April 19

A historian rebukes the recent Supreme Court Citizens United decision that granted corporations unfettered "personhood," especially in the realm of political spending:

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/the-founding-fathers-and-corporations/

http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/2010/04/what-the-founding-fathers-real.html

To me, this decision is one more coffin nail, albeit a particularly significant one. The coffin nails abound. Recovery? There is no recovery; just yesterday, the lead story in the Reno Gazette-Journal was the extraordinarily high level of personal bankruptcies, in Nevada and nationwide -- and this is coming after the bankruptcy laws were tightened. People have no choice. Forty years after the "lessons" of Vietnam, we are embroiled in not one but two unwinnable wars. Between the Supreme Court, the Republicans, the Democrats, the Presidency (under both parties), the Congress (under both parties), state governments, local governments, the corporations, the lobbyists, the mainstream media, the universities -- between them all, there are no promises left for America to break; they have all been broken.

And so my imminent departure from the country for a job overseas is not just a hide-saving maneuver, but also in the nature of a "bug-out." Whether or not Korea proves to be the right long-term location, I have no intention at this point of ever living or working in the United States again. There are plenty of other countries to try if the first one doesn't pan out. It is sad but undeniably true that for an American of my specific qualifications and training -- and probably for Americans of many different specific qualifications and trainings -- the world as a whole presents much more livable and exciting opportunities than staying stateside. Well, they did say it was going to be a global era. 

I sold my SUV a couple of weeks ago, because I needed the money to live on pending my move, and I wasn't planning on keeping the vehicle in storage.  Fortunately, since I live in a small downtown, I can handle most needed activities on foot, and there is a local bus system and a local taxicab company. Walking the streets of Carson City, I have noticed in a more forceful way than I ever did whizzing by in my car how down on its luck the area seems. The amount of vacant retail and office space is staggering. Local merchants start grousing about the lack of business if you give them the slightest opening. No one seems even mildly surprised that I would be leaving the state or the country; it makes complete sense to them. As a long-time student of history, I can now say that I have a fair inkling of what it felt like to live in 1931. Despair stalks the nation. And I have no desire to stick around and see how bad it can get, either for me personally or for the country as a whole.

OK, enough negativity for today. Now for something completely praiseworthy: Golfer Brian Davis calling a two-stroke penalty on himself for accidentally grazing a reed during a tough play-off shot at the Verizon Heritage -- and losing the tournament in the process -- is one of the classiest actions I've ever seen in sports, and shows why golf is still a great game. Davis should look at it this way: He may have lost a title, but he just increased his fandom by an incalculable amount, and completely deserves to have done done so. Good going! Whenever you see someone take the honorable path, it restores your faith a little.

http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/Davis-calls-penalty-on-himself-gives-up-shot-at?urn=golf,234963

Manisha Verma at 3QuarksDaily confirms what I had long suspected, that many would-be Internet "businesses" are in fact nothing of the kind, and Internet "advertising" (I'm having to use a lot of scare quotes here) is not going to save them:

In this pursuit of "eyeballs", a series of new internet stars emerged: MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter. Each provided a free service in order to attract a large audience that would then—at some unspecified point in the future—supposedly attract large amounts of advertising revenue. It had worked for Google, after all, and ought to work for the others. But the reality, it turns out, is that the number of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertising is much smaller than many people thought. Not one of them has really become an advertising success in its own right....Ultimately....every business needs revenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Free content and free services are a fanciful idea.....This is actually nothing new in the world of business. But it is a bit of a shock in the Web world, where "attention" and "reputation" are the currencies most in demand, with the expectation that a sufficient amount of either would turn into money someday, somehow.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/the-future-of-online-ads.html 

I am rather glad that what I do here at PMD lacks any chance of ever being "monetized," since I don't even have the eyeballs -- if I have as many as a dozen dedicated readers, I'd be thrilled (but I'm not even sure it's that many). Of course I'm contributing to the "hobbification" I mentioned in an earlier post, but there is no help for it.

A journalist I met who is trying to get a "hyperlocal" website off the ground explained to me that even when there is a possibility of profit in such ventures, it is small change compared to the dollars that newspapers used to rake in. So while some out-of-work journalists will be tempted by these new media opportunities -- because they need to do something, and actually believe in journalism -- most newspaper publishers will turn their noses up at the very minor money, amd move on to fresh fields and pastures new (if they can find any, which I wouldn't bet on). The level of potential "take" really matters in these contexts: You tell a Wall Street guy that he can get in on an exciting concept but that at most it will net him in the high five figures, and the scorn will blow you into the next state. Louis Menand once shrewdly wrote:

The logic that prefers an F to any grade except an A plus is the logic behind an enterprise like Kozmo.com. Its founders will be happy if they become billionaires; they will be happy (less happy, maybe, but still happy) if they are failures. What will not make them happy, it seems, is if they turn out to have created a respectable business that satisfies its customers, pays its bills on time and returns a modest income to its owners, enough for them to meet the mortgage payments and take their spouses out to dinner once in a while. This is America! What kind of success is that? 

Everyone is looking for the "big score." So a problem for starry-eyed Internet entrepreneurs is not just whether they can turn a profit, but whether they can turn a humongous enough profit to hold their own interest -- and in 99 cases out of 100, of course, the answer will be "No."

Among notables born on this date are novelist Richard Hughes, playwright Jose Echegaray, composer Germaine Tailleferre, soprano Natalie Dessay, pianist Murray Perahia, pop musician Alan Price, painter Fernando Botero, lawman Eliot Ness, broadcaster Forrest Sawyer, economist David Ricardo, and actors Hayden Christensen, James Franco, Ashley Judd, Barry Brown, Tim Curry, Dudley Moore, and Jayne Mansfield. I am so fond of Eliot Ness, the well-dressed lawman par excellence, that I have actually used him as an avatar in web groups. It is rather ironic that this defender of the Volstead Act later developed a drinking problem!

April 18

A few days after the trailer for Tom Six's horror film The Human Centipede was shared in one of my web discussion groups, Ed Gonzalez at The House Next Door posted this review:

http://www.slantmagazine.com/house/2010/04/tom-sixs-the-human-centipede-the-first-sequence/

The review makes the film seem less campy than the trailer, more disturbing. I am interested to read about The Human Centipede, but will I see it? Not sure. As I have often confessed, I am a big sissy about this stuff -- I watched long chunks of Gaspar Noe's Irreversible through my fingers. Part of the issue is that I am grossed out easily, but another, perhaps larger part is my reluctance to let disgusting images "rent space in my head" (a brilliant phrase that my mentor teacher shared with me some years ago). Once you've seen something, you can't unsee it.

I typically defend the right to use such imagery and to depict violence in whatever way, but occasionally my relation to that sort of defense is troubled -- I think that is true of most of us, if we're being honest. Roger Ebert found just this past week that the little-girl violence in the new Kick-Ass went beyond his threshold of disapproval:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100414/REVIEWS/100419986

A.O. Scott suggested that we all have to draw a line somewhere, although obviously where we draw it will be highly personal:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/18/movies/18scott.html

For me, what I want to or am even capable of watching, and what I will defend, are two distinct categories. In that same web group this week, I pre-defended Michael Winterbottom's already much-discussed The Killer Inside Me: "Misogynist murder should be ugly, shouldn't it? If we're not able to identify with the murderer, that's a good thing, right? Of course the film might be hard to watch....but it sounds eminently serious, which is nothing less than I would expect from....Winterbottom." Given my strong interest in noir, I probably will see this film, with fingers at the ready -- and remembering that after steeling myself to watch Irreversible, I would up thinking (as Ebert did too) that it was a very considerable -- and moral -- film. However, against my theory that realistic depictions make violence more disgusting in the way that it should be -- a debate that has gone on forever, but gained new life with the 1967 release of Bonnie and Clyde and has not let up since -- against that must be held the rather obvious fact that decades of such increasingly realistic depictions do not seem to have sensitized anyone; rather, they have simply upped the ante on what can be visualized without much objection. Overall, this is a very tricky subject.

Until I subscribed to the Africana blog Myweku, I had no idea that there were African Academy Awards:

http://www.myweku.com/2010/04/african-movie-academy-award-2010-winners/

Since African films are sadly under-represented on the international film festival circuit, a resource such as this list of nominees and winners could be helpful in looking for DVDs. African-produced DVDs would be Region 2 or 5, but with a multi-region player that worry vanishes.

I am also grateful to learn from Myweku about David Adjaye's important photographic survey of African cities:

http://www.myweku.com/2010/04/a-photographic-survey-of-53-african-cities-david-adjaye/

Jonathan Blitzer at The Nation offers a fine essay about the under-appreciated Uruguayan novelist Juan Carlos Onetti (1909-1994):

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100503/blitzer 

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

SoundRoots -- a "world music & global culture" blog also new to PMD -- reviews an album of Dutch medieval songs revived and modernized by the group Three Ality. Play the tune at the link; it's catchy.

Like 17th century Amsterdam, 16th century Antwerp was a melting pot of cultures, owing to a lively world trade. Hence it seems likely that this was reflected in the folk music of those days. Turkish sailors, African slaves, Chinese traders all worked and lived together. That's why the exotic textures on some of the tracks are not as farfetched as might seem at first glance.

http://www.soundroots.org/2010/04/monday-mp3-modern-medieval-music.html 

The Checkout, the blog of the Newark-based jazz radio station WBGO, does excellent podcast interviews with jazz artists such as the young pianist Orrin Evans:

http://www.wbgo.org/thecheckout/?p=2222

Among notables born on this date are lawyer Clarence Darrow, novelists Richard Harding Davis and Kathy Acker, playwright Thomas Middleton, historian Niall Ferguson, political scientist Samuel Huntington, rock critic Robert Christgau, composers Franz von Suppe and Miklos Rozsa, conductor Leopold Stokowski, singer/songwriter Skip Spence, film director Eli Roth, talk show host Conan O'Brien, and actors Hayley Mills, Clive Revill, Eric Roberts, Maria Bello, Rick Moranis, and James Woods. Over at The Blackboard, we also keep track of "noir deaths," and it was noted that today was the anniversary of the departure of screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894-1964). I love Hecht's freakier projects, such as his decadent fantasy novels Fantazius Mallare and Kingdom of Evil, and the films he directed or co-directed himself, such as Crime Without Passion, Angels Over Broadway, and Specter of the Rose. He was kind of a nut at times, and I mean that in a good way.

Great Hecht quotation: "In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."

April 17

There is a film writer over whom I have spilled some ink, because we all need a bete noire, who recently exited an Internet party he had started, leaving confusion in his wake. He also stopped posting at his blog, which, in fidgety spirit, he had frequently re-named. He migrated instead to Twitter, which takes his long-noted tendency toward compression to new heights; the inevitable next step will not be writing anything at all. The medium also reinforces his and others' habit of writing in a kind of code that only those "in the know" can decipher, and in this case, I don't mean "in the know" about cinema, I mean "in the know" about the inner workings of his head. Twitter itself may become passe now that they are trafficking in "sponsored tweets" (advertising): that party might move on too. I remain anti-Twitter and anti-Facebook myself. Blogging, my chosen Internet medium, is quickly becoming an "old fogies" style of communication, which suits me just fine.

Here is one user's break-up note to Twitter (which doesn't even mention the advertising):

http://thefastertimes.com/politicalhumor/2010/04/16/title-top-10-reasons-im-breaking-up-with-you-an-open-letter-in-more-than-140-characters/

Forbes enumerates "11 Career-Ending Facebook Faux Pas." I do a perfectly fine job at wrecking career opportunities without assistance!

http://www.forbes.com/2010/04/13/how-facebook-ruined-my-career-entrepreneurs-human-resources-facebook_slide.html

Christopher Lydon at Open Source did a superb interview with Michael Lewis, whose new state-of-the-economy book The Big Short is coming in for the the sort of praise that has rightly followed Lewis throughout his career:

http://www.radioopensource.org/michael-lewis-big-short-and-our-appetite-for-apocalypse/

The Times Literary Supplement looks at five novels of the financial crisis:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7082533.ece

Noel Murray and Leonard Pierce of The Onion amply demonstrate that Warren Zevon had one of the most character-based, literary sensibilities of any songwriter. (Hat tip to Robert Kennedy.)

http://www.avclub.com/articles/talkin-about-the-man-18-real-and-fictional-charact,39988/

The Korean poet Ko Un, often mentioned as a Nobel Prize candidate, has completed a monumental epic:

Poet Ko Un has finally completed ``Maninbo'' (Ten Thousand Lives), a 30-volume epic poem series, 25 years after he first began publishing the monumental work in 1986. The 77-year-old initiated the landmark epic poem series when he was imprisoned in 1980 on false accusations of treason during a military coup. He decided to describe every person he had ever met in his life in the project....``Maninbo'' consists of 4,001 poems describing 5,600 people who witnessed and shared moments in Korea's modern history....American poet Robert Hass hailed "Maninbo" as ``one of the most extraordinary projects in world literature.''

http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/201004b.htm#rn9

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/04/135_64320.html

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

Phil Baker at the Times Literary Supplement looks at a new book about the forgotten author Thomas Burke (1886-1945), whose short stories about London's Chinese district combine melodrama, miscegenation, "Orientalism," and pedophilia in an odd stew:

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7090223.ece

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Burke_%28author%29

One of Burke's stories, with the way politically incorrect title of "The Chink and the Child," became the basis of D.W. Griffith's film Broken Blossoms. Burke extended his interest in the urban demimonde with such offbeat offerings as For Your Convenience, a guide to London's public urinals! If you are imagining a certain audience which might have found knowledge of these locations to be particularly "convenient," your filthy mind is undoubtedly right on the mark; Burke's works are extensively discussed in Matt Houlbrook's study Queer London.

Nikil Saval at n+1 defends Brian Ferneyhough's and Charles Bernstein's demanding opera about Walter Benjamin, Shadowtime:

http://www.nplusonemag.com/benjamin-extremis

The cosmos must have gotten my memo about unplayed plays, because all of a sudden, neglected classics seem to be showing up everywhere (either that, or I'm subscribing to more theater blogs and becoming more aware of what's out there). Max Frisch's 1958 play Biedermann and the Firebugs has been revived in Los Angeles in a new translation/adaptation by Alistair Beaton entitled The Arsonists:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/theater-review-the-arsonists-at-koan-at-the-odyssey-theatre.html

Anne Elisabeth Dillon at The Daily Mirror shares her nostalgic appreciation of William Castle's marvelous film 13 Ghosts (1960), which is also a great favorite of mine. I love the charming depiction of the family life of an "absent-minded professor," which goes to show that growing up in an intellectual environment can in fact be a lot of fun! If you have kids of your own, this is a terrific movie to watch with them.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/thedailymirror/2010/04/from-the-vaults-13-ghosts-1960.html

As an enthusiast for all things Scottish, I note with sadness the passing of tenor Kenneth McKellar, who in addition to classical and operatic repertory, specialized in traditional Scots songs such as "The Song of the Clyde."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7099833.ece



Among notables born on this date are fiction writers Cynthia Ozick, Nick Hornby, and Isak Dinesen, poets Henry Vaughan and Brendan Kennelly, playwrights John Ford and Thornton Wilder, film directors Lindsay Anderson and Theo Angelopoulos, pianist Artur Schnabel, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, soprano Anja Silja, broadcaster Harry Reasoner, financier J.P. Morgan, cowboy film star Art Acord, and actor William Holden. I love this quotation by Artur Schnabel, whose Beethoven playing was legendary: "The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes -- ah, that is where the art resides."

