Thursday, October 31, 2002


Artchat Survival Guide -- Aesthetics
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- A shot at defining "aesthetics," a term some of our readers have expressed an interest in. "Aesthetics" is one of those words Americans get funny about. We balk at it; it seems to reek of refinement, English class, school ... The hell with all that, let's get on with the party! We're suspicious of aesthetics, and we all too often prefer to avoid the topic. When we do get interested, we look to Europe for guidance (Henry James was great on this theme), or to academics or gurus, and we find ourselves wanting. The problem with our suspiciousness about aesthetics is that it shuts off conversation. Aesthetic experience is hugely important; to avoid consideration of it is to deny ourselves the full experience of life's pleasures. (Our naivete also leaves us open to exploitation by "experts.") And what's the point of that? Technically, aesthetics is a branch of philosophy that concerns itself with the subject of beauty; the dictionary's opinion is that aesthetics has to do with a concern for, or appreciation of, beauty. Both of these definitions are fine, god knows. But there's another way to take the word that's more practical and more useful -- hey, values Americans like. In our confusion about the topic, we tend to picture aesthetics as something you do after you take care of everything else that's more important. We take aesthetics to be optional -- as the slice of cake we may or may not treat ourselves to after a hard day. In fact, it's part and parcel of, and inseparable from, how we experience life. We're always considering things and making decisions about them on grounds that are least semi-aesthetic. (The one exception: when the only value at stake is life or death.) Aesthetics is life considered from the point of view of beauty and pleasure. And nearly everything can be -- which isn't to say that, morally speaking, it should be -- discussed from the point of view of aesthetics. A long way of saying that whenever choice is available, aesthetics (taste and preference, pleasure and displeasure) plays a role. Say you're thirsty: do you pour yourself a glass of milk, or one of o.j.? What can drive people a little nuts about the arts is the way the aesthetic point of view is forever forming and re-forming itself, and operating on multiple levels. It's like my (admittedly pathetic) understanding of Zen -- you don't find enlightenment, you let yourself be the enlightened being you already are. How to do that? Quit trying to figure it out! It's all so indefinite -- but that doesn't make it less real. Here's how it works. I'll use the example of my walk to work this morning. I threw on some corduroy pants and a windbreaker (chilly outside!), got my tea at the deli rather than the usual fancy place, and angled up through Times Square rather than take the 5th Avenue route. Along the way, I... posted by Michael at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Learning from Las Vegas
Michael, Wandering around Las Vegas last weekend I ended up spending quite a while walking through various casinos on my way somewhere else. As you may have guessed, I’m not a gambler and I generally don’t “get” the whole gambling scene. My wife asked me at one point if I wanted to bet on the World Series, and laughed at me when I explained that I had neither inside information on the two teams nor any control over their behavior, so, no, I didn’t want to bet. But during my visit, the dimly lit, entirely enclosed, weatherless spaces of the casinos--filled with the glow of slot machines--kept reminding me of something. Finally, it dawned on me what it was: I was remembering a photograph I had seen of the deep interior of the Egyptian temple Abu Simbel. Innermost Shrine Lit by Glowing Gods (Egypt) and Glowing Slot Machines (Vegas) The picture had been on the web site “Sacred Places” by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe of Sweet Briar College, which I had looked at while writing a previous posting. When I got home, I went back online and reread his description of Abu Simbel. The actual interior of the temple is inside the cliff in the form of a man-made cave cut out of the living rock (cf. The Sacred Cave). It consists of a series of halls and rooms extending back a total of 185 feet from the entrance..[where one finds] the innermost shrine with seated statues of the gods Ptah, Amun-Ra, the deified Ramses II, and Re-Horakhte. The most remarkable feature of the site is that the temple is precisely oriented so that twice every year, on 22 February and 22 October, the first rays of the morning sun shine down the entire length of the temple-cave to illuminate the back wall of the innermost shrine and the statues of the four gods seated there… Following his link to the “sacred cave” I came across this: Caves are ambiguous spaces, offering both protection and shelter but can also trap and imprison. Because of its location within the earth, which many cultures have identified as female, the cave has been identified as the womb of Mother Earth, and associated with birth and regeneration… That sounded a lot like a Vegas casino, all right—womb and tomb all in one dimly lit location. Besides naturally occurring caves, artificial caves were dug into mountains…Often the mountain itself was also artificial. The pyramids in Egypt were man-made sacred mountains inside of which were created artificial caves… "Man-made sacred mountains" reminded me of Las Vegas’ Luxor casino, which is shaped like a pyramid, and which I had been walking past every day. Abu Simbel (Egypt) and Luxor Casino (Vegas) So let’s see if I can read the riddle of a Vegas casino: we’re talking about a sacred cave [the casino] in the middle of the desert, buried beneath an artificial sacred mountain [hotel], in which un-foreseeable units of good and bad fortune, of death and regeneration,... posted by Friedrich at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tacit Knowledge -- Sound Levels
Friedrich -- About ten years ago I spent time talking with some movie sound editors and technicians. The issue of the day was the new audio systems that were being installed in movie theaters. One of the interesting bits of not-in-the-textbooks knowledge the sound guys (all guys, no women) passed along was that people have strong volume-level preferences, and that these preferences change predictably with age. For most young people, loud noises are enjoyable, even exciting -- young males are even more prone than young females to be excited by loud noise. It's sometime around the age of 30 that people start losing the taste for loudness. By the time they're in their 40s and 50s, most will actively dislike loud noise, finding it annoying or even painful. The sound guys were thrilled by their new toys, which offered possibilities for wonderful sonic detail and atmosphere. Yet what they were mostly being ordered to do was pump up the volume: to deliver shake-the-floor thunderclaps, rib-rattling explosions, thumpa-thumpa scores. The sound guys weren't surprised by the result -- which was that movie attendance was skewing ever-more-pronouncedly towards the young. Older people simply don't want to be knocked around by sound in that way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Continuing Ed: The Chaos of History
Michael, While in Las Vegas, my wife and I were at the Venetian casino to buy some new shoes (don’t ask), when we stumbled across a local branch of the Guggenheim located in the building. The exhibit was 40 or 50 astonishingly high quality Old Master paintings from The Hermitage. (It included a Poussin unlike any I’ve ever seen, an early battle scene that rushes towards you in a nightmare of diagonally crossing action, combined with a wall-to-wall Mannerist phalanx of bodies—the impact is like standing in a theater exit watching a wall of people running towards you after someone has yelled “fire.”) My wife couldn't believe the average Vegas gambler cares for what I call HFOP (“high falutin’ oil paintings”) but I pointed out to her that the Guggenheim doesn’t need everyone to come, just enough people to come. My estimate is that fifty people went through the mini-museum during there in the half-hour I was wandering around, which translates into maybe a thousand customers a day @ $15 a head--$105 thousand a week! Over $5 million a year! You know, they may actually have a business for themselves there. Especially since the Guggenheimers probably “borrowed” the Hermitage’s art for peanuts! Ah, the "art spirit"! In the Guggenheim’s bookstore, which is about as big as the exhibit space, I came across a heck of a book—Robert Rosenblum’s, Maryanne Stevens’ and Ann Dumas’ “1900: Art at the Crossroads.” Starting from the art exhibited at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the authors selected samples and expanded their search through the years just prior to and following the turn of the last century. While an exhaustive review would be impossible, even a single volume shows the enormous variety of painting and sculpture gurgling away back in the “dark ages” before anyone even thought of the NEA. Views of the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris The more I’ve learned about art, the less the tidy summaries commonly presented in college courses or in hagiographic histories of “modern art” seem to accurately describe reality. In part, this problem is methodological—professors and authors attempt to make sense of the chaos by clinging to their linear “story line” while in reality, all sorts of artistic cross-breeding is going on, producing litters of lovely “dead-ends” which must be ignored for their lack of progeny! The other problem is the fact that artists’ rarely have a “starring role” in art history for more than a few years or so—but they have the awkward tendency to go on producing for decades on either side of that brilliant window. The result is, of course, that you find out that painters who were dealt with two chapters back (the original French Impressionists, say) are still hanging around doing significant work after the invention of Cubism! Will they never learn to gracefully leave the stage? While it may make hash out of neat scenarios, as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to love the junky messiness of it all, and to find... posted by Friedrich at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Steven Pinker
Friedrich -- The indispensable Steve Sailer does a q&a with Steven Pinker, author of the remarkable new "The Blank Slate," here. Sample passage: Q: You argue that the modernist high culture and post-modernist criticism have, on the whole, failed to engage humanity's interest because they ideologically rejected basic truths about human nature. What are some of modern art's flaws? A: My quarrel isn't with Modernism itself, but with the dogmatic versions that came to dominate the elite arts and bred the even more extreme doctrines of postmodernism. These movements were based on a militant denial of human nature, especially the idea that people are born with a capacity to experience aesthetic pleasure. Beauty in art, narrative in fiction, melody in music, meter and rhyme in poetry, ornament and green space in architecture, were considered bourgeois and lightweight, or products of mass-marketing. Instead, modernist and postmodernist art was intended to raise our consciousnesses, illustrate a theory, or shock us out of our middle-class stupor. Q: Why, in contrast, did popular culture become so much more, well, popular? A: Popular culture, to become popular, had to please people, and (at least at its best) it perfected engrossing plots, catchy rhythms and melodies and gorgeous fashions and faces. Huzzah to that. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 31, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, October 30, 2002


Comments
Michael We got an interesting and thoughtful comment the other day, which I thought deserved a bit more prominence than our format generally offers. It was from Mike Kelly in response to my posting "Getty vs. Acropolis." I've not been to the Getty, so I can speak only of the photographs I've seen, including those on your web page. Based on those, however, I'd score the comparison between it and the Acropolis slightly differently. On the second point, for instance, where you see lumpishness and illogic, I see interesting variation, which is not nearly so obviously inferior as you suggest to the Parthenon's "Masses [that are] cleanly and clearly articulated". But the main point I wish to make is that the comparison, though not irrelevant, is absurdly unfair. The Acropolis is nearly universally recognised as one of the great works, if not the greatest work, of collective architecture in the history of Europe, if not the world. You seem to be trying to pass off the comparison as a condemnation of the Getty. That's like trying to show that Long Day's Journey into Night is lousy because it fails in a comparison, on some arbitrarily chosen points, with, say, King Lear. Also, you point out that the Parthenon took less time to build than the Getty, but the relevant comparison would be between the entire Acropolis complex--which had been the object of comparison up until this point--and the Getty, would it not? First, I want to make it absolutely clear that I appreciate Mike (and the rest of our readership) taking the time to read my stuff and comment on it at all, whether or not you agree with my point of view. As for the actual design issues Mike raises, I look very, very often at the exact view shown below of the Getty as I wind my way from Los Angeles' West Side to the Valley. Not my favorite view Looking at this view (at length, usually in slow traffic) I find that the Getty's design suffers from a fundamental problem of scale. The large masses are very large, and yet really don't "articulate" well to each other: they don't create either a rhythmic or a structural pattern. The modernist "detailing" glued on the outside of the major masses does link the large masses and (modestly) articulate them, but is too small and insufficiently muscular to work visually from a distance. Ergo, the design can only hope to work fairly close up, and this building can be seen from at least 10 miles down the 405 freeway! I'm not the only person who thinks there's something wrong here, either; a friend mentioned that an architect of his acquaintance (who likes the complex as a whole) considers the "freeway" views of the Getty to be closely akin to what you see when a fat repairman with baggy pants bends over to pick up a tool (his words, not mine)--in short, the building was designed to be seen from the... posted by Friedrich at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Free Looks -- high-end digicams
Friedrich -- While digital movie images strain to approximate the quality of traditional film imagery, these days digital still photos have a gleam -- and they're getting denser and tighter by the month. Already, many of the photos you see in magazines, especially those with short schedules, come from digital cameras. The latest high-end digi-still cameras have 6 million pixels, and take photos so sharp they almost hurt. You can sample what they look like here. Be prepared for how scarily detailed the facial closeups are. Pretty models, attractively made-up -- and their skin, if you stare at it long enough, looks like Verdun, the morning after. Any more pixels, and the resulting photos will be drilling down past the bumps and follices to the sub-pore level. We'll be looking and staring, and finding ourselves being stared back at by sebaceous glands. As we move into a world where most imagery is generated digitally, one job-market prediction seems safe: the better makeup artists and lighting designers are going to find their services in urgent demand. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Public Art--for the Public?
Michael I just got back from a few days with my wife in Las Vegas. While there, I read the very interesting “Art Lessons,” by Alice Goldfarb Marquis, a book on arts funding centered largely on the National Endowment for the Arts. In one chapter she discusses public sculpture funded by the NEA. According to Ms. Marquis: While the NEA strenuously insisted that it was interested only in “excellence” and had no aesthetic or cultural agenda, the internal communications described by [Mary Eleanor] McCombie reveal a bias for certain artists and styles and a…belief in the redemptive powers of modern sculpture. When Northern Kentucky State University selected Red Grooms and Donald Judd to create 100,000 dollars’ worth of monuments for its campus, Ira Licht, the endowment’s public art coordinator, rejoiced at the selection of “excellent artists whom we’ve had difficulty placing.” I was intrigued to see for myself how credible the NEA’s claim of possessing no aesthetic or cultural agenda was, so I looked up pictures of artworks cited by Ms. Marquis. Regrettably, I couldn’t always find pictures of the actual piece funded by the NEA, so I have included several pictures of similar art by the same artist. Alexander Calder’s La Grande Vitesse in Grand Rapids, MI --$45,000 (1969 dollars) in NEA money Jose Rivera’s Construction #105 —resembles Construction #150in Lansing, MI --$45,000 in NEA money Donald Judd’s Untitled 1969 --resembles Dropped Plane at Northern Kentucky State University Carl Andre’s Stone Field Sculpture in Hartford CT --$50,000 in NEA money Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc in Manhattan Just to provide some context for my reading, I was spending most of my time wandering up and down the Las Vegas Strip (only occasionally in a drunken stupor), looking at the profilic public art on display: Fountain at Caesars' Palace Hall at the Venetian Viewed from Las Vegas, the idea that the NEA was without a cultural agenda is risible. The NEA had obviously equated "excellence" with a variety of academically-sanctioned art movements of the era such as Minimalism, Earth Art, etc. Although probably not giving what they were doing a second's thought, the NEA's agenda had the effect of validating academically-sanctioned art, and thus validating the role of the academy itself in the cultureverse. Don't get me wrong, I love public art, and would like to see more of it. I just think that public art should actually connect with the public, not talk down to it. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. As a thought experiment, try imagining that placing boulders in lines on empty lots (essentially, the formula of Carl Andre's Stone Field Sculpture) was a thriving rural tradition, usually performed inebriated, and imagine how eager the NEA would have been to fork over $50 grand to some drunken rube then. No, it helped Mr. Andre a lot to be a college graduate doing something that could be construed as lecturing the suburban public about its relationship with the environment.... posted by Friedrich at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Tacit Knowledge -- Genre Writers vs. Literary Writers
MIchael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Another entry in our ongoing attempt to put into words the things people know but that don't make it into the official sources... In a general sense, there are real group differences between American literary-fiction writers and American writers of genre fiction (horror, romance, mysteries, erotica, graphic novels, etc). It breaks down this way: Literary writers tend to feel that what they do is a vocation -- ie., a religious calling. Genre writers tend to view what they do as something that's fun -- which doesn't mean that they aren't committed to what they do, or don't fundamentally take it seriously. Lit-fict writers tend to feel harshly conflicted (a word we New Yorkers love) about money and careers. How could they not? Trust funds make people feel guilty, jobs take up too much time. Everyone hopes to be touched by the magic wand -- to win the respect of the bigtime, and to earn enough money from the writing to pay the bills. Yet nearly everyone winds up next-to-unread, and chasing academic jobs and grants. And isn't it kind of anti-artistic to fret over money and prestige anyway? So pretences and rivalries abound. Genre writers tend to experience no conflicts at all about money and career. Most seem to know that writing fiction-between-covers is an absurd field, but hope to win readers and make money at it anyway. They're straightforwardly happy when and if they do. Self-serious creatures on an artistic crusade, dependent on a sense of mission and destiny that's forever in need of recharging, lit-fict writers tend to be serious and touchy people -- and difficult on the personal level, to say the least. (Depression, jealousy and resentment are common ailments.) Lugging around egos that are both big and fragile, they make high-maintenance friends and acquaintances. Genre-fict writers tend on the personal level to be easy friends and colleagues. They've got a sense of perspective -- they're doing the absurd thing they do because they dig it, after all. They wish each other well; when someone in the field succeeds, it makes the others happy. American lit-fict writers: monks and nuns of art, intent on overcoming suffering and achieving redemption through art. American genre-fict writers: on the one hand, happy amateurs, like kids in a garage band; on the other, cheerful professionals who get a kick out of their loony field. Amazing numbers of exceptions allowed for, of course -- I've found that southern lit-fict writers are often quite cheery and companionable, for example. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Righties, Lefties, Art and Pleasure
Friedrich -- Laurel Panella has been following our discussions about righties, lefties and pleasure from her home in eastern Tennessee. She had these lovely thoughts and observations to pass along: I live in the middle of the conservative, small town South. (Diverse, within its narrow boundaries.) What I find is that the right defends a positive interpretation of status quo living. They won't be entering any debates on beauty and the arts, except to comment on the changing leaves in the Smokies, or the latest football victory. The right here is so grounded; they have a strong sense of identity from their deep home and community roots. From my perspective, they honestly need only a drop of novelty. The concept of beauty and pleasure doesn't seem to be an interesting topic of discussion to them. When they do discuss it, they go back to the Renaissance, when art was art, or quote from Southern Living Magazine, with its "gourmet" recipes. Sometimes I think it's the job of the right to balance out the left. The right doesn't defend cutting edge art, they defend the status quo -- in whatever package it comes. I tend to think this serves a valuable societal purpose. With the left, they’re adventurers, paving the way, so to speak, for the right. The right provides a sense of societal stability that gives the left its courage and footing, to stretch and question boundaries. I have a lovely group of friends that often debates the ideas you have presented. They of course are all lefties. Personally, I enjoy the challenge of learning from both perspectives without the desire to make one more like the other. The conservative right has so much to offer. But I don't think they'll ever play ball in the world of pleasure and beauty the way some would like. I tried suggesting that "status quo" pleasures are as legit as cutting-edge pleasures; that football games, changing autumn leaves and "gourmet" recipes represent a perfectly valid aesthetic; that there's no reason to let the left get away with defining art as being necessarily adventurous, or necessarily about questioning boundaries... But Laurel, who I suspect knows a fancy big-city move when she spots one, was having none of it. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Media Surplus redux
Friedrich -- Dave Trowbridge (here) takes my earlier posting comparing food and media surpluses and has himself a whole lot of fun with it. Don't miss the Scientific American article about TV addiction that Dave provides a link to. Oh, heck, I'll pass it along myself: here it is. Sample Trowbridge passage: Michael's metaphor of media obesity can be spun even further if one equates the body's insulin response to carbohydrates, which many believe to be the key to modern obesity, and the orienting response to visual and aural stimuli, which is the key to media overconsumption. Life under conditions of surplus... Many of us, I suspect, have little eating regimens that keep us from packing on too much weight. I certainly do. One element of it is, for instance, that I simply will not eat desserts. Period. (Exceptions made only out of respect for such events as birthdays.) I've found that it's far easier to follow that simple rule religiously than it is to decide whether or not to indulge on a one-dessert-at-a-time basis. I suspect many of us have similar pop-culture regimens. I do. Do you? One element of mine: I watch TV, but only on videotape. In other words, I never simply sit down and turn on the set on to see what's there. I force myself to choose what I want to watch (by deciding in advance what to tape), and then, by watching only what I've gone to the trouble of taping, render my TV time finite -- a tape will come to an end, where "TV" per se never does. Thanks to this agreement with myself, it's been years since I grogged out in front of the tube. I'm eager to know how you regulate your exposure to junk culture. Do you limit the number of magazines you subscribe to? Do you refuse to admit the Sunday Times into the house? And what regulating-junk-culture secrets can our readers share with us? (How embarrassing this question will prove to be if no one leaves a comment...) Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 30, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Tuesday, October 29, 2002


Continuing Ed 1 -- evo bio and aesthetics
Friedrich -- Another new rubric! I'm always impressed by how many people maintain intellectual and artistic interests despite the hecticness of daily life. Yet, after high school or college, these people often become frustrated; they're busy and distracted, and don't have the chance to turn up the kinds of gems of thought and information that you and I, geeks both, are passionate about finding. But why, in the age of the web, should anyone settle for the crap they were given at school, and the crap that journalists and the popular culture pass along? And why shouldn't geeks like us pass along a little of what we know? So, herewith the inaugural posting of a new 2blowhards department: tips for those interested in keeping their brains alive. Topic for today: evolutionary biology and its impact on thinking about pleasure, art and aesthetics. The politicized, Frenchy-and-Marx derived ways of thinking about art that have done such damage over the last 20 years have pretty much played themselves out -- about time, and cause for celebration. As Harold Bloom once observed, the decon people who moved into the college and foundation lit-and-art departments don't like art; if they did they wouldn't be so devoted to dismantling them. What they really like is politics. I'm guessing, from the standpoint of having followed writing and publishing for a few decades, that what we'll start seeing a lot of soon is evo-bio-derived ways of thinking about art. And hallelujah for that. Unlike the decon/structuralist rape of the arts, which leaves idiocy and devastation in its wake, evo-bio approaches respect the existence and nature of the arts. Does evo-bio answer every question one might raise about art? No, but what does? Is it timely, provocative and helpful? You bet. The best quick-and-easy place to start is the chapter on art in Steven Pinker's new The Blank Slate (buyable here) -- 15 or 20 pages that do a heroic job of laying the approach out and giving tips for further reading and thinking. The book is well worth reading in its entirety for many other reasons. Denis Dutton's great Arts & Letters Daily website (after a brief hiccup, it's back again here) does a fabulous job of keeping readers up to date on the latest evo-bio observations, theories and ideas. It'll also give you a sense of how lively the field is. Of all the books devoted entirely to the topic (I'm a buff), the one that seems to me the most helpful for someone dipping a toe in the water is Ellen Dissanayake's Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (buyable here). Dissanayake: Art has its roots in human nature I can't do a better job of summarizing the book's thesis than Publishers Weekly did: "Dissanayake argues that art was central to human evolutionary adaptation and that the aesthetic faculty is a basic psychological component of every human being. In her view, art is intimately linked to the origins of religious practices and to ceremonies... posted by Michael at October 29, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, October 28, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- I’m limiting my list of tips to the week on TV to two resources, the E! Channel’s showbiz documentary series "The True Hollywood Story,” and Turner Classic Movies. “The E! True Hollywood Story” is a glitzy, tabloid-style series that the Wife is addicted to and that I’ve also come to be a fan of -- imagine People magazine cover stories done as TV shows. But the shows seem responsibly researched, the producers are tenacious and successful in getting key sources to talk, and, as for the brassy style... Well, do you really want to watch something sober on a topic like Divine? It runs and repeats itself numerous times during the week. Here are a few of this week’s highlights: On the E! True Hollywood Story Friday 10 a.m.: Marlon Brando Friday 8 p.m.: Divine Monday at 8 pm, Tuesday at 9 am: Liza Minelli Thursday 9 am: Alfred Hitchcock Thursday 1:30 pm: Jaws Back in college, I had the film-history bug bad; I attended screenings of old movies nearly every afternoon and evening and ran a film series of my own for a few years. I’m told that old movies are now in short supply on most campuses. When I moved to New York in the late ‘70s, the city had a half-dozen repertory theaters where buffs could find old movies to watch. Nearly all are now closed. Where’s a film-history buff -- or an eager film-history neophyte -- to turn? The video store, of course. But Turner Classic Movies too. Better prints than you’ll see on video rental tapes (better prints, in fact, than the ones that used to be shown in specialized movie theaters), imaginative programming, the occasional good documentary about film history. It’s an amazing resource, a movie rep house available at home 24/7. Here’s just some of what’s on this week. On Turner Classic Movies Monday at 10 pm, Rebecca. Hitchcock does Daphne du Maurier -- Hollywood Gothic romance at its most luscious. Wednesday at 1:30 am, Notorious. Primo romantic suspense: one of Hitchcock’s best, with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman showing what star power really is. Shhhh -- I’ll never be caught saying this in public (too pretentious!), but I think it’s a masterpiece, and one of the greatest studio entertainments ever made. Now let's pretend I didn’t say that. Wednesday at 3:30 am, The Stranger. Early Orson Welles suspense, far more trim and fast than his more famous films, but every bit as stylized. Wednesday at 2 pm, Lord Love a Duck. George Axelrod’s frenetic Southern-California-in-the-’60s satire is hilarious, almost exhaustingly inventive, and a legend among comedy professionals. It also means a lot to people who grew up in Southern California -- it does a likably wonderful job of capturing the cheerful, heaven-on-earth inanity of the place. Wednesday at 4 pm, Holiday. Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn in a George Cukor adaptation of Philip Barry’s classy romantic comedy. Wednesday at 11 pm, Duel in the Sun. Overheated King Vidor-directed camp classic.... posted by Michael at October 28, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Sunday, October 27, 2002


Free Reads -- no, that's free looks
Friedrich -- Sometimes I wonder why artists/writers/whatever don't make more creative use of the web, and sometimes I marvel at the inspired ways artists/writers/whatever are making use of the web. Today belongs in the latter category, now that I've stumbled across a page of links (here) devoted to sites where photographers are keeping one-photo-a-day photodiaries. Some amazingly snazzy photos and some very chic sites. I especially liked an Italian site that features nothing but the day's one photograph and the words (my shakey translation) "no archives, no gallery, no links." What a terrific form the online photodiary is. I'd try one myself if only I weren't such a bad photographer. People scatter whenever I pull out my Nikon. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Why We Love Performers, part 4
Friedrich -- Shakira: It's hormonal The feminist journalist vs. the sexy pop star, from the recent Rolling Stone "Women in Rock" issue. Mim Udovitch interviews Shakira: Udovitch: Do you think that when you write, you write from a female perspective? Shakira: No. I write from my perspective. I'm not a feminist. Maybe a few centuries ago, I would have been a feminist. But now I think women who don't fight for their place in society, I just think that they don't want it. Udovitch: It depends. There is a big difference between rich and poor, and that creates more oppressive circumstances for a woman, or for anyone, than simply the fact of being male or female by itself. Shakira: Yes. The differences are more between classes than even between races. Especially in Latin America. Where I come from if you are born poor and without an important last name, then you will die poor. But here in New York, the people who are considered to be the richest men in the country, they could have come from zero. In Latin America, forget about it if you are not rich. Udovitch: What do you think are the differences between Latin American women and North American women? Shakira: I think at the end we are all the same -- we are just rolling trouble. We basically are, it's just an excess of hormones that makes us so conflicted, you know? Our hormones play a big role in it, I think. And sometimes I consider men, and I feel sorry for them about what they have to deal with every day. Udovitch: Oh, I don't know. They have a few advantages. Shakira: Yes. They get a lot of love. They get a lot of love, but a lot of trouble. Udovitch then changes the subject. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Getty vs. Acropolis redux
Michael, In a previous posting I recounted how disappointed I was in the Getty Museum complex, given the virtually limitless financial resources of its sponsors, comparing it to its disadvantage with the Acropolis in Athens. Mentally I put the disparity down, in large part, to the inferior performance of Richard Meier, the Getty’s International Style-mannerist architect, in contrast to what the Athenian trio of Iktinos, Kallikrates and Mnesikles had delivered working within the much tighter stylistic and technological constraints of classical architecture. Acropolis Temple Complex by Iktinos, Kallikrates and Mnesikles When I discussed the subject with a friend, his grimace when I made the comparison clearly indicated that he thought I was being unfair to Meier, or possibly any modern architect—would his name even be remembered 2500 years from now? Getty Museum Complex by Richard Meier I pondered my friend’s reaction later, thinking about the various alternate explanations that might have unfairly advantaged the Athenians over the Los Angelians. The first such advantage was undoubtedly political. After the Battle of Marathon, where the Athenians and their allies had defeated the Persians, the Athenians planned a series of new temples on the Acropolis in celebration. The first of these was in construction when the Persians sacked Athens in 480 BC. The next year, the Greeks defeated the Persians at Plataea, but the building plans for the Acropolis were shelved for nearly 30 years. Meanwhile, the Delian League, led by the Athenian fleet, pried the Greek city-states of the Aegean loose from the grip of the Persian Empire. Athenian power and wealth grew with the success of the League, until, under the “democratic” leadership of Pericles, it was effectively converted into the Athenian empire. To symbolize this new era, Pericles returned to the abandoned project of rebuilding the Acropolis, although making it grander to emphasize Athens’ greatly expanded financial resources. This program carried a huge weight of political and patriotic symbolism that elevated its emotional significance for the Athenians. The Getty represented nothing comparably meaningful to the people of Los Angeles. The performance of architects—like most artists—tends to rise to the level expected from them by their patrons, and Meier’s performance could not have been elevated by Los Angeles’s tepid interest in his efforts. But the larger advantage of the Athenians was religious. Looking for pictures of the Acropolis and its buildings, I visited quite a few websites, and in the process stumbled across one called “Sacred Places” by Christopher L.C.E. Witcombe of Sweet Briar College (you can visit it here.) This site, although still under construction, intends to be—in its own words—an “exploration of how and why places become invested with sacredness and how the sacred is embodied or made manifest through art and architecture.” Professor Witcombe’s thesis is that such loci (including Lascaux, Newgrange, Stonehenge, Abu Simbel, Giza, Teotihuacán, Chartres, etc.) achieved a quality of ‘sacredness’ first and that famous buildings or artwork present at each site followed on afterwards, intended to showcase or highlight that sacred quality. Moreover, many... posted by Friedrich at October 27, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Saturday, October 26, 2002


Policy Break: Legal Reform
Michael Knowing that you're a sucker like I am for stories of hard working young people who struggle despite adversity to rise in their profession, I would recommend an interesting story in the Los Angeles Times (which you can read in full here) on lawyers who gin up meritless claims based on California’s Proposition 65 against businesses, in the hope that the businesses involved will settle to make the claim go away. In case you haven't spent enough time in the Golden State to notice, Prop. 65 is responsible for all those little notices you see in California gas stations and other public businesses saying “Products Sold or Used on These Premises May Contain Chemicals Known to the State of California to Cause Cancer or Birth Defects." For years I’ve wondered what possible benefits such signs confer, since I’ve never seen anyone—pregnant women who won’t use aspirin included—jump back in their cars and roar away from gas stations where such signs are posted. The story focuses on Morse Mehrban, a Mercedes roadster-driving 33-year-old attorney who frequently sues on behalf of a non-profit organization Consumer Cause, which is run by his mother and his fiancé. This is not a uniquely smelly circumstance; of the over 5,000 such claims filed annually in California, most are on behalf of such nonprofit organizations that are, ahem, ‘linked’ to the lawyers filing the cases. Plaintiffs in Prop. 65 cases are not required to show personal harm and, if victorious, are entitled to attorneys fees—which, when Mehrban is representing Consumer Cause, are charged at $400 an hour. Mehrban and his mom (isn’t it nice, a boy and his mom in business together) rely on an annually published list of more than 700 chemicals known to the California governor to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm. Among his “greatest hits” Mehrban must include his successfully settled suit against a kosher market for selling imported cigars that didn’t have the U.S. Surgeon General’s warning about the dangers of smoking. His less successful cases have to include a decision by Superior Court Judge Brett C. Klein, who tossed out a lawsuit filed by Mehrban on the basis that Prop. 65 claims had to be brought in the public interest, while the attorney was obviously acting in his own private interest; the judge went on to describe Mehrban’s activities as “racketeering.” Unfortunately, Judge Klein is apparently in the minority on the California bench. The Second District Court of Appeals held that a business utilizing one of the Prop. 65 chemicals, in any quantity, bears the burden of proof of showing such usage is safe if it has not posted the relevant sign—a burden that probably would require millions of dollars in scientific studies. On that particular case, which concerned the presence of minute amounts of mercury in silver dental fillings, the dentists decided to settle for $20,000. But it’s a small price to pay to keep the public safe, don’t you think? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 26, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Trowbridge on dogs and music
Friedrich -- Dave Trowbridge at Redwood Dragon has been thinking about animals, in-born natures, and music, here. Not to be missed. Sample passage: While it may not make sense to characterize one kind of music as "better" than another, there does seem to be a sense in which some kinds of music are more "natural." That is, they seem to fit some basic sense of acoustic fitness that is shared by all human beings, and, it now seems, some higher animals as well. And paramount among these forms of music is the Western "classical" tradition, especially the baroque and classical periods. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 26, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Media Surplus
Friedrich -- Why are so many modern people obese? One helpful theory comes from evo-bio: because we evolved to survive in a world of food scarcity, we developed an inborn tendency to pig out whenever we run across some plausible eats. We pack it on when we can to help us get through the inevitable periods of scarcity. These days, though, those of us in rich countries are living in a situation of superabundance. Everywhere we look, there's food we might eat. And given such an inborn tendency to load up, it ain't surprising so many of us wind up fat. The challenge is no longer to feed youself and survive scarcity, and the inborn instincts are no help. They just get us in deeper and deeper trouble. Instead, you have to wrestle with the problem consciously and deliberately -- not an easy thing for most people to do. To go for it, or not to go for it -- that is the question It occurs to me that we're in the same predicament where the media and arts are concerned. Go back a few centuries and it was rare for a family to own more than a couple of books -- even a rich family might own only a few hundred. Imagery was in short supply too. The paintings in the church you attended, the signs over the stores and stalls and restaurants you patronized, might be all the imagery you ever encountered. Music? Live performances only. The mass press, photography and movies brought lots of changes, one of them the accessibility of imagery. In a book about how movies have treated historically-based subject matter (title to come as soon as my porous middle-aged memory revives), the novelist George Macdonald Fraser made a good point. It's common to grouse about how movie narratives mangle fact. But there's another side to it, Macdonald argues. Prior to the movies, most people didn't know what foreign cultures or distant historical periods looked like. The image bank was empty. With the movies, people's personal image banks started to fill up. Macdonald points out that the studios were able to do research into look-and-feel on a scale no university could match, and with onscreen results that were often accurate and stunning. Well, that was a heck of a digression. Back to my line of thought, such as it is. Even for us spoiled baby boomers: three channels of TV and no internet. Quark and Photoshop weren't around to make it easy for publishers to pump up the visuals in books and magazines. If you wanted to see a movie you had to go to the movie theater. Radio, records....But we were getting there. These days it seems like we're surrounded by beckoning arts-and-entertainment-and-media things all the time. It's become hard to get away from them. The magazine racks dazzle, the web's always there to play with, there's cable, radio, CDs, DVDs... Screens showing imagery in motion are everywhere. Things that twinkle, scratch, pop, and... posted by Michael at October 26, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Friday, October 25, 2002


A Conspiracy of Silence
Michael As an entrepreneur I am always kind of bemused by discussions of capitalism, since by my reckoning relatively few people are properly credentialed to talk about it. Yes, yes, I know, 84% percent of Americans in the non-farm labor force work for capitalists, but that’s not the same as being a capitalist. Now I’m going to go out on a limb and define true capitalists as entrepreneurs. Obviously, many other definitions are possible, and I doubt this is the standard definition, but I think for experiencing the full, gut-wrenching excitement and terror of capitalism, you really need to own and operate a business. (I once overheard a conversation between two business owners where one of them said, "Yeah, employees just don't get it...they're, like, you know...civilians.") However, there is a sort of conspiracy of silence about entrepreneurship. Believe it or not, there is very little exact data on exactly how many people are currently owner-operators of businesses. As Andrew Zacharakis, Paul D. Reynolds and William D. Bygrave put it in their “National Entrepreneurial Assessment: United States of America 1999 Executive Report”: The United States has one of the highest levels of entrepreneurial activity in the world. Yet there has been little serious attention—either by the national government or other research institutions—to developing a reliable means for measuring and describing the level of entrepreneurial activity. In addition, scholars lack a general understanding of the cultural, social and economic factors that determine the level of activity. The result is a glaring knowledge gap. Lacking exact information, what kinds of estimates can we make? Well, there are around 6.2 million businesses with employees in the United States, and the great majority of those are small (under 500 employees) owner-operator businesses. Assuming that each of those businesses has two owner-operators, that would imply around 13.5 million such individuals. Since the U.S. workforce is roughly 131 million, that would mean around ten percent of the workforce is a business owner-operator. And, of course, that means 90% of the workforce isn’t. Of course, businesses come and go (around 14-16% are new every year, and 12-14% go away every year.) So it’s possible that more people have been business owner-operators at some point in their lives than are currently engaged in that capacity. According to Mssrs. Zacharakis, Reynolds and Bygrave, around one in 150 adults in the U.S. becomes a business owner-operator each year. Over a 40 year working career that would imply roughly a quarter of the adult population may have taken a hand in this game, although this estimate may be high (I’m guessing that people who start one business may well start another.) Nonetheless, even this high estimate implies that 75% of the adult population hasn't been the owner-operator of a business. For a variety of reasons, this level of ignorance is bad. Small businesses are an important part of the economy, employing 53% of the private workforce, accounting for 47% percent of sales and 51% of private sector GDP, and yet you... posted by Friedrich at October 25, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Samizdata.net
Friedrich -- Curious about who the brainy, party-hearty British libertarians at Samizdata.net are (here, as though I don't link to them often enough), I emailed Brian Micklethwait and asked what their story is. Here's his reply: Samizdata happened for two reasons, as I understand it. One, there has long been a London libertarian scene based around the Libertarian Alliance (www.libertarian.co.uk) which has been shovelling out pamphlets, essays, monographs, scholarly writings, call them what you will (I'm working on the next little clutch right now) since the early 1980s. Not that many people knew, but we kept at it. In connection with that, I and a friend, Tim Evans, who now has a swank job at the Centre for the New Europe (I can't remember the www of that, but google will tell you - its basic remit is to try to libertarianise the EU as much as that can be done), have been holding Friday evening speaker/discussion evenings. Tim on the second Friday, me on the last Friday of every month. (It's all a bit like Peter Hall's description in Cities in Civilization of the evenings that Freud used to run, but alas, without a Freud to make it so historical, or not that I'm aware of. I.e. not everyone who comes is as clever as some of the people who come. There's one tonight, on philosophical themes.) These friday meetings have been going on for a decade or more, like clockwork, and since email came along they have been pretty much automatic to make work okay. Okay, so there are these fridays. At them, some time during 2001, this character called Perry de Havilland shows up. He's already a libertarian, but not because of anything we in London said or did. He's a libertarian because of his time in America, which is where he picked up on it. Can't remember the details of how, but that's where he got it from. And Perry picks up various human pieces of the London libertarian scene, David Carr, Adriana Cronin (like many bloggers too busy to be writing huge great bits for the Libertarian Alliance, although she did manage a couple when she was at Oxford), me, Tom Burroughes (who works for the hated Reuters!), Antoine Clarke (bilingual in English and French, I wish we could persuade him to make more blogging use of that than he does), and probably some others I've forgotten. Well, yes, I forgot to mention Patrick Crozier and Natalie Solent, who run their own blogs but who are definitely part of our scene, and Alice Bachini who connected more recently through Sarah Lawrence and the T(aking) C(hildren) S(eriously) crowd. (www.tcs.ac I think) The other thing I ought to mention is the Libertarian Alliance Forum, one of those email chat room whatsits that the Libertarian Alliance runs that I never could get with, where people with no sense of shame or style can call each other arseholes for the crime of disagreeing with each other. That turned up... posted by Michael at October 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads—Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Age
Michael A humorous note from the front in the Digital Wars: A musician, George Ziemann, was attempting to sell some CDs of an album his band had recorded via eBay, hoping to get some exposure. Unfortunately, in his auctions he used recordable CDs that he manufactured himself. Someone (it’s not entirely clear from my reading of the story)—either an eBay employee or an outsider who approached eBay via its Verified Rights Owner program—accused Ziemann of piracy and eBay shut down his auction repeatedly, despite the fact that the music in question was entirely his legal property. Less humorously, the wired.com story reveals that: ... eBay would not comment on its policing policy, but several companies scour the Internet looking for copyrighted materials. The movie industry uses Ranger Online...The recording industry has employed several search companies, including Media Enforcer and BayTSP.com You can read the entire account here. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. George Ziemann himself is a pretty entertaining guy, and you can read about him here.... posted by Friedrich at October 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, October 24, 2002


Movies--Sweet Home Alabama and Secretary
Michael You ask if I’ve seen any movies. The only movie I've 'been to' recently was "Sweet Home Alabama" which I can’t really claim to have seen. It was such a estrogen-fest that I kept passing out; every time I woke up, the fumes put me back under. I honestly could not bear to look at the screen much of the time. I was embarrassed--and not in a superior way--by what was going on there. (It just wasn't meant for my eyes.) Women seem to have some kinky fantasy about finding the perfect mate and then refusing to acknowledge this because of, er, pride or something. Then, of course, the perfect mate is so darn persistent that he wears down the heroine's idiotic preconceptions until she realizes her "error" and bliss ever after follows. Of course, anyone can see where this is all going long before it gets there (even while watching the screen no more than 20% of the time), but female viewers who are ordinarily intellectually demanding go into some kind of fugue state and sit open-mouthed and enraptured while the inevitable slides majestically onwards. Honestly, there is some kind of weird female pornography going on here. It's too bad that Reese Witherspoon got mixed up in this, because she's generally quite good (e.g., in "Election" and in "Legally Blonde.") Reese Witherspoon in Happier Days Oops, wait a minute, I also saw "Secretary." I went to see it with my wife because an old friend was involved in making it. Maggie Gyllenhaal, the lead actress, is just fabulous in the film. She gets more goofily human the more aggressively sexual the part gets. Eventually, at the end of the film, she achieves a truly unique distinction in my film experience: she emotes rapturously in full frontal nudity. For possibly the first time in screen history, the nudity is actually entirely justified (if only by her performance.) Ms. Gyllenhaal's character has become content with her lot in life at last and displays her stigmata--she has a thing for cutting herself--in the nude with total pride. James Spader, her costar, does his best with the role, but is directed in far too ka-thump, ka-thump a fashion to deliver an interesting performance. He seems to have no subtext--he's pretty much stuck being a plot device, really. As a matter of fact, the whole film is directed in far too "literal" a way--there's generally one and only one thing going on in each shot. The Radiant Maggie Gyllenhaal in "Secretary" A humorous note: the film, which revolves around the developing SM relationship between the secretary and her boss, involves a good deal of spanking, and Spader really whacks Ms. Gyllenhaal’s buttocks hard—you can see her flesh jump as he makes contact. That part of the film is not 'simulated sex' at all. What a girl—all that talent and a good sport, too! The only false note is early in the film, when for the first time, she cuts herself on camera, seeking... posted by Friedrich at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Righties and Pleasure again
Friedrich -- Brian Micklethwait at Samizdata.net, here, has been following our gabfest about righties and pleasure, and has now entered the fray. If I understand him correctly (these Brits! So educated and articulate!), he's presenting the notion that while lefties tend to move from personal preferences to entire worldviews -- ie., they want to dominate with their tastes -- righties see taste and pleasure taking place under the auspices of more substantial activities, such as politics, economics and business. Sample passage: If you are a lefty, you believe in actively shaping the details of the big wide world out there. You and your friends are going to plan it, shape it, sculpt it, collectively and democratically if you are being nice about it. Therefore your opinions about everything, including art, are a public issue. If you prefer abstract impressionism to neo-realism, then you have a positive duty to say so, because when you have finally become the Benevolent Despot of Everything of Behalf of Everyone, your opinion is going to make a big difference to all those favoured or thwarted artists and art fans out there. Ditto your opinions about history, geography, biology, nuclear physics, literary criticism, sport, car design or car abolition. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Philosoblog and Envy reredux
Michael To make my own pathetic little addition to your brilliant discussion of the current alliance between notions of pleasure and Left-wing politics, I offer the following scattered observations: 1. Modern Lefties (in contradistinction to more Traditional Lefties) can be intensely materialistic and focused on conspicuous consumption--both in their personal and professional lives--without this interfering with their self-image as egalitarians and citizens of the republic of virtue. I'm convinced after much thought that the guys who run the New York Times Magazine were not being hypocritical (no matter how much it may look like this to a Rightie) by running a lengthy article by Op-Ed Columnist Paul Krugman on the evils of increasing income inequality--advertised on the cover as “The Class Wars Part I: The End of Middle Class America and the Triumph of the Plutocrats”--while simultaneously running a 48-page advertising section on "The Best of Luxury Homes and Estates" in the same issue. The ability to do something like this without hypocrisy is the very essence of the Modern Left-wing Attitude--and just because Right-wingers and Traditional Lefties don't "get" how it's possible doesn't mean it isn't real. 2. There is an affinity I can't spell out but I sense exists between people who are trying to mirror the masses back to themselves (TV personalities, advertisers, movie execs, magazine editors, politicians like Bill Clinton) and a left-wing point of view. 3. Ralph Nader's consumerism has become the dominant strain in modern Leftist thought, the key principle of which is making sure that the powerful corporations that deliver the essentials of life to the average consumer are policed in this activity by the Nanny State and the plaintiffs' bar. This movement is NOT at root hostile to corporate America, but is rather symbiotic with it (by which I mean that corporate America gets something out of this, too). 4. The current vogue of celebrity-worship and the hushed attention paid to their fabulous personal trappings is definitely tied in to all this somewhere. I think I'm on to something here. Do you agree? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Theodore Dalrymple on Paris Crime
Friedrich -- The British doctor who writes under the names Theodore Dalrymple and Anthony Daniels is one of the best essayists since George Orwell. City Journal runs a new piece by him on the way crime is on the upsurge in Paris, here. Dalrymple doesn't avoid discussing the aesthetics of the Le Corbusier-inspired housing projects where most of the criminals live. Sample passage: The cités are thus social marginalization made concrete: bureaucratically planned from their windows to their roofs, with no history of their own or organic connection to anything that previously existed on their sites, they convey the impression that, in the event of serious trouble, they could be cut off from the rest of the world by switching off the trains and by blockading with a tank or two the highways that pass through them, (usually with a concrete wall on either side), from the rest of France to the better parts of Paris. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Andrew Sullivan on the economics of blogging
Friedrich -- I just caught up with Andrew Sullivan's essay for London's Sunday Times about writing, blogging, and trying to make a living, here. Sullivan is amazingly good at catching the conundra and paradoxes that bedevil online life. The piece is also a nice complement to your postings about copyright law and electronics. Sample passage: It takes a few minutes to set up your own "blog" ... and you can publish anything you can conceivably want to a readersip that has no physical boundaries whatsoever. My own modest little venture, imaginatively called www.andrewsullivan.com, is now around two years old. I've written tens of thousands of words; I've made hundreds of new web-friends; I get around 400 emails a day. I have to say I've never enjoyed myself as much as a journalist, had as much impact with my writing, or had as much sheer fun as a commentator on things large and small. But it's also true - and here's the catch - that this wonderful experiment has yet to make me any significant financial return. Despite what the New Statesman just called the "astonishing influence" of my site, it pays next to nothing... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Righties and Pleasure Forever
Friedrich -- It occurs to me that if I'm going to gas on about righties and pleasure, and if I'm going to make vague noises about how the web is allowing arty people of a non-leftie bent to make contact with each other, I should at least pass along some links. So here are a few places to begin. The curious can also explore the links we've supplied in the left-hand column of this blog. *Myron Magnet edits City Journal, a terrific, if New York-centric, city-life and politics magazine. It has a very complete online incarnation here. The very impressive and entertaining Roger Scruton and David Watkin often appear in these pages. *American Enterprise Magazine, here, does a good job of following developments in the New Urbanism, a movement of architects, builders, developers and planners who love and respect smalltown America, and who are determined to bring its pleasures back to life. *Frederick Turner is a British-born Texas professor, critic and poet who has developed a persuasive theory of what he calls "Natural Classicism." (His book by that title is buyable here.) It'll interest anyone who suspects there may be a connection between traditional artistic forms and recent discoveries in biochemistry, computing, chaos, and genetics. He has his own website here. *I have no idea what Christopher Alexander's politics are, but he's a fascinating and influential anti-modernist thinker on building and architecture. His "Pattern Language" website, here, is a beguiling thing to explore. The book of his to begin with (beware: they're addictive) is "The Timeless Way of Building," buyable here. *NewKlassical, here, is an online meeting place for artists and art fans interested in poetry that rhymes, music with tunes, and buildings that have comprehensible and enjoyable forms. *Lucien Steil's Katarxis, here, is a gem of an online catalog-magazine devoted to traditional and classical architecture. And that's just for starters. Persist, and you'll discover that the brilliant political columnist Mark Steyn is also a first-rate drama critic (an example here), that Notre Dame's School of Architecture (here) has been giving its students a traditional drawing-and-history based education for some years now... Rightwing political journalism and commentary have flourished because of talk radio and the web. Now, thanks to the web, the traditional and classical arts, and discussions about them, are finally starting to flourish in the same way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Politics and Cuisine
Friedrich -- In FrontPage, J.P Zmirak puts together an amusing political taxonomy of eating, then sets sail into deeper waters, here. (Link thanks to Sasha Castel, here.) A terrific piece on the theme of what a disservice it is to all of us to reduce political philosophy to a simple matter of left vs. right. Sample passage: What cuisine epitomizes the Right? Why French, of course. Rich, creamy, aristocratic dishes, replete with historically-derived inflections, baptized after kings and their queens (or mistresses), or more piously after saints, abbots and monasteries. (Coquilles St. Jacques, Dom Perignon and Chartreuse come to mind.) The French kitchen is replete with great names of great individuals, men who toiled in the kitchens of the rich, whose achievements “trickled down” to the ordinary fare of lady cooks in the provinces. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Pleasure and Politics reredux
Friedrich -- A political staffer from the West Coast writes: The reason why conservatives seem more puritanical than liberals about pleasure (e.g., sex, drugs, outre art) is because they are. For every libertarian blogger cracking jokes about pot and porn, there are hundreds of people like my aunt, who hates movies with "bad language" and is horrified by the thought of legalizing marijuana. Remember Nixon's Silent Majority and GW Bush's pledge to restore dignity and honor to the presidency, i.e. no Oval Office blowjobs. Liberal pleasures: sex, drugs, rock & roll, art, porn. Conservative pleasures: tobacco, football, country music, Tom Clancy novels, SUVs. Alcohol is bipartisan. Feminists don't believe in any of these pleasures. Gay men believe in them all. (I've been to gay C & W bars). Great stuff. I've got a little caffeine in me, so I'm going to tease apart one aspect of our correspondent's note. It's all-too-common for righties as well as lefties to say that righties are more puritanical about pleasure than lefties are. I can't agree. They may indeed be more puritanical about leftie pleasures than lefties are, but they just as clearly have their own pleasures. Our correspondent, when referring to the pleasures lefties are open to that righties generally aren't, makes mention of sex, drugs, and outre art. Those are indeed, or at least can be, pleasures, whether or not you personally want to experience or recommend them. (And lefties often do.) But they aren't all there is to pleasure. Our correspondent lists, all on his own, tobacco, Tom Clancy, and country-and-western music. Potential pleasures, each and every one! To indulge in cliches of Republicans for a moment, here are some other, and not-uncommon, potential rightie pleasures: duck paintings, good Scotch, rumpled corduroy pants, reading the morning paper while sipping coffee, listening to swing jazz on LPs rather than CDs, old stone houses, quilts and window seats, Labrador retrievers, making fun of lefties.... These are all potential pleasures as deserving of recognition, appreciation and discussion as any art-porn novel or deconstructed building. Which is to say that, despite the thought-policing of lefties and the reluctance of righties, righties already have an aesthetic, if not many aesthetics. Righties: It's simply not the case that you have no aesthetic tastes or preferences. Everyone does, at least everyone who has a few spare dollars and a few spare minutes -- who isn't entirely consumed by the struggle for existence. Your aesthetic is there already; you don't have to come up with one. The challenge is to recognize it as such, and to assert it as such. Lefties will look at the old Victorian house (or the crisp new condo) you adore and say, "That's not architecture." Don't let them get away with that. Say instead, "It certainly is architecture. And it's a kind of architecture I much prefer to the kind that you advocate." Why do you think it is that righties have such trouble recognizing that they have their own pleasures and their own... posted by Michael at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

The Economics of Janis Ian
Michael One of our correspondents brought to my attention the following article by Janis Ian on the topic of intellectual property rights in the digital age. I, for one, take the opinion of someone such as Ms. Ian fairly seriously--she's got a tangible, financial stake in this issue. She chose to offer free downloads of her music on her website, janisian.com, in July. An excerpt detailing her experiences: On the first day I posted downloadable music, my merchandise sales tripled, and they have stayed that way ever since. I'm not about to become a zillionaire as a result, but I am making more money. At a time when radio playlists are tighter and any kind of exposure is hard to come by, 365,000 copies of my work now will be heard. Even if only 3% of those people come to concerts or buy my CDs, I've gained about 10,000 new fans this year. That's how artists become successful: exposure. Without exposure, no one comes to shows, and no one buys CDs. After 37 years as a recording artist, when people write to tell me that they came to my concert because they downloaded a song and got curious, I am thrilled. Her article, "Music Industry Spins Falsehood," appeared in USA today. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 24, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, October 23, 2002


Moviegoing: "Far From Heaven"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I just caught a screening of the new Todd Haynes movie "Far From Heaven," starring Julianne Moore. Do you know Haynes' work? Very downtown-gay, hyper-artificial, theoretical and studied in a knowing way -- the knowingness, I suppose, meant to help transcend the studiedness, if you can imagine that. I managed to get through Haynes' early "Poison," a Genet derivative, but was out of the theater in about half an hour when I went to see his recent glam-rock epic, "Velvet Goldmine." During "Far From Heaven" I drifted off a few times. But I was semi-held by Julianne Moore's performance, and by the peculiarity of the project itself. Quaid, Moore: A not-so-perfect suburban idyll If you can imagine the John Stahl and Douglas Sirk women's melodramas of the '50s as one long movie, and "Far From Heaven" as a remake of all of them at once, you're in the ballpark. It's like "Imitation of Life" or "All That Heaven Allows," only with the racial and gay material openly dealt with. Dennis Quaid plays the embittered-handsome Robert Stack role, Dennis Haysbert the man-of-nature Rock Hudson role. Autumn leaves, soupy Elmer Bernstein score, color-coordinated everything, the occasional touch of pastel and spearmint, much focus on the anguish of the gracious leading suburban lady. Not quite as peculiar an act of movie-director karaoke as Gus Van Sant's shot-by-shot remake of "Psycho," but almost. An exercise in (mostly) straight-faced affectedness -- ie., theoretical camp, parody with no zest. Everything's deadened. Even the sunlight has no sparkle, and the sounds are made thumpy and hollow -- the entire movie looks like back-projection. Film buffs seem to be wild about the movie, which has already been featured on the cover of Film Comment, but how is the mall audience going to take it? Will it seem to them just a civil-right/homosexual-rights period drama played in the most bizarre style? Being a longtime film buff and Village resident, I'm familiar with the gay art strategies at use here. I'm overfamiliar with them, actually, and tired of them. Here's how Haynes talks about the tradition in the press kit: "What happens in the best melodramas is that there is a sense in which you are observing it from afar and you're seeing what they're doing...But you can't help getting drawn in emotionally at the same time." He's hoping to achieve something similar. But Sirk and Stahl had real audience chops, and knew how to reach out with the women's-magazine material. Haynes seems a hollow, rather academic and postmodern soul, hoping that his post-camp strategies and P.C. themes will provide the spark that makes the whole deliberately-deadened thing leap to life. Julianne Moore, though, was terrif. I'm not usually that much of a fan, are you? She picks interesting projects, she's willing to go out on a limb, she'll let herself get naked and look unglamorous. But I often find her work self-conscious, as well as a little indistinct and blurry, and I keep... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Viewing -- Clive James Interviews
Friedrich -- Online entrepreneurial arts-and-ideas flair: Clive James, the Australian novelist and journalist (remember how great his TV reviews were?), has set up a site devoted to video interviews of interesting figures, among them Jonathan Miller, Jung Chang, and Terry Gilliam, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Keats Redux
Friedrich -- Some helpful notes from readers about the poetry of John Keats. Tim Hulsey (from Virginia) writes: As for Keats, he's really not much in league with the Romantics, per se. He doesn't give you those grandiose, "change-the-world" fantasies you find in early Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley (Percy, not Mary). He's interested more in his own consciousness than the social order, and he's much more aware of the limitations of art. You might say that Keats is more individualized, more conservative in his claims for poetry. In short, he's closer to the Victorians than the Romantics. And Peter Nicholson, an Australian poet (website here), asks: Keats - too full on? Not really. Just working close to the edge where people aren't comfortable going - Wagner, Dickinson, Mahler, etc ? A classy readership we have! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Dana Gioia
Friedrich -- Good news, as reported by Robin Pogrebin in the NYTimes: the poet Dana Gioia is a candidate to head the National Endowment for the Arts, here. Gioia is a terrific poet and essayist who's also a man of experience (ie., not an academic but someone who's worked in the private sector), and one of the people responsible for reviving rhyming-and-rhythming poetry in recent years. His excellent website is here. Be sure to sample his poetry, and to read his classic essay "Can Poetry Matter?", here. Sample passage from "Can Poetry Matter?" The poetry boom has been a distressingly confined phenomenon. Decades of public and private funding have created a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse. Consequently, the energy of American poetry, which was once directed outward, is now increasingly focused inward. Gloria Brame did a long, two-part interview with Gioia, readable here. If we've gotta have an NEA, best it should be headed by someone like Dana Gioia. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Philosoblog and Envy redux
Friedrich -- Heavens! I go away on business for a couple of days and return to find all the neighbors having a party in my backyard. What fun. Did you read the comments left behind on my recent “lefties and attractiveness” posting? Good stuff! Little flurries of conversation on the topic even appeared on other blogs. What a sharp, civil and humorous bunch. Just try opening up such a subject in arty New York circles. “Civil and humorous” is not what you’ll encounter. It was fascinating that no one saw any need to dispute my central assertion that the left has succeeded in associating itself with attractiveness, and that the right has failed to keep up. Why this should be so, whether it has any real importance, and what (if anything) might be done about it -- all that’s up for grabs. But there’s a general acknowledgement that the left not only markets itself more attractively than the right does, but has made the topic of art-and-pleasure its own. I was impressed (as well as surprised and touched) that everyone who commented on the posting actually seemed to have read it and registered its argument. A few (perfectly civil) emails did come in from people who seemed under the impression that I was arguing something else entirely -- that lefties eat better, know what real art is, and probably fuck better too. For the record, no, I don’t think any of that. What I was hoping to say was that lefties own the discussion on these topics. There is almost no debate about such topics as food, sex, pleasure and art whose terms aren’t dictated by the left, which means that there is no real debate on these topics. How can there be, when one of the debating teams also sits in the judge’s chair? I was also, of course, hoping to say a few more things. One was that the left’s takeover of the topic of attractiveness is an accomplishment of some importance. Left policies and ideas have failed over and over again. How to explain the fact that, despite this, leftie-ism continues to do so well for itself? My humble suggestion? That “attractiveness” must be a large-ish part of the explanation. It was striking that even our brainy readers seem to accept the left’s definitions of art and pleasure. To them, “art” is Chris Ofili and his elephant dung, “cuisine” is the high-strung faddish restaurants the gals of “Sex in the City” hope to get tables at. As you and I know, contemporary visual art is and can be many things -- from Southern rural “yard art” to the neoclassical “toga painting” done by graduates of the New York Academy, from marine watercolors to the latest Flash’d corporate website. It’s striking too that our visitors don’t seem to realize that “cuisine” can be home cooking, barbecue, and corn on the cob as well as Latino-Asian fusion avant-gardism. The fact that what occurs to such a well-informed and open-minded... posted by Michael at October 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Tuesday, October 22, 2002


Getty vs. Acropolis
Michael I took my daughter to the J. Paul Getty museum complex in Los Angeles last weekend (she had a class assignment) and, once again, I realized how disappointed I am with this billion-dollar complex. So I got on the Internet and checked out another hilltop 'cultural' complex to see how it stacked up (all pictures are thumbnails--check 'em out for yourself): Acropolis complex reads well from a distance; Getty is visually incomprehensible from a distance. Running Score: Acropolis 1, Getty 0 Masses cleanly and clearly articulated; masses lumpish and illogically articulated. Running score: Acropolis 2, Getty 0 Entrance clearly marked, Propylaia creates dramatic yet dignified approach to Temple complex; entrance visually undistinguished, looks like approach to sports arena. Running score; Acropolis 3, Getty 0 Original--adaptation of temple design for a site with three different ground levels; copy--a staircase designed to display institutional bloat. Running score: Acropolis 4, Getty 0 Acropolis is a series of masonry buildings (real stones displayed); Getty is a series of steel frame buildings covered with stone veneer: Running score: Acropolis 5, Getty 0 And one other thing; the Parthenon was built faster (9 years) than the Getty (12 years from awarding commission to completion). Granted, it took the Athenians an additional six years to finish the sculptural decoration--but of course people are still fighting over that decorative sculpture 2500 years later. Thank goodness that won't be a problem at the Getty. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 22, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Saturday, October 19, 2002


Free Reads -- Philosoblog and Envy
Friedrich -- A new find: Jim Ryan's engrossing Philosoblog, here. It's a robust and invigorating pleasure going along for the ride as Ryan pulls questions apart and turns issues over. Action philosophy! Sample passage: Is there ever something wrong with forcing someone to do his duty? Is there always something wrong with it? Clearly the answer to the latter question is no. It's not wrong to force someone to fulfill his contracts, for example. Is it wrong to force someone to go take his aged parents a hot meal once a week? Is it wrong for the state to do that? Yes. Because it's too intrusive? Or because the state is likely to botch the job? The latter. There is nothing wrong with a perfectly wise and good entity applying pressure to slackers who are lax in their duty. The state is too far from wise and good, however, and shouldn't be trusted with certain intrusions into personal affiars. That bouquet thrown, on to the fun. Ryan has a couple of brainy recent postings dealing with moral relativism, and with leftie-ism more generally. Where do these tendencies come from? Here's Ryan's theory: Misfits will envy the happy and well-adjusted. The poor and their leaders are not the only elements of the progressivist left. The movement needs a middle management class, and it has one. These are the college-educated middle class who don’t fit in and who have been hoodwinked by the leadership into feeling guilt about their wealth. They join the movement because they are bored and restless. It comes down to envy and resentment, in other words. (Aaron Haspel at God of the Machine, here, adds some brainiac words of his own on the subject.) I've run across this "envy" explanation before, for example in Helmut Schoeck's book "Envy," and while it's clearly a contribution and explains a lot, I've never found it entirely convincing. I think a more nuanced and sympathetic explanation is called for. I live, play and work among vast crowds of lefties and find their motives for being leftie fairly numerous. A common one: the desire to fit in with a certain group. Lots of people don't give the big questions much thought. Wanting to lead a certain kind of life, they take on the colors of that life. If the crowd you want to run with is leftie, you'll probably go along with leftie-ism. Why not? So: Where's the envy? There's also the fact that being a leftie seems to make a lot of people feel young and rebellious. For whatever reason, it's a cooler, hipper attitude than rightie-ism. As lefties, they can feel that they haven't given totally in yet -- fuck the Power and rock out, man. An amazing number of people cling to this attitude even after they've got houses and kids and sit in the boss's office. Again: where's the envy? But this is a cultureblog, so the motivation I encounter that interests me most is this one: leftie-ism is... posted by Michael at October 19, 2002 | perma-link | (11) comments

Magazine Culture Redux
Michael As I browsed a magazine stand recently I was surprised to see an essay by Shelby Steele in the November issue of Harpers. Moreover, it had the extremely un-Harperian title of "The Age of White Guilt and the Disappearance of the Black Individual." Puzzled, I bought the magazine, and discovered that the essay is exactly what it sounds like. As Harpers does not divulge content on the Internet, the following is an excerpt from this excellent essay: What is white guilt? It is not a personal sense of remorse over past wrongs. White guilt is literally a vacuum of moral authority in matters of race, equality and opportunity that comes from the association of mere white skin with America’s historical racism. It is the stigmatization of whites and, more importantly, American institutions with the sin of racism. Under this stigma white individuals and American institutions must perpetually prove a negative—that they are not racist—to gain enough authority to function in matters of race, equality, and opportunity. If they fail to prove the negative, they will be seen as racists. Political correctness, diversity policies, and multiculturalism are forms of deference that give whites and institutions a way to prove the negative and win reprieve from the racist stigma…The fact is that affirmative action has been a very effective racial policy in garnering moral authority and legitimacy for institutions, and it is now institutions--not individual whites or blacks--that are fighting to keep it alive. But I still can't figure out what this essay is doing in Lewis H. Lapham's (you must not forget the "H") sandbox. This is still the same guy who writes, in his "Notebook" column: At ground zero, [President Bush] presented himself as a humble man of God, comforting the faithful in their time of trouble, at the United Nations as an impatient and angry general shaking the fist of war at Saddam Hussein. In neither setting did it matter whether he, or anybody else, understood what he was saying. The congregation at ground zero didn't ask for words, and if the summons to a descent on Baghdad proceeded from premises both illogical and false (about Iraq's store of nuclear weapons and its stature as a great power) to an imbecile conclusion (that Iraq transform itself into the state of Connecticut or suffer the penalty of extinction) what difference did it make?...But if it is no disgrace for any country at any particular time in its history to rest content among the relics of a lost language and an imaginary past, it is a matter of some interest in a country that possesses the power to poison the earth without possessing either the means or desire to know itself. As best I can tell from the entire column, which runs an exhausting 2400 words, Lewis H. Lapham is saying either that he would make a much better President than George W. Bush, or that he would make a much better magazine essayist than George W. Bush, or that... posted by Friedrich at October 19, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- We postmoderns tend to take for granted how well-off we are in terms of access to entertainment. You've got the Web and cable TV? Then you're in better shape to enjoy the fruits of the cultural world than any pre-1950s king or queen. Here's a Clip and Save guide to the upcoming week on cable. *Rising Sun (HBO Saturday at 3 a.m.). Philip Kaufman directs Sean Connery and Wesley Snipes in an adaptation of Michael Crichton's Japanophobe novel. Semi-effective as a thriller; sharp and sophisticated as a comedy about multiculuralism. *Training Day (Cinemax, Tues at 8 pm; Wednesday at 3 am; Fri at 10 pm). Denzel's Oscar-winning performance, and a snappy, gritty urban thriller in its own right. Ethan Hawke does a beautiful job setting off Denzel's performance, by the way. Second bananas deserve credit too. *Vanya on 42nd Street (IFC; Monday at 10 am and 4 pm; Tuesday at 8 a.m.). The sublime Louis Malle/Andre Gregory/Wallace Shawn adaptation of Chekhov's play. See what ensemble acting is really about. *Sweet Smell of Success (TCM; Sunday at 6 pm). This urban tale about tabloid Manhattan stars Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis, and was directed by Alexander Mackendrick. A flop when it first came out, it's now a legend, and helped establish a tough, flamboyant New York style. You'll see where a lot of Scorsese's style comes from. *Antonio Banderas is interviewed on Inside the Actor's Studio (Bravo; Sunday at 8 pm). *Joy Ride (Cinemax, Sunday at 10 pm, Thursday 11 am and 8 pm), a low-key but genuinely scary (and very handsome) thriller. Directed by John ("Red Rock West") Dahl. *The Making of 'Gone With the Wind' (TCM, Wednesday at 8 pm). I'm not a fan of the movie that is this documentary's subject, but the story of the film's production should be fascinating. *A Men Who Made the Movies hour on the director Raoul Walsh (TCM, Friday at 7 pm) *On A&E's American Justice, host Bill Kurtis can take a little getting used to, but he and his show do a terrific job of presenting stories of crimes and criminals. This week's episodes include *An hour on the disappearance of the famous atheist Madalynn Murray O'Hair (9-10 pm Wednesday) *An hour on Karla Faye Tucker, a Texas double-murderer (Wed., 10-11 pm) *An hour entitled Girl in the Box (Saturday, 5 pm), about a strange kidnapper/kindappee case. He kidnapped a hitchiker and made her his sex slave for seven years. Horrifying. But she never seems to have made any effort to escape. Perplexing. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tacit Knowledge -- Polaroid
Friedrich -- Polanyi: How can we know what we don't know we know? Have you run across Michael Polanyi's concept of "tacit knowledge"? The idea is, roughly, that there are two kinds of knowledge -- "explicit knowledge," which is consciously learned and consciously held, and "tacit knowledge," which undergirds everything else. Tacit knowledge is what we "just know"; it's knowledge we don't think about, that we've somehow picked up along the way. "Explicit knowledge" would be knowing, for example, how to use Photoshop. But think of the volume of "tacit knowledge" that has to be present in order to make that explicit knowledge possible -- familiarity with machines, with electricity, with how digital imagery works... Polanyi was a fascinating guy, by the way. I'd think that anyone whose brain buzzes to the ideas of Hayek or Sowell would get a charge out of him. You can explore Polanyi and his ideas here, here and here. Which is a long-winded way of kicking off an occasional new 2blowhards feature, Tacit Knowledge: an ongoing attempt to put into words things that are known but aren't known to be known, and to bring a few widely-known-but-generally-unacknowledged things out into the open. Though, depending on our mood, it's also likely to degenerate into another 2blowhards way to have a little mischievous fun. And in that spirit, here's Entry #1. An executive once told me this story: She was on a business flight and found herself sitting next to a guy who worked for Polaroid. He had a few drinks, and started to talk about his employer. "We don't kid ourselves," he said. "We know what most of our cameras are being used for. Lots of photos of the kids. And then...." -- and he cocked a flirtatious eyebrow. Do you suspect, as I do, that "being able to shoot ourselves having sex without anyone else knowing" also helps explain the popularity of videocameras and digital cameras? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, October 18, 2002


