May 19

Never pass up an opportunity to come into contact with as distinguished and humane a thinker as economist Amartya Sen:

http://www.radioopensource.org/amartya-sen-this-open-ended-year-of-india/

I very much enjoyed listening to Sen's thoughts about how Indians have been both historically receptive to outside influences and open to going abroad. He echoes Rabindranath Tagore: Anything we admire becomes ours. That is a beautiful guiding principle.

John Self at Asylum posts a compelling account of the experience of reading Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard, whose books may not be as fearsome as they look:

I approached Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters with trepidation.  His reputation precedes him: long sentences; long paragraphs (no paragraphs!); a relentless assault of misery on the reader....[the book] floods, in one unbroken block of text for 250 pages (albeit of large print in this new edition). Fears of this format are unfounded: rather than acting as a block to the reader, the unbroken text dragged me on, resistant to stopping, and I emerged from it like a man resurfacing, gasping and disoriented but invigorated.

http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2010/05/19/thomas-bernhard-old-masters/ 

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

Bette Burgoyne's white-on-black drawings made quite an impact on me:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/05/paper-ashes.html

Gregory Krum adapts some of the conventions of the painted still life to photography with intriguing results:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38136

http://www.jenbekman.com/artists/gregory_krum/

RIP: Yvonne Loriod. Olivier Messaien's pianist wife was also one of his greatest interpreters:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/19/arts/music/19loriod.html

British film director Roy William Neill, best known for helming 11 of the14 Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies, had an eye for images. Look at this, from Dr. Syn (1937) -- is it not positively Bergman -esque? (It's also a little reminiscent of Lev Kuleshov's 1926 silent By the Law; Neill himself began in silents in 1916.)

http://dcairns.wordpress.com/2010/05/18/original-syn/

Here, for comparison, is a still from the Kuleshov film, looking even more like The Seventh Seal than I had remembered.

This next, I suppose, was an inevitable development; the excellent French film site Fluctuat.net has a post on "Le Porno 3D au Festival de Cannes":

 http://cinema.fluctuat.net/blog/43900-le-porno-3d-au-festival-de-cannes.html

Among notables born on this date are philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, British politician Nancy Astor, activist Malcolm X, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, broadcaster Jim Lehrer, rocker/composer Pete Townshend, and actors James Fox, Nancy Kwan, and Bruce Bennett. As a hard-core classical music guy, I want to pay tribute across the aisle: Pete Townshend is a very seriously under-rated composer. Take Tommy as an example: what is striking now is how of a piece with operatic history it seems, using vivid music to tell and heighten a theatrical story. Granting the work's brilliance and originality, there is nothing all that terribly radical in the approach. Townshend makes his points musically and wins his arguments musically, like Mozart, like Bizet, like Wagner, like Gilbert & Sullivan, like Schoenberg, like Gershwin, like Sondheim. In the number "Go to the Mirror!", the passage beginning "Listening to you..." strikes me as easily the equivalent of any of the other great climaxes in opera: