Friday, August 30, 2002


Paul Johnson on Marx
Michael I thought I'd share a little gem from Paul Johnson's incredibly useful and fun book, "Intellectuals" which takes a close look at what he terms "the moral and judgmental credentials of certain leading intellectuals to give advice to humanity on how to conduct its affairs." He tackles many of the illustrious of the past few centuries: Jean-Jacques Rousseau ("An Interesting Madman"), Shelley ("Or the Heartlessness of Ideas"), Tolstoy ("God's Elder Brother"), Bertolt Brecht ("Heart of Ice"), Jean-Paul Satre ("A Little Ball of Fur and Ink"), etc. Perhaps my favorite chapter concerns Marx. The following is a brief extract: [Marx] was totally and incorrigibly deskbound. Nothing on earth would get him out of the library and the study. His interest in poverty and exploitation went back to the autumn of 1842, when he was twenty-four and wrote a series of articles on the laws governing the right of local peasants to gather wood....But there is no evidence that Marx actually talked to the peasants and the landowners and looked at the conditions on the spot. Again, in 1844 he wrote for the financial weekly Vorwarts (Forward) an article on the plight of Silesian weavers. But he never went to Silesia, or, so far as we know, ever talked to a weaver of any description...Marx wrote about finance and industry all his life but he only knew two people connected with financial and industrial processes. One was his uncle in Holland, Lion Philips, a successful businessman who created what eventually became the vast Philips Electric Company [now Philips Electronics, with sales of EUR 32.3 billion in 2001.] Uncle Philip's views on the whole capitalist process would have been well-informed and interesting, had Marx troubled to explore them. But he only once consulted him, on a technical matter of high finance, and though he visited Philips four times, these concerned purely personal matters of family money. The other knowledgeable man was Engels himself. But Marx declined Engels's invitation to accompany him on a visit to a cotton mill, and so far as we know Marx never set foot in a mill, factory, mine or other industrial workplace in the whole of his life. The question this and other matters discussed in Johnson's book (which has, predictably, been criticised repeatedly by lefties as "mean-spirited" but not, as far as I know, on factual grounds) raises is one you have asked repeatedly: why wasn't any of this ever brought up by the professors at our Lousy Ivy University? It's not like this stuff was a secret, exactly--except from us students. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Big Picture, Derbyshire Style
Friedrich -- A wonderful passage in John Derbyshire's column in today's NRO, which can be read in full here. He's writing about being religious. It has always seemed obvious to me that this is not the real world. This is a world of shadows; the real world is somewhere else. I can remember knowing this even as a very small child, and responding intensely, as soon as I could read, to any expressions of it in print. (For example, in Lewis Carroll's Alice books, which are steeped in it.) I can even remember, around age seven or eight, I think, my surprise when I realized that there are people who don't know it. It is the fundamental religious insight, and so far as I can see it is temperamental and congenital: Some people know it, and some, including a lot of very honest and decent people, just don't. It might, of course, be an illusion; but then, as the Empiricist philosophers pointed out, so might anything. Do you read this thinking, "Yes, indeed"? I differ with Derbyshire on some details -- my sense is more one of inhabiting parallel worlds, and on multiple planes, for instance. But I do know what he's talking about, and I'm grateful that he's spelled it out so directly and unapologetically. Like him, I remember how apparent this seemed to me as a child -- these other dimensions were simply there, as freely available to me as my right hand. And, like him, I recall my amazement on discovering that some people had no sense of these other dimensions at all, or at least chose to ignore them. You learn to be guarded, of course. You learn to take care, though over time you also learn to recognize people who might understand what it is you'd like to talk about -- and who might have their own secrets they'd like to tell you about, too. (There's a sense of a code shared; these are people who are able to look under the daily surfaces and recognize each other.) Puberty seemed to muddy the waters somehow. Was it the hormones? The anxieties? Being overwhelmed by that teenage feeling that dismal life was crashing down on you? But I always knew I wanted my clean, direct access back. I've never been religious in the sense Derbyshire says he is, and the Presbyterianism of my youth never did much for me, even though there was a month or two when I gave being religious my (self-deluded) best shot. As a teen, I thought that studying science might give me back easy access to other dimensions. Then I hoped that languages and travel might. Then it was drugs, then sex, and finally art. As a younger adult, full of hormones and energy, I thought that connecting with "it" would be a matter of goosing myself up -- hauling myself up onto a superior, and super-energized, plane. (Along the way I've fallen for a lot of fads and fields --... posted by Michael at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Symmetry, Classicism and Eros Reredux
Michael There is no excellent beauty that has not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wrong Field Redux
Michael I recall having the same general feeling the first time I walked across the UCLA campus in springtime, with all the coeds running (and walking and lying) about... That is, "What an IDIOT I was to go to my Lousy Ivy College!" Not so cheerful about it, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

I Went Into the Wrong Field
Friedrich -- Some men had the sense to become professional photographers of "art nudes," one example here. What was I thinking when I took a job in the mainstream media instead? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Colby Cosh
Michael I must earnestly recommend to anyone who has a brain and a sense of humor that they stop everything else they’re doing and check out the writings of Colby Cosh which you can check out here. Mr. Cosh’s day job is as Senior Editor of The Report, Canada's independent conservative newsmagazine, but that can’t be nearly as much fun as his website. In a topic close to my heart as an entrepreneur, following is an excerpt from a fairly serious discussion of the excesses of Canadian taxation: By world standards, Canada is in fact good at facilitating the creation and survival of enormous private fortunes. It is not so good at encouraging people to make that step from a $40,000 income to a $60,000 one, or from $60,000 to $80,000. The experience of the typical Canadian working person is a slide backward that never seems to end. Work for a raise, or put in overtime, and you'll see about half of every extra dollar you've earned disappear. Assuming you can hold a job and go up the salary ladder in the first place, that is. As the Fraser Institute has pointed out, the average Canadian's tax bill increased $761 in the past year. Income taxes went down, but the gain was promptly swallowed by Canada Pension Plan contribution hikes. If you fly, there's a new "security" tax. If you drink or smoke, you're paying more tax than you did before: I'm paying $3 a pack more for cigarettes than I did at the start of 2002, but then, smoking makes me evil so I deserve to be broke. Medicare premiums are going up in the provinces that have them; but those that don't will have them soon, don't worry. These are the good times, mind. The pattern is that taxes more or less stagnate when there's no crisis, and go up when there is. They don't ever go down. I speak solely from the standpoint of one who works for a living. This, of course, is unforgivable selfishness in a Canadian. On a less ideological note, I can’t help but quote his observation on airline safety in Canada: My morning Post tells me the U.S. Transport Security Administration has abandoned the routine check-in questions in air terminals. "Did you pack your own luggage?" Naw, I let my friend do it--my friend Abdul, fresh out of university in Pakistan! He is, like, the goddamn packing master! I think it was his major! Canada is retaining the routine questions, which a ministry spokesman explained by saying "We're all pretty much bonobos with chromosome damage around here." I'm paraphrasing, of course. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Sigmund vs. Science
Friedrich -- A levelheaded science column by Sharon Begley in today's Wall Street Journal (not online) about the unconscious. Of course there's a lot of mental activity that's unconscious -- but none of it bears much resemblance to "the unconscious" as Freud imagined it. Some excerpts: This isn't Freud's unconscious, that maelstrom of primitive emotions and repressed memories. Instead, the unconscious being excavated by scientists processes data, sets goals, judges people, detects danger, formulates stereotypes and infers causes, all outside our conscious awareness... This sophisticated system operates under the radar of consciousness not because it has something to hide, as Freud argued, but for the sake of efficiency. We need to process so much information to survive that some of it has to occur unconsciously, much as a computer runs on machine language that no one wants to see on the monitor. It's a practical matter! I remember my amazement when I learned years ago that no scientific evidence whatsoever confirms Freud's version of the unconscious. What kind of baloney had been sold to us? Why had anyone accepted it? Why did anyone continue to stand for it? Much science in fact directly contradicts the Freudian model. Example: "repressed memories." Studies strongly suggest that the more awful an event, the less (not more) likely you are ever to forget it. (Why should this "discovery" strike anyone as a surprise?) Why are you resisting my theories? How did the Freudian version of mental and emotional life get as far as it did? I suppose it's like asking why Marxism got as far as it did, and maybe the answer is the same: they were all-enveloping replacements for traditional religion at a time when many were losing their religious faith. Freud and Marx both had a charismatic, prophetic fervor that came across in their visions and their writing -- they had a hypnotic effect, like cult leaders. You read them and you feel pumped. And they both offered redemptive goals that one could at least imagine achieving: Freud, to integrate one's personality; Marx, to overcome class divisions. Thank heavens: something to look forward to! A goal to pursue! My contribution to this discussion is to suggest that Freudianism and Marxism were attractive because they made life seem dramatic. They gave it a storyline (however ludicrous). They added color, fire and spectacle, and many people seem to want those in their lives. What a relief that both of these cults are losing their grip. (And how satisfying when science confirms one's own hunches!) Will academia ever catch on? Have you read Frederick Crews's attacks on Freud? Fantastically satisfying (and impressive) displays of intellectual carving-up. The expressions of outrage and wounded dignity (usually in the form of thunderous personal attacks) from Freudians that followed publication of Crews' essays and books only added to the deliciousness of it all. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Thursday, August 29, 2002


