April 27

James Surowiecki, who has written elsewhere of the "wisdom of crowds, " doesn't think that the crowd -- or the nation -- will learn anything much from the current financial crisis:

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/financial/2010/05/03/100503ta_talk_surowiecki

I concur, and it's one reason why I've grown impatient enough with the country to leave it: The game never changes, and the same people always profit, the same people (you and me) always pay. I've never minded paying my taxes before, maybe because I was naive, but if those taxes are going to pay engorged salaries at Goldman Sachs and Citibank, I mind a good deal. So, by going overseas, I'm hoping to get into a new game, one that isn't so completely rigged against me. (That could be naive on my part, too, but what the heck.)

Yet another Cannes sidebar, The Cannes Classics, has had its line-up announced:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1756

I would personally be most interested in the more obscure items, the films by Mrinal Sen, Pierre Schoendoerffer (whose sea drama Le Crabe-Tambour I love), Rene Clement, Pierre Etaix, Jacques Davila, and Marcel L'Herbier. The schedule is fairly heavy in French films, but this is a French festival after all.

RIP: Peter Porter. The Australian poet (1929-2010), who lived in Great Britain from 1951 on, sounds like an engaging chap as well as a major writer:

There are those (mainly the English) who don't like to hear about things they don't know, and Peter was wasted on them. It was not that he was a conversational monopolist: he was as generous a listener as he was a friend, but he supposed that an interest in poetry, painting, music, politics (and the passing show of vanity that he satirised so well) was the stuff of life. Not having been to university himself, he also believed that knowledge was available to anyone who cared to seek it out: "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / for which I thank the public libraries of Paddington and Westminster."

http://blogs.theaustralian.news.com.au/alr/index.php/theaustralian/comments/vale_peter_porter/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/apr/27/peter-porter-ultimate-conspiracy-theorist

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Porter_%28poet%29

Just yesterday I wrote about Argentine writers in cafes; Porter would have been fun to sit down with in a coffee-shop or a bar. Another such is the Scottish writer Alan Warner (author of the novel Morvern Callar, made into a film by Lynne Ramsay), who joins The Herald's Brian Donaldson for a bit of chat in an Edinburgh pub:

For Warner and his generational kin, the pub is a place to sit and read a paperback or hang out with like-minded souls, sinking the pints and shooting the breeze on the political, social and literary issues of the day....He’s delighted to consider himself part of a wider Scottish literary tradition. “I read all the Kelmans and the Gunns and James Hogg and Alasdair Gray; that’s what excited me with Scottish literature, and I’m not uncomfortable being a part of all that. I know some writers can be a little bit touchy, and a little bit scared of saying ‘I’m a Scottish writer’ because they fear that it might ghettoise them and they want to be seen as ‘international’. But there’s nothing more universal, not just international, than Hugh MacDiarmid’s Scots poems. The early ones are masterpieces. I hope I’m part of all that.”

 
http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/book-features/alan-warner-on-his-new-book-the-stars-in-the-bright-sky-1.1023185

I like the fact that the 45-year-old Warner is allergic to Facebook:  “I hate Facebook because it just seems to be a lot of showing off:...‘Alan Warner has 300 friends’? F***ing hell ... I suppose I’m just a bit of a fogey that’s still getting to grips with email.”

Marc Myers at JazzWax spins an interesting tale of how pianist Duke Pearson formed a big band in the late Sixties:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/duke-pearsons-big-band-1967.html

Mick Gordon's and Billy Bragg's new musical Pressure Drop, "examining what it means to be British, white and working class," sounds timely and compelling:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831272275369/Pressure+Drop.html

The Flemish architects Paul Robbrecht and Hilde Daem appear to fall along the non-grandstanding portion of the contemporary architectural spectrum. Their subtle projects range from this woodland cabin:

...to the Bruges Concert Hall:

Though I have nothing against more theatrical architects per se, it is kind of nice to know that not every modern building designer is trying to twist your eyes out of their sockets.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37655 

http://www.robbrechtendaem.com/

Among notables born on this date are President Ulysses S. Grant, feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King, inventor Samuel F.B. Morse, philosopher Herbert Spencer, baseball player Rogers Hornsby, composers Friedrich von Flotow and Sergei Prokofiev, conductor Guido Cantelli, musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky, historian Edward Gibbon, politician Cory Booker, film directors Theo Angelopoulos and Im Sang-soo, animator Walter Lantz, novelists Ludwig Bemelmans and Yorgos Theotokas (Greece), poets Gilbert Sorrentino, Cecil Day-Lewis, and Edwin Morgan, playwright August Wilson, and actors Anouk Aimee, Sandy Dennis, and Jack Klugman. It is fitting that last night, August Wilson's Fences, the sixth play in his "Pittsburgh Cycle," opened in a Broadway revival starring a powerhouse cast of Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, and Mykelti Williamson:

http://theater.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/theater/reviews/27fences.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Wilson