April 16

How could a list of the "10 worst villains in children's books" leave out Count Olaf of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events? He schemed his way through 13 books! (Hat tip to Bill Crider.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/books-life/7545765/Be-afraid-the-10-worst-villains-in-childrens-books-of-all-time.html

It is never too late to start publishing. Longtime screenwriter Millard Kaufman (the wonderful Bad Day at Black Rock, among other films) saw his first novel into print at 90, and the second, Misdaventure, just published posthumously, gets a rave review here:

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/misadventure/

Salvadoran novelist Horacio Castellanos Moya sits down with Chad Post of Three Percent for a lively interview:

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=2652

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

Tim Kendall at War Poetry argues that Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) has been seriously undervalued:

http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2010/04/charlotte-mew-cenotaph.html

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

The blog What's On Stage presents a very useful round-up of recent theater books:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/features/theatre/london/E8831271349215/Worth+a+Read%3A+Theatre+Books+Round-up+-+Apr+2010.html

Elif Batuman discusses screenplays by famous intellectuals that were never produced. Was absolutely none of Jean-Paul Sartre's Freud screenplay used in John Huston's film? -- Perhaps not, although it would be possible to make a comparison: Sartre later published his whole 8-hour-or-longer scenario (and it was translated into English).

http://www.salon.com/books/writing/index.html?story=/books/feature/2010/04/14/mcsweeneys_intellectual_screenplays

The English National Opera is recruiting film directors. Terry Gilliam is going to direct Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust next year, and Mike Figgis, Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia. I enjoy these forays; I liked Robert Altman's Chicago Lyric Opera production of William Bolcom's McTeague, for example.

http://theplaylist.blogspot.com/2010/04/terry-gilliam-to-make-opera-debut-in.html

You ever wonder why you just stop hearing about some people? Often only when they are recalled to you later; since there are too many careers to keep track of, fade-outs are often not noticed. I had completely forgotten about actor Wes Bentley (American Beauty) until I read recently of his decade-long battle with heroin addiction. Ditto the late Mahler conductor Wyn Morris, whose Times (U.K.) obituary doesn't beat around the bush about how his career hit the skids; the opening line is "It was generally agreed that Wyn Morris was his own worst enemy." I can't imagine a New York Times obit starting that way. Those forthright Brits!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7098917.ece

The Daily Mirror unearths an amusing 1910 Los Angeles Times article about a vagabond whose language was unidentifiable: "Linguist and interpreters have been called to talk with him but each one has failed." His greeting word was "kush," which would lead me to suspect that he might have been Basque (in which "hello" is "kaixo," pronounced "kai-show"), but the article goes on to say that he is believed to have come from Russia. The linguistic candidates from that country would have been legion, many of the languages would not have been Indo-European, and many would have had few if any speakers in early 20th century California.

This guide to saying hello in various languages doesn't contain anything closer to "kush" than the Basque, but omits most minor languages of Russia:

http://www.wikihow.com/Say-Hello-in-Different-Languages

Among notables born on this date are novelists Kingsley Amis and Anatole France, poet Tristan Tzara, playwright John Millington Synge, travel writer Robert Dean Frisbie, aviator Wilbur Wright, silent film genius Charlie Chaplin, basketball player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, composer Henry Mancini, pop singer Dusty Springfield, choreographer Merce Cunningham, painter Ford Madox Brown, illustrator Garth Williams, and actors Alfonso Bedoya, Peter Ustinov, Ellen Barkin, and Shu Qi.

Despite my love for The Beatles, the sound of the Sixties that I remember is my parent's music, which was more along the Henry Mancini/Burt Bacharach line -- and it took me years to realize how great those two composers were, because of the common prejudice against "mere" pop. They were not mere anything; they were as good as the earlier composers of the Great American Songbook, to which they both added. Dusty Springfield singing Bacharach's "The Look of Love" takes me back like almost nothing else can:

April 15: Special Cannes Edition

The selections for Cannes have been announced, although they are not yet complete:

http://www.indiewire.com/article/cannes_film_festival_lineup_2010/

My initial take is that overall, people will be a lot less excited about the line-up than they were last year. If Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is able to be added, that will help; it would act as a "tent peg" for the Main Competition, which it seems to me it otherwise lacks. 

Last year, in the Main Competition, you had Pedro Almodovar, Jane Campion, Michael Haneke, Ang Lee, Ken Loach, Gaspar Noe, Alain Resnais, Quentin Tarantino, Tsai Ming-liang, and Lars Von Trier for starters, plus Andrea Arnold, Jacques Audiard, Marco Bellocchio, Brillante Mendoza, Park Chan-wook, Elia Suleiman, and Johnnie To among the less well-known but still impressive names. For marquee value, this year is very weak by comparison, with Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Abbas Kiarostami, Takeshi Kitano, and Mike Leigh providing the most "pop," and Bertrand Tavernier and Apichatpong Weerasethakul certainly no slouches. 

A few days ago, Cannes director Thierry Fremaux told the press, "It's a very difficult, complicated year," which I think is code for "It sucks." Cannes is totally about marquee value. Always has been. And even the most rarefied cineastes respond to those "big names." No one looks to the Main Comp for unknowns; that's what Un Certain Regard, the Directors Fortnight, and the Critics Week are for. The Main Comp is for already proven star auteurs, and a few of those who are about to be so. The number of star directors who had films ready for Cannes this year seems to have been much smaller than in a really good year.

I also think that Fremaux was sending a message that the quality wasn't there this year. The committee probably saw some films by bigger names that, even with a certain relaxation of standards in consideration of their marquee value (which goes on all the time), didn't pass muster. Notice how incomplete today's announcement is. Four to six more films to select for the Main Comp? -- That's unusual. Last year I believe that only one film was added to the Main Comp after the initial announcement. So I suspect that Fremaux is crossing his fingers that some miracles, among them the Malick, come through.

One of the head-scratchers in the Main Comp is Mathieu Amalric's Tournee. I adore Amalric as an actor; he's great. He directed an obscure feature, Mange Ta Soupe, in 1997; a couple of TV films in 2001 and 2003; and a few shorts over the years. But for him to bust into the Main Competition suggests, I don't know, that he has dinner with Thierry Fremaux fairly frequently. Ah, politics (and Cannes is as political as it gets). If I were Amalric, I wouldn't even have wanted to be in the Main Comp, because of the nasty chatter factor. Un Certain Regard would have suited me just fine, thanks.

Among notables born on this date are painters Leonardo da Vinci, Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Hart Benton, and Arshile Gorky, mathematician Leonhard Euler, sociologist Emile Durkheim, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, conductor Neville Marriner, blues singer Bessie Smith, rocker Dave Edmunds, film director Fruit Chan, novelists Henry James and Robert Walser (Swiss German), science fiction writer Boris Strugatsky, poets Wilhelm Busch (Germany), Maximilian Kronberger (Germany), Bliss Carman (Canada, Jean Moreas (Greece/France), and Nikolai Gumilyov (Russia), and actors Hans Conreid, Elizabeth Montgomery, Emma Thompson, and Seth Rogen. There can't be many writers with encyclopedia entries who didn't make it out of their teens, but Maximilian Kronberger (1888-1904), who died of meningitis just one day after his 16th birthday, is one of them. The homoerotically inclined German poet Stefan George met "Maximin" when the boy was 15 and was utterly smitten (abstractly or not, we don't know):

Maximilian became George's close friend and companion over the next year, and was admired by many members of the George-Kreis not only for his youth and beauty, but for his poetic talent as well. Indeed, George saw in Maximilian such perfection that he considered the boy to be an incarnation of the godhead, and worthy of absolute devotion. In 1904, Maximilian died of meningitis, an event which shattered George's stability and drove him to the brink of suicide. Soon afterwards, however, a new focus for George's work emerged: the series of Maximin-Gedichte center on George's belief in the transcendence of Maximin's earthy life - his idealized figure becomes for George the Stern des Bündes, "one of the new awakened spirits who would one day form the new kingdom on earth." 
 

This whole essay by Nancy Thuleen on George and his....enthusiasms, makes excellent reading:

http://www.nthuleen.com/papers/711George.html

UPDATE: Cannes excitement is pretty muted stateside. The selection announcement has not cracked the top four entertainment stories on my Yahoo home-page all day, and it has not made the Huffington Post home-page, either. With only one American film, Fair Game, announced for the Main Competition, this is not really surprising.