Free Reads -- Dorment on Puvis
Friedrich -- Puvis de Chavannes made two paintings of John the Baptist being beheaded. Richard Dorment in the Telegraph compares them, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Symmetry, Classicism and Eros Redux
Michael Is it possible that you go for the more mature female? In 1971, when Susan George was in "Straw Dogs," she was 24 and you were approximately 17. I mean, she was a Woman, capital 'W' variety. No matter how hard I try to overcome it, I'd feel like a child molester having anything to do with a Christina Aguilera or her contemporaries. (I was just explaining that to Britney the other day--nothing personal, babe.) For me hot young things are 30-ish women pushing baby carriages. Yep, you want to find me, just check out the local Mommy & Me classes--I'm the one ogling the women in the back dressed in a raincoat. In the interests of full disclosure, I will point out that my extremely good looking wife can also be found at Mommy & Me classes. Which is not to argue with your observation that younger women can have a sort of shock effect, at least temporarily. I stumbled across some high explosive I'd never heard of called Charisma Carpenter the other day. I guess I don't get out enough, or something, to keep up with popular culture today. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tales of Sociobiology
Michael Two short tales of the left’s reactions to sociobiology. The first is set during my least-favorite decade, both personally and ideologically. On 15 February 1978, a young woman carefully poured a pitcher of ice water onto the head of Edward O. Wilson while he sat waiting to address an audience at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A band of accomplices joined their pitcher-pouring confederate on stage to wave placards and chant, “Wilson, you’re all wet.”…. By his own account, he was utterly surprised to have achieved the kind of notoriety that evidently inspired his band of youthful appointments. But Wilson is also known as the “inventor” of sociobiology, having published a book of coffee table dimensions in 1975 entitled “Sociobiology: The New Synthesis.” In the interval between the book’s appearance and the AAAS meeting, a group of Wilson’s colleagues at Harvard University did some publishing of their own. Richard Lewontin, a leading geneticist, and Stephen Jay Gould, just beginning his own rise to fame and fortune as a writer on matters evolutionary, were among the authors of a manifesto printed in the New York Review of Books.… In their broadsheet, Lewontin, Gould and fellow co-signers declared that Wilson had produced a theory that could be used to justify the political status quo and existing social inequalities. Worse, according to them, sociobiology was founded on the same kind of pseudoscience that was used as a foundation “for the eugenics polices which led to the establishment of gas chambers in Nazi Germany.”… Although Wilson soon responded in print to these unnerving charges, the vehemence of the opposition to sociobiology and the personal nature of the initial attack and follow-ups colored the general view of Wilson and his apparent creation… As a result, to this day many persons, academics and nonacademics alike, have the sense that sociobiology may be slightly or substantially tainted, all the more so because Gould has continued over the years to cast aspersions on the discipline and its practitioners… In this he has found allies in various academic camps with some feminists and social scientists especially eager to dismiss sociobiology as misguided at best and socially pernicious at worst… Wilson’s postmortem of the affair is straightforward and plausible…The mid-1970s were years of intense political activity on campuses, much of it initiated by left-wing professors and their students who opposed the war in Vietnam. At Harvard University, the war and various other injustices came under fire from a number of scholars of the Marxist or semi-Marxist persuasion, including Wilson’s colleagues Lewontin and Gould. Lewontin and another colleague wrote at about this time, “As working scientists in the field of evolutionary genetics and ecology, we have been attempting with some success to guide own own research by a conscious application of Marxist philosophy…” Marxist philosophy is founded on the premise of the perfectability of human institutions through ideological prescription. Therefore, persons with Marxist views were particularly unreceptive to the notion that an evolved... posted by Friedrich at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Oakeshott for a Day
Friedrich -- Another sample of Michael Oakeshott. If I were a bigger fan, I'd have to walk around wearing an Oakeshott t-shirt. How deeply the rationalist disposition of mind has invaded our political thought and practice is illustrated by the extent to which traditions of behaviour have given place to ideologies, the extent to which the politics of destruction and creation have been substituted for the politics of repair, the consciously planned and deliberately executed being considered (for that reason) better than what has grown up and established itself unselfconsciously over a period of time. --"Rationalism in Politics" At our Lousy Ivy College Bookstore it was a snap finding books by Marx, Freud and their inheritors. But an Oakeshott title? The clerks would have been scratching their heads. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Symmetry, Classicism and Eros
Friedrich -- I've read, as who hasn't, news reports over the last few years about how evolutionary theorists have been thinking about beauty, about how beauty seems related to symmetry, and how both function (at the very least, I should think) as signs of reproductive health. Throw all that and a little del Sarto and Han into my muddled brain, and you've got me thinking, Hmm, classical art at its sexiest seems to be a matter of symmetry crossed with something just a little bit off. Why? Maybe symmetry represents design and conscious intention: Culture? Skill? Fantasy, desire, and the ideal? And maybe "something a little bit off" signifies "interest," "vitality," and "life." Put them together and you've got something that seems to fuse, in however unstable a mix, a hint of Ideal beauty together with its flawed incarnation in temporal life. And I'm musing a bit about today's gal performers. Have performers ever looked so gorgeous or been in such great shape? They seem physically perfect, walking fantasies -- yet they do almost nothing for my religio-erotic centers, at least once past the first attention-dazzling minute. Kapow! Then my interest is all burned up, and I'm on to the next blast. Cristina, Poppin' Out At You Recently I was looking at web sites devoted to actresses from the '60s and '70s (Anna Karina, Stephanie Beacham, Susan George, etc). Gorgeous gals, though not tweaked, implanted, buffed and Photoshopped to anything like the high polish of today's performers. Susan George, Inviting You In And I was enchanted, partly because that was the era that imprinted itself on my then-still-malleable brain. But the enchantment also had to do with the actresses's imperfections -- the overbite, the too-small butt, the little scar on the temple. They didn't exist as pure fantasy and thereby usurp my erotic imagination; and images of them don't jump out at you either. I find that these actresses (and images of them) stir the imagination while inviting me into the stuff of life: sorrow, beauty, transience, physicality. The result: I feel aroused, moved, touched, and exalted all at once. The sensation isn't of having my buttons pounded (and my soul hence flattened), but of being lured out of myself, there to contemplate the Larger Questions. Cute as the Britneys, Cristinas, Shakiras and Taras are -- and I'm a fan of kiddieporn pop -- they never move me. Too much symmetry? Do they move you? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Andrea del Sarto Reredux
Friedrich -- I've been leafing through my del Sarto book thanks to your urging. Classy! And classic. Fascinating how his pallette tends to be either muted or outright electric-stormy. He doesn't bother much with the range in between. I love del Sarto's shallow, sometimes indefinite shelf of space -- it makes the figures function like objects in a trompe l'oeil painting, defining their own space and world, as isolated in consciousness as on the canvas. Placement and organization, baby, not movement and dynamism! Also the care he takes with his compositions: chaste yet voluptuous. And stranger and eerier than you first think it's going to be, as classical art often is. Speaking of classic, have you ever seen the contempo painter Raymond Han's work? Very impressive, enjoyable, and sexual. His paintings have some similarities to del Sarto's -- the shallow shelf, the sense of organization, the khaki/mother-of-pearl color schemes, and the under-the-surface, somewhat freaky eroticism. Here are a couple of Han's still-lifes. I couldn't turn up examples of his paintings-with-people; in them, he arranges people and furniture as though they were still-lifes. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Paul Johnson Reredux
Michael You're quite right about the institutional similarities between the medieval monastic movement and Ivy League colleges. Irish Monks Modestly Saving Civilization I would say, however, that on the human level the professoriat comes off rather poorly in comparison with the monks. The monastic way of life emphasized humility, a quality not particularly in evidence among my professors. It also seemed to have relatively little room for ambitious careerism, in contrast to, say, the antics surrounding the move of Cornel West from Harvard to Princeton. I don't think there was a great deal of high-profile monastery-hopping by monks. The viciousness of faculty politics and the scramble for tenure may well have had analogs in the monasteries, but surely it could not have been as pervasive or as intense (no "up or out" for the monks, as far as I know). Cornel West Modestly Demanding Respect The monks, to the extent of their powers, also delivered the goods in terms of transmission of knowledge. The undergraduate instruction at most Ivy League institutions, in contrast, is fairly execrable. My professors seemed to regard teaching as little better than a necessary evil, and preparation for teaching as something best minimized. The assumption clearly was "You're bright boys and girls, just read the book and figure it out for yourself." Finally, the goal of the monastic exercise--the saving of souls--meant that the community was deeply interested in the welfare of each member. If a monastery wasn't a true community, I can't imagine what other institution could qualify. Ivy universities, to judge by our alma mater, are basically "prestige-maximizing" institutions with no interest at all the lives of their students or even in whether the "education" they claim to be delivering is really being absorbed. I felt far more of a sense of community in my first job, where my adulterous, hard-drinking, expense-account abusing boss had a genuine human interest in my welfare as well as my work product. More human interest, certainly, than I ever noticed at college, in which contact between the paid staff and the paying student body was highly ritualized and, as far as possible, minimized. As for what I was doing there, I was looking to join the wonderful world of ideas. What I found was a place in which ideas had been reduced to instrumentalities of a rather grim careerism. Pity. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Underclass? What Underclass?
Friedrich -- New, and apparently unpartisan, research shows that very few Brits remain in poverty for their whole lives. In other words, "the underclass" barely exists: here. Thomas Sowell once made the same point to me about poverty in America -- that very, very few people remain in poverty for all that long. Most people have a bad year or two or five, then pull their lives together and get on with it. The fact is that the percentage of Americans who are the real problem poor isn't the typically-cited 12ish percent, let alone 20ish percent. Instead, it's about 1-2%. Everybody else looks after themselves more than adequately. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Deadbeat Moms
Friedrich -- Research shows that women who lose custody of their kids in a divorce are even less likely than dads who lose custody to pony up child support, here. A sample: Census figures show only 57 percent of moms required to pay child support -- 385,000 women out of a total of 674,000 -- give up some or all of the money they owe. That leaves some 289,000 "deadbeat" mothers out there, a fact that has barely been reported in the media. That compares with 68 percent of dads who pay up, according to the figures. Thanks to View From the Right for spotting this. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Paul Johnson Redux
Friedrich -- Paul Johnson's discussion of the roles monasteries and monks played in the medieval world has got me thinking about our Lousy Ivy College. One of the main functions of the monks and the monasteries was to transmit what was felt to be True Culture in a barbarian age -- faith, as well as the classical world's legacy, were felt to be imperilled things. So the monks lowered their heads and beavered away at copying, preserving, and then copying some more. They felt they were laboring in the shadows of the greats -- the earlier Christian age of miracles as well as the Classical world. What could they possibly have to add? So, instead of creating, they copied, collected, and collated, doing their humble best to keep the light alive. Friedrich and Michael circa 1974 Which makes me wonder: have we been wasting energy and bile being indignant at our Lousy Ivy College and our Lousy Ivy Professors? I think both of us are bitter that our education was of no help in getting us on our feet creatively. Maybe that's not what a Lousy Ivy Education is for. Maybe Lousy Ivy Colleges are the monasteries of today and the professors are the monks. The vision is similar: Culture is imperilled, and we labor in the shadows of the Greats. We serve; we pass the faith along. And the view of commercial society (America generally) as value-free (ie., barbarian) seems analogous. The goal of the process -- to get trainees to genuflect before the True Faith -- rings bells too. One of the main practical purposes of monasteries was to train a class of skillful and trustworthy administrators; one of the goals of a Lousy Ivy Education is to train a class of skillful and trustworthy managers. I find the parallels striking, and I find myself thinking: Maybe it's as pointless to get mad at the Ivies for not promoting active creativity as it would have been to get mad at a monastery for not helping us learn a trade. Which, alas, raises the question: what the hell were we doing there? Your thoughts? Michael... posted by Friedrich at August 29, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, August 28, 2002


Adorno
Michael I was leafing through the book review section of the L.A. Times last Sunday when I stumbled across “Thinking Hard, Listening Deeply,” a review of Theodor W. Adorno’s "Essays On Music." (Link here.) Being a musical ignoramus (I’m pretty much of the “I don’t know from music, but I know what I like” school), I am a sucker for books that will explain music to me, so I settled down to read the review. I was pretty quickly put in my place by the very first paragraph: Given that whole careers are devoted to elucidating the thought of Theodor W. Adorno, an interested neophyte reader might well approach his work with trepidation. The ideal reader of his essays on music would have a thorough knowledge of the classical repertoire since Bach and philosophy since Kant as well as Adorno's other work, which runs to 20 volumes in the German collected edition. This clued me in—I am, after all, an Ivy League graduate, and, I like to think, pretty quick on the uptake—that I’d better accept as Gospel everything that follows, because evidently no one other than (possibly) Adorno himself could be sufficiently intellectually prepared to criticize Adorno. Feeling out of my depth, I was just about to bail when the reviewer, Adam Kirsch (identified somewhat obscurely as the author of the book of poems "The Thousand Wells") threw me a lifeline: For even at his most abstract and theoretical, Adorno's writing is always oriented toward real life. Like Marx, he seeks to understand the world in order to change it. I was intrigued that someone in 2002 was still complimenting a writer by comparing him to Marx, given the last century’s experience with “Practical Marxism.” Perhaps foolishly, I decided to stick it out. I learned that Adorno, born in 1903, was “from one of those Jewish households that revered German culture” (are there any other kinds of Jewish families in the serious books the L.A. Times reviews?) He went on to study musical composition in Vienna, was a huge fan of the music of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. However, after eventually deciding to focus on philosophy, he joined up with the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, a group that undertook the “sophisticated application of Marxist thought to cultural and social practices.” (I hope you picked up on that “sophisticated” and didn’t think they were just sitting around making “Workers of the World Unite” posters with magic markers.) Unfortunately, timing is everything in life, and Adorno had the poor judgment to do all this right around the time Hitler came to power. Adorno and the Institute quickly skedaddled from Germany, Adorno heading for London and the Institute for Columbia University in New York. Adorno eventually also went to New York in 1938, and moved on to Los Angeles in 1941. Adorno’s arrival in Los Angeles, while probably not making the front page of the L.A. Times in those benighted days before it became a world class newspaper, certainly... posted by Friedrich at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Stereotypes Redux
Friedrich -- In the last couple of weeks, here's some of what I've witnessed: *At my high-school reunion in Western New York, guys clustered with guys, and gals clustered with gals. The guys talked about sports; the gals talked about children. *In Greenwich Village, lots of black teens roamed about, showing off rapper gear and rapper swagger. *At the computer-repair store, there were two kids behind the counter. One was a geeky Jewish brainiac, the other a geeky Asian brainiac. *On Fifth Ave., a group of Asian teen boys walked by. They were holding calculus textbooks, and were talking to each other about test scores. I was working myself up to write a few wry paragraphs about stereotypes, largely on the theme of: "Don't they know?" And: "You mean, we aren't supposed to notice?" Tempered by a "Hey, I'm a stereotype too! We all are!" disclaimer, of course. And building to a "Stereotypes are inevitable and perfectly OK, even if potentially annoying. So let's roll with that, folks" conclusion. Then I ran across this sharp and amusing article by John Derbyshire, which is largely an appreciation of stereotypes and stereotyping, here. And now there's no need for me to say any more. Sample Derbyshire passage: Far from being a loathsome aberration that ought to be purged from our behavior, it turns out that stereotypes are essential life tools, are accurate much more often than not, and that we do not use them as much as, from cold practical considerations, we should. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Cynic's Sanctuary
Friedrich -- This site, Rick Bayan's "The Cynic's Sanctuary," is a well-done charmer, here. A Cynic's Hall of Fame, a Cynic's Dictionary, and much else. Here's his witty definition of a Cynic: An idealist whose rose-colored glasses have been removed, snapped in two and stomped into the ground, immediately improving his vision. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Paul Johnson
Friedrich -- What are you reading these days? I'm going through Paul Johnson's "History of Christianity." We're up to the 900s, more or less -- the Benedictines, the great medieval church estates and their impact on European wealth. I knew nothing about all this until the last couple of days. It's a robust (boy, can that man keep a narrative going), enlightening read, exactly what I was hoping for when I first cracked it open. I confess -- and this is the minor-est, silliest possible quibble -- that I'm not finding it as entertaining as his "History of the Jews." Did you? And I can't figure out why. I take these to be my options: 1) Being a Christian writing about Jews forced Johnson to leap up a level, and that additional perspective helped make the "Jews" book more striking. 2) Jews are more entertaining than Christians. Maybe being perpetual outsiders makes for more outsized personalities, a generally better, root-for-the-underdog yarn, and a clearer storyline. 3) Maybe it's me. Disputes over the meaning of the Trinity and Eucharist have always put me to sleep. 4) Maybe it's a matter of utility. For me "History of the Jews" was like a guidebook to living among them -- about 50% of NYC's white people are Jewish. I kept exclaiming, So that's why they're like that! Christians -- yawn, know 'em already. I guess there's also possibility 5) which is that "Christians" simply isn't as good as "Jews." But I don't think that's true. It's a staggering work, and a great read -- history as the interested amateur, at least this one, wants it. Have you read many of the other Johnson books? I'm semi-planning (if also expecting, knowing what happens to most of my plans, not to live up to this semi-plan) to finish up "History of Christianity," then take on "History of England," and then his "History of the U.S." What an educated boy I'll be! I don't know of another historian quite as accessible, useful, and entertaining as Johnson is. But I only recently seem to have developed much of an interest in history at all. Which writers of history do you recommend? I enjoyed an abridged Gibbon recently, but that's not the kind of swift modern historical reading I'm mostly in the mood for these days. Robert Darnton's terrif, but he writes about arty subjects, of which I often feel I've had more than my fill. I go through many of these books on audiotape -- easier on the eyes, and a good way to make use of walking and exercise time. Blackstone Audio, here, offers a wonderful selection of unabridged (and often classic) audiobooks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break -- 9/11 Power Grabs
Dear Michael, As I'm sure you've noticed, the disaster of 9-11 has been repeatedly cited by left-wing editorial page writers as an object lesson in the value of "big government"--oddly, in my view, since despite the bravery of New York's firefighters and policemen, the entire event seems largely to have amounted to a colossal failure of all levels of government to provide security to U.S. citizens (including, but not limited to, the intelligence, law enforcement, immigration, military and airline regulation functions of state and federal government.) The following (from the Wall Street Journal) doesn't exactly make me change my mind: Federal aviation officials, increasingly worried that U.S. airlines won't install bulletproof cockpit doors on all their aircraft by April's deadline [19 months after 9-11!!!], are stepping up pressure on the industry...The budding controversy--with some large carriers complaining about FAA foot-dragging while commuter operators fret they are getting short shrift in the regulatory process--shows how tough it has turned out to be to carry out what was viewed as one of the most clear-cut security enhancements. The finger pointing also comes at a time when the Transportation Department faces escalating criticism on Capitol Hill and elsewhere for problems in hiring screeners and installing bomb-detection equipment at every airport. Bulletproof and impact-resistant materials for the doors were developed many years ago, and Boeing drew up preliminary designs years before September's hijackings. Shortly after Sept. 11, Congress and the Bush administration agreed to set aside almost $100 million to subsidize the work...The FAA's move comes after weeks of manuvering by carriers. In a letter to departing FAA Administrator Jane Garvey, the industry's top lobbyist, Carol Hallett, warned that without immediate FAA Design approvals, the "threat of service interruption grows ever more serious. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Times Arts Frownlines 4
Friedrich -- The Times shows its usual lighthearted, companionable touch with arts coverage today. The two headlines on the front page of the Arts section: *"The Information Age Processes a Tragedy" *"Music Rivalry and Revelry Both Serving Irish Culture" Inside, fans get to read "Singing About Frustration, Some Strain, No Self-Pity," and "A Midnight Rendezvous With bin Laden." The arts as a grim burden -- that'll draw in the crowds. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, August 27, 2002


Scruton for a Day
Friedrich -- From an interview with my favorite prissy-and-stuffy, contemporary-Right philosopher, Roger Scruton: Our appreciation and understanding of works of art is in the first instance isolated from life -- that's the whole point of aesthetic experience, that it enables us to contemplate life from a position of solemn detachment. Works of art are not there to influence or guide our actions. They are there to be contemplated; but from the act of contemplation we gain a sense of what is meaningful. And this feeds our moral sense. The fact that there are bad people moved by works of art doesn't taint those works of art; you have to think of all the good people moved by them too. And maybe the only good thing about these bad people is that they were moved by those great works of art. The interview, which ran in The Philosopher's Magazine, isn't online. (The TPM site is a lot of fun to explore, here.) Voice of Reaction -- and I Mean That Admiringly I often don't agree with Scruton, but I always find it enjoyable to wrestle with his arguments and to watch his prose march by. He's a wonderful writer -- dismal, but sonorously dismal, like Elgar. There's plenty of other Scruton on the web. He gets off some good ones in an article for City Journal about art and kitsch, here. Salon ran a long q&a with him, here. Scruton's own website is here. Are there thinkers you're fond of similarly? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Still Life
Michael While I am crazy about Chardin and other French still life painters, I have also come to adore wild-and-crazy Flemish still lives with dramatic backgrounds and live animal (peacocks, dogs, etc.) studies. Some of them have amazing passages of drawing and very intriguing cool/warm color schemes. Not that it is of any significance, but I sometimes think the painters of the first half of the 17th century (Rubens, Van Dyke, Jordaens, Velasquez, Rembrandt, Halls, Caravaggio, et al) were so accomplished that it explains the relatively less vigorous state of painting in the 18th century--until Romanticism reinvented painting, it was suffering from a "been there, done that" mentality. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

If I Were an Editor 1
Friedrich -- If I were editing a mainstream news publication, I'd be running lots of coverage of immigration topics right now. The subject couldn't be more timely, what with anxiety about airplanes, Muslims, borders, Mexicans, etc. It's bizarre that the topic doesn't get covered regularly and widely all the time. Who, how many, on what basis? What kind of effect are they having on the country? Shouldn't such questions be openly and easily discussed? (If controlling the borders isn't one of the half-dozen main things a government should be responsible for, I don't know what is.) Making it next-to-impossible to discuss immigration rationally has been another victory for the Left's thought-police. Say, you don't think that political bias on the part of news people (along the lines of "thinking about, let alone raising the topic of, immigration"="being anti-immigrant"=racist) has had anything to do with the fact that immigration gets so little coverage, do you? But, heck, maybe it's just an innocent oversight; maybe journalists just aren't as smart, perceptive, and tuned-in as I am. If you're in a mood for some freewheeling, feisty thinking about immigration, I know of a couple of sites worth exploring. Are you man enough to wrestle with Steve Sailer, here? Let alone the Vdare crowd, here? Sorry to report that I waited too long to see "The Scarlet Diva." Its run lasted less than a week here in NYC. What's happened to the cult movie audience? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Rivette Redux
Michael Your Rivette posting got me remembering a hilarious article written by Phillip Pearlstein in "Art in America." Pearlstein had seen "La Belle Noiseuse" and found it rather sadly wanting as a description of the relationship between artists and models. He pointed out that, in his own large experience with models, artists who grabbed, pushed, or shoved around their models (as apparently happens in the film) would, at a minimum, get their faces slapped and/or have the model quit on the spot. Anything to Add? I think he also opined that Ms. Beart was too good looking to be a useful model; she, in taking up a pose, was completely aestheticised and thus left nothing particularly valuable for a painter to say (I believe Pearlstein felt the artist's final painting which is shown in the flick was less compelling than the footage of the model.) I don't know how to lay hands on this very witty article, but it was published in "Art in America" January 1992, and was titled "Modeling the Soul." ( This information had long since passed out of my leaky memory, and comes courtesy of an Emanuelle Beart fan page, here.) Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Dutton, Kalb
Friedrich -- An ear-and-mind-opening discussion of the pianist Glenn Gould by the editor of Arts and Letters Daily, Denis Dutton, here. Jim Kalb casts a skeptical eye on utopian enthusiasm for self-organization, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Monday, August 26, 2002


DVD Journal: "Va Savoir"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Have you seen many of Jacques Rivette's movies? I haven't -- he's one of the bigger gaps in my movie knowledge-base. "Va Savoir," which I watched last night on DVD (the wife fell asleep about ten minutes into it and snoozed all the way through its 2.5 hours), was only my third. (And one was "La Belle Noiseuse" -- more a film for admirers of Emanuelle Beart fans than for Rivette buffs.) I haven't yet brought myself to face "Celine and Julie Go Boating," which some critics adore. I wonder if I ever will. Do you know Rivette's schtick? Slow, long-form illusion/reality, theater/cinema/reality games, done with what I suspect he wouldn't be displeased to hear called philosophical playfulness. And duller and more prosaic on the surface than you'd expect -- I assume we're supposed to be dazzled by the whirling thematic undercurrents. Lots of real-time scenes done in one shot; no music score; much concentration on the sound of doors creaking closed, footsteps crossing wooden floors, etc. You like what he does or you don't, I suppose -- and maybe, given that Rivette made "Va Savoir" when he was 73, that's OK by him. A feast for film buffs, who can amuse themselves interpreting the mindgames and tracing all the carefully-planted connections. But I haven't found his movies to have a lot of sparkle, and this one has a (to me) not-very-charmante main actress of the winsome-and-angular type the French occasionally produce -- think Audrey Hepburn meets Fanny Ardant. Autumnal, Serene and Giddy? All that said, the visuals were eye-gasm fabulous: blue-gray Paris light, alabaster stone, richly textured aquas and peaches on the interior walls, much backstage lusciousness, oily maroons and browns (the action moves back and forth between a theater and various libraries, with occasional stops in hotels, cafes and apartments). Many gorgeous fabrics -- Rivette's playing here with Italian theater (Pirandello, Goldoni), and has lots of expensive-looking harlequin-striped fabrics onscreen. European films can be wonderful to watch even while they're boring you to tears. I remember an Agnes Varda movie from maybe ten years ago -- dimwitted and uninvolving, but I loved the way it looked, moved, and felt. So simple yet so rich: lots of natural light, I assume, and (especially by comparison to American films, where the effort generally goes into making the image pop, and the actors pop out of their environments) no fear of darks, moods, recessiveness and shadows. In the photographic work (and, come to think of it, the sound work too) of some of these New Wave-era filmmakers, there's an underlying old-world calm crossed with a modern informality that's very pleasing. Daddy's Girl? Hoping to drag the wife (an amazingly good sport) this afternoon to see "The Scarlet Diva" -- Asia (daughter of Dario) Argento's NC-17 semi-autobiographical DV extravaganza. My heart's beating faster just typing those words. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 26, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

War on PBS
Friedrich -- Do you watch PBS? I haven't much in years. "Mystery" series, evenings at the Pops, fundraisers, "Three Tenors"-style concerts, solemn battle-oppression P.C. documentaries about atrocities, feel-good P.C. documentaries about ethnic groups -- who watches this stuff? And why should tax dollars go to paying for it? I choose an evening's PBS programming at random from this week's schedule: *Nightly Business *NewsHours with Jim Lehrer *Evening at Pops *A documentary, "Growing Up Global" *A documenary about four nuns raped in killed in El Salvador The boring worthiness of it all. Plus the always-nagging question: is any of this something that can't be gotten from commercial channels? Although, in fairness, I did enjoy PBS's recent Richard Brookhiser documentary about George Washington. (David Gergan interviews Brookhiser here.) And, in fairness too, I could be as easily rid of HBO -- an ongoing stream of all the dumb movies I'm happy to avoid -- as PBS. But HBO's part of my cable-modem package. Let's see: if we de-fund PBS now, no one would notice. What's your favored plan for upgrading the legal system? Sometime soon: I declare war -- in the name of the arts -- on the NEA. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 26, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break -- Legal System
Michael I think it's time for all well-intentioned people to declare war on the U.S. legal system. It is a corrupt system, by which I mean one in which personally good people routinely do bad things. It is also a system that is very good at enriching lawyers and very poor at serving any other constituency in society. Which is not to pin all the blame on lawyers. Heck, there's plenty more obloquy to heap on lazy, sloppy legislators, law school educators, power-mad judges and the excessively deferential American press and public. (Hasn't anyone but me noticed the increasingly undemocratic--indeed royal--role judges now play in American politics?) A challenge to those who believe in the system: let's try one case with conflicting ambiguities in front of multiple juries. To raise the stakes, let's act out the same script with different judges, lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants (actors chosen to be either sympathetic or cold, attractive or plain) If the system works, we should get the same outcome, right? Who's willing to stake money on it? Gee, why do you think I've never heard of such an experiment being performed? Talk about the power of an entrenched special interest! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 26, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Saturday, August 24, 2002


Carbuncle Awards
Friedrich -- The Carbuncle Awards are given in Scotland to the country's ugliest buildings and towns, with the winner receiving the wonderfully-named "Plook on the Plinth." You can read about the contest here. Is there a similar contest in the States? There should be -- shame is a much-underemployed behavior-modification strategy these days. Let's use it to make architects and builders do better. Although, gosh, the competition for "lousiest" will be fierce. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Why Do I Care?
Michael I ask myself, why do I care about the state of high-falutin' oil painting ("HFOP") anyway? I think because good HFOP always implies the existence of a community--the kind of community which I could legitimately aspire to joining. Rubens or Michelangelo, as talented as they are, didn't go it alone during their lifetimes. Even posthumously their art needs people to understand it, appreciate it and even display it. I guess that's why I've spent so much time trying to figure out where I could find a local chapter of this (imaginary?) organization and join up. So far, needless to say, I've mostly had disappointments in this quest; this type of society is not only secret but virtually hidden. Nonetheless, I seem incapable of giving up the search altogether. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Auster, Video Clerk
Friedrich -- Lawrence Auster speculates, with much rigor, about why it might be that you don't hear Western liberals complaining much about the misogyny of Muslims, here. A video clerk's online journal of observations and reflections, many of them about porn and those who rent it, here. Best. Michael... posted by Michael at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Leni Riefenstahl
Friedrich -- A giant who's still with us Leni Riefenstahl turned 100 on August 22nd. Amazing to think that she's still around. According to some accounts she's quite vital -- she was scuba-diving (and working on a collection of undersea photographs, as well as a movie) into her 90s. Talk about a link to the past. In my view, she's a great figure not just for her awe-inspiring talent and accomplishments but because the Leni phenonenon poses such unresolvable quandaries. Did you attend Sontag's talk about Riefenstahl back at our Lousy Ivy College in the mid-'70s? Sontag showed "Triumph of the Will" and then argued (with all her audience-pleasing intensity and theatricality) that Leni was in fact a fascist -- I seem to recall that Sontag got a good year's worth of essays and talks out of that particular argument. (Hey, an intellectual has to have something to sell too.) I also recall sitting in the audience and thinking, duh, tell me something I didn't know. There's no avoiding these facts: Leni was friendly with Hitler, Leni made propaganda for the Nazis. Leni was also an actress, a dancer, and a visual artist, and was as self-obsessed, and as intellectually, politically, and morally clueless as such people usually are. Leni is also an immense talent, and her films and photographs are works of enormous beauty. All that is true, and is pleasingly hard to sum up in one tightly-wound intellectual or political ball. I've seen most of the movies, and have read some of the books and the scholarship, including her own (huge) autobiography. For what it's worth, my take is: she was young, ambitious and opportunistic. As many such artists do, she cozied up to whoever could help her achieve her art and career goals. (If she were young and American today, she'd probably be cozying up to the academia/P.C./NEA world.) Imagine television sports coverage without her influence Her work was all about a very sexual ideal beauty -- that's what moved her and motivated her. (Heroic beauty gave her exalted feelings; it turned her on.) Her love of heroic beauty also made her attractive to, and susceptible to, Naziism. Things clicked, she made connections, she was happy that people liked her work and was therefore prone to think well of them. And she took advantage of the opportunities that presented themselves. Was she as naive as she makes herself out to have been? Almost certainly not. Was she as consciously aware and conniving -- ie., as political -- as some make her out to have been? I think that's unlikely too. Does she deserve a reputation as bad as that of the truly evil Nazi monsters who were really behind the Reich? I can't see why. It seems to me that it's a mistake to picture her as a thinking, reasoning, let alone morally astute being, and that it's more accurate to picture her as someone in the graphics department of your business, who might be an verbal... posted by Michael at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Weekend's Worth of Oakeshott
Friedrich -- Philosopher/poet of politics Some passages from my favorite political philosopher (and namesake), Michael Oakeshott: I regard as an enemy that modified form of Utopianism which picks at one problem of society at a given moment and is prepared to upset the whole of the society in order to get that one problem solved... I should say that no problem in politics is ever solved permanently, and that no problem in politics should be allowed to get out of proportion and to exclude the real business of politics, which is to keep the society as a whole, in all its arrangements, coherent and stable as well as progressive.... The moral life of a man does not consist entirely in performing a number of reasonable actions, it consists in living according to certain habits of behaviour, which may be analysed into separate actions but which do not appear as separate actions except on a few occasions. Anyone curious can find out a lot more about this genius here. The book of his to start with is "Rationalism in Politics," which you can buy here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, August 23, 2002


Free Reads -- Nora Vincent
Friedrich -- Have you ever run across Norah Vincent's columns? She's feisty and brainy -- a tough-minded, rightish-leaning lesbian contrarian, and one of a kind. And now she's started a blog, here. What a pleasure to read someone so sharp on politics who's just as brainy (let alone shrewd and openminded) about cultural matters. All too rare. Here, for instance, she is on R. Crumb: As for Crumb’s alleged misogyny, I think this has always been a wrongheaded charge. Crumb’s women are striding, zaftig Amazons who embody Crumb’s clear, and if you saw the 1994 documentary “Crumb,” confessed reverence for women. The man may be a perpetually arrested adolescent, emotionally stunted and relationally inept in almost every way, but, much to his credit, he is both well aware and makes no secret of his condition. In Crumb’s work, women have all the power. His drawings are the landscape and expression of the harmless, and often hilarious heterosexual male id, in much the same way that the Tom of Finland cartoons are, in all their throbbing exactitude, the expression of the homosexual male id. In Crumb’s mind, men, enslaved by their irrepressible desires, are the ones constantly humiliating themselves in the skirt chase. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Ashley Redux
Michael I'm happy you also dig Ashley Judd. I'm quite a fan myself. Although I've liked her in several films, I fell for her when she played a small role in "Simon Burch." She had an impossible role--a dead mother I think in a flashback whose memory was carried reverently by her son. Perfectly ripe And, by God, by sheer force of personality and incredible good looks, she pulled it off--vivacious, charming, with a sort of sexual splendor like a perfectly ripe apple in the late afternoon sun. I've certainly carried the memory of that little scene reverently for 3 or 4 years now. How did you meet her, anyway? I'm the one who lives in L.A., I should be the one meeting starlets! (Does spending an uncomfortable 20 minutes late at night in the baggage claim area at LAX with Heather Locklear count?) Cheers, if envious cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

"Good Girl" Rerereredux
Michael I actually had mixed feelings about "The Good Girl." It was quite funny in parts, but I basically disliked the central character, and it pissed me off to see her screw everybody over without any style or flamboyance or other redeeming social value. I would have liked it better in one of two variants: (1) either you had to know more about her, and see why (from her point of view) she was entitled to do anything she wanted (for her version of the greater good), or (2) the movie needed to be more distanced and stylized, like a Roadrunner cartoon, so you didn't take the suffering she caused seriously. I think the latter would have had to kind of zoom in on the masochistic thrill that she provided the men in her life, a la Wiley Coyote. In other words, I would have been happier if she was either more full of life or more of a bitch. Or maybe I just wanted to be watching a Roadrunner cartoon. Beep, beep! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tivo Redux
Michael We like our Tivo. My wife is the TV watcher in the family, and she loves it. It has gotten me completely out of the habit of watching commercials--when I watch ordinary commercial TV I am always subconsciously looking for the Tivo remote to speed by them. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Andrea del Sarto Redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for the thoughts about del Sarto. I've got a book about him on my shelf that I've never given a close enough look. Now I will. Cool speculations earlier as well about why 19th century academic art has been so despised. I wonder too if the fact of its being "hypocritical" has been a strike against it. For we moderns, direct confrontation is (supposedly) good, circumlocution is bad. I'm a big partisan of hypocrisy myself. Like stereotyping, it's a sometimes-useful tactic. I'd go so far as to argue that without it (or some other way of applying sugarcoating) social life isn't possible. (I'd go so far as to argue that hypocrisy and stereotyping are inevitable -- so why argue about whether they should or shouldn't be?) Given that art is, if not primarily at least partially, a social activity: what's wrong with some hypocrisy in our art? This thought first came to me 5ish years ago as I stood in the Art Institute of Chicago, looking in rapture at 19th century white marble American nudes with mythological and allegorical names ("Justice", "Fidelity"). It also occured to me: what's great about the hypocrisy is that it enables you to look at and enjoy these nudes in public. Enjoying it in public Somehow because of this, the flesh of the nudes came into focus and seemed more, not less, tender. The eroticism became more, not less, powerful, and I realized I was experiencing it privately, even though the art itself was very public. Suddenly the magic of that kind of art started to work for me. Why had my modern/post-modern art education and experience deprived me of this pleasure previously? Do these (to me) dumb modernist attitudes about authenticity and confrontation and their supposedly essential connection to art all go back to Romanticism? Which more and more I think of as a kind of cancer that I don't want entering the system. (Or, maybe better: that needs constant beating-back.) But that's probably terribly classical of me. [Note to anyone who objects to my use of cancer as a metaphor in the previous paragraph and who's about to reach for a copy of Sontag in support: Fuck Sontag. I've had cancer too, and I can't imagine being offended by someone using "cancer" as a metaphor. ] Incidentally, do you enjoy your Tivo? I've been reading articles recently about how much users love 'em (once they've caught on to how to use them), and about how Tivo-like boxes will be everywhere in a few years. Does it change the way you use tv? Best Michael... posted by Michael at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

"Good Girl" Re-redux
Friedrich -- Very curious about your observations about "The Good Girl." Mostly on the (perhaps dumb) level of: do they represent "Friedrich enjoyed the movie"? Or "Friedrich's too polite to tell Michael that he didn't enjoy the movie"? Like you, I'm always a little suspicious of studiously blank directorial stances. It seems they almost always indicate a withholding-of-judgment that's really a judgment, usually one that boils down to a hipsterish "Ain't America weird." And maybe there's some of that in "The Good Girl," although I also sensed some fondness for the scene depicted. Did you? I may have taken the film's psychology (and dramatic arc) a little differently than you did. I took it as a sly way of dramatizing exactly what you point out: that what all the Good Girl's actions finally demonstrate is that she wants a baby -- even though she's never known that that's what it's all been about. I also took the film to be saying, quietly, that she is a maneater, though appearances may be to the contrary. One of her men ends up dead, the other ends up humiliated, all so she can have herself a baby. I took her less as an empty person and more as a clueless one. So, perhaps unlike you, I thought the movie was pretty shrewd, in a deadpan kind of way. But that's all a matter of interpretation. More basically, if idioticially, I found the movie's combo of observation, flakiness and satire-crossed-with-fondness pleasing. Most of the time, anyway. And hats off to the performers. I didn't know Anniston could do anything but wear a haircut. And usually I don't care for John C. Reilly; here I found him very touching. Another poker-faced "nonjudgmental" working-class midAmerica movie that's worth seeing: "Normal Life," with Luke Perry (really good!) and the heavenly Ashley Judd. He's a cop, she's a sexy, trampy blue-collar girl he falls for and who turns out to be much more screwy than he anticipated. In this case, the camera's blank face is judgmental -- working-class America is really being seen as a trash-strewn moonscape. Oddly, I didn't mind. The observations, the script, the (otherwise-good) directing (John McNaughton) and the acting got me over that hurdle. I wonder, not for the first time, if I'm becoming old and jaded. I seem to have gotten to the point where I'll look at a film like "Normal Life" (or, say, a Jim Jarmusch film -- although I can't stand Hal Hartley), and just think, Oh, it's one of those. And I'll try to take it (and see what's there to be gotten from it) as an example of its hipster genre. Maybe I've grown wiser. Maybe I'm just tired. Ashley in glam mode Did I ever mention that the wife and I once met Ashley Judd? For about five minutes. Ashley was glamorous and charming; she gave off warm down-home vibes as well as pure actress-confetti. The wife liked her, I think. And I was charmed -- not... posted by Michael at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

View from the Right
Friedrich -- I just had lunch with the first person I've met thanks to being fellow bloggers -- Jim Kalb, who runs a site called View From the Right. You can explore it here -- a blog, plus many other pages and essays. Lunch was a treat. Jim's a superbrainy guy who's one of the few true traditional conservative intellectuals I've met -- ie., not just temperamentally conservative (everyone has a bit of that, if not more), but a reasoning, educated, thinking, and (in his case) sharper-than-Gillette one. An excellent mind to run up against, as well as sweetly tolerant of, and maybe even a little amused by, my arty babble. Also quite brilliant and funny on the (to me) endlessly fascinating topic of "Why are lefties so intolerant"? And it's all thanks to being a blogger. [Note to skeptical lefties: You pride yourself on your tolerance and ability to appreciate other points of view. Why, then, do you demonize rightwing thought, usually without really knowing the slightest thing about it? (Old joke: Lefties are tolerant of everyone except those who disagree with them.) Try opening yourself up to the right. It's a little scary, but it won't kill you, and you're likely to get something out of the effort. Jim's site is a first-rate place to begin the process of moving beyond what is -- let's face it -- the left's own kind of bigotry.] Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Andrea del Sarto
Michael I was first attracted many years ago to Andrea by his red-chalk drawings, which are very rich and sensuous, with lots of crosshatching and vigorously reworked contours. He makes a virtue, at least in his better drawings, of searching for the form. (Okay, so his lesser drawings can be a bit clunky). Compared to the dominant drawing style of 16th century Florence--i.e., extremely precious ink-and-wash presentation drawings--Andrea's studies look refreshingly like some sort of "action painting." Then, on a whim about six months ago I got a good color artbook on Andrea's paintings and have been looking at it off and on since. I like his work more the longer I look at them. In looking at his few paintings reproduced in standard art-history texts, Andrea had come off like a kind of timid wallflower in comparison to the wild-and-crazy types around him--Michelangelo, Raphael, Rosso Fiorentino, Parmagianino, Pontormo--as though he started out somewhere quite near Fra Bartolomio's rather conservative classicism and never quite made the leap into the gloriously quivering whirlpool of neurotic Mannerism. And while I have quite a soft spot for Mannerists in my heart, my respect for Andrea's deliberately low-key, classical masterworks continues to grow. Which is not to say he wasn't a man of his time--more leisurely study of his paintings has made it clear how significant a figure he was in Florentine art. For example, he seems to have been the first Florentine, and possibly the first Italian, to really appreciate Durer's work, and to begin the long tradition of stealing Durer compositions (something Van Dyke and Velasquez were still busy at over a hundred years later.) He also appears (at least as far as I can tell) to have been the first Florentine to substitute straight lines for more naturalistic curves in rendering (check out his draperies, in which every apparently curving contour is a actually series of straight lines.) Pontormo and many subsequent artists are clearly indebted to Andrea for this element of their drawing styles. More significantly, Andrea was not only a gorgeous colorist, but he managed a to utilize what look like overlapping glazes of color--often alternating warm and cool--to recreate the effect of the multiply-reworked contours of his chalk drawings. One of the issues in art that seems to always attract my attention is how painters reconcile their drawing and painting. Of course, Andrea must have looked quite closely at Leonardo's sfumato techniques, but the final effect is quite different from Leonardo's (whose own tensions between drawing and painting were, in some respects, only resolved by after his death in Raphael's "Transfiguration" ). But most of all, I appreciate Andrea for what seems to be the simultaneous warmth and humility of his nature. He seemed to genuinely love beauty, and to trust that his love of beauty, however gentle, would make his art live. Perhaps this is a lesson all artists might benefit from. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, August 22, 2002


Altman -- Great Zen Baloney
Friedrich -- I suppose I should have outgrown my idolatry of Robert Altman by now, but I haven't. I re-watched "Cookie's Fortune" recently, found it very beautiful (in a small-scale, leisurely, rockin'-on-the-back-porch way), laughed a lot and even snuffled a bit -- mostly because it's a lovely movie, but partly because it reminded me so much of how and why I fell in love with art in the first place. Robert Altman Here's a long, good interview with him (by John Tibbetts), done in his hometown of Kansas City and dating from the time of "Vincent and Theo." Free-associative yet down-to-earth, full of shit yet Zen-ishly brilliant. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Academic Art Redux
Michael An interesting rant. While over the top (I simply cannot get as excited about Bougereau and Gerome as he does, except for some of their landscape painting, which is actually pretty good), he does get at how difficult it is to really look at 19th century Academic art with an unprejuidiced eye, and how deeply the period is still propagandized against in art history texts. Academic "Springtime" It almost makes me think that the social/economic/sexual/religious tensions of the 19th century were so extreme that art manufactured at the time raises such unpleasant feelings that it must be sent off to sit in the corner. I can still remember one of the first books I read about art history, "Impressionism," in which the author begins the book with a critique of the "official" art of the 1870's. Nonacademic Renoir He considered it to be deeply hypocritical, respectable on the surface but prurient underneath, with exhibit A being all those "pinup" Salon nudes, carefully dressed up with mythological trappings. (He also slammed it for using a "smooth" painting technique -- which must be bad because decades later it was appropriated by advertisers of consumer products.) Of course, this author wouldn't dare utilize such language against Titian's, Corregio's or Ruben's "pinup" nudes, or even Corot's, Delacroix's or Courbet's nudes. And I suppose the openly pornographic style of Indian sculpture (which I really dig) is beyond criticism because it is the work of oppressed people. Indian Religioeroticism This all raises the question of whether Impressionism is considered "good" by 20th century art historians because it was relatively unerotic during an era when the dominant style of eroticism makes us feel threatened (i.e., "icky."). In other words, is Victorian eroticism--based on rules designed to navigate Victorian sexual tensions--so disturbing to us that art constructed in accordance to its schemas must continue to be stomped on by writers 120 years later? This may be an interesting example of the "liberated" sexual mores of today's cultural elite being not nearly as tolerant as we like to imagine them. It makes me think the cultural elite are a group of very sophisticated people who don't want to know anything about their parent's sex lives. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Academic Art
Friedrich -- You might get a kick out of this piece, here. Blasts modern art, praises 19th-century academic art. And why not? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Fantasy vacation
Friedrich -- Take an architectural drawing tour of Italy, info about it here. Ah, for a little money and time. OK, for a lot of money and time. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Times Arts Frownlines 3
Friedrich -- The arts, ever under siege -- at least according to the New York Times's "Arts" section. Two of the section's front-page headlines today: * "Water and Woe For the Czechs' Cultural Gems" * "Radio City and the Rockettes Reach a Labor Agreement" How would the arts survive at all in this vicious world if it weren't for the Times? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, August 21, 2002


Gris Design
Michael I may go out and buy a book on Juan Gris that I've been eyeing--not that we have to talk about his paintings, but just because I've always thought he would have made the best magazine art director of all time. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Cineweblistmania
Friedrich -- Sight and Sound has done their once-a-decade, "Which are the greatest movies of all time?" poll of critics and filmmakers. Results are here. A nice Web feature: as you click further into the site, you can see who voted for what, as well as comments on the movies. Fun to go through, even though it's not as if you and I haven't seen just about all of the films named -- a few Iranian (yawn) and Chinese (snooze) things aside... Some questions that occur to me as I leaf through the site: *Why do I find the directors' choices more interesting than the critics' choices? *Is "Citizen Kane" anybody's favorite movie? Really? *Why does anyone think "The Apartment" is a great movie? *Can anyone compare for sheer self-serious Frenchness to Catherine Breillat? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Howard Hodgkin
Friedrich -- Are you a Hodgkin fan? I am, although I know that in edgier eyes that makes me a fuddyduddy. I take him, though, not as what he's often made out to be (Brit version of Matisse-esque AbExer), but as a more sizzling version of a Bloomsbury painter -- ie., all color, pattern, and suggestion. Not that, come to think of it, there's much difference between the two descriptions. The colors are all hot and bothered -- flushed -- but the paintings are at the same time poised and contained, and I enjoy the combo. Let's hear it for sensuality-in-reserve. Which, as I type these words, reminds me what a fan I am of Grace Kelly too, another exemplar of the well-behaved-yet-hot-to-trot. (I read in a bio of Grace Kelly that, when she was a young actress studying in NYC, one of her ideas of a good time was to put on a grass skirt and dance the hula for her boyfriend...) Naughty Princess A cute quote from Hodgkin (taken from Saturday's Financial Times): I think the reason that so few British artists have used colour since the pre-Raphaelites is that the British regard it as slightly pornographic. Look at Turner's sunsets -- they're the colour of tumescence, really. Best, Michael... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Steyn, Sailer
Friedrich -- A few more good columns today. Mark Steyn on some of the more shocking ways Muslim immigrants are causing trouble in a variety of Western countries, here. And Steve Sailer on the ways in which Britain has a better record as a multicultural society than the U.S. does, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

"Good Girl" redux
Michael I checked out "The Good Girl" on Saturday night, which reminded me of a relationship I once had. (I can't say that I was particularly flattered at my portrayal as Holden.) I found the movie's blank, understated style a bit problematic, in a circular logic kind of way. The stylistic blankness seemed designed to make the rather unbelievable emptiness of the good girl believable. In my own life experience, while people are not always clued in to what they want out of life, they are actually pretty energetic about grabbing some part of it--and usually more energetic the less clued-in they are. If the good girl wanted children above all (as she seems to) then I suspect she'd have been a little more of a man eater. Or am I missing the point somehow? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Elvis meets Rubens
Michael I've been listening to a good deal of Elvis recently, and have become obsessed with a strange issue that derives from it. Sam Phillips, the Sun Records man, described "Don't Be Cruel" as a "sad song with a happy beat." I've been listening a lot to another Elvis song, "Mess of Blues" which is also, ostensibly, a sad song: I got your letter, baby Too bad you can't come home I swear I'm going crazy Sitting here by the phone Since you've gone I've got a mess of blues I got your letter Sunday Didn't eat a thing all day The days are all Blue Mondays Since you went away Since you've gone I've got a mess of blues (etc.) Elvis is doing his operatic, booming, echo-chamber version of human suffering. However, the music is very swinging, strongly rythmic (if mid-tempo), with the beat emphasized by hand claps and background singers going "wooo-woo." In short, another "sad song with a happy beat." The closest artistic analogy that comes to my untidy mind is Rubens' "Raising of the Cross" in which a suffering (but very athletic) Christ looks plaintively to Heaven as he is being hoisted by the combined efforts of huge, ultra-muscular ( and rather evil looking) manual laborers, with a few vigorous Roman soldiers and a beautiful leaping spaniel (one of the great dogs in painting) tossed in. Again, we have a "sad story" told with, well, a "happy beat." In both the song and the painting, the protagonist's suffering is obvious, but the whole treatment (strongly rythmic in both cases combined with an extravagant, virtuosic execution) suggests an underlying energy or power that will, we know, shortly "resurrect" the protagonist from the dead. This suggests that the attraction of Elvis is that he is a modern version of Osiris, suffering the dismembering wounds of adolescence, but with the superhuman vitality that makes his sufferings ultimately life affirming. (I don't think it was an accident that in the Osiris myth he is resurrected with an 'improved' penis in place of his sacrificed natural one.) When I say that art is at root religious, I may be saying that human nature seems to demand certain stories/rituals/ideas from both art and religion. Osiris Rocks I've been trying to think of a movie-analog to all this, and so far flopping. What is the cinematic analogy to the swinging rythmn of both the song and the painting, anyway? I actually first noticed the tension between style and substance in 50's rock--where I think it is quite widespread--in "The Great Pretender." There the tension is between the operatic "doo-wop" form and the earnestness of the singer--he may be singing opera, but by God he's sincere. Does all of this derive from the fact that 50's rock was extremely self-conscious about being the art form of "teenagers"--who of course couldn't be taken seriously? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Dreyfus Lauds Heston
Friedrich -- Amazingly insightful, sympathetic appreciation of Charlton Heston (immortal as Moses, above) by, of all people, Richard Dreyfus, here. Performers who can enact heroic figures -- we need more of 'em. Aside from the pure pleasure of the spectacle, there's a practical reason: without 'em (heroic figures, performers in the heroic style) all we seem to wind up with is a mob of opportunistic wise-asses frantically trying to score off each other. Best, Michael... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Walter Williams
Friedrich -- Walter Williams has a punchy, "get outta my face, government" column today. I don't know that I've ever seen the main libertarian case put as succinctly as he puts it: Whose business is it if I don't adequately plan for retirement or save money for my child's education? If I don't wear a seatbelt while driving or a helmet while biking, whose business is it? What if I don't get enough sleep or don't exercise enough for good health -- should government force me to, under the pain of punishment? In other words, should Congress have the power to force people to do what's in their own health, safety and welfare interests? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Eat this
Michael From a review by Joan Acocella of Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Near a Thousand Tables: A History of Food: But Fernandez-Armesto agrees with other historians that most cannibalism has been motivated not by physical hunger but by spiritual need. The Papuan Orokaiva, like many other cannibals on record, eat their enemies in order to capture their souls; the Gimi women of the Papuan highlands, until quite recently, ate their deceased menfolk in order to give them a congenial resting place. (" 'We could not have left a man to rot!' protest the women.") Fernandez-Armesto regards these practices as merely an extreme example of the attachment of symbolic meaning to food, and he compares them to contemporary 'health' diets aimed at enhancing one's beauty or tranquillity or moral worth. 'Strangely,' he writes, 'cannibals turn out to have a lot in common with vegans.' --the New Yorker, August 19 & 26, 2002, p. 164 Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, August 20, 2002


Jack and Diane Rereredux
Michael I'm glad you got a kick out of "Hoosiers." I think Hackman's performance in that is as good as anything I've ever seen on the screen. I'm not sure if I've seen the more recent works by Gene Hackman you refer to or not, but at this point, I assume he acts purely for the money. After cranking out as many good performances over the years as anyone I can think of, I can't condemn such a mercenary attitude. Did you know he took several years off about a decade ago and painted?--he's quite an accomplished realist? I wouldn't sweat having "simple-minded emotions"--really, what other kind are there? And while no sincere emotion goes unpunished in the hipsterverse, that's a badge of honor. What is the motivation for trying to be a card carrying member of the hipsterverse, anyway? Will to power? Overcompensation for an inferiority complex? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Jack and Diane Reredux
Friedrich -- Coach Hackman I caught up with "Hoosiers'" on your recommendation and enjoyed it a lot, many thanks. It certainly deserves a place on my ongoing list of "art and entertainment works that have done justice to midAmerica." Those big, earnest, wholesome emotions got to me, and Gene Hackman's wit and spark gave it all some focus and contrast. By the way, have his recent performances struck you as being as bad as they've struck me? I used to think he was almost always great. These days I think he's almost always lousy -- twisted and domineering, usually. I also enjoyed the "Hoosiers" recreation of clunky, earthbound, oldtime whiteboy basketball. That's the way it was played in my public high school. I remember all those scrawny whiteboy armpits too. General question: I find that the big city makes almost no room (and certainly shows no respect) for the kinds of wholesome, earnest emotions that a midAmerican tends to experience. City life seems to be all about being cynical, self-interested and smart, and (if at all possible) hoodwinking people and juggling abstractions. I spend much of my life in the city feeling emotionally parched, and aware that most city people would be quick to label what moves me "sentimental" or worse. That is, if I were ever fool enough to let them know what really moves me -- the smell of maples, the look of cornfields and small towns, the modesty, sweetness and generosity of the kinds of people I grew up with. All of which I tend to think of as "normal life," by the way -- but I can hear, right now as I type those words, some urban lefty "friend" railing away: "Normal! What gives you the right to say what's normal? Isn't it fascistic to impose your vison of normality..." etc etc. Do you, fellow mid-American-gone-urban, find this to be as much the case on the West Coast as I find it to be the case in NYC? To be honest, attending my 30th high school reunion got my simple-minded emotions all stirred up. And then watching "Hoosiers" -- lordy, the emotions and nostalgia (all of them, I suspect, about "home") got downright overwhelming. But my emotions have been close to the surface generally since the cancer operation. Some days I think they've settled down a bit. Then I learn better. Oh, another candidate for our "justice to midAmerica" list: "Home Fries," a touching, small Drew Barrymore vehicle, and amazingly '70s in feel, like "Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins." Drew in "Fries" Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 20, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Horror and Catholics Redux
Michael As for me and horror, I'm not quite sure what to say. If it gets to me, it affects me very unpleasantly, and if it doesn't I'm usually rather bored. I rented "Scream" and flipped off my VCR very quickly--it wasn't doing anything for me or my wife. As Freud observed, morbid dread is the result of repressed sexuality, and I've apparently got too much repressed sexuality to have it tweaked casually, or something. (I didn't sleep for a week after reading "Dracula" in the 7th grade.) I did check out "I Know What You Did Last Summer II" (or whatever the title was) but that was on the hope I'd see Jennifer Love Hewitt in a tight tank top (a form of repressed sexuality that I was quite happy to have tweaked). You'll see a bigger version of the following picture of Hewitt if you click on it. JLH Religion-wise, you are at least partially misinformed: I was baptized a Catholic, but was switched over by my apostate mother early in life to Presbyterian Protestantism. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Horror and Catholics
Friedrich -- I'm surprised to learn that you and horror don't mix well. I was under the impression that all Catholics (weren't you raised a Catholic?) were into horror. And I do remember being told by some Hollywood person years ago that that horror movies are made for three groups: teens, blacks, and Catholics. I'm generally not interested in horror myself, unless it's funny-scary or sexy-scary. (Have you caught "Cemetary Man"? Funny-sexy-scary -- ie., bliss.) But I was raised a Protestant, and spooky rituals don't mean much to me. The wife, raised a Catholic, craves horror, and craves it straight. Blood, forebodings, dark corridors, signs from the other world -- she eats every bit of it up. You come equipped with no such cravings? Image below not of the wife but of Anna Falchi from "Cemetary Man." The wife is much more glamorous. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 20, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Carla Gugino
Friedrich -- Glad to hear "Spy Kids 2" is enjoyable. I thought the first "Spy Kids" movie was pretty much of a blast, and think that the guy who makes them, Robert Rodriguez, is just about a perfect pop moviemaker. He seems impish, energetic, good-humored, unafraid of silliness and flamboyance, and full of fizz and humor. His scripts could be better, but just about all of his movies have a pop lift to them. Did you see his high school horror movie, "The Faculty"? Pretty good! Carla Gugino, by the way, is the actress who plays spy mom -- by my lights, one of the sexier movie moms ever, right up there with the mom in "Murmur of the Heart." She was in that De Palma movie "Snake Eyes" (I didn't like the movie and didn't take much note of her). But I liked her in a small role in "The Center of the World" (lousy DV would-be "Last Tango" -- although I cheer the effort! -- for the digital age, but with Gugino and an elegant Canadian actress I love watching, Molly Parker). And I liked her a whole lot in a lousy movie called "Jaded," where she had the lead. An oddball, not-good issue movie, but at least the issue is, believe it or not, lesbian rape -- Carla gets raped (whiskey bottle, if I remember right, and I'm enjoying the effort) by a couple of lesbians. But she really does act the pain, betrayal and fury well, and is hot, fiery, lush and emotional to boot. Carla Gugino I found her particular package -- the cutie-pie, Sally Fieldesque round face emitting the "dramatic" voice, the blazing but solemn eyes, the toned-but-ripe Italian body -- a little confusing at first, I confess. Now I'm a big fan. Confusing can be good, I have to remind myself sometimes. I wonder whether she'll become a star or turn out to be one of those glamorous, good actresses who never quite becomes a star. And whose time finally passses. It's not like I feel sorry for, say, Madeleine Stowe or Annette O'Toole (both them stars in my book). They work, they make tons of dough. But I do puzzle over why some actresses win stardom and some more-plausible (to me, anyway) ones don't. Why is, for example, Andie Macdowell a star -- or why was she for five minutes? Once the equipment is in place (glamor, accessibility, skill, etc.), is it really just a matter of a lucky hit or two? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 20, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Saturday, August 17, 2002


Voice of sanity
Michael From a review of "Mirroring Evil: Nazi Imagery/Recent Art" at the Jewish Museum: In the end, this show isn't so much about the Holocaust itself as about the art world recycling ancient cliches and obsessions and grafting them onto the Holocaust...Mr. Schechner's Diet Coke self-portrait [a photo of himself holding a can of Coke inserted into a photo of camp inmates] is yet another rant about the corrupting tyrannies of consumerism familiar since the days of Pop Art--50 years ago...For three decades or more, contemporary artists have turned their backs on art for art's sake in favor of a more activist agenda...artists saw their mission as addressing the world's social inequities: racism, sexism and almost every other "ism" you could think of. Yet a show like "Mirroring Evil" with its insider references to art and philosophy, is so ingrown, so inside baseball, that it demonstrates just the opposite: how out of touch contemporary art has become and thus how incapable it is of engaging the real world in any significant way. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Theory of Amazon 1
Friedrich -- Do you use Amazon.com much? I do as a shopper, and also as surfer -- I can get lost there, and happily so, for hours. As an arts fan, I find its existence and (I hope) success heartening. I'd also make the case that it's an artistically revolutionary force, if I didn't dislike the word "revolutionary." If I were a betting man, I'd bet that in a hundred years art/lit historians will look back and decide that the advent of Amazon was much more important an art event than, say, any Jonathan Franzen or Toni Morrison novel. Why don't editors/writers/critics/artists/profs discuss this? Could it be that they're -- gasp! -- not listening to me? I'll bore you with my fullblown Theory of Amazon later -- or, more likely, I'll do it in dribs and drabs, as time and mental energy become available. For today's installment, I focus on one fact: that Amazon has given a number of good writers and critics a venue. For example, here's an Aussie who's terrific on Popper-ish subjects. Here's a dazzling Irish film critic, of the annoyingly-radical-grad-student ilk. Here's an English conservative who's smart and provocative about the Mideast. Here's another Englishman, this one an elegant and helpful guide to early movies on DVD. All of them strike me as considerably more interesting and entertaining than 9/10s of the writers commercial (and otherwise conventional) magazines are publishing these days. All hail the Web. And power to the people --at least those I approve of. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Times passes, art changes
Friedrich -- I just killed a little time reading a magazine cover story (by Joe Morgenstern) from 1970 about Barbra Streisand. (Not someone I'm prone to think much about.) It was lovely -- evocative, intelligent, knowledgeable about acting, movies and music while being modest about how much can really be said about how and why something works and something else doesn't. Brainy, unpretentious, and full of feeling. A civilized pleasure. Darn it, what happened to all that? I get depressed from time to time by the fact that the art, media and entertainment worlds have changed so much from what they were when I got interested in them. These days I'm often not just uninterested in them, I recoil from them. They seem like (almost) completely different creatures from what they once were, all about product, packaging, business, effects, personalities -- pure aggression, in other words, with the only alternatives seeming to be, yawn, politics or a kind of dreary, attitude-copping self-expression. Who cares? Generally speaking, not me. "I might as well have gotten an MBA," is what tends to run through my brain at such (unfortunately not-rare) moments. Is this unique to the last 30 years? Was there that dramatic a sea change in the nature of art-and-entertainment during the previous couple of decades? Am I just getting old and running out of gas? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, August 16, 2002


Movies, Painting
Michael Why are movies so darn variable in quality/vibe? I mean, Raphael paintings are better and worse, but they're all sort of a piece. Rubens and El Greco paintings even more so. Whereas movies seem much more dependent on luck, or something. The quality of somebody's last movie is a very poor predictor for how much you'll like their next movie. Maybe if movies were made by stable teams of writers, directors, designers, actors they would be more, well, "artistic." I grant you, the importance of such an issue has faded a good deal for me since college, but discussing it beats working. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Coulter
Friedrich -- A long q&a with Ann Coulter here. And another one here. Her own site is here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Paglia
Friedrich -- Andrew Sullivan interviews Camille Paglia here. Yet more Camille here. And more. Are you a fan? I am. I agree with about 90% of what she says, don't mind disagreeing with her on the other 10%, sometimes wish she'd lower the Amazon-warrior volume level a little, then kick myself for even thinking such a pussy thought. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Kubrick Rererereredux
Michael Thanks for sending along the Kubrick documentary, which I've watched about half of at this point. Most of the biographical information on his early life I knew from a book I had read on Kubrick back in college. What was a big surprise was listening to Kubrick talk--his accent was, of course, American. The other, related, surprise was realizing just how clued in his subject matter was to the times. He developed a nuclear war movie (Dr. Strangelove) around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, he made a teen-sex movie (Lolita) in the early days of the pill/sexual revolution, he made a space movie (2001) during the space race, he made a juvenile crime/urban disorder movie (Clockwork Orange) during the law and order presidency of Nixon. I'll bet if you read the screenplay for his cancelled project on Napoleon in the late 60's you'd see it derived from LBJ and the Vietnam war. I can see how someone with Kubrick's armor-plated chutzpah would ultimately end up with Hollywood eating out of his hand. Unfortunately, being in that position meant he stopped using his greatest talent--figuring out the hot issues of the day and building movies around them. In the end, the chess hustler seems to have hustled himself; Kubrick's art (I use the term seriously) came out of his street smarts, his instinct for the main chance, and when he stopped picking subjects on that basis (because of the hostile reaction to Clockwork Orange in Britain?) his movies lost their zip. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break -- "Liberal", phooey
Friedrich -- I've been waging a (pathetically trivial, admittedly) campaign for a couple of years, refusing to call Democrats and those to the left of them "liberals." They ain't liberals, they're controlling thought-police, being my experience and hence conviction. So I make a point of calling them "leftists" instead. (And the world quakes.) It turns out I'm not entirely alone. Here's something from Mark Steyn, a brilliant columnist (who once wrote for the Modern Review, I believe) who's hard to find evidence of in U.S. publications: You'll notice, incidentally, that I haven't used the word "liberal" to describe the left. "Conservative" has been carelessly appropriated by the media to mean no more than the side you're not meant to like. John Ashcroft is a hardline conservative, but so, according to the press, is the Taliban and half the Chinese politburo and the crankier Ayatollahs. So I think we conservatives ought to make an attempt to reclaim the word "liberal." We believe in liberty, and in liberating human potential. I don't know what you'd call a political culture that reduces voters to dependents, that tells religious institutions whom they can hire, that instructs printers on what printing jobs they're obliged to accept, that bans squeegee kids unless they're undercover policemen checking on whether you're wearing your seatbelt, etc., etc. But "liberal" no longer seems to cover it. And something from Jay Nordlinger at National Review, whose work I don't generally know: One of the reasons I turned from the Left when I was young was that these �liberals� seemed so colossally illiberal - closed-minded and intolerant, for one thing. And yet, I�ve never quite accepted the word �conservative,� perhaps because of the bias I was brought up with against that concept, and that word. In a speech I gave to students last spring I said, In time, I became what we call a �conservative� - though I still sort of choke on the term. . . . I like to consider myself a genuine liberal, believing in limited government, equality of opportunity, equality under the law, pluralism, toleration, constitutionalism, colorblindness, a robust, internationalist foreign policy, sound and equal education, a common culture, etc. Nowadays, that makes you a flaming right-winger. But it shouldn�t be so. Comfort in numbers! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Blogging, Movie Update
Michael The job is coming along. Astonishingly, several of my initiatives from earlier in the year seem to be paying off. I'm always kind of wide-eyed with wonder when my ideas actually come to some kind of fruition--financially, I mean. By the way, do you have the same reaction that I do to seeing some of your opinions on the Web--to wit, uncertainty as to whether the opinions are too extreme/sweeping/unfair? For example, while I appear to smack Kubrick, Altman and Woody Allen some postings ago, the larger truth is that I love and frankly treasure several individual movies by each of them. I mean, I'm not about to disresptect "Thieves Like Us," "California Split," "Dr. Strangelove," "Bananas," "Take the Money and Run," etc. (Not only do I like them, I understand "Dr. Strangelove" was Elvis' favorite movie of all time!) Ann Prentiss and Gwen Welles in "California Split" On the other hand, I believe the "Economist" style guide maintains that vivid writing results from a two part process--simplify and exaggerate, so maybe strong opinions are their own reward. As far as my own movie-going activities, I saw "Signs" which I thought was pretty ramshackle if ultimately redeemed by having Joachim Phoenix take on an evil alien with a baseball bat. M. Night is a weird mixture of an eight-year-old comic book fanatic and an adult in therapy, and this time the adult-in-therapy part never quite got out of his head, so thank God the eight-year-old was along to take up the slack. I also saw "Spy Kids II" which was like eating cake for breakfast: not exactly stick-to-your-ribs fare, but goofy, fast-moving, and good for a sugar rush. Antonio Banderas was brilliant as the blundering, vain but good-hearted dad. I could have used more of Mom (hubba hubba)--are there other movies she's been in? By the way, what do you think of Steve Buscemi? He appears to be having the ultimate stealth career success of the modern acting world. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Art and Religion
Michael It does seem that the rise of "intellectually respectable" American Art eerily parallels the dominance of psychoanalysis (and, of course, the decline of organized religion) in American public life. As I have pompously opined in the past, I think Art only finds a meaningful social context in religion (or a reasonable facsimile, like J.L. David's worship of the Jacobin Revolution.) It's a bummer that psycholanalysis was the best religion Depression- and Postwar-Artists and Arts Intellectuals could latch onto. I mean, would you rather have illustrated stories of nymphs and satyrs (or even Madonnas and babies), or be forced to inflate your early family history into "mythic" terms via slashing brushstrokes? No wonder you would gradually wander off into color field painting--twice the fun, and with your pretensions of mythic "selfhood" more or less intact. If you noticed, however, Macho Mythic Self Art kind of conked out during the Vietnam War, and its religious function feebly yielded to Feminism. Honestly, walking around Soho and looking at galleries, or leafing through Art in America, does contemporary art look bursting with health to you? It feels more to me like an exhausted masturbatory fantasy. I grant you, I'm just an old fart (and was one even when I was in art school) and there are all these ambitious careerist young artists and art intellectuals on the make. But doesn't it seem like they're too late to the party? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Miseducations
Friedrich -- So true. My additional gripe about Ivy educations is that, these days at least, they seem to be anti-educations. The underlying assumption the elite educationists seem to share is that knowledge and skill somehow hold back the soul, or maybe even turn you into a racist/exploiter/etc. Thus, the goal of education is to free us from all that and lead us all into paradise. The result here at work is that I'm surrounded by babbling, entitled young Ivy (or Ivy-ish) idiots who regard knowledge and skill not as prerequisites to saying or doing anything that might merit attention but as evils to be attacked with all the bullshit multiculti p.c. crapola they can summon. (Which, given that they're basically very bright, is considerable.) What the kids coming from these schools seem to have is quickness and cleverness, and a kind of hyper-responsiveness that can be amazing -- ie., they're still basically kids. (Knowledge and skill being viewed apparently as adult evils.) They're cute, fast, and mischievous. I'll be curious to see what happens to them as they move out of their 20s and start encountering some of life's trainwrecks -- disappointment, illness, death, failure. As tedious and stuffy as a traditional upbringing can be, it does develop in you a few resources, which you can draw on when necessary. I don't find that these new kids have any such resources. So: Will they crack up? Go into a fury of blaming others? (All that said, I do envy the kids their quickness and their easy access to great technology. And their youth, of course.) But then, over and over I've been amazed by the baloney teachers lay on people. The arts, alas, seem especially susceptible to nonsense about "creativity," maybe because they're so damn soft. Over and over again I've taken arts classes, and have had the same set of reactions: show me the skills, steep me in the culture, and I'll make the decisions about what to do with it all, thank you very much. Forgive me, I'm getting a little overexcited... OK, I've calmed down. What arts teachers seem to want to do (not consciously, but in effect) is to brainwash you, take away your pride, and set you on a predetermined path: This is what art is, this is how it's studied, this is how it's made. It's like a cult, and the exact opposite of what I was hoping to propel myself into when I made the choice to lead an artsy life -- ie., a more free-thinking, more-open-minded, more-experimental way of life than the usual one. And lord knows you're right, all most profs seem finally to know how to do is instruct you in how to become a prof. We pay them to do this? I'm a big school-vouchers fan as a consequence -- anything for a little choice and competition. What's your take on vouchers? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Leon Krier Redux
Michael Great stuff. Why do you think we never heard about guys like this while we were at our Lousy Ivy College? Have you ever noticed that universities (with the possible exception of the sciences) seem to be about the last place one would go for truly original thinking on any subject? One suspects that's because academic "teaching" amounts to a sustained test of a student's abilities to absorb and parrot back the concepts that their teachers present to them; the people that are happy with this paradigm as students seem to be the ones that go in for careers in academia. The Ivies: Avoid 'em I remember being astonished once at hearing that Einstein got to pondering General Relativity because he was thinking about all objects, light and heavy, falling towards the earth at the same acceleration (a measurable fact). He couldn't believe that it was because (as Newton's gravitational theory explained it) that objects of larger mass had their increased gravitational pull exactly offset by an increase in massy inertia. Einstein apparently thought, "It's perfectly offset, 100% of the time, always and everywhere? Bullshit!" So Einstein decided to look for another mechanism which would explain the observable phenomenon. The reason I was astonished by this is that it totally flies in the face of traditional academic expectations in which the godlike teacher knows all the answers and you get higher grades the faster you get with the program. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Leon Krier
Friedrich -- Have you run across Leon Krier? An architect and town planner, and (roughly speaking) the intellectual godfather behind the New Urbanism movement. (The photo above is of Poundbury, an English town extension he's masterminded.) Fascinating, witty, provocative and, yes, I suppose you'd have to say reactionary, although I'd argue that he's a progressive, cheerful, forward-looking reactionary, not that he needs me making such a ludicrous case. To tell the truth, I think he's a genius. His thinking and observations get my head spinning on numerous subjects. You can sample his mind here. Here's an appreciation of his great book, Architecture: Choice or Fate? Your reaction? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 16, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, August 15, 2002


DVD Journal: "Sex and Lucia": "Lost and Delirious"; "The Good Girl"; "My Big Fat Greek Wedding"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I confess that I'm not a tax or Social Security wonk, but would be curious to know what your favorite plan for fixing them is. I have only a few dim feelings on the subject, all of them along the lines of "simpler is better," and "what a Ponzi scheme!" These hunches lead me in the direction of thinking a flat tax makes a lot of sense, and that (assuming government needs to get involved in retirement planning at all) Social Security ought to be put on a you-pay-for-yourself basis ASAP. Deep, huh? Enlighten me. Despite all discouragements, I still watch the occasional movie. Do you? What a nice art/entertainment form, at least in principle -- the work complete unto itself, lots of talented people contributing, and over in an hour and a half. What a pleasant, compact way of having a "fiction experience" when you're in the mood for one. So, an update: 1. "Sex and Lucia" -- fairly enjoyable high-class art-porn. Ingrown, and full of the kinds of mystical-seeming coincidences modernist art-porn seems prone to, which is fine by me -- the modernist art-porn novella is one of my favorite forms, and I accept its conventions happily. Ie., half "Emanuelle," half Atom Egoyan. Too much death and grief for my tastes (modernist art-porn novellas require some death and grief, but this was a bit much). But three fabulous, and fabulous-looking, actresses, each one very uninhibited. (The guy who directed "Y Yu Mama" said in an interview I ran across somewhere that he chose a Spanish, rather than a Mexican, actress for his movie because Spanish women are so free and daring these days.) A couple of remarkable scenes: One where the newly-in-love guy and girl are sexually frolicking -- I haven't seen many movie scenes that suggest so sweetly how silly and playful sex can be. And another where a woman seduces a guy verbally. They're on a park bench, watching children at play, and she tells him about how she masturbated the night before while watching a videotape of her mother (who happens to be a porn star) getting fucked. The girl is grinning and mischievous and the poor guy hardly knows what to do -- he just gets more and more confused and worked-up. Now that's my kind of modernism, ingrown and kinky. The women in the audience seemed to enjoy the movie, which raises the evergreen question: why do women go so enthusiastically for some erotic movies and object so vehemently to others? 2) "Lost and Delirious" -- Lesbianism as a disruptive force at a Canadian girls' boarding school: "A Separate Peace," basically, but with girls instead of boys, and with the implicit homosex made explict. Beautifully made, in a subdued, art-house way (great light, great attention to the girls' facial flesh -- the tiny scars, the translucency, etc), and gutsily acted. But a long, solemn trip into a very dreary lesbian mindset -- a movie for the Lillith... posted by Michael at August 15, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break -- Tax Takedown
Michael -- In which I take on a letter writer to the Wall Street Journal. [Letter to Wall Street Journal 2 5 02] "Taxes Follow the Money Your Jan. 22 editorial 'A Rich Tax Debate' brings to mind Willie Sutton's response when asked why he robbed banks: 'That's where the money is.' We tax the rich because they have the money. Using the data you presented, if we had a population of 100 people and an AGI of $100, the top guy would get $19.50, while the bottom 50 people would divide $13.20. (Split evenly, that comes to $.264.) I bet it's a rare person who turns down a raise [1] because it puts him in a higher tax bracket [2]. The guy barely making a living wage, who spends every dime just getting by, is far less able to pay income tax [3] than the guy making big bucks, to whom paying taxes is an annoyance [4]-it just means he has less money to indulge his whims.[5] --Robert Weston." Assumptions made in letter: 1 Assumption: greater wealth comes in the form of a raise-that is, once granted by some outside force, essentially permanent, and it is not a result of greater risk taking or other activities outside the range of normal employee behavior. 2 Assumption: the desire for greater wealth is so powerful as to be indifferent to tax policy. 3 Assumption: income levels are not the result of human choices, but of higher and lower abilities. 4 Assumption: higher taxes merely annoy, but do not harm, high-earners. 5 Assumption: the desire by high-earners not to be taxed at progressive rates is the result of their childish insistence on being able to indulge their whims. My observations about assumptions: *Assumption #1 is very questionable. The very wealthy are not generally employees, and their wealth is generally the result of pursuing educational or risk-taking activities that fall outside of normal employee behavior. One suspects the author is not an entrepreneur or a doctor, and is unable to empathize with such people. *Is assumption #2 true if incremental tax rates are set at 100%? (that is, if the greater income results in no greater wealth to the individual?). If not, at what incremental tax rate does this counter-incentive kick in? *Concerning assumption #3, is it inconceivable that a person could work at less than his abilities? (Research implies that an increase in income, for example, almost always implies an increase in the time that is spent working; is everyone willing to maximize the amount of time spent on work?) If so, doesn't that suggest that "under-performing" persons-who choose a more leisurely lifestyle over wealth-are getting a "free ride" on their taxes, which are set at the level of their actual, not potential, income? *Assumptions #2 and #4 are incompatible; assumption #2 assumes that the drive for wealth is so powerful that it is unaffected by tax policy, while assumption #4 assumes that those same individuals would not feel themselves anything more... posted by Friedrich at August 15, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break -- Social Security forever
Michael -- In which I tear apart... "Social Security (as We Know It) Is Here to Stay" By Martin Mayer in the New York Times, 8/28/01 Buried under layers of argument, analysis and sophistry, the real issue in the Social Security fight has become invisible. That issue is the nature of the obligation. Is Social Security a firm contract with its beneficiaries, as a government bond is a contract with its holders? Or is it simply another government program that can be modified or even abandoned at any time by Congress and the President? [The Social Security program has been repeatedly modified through the years-in the direction of larger benefits-so apparently it is simply another government program that can be modified by politicians to obtain votes.] Through the years of the big deficits-the early Bill Clinton years as well as the years of Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush-presidents insisted that all the revenues from Social Security taxes were available to be spent for other purposes, just as the revenues from other taxes were. Borrowing from the so-called Social Security trust fund was a routine way to pay the government's bills. Mr. Clinton's first budget justified "consolidating" the surplus generated by Social Security taxes into the general budget on these grounds: "The federal budget meaning of the term 'trust' differs significantly from its private sector meaning. In the private sector, the beneficiary owns the trust's assets...In contrast, the federal government owns the assets of most federal trust funds, and it can raise or lower future trust fund collections and payments by enacting changes to existing law." But history shows clearly that absent serious abuse (and sometimes despite it), pension obligations, once assumed by a nation, are for all practical purposes irrevocable. People who have come to expect government support in old age as a right-especially if they have long paid taxes dedicated to a pension program-will so resist revocation or even significant alteration of this support that change is virtually impossible. [Ah, so this is not a matter of ethics per se, which might find fault with the idea that retirees should be so passionate about claiming benefits which are far larger than those which they, as workers, ever paid to support, but rather about what large groups of voters (in this case, the elderly) think they have the voting muscle to get away with.] This practical truth is so well accepted internationally that the World Bank does studies of "implicit pension deficit" in every country, adding these obligations to the published national debt figures to calculate each government's real balance sheet [if this is so well known, name me a man on the street who can accurately give me the World Bank's estimate of the U.S. government's implicit pension deficit. Of course, Mr. Mayer doesn't actually mention the size of this pension deficit-the number is in the trillions of dollars-as it might reduce the political support for the current pay-as-you-go Social Security program]. The contract between the United... posted by Friedrich at August 15, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Times Arts Frownlines 2
Friedrich -- The NYTimes Arts section today goes four-for-four -- all, repeat all, of the headlines on the front page of the section are self-serious protest classics: 1. "It's Gloves-Off Time for an Angry Arthur Miller" 2. "Not Just Singing, but Soul-Baring Too" 3. "Party for Zora Neale Hurston, Obscure No More" 4. "Actors in Ellis Island Show Vote, 7 to 1, to Join Union" ...I was thinking of making some comments here about the Times' vision of of what art is (apparently a civil-rights fist shaken, in the name of justice and self-expression, in the face of oppression), and about how, if that's what art really were, I'd have no big interest in it. But I'll spare you. Best Michael... posted by Michael at August 15, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, August 14, 2002


Waking Dream of Monsters Redux
Michael -- The 1930s "Wolf Man"? No, I haven't seen it. I haven't seen the Bela Lugosi "Dracula" either, or "The Bride of Frankenstein." I'm sort of hopeless in the horror department. I understand that the director of "Freaks" was a talented guy. (Apparently my 50s are going to be marked by a complete failure of my memory for names. Well, at least that way I'll be constantly meeting new people.) Do you agree? I believe he was, along with Erich von Stroheim, an assistant director on "Intolerance." Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

DVD Journal: "The Wolf Man"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I caught up with "The Wolf Man" last night, which I'd never seen. Do you know it? It isn't all that good, and as I watched it I drifted in and out of drowsiness. Though it has some terrific scares, a wonderful dry-ice expressionist forest, and fab Wolf Man makeup. Watching the film in a state of semi-bored drowsiness was perfect. I wasn't sure from moment to moment when I was watching the movie and when I'd moved into that pre-sleep state where your awareness has just let go its grip on the external world. An ideal experience of the movies as a, as some have described them, "waking dream." Are you as amazed as I am how poetic and operatic some of the early pulp movies are? I can't understand why composers and directors don't want to make operas of them. Moving, archetypal, mythopoetic stuff. Plus great monsters. But maybe the movies themselves are the operas -- ie., maybe they don't need expansion. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Times Arts Frownlines I
Friedrich -- One of the few reasons I still look at the NYTimes is because I'm so fond of the way the newspaper tries to turn the arts into a day-to-day matter of intense social concern. The effort it must take to continue strong-arming readers in this way! Here's the frownline, er, headline of one of today's leading arts articles: "Young Musicians Granted a Respite From War's Curses." Gotta love it! But maybe the editors are cynical and are just playing to their audience. Maybe the editors have a macro key on their keyboards that spits this stuff out, endlessly recombining such words as "oppression," "youth," "spirit," "war," and "protest." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Jack and Diane redux
Michael Very glad to hear about the cancer-test results. My vacation was probably the best I've taken in years. I got to see aunts, uncles and first cousins. Talking with my cousins was particularly interesting; despite the fact we're all pushing 50, none of us seem fundamentally different from when we were 10 years old. Obviously, our life experiences have taken us in all sorts of different directions, but our basic "toolkit" seems indistinguishable from what we had to work with 40 years ago. The older I get the less I believe in the notion of the "autonomous individual"--it's almost like each of us is a like one hand of cards in a game of poker, but the deck we're dealt from is the more "fundamental" unit. Any biography that doesn't spend as much time on the subject's parents, siblings and children as on the subject is missing the boat, I suspect. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Jack and Diane
Friedrich -- By the way, how was your vacation? Mine was great: Good cancer-test results out in St. Louis (PSA's "undetectable," praisethelordandknockonwood), then a very sweet 30th public-high-school in western New York. I wonder what your reflections are on growing up in the midwest -- for all intents and purposes, western New York is part of the midwest. Are you as amazed as I often am by how contemptuous big-city types are of flyover country? (You'd think at least a few of them would look at midAmerica and think: Peaceful, prosperous, pleasant -- hmm, maybe they're onto something.) But maybe that just demonstrates what an earnest and easily-shockable mid-American I remain, even after all these years in the big bad city. Early in my stay in New York, I was comparing notes with a young woman, who asked where I was from. I told her, and mentioned that I was fond of it. She looked me dead in the eye and said, "No you aren't." New Yorkers for you. At least midtownish, careerish New Yorkers. They either grew up here and think it's the center of the universe and every other place is a joke, or they came here from some other place they spend the rest of their lives hating. I'm such a small-town midwesterner at heart. Are you? I remember once telling the wife, a big-city girl, how pleasant life in a small town in western New York was for a kid. She was skeptical, so I made her sit through the movie "Breaking Away," which, aside from the whole bicycle-racing thing, might be a documentary about how I grew up. She enjoyed the film but couldn't stop rolling her eyes. She watched it like she was watching something from Timbuktu, it seemed that bizarre to her. Seedbed of oppression, racism and homophobia? The weekend of the reunion, full of "Breaking Away"-style kids (although "kids" may not be the best word for people in their late 40s), I had the usual, intense "Why did I ever leave?" stirrings. Short answer: ambitious mother. Longer answer: some interests I wanted to pursue. But neither answer seemed adequate as I made conversation with old friends who've never left town, and who seem at least as happy as I am. So: why did I ever leave? Gulp. Art question: which movies/books/paintings/etc have done a good job of presenting smalltown mid-American life? Some offhand answers: "Babbit." "Winesburg, Ohio." "Breaking Away." A few of the early Jonathan Demme movies. "Spoon River Anthology." "Picnic." And my personal favorite, "The Music Man," a towering masterpiece (I would argue this seriously) which also nails the "American salesman" type far better than the awful "Death of a Salesman" did, at least for this son of a salesman. Poet of the heartland: Sherwood Anderson I should be coming up with paintings too. Any ideas here? But I think artists have generally done a lousy job of dealing with mid-America, which they see all too often as a nothing but... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Fleshy Old Lucian re-re-redux
Michael -- Haven't seen much Auerbach, but the little I have seen makes me curious to see more. I didn't think you'd be too intrigued by L. Freud. I'm sort of pleased I could make that prediction accurately. I guess I've been paying attention to what you were saying for the past 30 years. For a non-Expressionist comparison, though, what do you think of Rubens' more exaggerated skin painting, in which he juxtaposes cool grays (transition tones, veins) with warm lights, cooler highlights, and super-warm reflected light to create a flesh-physicality as intense as Freud? For an English painting comparison, have you ever seen Stanley Spencer's "Leg of Mutton Nude"? Best, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Fleshy Old Lucian re-redux
Friedrich Very impressed by Lucian, though more so now that you've pointed out what fascinates you about him. But never fond of his work. I don't think I'm deep or substantial enough for it. You may be fonder of tortured/pondered/heavily-worked things than I am: make sure every square inch matters! My essential laziness is overawed by such concerns. And as a would-be painter, I'm looking for tricks. "How to fill up all that extra space easily and entertainingly," basically. I once took a class in how to paint faux finishes -- it was as useful as, and much less pretentious than, any other art class I've taken, even if I retain little. (Sponges? Rags? Something like that.) There's a place here in town (the Studio School) that runs a program called the Drawing and Painting Marathon. A week or two of working eight hours a day on the same drawing or painting. I've been tempted to give it a try, but lordy, I just don't know. Maybe more up your alley? Are you an Auerbach fan too? Freud I feel I get, even if only in some dim way. Auerbach I can't make sense of. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Fleshy old Lucian redux
Michael Interesting article. What do you think of old Lucian? I had an art teacher who didn't like him, claiming that Lucian always painted the same painting. I like him because he evolved a style of modeling that, by exaggerating color and tonal shifts, manages to intensify the fleshiness of flesh (as well as creating a densely linear network throughout the picture, which unifies his painting and his drawing.) Yes, yes, it's a bit morbid. But Freud strikes me as a (less facile) Egon Schiele-type, but one who lived long enough to get interested in other people. While I don't see myself copying him, I wouldn't mind pursuing a nude or a portrait over many, many sessions, trying to wring everything I could out of every square inch. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Fleshy old Lucian
Friedrich -- Hey, a not-bad Observer article about Lucian Freud, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at August 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Monday, August 12, 2002


The Uses of Reality
Friedrich -- Journalism vs. fantasy? I suppose that I view "the journalistic" as one element a given work of art or entertainment might be selling, nothing more or less. I don't live for it, per se, but I'm sometimes glad when it's present. I thought the fiction (is that what you mean by "fantasy"?) side of "Bonfire of the Vanities," for instance, was weak, though I enjoyed the book's journalistic side. I recently watched a movie on DVD called "Perfume," and one of the things it too was selling was "journalism" -- in this case, the look and feel of the fashion-and-media industry. The movie (worth seeing for a variety of reasons) was dead-on, and very enjoyable, in that department. Starved as this spectator usually is for something, anything, I'm not about to turn down some decent journalism if and when it comes along. The "Yeah! That's what it's like!" response is perfectly enjoyable for me. From "Perfume" But that's just a mature and impersonal response. Yawnsville. Personally, the fulcrum I'm more drawn to contemplating is realism vs. symbolism. (The strictly fantastic -- sci-fi, fantasy, etc -- doesn't attract me as much as it does you. I tend to be happiest when I can feel the imagination stirring beneath a cloak of something recognizable.) I seem to have a bigger-than-usual appetite for the symbolic -- Colette, for instance, or turn- of-the-century erotic painting. People can talk all they want about Klimt's superficiality, about how he's more a poster designer than a real artist, but they'll never persuade me to stop enjoying his paintings. I suspect that my taste for the symbolic helps explain my attraction to crime fiction, too. Its basic structure (a crime is committed, an investigation follows) resonates for me. I walk around thinking thoughts about how wrong literature goes when it tries to model the (supposed) quantum uncertainty and existential formlessness of existence. What's the point of doing that, or even attempting to do it? (People can do as they please, especially in the arts. I'm just chugging along my own tracks right now...) People are storytelling creatures. We impose explanations and stories (ie., cause and effect) wherever possible, and whether or not our cause-and-effect stories can hold up in some ultimate sense. (His acceptance of the human inevitability of cause-and-effect thinking, even as he debunks its validity, is the main reason I love Hume so much.) Why not run with, rather than fight, that tendency? Particularly given that art isn't science. Which is a rant I'm rarin' to go on any time now -- about how wrong I think artists go when they picture what they're doing as something akin to science or philosophy. (Oakeshott is terrific on the way people get themselves in trouble when they impose on one field the thinking that's appropriate to another.) Ie., why not assert form in the face of it all? The effort can, at the least, give the artist a chance to bring a few aspects of experience... posted by Michael at August 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, August 7, 2002


Kubrick Rerereredux
Michael -- I rented "Eyes Wide Shut" and hit the eject button about 20 minutes into it. What a snore. Kubrick managed to direct some interesting movies up to about 1972. "Dr. Strangelove" and "Lolita" are genuinely interesting. "2001," "Clockwork Orange," "Paths of Glory and "Spartacus" have their moments. But as far as I'm concerned, he could have been struck by an asteroid at that point and I wouldn't have missed anything. Frankly, other than fondly remembering Nicole Kidman's bottom as she walked away from the camera in a long, flowing dress and high heels, my rememberance is that "Eyes Wide Shut" was laughably bad. Kubrick, Altman and Woody Allen all seem, on some level, to be of greater interest as cases of how to be a "movie virus" than as artists -- that is, their life stories show how to infect the defense mechanisms of the movie industry and turn them against themselves (like HIV), so that studios helplessly produce their films. As regards "Y Tu Mama," what I was objecting to was the reductionism. I felt the story was reduced to a political cartoon by the ending. Other than that, it was fun. Question: What is the proper mix of reality and fantasy in movies? Can you say that the "journalistic" component of a piece of narrative art has ever taught you anything meaningful about life? (I will grant you that meditating on "MacBeth" taught me some practical lessons about growing up in my family, but it has no discernable sense of "real" time or place, unlike, say, "Madame Bovary," which is loaded with "journalism" but which I can't say has had any discernable impact on my life.) What do you think about this? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at August 7, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, August 5, 2002


Kubrick re-re-redux
Friedrich -- Sherman? I dimly recall from the two books I ever read about the Civil War (a kiddie picture book, and Bruce Catton's one-volume history) -- no, I recall almost nothing about him, dimly or not. Atlanta, burning, Southerners hating him... A bad guy? I don't think I've I've ever identified with a military figure, at least since I was a "war"-playing kid. But I was surprised how much I enjoyed, and how much I was moved by, two adult ventures in reading about war -- Paul Fussell's "Wartime" and John Keegan's "A History of Warfare," both of them terrif. Fussell's book mentions and praises many war memoirs -- "With the Old Breed on Peliliu" is one such, about WWII in the Pacific. Have you read it? Looking back on our earlier exchanges, I notice that I was unfair to Kubrick, who I described as intellectually-driven. I think he was (do you?), but I was using the description as though it automatically implied a negative judgment -- "intellectually-driven"=bad. My failing. Even if I do tend not to enjoy most intellectually-driven art, grumble grumble. But of course there's some such I do enjoy, De Palma, for instance. Have you seen "Mission to Mars"? Many flaws, but also some beauty, brains and humanity. Plus a childlike sense of wonder (from De Palma!) that reminded me of how I felt as a kid looking at those charts of the solar system so many Boomer boys had tacked to their walls. When I wrote something online praising "Mission to Mars," I got tons of angry emails denouncing me, often viciously . It took me a while to understand who my correspondents were -- sci-fi geeks for whom "2001" is the gospel. And it took me a while to figure out why they so hated "Mission to Mars." It was because the movie had some human and poetic qualities. They like the I-am-a-computer quality of most sci-fi. They're geeks because life inside the machine and the mind makes more sense to them than does life in the body and the world. Or so I surmise. I should simply have said at some point that "Mission to Mars" was a sci-fi movie for people who don't usually like sci-fi movies. (Though I do wonder if the outraged geeks would have been less abusive if I had. What a badly-socialized lot they are!) There were certainly many reasons to not enjoy "Mission to Mars" -- some not-great writing, some flubbed acting. But it did have some poetry and some (perhaps over-earnest) emotionality. Sweetness, tenderness, innocence -- imagine that. Have you seen it? As for Kubrick -- what's wrong with creating a vivid picture of the "cage of intellect"? If indeed that's what he's doing, it's an achievement, whether I enjoy it or not. I don't know how you reacted to "Eyes Wide Shut." When I saw it at a screening, I found it amazingly bad. Thinking back on the movie now, I'm fascinated to find that... posted by Michael at August 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, August 1, 2002


Business, Sherman, Thurber
Michael -- To the naked eye, it would seem that we're being very successful and making lots of money. I find, oddly, that the task of being me seems almost insupportable precisely at such moments. I am much better at dealing with absolute disaster; it brings out the best in me. (My wife, having observed me closely for many years, agrees wholeheartedly.) I have considerable fellow feeling for Wm. T. Sherman, the Civil War general who was relieved of a high command for "nervously" predicting that the likelyhood of a quick Union victory was not very high. Indeed, he suggested that the South might well be able to take St. Louis before the North could take Nashville. He was redeemed from rumors of insanity by the battle of Shiloh, where his troops were confronted by a Confederate surprise attack and almost routed. In conditions that were finally as bad as (or worse than) his worst fears, he became extremely effective. Although wounded twice (staunching blood from a bullet through his hand with a handkerchief he pulled tight with his teeth) and having two or three horses shot out from under him, he calmed his panicked men, stabilized his defensive line, and even reached the supreme height of practical eloquence by convincing soldiers who had run out of ammunition not to retreat. In order to reach his full potential as a general he needed to melt the ice of his self-doubts in the warmth of his relationship with Grant, who he felt "...didn't know as much as I did about military history or theory, but who had faith in victory the way a devout Christian has faith in God. When I don't know what the enemy is up to, I start to get very nervous; Grant doesn't care what the enemy is doing, he just cares about what he is doing." An interesting guy, Sherman; did you know he was probably the most famous person in America when, after retiring as head of the Army, he lived in New York during the 1890's? He was very ascerbic and quick witted, and always had a great quote for newspapermen on any subject. I'm reading a biography of James Thurber, which isn't a great biography but is entertaining because he spends a lot of time quoting Thurber's humorous writings. (Thurber, by the way, appears to have dealt several times with the Civil War. In one piece I'd love to read, spoofing a "what might have been" series in another magazine, Thurber portrays General Grant--after a night of hard drinking at Appamatox--as so confused and hung over that he attempts to surrender his army to a surprised General Lee.) While Thurber seems to have perfectly illustrated the idea that to be a successful humorist you have to lead an emotionally immature and stunted private life, I do respect his public resistance to left wing thought during the 30's. I think what has always depressed me about the Thirties is that so many intellectuals, who... posted by Friedrich at August 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Mexisex redux
Friedrich -- I enjoyed "Y tu Mama," didn't love it, certainly not as much as many of my movie-critic friends, of whom I seem to have fewer and fewer. Do you know the director's other work? Alfonso Cuaron, very talented. Did a gorgeous kid's movie, "A Little Princess," as well as a modern-dress version of "Great Expectations" (beautiful to look at but a stiff). In "Y Tu Mama," I enjoyed the use of the teen-sex-road-movie framework as an excuse for an essay on the topic of "whither-Mexico." Since I know next to nothing about Mexico I have no way of judging whether the essay aspect was accurate or not, but I liked the road-movie/essay concept. I suspect you're right about the underlying agenda, but I wasn't bothered much by it. Latin macho does seem to encompass a lot of homoeroticism (of a sort that wouldn't have been endured in the Anglo-German American small town where I grew up, for instance). And, whatever my ignorance, Mexico does sort of seem to be a teenaged country, doesn't it? Forever trying and failing to get its shit together? Plus I figure that art-and-entertainment types have to be cut some slack, otherwise we'd have no arts or entertainment. (I could be wrong about this.) That said, artsy types, while sometimes spot-on when they observe something, are almost always dead-wrong when they prescribe a solution. So I agree that we're right to be wary of them and their agendas. But I liked the raunchiness, the actress, and the little touches of poetry -- the overgrown swimming pool, the Godardian voice-over, the moment when the actress puts the coins in the jukebox and then turns and dances right at the camera. Especially the moment when she puts the coins in the jukebox and dances right at the camera. As far as I'm concerned, that's the kind of thing the indie cinema in this country ought to be doing but never is. (Big mystery: why are American indie films so uninterested in art, beauty, and pleasure?) I remember feeling pretty cheery as I left the theater: Poetry, romance, sex, melancholy! A New-Wave-esque pleasure, however minor a one. Where gays are concerned more generally, I seem to have a peculiar view. I live in a heavily-gay neighborhood, have lots of gay friends, have more of a taste for camp humor than the typical straight guy, live for the arts, etc. I find many of them very simpatico and relish the often-present irony and humor, and get a big kick out of their love of quality of life. But I find the groupthink that so often prevails appalling. On AIDs, for instance, it's striking (and horrifying, once you think of the cost) how quick they are to speak of it as "an epidemic" even while forbidding all talk of a quarantine. How do advanced societies deal with epidemics? Quarantine is certainly one of the more efficient options. (The case I've heard some of them make is that their ability... posted by Michael at August 1, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments