May 8

It occurred to me that, since I appreciate gardening as an art form (although I haven't any patience as a practitioner), I should run some items on that subject; and sure enough, the Los Angeles Times Culture Monster blog obliged me a few hours later by running a post on Robert Irwin's palm-garden-in-progress at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/robert-irwins-palm-garden-takes-shape-at-lacma.html

Although the great comics artist Carl Barks is primarily associated with Disney characters -- including Scrooge McDuck, whom he created -- he had a shot at Warner Brothers' Porky Pig in 1944:

http://zvbxrpl.blogspot.com/2010/05/carl-barks-playing-for-other-team.html

http://greatestape.blogspot.com/2010/05/porky-pig-by-barks.html

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

Jason Crane's interview with Henry Threadgill at The Jazz Session doesn't have the flow of some of some of his other interviews, but it is worth persevering with because Threadgill is a terribly interesting musical thinker (the musical excerpts used in the podcast are tremendous):

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/04/29/the-jazz-session-164-henry-threadgill/

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

I completely agree with Threadgill that art needs "local support" to flourish; his complaint that the New York arts and even sports scenes are almost entirely aimed at wealthy tourists is, sadly, right on the mark. Chicago has avoided that fate to a large extent -- but needs to stay aware of the danger.

The great classical singer Thomas Quasthoff performed a challenging lieder program at Carnegie Hall last week, happily including the neglected Swiss composer Frank Martin's 1944 song-cycle Six Monologues from Everyman, to texts by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Hopefully some locals showed up:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/07/arts/music/07thomas.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Martin_%28composer%29

The gifted theater composer Michael John LaChiusa's 2005 musical See What I Wanna See -- based, like Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon, on short stories by the marvelous Japanese writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa -- is receiving its West Coast premiere in an "arresting" production:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/theater-review-see-what-i-wanna-see-by-blank-theatre-company.html

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

Arresting, too, are the metal sculptures of Albert Paley, often on a large scale, some of which are currently on exhibit at the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester. Here is Paley working on a construction:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37804 

http://mag.rochester.edu/exhibitions/index.html#Paley

http://www.albertpaley.com/

Geoff Page at the Australian Literary Review attentively considers four new volumes of poetry by Tom Petsinis, Stephen Edgard, Andrew Slattery, and Thomas Shapcott. (Hat tip to the blog A Pair of Ragged Claws, written by Stephen Romei, who edits the ALR.)

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/arts/tools-of-the-trade/story-e6frg8nf-1225860752565

The letters of the late English novelist Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) have been published, and Levi Stahl offers both an enthusiastic review and a follow-up post:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/constant/there-is-a-moral-in-all-this-or-the-letters-of-penelope-fitzgerald

http://ivebeenreadinglately.blogspot.com/2010/05/so-many-potty-ladies-so-many.html

I love belles-lettres, and wonder how long it will be before we see someone's collected e-mails. E-mail would seem to be easier to save than paper letters, but I worry about the transience of electronics.

P.J. Brooke -- the pseudonym of the wife-and-husband writing team Jane Brooke and Philip J. O'Brien -- did a nice two-part post on Spanish crime fiction for Detectives Beyond Borders, mentioning a number of writers who are new to me:

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2010/05/war-crime-and-politics-pj-brooke-looks.html

http://detectivesbeyondborders.blogspot.com/2010/05/more-sketches-of-spain-pj-brooke-on.html

Although another example of Spanish language crime fiction, Mexican author Martin Solares's The Black Minutes, gets only a middling review at The Rumpus, critic Kevin Nolan tells me enough to make me quite sure that I will like the book a lot:

http://therumpus.net/2010/05/the-black-minutes/

If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger's "Annals of Crime" series yields a provocative and evocative historical image, taken just after the murder of Minneapolis journalist Howard Guilford in 1934:

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/05/annals-of-crime-86.html 

Historians generally agree that the gangster Kid Cann's gang was responsible for Guilford's murder, as well as that of another editor, Walter Liggett, a year later.

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

Among notables born on this date are President Harry S Truman, novelists Thomas Pynchon, John Meade Falkner, Sloan Wilson, Roddy Doyle, Alain-Rene Le Sage, and Romain Gary, poet Gary Snyder, literary critic Edmund Wilson, economist Friedrich Hayek, journalist Naomi Klein, composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, jazz cornettist Red Nichols, jazz pianists Mary Lou Williams and Keith Jarrett, pop singers Ricky Nelson and Gary Glitter, sopranos Heather Harper and Felicity Lott, film director Robert Rossellini, graphic designer Saul Bass, naturalist David Attenborough, comedian Don Rickles, and actors Fernandel, Janet McTeer, Phyllida Law, and Miyoshi Umeki. In the Fifties and Sixties, nothing could kick off a film like a Saul Bass title sequence (and he later showed himself to be a considerable film-maker in his own right with the excellent 1974 science fiction film Phase IV; I wish he had kept on with it). Here is the Bass opener to Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder, knock-out credits for a knock-out film: