June 13

Robert Reich found Obama's oil spill speech "vapid" and goes on to say:

Whether it's Wall Street or health insurers or oil companies, we are approaching a turning point. The top executives of powerful corporations are pursuing profits in ways that menace the nation. We have not seen the likes not since the late nineteenth century when the "robber barons" of finance, oil, and the giant trusts ran roughshod over America. Now, as then, they are using their wealth and influence to buy off legislators and intimidate the regions that depend on them for jobs. Now, as then, they are threatening the safety and security of our people. This is not to impugn the integrity of all business leaders or to suggest that private enterprise is inherently evil or dangerous. It is merely to state a fact that more and more Americans are beginning to know in their bones.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/obamas-missed-opportunity_b_614027.html?ir=Daily%20Brief

Reich nails the historical analogy, with which I agree 100%. Obama, to salvage his floundering presidency, has got to follow the lead of a Teddy or Franklin D. Roosevelt in articulating the ways in which the "pillars of society" (a phrase I taught to my Korean students this week) are actually threatening that society. I know that Obama reads about the Roosevelts -- he has said so -- but he has to do more than that; he has to emulate them.

World Cup fever is gripping Korea, and we talk about it every day in my conversation classes. So nothing could be more timely than a list of great soccer books:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/09/mihir-bose-top-10-football-books

There's a lot to be said for architects working especially hard to make utilitarian buildings attractive; there is no good counter-argument that they need to be ugly (although of course many of them are). The Altstadt Garage Building in Switzerland is sensitively and appealingly designed:

http://www.archdaily.com/58382/altstadt-garage-building-lussi-halter/

Before the tightening of ethics regulations surrounding medical and psychological experiments in recent decades, researchers used to try some pretty wild scenarios. Stanley Milgram's "obedience to authority" and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiments are famous, but what about this?

In the late 1950s, psychologist Milton Rokeach was gripped by an eccentric plan. He gathered three psychiatric patients, each with the delusion that they were Jesus Christ, to live together for two years in Ypsilanti State Hospital to see if their beliefs would change. The early meetings were stormy. "You oughta worship me, I'll tell you that!" one of the Christs yelled. "I will not worship you! You're a creature! You better live your own life and wake up to the facts!" another snapped back. "No two men are Jesus Christs. … I am the Good Lord!" the third interjected, barely concealing his anger.  

http://www.slate.com/id/2255105/

A dance score called Estancia by the great Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, that was commissioned for Georges Balanchine but never used by him, has become the basis of a "gaucho ballet" by Christopher Wheeldon:

http://thefastertimes.com/dance/2010/05/30/christopher-wheeldon%E2%80%99s-marvelous-gaucho-ballet-%E2%80%9Cestancia%E2%80%9D/

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

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

James Wolcott, who loves Wheeldon's new ballet ("After seeing it, I've decided to become a gaucho and roam the pampas, as soon as I order an appropriate poncho"), argues that

The Balanchine purists have become a pox on ballet, a reactionary drag that betrays Balanchine's forward spirit. Choreographer after choreographer gets scolded and rapped with the nun's ruler over not being Balanchine enough or being too Balanchine derivative, and it's a bore.

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/wolcott/2010/06/-the-plaza-fountain-at.html

(Hat tip to Haglund's Heel.)

Covering Ensemble Modern's offering of Frank Zappa's concert music at the Ojai Music Festival, Mark Swed assesses that side of Zappa's protean creative career:

From the point of view of new concert music, Zappa’s works are very much a mixed bag....[He] was a tireless experimenter with sound and form. At its best, Zappa’s music boldly presaged the breaking down of barriers between pop and new classical music with restless imagination and refreshing irreverence. At its worst, Zappa’s concert music could be insistently defensive, messy, silly and headache-inducing. Zappa absorbed music widely but didn’t always digest it well....[But in his later works] Zappa was on to something, and had he lived we might now be celebrating the 70th birthday of a major composer.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/06/frank-zappa-at-ojai-music-fesitval.html

James White's photorealist paintings in black and white have an inescapably noir aura:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=38567

http://www.timeout.com/london/art/article/1192/james-white

One way to determine if someone is a true film geek is to say the words "aspect ratio" to them and see how they respond. If they hold forth as Glenn Kenny does here, you have a positive identification:

Most folks with a good understanding of the history of theatrical film projection will tell you that 1.85 matting came in pretty much in the wake of the introduction of Cinemascope, the 2.35 aspect ratio, itself. This does not necessarily answer the question of which directors really applied themselves to actively composing their frames for 1.85 in the wake of that.  

http://somecamerunning.typepad.com/some_came_running/2010/06/more-fun-with-aspect-ratios.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Fanny Burney, Bruno Frank (Germany), Etienne Leroux (South Africa), and Gonzalo Torrente Ballester (Spain), children's writer Heinrich Hoffmann (Germany), mystery novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, poets William Butler Yeats, Fernando Pessoa (Portugal), Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau (Quebec), and Jay Macpherson (Canada), philosopher Etienne Gilson, fashion designer Lucy Duff Gordon, composers Carlos Chavez (Mexico) and Xian Xinghai (China), scientist James Clerk Maxwell, mathematician John Forbes Nash, artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude (collaborators who happen both to have been born on June 13, 1935), photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (France), film director Tay Garnett, and actors Basil Rathbone, Paul Lynde, Malcolm McDowell, Ben Johnson, Richard Thomas, Stellan Skarsgard, and Ally Sheedy. An unusually diverse and amazingly talented group today! French photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894-1986) is one of the most amazingly precocious artists in history; he was taking fine photographs from the age of six on. Very few children can report on what it is like to see with a child's eye, but Lartigue could, and the pictures are irresistible, such as My Hydroglider with Propeller, shot when he was around age ten:

http://www.clas.ufl.edu/cclc/Lartigue.html

http://www.masters-of-photography.com/L/lartigue/lartigue_articles3.html

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