April 14

In the light of my last post, I have to cheer on fellow old coot Steve Cohen, who is a 58-year-old 1L at New York Law School:

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/04/14/back-to-school-a-58-year-olds-thoughts-on-the-one-l-year/

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/04/12/cohen

The DVD Savant, Glenn Erickson, praises Uli Edel's film The Baader-Meinhof Gang, which John Waters liked so much (PMD, March 10 Extra Edition):

http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s3183baad.html

Carsten Jensen's list of the top seafaring tales includes some unusual items, such as Hans Kirk's The Fishermen (a Norwegian novel available in English translation):

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/apr/14/top-10-seafaring-tales-carsten-jensen

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

I enjoyed  Scott Bryan Wilson's rundown of his collection of novelist Robert Coover:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/constant/robert-coover-rarities

Although I was aware of British children's author William Mayne from any number of laudatory mentions in histories of children's literature, I did not know until I read his Times (U.K.) obituary that he had been convicted on multiple counts of child molestation:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article7097657.ece

This raises interesting questions as to what extent the "ick" factor here should have an impact on our reading of Mayne, and whether it should have an impact on children's access to his work. As an adult, once you know it, you know it, just as with any knowledge of biographical facts. Many creators are unpleasant people, and some are criminal and evil people; it's undeniably fascinating to know about, but it doesn't bar me from considering their work. On the other issue, I would hardly toss Mayne's novels from children's library collections, but sure, I can see where people might get a little exercised about them being there. 

Niles's Blog brings up the parallel case of another British children's writer, Alick Rowe:

http://www.alexfoster.me.uk/2010/04/06/alick-rowe/

A Blog Supreme notes the death of jazz drummer Steve Reid, who played with Miles Davis and Sun Ra among others:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/04/remembering_an_oblong_odyssey_steve_reid.html

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

The Chicago Cultural Center has mounted a show of the graphic work of the great  African-American artist Romare Bearden, who counted jazz among his visual subjects:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37402

Among notables born on this date are educator Anne Sullivan, scholar Robert Curtius, baseball players Greg Maddux and Pete Rose, architect Peter Behrens, Maldivean novelist Husain Salahuddin, country singer Loretta Lynn, jazz saxophonist Gene Ammons, jazz trumpeter Shorty Rogers, and actors John Gielgud, Rod Steiger, Julie Christie, Bradford Dillman, Brad Garrett, Robert Carlyle, and Adrien Brody. Greg Maddux, the absolute artist on the mound, is unquestionably my favorite pitcher in major league history, rivaled but not surpassed by Christy Mathewson (whom of course I never saw, but man, the stories I heard from my grandfather!) and Tom Seaver. Tom Verducci's appreciation of Maddux's mastery is one of the best that I've read:

This appreciation, not by accident, made no mention of any career statistic of Maddux, no more than you would cite records sold to describe the voice of Sinatra. Maddux is synonymous with the art of pitching. He was that good. Never again will we see, or hear, anyone quite like him.

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2008/writers/tom_verducci/12/06/maddux/

Misanthropy

I wonder sometimes if it is natural to become more misanthropic as one grows older -- to embody what one might call the "old coot" syndrome. Whether it is typical or not, I certainly find it is true for me. And honestly, I've always kind of looked forward to being an old coot. When I was 15 (in 1973-74) or 25 (in 1983-84), I had little identification with my own generation and felt that whatever criticisms might be launched against us by our elders were probably entirely justified. I believed that although I might be a technically adept writer as a young man, I wouldn't really have anything to say until I was past 40; and I think that has proven to be precisely the case.

Despite my clinical depression, which I have learned to live with, I am outwardly a cheerful and upbeat person. My students have always taken me that way, and I have always felt that I owed them that kind of persona. It's not a put-on. But it's equally true and not at all contradictory to state that I have less and less use for many, perhaps most, people as the years pass. Events conspire to remind me of that pretty much on a daily basis. I have less patience for willful stupidity, for mindless conventionality, for unkindness and petty cruelty. I find myself less and less able to cut those behaviors any slack at all.

Although I basically subscribe to Barbara Ehrenreich's thesis (as propounded in her book Bright-Sided) that "positive thinking" is a scourge on American rationality, I tend to go along with the positive thinking crowd on at least one point: It is helpful to eliminate "toxic people" from your life. Not realistic people; they are always welcome. But I don't think that the concept of "toxic people" is merely a pop psychologism. I have known too many of them, invested in too many of them, and know from experience that their influence is indeed toxic. I will gladly look at any book or website that advises one how to rid oneself of toxic people (or, more rarely but just as helpfully, how not to be a toxic person).

A problem attendant on eliminating toxic people from your life is, however, once you have done so, who will be left? Not very many, in most cases. Ray Romano used to describe one of the thematic wellsprings of Everyone Loves Raymond as, "your family and friends who drive you crazy" (which they definitely will do, if they live next door or across the street). It is unquestionably rich material for a sitcom, which needs those kinds of tensions to play with, but thinking of the issue in a real-world way, my response has invariably been: Cut them loose.  If you are surrounded by "deflationary people," as Raymond clearly is, people who belittle your every thought and aspiration just because they can, you have to rid yourself of those people -- and if they are family members, that makes it all the more imperative. Of course, most folks find this hard to do, because it puts them more or less on their own, and that's even scarier than being constantly criticized. But co-dependency with the enemies of your selfhood is not a state to be desired, either.

As the great poet e.e. cummings once put it, "To be nobody-but-myself -- in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and keep on fighting." In that struggle, sad as it is to say, most people you know are not your friends. So I am thankful for the members of Confabulation, and The Blackboard, and those others who are genuinely my friends, and I hope that I can live up to the ongoing challenge of being the same to them.

The Wolf that You Feed

A commenter at the Huffington Post put this story up the other day in response to an article about why the top 25 hedge fund managers averaged a billion apiece in compensation last year, and I was really taken with it. I am in the middle of reading Marion Starkey's classic history of the Cherokee nation, and am coming away with great respect for the sort of wisdom embodied here:

There is a Cherokee tale that I think relates to our nation's current state.

A Grandfather from the Cherokee Nation was talking with his grandson.

"A fight is going on inside me," he said to the boy.

"It is a terrible fight between two wolves."

The young grandson listened intently.

"One wolf is evil, unhappy, and ugly: He is anger, envy, war, greed, selfishness, sorrow, regret, guilt, resentment, inferiority/superiority, false pride, coarseness, and arrogance. He spreads lies, deceit, fear, hatred, blame, scarcity, poverty, and divisiveness."

"The other wolf is beautiful and good: He is friendly, joyful, loving, worthy, serene, humble, kind, benevolent, just, fair, empathetic, generous, honest, compassionate, grateful, brave, and inspiring, resting wholeheartedly in deep vision beyond ordinary wisdom."

The grandson paused in deep reflection of what his grandfather had just said. Then he exclaimed; "Oyee! (in recognition).

Grandfather continued; "This same fight is going on inside you, and inside all human beings as well."

The grandson paused in deep reflection and recognition of what his grandfather had just said. Then he finally cried out deeply; "Oyee! Grandfather, which wolf will win this horrific war?"

The elder Cherokee replied, "The wolf that you feed."

April 13

Lewis R. Gordon of the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought at Temple University has interesting thoughts about the "market colonization" of the academy, but I suspect they are historic in nature; the battle for intellectual values in higher education (however you define them) has already been lost.

http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Academe-on-Other-Peoples/22501/

http://www.truthout.org/the-market-colonization-intellectuals58310

http://www.temple.edu/isrst/LGordon/

Elie Mystal of Above the Law is understandably angry with a generation of students who all think they are the special case and not the norm:

http://abovethelaw.com/2010/04/the-hubris-of-would-be-lawyers/

You see the kind of thing he talks about all over; I remember an MBA student in a Wall Street Journal comments section a few weeks ago saying it didn't matter in the least if only 10% of new MBAs were going to get offered choice jobs, because he was just so great, he was definitely going to be in the 10%! I wouldn't feel that certain if I was Barack Obama. Confidence is a winning quality, but anyone who is that confident in this economy is a fool.

I mentioned the other day that many great plays of the past languish long between productions, but this is somewhat less true in London; God bless the English theatre. First Strindberg's Creditors, now Mikhail Bulgakov's The White Guard (adapted by Bulgakov from his own novel):

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/arts/14iht-lon14.html

The blog Coffee Coffee and More Coffee has been taking a careful look at many films by the great Japanese director Mikio Naruse, who as a director of shomin-geki (working class dramas) was overshadowed for a long time by my hero Yasujiro Ozu, but who has been coming more into his critical own of late. All the Naruse posts at the site are worth reading:

http://www.coffeecoffeeandmorecoffee.com/archives/2010/04/lightning.html

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

Stephen Bowie at Classic TV History has posted a very rewarding consideration of the career of the late Robert Culp:

It may have begun as too-cool-for-the-room attitudinizing, but Culp found a way to build his distance from the material into his acting in a way that was seamless, and exciting.  Unlike most TV people, but like most of us in the real world, Culp’s characters considered their words as they spoke.  They slowed down as they formulated a thought; underscored a remark with a note of sarcasm or doubt; interjected a chuckle at something that came out sounding silly.
 
http://classictvhistory.wordpress.com/2010/04/12/culp/

Zachary Watterson at Fiction Writers Review interviews the National Book Award-winning novelist Charles Johnson, who is rightly concerned about "the lack of civility and the disinterest in civilized living that I see every day around me in contemporary America, the lowering of personal and professional standards, the selfishness and violence and anger, and the absence of shared values in a country that has been culturally Balkanized for my entire adult life."

http://americanfiction.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/charles-johnsons-throwaway-pages/

http://fictionwritersreview.com/interviews/literary-mentors-friends-an-interview-with-charles-johnson

Since I can be readily seduced by color, Shirley Jaffe pretty much had me at hello:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37383

http://www.tibordenagy.com/exhibitions/shirley-jaffe_1/

Among notables born on this date are President Thomas Jefferson, painters Thomas Lawrence and James Ensor, philosopher Jacques Lacan, literary critic Georg Lukacs, journalist Christopher Hitchens, Ecuadoran essayist Juan Montalvo, novelists Eudora Welty, Nella Larsen, John Braine and J.M.G. Le Clezio, poet Seamus Heaney, playwrights Samuel Beckett and Lanford Wilson, film director Stanley Donen, soul singer Al Green, golfer Davis Love III, and actors Peter Davison, Howard Keel, Edward Fox, Maurice Ronet, Paul Sorvino, and Ron Perlman. Since at least one reader has been enjoying the musical clips, I'm happy to oblige again with an excellent live Al Green performance of "Let's Stay Together":

April 12

A member of The Blackboard pointed out that today was the anniversary of the suicide of the Norwegian black metal vocalist Dead (although Wikipedia says that he took his life on April 8, 1991). I replied:

"Those Norwegian black metal guys are seriously deranged dudes. My 'favorite' is Varg Vikernes [PMD, February 11], who, like Dead, was associated with the band Mayhem. Over its history, the band completely lived up to its name. After Dead's death, the Satanist neo-Nazi Vikernes joined the group and a year later murdered the guitarist Euronymous, who he claimed had planned to torture and murder him, but whatever. Vikernes served 16 years for the murder and for various church arsons, which are popular in the black metal crowd since they want to return Norway to its 'pagan' roots. Vikernes never got to carry out his plan for blowing up a 'punk anti-fascist' hangout in Oslo, although he had assembled the necessary explosives. But hey, he's out of prison now! Cancel your trips to Norway."

Euronymous, who once said "I honestly think Dead is mentally insane. Which other way can you describe a guy who does not eat, in order to get starving wounds?", is rumored to have "made a stew with pieces of Dead's brain, and made necklaces with fragments of Dead's skull." Ordinarily I would believe those were just urban legends, but with this crew, you never know.

Although I don't like B.R. Myers's literary criticism, he is worth attending to on the subject of North Korea:

If we have to posit it anywhere on the ideological spectrum, we have to say that it's more of a far-right country. This is a country with a race-based way of looking at the world. It does have a command economy, but the far-right national defense states of the 1930s and 1940s, namely imperial Japan and Nazi Germany, also had a command economy. It was perhaps not quite as extreme as the one you see in North Korea, but a command economy is by no means incompatible with a far-right state.

But we have to keep in mind that this left-right scale should really be envisioned more as a kind of circle. In other words, the further you get to the extreme left, the closer you get to the extreme right. I would see North Korea as being right there where the extreme right and the extreme left meet.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/immersion-in-propaganda-racebased-nationalism-and-the-unfigureoutable-vortex-of-juche-thought-colin-.html

Here is an interesting piece on the expanding periodic table of elements:

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2010/04/enjoy-this-beauty-it-will-not-last.html

David Denby is enthusiastic about the Argentine film The Secret in Their Eyes, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign-Language Film against better-known competition:

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/19/100419crci_cinema_denby

The Nation has published a lengthy, fascinating essay by Nathaniel Popper on the complex relationship between the work and personalities of Jewish Holocaust scholars Raul Hilberg and Hannah Arendt. It is worth printing this piece out, as it may be tiring to read on a screen:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100419/popper/single 

A blog new to me, Strange Maps, looks at Dell Books' delightful "Map Backs":

http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2010/04/11/456-maps-of-murder-dell-books-and-hard-boiled-cartography/

The Neglected Books Page enumerates some lesser-known titles that H.L. Mencken championed during his editorship of The American Mercury from 1924 to 1933:

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=334

It is fascinating to learn at Wikipedia that the Mercury in its later years changed hands several times and moved so far right that it became an actual neo-Nazi publication which Varg Vikernes might have enjoyed, albeit probably a little light on the Odinism:

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

I'll bet you did not know that there was a sub-group of Op artists specific to Ohio:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37379

http://www.dwigmore.com/exhibitions/index.html

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

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

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

Bring on the performing geese!

http://tsutpen.blogspot.com/2010/04/art-of-big-top-29.html

Among notables born on this date are statesman Henry Clay, playwrights Alan Ayckbourn and Alexander Ostrovsky, novelist Scott Turow, children's writer Beverly Cleary, journalist Jon Krakauer, sopranos Lily Pons and Montserrat Caballe, jazz singer Helen Forrest, country singer Vince Gill, novelty singer Tiny Tim, jazz pianist/composer Herbie Hancock, talk show host David Letterman, and actors Robert Harron, Ann Miller, Hardy Kruger, David Cassidy, Ed O'Neill, Andy Garcia, and Claire Danes. There is a hilarious moment in Harry Stein's now-rare 1976 biography of Tiny Tim in which Tiny, discussing his attraction/repulsion to pornography, says that he has stopped seeking it because he does not want to go to H-E-L-L -- also, it is so hard to find a good supplier.

Here is a Tiny Tim appearance from the great New Jersey-based Uncle Floyd Show, which I am surprised that I have not written about here at PMD -- believe me, it is only a matter of time. Two sublime eccentrics in a moment of mutual admiration:

Phil Mickelson

Major sporting events have certainly been rich in symbolic subtext lately. First there was New Orleans winning the Super Bowl; now there's family guy Phil Mickelson beating serial adulterer Tiger Woods (and everyone else) in the Master's. The scenario as it played out would not have lent itself to prediction. We knew that Tiger would be back and that there would be an enormous amount of attention because of that (television ratings skyrocketed). Guesses as to how he would do ranged from "a lock to win" (over-optimistic given his months off) to "won't make the cut" (over-pessimistic given that it's Tiger). In the event, he played very well, just not quite well enough to win, or to satisfy himself. It is fair to say that he did not seem to be in a great mood, and one of the messages he was clearly conveying was, I've already done the public apology thing; that's all you're going to get out of me. His profanity on the course, which is nothing new, was widely reported and occasionally captured on mike, and he was no more ingratiating with the crowd or the media than he has ever been. His tense, steely manner with CBS's Peter Kostis during the post-tournament interview made me feel sorry for poor Kostis, who looked as if he wished he was a thousand miles away.

Meanwhile, Mickelson appeared to be having a great time. I've seen him in person, at the 2004 PGA, and what you see on television is not misleading; he really does know how to work a crowd. Very few would have predicted him to contend coming into the tournament, because he has not been playing well this year and because of the well-known issues with his family's health; both his wife and his mother are being treated for breast cancer. But talk about rising to an occasion. The scores for his four rounds were 5 under, 1 under, 5 under, 5 under. The eagle-eagle-birdie streak in the third round was an amazement. As widely noted, he did not bogie a hole in the fourth round. And the birdie on the final hole was like the concluding chord of a great symphony. That his wife, who had been in town all week but unable to walk the course, was there to greet him on 18 was a moment that would make a stony cynic melt. Unlike the trumped-up "human interest" stories that you sometimes get at the Olympics, this was truly human and truly moving.

None of the TV announcers need have pointed out -- although many print columnists did later -- that Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren were the ghosts in that picture. It was obvious. What Phil and Amy Mickelson appear to have in the image of their embrace -- I say "appear" because you are bound to think of the similar situation with John Edwards, and look how that turned out -- can't help but contrast with what people now think of Tiger Woods, and always will. Tiger could get back together with his wife, could put on the right show from here to eternity, and no one will ever again think of him as a devoted husband and family man. That can't be gotten back. It's like a blown lead in the last round.

It all boils down to marriage. I'm not the biggest believer in marriage, but I will say this: If you're going to take that road, if you're going to make that promise, keep it! And if you should stray, which is human too, own up to the fact that in a weak moment your baser impulses got the better of you -- and it is important that it be a weak moment and an isolated moment, because that can be forgiven. A seemingly endless series of cheerful transgressions with porn actresses and that ilk doesn't show any impulse control, to put it mildly. If you're unmarried, it's just sowing wild oats, which civilized society has always allowed for. But when you make that marital promise, you put your untrammeled youth behind you, and if you can't, don't make it.

There is an odious, possibly fictional confessional piece from an anonymous adulterer's perspective in the current issue of Esquire, which I won't link to but which contains such specious self-justifications as "I feel the blood moving in me again. So it's the blood. That's who I am. That's why men cheat." Is it non-monogamous copulation that gets these guys off, or the act of cheating itself? If the former, then simple, just don't get married. If the latter, then they are as sick and as little deserving of respect as any media moralist could assert.

Phil Mickelson, by virtue of a constellation of circumstances not entirely within his control, now stands for the counter-argument: that loyalty and fidelity are sexy, too. You haven't noticed people making this argument much, but it's evident when you think about it. Phil is now the anti-Tiger in a way he would never have expected, and I hope he's up to it, but I suspect that he is: I've always liked and rooted for Lefty. He has been a phenomenally popular athlete, but that popularity is headed into a new dimension now. Arnie had an Army, but for the time being, at least, Lefty's Army is the world.

By the way, it is worth doing a little thought experiment with respect to the fickleness of sportswriters. If Mickelson's now famous "shot through the trees" on 13 had ricocheted off one of the trees and he had double-bogied, any number of columnists would have criticized him for taking an unnnecessary gamble, blowing his shot at winning the tournament, etc. Because the shot worked, he's a gutsy genius. You can't always take what people say very seriously, because it's so situational. But I do agree with golf writer Jay Busbee that Mickelson has now unquestionably staked his claim as one of the fifteen or so greatest male golfers of all time. What he does over the next ten years -- he turns 40 in June -- will determine his final standing among that crowd, but it's looking good.

POSTSCRIPT: Aaron Traister's response at Salon to the Esquire adulterer piece is hilarious, and I benefited from his ideas:

http://mobile.salon.com/mwt/feature/2010/03/19/why_men_cheat/index.html

UPDATE (4/13/2010): Jim Nantz of CBS gave an excellent interview about the tournament to Mike Francesca of WFAN, and he doesn't pull any punches about Tiger Woods or anything else. I admire Nantz; sharp guy.

http://sports.yahoo.com/golf/blog/devil_ball_golf/post/Jim-Nantz-criticizes-Tiger-Woods-vocal-tantrums?urn=golf,233852

April 11

Andrew Sullivan's magnificent indictment of Pope Benedict for his role in the Catholic sex abuse scandal -- factually grounded, carefully argued, simultaneously measured and furious -- represents a great journalist and commentator at the height of his powers:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/04/the-third-strike.html 

There are many excellent plays in the pantheon of world literature that are seldom if ever performed in the English-speaking theater, so it is always pleasing to read of one that is getting overdue exposure, such as Strindberg's Creditors, in a London production directed by Alan Rickman:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/theater/11creditors.html

Narciso Ibanez Serrador's provocatively titled 1976 horror thriller Who Can Kill a Child? (an exact translation from the Spanish)  falls squarely in the "spooky children" genre of Joseph Losey's These Are the Damned and Wolf Rilla's Village of the Damned (and, of course, all versions of Lord of the Flies):

http://mondo70.blogspot.com/2010/04/who-can-kill-child-1976.html

The Auteurs Notebook uncovers some gorgeous Japanese film posters for Paul Thomas Anderson's great Punch-Drunk Love:

http://www.theauteurs.com/notebook/posts/1702

The designs are based on the Jeremy Blake artworks featured in the movie. I was unaware until reading this post of Blake's sad subsequent history: in 2007, he committed suicide by walking into the ocean, just a week after the suicide of his partner, the writer and film-maker Theresa Duncan. Though these deaths occurred in New York, there is something very Hollywood-inflected about Blake's manner of suicide: think of Fredric March and James Mason in their respective versions of A Star Is Born, Joan Crawford in Humoresque, Sterling Hayden in The Long Goodbye. Blake and Duncan have been mentioned as the possible subjects of a movie to be written by Bret Easton Ellis and directed by Gus Van Sant, although who knows if anything will come of it.

All of those movie deaths probably derive partly from the 1936 suicide of silent film star John Bowers, who drowned in the Pacific at 50 after renting a small sailboat and announcing his intention of not returning to a friend. The timing of his death in relation to the filming of the 1937 A Star Is Born is interesting: His suicide occurred about two weeks into the production. So either the screenwriters (among them Dorothy Parker) were prescient, or they hastily (almost ghoulishly) incorporated this detail into their screenplay "on the fly." In the earlier version of the material, George Cukor's and Adela Rogers St. John's 1932 What Price Hollywood?, the suicide is accomplished by conventional gunshot; as was the case with St. John's inspiration for the character, silent film actor/director Tom Forman, who gave up in 1926. There is never any shortage of suicides to draw on in Hollywood.

Some suicides are sudden, but some are gradual, as in the case of the heroin-related death of child actor Bobby Driscoll (1937-1968), who starred in Disney's Song of the South and Treasure Island, and won an Academy Award for juvenile performance in the film noir The Window.

http://thenighteditor.blogspot.com/2010/04/lost-boy-sad-end-of-bobby-driscoll.html

http://www.isntlifeterrible.com/2007/10/bobby-driscoll-1937-1968.html

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

In order to keep from getting too gloomy here, let me introduce a somewhat ridiculous item: Russian artists have apparently reached the inevitable point in the cultural cycle when there can be a kind of pop nostalgia for "socialist realism" -- an artistic style that frequently involved the glorification of technological and industrial subjects, resulting in such characteristic products as Fyodor Gladkov's novel Cement (which I have actually read and have a certain fondness for, although it's not as good as Valentin Katayev's factory novel Time, Forward!). Young composer Anton Lubchenko "has written a symphony in honor of the Shtokman gas condensate field in the Russian sector of the Barents Sea," part of an "Industrial Trilogy" that will also memorialize "the construction of Europe's largest railway bridge across the Yuribei River in the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous District and the Sakhalin oil and gas projects in Russia's Far East." I can add nothing to that announcement that would not descend to the level of snark.  

http://thefastertimes.com/classicalmusic/2010/04/09/methane-the-symphony/

http://en.rian.ru/culture/20100409/158501471.html

California painter Jeff Koegel has a beguiling style that in a few works seems to be touched by the influence of Joseph Stella and Stuart Davis:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37259

http://www.mkgallery.com/Exhibitions/KOEGEL-EUCLIDE/CARBON-RAINBOW/index.php

Among notables born on this date are poets Christopher Smart, Mark Strand, and Attila Jozsef (Hungary), novelists Glenway Wescott and Sandor Marai (Hungary), animator Norman McLaren, statesman Dean Acheson, Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland, Northern Irish painter Paul Henry, Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, bass Kurt Moll, film directors John Milius, Carl Franklin, and Vincent Gallo, and actors Louise Lasser and Joel Grey. The great Norman McLaren could evoke emotions using the most minimal combination of elements. I defy anyone to watch Dots (1940) without smiling:

April 10

The big news in the opera world of late has been the sudden departure of conductor Leonard Slatkin after a single performance of Verdi's La Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera -- a performance which got one of the worst sets of reviews I've ever read for an operatic opening night. Mark Swed at the Los Angeles Times  gives an excellent account of what happened and explains why Slatkin may be the fall guy here:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/04/its-time-to-cut-slatkin-some-slack.html 

In the world of performances that go better than this Verdi debacle, it is delightful to read of a spectacular concert version of Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle with a killer cast-- Donna Murphy, Sutton Foster, and Raul Esparza.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/10/theater/reviews/10anyone.html

Deborah Eisenberg at The New York Review of Books reviews a new translation of the novel Skylark by the early 20th century Hungarian writer Dezso Kosztolanyi (1885-1936) -- one of the numerous world authors of the seminal 1850-1950 era who are ever so gradually being rediscovered in English (it tends to happen faster in French and German, languages in which translations from "minor literatures" are much more common). We will never be done with that feast.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23788

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dezs%C5%91_Kosztol%C3%A1nyi

AbeBooks has put together another engaging list, of top "train thrillers"  -- nothing wrong with a group that includes Patricia Highsmith, Graham Greene, Christopher Isherwood, and Emile Zola!

http://www.abebooks.com/books/railways-stations-orient-express/train-thrillers.shtml?cm_mmc=nl-_-nl-_-h00-trainsA-_-01cta

Steve Donoghue takes a break from reading16th century poets to ponder modern action heroes:

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/04/the-perils-of-pessmissism-in-the-penny-press/

Sometime action hero Richard Basehart was a terrifically versatile actor (whose talent sent the robot Gypsy on Mystery Science Theater 3000 into paroxysms of appreciation):

http://www.cinemaretro.com/index.php?/archives/4521-REFLECTIONS-ON-THE-LIFE-AND-CAREER-OF-RICHARD-BASEHART.html

I am paying a great compliment to the Romanian painter Szabolcs Veres when I say that his "portraits" disturb me in a way that I associate with Francis Bacon:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37360

http://www.spencerbrownstonegallery.com/Artists/Veres_Szabolcs/Veres_Szabolcs.html

In lighter vein, this clip of Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong from High Society proves that white boys got soul, too (catch those arm movements):



I've always believed that the entertainment world helped, slowly but surely, in leading the way to racial integration, because in the republic of talent, color is scarcely the paramount characteristic. A musician who wouldn't want to perform with Louis Armstrong -- who wouldn't be honored merely to be thought worthy of it -- would not just be a racist musician, but a goddamn stupid musician. Bing Crosby was not stupid.

Among notables born on this date are journalists Joseph Pulitzer, David Halberstam, and Claudio Magris (Italy), essayist William Hazlitt, playwright Claire Boothe Luce, scholar Montague Summers, philosopher Hugo Grotius, novelists Paul Theroux, Anne Lamott, and Stefan Heym (Germany), poet Bella Akhmadulina (Russia), sportscaster John Madden, composer Eugen d'Albert, violinist Yefim Bronfman, jazzman Claude Bolling, rocker Brian Setzer, exotica musician Martin Denny, painter Kenneth Noland, naval commander Matthew C. Perry, and actors George Arliss, Max von Sydow, Omar Sharif, and Harry Morgan.

I mentioned back on July 18, 2009, that I took a course on "Television News in America" from Tom Brokaw while I was at Yale, and that a highlight of the semester was our day-long class trip to New York. After watching the production of the Today show in the morning, we had a few hours of seminar sessions at NBC headquarters, and the great David Halberstam led one of them. He followed a youngish NBC producer whose name I have happily forgotten, who seemed annoyed to have been roped in by Brokaw, and spewed non-stop cynicism at us for some uncomfortable minutes, along the lines "There is no place for you in this industry, you have nothing to contribute to journalism, etc." Tom was visibly embarrassed by this performance; maybe the guy was just having a bad day. In any case, Halberstam was also in the room, awaiting his turn to speak to our small group, and since I was seated near him I quickly got the sense that he was trying to control himself. Ultimately he couldn't, and he broke in on Mr. Young Hot Shot "Pull Up the Ladder Behind Me" Producer, "I think you are doing these young people a real disservice....Of course, they have something to offer, and the world of journalism will always need their energy and passion." I will never forget it; it was electrifying. Halberstam then held forth for one of the most inspiring hours of my life on how we could not only make a difference, but were called upon by our talents and our privileged position to do nothing less. There was not an ounce of cynicism in the man who had written about the failures of the "best and the brightest," and who would have had every justification for being deeply cynical. No, there was only the passion for betterment that he generously called on us to share. Every now and then, famous people don't disappoint you.           

April 9: Special Follow-Ups Edition

The Neglected Books Page has posted the best appreciation I've seen of the late novelist Louis Auchincloss (PMD, January 28). I enjoy the fact that Auchincloss called the Bushes, his social peers, "a big family of shits" (I'm laughing just typing that).

http://neglectedbooks.com/?p=333

Cameroonian novelist Leonra Miano, outraged by the foreword to the American translation of her Dark Heart of the Night (PMD, March 19, April 2), will see it removed from subsequent printings:

http://www.complete-review.com/saloon/archive/201004a.htm#rk6

As literary hoaxes go (PMD, March 3, March 16), this new one is a doozy:

http://quarterlyconversation.com/constant/this-conversation-never-happened

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2010/04/more-counterfeit-interviews.html

Here is more background on Karl Marlantes's Vietnam novel Matterhorn (PMD, April 9):

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-08/the-last-great-vietnam-novel/

Where the Long Tail Ends looks in detail at the 1973 thriller The Killing Kind, directed by Curtis Harrington (PMD, April 2):

http://wherethelongtailends.com/archives/the-movie-night-diaries-the-killing-kind

Not all octogenarian jazz tenor saxophonists are as famous as Sonny Rollins (PMD, April 7). Chicago great Eddie Johnson has passed away at 89:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/ct-live-0408-johnson-20100408,0,646149.column

April 9

Vladimir Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd defends -- quite exhaustively -- the posthumous publication of the unfinished The Original of Laura:

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/nabokov-lives-on/

Edward Hirsch offers a helpful appreciation of the Polish modernist poet Tadeusz Rozewicz at The Virginia Quarterly Review:

...he treats modern poetry as “a battle for breath” and writes with an anxious, prolific, offhanded urgency. He is wary and intense, a bemused seer of nothingness. I consider him the Samuel Beckett of modern Polish poetry.

http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2010/spring/hirsch-dark-refusals/

Reaching across the centuries to another fine poet, Steve Donoghue is enraptured by the complete Penguin edition of the poems of Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542):

http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/stevereads/2010/04/penguins-on-parade-the-complete-poems-of-thomas-wyatt/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wyatt_%28poet%29

Karl Marlantes's long-gestating Vietnam epic, Matterhorn, is heralded by Sebastian Junger as "one of the most profound and devastating novels ever to come out of Vietnam — or any war. It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered."

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/books/review/Junger-t.html

The Second Pass considers the short historical novels of Janet Lewis, which are perennials in discussions of neglected books. Lewis, the wife of the notoriously cranky poet Yvor Winters, took her plots mainly from one source:

The subjects of The Wife of Martin Guerre (1941), The Trial of Soren Qvist (1947), and The Ghost of Monsieur Scarron (1959), were all drawn from one slender law book published in 1873: Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence with an Introduction on the Theory of Presumptive Proof by Samuel M. Phillipps. Famous Cases is fascinating in its own right. The stories in the book all concern how we arrive at and know the truth, with a particular focus on circumstantial evidence. Lewis once said, “I have this affinity for the circumstantial case. I like to get at the intimate obliquely.” 

http://thesecondpass.com/?p=5237

The archive of the great fantasy novelist and artist Mervyn Peake, who illustrated his own books, is going to the British Library:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37306

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

Another illustrator whose style is somewhat akin to Peake's is the Russian Alexandra Grinevsky (1899-1976), one-time wife of Alexandre Alexeieff:

http://ajourneyroundmyskull.blogspot.com/2010/04/devil-hath-met-with-his-match.html

The American painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a near-exact contemporary of Grinevsky, although it is unlikely that their paths ever crossed. Neel married the Cuban painter Carolos Enriquez, and spent a good deal of time in Havana until he later abandoned her; around the same time across the ocean in Paris, Grinevsky tolerated a menage a trois between her, Alexeieff, and American artist Claire Parker, but Alexeieff eventually divorced her anyway and married Parker. Never trust those male artists! Neel achieved her greatest fame as a portraitist; here is her portrait of Enriquez.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37091

http://www.aliceneel.com/

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Enr%C3%ADquez_G%C3%B3mez

Atom Egoyan's new film Chloe has drawn generally less-than-favorable reviews, and The Rumpus's is no exception; but they do add an interview with Egoyan that I enjoyed reading, especially the parts about his warm admiration of Pasolini's Teorema.

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/the-rumpus-review-of-chloe/

http://therumpus.net/2010/04/the-rumpus-interview-with-atom-egoyan-chloe/

A Blog Supreme, another jazz blog I've added to my reading, features a fun post about the great Eric Dolphy's special status at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, New York:

Dolphy Day [is] an annual event at Le Moyne College. As the story goes, one day in 1971, jazz aficionados on campus decided to forego their academic responsibilities to listen to Eric Dolphy's music outside. They were in part inspired by the facts that Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention had recently recorded "The Eric Dolphy Memorial Barbecue," and that the mascot of the College is the Green Dolphin. (Dolphy, Dolphin ...) That, and it was a nice spring day.

 Forty years later, Dolphy Day was celebrated in style. According to the Le Moyne Web site, festivities included:

--Unveiling of a life-size Eric Dolphy sculpture in the Dablon quad where this tradition was first held and is still celebrated;
--Announcement of the Eric Dolphy Music Scholarship, which will be given to an outstanding performing arts student at Le Moyne;
--A lecture by legendary music icon Gunther Schuller, who wrote jazz pieces for and conducted several Eric Dolphy performances in the 1950s and early 1960s;
--A performance of "Out to Lunch," Dolphy's most famous album, by the Russ Johnson Quintet.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/ablogsupreme/2010/04/celebrating_eric_dolphy_day_bronze_statue.html?ft=1&f=104014555

There is some great footage of Dolphy (1928-1964) to be found on YouTube, including this performance of "Take the A Train" with the Charles Mingus Sextet. Dolphy is on bass clarinet and has an amazing solo.



Among notables born on this date are engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, photographer Eadweard Muybridge, poet Charles Baudelaire, novelist Johannes Bobrowski, children's writer Joseph Krumgold, architect Jorn Utzon, conductors Antal Dorati and Armin Jordan, satirist Tom Lehrer, sportswriter Peter Gammons, golfer Seve Ballesteros, painter Victor Vasarely, film director David Gordon Green, singer/songwriter Carl Perkins, zoologist Jim Fowler, and actors Michel Simon, Paul Robeson, Ward Bond, Michael Learned, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Dennis Quaid, and Cynthia Nixon. Because Tanner on Tanner, Robert Altman's brilliant 2004 follow-up to Tanner '88, has been seen by so few, not too many have gotten to enjoy Cynthia Nixon's reprise of her role as Jack Tanner's daughter Alex, a college student in 1988, a documentary film-maker 16 years later. But I think the grown-up Alex is among Nixon's best performances, superb dramatically as well as comedically. I would love to see her doing more challenging film roles than Sex and the City sequels. It must be disappointing for her not to be able to play the lead in the upcoming John Cameron Mitchell film adaptation of David Lindsay-Abaire's play Rabbit Hole, since she won a Tony for Best Actress playing the part on Broadway; Nicole Kidman, who bought the rights, stars instead. (More on this subject in the Comments.)

April 8

The American Folk Art Museum presents a show of the collages of the endlessly fascinating Henry Darger (1892-1973), who has probably become the most famous American "outsider artist." I remember the initial excitement that so many of us had when we learned about Darger's work in the Eighties, and that excitement has not faded: one indication that we are dealing with a major creator.

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=37235

http://www.folkartmuseum.org/index.php?p=folk&id=6172

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

The self-taught African-American artist Winfred Rembert works in a most unusual medium:

A self-taught artist, Rembert grew up working in the cotton fields of Cuthbert, Georgia, in the 1950’s. He was arrested after a 1960’s civil rights march and survived a near-lynching before serving seven years in jail. It was in jail, creating wallets next to another inmate, that he first learned to hand-tool leather. Years later, at the suggestion of his wife, Rembert integrated storytelling and the tales of his youth into tableaux on sheets of tanned leather....Rembert often begins his pictures with drawings to work out detailed patterns. When the stories are carved and tooled into the leather, his images take on texture and depth, and finally he paints the surfaces in vivid dyes. The surface of the piece becomes an important aspect of the composition. The final images offer a flamboyant narrative of life in the still-segregated South of the mid-twentieth century. 

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36273

http://www.adelsongalleries.com/exhibitions/2010-04-07_winfred-rembert/

http://www.winfredrembert.com/

The influence of outsider art, however we choose to define it (and that is a contentious subject), has not been lost on more conventionally trained artists such as the Canadian painter Kim Dorland. One commenter at the last link below actually refers to his work as "naive art," which it emphatically is not, but there is a trace of shared visual appeal between Dorland's use of bright thick colors and cut-out shapes, and the work of certain outsider artists:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/03/art-review-kim-dorland-at-mark-moore-gallery.html

http://www.markmooregallery.com/artists/kim-dorland/

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2008/05/artseen/kim-dorland-north

http://beautifuldecay.com/2009/06/08/interview-kim-dorland/

http://www.blogto.com/artists/kim_dorland/

Polar Bears, a new play by British novelist Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time), sounds fascinating, something I would make a bee-line for if I was anywhere near London's West End:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831270630408/Polar+Bears.html

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

But you can't be everywhere, which is one reason I at least love to read about events I'm missing. An art show devoted to the elaborately beautiful scores of Greek composer Iannis Xenakis closes today at the Drawing Center in Manhattan: 

http://www.waggish.org/2010/04/04/iannix-xenakis

http://www.drawingcenter.org/exh_current.cfm?exh=662

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

Xenakis was also an architect, not surprising to anyone familiar with the "spatial" qualities of certain of his compositions; as with the American composer Henry Brant, the placement of musicians in (sometimes unusual) performing spaces was of great interest to Xenakis.

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

Brant, also attracted to unusual instruments and combinations, and an incorporator of jazz in his music, might well have enjoyed Bud Shank's Fifties experiments with playing his alto sax in ensemble with valve trombones:

http://www.jazzwax.com/2010/04/bud-shank-and-valve-trombones.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_trombone#Valve_trombone

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

The brilliant graphic novelist Seth (It's a Good Life If You Don't Weaken) has compiled a list of his favorite Criterion DVDs:

http://www.criterion.com/explore/84-seth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_%28cartoonist%29

It's a a very interestingly diverse list, with Ingmar Bergman's Winter Light (great pick) rubbing up against the home-made horror film Equinox. The Canadian short Paddle to the Sea is unknown to me -- I'll have to check that one out.

Among notables born on this date are philosophers Edmund Husserl and E/M. Cioran, journalist Seymour Hersh, singer songwriter Jacques Brel, theater director/choreographer Michael Bennett, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Chicano activist Oscar Zeta Acosta, architects Richard Neutra and Kisho Kurokawa, fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, composers Giuseppe Tartini and Dimitrios Levidis (Greece), conductor Adrian Boult, tenor Franco Corelli, jazz singer Carmen McRae, lyricists E.Y. Harburg and Fred Ebb, mountaineer Andrew Irvine, baseball players Catfish Hunter and Gary Carter, film director Hugo Fregonese, special effects artist Douglas Trumbull, novelists John Fante and Glendon Swarthout, and actors Mary Pickford, John Gavin, Patricia Arquette, and Robin Wright Penn. I grew up on Adrian Boult's magnificent recordings of the Vaughan Williams symphonies and owe him a real debt of gratitude. It is interesting to read at Wikipedia that he was an accomplished conductor of more radical composers as well, adept in Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, and Bartok, although almost never asked to record them in the studio. I wonder if air-checks exist of any of these performances?

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