The Economics of Elvis reredux
Michael You ask what direction would I like to see copyright law take as we move further into the age of perfect and easy replication? Based on what I learned writing my posting, “The Economics of Elvis,” I’m not so sure copyright law should take much of a direction at all. When a new copyright law is passed, it’s always justified as an attempt to protect the property rights of innovative people from some current threat (whether mechanical reproduction in 1909 or digital piracy in 2002). Once this “hole” in intellectual property rights is patched, things will work “like everyone knows they should.” But intellectual property is subject to the law of unintended consequences big time. What has commonly happened is that once the lawmakers have applied their backward looking "patch," we discover that they've gone and created entirely new property rights, often in industries undreamt-of when the law was passed. For example, was it really a matter of course that songwriters (or, in reality, their corporate successors) should own the radio rights to their songs? How about television rights? Did anyone know how much money would be involved in either the radio or the television rights when the bill that granted these rights was debated—in 1897? Of course not; the congressmen of 1897 felt bad for songwriters because they couldn't charge royalties for performance of their music, a power that dramatists had enjoyed for performances of their plays for 50 years. But this decision had a whole series of unforeseen impacts that extend to this day. Another troubling consequence of the creation of such expanded intellectual property rights is impact this has on the creative "temperature" of an industry. Corporations are money-making entities, not creative entities. They are not in business for the joy of innovation or the joy of making “art.” A portfolio of intellectual property of demonstrated popularity that can be risklessly exploited offers the illusion of security in a notoriously unpredictable environment. (For one example, think of the profits the current generation of Disney managers has extracted from their control of Walt Disney's portfolio of intellectual property.) This path, however, leads directly away from the risk taking and experimentation of trying to develop products for new, poorly defined markets. Unproven markets will always be inherently dicey for large companies, because it is genuinely unlikely that such markets can generate enough sales to provide a good return on the organization’s large amounts of invested capital. The net result is a conservative, play-it-safe tendency to pursue strategies that have yielded mass sales and large profits in the past, and that, if possible, don’t make existing inventory “obsolete.” While apparently rational, such a strategy will also generally fail to flush out the new, urgent wants/needs in society that can serve as the basis for a radically enlarged market. In my piece I used the example of music industry’s failure to identify and exploit the demand for “race” music for twenty years, and for “hillbilly” music for fifteen years—because the... posted by Friedrich at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Bye-Bye Movies, Hello Digishorts
Friedrich -- I dragged the Wife to an evening at ResFest, a touring festival of films made with digital equipment that happens to be in NYC this week. We watched a collection of shorts. A perfectly enjoyable and interesting way to spend an evening, like visiting a show of student art work. You're unlikely to be moved or touched, but it's genuinely interesting to see the kind of work that's being done. (And you know that the kind of thing you're seeing is going to show up elsewhere soon.) Some notes on the evening: *What was most striking was how cheerful, young and attractive the crowd was. Remember the grubby and political NY Film Festival audience? How much they loved rooting for the avant-garde against the powers that be, and siding with the artists against the awful and fascist moneymen? None of that here. These kids were pulled-together and attentive, and they looked like they were going home after the show to get back to work on their own digital projects. We're all mediamakers now. *Another striking thing was how little the films -- videos, really: shot on digital video, edited on computers, and projected digitally -- had to do with traditional movie language, or traditional movie values. The basis for what these computer-and-video kids are doing -- the elements of the language they're using -- is ads and rock videos. Quick cutting, multiple screens, lots of floating and flashing words, image processing, sounds that claw at your eardrums. Hyperbolic, glamorous-but-edgy -- these are the terms these young artists see themselves in. This is their language, and they seem to like veering back and forth between pumpy, hyped-up effects and a gritty "reality-TV" look. As artists, they seem completely uninformed by movie history, let alone by the rest of the history of art. They seem to come completely out of magazines, pop music, and video, and to want to do little but orchestrate effects. *The avant garde is here, now -- not that anyone's giving this fact a second's thought. Multiple screens, windows within windows, image and sound processing -- all this comes standard with any G4. You want multidimensonality? You want multiple perspectives? You want an absence of objectivity and a writhing mass of warring subjectivities instead? Click here. *The visual quality of the shorts was ok-to-pretty-good: functional, a little watery, as though the theater lights were too high. (They weren't.) Parts of the screen sometimes pixillate, stripey objects go all zany -- and for a couple of seconds you watch the background rather than the action... Video/computer-image quality has quite a ways to go, although it has now crossed the "acceptable" line. *This being a young scene, you'd expect the sound system to be a corker, and it was. Digital sound quality is miles ahead of visual quality. It's freakily good. You're right in the middle of every noise. The slightest shimmer becomes its own event happening all around you, the sound of glass breaking creates as elaborate... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Economics of Elvis Redux
Friedrich -- Many thanks for explaining the business history behind the pop-music business. I'd always wondered what the hell ASCAP and BMI were, and had supposed they were sinister cartels. Nice to know that I was right. In old-fart moments (more and more frequent these days), I tell young people to go into copyright law. It'll be a happening field for decades; adjusting the laws pertaining to creation and ownership isn't going to be easy in the digital age, and the only people certain to do well are the lawyers. In the midst of these disputes, my sympathies tend to be with the artists, although I try not to be too, too sentimental about this. But I'm a know-nothing -- or, given the couple of stories about copyright I helped out with, a know-little. You're a student of the issues. What direction would you like to see copyright law take as we move further into the age of perfect and easy replication? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

On-Stage Ads
Friedrich -- Vanessa O'Connell in the WSJ (not online, at least not for free) reports that billboards for Piper-Hiedsick and Montblanc -- paid-for ads -- will be part of the onstage scenery of the much-anticipated upcoming Broadway production of "La Boheme." (Much-anticipated because it's being directed by Baz -- "Moulin Rouge" -- Luhrmann.) Sample passage: "'This is an example of a deal where you can service the art and service the business,' says Jeffrey Seller, a producer of 'La Boheme.'...'The economics of live theater are always challenging, especially because we have to persuade people to buy $95 and $100 tickets'." My suggestion to people who are bugged by product placements? Skip the kinds of productions that are likely to feature them. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- John Allen Paulos
Friedrich -- In ABCNews.com, here, John Allen Paulos looks at how and why people seem more responsive to stories than they do to rationality. His conclusion? Because it's natural. Not much a conclusion, but convincing nonetheless. Sample passage: Consider ... the media coverage of last year’s Institute of Medicine report on the inordinate number of deaths due to medical mismanagement. Much of it focused on doctors’ egregious mistakes — amputating the wrong leg, say — and not on the many small changes in the system that could save tens of thousands of lives annually. Again, misbehavior seems to attract more attention than inefficient routines even when the latter kill more people. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Keats and British Acting
Friedrich -- I just finished listening to an audiobook of selected poems by John Keats, read by a variety of classy British actors. What a pleasing thing it is to listen to poetry on audiobook -- for some reason, much of the worshipful-English-major shellac comes off, and the experience seems more direct. Poetry! What a fun medium! Finite little verbal things, there to be enjoyed! Or not! Keats: Melancholy baby A couple of quick reflections, as well as questions. *Does romantic poetry bug you as much as it does me? I can take Keats a lot more easily than some other Romantics. He seems more interested in form, the pre-Raphaelite-esque fantasies have their charm, and he wrote a few surprisingly down-to-earth (and even funkily erotic) bits. But the damn effusions, the coddled sensitivity, the willed epiphanies -- arggggh. The emotional exhibitionism of the Romantics can really get on my nerves. I wonder, though, if I'm annoyed more by what Romanticism is, or more by its influence and impact. Romanticism has so much shaped how we think of the arts -- and to my mind in largely idiotic ways. Our image of "the artist," our ideas about art as inspiration and expression -- it's all still basically Romantic. I (grudgingly) understand that some Romantic notions have some validity. But enough to explain the scale of their impact? These ideas (and fantasies) seem to be like highly addictive drugs. Though I'd prefer to see people kick the habit entirely, there's no avoiding the conclusion that, in evo-bio terms, Romanticism has been quite a success. I wonder why. Your theories? *I also find myself wondering about something I've often puzzled over, which is this: why do I find English actresses generally very easy to take, while English male actors often embarrass me? The women often seem to have the best of all acting worlds -- great technique plus immediacy, rootedness, and sensuality. The technique enhances the being and the reacting. The men, on the other hand, carry on, gush and declaim -- it's like an excruciating form of Kabuki. I cringe. I wonder if this preening is the English-male-actor way of demonstrating virility and dynamism. (If so, what does that say about the English?) On the Keats tape, the actresses read the poems straightforwardly while the men seem to feel driven to "perform." They bellow, they whisper, they tremble. I want to say, Boys, please! Enough! The contrast with the women is so great that it's as if the women and the men have evolved separate -- and by now only distantly related -- schools of acting. How did this happen? What's your reaction these days to English actors? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

The Economics of Elvis
Michael Perhaps you noticed the following in the October 12 issue of the Economist: The war over control of the digital copying of music and movies has many fronts, in Congress and the marketplace as well as the courts. It has pitted Hollywood against the technology firms of Silicon Valley and consumer advocates such as Mr. Lessig. The record industry succeeded in killing Napster this year, but file-sharing by consumers is growing; on-line swapping of films and TV shows, as well as music, is catching on. America’s frightened media behemoths are lobbying hard for new laws and new technology to stop copying and to control what customers do with their products. While the fight over the control of digital music rages, a look at history suggests that many of struggles of today echo the battles fought in the music industry over the past century. (My account is largely based on the work of Russell and David Sanjek in "American Popular Music Business in the 20th Century" and Peter Hall's "Cities in Civilization.") In the late 19th century, practitioners of the music “content” industry clustered in New York’s Tin Pan Alley. Songwriters primarily made money by selling their product to music publishers, who in turn sold sheet music to consumers who wanted to play the music at home. However, when in 1891 the first major revision of copyright law in one hundred years was passed, the music publishers “saw the light.” In 1895 the Music Publishers Association (MPA) of the United States was formed, and within two years had successfully lobbied Congress for additional copyright legislation, giving them the power to license (i.e., demand royalties for) public performance of their work—a right which they had never previously possessed. The music publishers were fed up with the money (i.e., payola) that vaudeville was sucking out of them. (Musical vaudeville performances were the chief advertising medium for new songs.) Armed with their new intellectual property right, the music publishers decided to turn vaudeville from a cost center into a revenue source. In 1913 they formed ASCAP, the American Society of Composers and Publishers, and announced that ASCAP would prevent the playing of all copyrighted music at any public function unless a royalty was paid. ASCAP chose from the beginning to pool the funds it received (that is, they weren’t divided according to the exactly calculated earnings of each song). ASCAP’s distributions deliberately favored the larger music publishers and the most popular songwriters. ASCAP’s bargaining power came from the perception that it controlled the most popular, most “mainstream” music, and it had to keep the major players on board to maintain its clout. A big source of royalties that started to roll in (an unintended benefit of the 1897 copyright law) came from the recorded music industry. These grew healthily until 1921. However, when this total began shrinking the next year, ASCAP easily identified the culprit: free music from the nation’s infant radio industry. And ASCAP knew what to do about it. In 1922,... posted by Friedrich at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Report From Texas redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for passing along the story about Joni Rogers, who sounds like quite a wit, and quite an honest woman too. As a survivor (so far) of prostate cancer, I'm happy as well to endorse the accuracy of her observations. I'd add only that -- well, I'd add a lot, but I'm sure she'd add a lot too. Suffice it to say that the moment when you hear your doctor deliver the words, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but we found a little cancer in you," life takes a very big turn, and is (apparently) never again quite the same thing. Some months after my surgery, I was awake at 4 or so one morning, unable to sleep, and basically miserable, grateful and terrified, though what was swirling through my head on a superficial level was something piteous like "Will life never return to normal?" And it occurred to me that maybe it never would return to what I'd once considered normal. That particular "normal" was, for me, done and gone. I wish I could say that, having come to this realization, I was instantly able to reconcile myself to my new life. But I'd be lying. Best, if often knocking on wood, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Report from Texas
Michael One of our correspondents writes that she attended an interesting luncheon recently featuring Joni Rogers, a cancer survivor who has written a book called "Bald in the Land of Big Hair." A few of Ms. Roger’s observations: In regards to the stupid platitudes that people cough up with when someone has a cancer diagnosis, like "God never gives us more than we can handle," the only two topics that this is actually true about are money and cleavage. While the saying "That which does not kill us makes us stronger" is true, it is also about as comforting as "Your seat cushion can be used as a flotation device." Just after receiving a cancer diagnosis is no time to make new friends. "Hi---I am a great sucking black hole of emotional need, and all my hair is going to fall out----want to be my friend???" Cheers, Friedrich P.S. Our correspondent agrees with your wife about two things: (a) that you ARE jealous of her relationship with pastry and (b) if men really did want to get laid as much as they say they do, they would in fact learn to cook. (“I bet most men don't even know how sexy that is.”)... posted by Friedrich at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Evo Bio Questions -- Acne
Friedrich -- I couldn't be happier that evolutionary-biology thinking has been flourishing, and at the progress it's made in pushing aside the old models -- Marx, Freud, deconstruction, all of which have long outlived their usefulness, assuming they ever had any. And I couldn't be more eager to see evo-bio forms of thinking make more inroads in the arts. That said, there are questions the evo-bio crowd hasn't addressed that I'd like to see them take on. The first one is acne. What kind of evo-bio sense does it make that acne is so common during puberty? I don't think other animals suffer from it -- perhaps you, or some of our readers, know better. Why do we? Acne is so common among human teens that it should probably be considered a standard feature of adolescence. It's uncomfortable, humiliating, and disfiguring. Where's the evolutionary advantage in any of that? What exactly is being selected for? I seem to recall someone theorizing that acne might be a way of discouraging humans from procreating until they're past it, the idea being that acne is so gross that kids will avoid sex until they have the acne under control. It's a try, which I appreciate, but I'm not sure it stands up. Where's the evidence that teens avoid sex? Or that people are prone to have more sex after adolescence than during adolescence? Or that acne plays a role in people's decisions whether or not to have sex? Do we have to settle for an explanation along the lines of "well, it's an unintended consequence of blah blah blah"? That'd be lame. Evo bio people -- give me your ideas! Best, if still recovering from adolescence, Michael... posted by Michael at October 18, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Thursday, October 17, 2002


Derbyshire on taxes
Friedrich -- Most of the arguments I've seen in favor of smaller government have been based on such notions as justice, fairness, and practicality. John Derbyshire at National Review Online, here, adds an appealing new one to that list -- a decent sense of courtesy. Sample passage: There is no such thing as "government money." There is only money seized from citizens and corporations by force of law, to be used with care, wisely, for common purposes agreed by practically all citizens to be essential. These funds are a sacred trust, earned by our people from the sweat of their brows, and handed over to their elected representatives reluctantly, but in the citizenly belief that they will contribute to the good of the nation. [But in 2002,]public finance is a huge suck-and-blow machine, vacuuming up money out of your pocket and mine, and spraying it out at the other end on powerful interest groups — unions, trial lawyers, well-connected corporations, foreigners who hate us. Public money a sacred trust? Ha ha ha ha ha! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Saddam's Sons
Friedrich -- Fabulous reporting in this Newsweek piece about Saddam Hussein's sons, here. Evan Thomas, Christopher Dickey, Colin Soloway and others turn up scads of amazingly unappetizing details about this amazingly unappetizing family. Old-fashioned newsweekly-team journalism at its best. Sample passage: Saddam has always believed in the symbolic power of mutilation. “Under torture, the high and mighty are quite literally exposed as being made of the same stuff as everyone else,” writes Kanan Makiya in his study of Saddam’s Iraq, “Republic of Fear.” As Iraqi ruler, Saddam delivered the broken bodies of his victims to their families. He was aiming at the creation of “a new man” in Iraq, just as Hitler and Stalin had tried to do in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. He may well have made his sons into psychopaths. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Paul Johnson
Friedrich -- A freebie online treat from the Wall Street Journal, which doesn't give much away for free: the historian Paul Johnson, who always writes with vigor, brains and perspective, explaining why Europe carries on as it does, here. Sample passage: We have to remember that twice in the 20th century, Europe came close to committing suicide by wars that in retrospect seem senseless. These were followed by a Cold War that imprisoned much of Europe in a cage of fear. In this process, Europe, a collection of vigorous peoples who pushed forward the frontiers of civilization for a thousand years and created the modern world, learned to opt for a safety-first existence in which comforts and short-term security became the object of policy. They sought a cozy Utopia, with risk and pain eliminated. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Steve Sailer
Friedrich -- I love checking in on the protean Steve Sailer (here). He writes enlighteningly about evolutionary biology, he writes sensible political commentary, and he writes smart, brave, always-worth-wrestling-with things about race and immigration. (A standout piece on whether or not the concept of race has any validity is here.) In addition to all that, he's a movie critic who takes a distinctive approach to thinking about movies, treating their business and popular history not in the usual way (as gossip and matter for facile sociology) but as evidence of what works and what doesn't in the art form. It's a kind of evo-bio approach to writing about the arts -- let's see more of that. He even manages to get off the occasional good, yet informative, anti-P.C. crack, as he does in a review (here) of the Navajos-in-WW2 thriller "Windtalkers." Sample passage: The screenwriters...are so terrified of being accused of stereotyping Native Americans that they portray the Navajo with no particular traits. Look, you can't "celebrate diversity" unless you show some diversity. In reality, the Navajo are fascinating. They are possibly the most economically dynamic of all tribes. They were originally invaders from Canada who arrived in the Southwest not long before the conquistadors. Acquiring sheep from white people, they prudently shifted from hunting and gathering to herding, weaving, and crafts manufacturing. While the rest of the Native American population was in catastrophic decline due to European diseases, weapons and alcohol, the Navajo exploded in numbers, much to the distress of their neighbors and rivals, the more conservative Hopi tribe. You won't find that kind of thing in Film Comment. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 17, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, October 16, 2002


DVD Journal: "Rollerball"; "The Shipping News"; "Donnie Darko"; "Monster's Ball"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- The Wife and I had a DVD orgy over the long weekend, managing to watch four movies without sitting all the way through any of them. A good reason to love DVDs is that they give you the ability to bop around inside a movie and get to know it in the same way you can get to know a book by paging around inside it. No need, if you aren't completely taken by the work, to labor your way through every little bit of it. The remake of Rollerball is certainly the stupidest movie ever made, although redeemed, if only for 5 seconds, by a few shots of Rebecca Romijn topless. Cute! The Shipping News was beige and painful beyond belief despite Cate Blanchett, who has a few tiptop minutes as a doomed, high-strung working-class sexpot. I love some of Lasse Hallstrom's movies ("Cider House Rules," "What's Eating Gilbert Grape") but here his taciturnity gets pretty opaque. Donnie Darko is an oddball pretentious gen-Y art thing in the guise of a dysfunctional-suburbia horror/sci-fi thing -- "American Beauty" meets David Lynch meets a Moby video, basically. The youngster who made it is certainly talented, and his movie did make me think "whither the cinema" thoughts that I won't bug you with. But he's also the winner of this week's "get back to me when you have a little life experience" award. I have to admit I enjoyed hating Monster's Ball, a Euro-fantasy of southern bigotry and insanity that has a handsome, German-art-photo-book design. But I'm a sucker for suave Eurosleaziness, at least the sexy stylishness of it. (The movie doesn't look anything like what the south actually looks like.) But it also has one of those two-messed-up-and-desperate-losers-make-some-kind-of-pathetic-connection narratives, and a boring "issue" -- racism. What would Europeans do with themselves if they couldn't sneer at Americans? Billy Bob Thornton is passable, but Halle Barry's a really, and I mean really, terrible actress, always reaching for (and never coming close to grasping) an appropriate emotion. I hit the normal-speed button so I could give the infamous fuck scene my full attention. It was hot, arty, and pretentious, just like I like 'em. So I watched it again. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Non Negotiable Demands reredux
Michael I’m not normally a big one for movie sequels, but I was pleased to read in the Los Angeles Times of October 15 that a sequel to the film “Barbershop,” is planned. The film, which I was also heartened to note is still in the national top ten in weekly grosses, has pulled in $65 million to date domestically. In the end, the film’s politically controversial inclusion of irreverent remarks about black civil rights figures has not caused a backlash; apparently the Rev. Al Sharpton’s threat of a boycott of the releasing studio, MGM, is not going to materialize. I think the director, Tim Story, deserves the last word: At the end of the day, [the controversy] became conversation, which is the only thing we ever wished it would be. Cheers, Friedrich P.S.—I also note that “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” made (like Barbershop) for a paltry sum, has so far brought in $160 million at the box office—a significantly greater amount than, say “Minority Report” (starring Tom Cruise and directed by Steven Spielberg) earned. Hee, hee.... posted by Friedrich at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Artistic Quote of the Day
Michael A quote from John Walker’s “Constable”: [Constable] found beauty in everything that grows: weeds as well as flowers. He once corrected a lady, who, when looking at an engraving of a house, called it an “ugly thing.” In what was virtually a reprimand, he stated one of his fundamental beliefs. “No madam,” he said, “there is nothing ugly; I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the form of an object be what it may,--light, shade, and perspective will always make it beautiful. I think Constable has put a finger on something rather larger than art here; that is, a tendency (which I am far too ready to indulge) to dismiss whole chunks of life as not “measuring up” to our assumptions about what is beautiful, desirable, pleasurable or profitable. As a result, I, at any rate, am constantly in danger of not enjoying life as much as I should as a consequence of pre-conceived ideas—the most idiotic explanation imaginable! (And something approaching what I, for want of a better term, would describe as a mortal sin.) I hereby resolve to do better. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Gross Over-Generalizations -- Women and Baked Goods
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Mood heighteners? What is it with women and baked goods? Last night, for example, I was at dinner with the Wife and a woman friend when the talk turned to food and thence to baked goods. The two women lit up: Which bakeries are are the best right now? Have you tried this pastry? How about that one? What about that recipe that was in the Times? And where do you buy your bread? The two gals were still happily discussing these pressing matters when the dessert menu arrived and gave the topic another boost. I can certainly enjoy a good piece of bread, but I don't have much to add to these conversations. Do you? Bakeries and pastries .... I've got as much to say about them as I do about manta rays or weather balloons. Plus there's the fact that sweet, chewy, grainy things just don't mean that much to me. Since it seems to be law that eating a lot of them will make you fat, I simply don't eat them. It's no big sacrifice. But women! Their moods go up and down; they really, really care. They feel better when they can have something sweet. They give the bread or cake or cookie a good look and feel before placing it in the mouth. They're crushed if they have to deny themselves a brioche. Becoming a woman in Paris Leafing through some evo-bio book a few years ago, I came across a passage where the (woman) author was writing about differences between women and men. She had looked at tons of cultures, modern and ancient. And her conclusion? She wrote that, if it were possible to factor out all variables, she'd bet that the the biggest difference between the sexes would prove to be that women would spend most of their time searching out and fussing over food, and men would spend most of their time and energy pursuing sex. Sounds about right to me. To you? Thiebaud likes painting them more than eating them Even allowing for many exceptions (male pastry chefs and bread bakers, for instance), doesn't it seem that women show an amazing affinity for cakey, moist things that tend to the sweet? (I recall, if dimly, some passage in Virginia Woolf where she referred to women and their gabble and their little cakes....) There are male customers at the local high-end bakery, but not many. It isn't men who make a detour just to see "what's in the window of that cute little patisserie over there." I don't recall ever seeing a table of non-gay men babbling while passing around and around a dish of little colored cookies. Look at the expressions on the faces of the women in the photos accompanying this posting -- angelic, foolish, "caught," eager, blissed-out. You get the impression that they could spend their lives with their hands in the cookie jar. And the symbolism of "the cookie jar" ... When... posted by Michael at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Poussin redux
Michael Your posting on Poussin reminded me of an observation by Delacroix (who was an extremely intelligent art critic.) Delacroix proposes a dichotomy between the way Classical Greeks and the Rennaissance Italians perceived and communicated form. He points out that the Greeks perceived complex forms (e.g., nude people) as a series of overlapping geometric volumes, like those of an amphora. One Amphora: a Vase Because of the underlying geometry of each of these volumes, we can perceive not only the shape of each amphora “unit” but also its orientation, the “tilt” of its central axis. Many Amphorae: A Greek Torso, 5th Century B.C. In contradistinction, the Italians of the early Renaissance grasped a form by its surface planes or its contour lines. Note the harsh planes and angular, chopped outlines of Antonio Pollaiuolo's Hercules and Antaeus of 1470: No Amphora Here On the basis of this dichotomy, Delacroix claimed that from an examination of Poussin’s drawings that the French Baroque artist’s sense of form was Greek rather than Italian—that Poussin felt objects by their centers and not by their edges. Poussin's Acis and Galatea: Obviously Greek I just knew you couldn’t sleep at night without this information. Cheers and sweet dreams, Friedrich P.S. I couldn't resist tossing in Poussin’s self-portrait; it’s one of my favorite all-time paintings. Enjoy. Poussin's 1650 Self Portrait... posted by Friedrich at October 16, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, October 15, 2002


Decades of Design?
Michael Granted, I’m the former Detroiter, but we’re both old enough to at least dimly remember the days when American cars had genuine style. I was struck the other day by the progression in the following Buick ad… Buick's Decades of Design Campaign …that is, I was struck by the progression from powerful design to inoffensive mediocrity. How dare Buick be so insensitive as to run the top and bottom pictures in this stack together--it's offensive. I think General Motors continues to miss a huge bet by not resuscitating elements of its much more stylish past. And I'm not referring to running ads stressing how hot their styling used to be, I'm talking about incorporating some of their traditional elements into today's cars. Let's bend a little metal here. As I’ve watched Cadillac, in particular, try to find its way stylistically out of the wilderness over the past twenty years, I keep wondering why nobody ever has the balls to create a car that at least echoes the 'Great White shark' aura of the 1950s and 1960s Caddies. Will Anyone Make Lithographs of the 2002 Cadillacs? How many consumer products can access such a fully developed brand identity, an aesthetic that screams “Live Large! Be Optimistic! Kick Ass!” How many companies have this much stylistic DNA just waiting to spring forth, like the first shoots of spring hiding under the winter snows? Has GM learned nothing from the success of Harley Davidson over the past decade? A Still Unresolved Question Does GM really think they can out-Mercedes Mercedes? Or out-BMW BMW? I keep wanting to tell them: Come on, guys, give it a shot. You can do it! You can return to your roots!. Or am I just kidding myself? Somewhat nostalgic cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 15, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, October 14, 2002


Short Stuff
Michael Going through the Wall Street Journal of October 14, I noticed the following, er, "Dog-Bites-Man" headlines: -TNT Tells Operators That Its Higher Fees Are Worth the Price -Global Aids Fund Issues Appeals for More Money -Worldcom’s Ex-Controller Pleads Guilty -Do Predatory Lending Laws Curb Mortgages? -China May Free Political Prisoner Ahead of Summit I'm just guessing that Sunday might have been a slow news day. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Glenn Gould
Friedrich -- Rick Phillips writes about Glenn Gould for Gramphone magazine, here. Thanks to cultureblogger Kelly Jane Torrance (here) for the link. Sample passage: Recently I met Natalie Webster, a young piano student at Birmingham Conservatory in England... Shortly after discovering Gould a few years ago, she was so moved that she made a pilgrimage to Toronto, ‘fuelled with an eagerness to pay tribute to him somehow’. On her first and final days in Toronto, Natalie visited the peaceful Gould gravesite, where she listened to the 1981 Goldberg Variations recording from beginning to end on a Walkman. Hey, the Wife and I made our own pilgrimage to Gould landmarks the last time we were in Toronto. Have you ever caught the Gould bug? When you come down with it, you tend to come down hard, and to never want to get over it. Even I, a classical-music moron, have become a buff. My (rather quirky) tips for tyros who want to give Gould a try: start with the early and late Goldbergs (a fabulous deal at Amazon, here); move on to the Bach English Suites (here) and then to my fave of Gould's recordings, of some pieces by Byrd, Gibbon and Sweelinck (here). And don't neglect to treat yourself to a browse through his writings (here) -- Gould was, as the Wife patiently explained to me, a philosopher of music as well as an entertainingly perverse character. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- As you with your Tivo and I with my VCR know, the idiot box is idiotic only if you let it make the decisions for you. Take the time to search programming out for yourself, and you've got yourself an amazing cultural resource. A few highlights from this upcoming week. *The E! True Hollywood Story: Steven Seagal (Monday 11 am, Tuesday 8 pm, Wednesday 9 am). The action star’s checkered life should provide tasty grist for this celeb-series mill. *What Lies Beneath (HBO: 12 15 pm Monday; 4 pm Thursday). Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer in a thriller for grownups that's so hushed and precise it's like a ride in a high-end Mercedes. My friends hated it; I sat back and enjoyed the expensive purr. *A&E Biography of James Dean (Monday at 8 pm, repeated at midnight). A two-hour look at the life of the method-acting icon. *Joy Ride (Cinemax, Monday 8 pm; 3:30 a.m. Tuesday; 3 pm Wednesday; 10 pm Wednesday). Starts as a thriller and morphs into a horror movie. Attractive young cast, but the real star here is the director, John Dahl, who gives the film a beautiful pulp-paperback look and keeps its tone unpretentious and fast. One of the few new movies to have an old-style, B-picture feel. *Cookie’s Fortune (IFC, Monday 6 pm). Small, easygoing, sweet-natured Southern mystery-comedy from Robert Altman, with Glenn Close, Julianne Moore, Charles Dutton and many others. Quiet, musical, finally very touching. *Dinner at Eight (TCM, Monday at 8 pm). All-star MGM comedy-drama with Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, and Marie Dressler, directed by George Cukor. A confident display of how-it-was-done in early Hollywood. *Ace Ventura, Pet Detective (HBO, 3:30 pm Tuesday; 2:30 pm Saturday). The role that made Jim Carrey a star. Daring, far-out, still fresh – Ace Ventura for me is as first-rate a comic creation as Groucho, Woody, and Curly. *FBI Files (Discover, Tuesday at 10 pm; repeated at 1 a.m. Wedesday) The wife and I have a taste for true-crime documentary series. This back-to-basics show, our current fave, is like a reality-TV version of “Dragnet.” *VH1/Vogue Fashion Awards (Tuesday 9 pm; repeated Wednesday at 6 pm, and noon Thursday). Shows like this one offer glimpses of fashions in dress, attitude, and general pizazz that are likely to start showing up at work or school in a few months. See the future (as well as, of course, some great legs and cleavage). *A&E Biography of Steven Spielberg (Thursday at 9 pm, a 2-hour episode; repeated at 1 am). *A documentary about the conceptual artist Bruce Nauman (Ovation, Friday at 6 pm). *A one-hour Men Who Made the Movies episode about the great "women’s director" George Cukor (TCM, Friday at 7 pm). *Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (IFC 10 pm Saturday). As far as I’m concerned, David Lynch hasn’t made a good movie since “Blue Velvet.” But even the duds generally have a juicy sex scene or two. This prequel (if I remember right) to “Twin Peaks”... posted by Michael at October 14, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Sunday, October 13, 2002


Comics--That Old Time Religion
Michael, Thanks for tipping me off on the latest in the debate over the religious affiliation of super-heroes. According to a story on jewsweek.com, "Up, Up and Oy Vey," which you can read here, the discussion has been fueled by the recent "outing" of The Thing (a member of the Fantastic Four super-hero crime fighting team) as a Jew—and, apparently, a traditional one at that. The Thing Affirms His Jewish Identity--Are You Gonna Argue With Him? I first heard the argument that all super-heroes are Jews in Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.” In that novel, Clay, a Jewish teenager who goes on to become a comic-book writer, wises up his Jewish cousin Kavalier, a future comic book artist: They're all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don't think he's Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself. As quoted in the jewsweek.com story, Steven Bergson, who works at Toronto's Albert and Temmy Latner Jewish Public Library, and who moderates an Internet site dedicated to Jewish comic books (which you can see here) admits Superman's "origin story" invites a Jewish interpretation: Superman is an 'alien' immigrant, leads a double life (as Jews who passed as Gentiles did), was saved by being sent away as an infant, (with obvious parallels to both the 'Moses in the basket' story and the escape of the Jews from Germany) and his Kryptonian birth name sure sounds Jewish (Kal-El in Hebrew means 'All that is God.') The Moses of Krypton? As a religious triple threat (baptized a Roman Catholic, raised a Protestant and converted in adulthood to Judaism) and a longtime comics fan, I’d like to weigh in on this incredibly significant issue. The arguments for Superman’s Jewishness are strong, but not, I think, totally conclusive. The two Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joseph Shuster, who invented the ‘Man of Steel’ (and who are the obvious prototypes for Kavalier and Clay) appear to have been channeling other religious traditions as well. Superman is raised by a man (Pa Kent) who is not his biological father, and is brought up in a rural backwater (Smallville); moreover, this foster Son from the heavens grows up to possess miraculous, godlike powers. This is all rather reminiscent of the Christian narrative of Jesus (of course, another Jewish boy). The Iron Giant--Can a Robot Look to Superman For Spiritual Guidance? The regrettably underseen animated movie, “The Iron Giant,” is a good example of how popular culture has used Superman as a Christ-symbol. In it an alien robot of superhuman power is inspired by reading Superman comic books to sacrifice itself in order to save its adopted community. Rather touchingly, the robot mutters the single word: “Superman” under its breath just before ramming a haywire nuclear ICBM head-on in the upper atmosphere, detonating the warhead and scattering itself to the four winds. Echoes of the Buddha? And the Superman story doesn't just echo... posted by Friedrich at October 13, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Truth in Advertising redux
Michael My posting on “Truth in Advertising” received a response from one of the University of California lecturers who was quoted in the story. I thought it deserved a little more prominence than our blog format allows for comments: Dear Blowhards: I fear I must agree that, if the university had to adhere to a code of truth in advertising, the statement would have to read much as you have written it. When I hear administrators talking of students as so much "through-put" I have to wonder what has happened to education (as "educare" the leading forth of the individual). But I must distance myself from the adjunct who describes his or her teaching as mindless. I have not spent much of my "free" time over the past 3.5 years writing a book on how to teach writing because because I think my work is mindless. I have put in the time because I think the opposite. Teaching at the university level can be a very meaningful activity. I say this in spite of the fact that my working situation is horrible and in spite of the fact that the administrators of the university do not apparently share my views. I say it because I believe in education and am very sad that today's students are not being educated. Nick Tingle Do you suppose it means anything in particular that the Left criticizes academia on the grounds of racism, sexism, class warfare, etc., but emphatically not on the fact that it does its job so poorly? I could imagine a leftist sympathizing with Mr. Tingle’s working conditions, but not with his frustration with how poorly college students are educated. Speaking of which, are you aware of any aspect of human life where Leftist thought focuses on issues of execution, efficiency or methodology rather than issues of morality; on how rather than ought? Uh, oh, I better watch out…I’m starting to think like…like…like that right-wing bastard, Oakeshott! Prepare for leftist spitballs (incoming.) Cheers (while donning emergency gear) Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 13, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Art, Beauty & Fashion
Michael Thanks for sending me a copy of Dave Hickey’s 1992 book, “The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty.” I wasn’t aware of Hickey before this, but his discussions on the problematic nature of beauty in contemporary art, as well as beauty's slippery relations with politics are quite brilliant. Dave Hickey There’s hardly a single paragraph in the entire 64-page book that doesn’t convey a rather pithy insight, but given the attention I’ve been paying to the economic infrastructure of art production, I thought I'd share the following with you: I think we must acknowledge Picasson’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—a painting that we must regard either as a magnificent “formal breakthrough” (whatever that is) or, more realistically, as a manifestation of Picasso’s dazzling insight into the shifting values of his target market. I mean this seriously. Consider this scenario: Pablo comes to Paris, for all intents and purposes, a bumpkin, complete with a provincial and profoundly nineteenth-century concept of the cultural elite and its proclivities—still imagining that the rich and silly prefer to celebrate their privilege and indolence by “asetheticizing” their immediate environment into this fine-tuned, fibrillating, pastel atmosphere. He proceeds to paint his Blue and Rose period pictures under this misapprehension (pastel clowns, indeed!)—then Leo and Gertrude introduce him to a faster crowd. He meets some rich and careless Americans and, gradually, being no dummy, perceives, among the cultural elite with whom he is hanging out and perilously hanging on, a phase-shift in their parameters of self-definition. These folks are no longer building gazebos and situating symboliste Madonnas in fern-choked grottos. They are running with the bulls—something Pablo can understand—and measuring their power and security by their ability to tolerate high-velocity temporal change, high levels of symbolic distortion, and maximum psychic discontinuity. They are Americans, in other words, post-Jamesian Americans, in search of no symbolic repose, unbeguiled by haystacks, glowing peasants, or Ladies of Shallot. So Pablo Picasso—neither the first nor the last artist whom rapacious careerism will endow with acute cultural sensitivity—goes for the gold…[and] encapsulates an age… Picasso's Demoiselles: Fast Girls for a Fast Crowd? I will admit, I always wondered about Picasso's abruptness in "pulling down the curtain" on his Blue and Rose periods and making such an abrupt jump-shift into Cubism. (The rest of his career shows no such complete abandonment of former artistic concerns as he moves from one era to another.) The 'received' story of modern art has a whole series of intellectual gaps like this, and, in my opinion, needs to be complete demystified. What we all grew up reading about post-1850s art is largely a fairytale, and hooray for guys like Hickey for trying to chop his way through the underbrush of this Enchanted Forest. You can buy a copy of “The Invisible Dragon” here. For a review of another of Hickey’s books, “Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy" go here. For a March 2000 conversation with Dave Hickey and Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe on the state of contemporary painting, you can go... posted by Friedrich at October 13, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Saturday, October 12, 2002


Times Square
Friedrich Times Square: The revolution is now I can’t be the only person who’s noticed that what the early Soviet revolutionary artists envisioned has come to pass. It's visible in the architecture of the new Times Square, and it's all around us in the form of the media-and-technology networks so many of us work and play in. This became evident to me some time ago when The Wife and I attended a show in L.A. of Soviet revolutionary architectural drawings. "It's Times Square!" we whispered to each other over and over. Bewildering that more people don't recognize that what radicals have dreamed about for centuries has arrived. We have critic acquaintances, for instance, who denounce the new Times Square yet carry on as though there's something subversive about pop culture. Er, guys.... How can they miss the fact that avant-garde-ism is all-pervasive these days? In the electronic and digital universe, everything connects, everything interpenetrates, there's no gravity, linearity is a beat-up old relic, the hierarchies that haven't yet been leveled are about to be, etc etc. Listen to a CD while surfing the web, take a stroll through a shopping mall while your VCR records a show at home... Zdanevich and Tatlin would keel over in amazement and delight. Early Soviet art: The dream was then Why don't lefties recognize their dream now that it has become a reality? (My suspicion: they prefer the dream because it is a dream.) Two answers occur to me. One is that the underlying realities (birth, death, scarcity, illness, frustration, etc etc) haven't changed and never will, and that what lefties have really been protesting are the basic facts of life. They always assumed these problems would evaporate once avant-garde-ism was installed in power. Basic facts of life haven't changed? Well, then, the revolution hasn't really arrived. The second is that lefties are so accustomed to thinking of their dream as a pure thing that they don't recognize it in a (necessarily messy) incarnated form. Oooooh -- money, profits, business -- nasty. That's not a revolution. But maybe there are better explanations. Do you have one? Funny how it never seems to occur to lefties that even the revolution has to be paid for. Utopia does too. I had lunch with a friend in the Frank Gehry-designed Conde Nast lunchroom the other day, and was struck, not for the first time, by the way that Times Square represents a bringing-together of international finance, media power, avant-garde star architects, and theme park whoopee aesthetics. These elements and values are no longer in conflict. They're playing on the same team. Not enough is made of the way the most mundane pop culture these days embodies avant-garde ideals. TV commercials and rock videos are as nonlinear and unbounded as anything Godard collaged together. What producers do with techno and rap is as far-out as anything Varese or Boulez devised. OK, the new-media artifacts are pumped-up, are determined to sell sell sell, and are set to throbbing dance... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Eisenman/Oakeshott redux
Friedrich -- Sweet of you to take a look at Oakeshott's great essay, "Rationalism in Politics" (readable here) -- and you're right on the money to choose Peter Eisenman as a primo example of the "rationalist" type. (The New Urbanist Andres Duany has a go at Eisenman here.) I'm sorry I haven't been able to get more people to give Oakeshott a whirl. Reading him jolted my mind out of any number of binds I didn't know it was in, and lured me into an appreciation of many things I hadn't given enough recognition to -- evolved ways of being and doing, largely. My brain felt sharper, as it often does when wrestling with philosophy, but it also felt like it gave a series of great big yawns, and with each one settled into a deeper and more nuanced enjoyment of life. It would be hard to read the best essays in "Rationalism in Politics" (buyable here) and not get a lot out of the experience. The essays in that volume that this Oakeshott fiend recommends most fervently: "Rationalism in Politics," "The Masses in Representative Democracy," "The Political Economy of Freedom," "On Being Conservative," and "The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind." Gems all, guaranteed to set the mind a-buzzing on many, many topics. Why not enjoy pornography in private while entertaining the idea that perhaps it ought to be outlawed? Why not combine a taste for liberal economics, smaller government, a humanely conservative social gestalt, and bohemian pleasures? Why not prefer to avoid interacting too much with popular culture even while recognizing its vitality and (occasional) genius, and that it serves its functions for most people pretty efficiently? Oakeshott fuses enlightening philosophy with a sophisticated and subtle "such is life" attitude. How to beat that? Though I do remember some critics dismissing him as a crank and a dandy -- they seem to think there's no place for the aesthetic point of view in political philosophy. Me, I find any political philosophy (or economic system) that doesn't take the aesthetic point of view into account beyond unappealing. A telling Oakeshott personal detail I'm fond of: though he wasn't a believer, he enjoyed attending church services, finding them poetic and deeply moving. Incidentally, I notice that many blog-surfers are puzzled (if not incensed) by some of Andrew Sullivan's stances; they seem bewildered by the way Sullivan's positions don't cohere in a familiar way. They might find his take on the world less puzzling if they were more familiar with Oakeshott, the subject of Sullivan's college thesis. Much of what Sullivan does in his thinking is exploring territory opened up by Oakeshott. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Google Searches
Friedrich -- Fun to keep track of Google searches that have led surfers to this blog. For every one earnest and arty search string (+bertolucci +besieged +moral +analysis), there are at least ten that are grotty (+young +boys +private +parts +gay +fuck +video). Are we aiming too low? Not yet low enough? Here are some others. +sexy +nose +art +for +world +war +2 +planes +my +wife +thong +public +libertarian +woman +pose +nude +for +calendar +PowerPoint +nude +miss +italy +digital +video +of +me +and +my +wife +having +sex +white +wife +fucks +only +blacks +images +of +underage +girls +having +sex +bikini +women +with +hotrods +hot +girls +in +bikinis +posing +with +surfboards +feeling +lousy +making +love Hey, it's an X-rated country-western song! I swear, some smart reporter is going to notice this trend of guys making porno PowerPoint presentations and score a journalistic coup.... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Knowledge Loss
Friedrich -- I was talking about books with an arty guy in his early 20s who's very bright and talented. He has a project in mind, and I was pointing out a few titles he might want to peep at to see how various problems of tone and voice can be handled. After a minute, I noticed that he had a strange, mirthful-foolish expression on his face. “What’s up?” I asked. “It’s about books, I was just thinking.” “Thinking what?” “Well, I haven’t read any of the ones you’re talking about.” “You haven’t?” “I haven’t read very many old books, actually.” “But you went to a fancy, expensive, exclusive Northeastern private college. Didn’t they have you read at least a few of the great old books?” “Well, one of the profs there told me that the canon was coming apart, and since this was probably a good thing, I didn’t have to worry about reading any of the great old books. He told me not to worry about it. So I didn’t.” Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads – Oakeshott redux
Michael I’ve been turning over the essay you recommended in your posting, Michael Oakeshott’s 1947 essay, “Rationalism in Politics." As I believe you pointed out somewhere, this “Portrait of the Rationalist as a Young Politician” describes a human type which has not limited its activities to politics. In fact, I came across a description of this human type in action while reading a story in October 10’s New York Times, “White Elephant in Vermont Reincarnated.” The individual in question is an architect, Peter Eisenman. What struck me, frankly, was the astonishing accuracy with which Oakeshott had described the life, work and mentality of a man who was only 15 at the time this essay was published. Peter Eisenman: The Rationalist The NY Times story depicts how a retired furniture manufacturer, John Makau, searching for a lot on which to build a summer home near Sugarbush, Vermont, spotted the unusual house, designed by Mr. Eisenman. Upon making inquiries, he discovered the house had been vacant and on the market for years. He bought it and began renovations, only learning by accident that it was rather famous in architectural circles. According to the Times: [The abandoned home] was one of a series of 10 designs [by Peter Eisenman], of which four were built…The four houses were legendary experiments in pure theory rendered on a domestic scale with notoriously mixed results. “This was Eisenman’s first freestanding building, and it was a kickoff project,” said Joseph Rosa, the Helen Hilton Raiser curator of architecture and design at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “He was helping architecture rethink itself and become self-critical [emphasis added].” Oakeshott: To the Rationalist, nothing is of value merely because it exists (and certainly not because it has existed for many generations), familiarity has no worth, and nothing is to be left standing for want of scrutiny. Consider the couple who commissioned House II, Florence Falk, now a psychologist in Manhattan, and Richard Falk, an emeritus professor of international law at Princeton. The Falks and Peter Eisenman started talking at a Princeton cocktail party in the late 1960s. Mr. Eisenman was then known for contentious, densely written architectural manifestoes. He had completed one project, an addition to an existing Princeton residence, which he called House I. Mr. Eisenman and Mr. Falk shared an interest in Noam Chomsky’s theories of language and mused about Mr. Eisenman called a Chomskyesque house. “I don’t know what it meant,” Mr. Falk said in a recent interview, “but it sounded good.” [Emphasis added.] Oakeshott: [The Rationalist’s] circumstances in the modern world have made him contentious: he is the enemy of authority, of prejudice, of the merely traditional, customary or habitual. The Falks had purchased an old dairy farm in Hardwick [Vermont] for $22,000; Mr. Eisenman suggested they tear down the house and erect a Chomskyesque successor. [Emphasis added] Oakeshott: …[The Rationalist’s] disposition makes both destruction and creation easier for him to understand and engage in, than acceptance or reform. Mr. Eisenman said: “I worked... posted by Friedrich at October 12, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, October 11, 2002


