Friday, February 28, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part VI
Michael: This is the next installment in my attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#5, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following (essentially Marxist) social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire] was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. After examining each point of this analysis (and finding it wanting), I’ve developed a less schematic but more factual version of the social background to Impressionism: Friedrich’s Revised Account of Impressionism: Under the 2nd Empire, France entered the railway age. This didn’t create wrenching new social conditions but did provide many highly visible symbols of modernism—promoting a belief in progress and modernity as a positive force. As the rapid growth of the 1850s petered out during the 1860s, the urban bourgeoisie, which lagged the rural landowning class both financially and in terms of political influence, began to think that it could do better under a republican system of government. Meanwhile, although the financial lot of the Parisian proletariat was improving relative to its miserable conditions of the 1840s, it was deeply alienated by being exiled to the suburban wasteland by the urban renewal programs known as Haussmannization. Under the leadership of a socialist labor movement encouraged by Napoleon III, the politicized working classes attempted to seize control of the country via the Paris Commune (during an extraordinary vacuum of power caused by the Franco-Prussian War). The defeat of the Commune and its savage repression however, no matter how dramatic, were essentially distractions and only temporarily obscured the "slow revolution" by which the moderate republican ideal was gaining traction against the dominant political class, the rural landowners. The struggle of urban bourgeoisie to implement their “revolutionary” ideal (i.e., a capitalist democracy,... posted by Friedrich at February 28, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Another Web Crawl
Friedrich -- * If you didn't happen to catch the mention of this in the NYTimes (and, boy, don't I hate it when the Times gets wise to things before I do), here are the Photobloggies -- prizewinning (in the most friendly and low-budget way) photoblogs. The great thing about surfing photoblogs: lots of visual pleasure. The worst thing about surfing photoblogs: realizing that I'm not just a so-so photographer, I'm in fact a really bad photographer. * An amusing review by an unnamed writer in the Economist (here) of Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni's new biography of the film producer Sam Spiegel. I often go on, no doubt tiresomely, about how very much filmbiz people differ from normal human beings. Here's pleasing confirmation: "Honesty came no more easily to Spiegel than financial regularity. To get his way, he would fake heart attacks. 'Telling the truth unnerved him,' according to an acquaintance." * The Economist's obit of JFK advisor Walt Rostow (here) makes something clear I'd never quite understood before. I'd known that Rostow played a big role in getting the U.S. involved in the Vietnam War. What I hadn't realized was that the war was an extension of Rostow and JFK's altruistic foreign aid policy -- ambitious do-goodism gone mad, it seems. This deserves a long-ish excerpt: Mr Rostow's ideas matched the mood of the Kennedy administration. It fitted with liberal notions of ending poverty at home and devising a welfareish state. Kennedy declared the 1960s the “decade of development”, and Mr Rostow was allowed to try out his ideas. He became particularly concerned with South-East Asia. South Vietnam was getting American aid, and prospering. But it was being undermined by guerrillas infiltrating from communist North Vietnam. If the South fell, Mr Rostow feared that a series of countries would topple like dominoes into the communist grasp: Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. His remedy was that the United States should use force to rid South Vietnam of guerrillas to allow the country to continue to develop successfully. It was this policy, seemingly carefully thought-out, that dragged America deeper and deeper into what came to be called the Vietnam war. * In the Financial Times, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge (here) ask whether the joint-stock company has been a blessing or a curse. I can't tell whether this piece is an excerpt from a forthcoming book or an appetizer for it. What is going on? Seen from a broad historical perspective, two things stand out. The first is that the current wave of anger against companies is completely normal – even a healthy thing. The second is that the company’s gainsayers – particularly the anti-global crew – are wrong: the company has been an institution that has changed the world enormously for the better. Indeed, it has been the secret of the west’s success. * I missed this first time around, but NRO, bless them, has had the inspiration to run it again: Catesby Leigh's review of the WTC proposals, here. Have you... posted by Michael at February 28, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, February 27, 2003


The Proper Use of a Cineplex
Michael: I think I’ve finally figured out the proper way to use a multiplex: for movie surfing. (Okay, so I’m a little slow—better late than never, I say.) The other night I needed to get out of the house and see a movie. Unfortunately, when I got to the movie theater, I realized that I had arrived between waves of movie start times—it over an hour until the next showing of a movie. I thought, I can’t wait that long, I’ll just walk into some movie late and it’ll be okay. I chose “Gods and Generals” (by alphabetical order) and sauntered in. Well, I promptly sat through about 15 minutes of snore-inducing character development, apparently designed to show that the ferocious Stonewall Jackson (a guy who could have given Osama Bin Laden lessons in fanaticism) was secretly a sensitive soul. It all made me pine for the greater candor of one of Jackson’s real-life soldiers, who famously remarked that Jackson would have a man shot at the drop of a hat and would drop the hat himself. When the movie got around to a scene establishing that Ambrose Burnside, the Union commander, was a world-class moron, I thought, well, we know how this turns out and left the theater. I went over to see how Michael Caine and Brandon Fraser were doing in “The Quiet American.” While this was a superior product to “Gods and Generals,” perhaps half an hour of it was enough for me to absorb the essence of this little morality play as well. On a roll, I hopped out of my seat and went to check out the remaining offerings. Finally, I spotted “The Life of David Gale” and wandered in. Well, the less said the better about this particular offering. Nonetheless, although it was my first time movie surfing at a Cineplex and regrettably turned out about as well as channel surfing on T.V. usually does—a lot of shows and nothing absorbing to watch—it made me realize that given the formulaic nature of most movies, wasting a whole two hours watching one is rarely necessary. And, you don’t have to worry about when they’re playing, either. When you need to kill some time, just wander in off the street. Pretty soon, you’ll find that the whole experience isn’t so bad—as long as you keep moving. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 27, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Wednesday, February 26, 2003


Doing What You Love for a Living Redux
Friedrich -- As you know, one of the issues I return to over and over again (apologies for the monotony of this, by the way) is whether or not it makes sense to try to turn doing what you love into a career. Whether or not it makes sense even to imagine making a living by doing what you already love, in fact. We're encouraged (by parents, schools, friends, movies, our own dopey fantasies) to think in these terms, even to be unhappy if the dream hasn't yet come true. Yet, IMHO, it can be a ruinous and destructive way to think, especially about a life in the arts. Why? In the first place, there's next to no chance it'll happen. In the second place, if it does happen -- or if something like it does happen -- there's a good chance that the very act of doing it for money will ruin the pleasure. You're likely to wind up with the worst of both worlds -- a perilous and not-great job doing something that has ceased to mean anything to you. (Yet what you're selling has got to seem special -- and where does that special touch come from if you've lost that special feeling? So you fake an emotion, then wind up feeling like you've betrayed a lover. And on and on the heartbreaking cycle goes ....) A few notes from the outside world to give my argument a little weight. The gifted erotic-art photographer (I don't know his name and can't find it on his website) who runs Eumorphia (here) is closing up the commercial side of his shop. (But be sure to visit: there's much still there at the site to explore.) Why? In his words: I've decided to shut down the pay side of things. There are many reasons for this which I'm just not really wanting to talk about but the main issue is this: Doing photography as a commercial enterprise is not doing photography as an artform. I'm giving up the commercial side of things and going back to making art. The very funny and industrious Andrew Marlatt ran SatireWire (here) for almost three years. Recently he quit. Take a guess why. Here's the way he puts it: It's not about the money. The site actually makes money ... Nice little setup, actually. I've been very lucky. But the bottom line is, it has ceased to be fun. My heart is not in it. My head is not in it... The thing is, SatireWire, successful as it has been, is also suffocating. I work best tangentially, meaning I work best when I let ideas just come at me, flitting about my head like confetti as I marvel at all the pretty colors, the way they turned in the wind. I would pick out the ones I liked, put them together, make a story. But the confetti no longer falls. It's all on the ground now. The parade is over. I'm just sweeping up... posted by Michael at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Free Reads -- Theodore Dalrymple
Friedrich Another brilliantly grumpy piece by the British prison-doctor/essayist Theodore Dalrymple, here. His theme this time is youth crime and anger management. Sample passage: What has changed is our ability to accept and tolerate this ineluctable condition of human existence. We do not need more anger management: we need to say no to our children as a matter of principle and abandon the notion of rights, our own included. Every time I hear someone say "It's my right", well, I grow angry. Link thanks to Chris Bertram (here), whose posting reminds me that I really ought to feel more ashamed than I do by the way I'm forever making dismissive cracks about Rousseau without having read more than a few pages of his work. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Another Web Crawl
Friedrich -- *Aaron Haspel (here) threatens that his latest "How to Read a Poem" posting will be the last in the series. Email him and theaten grievous bodily harm unless he continues. *Jim Ryan (here) continues his excellent series on the conservative philosopher John Kekes. *Brian Micklethwait (here) argues that while Mies van der Rohe's influence on building was largely bad, his influence on interiors was for the better. *Now that Daniel Libeskind's mausoleum/videogame design has won the competition for the reconstruction of the WTC site, it's all the more timely to give Brian Hanson and Nikos Salingaros' brilliant essay about it a read, here. *James Howard Kunstler is the New Urbanist movement's attack dog, an entertaining (and brainy) combination of Dennis Miller and Anne Coulter who does his ranting and joking on the topic of suburbs and buildings. I've often wondered why people in towns and cities don't form protest groups and picket aesthetic atrocities. Kunstler shows the way. His own high-blood-pressure website is here (don't miss the q&a he did with the great Jane Jacobs); a decent short interview with him is ">here. You can buy his eye-poppingly good book The Geography of Nowhere ">here. *And, did you know that making little Flash animations of stick figures engaging in fights, especially kung-fu fights, has become a standard Web folk-art thing to do? I didn't either, until I read about it in The Scotsman. (Damn, can't find the link to the exact story anymore.) Anyway, this one guy who goes by the handle Xiao Xiao (here) is considered to be the true auteur of the school. Fun and impressive: plot lines, humor, Bruce Lee-style sound effects -- and watch for the slow-mo/3D "Matrix" passages. Thwack, thwack, Michael... posted by Michael at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Tell, Don't Show
Friedrich -- I recently finished Paul Johson's magnificent History of the English People (out of print, but Amazon will do their best for you here), as well as John Keegan's elegant short biography of Winston Churchill (buyable here). Thought I should know a little more about English history than the eensie bit I did -- they have royalty, some white cliffs somewhere, and produce many programs for Masterpiece Theater. First-rate books, both of which I listened to on audiobook. I don't understand why more people don't use audiobooks, which are a great way to spend commuting and traveling time (beats the radio), as well as exercising time (I got tired of my music tapes pretty quickly). Audiobooks also spare middle-aged eyes, something I'm appreciating more and more. Did someone say "expense"? But renting audiobooks turns out to be quite a cheap way to go through books. The Paul Johnson is a long work of history, yet, renting it from the excellent Blackstone Audio (here), my total cost was about 20 bucks -- a steal, really. (Another good rental source is Books on Tape, here.) Arty flibbertigibbet that I am, my main reflection on finishing the Johnson and the Keegan was about the writing. Well, one aspect of the writing. American teachers and critics often go on and on about the importance of "showing, not telling," advice that tends to enrage me. Why the general preference for one over the other? There are times when it's appropriate to tell, and times when it's appropriate to show. Plus, heck, my tastes run more towards telling anyway. Stendhal, my favorite author, is in "tell" mode probably more than half the time. Aaron Haspel (here), a "tell" buff himself, points out that one of his favorite authors, the great Heinrich von Kleist, almost never "shows." Johnson and Keegan, bless their hearts, are both primarily tellers, not show-ers. When they feel they need to, they'll zero in on a detail or a setting or a anecdote. But most of the time they're simply telling you what you need to know. Why not? I wonder if this is partly a British/American thing. American writers and publishers (and presumably at least some readers) seem to be crazy about show-ing: "On the evening of August 8th, 1764, a small boy in a straw hat was whittling a piece of birch with his father's penknife..." My response: who cares? (My other response, which I'm a little ashamed of: What a bunch of rubes we Americans can be!...) A biography-buff friend of mine shares my aversion to excessive show-ing, but claims that it's the quality of the writing that makes all the difference. According to him, there are a couple of biographers who can make "show" mode really sing. I'll take his word for it. As for me? Hey, authors: When you've got something to tell me, tell it to me. You want to keep it lively with a few concrete details? Fine. Otherwise, shut up. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Oil Painting and Sex
Michael: I hear you're doing some oil painting. A bit daunting, isn't it, with paints and medium and turpentine and all. I've done oil painting, although I was never systematically instructed in it (another legacy of going to a contemporary art school.) I remember being quite frustrated by the complexity of oil-paint "logistics" when I was first forced to confront them. And I'll admit that over the years I've had a few paintings go down into a death spiral when I simply couldn't get parts of them to dry in a reasonable time frame. Of course, I seem to have a strange fascination with painting wet-into-wet, which can create some dazzling passages when it's working but invites problems when its not. As a result, I've generally chosen to paint in acrylic, since I know it'll dry pretty fast and I won't be smelling up the house with turpentine. The downside of spending time painting in acrylics is that it hasn't trained me to pay close attention to the whole very important issue of thick paint vs. thin paint, smooth-paint vs. textured-paint which is a natural part of oil painting. I gained a greater interest in this particular painting issue when I recently visited a traveling show of the Phillips collection at the Phoenix Art Museum. I spent my time in the exhibit looking at how the paintings were painted and how that process impacted their sense of space. I also tried to figure out why the painters had chosen to paint them the way they did, although this is a much tougher intellectual problem. For example, I know that early in his career Monet often started his paintings with thin, semi transparent washes which he then overlaid with heavier, more textural touches. [Note from an irritated art-school student: "Classic" or 1870s Impressionism is all about layering--don't let sloppy instructors pawn off that nonsense on you about broken brushstrokes being the essence of the Impressionist style. As a practical matter, broken brushwork won't work unless it's been set up by layering. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.] In painting this way, Monet was following "standard" oil painting practice, since the human eye perceives heavily textured objects as close at hand, while distant objects are much more purely visual, like thin washes of color (objects in the distance always have a kind of watercolor-y look). Granted, Monet applied more visible brushstrokes (both thick-and-meaty and runny-uneven) than was standard in his day, but he was still respecting the process and visual principle of thin/distant and thick/close. Then, as he got older, he started to use heavy, chalky paint throughout his image. There's a grey-day landscape looking over cliffs along the Normandy seacoast and then out to sea in the Phillips collection (painted around 1890, I think) which was a bit startling. Although it "read" properly in the line drawing sense, when you squinted at the painting and deliberately ignored the "subject matter" the whole painting sort of bulged forward around the linear... posted by Friedrich at February 26, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Tuesday, February 25, 2003


Humbled Again
Friedrich -- The Wife and I were out at dinner the other night with a woman friend. We talked of this, we talked of that. Then the Wife and our friend discovered that as girls they'd both been horseback riders. They'd both owned horses. They'd taken part in competitions in California within a few years of each other. They compared notes; their eyes shone; they imitated the sounds horses make; they made cute faces and burst into giggles; they talked about how much they missed their horses; they looked at me pityingly ... A man will never be anything more than a poor substitute for a horse. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 25, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Nature v. Nurture
Michael: A few years ago I bought a book entitled “Beyond Left and Right.” I thought at the time that I might be in for some genuinely new political thought. Unfortunately, upon examination at home, I found the contents consisted of new fashioned ways to sell old-fashioned left-wing ideas, the desirableness of which were simply taken as a given. I mention “Beyond Left and Right” because I just read something in the New York Times that feels a lot like it. I refer to Natalie Angier’s column, “Not Just Genes: Moving Beyond Nature vs. Nurture.” (You can read it here.) I won’t keep you in suspense about the similarity; Ms. Angier ostensibly lists examples of how science doesn’t support either position in the political debate over nature or nurture while managing to give the impression of wanting desperately to hang on to the nurture thesis. Ms. Angier notes what is the politically correct position in science, which is that genes are always dependent on their environment for expression. She also points out that scientists are, like everybody else, politically opinionated: “Everyone calls themselves an interactionist," said Dr. David Sloan Wilson, an evolutionary biologist at Binghamton University in New York. "Yet often, when you scratch below the surface, you find a sociobiologist who marginalizes the importance of culture, or a social constructivist who hates the very idea of sociobiology, and they end up painting caricatures of each other. True integrative thinking is in the very early stages." Regrettably, Ms. Angier is among those who aren’t up to “true integrative thinking” at least at the political level. All the examples she selects appear to support a “nature” hypothesis, but viewed more closely (she claims) are really more ambiguous. Oddly, or perhaps not so oddly, she selects no examples that, at first glance, appear to support “nurture” but in reality turn out to be more ambiguous. Beginning her catalogue of ostensibly erroneously "naturist" thinking she cites phenylketonuria, or PKU. This disease results from a genetically inability to break down phenylalanine, found in foods like milk, eggs, meat and bread. Excess phenylalanine then builds up in the body, resulting in tremors, seizures and brain damage. She argues that because it is possible for sufferers to manage the condition by avoiding foods containing phenylaline, this condition can’t be considered merely “genetic.” Say what?! Last time I looked, the nature-nurture argument had to do with the ability to create new—and better—human relations by modifying social conditions. That is, the better society is the cause that leads to the effect of better human beings. Lefties, by and large, believe passionately that human beings are malleable enough to be manipulated into virtue by their social environment, while righties, by and large, have a much lower opinion of the malleability of human nature and fear that such manipulations are more likely to have extremely nasty unintended consequences. For this example to have supported the point that Ms. Angier seems to be making—that human beings are more flexible than hard... posted by Friedrich at February 25, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Free Reads -- Political Test
Friedrich -- Another online "what are your politics" test, here, but more thoughtful and nuanced than most such, or so it seems to me. Although these tests never make enough allowance for those of us who simply dislike politics, or prefer to see politics kept out of as much as possible. I can't tell who's behind it, can you? Still, pretty well done. I'll tell you my results if you'll tell me yours. Eager to hear how everyone else scores too. Other volunteers? Yahmdallah? Laurel? Michael Serafin? J.C.? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 25, 2003 | perma-link | (36) comments

Monday, February 24, 2003


New Magazines
Friedrich -- Do you follow the style magazines? I don't mean the fashion magazines, I mean the style magazines. I do, though I sometimes wonder why. I guess that I simply enjoying keeping up with what people are doing with magazines. And what I find myself mostly buying these days are examples of a new breed of style magazine. I wonder if you’ve run across them. Hard to describe; I don’t know if the genre has a semi-official name yet. Style, fashion, art, celebrity -- but, frankly, old fart that I am, I can’t tell what their subject matter really is, and I can’t tell what it is they’re selling. There seems to be nothing at the core. There’s little or no information in them, the writing is drivel (and next-to-unreadable anyway, what with the text being Quarked way over to the side, reduced in size and made sans-serif -- it isn’t writing, it’s decor). There’s no gear on sale. There seems to be nothing graspable there. Which seems to be the point: style, look and attitude. These magazines seem to be all about edgy media values. Period. There’s a fair amount of art-school-style semi-nudity, fashion and performance-art self-consciousness, and new-look models hoping to make it big. But they’re a long way from a Maxim or a Stuff. This is alternative product, and part of what’s bewildering about them is the combination of grunge and uptown-quality production values. For some reason, nearly all of them have one-word titles: Zink, Flaunt. Trace. Contents. And they’re often quite spendid, as lavishly and sumptuously produced as art books. They also make me think of those legendary custom-made art-thing magazines that were financed by rich people for about five issues back in the ‘30s and ‘40s, and whose titles escape me at the moment. The big diff between them and traditional art-and-word-centric publications is their value-set, which derives from the media. Whoosh. Fwoof. Kapow. They’re as consciously designed and constructed as art things, and in a way, that’s about as good a description as I can come up with: they’re media-derived abstract magazine experiences, Quark and Photoshop extravaganzas put together (as far as I can tell) by recent art-and-design grads. The thing about Quark and Photoshop is that they enable you to compose a magazine in a non-linear way; designers actually speak about “constructing” pages, layouts, passages, entire issues. These magazines take that approach as far as any I’ve run across. The individual pieces are subordinated to the larger digital-media page-flipping experience. They’re disappointing -- nonexistent, really -- in terms of content. But why be square: Content, that’s so 20th century. No, they’re all about media effects. A lot of lavish paper, gorgeous models all shiney and full of ‘tude, photographs blown up so that the bigness is the point, and the whole put together to create (this seems to be the point) an abstract media-magazine experience. It’s all about look, feel, rhythm and effects. It’s as though the raw material is the Fwoof... posted by Michael at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

A Feathered T. Rex--Image Evolution
Michael: According to a story in Scientific American, the evolution of feathers seems to have occurred not in "birds" or even "proto-birds" but in dinosaurs. Specifically, feathers seem to have developed in therapod dinosaurs (the carnivorous types that ran about on two legs with prominent teeth.) Apparently feathers have a host of valuable properties not connected with flight, including being good heat insulators and being waterproof, to say nothing of allowing all sorts of interesting opportunities for sexual display and differentiation. So feathers came first, and flight was something that showed up later (possibly, much later) in the game. One consequence of this is to change the primary definition of birds from feathered, flying bipeds to the longest-running show among the therapod dinosaurs; another is eliminating the question: "Why did the dinosaurs become extinct?" What astonished me, however, is that the current thinking (if I'm reading this story correctly) is that all therapod dinosaurs may have been feathered, including famous macho nasties like the velociraptor and T. Rex. The cover of Scientific American shows what I think is a velociraptor running around like a really scarey (and rather demented-looking) chicken. I can understand why they didn't even try to illustrate a feathered T. Rex--it would go against too deeply ingrained a mental image. I keep thinking about what the damn thing would look like, and having my visual imagination conk out. I mean, it seems like I just got used to the idea that T. Rex walked around with its body held horizontally, and not dragging its tail. I wonder if this will hurt the popularity of dinosaurs--trying to match up the idea of T. Rex's tons of bone and tooth with cute ruff of fluffy feathers. Or will it end up pictured more like a giant vulture, dripping blood and dropping gore-stained feathers? (This image seems to be supported by recent theories that T. Rex was too big and slow to hunt and was therefore more of a scavenger or stealer of other dinosaurs' kills.) That has a messy reality that might put off children--and Hollywood, too! Evolution of T. Rex's Image From Tubby to Buff to...Avian? The "mutation" of T. Rex's image from upright, big-bellied tripod to horizontal menace (sort of a crocodile with really long back legs) at the time of "Jurassic Park" was speedily accepted, largely because it made our boy seem far more fit and athletic--a true tyrant king in tune with 90s ideas of masculine sexuality. But I'm guessing that aesthetic preferences may hold the notion of a feathered T. Rex back for a while. I guess Darwinism isn't just for living creatures; now that I think about it, mental images seem to have a "survival of the fittest" aspect as well. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Affirmative Action: An Education for Us All
Michael: Bob Herbert in the New York Times of February 24 spells out the logic behind affirmative action in an Op-Ed piece by. In it he makes the following rather oddly paired assertions: A glance at the current challenges to affirmative action in higher education would show little more than the fact that a number of white applicants have asserted in court that they were illegally denied admission to college or law school because of preferences given to racial or ethnic minorities. ...The United States is a better place after a half-century of racial progress and improved educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities and women. We have all benefited and, and voluntary efforts to continue that progress, including the policies at Michigan, are in the interest of us all. [emphasis added]. I think it's true that “The United States is a better place after…improved educational opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities…” However, one would have a hard time arguing that the “white applicants who have asserted in court that they were illegally denied admission to college or law school” are wrong to feel that they may have benefited from affirmative action just a tad less than, perhaps, the racial or ethnic minority students that were admitted to the University of Michigan Law School. In fact, I suspect they probably feel like they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. Wouldn’t you? My question is: why should the costs of a policy that Mr. Herbert argues benefits “us all” (by which he presumably means that this policy is in society’s best interest) be born by this particular set of individuals (i.e., the white students refused admission)—without any compensation? I notice Mr. Herbert doesn’t even try to make the case that these particular students were in any way personally responsible for racial discrimination aimed at minorities and ethnic groups. Nope, apparently they’re just society’s sacrificial lambs—too bad, boys and girls. It would seem to me that affirmative action would have virtually no downside if the specifically “damaged” applicants were compensated for the harm being done to them. It would be fairly easy to calculate such damage, and for the University of Michigan to write a nice little check to each of them. But that would interfere with the unmentioned but clearly implied emotional calculus of left-wing social programs. I mean, let’s face it, how many racial or ethnic minority individuals are ever going to the University of Michigan Law School? Only a few hundreds will attend out of tens of millions. So the issue is largely one of symbolism. I guess that symbolism is made a bit more emotionally gratifying when it involves the spectacle of somebody else getting screwed. I guess these kids just need to suck it up—Mr. Herbert seems to need his pound of flesh. And the administration of the University of Michigan (who are not required to make any personal sacrifice here in order to practice “virtue”) intends to give it to him. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments

Free Reads -- Corby Kummer on Slow Food
Friedrich -- As long as I'm crashing around The Atlantic's site... Here's a good long q&a with The Atlantic's tiptop food writer Corby Kummer, who recently published a lavish book about the Slow Food movement (buyable here). Have you heard of Slow Food? Begun in Italy, it's a worldwide network of people devoted to artisanal food -- home-made cheeses, by-the-case wines, "heritage" poultry, etc. Slow down, take your time, sink into things, recover the good old qualities, savor life ... That's the general idea. Kind of the equivalent in the field of food to what the New Urbanism is in architecture, and just as admirably entrepreneurial. Sample passage: Europeans are pretty much converted already. In Europe almost everyone has memories going back over generations of food with actual flavor, food that's carefully raised. So Slow Food has appealed not just to rich people who like better things but to pretty much everybody who knows that there was once actually good food... There's a real problem with Slow Food in America, and it's this: we don't have that memory bred into us, so it's still a movement of the elite...Generally, once people taste eggs, cheese, barbecue, beer, bread, that has real flavor, they understand that this is something they'd like to have again, and that might be better than what they're having every day. But you have to organize events that will reach a wide range of people and give them something for a really reasonable cost. Or else they're not going to try it, and they're not going to know it, and it's going to seem like an elitist movement. I'm all for Slow Food even if, like the New Urbanism, it sometimes shades into yuppie-Volvo do-goodism. It's a little like the old Arts and Crafts movement, organizing and promoting, and helping a decent number of people take note of what's around them and start to appreciate quality of life issues. The q&a with Kummer reminds me of a blog posting I may never get around to writing, which is on this topic: that of all the high-end art forms these days in this country, the one that's in the best shape is cooking. I'm not much of a foodie myself, but The Wife is. So I've tagged along to an amazing number of amazing meals and have this to report: there are a lot of brilliant high-end cooks and kitchens at work these days. It wasn't all that many decades ago that good eating was in very short supply in this country. Today, you can do pretty well for yourself in many places, and superlatively well in quite a few. That's quite a change. How has this happened? Heaven praise Julia Child and Alice Waters, of course. But other elements have fallen into place too: look at the good craft-and-trade-oriented schools, for instance. Places like the French Culinary Institute and the CIA turn out class after class of well-trained grads. Look at the quality of the journalism about the... posted by Michael at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Free Reads -- Jonathan Rauch
Friedrich -- In this month's Atlantic, Jonathan Rauch writes humorously about introverts (he admits that he's one) and extroverts. Sample passage: Extroverts are easy for introverts to understand, because extroverts spend so much of their time working out who they are in voluble, and frequently inescapable, interaction with other people. They are as inscrutable as puppy dogs. But the street does not run both ways. Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As you probably suspect, "up with introverts" is his theme. He mentions in passing how tragic it is that politics is dominated by extroverts. I'd push this idea a step further: I think it's tragic that politics is dominated by people who are interested in and care deeply about politics. Why entrust something so important to that awful bunch? The piece is readable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 24, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments

Sunday, February 23, 2003


Showbiz People -- Mariel Hemingway
Friedrich -- The Wife is enjoying tut-tutting her way through Mariel Hemingway's recent memoir (buyable here). Boring and bad is the verdict -- "too much about yoga." Even so, I notice that The Wife hasn't stopped reading the book. Hmmm ... Anyway, remember Mariel? Margaux's younger sister? She played the teenager Woody Allen fixated on in "Manhattan"; then she starred in "Personal Best" and "Star 80"? I know very little else about her. The Wife guffawed a little while ago and read me a passage from the book. It seems that Mariel wanted desperately to play the role of dreamy Playmate Dorothy Stratten in Bob Fosse's "Star 80," despite how unlikely a physical match she was. Where Stratten was creamy, blurry, and well-upholstered -- a woman born to wear cashmere and lipstick -- Mariel was leggy, athletic, and tomboyish, someone you picture developing a sunburn from too much cross-country skiing. Still, for god knows what reason, Mariel was determined to win the role, and (at the age of 19!) had her breasts enlarged to make herself more plausible for the part. Fosse eventually did give the role to Mariel. Then, once filming started, he (surprise!) put the moves on her. When she resisted, he professed amazement, using this great line: "But I've never not slept with my leading lady!" As I often say, we civilians are kidding ourselves when we imagine that we have much in common at all with showbiz people. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 23, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Saturday, February 22, 2003


A Confession
Friedrich -- I own hundreds of books I will almost certainly never get around to reading. Before I die, I will almost certainly buy and own hundreds more books that I will never get around to reading. I'm not sure why, but I needed to get that off my chest. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 22, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Another Web Crawl
Friedrich -- I don't know if you kill quite as much time in front of the computer as I do. But I'm stunned these days by how many good sites and blogs there are. Even given my own relatively-limited set of interests, there's 'way too much to keep up with. Which leaves me feeling like a bad friend, breathless and apologetic. (I  wonder whether young people will have such qualms. They're growing up in a time of media and information excess; it's now just a matter of simple fact that there's never enough time or energy for what's available and desirable. Will they ever be able to imagine what it was like when there were only three TV networks, a finite number of books and magazines, and no internet, no local Borders and no nearby videotape-rental store?) Old fart that I am, it bugs me that I can't manage to make more mention of, just for a very few examples, Cinderella Bloggerfella, PublicInterest, Colby Cosh, Glenn Frazier or Steve Sailer. First-rate and provocative stuff keeps coming from all of them, and at a dazzling rate. In any case, apologies (and gratitude) to many, many sites and people. That said, today I'm singling out a few (which doesn't mean I wouldn't like to single out a whole bunch of others too). *Plep and Cronaca are both pig  heaven for arty websurfers. Postings feature lots of links of interest to culture buffs, often wittily chosen and described.  Cronaca (here) has more interest in the art market, in archaelogy, and in art-news headlines, while Plep (here) is more meadering and whimsical, its entries often arranged by theme (lately: tea, and architecture). They're both witty and idiosyncratic resources.  I don't know how the brainiacs behind them get the time or energy to do the sheer amount of good, entertaining and helpful work they do. *Alaina Alexander is an interesting and thoughtful person who has led a challenging life, and who gives her good times and bad times some moving thought on a small network of sites. She's a young black woman who has studied opera and law, and who has faced family and academic ups and downs, and she's direct and down-to-earth about her experiences in ways I find sweet and engrossing; I'm even touched by the way she uses the web to explore and express different sides of herself.  Here she and some friends discuss one of my favorite themes: the challenges of making a living as an arty person. Here she talks about what it was like for her to bail out of law school. And here she gives her personality-kid/diva side a chance to frisk. I'm not a fan of me-blogs generally, but Alaina's sites -- which, taken together, are like a still-in-process memoir -- I've come to respect, and to enjoy a lot. *Here's a bizarro web-art treat. Eyeball this here.  Web projects like this one makes me muse all kinds of things about the digital universe and what's maybe... posted by Michael at February 22, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, February 21, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part V
Michael: Here’s yet another installment in my (ongoing) attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#4, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire] was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with Mr. Harris’ claims of “economic and social transformation” (overstated), “bourgeois wealth and power” (obscures critical conflict between rurals and urban bourgeoisie), and “bourgeois responsibility for the creation of a revolutionary proletariat” (largely a consequence of Napoleon III’s activities) in Parts II, III and IV. Now we’ll deal with his next claim: Did the bourgeoisie shun “exposes of economic realities” and did they possess a “deep fear of revolution in any form”? The claim that the bourgeoisie couldn’t handle economic realities is a little hard to understand. The bourgeoisie were professionals or business people; generally, I think it’s safe to say they had a pretty clear idea of economic realities. Presumably, however, Mr. Harris is implying by the word “expose” that the bourgeoisie (being, in his opinion, morally stunted creatures) disliked being exposed to ridicule or moral criticism. Well, nobody likes to be ridiculed or criticized, but the urban bourgeoisie, anyway, seems to have born up under such criticism fairly well. To select one example of this out of many in 19th century Paris, I would call attention of the career of political and social caricaturist Honore Daumier, whose humor came chiefly at the expense of the urban bourgeoisie. H. Daumier, News bulletin: Scenes of Paris life since we played the moral comedy entitled "The Stock Exchange" H. Daumier, To Anyone With Capital To Lose The readers of Charivari and the other publications for which Daumier drew were,... posted by Friedrich at February 21, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Thursday, February 20, 2003


Bulletins from the Sickbed
Friedrich -- I'm home with the flu, and am feeling even more scatterbrained and stupid than usual. Hey, why fight it? So, a bit of this 'n' that. * I caught up with Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone on DVD, and can recommend it. Horror fantasy from a Mexican film poet/intellectual whose movies ("Cronos," "Mimic," "Blade 2") I generally like. This one's set in a boy's boarding school way out in the middle of nowhere during the Spanish Civil War, and it's a little "Zero for Conduct," a little Fritz Lang, and a little post-'60s trash fantasia. The storytelling isn't of much interest, but the movie is a gorgeous and spooky film-buff tone poem. Where did all these gifted Spanish/Latino filmmakers come from, by the way? There's Almodovar, Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama, A Little Princess), Alex de la Iglesia (Perdita Durango, 800 Bullets), Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), the guy who made "The Others," which I loved ... Spanish and South American directors used to be awful, with very rare exceptions. These days there's a ton of them, apparently all bursting with talent. Odd the way these waves happen. The British cinema used to have little to brag about apart from Hitchcock, Ealing and Carol Reed. Then in the '80s, it was like a whole bunch of them popped out of the womb knowing how to make movies. Why? How? *Saw a fascinating small piece in a U.K. magazine called Digital Photography Made Easy (a first-rate how-to mag, perfect for morons like me) talking about holographic computer memory. Can't find a link to it online, so I'll type out a passage from Cliff Smith's article: The commercial release of such devices is closer than you think. Researchers at IBM claim they will have small holographic units available by 2003, with the first devices storing 125 Gb at transfer rates of 40Mb per second. They believe that, before long, 1,000 Gb units will be avilable that can transfer 1Gb of data per second -- that's fast enough to record a DVD movie in about 30 seconds. And these holographic storage devices are apparently the size of sugar cubes. Heavens! OK, let's say the IBM people are being 'way too optimistic, and we finally get only half of what they promise, and a couple of years later than expected. Still! That means you'll be able to take a few lifetimes' worth of photos with your digicam before having to download them onto your computer. It means you'll be able to record hours and hours of high-quality video onto teeny-tiny devices. Oh, why aren't I younger? Ten or so years ago I visited the editing suite of a Major Motion Picture that was one of the first to be edited on computer. They'd put all their footage onto video and thence onto hard drives -- I seem to remember they had something like 100 hours on 90 Gb. Though image quality wasn't great -- about standard VCR level -- they were just... posted by Michael at February 20, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Wednesday, February 19, 2003


Web Crawl
Friedrich -- A few of the goodies I've stumbled across in recent days... Daniel Libeskind's proposal for the WTC site has been widely praised. Brian Hanson and Nikos Salingaros take a different view. This is the complete version of an essay that 2Blowhards was proud to run an excerpt from a couple of weeks ago. Brian Micklethwait likes reading Nick Hornby, Susan Isaacs, and a few of his own short stories. Eddie Thomas and Aaron Haspel are kicking up a lot of entertaining dust on the question of Hegel: Classical Liberal or Writer of Gibberish? Jim Ryan is up to installment eight in his not-to-be-missed introduction to the conservative philosophy of John Kekes. Paul Mansour has turned up an excellent City Journal essay by the British new-Classicist architect Robert Adam about skyscrapers. Sasha Castel recommends the tenors Ramon Vargas and Frank Lopardo. Andy at Blog Lodge is enthusiastic about "All the Real Girls," David Gordon Green's first movie since "George Washington." Alexandra Ceely has some reflections about Buddhism and art. I dimly recall from the days when I was interested in anarchist social criticism that Paul Goodman was a poet as well as much else. (And, hey, "Communitas," a book about city planning he wrote with his architect brother Percy, was pretty good.) Mike Snider recommends some of Goodman's sonnets. What is it with women and comic books? Let alone graphic novels? Polly Frost has set off an interesting conversation by asking these questions. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- Wendy Kohn on Christopher Alexander
Friedrich -- The subject matter of Christopher Alexander's 1977 A Pattern Language (here) and its followup The Timeless Way of Building (here) is architecture, but they're also among the most provocative and useful books about the arts generally I've ever read. I'm far from alone in feeling this way. "A Pattern Language" especially has been phenomenally popular, outselling almost all other books on architecture year after year since its publication. I've talked to poets who found the book eye-opening; software designers have conferences where they discuss Alexander's concept of "patterns"; I've even met architects who have told me they didn't really "get" architecture until they read the book. I once gave a copy of Alexander's perfectly amazing book on Turkish rugs to a theater-critic friend, and it blew his mind; he was babbling about it (and about the new thoughts it was making him have about the theater!) for weeks afterwards. A visit to Alexander's website, here, will give you an OK taste of his mind, but it's probably more fun to sample what reader/reviewers on Amazon have had to say. Here's a typical Reader's Comment: "The book's main idea is much more powerful than that. It applies to almost every aspect of life, not just to architecture. This is definitely one of the best books on my shelf. It has really changed the way I look at...everything." Great stuff, and stuff that hits many brainy and interested people on a deep level. Yet neither book -- both of them concerned with what you might think of as harmless and useful topics such as beauty, usability, and evolved form and knowledge -- is used in architecture schools. Why? As far as I can tell, quite simply because the official architecture world is demented. Alexander (along with such thinkers and writers as Tom Wolfe, Jane Jacobs, Nikos Salingaros, Lucien Steil, Leon Krier, Philip Langdon, and William Whyte) is part of a dissident strain in architecture that's trying to bring the building crafts (and, yes, arts) back to their senses. Why should the academic (ie., "avant-garde") establishment be open to this? Christopher Alexander It'll be fun to see what gets made of his next publication, The Nature of Order, which is due out in July. This is his magnum opus, a four-volume, several-thousand-page-long monster in which he's summing it all up -- beauty, science, order, nature, pattern itself. (The book's publication has been put off several times before, so let's see if it actually is published on time. Its Amazon page, in any case, is here.) On this occasion, Wendy Kohn has written a good introduction to Alexander and his work for The Wilson Quarterly. It's readable here. Sample passage: Yet Alexander’s own colleagues in the American architectural establishment will have nothing to do with him. After warmly embracing Alexander early in his career, his most natural audience has effectively airbrushed him out of its current canon. In the past 15 years, few undergraduate or graduate architecture programs have included A Pattern... posted by Michael at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments

Politics and Relationships
Michael: I have decided to steal your excellent idea and write about the topic of politics and relationships (hey, you snooze, you lose). The topic came up in a comment by Laurel on your post, “Free Reads -- Chris Bertram” in which she discussed breaking up with her boyfriend over Iraq. In my own relationship with my loving wife, politics isn’t much of an issue because (1) we agree and (2) my wife sees no reason for me to waste time discussing something we agree on when I could be doing household chores or driving the kids somewhere. But even turning my memory back to my misspent youth, I could only remember one relationship in which I’d had heated political disagreements, and those only seemed to lead to sex, so in retrospect I’m not sure if we were really arguing or conducting foreplay. To try to get a more objective view, I conducted a lightening poll on entirely unscientific grounds among my employees. These were the results: of 6 people surveyed (3 men, 3 women) 3 considered political differences to have been an issue in one or more of their relationships and it was a factor in one breakup. On the other hand, disagreements over religion had played a role in 4 people’s relationships, and it had led to at least 4 breakups. So it would appear—if this ludicrous survey is an indication of anything—that religion is a much better relationship-buster than politics. Another topic for future blogging. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 19, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Tuesday, February 18, 2003


Free Reads -- Chris Bertram
Friedrich -- Do you have a strong opinion about whether or not the US should take Saddam out? I don't know that I do. It seems to me that while there are good arguments to do so there are also good arguments to abstain from doing so. I'm not sure which side I tip towards and I'm not sure it matters (even if, in a pinch, I choose to root for the home team). Saddam's a really, really bad guy -- but war isn't a prospect that thrills me. Shallow soul that I am, my strongest opinion has less to do with whether or not to go to war than with how the public debate's being conducted by both sides. I'm annoyed by the generally low level of it -- the name-calling, the hysteria, the contempt, the accusations of moral idiocy ... Sheesh. Chris Bertram, who tilts antiwar, is one of the few observers I've found who's doing a first-rate job of keeping the good points from both sides in full view, and in his excellent posting today he does a far better job than I ever could of spelling them out. And you know what? They're all worth wrestling with. Sample passage: Americans, having actually been attacked by Al-Qaida on September 11th are naturally disposed to accept a much lower standard of proof for such [an Iraq/Al Qaeda] connection than Europeans and, even if skeptical, are likely to be sufficiently risk-averse to act on the supposition that there might be something in it. Europeans, by contrast, seeing the public case for war being erected around propositions they think dubious (at best) are likely to become more anti-war the more the Al-Qaida line is pushed. The Al-Qaida argument bolsters support for war in the US, but undermines it in Europe. Talk about level-headed. The rest of Chris's posting can be read here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 18, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments

Policy Break--Told You So
Michael: An editorial in the New York Times of February 18 opines that The most hawkish figures in the Bush administration never wanted to bring the Iraq issue before the United Nations. With last Friday's show of resistance in the Security Council to early military action against Baghdad, it's easy to imagine some of them saying "I told you so," and urging President Bush to bypass the Council and prepare for an invasion joined only by Britain and a narrow coalition of smaller nations. That would be a damaging mistake. As I noted on September 17 of last year—five months ago—anyone could see how the game of “inspections” was going to turn out: According to a NY Times editorial for September 17 on “The Iraqi Chessboard,” Saddam’s unconditional offer to allow U.N. inspection “could open the way to resolving the crisis peacefully and should certainly be tested.” Of course they admit that Saddam may just be trying to jerk the U.N. Security Council around on his program to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, but they opine that “[i]t shouldn’t take long to tell whether Iraq will really give inspectors a free hand, or will follow its invitation with limitations that render it meaningless.” Really. We seemed to go on for years back in the middle-1990’s with an impotent game of cat-and-mouse inspection; how long d’you suppose the Times means by “too long” in this instance? Granted, the eagerness with which the French and Germans have defended Saddam’s right to continue his long-running role as neighborhood psychopath has proved a bit of a surprise, but the way “inspections” would pan out was never in much doubt. I guess today’s question is how long opponents of military force will cling to the fig-leaf of “inspections” as a way of doing nothing about a problem while appearing to do something. Based on the Times’ record to date, I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for them to drop the leaf. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 18, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Monday, February 17, 2003


Safe Bets -- Hard Core?
Friedrich -- I don't know why it's taken me this long to develop this hunch, but in any case I've finally gotten around to it. Here it is. Forgive the lengthy setup -- I can't figure out a way to get to my point without going through some preliminaries. Remember how, decades ago (centuries ago!), back when putting nudity and sex onscreen seemed new and exciting, it wasn't uncommon to hear that what many directors really wanted to do was shoot a real movie -- real script, real techies, real budget -- starring real, recognizable actors that was also a hardcore sex film? Here and there, a few directors got close to that goal, with pictures like "Last Tango," "The Last Woman," "Going Places," "In the Realm of the Senses"... Actually, "In the Realm of the Senses" was a hardcore art/sex movie, although I don't think the actors were well-known. (I recall that the girl was really good and that the guy was pretty bad.) But, as can be deduced from such recent movies as "Romance," "Eyes Wide Shut," "The Center of the World," "Baise-Moi" (hardcore indeed, but the art side of the equation was weak), "Y Tu Mama Tambien," and "Lies," the dream lives on. Will it never come to pass? I'm betting that it will, and any day now. Why? I think the answer to that question has to be "Why not?" What with the supercharged eroticism of the mass media, the easy availability of porn, the web, the "empowerment" of girls and young women, the ease and cheapness of the new digital tools -- how could it not happen, and soon? Heck, with projects such as Jennicam, Isabella @ Home (which I recommend, and which can be seen here), Grownup Girl (also recommended, and here) and Natacha Merritt's Digital Diaries (sample-able here, buyable here), these kids these days are more than halfway there already. Come to think of it, why should anyone -- particularly edgy digital youth -- care about a big, dumb, overexpensive medium like the movies anyway? That's a place to do action, animation, and stars, not to take chances. Though I'm told that Natacha Merritt wants to become a director. I wonder what kinds of movies she's hoping to make. Isabella, Grownup Girl, Merritt: In charge, and why not? Still, this is the generation for it. Kids today seem almost bizarrely uninhibited. They're square in many of their attitudes, but sexual matters seem to them to be little more than a hoot, just another set of buttons to be pressed and icons to be clicked on. Sex? Hey, it's about horsing around, posing for the camera, acting out fantasies from ads and videos, and feeling hot. Which also suggests that sex may simply not mean all that much to them. All the old religio-artistic significance? Finito, as far as I can tell. The taboos have been lifted once and for all, everybody's "in charge of" their own sexuality, whatever the hell that means, eroticism... posted by Michael at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Fear and Memory
Michael: I thought you might be interested in an article in the March edition of Discover magazine, entitled “Can the Brain Conquer Fear?” by Steven Johnson. Although it focuses on the specific mechanics of fear-coded memories, what I found most interesting was the discussion of the brain’s multiple memory storage systems. As Mr. Johnson explains: We’re accustomed to describing someone as having a good or a bad memory, as though memory were a single attribute that covers the entire range of storing and recalling information. We now know that the brain’s memory systems are far more diverse than this. There are systems devoted to explicit or declarative memories, like your childhood recollection of that pet python, and systems devoted to procedural memories that usually involve physical movement, like learning how to ride a bicycle. And then there are emotional memories. If you watch the activity in someone’s brain using a modern fMRI scanner, you see a different profile depending on which kind of memory the subject is conjuring up. If something—say a movement in the bushes—reminds you of a previous encounter with danger, you’ll have a double reaction. You’ll consciously summon up a declarative memory of the previous scary event, which was originally laid down by your brain’s hippocampus. (“There I was walking down the path and I suddenly realized I had stepped right next to a rattlesnake”). You’ll also unconsciously access an emotional memory, which is routed through your brain’s amygdala. The declarative memory is rich, detailed and slow—it takes a second or two to appear. The emotional memory is virtually instantaneous, and its impact is felt indirectly via increased blood pressure, sped-up heart rate, elevated hormone levels and other physiological responses. The existence of these two different memory systems explains why fearful people often aren’t very resourceful; their amygdala, having identified a dangerous situation, either falls back on what appears to be its default remedy—simply hunkering down and freezing—or on some other remedy that got them through this situation in the past, like screaming for help. (Interestingly, while there are many neural pathways leading from the amygdala to the neocortex, there are very few running back the other way, so it is difficult for your rational mental processes to win an argument with your amygdala.) And while the amygdala can be trained to associate the scary memory with a more intelligent response, simply explaining to the sufferer the irrationality of his or her phobia or the inadequacy of his or her reaction is a waste of breath. (Remember, the amygdala isn’t listening.) I don’t know if the mechanism of other emotional memories is similar to that of fear. If they were, however, it would tend to explain a lot of neurotic behavior, and to suggest that trying to modify emotional memories/reactions via “talking therapy” may be fighting an uphill battle. The very existence of multiple memory systems (which suggests the possibility of multiple, parallel versions of many of one’s mental processes) also suggests that classical models of mental... posted by Friedrich at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Moviegoing and DVD Journal: "Demonlover"; "Brief Crossing"; "Barbershop"; "High Heels and Low Lifes"; "New Best Friend"; "Storytelling"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- For no good reason at all, I found myself rushing around town checking in on arty French movies, then returning home to watch DVDs. Hey, maybe I'm still a film buff after all, and maybe youth isn't yet entirely spent. Or maybe I was just making a futile effort to recharge my already-expired film buff MetroPass. I'll try to spare you the wordy reviews. (Or so I say as I launch into them.) Olivier Assayas' Demon Lover was as sociologically observant and as conceptually thought-through as anything I've seen or read recently. It's basically a thriller about industrial espionage starring Connie Nielsen as an ambitious corporate lawyer. (Gina Gershon is in two or three scenes, and the two names -- Connie and Gina -- explain why I was at the movie in the first place.) But it's really a poetic essay about where we are and where we're going -- imagine "The Matrix" and "Run Lola Run" as seen by Antonioni. Everything is permeable, everything interpenetrates, everything is virtual -- finance, cities, deals, architecture, relationships. Even narrative form, which Assayas seems to have laid out as a computer game rather than a traditional act-by-act structure. You advance from level to level, with the rules of the game seeming to change with each advance. It's all very brilliant, though the film did leave me thinking, If only it had been a comedy! Sarah Pratt Then on to Catherine Breillat's recent (and apparently never-to-be-released-in-this-country) Brief Crossing. I'm apparently almost alone in loving some of Breillat's movies. I guess I understand why; most people seem to find them chilly, off-putting, and obnoxious. But they make me really excited and enthusiastic. Offputting? Surgical? Yes yes yes, I want to cry -- all that and more! It seems to me they deliver goods (mainly about women and sex) next-to-impossible to find elsewhere. Have you caught Breillat's "Romance"? It's the picture of hers that's most completely realized, and I'd be eager to hear your response to it. Breillat works territory I'm fond of, which is the novella-like narrative of sex, religion and despair, and does it from a neurotically narcissistic female point of view. Yippee! Most of her films seem to be made from 15 page screenplays and to exist for the sake of one good 20-30 minute passage. Still, in "Brief Crossing," as in her recent "Fat Girl," it's one heckuva passage. "Brief Crossing" is about a 30ish Englishwoman and a teenaged French boy who meet on a ferry crossing the English channel. For 2/3 of the movie, Breillat is doing little but setting the tone, getting you used to the scale and content of what she wants you focused on (minute emotional shifts underlain by anguish, fury and lust, basically). Then comes the amazing 20-30 minutes, when the boy and the woman are playing with emotional dynamite. He's foxy, cocky, Latin, and scared; she's Anglo, bitter yet still yearning. What a performance by Sarah Pratt! (Who has only... posted by Michael at February 17, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Sunday, February 16, 2003


Free Views -- Virtual Fireworks
Friedrich -- An instant mood elevator: Virtual fireworks! I find the colored haze and smoke they leave behind especially beautiful, mere pixels though they may be. Viewable here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 16, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Free Reads -- Gay Oscar
Friedrich -- Thinking about the topic of gays and movies, I recall that Andrew Sullivan has posted a note from a film-buff friend of his spelling out just how gay-friendly this year's Oscar race is. It's readable here. Hey, maybe the ceremony will be a little livelier than usual. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 16, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Thursday, February 13, 2003


Free Reads -- Bruce LaBruce
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- Do you have much of a taste for campy gay carrying-on? As a spectator, I mean. I do, although the pruned-and-tweezed guppy variety that seems to have become de rigeuer (ie., the heroine's best friend) these days usually leaves me cold. No, what can really get me giggling is what some of my gay friends refer to as Extreme Faggotry -- silliness, perversity, and theatrics unredeemed by respectability or self-conscious art, let alone politics. The irreplaceable Charles Ludlam. Charles Busch, showing the lady stars how it's really done. The early Almodovar, and the early John Waters. Did you ever read Waters' Shock Value? (It's buyable here.) A memoir of growing up as John Waters, and hilarious. Where do these guys come from? They can make me laugh till the tears run. But Ludlam is dead, I've missed the last few Charles Busch productions, Almodovar should go back on whatever it was he's since kicked, and while I'm sure Waters is a hundred times wittier than I'll ever be, in recent years he's begun seeming a little snug, happy and tame. Where's a fan of Extreme Faggotry to turn? Maybe to the gifted Canadian Bruce LaBruce, about whom not nearly enough Americans know. Who he? Well, in his own words: He started out as a child, then quickly moved on to the production of homo punk fanzines (J.D.s [with G.B. Jones], Dumb Bitch Deserves To Die [with Candy Parker]) and super 8 movies (Boy/Girl, I Know What It's Like To Be Dead, Bruce and Pepper Wayne Gacy's Home Movies [with Candy Parker], Slam!). These products helped to launch the so-called Homocore or Queercore movement which corrupted a whole new generation of homosexuals. LaBruce has gone on to make feature-length movies such as No Skin Off My Ass and Super 8 1/2. He describes the latter as "a harrowing cautionary bio-pic about LaBruce's rocky rise to cult stardom. LaBruce may or may not be playing himself in this disturbing film, an aging porn star/director whose career is on the skids owing to his inability to cope with his emerging identification as a cineaste." As I recall, the Bruce character is going through an avant-garde period; he's determined to break down the fourth wall, which in his case means looking at the camera during the sex scenes. His degradation is complete when he's put to use as a "stunt ass" during a generic buttfucking scene. LaBruce is wonderfully disreputable -- everything the proper contempo guppy probably wishes homos were over and through with. His autobiography The Reluctant Pornographer (buyable here) is a hoot, he's written smart and insightful pieces about movies, and he was a memorable contributor to a too-much-overlooked collection of essays called Anti-Gay (buyable here), where he and other wits and dissidents did their best to trash the gay-clone and the gay-respectability things. Silliness and perversity should rule! These days, LaBruce still seems to be writing, and he has wangled some gigs for himself photographing... posted by Michael at February 13, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Dept. of Overgeneralizations -- More Women and Food
Friedrich -- Many postings ago (here), in the midst of wondering out loud about women and their relationship to baked goods, I mentioned a woman anthropologist who'd studied food and sex across many cultures and who'd come to an interesting conclusion about the sexes. After all the study, she now believed that, if all other variables could be held constant, women would spend most of their time searching for food while men would spend most of their time looking for sex. The other day, I noticed a report on a sociological study. While I forget where this report appeared, I did copy and paste a passage summarizing the study's findings, which go like this: Women think what they eat is more important to their personal wellbeing than their sex life. Seventy-nine per cent said their diet was the key to their happiness. Imagine! What apparently lies underneath a woman's fussing and feeding is ... well, apparently not the hot-to-trot tramp we guys like to imagine when we try to have a go at her, but instead a creature who'd really like to do a little more fussing and feeding. Impartial, in-depth student of the sexes that I am, I polled two women for their reaction to these facts. The Wife said, "Well, of course it's true. The challenge for you when you want to initiate sex is basically to get my mind off food. Now, pass me that plate of oatmeal cookies." Another, my former tennis partner, wrote me an email saying, "Not surprising in the least. I think that for myself. In fact, I just made a humongous pot of chicken chili. Yum yum." Best, if with badly battered ego, Michael... posted by Michael at February 13, 2003 | perma-link | (20) comments

Wednesday, February 12, 2003


Free Reads -- Lynn Sislo and more
Friedrich -- Good stuff from all over. Too much! But in the most wonderful kind of way. Lynn Sislo has written a lovely -- touching and open-minded -- short memoir (here; be sure to read both parts) of what it was like when her Texas junior high school was desegregated. (Note to self: write posting someday on how great it is to be witnessing the birth of new art and literary forms -- the photoblog, the mini-essay, the mini-memoir, etc.) Although blogosphere sweethearts Sasha Castel and Andrew Ian Dodge remain stuck in a gulag somewhere in deepest Maine, their blogging continues unabated, here.  Well, "unabated" is far too weak a word. The two of them manage to make all other bloggers look like bleary-eyed laggards. Recent postings have touched on opera (of course), the anti-war movement in Portland, and genetically modified food. They're using more images these days too. Sasha links to a special treat: an interview (here) by John Hawkins with columnist Mark Steyn. (Note to self: reserve opera tickets, brush up on political philosophy, then write posting about art and politics as separate "modes," to use an Oakeshottian term. Expect fierce rebuttal from Felix Salmon and, possibly, Robert Birnbaum.) Aaron Haspel (here) kicks off what he's promised is a series on Bogus American Sages by letting the reputation of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. have it with both barrels; little is left of OWH Jr. when the dust settles. Mere postings later, Aaron returns to a discussion of rule-based reasoning that he's been carrying on with Jim Ryan of Philosoblog (here) fame. Jim responds to Aaron, then puts up a wonderful short paragraph that includes all you need to know about Karl Marx, meanwhile crediting Cinderella Bloggerfella (here) for setting him off. CB's gem of a posting turns out to be a response to Aaron, who in turn had written about a Mark Goldblatt piece about the MLA's annual meeting, which 2Blowhards had linked to maybe six or seven postings ago. Which pleases me, but which seems to prove nothing, really, except that blogging is a Really Great Thing. At Out of Lascaux, here, Alexandra has been classing up the blogosphere with posts about anime and Japanese scrolls, David Hockney's theories about artists using optical-device crutches, and how she herself was once the stepdaughter of comics legend Wally Wood. Modernist architecture takes it (deservedly) on the chin once again, this time from Paul Mansour at The Scourge of Modernism, here. "If you cannot line a street with 5 or 10 buildings of a particular style and have the total effect be greater than the sum of the parts then you are not working with an architectural style. Maybe you are working with art or sculpture, but you are not working with architecture," he writes, and Tom Wolfe never put it better. Kevin Drum's CalPundit (here) and Chris Bertram's Junius (here) are brainy and provocative, the two decent-leftyish blogs I enjoy checking in with regularly. Kevin's been having fun tweaking... posted by Michael at February 12, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part IV
Michael: Sorry for the delay, but here’s the next installment in my (ongoing) attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1-#3 I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with Mr. Harris’ claims of “economic and social transformation” and “bourgeois wealth and power” in Parts II and III and found his ideas both simplistic and overstated. Now we’ll deal with his next claim: did the inequities of industrial capitalism create a resentful proletariat who eventually rose against their repressive bourgeois overlords during the Commune? Mr. Harris’ view of the French masses as being masticated by the iron teeth of 2nd Empire modernization, creating huge social turmoil, appears more than a bit overstated. In the countryside, life was difficult—as it had been for centuries—but was slowly improving. During the period 1852-1871, the intake of calories of the average Frenchman rose about 16%. As a result, by the end of the 2nd Empire the French were—for the first time in history—getting enough to eat. The improved diet showed up in various ways: the height of the peasantry increased and vitamin deficiency diseases were gradually disappearing. There was an increase in agricultural yields, although Frenchmen could achieve only half to two-thirds the yields obtained by contemporary Dutch or German farmers. (Fertilizers were very sparsely used, chiefly on a few large and very up-to-date farms.) J. Millet, The Gleaners, 1857 (Detail) While only one peasant in four made a living cultivating his own land, the numbers of the more impoverished grades of peasantry (such as small landowners who had been forced into day labor) decreased and the... posted by Friedrich at February 12, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Tuesday, February 11, 2003


Free Reads--Wiggle Room
Michael: The indispensable Polly Frost at her website “Velvet Crypt” put me on to a website you should check out, called “Wiggle Room” (here). It contains the collected works of one Ray Sawhill, who seems to have been both a detached and involved observer of movies, books, and what he describes as “other media” for a number of years now. He’s at least old enough to remember the movie “Nashville”, so I assume he’s a rough contemporary of ours--or, gasp, even older (if that's possible.) Reading his description of what film watching felt like—at least to a film afficianado—in the 1970s does take me back a bit to my misspent youth: It was a cuckoo time. There was an intoxication about filmmaking and filmgoing -- a euphoria and a fever. For many people, an interest in movies and movie history provided a way into the arts and a framework for exploring them. Films like "Nashville," "The Conformist" and "The Godfather" were peak experiences that seemed to bring together all your interests in the arts -- high and low, visual, auditory and literary. A figure like Godard or Altman or Coppola opened up new directions and led you into discoveries not just in art but also in your life, in terms of sex, philosophy, love, fantasy and friendship. So these figures meant something to you personally. They transformed you; they made a difference in your sense of what was possible. (All right, so maybe he’s a little starry-eyed about the old days—go ahead and shoot him.) If you want to check out the rest of his essay on “Nashville at 25” you can find it here. There’s also tons of other interesting stuff, including short reviews, extended essays and some wacky dialogues. It’ll give you a few hours of very intelligent and civilized diversion, at the least. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 11, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Monday, February 10, 2003


Free Views -- Business Card Art
Friedrich -- A charmer: Hugh Macleod's website, here, where he shows off his one-of-a-kind artform -- art on the back of business cards. Using a Rotring technical pen, he makes little drawings, writes a few words, scribbles some patterns. I see a little Ralph Steadman, a little Saul Steinberg, a little John Callahan -- this is fine-art cartooning, basically -- and I like it a lot. I'm hoping he won't mind my posting an example of his work. Click on the image for a bigger view. Thanks to Thomas Hobbs (here), and Out of Lascaux (here). Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Pix of the Day -- Donald Evans
Friedrich -- Have you ever run across the art of Donald Evans? Of artists from the last 30 or 40 years, he's one of my faves. He painted stamps -- that was his art form. Thousands of them, watercolor on tiny little squares, triangles, and rectangles. Sometimes entire sheets of stamps. The painting itself, as I hope is visible from the scans I've included in this posting, is charming. But the painting per se is only half of what makes Evans' art so lovable. The other half is that these were stamps for countries he dreamed up. So the art wasn't just in the design/drawing/painting, it was also in the world behind the stamps (as well as in the idea of using stamps-from-imaginary-countries in the first place). An example: stamps from Mangiare ("Lo Stato di Mangiare"), where the government named the country's geographical features after items on restaurant menus from Florence: a hill town called Side Dish ("Contorno"), a countryside named after a sausage ("Mortadella"). (The images below are popups. Be sure to click on them.) Messages from the land of "Amis et Amants" -- "friends and lovers" A bit of biography: Evans was born in 1945, the dreamy only child of a middle-class New Jersey couple. He had an idyllic childhood, during which he was introduced to stamps and stamp collecting at the age of 6 by a neighbor. He took to them instantly --  they seemed to him little portals to the world at large as well as to his own imagination.  He collected stamps, and soon started designing and making his own. He outgrew the passion in adolescence, and went to Cornell to study architecture. He had a vague feeling he wanted to be an artist, though, and he painted (big Ab-Ex paintings!) and learned about various crafts -- fabric and collage, for example. But he also knew he'd have to make a living, and did well at his architecture studies. In the early '60s, he moved to NYC and got a job in an architect's office as a renderer. Evenings, he explored the art world, collecting modestly, getting to know real artists (Marisol, Robert Indiana), and painting sets for small dance and theater troupes. He began to show some of the stamps he'd painted as a kid to friends. They liked 'em. He painted a few more. He was feeling ... Well, something had to happen. And what finally did happen was that a friend invited him to Holland. Evans, who always lived frugally, saved a little more money, packed up and went. There, while staying with a group of friends, he found his metier.  He loved the quaint and miniature quality of Holland's countryside. He started selling a few of the stamps, then a few more. He practiced old-looking handwriting, and he used X-acto knives to erasers; inked, he could use them to mimic the postmarked look of a postcard that had been through the mail. Careerwise, nothing ever broke or burst for him on... posted by Michael at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Ansel Adams at 100
Michael: The other day I made the hour-long drive from my suburban fastness to see a good-sized retrospective of the work of Ansel Adams at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I did so because ever since high school I’ve always half-deliberately steered clear of art photography. However, when I heard about the Adams exhibit, I thought: Aha! Here’s a serious artist—I’ve seen his work in calendars and art books, and they are nothin’ if not serious. So I forked out $15, stood patiently in line (I really hate lines) and filed through the show, only occasionally cutting ahead to escape from male retirees lecturing their friends loudly on the facts of Adams’ life or camera technique. I didn’t even strangle these “helpful” lecturers, a feat which I considered either (1) a moral victory for me or (2) a victory for the manufacturers of my anti-depressant drugs. Mr. Adams turned out, rather to my surprise, to be several different artists. The first “Ansel Adams” did his work during the 1920s (when his “official” artistic goal was to be a Classical pianist), chiefly during breaks while shepherding Sierra Club camping trips through the California mountains he loved, and while wooing his girlfriend who actually lived in Yosemite Park. Interestingly, the photographs he made at this time—while still an amateur—were very small scale, intimate and quiet. At the time he was primarily interested in finding fairly simple abstract and emphatically flat patterns in nature. These pieces made me think of certain Dada collages made from found or random elements—they appear to be the work of a young man who was conscientiously keeping up with current developments in Modernism. The photos obviously are based on mountain or otherwise wilderness scenery, but the obvious attraction this subject matter holds for him is left implicit, rather than being insisted upon. I found photographs made during this era to be extremely pleasurable. ANSEL: THE EARLY YEARS Vernal Falls Through Tree, Yosemite Valley, California, 1920; Fall in Upper Tenaya Canyon, Yosemite National Park, California, c. 1920 The Back of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park California, c. 1920; Suguaro Near Phoenix, Arizona, c. 1932 Regrettably, around 1930 Mr. Adams apparently decided to become a professional photographer (abandoning his musical ambitions) and paid a visit to the leading American art photographer of the day, Paul Strand. Apparently while hanging out at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s house in Taos, the older man showed Adams the negatives of his recent work, which seem to have stupefied the younger photographer. He later recalled the …full, luminous shadows and strong high values in which subtle passages of tone were preserved. Here our hero got himself entangled—in my opinion, fatally—in two diversions. The first diversion is what I call the “well-made photograph.” Black and white photography is an oddly Platonic art form. It can deliver an immense amount of visual information—far more than your eyes take in—which is perfectly ordered for your absorption, so that the enormous excess of detail remains, astonishingly, subordinate to... posted by Friedrich at February 10, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Sunday, February 9, 2003


Guest Posting -- Andrew Takeuchi Redux
Michael: A few hours ago I left a comment on your "Guest Posting -- Andrew Takeuchi." Having just gone back and re-read it, my first thought was what a grumpy old fanatic I've become (or, likely, remain.) My second thought was that it might behoove me to explain my embrace of video technology and my ambivalent relationship with the commercial cinema (including the arthouse cinema.) As I said in my comment: One of the more surprising disappointments of my adult life [has been] watching the experimental attitude of Sixties film towards film conventions evaporate; it's as though people haven't realized that the words you speak control the thoughts you can have, or at least express. As a college student and in my early twenties I made a number of fairly elaborate amateur films, and then compounded this folly by going to art school. My more "mature" reflections on film as a medium therefore have been conditioned by my exposure to painting, sculpture, installation art, etc. My overwhelming conclusion is what might be termed the narrowness or rigidity of the movie camera. Like all forms of photography, a movie camera is a very poor substitute for the eyesight of a mobile observer. Converting real life, or even staged activity, into a film demands you massage the content to fit the limitations of first the camera, second the editing bench, and third the audience's "organizational" expectations. (Think of how difficult it is to photograph architecture or sculpture with any aesthetic impact. Then contrast that with the fact that when you're in the physical presence of architecture or sculpture they affect you even when you're not paying attention to them.) The very strict editing and selection process involved in filmmaking inevitably affects the subject matter you're treating. Since one set of camera/editing bench/organizational expectations have become hugely dominant (that of D.W. Griffith's narrative entertainment film), movies not surprisingly tend to resemble each other far more than they resemble my experience of reality, or even my thoughts about reality. While a certain amount of French "New Wave" experimentation always made my teeth grind, it certainly demonstrated the possibility of alternatives to the above expectations. Others can be discerned by anyone with a video camera; I remember taking a video of my 3-year-old daughter riding her tricycle around me in a empty room, her wheels echoing in the enclosed space, and thinking how unusual such a "unified" treatment of time and space was in the commercial cinema (where the goal is to admit only very tiny fragments of reality into the film at a time, lest too much information overwhelm the narrative line.) From the standpoint of playing with the "rules of the game," the most interesting commercial film I've seen in years was Oliver Stone's "JFK," because it incorporated documentary or TV news techniques into a fiction film--with a notable uptick in the amount of information a film could convey per minute. I assume, probably mistakenly, that if a non-commercial cinema develops--an amateur's cinema,... posted by Friedrich at February 9, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Friday, February 7, 2003


Guest Posting -- Andrew Takeuchi
Friedrich -- Andrew Takeuchi, who wrote an article I cited some time ago about cinematography, digital technology, and movies, spotted the posting and left a terrific comment on it. I found it so interesting that I asked Andrew if I could use the comment as a new posting here, and he agreed. Here it is: I stumbled across this discussion tonight during a break from writing - In a moment of boredom I googled myself and was surprised find that someone had actually read a recent article I had written on the emerging field of electronic cinematography. My training and passion has been in the field of analog film so it was fascinating to talk with a few seasoned veterans about HD video and its use in motion picture and television production. Recently I had the opportunity to shoot a project with the Sony HDW-F900 camera (the same system used by Lucas on the latest Star Wars movie) and was generally pleased with the results. Yes, it is in some ways cheaper to shoot in HD as the tape stock is considerably cheaper than 35mm raw stock. But when it comes to post-production, costs are not necessarily that much lower. Also, the cameras are considerably more expensive to rent, body without lens runs in the $1000/day range versus around $500/day for a state of the art 35mm camera. And let's not forget about the importance of having a skilled crew to dress the sets and light them - those costs remain the same. Beyond issues of resolution and more importantly, dynamic range (tonal range from light to dark) HD has other limitations including its lack of depth of field fall-off due to the smaller size of the imaging chip and the cumbersome nature of the equipment. But enough with the technical details. I agree that advances in digital video have opened the door to a wider range of filmmakers, but I think that what is often forgotten in these discussions is that filmmaking, like any other art form is a craft with fundamental skills that must be mastered. I regularly make short digital movies with a local film club - shot primarily on Mini DV and edited on Macs. Occasionally movies made by novices will capture attention with a breath of originality, but more often than not pieces made by novices are hard to watch, lacking the sense of composition, pacing and dramatic direction that is only learned with experience. Of course the ability to make short pieces with friends certainly allows one to polish skills without too much financial commitment and this is one reason I participate. There are an increasing number of outlets for the works produced by the new breed of digital filmmakers including the proliferation of digital "film" festivals and the occasional DVD magazine featuring short work. But in many ways I think the situation is akin to the independent music scene, made possible in part due to the arrival of affordable home recording equipment -... posted by Michael at February 7, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Thursday, February 6, 2003


Free Reads -- Amy Sohn on Hasbians
Friedrich -- I knew lesbians were chic five minutes ago, and I'd heard of LUGs (lesbians until graduation), and I've certainly registered that for a certain class of kids sexual identity seems to have become a mix-and-match thing. But I hadn't yet heard of "hasbians" -- gals who were once with gals who are now with men. Been there, done that, now doing something else. Amy Sohn tells us more in New York magazine, here. Sample passage: If there are more hasbians today than ten years ago, Sharpe thinks, it may have to do with the excitement of the gay-positive early nineties. “The aesthetic of gay politics was really cool. There was that whole act up thing, and it was easy to be gay. You had k.d. lang on the cover of Vanity Fair with Cindy Crawford, and there were all these lesbian movies like Go Fish. The gay community felt more exciting back then, and there was something alluring about entering into that scene.” “It’s like a junior year abroad to Gay World,” says Sullivan. “Lots of girls at Brown, Berkeley, Barnard, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Yale go there but don’t stay there. For lesbians over 45, sexuality wasn’t a choice. It wasn’t popular to come out. It was pre-Madonna and pre–Sandra Bernhard.” Hey, weren't the early and mid-'70s, when we were in college, also very gay-friendly? And weren't a fair number of girls messing around with other girls back then? Not that anyone these days wants to hear about it. Once again, we're the Generation No One Took Note Of. Crushed by the passage of time, Michael UPDATE: Jim Miller has a posting on the "hasbians" phenom here.... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Free Reads -- Felix on Muschamp
Friedrich -- The alert Felix Salmon has caught the NYTimes' ludicrous (scandalous? soi-disant? evil?) architecture critic Herbert Muschamp stepping on his own toes. It's readable here. Hey, maybe Felix is ready to join Philip Murphy, Paul Mansour and me in our Anti-Herbert-Muschamp Webring. Or maybe not. Felix has put up his own posting about the WTC finalists here. He likes the THINK proposal a lot. Wrong wrong wrong! But nicely done. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Doing It For a Living
Friedrich -- Your recent postings about Impressionism have reminded me of a question I've always wanted to raise about art. It's the question of doing it for a living. There tends to be an assumption that if you're good at something, you should (or could) turn it into a job, you should do it professionally. Having a job that you love doing (and are well-paid for) is a widespread fantasy, and one that's taken very seriously; if you have a talent or an activity you enjoy doing for its own sake, you're likely to receive a lot of encouragement to turn it into a job. Yet is this always good advice? I wonder. It strikes me as more than likely that the process of turning an activity you love into your means of making a living might very well kill your enjoyment in the activity. Why should it be otherwise? Something you do freely, and purely for the pleasure of it -- isn't this chemical formula necessarily going to be modified if you add "now go make money with it" to the mix? It might change for the better, but it might very well change for the worse. How so? Imagine loving making furniture. You love the wood, the concentration, the process of design, the tactility, the sawdust, the tools and machines, the planning, the smiles on people's faces when you give them a gift ... Now imagine making furniture for a living. Bosses, possibly -- always a joy. Accountants and bookkeeping in any case. Clients making demands instead of friends delighted to receive gifts. Competition and compromises. (After all, the more straightforwardly market-economy a field is, the more you're stuck servicing your customers -- a good thing generally, but is there any reason to assume that it'll enhance the pleasure you take in your craft?) Even if you're financially successfully, you might very well wake up one day wishing you'd never followed your bliss. You've spoiled your pleasure in something you used to love. Yet the fantasy persists. I think it's partly because we're Americans, and we have dreams about finding joy and satisfaction (redemption, really) in our jobs. I think it's also partly human and completely understandable. It isn't easy -- in a life that includes job, family, friends, and routine maintenance -- to squeeze in much of anything else at all. So it may be natural to fantasize about getting pleasure and "fulfillment" (whatever that means) in addition to a salary from the workplace. That way, at least you'll have a little leisure time at the end of the day. Without a fulfilling job, you're stuck: use the spare time for leisure, or for what you love? Splitting those precious hours half and half doesn't leave a lot for either. Another example is blogging. I contribute to this blog for fun and pleasure. If someone loves my work and wants to throw money at me, I'm certainly not going to refuse to cash the checks. But such... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Free Reads -- Mark Goldblatt on the MLA
Friedrich -- The annual meeting of the Modern Language Association is always good for an easy laugh or two, what with so many lit profs being the political nitwits that they are. In his column today, Mark Goldblatt manages the easy laughs well, and then takes the discussion a useful notch or two further along. Sample passage: On the one hand, Leftist intellectuals — drenched by now in postmodern hogwash — dismiss the suggestion that the world exists independently of our perceptions ... Knowledge, to them, is a function of power, always tainted by political and cultural bias ... Telling people who disagree with you that they're wrong, under such circumstances, is an act of political oppression. On the other hand, Leftist intellectuals have no problem whatsoever telling people who disagree with them that they're wrong. That's not oppression . . . that's (open finger-quotes) education (close finger-quotes). Leftist intellectuals believe they see beneath the surface of things, that they discern the reality beneath the blur of language — conveniently forgetting that they're committed to a worldview in which the blur of language creates reality, a worldview in which one blur of language is no more valid than another since there's no underlying reality to measure language against. In other words, they claim that they see beneath the surface while simultaneously claiming that the surface is all there is. Not bad! The piece is readable here. Best, Michael UPDATE: Chris Bertram has posted a response, as well as some excerpts from Bernard Williams here.... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part III
Michael: As you've probably caught on by now, this is the next installment in my attempt to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. As I explained in parts #1 and #2, I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). As I mentioned in Part #2, Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Well, we dealt with the somewhat questionable accuracy of Mr. Harris’ “economic and social transformation” in Part #1. Next we have the question: did the middle class, or bourgeoisie, grow rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade, as Mr. Harris maintains? The early years, at least, of the 2nd Empire were undeniably prosperous. Apart from the effects of the government’s economic program, France benefited from the discovery of gold in California (1848) and later in Australia. As a consequence prices, which had generally been falling since 1815, rose sharply until 1856, and remained thereafter at those levels, which, until the price increases percolated through the economy, provoked a sharp increase in entrepreneurial profits and thus triggered a rapid expansion. However, neither this favorable effect nor the impact of the government’s economic program lasted past the 1850s. As Alain Plessis notes in his book, “The Rise & Fall of the Second Empire 1852-1871”: …[O]ne can distinguish two successive and very different rhythms in this expansion…[T]he production indexes seem to show that growth was more rapid at the beginning of the Empire, until 1858-60, than after. The early years were also marked by steadily rising prices. Hence an undeniable euphoria among businessmen that consolidated the new political regime. Napoleon III Thereafter, however, things clearly slowed down, causing a clear loss of support for the Imperial regime among the urban business classes:... posted by Friedrich at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Free Reads -- Amy Harmon on computer chess
Friedrich -- It's become one of our themes, I guess: the wonderfulness of digital technology, but the new quandaries and conundra that seem to come along with it. How to resist the convenience and fun of digital photography? Yet the images are so ... so ... Well, they're kind of twinkly, metallic and overdetailed in some inhuman way. How great that DV videocams and computers can put a mini movie studio on just about anybody's desktop. Yet the imagery tends to lack poetry, and what gets made often bears little resemblance to traditional movies. Now: chess. Amy Harmon reports in the New York Times that similar discussions are taking place in the chess world (about which I know less than zilch). Chess players are using computers for study, for competition, and in online matches as silent partners and crutches. "We don't work at it anymore... We have lost depth," she quotes one top player as saying. Computers make it possible to study lots of games and moves, but some players have noticed that studying with computers "detracts from an ability to concentrate intensely on devleoping a personal style or strategy." More people are getting better at the game, it's being noticed -- but they're burning out faster too. Aha: sounds familiar. Computers make so much available -- yet they can also tend to pancake matters, including (sometimes) style, personality, and imagination. Maybe we're all onto something. Or maybe style, personality and imagination are simply going to be taking new forms and working their way through different channels. Or maybe all of the above, and more. In any case, the piece is readable here. Sample passage: "Because of computers, humans are playing more broadly, and there are astonishing numbers of new ideas," said John Watson, the author of several books on modern chess strategy. "Computers are opening the game up much more than they are closing it." But others say chess is becoming more like checkers, with so much known or memorized that games now more often end in draws. They complain that players have become slaves to their software, so fascinated with the myriad possibilities it presents that they do not bother to work out their own new strategies. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Art Class
Friedrich -- Have you taken any art-making classes recently? I was away from them for a couple years and missed them, so I'm treating myself to one this term, an intro to oil painting. I've never done any oil painting. If not in a classroom, where would I do it? The Wife and I share about 3 square feet of apartment space, and I'm not eager to inflict the fumes on her. I went to the first class last night, and was reminded of what a ripoff most art classes are. The woman teaching it seems nice and for all I know is a good artist, so I have nothing against this class specifically -- it seems like an OK version of the standard thing. It's the standard thing that's a ripoff (and that, in a sane art world, would be a scandal). Last night's class, like about 3/4 of the art classes I've taken, followed this model: the teacher has set up a subject, whether a model or a still life. You bring a bunch of art materials with you. You draw and paint. The teacher wanders around, giving each person a little time and a few hints. You pack up and go home. Like I say: what a ripoff. It's amazing the schools charge for this, and just as amazing that eager students put up with it. Would it be too much ask an art teacher to do a little actual art instruction? To have a little something prepared? To structure a series of classes so that the bit you learn this week joins together with the bit you learned last week, and you leave the term having acquired some genuinely new skills, and able to do things you hadn't previously been able to do? You wouldn't think it would be such a challenge to put together such a course. OK, class, this week we're going to study negative space. I've prepared six exercises. Next week we're going to focus on the way warm colors pull and cold colors push. And I've prepared six exercises to ram that home. What could be so hard about preparing and delivering such a course? I tolerate this nonsense because there seem to be so few alternatives and I like drawing and painting, lousy as I am at both. I have been lucky enough to stumble into a few classes where the teachers, bless 'em, did approach art instruction as a matter of conveying finite, definable skills, and I've learned probably 95% of the little I've managed to learn about art-making from them. Has this kind of thing plagued your art-class-taking life too? I guess I assume that what it represents is a coming-together of four things: asinine progressive-education ideas (let the student discover art for himself!), laziness and convenience, the continuing-ed business, and annoying modernist (ie., anti-technique, anti-skill, pro-self-expression) ideas about art. Do you think I'm off here? Or that I'm missing some other element? I'll probably stick the class out... posted by Michael at February 6, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Wednesday, February 5, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism Part II
Michael: As I promised in my previous posting, this is the second part of my series attempting to reconstruct what Impressionism meant to its creators and its contemporaries. I’m trying to re-evaluate each element in what I’ve called the Standard Account of Impressionism (which, for purposes of convenience, will here be represented by quotes from a popular art history book: “A Treasury of Impressionism” by Nathaniel Harris). Mr. Harris begins his book by denying the existence of any controversial content in Impressionist pictures. He is then left with the problem of explaining why the French art market didn’t embrace this happy, cheerful painting in the late 1860s or 1870s. To make sense of this the mysterious market failure, he provides the following social analysis: …France [during the Second Empire]was going through an economic and social transformation: her version of the Industrial Revolution, with its accompanying factories and workshops, booms and slumps, railways and steamships. The middle class, or bourgeoisie, grew rich and powerful from the proceeds of expanding industry and trade. A new industrial working class began to resent the appalling conditions in which it lived and laboured. The specters of socialism and communism began to haunt France; and indeed the radical workers of Paris took the opportunity provided by the defeat of 1870 to organize a revolutionary government, the Commune, that was bloodily suppressed by the regular army. Bourgeois distaste for exposes of economic realities, and a deep fear of revolution in any form, were two shaping factors in contemporary attitudes to art. Let’s take a closer look at this one point at a time. Did France undergo during the 2nd Empire an economic and social transformation sufficiently drastic to merit the title of an industrial revolution? The Second Empire came into existence as a sort of delayed result of the revolutionary uprisings of working class Parisians in 1848. The urban proletariat, enraged by its declining economic prospects (wages had been falling for decades), and inspired by similar uprisings throughout Europe, forced the then-constitutional monarch Louis-Philippe to abdicate. H. Vernet, Barricade in the Rue Sufflot, Paris, 25 June 1848, 1848-50 (Detail) The Second Republic that followed immediately thereafter was ill-starred; Louis-Napoleon, nephew of the famous Corsican military adventurer, was elected president. When the public became disenchanted with the Republic’s ineffectual political squabbling, Louis Napoleon proceeded to organize a coup in 1851 to seize supreme power. (Gee, who could have seen that one coming?) Napoleon III, as he became known, set up a proto-Fascist government: authoritarian with an emphasis on public order to placate the property owners, and with close ties to big business in order to (hopefully) force the pace of economic growth and keep the masses happy. The masses that Napoleon III was particularly interested in were not, however, urban but rural, since his imperial status had been validated by a plebiscite with a universal male franchise, and France remained a predominantly rural country. H. Flandrin, Portrait of Napoleon III, 1862 (Detail) In practice, Napoleon III’s economic program... posted by Friedrich at February 5, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Tuesday, February 4, 2003


Two or Three Things I Learned About Impressionism, Part I
Michael: In a previous posting I suggested that visual art is a way of talking about sources of power (or perceived power) that people are either unwilling or unable to discuss openly. After I wrote that post I ran down a mental list of art-historical movements which this idea seemed to account for properly enough, but I quickly ran up against one famous example that I couldn’t fit into my shiny new theory: Impressionism. What kind of “not-openly-discussable” subject matter, if any, was hiding in this sunny painting of people enjoying themselves in and around Paris? Unfortunately, in trying to puzzle this out, I realized that my only knowledge of France in this period had come from art books, which gave what I would call the Standard Account of Impressionism. But the more I pondered this Account the less it seemed to make sense to me. H. Daumier, Just Look At Where They've Stuck My Picture, 1859 I mean, say you were a young man who wanted to be a professional painter in mid-19th century France. You lived in a country with the best-developed art market and institutions in the world. Artistic taste and standards were clearly articulated in your society, which was wealthy enough to reward its favorites richly. There was even the possibility of a certain level of government patronage if you played ball with the system. At the same time, however, the system tended to withhold rewards from those who deviated from these standards. Why on earth would you have gone out of your way to introduce an unfamiliar style of painting and use it to describe non-traditional subject matter? Just to make your already difficult task —making a living at painting—a nearly impossible one? Surely few people would take self-expression that far, and especially few people who were as ambitious as the Impressionist painters. And yet the Standard Account never seems to treat this as a question that even needs an answer: apparently, according to this account, the Impressionists were simply born to paint modern life with broken color and a lack of "finish." The closest the Account edges to an explanation (which it never quite says explicitly, but heavily implies) is that the Impressionists were just too darn manly to settle for the watered down formulae of a decrepit Academicism. And they rejected these timeworn formulae even though doing so meant they couldn’t count of the support of their era’s blinkered and timid art consumers. Alternatively, the Marxist Variant of the Standard Account suggests that the Impressionists, like all Modernists, were just too darn manly to put up with the degrading aspects of industrial capitalism and created new aesthetic formulae to take critical potshots at it. Of course, the fact that the Impressionist paintings (with or without “critical” content, depending on your point of view) were then sold to the very bourgeoisie that was supporting the Academy as well as cracking the whip of industrial capitalism is a bit of conundrum neither seem to address.... posted by Friedrich at February 4, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Blog Reading
Friedrich -- Has spending time in the blogosphere affected your reading habits? It has mine, even where something as basic as the news is concerned. These days, I find that I rely on the major media only for headlines and basic information. When I want commentary, brains, insight, debate and personality, I turn to blogs. It's a livelier, freer, more open universe than the traditional media one. But I'm finding more and more that I turn to blog-reading to satisfy fancier appetites too -- appetites for entertainment, and even for pleasures literary. Seeing what's happening on my favorite blogs gives me some of the satisfaction of watching a good TV series. There are recurring characters, long story arcs, the fun of familiarity crossed with the fun of surprise. The bloggers themselves become characters in my brain much like fictional (or public) figures do. As for literary pleasure ... Well, from a voice and personality point of view -- ie., for some of the things I've tended over the years to turn to fiction for -- there are bloggers who outdo most of what's done in the official literary world. They're as or more distinctive, plus they're looser and more informal. So, let's see: there's story, there's character, there's voice ... Hmm, I'd say literature may have some real competition on its hands. Which is by way of providing a link to a terrific character I hadn't run across until last night: Rob somebody-or-other, who goes by the handle Acidman and runs the blog, Gut Rumbles, which is readable here. I can't do justice to his voice, though I can tell you that reading it reminds me of reading Barry Hannah, Charles Bukowski, Joe Lansdale, and Charles Willeford -- shitkicking and wild-ass, depressive and bitter, rowdy and absurd. But there I go, getting pretentious. (The curse of the arty.) Here's my reaction minus the pretentions: Smokin' stuff! Gut Rumbles is instantly one of my favorite blogs, in any case, and not just for Acidman's voice. There's a super-lively set of regular comment-leavers, each one a full-fledged character, and a whole new set of links to explore, many to other southerners with original voices of their own. Lordy, doesn't it sometimes seem like it must be a lot of fun to be a Southerner? Pulitzer Prizes? New York Review of Books? Your number may be up. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 4, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Middle Age Memory
Friedrich -- I was leafing around an intro-to-economics book last night, and was wondering idly why I so much enjoy intro-to books these days. I always have, but in recent years my appetite for them has gotten ridiculous. When I get interested in a new subject -- say, econ -- I'll read not one but five or ten intro-to books on it. And I'll do so with great pleasure. Bizarre, no? Is it that I'm trying to pound the basics into a reluctant brain? I recall that in my teens and twenties my brain seemed to soak up information almost against my will. These days, all I seem to want to do -- and maybe all I'm capable of doing -- is paddling around and around the shallow end. I simply can't learn or remember specifics like I once did, and I can't juggle the same number of facts simultaneously either. For example, despite being an architecture buff, I can't for the life of me keep straight the field's technical terms (although my brain seems to be fond, for some reason, of the word "spandrel"), and I'm always having to go back to my architecture-reference books to brush up once more. God only knows what kind of mess I'd make of it if I tried to teach myself technical poetry terms. Trochees, dactyls ... It'd all be in one ear and out the other. Or else I'd read intro-to-poetry-technique books one after the other. Which I'd probably enjoy. But it's as though my hard drive, or RAM, or whatever, has simply maxed out. No more room on this boat. Alas. It was fun having a quick and absorbent brain. These days, learning has become something else for me, and it's no longer a matter of seizing and retaining new facts. I find that what I'm capable of instead is moving the furniture around some, cleaning out the closets, and familiarizing myself in general ways with new neighborhoods. I find that when I return to a subject I've looked into as an adult, it isn't completely foreign to me. I feel like I've been there before. I can't necessarily find my way around, and the details escape me. But I have a sense of having once visited, and bits and pieces of it do coalesce. And then it's back to the intro-to books... How's your memory these days? The same as it once was? At this point, I'm just glad I'm still capable of remembering how mine once was. Hey, maybe the time has come to start pretending that I've developed "wisdom." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 4, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Monday, February 3, 2003


TV Alert
Friedrich -- I made the mistake of turning on another PBS documentary -- will I never learn? -- and, predictably, wound up snoozing through most of it. It was about the painter Thomas Eakins. Have you caught it? Hard to imagine making his life -- full of scandal, and much, much nudity -- dull and ponderous. But mournful, solitary strings, and mournful, solemn pacing did the job. Luckily, we’re no longer held in documenary thrall by PBS now that lots of other channels supply shows on good topics. Nearly all of them attend to pace and storytelling a lot more cannily than PBS does. *In honor of juicy information crisply delivered, The 2Blowhards Pick of this Week is Mysteries and Scandals, an E! Channel series hosted by A.J. Benza, who has his John Gotti/elegant-thug act down pretty well. (I believe that no new episodes are being made, but E! recycles the ones they have fairly regularly.) The topic is showbiz, the (overdone but bearable) style is nostalgia-for-gangsters-and-tabloids. And -- bliss -- the length is an innovative 30 minutes per episode. I don’t know about you, but there are a lot of topics I have 30 minutes’ worth of interest in, and many of them are showbiz-centric. Here are this week’s episodes: TUESDAY 10 a.m.: Tallulah Bankhead 10:30 a.m.: Susan Cabot WEDNESDAY 2/5   9 a.m.: Ava Gardner 9:30 a.m.: Linda Darnell THURSDAY 2/6   9 a.m.: The War of the Worlds 9:30 a.m.: Sam Peckinpah FRIDAY 2/7   9 a.m.: Aimee Semple McPherson 9:30 a.m.: The Hillside Strangler And here are just a few of the week’s choice movies: * Grand Hotel (TCM, Tuesday at 9:30 pm), followed directly by Dinner at Eight at midnight. A shrewd pairing: two big-star ensemble vehicles, comedy/dramas from the early sound days, classic precursors of the innumerable big-star ensemble comedy-dramas we’ve had since. Garbo, Barrymore, Harlow, Dressler -- legendary names. Now the film-buff crap: Part of the fascination of watching films from that time (the late ‘20s and early ‘30s) is that the studio style hadn’t yet settled. No one was yet sure of how to deliver lines, or even of how to film actors delivering them. So the films, however conventional, often have an enjoyably unsettled quality. These two, both of them full of stars imported from the theater, are an especially good way to sample the theater styles and personalities of the era. * Mystery Train (IFC, Thursday at 2:00 pm). Jim Jarmusch may be the ultimate Mr.-Cool-Downtown filmmaker, making one conceptual-minimalist feature after another. This isn’t, by any means, an unqualified compliment: He never delivers much. But he’s resourceful, and has evolved a deadpan style that can sometimes deliver his not-muchness in a nicely-shot, fairly droll way. The most watchable of his features that I’ve seen is this one, a collection of three oddball stories linked in a pointedly (and characteristically) non-linked way: they’re all set in Memphis, all reflect the presence or absence of Elvis, and at some point in... posted by Michael at February 3, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Chicago--Not My Kind of Movie
Michael: My wife and daughter dragged me to see “Chicago” over the weekend. Having seen the play in London several years ago, and thus not being in a whole lot of suspense about the plot, I found myself thinking about the movie’s premise—never a good sign in a Hollywood production. If I had been able to write it down on a piece of paper I would have gotten up and gone into another theatre. According to the film, Chicago in the Roaring Twenties was so pruriently interested in sex and violence that “crimes of the heart”—at least those committed by attractive young women—instantly converted the justice system into an annex of show business. Of course, as soon as you start to sit in judgment on these hypocritical Midwestern rubes of the jazz era you get stung, because after all you plunked down your hard-earned bucks to watch good looking young women sing and dance in states of undress—you’re part of the freak show, too. Unfortunately, the London stage production and the Hollywood movie both spend the better part of two hours showing you such fit, athletic young women in such artful states of undress that I ended up feeling like I’d had my complicit moral state not only just “bumped” into my face but also “ground” around a good bit. "Chicago" offers such a reductive version of both the musical theater and the justice system that the whole gag eventually implodes like a black hole, leaving…very little other than Kander and Ebb’s music, which is pretty darn catchy. Too Much Flesh, Not Enough Fun When I saw the play I thought that it was a pity that the director’s attempt to do the play in a Brechtian hard-edged style had only managed to take all the fun out of it—I ended up staring at terrific looking, nearly nude young women dancing their hearts out for two hours and didn’t even get a charge out of it. (And given London theater ticket prices, even if I had, the experience could hardly have been described as a cheap thrill.) Of course, when Hollywood got its hands on it, a tremendous amount of razzle-dazzle (shifts between “reality” and “inner states,” deliberately accentuated theatrical lighting in “everyday” settings, and truly frenetic cross cutting) was added in to distract you from the heavy-handedness of the film’s concept. I wish I had seen a version of Chicago that Bob Fosse had been involved with. At least for him the emotional core of the musical—that of an intrigued/repulsed little boy who notices that adults are a bunch of hypocrites on the subject of sex, violence and especially sexual violence—seemed to carry a kick from the deeper recesses of his personality, which he managed to convey to the audience. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at February 3, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Free Views -- Overheads
Friedrich -- Sometimes when I "discover" something on the Web, I feel like I must in fact be the last person in the world to run across it. So perhaps you've seen this site here already. If not, you might enjoy a visit. Type in an address, and in a few seconds you'll be given an overhead photograph of that neighborhood. Zoom in, and you'll be able see the actual building you're looking for. I tried the apartment monstrosity I live in now, the suburban house I grew up in, and the in-law's beach bungalow, and they all showed up promptly. Cool! A bit freaky, too. If computers and lenses get much more powerful, we're going to be able to sit at the computer and dial up images of ourselves sitting at the computer dialing up images of ... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 3, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Sunday, February 2, 2003


DVD Journal: "Human Nature"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Just caught up with another Charlie Kaufman-written film -- not "Adaptation" but Human Nature, which recently came out on DVD. It's unusual, it's quirky, and I thought it was a stinker. To its credit, it's pretty extreme. Patricia Arquette is a woman with lots of body hair, Tim Robbins is a compulsively orderly psychologist, Rhys Ifans plays a man who grew up wild in the woods thinking he was an ape ... Intellectual control (and culture!) vs. animal nature. Thought-provoking, providing only that you've never had a thought before. I read somewhere that this was Charlie Kaufman's first movie script, and it doesn't have the pesky brilliance of the first 30 minutes of "Being John Malkovich." It droops along, then goes gonzo for a few minutes as though reminding itself to be outstanding, then loses its way again. The chemistry isn't there in the directing or most of the acting either. Michel Gondry, who apparently has a reputation as a rock-video director, doesn't show much flair; Arquette (who I often find fascinating in a vague, hippie-cow kind of way) doesn't have anything like the energy the role demands; Robbins (who was once capable of being amusing) is like a college actor who has decided he's really going to be funny this time out, and Ifans ... Well, I guess he lends himself to things OK. I dunno. I didn't enjoy him, but I didn't feel like blaming him for anything either. A dud, in other words, even if Arquette does get naked a few times. The only performance I enjoyed was from the one lead actor who isn't, for some reason, pictured on the DVD box -- Miranda Otto, who's witty, silky, and mischievous as Gabrielle, the sexy lab assistant who sets her sights on Robbins. But I'm a Miranda Otto fan, and think she's always a treat. Have you ever noticed her? Australian, slim, red-haired (usually), and luscious, with a nice line in the angel/devil, vulnerable/conniving, remonstrating/seducing thing. This is probably the biggest role she's had in an American movie, and she gives a sweet yet high-style performance. The many-sided Miranda Otto If you're interested in seeing her act, the best movie I know of to recommend is a small Australian picture called Love Serenade, where she plays a slow-witted provincial girl who has more resources to call on than most people think. She doesn't know how to go about getting love, but that isn't going to stop her. I enjoyed "Love Serenade" a lot, by the way. It's small, genuinely eccentric (in an unforced way, unlike a Charlie Kaufman script) and a little magical. It's also droll and peculiar, like a Bill Forsyth movie only from a woman's perspective. The Wife liked it too. What have you seen recently? Best, Michael UPDATE: Oops, I was ungallant and forgot to link to Admired Miranda, the best Miranda Otto fan page on the web, and from where I lifted the above images. Admired Miranda... posted by Michael at February 2, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Free Reads -- Pictures of Sex
Friedrich -- I'm not sure I'd have guessed the figure was quite this high... Ryann Connell reports in the Mainichi Daily News that three-quarters of Japanese people between the ages of 20 and 35 admit to having been photographed or videotaped having sex. The story is readable here. Sample passage: "There's no doubt resistance to appearing in sex scenes on film has weakened among a growing number of girls over the past two or three years. In fact, many probably regard being filmed having sex as normal. Ten years ago, barely anybody would have even thought about it," cameraman Shozo Furusawa tells Spa! Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 2, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Saturday, February 1, 2003


Blog Surfing
Friedrich -- Is there no end to the good blogs? It's amazing how many people are both sensible people and good writers -- who'd have thought such creatures existed in such numbers? And even if, who'd ever have known, prior to blogging? Some of my latest finds: Jim Ryan at Philosoblog is finally getting around to his long-promised discussion of the work of John Kekes, and it's a multi-part corker, here. Paul Mansour runs The Scourge of Modernism, a blog devoted to giving modernist architecture a little what-for. Too bad he doesn't post more often, but when he does it's worth paying attention to, here. Alice Bachini, the Libertarian Parent herself, has kicked off another blog, Rational Parenting, here. At Cybrarian at Large, Liz L. does a little me-blogging, and writes about this and that. But she always seems to find her way back to cultural matters, especially what should be done with the WTC site, here. And a couple of amazing meta-blogs, sites that incorporate typical blogging material but much else as well -- total cranial environments, perhaps: Jeff Ward's brainily seedy and literary Visible Darkness (here), with a focus on writing itself, photography and (good for him) grotty bars; and Alan Sullivan's lyrical and contemplative Seablogger (here), all about Tolkien, the weather, sailing, life in the midwest, and more. Humbling! But in a good way. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at February 1, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments