June 19

Liberate Your Inner Comic: I had my classes laughing pretty hard today with my re-enactments of American used car commercials, among them the classic featuring Rudy the Cuban gynecologist:



This has got to be the only used car commercial with a "making of" video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pE2qWJSvqzg

Marc Myers at JazzWax interviews alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, who got his start in the Fifties and is still going strong at 83:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/interview-lou-donaldson-part-1.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/interview-lou-donaldson-part-2.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/06/interview-lou-donaldson-part-3.html

The Lyric Opera of Los Angeles has performed a great service by staging one of the rarest operas by a major composer, Wagner's suppressed early work Die Feen:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/06/opera-review-wagners-die-feen-by-lyric-opera-of-los-angeles-at-pasadena-playhouse.html

We tend to think of mid-19th century composers as conventional and conservative, but as oboist and composer Heinz Holliger points out, Robert Schumann is anything but:

You never reach a dead end with Schumann and his analytical observations. New doors are always opening up. One door opens onto the next and there is another one behind that, and another and another. In his work, speculative thinking collides head on with a vast, labyrinthine imagination. Schumann was an extremely erudite man. He translated Sophocles at 17. He had considerable literary talents and he was probably one the greatest writers among the composers, up there with Berlioz and Debussy. This makes him an encyclopaedic character. A cosmic figure without limits. The same applies to his music.

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1858.html

Schumann's Swedish contemporary Franz Berwald is another decidedly individual composer of that time. (Hat tip to 3QuarksDaily.)

Larry Fahey at The Rumpus deconstructs the movie version of Mary Poppins (not the P.L. Travers novels). I adored this Disney classic uncritically when it came out in my seventh year, but Fahey is onto something when he notices that the "lovable" protagonist is actually rather unsettling:

The first thing you notice is that, despite her reputation as a paragon of patience, understanding, and love, Mary Poppins simply isn’t very pleasant. It’s not clear that we’re even meant to like her. For one thing, she’s highly and relentlessly critical of the children, Michael (Matthew Garber) and Jane (Karen Dotrice) — you slouch, she tells them, you’re slobs, your manners are deplorable, and when you let your mouths hang open you look like fish. She’s also largely humorless, never satisfied with anyone but herself, and terribly vain (she describes herself, quite sincerely, as “practically perfect in every way”). Furthermore, she’s a bully: When a line of nannies congregate outside the Banks’s front door to apply for the job, she conjures a violent windstorm to sweep them away.
Mary Poppins isn’t just rude and egostistical, she’s also faintly sinister. 

http://therumpus.net/2010/06/something-steely-unsympathetic-and-cold-a-reconsideration-of-mary-poppins/

The great, challenging Guyanese novelist Wilson Harris has got to be one of the least-known contemporary writers of his stature. It is good to see him recognized with a knighthood at 89:

http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/2010/06/19/absent-presences/

http://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/editorial/06/19/the-lost-world-of-wilson-harris/

http://caribbeanreviewofbooks.com/2010/06/16/arise-sir-wilson/

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

Yevgeny Fiks's ironic visual interpetations of the work of the Russian-born Ayn Rand, which appropriate images from Soviet socialist realism, attain a power that goes far beyond a mere goof on a dislikable author:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38751

http://www.winkleman.com/exhibition/view/1915

Spaceship Los Angeles: John Lautner's  1960 "Chemosphere," once futuristic, now almost old-fashioned in the way that visions of the future can become, is secure as a classic no matter what temporal angle you consider it from:

http://www.archdaily.com/64345/ad-classics-malin-chemosphere-residence-john-lautner/

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

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

Among notables born on this date are novelists Salman Rushdie, Jose Rizal (Philippines), and Dazai Osamu (Japan), philosopher Blaise Pascal, film critic Pauline Kael, activist Aung San Suu Kyi, composer Alfredo Catalani, singer/songwriters Chico Buarque and Nick Drake, bluegrass guitarist Lester Flatt, baseball player Lou Gehrig, and actors Gena Rowlands, Moe Howard, Louis Jourdain, Pier Angeli, Charles Coburn, Mildred Natwick, Nancy Marchand, May Whitty, Phylicia Rashad, Paul Dano, and Kathleen Turner. Here is a great archival clip of a young and wickedly handsome Chico Buarque at a Brazilian music festival in 1967:



Wikipedia reminds us that "Buarque came from a privileged intellectual family background—his father Sérgio Buarque de Holanda was a well-known historian, sociologist and journalist and his mother Maria Amélia Cesário Alvim was a painter and pianist."

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