New Cultureblog
Friedrich -- A delightful discovery, "Out of Lascaux," an art-history cultureblog run by Alexandra, whose last name I don't know, here. Sample passage: As a kid, I used to think medieval art was ugly because it wasn't "realistic". I think most of us think that way when we're young. Then, we grow up and learn why things are the way they are and we look at life differently. Well, most of us. But now I love medieval art, especially Gothic art. Alexandra's list of permalinks includes some promising-looking blogs -- more to explore! One of these days the 2blowhards, computer mediocrities both, will figure out how to add new blogsites to our own list of permalinks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Poussin
Friedrich -- A couple of terrific, oh-so-true pieces about Poussin: Karen Wilkin in The New Criterion, here, and Robert Hughes in Time, here. Sample passage from Wilkin: There’s a wonderful loosening of contour— without any weakening of form—in Poussin’s drawings, an invigorating openness quite unlike the sculptural, closed delineation of his paintings, that is especially appealing to twentieth-century eyes. Even more accessible to modern taste are the brushy drawings where tone all but drowns line and only a few, telling islands of untouched paper remain to suggest form and mass. Sample passage from Hughes: "Questo giovane ha una furia del diavolo," remarked Marino, introducing him to one Roman patron - This young man has the fury of a devil. Furia didn't simply mean rage; it suggested a state of inspiration, of contact with primeval forces that lie below the surface of culture...Poussin wanted to reconstitute antiquity in his paintings by grasping its root: energy. Always in his best work there are the signs of overflowing vitality, constrained by form's superego, the mode - tragic, idyllic, epic, sacred. I'm not crazy in seeing technical similarities between Poussin and Frank Miller, am I? The limited number of values, the relative absence of line and the almost-total dependence on tone and shadow to delineate mass and form, the way the areas of light and dark are so often, as Wilkin points out, open .... Of course, their work couldn't be more different in terms of feel. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Marriage
Friedrich -- Remember how common it used to be for people to claim that, while marriage was good for men (calmed 'em down, helped 'em live longer, etc.), it wasn't good for women? This has been conventional wisdom for 30ish years. It now turns out that this conventional wisdom is wrong. It was based on one book, Jessie Bernard's 1972 "The Future of Marriage." And a careful study of her assertions, using a wide range of Australian women, shows that marriage is as good for women as it is for men, and in exactly the same ways. Anne Manne explains all in The Age, here. Thanks to View from the Right, here, for the link. Sample passage: A new study for the Australian Institute of Family Studies, by sociologist David De Vaus, shows that almost none of the propositions about the toxic nature of marriage for women stand up in the light of contemporary data...Being single is the strongest risk factor for mental health problems for both sexes. Singles, whether never married, separated or divorced, have much higher rates of mental distress than married people. In related news, Steve Sailer (here) points to a new Gallup poll that highlights differences in voting patterns between single and married people. Sailer summarizes the findings this way: Gallup's new poll on the Congressional elections shows an enormous gap between unmarried women (who favor the Democrats 68%-32%) and married women (who favor the Republicans 58%-42%). Married women are now more Republican than married men (who prefer the GOP 54%-46%). Married people (of either sex) with children go GOP 59%-41%. Let's see: married women are happier, healthier, and vote GOP. Unmarried women are more prone to mental problems, and vote for Democrats. Hmmm. What to make of this? Say, do you suppose anyone has brought any of this news to the gals of "Sex in the City"? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Frank Miller
Friedrich -- I know I'm 15 years late arriving at this particular party, but: have you ever looked at the graphic novels of the artist/writer Frank Miller? He's probably best-known for "The Dark Knight Returns," an operatic Batman epic that was the visual basis for Tim Burton's "Batman" and is often said to be one of the best of all superhero graphic novels. I tried "Dark Knight" years ago and wasn't much taken with it. But the other day I read an installment of his "Sin City" series, and flipped for it. (By the way, does one "read" or "look at" a graphic novel? I wonder if it's best to say one "goes through" such a mixed-media thing?) The story was passable romantic-downbeat urban noir, but the visuals were beyond fabulous: lurid, and trippy-intense. And the pyrotechnics! The entire book is done in black and white (no in-between values at all), but the variety of effects he gets -- from the individual frames, as well as the page-compositions and sequencing -- is amazing. A breath-taking high-wire act; I was giggling and gasping all the way through. Sweet Dreams: Frank Miller, Poussin, "The Matrix" Despite the fact that I'd recently seen a wonderful museum show of French drawings from the 1500s and 1600s (mucho Poussin, who I adore), and despite the fact that the same day I read "Sin City," The Wife and I re-watched "The Matrix" (which we adore) -- despite competing with these two powerful visual experiences, Frank Miller's visuals dominated my dreams. That night, I dreamt in Frank Miller. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Jenna
Friedrich -- Are you a fan of the porn star Jenna Jameson? She's an interesting figure, very entrepreneurial and in-charge. Many women like her and her videos, especially "Dreamquest," which is full of fairies, elves, chiffon, and sparkly things. There's nothing about Jenna that suggests the victim, and she's mischievous and rowdy, but in a cute way. It may be key that, despite how explicit her videos get, she holds a little something back. She seldom takes it up the butt onscreen; she seems to prefer doing scenes with other girls; and she limits the number of Jenna videos released each year. In other words, she keeps her fans a little hungry -- smart girl! Jenna has become a kind of you-go-girl role model for the young and the sexually out-there; according to South Africa's Sunday Times, Britney Spears is such a fan of Jenna's work that the two have become friends. The story is readable here. Jenna's also the most popular porn star in history. If you look at her early videos, you can see why: she's very cute, has some sweetness and a lot of personality, moves like a dancer, and often seems genuinely into the sex (ie., not in the usual bored/over-enthusiastic way). Her more recent videos are less pleasing. Her skills and talents are what they always were, and her personality and responsiveness don't seem to have grown jaded. But she's gotten way too much plastic surgery, and these days looks like just another overly-Photoshopped flashy blonde. Physically, she's no longer as enticingly idiosyncratic as she used to be. But the Jenna phenom just keeps rolling along. She's become her own producer, and mentors younger porn stars. And now, this press release just in: New York, NY (October 11, 2002) -- ReganBooks, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced today that it has secured world rights to a new book by the world's leading adult film star Jenna Jameson entitled HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR. In a steamy, fun, and intimate guide, Jenna Jameson takes readers on-set, on-stage, in the bedroom, backstage at the strip club, and more, using her life experiences as the framework for an explicit how-to on achieving a love life like hers. HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR will bring Jameson's sexual education in the adult entertainment industry out from behind closed doors and into bedrooms everywhere. Whether you want to learn to make love to a man or a woman, Jenna will show you how. With detailed instructions for acts of love and lust ranging from strip tease to oral sex, HOW TO MAKE LOVE LIKE A PORN STAR leaves no pleasure unexplored. In the section, "The Wicked One," you'll learn everything from how to accommodate extra large penises to light bondage and how to properly drip candle wax on each other. In another section, "Silver Screen Confidential," you'll not only learn how to dress the part, but what scenarios to use to let your inner porn... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Crunchy Cons -- Redux unto exhaustion
Friedrich -- NRO is going hog-wild with the Crunchy Cons controversy. Who'd have expected the topic to generate any controversy at all? Jonah Goldberg, here and here, attacks; Rod Dreher, here, defends. The battle continues in The Corner, here, NRO's gangblog. National Review must be pleased -- we in the media biz consider it a triumph when tussles over an "issue" turn into a professional wrestling match. I do wish, though, that I could make sense of Goldberg's objections. If you can, would you enlighten me? Sample Goldberg passage: Crunchy conservatism reeks with the implication that mainstream conservatives really are the caricatures and stereotypes the left claims. Again, I don't think it was Rod's intent, but I can see many young and overly iconoclastic conservatives buying into this entirely superficial distinction between "crunchy" cons and "normal" cons and thereby join the chorus of critics who say conservatism is really just a bunch of slogans and lock-step tastes. And I think it was a mistake for National Review to make their job any easier. Sample Dreher passage: As Jonah points out, it's not exactly news that there are and have always been conservatives critical of the destruction capitalism wreaks on institutions. But that is not the impression you would get from the media (for obvious reasons), and that is certainly not the impression I think many rank-and-file conservatives have about the movement. Conservatives can be quite politically correct within their own circles. My intent with the crunchy-con article was not to restrict the definition of conservative, but to expand the popular understanding of it by highlighting a subset of conservatives who perceive themselves as different from the conservative mainstream, but still well within the same philosophical tradition. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Amiri Baraka rereredux
Friedrich -- John Derbyshire is dryly amusing on Amiri Baraka in today's National Review Online, achieving his effects by pretending to take Baraka's poem seriously as poetry, here. Sample passage: Mere historical truth is of course beneath the notice of a poetic genius like Amiri Baraka. If you actually try answering some of his questions, in fact, you get into some very confusing terrain. "Who killed the most Africans?" Other Africans, without any doubt. Tribal warfare has been endemic in Africa since remote antiquity, except for the few brief decades when European colonizers suppressed it. "Who bought the slaves, who sold them?" Same answer, mostly. Every single pre-colonial African society was slave-owning, and some post-colonial ones have resumed the tradition. "Who killed Malcolm?" Some black radicals he'd fallen out with. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 11, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, October 10, 2002


Free Reads -- Vernon Smith
Friedrich -- Mike Lynch and Nick Gillespie interview the brand-new economics Nobelist, Vernon Smith, here. Smith is known as the pioneer of "experimental economics" -- testing economic assumptions and models by setting up experiments involving actual human beings. Sample passage: People work out exchange systems that are not necessarily related to formal law. If you read [economist] F.A. Hayek, you know that the early lawgivers were not people who made law. They just wrote down the existing practices.... It's "discovered law." "Made law" starts to come in later. Of course, not every transaction is local or face-to-face. That's why you need more formal markets and property rights. What's the old saying? "Everything for a friend, nothing for an enemy, and the law for strangers." Property rights and markets help to extend the gains from trade to strangers by ensuring payment or ensuring delivery. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Matt Welch
Friedrich -- Matt Welch in the National Post discusses globalization, politics, subsidies, tax breaks and film production. It's a good snapshot of some of the conditions under which movies get made, readable here. (Thanks to bitter-girl.com for the link.) Sample passage: Southern California, especially the commercial strips on either side of the Hollywood Hills, is overrun with freelancers who work on movies, television shows and commercials. They toil long hours in concentrated bursts, then are idle for weeks at a time. Once they gather the thousands of dollars necessary to join their relevant union, they make a handsome amount of money; until then, they chase after a shrinking pool of poorly paid non-union jobs, and make up the difference waiting tables or tending bar. It is a peculiar system, but it has worked fairly well for nearly a century. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Self-Esteem Redux
Friedrich -- Andrew Sullivan has a good time connecting Robert Torricelli's resignation from the NJ Senate race and the recent announcement that self-esteem can be a bad thing, here. Sample passage: Friends of mine who teach today's college students are constantly complaining about the high self-esteem of their students. When the kids have been told from Day One that they can do no wrong, when every grade in high school is assessed so as to make the kid feel good, rather than to give an accurate measure of his work, the student can develop self-worth dangerously unrelated to the objective truth. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Philip Roth Reredux
Friedrich -- Funny rant about the incoherence of visual people, thanks. A professor I know who has to teach aesthetics to visual-arts majors tells me there's no way to get his students thinking intellectually in an even semi-organized fashion. "They're hopeless," he says, rolling his eyes. And a painter I know (that rarity -- a bright one) tells me the French have an expression, "Bete comme un peintre" ("stupid like a painter"). I find visual people to be in many ways like performers -- talented, rarely gifted with much in the way of intellect, and full of meaningless chatter, which is, however, interrupted now and then by brilliantly helpful, offhand observations and statements. Like performers, they seem to have no idea when they're being idiotic and when they're being insightful. Listening to them is a peculiar experience, something like this: babble babble bab AmazinglyInsightfulObservation babble babble bab. But I'm sometimes charmed by their silliness, their sense of style, and the way they feel so very strongly about how things should look. Even the babble, properly edited, has its pleasures. Degas, for instance: what an amusingly stylish gruff bastard. A couple of excerpts from Degas' letters: No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and the study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament ... I know nothing. Everyone has talent at twenty-five. The difficulty is to have it at fifty. Cranky Bastard Is there anything to what he says? Maybe. What I mostly like is the way the words, the thoughts, the attitude, the pickiness, and the sheer Frenchiness all snap into place. Ker-thwam. I find his little sayings as pleasing as good jokes. On the other hand, phew, can visual people radiate "attitude" or what. Why are so many of them so prone to do this? The artier types in the media world, and the arty types in the art-gallery world, can out-disagreeable and out-snoot the worst country-club snobs. My best shot at an explanation runs along these lines: they aren't smart, they are stylish, there's a natural tendency to cluster with people who are kinda like you and once there to look down on outsiders...This line of reasoning suggests that visual people are very insecure -- perhaps about having such lousy verbal skills? Perhaps they deal with their vulnerability about not being very smart by over-doing the visual-style snobbery. What are your former-art-student thoughts about this? Complicating matters a bit, I notice that people who go into commercial illustration and graphics are often funny, bright, irreverent and pleasant -- they're like the kids in the back row who throw spitballs. I once asked a few of them about this, and was told that many of them grew up loving (and drawing) comic books, and either never went to art school or tried it and dropped out. So: An art school education equals "attitude"? Growing up on comic books equals "likable irreverence"? It's a theory, anyway. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Female Gaze
Michael I was driving down the road the other day when I passed a bus shelter and spotted the following Bebe ad. Eye Catching? (By the way, all the pictures in this posting are pop-ups, and it helps to click on them so you can see them in more detail.) From my not-very-well informed point of view, fashion ads seem to divide into two overlapping, but essentially independent camps: one aims at making women attractive to men, and the second provides fashionable women with firepower in their struggle to demonstrate superior taste. Frankly I look at ads from the first camp and ignore the ads from the second camp. Bebe, being emphatically in the first camp, tends to get my attention. But there was something about this particular ad that caught my eye. (And I assure you, the fact that the girl was managing to display her face, her breasts and her thighs had nothing to do with my interest. I am shocked, simply shocked that anyone would suspect me of such impure motives!) Regrettably, having only 1.7 nanoseconds to look at the ad, I couldn't study it at the length it so obviously deserved. It left me with an impression suggesting a narrative or dramatic context (i.e., the girl seemed a tad flustered getting ready to go out on a big night on the town.) But that didn’t entirely explain my feeling that I was seeing something relatively new here, something that had unusual echoes. So when I got back home I picked up some of my daughter’s/wife’s fashion magazines and started checking out the ads. They seemed to divide, relatively straightforwardly, into the following categories: 1. Direct Eye Contact Category #1 is the most common, with one or more models making direct eye contact. This replicates the effect of trying clothes on before a mirror. 2. Avoiding Eye Contact Category #2 involves a female model avoiding eye contact. Here you're supposed to look at something on the model, as if on a mannikin. Generally used for jewelry, skin care ads, hair care ads, etc. 3. Radiantly Happy In Category #3, we generally have one female model making direct eye contact, while looking radiantly happy. This foreshadows what a shopper will see in the mirror after she tries the product. (This is a sort of old-fashioned ad strategy and is never used by products attempting to create a high status impression. Apparently, very high status women are never radiantly happy or at least never allow other women to catch them at it.) 4. Everyone's Looking At Me (Including Me)! Category #4 involves one female model looking directly at the camera while other models (usually men) stare at her. This reproduces the common experience of fashionable women who constantly check themselves out in store windows and mirrors while in the presence of other people. 5. Love the Life You Lead, Lead the Life You Love In Category #5, a more rarely used strategy, we have multiple models (usually male and... posted by Friedrich at October 10, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, October 9, 2002


Free Reads--Philip Roth redux
Michael In your posting “Free Reads—Philip Roth” you comment that “a gift for writing fiction has nothing whatever to do with the ability to reason and make sense of things.” I would guess that Roy Lichtenstein would agree with you, if you would extend your comment to the visual arts and to the ability to make sense of things—verbally. In Michael Kimmelman’s book, “Portraits,” he talks with Roy Lichtenstein as they walk around the Metropolitan Museum of art: Lichtenstein settles finally on a group of Ellsworth Kellys: a tall standing steel sculpture, nearly rectangular, and two shaped canvases, one of them all blue. Ellsworth Kelly (from nature?) [Lichtenstein:] ‘[The Kelly painting] is the ultimate in color intensity. It’s entirely about the relationship between color and shape. There’s no modulation of color. Modulation is usually read as atmosphere, it gives you a sense of recession. But here you don’t have that, there’s no illusion, which turns the picture into a thing, the opposite of a window. It’s like a sculpture that just happens to be on the wall. I know Ellsworth says it comes from nature. But I don’t know why you’d want to say this, because art relates to perception, not nature. All abstract artists try to tell you that what they do comes from nature, and I’m always trying to tell you that what I do is completely abstract. We’re both saying something we want to be true. I don’t think artists like myself, or Ellsworth, have the faintest idea what we’re doing, but we try to put it words that sound logical. Actually’—Lichtenstein grins—‘I think I do what I’m doing. But no other artist does.’ Roy Lichtenstein (pure abstraction?) An excellent example, I think, of why art needs to reference a tradition of meaning outside itself. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Been there, Done That Redux
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your rant about Paul Goldberger’s review of the Times Square Westin. Goldberger’s an odd critic (as I noted in a posting, here, about his review of the new L.A. cathedral), often on the verge of taking a shot at orthodoxy, then retreating straight back into it. He may believe what he writes; he may also suspect that if he were to blow the alarm on the hoax that is most new architecture he’d soon be out of a job. Like you, I enjoy sounding off about bad new buildings. (The Wife doesn't share my passion, but puts up with it graciously.) I wonder what it is that’s so satisfying about lambasting awful architecture. Its generally public nature? A bad building is an offense not just against individual taste, but against users, passersby, even entire neighborhoods. Is it the ponderous self-importance of the architecture establishment? Various malcontent architects have told me that there was a brief moment in the early 1990s when it looked as if the Kremlins of architecture taste were finally going to throw open their doors. Then the doors slammed shut once more, and they have been locked ever since. These days, I know of only three schools (Syracuse, Miami, and Notre Dame) that teach anything but mainstream modernist-postmodernist dogma. You write that you first saw through the propaganda of modernism when you wrestled with architecture in college. Sorry to say that I woke up somewhat later, but it was also while wrestling with architecture that it happened. I remember (to my shame) reacting indignantly the first time I read Tom Wolfe’s From Bauhaus to Our House (buyable here). Well, I huffed, he has some points, but he just doesn’t really know what he’s talking about, blah blah. I knew a bit about architecture history, see, and clearly Wolfe didn’t get it. Then I learned much more about architecture history, re-read the book, and realized that Wolfe had indeed gotten it. He’s deliberately provocative, and he cartoon-ifies everything he touches. But his main point isn't just perfectly valid, it's key to understanding what's happened to cities and buildings in this country over the last 50 years. The two cents that I’d try to add to the discussion is that it doesn’t hurt to be wary of the rhetoric of postmodernism, which poses as a playful rebellion against modernism but which in practice turns out to be an extension of it. Postmodernism can be just as academic and imposed-from-above as the worst modernism. I'm pleased, for instance, that Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown (godparents of postmodernism) think architects should pay attention to the American strip. Big of them! But I find the buildings that they've built at Our Lousy Ivy College as stuffy and shallow as a building with lots of goofy brickwork can be. I mean, decoration's nice, but a shoebox is still a shoebox. Venturi and Scott Brown's Lewis Thomas Building The most entertaining and useful critiques of the modernist-postmodern mafia... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- John McWhorter
Friedrich -- Have you run across the writing of John McWhorter? A Berkeley prof of linguistics who writes commentary about black/white American racial issues, and one of the freshest voices on the topic I’ve encountered recently. He dares, for instance, to suggest that while racism hasn’t entirely vanished, it’s no longer the main factor holding blacks back. The civil-rights establishment isn't pleased -- what fun! McWhorter has written (for the New York Post) the best sum-up of the Amiri Baraka-9/11-NJ-poet-laureate debacle that I’ve come across, readable here. Sample passage: Stringing together visceral ejaculations does not make one a serious poet, regardless of race. This is clear to everyone when the writer is white. But a sentiment reigns, especially in academic and artistic circles, that the rules of the game are different when it comes to black people. He's best-known for his book "Losing the Race: Black Self-Sabotage in America." But there's lots of McWhorter to be enjoyed online. The Manhattan Institute's website provides a list of links here. I've stumbled across a side of McWhorter that I haven't seen mentioned any place else, which is that (unless someone's perpetrating a hoax) he's an avid customer-reviewer on Amazon, with a marked interest in musical comedy. You can check out his likes and dislikes here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Orchestras in Crisis
Friedrich -- Robert H. Hughes in The Wall Street Journal (online, but you have to subscribe) reports that big-city symphony orchestras are undergoing a terrible financial crisis. They're really feeling the current business crunch. "Nearly a dozen cities' symphonies are operating six figures or more in the red," Hughes writes. Programming and salaries have been cut, seasons have been shortened, and a few orchestras have closed up shop. All this, despite the fact that attendance grew 16% during the 1990s. Further interesting facts: income from ticket sales accounts for only 38% of the revenues of the big orchestras. (Other main sources of income: endowments, gifts, government funding.) Classical-CD sales are shrinking. And the number of commercial radio stations devoted to classical has shrunk from 50 to 32 in the last decade. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Ron Rosenbaum
Friedrich -- Ron Rosenbaum grew up reading The Nation, but these days he's feeling pretty disenchanted with the Left. In the New York Observer, he tells us why, here. Sample passage: It’s important that America have an intelligent opposition, with a critique not dependent on knee-jerk, neo-Marxist idiocy. And it’s important that potential constituents of that opposition, like Nation readers, be exposed to a brilliant dissenter like Christopher Hitchens. And the level of idiocy one finds in knee-jerk Left oppositionalism is sometimes astonishing. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Philosophy and Literature
Friedrich -- I'm a few days behind on this, but I thought I'd let you know that the wonderful, indispensable, best-of-the-web, [enter superlative here] Arts & Letters Daily is no more, apparently done in by legal/financial/who-can-figure challenges. But I'm thrilled to report that the brains behind ALD, Denis Dutton and Tran Huu Dung, have kicked off a brand-new site that promises to be at least as good as Arts & Letters Daily. It's called Philosophy and Literature, and you can find it here. It's already looking like the [enter superlative here] thing on the Web. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, October 8, 2002


Policy break
Michael Of course, just because I told you to check out "Prospect" doesn't mean I agree with everything in it. After browsing through it, I must admit I don't. Nonetheless, it is always interesting to have a look at the views of those on the other side of the argument. For example, take Anatol Lieven's article, "The end of the west?" Mr. Lieven argues that if the U.S. goes to war against Iraq in alliance with Israel, really, really bad things will happen, particularly to the "West"--i.e., the U.S.-European political alliance. Israel is something of a bugaboo for Mr. Lieven. He seems to take seriously the theory that Israel, through the Jewish lobby, controls U.S. foreign policy. According to Lieven: ...thanks to support from the US, Israel has become a kind of superpower, able to defy its entire region and Europe too. This is an untenable situation. Israel is not a superpower. It is rich and powerful, but it is still a small middle eastern country which will have to seek accommodations with its neighbours if it is to live in peace. I wonder what accommodations Mr. Lieven has in mind--jumping in the sea? Mass suicide? Conversion to Islam? He makes no direct mention of the three defensive wars the Israelis have had to fight with their neighbors during the time Europe has sat protected by American military power. He does, however, describe Israel's claim to the West Bank as a result of military victory as the sort of claim that "Milosevic and his henchmen" would have made, had they triumphed. Apparently the difference between Israel acting in self-defense and Milosevic performing ethnic cleansing is too unimportant for Mr. Lieven to take notice of. Arab Invasion Routes into Israel & Israeli Counter-Attacks, 1948 Do you suppose that for Mr. Lieven, Israel acting like a superpower is untenable because the damned upstarts won't bow to Europe? Frankly, the whole European-American "fight" over Israel seems to ultimately derive from European resentment of its own second-class citizenship in world affairs. As the French ambassador to Britain so eloquently put it, Israel is a "shitty little country" which should come and heel when Europe whistles. (I mean, if you can't order around a "shitty little country" then what are you, exactly?) I keep hearing that Europeans believe that America really needs Europe because it needs their troops as peacekeepers when the American soldiers are finished fighting. I've also heard threats (which are repeated by Mr. Lieven) that European countries could refuse to allow Americans to use the Nato logistical facilities (which the Americans paid for and built to defend Europe from the Soviet Union) to support their attack on Iraq. Both strike me as revelations chiefly of a massive European inferiority complex and its attendant hostility. As I've said before, it's always good (if not always pleasant) to know the score in these difficult international situations. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 8, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

A Prospect on Prospect
Michael I guess I gotta get down to my local magazine stand a bit more often. Hunting around for something to read at my dental appointment (don't get me wrong, my dentist is a great guy, but his taste in magazines is not mine), I came across a magazine I haven't noticed before called "Prospect." It's a U.K. mag (my copy came with a large and rather strange sticker marked "Printed in England" stuck on it) which carries the subhead: "Politics - Essays - Argument" and, rather astonishingly, delivers. All you hipsters who are on to "Prospect" can feel free to giggle at my insularity right now, but if, like me, you haven't tried this yet, I would recommend it. A sample quote from "Death of An Idea" by Julian Baggini: ...most of 20th-century Anglo-american analytic philosophy--perhaps the least postmodern alcove in academia--has been based on a rejection of grand systems, such as those of Kant, Hegel and Marx. In its place has been a piecemeal approach to philosophy that is as much opposed to grand narratives as post-modernism. Nor is the rejection of absolute truth the hallmark of a distinct philosophy. There are many ways to be a relativist, not all of them intellectually disgraceful, as Jonathan Ree has recently pointed out in these pages. We cannot locate a philosophy that lies behind these various postmodern positions because there isn't one. What is worse, when people do try to make the lead from postmodernism as a social or cultural phenomenon to post-modernism as a philosophy, they tend to make basic mistakes. If you want to check out the "Prospect" website, you can do so here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 8, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Definitions -- "Liberal"
Friedrich -- However gloomy I can get about whither-the-modern-world, I sometimes remember what a great time it is too. One up-to-date thing especially worth celebrating is the way many of the old thought-and-idea-monopolies are breaking up. In honor of this process – and, in my small way, to hasten it along -- I want to kick off a new rubric, “Definitions.” There are words that various elites (many of them leftish) own, among them: art, architecture, environmentalism, feminism, beauty, pleasure. Why let that continue? For my first installment, I’m taking on the word “liberal.” There’s a lot of confusion around the word, and the Left profits from that confusion. Liberal, liberal… Many Americans think “liberal” and automatically think “Democratic.” Yet I suspect many of these people get dismayed when they look around the land of the Democrats. What a long list of policies you’re expected to endorse! And how nutty many of them seem – affirmative action, for example. What’s liberal about advocating racial discrimination? And how fervent and exacting the left can be! Sheesh: Fail to go along with their entire program and you find yourself anathematized, thrown out and told that you aren’t really a liberal. Yet you still feel like a liberal person… One of the tricky things about "liberal" is that it’s just such a damned attractive word. It’s nice to think of yourself as being a liberal person. “I don’t care if my neighbor’s gay” equals “Thus I’m a liberal.” Sure, why not? But there’s a tendency to extrapolate from that, and that's where the trouble begins: being a liberal person, you want to root for the team that calls itself the liberals. And you get sucked in, because “liberal,” in current American practice, means “Democrat.” And there you are, back in the world of racial quotas, love of bureaucracy and regulations, warring ideals, and dictated and policed outcomes. But lord knows you’re anything but a conservative, heaven forbid… The mistake here – one I was prone to for years myself – is to scramble the general sense of the word with its specifically political sense. Pry these two meanings apart, and -- ahhh -- the brain gives a big sigh of relief. What many people – who, bless them, have better things to do with their lives than fuss with this kind of nitpicking research – may not realize is that “liberal” in the contemporary American-politics sense means not just the opposite of what the word means in a dictionary sense, but more or less the opposite of what it initially meant in a political sense. In other words, if you have the impression that many of the Americans who call themselves liberal are mighty intolerant, you’re absolutely right. A brief examination of the word and its meanings. The dictionary definition of “liberal” taken in its non-political sense is exactly what most people assume it is: the word basically means broad-minded and generous. Then there’s the political meaning of “liberal.” And here’s the surprise:... posted by Michael at October 8, 2002 | perma-link | (6) comments

Monday, October 7, 2002


Been there, done that
Michael I was glancing through the New Yorker of October 7 when I happened to notice the headline: “Miami Vice: Is this the ugliest building in New York?” I was intrigued, as I keep a special place in my heart for architectural theory. It was in an architecture class that I first rebelled against the authority of Modernism, which in the early 1970s lay like a frigid, crushing ice sheet across the aesthetic landscape. The ugliest building in New York? So I checked out Paul Goldberger’s review, eager to see where ‘educated’ opinion had gotten to in the intervening thirty years. Did that headline promise a postmodern rave, or some new-urbanist critique? At the beginning, I couldn’t exactly tell: The forty-five-story Westin is the most garish tall building that has gone up in New York in as long as I can remember. It is fascinating, if only because it makes Times Square vulgar in a whole new way, extending up into the sky…This is less a building than a concept, and you can imagine it being pitched to the developer, Tishman Realty & Construction, the way producers pitch a television show to network executives… Yes, yes, Mr. Goldberger, but does that mean you like it or not? (I assume a postmodernist would think those were all good things.) I manfully stuck with the review, hoping to get my question answered. Goldberger was spending a lot of ink on the way the Westin’s tower was divided vertically into two parts by a curving white stripe, the taller half clad in vertical blue glass and a shorter half clad in horizontal pink glass. Finally he got down to brass tacks: [I]t makes no sense to design a single building to look as if it were two different, clashing buildings. The two parts aren’t different structurally and they aren’t doing different things inside…It’s all pretense—not the kind of pretense that brings us fake Georgian or fake Renaissance but the pretense that the hoopla is somehow connected to a meaningful architectural idea. Everything [the architectural design firm] Arquitectonica has done here is as superficially decorative as if the building had been sheathed in classical columns and pilasters. I sat up straight when I read that one. He was actually accusing the design of failing to obey the High Modernist commandment: Form Shall Follow Function. And it was not sinning venially (“the kind of pretense that brings us fake Georgian or fake Renaissance,”) it was sinning mortally by calling into doubt the True Faith (“that the hoopla is somehow connected to a meaningful architectural idea” [emphasis added]). He must be really outraged: he even compared the design to the perennial 'bad example' of modernism, Beaux Art classicism. Superficially decorative or just plain ugly? Just as I had pegged Mr. Goldberger as an unreconstructed Modernist (hey, there's no accounting for taste), he pulled a fast one on me. Moving on from the tower, he turns to the building’s “bustle”, the 13-story entertainment complex fronting on Times... posted by Friedrich at October 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Sunday, October 6, 2002


Short Stuff
Michael Two headlines from the NY Times of October 5: Jury Sets Punitive Damages at $28 Billion for Smoker I understand about the dangers of second-hand smoke, but it still seems a bit excessive. I.R.S. Offers Deals on Tax Shelters In a down market, you gotta do what it takes to move the merchandise. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 6, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Parental Discretion Advised
Michael You’ve asked me what it’s like to be a parent in today’s sexually saturated environment. Well, let’s just say it’s kind of tricky. My adolescence left me with decidedly ambiguous attitudes about how parents should deal with their teenage children’s sexuality. My parents tried to bravely overlook my very existence as a sexual being, although somehow they communicated that if I got some girl into trouble there would be hell to pay, mister. (They needn’t have worried: the spectacle of watching them fight regularly as clockwork every Sunday afternoon in combination with my own stupifying clumsiness with the opposite sex was the best birth control method ever contrived.) While the resulting lack of unplanned pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases during my teenage years was undoubtedly a good thing, this approach did leave me mystified as to how they expected me to ever make them grandparents. So I have a certain inner tension when confronted with sexually charged material in the presence of my children—a confrontation that occurs every morning. I drive my teenage daughter and a friend to school, and they insist on listening to a Top-40 radio station that has some fairly explicit material on it. My mental advice to the musicians and the diskjockey tends to be: Hey, sex is great, guys, without it none of us would be here, but please remember that around adolescents this stuff is like high-explosive Brylcreem—a little dab’ll do ya. Dispenser of High-Explosive Brylcreem The other day my parental hackles started to rise when the lyrics from Nelly’s song “Hot in Herre” floated out of my radio speaker: Nelly: I was like, good gracious, ass bodacious Flirtatious, tryin’ to show patience Lookin’ for the right time to shoot my steam (you know) My trigger finger was itching to find the channel changer when the “hook” suddenly came on: Nelly: I said: It’s gettin’ hot in here (so hot) So take off all your clothes Which, I will grant you, is kind of funny; but the real kicker was the next line: Docile chorus of female singers: I am gettin’ so hot, I wanna take my clothes off At this point I relaxed—false alarm. It was obvious that we had crossed the line from discussing any aspect of reality and entered into the oldest male fantasy in the book: being able to control a woman and make her do just what you want her to, with no fuss or muss. I looked over at my daughter, who presents a placid, easy-going exterior to the world, while actually possessing a will of iron (which she inherits from her knows-her-own-mind-thank-you-very-much mother.) Platinum-selling artists the world over could try lines like this on my daughter for years without ever once getting her to coo obediently “I am getting so hot, I wanna take my clothes off.” Frankly, once I listened closely, I realized that even the girls getting paid to sing this nonsense on the radio were managing to do it without a shred of... posted by Friedrich at October 6, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Arts in the Moonlight Re-redux
Michael In your posting, Arts in the Moonlight redux, you ask: I wonder how the NEA decides which artists who make little or no money at their art qualify to be called “professional artists.” Is it a matter of holding a degree of a certain sort? Of making a certain amount of money from art? If so, where is the line drawn? And why there? According to the NEA, their information came from the monthly Current Population Survey (“CPS”) data files. This survey is a joint product of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of the Census; it is described on the CPS website, (which you can visit here): The Current Population Survey (CPS) is a monthly survey of about 50,000 households conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics...The CPS is the primary source of information on the labor force characteristics of the U.S. population…Estimates obtained from the CPS include employment, unemployment, earnings, hours of work, and other indicators. They are available by a variety of demographic characteristics including age, sex, race, marital status, and educational attainment. They are also available by occupation, industry, and class of worker. In short, for the purposes of the CPS (and thus the NEA study), a worker is a professional artist if he says he is. It appears that the CPS offers survey respondents a very long list of occupations to select among, including the following “artistic” categories: architects, designers, musicians and composers, actors and directors, dancers, announcers, painters, sculptors, craft artists, artist printmakers, photographers, authors, college and university teachers of art/drama/music, and artists not elsewhere classified (no doubt we bloggers could squeeze into this last category.) A “moonlighting” artist is a person who lists their “main” occupation as one of the above and also holds down a second job. This second job may or may not also be artistic although apparently the second job is more likely to be non-artistic today than in the past. Sorry if I was unclear on this significant point. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 6, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Saturday, October 5, 2002


Truth in Advertising
Michael The L.A. Times on October 5 published some letters from non-tenure track lecturers that showcase the low priority the modern university places on its teaching staff and on the education of students generally. From Nick Tingle of Goleta: I have taught as a lecturer in the UC [Univeristy of California] system for 22 years. I do not want the ‘respect [or] rewards of tenure.’ I want the respect that the University of California, considered by many the greatest publicly funded university in the world, should accord its teaching faculty. Lecturers are the teachers of the UC system. However, lecturers have less job security than K-12 teaches and make less money, at the entry level and in terms of years of service, than their colleagues at community colleges…Clearly, the UC does not respect its teaching faculty and, by extension, its state-mandated educational mission. From Aneil Rallin, Assistant Professor of Literature, Writing Studies at Cal State San Marcos: …administrators at most universities across the country think of lecturers as ‘cheap labor,’ but I am made much more distraught by my colleagues who often collude with administrators …[to] treat lecturers as second class citizens. Perhaps an even more telling letter came from May Akabogu-Collins, who happily left a full-time, tenure-track position as an assistant professor of economics to serve as a lecturer, enabling her to make more money by writing freelance articles in her now plentiful spare time: …I don’t mind at all the mindless teaching of lower-division economics courses, which requires little or no preparation. Gee, did you ever wonder why most college classes were so boring, uninformative, needlessly confusing and eminently forgettable? Remember Those Exciting College Lectures? Did it ever dawn on you how much information could really be communicated in the amount of time an average college class absorbs? Imagine if the instruction was designed not by some underpaid junior academic who is happy that teaching you requires "little or no preparation"(!), but by a staff of professionals utilizing modern multi-media technology? And particularly by a staff that was incentivized, say, with financial bonuses based on the amount of material retained by students two years down the line? I have said it before, and I say it again, the actual instruction at modern universities is a joke, and a wildly out-of-date joke at that. If universities had a truth-in-advertising law, this notice would appended to all university recruiting materials: On the advice of counsel we make the following declaration: The purpose of the university degree which we may or may not award you is solely to certify to future employers or graduate schools that you are a reasonably bright, hard working individual. In return for this certification we demand four years of tuition, and the right to solicit you endlessly for donations. This certification will be accomplished based on two methods: we will examine your standardized test scores and high school record to ascertain your intellectual horsepower, and make a decision on whether or not to admit you. (We... posted by Friedrich at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Art in the Moonlight Redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for returning to the theme of art and economics, a much-underdone topic. The NEA study you discuss, about the job situations of “professional artists,” sounds fascinating. You’re no doubt better equipped than I am to pull it apart and make further sense of it. But one thing I’d like to know is how the study’s researchers define “professional artist.” I mean, if an artist isn’t making real money at his art, then he’s not a “professional artist” -- that’s basic, no? We’d laugh at a guy who claimed to be a “professional baseball player” if he had to hold down a fulltime job to support his baseball habit. So why do we allow a guy who enjoys playing the trombone but who makes his living as a carpenter to call himself a “professional musician”? (Most likely answer: sentimentality about that poor, persecuted field, the arts.) Another example: What’s the difference between a teacher who paints watercolors as a hobby, and a “professional watercolorist” who makes no money as a watercolorist and so supports himself as a teacher? No difference at all, as far as I can see. In both cases, it comes down to the same equation: Painting-for-pleasure plus teaching job. Does it really matter if the first person is relaxed about his commercial painting prospects, while the second person is still clinging to a dream of making it? They're both still doing the same thing. I wonder how the NEA decides which artists who make little or no money at their art qualify to be called “professional artists.” Is it a matter of holding a degree of a certain sort? Of making a certain amount of money from art? If so, where is the line drawn? And why there? I wonder this in full sympathy with all artists who wish they had fewer money challenges, and more time to do art. I know where you’re coming from, dudes and dudettes. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Philip Roth
Friedrich -- Working in and around the arts, you find yourself having to get past many sweet illusions. (It's either wise up, or go back to school for that business degree.) One of the first illusions I had to let go of, back when I was but a babe, was this: that fiction writers are smart. It's such an easy assumption to make. School tends to leave us thinking that writers write because they're smart. And there's a perhaps-natural tendency to look at and handle a book and think, Gosh, there must be something special about the person behind it: s/he got published! Wow! I was as prone to this delusion as anyone when, back in the early '80s, I attended a major international conference of writers. Award-winners from dozens of countries were present. There were panels, speeches, seminars. I ran around with pen and pad, interviewing whoever I could sink my claws into. What a chance to learn and be enlightened, right? In fact, I'd seldom heard such inane nonsense spoken in my life. Writer after writer, many of them famous, got up to speak -- and delivered naive baloney. The average American burger-flipper has more horse-sense about how the world works, as well as more shrewdness about basic psychology. Quel surprise: Fiction writers tend to be to hyper-reactive and over-imaginative, often to the point of near-hysteria. It's common for them to feel persecuted, unheeded, misunderstood. Their views of the world often reflect this; as political thinkers, they identify (ludicrously) with the oppressed and the unconscious. They're like children, forever looking for parents who'll take proper care of them. And, gollygosh, if life isn't fair it's because there are bad people (Americans almost certainly, and quite likely Republicans) out there! My conclusion is that a gift for writing fiction has nothing whatever to do with the ability to reason and make sense of things. Instead, it's a talent, like a gift for singing, dancing, or throwing a football. (I'm deliberately side-stepping here any fancypants games along the lines of: but gee, isn't intelligence itself a kind of talent? And, gee, isn't an athlete's talent a kind of intelligence?...) I've found that talent and intelligence are best thought of as two different things. It's possible to be very talented yet completely brainless; it's also possible to be very intelligent yet without talents (though, realistically speaking, we all seem to have some talent -- parenting, perhaps, or telling jokes, or taking care of animals. Or, in my case, setting the VCR). Having brains and artistic talent: now that's a nice, if unusual, combo. Add a little common sense into the mix, and you've found yourself a rarity indeed. What brings these thoughts to mind is a piece in the Telegraph about Philip Roth, who has been doing some (eek) thinking about America and 9/11. He's certainly a very talented guy, and obviously one with ferocious powers of mental concentration. But he also seems to be someone whose reasoning gifts are --... posted by Michael at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- Cable TV is so rich in movie pickings next week that the best rep theater would have a hard time competing. Here are some highlights: * Cat People (TCM: Thursday 8 PM). The producer Val Lewton made a number of no-budget horror films in the late ‘40s that have since become small legends for their low-key eerieness, and for the way they chilled and scared viewers with subtlety and suggestion rather than overwhelming effects. “Cat People” was the first in the series, and was directed by the very talented Jacques Tourneur. * Vanya on 42nd St (IFC: Sunday at 8 PM EST; Sunday at 2 pm; Friday 8 AM; Friday 4 PM). In this version of Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya,” the team (Andre Gregory, Wallace Shawn, and Louis Malle) that was responsible for “My Dinner With Andre” moves fluidly in and out of theater reality. What’s rehearsal? What’s real? Am I reacting to the actor or the role? A meditation on theater, film and reality that's modest in physical scale, but big in emotional impact. * Training Day (Cinemax: Monday at 8 pm; Tuesday at 3:30 AM; Wednesday at 10 PM). The performance for which Denzel Washington won his Oscar. Washington is spectacular -- was this his first time portraying a truly Bad Dude -- but the film itself is notable too: a tough cop melodrama, small but flamboyant, and well-turned on all levels. Some viewers had trouble making the leap into the third act, though I didn’t. Major dirty-language and wild-violence alert. * Mermaids (AMC: Monday at 8 PM EST; Tuesday at 12:30 AM; Tuesday at 5:30 PM). Cher, Winona Ryder and Cristina Ricci as a mom and her two kids. Laugh-a-little-cry-a-little period dramedy about what happens between a sexy working-class mother and her daughter when the kid hits adolescence. Memorable and touching: Cher’s terrific; Ryder and Ricci are spunky and sensitive; and Bob Hoskins is sweetly bewildered as Cher’s beau. Hard to beat if you love watching actresses do their thing. Why isn’t this film better known? * Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (TCM: Tuesday at 6 AM). The Frederic March and Miriam Hopkins version of the Robert Louis Stevenson material. Effectively moody, operatic in its studio stylization (as early horror often was), and surprisingly frank in its eroticism. * This Land is Mine (TCM: Wednesday at 2 AM). A Jean Renoir rarity -- I’m a Renoir nut, and I haven’t seen it -- and one of only a handful of films this great filmmaker managed to complete during his years in Hollywood. No one makes huge claims for it, but I’m setting the VCR to Record anyway, and am losing respect for anyone who doesn’t. * Desire (TCM: Wednesday at 12:30 PM). Glamorous comedy about a jewel thief, with Cooper and Dietrich. A curiosity for film buffs, because it was a Lubitsch production, but was actually directed by Frank Borzage. So: How much of the “Lubitsch touch” comes through? * The Stepfather (IFC: Wednesday at 8... posted by Michael at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Literary Pleasures of Military History
Michael I don’t know if I ever mentioned to you that I spent several years reading a lot of military history, possibly being a sucker for the intellectual pugnacity that seems a dominant characteristic of writers in this field. I also found their literary qualities to be highly underrated. I mean, who ever wrote a better piece of really smart yet hard ass reportage than von Clausewitz' "The Campaign of 1812 in Russia"?--to say nothing of coming up with the best 'high serious' book title of all time: "On War"? (It sounds even better in German: "Vom Kriege".) Generals Clausewitz and Fuller: Military Intelligence Among my other literary discoveries was the British general J. F. C. Fuller (1876-1966). Although in military circles he is mostly famous for being an early theorist of armored warfare (whose ideas were, unfortunately, appreciated chiefly by the Germans between the wars), I read his books with glee because of the absolute directness with which he expressed his almost aphoristic opinions. Possibly as a result of having a military, rather than a literary, background, Fuller never wrote his way to his subject: having previously thought his material through to a conclusion, he generally starts right there: bang! Perhaps a few scattered quotes describing leading figures in the American Civil War, all derived from his 1932 book “Grant and Lee: A Study in Personality and Generalship,” will convey the pungency of his prose: Lincoln…was a strategical visionary, that is to say he could often see what should be done without possessing an idea of how to do it… From the military point of view both men [Lincoln and Davis] were incapable in the extreme. Davis thought he understood war, Lincoln acted as if no one could understand it. …General Henry Wagner Halleck, a bookish type of man, stupid and jealous by nature, nicknamed “Old Brains,” and rightly called by W. E. Woodward “a large emptiness surrounded by an education.” “An army,” so said Napoleon, “marches upon its belly”; but Lee, though a saint, and because he was a saint, was no quartermaster. Jackson possessed that brutality essential in war; Lee did not. [Lee] could clasp the hand of a wounded enemy, whilst Jackson ground his teeth and murmured: “No quarter to the violators of our homes and firesides,” and when someone deplored the necessity of destroying so many brave men, he exclaimed, “No, shoot them all, I do not wish them to be brave.” With all his ability there was something repellent about Jackson… Throughout life Grant’s enemy was his inner self, an enigma he could not solve, something which always held him back…As long as he was conscious of himself he remained a child; but directly a turmoil arose which drowned this consciousness he became a Titan. If you’re interested, you can see a list of Fuller's works here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Art in the Moonlight
Michael The NEA, after performing considerable analysis on the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) and longitudinal databases such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics has come to the rather unsurprising conclusion that most “professional” artist are unable to make a financial go of it without holding down a second job. (You can read the entirety of their study, “More Than Once In A Blue Moon: Multiple Jobholdings By American Artists,” here.) Getting beyond the obvious, the NEA offers some interesting (if not terribly astonishing) observations. One is on the precariousness of artistic jobs: while noting that artist’s educational qualifications are more similar to professionals rather than to the general workforce, the NEA notes that artists appear to have unemployment rates that are twice as high as other professionals. Another is that art doesn’t pay particularly well: artists earn only 77 to 88 percent as much as the average of other professionals. Ancient Economic Symbol of the Arts As for the extent of moonlighting by artists, the NEA’s analysis indicate that at any given moment of time, around 14% of artists are holding down a second job, which is about 40% higher than other professionals. The study also reports the results of several work-related surveys of artists. A 1983 survey of artists in New England suggests that only 24 per cent could make a living working solely at their artistic job. A 1981 survey found that 61 per cent of performing artists held second, non-artistic jobs. Authors surveyed in 1986 suggested that 70 per cent required a second job to make ends meet. The figure in a 1993 survey of choreographers was 80 per cent. Interestingly, given many complaints about the lack of government support for the arts in the United States, other countries with more developed publicly funded arts programs report very similar results. Finland, for example, a country with strong government support for artists, shows high rates of multiple-jobholding, with only 21 per cent of fine artists able to make ends meet without an outside job (although performing artists in Finland needed less outside employment than Americans.) A 1998 survey of Dutch visual artists reported that more than one-third of their earnings came from teaching and more than one-quarter of their earnings came from non-arts work despite extensive support for artists by the Netherlands’ government. In a 1982 survey of Canadian authors, 63 per cent needed income from moonlighting. A 1988 survey of almost three-quarters of Australian artists held some other job in addition to their artistic work. A 1994-95 survey of British visual artists found that only 11 percent earned all their income from working as artists. What would an economist make of this? I can’t speak professionally, but it would appear that the demand for artistic careers among the workforce seems to easily outstrip the supply of paying work in these fields. Apparently, this is true not only in America but around the developed world. It would appear that the psychic rewards of a career in... posted by Friedrich at October 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, October 4, 2002


Free Reads -- Funniest Jokes
Friedrich -- Dr. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire has been collecting jokes for over a year, and asking people to rate how funny the jokes are. The results of his study are now in. You can sample jokes and find out about results here. Sample passage: Top joke in Belgium: Why do ducks have webbed feet? To stamp out fires. Why do elephants have flat feet? To stamp out burning ducks. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Hugh Grant
Friedrich -- I'm not much of a fan of Hugh Grant as a movie performer. About half of what he does makes me giggle, but then he repeats it, and then does so again. As an actor, he doesn't seem very resourceful. Hugh Grant the public personality amuses me no end. He's foxy, vain and funny -- his specialty: being so-modest-he's-showing-off, or so-vain-he's-cute, and sometimes both at the same time. In person, he displays all the virtuosity he doesn't have when he's on screen. Did you ever catch him on "Inside the Actor's Studio"? A hilarious hour -- Grant is amazingly quickwitted and droll despite the best efforts of the show's ineffably worshipful and somber host, James Lipton. Lipton keeps trying to snake a tongue up Grant's ass, and Grant keeps dodging nimbly away, cracking jokes as he does so. The public Grant comes across well in newspaper interviews too. Amy Raphael talks to him for the Observer, here. Sample passage: I cut my hair once to get out of floppy-hair mode and it didn't work. I looked like a lesbian. I really did - I've got that kind of face. I looked like a slightly cross lady golfer. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Amiri Baraka re-redux
Friedrich -- Thanks for pointing out the latest development in the Amiri Baraka anti-Semitic-poetry saga. It highlights, or at least gives me the chance to highlight, a dilemma lefties are forever walking into. Here’s how it goes: Given that lefties are compulsively, dogmatically anti-authority and pro-underdog (and ignoring for the moment their strategy of being pro-underdog as a way of claiming authority) ... What happens when the underdog turns against the lefties? In this case, when the angry and (supposedly) oppressed black poet attacks the Jews? Well, what happens, as you point out, is that the lefties (in this case, the Times) come out in support of the (in this case, stupid and anti-Semitic) underdog. Hey, let’s reward the underdog for attacking us; let’s congratulate ourselves on our noble devotion to the cause of underdogs everywhere; and let’s demonize those who would stand up for themselves in the face of attack. It’s a pattern that shows up over and over again. *I remember the upper-middle-class (and rich) parents who gave their rebellious, spiteful, angry hippie children credit cards. *There was the case of a lefty woman judge in NYC who was on trial for something. Her daughter was called to testify against her, and did so devastatingly. Afterwards, the lefty judge was seen telling her daughter how well she’d done. *These days, it’s striking to observe the Jewish intellectuals (Sontag, Chomsky) who demonstrate sympathy for Islamic fanatics. Do lefties ever notice how often they fall into this trap? Do they even experience it as a trap? Are they proud of the way even direct assault can’t shake their “commitment”? As someone from a smalltown Republican background, I stare at this kind of behavior utterly amazed. People in Republican small towns have their own quirks, lord knows, but I never encountered this particular kind of through-the-looking-glass, no-end-to-it neuroticism until I started moving in fancier -- more academic, leftier, more moneyed -- circles. Did you see this kind of acting-out much before arriving at our Lousy Ivy College? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 4, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

DVD Journal: "The Business of Strangers"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- The Wife and I watched "The Business of Strangers" last night. Did you notice it when it had its brief theatrical release a while back? Not many people did, but it's now available on DVD, and is worth catching up with. It's a movie version of what we who have attended too much theater call a "two-hander," ie., a piece that focuses on two characters, who claw at each other till one or both of them bursts, and some kind of something ("the truth", usually -- yawn) is revealed. Channing, Stiles Here, Julia Stiles plays an entitled X'er with a grudge, and Stockard Channing a Boomer corporate dragon-lady. They meet, they drink, they fight, they drink some more, they fight some more, now they're really getting down to it, the tension mounts.... I used to hate this kind of theater; it struck me as a lame excuse for an evening out. A two-hander is usually just a "confrontation" scene tricked out to play-length, and often doesn't offer a lot beyond mind-fucky actor games. I've grown more tolerant of the genre over time. A two-hander can function as an effective showpiece for performers as well as a vehicle for sociological observation. And because two-handers are usually cheap to produce, troupes presenting them often have the freedom to get loosey-goosey, and to take the kind of artistic risks you don't often see in more expensive works. A friend who saw "The Company of Strangers" in a theater told me that on the big screen the film didn't offer enough. On DVD, and to us, it seemed to offer plenty. Patrick Stettner, the writer/director, nurses his idea along more than effectively, and he frames it with some apt visuals. This is the modern-day corporate warrior's environment, sleek, hushed and abstract, a stainless-and-cyber cage, all hotels, airline terminals, conference rooms, and suitcases on rollers. He's getting us to see the two women as gladiators in a glittering cage, and he's focusing on their flesh and their feelings. He's also focusing the movie on the characters, and on the actress's performances, which are both spectacular. Stiles pushes the young woman's self-centeredness, and her humorlessly angry scorn and greed -- her Xer "attitude" -- a step beyond what's usual; the young woman's a familiar bratty type, but there's something mysterious about this particular brat. Stockard Channing nails the Boomer exec good. She's a role model and a success; she's also a wreck who has no life. She's been on the forefront of a revolution, she's proved herself at work, she's defied all expectations -- and yet is only now waking up to the fact that, after all, a job is only a job. Channing's got all that going on in every step she takes: the weariness and pride, the battle-hardened swagger and the crumpled-up lost little girl. A fab performance. Channing and Stiles kick out the jams So the movie has psychological and sociological validity, a little something in the... posted by Michael at October 4, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Amiri Baraka redux
Michael The NY Times today addresses the controversy that has erupted over a poem read at a festival by the New Jersey state poet laureate Amiri Baraka (the former LeRoi Jones) entitled “Somebody Blew Up America.” In it Mr. Baraka asserted that 4000 Israeli (read Jewish) workers at the World Trade Center were told to stay home that day and laments that Israel’s Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, stayed away. New Jersey Governor James McGreevey attempted to fire Baraka and, finding out that he can’t do that, insisted he resign; Mr. Baraka refused. From the Times’ Olympian heights it comments: The poem’s mix of disenfranchised rage and appalling falsehood, and the controversy they have generated, are the hallmark of Mr. Baraka’s career. When you name a man known for ferocious political opinions as your poet laureate, you had better be prepared for poems that offend. But any notion that Mr. Baraka’s offensiveness should be a reason to fire or silence him is itself offensive. Mr. Baraka is not the state’s spokesman. He is a poet and he was chosen, at least partly, because of the way he seeks to give voice to the minority community. Like Mr. Baraka, that community can often be angry. Allowing him the freedom to express that anger seems part of the point of the exercise. Apparently the Times’ logic here is that Mr. Baraka, as a member of an ‘often angry’ minority group, has been elevated above (or sunk below) such concepts as telling the truth and as such no attempt should be made by the State of New Jersey to insist on responsible behavior. Well, I’m waiting for the Times to be similarly gracious when Idaho appoints a White Supremacist poet laureate. Heck, the Aryan Nation is pretty damn angry, demonstrably a minority (even in Coeur d'Alene Idaho) and I bet those guys could string together a rhyme or two—oops, I forgot, we can’t call them that anymore. As I recall, a jury in February 2001 awarded $6.3 million (and rights to the Aryan Nation name) to a woman and her son who were attacked by Aryan Nation guards outside the white supremacist group's north Idaho headquarters. I believe the theory was that the Aryan Nation’s leader Richard Butler and the group were negligent in the selection, training and supervision of the security guards. Somehow, though, an award of $6.3 million seems kind of high for negligence; it almost looks like the Idaho jury was trying to send the group a message about their evil doctrines. Maybe somebody should consider suing the State of New Jersey for negligence in appointing Mr.Baraka. Baraka and Butler--Brothers Under the Skin? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 4, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, October 3, 2002


Free Reads -- Self-Esteem
Friedrich -- Has a major social turning point arrived? Is the insane vogue for "self-esteem" finally over? Erica Goode in the New York Times reports that research has begun to show that elevating self-esteem cures little, here. Sample passage: "D" students, it turns out, think as highly of themselves as valedictorians, and serial rapists are no more likely to ooze with insecurities than doctors or bank managers. At the same time, high self-esteem, studies show, offers no immunity against bad behavior....Some people with high self-regard are actually more likely to lash out aggressively when criticized than those with low-self esteem. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Begs the Question
Friedrich -- It’s the rare language-usage error that makes me emerge from my usual apathetic shell, but this one does: the epidemic misuse of the phrase “begs the question.” I almost never see it used properly these days. Writers -- and, perhaps worse, their editors and copy editors -- seem to think “begs the question” means “provokes us to ask,” or “makes me wonder,” or something close to that. An example is in today's Wall Street Journal. Michael Judge, in an opinion piece about Amiri Baraka’s loathesome WTC poem, writes that “New Jersey’s previous poet laureate, Gerald Stern, recently told the New York Times he was ‘shocked at the stupidity of Somebody Blew Up America,' saying ‘Lies never serve good, and there was hate in it.’ Which begs the question: was there no hate in Mr. Baraka’s earlier work?” No, no, no, no! What “begs the question” in fact means is “to assume the truth of an argument or proposition to be proved, without arguing it” (thank you, Oxford desktop dictionary). The statement “We’re going to publicize the hell out of this excellent blog,” for instance, begs the question of whether or not this blog really is excellent. A not-bad way of understanding this meaning is: You beg a question when you skip over a matter that’s disputable. The question begged isn't what the statement makes you think or wonder, but is instead the matter that’s skipped over. And here I withdraw back into my shell, there to await the arrival of the real language buffs, who’ll finetune and/or correct me. As well they should: in order to thrive, language (like a city) needs policing. The superego has its functions too. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments

Not a Critic
Friedrich -- After a few recent visits with bright, talented friends who are critics, it occurs to me why I’m not one. (Putting aside all questions of my gifts and credentials, or lack thereof, of course.) Critics, generally speaking, care about their opinions. I mean, really care. Do they want to impose their opinions, and see them prevail? I don’t know. But at the very least, most of the critics I’ve known want their opinion to be out there in public, playing a role (the bigger the better) in forming “the general consensus.” My opinion just isn't that important to me, and I have a hard time seeing why it should be of much importance to anyone else. (“Opinions are like assholes...”, etc.) The real critic seems to feel that the world needs to know his opinion. Me, I’m grateful to have a few people in my life willing to put up with me, let alone my no doubt tiresome opinionating. The “general consensus”? It gets on fine without input from me. And then it gets revised anyway. So why waste the energy? For me, an opinion is a small part of a much larger package of responses: feelings, reflections, musings, thoughts, observations, bodily sensations. And lord knows I do love exploring reactions, other people's as much as my own. But that's one of art's functions, to give us excuses to muck voluptuously about in this make-believe-but-oh-so-real way. Comparing notes=bliss. Fighting over opinions? Arguing about whose is right? Thanks, but I’ll pass. How do you experience your own opinions? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Free Reads -- P.D. James
Friedrich -- Have you read the British mystery-and-detective novelist P.D. James? She has tons of fans. I've read a few of her books, and was very impressed. She does a more convincing version of the well-upholstered, realistic novel of social observation than any contemporary literary writer I know of. In other words, if you want a traditional, 19th-century-style novel-reading experience, salted with serious moral questions and concerns, but you want it set in the modern world, I don't know how you can do better than P.D. James. If I'm not really a fan, it's only because I don't really have a taste for that kind of fiction, alas. But she's as smart and talented as can be. The Smithsonian Associates offers a wonderful, free audio talk by James here. Robert McCrum of the Observer talks to James about murder, God, the artificiality of fiction and much else, here. Sample passage: Murder is the unique crime; it's the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. We feel that the murderer steps over an invisible line which divides him or her forever from the rest of us. It is an astonishing act and we regard it with horrified fascination. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 3, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Magazine Culture
Michael 2Blowhards has scored another triumph of investigative reporting. Owing to a wrongly directed fax, we’ve got the behind-the-scenes scoop on Lewis Lapham’s latest screed: Lewis H. Lapham Editor, Harper’s Magazine Darling Lewis, I just read your fabulous essay, “The Road to Babylon—Searching for targets in Iraq.” Loved it, simply loved it! As usual, you’re just too good for the American public! However, a few words of advice if you want to get it published someplace other than, well, you know, Harper’s. Not that there is anything wrong with Harper’s, darling, you know I read it cover to cover each month, but remember how the magazine world snickers when you write the lead article in a magazine that you edit. I mean, even Tina Brown never did that! And, as long as I’m being terribly frank, you need to do something about the circulation of Harper’s—more people would read your work if you published it in the Piscataway Penny Saver! So, while I would never dare to edit you from the purely artistic point of view, I jotted a few notes of some eensy-weensy things you might want to do if you’re serious about getting published in a magazine with a real subscriber base for a change: 1)Try getting to the point a tad quicker. You’re saying the invasion of Iraq is a bad idea, but you’re 900 words into your piece before you mention the first actual reason it’s bad. 2)Lose the extended comparison with the Athenian invasion of Sicily. I mean, people might get confused and remember Patton’s invasion of Sicily—which went rather well, you recall, during World War II. And it pushes your word total to over 3,500 words—in other magazines, darling, they have advertising and have to watch how long their articles are! Really! 3) You don’t provide much substance on many of your main points. You describe Bush’s invasion plan as being “[a]gainst every precedent in international law, in violation of the United Nations Charter, and without consent of the American Congress.” I mean, we’ve all read lots of op-ed pieces that don’t agree with you, darling, and I think you’re going to have argue these points a bit, don’t you? 4) Some of your arguments, are, well—I don’t know how else to put this, darling—a bit shrill. I think you might want to rethink the sentences starting: Even if one discounts the devastation of Baghdad as a minor and scarcely noticeable loss, what is to prevent the conflagration likely to erupt in the nearby countries of Saudi Arabia, Syria and Iran once the U.S. Air Force has lit up the entire Muslim world with the putrifying fires of civil and religious war? Who prevents Ariel Sharon from upgrading with nuclear weapons the Israeli program of ‘preemptive assassination,’ and, in the relatively sizable footprint of an oil price marked up to $50 or $70 a barrel, what happens to the economies of London, Paris and New York? 5) You might be a bit less personal... posted by Friedrich at October 3, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, October 2, 2002


Best of the Blogs?
Michael I wonder if one could put together a magazine (ezine?) based on the "Best of the Blogosphere." It would certainly be more interesting than Harper's or the Atlantic Monthly. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Pauline Kael
Friedrich -- The jazz critic Francis Davis talked with Pauline Kael shortly before she died. A version of that q&a was published online by The New Yorker (no longer available). Now Davis has brought out a more complete version of the interview in the form of a small book, "Afterglow," buyable at Amazon here. Very sweet Amazon reader reviews, by the way. An "intellectual biography" of Kael is being prepared by the editor Susie Linfield, who writes an attack on "Afterglow" for the LA Times, here. (Thanks to Arts & Letters Daily, here, for the link.) Sample passage (from Linfield): Kael, like her predecessors Gilbert Seldes and James Agee, loathed the pretensions of middlebrow culture and dug the spunky, demotic aspect of American life and culture. But she never mistook trash for art; never thought it elitist (or unimportant) to distinguish the two; never put forth that there was any connection, organic or otherwise, between the widely accepted and the good. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- WTC Architecture
Friedrich -- Catesby Leigh in the New York Post argues that the planners and agencies responsible for rebuilding the site of the World Trade Centers are on entirely the wrong track, here. Sample passage: The announcement of the competition back in August made no bones about it: Hostility to tradition was a plus. It placed "risk-taking" - defined as "not accepting received wisdom but starting with fundamentals to go beyond easy and safe solutions" - at the top of the list of qualifications. Yet that "received wisdom" has shaped Gotham's noblest vistas. One traditionalist proposal for the site can be seen here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- Wednesday, 10-02 * At 8 pm, A&E runs a "Biography" episode on the British comedian Benny Hill. Americans tend to think of Brits as uptight and proper, yet upperclass Brits can be perverse and decadent, British theater people, as I've been told by actor friends, are uninhibited even by theater-people standards, and the Brit tradition of working-class, music-hall bawdiness is a long one. Benny Hill showed us what that tradition was like. * At 10 pm TCM broadcasts "What Price Hollywood." Directed by George Cukor and starring Constance Bennett, it's "A Star is Born" minus the music, and the first time that material was put on screen. Thursday, 10-3 * At 4:30 pm, the E! channel's "True Hollywood Story" is about the movie "Jaws." A good episode, partly because "Jaws" really did change Hollywood history, establishing the tradition of the "summer action blockbuster." * At 8 pm, on TCM, a trim little horror picture, "The Spiral Staircase," directed by the underappreciated Robert Siodmak. Sunday, 10-6 * At 8 pm (and again at 11 pm) E! broadcasts a "True Hollywood Story" about Marlon Brando. * At 8 pm, Sissy Spacek is interviewed on Bravo's "Inside the Actor's Studio." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

War Poetry redux
Friedrich -- Sweet of you to think of me as 2blowhards' resident "poetry expert," but if I am indeed that then 2blowhards, not to mention poetry, is in pretty bad shape. I see that Penguin publishes an anthology of First World War poetry, buyable here. There's always Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade" to be savored, readable for free (bless the Web) here. But, like you, I don't know of much poetry that came out of later wars. I trust you'll be doing the necessary research, and getting back to us with the results and your conclusions? I've got a lousier-than-most, English-major background in American and British poetry, and a slightly better, almost-majored-in-French education in French poetry. These days, I read poetry spottily and quirkily. (These days, doing anything systematically seems out of my reach.) I notice that I go through phases, intense but always short, of falling in love with Asian poetry. Do you plunge in to the poetry world from time to time? I occasionally surface with a find, a recent one of which is Wendy Cope. Her name will come as no surprise to Brits, droves of whom have been reading her for years. But many Americans who might enjoy her are probably unaware of her work, which is modest, impish, accessible, and touching: "minor," but in the best possible sense. (Possible forthcoming blog posting: "the major pleasures of minor art.") Wendy Cope Her most well-known book is "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis," and if you get a kick out of that title, you'll probably get a kick out of her poetry. The Observer runs an enjoyable interview with her here. Sample passage: I began writing just after I started living on my own for the first time. I didn't have anyone at home to talk to. That was important. In recent years, I thought, well now I have got someone at home to talk to maybe I won't write any more. But I'm still writing. I discovered a few years ago that I generally enjoy listening to poetry (on audiobook, mostly) more than reading it. The BBC runs a good page devoted to poets reading their work here. If you scroll down a bit, you'll find Wendy Cope reading "Men and their Boring Arguments." You'll find a recording of Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade" too, amazingly enough. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, October 1, 2002


If I Were an Editor 10 redux
Michael Where do you get off asserting modern artists come from money? Eager to refute this outrageous claim, I visited an Internet site with a large number of biographies of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists, renoirauction.com. There it took me only a few moments to assemble the following data on their social origins: Frederic Bazille was born in 1841 to a wealthy family of wine producers near Montpellier. [Bonnard] began law studies c. 1885, but abandoned them in 1888 to work for a year at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, and at the Académie Julian…In 1889, after he had sold a champagne poster design, his father allowed him to begin serious training. Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania to a prominent Pittsburgh family, [Mary Cassat] traveled extensively through Europe with her parents and siblings while a child. Cézanne was born in the southern French town of Aix-en-Provence, January 19, 1839, the son of a wealthy banker. …In 1886…he inherited his father's wealth and finally, at the age of 47, became financially independent… Degas was born into a well-to-do banking family on July 19, 1834, in Paris. Toulouse-Lautrec was born in Albi into one of the oldest aristocratic families [in France]. Manet was born in Paris on January 23, 1832, the son of a high government official. To avoid studying law, as his father wished, he went to sea. He then studied in Paris under the academic French painter Thomas Couture and visited Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands to study the paintings of the old masters. Berthe Morisot was born in Bourges, France into a family of wealth and culture. Her father was a high ranking civil servant. She was Fragonard's great-grand daughter. Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) …was born in St. Thomas in the West Indies, where his father was a prosperous merchant. Georges-Pierre Seurat was born in Paris on 2 December 1859, the son of comfortably-off parents…Seurat's relative financial ease meant that he was unused to dealing with potential clients… Signac …decided to become an artist, his prosperous shopkeeping family giving him financial independence. Well, I hope this small study disabuses you of any idea that independent means and advanced art are in any way linked! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

War Poetry
Michael As we are perhaps on the brink of military activity, I found myself wanting to know more about war poetry. In leafing through a collection of “modern” poetry, roughly 1855 to 1970, I noticed that the poetry that explicitly discussed war was chiefly a product of the First World War. You know, straightforward stuff like Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth”: What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918 There appeared to be one World War II poem by F. T. Prince, “Soldiers Bathing” but it was pretty elliptical on the war part. Last year, when I read a new translation of the Illiad, I remember being stunned at the immediacy of the images of death and slaughter, of soldiers running, scouting, thrusting, stabbing, dying—it seemed the poetic forebearer for the first ten minutes of “Saving Private Ryan.” Since Western poetry seems to have originated on the battlefield, so to speak, one assumes that there is poetry from the Civil War, the Second World War, Korea and Vietnam. As our blog’s resident expert on poetry, do you have any suggestions for where one can learn more? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- The usual thing to do about TV is complain about the amount of crap that's on. Me, I'm amazed and overwhelmed by the amount of good stuff that's there to be found. It does take some digging to find what's worthwhile. But if you're handy with TV schedules, VCRs and Tivos, you can always have yourself something more-than-decent to watch. The Wife and I, for instance, both picky TV-watchers, have nonetheless accumulated a couple of shelves full of promising videotaped shows and movies. They sit there ready to be enjoyed at any time, and entirely at our convenience. I have to admit that I'm more of a fiend than most for combing through TV schedules -- and the Wife claims (jokingly, I hope) that setting the VCR is one of my few true talents. But, hey, that means I've got something to contribute! So with this posting I'm kicking off TV Alert, an occasional new 2blowhards service, pointing out TV programming it'd be a shame to let slip by. Tonight at 8 pm EST, on Turner Classic Movies: "The Tramp and the Dictator," an hour-long documentary that compares the lives of Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin. Sounds a little iffy to me, but the man behind the documentary is Kevin Brownlow, one of the classiest of movie historians. Following the documentary, TCM (at 9 pm) broadcasts Chaplin's satirical attack on Hitler, "The Great Dictator" (and then re-broadcasts "The Tramp and the Dictator" at 11:30 pm). Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

If I Were an Editor 10
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your enlightening treatises about Shakespeare’s London and Mozart’s Vienna. The topic of money, business and art is usually taken on in such unhelpful ways: a big deal here, a betrayal there. Who cares? What I want to know is: how does this weirdo arts economy work? If I were an editor, I’d kick off coverage by commissioning a piece on the theme of “Trust Funds and Modern Art.” In my art-history explorations, I’ve been amazed by how many of the “radical” artists of the past were independently wealthy (or managed to marry someone rich). “Independently wealthy”: what an adorably genteel way of saying “rich enough to not have to work.” And in my explorations of today’s art-and-lit worlds, I’ve been just as amazed by how many current avant-garde types have enough money not to have to work for a living. The rest of us need to figure out some way to get by financially, which usually means either choosing to apply our talents in some business context (visually talented gal finds work as graphic designer) or by working at some job (word processor, teacher) we hope will be tolerable in order to support the art activities (painting, poetry) we care about more. If you take the first option, you wind up doing "commercial art," which isn't considered to be "real art"; if you take the second option, your art is in constant danger of becoming “just a hobby.” It sometimes seems like (a few exceptions allowed for) only the rich get to be "real artists," doesn't it? So why do we pay attention? It's not as though they need more luck and attention than they already have. The way family money has supported and fostered the avant-garde; avant-garde-ism as a function of the posture-striking of bohemian rich kids – yet more things they didn’t tell us about at our Lousy Ivy College. What was the student population like, money-and-statuswise, during your time at art school? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at October 1, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments