May 9

When the critic Martin Seymour-Smith called Edwin Arlington Robinson "a most courageous, honest, and exemplary poet -- and a lovable one," he was right on the mark. He is a very gratifying poet to teach. I can tell you for a fact that high school students in the 21st century can still be shocked by the suicidal last stanza of "Richard Cory," and that it provokes the most engaged sort of discussion, both concerning subject matter and poetic technique. The Guardian Books Blog looks at another excellent and moving Robinson short poem, "Eros Turannos," as its Poem of the Week:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/03/poem-week-eros-turannos

Elsewhere at the Guardian, John Mullan -- who has a knack for compiling good lists with unexpected items -- considers some of the best elections in literature:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/08/ten-best-elections-john-mullan

Shakespeare, Smollett, Dickens, Trollope, George Eliot, Henry James, Jose Saramago -- as I say to my cat Claire when I feed her Fancy Feast, "That's the good stuff!"

Turning from the good to the decadent, consider renting the perverse 1973 exploitation film The Sinful Dwarf. Or just read these accounts of it. Possibly as much to the point.

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1763

http://mmmmmovies.blogspot.com/2008/01/sinful-dwarf-1973-or-dont-sell-danes.html

http://www.dvdverdict.com/reviews/sinfuldwarf.php

http://www.1000misspenthours.com/reviews/reviewsn-z/sinfuldwarf.htm 

http://ludicdespair.blogspot.com/2009/11/i-have-seen-sinful-dwarf.html

I'm not sure whether the story that this movie was re-discovered "in a janitor's closet at the Danish Film Institute" is apocryphal or not, but really, it should be true.

More unseen cinema: Of the 15 features directed by "underground" film-maker Robert Kramer (1939-1999) (under-financed is more like it), three have fewer than 5 viewer ratings at the IMDB; eight have between 5 and 13 ratings; none of the other four has more than 83. (For comparison, Avatar has 230,360 ratings.) Like some jazz artists I've discussed, Kramer had to move to Europe to work, and I'm assuming more people have seen his films there. The Auteurs found a poster for the 1980 Guns, which Kramer made in France:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1798

The Harvard Film Archive ran a Kramer retrospective a decade ago that included eight of the features and a short:

http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2000janfeb/kramer.html

Anthology Film Archives in New York showed six Kramer features and two shorts last summer (all but one of the features overlapped the Harvard selection; these shorts had not played there).

http://www.arthurmag.com/2009/07/17/nyc-the-films-of-robert-kramer-retrospective-begins-tonight-at-anthology/ 

A haunting obituary from the New York Times of Forties folk singer Susan Reed, who withdrew from the public eye partly because she was associated (through her family) with political radicalism (as Robert Kramer was also):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/arts/music/02reed.html

British author Will Hodgkinson writes about his own folk music odyssey across the English counties in The Ballad of Britain:

http://vulpeslibris.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/the-ballad-of-britain-by-will-hodgkinson/

Stephen Bowie at Classic TV History offers a warm tribute to the late actor Peter Haskell (1934-2010), a familiar face from series television of the Sixties and Seventies. Bowie does an excellent job at analyzing the Haskell persona:

....on Bracken’s World [Haskell] was convincing as both an intellectual and a sensitive creative type....[He] was a whisperer....someone who solved problems by taking people aside....and talking to them calmly and cleverly.  That may not sound like such a big deal, but American TV heroes who work this way remain anomalous; just count the number of gratuitous brawls entered into by the protagonists of Route 66 or Lost, ostensibly “smart” shows four decades apart, and you begin to see how against the grain it is in our mainstream culture for affairs to be settled with logic rather than violence. 

http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/05/07/peter-haskell-1934-2010/

The Iranian artist Shirazeh Houshiary has evolved a remarkably subtle and rewarding style. Her own website, the last link below, is exceptionally well designed:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37799

http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/#/exhibitions/2010-04-29_shirazeh-houshiary/

http://www.shirazehhoushiary.com/

Among notables born on this date are novelist/playwright James M. Barrie, fantasy novelist Richard Adams, science fiction novelist William Tenn, poets Charles Simic and Mona Van Duyn, playwright Alan Bennett, philosophers Jose Ortega y Gasset and Lucian Blaga, activist Daniel Berrigan, conductor Carlo Maria Giulini, mezzo-soprano Anne-Sofie von Otter, singer/songwriters Hank Snow and Billy Joel, architect Rafael Moneo, baseball player Tony Gwynn, broadcaster Mike Wallace, film director James L. Brooks, and actors Richard Barthelmess, Pedro Armendariz, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, Candice Bergen, and John Corbett. Encouragement for struggling authors: Richard Adams's first novel Watership Down, which I read soon after its American publication in 1974 and absolutely adored, was rejected by 13 publishers before it found a home; in its later paperback edition, it is now Penguin's best-selling book of all time.

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:

May 7: Extra Edition

The Liberal Democrats didn't do as well in Britain's general election as hoped, but here is more about lovable Nick Clegg anyway:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/05/nick-clegg-general-election-bookish-vote

Having done my time as a temp worker, I'm sure I would enjoy Dan Dietz's play tempOdyssey, enthusiastically reviewed by the Los Angeles Times:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/theater-review-tempodyssey-at-artworks-theatre.html

I'm excited to hear that the entire run of the 1960-1962 television detective series Checkmate, with Anthony George, Doug McClure, and Sebastian Cabot, is being made available on DVD:  

http://thrillingdaysofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2010/05/fogged-over-frisco.html

http://blogs.salon.com/0003139/2007/03/06.html#a1080

http://thrillingdaysofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2008/06/streets-of-san-francisco-circa-1960-62.html

I've seen several episodes of Checkmate, which has always been a well-regarded show, and I would purchase this box set without hesitation.

It is interesting to read in depth about Orson Welles's flirtation with television:

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2010/05/failed-romance-between-welles-and.html

http://blogs.tc.columbia.edu/fera/2009/12/15/arrested-development-how-orson-welles-tried-to-revolutionize-television-and-why-television-wouldn%E2%80%99t-let-him-by-ben-walters/

Sam Peckinpah started in television, of course -- he created The Rifleman and The Westerner -- and as late as 1966, he filmed an adaptation of the Katherine Anne Porter short story "Noon Wine" for the anthology series ABC Stage 67. There's a new book out on the making of Peckinpah's films, Entered His House Justified by Jeff Slater, that looks well-researched (albeit pricey at $72.95 list):

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/48-ENTERED-HIS-HOUSE-JUSTIFIED-THE-MAKING-OF-THE-FILMS-OF-SAM-PECKINPAH.html

After 18-year-old Japanese golfer Ryo Ishikawa shot a 58 on a par-70 course in last weekend's Japan Tour event, Shane Bacon at Devil Ball Golf took the opportunity to review the history of sub-60 rounds in tournament play:

http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/Ranking-the-all-time-sub-60-rounds?urn=golf,238312

The young Bulgarian painter Iva Gueorguieva draws part of her ferocious energy from the example of earlier modernist painters, but her attack is too much her own to be considered in any way derivative. I don't see her as in the least "post-modernist"; there is no fashionable irony here. The last link has a slideshow of 26 images that is worth looking at in full:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/art-review-iva-gueorguieva-at-angles-gallery.html

http://articles.latimes.com/2009/dec/27/entertainment/la-ca-iva27-2009dec27

http://www.anglesgallery.com/ssp_director/exhibitions.php?id=104

With its usual flare for uncovering striking images, the visual blog If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger... offers a delectable LP cover from a country album by Danish jazz trombonist Kai Winding. Take me back to 1964 (please):

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/05/art-of-jazz-115.html


http://bjbear71.com/Winding/Kai.html

May 7: Special "Real/Unreal" Edition

DNA analysis is having interesting effects on our knowledge of the relations of living things. Giant Pandas, which for years were considered a member of the raccoon family, have now to been shown to be true bears after all, which is what ordinary people always thought they were. The Lesser Panda, an equally beautiful mammal, has been split off from the raccoons into its own family:

Now word has come that orcas, previously thought to be one species, are actually three:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/orca-3/

And the white rhino is now believed to comprise two species, which expands the total number of rhino species to six:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/2-whites/

More animals to love; I'm there.

From the real to the unreal: Here is a gorgeous piece of science fiction animation, Sprance II by Gerhard Hoberth (hat tip to the Animation Blog):


Sprance II from Gerhard Hoeberth on Vimeo.

http://www.animationblog.org/2010/05/gerhard-hoberth-sprance-ii-2009.html

Woody Allen finds reality painful anyway:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/woody

Matt Zoller Seitz thinks that super-hero movies, even viewed as pure escapism, have become a pox:

The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors' box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material; spicing up otherwise rote superhero vs. supervillain storylines with "complications" and "revisions" (scare quotes intentional) that the filmmakers, for reasons of fiduciary duty, cannot properly investigate; and delivering amusing characterizations, dense stories or stunning visuals while typically failing to combine those aspects into a satisfying whole.

http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movies/iron_man_2/index.html?story=/ent/movies/film_salon/2010/05/06/superhero_movies_bankrupt_genre

Matt Zoller Seitz speaks as a fan of the super-hero genre, not a condescending high-culture crank (like, say, me), and is well worth attending to here. He is dissatisfied with the development of the genre, but he is fair and detailed. (I also like his conclusion: "The next superhero film should star Mickey Rourke. As himself.")

Continuing today's alternation of real and unreal, Sarah Weinman reveals her favorite true crime books:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-03/the-best-true-crime-books/  

I like Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher very much; a delightful fact I learned from it is that the word "detective" comes from the Latin "detegere, " to unroof: a detective takes the lid off a house and sees what really goes on inside (which is certainly what happens in her book).

Who can say whether Harmony Korine's world is real or unreal? I could scarcely decide, looking at Gummo, whether it was utterly fantastic, or the most depressing piece of social realism I had seen in many a day. Either way, great film. Korine is back to kick up controversy again with his new Trash Humpers:

Trash Humpers suggests a cretinous remake of John Water's Pink Flamingos or perhaps a musical created by the brain-eaters from the original Night of the Living Dead.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-05-04/film/harmony-korine-s-trash-humpers-captures-nashville-s-roving-gang-of-wilding-seniors

Watching Trash Humpers at the Toronto Film Festival, Mike D'Angelo objected to it on grounds that, even though I'm a Korine fan, I do understand:

....Harmony Korine’s fourth feature, Trash Humpers, will appeal exclusively to the handful of folks who derive their shaky sense of self-worth from enjoying films like Trash Humpers. Nor do these people actually need to see Trash Humpers in order to conclude that it’s awesome, since its perceived awesomeness is encoded in its conceptual DNA. Korine simply describing the idea in a couple of sentences would serve just as well.

http://www.notcoming.com/reviews/trashhumpers/

I'm not sure that I entirely agree with D'Angelo that "what Korine is doing in Trash Humpers can’t be done well, or done poorly, or done indifferently" -- conceptual art has been dismissed on that basis going back to Marcel Duchamp. He is right that a certain sort of audience for conceptual art can be indulgent and rather soft because they want to identify with the brilliance or anti-brilliance or trangressiveness of its ideas, but many audiences are indulgent of genres they like on similar grounds. That's part of what irks Matt Zoller Seitz about the reception of super-hero movies: Their perceived awesomeness by fanboys is encoded in their conceptual DNA, too.

The real danger from where I sit, and I definitely think that D'Angelo is getting at this too, is the matter of predictability and inadvertent self-parody. I have had many talks with friends over the years about the concept of "Bergman doing a Bergman" (a notion, I hasten to add, that we borrowed from Bergman himself; it's in one of his autobiographies). Well, if a film called Trash Humpers isn't Harmony Korine doing a Harmony Korine, I don't know what would be. And that can be a real trap for artists; it's one thing to develop a recognizable style or approach, another to be confined by it. Of course, every case is quite different. Ivy Compton-Burnett's 19 mature novels are all cut from exactly the same cloth, but the 19th is as intense as the first, so no one seems to mind. To work your niche over and over and over puts enormous pressure on an artist to sustain the inspiration that helped them create the niche in the first place, and when that doesn't appear to be the case, then the "Bergman doing a Bergman" criticism justifiably comes into play. Many Peter Greenaway followers, for example, feel that is exactly where Greenaway has placed himself: repeating the same strategies to diminishing effect. I hope Korine isn't at that point.

Among notables born on this date are composers Johannes Brahms and Peter Ilych Tchaikovsky, novelists Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Angela Carter, Peter Carey (Australia), Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali), Willem Elsschot (Flemish), and Wladyslaw Reymont (Poland), science fiction novelist Gene Wolfe, poets Robert Browning and Archibald MacLeish, philosopher/historian David Hume, icon Eva Peron, Irish folk singer Christy Moore, pop singers Teresa Brewer and Thelma Houston, film-makers Val Lewton and Amy Heckerling, quarterback Johnny Unitas, broadcaster Tim Russert, and actors Gary Cooper, Anne Baxter, and Darren McGavin. In discussions of the real and unreal, the Val Lewton horror cycle is especially interesting, because if I am remembering correctly, in only one of the nine films -- Cat People, the first -- is it reasonably clear that an actual supernatural element is operating. In many of the films, a belief in or worry about the supernatural comes into play; but the actual "explanations" are naturalistic.

May 6: Special Bookish Edition

Continuing with yesterday's international literature theme: Penguin's new Central European Classics series is splendid in both content and design:

http://theasylum.wordpress.com/2010/05/06/slawomir-mrozek-the-elephant/

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php

There has been a welcome resurgence of interest in the German novelist Hans Fallada (1893-1947):

http://mhpbooks.com/mobylives/?p=14845

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/opinion/04iht-edcohen.html?ref=opinion

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

Stuart Evers at the Guardian Book Blog discusses recent political fiction:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/may/06/what-happened-political-fiction

Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading explains why it's a good idea to "stick with" difficult texts:

http://conversationalreading.com/its-not-really-translation-that-they-hate

I couldn’t agree more. I remember when I first read Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano, and was having a tough time, that around a hundred pages in, exactly the point that Esposito mentions, something just clicked and I got it; the rhythm of the prose had sunk in, and it all started to make sense. I read the remainder of the novel in an enthralled state.
\
Some works need to be re-experienced altogether to yield up their treasures. I didn’t care for Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker the first time I saw it, but it stayed with me and nagged at my memory. I gave it a second shot, and was mesmerized. Knowing what to expect helped a lot.

Simone Weil said that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity,” and she was right. But there is a pay-off. Works that need close attention and patience often have the most to give back.

An author that has largely fallen out of general discussion because he demands intense attention is the 19th century English art critic John Ruskin. Steve Donoghue reminds us of why he matters:

One hundred and fifty years ago, he ruled the Western intellectual world with a breadth and thoroughness that hadn’t been seen in centuries. Socialist workman’s groups, lace-curtained Mayfair reading rooms, rough and tumble Colorado mining towns, and not only the lecture halls of Boston and Oxford but their boarding houses as well – all these were conquered by Ruskin in the 1840s and 1850s. Conquered many times over, for Ruskin’s writings extended to many different fields of interest, but conquered mainly by the same instrument: Ruskin’s magnificent prose, at once hortatively beautiful and grippingly personal (as when writing about the humble barn swallow: “It is an owl that has been trained by the Graces. It is a bat that loves the morning light. It is the aerial reflection of a dolphin. It is the tender domestication of a trout”).

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/the-nautilus/

Contemporary critic and novelist Michael Moorcock weighs in (literally) with a huge collection of non-fiction, Into the Media Web, beautifully designed by {feuilleton}'s John Coulthart. Handling and reading this book is an experience that no Kindle could duplicate:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/05/06/into-the-media-web-by-michael-moorcock/

Rock musician and author Jim Bob put together a nice list of "illustrated books for adults," slanted toward recent books:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/may/05/jim-bob-top-10-illustrated-novels

In a more historical survey, Phiz's illustrations for Dickens and Thackeray's illustrations for himself, among many others, would rank high.

Animalarium found a beautiful old children's illustrated book, The Noah's Ark Book:

http://theanimalarium.blogspot.com/2010/05/fun-and-tragedy-on-noahs-ark.html

Among notables born on this date are psychologist Sigmund Freud, film directors Orson Welles and Max Ophuls, film producer Ross Hunter, cinematographer Lucien Ballard, painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, philosopher Martha Nussbaum, singer/songwriters Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Bob Seger, novelists Gaston Leroux and Harry Martinson, poets Randall Jarrell, Erich Fried, and Christian Morgenstern, journalist Theodore H. White, explorer Robert Peary, baseball player Willie Mays, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and actors Rudolph Valentino, Stewart Granger, and George Clooney. The German Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914) is one of the greatest "nonsense poets" in any language; that sort of poetry is of course difficult to translate, but still, why Morgenstern isn't better known in the English-speaking world is a persistent mystery. Max Knight, among others, has done fine English versions of Morgenstern's Gallows Songs:

Die unmögliche Tatsache

Palmström, etwas schon an Jahren,
wird an einer Straßenbeuge
und von einem Kraftfahrzeuge
überfahren.

"Wie war" (spricht er, sich erhebend
und entschlossen weiterlebend)
"möglich, wie dies Unglück, ja- :
daß es überhaupt geschah?

"Ist die Staatskunst anzuklagen
in Bezug auf Kraftfahrwagen?
Gab die Polizeivorschrift
hier dem Fahrer freie Trift?

"Oder war vielmehr verboten,
hier Lebendige zu Toten
umzuwandeln, -kurz und schlicht:
Durfte hier der Kutscher nicht-?"

Eingehüllt in feuchte Tücher,
prüft er die Gesetzesbücher
und ist alsobald im Klaren:
Wagen durften dort nicht fahren!

Und er kommt zu dem Ergebnis:
Nur ein Traum war das Erlebnis.
Weil, so schliesst er messerscharf,
nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.

The Impossible Fact

Palmstroem, old, an aimless rover,
walking in the wrong direction
at a busy intersection
is run over.

"How," he says, his life restoring
and with pluck his death ignoring,
"can an accident like this
ever happen? What's amiss?

"Did the state administration
fail in motor transportation?
Did police ignore the need
for reducing driving speed?

"Isn't there a prohibition,
barring motorized transmission
of the living to the dead?
Was the driver right who sped . . . ?"

Tightly swathed in dampened tissues
he explores the legal issues,
and it soon is clear as air:
Cars were not permitted there!

And he comes to the conclusion:
His mishap was an illusion,
for, he reasons pointedly,
that which must not, can not be.

http://www.jbeilharz.de/morgenstern/morgenstern_poems.html

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

May 5

One of the few Tweets I've ever read that I thought was any good comes to us from Roger Ebert:

Advisory: If your date wants to see The Human Centipede, have a long talk with yourself about who this person really is.

Let's tour the world of books. The blog Arabic Literature (in English) is still in the process of running down the 100 Best Arabic Books as selected by the Arab Writers Union, but is almost done. Hat tip to The Literary Saloon.

http://arablit.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/the-best-100-arabic-books-according-to-the-arab-writers-union-1-10/

Perhaps you prefer Portuguese literature? No problem. Well, except perhaps with findng English translations of these titles:

http://splalit.blogspot.com/2010/05/100-portuguese-books-of-20th-century.html

How about some Swedish book covers?

http://therumpus.net/2010/05/lord-of-the-flugornas-more-vintage-swedish-book-covers/

The Complete Review offers a review of a translation of an 1899 Urdu novel, Paradise of the Assassins by Abdul Halim Sharar:

http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/urdu/sharar.htm

Colin Marshall at The Millions guides us through the "surreal" and "erotic" novels of Kobo Abe:

http://www.themillions.com/2010/05/the-scientifically-surreal-eerily-erotic-novels-of-kobo-abe.html

Helping with another branch of contemporary Japanese culture, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky at The Millions analyzes the visual and narrative strategies of Takashi Miike's 2003 TV movie The Negotiator. Miike, whose output is so volcanic as to make Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Raul Ruiz look like lazy bums:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1690

While you're in Japan, take the train!

http://www.infrastructurist.com/2010/05/03/japan-the-model-of-a-train-riding-experience/

Among notables born on this date are economist Karl Marx, philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Richard Wollheim, journalist Nellie Bly, broadcaster Brian Williams, chef James Beard, country singer Tammy Wynette, pop saxophonist Ace Cannon, composer Hans Pfitzner, Monty Python member Michael Palin, novelists Christopher Morley and Henryk Sienkiewicz (Poland), film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, and actors Alice Faye, John Rhys-Davies, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Richard E. Grant, Roger Rees, Vincent Kartheiser, Tyrone Power, and Michael Murphy. It is very easy to think of privileged moments that a number of these actors have shared with me:

Leaud: Repeating "Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel, Antoine Doinel" into the bathroom mirror in Truffaut's Stolen Kisses.

Murphy: Giving Jack Tanner's big off-the-cuff speech to his staff, captured on film unbeknownst to him, in Altman's Tanner '88.

Kartheiser: The silhouetted shot in the first episode of Mad Men of Pete Campbell offering his hand to Jon Hamm's Don Draper -- and being refused.

Power: Making the decision to sacrifice lives so that some can survive in Richard Sale's Abandon Ship!

Grant: Doing the "elevator pitch" for the death-penalty thriller Habeas Corpus in Altman's The Player.

Rees: On stage as Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby in the eight-hour Royal Shakespeare Festival production, one of my great theatrical memories.

Monte Hellman and Others

In my private web-group, we were talking about Sam Peckinpah, which led to Warren Oates, which led to Monte Hellman. I noted, "Hellman apparently has a new feature, Road to Nowhere, in post-production. Does anyone know why he has done so little over the last 35 years? Does he have personal demons [like Peckinpah]? It seems like a waste. He was only 42 when he shot Cockfighter, and since then he has made only three features -- China 9, Liberty 37; Iguana; Silent Night, Deadly Night III (Lord help us) -- and a segment of an omnibus film, Trapped Ashes. Not even any television episodes except for one Baretta back in 1975. What gives?"

No one was really sure. It was pointed out that Hellman is listed as an executive producer on Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, and I dug a little deeper into his credits: "He is also listed as co-editor on a 1993 Civil War horror film known variously as Grey Knight/Ghost Brigade/The Killing Box, directed by the same George Hickenlooper who made the Coppola documentary Hearts of Darkness, and starring Martin Sheen, David and Alexis Arquette, Ray Wise, Adrien Pasdar, Matt LeBlanc, Cynda Williams, and Billy Bob Thornton in support of L.A. Law's Corbin Bernsen. If the IMDB was a work of fiction, it would be hard to suspend disbelief sometimes."

With respect to the Hellman career arc, I added, "I do wonder how he supported himself. It's not as if you could retire off the proceeds from Cockfighter and Two-Lane Blacktop. Most directors under similar circumstances would wind up doing plenty of television episodes or internationally financed schlock out of necessity, and of course that sort of necessity is the correct light in which to view the direct-to-video Silent Night, Deadly Night III. (China 9, Liberty 37 and Iguana were both internationally financed and shot, as well.) Although the IMDB and Wikipedia are silent on this point, I wouldn't be in the least surprised if there were personal issues that reduced his productivity. 35 years of spottiness is a heck of a long time."

Another minor Hellman credit put us on another tangent: "And he plays a bit part as a party guest in Henry Jaglom's Someone to Love! When you get to Henry Jaglom, you're sort of piling obscurity on obscurity -- where does it all end?"

Another member of the group had seen the documentary Who Is Henry Jaglom? (PMD, March 20), which he said made Jaglom out to be a "complete megalomaniac" and an "insufferable prick."

I responded: "I can believe it! He is, one must grant, awfully prolific for a micro-auteur; his next feature, Queen of the Lot, starring his recent muse Tanna Frederick, will be his 17th. Plus he wrote the screenplay for his protege Ron Vignone's upcoming Always But Not Forever, also starring Frederick. Another Vignone/Frederick opus in post-production (is anyone confused yet?), Katie Q, co-stars Jaglom alumna Karen Black. 

Jaglom's second feature, the Vietnam film Tracks with Dennis Hopper, is supposed to be at least interesting. The first feature, A Safe Place, has to command interest for its co-starring trio alone -- Tuesday Weld. Orson Welles, and Jack Nicholson! Welles certainly seems to have been supportive of Jaglom over the years, but Welles tended to get involved with 'characters.' His Other Side of the Wind cinematographer (and curator of Welles obscurities), Gary Graver, has carved out a lengthy career as porn director and cinematographer, including many films in the 'parody title' genre -- Maverdick, Three Men and a Hooker, Home But Not Alone, Silence of the Buns, Drivin' Miss Daisy Crazy Again, and (perhaps best of all) The Joi Fuck Club."

The Warren Oates discussion also led us to novelist/director Thomas McGuane, who cast Oates in his 92 in the Shade. I wrote: "I like McGuane as a novelist. I've always wanted to see Larry Peerce's very badly received film of his excellent first novel, The Sporting Club. Kael called that movie 'loathsome,' enough to pique my interest. It was pulled from New York theaters after one week, apparently.

McGuane traveled in a fast pack in the Seventies, and was involved with Elizabeth Ashley and married to Margot Kidder -- extraordinarily high wacko quotient there! (Even before Kidder flipped out, both those women were in great demand for talk shows because there was no censor operating between their brains and their mouths. Let 'er rip!) Another wife, Becky Crockett (descended from Davy Crockett!), went on to marry Peter Fonda, and McGuane himself went on to marry Jimmy Buffett's sister. He also wrecked his Porsche in a spectacular fiery crash. It all makes me dizzy."

The Seventies: They had personalities then.

UPDATE: I had a very pleasant comment from an associate of Hellman's who says that Monte is actually quite demon-free for Hollywood; it's his artistic principles that get him into frustrating situations. Read the comment below; you'll enjoy it.  

May 4: Special Follow-Ups Edition

A very impressive roster of American film-makers has called for the release of the still-jailed Iranian director Jafar Panahi (PMD, March 3):

http://www.avclub.com/articles/seemingly-every-major-american-director-signs-peti,40680/

Last month, Panahi's fellow Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami wrote an open letter in his support:

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/09/iranian-filmmaker-speaks-out-on-prisoners/

Another Facebook detractor heard from (PMD, April 27):

http://groovyageofhorror.blogspot.com/2010/05/fuck-facebook.html

Armistead Maupin and Olympia Dukakis reminisce about the Tales of the City mini-series (PMD, April 30):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/revisiting-tales-with-armistead-maupin-and-olympia-dukakis-.html

It's interesting to discover that Robert Altman was a huge fan of the innovative radio dramatist Norman Corwin, who turned 100 on Monday:

http://thrillingdaysofyesteryear.blogspot.com/2010/05/happy-100th-birthday-norman-corwin.html

JazzWax has some additional material from its lengthy encounter with Herb Geller (PMD, May 2), specifically relating to his friendships with pianist Bill Evans and bassist Scott LaFaro, who died tragically young at 25:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/05/herb-geller-on-bill-evans.html

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

A fine obituary of the late jazz critic Gene Lees (PMD, April 26) -- Times U.K., again!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7113236.ece 

More on the Donner Party dust-up (PMD, May 2) (hat tip to Bill Crider):

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rarick-20100502,0,2579910.story?track=rss

The New York Times is impressed with the English National Opera's production of Henze's Elegy for Young Lovers (PMD, April 25):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/arts/05iht-Loomis.html

The ideas of the great sociologist Erving Goffman (PMD, April 30) come up again in Christine Rosen's essay on "The Death of Embarrassment":

In Behavior in Public Spaces, published in 1963, sociologist Erving Goffman described our public actions, from greeting friends on the street to answering questions posed by strangers, as signals of the strength of our commitment to our social communities.  "What the individual thinks of as the niceties of social conduct," Goffman argued, "are in fact rules for guiding him in his attachment to and detachment from social gatherings."  These are what mark us as belonging, or not. "More than to any family or club, more than to any class or sex, more than to any nation, the individual belongs to gatherings, and he had best show that he is a member in good standing," Goffman wrote.

http://incharacter.org/features/the-death-of-embarrassment/ 

Historian Tony Judt (PMD, March 23) is working on a new book about how railroads changed the world:

I've for many years fantasized about writing a study of the place of the railway in the modern world, economically, topographically, in town planning, in the creation of space and the idea of time, in movies and literature and so on. I knew some of this stuff in the abstract, but I've learned much more concretely about the astonishing degree to which the railway—literally the railroad, trains, the whole economy it created—changed our world in ways that planes, cars, the Internet, even electricity maybe didn't quite match. The very notion of society existing in terms of classes, in terms of collective life, public and private space, cities and the relationship between city and country; the idea of time, of time as something that organizes us rather than we organizing it—these were all railway creations. If you try to imagine the world that existed before 1830, before the first railway line in England, between Manchester and Liverpool, it's quite literally unimaginable. It takes an effort of will to realize that in Roman times the sense of distance was about the same as it was in 1780, let's say. For most of human history, people never came into contact, or did very rarely, with either someone who was not born where they lived or some artifact that was not made either by them or by someone they knew or in the town in which they were born. But within one generation they are living in a world that makes today's globalization look like nothing in terms of the transformation. That's the work of the railway, much more than anything else in the world, and that's what I want to try to capture in the book.

http://www.thenation.com/article/talking-tony-judt

May 4: Special "Birds and Brits" Edition

I have made friends with a Western Scrub-Jay that lives around the corner from me. With the help of the linked article, I was able to identify the bird as the California sub-species:

http://fog.ccsf.cc.ca.us/~jmorlan/birdingquiz.pdf

Scrub-Jays like "suburban gardens," according to Wikipedia, and sure enough, my little buddy lives in one. It's on a quiet Carson City corner, protected by a wooden fence, and the Jay is often perched on the fence or flitting between it and the garden's small tree. The California subspecies is said to be bold and tame, and this fellow certainly is; I can walk within a couple of feet and talk to him, and he shows no inclination at all to fly away. It has become pleasant to greet him on my morning walks!

Nick Clegg, Liberal Democratic candidate for Prime Minister in this Thursday's British general election, has revealed that his favorite author is -- Samuel Beckett!

Every time I go back to Beckett he seems more subversive, not less; his works make me feel more uncomfortable than they did before. The unsettling idea, most explicit in Godot, that life is habit – that it is all just a series of motions devoid of meaning – never gets any easier.

It's that willingness to question the things the rest of us take for granted that I admire most about Beckett; the courage to ask questions that are dangerous because, if the traditions and meanings we hold so dear turn out to be false, what do we do then?

http://playgoer.blogspot.com/2010/05/politician-admits-to-reading-modernist.html

http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/2010/05/oh-no-now-nicks-gone-and-made-me-like.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/richard-adams-blog/2010/may/04/nick-clegg-samuel-beckett-politics

Along with the important fact that I like his politics better than Gordon Brown's or David Cameron's, this would be enough to get my vote. Also, I must admit, the guy is swoonily good-looking. So go, Nick, go!

Maybe, if Clegg is elected, he can put down as #7,483 on his to-do list, the need to persuade BBC America to run actual British programming instead of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Nothing against the excellent ST: TNG, but come on:

http://cultureshark.blogspot.com/2010/05/putting-america-in-bbc-america.html

Staying with the British theme here, Neil Young at The Auteurs lists the upcoming British film releases he's most excited about. Young has unimpeachable taste:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1753

Sean Axmaker draws my attention to a modern-dress Royal Shakespeare Company/BBC (yes!) Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart that is being released on DVD presently:

http://www.seanax.com/2010/05/03/tv-on-dvd-05-04-10-david-tennant-is-hamlet-robert-young-is-marcus-welby-and-invader-zim-the-conquering-hero/ 

On the current London stage, Laura Wade's "continually riveting" political play Posh sounds like a winner. The review reminds us that "the Liberal Democrat candidate Nick Clegg appeared in 1988 in a Cambridge University production of Cyrano de Bergerac, directed by Sam Mendes":

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/05/arts/05iht-lon5.html

J. Kingston Pierce at The Rap Sheet is overjoyed to see the return of the British TV series Foyle's War. I haven't watched the show yet, but one photograph of lead actor Michael Kitchen in splendid period garb is enough to hook me sartorially. Love the look, chum:

http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2010/05/no-more-bombs-but-still-bombshells.html

Among notables born on this date are novelists Graham Swift and Amos Oz, poet Thomas Kinsella, historian William Prescott, critic Lincoln Kirstein, journalist George F. Will, urbanist Jane Jacobs, painters Frederic Edwin Church and Keith Haring, stage designer Alexandre Benois, educator Horace Mann, scientist Thomas Henry Huxley, explorer John Hanning Speke, jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson, jazz bassist Ron Carter, rock guitarist Dick Dale, country singer Randy Travis, conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and actors Audrey Hepburn and Richard Jenkins. The great British actress and humanitarian Audrey Hepburn, born in Belgium to an English father and a Dutch mother, and partnered in her adult life by an American, an Italian, and a Dutchman, could and did play characters of many different nationalities (although she sensibly turned down playing a Japanese role in Sayonara!). Here she is as an American in Breakfast at Tiffany's, singing the exquisite "Moon River," which Henry Mancini wrote for her unique delivery; he later said that no one would ever understand the song as completely as she did.

Marketing

[I posted this in a thread at the Life After the Oil Crash Forum where the subject of marketing had come up.]

Here is an interesting fact re: marketing. The majority of college students who are majoring in "business" these days are specializing in marketing. It is perceived to be the "hot" area. A couple of years ago, I ran a sizable college internship program for a vitamin manufacturing company. We handled virtually all functions in house -- even had our own in-house ad agency -- so I did have a variety of internships to offer. To find potential interns, I got booths at a number of college career fairs and talked to hundreds of students. Business students were of course in the majority, and 75% of them, no exaggeration, announced themselves as marketers. I didn't know what to do with them! -- I had only one marketing internship. There were far fewer finance/accounting students, I think because average American students are largely innumerate, and the math aspect scares them. I had several finance/accounting internships, and was able to help more of those students.

I also placed several science majors in our product development and quality control labs, and placed some top-quality liberal arts majors (who I think are often overlooked) in various departments as well.

Among those hundreds of business students, only one was concentrating his studies in manufacturing and distribution -- specifically in logistics and the supply chain. We snapped him up but fast! The entire company fell in love with him, and he is one of several in that intern cohort who got full-time jobs at the company after graduation. His academic niche really, really stood out, as compared to all the kids who were getting into marketing because it was "sexy" (as well as non-technical, non-mathematical, and largely non-analytic).

"Normal Life"

A normal existence -- what could be more irrational? It's fantastic the number of things you're forced not to think about in order to go from one end of the day to the other without jumping the track! And the number of memories that have to be driven from your mind, the truths that have to be evaded!

Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

For the first time, tragedy had been brought near to [Harvey Rolfe], and he marvelled at the indifference with which men habitually live in a world where tragedy is every hour's occurrence....what he now saw and felt was the simple truth of things, obscured by everyday conditions of active life....But for the power of deceiving ourselves, we couldn't live at all.

George Gissing, The Whirlpool

Man is born to live, to suffer, and to die, and what befalls him is a tragic lot. There is no denying this in the final end. But we must deny it all along the way.

Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again

That, he had decided, was the final truth of the war, and he had greeted it with relief, greeted it eagerly, the simple fact that it was incomprehensible and had to be forgotten. Things just happen, he decided; they happen and they happen again, and anybody who tries to make sense of it goes out of his mind.

Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit

I don't watch much television (apart from Turner Classic Movies, bless them), but lately, on the occasions when I have watched conventional broadcasts -- a golf tournament, say, or Sixty Minutes the other night to catch the Conan O'Brien interview -- I have been struck by the extent to which the commercials pretend that we are still living in the "normal world" -- of 1980! There's a mom, there's a dad, there are two young children, a boy and a girl, there's a dog, there's a nice suburban house with a mowed lawn, there are investments, there are vacations, there are two vehicles. Mom and dad both work (which is why I say 1980 rather than 1960), at good, secure jobs, moving steadily up the career ladder with no disruptions, no lay-offs, no nasty office politics, no thwarted ambitions. This is the world that the commercials imply. It is one sort of fantasy of normal life.

If you check out the covers of the remaining print magazines at your local news-stand or grocery store, you can sample other such fantasies, because most magazines peddle a particular fantasy, month in, month out. A very popular one, which gets more play in the publications than on television, is that you can have phenomenal sex on a daily basis if you follow the tips in the magazines' articles and if, crucially, you look like the models on the magazines' covers (which even they don't look like, really).

Sexual fantasies are, of course, persistently unrealizable; Freud long ago wrote about how this enables "the grandest cultural achievements, which are brought to birth by ever greater sublimation of the components of the sexual instinct. For what motive would induce man to put his sexual energy to other uses if by any disposal of it he could obtain fully satisfying pleasure? He would never let go of this pleasure and would make no further progress."

So it is unrealistic to expect specifically sexual fantasies to change much, although they are a little more public nowadays, glaring at you from the covers of Cosmopolitan and Maxim instead of hidden under brown wrappers. But the larger fantasy of normal middle-class life depicted in the TV commercials -- one might expect that to adjust to reality just a wee bit more, and it hasn't except in a few relatively minor ways (more depiction of racial diversity, for example). The fact is that Americans have long been drifting away from the middle class fantasy lifestyle, partly out of choice, partly out of necessity. The recent financial disasters are going a long way toward decimating the middle class, of course. But even before that, the most common sort of household being formed in the United States was the kind I live in -- a singleton in an apartment. The notion of a life without significant disruption ("Pre-approved with your good credit rating!") is going by the boards; I know scarcely anyone who made it through the last decade without being up-ended at least once. You get more of a glimpse of the actual state of affairs in the cheap world of local TV commercials, with their hawking of used cars and personal injury attorneys. But at the national level, advertisers pretend against all available evidence that everything is just fine.

A dominant fantasy is one that the majority of people need to buy into in order for things to run "smoothly." But when a dominant fantasy unmoors itself too noticeably from reality, will people still buy in? "Normal life" is a fiction that goes on only as long as most of us consent to it, and only if conditions permit. If conditions no longer permit, and enough of us stop consenting to the fiction, matters could get quite interesting. I think that is where we are at, even if the Don Drapers of today don't know it yet.  

May 3

After Phil Mickelson's scintillating closing round at The Masters, I thought it might be a while before we saw another stretch of golf as good; but this Sunday, at Quail Hollow, Northern Irish phenom Rory McIlroy hit a spectacular groove in one of the best rounds anyone will ever see. Nine pars, eight birdies, an eagle; course record 10-under 62; 16-under for the weekend; started Sunday four back, wound up winning by four; capped it all with a 40-foot birdie on the 18th. "Ridiculous," really, as the golfer said himself; but hardly accidental. Jim Nantz at CBS was quick to point out that Seve, Phil, and Tiger all won on the Tour prior to their 21st birthdays; McIlroy celebrates his 21st on Tuesday, so he's in pretty nice company. He's got a tremendous gift and comes across as a charming young guy, besides; CBS commentators Nick Faldo and David Feherty (a fellow Ulsterman) could barely contain their delight, and fellow golfers Lee Westwood, Padraig Harrington, and Jim Furyk were all waiting to congratulate him as he came off the course. Good going!

   
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/golf/wires/05/02/2070.ap.glf.quail.hollow.3rd.ld.writethru.1041/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2010/may/03/rory-mcilroy-quail-hollow

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/golf/mcilroys-incredible-62-seals-charlotte-win-1960923.html

http://www.cbssports.com/golf/story/13337026/any-way-you-look-at-it-an-amazing-us-coming-out-party-for-mcilroy

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/sports/golf/03pga.html

http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/McIlroy-Tway-Kim-pull-off-the-shots-of-the-wee?urn=golf,238241

That thing called star power: operatic tenor Lawrence Brownlee also has it:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jrLkRXVDEhn_g1v-OtixhmSyDV8wD9FDB6G80

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/arts/music/14armida.html

It is good to see the Metropolitan Opera taking on a major, neglected, difficult work such as Rossini's Armida for the first time; and although the lead, Renee Fleming, received somewhat mixed reviews, Anthony Tommasini is perfectly right to say, "Armida belongs at the Met."

Athletes and artists naturally want to announce, "I am here," and I would say that with his bruising video for M.I.A.'s song "Born Free," director Romain Gavras has done just that:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/04/music-video-m-i-a-s-born-free/

Romain Gavras, who is the son of the renowned film-maker Costa-Gavras, and M.I.A., whose father is a Sri Lankan Tamil activist, are entirely serious political artists, and deserve to be treated as such. This video is one of the most powerful pieces of film I have seen in a while. At the link, Eric Henderson suggests two likely cinematic influences -- Peter Watkins's Punishment Park and the ending of Brian De Palma's The Fury -- and let me add a third: the opening sequence of George Romero's Dawn of the Dead.

Also eminently serious, in his ornery, elusive way, is Mark E. Smith, founder and only constant member of the British band The Fall, now at 34 years and 28 studio albums. I've got to like, at least conceptually, any artist who admires Wyndham Lewis and who named his outfit after a Camus novel (which, by the way, happens to be one of the greatest works of fiction that I have ever read).

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/arts/music/02fall.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_%28band%29

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_%28novel%29

A musician who similarly stuck to his own path is the late French composer Gerard Grisey (1946-1998), whose whopping big Les Espaces Acoustiques just received its U.S. premiere as a complete work in Los Angeles. Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed attempts to explain the piece and the genre of "spectral music" that it (maybe) belongs to (Grisey disowned the phrase):

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/05/g%C3%A9rard-griseys-spacetime-epic-recieves-its-us-premiere-at-redcat.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%A9rard_Grisey

The follow-up concert "New Music After Grisey" also sounds extremely interesting. When I was at Yale, I hung out with the new music crowd (as a non-musician, which made me unusual), and attended a number of concerts of this kind which I remember with great pleasure -- specifically an all-nighter by the student ensemble Sheep's Clothing which ended with a greet-the-dawn performance of Terry Riley's In C (and along the way featured an arresting account of the dadaist Kurt Schwitters's spoken Ursonata by Scott McLarty, now a Green Party politician).

I'm enchanted by Tim Bavington's color-based paintings:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/art-review-tim-bavington-at-mark-moore-gallery.html

http://www.markmooregallery.com/exhibitions/2010-04-24_tim-bavington/

http://www.timbavington.com/

http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32321/my-brilliant-career-tim-bavington/

I could perhaps display one in this Austrian summerhouse, which was designed for a collector:

http://www.archdaily.com/57876/komic-house-synn-architekten/

Among notables born on this date are political theorist Niccolo Machiavelli, cowboy writer Andy Adams, journalist Jacob Riis, novelists May Sarton, Dodie Smith, Nelida Pinon (Brazil), Tatyana Tolstaya (Russia), and Konstantine Gamsakurdhia (Georgia), poet Yehuda Amichai (Israel), lyricist Betty Comden, playwrights William Inge and August von Kotzebue (Germany), radio dramatist Norman Corwin, pop singers Bing Crosby and Frankie Valli, folk singer Pete Seeger, composer Marcel Dupre, film composer Hugo Friedhofer, film historian Robert Osborne, theatrical producer Richard D'Oyly Carte, boxer Sugar Ray Robinson,  and actors Mary Astor and Beulah Bondi. One of the first scenes to excite me about the possibilities of movie scoring is the incomparable airplane graveyard sequence in The Best Years of Our Lives, acted by Dana Andrews, directed by William Wyler, shot by Gregg Toland, and scored by Hugo Friedhofer. Goosebumps:

May 2

Today's Reno Gazette-Journal has a good article refuting the ridiculous story that traveled the wires last week, to the effect that the Donner Party did not engage in cannibalism:

http://www.rgj.com/article/20100502/NEWS/5020366/1321/news/Researcher--Donner-Party-did-cannibalize-the-dead-after-all

I have studied the Donner Party and taught it. The cannibalism is definitively attested to in the historical record, as the Gazette-Journal makes clear, and the fact that a "new study" found no human bone fragments at one of several Donner Party campsites -- big whoop. That this nonsense got play shows that (1) journalists are overexcitable, and (2) Gwen Robbins, the Appalachian State University anthropology (not history) professor responsible for the press release, deserves to be thrashed by her department chair and university president. (By now, I hope that sensible news consumers know that any journalistic sentence beginning with "A new study..." or "A recent study..." deserves a deep mental discount.)

As to the overexcitability -- it's only going to get worse. Journalistic departments across the country are slashing staff -- the national ABC News operation laid off one quarter of its workers this past week -- and none of the few, remaining, overworked bodies are going to have time to check much. As author David James Brown notes in the Gazette-Journal article. "The press release was riddled with inaccuracies, but newspapers and websites printed it without verifying anything." So p.r. folks out there can pump any kind of bilge in their press releases, and it will probably get printed. The Internet tends to ratify rumor as fact, anyway.

I enjoy io9's list of the best science fiction/detective novel hybrids, although I agree with the commenter who is puzzled by the omission of Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man:

http://io9.com/5526900/top-10-greatest-science-fiction-detective-novels-of-all-time

Science fiction-wise, it looks like we're going to get to see more of Philip K. Dick's legendary Exegesis, although I expect it will fall into the same "borderline unreadable" category as Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/books/30author.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exegesis_%28book%29

Detectives-wise, Vince Keenan likes the recent "post-9/11" neo-noir The Missing Person, and I do too:

http://blog.vincekeenan.com/2010/04/movies-missing-person-200944-inch-chest.html

Director Noah Buschel has a sharp compositional eye, and he and cinematographer Ryan Samul combine to get some truly memorable images up on the screen. Michael Shannon's "quietly forceful" lead performance grew on me considerably as the film went along.

The latest print interview at JazzWax is an epic encounter with alto saxophonist Herb Geller that stretches over five posts. Geller was best pals with Eric Dolphy at Dorsey High School in Los Angeles and played in the school band with him, along with future jazz professionals Vi Redd (saxophone) and Bobby White (drums). That must have been some band!

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-herb-geller-part-1.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-herb-geller-part-2.html 

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-herb-geller-part-3.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-herb-geller-part-4.html

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/interview-herb-geller-part-5.html

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

Like so many American jazz musicians, Geller couldn't make a real living here -- he talks in the interview about playing at strip clubs for extra money during the Fifties -- and has spent the last 50 years living in Europe and playing mainly there. We don't honor our own.

Conductor Gustavo Dudamel is leading an "Americas and Americans" festival with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, highlighting composers such as the Venezuelan Antonio Estevez (1916-1988) and his Cantata Criolla:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/gustavo-dudamel-brilliantly-revives-forgotten-venezuelan-work.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Est%C3%A9vez

{feuilleton} brings us a striking large sculpture of Lucifer, El Angel Caido (The Fallen Angel), by the Spaniard Ricardo Bellver (1845-1824). It sits in a Madrid park:

http://www.johncoulthart.com/feuilleton/2010/05/01/ricardo-bellvers-el-angel-caido/

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

If you're in the mood for more deviltry, check out Stefan Eggeler's illustrations for Gustav Meyrink's 1917 novel Walpurgisnacht:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/04/happy-walpurgisnacht.html

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

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

Among notables born on this date are comic novelist Jerome K. Jerome, science fiction novelist E.E. "Doc" Smith, poets Novalis and Gottfried Benn, journalist Theodor Herzl, lyricist Lorenz Hart, composer Alessandro Scarlatti, conductor Valery Gergiev, rock guitarist Link Wray, pop singer Lesley Gore, and film directors Satyajit Ray, Stephen Daldry, and Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. In a lifetime of film-going in big American cities such as San Francisco and Boston, I have had fewer opportunities to see films by Satyajit Ray than by any director of similar stature. My sense is that the stewardship of his movies has been notably poor. Many key titles are not currently available on DVD (either here or in the U.K.), and probably most of the films need restoration. The Film Society of Lincoln Center did host a retrospective last year that programmed 19 of the 28 features, including everything up to 1971:

http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale09/satyajit/program.html

But much more needs to be done. Here is an interesting discussion of the situation at The Auteurs:

http://www.theauteurs.com/topics/2063

May 1

Several years before he became famous with The Battle of Algiers (1966), Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo made one of the first World War II concentration camp dramas, Kapo, with the American actress Susan Strasberg. Sean Axmaker comments on the Criterion DVD release:

http://www.seanax.com/2010/04/14/gillo-pontecorvos-kapo/

Glenn Kenny is blown away by the films of Frantisek Vlacil from the same period:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1747

On the other side of the globe, in Japan, Susumu Hani was then launching his short, intense career as a feature director. Here he is interviewed by the excellent website Midnight Eye:

http://www.midnighteye.com/interviews/susumu_hani.shtml

Jason Crane at The Jazz Session conducts another wonderful interview, this time with trumpeter and bass clarinetist Matt Lavelle, who was born a couple of towns away from me in Paterson, New Jersey. The excerpts from Lavelle's recordings are striking:

http://thejazzsession.com/2010/04/15/the-jazz-session-160-matt-lavelle/

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

I like -- and clearly Crane does too -- the fact that Lavelle has a terrific relationship with jazzmen of an older generation, both musically (for those who are gone) and personally (for some who are still alive). He talks of his visits to "the Planet Ornette" (which made me laugh heartily) and also of his part in helping to resuscitate the career of Giuseppi Logan, a Sixties multi-instrumentalist who had dropped out of sight and was long thought to be dead:

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

Lavelle is a regular contributor at the jazz blog Brilliant Corners, where in this post he speculates on how to make a living and keep on playing. I am utterly sympathetic to the dilemma:

By 2002, I had been a dishwasher, a recycling plant guy, worked at Mcdonalds, worked Bodega's, night shifts at a supermarket, been a cashier, a subway sandwich artist, worked at Caldor, worked with disabled people, was a driver, and tried to start my own business as an astrologer and a psychic. Since then I was the shipping receiving manager at Tower records, the Jazz buyer at Tower, worked at Barnes and Noble, sold Trumpets at Sam Ash, and now I wash dogs (and even cats!). Do I want a medal or special recognition? No, but I can look back and say,...DAMN...

http://brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/jazz-musician-chain-gangmatt-lavelle.html

Also at Brilliant Corners, you can learn more about interviewer (and poet) Jason Crane:

http://brilliantcornersabostonjazzblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/jazz-session-restoration.html

A concert I'm sorry I missed: The New York Philharmonic under Valery Gergiev playing Stravinsky's incredible Oedipus Rex, with Jeremy Irons as the narrator:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/30/arts/music/30rex.html

This is a score that I discovered as a teen and have adored ever since. Stravinsky himself, questioned about it by Robert Craft, expressed some doubts about the effectiveness of the narration but then added, "The music? I love it, all of it" -- as well he ought to have.

The much-quoted economist Joseph Schumpeter, him of"creative destruction," is one of those thinkers who, like Machiavelli, forces me to concentrate on those aspects of human nature I'd sometimes rather wish away. There is a big new biography by Thomas McCraw:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/smiling-and-back-to-work/

If I get too depressed thinking about the "hard-wired" greed of mankind (I'm not actually sure that I agree with McCraw on that point; not all cultures display equal greed motivation), I can always shift my focus to something more charming and encouraging -- such as toy boats!

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37777

Among notables born on this date are novelists Joseph Heller, Terry Southern, Antal Szerb (Hungary), and Jose de Alencar (Brazil), poet Yannis Ritsos (Greece), essayist Joseph Addison, theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, sculptor Ralph Stackpole, film directors Karel Kachyna, John Woo, and Wes Anderson, jazz singer Shirley Horn, folk singer Judy Collins, talk show host Jack Paar, game show host Art Fleming, and actors Glenn Ford and Dan O'Herlihy. Alex Trebek is so associated with the game show Jeopardy! from 1984 on that it is often forgotten that Art Fleming was the show's original host, from 1964 to 1975 and again in a 1978-1979 revival. I was a huge fan as a kid (and since), and have often thought about trying out for the show; I have such a good memory for minor facts that after a while, my family refused to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Most of the Fleming-era Jeopardy! episodes were "scrubbed" and no longer exist, but there is some footage (naturally) on YouTube: