March 21

Fridolin Schley at The Millions has posted an impressive account of reading German novelist Uwe Johnson's four volume Anniversaries (only available severely abridged in English):

http://www.themillions.com/2010/03/the-edge-too-has-its-edge-reading-uwe-johnson-in-new-york.html

Michael Orthofer's review of the complete German Anniversaries is also helpful:

Anniversaries is a very long book; remarkably, it hardly ever flags. The variety of narrative techniques -- quotation, different voices and perspectives -- help keep the reader focussed, and the different storylines...are woven together well. It is a history of Germany, 1933 to ca. 1953, as well as of 1968 America. It is about the experience of being a European emigrant, and about being an almost-teen in the late 60s. It is about past and present and, emphatically, morality in its broadest senses. It is about society -- German and American, and society under Nazi, communist, and capitalist systems -- and works as such because it isn't a moralising text and offers little forced philosophical exposition and debate: Johnson shows by example and experience.

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/brd/johnsonu.htm

Johnson died quite young, at the age of 49, and in my searching the Web to learn more about that, I have yet to come across more than vagueness: he broke off a reading tour "for health reasons" (what were they?); he died on February 22, 1984 at a house where he apparently lived alone in Sheerness-on-Sea, England, yet his body was not discovered until March 13 (then how do we know what day he died?). If anyone can offer more information, I'd be grateful, because the references suggest a mystery that may not exist. There is no hint of suicide in them beyond the sheer vagueness, although suicide seems to have been a theme that preoccupied Johnson in his fiction.

As an emigre from East Germany, Johnson was undoubtedly familiar with the genre of "totalitarian kitsch":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574336383324209824.html

Samuel Wilson at Mondo 70 goes far afield from the exploitation films he usually writes about, but back in the direction of his own training as a historian, to consider Roberto Rossellini's controversial (because so different from other costume films) The Rise to Power of Louis XIV:

http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/03/taking-of-power-by-louis-xiv-1966.html

Southern California photographer Bill Dewey has a nice eye for patterns of landscape that are only visible from the air:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/aerial-photographs-capture-the-landscape-of-southern-california.html

http://www.eastongallery.com/all/artists/DEWEY/New-Work.html

Could there be a weightier title for an exhibition than "Metamorphoses of World History"? No, I didn't think so. German artists such as Markus Lupertz (whose show this is) or Anselm Kiefer are unafraid of taking on the "big themes," and often do so successfully:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36797

http://www.albertina.at/jart/prj3/albertina/main.jart?rel=en&reserve-mode=reserve&content-id=1202307119317&ausstellungen_id=1253865734424

And speaking of big gestures, here is a typically brash project by Daniel Libeskind, the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin:

http://www.designscene.net/2010/03/grand-canal-theatre-by-daniel-libeskind.html

"The 2000-seat Grand Canal Theatre is a landmark that creates a focus for its urban context" -- I'll say!

I had been a little worried that the fine aggregation site Arts & Letters Daily was tilting just a little too heavily toward conservative think-pieces, since I prize a balanced selection of viewpoints there. But lately they have been linking to substantial pieces from The Nation, such as this profile of Sixties activist Mario Savio, so maybe the tilt was in my mind:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100329/saul/single

Among notables born on this date are composers Johann Sebastian Bach, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikos Skalkottas (Greece), violinist Arthur Grumiaux, cellist Paul Tortelier, cowboy film star Broncho Billy Anderson, film director Russ Meyer, theater director Peter Brook, Mexican statesman Benito Juarez, talk show host Rosie O'Donnell, Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, German novelist Jean Paul, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, and actors Francoise Dorleac, Timothy Dalton, Matthew Broderick, and Gary Oldman. Nikos Skalkottas (1904-1949) is, with the Frenchman Charles Koechlin, one of the most under-played of the super-prolific composers of the 20th century (among whom are Darius Milhaud, Bohuslav Martinu, Paul Hindemith, Alan Hovhaness, and Heitor Villa-Lobos). After studying with Schoenberg in Berlin, he returned to his native Greece but didn't achieve much acceptance there (although he is now considered Greece's pre-eminent composer of the first half of the century). He died sadly young and never heard most of his music performed; scholars are still digging their way out from under the manuscripts.