Saturday, November 30, 2002


Chaos of History: Art in 1930
Michael Here's another mini-installment of my "cross-section" approach to art history, this time focused on 1930. All the following images were painted over a period of, at most, 5 years (1928-1933). As always, we're dealing with pop-ups, so I hope you take the time to look at them full-size. Abstraction B. Brooker, Sounds Assembling, 1928; A. Dove, Foghorns, 1929 Landscape M. Hartley, Carnelian Country, 1932; A. Jackson, Winter, Charlevoix County, 1932 Female Portrait F. Varley, Vera, 1931; P. Picasso, Woman in a Red Armchair, 1932; Y. Biriukova, Portrait of Lillian Evers, 1933 Female Nude T. Lempicka, Andromede, 1929; E. Holgate, Nude, 1930 Perhaps I should mention that I have no animus to analytic art history, simply that I think it's always a good idea to look at things a bit differently from time to time. I remember having one of those "aha" moments the first time I realized that Velásquez and Van Dyck were exact contemporaries, and Rembrandt was a mere 7 years younger. It suddenly became obvious to me exactly why Baroque painting had stamped itself so indelibly on art history. Anyway, enjoy! Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 30, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Friday, November 29, 2002


Free Reads -- Why leftists?
Friedrich -- Why would a rational person with some knowledge of the world choose to be a leftist? It's a puzzler. Thomas Sowell and Michael Oakeshott have written brilliantly on the topic. Online, the best musings seem to me to come from Jim Ryan at Philosoblog (here), and John Jay Ray (here). In a recent Philosoblog posting, Ryan brings together several strands of thought, which combine to throw off a lot of sparks. (He too graciously credits me with setting some of this thinking off.) Sample passage: The adolescent without direction suddenly gets direction: to prove the conservative to be effete, pretentious, and, even vacuous in his tastes. The young liberal will show that profoundly rich experiences are there to be had precisely by those who are not so controlled and discriminating ... So, the anti-establishment aesthetic is cast sometimes as a spiritual mysticism (usually Asian kinds, since those involve profound aesthetic experiences and ‘not making distinctions’), but usually as an avante garde, rule-breaking aesthetic elitism to rival that of the conservative establishment. "Dissecting Leftism" is the name of John Jay Ray's blog, and it's an ongoing conversation about the mystery that is leftism, worth checking in with regularly. From time to time he even gets in a welcome dig or two at the art scene. Sample passage: I have argued elsewhere at some length that Leftists are basically unoriginal people who are desperate for attention, and postmoderns are clearly an extreme example of that. They are people driven to desperation by having nothing to say or contribute yet also having a great longing for attention -- and in that situation any attention will do, even if all they manage to do is to disgust people. Coming one of these days: a grand unified theory of leftism. Till then, the thing to do is to keep in touch with Philosoblog and John Jay Ray. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 29, 2002 | perma-link | (18) comments

Aesthetics and Dogs
Michael A story from the New York Times, which you can read here, reveals recent progress made in understanding the domestication of wolves: On the basis of DNA from several wolf populations and from the hairs collected off 654 dogs around the world, Dr. Savolainen calculates a date for domestication either 40,000 years ago, if all dogs come from a single wolf, or around 15,000 years ago, the date he prefers, if three animals drawn from the same population were the wolf Eves [i.e., the ancestral females] of the dog lineage. Dr. Savolainen believes that dogs originated from wolves somewhere in East Asia, because there is greater genetic diversity, often a sign of greater antiquity, in Asian dogs than in European dogs. However, there remains a debate over exactly how this domestication took place, given the circumstances: The dates yielded by dog DNA suggest that wolves were domesticated by hunter-gatherers, before the invention of agriculture and permanent human settlements. But domestication is an arduous process, in which animals must be selected for a particular trait through many generations, by several generations of people. It is hard to see how hunter-gatherers could have foreseen the payoff from domesticating wolves, or would have known what traits to select for. I want to jump into this debate with my own, er, crackpot theory: humans selected which little wolf puppies to shower attention (and, more importantly, food) on because of how the little rascals looked. In short, the domestication of wolves was guided by (human) aesthetics. A related story in the Wall Street Journal lists the, ahem, design modifications that occurred as a result of domestication: (1) snouts became smaller and less overtly toothy; (2) ears became floppy; (3) tails curled up or became less rigid; and (4) coloring became more varied and splotchy. Canines: Early and Late Models Of course, one can argue about priorities here: whether people deliberately bred wolves to appear cuddly or whether people have learned to “read” canines that have shorter snouts, floppy ears, curled up tails and varied colors as unlikely to devour Grandma and Little Red Riding Hood. But either way, it suggests that people have good reasons to be conscious of “design” in their surroundings and certainly don’t tolerate just anything around them because it happened to wander in from the cold. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 29, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments

Thursday, November 28, 2002


Politics of the NEA, part II
Michael As I mentioned in my last posting, the NEA was created in large part under political pressure from established arts organizations; from the politically active, wealthy individuals who raised funds and sat on their boards; from the film industry; and from labor unions like the American Federation of Musicians and Actors’ Equity, many of which were associated with the then-languishing New York theater industry. The whole question of the agency’s goals had been left essentially unaddressed in the legislation creating the NEA, other than by such meaningless phrases as The arts and the humanities belong to all the people of the United States. The infant agency was a tabula rosa—and thus, in political terms, its budget was up for grabs. There was not much to squabble over in the first few years, however. The Johnson administration, whose ardor for supporting the arts had dropped off sharply after it became clear that the arts community vociferously opposed the War in Vietnam, had asked never asked for anything more than token (i.e., under $10 million) appropriations from Congress. Paradoxically, that set the stage for a huge increase in funding under Johnson’s Republican successor. Nixon, on taking office, had appointed Nelson Rockefeller’s protégé (and ex-mistress) Nancy Hanks to head up the NEA. Hanks, like the good bureaucratic empire builder she was, recommended a significant funding increase for the NEA in Nixon’s first budget. This would have been a merely predictable but empty gesture except that Nixon’s political advisor Leonard Garment supported Hank’s plans. Garment felt that the increase …would have high impact among opinion formers…Support for the arts is, increasingly, good politics…you will gain support from groups which have hitherto not be favorable to this administration… [T]he key is in the headline. Doubling won’t do when the money is peanuts—a bag of peanuts becomes two bags of peanuts. The ever impish Nixon, conscious that he was viewed as a cultural bumpkin, agreed, and on December 10, 1969, asked Congress to approve $40 million for arts and humanities for fiscal year 1971. Hanks then went to work to gain congressional approval. She began by committing most of the requested new money to museums and symphony orchestras, the groups best organized to apply pressure in Washington. Hanks stirred up support by visiting orchestra and museum boards to chat about what they might do if she—and they—got the money. And she delivered in return for their support: throughout her tenure the NEA’s expanded budgets amply rewarded established non-profit art organizations. Museums received nothing in 1970 but more than $9 million in 1974. Orchestras received $2.5 million in 1970 and more than $16 million four years later. In lobbying for her agency Hanks seldom dwelled on what she called “the great philosophical importance of the arts,” and instead worked to ensure that every congressman whose vote was needed heard from important, supportive constituents. One of Hank’s key allies was Jack Golodner, a Democratic labor lawyer who had become a lobbyist for the American Council for the... posted by Friedrich at November 28, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, November 27, 2002


Free Reads -- Anne Perry
Friedrich -- Do you remember the movie "Heavenly Creatures"? Peter Jackson directing a tale about two teenaged girls who have a folie a deux friendship and wind up killing the mother of one of the girls? It made Jackson's reputation, and it got Kate Winslet's career off to a great start. You may remember that the story was based on an actual New Zealand murder case, and you may also remember that at the time of the film's release, one of the real-life girls, now grown-up, was tracked down -- and that she turned out to be the very-successful English crime novelist Anne Perry. An amazing story. Now Perry has spoken for the first time at length about the crime, and about what it has been like for her to live with the knowledge of her role in it. Olga Craig does a beautiful job of writing the conversation up for the Daily Telegraph, here. Sample passage: It was during solitary confinement, Anne says, that she learned to accept the enormity of what she had done. "It was then that I forgave myself," she says. "Don't run away, I told myself. I faced what I had done. I knew it was wrong. There was no evasion. I had done a terrible, vile thing. And when you face your worst crime, the fear leaves you." Not exactly cheerful Thanksgiving reading, but fascinating nonetheless. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thanksgiving
Michael-- I was just sitting here twiddling my thumbs before heading out to the airport. I am dragging my long-suffering nuclear family off to see my Dad on the East Coast. (This should not be construed as meaning that I am from the East Coast—I am a Midwesterner born and bred, raised in the Motor City. It’s not my fault that the old parental unit decided to build his retirement home so hellaciously far away.) Anyway, I thought I should make some sort of Thanksgiving gesture to our loyal readers (may they ever increase—in numbers, not in waistline) and so started aimlessly trolling the Web with a Google search on…of all things…Thanksgiving! Obviously endless stuff pops up, but, to me, the most significant items are the real-life Thanksgiving snapshots people have posted. When hipsters started talking a few years ago about how the Web was going to change everything, I for one never anticipated the way it would bring me into a form of domestic intimacy with so many people I’d never met. A few months ago when I was researching pictures of the Parthenon in Athens, I was surprised to see that many of the best shots had been taken by tourists and posted on their individual websites. I didn’t use any of them, because they usually had themselves or their loved ones in the picture, but I still went away quite impressed at catching a glimpse at the amount of thought, creativity and general adventure that occurs at what used to be an utterly private level. History will never be the same, assuming that historians are smart enough to download virtually the entire World Wide Web on a regular basis. Anyway, I came away from my very brief search with this iconic Thanksgiving picture for all of you. I don’t know who created it, but a tip of the hat to the Unknown Artist. Iconic Thanksgiving Picture By Unknown Artist I also stumbled across the following, a page of doodles entitled “Thanksgiving”—note the stuffing recipe in the upper right corner. G. Fama, Thanksgiving, 1998 This is from the website of Gene Fama, which you can see here. Gene is, well, I don’t know what Gene is now, but at one point he was a comic book artist and a funny guy. (He probably still is.) He has some very amusing doodles and other entertaining stuff, including a page of his daughter’s drawings, on his site. Anyway, a Happy Thanksgiving to Gene (happier anyway than 1998 on the evidence of his drawing--although with artists you can never tell) and all the rest of you. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Digital Photography Musings
Friedrich -- "But what about the printer?" That was my main worry a while back, when I was lusting to get myself a digital still camera. The cameras finally seemed tolerably good and tolerably priced. But the printers ... I didn't like the expense -- refilling all those damn ink wells! -- and I worried that the prints wouldn't last long before fading. Also, since I already have a good b&w laser printer, I wasn't eager to clutter up the work space with yet another gizmo. I want one, I want one ... No, actually, I can wait When I finally sprang for the camera about six months ago, I decided that my way of resolving the printer question would be by sliding into "waiting until they get better" mode. What prompts this posting is that I just realized that not only have I not yet bought a color printer, I haven't yet wanted to make a color print. I'm still in "waiting till they get better" mode, and am perfectly happy there. The fact is, or has proved (to my surprise) to be, that I find storing photos on my hard drive and looking at them on the computer monitor not just an adequate substitute for storing and leafing through traditional prints, but much superior to it. This isn't just a matter of editing fun with Photoshop, it's also a matter of sheer looking-at-'em pleasure. The photos look really, really good on screen -- that beaming CRT glow gives them a kind of glamor. I can make them larger and smaller at will, and I love being able to email them. Plus I can riffle through them pretty easily. Despite hard-drive clutter, my digi-photos are much more accessible to me than my old on-paper photos are in the boxes and bins where they're heaped. So I enjoy them more. I seem to remember that you've entered the digi-still-photo world yourself. Have you found this to be the case too? Assuming my experience reflects that of other users, I wonder what this means for photography. I'm happier with virtual photography than I am with hard-copy-centric photography, not just as somebody who dislikes the smell of chemicals but simply as someone who enjoys looking at photographs. Will the primary life (not just the production but the viewers' experience) of photos soon start to be onscreen rather than on paper? Myself, I'll always have some framed photos out and on display. But I suspect the great majority of my photos will accumulate on my hard drive, thence never to take on existence in the physical realm. And that's fine by me. I still crave a good color printer but now consider buying one such a luxury that I may never get around to making the purchase; they're always getting better and cheaper. Plus, I'm rather enjoying the pleasures of holding off -- the Wife claims that I enjoy waiting on a purchase more than actually making it. What I really crave these... posted by Michael at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Aloha, "Aloha"
Michael In a comment a while ago, you asked for more information on “Aloha” Barney, who was the art dealer for Edgar (“The King of Black Velvet Painting”) Leeteg. At the cost of countless minutes spent reading the articles thrown up by a Google search, this is what I’ve discovered: Apparently Aloha (whose name was either Barney Smith or Barney Davis) had been a submarine pilot in World War Two. He seems to have met Leeteg in Hawaii. Alternatively, since Leeteg spent most of his time drunk or high in Tahiti, it’s possible that he merely thought he had met Aloha in Hawaii. In any event, Aloha opened a gallery in Hawaii, where he sold Leeteg’s work. This was no small task, since ex-billboard painter Leeteg churned out two velvet paintings a week—over 1,700 in a 15 year period. Aloha was shrewd enough to call Leeteg “The American Gauguin,” and would often compare Leeteg’s technique of painting on black velvet with the play of lights and darks in the works of the Dutch Masters. As Phil Patton remarks, this was a school of painting “he could be sure patrons would know from the cigar box.” Note the Play of Lights and Darks Aloha also seems to have helped promote Leeteg’s image, encouraging the painter to construct the palatial Villa Velour, which was even equipped with a 10-seat Italian marble outhouse. Aloha realized that a hard-drinking, wildly promiscuous image was good for Leeteg’s prices; statements attributed to Leeteg like: “I have boozed more, fought more, laid more girls and thrown more wild parties than anyone else on the island, but it's all good publicity and gets me talked about plenty, and that's what sells pictures" have Aloha’s fingerprints all over them (especially since Leeteg lived with his mother.) Anyway, Aloha gave as good as he got in his relationship with Leeteg, since he managed to move the black velvet to the tune of $10,000 a picture in the late 1940s—when a buck was a buck—which would have made anyone other than a tormented artist like Leeteg happy. Of course, Leeteg may have been tormented by being excessively happy, since he died by falling off a motorcycle while drunk. Anyway, it was hard to tell his mental state since he was more or less always drunk, high, or getting yelled at by his mother. Visionary Dealer Aloha Barney In short, I believe the NEA should endow a college scholarship fund in memory of Aloha Barney Smith/Davis; more dealers with his visionary temperament would be the best development imaginable for the American art scene. You can read more about Aloha Barney and Leeteg here, here, here and here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 27, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tuesday, November 26, 2002


Pollock's Drip Fractals
Michael In the December 2002 issue of Scientific American there is a very interesting article by Richard Taylor on the existence of fractal patterns in Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings. Dr. Taylor, a physics professor at the University of Oregon, is perhaps unusual for a hard scientist in also possessing a master’s degree in art theory. J. Pollock, Lavender Mist, 1950 (detail) Does Art Imitate Math? After a chance occurrence got him thinking about possible affinities between Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and fractals, Dr. Taylor scanned a Pollock drip painting into a computer, then covered the image with a computer-generated mesh of identical squares, and analyzed which squares were occupied by the painted pattern and which were empty. As a result, he could calculate the statistical qualities of the pattern (i.e., the number of full or empty squares.) According to Doc Taylor, …fractals consist of patterns that recur on finer and finer magnifications, building up shapes of immense complexity. In short, a fractal pattern looks quite similar at any scale of magnification, with a constant ratio of filled to empty areas. When Doc Taylor examined the “statistics” of the Pollock drip painting patterns under different sized-grids—from ones small enough to isolate a single speck of paint to grids a meter square—he found that the Pollock's imagery was of a fractal nature, with the same patterns appearing over the entire scale range. The good doctor considered the possibility that all drip paintings automatically create fractals, and to check this hypothesis he analyzed a painting by an artist other than Pollock. The non-Pollock drip painting yielded no fractal patterns. On the possibility that what he had found was just a fluke, Dr. Taylor analyzed a lot of samples, including: ...five drip paintings sent to us by collectors who suspected their acquisitions might have been created by Pollock. Despite superficial similarities with Pollock’s work, none of the paintings contained fractal patterns. The fractals are the product of the specific technique that Pollock devised, and all the 20 drip paintings of his that we have analyzed have this fractal structure. Dr. Taylor has also gotten interested in the aesthetics of fractals. For example, the more complex the fractal pattern, the higher the “fractal dimension," or "D” is: For a smooth line (containing no fractal structure), D has a value of 1; for a completely filled area, [D’s] value is 2. For a fractal pattern, however, the repeating structure causes the line to occupy area. D then lies in the range between 1 and 2; as the complexity and richness of the repeating structure increase, its value moves closer to 2. Dr. Taylor and his colleagues have investigated aesthetic reactions to three categories of fractals: natural fractals, such as those found in trees, mountains and clouds, mathematical fractals developed by computer simulations and artistic fractals, in this case sections of Pollock paintings. Participants in Doc Taylor’s tests consistently prefered D values in the range of 1.3 to 1.5, regardless of whether the pattern was from nature,... posted by Friedrich at November 26, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments

Games and Puzzles
Friedrich -- A few remarks by Glenn “Mac” Frazier in the comments section of the modernist/modernism posting below got me thinking about puzzles and games. I dislike puzzles and enjoy games. Puzzles, which seem to be about figuring things out, give me a headache -- I seem to spend a lot of time fighting frustration and fury, and can’t seem to find whatever pleasure might be there to be had. Games on the other hand I often enjoy. Sports, cards ... One of my probably-never-to-be-realized ambitions is to become good at the game of go, which (the few times I’ve played it) has made my brain feel refreshed and tingly. A game is a very different experience for me than a puzzle. It’s a more or less simple set of rules, understood before the action begins, and then the playing-out of one’s energies and inspirations -- all of which I find intensely pleasurable, not that I’ve ever been terribly good at any games. Video and computer games, which I’ve never enjoyed, strike me as some new hybrid -- half puzzle, half game. There’s often action to be taken part in. Yet the rules never seem fully spelled-out beforehand; you discover them as you go. So the playing-out of the game is really the figuring-out of the puzzle. Once you’ve figured the game out, it’s over, you’re done. Figuring the game out is the game -- which, as far as I’m concerned, makes these things not traditional games at all, but more related to puzzles and programming. And like puzzles, they give me headaches. The Wife tells me she thinks that puzzles appeal to obsessive personalities like her own, and that my personality is a more open-ended one. Her hunch is that, as a well-behaved, bland-o Protestant person who appreciates decent manners, I like inhabiting spaces that are defined by rules yet allow for mental and physical romping. A good theory, I think, even if I suspect she’s really telling me in a sweet way that I drive her nuts because I’m an inane and shallow person. Ah, subtext. But I’m a tyro at thinking about these puzzles-and-games questions. Any insights? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 26, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments

Free Reads -- Callow on Guinness
Friedrich -- Have you run across the writing of the British actor Simon Callow? I think he's one of the handful of really good writers on performers and performance, topics that are amazingly difficult to write about well. Callow's biography of Charles Laughton (buyable here) is, for me, one of the very best biographies ever written about an actor; Callow knows what acting is and he knows what Laughton was about. And he treats Laughton's work with the kind of respect and knowledge we expect in discussions of writers and painters but almost never encounter in discussions of performers. Guinness: What did he have against Larry? You can sample Callow's mind and touch in this good, long review by Callow (for the Guardian) of Gary O'Connor's new biography of Alec Guinness, here. Sample passage: O'Connor is keenly aware of the nature of the acting enterprise that Guinness was slowly identifying for himself, his unusual sense of character, his uncommonly economical transformations (I was in the dressing room with him on the last night of his Merchant of Venice, for which he produced one of his most remarkable physicalisations, and watched him dismantle his Shylock by simply removing two pieces of Blu-tack from behind his ears - "Jumbo ears" he said - and some eye-liner). Above all Guinness possessed the thrilling capacity to embody thought, to harness mental power. "An actor needs a slightly mystical approach to the stage," he said at a relatively early period in his career. "You can't force yourself on the character." The piece is full of stories and gossip, too. Guinness could put away enormous amounts of booze; hated Laurence Olivier; and, despite marriage and fatherhood, was almost certainly gay. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 26, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, November 25, 2002


Free Reads -- Pre-Code Hollywood
Friedrich -- Jon Walz visits the author and film restorer Mark Vieira for the L.A. Times, and produces a concise introduction to the history and pleasures of "pre-Code Hollywood," here. The pre-Code period was the four(ish) year long stretch in the early '30s when an amazingly large number of rowdy, uninhibited films were produced. Then the censors cracked down. Sample passage: Content from hundreds of pre-1934 films was excised methodically by the Hays Office's zealous L.A. studio liaison Joseph Breen, beginning in 1934 and continuing well into the mid-'50s, when films began playing on television. In recent years, lost footage has been found and reinserted into many of the "cut" films, but there are close to 100 films still missing footage.      "I grew up in the Bay Area in the '50s and would watch these films on local TV stations," Vieira says. "Although I didn't know about the cuts, something just drew me to the kinds of worlds these films portrayed, and it fascinated me." I haven't seen as many of the pre-Code films as I'd like, but I can certainly vouch for their energy, physicality and good-nature. What a shock it is to see such films coming from that era. You mean, Grandma and Grandpa drank, had fun, and enjoyed sex? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Q&A archive
Friedrich -- Are you as fond of the q&a form as I am? I sometimes feel sorry for the interviewee, who's often spent years developing a subject and a style and who's now expected to deliver the essential goods in an hour or less. Yet the first thing I do when I get interested in a recent artist is search for q&a's he's done. It's an amazingly efficient way to get up to some kind of speed. A resource for q&a junkies I hadn't run across before just came to my attention: an archive of interviews with a fun range of book people, from Nicholson Baker to Anthony Lane, readable here. The interviewer, Robert Birnbaum, gives his subjects plenty of space, as well as attentive and sensitive questioning. Sample passage, from an interview with Alain de Botton: Birnbaum: Let's talk about the sublime. You introduce this notion as a kind of substitute for traditional religious worship in the 19th century. AB: The sublime is a feeling provoked by certain kinds of landscape that are very large, very impressive and dangerous. Places like the wide-open oceans, the high mountains ... It's interesting that around the end of the 18th century, people started to say that the feeling that these places provoke in us is a recognizable one and universal one—and a good one. This feeling was described as the feeling of the sublime ... What lies at the center of the experience is a feeling of smallness. You are very small and something else is very big and dangerous. You are very vulnerable in the face of something else. Of course, the other thing that tends to make you feel very small and vulnerable is God, traditionally, in our culture. There is an intriguing synchronicity between the rise of the idea of the sublime and the decline of organized religion. The way many people speak of landscape as of the late 18th century is often in quasi-religious tones or actively religious tones. So if one thinks about people like Thomas Cole going out and painting the American West what they are saying and seeing is the hand of God in Nature. Lots of good reading to be had here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Art is Long, Life is Weird
Michael The Wall Street Journal of November 25 has a column (“Boomtown” by Lee Gomes) on a wrinkle in the art-technology interface known as 3-D scanning or “lidar.” This is a laser scanning system that yields 3-dimensional data of an object. While I’ve been aware of this type of optical scanning for a number of years (didn’t they use something like this back when they were creating the clay-to-animatronic-to digital dinosaurs for Jurassic Park?) I wasn’t aware that it was being applied to our sculptural heritage. As the article points out, Some of the most interesting laser-scanning work, though, is in the field of cultural and historical preservation. A team from Stanford University runs the Digital Michelangelo project that used a special high-powered laser to scan the statue of David in Florence. The scanning is accurate down to less than 100th of an inch and fills up 20 gigabytes of data. The article points out that, for art historians, these scans have a variety of worthy uses: David Koller, a Stanford graduate student who worked on the project, said the David 3D model was used in Florence to help plan the current cleaning that David is getting. He also said that the Stanford model is accurate enough that one can discern the direction of Michaelangelo’s individual chisel marks. With the right sort of image processing software, said Mr. Koller, an art historian could develop new insights into Michelangelo’s sculpting techniques. Art history almost seems besides the point, however: what really strikes me is that the David has entered a new phase in its life as an artwork. I mean, the darn thing's been digitized (the David’s been reduced to a mere 20 gigs?—that doesn’t seem big enough somehow) and will now go off into thousands of new experiences as a work of art. It will no doubt get “quoted” and inserted into God knows what new artistic concantenations. While I don’t claim to see this future more than through a glass, darkly, I suppose one can analogize with the ways in which 2-D scanners and the Internet have “democratized” the museum—today, every man can be his own art publisher/image-appropriating digital collagist. And if images have cast off their link to their handcrafted originals today, why shouldn’t this be true for 3-dimensional representations tomorrow? The mind boggles, but I guess that’s sort of the point. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 25, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Moviegoing: "Punch Drunk Love"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I just caught P.T. Anderson's Punch Drunk Love, and I think it's going to be the last of his movies I'll bother with. He's certainly talented, and his movies have the virtue of being strange, unusual, and ambitious. I have friends whose brains and taste I respect who enjoy his work, and even seem to think he's the great young post-Tarantino hope. Emily Watson and Adam Sander: Movie love How do you react to his movies? I think I see pretty clearly what he's doing -- I get it: A panoramic/sociological Altmanesque thing, but done with a hyper-subjective, my-head's-about-to-explode, early-Scorsese intensity. I just don't take any pleasure in it, though bless his heart for persuading Heather Graham to be so uninhibited in "Boogie Nights." I can't bring myself to write much more, but for the sake of information let it be noted that "Punch Drunk Love" is an absurdist romantic fairy tale (ie., stir a little Demy into the usual Altman-Scorsese mix) in love with the ideas of unlikeliness and the miraculous (Love! Art! Success in both is such a fluke!), and determined to prevail in the face of cosmically bad odds via sheer... via sheer... Well, to be honest, what I really keep wondering when watching Anderson's movies is "What's this guy on?" Almost everything in his movies is over-intense, over-upsetting. The visuals smear, blur, and twinkle -- here, he's forever using stabs and jabs and flashing -- and the sonics are pure echo-chamber mindfuck. What's he on? No idea. But his films remind me of those final hours of an acid trip when it's too much and you just wish it would all stop. Even after leaving the theater I notice that I'm feeling like I used to the day after taking acid -- flattened, burnt out, with nothing to do but wait for the nervous system to repair itself. The wife thinks Anderson may simply be high on the idea of being a great director, that being an artist is so important to him that making films may be drug enough. There's no question that he burns to be the creator of '70s-style, mysterious-renegade films -- his whole soul seems consumed by that era. Which may help explain why some of my critic friends are so high on his work; they're nostalgic themselves for those headstrong old days. And P.T. Anderson helps them keep that miracle alive. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 25, 2002 | perma-link | (9) comments

Saturday, November 23, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- A few treats, plucked from the overgrown thicket that is next week's television schedule. Pierce Brosnan on Inside the Actor's Studio (Bravo, Sunday at 8 pm). The show's host, James Lipton, may be more than a little something to endure. But he also runs the only show on TV where performers regularly get a chance to speak at length about something they actually know about -- performing. Always iffy, but Brosnan, who's Irish, may prove to have the gift of gab. Battle Group: Spruance (History Channel, Sunday at 8 pm and midnight). A promising-sounding 2 hour documentary about a largely forgotten American Admiral who won at Midway and spearheaded many other battles in the Pacific. Lolita (TCM, Monday at 8 pm). If you can forget that it's an adaptation of the book, and can take it on its own terms instead -- something some people have a hard time doing -- it's a flakily brilliant, out-there comedy of lust and tackiness. Stanley Kubrick directs James Mason in one of his best performances, Peter Sellers, Shelly Winters and Sue Lyons. A word to Nabokov loyalists and sticklers: I've read the script that Nabokov wrote and Kubrick rejected. Kubrick was right to reject it -- it reads like a dream and provides almost nothing to film. The Horse's Mouth (IFC, Tuesday at 6 am). Alec Guinness as the roustabout bum-artist Gulley Jimson, in a more-than-decent adaptation of Joyce Cary's great lowdown comic novel. All too rarely seen, although IFC has been sneaking it into its schedule for a few weeks now. Classic Westerns directed by John Ford (TCM, from 8 pm Wednesday evening thru 6 am Thursday morning). You aren't a real film buff if you haven't watched John Ford's best. Here's your chance to earn those manly stripes: The Searchers (8 pm); My Darling Clementine (10 pm); Fort Apache (midnight); She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (2:15 am); Rio Grande (4 am). Each one a giant. An A&E Biography about Audrey Hepburn (A&E, Thursday at 8 pm and midnight). A ballet dancer and the daughter of a Dutch baroness, Hepburn was a bit player when she was spotted by the great French novelist Colette, and was cast in the Broadway adapation of "Gigi." She went on to become one of the key female icons of the post-WW2 years -- Winona Ryder as a physical type, for instance, is inconceivable without Audrey Hepburn. The Paleface (TCM, Friday morning at 2 am). When most people think of Bob Hope, they picture the stale old comic he became. As a young man, though, he had a naughty spark, and starred in many likable entertainments. This easygoing Western parody is one of them -- you can see why Hope was for many years one of the biggest stars in the world. Break out the VCR! Er, Tivo... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free reads -- Philosoblog and Glenn Frazier
Friedrich -- Jim Ryan is an interesting case -- a philosopher with a lot of respect (including philosophical respect) for common sense. At Philosoblog, here, he writes mini-essays on provocative topics. The exchanges in his comments are a special pleasure. Today's topic is "A Rough Topology of Right and Wrong." Sample passage: In many cases, one has a right to act in his own self-interest. Also, everyone has a duty to sacrifice his interests in order to help others in some cases. There is a restriction on harming; it is wrong to inflict harm in many cases. But, it is also wrong to allow harm in some cases. Finally, the degree of harm and self-interest at stake matters. And I just stumbled across this enlightening posting over at the always-interesting GlennFrazier.com (here): a discussion of the differences between what he labels the radical liberal and the liberal conservative. Sample passage: The point is that it is very good to want to make life better for people, but it can't be done in ignorance to or without respect for the powerful world outside. The fundamentals of this world will not change, no matter our intentions. We have to go with what works. And that is the statement that so chills the romantic, the radical, the liberal. And for good reason: "what works" does not constitute a good enough criterion for how we decide to live our lives. The liberal heart insists on doing "what's right." What separates the liberal conservative from the radical liberal is the idea of a balance of tensions between the two. Exposure to the mainstream media can sometimes leave you wondering whether common sense, as well as horse-sense, have become things of the past. But blogdom seems to have given both a great new outlet. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 23, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friday, November 22, 2002


Free Reads -- De Palma
Friedrich -- Like his work or not, Brian De Palma (who talks to Michael Sragow in a good interview for the Baltimore Sun here), has always been one of brainiest and most articulate of recent American film directors -- as well as one of the few who, even after becoming a filmmaker, has remained a real film buff. (Surprisingly rare, this.) Sample passage: From [Welles] you learn how to use a group of actors, how to move them around in a certain location and frame them with the camera. The big problem is that you no longer can get American actors who can move they way they do in Welles' films. Very few film actors in America have real stage training any more - they're used to walking around in a two-shot and having a Steadicam trail behind them. The good thing about Femme Fatale is that actors in France, like actors in London, are always on stage when they're not in movies. Remember in the old days, when all the major actors pooh-poohed going to Hollywood? All the great roles for actors are still in the theater - they're certainly not in movies. The new generation of movie actors can't do anything because they have no stage movement or voice training. Welles could come up with fabulous moves because he had this whole stage-trained troupe - he could order them to go anywhere and they could do anything. It hadn't occurred to me that one of the reasons De Palma was able to do the extreme and stylish visual things he did in "Femme Fatale" was that many of his actors had a highly-trained ability to maneuver around physically. Dodge those cameras, kids! Among the professional reviewers of the film that I've looked at online, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader (here), Armond White in New York Paper (here), and Sragow in the Baltimore Sun (here) strike me as most on-the-money -- which of course means that they seem to have watched and enjoyed the same movie I did (here). For a similar view that reaches different conclusions, try reading Felix Salmon's posting about the film (here). The Femme Fatale Eyes of Rebecca Romijn-Stamos Sample Rosenbaum passage: What matters isn't plot details, much less character or motivation. It's the visual rhymes ... and other kinds of abstract visual patterns that hype up various incidents ... Because we're persuaded by De Palma's baroque stylistics, we're bound to see his characters as somewhat dehumanized. De Palma isn't so much eliminating motivations as minimizing and mocking them. Sample White passage: Reading the plot is less important than considering the title, which is the film’s theme. With his unfettered camera movements that evoke one’s dreaming, De Palma employs the essence of cinema (picture-making) so that a viewer is enraptured by his visual intelligence: every sequence probes sexist female iconography for the soul it represents. Sample Sragow passage: The whole movie gets its charge from a jaw-dropping blend of sensuality and calculation. De Palma... posted by Michael at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- Sullivan on media bias
Friedrich -- Andrew Sullivan has written a subtle yet levelheaded and enjoyable piece about media bias for the Times of London, readable here. Sample passage: Bias is inevitable in any grown-up journalist's work. You can try to be balanced (and you're a better journalist if you try) - but even in your choice of topics, selection of guests, presentation of facts, you inevitably show your hand. And a grown-up journalist admits this. Then we can all get on with the task of assessing, discussing, and debating the issues involved. This isn't to say journalism should degenerate into simple propaganda or outright advocacy, at least not in the presentation of news rather than opinion. Trying to present many sides of an issue is a mark of an honest journalist or reporter. And maintaining a distinction between news and opinion is also the mark of an honest editor. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

The Politics of the NEA, Part I
Michael In my never-ending series on American culture I thought it was finally time to get around to the NEA. The story of this august institution begins at the end of the 1950s. The social prestige of the arts had reached a new high in American life. Around the country, cultural events formed a new platform on which the affluent and socially ambitious could court distinction. While John Kennedy (like most of his colleagues in the Senate) had never been known as a friend of the arts, he had noticed that the arts constituency was growing and it included many powerful figures: bankers, lawyers and doctors, university presidents and newspaper publishers. After his election, Kennedy carefully used high culture to brand his administration as aristocratic and forward-looking. Fear of Rocky: Motivation for the NEA The political question of government support for the arts, however, really became a hot-button issue when New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller (considered Kennedy’s most likely challenger in the 1964 election) upped the ante by establishing a state arts council in 1960—the first in the nation. In doing so Rockefeller rallied both liberal Democrats and ultraconservative Republicans, as well as such powerful labor unions as the American Federation of Musicians, Actors’ Equity, and organized stagehands, electricians and carpenters around the bounty of public arts funding. Sensing a threat, Kennedy moved to enhance his own cultural profile. He sent Arthur Goldberg, his labor secretary, to New York to get headlines by mediating a strike at the Metropolitan Opera. Kennedy also proposed a National Culture Center for Washington, D.C. and appointed a prominent group of artists to its advisory board. Although Kennedy supported establishing an agency for federal funding of the arts, he was assassinated before this was accomplished. In the months that followed, it became clear even to anxious observers that however little Lyndon Johnson knew or cared about the arts, he was just as determined as Kennedy to woo the arts constituency, and was better at getting legislation passed. Johnson propelled a languishing arts bill through Congress. Although Congressional hearings focused on the problems of individual artists, it was actually a coalition of major arts institutions, New York City’s congressional delegation, the American Federation of Musicians, Actors’ Equity, the Motion Picture Association, and John D. Rockefeller III (puppet-master of Lincoln Center), that helped Johnson put the heat on recalcitrant legislators. On September 16, 1965, the House and Senate agreed on legislation establishing the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. There was a significant gap in the legislation, however: to wit, what was the National Endowment of the Arts supposed to do? To what purpose was it to spend the $2.5 million allocated to it the first year? The congressional committee reviewing the bill affirmed that the endowments’ principal objective was …the encouragement of free inquiry and expression…conformity for its own sake is not to be encouraged…no preference should be given to any particular style or school of thought or expression. Nor... posted by Friedrich at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Modern/Modernist
Friedrich -- Remember my small campaign to avoid using the word "liberal" to describe leftists (who, in my experience, are anything but liberal)? Let's call them "leftists" instead. Well, I've got another one to propose. "Modern art," "modern architecture," "modern poetry" ... Hmmmm. That word "modern" is a problem. Why? Because it does several things that demand to be untangled. I'm proposing (and hereby resolving, if only for myself) using the word "modernist" instead of "modern" in these cases. Why? Because so-called "modern art" is really nothing but one strain and tradition in recent and contemporary art. Many different kinds of art have been produced in recent years, and are being produced now -- marine watercolors, for instance, and paintings-on-black-velvet, and surfboard decoration, and cowboy art. Some of it's good, and many of the artists producing this kind of work have their talents and skills. Yet they aren't taken seriously, or (often) even thought of as doing real art. Why not? Well, partly because the "modern art" (and "postmodern art") mafia makes the claim that the only real art of our time is art done in their own particular "modern" or "postmodern" tradition. The terminology allows them to look down their noses at all the other art that's being produced, and even to dismiss it as not-art. Because painters of hunting scenes, for instance, aren't grappling with the "formal issues" supposedly demanded by the nature of our time (said nature as defined, of course, by members of the "modern" mafia), they aren't serious, they aren't deep -- they aren't really doing art with a capital A. Why let them get away with this? One way, I propose, of combating the tyrrany of the modern-postmodern mafia is to insist on referring to their art tradition as "modernist" and "post-modernist." If we do so, we'll succeed in implying that their tradition is simply one of many. We'll undermine their claims to be the ultimate authority on things artistic. An example: "modern architecture" -- what a brilliant p-r victory to have claimed that name. It has many people believing that the only legitimate new (or newish) architecture -- the only buildings that qualify as architecture -- are shiney, abstract things (or, these days, jagged and bewildering things). Yet most people don't like these buildings, and many many other kinds of buildings are being built -- and, of course, not considered to be legitimate architecture by the mafia. Call the mafia's work "modernist architecture" (or "postmodernist architecture") instead, and it's clear that there are alternatives. "No, dear, I'm not in the mood for postmodernist, I'd prefer something a little more Adirondack cabin-ish instead." Using modernist instead of modern will open up minds, if only in a small way. Besides, I'm offended from a purely language-buff point of view. Any art produced now is modern art by definition. Anything built now is modern architecture. Any poem written today is modern poetry. None of them, though, have to be modernist. Which style to use (let alone... posted by Michael at November 22, 2002 | perma-link | (22) comments

Thursday, November 21, 2002


Free Reads -- Walter Williams
Friedrich -- Walter Williams, one of my favorite columnists, delivers another punchy piece of down-to-earth, rock-solid commonsense, readable here. Sample passage: It's clear sailing if you argue that the high crime rate is caused by poverty and discrimination, and the way to get rid of crime is to eliminate these root causes. But there's a problem with that theory. It doesn't explain why black communities were far safer in earlier times, such as in the '20s, '30s and '40s, at a time of far greater poverty and discrimination, and fewer opportunities. Crime imposes devastating economic and personal costs on many black neighborhoods, but it's not a civil rights problem. The high crime rate represents political choices made by black politicians, civil rights organizations and many black citizens to tolerate criminals. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Nicole Kidman
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Are you a Nicole Kidman fan? I am. She has pretty much everything I want from a star, even if minus much of the acting talent. She has beauty (although in her case I'd say that she has extreme prettiness more than beauty, if by beauty you mean, as I do, something idiosyncratic, poetic, and mysterious), daring, a love of hurling herself into things emotionally and physically, an entertaining (in her case, apparently unguarded and engaging) public persona, an eagerness to play the game. All that, a star marriage and divorce, unfair rumors, and terrific luck, too. I smile when I encounter her; I'm glad to see her; I'm amused by the roles she takes and the directions she steers her career in; I'm involved (in a semi-camp way) with her personal travails. Plus she once told British GQ that she enjoys "going commando," by which she apparently means that she sometimes doesn't wear underpants. Heaven-sent, yet going commando Acting talent? Well.... enough. She was genuinely good in "To Die For," but have any of her other performances shown much range or skill? Yet I don't mind, and don't see why I should, even if I wouldn't want her to be much less talented than she is. She is a funny case, though, because in so many ways she seems pure actress. She likes making daring choices ("Eyes Wide Shut," etc), she's full of enthusiasm, and she seems to think like an actress about the people she wants to work with and chances she wants to take. But that just reminds me of how little a role acting talent per se really plays in stardom. I still get annoyed by people who run down the likes of Julia Roberts on the basis of her not being a very good actress. I'm not a huge Julia fan, and I don't by any means think she's the most gifted actress around. But she's obviously a very good and effective star. Mixing up acting talent with star power is one of those elementary mistakes people make when talking about performers. Star power is one of those things: a person who has it is simply somebody many people really, truly enjoy watching, and who crowds will go out of their way to watch. (Additional skills and talents are a bonus.) Who can explain it? For me, for instance, Miranda Otto and Minnie Driver both qualify as stars -- I love following both of them too. Yet neither one seems to have worked for the general public -- and, in Minnie's case particularly, it ain't for lack of trying. One more reason not to hire me as a movie executive, I suppose. This also reminds me of one of those elementary things. It came to me some years ago, as I was learning my way around the arts. I got to know some actors who, lord knows, were nothing if not actors; self-absorbed, overemotional, vain, transparent, silly, charming. At... posted by Michael at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments

Aesthetics & Automobiles
Michael Knowing your interest in the aesthetics of everyday life, I thought of you when I read a story in the New York Times of November 21, “BMW Design Chief Sees Art on Wheels; Some Just See Ugly.” (You can read it here.) Apparently Christopher E. Bangle, BMW's chief designer, wants each BMW to be a conversation piece known as much for design as precision engineering. Where BMW's [once] looked very much alike, he is trying to make each model different — some with bulging back ends, some with unusually reflective surfaces and sharp curves, and some, like the Mini, just plain small. According to the story, automotive market researcher Chris Cedergren thinks BMW is smart to adopt this approach: "It moves away from everyone else and differentiates the brand," he said. "It makes a statement. The more you can get the consumer to be one with that vehicle and really link their emotion to that vehicle, that will translate into a situation where the consumer will say, `I want it.' " "What Chris Bangle is doing is reading that into the marketplace, and, rightly so, developing vehicles that go after individual emotions," he added. While there has been considerable criticism of the revised styling of the 7 Series—in the interests of full disclosure, I’m not crazy about it—the article notes that Mr. Bangle’s overall strategy is proving quite successful. Sales of the new 7 Series — BMW's most expensive line of cars, starting at about $70,000 — have increased 45 percent this year. Mr. Bangle is particularly fired up about BMW's new Z4, which he claims represents an aesthetic leap in car design, analogous to the shift in Greek sculpture that occurred when sculptors discovered the power of draping cloth on nude figures to infuse them with an illusion of motion. BMW's Z4: Aesthetic Leap? I've never seen this car in person, so it's a little hard to evaluate this claim, but it would be nice if Detroit’s automakers, who once seemed to have some insight into car design, took Mr. Bangle's philosophy a bit more seriously. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Free reads -- black velvet
Friedrich -- Have you stumbled across this? An article in The Age by Pat Sheil about Edgar Leeteg, apparently the father of that great art form, paintings-of-Tahitian-girls-on-black-velvet. You can read it here. Leeteg was known as "The American Gauguin" Sample passage: When he received a letter from a friend living in Tahiti ... he stole a fistful of brushes from work, filled a dozen jars with paint and hightailed it to the south seas ... He eked out a living doing odd jobs. He also started painting the local girls and selling the results to sailors for a few dollars apiece. A self-confessed "gin-soaked dopehead", Leeteg was having a hard time of it. Link via Out of Lascaux, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (12) comments

Google Searches
Friedrich -- I can't explain why, but the Google searches that have led websurfers to our blog haven't been as outrageous as they once were. Are we falling down on the job? Although there have been a few gems, among them: +Batman +porn +little +girl +slave +hunting +erotica +pregnant +women +smoking +pot And I sometimes think my web-surfing interests are kinky! The two topics we've raised that have brought in the most traffic (and that, amazingly enough, continue to bring it in) have been Jenna Jameson and science-fiction. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. Note to all bloggers: you want to drive up your traffic? Write a posting about Jenna Jameson and science fiction. I won't be held responsible for what visitors make of your site once they arrive, though. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

"Globalization" and Education
Michael As long as I'm on a roll about modern public-school education: what’s with the total indifference to geography? My kids go to what is widely considered the best public school system in the Los Angeles metropolitan area, and even they just figured out that California isn’t its own country about a year ago. At college we used to conduct an experiment (after having too much to drink) at how well we could draw a map of the 48 continental states—quickly concluding that the map’s accuracy declined in proportion to our sobriety. I tried it out the other day on my kids, and for a horrified second or two thought I was going to have to take them to the hospital to get their stomach pumped. This is pretty much the reaction the National Geographic Society had after commissioning an international survey of geographic literacy. According to an A.P. story: The society survey found that only about one in seven -- 13 percent -- of Americans between the age of 18 and 24, the prime age for military warriors, could find Iraq. The score was the same for Iran, an Iraqi neighbor. So, you might say, that’s on the other side of the world. The more depressing news was that 70 percent cannot find New Jersey, 49 percent cannot find New York, and 11 percent cannot find the United States (hey, guys, a clue—that’s the part of the globe that you end up focusing on underneath the Universal Pictures logo at the movies.) "Someone once said that war is God's way of teaching geography, but today, apparently war or even the threat of war cannot adequately teach geography," John Fahey, president of the National Geographic Society, said. "More American young people can tell you where an island that the Survivor TV series came from is located than can identify Afghanistan or Iraq. Ironically a TV show seems more real or at least more meaningful interesting or relevant [than] reality." It occurred to me that all the controversy over “globalization” may not be because of the disruptive impact of international trade, but rather because it’s just dawning on a lot of people that they live on one. The most geographically literate country was Sweden, with an average of 40 correct answers out of 56, followed by Germany and Italy, each with 38. No country got an "A," which required an average scores of 42 correct answers or better. The U.S. got a “D”, with an average score of 23. As the alert correspondent who forwarded this to me points out: Notice the grading scale, which was apparently devised to keep the US from getting a failing grade: A (42/56=75%) D (23/56=41%) It’s a sad day when a whole country needs, er, grade inflation to get by. But I guess the education industry has a lot of experience with that. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 21, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, November 20, 2002


Celebrity Smack Down
Michael As you know, one of our readers, Felix Salmon (not gregdotorg as I mistakenly mentioned when I first posted this story--sorry, Greg), in hotly defending the value of conceptual art, made a comparison between Robert Irwin and Thomas Cole, which he seemed to feel would favor Mr. Irwin: Do you really think that Thomas Cole would win a Celebrity Smack-down against Robert Irwin? The latter, just for starters, could easily lay claim to having a genuinely American vision, as opposed to simply taking Netherlandish lanscape painting, blowing it up a bit in size, and painting medium-sized mountains instead of fields with cows. Well, this got me to looking at both men’s works, something I hadn’t done for a few years—and along the way, I ran across some examples of their writings (the Internet is a wonder, ain’t it?) After studying these, I think any suggestion of a battle royale between Irwin and Cole is kind of misplaced. The two men seem more like artistic brothers (making allowance for the century and a half of artistic and intellectual evolution that separates them.) T. Cole, Schroon Mountain, Adirondacks,1838; R. Irwin, Double Diamond, 1997-8 A quote from Robert Irwin: If light is the medium and space is the medium, then, in a sense, the universe is a medium. I know the impracticality of it right now but when I say that the medium is the universe, that maybe the world is an art form, then the gardening of our universe or our consciousness would be the level of our art participation. A quote from Thomas Cole: [American scenery] is a subject that to every American ought to be of surpassing interest; for, whether he beholds the Hudson mingling waters with the Atlantic--explores the central wilds of this vast continent, or stands on the margin of the distant Oregon, he is still in the midst of American scenery--it is his own land; its beauty, its magnificence, its sublimity--all are his; and how undeserving of such a birthright, if he can turn towards it an unobserving eye, an unaffected heart! R. Irwin, Double Diamond, 1997-8; T. Cole, The Oxbow, 1836 The verdict in our celebrity smack down would appear--to me anyway--a draw, with both artists articulating an "genuinely American vision." Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 20, 2002 | perma-link | (6) comments

Free Reads -- Sullivan on Oakeshott
Friedrich -- I sometimes suspect that I'm evolving into little more than a public-relations agency for the philosopher Michael Oakeshott. So be it: there's been little in blogging that I've enjoyed more than learning that I've helped a few people give Oakeshott's writing a try. If you respond to Oakeshott as his fans do, reading him delivers something really cherishable -- an experience of esthetic rapture as well as an experience of political soundness. Some people seem to find that bewildering; me, I bliss out. The polemicist and blogging superstar Andrew Sullivan wrote his thesis on Oakeshott; I've been hoping to get a chance to read it someday. Until then, this will do very well, a recent lecture (followed by a q&a session) Sullivan gave to the American Enterprise Association on the topic of Oakeshott, the Skeptical Conservative, here. Sample passage: He loved the young. He loved their sense of endless possibility. He loved their sense of play. He just thought they should never be allowed anywhere near government. So, too, I think he would love American life and vibrancy and urgency, its experiments, its radicalism, its constant churning. He just wouldn't want to see it replicated in government. He said once, "I'm a conservative in government because I'm a radical in every other human activity. The only way in which we maximize the possibilities of human beings to invent themselves and reinvent themselves, pursue their own ideas and models and desires, is when we make sure the government is strong enough and firm enough to maintain a society which allows such freedom to exist. That requires sobriety, judgment, prudence." Like I say: bliss. (Link via Junius.) Best, Micheal Update: Andrew Sullivan emails that he's hoping to make his thesis on Oakeshott available sometime soon on the website of the Michael Oakeshott Association. I'll let readers know when that happens.... posted by Michael at November 20, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads—The Source of Consciousness
Michael In the Los Angeles Times of November 17, there is an interesting article on brain research—apparently my topic for the month—titled “Stalking the Rational Mind.” It describes how Francis Crick (who won the Nobel Prize for deciphering the structure of DNA 40 years ago) and his band of merry men at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies are pursuing the physical basis of consciousness. (In the invariable habit of scientists, they’ve given this physical mechanism its very own buzz word: the "neural correlate.") Raider of the Neural Correlate: Francis Crick One of the things that surprised me about the story is how literally Crick and his number one colleague, Caltech professor Christof Koch, take the idea that the neural correlate is a specific, identifiable mechanism: At one point, Crick and Koch speculated that the neural correlate of consciousness might be related to the synchronous firing of groups of neurons at about 40 hertz (40 times a second)…But Crick and Koch have more recently backed off some of their broader claims for that theory. Still, they are inclined to believe that the neural correlate is a discrete process in the brain, whether of neurons acting individually or in groups. "Francis and I believe [it] is probably something very specific," Koch says. "The biological model is very specific--so many things in biology are little machines." You can read the whole story, here. I have no idea if Crick and Koch have a clue as to the nature of consciousness, but I must say the whole thing is quite fascinating. Could you recommend any accounts of current day brain research for the general reader? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 20, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Tuesday, November 19, 2002


Change, Death and Pop Culture
Michael I was a bit surprised by the comments on my recent posting on Theodor Adorno; people who I know to be right wing wrote sympathetically of this avowed Marxist’s criticisms of popular culture. This got me to pondering some aspects of Mr. Adorno that I hadn’t included in my posting. (Hey, there’s a real space limit in blogging, okay?). In Adorno’s essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception,”he sounds rather nostalgic when discussing the earlier, or, as he terms it, “liberal” phase of capitalism (i.e., prior to the rise of Big Business or “monopoly” capitalism.) Adorno presents Beethoven, despite his commercial success, as a genuine thinker because he didn’t ignore the conflict between moneymaking and art making: When mortally sick, Beethoven hurled away a novel by Sir Walter Scott with the cry: "Why, the fellow writes for money," and yet proved a most experienced and stubborn businessman in disposing of the last quartets, which were a most extreme renunciation of the market; he is the most outstanding example of the unity of those opposites, market and independence, in bourgeois art. Those who succumb to the ideology are precisely those who cover up the contradiction instead of taking it into the consciousness of their own production as Beethoven did: he went on to express in music his anger at losing a few pence, and derived the metaphysical Es Muss Sein (which attempts an aesthetic banishment of the pressure of the world by taking it into itself) from the housekeeper's demand for her monthly wages. Adorno also pines in a rather non-Marxist way for the “old fashioned” elements in German culture: The belief that the barbarity of the culture industry is a result of "cultural lag," of the fact that the American consciousness did not keep up with the growth of technology, is quite wrong. It was pre-Fascist Europe which did not keep up with the trend toward the culture monopoly. But it was this very lag which left intellect and creativity some degree of independence and enabled its last representatives to exist—however dismally. In Germany the failure of democratic control to permeate life had led to a paradoxical situation. Many things were exempt from the market mechanism which had invaded the Western countries. The German educational system, universities, theaters with artistic standards, great orchestras, and museums enjoyed protection. The political powers, state and municipalities, which had inherited such institutions from absolutism, had left them with a measure of the freedom from the forces of power which dominates the market, just as princes and feudal lords had done up to the nineteenth century. This strengthened art in this late phase against the verdict of supply and demand, and increased its resistance far beyond the actual degree of protection. Adorno’s comments here (which seem much more “genuine” expressions of his feelings than many of his rhetorically bombastic theoretical pronouncements) struck me as very similar to views expressed by a writer who might be thought of as his opposite number: Henry James.... posted by Friedrich at November 19, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Monday, November 18, 2002


NYC Arts and Media on Film
Friedrich -- Just because my mind sometimes makes lists in the middle of the night, here’s a list of movies that accurately portray the NYC arts-and-media life. The Big Clock. First-rate murder noir, with Ray Milland and Charles Laughton, set in a magazine empire, cracklingly directed by John Farrow (Mia’s father). Sweet Smell of Success. Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in a tense, flamboyant expressionistic cautionary fable about gossip and ambition, co-written by Clifford Odets, directed by Alexander Mackendrick. It helped establish one of the great movie looks – tabloid expressionism, via Weegee. All About Eve. Joseph Mankiewicz directs Bette Davis, George Sanders, and Anne Baxter in a behind-the-scenes Broadway-and-stardom catfight melodrama. Campily exaggerated perfection, the favorite movie of innumerable gay men. The Wife contends that George Sanders’ performance nails a certain kind of critic once and for all. The Fountainhead. Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, from the Ayn Rand philosophical potboiler, lovingly over-directed by King Vidor. Way-over-the-top bliss about a my-way-or-the-highway architect who’s loved and hated by a real woman. Wait till you see Neal get excited about the way Coop handles a jackhammer. Youngblood Hawke. From a Herman Wouk blockbuster about an ambitious young novelist. A favorite of the Wife’s: “One of the movies that make you want to be a writer. It’s everything you want the NYC publishing life to be like – full of betrayals, penthouse parties and sleazy sex, little of which you actually encounter, unhappily. But I’m still looking!” The Martin Scorsese/Richard Price/Nick Nolte episode from the three-part film, New York Stories. Nolte’s a middle-aged Ab-Ex painter trying to rev himself up for his next show. The gallery opening is a little – OK, a lot – overblown, but the movie is sly and ironic in a way you don’t usually associate with Scorsese, and the downtown painting-scene details are as if out of a documentary. Six Degrees of Separation. Fred Schepisi directs a hyper-stylized version of John Guare’s play. Small-scale but panoramic tragicomic farce about race, art, class, money and fraudulence, with a great performance by Stockard Channing. If you want to see one movie that gets it all, this is it. Basquiat. Julian Schnabel as a painter is a buffoon, as far as I’m concerned. As a filmmaker, though, he’s a terrific talent. This moody biopic of the live-fast-die-young ‘80s art star Jean-Michel Basquiat is canny about the mix of opportunism and idealism that can be so bewildering in the arts. Schnabel is great too at evoking the druggy high that art, beauty and hanging out in the art world can give you. Full of amazing performances, with Jeffrey Wright especially amazing as Basquiat. Perfume. Half-improvised, Altmanesque look at the fashion and fashion-magazine industry, with a top-drawer cast (Rita Wilson is the standout as a magazine editor) and a chic look. Much better than Altman’s own “Pret a Porter,” and very true to the industry’s atmosphere of high-strung freneticism, sex, and terror. Released with no fanfare straight to video, it’s one of... posted by Michael at November 18, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Sunday, November 17, 2002


Chaos of History: Art in 1910
Michael, In a previous posting, I mentioned how inspired I was by the book, “1900: Art at the Cross Roads,” by Robert Rosenblum, Mayanne Stevens and Ann Dumas. This volume catalogued a broad range of paintings and sculptures produced within a few years of 1900. I thought that looking at such broad “cross-sections” of art production was a way of providing a more enjoyable look at art history than the typical linear narratives or the “succession of isms” approach so beloved of textbooks. Given the limitations of space in a ‘blog posting, the only way I could think to utilize this idea was to pair paintings that had (1) either strikingly different formal approaches to a similar subject or (2) showed similar formal concerns being pursued by artists who aren't normally paired. So I put together the following as a mini-cross section of activity clustering around the year 1910. (All pictures are thumbnails; check 'em out at full size for maximum enjoyment.) Male Portrait P. Picasso, Portrait of AmbroiseVollard, 1910; A Zorn, Self Portrait, c. 1910 Female Nude R. Bereny, Reclining Nude, 1907; P. Picasso, The Dryad, 1908 Seaport Landscape G. Braque, Harbor in Normandy, 1909; M. Braun, Bay and City of San Diego, 1910 Figures in Action G. Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909; L. Corinth, Samson Blinded, 1912 Hope you like it, and maybe this will chip a few splinters off art-history’s shibboleths. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 17, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Brain Research
Michael I seem to have suddenly been reading a lot about scientific research that has implications for the arts. I suspect that people much hipper to the state of brain research than I are way ahead of me on this, but—vowing bravely to ignore the likelihood that I am about to re-announce the invention of the electric light bulb—let me share my tiny thoughts on these matters. The story that got me going on this was Sharon Begley’s “Science Journal” column in the November 15 Wall Street Journal. She describes the infant science of neuroeconomics, which studies functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of volunteers’ brains during economic experiments to see what is going on inside the old noggin. One conclusion the neuroeconomists seem to have established is that the anticipation of monetary rewards stimulates the same portions of the brain that fire up in anticipation of pleasurable food, sex or drugs. I assume it is legitimate to assume that the same mechanism is at work with other sources of aesthetic pleasure. If this is so, it may explain patterns of behavior one can observe in the arts. For example, according to Ms. Begley: The brain seizes on even the slimmest evidence of pattern. After only a couple of repetitions of some event, the anterior cingulate begins to fire in anticipation of another: as a result, we’re convinced that a stock that beat profit forecasts two quarters in a row will do it a third time. And if it doesn’t? Then neurons in emotion processing regions fire like crazy, generating a sense of anxiety and dread, researchers at the Duke University in Durham, N.C., report. Result: When a nice, reliable stock misses its earnings target by even a little, investors abandon ship in a fury. Often, the longer a stock has persisted, the worse the beating, because the longer a pattern has persisted the more alarmed the brain gets when [the pattern is] broken. This mechanism might explain why, only a decade or so after his death, the paintings of John Singer Sargent—for years one of the most fashionable painters in the world—could be had for only a few hundred dollars. He had been a highly "reliable” artist for 30 years, and yet, with the seismic shift in art world fashions of the 1920s, he became suddenly déclassé. Full of possibly the same anxiety and dread described by Ms. Begley, his collectors bailed out en masse. John Singer Sargent's "Nonchaloir" Suffering from Anxiety and Dread? Ms. Begley also lays out a mechanism that might make collectors or art buffs treasure the adventuresome and novel in art: The [brain’s] reward circuit runs on the neurochemical dopamine. We get a dopamine surge when we anticipate a niche, healthy 4% return on a money-market fund. But dopamine neurons get extra juiced when a long shot comes in—and the addictive nature of dopamine makes us willing to take financial risks for those long shots. Even the popular preference—easily observable at your local cineplex—for happy endings... posted by Friedrich at November 17, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments

Saturday, November 16, 2002


Art in Santa Fe
Friedrich -- A busy few days of art-going here on vacation in Santa Fe, wrestling with the way popular and elite art have become ridiculously (and tragically) polarized. First, a visit to the International Folk Art Museum, full of delights and surprises. Much amazement at how evocative, humorous, melancholy and mysterious folk art can be. Also how traditional, yet how inventive and bizarre: it can make you wonder why sophisticated, cosmopolitan artists bother trying. Later, an afternoon spent in the local galleries, full of cowboy art, designer abstractions, etc. Art for the tourist trade, yet almost all of it talented and skillful. It’s enjoyably disorienting for a NYC-based arts fan with an overdeveloped critical-intellectual muscle to wander around taste-testing this kind of art. Santa Fe puts you in a pleasing-yourself, quality-of-life frame of mind. You think about food, imagery, houses, and spending money on pleasure. You find yourself thinking, “Hmmm, I could live with that.” Is much of this art made for the market? Sure. Is that any reason to dismiss it? At the moment, I can’t see why. I’m pretty certain, however, that my art-world friends back in NYC will remind me why I should. Then an evening at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum, feeling chagrined, because whenever I’m not in front of her paintings, I can feel annoyed by her. When I see them live, I think, Gee, these pictures are really very catchy. Finally, a visit to Site Santa Fe, the local stark-and-severe “art space,” an abrupt return to contempo, high-serious, art-world art, and a look at an installation show by Janine Antoni, who’s, ahem, upending assumptions of gender and the body. An impression in plaster of one of her nipples: inner/outer, masculine and feminine ways of doing things, etc. Lots of cows, soap, lard and chocolate: the inside/the outside, consuming/creating, feminine and masculine ways of making art. Hey, it’s possible to get what her work is about and still not like it. I can see taking pleasure from the folk art. I can see enjoying the tourist art. The O’Keefe paintings are hard to resist (part of the fun being that so many of them are about what it’s like to have a pussy, yet she’d never admit there was any sexual content in them). Out here in Santa Fe, surrounded by people enjoying Indian art, Hispanic low-rider art, and Georgia O’Keefe, it’s hard to imagine anyone getting much of anything out of Antoni. My own tastes run towards avant-garde art, and Antoni of course can do what she wants – free country, etc. But it’s telling that she gives you next-to-nothing to look at – her work’s all about realizing would-be clever art-world ideas. You have to read and decode it; the only other people looking at her show was a small crowd being led around by a docent, who was busy explaining the ideas. In fact, her work hardly exists without explanation. Antoni seems a clever, capable illustrator of current art-professor-and-foundation ideas, more a maker... posted by Michael at November 16, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments

American High Culture IV: The Role of Universities
Michael In my previous posting on “high” culture, I discussed how real estate developers have often used the prestige associated with performing art centers to advance their own business interests, often to the detriment of the art institutions the centers ostensibly serve. Well, if I’m going to survey “friends” of the arts with ulterior motives, I guess I have to mention higher education as well. Prior to World War Two, visual and performing artists were trained either in specialized schools, apprenticed with masters or studied with private tutors. After the passage of the G.I. Bill, however, colleges and universities swiftly glommed on to the arts. Whole departments devoted to creative writing, visual arts, music, drama or dance sprung up, offering new degrees such as the M.F.A., with doctorates coming rapidly after. The extent of university programs in the arts grew at an extraordinary rate. In 1948, only 105 colleges and universities even gave courses in dance—and then mostly in the physical education department. Twenty years later, 110 colleges and universities offered a major in dance, 22 had dance departments, 42 offered an M.A. degree in dance, and 6 were prepared to hand out Ph.Ds in dance. In 1960, some five thousand American college students were majoring in theater; a mere seven years later, there were 18,000. And this growth rate continued past the Sixties. In 1971, American universities handed out roughly 30,000 bachelor degrees in the visual and performing arts; by 2000, the annual production had doubled. During the roughly 30 years between 1971 and 2000, over seven hundred thousand Americans graduated with degrees in the visual and performing arts. Obviously, only a fraction of these people ever found employment in the arts, but I doubt that ever counted a great deal with the mandarins of higher education. ("Hey, if the tuition checks clear, what's the problem?") Given that “academic art” is a term of contempt in modernist art history, how has the movement of art training into a university setting affected the quality of art production? According to Alice Goldfarb Marquis, one 1970 survey of artists who took creative sabbaticals at the MacDowell Colony in New England revealed: …the MacDowell composers complained of over-intellectualized music and of faculties “too cramped, too cozy, too ingrown.” No one wanted to criticize anyone else because that would hurt the department. Many university-based composers were writing only for each other, said some, while others resented “cliquishness and faddism.” Writers who were MacDowell alumni were similarly disenchanted with academe. The campus atmosphere, said on, “encouraged too many academics to imagine they were artists.” Painters were even more disillusioned. Moving art from professional schools to campuses, said one, “made the art student a dilettante and killed the apprentice system.” The eminent art critic Robert Hughes discussed the impact of university art training on the quality of art production in his 1980 book “The Shock of the New”: Every five years, the art schools of America alone produced as many graduates as there were people in... posted by Friedrich at November 16, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Friday, November 15, 2002


Adorno's Self Portrait
Michael As you may recall, I had a little fun a few months back with a review of Mr. Adorno’s “Essays on Music.” But given his reputation as a major critic of popular culture—higher today than when he was alive—I decided to take a look at Mr. Adorno’s writings. Scouring the Internet, I found a translation of his 1944 essay, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment As Mass Deception,” written with his collaborator Max Horkheimer. Although it took several readings of this densely worded, convoluted, 16,000-word essay to distill the main concepts—the things I do for 2blowhards!—I think the following summary describes them fairly accurately: #1—Modern popular culture represents the triumph of fixed entertainment formulas: Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable…As soon as the film begins, it is quite clear how it will end, and who will be rewarded, punished, or forgotten. In light music, once the trained ear has heard the first notes of the hit song, it can guess what is coming and feel flattered when it does come. #2—Modern popular culture gains authority from its mechanical reproduction: The National Socialists knew that the wireless gave shape to their cause just as the printing press did to the Reformation. The…charisma of the Fuhrer…has finally turned out to be no more than the omnipresence of his speeches on the radio, which are a demoniacal parody of the omnipresence of the divine spirit. #3—Modern popular culture imposes a rigid “house” style on all artworks: No Palestrina could be more of a purist in eliminating every unprepared and unresolved discord than the jazz arranger in suppressing any development which does not conform to the [rules of commercial music]. When jazzing up Mozart he changes him not only when [Mozart’s music] is too serious or too difficult but when [Mozart] harmonizes the melody in a different way, perhaps more simply, than is customary now. #4—Modern popular culture converges with advertising: The highest-paid stars resemble pictures advertising unspecified…articles. [Movie stars are] often selected from the host of commercial models. The prevailing taste takes its ideal from advertising, the beauty in consumption… With these four ideas Adorno sketched out the salient characteristics of commercial culture in a capitalist-industrial era, and there is at least an argument (if not always a strong one) to be made for his positions. However, he didn’t stop there. He overlaid these points with a unique conspiracy theory, which I would call “The Culture Industry as a Mind Control Mechanism for Monopoly Capitalism.” This theory, although Adorno is a bit sketchy on the details, goes something like this: #1—Modern popular culture converts citizens into consumer zombies: The principle [under which the culture industry operates] dictates that [the average citizen] should be shown all his needs as capable of-fulfillment, but that those needs should be so predetermined that he feels himself to... posted by Friedrich at November 15, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Thursday, November 14, 2002


Our Mission, so to speak
Bleep, bloop, sounds of static… We interrupt our regular programming for this public service announcement. It occurs to the two of us here at 2blowhards that now might not be a bad time to come clean about what we’re up to with our blog. In addition to having a lot of fun sounding off about this and that, we do have a fairly serious, two-part agenda. (Cue “Fanfare for the Common Man.”) The first is that, in our scatterbrained way, we’re trying to do for the arts (and for coverage of the arts) something like what Bernard Goldberg did for the conventional news. Goldberg wrote about how the kinds of people and the kinds of institutions that deliver the mainstream news condition what’s considered the news. The same thing holds in the arts. Cultural institutions and outlets are (mostly) run by certain kinds and classes of people, who tend to promote (if only professionally) certain values. Understand this, and how this works, and your enjoyment of the arts (as well as your awareness of what art is, and can be) will only increase. Or such is our conviction anyway. It’s a mystery to us why people who follow the arts aren’t as skeptical of what they encounter as people who follow the evening news. Many people are sharp about the day’s hard news. They see the slant, they know where it comes from, they call attention to it, they inform each other about it, they seek out alternative sources. For some reason, people who follow art often aren’t as aware and on the ball. Why is this? Maybe art and culture don’t seem as pressing as hard news. Maybe part of the reason people turn to the art and culture pages is to seek refuge from the squabbles of the hard news pages. Maybe the arts have been successful in their campaign to present themselves as an alternative – and why seek out alternatives to what’s already alternative? We also find that, often, when such questions as “who gets to define what’s art” are raised, people flip between total credulousness and total cynicism. On the one hand there’s the trusting response: “Oh, these poor, worthy artists!” On the other, there’s the prematurely gruff and cynical response: “It’s all a scam.” Both strike us as offbase. Total credulousness is hardly wise because this stuff is being created and fed to you by a class of people with its own interests. Total cynicism is offbase because there is in fact a lot of talent and brains out there. If you’re overly cynical, you aren’t going to let yourself find and experience the current work and thinking that is in fact useful, provocative, interesting and pleasing. Why worry about any of this? It’s true that the arts are less immediately a matter of life and death than hard news is. They’re gooier, and more a matter of such semi-indefinables as glamour, sex, entertainment, and personal opinion. But they aren’t just a matter of... posted by Michael at November 14, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Wednesday, November 13, 2002


The TiVo Revolution continues
Michael Although I’m a mere amateur TV-watcher compared to you, I thought I should share how TV watching at my house has changed since my technophile wife installed a TiVo. I’m no “early adopter” of electronic gizmos, and I stopped watching much TV at all a number of decades back, but I must say getting a digital video recorder, or “DVR” as the acronym-crazy electronics industry likes to call them, has been a revolutionary advance over standard TV. My family now watches what we choose to watch when we choose to watch it. We skip commercials with carefree abandon. (On the rare occasions when I end up watching “live” TV—without running it through the DVR—I find myself futilely reaching for the control to make commercials go away, and then painfully realizing that I’m back in the Stone Age. It’s always hard to go back.) My wife uses the DVR to analyze the serves of tennis pros in slow motion. My daughters’ viewing habits now consist exclusively of watching digitally recorded reruns of “Friends” (after their homework is done, of course.) Since the major limitation of the original TiVo device was how much stuff could get recorded—a lot of material had to be erased each week to make room for new programs—Hughes Electronics now offers an option that combines its DirecTV satellite service with the basic features of TiVo and which has the capacity to record 35 hours of video. Not to be outdone, EchoStar Communications sells one device with 60 hours of recording time and a more expensive variant that gives you 90 hours. Since we recently shifted to satellite TV from Adelphia cable (their accounting wasn’t the only dodgy element in their operation) we now have one of these in our house too, I forget which. These changes have made so radical a shift in my family’s interaction with TV that I found myself reading a newspaper story on the next chapter in the DVR saga. According to the Wall Street Journal of November 13, manufacturers of digital video recorders like TiVo and ReplayTV hope to reach a broader audience by piggybacking on the growing popularity of DVD players. Toshiba Corp’s U.S. unit will incorporate TiVo’s DVR technology in a DVD player that will be released next year. Thomson Multimedia SA has introduced the RCA Scenium Digital Media Recorder that plays DVD movies and has recording space for more than 30 hours of video. It also copies digital pictures and songs from a CD, turning a DVD player into a jukebox, a TV into a photo album. Why do I care? Well, as the WSJ story mentions: …DVD-DVR products are most likely to appeal to people who place a premium on uncluttering the shelves of their home theaters. I must confess the biggest drawback to all this progress is the ever-increasing number of interwired boxes sitting above, below, right and left of the TV screen. I mean, I’ll watch digitally recorded satellite TV, but if anything goes wrong (say,... posted by Friedrich at November 13, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Moviegoing: "Femme Fatale"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich, I was taken by surprise the other day when I turned to the movie pages and saw that Brian De Palma's Femme Fatale had opened. I knew the film was coming, but I don't pay much attention to the movie biz anymore. And there it was, a little ad announcing that the film was opening Wednesday. A little ad? A Wednesday opening? Is the movie company dumping the picture? Well, they may be right to. I enjoyed the movie a lot and am happily making plans to see it a second time, but I'd be wary of recommending it to anyone who isn't a very particular kind of weirdo film buff. I'll try to spare you the full-scale review and cut semi-directly to what's most salient. "Femme Fatale" is the first time in a long while that De Palma has made one of his Hitchcock-esque numbers; it's like an upscale, marble-ized version of "Dressed to Kill." As a routine movie, "Femme Fatale" is hardly worth discussing. There's a bit of a story (jewel heist, double-cross, impersonation, marriage to a tycoon, baddies who want their money back, etc.), but it's a patchwork , cut-and-paste thing, and the characters are just chess pieces. In conventional terms, not only does the film not work, it hardly seems to be trying. Femme fatale Romijin-Stamos What's gripping isn't the story, it's the filmmaking. The film is really a bunch of glittering, bravura sequences. I'm only guessing, but it's as though de Palma turned 60, bombed with "Mission to Mars" (which I also loved), moved to Paris, and said, Fuck it, I'm going to make movies only for the reasons that interest me. (Which makes sense. In my view, he only ever had the pulse of the mainstream audience for about five years -- and given that his temperament is basically an avant-garde one, it's a miracle he had it for that long.) The film is a poem on the themes of beauty and danger. What it's really like is an avant garde bit of silent film poetry (with an extravagant Ryu Sakamoto musical score) from the days back when film was still finding its way. It's like "Napoleon" or "Menilmontant," or one of Rene Clair's early movies; it also reminds me of reading Hart Crane. Very experimental and '20s in feeling, in any case. It's all about going into raptures about the potential of the medium. There are moments in his films when -- to a De Palma buff, anyway -- they seem about as aesthetically far-out as a movie can be. I write this being all-too-aware that his movies don't work for many people, conventionally or as poetry. I suppose if a movie of his like this one doesn't work for you it looks shrill or super-affected. Me, I enjoy the spectacle of this hyperintellectual film poet going bananas in the nursery room that is movie history. When he's inspired, his projects can take on a kind of dream... posted by Michael at November 13, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Tuesday, November 12, 2002


Education and Race
Michael Is it just me, or do stories about racial diversity initiatives at colleges make you want to laugh and cry at the same time? The spectacle of university administrators—to whom, let’s not kid ourselves, undergraduates are just one more revenue stream—lumbering out to do a spot of social engineering on a vulnerable population of 18-year-olds is just too painful for anything other than sick humor. As a result, when I open the newspaper and find stories on the topic, I tend to skip them, as I presume many others do as well. But the headline of the New York Times’ story of November 12: “Colleges Find Diversity is Not Just Numbers” was so eloquent in its blandness I had to check it out. (If nothing else, I knew that I would enjoy the spectacle of the Times uncomfortably squirming through the minefields of its own institutional political correctitude while trying to discuss changes in, well, another institution's political correctitude.) It used to be that freshman orientation here at Dartmouth College revolved around hiking up mountains and sleeping in huts along the Appalachian Trail. But this year one of the highlights was a talk by Karim Marshall, a senior, who told the 1,100 new students about his arrival on campus from a predominantly black high school in Washington. "Everyone in my world was black," Mr. Marshall began. His grandmother from Mississippi could not even understand why he wanted to attend mostly white Dartmouth, he said. In the audience, Matthew Oppenheimer, a white student from Boise, Idaho, was riveted by Mr. Marshall's story, just as Dartmouth administrators had hoped. "I couldn't imagine what it was like to come from his community to Dartmouth," Mr. Oppenheimer said. "I have such respect for him being so open." I suppose Dartmouth administrators must revel in the feelings of their power when setting up such orgies of virtue. It must be quite a rush to be able to grind the identities of 18-year-old children down to mere racial ciphers. ("You're either white and thus a privileged racist or you're not and thus a victim--that's all you need to know, people. Just get with the program, okay?") With the Dartmouth power structure looming over Mr. Oppenheimer at his orientation, I bet it never occurred to this rather naïve college freshman that he, with equal justice, could stand up and relate tales of his all-white childhood in Idaho to Mr. Marshall. Or that Mr. Marshall’s own humanity was being stripped away by being paraded around as a personification of the Black College Experience. The only person I can actually contemplate in this whole tableau without feelings of embarrassment is Mr. Marshall’s grandmother, who sounds like a woman of too much sense to subject herself to the improving influence of Dartmouth College. I guess it needs to be said aloud every so often that the P.C. treatment of minorities is just as morally obtuse as racism: both ignore the individual humanity of minority students while focusing on their... posted by Friedrich at November 12, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Monday, November 11, 2002


Tacit Knowledge -- New Books
Friedrich Covering the arts professionally (for way too many years) burned a lot of earnest-and-dreamy liberal-arts foolishness out of me. It may have left me a tiresome old gasbag too, but it did leave me with a number of observations, ideas and tips. Why not use the blog to pass a few of these along? Today’s topic: the passion for new books. I’m often amazed by the way some people think they really ought to be reading the latest much-discussed book. I’m also amazed by how eagerly people discuss the merits of current writers. Is Zadie Smith really as good as David Foster Wallace? Who cares? I’m probably deceiving myself, but I take myself to be one of the less high-minded aesthetes, yet even I’d say that in the 15 years I followed publishing, I read maybe 15 books that I felt fell in the category of fabulous-to-great. That’s one a year – not bad, really. And, realistically speaking, can any of the even the most highly-touted new books compare to the thousands of great old books that you, or I, or anyone haven’t yet gotten around to? That hot new presidential biography, even that edgy postmodern fantasia -- are they really in a class with Gibbon, or Lady Murasaki? Of course not. On the other hand, people sometimes simply seem to be in the mood for something new, and what’s wrong with that? It’s fun to try out what friends are arguing about; it’s fun to see contemporary life portrayed; it’s fun to keep up with interests, whether they’re movies or travel. There’s a lot of information to be gleaned and entertainment to be enjoyed. And, to be fair, in my years of active service, I read hundreds of books that struck me as anything from pretty-good to excellent. I’d never attack people’s pleasure in new books, but I do (as here) blow the occasional gasket about the way people will fall for the notion that keeping up with new books is some kind of moral imperative, or even has much importance at all. So, a 2blowhards insider tip: any time you read or hear about a new book, take it for granted that this phrase is present: “if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing.” Ie., this new post-feminist romp is great fun – if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing. This new look at Pearl Harbor is mind-boggling – if you’re in the mood for this kind of thing. Remembering this trick will set what’s being discussed in context, will help cool the moment-to-moment passions, and will help you defend yourself against annoying and unjust moral suasion. By the way, when these thoughts were first occurring to me, I was wary of them, and wary of myself. To make sure it wasn’t just me and my oddness, I made a point of comparing notes with other people in the field. At the time, I was lunching, partying and dinnering with people in... posted by Michael at November 11, 2002 | perma-link | (9) comments

Education and Science
Michael My experience at our Lousy Ivy University, my adventures with public and private school education for my children, and the stories told me by an executive who left the corporate world for a teaching career, have all left me with a sort of bruised curiosity regarding education. That is to say, I remain curious about and sympathetic to efforts to make education better, and I think it’s as important as all get out, but I wince in sympathy for anyone daring to stick their snout into the midst of the pedagogy industry. Now I will grant you, about 10 years ago my interest in education had grown rather sleepy as I had gotten further and further out of the clutches of professional educators. So I was pretty nonchalant when my wife announced that after surveying the local educational options (public school, for example, flopped when there turned out to be no morning English-speaking kindergarten classes at our neighborhood school), she had decided that our eldest child should get a private progressive education. I thought, well, fine, how bad could it be? Unfortunately, I found out. On parents’ night in first grade my daughter’s teacher began to go on and on about the intellectual pedigree of each specific technique involved in what I later learned was a "whole language" reading program. Finally, I interrupted the interminable discourse (it was like listening to a nobleman reciting the list of his illustrious ancestors) and said, “It’s great that these guys—whoever they are—thought this stuff up, but you know it works, right? This is the best way to teach kids to read, right?” Well, it turned out that this teacher actually had chosen her methods on the basis of aesthetics, or something—these methods spoke to her. She seemed to nurture a pious hope that they might also speak to the kids. When I went to get to the bottom of things with the principal, I started to realize my worst fear: not that this school might have chosen the wrong approach—which could have been fixed easily enough—but that the teaching profession placed so little value on testing the efficacy of their techniques that nobody knew definitively what worked. It just wasn’t a priority for these people. Studies were done and such (although usually sloppily) but all they resulted in were more angry polemics—it was like living in a hallucinogenic banana republic where the losers never accepted the election results. So when I picked up the New York Times Education Life section of November 10, I didn’t even wince when I read the following in James Traub’s story, “Does It Work?”: The idea that pedagogy ought to aspire to the condition of science, or even social science, is quite novel, and it runs against the grain of mainstream educational culture. As Grover J. Whitehurst, assistant secretary for research and improvement at the Department of Education, says, ''Education has not relied very much on evidence, whether in regard to how to train teachers, what sort... posted by Friedrich at November 11, 2002 | perma-link | (7) comments

Saturday, November 9, 2002


The Anatomy of Melancholy
Michael Do you suffer regularly from melancholy? I do. Yes, I understand, millions of people are either a bit or seriously depressive, I should just be happy I’ve got the mild variety. But what is oddest about my mental landscape is my melancholy tends to set in when the dogs of external unquiet are barking the least. (I seem to adore crises, when I’m far more level-headed and level-hearted than when everything is rosy.) I mean, things are pretty good at work, I’ve got a good backlog of money-making ideas being executed capably by the staff, I’m getting along fabulously with my wife, my children are deeply rewarding, my dog has stopped chewing compulsively on his front paws, my home repairs of last winter seem to be holding up during the rains of the past few days, my diet’s working, my list of physical defects seems to be holding steady, I’m having a good time blogging with you…so where’s the fly in the ointment, so to speak? I wonder if the problem doesn’t lie, at root, with the fact that I’m not being goaded into action, and I have to look my own profound inertia in the face. In other words, if I want my life to get better than it currently is, I’ve got to actually get up off my physical and metaphorical bottom and stir things up—on my own behalf. No, this is not my favorite sort of task. Portrait of the Blogger as a Middle-Aged Grump How do you handle this sort of thing? I’m getting too old for most of my usual remedies. Cheers (sort of) Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 9, 2002 | perma-link | (8) comments

TV Alert
Friedrich -- More riches brought up from the depths of next week's TV schedule. Master Spy: The Robert Hansson Story (part one; CBS, Sunday at 9 pm EST): Made by the team (Norman Mailer on the script, Lawrence Schiller directing) that, lo these many years ago, made the wonderful "The Executioner's Song." This one's also based on fact -- it's about the FBI agent who spied for the USSR. The Horse's Mouth (IFC, Monday at 6 a.m.): A rarely -shown treat, Alec Guinness directing himself in a version of the great comic Joyce Cary novel about a ruffian of a modern artist. The movie doesn't have the sweep or punch of the novel, but it's a funky and droll work in its own right. Citizen Ruth (Cinemax, Monday at 8:30 a.m.): The first feature by director Alexander ("Election") Payne is a likable, barbed satire about how the abortion wars play out in a small midwestern town. Pleasingly, neither side is spared -- Payne is a true satirist. Laura Dern is wonderfully disarrayed as the amoral, glue-sniffing wastrel at the center of the conflict. Someone Like You (Cinemax, Monday at 10 pm): A "Bridget Jones" wannabe that got bad reviews and tanked. I didn't think it was so awful -- but I was there only to enjoy the enchanting Ashley Judd, who looks great, smiles beautifully, has a lot of charm, and looks damn cute when she gets flustered. Donald Cammell (IFC, Thursday at 5 am, and Sunday at 3:30 am). A decent documentary with a charismatic subject, a British hippie-"genius" filmmaker who got by on charm and potential. Worth seeing for the snapshots of a certain get-away-with-murder character type, as well as its looks at the filmmaking world. Turner classic movies is continuing its Westerns series, and I can recommend highly three of the films: Major Dundee (TCM, Tuesday at 5:30 pm), Rio Bravo (TCM, Monday at 8 pm), and Vera Cruz (TCM, Sunday at 1:30 am). "Major Dundee" is the movie where Sam Peckinpah began to tear the fabric of the Western apart; Charlton Heston stars, impressively. "Rio Bravo" features Dean Martin and John Wayne in an easygoing, masterly entertainment directed by Howard Hawks. Gary Cooper is featured in "Vera Cruz," an early Robert Aldrich picture that has a suprisingly up-to-date sting. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 9, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Libertarians and sci-fi
Friedrich -- One thing I notice over and over that I've never managed to make much sense of is the appeal sci-fi seems to have for many libertarians. Can you help me with this? I confess that the taste for sci-fi makes me a little suspicious, though this may not reflect well on me. Shooting entirely from the hip... Sci-fi has always struck me as an early-adolescence taste: Superman fantasies crossed with a craving for feelings of, "Ah, to be entirely unfettered from earthly shackles." The storytelling and characters never seem the point; the energy always seems to go instead into things (alternative universes; "philosophy") that don't interest me much as entertainment goals. I'm happy to admit a) that, having managed to get through about a half-a-dozen sci-fi novels, I couldn't be less qualified to reach conclusions, and b) that this may all reflect nothing but taste and temperament anyway. Still, rightly or wrongly, I tend to be as wary of anyone who's crazy about sci-fi past the age of about 25 as I am of anyone who takes Ayn Rand entirely seriously past that age. Before that age these tastes seem commonplace and harmless. After that age? Well, hmmm. Musing heedlessly on, I also notice that some libertarians are as prone to utopianism as socialists are, though the two groups dream of different kinds of utopias. The dogmatism of both groups -- they always have the one right answer, and it's always the same one -- can become really oppressive. An example: there was an attack in Reason magazine on the New Urbanism a year or two ago whose argument was that the New Urbanism is nothing but a (probably socialist) attempt to impose new regulations, and that the only real answer to anything is no regulations. "OK, but back in the real world..." was my response. The New Urbanism can certainly be criticized (what can't be?), but the piece seemed crazed (and juvenile) in its absolutism, and in its unwillingness to wrestle with what the New Urbanism does in fact propose, which is that, given that (in the real world) a region simply is going to have development regulations, why not minimize them, and tinker with them in such a way that playing by the rules leads to a more pleasant, rather than a less pleasant, neighborhood? So, I return to my hunch (and my fear): that libertarians enjoy sci-fi more than most groups do because many of them tend to be attracted to utopias, as well as to what's completely unrealistic. I guess what I'm long-windedly getting to is this: that the taste for sci-fi, like the preference for a dogmatic libertarianism, seems to me the taste of immature people who'd rather float off into fantasy than wrestle with what's before them. I wince as I type these words because I have my own taste in fantasy, namely erotica. And what's wrong with a little harmless indulgence in fantasy, darn it? And I suppose it is harmless... posted by Michael at November 9, 2002 | perma-link | (25) comments

American High Culture III: The Role of Real Estate
Michael “High” culture in America, city governments and the real estate industry have had a long relationship in the U.S. This relationship was already visible in 1892 when the original Metropolitan Opera building in New York City burnt down. The stockholders were divided as to whether it made sense to rebuild, as they had only $60,000 in insurance, and it would take several times that to restore the building. One of the stockholders, Henry Clews, spelled out the case for rebuilding: The opera house property is a good investment. The ground alone is worth that much and the enhancement of values has been so great that I am sure that it has increased more than three times the original cost. In this way the stockholders are protected from loss in spite of the lack of insurance. In the end, the partners who wanted to rebuild created a new company, tellingly named the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, and bought out the property for $1,425,00—a price that was, in fact, roughly three times the cost of the original building. By the late 1920s, the rebuilt opera house was obviously far too small and there was widespread desire for a new facility. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., (known rather touchingly as “Junior”) whose business interests had always been in real estate, not in oil, went so far as to buy up several blocks around 50th Street, west of Fifth Avenue. He intended to build a new opera house along with office and commercial space. By October 1929, Junior was committed to paying $3.3 million a year in ground rent when the stock market plunged and the Met hastily withdrew from its commitment. Junior went forward anyway, and built Rockefeller Center. Rockefellers Senior and Junior Art Lovers? However, although the Met got away that time, the Rockefellers weren’t done with culture, or with real estate, of which they had amassed a great deal in Manhattan by the 1950s. The next go-round with the Met was, in fact, motivated by the fact that after the Second World War and the revival of general prosperity, people had started leaving New York and heading for the suburbs. This trend was distinctly unfavorable for the Rockefellers’ extensive real estate holdings in the city, and it led them to counterattack on multiple fronts, assaults that lead not only to the development of Lincoln Center but also to the World Trade Center. As Alice Goldfarb Marquis in her book “Art Lessons” points out, the motivation behind the development of Lincoln Center had little to do with art (not a subject the Rockefellers were known to embrace): Many lofty words have been offered as motivation for the determination by John D. Rockefeller III and a phalanx of New York’s business moguls, in 1955, that the city must have a grand cultural complex…Beneath the flow of fine words, unarticulated, ran a current of fears: that the city was slipping from the summit of the financial world; that Manhattan real estate values... posted by Friedrich at November 9, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friday, November 8, 2002


Dvorak in Love
Friedrich -- You've got me thinking about 19th century American art, and as I was doing so during this morning's walk to work I remembered one of the best books I've ever read on the topic -- Josef Skvorecky's novel Dvorak in Love. Have you checked it out? A terrific treat, enthralling both as fiction and as history. It's about a visit the composer Antonin Dvorak made to America, brought over by a lady patron of the arts to help us develop our own musical tradition. His conclusion? That we already had a great musical tradition -- in African-American music and in Native American music. Why he wasn't crazy about white people's folk music I don't know. But he went on, in any case, to write the New World Symphony based on his visit here. As a novel, it's beyond fab: A big, burstingly soulful, poetic, lyrical thing, full of characters with rich inner lives, and organized like a jazz symphony (although I like it better than I like most jazz symphonies). It was one of the books I was most thrilled by during the years when I was following new fiction. I seemed to be almost alone in my enthusiasm, but I thought it was as good as anything by Garcia Marquez or Kundera. Why it didn't get more notice I don't know. But it's just as good as a reference work for 19th-century American art buffs. I was so taken by the book that I did some research about the stories it tells, and as far as I could determine, everything in it besides the obvious (inner monologues, etc) is true to the facts. There's tons of information in there about early black music, early attempts to create conservatories, and 19th century performance traditions -- and Skvorecky is as touching about the genteel yearning for high art as he is about the beauty and vitality of the folk arts. It's buyable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 8, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Free Reads -- Anti-Americanism
Friedrich -- Jamie Glazov at Front Page magazine leads a panel discussion on the topic of "Anti-Americanism," here. How to explain it, and how to explain its virulence? What are the differences between native anti-Americanism and the anti-Americanism of foreigners? Good, provocative thinking and speculation from the panelists, Paul Hollander, Stanley Kurtz, Victor Davis Hanson, and Dan Flynn. Sample passage (from Flynn): Anti-Americanism is the religion for people who hate religion. It comes complete with a devil (the United States); sacred texts (I, Rigoberta Menchu, The Communist Manifesto, etc.); saints (Noam Chomsky, Mumia Abu-Jamal); zeal ... and many of the other characteristics that we find in various faiths. Anti-Americanism, however, provides none of the social good that most religions provide, and it is of course a false faith as well. Why is America hated even within the West? America is hated because its existence contradicts the mistaken theories so passionately held by a significant portion of Western intellectuals. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 8, 2002 | perma-link | (5) comments

Cultureblog Fever
Friedrich -- Prowling the work of our fellow culturebloggers, I notice that Alexandra, over at Out of Lascaux (here), has worked up an entertaining head of steam over the proper role of art critics, and that AC Douglas (here) is deep in the midst not just of a Movable Type upgrade but an enlightening discussion of the best way to understand Wagner's "Ring." Sample Alexandra passage: And why do they feel they have to take on this role? Because so much contemporary art is completely incomprehensible, not just to the "common man," but to anyone who stumbles across it. Art is about ideas, but it is also about communicating ideas. If art doesn't say something to the audience besides "I bet you're too stupid to figure this one out," then it has failed. Sample AC Douglas passage: Italian-form opera, for all its often convoluted melodrama and grand staging, has but one purpose and one purpose only: To act as showcase for the human voice in song.... Not so Wagnerian music-drama. Music-drama is about the drama, and singers are merely one part of the musico-dramatic apparatus, and not the most important part, either. That role falls to the orchestra in which is contained and played out the very core of the drama itself. Classy stuff! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 8, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Thursday, November 7, 2002


How Happy Are You?
Michael Are you happy? Are you satisfied? If you told me: “yes” or “very” should I believe you? Obviously, there are a lot of, ahem, philosophical issues raised by such “subjective” measures of happiness. However, blithely ignoring all of them, Ronald F. Inglehart of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Hans-Dieter Klingemann of the Social Science Center in Berlin apparently conducted tens of thousands of personal interviews around the world (personally?) in the mid-1990s and devised a “subjective quality of life” map, which is reproduced in the November issue of Scientific American. Although the map, for reasons left unexplained, does not include Siberia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and Southeast Asia, I thought you’d like to know a few of the highlights: 1. Disneyland is not the Happiest Place on Earth. Apparently, that distinction belongs to Iceland. (Having taken a good look at several “Miss Iceland” contestants at international beauty pageants, I can see how that might be the case. As I understand it, Iceland has a "Miss Universe" for every 90,000 inhabitants.) Happiest Men on Earth? 2. While the U.S. reports itself to be marginally less happy than Scandinavia, Ireland, and Switzerland, it is either marginally or significantly more happy with its lot than is the rest of Europe or Japan. 3. The least happy country reported is the Ukraine, where people either appear to be downright sunk in misery, or, possibly, highly amused at the thought of lying to the good professors. 4. The biggest surprise is Canada, which only squeaks in ahead of Germany and is a good bit behind the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. Does this demonstrate a true “happiness gap” (as in, “Man the barricades, a horde of disaffected Canadians is headed south across the border!”) or is this some sort of low self-esteem issue for the Canadians? Perhaps they don’t feel they deserve happiness when their dollar is worth only around 67 American cents. I have only one question. Every time I’ve ever asked a woman this question, it usually entailed a two-to-three hour conversation to discover how she really felt. Do you think the professors stuck with it long enough to really find out? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- Catlin Gunn
Friedrich -- In the Guardian, Catlin Gunn kicks off a new series of columns with the tale of how she, a middle-class woman fresh from an office job, auditioned for work as a stripper. It's readable here. Sample passage: Terror has a way of making time stre-e-e-e-tch and three minutes seemed to last a day or two. I must have lost the slip and bra in the first five seconds because I found myself nearly naked with nothing left to do but rotate slowly like a great big girl-kebab in front of this horrible man who sat there as bored and impassive as a rock. It turns out that there's no elegant way to get out of your knickers while standing. Promising! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Policy Break
Michael I’ve done my best to avoid the whole topic of politics lately, but I was struck by the juxtaposition of two columns on the NY Times Op-Ed page. One was by that Democratic party supporter, Bob Herbert. It was headlined “Tiptoeing to Defeat” and could be summed up by the following excerpt: Despite the economic burdens that the middle and working classes are shouldering, despite the two million jobs lost and the scandalous concentration of wealth and income in the precincts of the very rich, the Democrats have yet to offer a compelling alternative to the reverse Robin Hood policies of the G.O.P. In short, the Democrats lost because they didn’t hold true to their core beliefs. Now on the same page we had an opinion piece by David Sahmbaugh on the possibility of the Communist Party ‘losing’ China. But in it, he again and again refers to simply “the party” and when I first picked it up, I was confused about which party he meant. Then I started noticing how much of the column could be describing today’s American Democrats as well as China’s commies. Widespread alienation and cynicism exist at all levels of society about politics and the party…Rampant corruption has laid bare the insufficiency of the legal system… Gee, I suppose anyone who has read about how the cigarette industry settlement is being carved up or about what’s happening with asbestos litigation might agree with that statement. And of course, one should keep in mind that the trial lawyers are the biggest financial contributors to the Democratic party. Many of the party’s current problems are the result of broad processes associated with socioeconomic modernization and greater social stratification. Significant parts of society have been left behind as others have benefited from market reforms. This is a fairly accurate description of modern America, too. But other than continuing to call for incrementally increased income redistribution, the Democrats have very little to offer here, intellectually. The Dems are remarkably silent on how to get more people to play and win the game of capitalism, being of the conviction that most of the population will never be able to take risks or plan for the future like adults. Even the parts of society that have experienced some economic gains pose new challenges for the party. These gains have led to rising…demands for improvements in health care, public safety, jobs, education, environmental quality and care for the elderly. The party at all levels is attempting to meet demands brought on by the breakdown of many social services, but it cannot fully meet these demands, in part because it has suppressed avenues of input from the people themselves. With the Democratic position being that the only solution to any problem is big government programs or employer mandates, the challenges facing modern America are not really solvable—too many needs, too few golden-gooses to pluck. But the Democrats remain stubbornly disinterested in, say, self-help or civil-society input. Maybe Mr. Herbert should take another... posted by Friedrich at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

American High Culture re-redux; and Continuing Ed: Lawrence Levine
Friedrich -- Many thanks for your ongoing series about the stresses between popular and high cult in America. You're touching on a bunch of topics I'm primed to rant about myself, among them the greatness of 19th century (ie., pre-modernist, pre-NEA) American art, and the scandal that is a modernist art education. Much else too, but I'm feeling scatterbrained at the moment, and can't pull together anything of much interest or use. Except a mention of a book I suspect you'd enjoy, Lawrence Levine's Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (buyable here). Levine: Give the man a Blowhardy It's a terrific book of cultural history (and a book of facts and inductions, not theory). Levine discusses 19th century America and American culture in eye-opening ways. His topics include Shakespeare (whose works were central to American popular and elite cultures both); sheet music; folk songs; opera; Mozart; marching bands, and much more. The shitty art-history brainwashing, er, education we were given back in the '70s left us with the impression that pre-modernist American art was an embarrassment -- a crass mess, by and for rubes who could never quite get it until Euro-modernism showed the way. In fact, pre-modernist American culture turns out to have been rather like what's currently developing on the Web -- a wonderful, patchworky jumble. It wasn't until the end of the 19th century that the stress line between popular and elite cultures, always present, became hard and almost absolute. It's interesting (to me, in any case) to note that one of the reasons for this was the way the rate of immigration went soaring. How does this work? Well, the immigrants brought with them Old World beliefs, preferences and tastes, as well as a pushy verve, and knocked aside the old debates and conversations. For better or worse, American modernism was, like Hollywood, largely the creation of immigrants. The other reason was that the native-born, at least those with enough money, found these crowds of rowdy newcomers a bit much; they retreated from the newcomers and the public cultural sphere into enclaves, private life, and a "high culture" that became rather like a country club. John Philip Sousa: Great American artist? Part of the strength of Levine's book is his honesty about his reactions to the story he tells. How refreshing and democratic the rowdiness of the 19th-century American crowd! Yet, gosh, do you really want every aria disrupted by a tomato-throwing, cheering, spitting public? It can be too easy to mock the elites, as it can be too easy to be sentimental about the popular crowd. I'm curious to hear about your responses to the elite-popular split, one of the distinctive characteristics of American culture. (I gather, if with rather little evidence, that the popular and the elite worlds are more prone to coexist than to be at war in Europe and Asia.) Myself, I'm rather like Levine. I approve of the profit motive, and acknowledge that it's into popular culture and commercial... posted by Michael at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

American High Culture Redux
Michael In my last posting on “high” culture in America, I promised to explain where today’s high-cult institutions—museums, symphony orchestras, opera houses, all unified by the practice of scrounging to make up for the inadequate take at the box office—come from. As we saw, the arts in 19th century America were a boisterous, democratic, and very much private sector affair. However, those that hewed closest to their European artistic model, like symphony orchestras and opera houses, were unquestionably fighting an uphill financial battle. The audience for complex, expensive ensemble arts such as these only outnumbered the performers by a ratio of some ten-to-one (in a full house), which made it tough to make money if ticket sales flagged. Rationally, that may well have been an argument for developing a simpler—i.e., cheaper—style of presentation, but the cultural prestige of the European symphony orchestra and opera company held a potent allure for Americans. It was so potent, in fact, that wealthy European-culture-worshippers, like J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Joseph Pulitzer were willing to subsidize the New York Philharmonic, and Henry Lee Higginson not only founded the Boston Symphony but acted as a guarantor of its debts. I’m offering no criticism of these gentlemen—it was their money and they were certainly free to do as they pleased. (Higginson also had the good taste to sit for John Singer Sargent and got a terrific portrait in return--click on the popup below to check it out.) John Singer Sargent Portrait of Henry Lee Higginson However, this was only a stopgap solution to the problem. It was not clear that there would be an endless succession of extremely wealthy art-fanatics who would be willing to spend their money behind the scenes to prop up these institutions. The solution, oddly, was the 1894 income tax law, which included a provision that charitable donations to nonprofit corporations organized for “educational” purposes would be tax-deductible. This presented the wealthy with a choice of paying the government taxes or donating to nonprofit enterprises, which was a choice many less-than-religious supporters of the arts were willing to make--especially if they got to be a certifiable member of the social-cultural elite in return. In short, the income tax provided the incentive, and the nonprofit corporation the vehicle, to broaden the group “supporting” the uneconomic arts. The biggest givers, while no longer required to assume a heroic burden like that of Mssrs. Morgan or Higginson, got another perk as well: they got control of the enterprise because they sat on the board. These wealthy, prestige-seeking board members, often determined to use their art institution to civilize the masses, had an intensely conservative effect on the material that was actually presented and how it was presented—no more of the wild and wooly hybrids of “low” and “high” art which we saw were financially successful for decades in New Orleans-style opera and on the vaudeville stage. No, by jingo, we were all going to take our “high” culture straight. So much for giving the... posted by Friedrich at November 7, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Wednesday, November 6, 2002


Reflections on blogging
Friedrich -- How have you found the process of blogging? I've found it fascinating. In fact, it's the intellectual/cultural thing that's been most on my mind recently, tiresomely self-reflexive though I'm sure that is. I've found blogging a fun and curious topic to think about, as well as a fun and curious medium to exploit. There are days when I feel the high and crave more, and turn to the computer hungrily, like an addict. There are other days when I don't have the urge at all, and even feel a little disgusted with myself. But there have been a few things about the process itself that have struck me. The first is that it's its own thing. I don't know about you, but I went into blogging thinking of it as the poor cousin of real writing and publishing. Maybe I could diddle a bit, and maybe I'd get the first draft of a book out of it, or at least cook up a few ideas I might develop in some real medium... After a few months, I find myself thinking instead: no, it's not a poor excuse for a book or a magazine, it's a blog. I'd been thinking of it as a substitute for something else when it turns out to be its own, fully-absorbing (or at least as-absorbing-as-you-want-it-to-be) activity. These days, I'm feeling no need at all to view what I write here as a preliminary step in any other direction. I'm just happy to be blogging. Being its own thing, blogging makes its own demands. I went into it, as I've so stupidly gone into many cultural forms, thinking: all right, finally, no formal constraints. Cut loose: finally, I'll have the means to rock on out, unrestricted. Freeform orgy, baby. Basically, I thought I'd be able to get down most of what passes through my head, and to do so effortlessly. Instead, I find myself putting some real time (in a small way) into these postings, and thinking thoughts like, hmm, I'd better keep each posting to one main topic. (Not easy for me, given my taste for weaving together a lot of disparate, only-loosely-related themes.) I look at the computer screen and think: hmm, better break those paragraphs up, and offer some visual relief and variety. All of which means that, to my shame (but pleasure too), I'm thinking like a magazine editor. So I'm as conscious of effort, and am as consciously attending to form and finish, as ever. And, instead of getting down most of what passes through the noggin, I'm getting down who knows, 10%? But it turns out that 10% leaves the desk clean enough, as it were. My brain's a little freer of what usually gnaws at it. The frustration of keeping a traditional arts journal was that, enjoyable though it could be to note down reactions and reflections, the journal itself did nothing but gather dust. It was hard not to ask yourself, what's the point? The frustration... posted by Michael at November 6, 2002 | perma-link | (6) comments

The Church of PBS
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Stephen Foster: Death by documentary "Major funding for this program was provided by Sominex...." Well, not really, but just as well. You have to take your hat off to PBS. Has there ever been an organization more expert at taking juicy subjects and turning them into the purest tedium? I mean, aside from textbook-publishing corporations. (Two exceptions noted: the Michael Pack/Richard Brookhiser documentary about George Washington, website here; and "The Commanding Heights," from the Daniel Yergin and Joseph Stanislaw account of the battle between market forces and faith in government, watchable online -- bless the web -- here.) I should be a perfect PBS audience member. I'm in a facts-not-fiction phase; I'm devouring history books, reading them at night and listening to them on audiobook during commutes. I'm amazed by how passionate and immediate history can be in the hands of the right writers and thinkers. Why wasn't I able to pay attention back in high school and college? Have I changed? Have I simply discovered the writers who suit my tastes and interests? So, full of hope, I record PBS documentary after PBS documentary. What could be more alluring than a video presentation of real lives and true stories? You can watch in the company of your sweetie! You can talk about what you're learning as you watch! In fact, it's always a challenge to get The Wife, as addicted as ever to fantasy and make-believe, to settle down in front of a documentary. But sometimes I do succeed... And we almost never make it through. I've tried the Ken Burns shows; they were gruesomely difficult to endure. I'm pleased that many people watched and enjoyed his series on jazz, for instance, but only because I root for jazz. There were wonderful facts and footage there to be discovered. But why did the series have to be so long, so solemn, and so slow? This evening the Wife and I sat down to watch the PBS "American Experience" hour on Stephen Foster (link here). Within 15 minutes we were both fighting sleep. How do they do it? It's as though the people behind these shows are determined to kill all interest in history, or at least my interest in history. I watch the shows wondering who the producers are: grown-up versions of those kids who loved 8th-grade social studies class? And who then went on to major in that vapid field, American Studies? What a dull exercise in earnest civic uplift the Stephen Foster show was. It might have been put together by a committee of progressive junior-high teachers who like to encourage debate on such topics as "What is America?", and who, no matter what the question, always come up with the same answer: black/white race relations. Stephen Foster was an important and interesting figure, and I'm sure there are viewers who got something out of the show. But the people who make these documentaries seem terrified of immediacy, and are so... posted by Michael at November 6, 2002 | perma-link | (0)

Evobio Keeps Up With the Times
Michael I don’t know if you noticed, but the NY Times Science Times section of November 5 was an orgy of sociobiology, or at least stories with a strong sociobiological dimension. The stories included “Weighing the Grandma Factor” which covered the first international conference devoted to grandmothers: It turns out that there is a reason children are perpetually yearning for the flour-dusted, mythical figure called grandma or granny or oma or abuelita. As a number of participants at the conference demonstrated, the presence or absence of a grandmother often spelled the difference in traditional subsistence cultures between life or death for the grandchildren. It also included a book review of Dr. Olivia Judson’s “Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation” which seems to be pretty entertaining, judging from the following: Eggs are few, and sperm are many. This microscopic-level asymmetry is the root cause of ardent civil war that in every species pits male against male, and male against female. Males, from sea lions and fruit bats to [the] Taliban, are driven to control females’ fertility so as to ensure their own paternity. But a female’s interest usually lies in having many lovers…[enabling her] to guard against male sterility, to ensure diversity in her offspring, to encourage each male in her group to think that he is the father and protect her children accordingly and to encourage competition among the sperm of several males so as to ensure her egg gets the best. “Natural selection, it seems, often smiles on strumpets,” Dr. Tatiana writes without much hint of regret. “Sorry, boys.” Olivia Judson, Ph.D., a.k.a. Dr. Tatiana Of course, not everyone is a convinced sociobiologist. In “Brain Power: The Search for Origins” we hear from Dr. Terrence J. Sejnowski, a neuroscientist at the Salk Institute in San Diego who is advancing a more culture-centric view of brain development: “It’s true you can’t separate the question of who we are from the world our ancestors passed through on their way to becoming us,” Dr. Sejnowski said. But that evolution did not occur in the relatively stable savanna described by evolutionary psychologists, he said, but rather during a period of unusual, extreme and rapid oscillations in climate. If the brain evolved any trait during the Peistocene, he declared, it was flexibility. However, before arguing for a “blanker-slate” theory, Dr. Senjnoski should check in on another story in the section, “On Profit, Loss and the Mysteries of the Mind: A Conversation with Daniel Kahneman” I think the major phenomenon we [he and Dr. Tversky, his long-time research partner] observed is what we called “loss aversion.” There is an asymmetry between gains and losses, and it really is very dramatic and very easy to see. In my classes, I say: “I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would have have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?” People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve... posted by Friedrich at November 6, 2002 | perma-link | (2) comments

Tuesday, November 5, 2002


The Living Dead
Michael Given your interest in graphic novels, I thought you might want to know that Eddie Campbell, the artist of “From Hell,” is also a writer on art. While researching another posting I absolutely stumbled across a column, "Eddie's Corner," written by Mr. Campbell for his own website. Mr. Campbell was apparently irritated into writing by an academic’s formalist and reductionist definition of comic books, but his comments are certainly applicable to many other areas of art: I’m sure a psychologist could oblige us by explaining what is missing from modern life that gives rise to the need to declare our enthusiasms to be ‘art-forms’, for it is indeed a strange neurosis. Then we argue about the definition of our our new found art form and attempt to find in it the formal purity that we have persuaded ourselves an art form must possess. Where did this expression ‘art form’ come from anyway? The earliest stated use of the term I can find dates to 1868. That would put it right at the beginning of what is called modern art...In 1871 Whistler painted the portrait of his mother and titled it ‘Arrangement in grey and black’. From here on the avant-garde would continue to push art toward greater austerity of purpose. Subject is pushed to the background. Form is the connecting tissue between one movement in art and the next: Cezanne points the way to cubism, which opens the door to abstraction etc…. We need refer to nothing else but form, if we desire it. I was reading a book written in the 1970s (I’m trying to relocate it) on the subject of Gothic architecture. Having discussed one great building from an aesthetic point of view, the author states we should not forget that it was also designed to be a place of worship. Eh? At what point in the discussion of a Gothic cathedral do we lose sight of what it was built for? Art had become that part of an object that is separate from function…The bottom line to all of this is that the world desperately needs a new concept of art and the place of art in the world. Firstly we have to stop thinking in terms of ‘art form’…[W]hen I ceremoniously toast the ‘founding fathers’ of the art that I practice, they are as likely to be writers as cartoonists, comic dramatists as doodlers, sculptors or even just barroom talkers, because I see my art as the art of humour. There are only two arts. Being serious and being funny. All the technical stuff is but the means, the craft or the tools. There is a tendency among those who write on art to make the means the whole of it. Time to end the tyranny of the tools. The Versatile Mr. Campbell I don’t know about you, but the line of critical discourse Mr. Campbell is rebutting is painfully familiar to me from my student days at our Lousy Ivy University. It’s appalling that,... posted by Friedrich at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

American High Culture
Michael After reading a history of the NEA last week, I got to pondering the whole question of “high" culture in America. As you might imagine, the term gets tossed around quite a bit in any such book. But once I started thinking about it, I got a bit confused: I mean, can anybody tell me exactly what is "high" culture? From sociological observations over the years, I would say it would include painting (but not Norman Rockwell), classical music (but not R&B), opera (but not Broadway musicals), ballet (but not square dancing), poetry (but not the kind that rhymes if written between 1910 and 1990), literature (but not best sellers), etc., etc. It seems to help a work’s high-culture quotient a lot if it embodies a well-defined artistic tradition that was nurtured someplace other than America (if possible, Europe) and if that art, previous to the French Revolution, was created for kings, aristocrats, and/or the prelates of the Catholic Church. I guess a working definition of "high" culture in today’s world is anything that (1) wasn’t dreamed up by Americans, or, at the very least, will never be understood by the average American (2) conveys social cachet and (3) can’t charge its consumers enough to keep it afloat. Now, it may seem harsh to condemn all cultural activities originating in America as “low.” But I think the following quote from historian Clinton Rossiter accurately summed up many generations of American and European intellectual thought on that subject: …no great nation can be said to be worth respecting or imitating if it has not achieved a high level of culture, and it is at least an arguable question whether this nation will ever achieve it. Obviously, in the 20th century America has plenty of institutions that have guarded the gate against the barbarians of the “low” and nurtured the flame of the "high"—universities, museums, symphony orchestras, etc. But it got me thinking where these institutions come from, because when I look at America in the 19th century, I can't see any such thing as "high" culture, in the sense of artistic activities fulfilling all three conditions I outline above. For the skeptics in the audience, I’m prepared to lay out some illustrations, limiting myself to music in order to keep this posting at a manageable length. Music began its history in America in church, where, by the beginning of the 18th century, it was conceded by even the Puritans to be necessary in order to keep everyone together when reciting the Psalms aloud. Let's face it, though: there has never been any social cachet attached to the Puritans. The Revolutionary War saw a flowering of musical creativity, but it was aggressively anti-European in nature, with American musicians deliberately changing the words of British songs, such as "Yankee Doodle," to taunt their adversaries. William Billings, a Boston tanner, composed an anthem called "Chester" that expressed his confidence in the ability of the new nation to shake off the "iron rods" and... posted by Friedrich at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Moratoria Dreams
Friedrich -- It occurs to me that many fields could use the occasional imposed-from-without break from habit. It might freshen them up, or make them dig a little deeper. Baseball, for instance: wouldn't you be curious to see the consequences of a moratorium on spitting and crotch-scratching? So why not at least dream of imposing moratoria on cultural fields? Here are some of my proposals: Magazine journalism: a month every year with no puns allowed in either headlines or picture captions. Standup comedy: a week every month with no use of the word "motherfucker." Literary fiction: one season a year without any mention of incest. Television: a day a week with no twirling or spinning graphics. Movies: a summer a decade entirely without special effects. Indie comic books: a onetime year-long ban on stories about slackers with bad sex lives. Advertising: a month every year with all type to be set in traditional serif typefaces of uniform size, and with typeface-movement forbidden. Gallery art: every other season to feature no installation or conceptual art, or anything of any kind involving video. Highbrow criticism: the words "formal rigor" and "transgressive" to be banned forever. What kinds of cultural-field moratoria would you impose, if only you were king? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (3) comments

Top Drawer Blogs
Friedrich -- Something I’ve come to appreciate over the past few months is blogging as an improvisatory performance art. What generally seems to create the most buzz in the blogozone is political ideas. Steven den Beste and Glenn Reynolds, for instance: brainy guys doing impressively heavyweight things -- and I hardly ever look at them. No music or poetry (or something like that). Culturebug that I am, I’m drawn instead to style and personality, and gravitate to the likes of (among others) Colby Cosh, here, who has a heavy-metal guitar-solo way with a posting, and Kelly Jane Torrance, here, a model of class, grace and generosity. I'm happy to report some tiptop recent blogger discoveries, both of whom project a ton of likable personality, and both of whom have style to kill. They’re distinctive without trying too hard; they just seem to "have it.” (Of course, that “it” may take a lot of effort to achieve.) Alice Bachini, whose blog, A Libertarian Parent in the Countryside, is readable here, is a Brit with an eccentrically winning manner -- lots of playful irony and mock-naivete, delivered with the kind of verbal ease that makes an American feel cloddish and want to give up. This is blogging as charming chatter -- until you realize how much substance, daring, and fresh thinking is also whirling by. Sample passage: My education philosophy is temporarily stuck at the "well, it works for me..." stage again, at the moment. This happens from time to time. I will take it in to the Repair Shop at some point soonish and see if I can get it a nice overhaul, service and respray. In the meantime, you might find me pottering gently in the comments section, talking contradictory nonsense. Contradicting oneself is positively a good thing, in my opinion. It shows you are open-minded and learning and not unduly concerned with outward appearances. The other charmer is Scott Chaffin of The Fat Guy (here), who does a burly, ten-gallon-hat-and-a-pickup-truck act better than anyone else online. Part of what’s pleasing about his blog is his drawling, “I’m just a guy with too many dogs and opinions” flair. (Sample posting title: “How do you spell ‘Ten-Hut!’?”) But he’s like a good poker player, always playing what he's got a lot more shrewdly than you could. Most of the time he's humorous and to the point, but every now and then he can really take you by surprise. Check out, for example, his recent posting about hunting and his dad: sweet and powerful. (Search on the posting's title, "Mi Padre.") Sample passage: I feel sorry for my poor Mom, now that I think about it. She can cook anything on the face of the earth and make it taste good. And she had to deal with four Texas males who wanted nothing more than fried beef and Del Monte green beans most nights. She tried hard, with salmon croquettes, and eggplant parmesan, and all kinds of gussied-up vegetables like zucchini, but... posted by Michael at November 5, 2002 | perma-link | (4) comments

Monday, November 4, 2002


Turner Prize: Tate v. Howell
Michael Intrigued by the furor over UK culture minister Kim Howell’s negative comments regarding the work of the four short-listed finalists for this year’s Turner Prize, I did a little research on the plain-talking minister. According to the Guardian, this isn’t the first time Minister Howell has made blunt remarks: [Howells] described the royal family last year as "all a bit bonkers" and had to apologise after saying in a Commons debate that "the idea of listening to three Somerset folk singers sounds like hell." Since he seems like a remarkably perceptive fellow, I thought we could use his remarks to stage a debate over the work of at least two of the four finalists. For the “pro” side of the debate, I took some remarks from the website of the Tate, which held the exhibition and hands out the prize. Entry of Liam Gillick, Turner Prize Finalist What the Tate says: [Gillick’s] art is underpinned by rigorous theorising: he is as much a writer as a maker of objects. However, Gillick's work is shaped by a very visual awareness of the way different properties of materials, structures and colour can affect our surroundings and therefore influence the way we behave. Coats of Asbestos Spangled With Mica (2002), made of coloured Perspex and anodised aluminium, has been created specifically for this exhibition. In this work, Gillick encourages us to explore our bodily and intellectual perception of an altered environment. What the Minister says: I've sat under perspex roofs like that in canteens since the mid-1960s. It's not at all interesting. It's very, very boring. Entry of Fiona Banner, Turner Prize Finalist What the Tate says: Banner explores the seemingly limitless possibilities of language, yet at the same time demonstrates how words can often fail us, exposing our inability to convey internal thoughts, emotions and experiences. Since 1994, she has created handwritten and printed texts, which describe feature films or particular scenarios in meticulous detail. Since 2000, Banner has used pornographic film to explore sexuality and the extreme limits of written communication. In the works shown in the exhibition, she transcribes the activities taking place in Arsewoman in Wonderland, an X-rated version of Alice's fictional adventures. What the Minister says: I thought it was a piece of pointillism [dot painting] when I walked into the gallery but it turns out to be her description of a porno movie. As for me--a onetime art student who has personally created installations with his own hands--I must admit that my suspicions as to the seriousness of the Turner Prize committee are aroused by the general vagueness and the lack of impact of the installation art they've been handing these prizes out to. One suspects if the work "read" well enough to convey any genuine heat, it would be rejected as insufficiently shocking to the bourgeoisie, or whoever it seems they think they're shocking. Turner Prize Presenter and Media Attention Grabber I sense the whole ethos of the Turner Prize was best summed up by... posted by Friedrich at November 4, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Sunday, November 3, 2002


TV Alert
Friedrich -- More tips for those who want to use their TV as a cultural resource, and not a narcotic. I’m fond of three or four of the current true-crime series: Good stories! With beginnings and endings! And juicy characters! The quirkiest of the bunch is A&E’s atmospheric City Confidential, which views a crime story as a chance to explore an environment. A murder in Memphis? Why not pick up a lot of Memphis lore along the way? Why not meet some oddball local characters? Why not peak inside a social circle? Often an episode gets so engrossed by its setting and characters that it won’t get around to the specific case that is its ostensible subject for 15 or 20 minutes. Yet the shows are usually quite satisfying -- they're like short versions of "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." The voice of Paul Winfield, who supplies the narration, is a big plus -- seldom have you heard anyone relish his instrument's effects quite so shamelessly. City Confidential (A&E, showing this week Sunday at 9 pm; Monday at 1 am; Wednesday at 10 pm; Thursday at 2 am; Saturday at 6 pm). Just because I'm a women's-tennis buff... The WTA Sanex L.A. Championship (ESPN coverage begins Wednesday at 3:30). Women’s tennis has been more fun to follow than men’s for some years now; the men are bazookas blasting away at each other, while the women still have to rely on strategy. And, hey: Women! Ie., drama, family intrigue, conflicted feelings, wild mood swings, diva tears and diva delight. Given how monotonous the finals have become -- all Serena and Venus, all the time -- you’re likely to find more unpredictability to enjoy in the early rounds. Movie tips for people who love watching beautiful, talented actresses and who don’t mind sitting through lousy movies to get a glimpse of their goddesses: Sweet November (Cinemax, Saturday at 6 pm). Godawful sentimental chickflick about a tragic kook (Charlize Theron) who decides to loosen up a hard-driving prig (Keanu Reeves) -- but Theron is terrific, as well as beyond-belief pretty. Thief of Hearts (IFC, Wednesday at 10 pm; Thursday at 6 pm). Remember the glossy, overdynamic Simpson/Bruckheimer hits of the ‘80s -- “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Top Gun,” etc? Well, they made some duds too, and this was one of them. But Barbara Williams, playing a conventional woman lured into a romance with a thief, brings to her character a slow-motion sensuality, and dark undercurrents of fear, distress and need, that are very erotic. Killing Zoe (IFC, Friday at 8 pm and 11:15 pm; Friday at 4:15 am). Crappy heist-gone-bad edginess from a Tarantino sidekick, but an all-too-rare opportunity to feast your eyes on one of the most elegant, jewel-like actresses around these days, Julie Delpy. This month’s theme on TCM is Westerns. Morality plays in mythic settings -- that’s what Westerns deliver, and it’s what the form is all about. The hunger for this kind of entertainment never seems to... posted by Michael at November 3, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments

Saturday, November 2, 2002


The Emperor Has No Clothes
Michael Thanks for putting me on to the most recent flap in British art, in which Culture Minister Kim Howells seems to have spoken his mind without pausing to edit it for popular consumption (something you've got to admire in any politician.) I really can't do better with this than just quoting the Reuters' story: Minister blasts Turner art as "bullshit" LONDON (Reuters) - Culture Minister Kim Howells has blasted the contenders for one of the art world's leading prizes as "conceptual bullshit." He accused the art establishment of being out of touch with public taste and urged a new generation of artists to step forward. Howells was reacting to the entries for the Turner Prize, on show at London's Tate Britain gallery. The prize, derided by its critics as a farce, has been won in the past by pickled sheep and elephant dung. Howells visited the exhibition and left a comment pinned to a gallery noticeboard. "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost," the note read. "It is cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit." Plain Talking Culture Minister Our readers can read the entire story here. I'm going to be trying to follow how all this turns out. If any of our readers is more hip to the British art/political scene than I am, I would welcome their views and news. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at November 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Views -- Cristina Aguilera
Friedrich -- When you check into pop culture as seldom as I do, you lose track of where current pop things come from, as well as what any of it means to anyone. It's all a big, sparkly blur, like an evening of clubgoing spent on drugs and in the company of strangers. You wonder afterwards: What was that all about? Cristina 1: Not yet Dirrty enough As for teeny-porn pop ... Well, I wholeheartedly approve, just as I wholeheartedly cheer the parents and teachers who worry about its impact. What's pop culture without these ritual stresses? But what do I really know about teeny-porn pop? And what do I know about how to judge it? Today, for instance, I stumbled across a new Cristina Aguilera video called "Dirrty," which can be viewed here. Holy moly! "Dirrty" is a pop blur, all right -- of sexy kids strutting and striking poses, of flashing lights, of taunting self-caresses, and of more provocative, athletic hip-twitching than I've ever seen in my whole long life. (I worry about the future health of Cristina's lumbar region.) For most of it, Cristina is dressed in leather chaps and red panties, whose crotch she aims at you whenever possible. Music-wise, there was a lot of whompa-whompa, of course, and a lot of whooping, hollering and growling too. You could tell when it was a blonde girl's voice because it soared out of control; you could tell when it was a black guy's voice because it growled menacingly. As for the lyrics, I could pick out only a few words: "get me off," and "sweatin' till my clothes come off" (I think a rhyme was intended). The video is like an encyclopedia of everything anyone ever thought was sexy, set to strobe lights and jackhammers. My first thought was, Lordy! As though it wasn't difficult enough learning sexual self-control 35 years ago! Surrounded by this kind of thing, how do modern boys ever stop masturbating? My second thought was, When did singing become a matter of vocal gymnastics instead of carrying a tune? I may be wrong, but I'm guessing it was about the same time pop music stopped being about songs and started being about sonic-effects-set-to-beats. My third thought was: there comes a moment in a young female performer's life when she decides to declare herself no longer a child, and I guess that moment has arrived for Cristina. A young movie actress usually marks the passage to womanhood by doing her first nude scene; Cristina seems to have decided it was time to break out the chaps and panties. All of which means that she has decided that, in her previous incarnation, she wasn't being sexual enough. Cristina 2: A woman now But here's the question I have no way of answering, having lost whatever feel for pop I once had: Has Cristina gone too far? Will her fans follow her? I do wonder. Physically, she's lost a little of her adorable scrawniness, and seems... posted by Michael at November 2, 2002 | perma-link | (12) comments

Free Reads -- Dennis Lim and Todd Haynes
Friedrich -- If you ever needed confirmation that 1) you aren't a leftie, 2) you aren't gay, and 3) you didn't go to Brown and major in semiotics, here's a fast way to get it -- reading Dennis Lim's article about the filmmaker Todd Haynes in the Village Voice, here. Haynes is the director who made the new pseudo-Sirk melodrama "Far From Heaven," which I wrote about some postings ago, here. To be fair, it's a cheerful and informative article. But it's mostly to be enjoyed (so far as I'm concerned) for the density of the leftie-art-robot-speak on display. Sample passage from Lim: From the delirious palette to the prim, italicized performances, Haynes's meta-melodrama pays homage to German-born maestro Douglas Sirk. A Weimar stage director who emigrated to the States in 1940, Sirk went on to make a string of Brechtian soaps in Hollywood, wrapping up his film career as resident tearjerker at Universal Pictures. Resurrecting All That Heaven Allows (1955), Sirk's attack on bourgeois repression, and Imitation of Life (1959), his tempestuous saga of race and identity, Haynes revels in the ebullient artifice of the originals. Far From Heaven, pace Courtney Love, fakes it so fake it is beyond real. Phew! Sample passage from Haynes, who's talking about the performance artist John Kelly's legendary (between Canal and 14th St, anyway) impersonation of Joni Mitchell: He sounds just like Joni Mitchell, he imitates her stage banter, he's in drag and looks like a ghoulish version of the little pixie Joni Mitchell from the '60s. You're laughing, but you're laughing at yourself, at your own intensely serious investment in Joni Mitchell when you were in high school. But you're also crying, at the beauty of the music, and for that person in high school who loved those songs and who you feel rekindled. There's this freedom to go from one emotion to the next, neither one undermining the other....There's something about a beautiful surrogate that opens up this wealth of feeling that you wouldn't have with the real thing. And to me, the best kind of cinema is not about the real—it's about a distance that you fill in, participate in with your life experiences, your memories, and your associations. Double-phew! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 2, 2002 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, November 1, 2002


Free Reads -- Perl on Modigliani
Friedrich -- Le Grand Nu, 1919 The Modigliani exhibition that's up in Buffalo right now is apparently the first such major retrospective of his work in this country in 40 years. The New Republic publishes a beautiful Jed Perl review of it, here. Sample passage: Everything in Modigliani's work is short cuts and telegraphed messages. When he paints people he gives us summaries. He is a mythologizer for a hurry-up generation, the perfect court painter for the fast-moving bohemia of Montparnasse ... To operate so much by instinct is to be a sort of gambler, and Modigliani's virtuosity sometimes suggests a wise guy's manipulative personality. His swelling, swerving contours are authoritative, singular, and also frequently superficial. And yet even when his work, in many of the portraits of blank-eyed beautiful women, is half-baked, it is not necessarily slapdash. He brings his own quickening authority to the gathering excitement of the modern movement. I'm very fond of Modigliani myself, even if vaguely aware how uncool that is. The iconic quality of his nudes and portraits seems gimmicky and too easily arrived at, yet I can't help enjoying and admiring his sensuality, his Classicizing instincts, and his ease. And the dream of Bohemia that his paintings conjure up ... Well, shameful and hick though it is to admit, that image is part of what lured me into the media-and-arts field. Would someone please tell me what became of that dream Bohemia? I'm here, but now it's gone. Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery, here, has put together a Flash presentation on Modigliani. The Artchive (here) has a good page of text, with links to many images. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at November 1, 2002 | perma-link | (1) comments