May 11

Let's start the day with a smile. Big Rabbit is in a Bad Mood:

http://curiouspages.blogspot.com/2010/05/big-rabbits-bad-mood.html

Steve Donoghue at SteveReads has been doing an epic series of posts on composer biographies. The last, on a "biography" of P.D.Q. Bach, is negligible -- I honestly never thought P.D.Q. Bach was all that funny -- but most of the others, on Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, Brahms, and Verdi, are well worth your time. The post on Wagner is problematic, because Donoghue is one of your really serious Wagner haters (to him, the Ring cycle is "garbage").

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-1-franz-liszt/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-2-hector-berlioz/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-3-felix-mendelssohn/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-4-frederic-chopin/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-5-robert-schumann/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-6-richard-wagner/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-7-johannes-brahms/

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/05/nine-lives-8-verdi/

Carrie Rickey writes about the fading presence of international films in the United States. They accounted for 10% of box office in the Sixties, less than 1% today:

http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/93064214.html

And no, the reason is not, as an idiot foreign policy professor quoted in the article suggests, that "maybe the foreign films just aren't very good." The American public has grown incurious, and our popular culture enthrones stupidity as a virtue. 

Ian Traynor in The Observer analyzes the language divide in Belgium, which is much worse than I would have thought:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/09/belgium-flanders-wallonia-french-dutch/print

(Hat tip to Truthdig for these last two items.)

Filipino author Miguel Syjuco's novel Ilustrado, which won the 2008 Man Asian Literary Prize while still in manuscript, is coming in for a lot of favorable attention upon its publication in the U.S. and U.K.:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/world/asia/09syjuco.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/10/miguel-syjuco-literary-prize

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/05/05/AR2010050504709.html

August West at Vintage Hardboiled Reads had a blast with Desmond Bagley's 1971 thriller The Freedom Trap:

http://vinpulp.blogspot.com/2010/05/freedom-trap-by-desmond-bagley.html

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

Russian photojournalist Dmitri Baltermants (1912-1990) deserves to be as famous as his contemporary Robert Capa:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37977

http://nailyaalexandergallery.com/updates/dmitri-baltermants-photographs-1940s-1960s

http://www.skjstudio.com/baltermants/

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

Innovative furniture designer Wendell Castle, still very active at 77, has new work on display at Barry Friedman Ltd. in New York:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37877 

http://www.wendellcastle.com/

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

Among notables born on this date are novelists Stanley Elkin, Camilo Jose Cela (Spain), and Francisco Umbral (Spain), composers Irving Berlin and William Grant Still, rock singer Eric Burdon, jazz pianist Carla Bley, painters Jean-Leon Gerome and Salvador Dali, dancer/choreographer Martha Graham, physicist Richard Feynman, baseball player Charlie Gehringer, comedian Mort Sahl, film director Marco Ferreri, actor/director Tim Blake Nelson, and actors Phil Silvers, Margaret Rutherford, Doug McClure, Natasha Richardson, and Shohreh Aghdashloo. Here is an impossibly young Eric Burdon with one of the early line-ups of The Animals -- if you can keep track of who played in this band when, you're better than I am -- singing "We Gotta Get Out of This Place":