Monday, June 30, 2003


Weekend Update
Michael: Just a few items that cropped up over the weekend: Re my posting on Fathers, Sons and the Hulk, there is a lengthy and interesting profile of the film's director Ang Lee entitled “Becoming the Hulk,” in the June 30 issue of The New Yorker. Re your post on Surfin' Ignominy, I thought you'd like to know that my 12-year old daughter went to her first day of surf camp in Malibu on Friday, where she managed to get up on her board and rode a wave at least 5 times. Kind of reminds me of that scene in "Personal Best" where the male coach sits in the bleachers drinking beer while his Olympic-level female athlete is training on the track, during which she passes an anonymous guy out jogging; the coach yells "You got passed by a girrrlllllll!" One of the great scenes in modern cinema. Re my career as a weekend painter, I packed up my new foldable French easel and headed off into a canyon for a spot of plein-air painting, only to be attacked by a swarm of carnivorous insects. I tried to ignore them while creating a masterpiece; but I regret to announce the final outcome was Art 0, Insects 1. They even chased me back to my car and then buzzed around the windows making a noise that sounded like “…and don’t come back, punk.” I've had plenty of time to contemplate my humiliation while I dab my hundreds of insect bites with calomine lotion. Re nothing in particular, I managed to dodge going to Lily Tomlin’s one-woman play, “The Search for Intelligent Life” by convincing my wife to take her girlfriend as a birthday present. While chortling evilly to myself at my cleverness, I then ended up having to take my daughter to “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle.” This was a bit too much good-girl sexiness—which has nothing to do with real-life sex, you understand—for me to take in a mere two hours. The situation was made worse by a weird coincidence—in twenty years of living in Los Angeles, I never saw such a collection of attractive women as were at that particular movie showing. All this goes to show that despite rumors to the contrary, there is a God, and that trying to take the easy way out is apparently an efficient way to piss him off. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 30, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Saturday, June 28, 2003


Qualia, Neuroscience and Art
Michael: Thanks for putting me on to another paper written by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein, “The Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us about the Biological Functions of Consciousness, Qualia and the Self” (which you can read here.) Our readers may recall Dr. Ramachandran, as he is rapidly turning out to be 2blowhards’ go-to guy for neurology and cognitive science. (He put in appearances in two of our recent posts, here and here.) First, a small disclaimer: Dr. Ramachandran is the Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego, and Adjunct Professor of Biology at the Salk Institute. I, on the other hand, am (in my more lucid moments) a middle-aged businessman. Obviously, I’m in no position to either vouch for or challenge the neurological facts the good doctor and Mr. Hirstein present in their paper. So, making the assumption that he knows what he’s talking about, I thought I’d summarize those portions of his paper I think I understand, and make a few mild speculations about them. You may not recognize the term, qualia, but you’ve known about a long-standing philosophical argument that involves qualia since you were in grade school. To wit, one of your playground companions undoubtedly turned to you one day and said, “Did it ever occur to you that even though we all call the color of the sky blue, what I see as blue could be what you see as red, or green?” In short, qualia are the subjective aspects of sense perception, the parts that concern what perceptions “feel like” inside the brain of the perceiver. When I look up at the sky, I see light of a particular wavelength, but subjectively to me this light feels blue. Likewise, when I look at the grass, I see light of another particular wavelength, but in my head I see green. A robot with black and white vision might intellectually understand that I have a different neurological response to light depending on its wavelength, but it wouldn’t “get” what my subjective response “feels like” to me. Equally, (to put myself in the place of the poor robot) I might intellectually understand that some fish can directly sense electric currents, and even study just how sensitive this reaction is, but I won’t “get” what sensing an electric current “feels like” to the fish. Philosophers got about this far in thinking about qualia and more or less concluded that the damn things were inescapably subjective and impossible to communicate from one brain to another. (We’ll never know if our companion on the playground really sees my blue as his green, or my green as his red, etc.) Philosophers have also have been more or less stumped by what purpose, if any, qualia serve in the mind. This topic is, of course, closely related to what purpose, if any, consciousness itself serves in our mental economy. Well, Dr.... posted by Friedrich at June 28, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments

Friday, June 27, 2003


Yogaguy
Friedrich -- As part of the Hindu phase I'm treating myself to during my California vacation, The Wife and I recently attended two different yoga classes. I'm an ultra-beginner with a come-and-go sense of balance, tendons made of glass and joints of concrete and granite, so picture me in the back row doing my ineffectual best not to tip over. The first class was very pleasant. A winner, really. The teacher, bless her, was kind and patient, and determined above all things that we not hurt ourselves -- very important to us non-stretchy types. The class itself made a nice contrast to NYC yoga classes, which have recently gotten very crowded with students who, in true NYC, gotta-be-the-alpha-person fashion, have become very competitive. (Competitive yoga -- what's the point?) In any case: Terrif, first-rate, glad I did it, I might even do some more back in the big city. The class we took yesterday was something else entirely. Bikram yoga -- have you heard of it? Also known as hot yoga, because you take the class in a room that's been heated to circa 105 degrees. You're there for 90 minutes, being led through a very slow and controlled routine. 105 degrees -- that's almost a sauna. Sweat drips off you copiously within a minute or two of entering the studio. Towel-off and water-guzzling breaks are numerous. And then back once more to the stretches and the postures. What a fab experience. Although there were a few moments when I was almost overwhelmed by dizziness and thought, This can't go on, I walked out of the class (completely soaked, by the way) a convert, and was thrilled when the Wife expressed her enthusiasm too. We clambered wetly into the car, drove to the Pacific and threw ourselves in the cool surf. Whew, and whee -- I don't know when I've felt so physically good. Loose in the joints, elastic everywhere, tingling yet relaxed -- I felt like a hot, wet dishrag that's been thoroughly wrung out, over and over again. And part of what was so great was the mental sensation; the class had a mind-altering-drug quality. I felt like I'd been on an extensive and amazing voyage and had returned from it with a whole different view of things. I was inside my body and hovering above it, but I was also inside-yet-hovering-above life generally too. My mind felt as rendered into taffy as my body did; life itself seemed a much more expansive thing than it usually does. Amazingly, the feeling stayed with me -- with us, really -- for the whole day. Part of the fun of the classes, I confess, is sociological and aesthetic. Yoga styles, yoga personalities, yoga bodies ,,, Yoga men, I've gotta say, I find an embarrassment. The rube in me finds yogaguys as unseemly as male actors. The same handful of types seems to show up no matter where you take a class -- the pothead with dreadlocks; doe-eyed Mr. Sensitive; the... posted by Michael at June 27, 2003 | perma-link | (13) comments

Sandra Goldbacher and Her Pet, if Unconscious, Theme
Friedrich -- You know those oddball art experiences, the ones where you find yourself reading an artwork completely differently than how it's asking you to take it? Bizarre, aren't they? Yet sometimes they're OK. "The Wild Bunch," for example, famously asks you to take it as an anti-violence movie, yet what's most memorable about the film is how beautiful the violence it shows is. Finally the best way to take the movie may be as an ambivalent, poetic hymn to violence. Other times, though, it ain't a good thing. I've just run into such a peculiar case. Peculiar because 1) It isn't just a single case, it's two films by the same director, and 2) Because the warring themes (how the movie sells itself/how I took it) involve dicey and embarrassing ethnic elements. So, a plea here to everyone to forgive me in advance, or at least to postpone castigating me until you've looked at the movies for yourself. Then, lambaste away. The movies are two serioso chickflicks by the English director Sandra Goldbacher. A warning to everyone: plot spoilers galore ahead. I can't figure out a way of discussing these films' themes without discussing their stories. The first is "The Governess," a costume drama Goldbacher made five-ish years ago. Here's the setup: a homely-sexy Jewish girl's family loses their money, and she winds up working (pretending not to be Jewish) as a governess for a chilly family of miserable Scottish aristocrats. (I may be scrambling a few of the details -- I'm away from my reference books and stuck with a lousy AOL connection, so I'm neglecting my usual self-fact-checking.) What follows? Well, if you accept the movie at its word, you take what follows this way: governess (played by the adorable Minnie Driver), endowed with vitality, spunkiness, and brains, brings the almost-dead back to life. Once again the household is alive with warmth. The laird, a dashing but depressed fellow who's also an inventor and is toying with some early photographic processes, can't help but succumb to the charms of the governess. She's the gal he always needed -- encouraging, and also more than a match for him. But then all hell breaks loose, the governess's Jewishness becomes public, and (a victim of anti-Semitism) she's cast out -- only to bounce back and set herself up, in a proto-feminist triumph, as a successful big-city photographer. Goldbacher is asking the viewer to take this as a rousing tale of self-realization, in other words. (With a sprinkling of message-movie anti-anti-Semitism.) Me, though, I sat there in disbelief, thinking, Gee, if you're of a less reverent cast of mind, you could interpret the film's story much less flatteringly. How so? Well, how about this: hustling, vain Jewish girl fucks her Gentile boss, destroys his family life, and steals his invention. Viewed this way, it's a somewhat less appealing tale of self-realization, and a somewhat less appealing self that's being realized. OK, maybe Goldbacher lost control of what she wanted to say.... posted by Michael at June 27, 2003 | perma-link | (15) comments

Find and Replace Justice
Michael: I was reading the New York Times article on the Supreme Court’s rather libertarian decision on gay rights (which you can read here) and suddenly thought, what if the same logic was applied to another minority rights topic—to wit, the progressive income tax. So I made the following, I think reasonable, changes via my find-and-replace function: Gays -> wealthy people Sexual -> economic Homosexual -> rich Texas sodomy law -> national progressive income tax Having sex -> making money and not paying extortionate taxes on it Same-sex marriage -> flat tax this relationship -> economic activity homes -> businesses gay -> rich lesbian -> rich oral or anal sex -> making money and not paying extortionate taxes on it same-sex couples -> rich people heterosexuals -> middle-income people Here goes: WASHINGTON, June 26 — The Supreme Court issued a sweeping declaration of constitutional liberty for rich people today, overruling the nation’s progressive income tax in the broadest possible terms and effectively apologizing for a contrary 1986 decision that the majority said "demeans the lives of rich persons." The vote was 6 to 3. Wealthy people are "entitled to respect for their private lives," Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. "The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private economic conduct a crime." Justice Kennedy said further that "adults may choose to enter upon economic activity in the confines of their businesses and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons." [Excerpts, Pages A16-17.] While the result had been widely anticipated since the court agreed in December to hear an appeal brought by two Houston men who were prosecuted for making money and not paying extortionate taxes on it in their home, few people on either side of the case expected a decision of such scope from a court that only 17 years ago, in Bowers v. Hardwick, had dismissed the same constitutional argument as "facetious." The court overturned that precedent today. In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia accused the court of having "taken sides in the culture war" and having "largely signed on to the so-called rich agenda." He said that the decision "effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation" and made the flat tax, which the majority opinion did not discuss, a logical if not inevitable next step. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas signed Justice Scalia's dissent. …[T]here was no doubt that the decision had profound legal and political implications. A conservative Supreme Court has now identified the rich-rights cause as a basic civil rights issue. …"It removes the reflexive assumption of rich people's inferiority," Professor Goldberg said. "Bowers took away the humanity of rich people, and this decision gives it back." The vote to overturn Bowers v. Hardwick was 5 to 4, with Justice Kennedy joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer. "Bowers was not correct when it was decided, and... posted by Friedrich at June 27, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Thursday, June 26, 2003


Moviegoing: "The Italian Job"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- A critic I know refers to dumbass movies with no imagination or sensitivity as Meatball Movies. (Rennie Harlin is the acknowledged maestro of the Meatball Movie.) I guess I'd say that, since the new action caper flick "The Italian Job" does have one good idea (putting Morris Minis in chase scenes), the film doesn't quite qualify for a Meatball Award. But it sure comes close. A guyflick to the max: heists, payback, engines, gizmos, chases, choppers, punches. Fewer wisecracks than usual, for some reason. Zero style. Mark Wahlberg, who's got less idea about acting than I do, as the gang's supposedly suave ringleader. And, sigh, no sex. The director was someone named F. Gary Gray, whose filmmaking technique boils down to "when in doubt, cut to an aerial shot and pump up the techno." The movie has one huge plus, as least as far as I'm concerned: one of its stars is Charlize Theron, who I love watching. She seems to have a taste for appearing in the occasional guyflick, and when she does she's often a wonderful combo of b-movie moll-ishness, sleek yuppie competence, and messy emotionality. (If you've got a taste for this kind of thing, don't miss Charlize's performance in "Reindeer Games," a film that has a number of other genuine B-movie virtues too.) Here, she does a nice variation on her usual wised-up-but-still-sweet number, has two or three scenes where she gets to show off her proficiency at appearing congested with feelings, combines steely determination with looking ultra-kissable, and wears her Banana Republic, pony-tailed-but-all-business persona with panache. You go, Charlize -- and where you go, I consider it a pleasure and a privilege to follow. To be fair, the audience (even the gals) seemed to enjoy the movie. Maybe the fantasy of getting even while getting away with millions was enough to win them over; or maybe many people simply crave the occasional really dumb and obvious but not overbearing bit of borderline-competent pop idiocy. In any case, as the levelheaded Wife correctly pointed out, "The Italian Job" was a lot easier to take than "Xmen 2" or "The Matrix Reloaded." But please don't mistake this for a recommendation. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 26, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments

Wednesday, June 25, 2003


Fathers, Sons and the Hulk
Michael: I went with my teenaged daughter to see “The Hulk” last night, and I’m kind of glad I did. I mean, the movie is a mess, but, oddly for a comic-book movie, its messiness is actually interesting. I don’t know if anyone else goes to popcorn movies out of a sense of duty, but for me going to see "The Hulk" was an obligation. I connected with certain aspects of pop culture as a child, and I feel occasionally required to show my childhood tastes a certain degree of “respect.” It doesn’t matter what I think of this stuff as an adult; I just have to take my inner child to see it. (It’s a motive somewhat similar to the one that impels me to go to the weddings of a distant relatives or the funeral of someone I knew only slightly.) No matter how bad the reviews for the Hulk were (and I’ve never read a good one, although they may exist), sooner or later I was going to have to plunk down money and sit through this film, like it or not. The positive aspect of seeing a movie under these circumstances, of course, is that I had no expectations, or at least no positive expectations, about the quality of this film walking into the theater. The reviews led me to expect Claymation-quality special effects (Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal had a great line about expecting to see Wallace and Grommit manning the attack helicopters), an unconvincing computer-animated hero/monster, a murky story, etc., etc. What I found, stuggling to emerge from its superhero genre trappings, was an intriguing, if perhaps insufficiently dramatized, film about the struggle between fathers and sons. Warning: I am about to wantonly give away some of the plot. In the film, David Banner, our hero's father, mumbling some nonsense about improving on humanity, deliberately alters his own DNA. These latent genetic alterations are passed to his son. When his forbidden experiments are discovered, David Banner (after terribly traumatizing his son) gets dragged off by the military-industrial complex. (Hey, it was a busy, busy day at that dusty Southwestern army base.) Thirty years later Mad Scientist Dad reappears and starts meddling in his son’s life again. And not meddling in the usual ways, disapproving of little things like the son's occupation, spouse or earing. No, this is big time stuff: Dad starts manipulating the young man to get him to express his modified genetic inheritance. After that inheritance has been augmented rather over-deterministically by both nanotechnology and a burst of gamma rays, it allows the younger Banner to transform into an 18-foot tall extreme bodybuilder with a really, really short temper and superhuman strength. Oh yeah, he's also green. You Won't Like Me When I'm Mad Nick Nolte’s sly performance as David Banner is about the “genetic” ruthlessness (some? all?) fathers can exhibit towards their sons. Sharing half his genes and his sexual identity with Bruce, the old man sees his son... posted by Friedrich at June 25, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

DVD Journal: "Frida"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- We caught up with Frida, the Julie Taymor-directed biopic about the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, with Selma Hayek as Frida, Alfred Molina as her hubby, Diego Rivera, and tons and tons of high-profile guest stars in small roles as historical characters. (Antonio Banderas as Siquieros, for instance, and Geoffrey Rush as Trotsky. Did Frida really sleep with Trotsky, by the way?) A dud, though semi-interesting to think and gab about. On the plus side, and to Taymor's credit: lots of enjoyably glam glimpses of Mexican radical bohemia; great decor, color and light; and a taste for presenting women as the sexually powerful creatures they are. On the minus side: lots of this-might-work-onstage-but-not-in-a-movie ideas (puppet interludes, collage-y passages, is-it-a-tableau-vivant-or-not recreations of Frida's paintings); and a complete inability to get you to focus on the characters and the situations. In fact, in many ways, the movie is a real lesson in how not to do it. Instead of the characters and the story, Taymor (a well-known stage director) has you watching the decor, the lighting -- the stagecraft. She seems far less interested in Frida and Rivera than in putting on a Julie Taymor show, something she evidently knows how to make work onstage. (I haven't seen her stage work.) The movies, though, seem to flummox her. I couldn't sit through her first movie, "Titus." Did you catch it? Shakespeare, supposedly, but really an inept Fellini-esque phantasmagoria. "Frida," which is more conventional, is much easier to take. Even so, it's an odd combo of talent and cluelessness, and is almost never very engaging; Taymor's talents don't seem to include using a motion picture camera or editing a movie. (Rumor has it that Harvey Weinstein made her cut about a half-hour from the film.) For Taymor, cameras exist to capture her set-ups, and a movie idea is a stage idea that has managed to get itself filmed. Frida and Rivera? We saw the movie just a few nights ago and already I've forgotten almost everything about them. But the colors, the light, the decor ... Too bad about those puppets, though. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 25, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Policy Break: Legal Mysteries
Michael: As you remember, I spent a fair amount of time and effort looking into affirmative action and wrote up two postings on the subject (which you can see here and here.) So when I read the headlines today about the Supreme Court’s affirmative action decisions, I thought, what the heck, I’d be interested to actually read the opinions. I’m kind of sorry I did. I’m left with the distinct impression that I spent a lot more time and energy thinking about the subject in order to write a couple of blog postings than Justice Sandra Day O’Connor did in writing the majority opinion in the University of Michigan Law School case. To say that the opinion, which you can read here, is a little short on constitutional reasoning (or any kind of rigorous logic) hardly does its lack of intellectual muscle-tone justice. I did a quick read of the constitution to see what are the obvious parts that one would parse in making such a ruling; I’m no constitutional scholar but it certainly looks to me like the 14th Amendment and the 15th Amendments are relevant. Those are the parts about “equal protection of the laws” and “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Well, guess what? Justice O’Connor mentions, (but in no way parses, analyzes, or even discusses) the 14th Amendment, albeit only in the very last line of her opinion as she "affirms" the incredibly murky logic of Justice Powell in the Bakke case (i.e., racial quotas bad, racial plus-factors good). The 15th Amendment never even makes it onto the playing field. Her opinion, on the other hand, is quite replete with discussions of such issues as the need of the military to use racial preferences in order to get an officer corps that looks like the enlisted ranks and the importance of deferring to the wisdom of universities in creating diverse student bodies. Oddly, I couldn’t find any reference to those matters in my perusal of the constitution, but perhaps I read it too quickly. In short, the opinion looks to me like a memo that might be prepared by a congressional staffer discussing the pros and cons of a piece of legislation. It does not resemble what I always thought Supreme Court opinions were supposed to be: to wit, “theorems” deriving from constitutional “axioms.” If we take the opinion to be such a legislative memo, I’m willing to grant that Justice O’Connor may have produced a wise analysis of the merits of affirmative action as a piece of public policy. I mean, I don’t agree with it, but what do I know? Race-based affirmative action certainly seems to make university presidents and military generals happy. But the nature of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s brief assumes that the real function of the Supreme Court is to function as an... posted by Friedrich at June 25, 2003 | perma-link | (27) comments

The Book-Besotted
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Have you had a chance to eyeball the comments on the "Writing a Book" posting? A fascinating collection. Many were sweet, some were thoughtful, some even appreciative. Best, I thought, were the personal stories many people told. For a glimpse of what the book-writing life is really like, I can't imagine doing better than checking out the comments, which will tell you lots more than the lit mags ever will. I got just as fascinated, though, by the commenters who quarreled with me, or tried to pick fights. Some went after my motives. Perhaps I wrote the posting because I'm depressed? (Never been happier.) Perhaps because I'm bitter? (Nope, sorry.) Others tried to take me to task for doing things I wasn't doing. Most of these commenters seemed to be under the impression that I was trying to discourage or even prevent people from writing books -- as though the only alternative to you-can-do-it-ism is you-shouldn't-do-it-ism. A few commenters questioned my handful of publishing-life facts, yet offered no evidence that contradicted any of what I offered up. (I covered the field closely for more than a decade, and lunched and partied with hundreds of publishing people and authors. I feel on pretty secure ground when I talk about publishing.) So I find myself wondering: What were the carpers really up to? Any ideas here? Me, I'm guessing that they were feeling offended. But by what? I'm guessing here too, and perhaps I'm wrong, but: by my attitude towards books. Why? Because they believe in books and I don't. Well, perhaps they believe not in books, but in "the book" per se. I can't tell you how often I've run into this particular form of semi-religious regard. I tend to forget how many people have this attitude. I'm very fond of certain literary forms -- erotic novellas, for instance, and psychological suspense. But "the book" per se means nothing to me, despite having been just as big a reader as most art-and-lit geeks are as kids. (Book-y kids sometimes grow up to be book-worshipping adults.) As far as I'm concerned, a book is just a bound-together container for a certain sum of paper and ink. It's a delivery system -- one that I've got a lot of respect for, and one that has many virtues. But, per se, "the book" is nothing more to me than a very cool delivery system. Such is how I think and feel, in any case. (Covering the publishing biz for years will tend to knock the sentimentality about books out of you. But even so, I was never all that reverent.) But, to my eternal surprise, many, many people seem to care about books per se. They worship 'em -- or perhaps what it is they worship is the idea of "the book." Starry-eyed believers, they clearly aren't thinking of the actual bestselling thrillers, the cat books, or the politicians' memoirs that clutter up our lives. No, they're thinking... posted by Michael at June 25, 2003 | perma-link | (34) comments

Tuesday, June 24, 2003


Hidden Capacities
Michael: There’s a fascinating piece in the New York Times of June 22, “Savant for a Day” (which you can read here) on how transcranial magnetic stimulation (“TMS”) may make it possible for people to tap unusual mental powers…by suppressing certain brain activity. The argument of Alan Snyder, a cognitive scientist at the University of Sydney, is that (1) the unusual mental abilities of savants (autistics who are capable of amazing mental feats) are actually present in all human beings, (2) that these abilities—such as the ability to do complex mental arithmetic rapidly, to remember with photographic detail and accuracy, to instantly spot proofreading errors, etc.—are actually just basic, lower-level brain processes that occur below the level of ordinary human consciousness, (3) that somehow our ordinary conscious processes mask these abilities or prevent us from accessing them, and (4) that these savant-like skills can be brought out by using TMS to turn down the volume on the "masking" processes. Professor Snyder claims that the TMS machine, which was originally utilized as an aid in brain surgery, may be the key to unlocking attributes ordinarily considered the property of geniuses or savants in ordinary people: You could call this a creativity-amplifying machine. It's a way of altering our states of mind without taking drugs like mescaline. You can make people see the raw data of the world as it is. As it is actually represented in the unconscious mind of all of us. And this line of thinking (and experimenting) is not confined to Professor Snyder: …researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke found that TMS applied to the prefrontal cortex enabled subjects to solve geometric puzzles much more rapidly. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, associate professor of neurology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston (who, through his work at the Laboratory for Magnetic Brain Stimulation, has been one of the American visionaries of TMS), has even suggested that TMS could be used to ''prep'' students' minds before lessons. I'm sympathetic with this line of thinking because of three of my own life experiences. One occurred while I was an undergraduate at our Lousy Ivy University: for no particular reason (that I can remember) I made a hobby of doing mental arithmetic. I was astonished, after just a few months of this, at my ability to do things like multiply two- and three-digit numbers just by looking at them and pressing a sort of mental multiplication button—none of your usual “carry the five” stuff, just “boom here’s the answer.” After a while, I got bored with this game and stopped practicing it, and thus gradually lost the ability. A few years later I noticed that if I concentrated while in a car, I could tell how fast the car was going (accurate to within a few miles per hour). To reassure all of you, I did this while driving around as a passenger in other people’s cars. When I got interested in art twenty years ao, I spent... posted by Friedrich at June 24, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments

Monday, June 23, 2003


Surfin' Ignominy
Friedrich -- After my four-hour group surfing lesson yesterday, I can guarantee that no Blowhard will ever again be welcome on a surfing beach. I'll pass quickly over my complete lack of talent for the sport and cut directly to the excuses. The main reason I won't be going back again is that there's a lot more physical daredeviltry involved in surfing than I expected. And even though it's a point of pride with me that I'm not the world's least-athletic arts geek, I've got nothing -- zero -- of the physical daredevil in me. Surfing reminded me of rockclimbing, another sport I gave my all to for a total of a couple of hours. "I'm supposed to find being in actual physical danger thrilling? You've got to be kidding" -- such was my overwhelming response to both these sports. There were seven of us tyros (I was, ahem, the oldest), there was an instructor, there were slightly-bigger-than-ideal waves; there was some instruction on the beach and then an enthusiastic plunge into the ocean. You wrestle yourself and your board through the 50-feet-or-so stretch where the waves are actually breaking, then paddle out even farther, sit up on your board, and inspect the horizon for likely wave candidates. So far, so good. Like everyone else, I wound up in the drink a few times when I first tried to pivot the board around so it faced the beach, but I soon mastered the move. The ocean seemed a surging but friendly beast, full of promises for fun. And then ... "In surfing, you just gotta accept that you're going to take your knocks," shouted the instructor, and never were truer words etc. OK! It's a good one coming at us! Now now now now! Paddle paddle paddle paddle! Dig dig dig dig! And ... kaboom! Flipflipflip; tumbletumbletumble; sea water up the nose; sand and pebbles everywhere. Whee! What fun! Let's do it again! Trouble was that three factors immediately started to ruin my fun. One was my meager arm and shoulder resources, which started to run out after 15 minutes. Surfing demands tons of pushup/pullup-style strength, and evidently the 10-pushups-in-the-morning routine I adhere to is far from sufficient preparation. In no time, my arms had become mere jointed weights dangling from shoulder sockets. Without your arms to pull you along, you're completely (as opposed to semi-completely) at the mercy of the ocean. Now and then, little surges of energy did return to my upper body, but only enough to get me back into trouble. Factor #2? A little something to do with my inability to actually see the waves. You're meant to sit out there on your board (hips loose, like you're riding a horse) looking around for something to ride; when you spot a good one, you do your best to take off and surf that baby. Now, crank that ideal sequence back a step or two. I had a hard time with the basic skill of looking over... posted by Michael at June 23, 2003 | perma-link | (10) comments

The Evo-Bio of Impressionism, Part I
Michael: In many posts since we started this blog we’ve predicted that evo-bio would begin to impact how we view our own culture. In a series of posts I’d like to offer a small demonstration of how that might work by discussing the way in which changing relations between the sexes in the 19th century affected Impressionist art. The French Revolution, in addition to ushering in nearly a century of political turmoil in France, also ushered in a quieter—but perhaps more humanly significant—shift. Starting in the 1790s, French women were the first in the world to deliberately and significantly limit their national birthrate via contraception—and not as a passing response to war, famine, pestilence, etc., but as a permanent part of a new reproductive order. From 1790 to 1850 the average number of children born to French women fell from approximately 5 to 3.5. The fact this shift occurred is unquestionable; the reasons for it are still debated vigorously. It wasn’t, for example, because of dramatic reductions in infant mortality: those only came as a result of Pasteur’s “microbe revolution” of the 1870s. Other public health changes may have played a role in reducing the perceived need for spare children, such as the gradual lengthening of the average French lifespan during the 18th century—from a truly horrific 25 years in 1700 (life in Louis XIV’s France was nasty, brutish and short) to 35 years in 1800 (still several years less of the average British or American lifespan.) Political conditions undoubtedly played a role. After the Terror and during the Napoleonic Empire, French society's treatment of sex underwent a “libertarian” interlude; both divorce and prostitution were legalized, while the influence of the Church was greatly reduced. The net result may have been to provide loose enough social conditions to permit the knowledge of contraception to spread and for women to begin to rebel against traditional value systems that relegated them to roles as baby factories. J. L. David, Cupid and Psyche, 1817 Economic factors also seem to have played a role. France grew economically at only half the rate of Great Britain at the start of the 19th century, and even slower relative to Germany or the U.S. at the century’s end. Without limitations on fertility, living standards for the French middle and upper classes might well have fallen in absolute terms. This may explain why the trend towards restricted fertility seems to have originated within the bourgeoisie. Economic incentives certainly encouraged the spread of contraception among the peasantry. France was a largely agrarian country with no tradition of primogeniture, and there was a need to reduce number of children born in the countryside so as to prevent farms from being splintered by inheritance, thus causing whole families to slide out of the landowning class. Economic factors also explain why the haute bourgeoisie and wealthy aristocrats were “holdouts” from the trend to restricted fertility; apparently plentiful children became a form of conspicuous consumption for the rich. It also explains the continued... posted by Friedrich at June 23, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Sunday, June 22, 2003


Writing a Book Redux
Friedrich -- Our posting from a few weeks back entitled "Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book" was linked to by the great Arts and Letters Daily. Yippee: An honor and a pleasure. Also an occasion for more visitors than usual to drop by, and to leave comments. Readers interested in the topic of writing and publishing might enjoy revisiting the posting in order to read the new comments, which follow the posting here. It'd be hard to find a more raw and truthful set of snapshots of the book-writing and book-publishing life. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 22, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Saturday, June 21, 2003


Prisoner's Dilemma: Inmate Art
Michael: A story in the L.A. Times of June 21, “Inmate Artists Won’t Be Brushed Off,” discusses the effects of cutbacks caused by California’s state budget crisis on an inmate arts program at the maximum security state prison in Lancaster. The focus of the story (which you can read here) is on the effects of continued funding cuts—first the program lost its paid civilian teachers, and now may shut down entirely for lack of dough to pay for art supplies—but along the way it also provides an interesting glimpse into the mindset of artists under relatively unique circumstances. Two inmate artists are discussed: Mitch Smiley and Cole Bienek. Both are in for second-degree murder; Mr. Bienek has been in prison for 15 years. Both are painters. Mr. Smiley focuses on figurative subjects, most recently on images derived from Orthodox Christian icons. Mr. Bienek is partial to landscape painting on the lines of the California Impressionists. M. Smiley at work Now these are only two men, not any kind of representative sample of the population, and I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that neither has a great deal of education. Nonetheless, they are both living out what would be for most of us a thought experiment: if locked up in prison, what kind of art would one choose to make? Mr. Bienek’s and Mr. Smiley’s choices are therefore intriguing to me. I notice that they are not spending time making abstract paintings or Duschampian ready-mades or conceptual art or any of the dominant modes of 20th century art. Mr. Bienek is trying to make representations of a nature he cannot currently experience and Mr. Smiley is trying to make representations of what, one assumes, is his form of ultimate reality. As Mr. Smiley explains: When you're painting, you're not here...You're in your own world, you know? I know very little about prison art; I wonder what choices other artists in this situation have made. Perhaps more to the point, what kind of art would you choose to make in this situation—and why? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 21, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Friday, June 20, 2003


California, Religion and Art
Friedrich -- Every time I come to California, it happens. A few days pass, and my stern, Northeast mental wranglings start to relent. I give up grim resolutions. Why not sniff the beautiful eucalyptus-and-sea-salt air instead? Why not sip some chilled white wine and watch the waves break? If all else fails, there’s always the hot tub. No wonder so many Californians walk around wearing an expression of inane, self-pleased untroubledness. I’m wearing it myself, and I’ve only been here a week. As my mind gets driftier and more relaxed, it also starts to muse -- or Muse, with a capital M. I start to think what strike me as Big Thoughts. I think about religion. It’s not as though I don’t think about religion when I’m back home, although I do it in a scrappy, off-and-on way. I meditate; I drag my sorry butt to the occasional tai chi class; I’ve attended a handful of Zen and Tibetan Buddhist classes and lectures. (A tip to single guys: an amazing number of the women who are attracted to Tibetan Buddhism are really good lookin’.) I’ve dragged The Wife to services at a couple of the more beautiful NYC churches and cathedrals, although largely in the spirit of an architecture buff and an amateur anthropologist. Do any religions speak to you? I can get fascinated, for a short while anyway, by almost any of them: the various Christiainities and Jewishnesses and paganisms and animisms and Native Americanisms, etc. The mythologies are interesting, it’s fascinating to watch different cultures wrestle with the Big Questions, etc. But it’s an intellectual/esthetic fascination for me, because none of them resonate -- certainly not the smalltown Presbyterianism I was raised in. And the idea of buying into their doctrines and creeds? All due respect to people’s religious preferences, but I’d as soon choose to believe in a Marvel comic book. Miracles? Virgin births? Coyote spirits? Puh-leeze. Then I visit California, and every time, I get intrigued all over again by the Eastern philosophy/religions: Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism. They speak to me. When I read about them and explore them, I’m not just intellectually fascinated, but moved and hypnotized; I feel like I’m in private conversation with someone who knows exactly what concerns me on the deepest levels, and who has sifted and sorted these questions out far better than I ever will. These religion/philosophies seem full of good sense, and also seem based in certain experiences that I recognize as fundamental. I can never find my footing with, say, Christianity or Judaism; what seems to concern them most urgently are questions I respect but have little feeling for. With the Eastern philosophy/religions, I feel right at home. I also find it appealing, or at least convenient, that the gods and mythologies these Eastern approaches peddle seem optional -- I once saw Buddhism described as “religion for atheists.” Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism -- I’m happy bouncing from one to the other, which is apparently yet another demonstration... posted by Michael at June 20, 2003 | perma-link | (19) comments

Religion, Politics and Temperament
Michael: Some time ago you mentioned in a posting that you (at least half jokingly) attributed the persistence of religion in modern secular society to the fact that people must have a gene for religious belief. Not long after, I was rather surprised to stumble across something at least supportive of this notion (although probably not as a result of anything so neat as the operation of a single gene) . In Matt Ridley's book, "Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human" he discusses some of the interesting differences in correlations found between identical twins reared apart (that is, individuals who share all their genes and little or none of their environment) and in fraternal twins reared apart (that is, individuals who share roughly half their genes and little or none of their environment) on the topic of religion: In a recent study [psychologist Thomas] Bouchard measured how [religiously] fundamentalist individuals are by giving them questionnaires about their beliefs. The correlation between the resulting scores for identical twins reared apart is 62 percent; for fraternal twins reared apart it is just 2 percent. Bourchard repeats the exercise with a different questionnaire designed to elicit a broader measure of religiosity and still gets a strong result: 58 percent [for identical twins reared apart] vs 27 percent [for fraternal twins reared apart]. And that ain't all. Similar effects seem to crop up in political opinions, or at least right-wing political opinions: [Bouchard] repeats the exercise with a different questionnaire designed to discover what he calls "right-wing attitudes." Again there is a high correlation in identical twins reared apart (69 percent) and no correlation at all in fraternal twins reared apart. He gives the twins a different questionnaire that simply lists single phrases and asks for approval or disapproval: immigrants, death penalty, X-rated movies, etc. Those who reply no to immigrants, yes to the death penalty, and so on are judged more "right-wing." The identical [twins reared] apart correlation is 62 percent, the fraternal [twins reared] apart correlation is only 21 percent. Similar huge differences [in the similarity between the political opinions of identical twins and fraternal twins reared apart] emerge from similar large studies in Australia. All this, of course depends on the (apparently reasonable) assumption, hopefully accounted for by Mr. Bouchard and his Australian counterparts, that adoptive homes represent a spectrum of religious and political opinion; if the adoptive parents were all right- or left-wing, and all highly religious or utterly irreligious, these results would be about how genes control the receptiveness of children to their parent's religious and political views. But this conclusion is unlikely if the studies embraced any very large group of adoptees and adoptee families.) Gee, do you suppose there are tests designed to measure or categorize aesthetic tastes (Elvis vs. the Beatles, abstract painting vs. representational, ballet vs. modern dance) that we could get introduced into these twin studies? I wonder how heritable such aesthetic preferences would turn out to be? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 20, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Free Reads -- Diana Cambridge on Writing
Friedrich -- Chris Bertram (of Junius, here) was kind enough to email along a link to a good piece by Diana Cambridge in The Guardian, here. Cambridge asks writers who hold down office jobs yet manage to finish novels, How do they manage to do it? 2Blowhards visitors who have gotten something out of our discussions of the challenges of being involved in art yet having to make a living will probably enjoy the piece. Thanks to Chris Bertram. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 20, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Wednesday, June 18, 2003


Kem Nunn 2: Writin'
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- More musings prompted by my reading of Kem Nunn's surf-noir novel Tapping the Source. Yesterday I scratched my chin a bit over the topic of neo-noir. Today: writing per se. How important is the word-to-word, sentence-by-sentence writing -- I always think of it as "writin'" -- in a work of prose fiction? I know all too well that the professor-and-critic-approved line is that for a work of true literature, the writin' is everything. Sigh. Lord, am I aware of this. I dispute it, though. I don't see -- given the massive amount of evidence to the contrary -- how the case can even begin to be made. There are a lot of powerful novels whose writin' is indifferent, and tons of books whose writin' is first-class that have no life at all. And there's the gigantic question that history itself poses, namely: How certain can we be in our judgment of a lot of the writin' of the past? We've lost much of our feel for it. To take two examples of certified Important Literature that I happen to have read fairly recently: How well-written can "Beowulf" be said to be? How well-written is "Clarissa"? And how can we know for sure? "Clarissa" struck me, as it has struck many people, as horrendously written -- but, although I'm a bit of an 18th-century prose nut, who am I to judge? I feel semi-qualified to characterize Richardson's style by comparison to the other 18th century prose I know. But I clearly don't have the same in-the-blood feel for this that a good 18th century reader would have had. There may well be much there, style-wise, that simply eludes me. There's also the major/minor issue of how much lit we know only via translation. Thanks to a long-ago year in France, I can sort of judge, or at least characterize, recent French prose (or I semi-could at one point). I still feel competent enough to get good and furious over a recent, highly-praised translation of Stendhal's sublime "The Charterhouse of Parma," which strikes me as an abomination. Grrr, snarl. But so much lit from so many other countries I'll only ever know through the work of translators. I loved the writin' in "Anna Karenina," for instance, along with much else about the book. Yet how can I know for sure whether what I responded to was Tolstoy or Constance Garnett, or some combo of both? I can't, for another example, think of a more beautiful novel than Lady Murasaki's "The Tale of Genji." But, sheesh, that's a novel dating from a thousand years ago that was originally written in an archaic form of Japanese, and that I read in a famously loose and poetic translation. Exquisite writin', for sure -- but was it Lady Murasaki's? Are we stuck making do with the word of the translator, or (worse) of the professor? Perhaps, alas, we are. I'm not remotely averse to writin'; I just don't assign it... posted by Michael at June 18, 2003 | perma-link | (23) comments

Aesthetics: Dude, Where's My Flying Car?
Michael: I came across this little gem the other day on, of all places, a NASA website for children: Have you ever watched the cartoon, "The Jetsons"? How do they travel from place to place? They do not get in the family car and drive. They get in the family car and fly. How would you like to have a flying car? Your grandparents thought that by the year 2000, everyone would have a flying car. So, what happened? The flying car has had two problems. One problem is that you have to be a pilot to fly one. The other problem is that you have to have a lot of money to own one. Yeah, yeah, let me down easy, NASA. This just served as one more painful reminder about the realities of having grown up: not only am I stuck with the whole death and taxes thing, and having to do awful stuff like figure out how to pay for my kids’ college tuitions, but I have to soldier on through this dreary mess without having a flying car. For an old Detroiter (whose father worked in the auto industry) this really sucks. Okay, granted, flying cars were always a trifle, shall we say, fanciful for any society without unlimited—and I do mean unlimited—energy resources. But at a minimum, I should be able to tool around town in something like these: Ford FX-Atmos, 1954 GM Runabout, 1964 I understand that these were never more than concept cars, but, hey: we’ve had almost half a century to make these babies a commercial reality. And what do we have now that we’re several years into a new millenium? A bunch of timidly designed cars that can only serve to lower our already sagging middle-aged expectations to the ground. So I thought I’d inaugurate a series of postings to recognize the smallest, most infintesimal efforts of the world auto industry to deliver vehicles that reflect the creative exuberance of the illustrators and designers of my youth. To qualify, a car must be a mass marketed vehicle that might have surprised auto consumers of fifty years ago with its styling—as opposed to merely disappointing them with a sort of lowest-common denominator evolution (devolution?) from cars of that period. Nissan Murano, 2003 Honda Element EX, 2003 Have you got any cars you’d like to nominate for future postings? Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 18, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Tuesday, June 17, 2003


Kem Nunn 1: Neo-Noir
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Blowhards -- I'm out in California for some vacation weeks, and in recognition of this happy fact I've lined up a couple of beginning-surfing lessons for myself. You laugh, and rightly so -- but also: hey, if not now, when? I suspect that the outings my nursing home is likely to arrange won't include visits to the surf shop. More a propos to a cultureblog, I'm also reading Kem Nunn's surf-noir novel Tapping the Source. Have you ever looked at it? Considered by the three or four who might know to be the great surfing novel. (Myself, I'm not even sure what the competition is.) I have no interest in writing a review of the novel, which I haven't enjoyed terrifically but have found fascinating to think about. Instead, I'm interested in using the book as a pretext for wondering out loud about a few things. But, to do the book the courtesy of politeness, I'm first going to ask myself: What would I say about this novel if a friend had written it? Here's what I come up with: Surf noir? Fab idea, and I hope to come with half as good a concept for a novel myself sometime before I die. The evocations of what it feels like to surf, not that I have any firsthand knowledge of this? Also fab. Plus, I like the fact that Nunn committed himself to working with the noir-crime tradition, and to crafting an actual plot. Not enough of that around in lit circles these days as far as I'm concerned. But on to my own musings. Today: the topic of neo-noir. I feel cheerfully divided on the topic, surprise surprise. How about you? I'm thinking about pop music guys like Chris Isaak and Mark Knopfler; I'm thinking about movies and filmmakers like "L.A. Confidential," "Red Rock West," David Lynch; I'm thinking about writers like Kem Nunn and Barry Gifford. I'm very sympathetic to and full of admiration for what they're doing, while (alas) not enjoying much of their work. On the good side: these are guys who recognize a central arts-in-America pickle -- which is that, while we have wonderful popular and folk forms and traditions, we barely have a fine-arts tradition at all. What becomes of you if, like so many Americans, you come to the arts through loving commercial and folk forms? Authors like Jim Thompson and John D. MacDonald really are first-rate, god knows. Yet, let's face it, popular forms are mainly suited for kids, for the unschooled, for people who are very unself-conscious, for easy pleasures, and for those tiny handful of people whose talents really do lie in the commercial direction. How to make use of them yourself? Let's say you get an education, or you acquire some sophistication and experience, or you have talents that lend themselves to more complex forms. What do you do in the American arts? And how do you grow in them? If you try to adapt... posted by Michael at June 17, 2003 | perma-link | (15) comments

Half Baked Notions, Redux
Michael: A paragraph from your recent posting, Some Half-Baked Notions I Couldn't Figure Out How to Fit in Other Postings, prompted some rather half-baked notions of my own. (These notions are based on several ideas I’ve come across recently; the half-baked element no doubt arises from how I’m stringing them together, assuming I’m understanding what I’m reading in the first place.) You write: The American commercial-art world is often amazingly proficient and impressively dynamic. It's also, or so many people find, scarily aggressive. Its values, it seems to me, are basically the values of money, technology and business, with even sex and art put at the service of them. Plus, if you're a creative person making a living there, the chances that you'll ever be able to do much of your own thing are pretty slim. You'll be putting your talent and energy to work selling business values instead. My half-baked notion is that you may be mistaken in assuming that there is a contradiction between art and commerce, because—at least in their origin—art and commerce seem to have shared the same root. I had this thought yesterday when reading an article in the July 2003 Scientific American by Jonathan Mark Kenoyer, “Uncovering the Keys to Lost Indus Cities.” Professor Kenoyer summarizes some of the findings of archeological studies of cities in the Indus Valley (in what is today Pakistan), which was the site of one of the four early urban cultural centers (the others being Mesopotamia, Egypt and China’s Yellow River.) Much less is known, admittedly about this culture than the other three, because nobody has yet found an Indus-valley Rosetta Stone that would permit scholars to read the voluminous preserved writings of this culture. Nonetheless, certain elements seem well established. While the economics of the Indus valley cities appear to have been pretty much like those of the other ancient riverine civilizations, there appears from the beginning to have been a very significant role for trade: The Indus cities established their economic base on agricultural produce and livestock, supplemented by fishing and hunting. Both the common people and the elite classes derived additional income from the production and trade of commodities, including cotton and woolen textiles as well as a variety of craft items. During the oldest, or Ravi phase of the city-state of Harappa (approximately 3300 B.C.E. to 2800 B.C.E.), the locals were cranking out, and trading, a considerable amount of, well, art: Specialized craft technologies spread among the early settlements along trade networks, which likewise disseminated a shared set of religious symbols and artifact styles throughout the region...In the limited exposed areas of the Ravi-period Harappa, investigators have turned up signs of the production of both terra-cotta and stone beads and bangles. The terra-cotta items were probably worn by children or commoners, or both, whereas the more exotic stone and seashell ornaments most likely adorned local upper-class populations. Through careful analysis of the raw materials and comparison to known source regions, archeaeologists have shown that some... posted by Friedrich at June 17, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Monday, June 16, 2003


The Evo-Bio of Kate Hudson Movies
Michael: Thanks for holding down the fort while I was away vacationing last week in Hawaii. You cranked out some masterful postings. I spent most of a very enjoyable week painting—in part, to mollify my wife, who after five years of living in our current home has been getting justifiably impatient with having so little in the way of paintings on the walls. I also read Steven Pinker’s book, “The Blank Slate,” and part of a book by Matt Ridley, “Genome” which is a sort of prequel to another book I recently finished, “Nature via Nurture.” So picture me living in a bizarre world comprised of gorgeous natural scenery, sipping tropical drinks, mixing colors under a hot sun and chewing over evo-bio notions of warfare between “selfish” male and female genes. In the midst of this rather blurry mental state, we went to see a movie as part of the Maui Film Fesival. Billed as a “Celestial Cinema” presentation, I ended up watching a commercial Hollywood flick, “Alex and Emma,” while sitting on a lawn chair on a golf course under a full moon. And the next day, while back again hard at work in my hotel room (a drink ready to hand, naturally), I listened to—but did not literally see—another Kate Hudson romantic comedy, “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.” All of this got me thinking about the evo-bio implications of the two films. First, I have to warn you off of “Alex and Emma,” even when viewed under a full moon with your soul mate by your side. It fails for the fairly obvious reason that it utterly lacks dramatic (or even comedic) conflict. In it the hero, played by the always likeable Owen Wilson, wants to spend a month dictating his second novel and collect his $125,000 advance. Kate Hudson, playing his long-suffering and strangely frumpy stenographer, also wants him to dictate his second novel, collect his $125,000 advance, and pay her a month’s wages. The hero’s publisher is eager for the hero to finish up this second novel, as are two loan sharks who are eager to collect $100,000 from the novelist. Everyone, in short, wants to see the damn novel finished, and no one more so than the poor member of the audience who has to endure to its utterly pedestrian language and its clichéd plot presented in voice-overs with enactments. The only tension the movie can gin up is whether the hero should go for the plain-jane stenographer (or her stand-in within the novel, a maid or a cook or something) or for the flashy, untrustworthy but really hot-looking French seductress played by Sophie Marceau (also playing duel roles in real life and in the book). Since the movie clearly bills Kate Hudson as the co-star, who do you think gets the guy? Dubious Choices: Alex and His Women “How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days” was a better effort, particularly for Kate Hudson, who at least gets to be the... posted by Friedrich at June 16, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Saturday, June 14, 2003


Free Reads -- Matt Ridley on Genes
Friedrich -- I'm sure this is nothing more than a sign of how shallow I am and how short my attention span has grown. But I got as much out of this excellent and informative short piece (here) that Matt Ridley wrote for The Spectator about what's the latest on the genes front as I did out of spending a couple of hours with his new book, "Nature Via Nurture." (Which, as I remember, you actually read all the way through.) No disrespect to the book intended -- I'm just enthusiastically recommending the Spectator piece, which answers most of my lame questions... Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 14, 2003 | perma-link | (0) comments

Some Half-Baked Notions I Couldn't Figure Out How to Fit in Other Postings
Friedrich -- * American pop culture is like junk food. Here and there, some of it's fun and good. Here and there, some of it's really terrific. But most of it's lousy, and should be avoided. (The young, the poor and the hurried? Why not? But the rest of us?) Do you have any problem with this notion? I don't. * Part of what some Americans envy about Euro-cultures is that they have stable, well-defined fine-arts traditions. England and France, for instance, have secure, largely unquestioned art traditions. Art values are prized, a literary culture is taken for granted, artistic forms and cultural institutions are in firmly in place. Americans who move overseas rave about the food, the cities, the art, the buildings, the "quality of life" ... * Many of these things, we American simply don't have. Instead, we zigzag back and forth between an aggressive, dynamic commercial-arts world and a self-righteous, ever-in-fear-for-its-very-life fine-arts world. There never seems to be an halfway stable resting place where you can catch your breath. And isn't the art thing partly about finding a center? We so seldom seem to be able to. This can be exhausting, annoying and boring. We get frantic, we feel we're missing the point of life. * We seem to be at one of those awful moments when the fine-art and the commercial-art worlds have almost nothing to do with each other -- when things between them have gotten downright antagonistic, in fact. Too bad. Some of the great eras in American art -- the late 1800s, the '20s and '30s, the '60s-'70s -- happened when a real, eager conversation fired up between masscult and elite cult. * But maybe I'm silly to be dismayed by this. Digital technology seems to be bringing a lot of the old barriers down. Perhaps in a couple of decades it'll have long been forgotten that there ever was such a divide. Will that become its own problem? I kind of like the divide. I just wish more genial, respectful and helpful exchanges were taking place back and forth. * The American commercial-art world is often amazingly proficient and impressively dynamic. It's also, or so many people find, scarily aggressive. Its values, it seems to me, are basically the values of money, technology and business, with even sex and art put at the service of them. Plus, if you're a creative person making a living there, the chances that you'll ever be able to do much of your own thing are pretty slim. You'll be putting your talent and energy to work selling business values instead. * Our fine-arts world -- feeling itself to be under siege and carrying on histrionically -- is 'way overprone to get caught up in anti-capitalist protest politics, as well as 'way overprone to make absurd claims for what art can do for a person. It's a hysterical pretentiousness that's self-defeating. Finally, all it accomplishes is to make even more Americans turn against the fine arts. *... posted by Michael at June 14, 2003 | perma-link | (9) comments

Magazines and Hip Fat
Friedrich -- A quarter of an hour at a crowded, chic local magazine store has left me pondering a few things. 1) Young women are still wearing hiphuggers and showing off their midriffs. It's been a couple of years since this style began, no? Which is longer than I'd have expected it to last. Do you, as I do, sometimes wonder about when and why and how some fads turn into standards? I was wondering about baseball caps worn backwards, for instance. A year ago it seemed to me that they were on the verge of becoming a standard, like khaki trousers. This summer, poof, they're gone. There are only a few baseball caps to be seen, and most of them are being used for forehead-shading purposes. Why? What happened? As for hiphuggers, they may still be with us, but something about the style seems to have changed. A year ago, the fashion seemed to be all about being wild and daring -- about how-low-can-you-go -- and it seemed to me that the focus was on the millimeter above the pubic hairline. This season, my eyes seem to be drawn less to the crotch-diving V and more to the hips as seen from behind. To the hip fat, to be more exact -- the wiggly, tender stuff that rides the hipbone, the bulge right where it starts to turn into a waistline. Is that where you feel your eyes being steered? I think this is the first time I've ever felt my attention directed to that feature. Once again I marvel at the ingenuity of women (and the fashion industry), who manage to keep the female body looking fresh, different and alluring. Look here. No, there. Now I'm going to cover it up. But not before giving you a little glimpse. Gasp, pant, collapse. 2) I spent a couple of minutes leafing through some of the more avant-garde glossy magazines. Is this anything you ever waste time on? Amazing creations: fabulousness everywhere you look -- in the design, the photography, the printing, the concepts. (The writing's just gray stuff between the images and graphics.) These magazines are all about dazzle, dude, and as displays of media fireworks they're hard to beat. I look through them feeling as though a slow-motion nuclear explosion is going off in my brain, incinerating the few IQ points I still have left and leaving the rest of me happily stupefied. I'm a blissed-out cinder going twinkle, twinkle, bzzzzt, crackle. Which isn't exactly what I'm looking for from a magazine. I tend to like something a little more reflective and thoughtful, something that leaves me wrestling with (dare I say it?) a thought or two. These things leave me feeling pumped, wowed, overthrilled, and empty. Basically, they make me feel like masturbating -- hey, I noticed a new magazine, very edgy, called SelfService -- or maybe (even better!) like going out and buying something. Which, come to think of it, is probably the point. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 14, 2003 | perma-link | (14) comments

Mini Link-o-Rama
Friedrich -- Life's been busy, I've been even more disorganized than usual ... So just a quick once-over today. * Evan Kirchhoff has been wrestling with computer games, spam, and Canadian politics (Canada has politics?), and has been making sharp point after sharp point (here). * Tim Hulsey (here) continues his first-rate Intro to Film History series with a posting on "Chimes at Midnight," writes a refreshingly ambivalent piece about Gay Pride Day, and does some thinking about live vs. animated action movies that'll interest a lot of 2Blowhards visitors. * Over at the engaging new pop-culture blog called The Bizness (here), the pseudonymous blogger is full of enthusiasm and energy. If Tim Hulsey is the refined and articulate observer of the movieworld, The Bizness -- uncouth and overexcited, yet with a puppydog sweetness -- is like the movieworld's id. * Alexandra Ceely (at Out of Lascaux, here) has been lively and searching, with thoughtful postings about medieval and postmodern art, and about beginning to collect Hawaiian shirts. * All we bloggers have our warmer and our cooler streaks, and part of the fun of following blogs is keeping up with these cycles. The hottest cultureblogger I'm aware of at the moment is David Sucher at his architecture-and-town-planning blog City Comforts (here). He's only a couple of weeks into blogging and is clearly overflowing with energy and things to say. He'll be terrif even if and when he slows down a bit, but lord knows there's a special thrill in catching someone while he's on fire. Short sample: A diverting and comfortable city --- check this out for yourself --- is not made of a series of 'brilliant' designs but is a fabric woven according to well-understood rules. Some of the buildings may indeed be indifferent as pieces of architecture. But they fit together to create good streets. Great stuff: in three sentences, David says 9/10s of all anyone really needs to know about architecture and neighborhoods. It's a pity -- a tragedy, really -- that so many of the architecture critics and schools have lost track of these basic, but important, principles. * Polly Frost (here) seems to be edging back into quirky blogging life again, having put up one of her too-rare but always insightful postings, this one about the new Lukas Moodysson picture "Lilya 4Ever." * Lynn Sislo (here) has been generous and inventive with links, has written reflective short essays about writing and racism, and has begun a series of postings on Classical Music 101. * Brian Micklethwait (here), writing about the architect Michael Graves, has some caustic and sensible things to say about design in general. * Two of the most civilized culturebloggers out there -- Alan Sullivan and Will Duquette -- have moved their blogs onto Moveable Type -- yay to that -- and have new URLs. Alan's Seablogger is now here, and Will's View from the Foothills is now here. Adjust those bookmarks. * And, Yahmdallah visits a few strip joints, here. Best,... posted by Michael at June 14, 2003 | perma-link | (1) comments

Friday, June 13, 2003


Ripped From the Pages of Friedrich's Sketchbooks...
Michael: This little doodle dates from the era when my girls were young enough that I had both Barbie dolls and little wooden train cars lying around when I went looking for something to draw. Technically, this is mildly interesting because there’s no linear under-drawing involved; it was all done with overlapping patches of acrylic paint, in which an original shape could be corrected only by changing the shapes around it. I remember it more for it's rather sinister mood: I remember that as I was painting away, it started dawning on me that that Barbie, in contrast to the straightforward, four-square train car, was a bit of a schemer. As is fairly obvious from the background it was painted at night; I guess somehow a certain late night cynicism worked its way into the painting. Sorry, Barbie. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at June 13, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- William Berlind on Itunes
Friedrich -- We aren't the only people gnawing over the question of how the digitizing of almost everything may be affecting the arts, and our experience of the arts. William Berlind noticed that his daughter and her friends are listening to pop music via Apple's new Itunes service -- but they aren't downloading the songs. They're just listening to the free 30-second promotional snippets. He takes off from there to make many terrific observations. Sample passage: Technological advancement has changed the priorities of composition. The emphasis, which was once on development and theme, on modulations that took place over the course of a song or a musical piece, has shifted to sound design and texture—variables that can be piled up and reduced in a manner of seconds. It’s the difference between developing a musical idea (recasting it, changing keys and repeating it) and putting a sound through different filters, or playing a beat four bars with a bassline, four bars without. If our musical attention span could be diagnosed, we would all get treated for musical Attention Deficit Disorder. Berlind's piece can be read in the New York Observer, here. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 13, 2003 | perma-link | (4) comments

Free Reads -- Lawrence Osborne on Che Guevara
Friedrich -- Che Guevara: idealistic and charismatic, the James Dean of revolutionaries? Or a spoiled, ineffective, vain man whose escapades came to nothing? And why does he continue to fascinate Western media and arts people? Lawrence Osborne, writing in the New York Observer here, spells out a lot of useful things. Sample passage: All of Guevara’s books seem to come with sheaves of photographs, as if everything in his life were constantly being prepared for mythology. And in these, we see Che as he probably was: a pretty, convivial, quick-tongued Latin American prince off on a peripatetic lark. He sizes up people according to whether they are "useful" or not; he badgers his mother for supplies of mate tea. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 13, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Thursday, June 12, 2003


Guest Posting --Stephen Bodio on Writing
Friedrich -- Tons of good thinking, reacting and writing in the comments to the posting below about writing a book (here). I hope visitors will treat themselves to a very lively and classy conversation. I want to be sure that one of the comments especially doesn't get overlooked. Stephen Bodio, a professional freelance writer who lives in New Mexico, wrote in with a lot of interesting thoughts and observations. I'm lifting what follows from the comments as well as from a few emails he and I exchanged. He's given us permission to use what he wrote on the blog: Great discussion -- I read it through going yes, yes, yes, all the way. You have summed up the current dismal state of publishing perfectly. Despite which: I am a well-reviewed and utterly ill- paid writer (mostly "creative non-fiction" -- nature/travel/bio for lack of a better definition) with 4 or 5 books in print, and I can't think of anything else I'd rather be. I should add I haven't had a "real" job in close to 30 years, and have no independent income. I do write an awful lot of magazine work, from well-paying (Atlantic) to stuff that pays $125 a pop (newspaper book reviews). You have to do it because you love it; you must -- otherwise it's really pointless. If you do, you do it because you must, and do on some level enjoy it. One alternative to job versus starvation may be to live somewhere off the beaten track that is very cheap. I have lived for 22 years in a small New Mexico village 75 miles by air from the nearest city, and in a determinedly un-chic part of the state. I live in a 100 year old stone house with 4 main rooms (a nice piece of "Alexandrian" vernacular architecture) that cost me less than a cheap new car does today. My newest car is 13. My wife currently works part-time in the local post office. At times she has worked full-time, and often had no job at all. Our main expenses are books and travel. And travel itself can help pay the bills. We have in the last decade spent time in London, France, Zimbabwe, traveled twice to Mongolia, and are heading for Kazakhstan in the fall. All trips were at least work-related, and the last 3 paid for up front. What other life would give me freedom to do what I like and write about it? A job that paid for a month here and there would take all my time ... expensive! Isolation was more of a problem 20 years ago. Now, with blogs, e-mail, and internet it's not even a factor. I "talk" every week with people in England, New York, Latvia, Finland, Russian, Kazakhstan and more. There is more info a click away than you could have had in, say, Victorian London. Blogs (and websites, etc.) ARE dessert -- "Mmmm--bllooggs!" -- but also the best news and culture source there is.... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

The Frame Around the Picture
Friedrich -- The Wife and I caught a couple of movies the other night, one right after the other. First we saw L'Auberge Espagnole, then we walked over to Finding Nemo. An interesting contrast. "L'Auberge Espagnole" does a good job of updating and purveying French post-grad charm -- cafes, airports, affairs, heartbreak, and larky absurdity, with a good helping of ideas (about multiculturalism, "Europe," sex and computers) in there spicing the lot of it up. Very French, yet very of-this-moment too. I seem to remember reading that the film was shot in a semi-improv style on digi-cams. The editing has been souped up here and there with computer tricks: with multiple windows, with the screen treated as a desktop, with quicked-up motion, etc. A perfectly fine, novel-like, lightweight-but-touching Euro-art film, if 20 minutes too long. "Finding Nemo"? Well... Pixar does a good, meticulous job, but as I've got almost no taste for this kind of thing I don't have much to say. Had an OK time, I guess, even if the film didn't click along as confidently as the "Toy Story" movies did. Impressive, sometimes beautiful. I give it three "Whoa"s. But I couldn't have cared less, to tell you the truth, despite the fact that it was a much more complete digital experience than the French movie was: computer animation, of course, plus we went out of our way to see the movie digitally projected -- thrown up on screen by the Texas Instruments DLP system, while a phenomenal sound system was showing off its stuff. An ideal viewing environment for a computer-animated film, in other words: a clear, detailed, hyper-controlled total sensorium. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. But what the evening left me thinking about most was "immersiveness." (Prodded and guided by some of our blog's visitors, I've been dabbling -- ineptly, hesitantly -- with a couple of computer games, Nanosaur and Doom, and they've got me thinking about the topic of immersiveness too.) How immersive is a movie or other art experience? How immersive do you want it to be? Is immersiveness always a good thing? To cut directly to my own preferences: I don't crave immersiveness, at least not in the literal sense -- and the literal sense (as in physically larger, more "realistic," with everything made more impressive and explicit) seems to be what people mean when they talk about immersiveness. I sometimes wonder if I'm a freak and an exception. While I certainly appreciate a well-projected film, once the projection-quality has hit the acceptable level, my brain is on to questions about subject and style instead. And I confess that I'm surprised by how many people seem to crave immersive experiences. I suppose what most of them are saying is that they love the feeling of being imaginatively transported, and simply want more such. But there seems to be a sizable number of people who want more than that; they seem to want to be made to feel like they're in the action, in the most... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (14) comments

Everything You Wanted to Know About Design
Michael: When researching Carl Rungius for my posting on his retrospective, I came across this rather snappy animated introduction to design principles that uses his paintings as illustrations. You don’t have to be in love with Carl Rungius to enjoy this little tutorial. Check it out here. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Browsing and Scanning
Friedrich -- Dept. of "You Know It's True Just From Looking at the Products But It's Always Fun to Hear the People Responsible Spell the Facts Out Anyway": A graphic designer I ran into at a party told me that most magazines are now designed and made with the idea in mind that purchasers will spend no more than 30-45 minutes with the magazine. (In more logocentric days, such publications were referred to as "fast reads." These days it seems like magazines are simply assumed to be fast reads.) Ie., most magazines are being made to be leafed through, not read. It seems to me that the implicit assumption (and fact) is that the words are present to 1) accompany (and explain) the flow of pictures and graphics, and 2) to be dipped into from time to time. I wonder what percentage of their articles, essays and stories magazine editors expect readers to read all the way through in the old, linear, from-beginning-to-end way. How do you experience magazines these days? I'm awestruck by them, but in a very limited way; as composed-and-assembled, Hollywood-esque productions (conceptualized, designed, printed, etc), they're often astounding, and bursting with energy. That said, I by and large have no interest beyond the curious-and-anthropological. I look at them trying to figure out what's what in terms of the media world. Main conclusion: Most of them seem to mimic channel-surfing. Main reflection: Fascinating how channel-surfing has become the media/art experience against which all others are measured, isn't it? I guess what interests me most is the frame of mind the current media products promote and assume. I find "looking" to be one thing, "browsing/scanning" to be another, and "reading" to be a third. In a way, it's a continuum, from visual to verbal. In another, "browsing and scanning" stands apart. "Looking" and "reading" can both lead to and promote experiences of depth, while "browsing and scanning" always seems to be a matter of skittering along the surface. I wonder if it has to be. But, in any case, these three different mental activities/states-of-mind seem so different -- at least I experience them as very different -- that I'm surprised studies aren't being done on them. I'd be surprised if brain scans of people looking, of people browsing/grazing, and of people really reading didn't reveal striking differences. But a few quick Googlings haven't dropped anything in my lap. Have you stumbled across any such discussions? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 12, 2003 | perma-link | (8) comments

Tuesday, June 10, 2003


Free Reads -- Postwar architecture
Friedrich -- Two terrific finds, both of which I ran across thanks to David Sucher's superb new blog, City Comforts, here. Roger Scruton and Sophie Jeffreys argue that "The Future is Classical," here. Fabulous stuff, clearer and brainier than which it would be hard to be, and well worth a look no matter what your feelings about classicism. Sample passage: The critical orthodoxy that established modernism in architecture takes its inspiration from impressionist painting, symbolist poetry, and atonal music – in other words, from artistic movements addressed to an elite. The modern architect was likened to the modern painter – dedicated to re-shaping the language of his art, so as to explore new regions of the human psyche and new possibilities of expression. Aesthetic freedom and experiment were held to be, in architecture as in the other arts, the pre-conditions of authentic utterance. Classical architecture was therefore seen in the same light as figurative painting and tonal music: the last gasp of a culture from which the life had fled. The fact that the classical tradition is popular, functional, and pleasing to the eye did not deter the modernists: on the contrary, this was simply the final proof that classicism was kitsch. And one of the best uses of a blog I've ever run across: using Portland as his example, Michael Totten tells -- and shows! -- you almost everything you need to know about American cities and buildings since World War II here. If the permalink doesn't take you directly to the posting, do a search on "modernism." Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Guest Posting -- John Leavitt on art students
Friedrich -- John Leavitt, a student at the School of Art and Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology, dropped us an email that included some nifty observations about life at art school. I asked if we could run an excerpt, and he's given us his OK. As a current art student at a not-so-bad state-arts trade school, I can say with arrogant confidence that the bulk of fine art students are out of their frigging minds. Drug-addled and insular, a whole system of classes and teachers support and indulge their whims and fancies without any grounding in technical or economic reality. You'd think they'd teach about the gallery system, how to land a show, or how to make slides for presentation. I'm a refugee from the Fine Arts dept. myself, who settled in the much more stable and levelheaded Illustration dept. The courses there at least give the students a grounding in reality (draftsmanship, painting, how to copy a photograph or paint features), in addition to teaching how to get a job. They don't teach concepts or composition though, so the result is many a technically wonderful but dead senior show -- an award-winning photorealistic painting of a brick wall sums it up nicely. In my experience, the Fine Art students are incoherent, insular, and ignorant even about modern art. The illustration students are, as a whole, more realistic about their careers, more technically skilled, and less attitude-driven. I do lament a kind of "Illustration-guy" template I see walking down the street, or in every autobiographical indie comic. A flannel-wearing, lanky, insecure guy with thick glasses and an interest in Japanese prints and 1900 recordings. But I digress. Graphic designers, on the other hand, have always seemed more snot-nosed than illustrators, and hostile toward anything done by hand. Of course, that could just be my own prejudices talking. But I don't like the modern computer-ready aesthetic and think that graphic design is just a subcategory of illustration, unworthy of its own field. The endless minutiae of graphic design theory seems to support this -- no place to go but into the fractal esoteric. And, as a type, the graphic designer seems like a wormy bald man with big earphones and a Gnostic attitude. An extension of the digitizing trend to turn all gross matter into pure light? An offshoot of the puritan-minimalist movement, white walls to shut out sensuality? There you have it, the 3 types of artists I meet in art school. Our thanks to John Leavitt. Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Critical Standards
Dear Michael: After our own Blowhardy examination of the Louis and Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cinncinnati (which you can read here), I found it particularly amusing, and instructional, to examine Paul Goldberger’s take on this building and on Frank Gehry’s recently opened Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College. (Mr. Goldberger’s essay, “Artistic License,” appears in The New Yorker of June 2) It will not come as a surprise to you that Mr. Goldberger gives both of these buildings big sloppy wet kisses of adoration. What is surprising is that he admits to having had a spasm of (understandable) doubt about the Rosenthal Center at the drawing stage: Hadid’s first designs, which were shown in 1998, were conceptually heavy and were difficult to understand except as a series of fragmented, disconnected masses floating in space. Z. Hadid, Design for Rosenthal Center, 1998 However, the redoubtable Mr. Goldberger triumphantly overcomes this shameful “O ye of little faith” moment and finds the final result a triumph: From the outside, the building looks like a mixture of concrete and black aluminum boxes that float over a glass-enclosed base…This is a virtuouso composition, in which the masses hover in graceful counterpoint to one another. Golly, the final building sounds as if it is…well…exactly what Mr. Goldberger thought the plans suggested: a series of fragmented, disconnected masses floating in space. It kind of makes you wonder what set of aesthetic or practical criteria a critic is using when his criticisms and his praise arise from exactly the same phenomena. Z. Hadid, Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, Cincinnati, 2003 Moreover, I must admit to a difficulty in conceptualizing how large concrete and metal boxes can be said to “float” or “hover.” One wonders how the notion of “floating” or “hovering” masses squares with the old Modernist notion of (1) truth to materials and (2) having the design of the building express its structural reality. And yet, in a manner that only a master-critic such as Mr. Goldberger can observe, this squaring must have taken place, as he places Ms. Hadid squarely in that venerable tradition: Hadid is expanding the notions of interpenetrating space and geometric composition that have preoccupied modernist architects for more than a hundred years. In any event, he makes it clear that petty caviling about the building simply won’t be tolerated, at least around the New Yorker: The Contemporary Arts Center ought to stifle doubts about Zaha Hadid’s work being either buildable or workable. This has been built, and it works. (For some reason, this sentence reminds me of an old 1950s TV series, Sgt. Preston of the Yukon; at the end of every episode, with the villain safely behind bars, Sgt. Preston would turn to his trusty canine companion and, while literally shutting the RMP version of an attaché case, remark: “Wolf, this case is closed!” ) F. Gehry, 2003, Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts at Bard College Then Mr. Goldberger turns... posted by Friedrich at June 10, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments

Monday, June 9, 2003


Diversity on Campus -- NOT
Michael: One of our correspondents sends an interesting tidbit about ideological “diversity” on campus: Professor Mike Adams at Univ of North Carolina tried an experiment. He put up a bumper sticker for Clinton-Gore on his office door, which stayed there for 2 years. Even though there is an official policy at UNC that faculty cannot actively campaign for candidates on campus, nobody said a word about this bumper sticker. Then he took it down, and put up a bumper sticker that said "Bush-Cheney". It took one week for several faculty members to lodge a complaint. He sent out a memo to his fellow faculty that said "You have been involved in an experiment in tolerance, one which several of you have failed..." But just remember, the idea that there is an ideological tilt to American’s universities is just another fantastical notion of the vast, right-wing conspiracy. Cheers, Friedrich P.S. A fairly humorous discussion of “socially acceptable” bigotry both on and off campuses can be read here.... posted by Friedrich at June 9, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Saturday, June 7, 2003


Tacit Knowledge -- Writing a Book
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- Another posting in my very occasional series concerning the rules of thumb that people in the arts work by but almost never get around to articulating. Today: writing a book. Isn't it interesting how many people dream of writing a book? It's sweet, and it's (mostly) harmless, and I guess I once semi-shared that dream, and I guess one or two brain cells still make room for the possibility that I will someday write a book (fat chance). But, but, but ... Then I followed the book-publishing industry for 15 years. Fact #1: Millions of people are working on books, or believe that they could write a book, or are planning to write a book. And I'll bet that for many of them a part of that fantasy is the making - a - living-as-a-freelancer -doing-something-interesting-rather- than-working-as-a- flunky-in-a-boring- job element. But how many people in the country actually manage to make a living writing books? A couple of hundred. Millions would like to do it. A couple of hundred actually manage it. In other words, your chances of making a living writing books are perhaps better than are your chances of ever playing in the NBA. But not all that much better. Technical pause here: there's an important-to-understand distinction that needs to be made between "book publishing" generally and "trade book publishing," which is what most of us think of when we think of book publishing -- ie., the biz that creates the books that fill up the local bookstore. Book publishing generally is a fairly substantial industry, and most of the money in the field -- 2/3, if I remember right -- doesn't come from "trade book" publishing. It's generated by the sales of products many of us almost never think of as books: medical reference books, atlases, textbooks. This end of the biz operates in the semi-rational way many businesses do, with similar profit margins and incentive structures. There's real money to be made here, other words. You can get rich writing and/or publishing textbooks, for instance, even if it's a very competitive industry. Trade-book publishing, the wing of the industry that fills up your local chain store, is a very modest subset of book publishing. And it's got a quite different texture. It's rather irrational, makes very modest profits, is full of well-meaning ex-English majors, and is forever being invaded (and wreaked havoc on) by conglomerates that think they can run it like a conventional business, and who always fail to turn the trick. Despite the celebrated star authors and the occasional celeb execs and agents, there's rather little money to be made here. And most of that money is as flukey and moody as the money that sloshes around the moviebiz. You'd be surprised by how many name authors don't manage to make a living at their trade. Fact #2: Most people who write "serious" trade nonfiction actually lose money on their projects. Biographies? Serious travel books? Moneylosers for most... posted by Michael at June 7, 2003 | perma-link | (186) comments

Friday, June 6, 2003


A Fistful of Dinars
Michael: I was going through some of my old emails today and noticed two that seemed somehow connected. Both emails contained excerpts from stories that had appeared in the New York Times. The first was from the May 5 edition: In the hours before American bombs began falling on the Iraqi capital, one of President Saddam Hussein's sons and a close adviser carried off nearly $1 billion in cash from the country's Central Bank, according to American and Iraqi officials here. The removal of the money, which would amount to one of the largest bank robberies in history, was performed under the direct orders of Mr. Hussein, according to an Iraqi official with knowledge of the incident… Neither Iraqi nor American officials claimed to know the whereabouts of the $1 billion or, for that matter, of Saddam Hussein, Qusay Hussein or Mr. Mahmood. All three men are being sought by the United States. The Iraqi official insisted on anonymity because, he said, he feared that he could fall victim to Mr. Hussein or one of his associates who remain at large. The next was a movie review from May 25: The newly restored version of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" has three scenes not included in the American release; they were dubbed into English for the first time last year, after Mr. Eastwood and Mr. Wallach made time to record them. These additions give each of the characters a bit more screen time, but overall serve only to increase the dazed lunacy of the chase for the gold, which becomes a slapstick comedy with a gun permit. Suddenly my mind began to wander… A little meeting at Baath Party HQ in downtown Bagdad… (Wild Applause) Saddam Hussein: Well, boys, now that the Americans are about to invade, I suppose you’d like to know my plan. Audience (off): You bet! Saddam Hussein (off): A few days ago I sent a trusted associate to the National Bank of Iraq to make a little withdrawal. Associate: “I’d like a billion dollars. Small bills, please.” Saddam Hussein (off): It was a tidy sum…so large, in fact that it took several hours to load the truck! Don’t worry, I had all of the workers shot. Saddam Hussein(off): It will be plenty to keep all of us in luxury for life in some friendly vacation retreat, so relax and have no fear. I’ve arranged a little show for you. Enjoy! Baath Party Loyalists: Ah, Saddam, we knew you’d think of something! Come, join in the fun! Saddam Hussein: Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll be there as soon as I finish my target practice. (Suckers!) (SFX:) Loud Explosion Saddam Hussein (off): What a bunch of morons! No wonder my little schemes for world domination never worked out. Ah, but no crying over spilt milk. (Sings:) On the road, again...da da da da da....on the road again... One month later at U.S. Army HQ in Iraq... General Franks: So that's how it is. We seem... posted by Friedrich at June 6, 2003 | perma-link | (3) comments

Blockbusters, Week 2
Friedrich -- Interesting article in today's WSJ by John Lippman, their new L.A. showbiz reporter, discussing the way blockbuster movies are more and more creatures of their very first weekend. Some excerpts: It's no longer unusual ... for first-weekend box-office tallies to reach $60 million to $80 million ... But all that this may be adding up to is Hollywood's biggest mistake. America's love affair at the movies is turning into a one-night stand. More and more of the money to be made in ticket sales is coming in the opening days of a movie's release. Increasingly by the second weekend, a movie has likely raked in half of its total box office, and is 75% spent by its third weekend. (Ten years ago a movie was only about half-spent in its first month of release.) This quick-hit trend is actually eroding long-term box office. As fickle audiences shuttle on cue from one sci-fi epic to broad comedy to caper flick, many Hollywood insiders predict there will not be a movie this summer that is No.1 at the box office for two consecutive weekends -- the summer without a blockbuster. "Films don't have legs anymore," says Paul Dergarabedian ... It's a trend that started in earnest last summer, he says, when ticket sales for some notable movies began to drop off precipitously... This year, the drops are even more marked: "Daredevil," "X2: X-Men United" and "The Matrix Reloaded" all broke the 50% barrier ... Far from trying to stop the falloff, studios are starting to play to the fickle audience, 'blasting open' movies by booking as many as 8,000 screens at once at the multiplexes ... One thing missing from Lippman's excellent piece is a little long-view perspective. Time for some Blowhards background! Back in our (ahem) moviestruck youth, it wasn't unusual for a movie to take weeks after its initial release to even get to smaller cities and towns. Hit movies often ran for months and months. It was the sucess of "Jaws" in 1976 that changed all this. "Jaws" was the first big-budget studio pic to be marketed like exploitation pictures had sometimes been promoted, via the process known (if I remember right) as "four-walling" -- blitzing the airwaves with ads, renting tons of theaters, creating a gigantic stir. But the little exploitation pics were only able to do this on a city-by-city basis. With "Jaws," Universal blitzed the entire country at once. On the subject of which, I realize from talking to young people that many of them seem to think that "the summer blockbuster" movie is a phenom that dates to the very birth of movies and may indeed be some kind of representation of the very nature of movies themselves. In fact, it started fairly recently -- with "Jaws." Hard to believe, but prior to "Jaws" there really wasn't anything like what we currently consider "summer movie season." Dept. of Fun Coincidences: in another part of today's WSJ, there's a review of Connie Bruck's new... posted by Michael at June 6, 2003 | perma-link | (18) comments

Free Reads -- V.S. Ramachandran
Friedrich -- From a BBC 4-sponsored talk given by Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Director of the Centre for Brain and Cognition and professor with the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Programme at the University of California, San Diego: I would say there is something special about humans - that is reflective self-consciousness and it's unlikely that dogs, for example, have that. But there's something even more unique about humans, which I don't think any of us can explain yet. Sometimes reporters come and; humour - you know, we're the laughing primate; we have free will; we can contemplate the consequences of our actions, so on and so forth. But there is one quality that I think is very special and that is the need to be more than human. In other words, you're constantly confronted with this dilemma. You know that everything that you hear from science and from neurology, that you are a beast, just a hairless ape which happens to be a little bit more clever than other apes. At the same time, you don't feel like that. You feel like you're an angel trapped inside this body, constantly craving immortality, craving transcendence trying to escape from this body. And this is the essential human predicament. Good, huh? It's from a terrific five-lecture introduction to contempo neuroscience, presented in very enjoyable, non-technical English. Go here to read them all. Arty 2Blowhards visitors won't want to miss Lecture 3, "The Artful Brain," or this brief discussion here, in which Prof. Ramachandran draws up a tentative list of ten laws of art. Both of these talks left me with an urge to introduce Prof. Ramachandran to our friend Nikos Salingaros. I think they'd find a lot of common ground. I'm tellin' ya: neuroscience, computer science, evo-bio and evo-psych, the classical revival, Alexander/Krier/Salingaros, the Web ... All these semi-parallel things are happening. They're live ideas and fields, and more and more they're feeding into and reinforcing each other. There's juice there to feed on and power there to surf on. Meanwhile the arts continue sucking on the long-dried-up corpse of Euro-theory -- po-mo, decon, etc. How can they be so completely unaware that the world left them in the dust about 20 years ago? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 6, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Thursday, June 5, 2003


Torn from the Pages of Friedrich's Sketchbooks
Michael: Again, as I threatened, I’m sharing some of the contents of my sketchbooks. Both of my examples today are copies after paintings. I make such a copy from a desire to explore the visual logic of an artist—how does he or she produce their signature effects? I suspect some part of my brain thinks it knows and wants to test its hypothesis, although my “normal” consciousness hasn’t a clue (as usual). So I get a sketchbook and start drawing, and see what comes out. The first sketch is after “The Felicity of the Regency” by Peter Paul Rubens. The original is with the rest of Rubens’ Marie de Medici cycle in the Louvre, which I’m sorry to say, is not where I made this drawing. I believe Ingres as he led his pupils through the halls of the museum forced them to shade their eyes so they wouldn’t see these paintings, claiming that Rubens couldn’t draw, which Ingres must have known was nonsense, and that he was “a butcher” which I suspect is much closer to the truth—for Ingres, anyway. In any event, I made this as a pencil drawing and went over it with acrylic paints, because I was investigating how Rubens modeled his heroic nudes, which are both incredibly three dimensional and full of muscular energy (not bad for patches of paint on a 375-year-old-canvas.) Moreover, I had noticed that despite creating terrific heroic nudes in one painting after another—figures that in anybody else’s paintings would have hogged the limelight and turned everything else into mere background—Rubens somehow integrated these figures into the rest of the image so that you looked at the whole canvas. What I discovered is that Rubens used his modeling, and particular his highlights, to create linear webs all over the canvas that channel the eye to and fro, around and down, loop the loop. I first noticed this when I realized that his highlights weren’t isolated little puddles of paint, but either physically or by extension connected to each other, pulling your attention along with them. In short, there’s more than a little Jackson Pollock in Rubens (or possibly vice versa, considering their dates.) The second copy is after “Pregnant Girl” by Lucian Freud, a somewhat more contemporary effort (1960-1). Again, I had been very struck by the plasticity of Freud’s modeling, and surprised myself by reaching for a colored pencil to make a copy (remember about my conscious mind not having a clue. Oh, heck, just assume I never have a clue.) What I discovered is that Freud’s modeling is a sort of jigsaw-puzzle affair, in which rather than blending his various color-tones into each other, he uses them to make quite distinct shapes on the canvas…think of picking up a brush loaded with a yellowish skin tone and drawing a triangle, then using a brush with a grayish tone to create a long, narrow patch, then mixing some pinkish paint to create a lozenge-shaped area, etc. It’s very much drawing... posted by Friedrich at June 5, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Wednesday, June 4, 2003


Psychological Suspense
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I caught a good French movie the other night -- Claude Miller's Alias Betty. From one point of view, it's a fairly absorbing, not-very-thrilling thriller. But from another, it's a first-rate example of my very favorite genre, the one known as "psychological suspense." Some people like speculative history; some like hobbit-style fantasy; some like Cold War spy fiction. I like psychological suspense. I can't defend my taste for it, which seems built into my biology. All I know is that I tend to be happy and engrossed when I'm in that world. Ever run across discussions of this genre? I can't imagine why; it's not very well known in America. England and France have much more developed traditions of psych-suspense fiction. But it's got its own interesting history, and sets of conventions and expectations. A few movies and authors to get us in the ballpark: Ruth Rendell. Patricia Highsmith. Simenon's non-Maigret novels. "Lantana." The Swedish co-authors Sjowell and Wahloo. "Purple Noon." "Cul de Sac." Chabrol. "The Vanishing." The movie version of "The Talented Mr. Ripley" was a highly-compromised version of psychological suspense. Another fairly recent example: "With a Friend Like Harry." Have you seen that one? A French film about a charming murderer, very lowkey and quietly freaky. Tragedy, desperation, psychosis -- and life goes on. What characterizes the genre? I find it helpful to keep in mind that it isn't a mystery-fiction subgenre; it's really best thought of as a crime-fiction subgenre. That helps take some weight off the idea of "mystery." Its main characteristic, though, is it generally uses a crime as a pretext for opportunities to look into personality and sociology. There's a murder or a kidnapping, sure -- but often in psychological suspense you know from the outset who did it. Ie., from a mystery point of view, there's pointedly no mystery. And often the central character, if there is one, isn't the investigator but the criminal. In the crime-fiction world, these fictions are sometimes referred to not as whodunnits but as whydunnits, because they aren't as concerned with the finding of the solution to a crime as they are with psychological and social observation -- with tracing the reasons that lead to a crime and the consequences that flow from it. Where the detective novel, say, drives to a solution, the psychological-suspense fiction lingers over the minds of the criminal and the other people involved. I recall someone somewhere writing that psychological suspense is (roughly) "the story of a crime, not the story of the tracking down of a criminal." These novels and films often resemble Altman movies but with actual pretexts. Suspense? Well, kindasorta. But seldom of the rushing-to-a-breathless-climax sort. There's often a tone of dread or malignity -- you're watching or reading about curious, fated, peculiar things, people and actions. But that tone is usually part of a more "objective" overall point of view. (Because of this, these books and movies are more likely than most to... posted by Michael at June 4, 2003 | perma-link | (18) comments

Schizophrenic Science
Michael: When you were leafing through a magazine, did you ever wonder if the editors ever read the whole publication? Or even the whole section? I recently had this experience in connection with the June issue of Scientific American. On page 20, in the News Scan section of the magazine, I saw a story on “Acting Locally: In Curbing Greenhouse Gas Emissions, States Go It Alone.” The main thrust of this story is accurately summarized in its concluding paragraph: Still, the collective effort of the states is already beginning to compensate for the lack of reductions by the Bush Administration. “You may have some American states that are better prepared, from a policy standpoint, to reduce greenhouse gases than a number of nations that have ratified Kyoto,” [Barry] Raab [of the University of Michigan] comments. The earth’s atmosphere will take whatever help it can get. The Problem, Right? Okay, I thought, that’s interesting, and then kept flipping until I reached page 28—still in the News Scan section of the magazine. Now I’m confronted with a little squib entitled, “Rising Sun”: Humans may be shouldering too much of the blame for global warming, according to a new look at data from six sun-gazing satellites. They suggest that Planet Earth has been drenched in a bath of solar radiation that has been intensifying over the past 24 years—an increase of about 0.05 percent each decade. If that trend began early last century, it could account for a significant component of the climatic warm-up that is typically attributed to human-made greenhouse gases, says Richard C. Willson of Columbia University’s Center for Climate Systems Research in Coronado, Calif…[Willson thinks] the evidence merits keeping a close eye on both the sun and humans to better guage their relative influences on global climate. “In 100 years I think we’ll find the sun is in control,” he says. Or the Problem...? Hey, I’m resolutely agnostic on the whole topic of global warming, but it sure would be easier on us average-citizen types if Scientific American, to say nothing of the rest of the scientific community, could make up its mind. Cheers, Friedrich... posted by Friedrich at June 4, 2003 | perma-link | (5) comments

Tuesday, June 3, 2003


Computers, animation and drugs
Friedrich -- Are you looking forward to seeing the new Pixar "Nemo" movie? I am, if only sorta. I'm not a fan of longform animation generally, but I've found the Pixar movies pretty enjoyable and impressive. A gal I once interviewed spends some time every year visiting the arts schools in the US and Canada recruiting fresh cannon fodder for one of the big animation departments. She told me that the best young artists she sees (ie., skillful, devoted, etc) are the kids who are serious about making a go of it as professional animators. They work hard at conventional drawing and painting skills, and they turn themselves into snazzy and imaginative computer people too. They also think sensibly about making a living as an artist. Meanwhile, the fine-arts kids drink, horse around, feel superior, and carry on like they're doing something important. How do you react to the new animated features generally? I mainly avoid them. Longform animation goes nightmarish on me pretty quickly: please, someone, make it stop! But I do find the Pixar movies bearable. The Pixar crowd gives story and character some real focus and concentration, for one important thing. You don't feel you're being forcefed product. The pictures feel artisanal -- put together as unique pieces of cyber-handicraft. Years ago I took one of those Robert McKee screenwriting classes -- brilliant, by the way -- and wound up during a break talking to a guy from Pixar. Nice, bright, obviously hardworking. He told me that Pixar makes every employee take McKee's class. "It's all about the storytelling at Pixar," he said. "People think it's the computers and the visuals. But it's really all about crafting the story and figuring out how best to tell it." Beats me whether it's true that literally everyone at Pixar takes the course. But he did convince me that Pixar takes storytelling seriously. And I find the Pixar visuals impressive, though I'd have a hard time saying I plain enjoy them. Everything these days is so intense, so overproduced, and the Pixar visuals are no exception. I find that I'm constantly wincing. Why is everything so damn vivid and emphatic? Does everything have to come at my senses so damn hard? I'm also surprised that more people don't seem to have the kind of trouble I do with what computers do with light. This isn't a minor problem for me. Movies? Light? Pretty closely related. But everything in a computer-animated picture looks flat and dead -- as though lit by flourescents that were bounced off of concrete. There's never any sparkle or lyricism in the light; it isn't life-giving. I suppose the geniuses at Pixar are on the case. Heck, they've got hair and fur under some control these days. I wonder how long it'll be before they make the light behave better. But I have a larger thesis here, which is that the whole drive with computers, electronics and the media is to create what are essentially drug trips.... posted by Michael at June 3, 2003 | perma-link | (22) comments

Rungius, Hunting and the Roots of Art
Michael: I’ve written a couple postings on the topic of the “primitive” issues that lurk underneath our modern notions of aesthetics. I didn’t expect to visit this topic again but I ran smack into it in the art of Carl Rungius. I caught an exhibit of his work—the largest ever assembled—at the Gene Autry Museum. (I should note that the show was organized as a traveling exhibition by the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, Alberta, which contributed the lion’s share of the paintings.) I’d heard vaguely of Rungius (pronounced “Rungus”) before. When I was in art school, I got very interested in drawing animals at zoos, and spent some time learning about wildlife art. My impression of Rungius was as an animal painter from the era—the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th –when not-quite-Modern artists were still trying to blend academic drawing with Impressionist color. In other words, Rungius was a rough contemporary of the California Impressionists, Joaquin Sorolla and John Singer Sargent, who just happened to paint animals in the woods. Rungius, along with the Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors, also seemed to form a link in a chain between the Barbizon animal painters of the mid-19th century and 20th century American wildlife artists like Bob Kuhn and Robert Bateman. As far as it went, this was correct. But that understated the truth by a lot. Carl Rungius—who was born in Germany and educated in Berlin—actually single handedly transplanted the very German tradition of Jagdmalerei (the representation of hunting scenes and game animals) to America. And, because at this very moment hunters (including Teddy Roosevelt) were creating the modern notion of conservation, Rungius also invented modern American wildlife painting, albeit more or less by accident. But I don’t want to focus on the social role of Rungius’ art in this post. Rather, I want to focus on a disturbing quality in his art that I first noticed in this drawing: C. Rungius, Skinned Feline, 1893 The label next to this drawing politely informed me that Rungius had hunted stray cats in order to obtain specimens for these anatomical studies. (Apparently there was some family background in taxidermy.) I could understand the passion of an animal artist to learn anatomy by dissection—not an ambition for the faint of heart, but fairly common since the Renaissance—but I have to admit the idea of deliberately stalking domestic cats struck me as a trifle outré. I took a closer look into his biography, and discovered that it wasn’t the artistic opportunities of America that lured this German artist to America—it was the opportunity for hunting big game! According to Dr. Karen Wonders in her essay, “Big Game Hunting and the Birth of Wildlife Art” in the show catalogue: By the end of the nineteenth century, hunting in Germany, for the average citizen, was an activity carefully controlled by local authorities who granted access to the land and by scientists responsible for managing the state forests and game animals. For an... posted by Friedrich at June 3, 2003 | perma-link | (11) comments

Monday, June 2, 2003


DVD Journal: "Drumline"
Michael Blowhard writes: Dear Friedrich -- I am one sorry arts buff and one sorry American, I confess it here and now. Why? Because I've always felt in my heart of hearts that one of the great American art forms is the African-American marching band tradition, yet I've never really looked into the phenomenon. In fact, I know nothing more about it (and have no more experience of it) than does any kid who grew up watching college-football halftime shows on TV. But, good heavens, those memories are so vivid -- I loved those marching bands -- that they make me want to do penance for not following up on the pleasures they represent. I feel like I've done a disservice to life itself. Auggghhhhh!!! (Sound of me knocking my head against a wall for being so negligent, then falling to my knees and begging forgiveness.) So I was thrilled to hear about the movie Drumline, apparently the very first feature ever made about African-American marching bands. I rented the DVD last night. Have you seen it? Well, it ain't all it could be, let's say that flat out. Much of it's almost childishly bad -- a Cuisinarted mush of every sports-movie and "Officer and a Gentleman" cliche you could ever come up with and then some, directed in a way that made The Wife lean over and say to me, "I feel like this has nothing to do with movies. It's making me feel like an alien, 80 years from now, trying to make sense of what this was." Market-driven yet naive is how it feels. You watch the movie convinced that the script wasn't written, it was hashed out by a conference room full of accountants. Brace yourself for the tale of the big-city hotshot who's got to get past his ego and learn how to be part of the team -- only the hotshot here is a snare drummer, and the team is the band. Every little narrative element that gets raised gets returned to, including a number I'd have been happier to see dropped. Lessons are learned to the right of you, lessons are learned to the left of you. The movie's also a textbook case of either underbudgeting or ineptness: you've never seen such a lousily-realized "college" atmosphere, or such badly disguised "crowds." Did they even bother asking the 50 people they hired to sit in the stadium seats to change costumes when they went and sat on the other side of the stadium to cheer the other band? Not enough of this The ultimate disappointment is that there isn't nearly enough marching, and what's there is so chopped up you barely get a sense of what the routines are meant to be. Bob Fosse, dude, I loved what you did yourself. But can't you make everyone else stop it, now? Subject for a future blog posting: "Fear of not cutting a scene to shreds." Still: cute performers, some snazzy footwork, glimpses of a lot... posted by Michael at June 2, 2003 | perma-link | (6) comments

Outsider Art--Watts Towers
Michael: Being the worst tourist in the world, after twenty years in Southern California I finally made my first visit to Watts Towers. I went along as a chauffeur for my daughter, who was bribed by her art teacher to attend a ceremony honoring high school art students who were the winners of an “expressionistic portrait” contest. (My daughter seemed rather relieved that her own expressionistic portrait, which she found a bit embarassing, hadn’t been selected for the contest.) The ceremony was held at the Watts Towers Art Center, a building right next door to the Towers themselves. The student art on display at the Center demonstrated to my satisfaction that (1) there are many talented young artists out there and (2) expressionism is not a mode of art making that I would recommend to the young. It’s hard to invest distortion with meaning when there isn’t a context of “standard” representation to play off of, and most of these kids are not yet sufficient masters of mimesis to provide this context. Likewise, the notion of having adolescents make art out of anguish is like throwing gasoline on fires—the outcome is rather too predictable for the creation of great art. I suspect trying to get giddy and tormented adolescents to create art in a classical vein would produce more interesting final results, as it would involve a far bigger imaginative stretch for teenagers. S. Rodia, Watts Towers (Nuestro Pueblo), 1921-54 While I was there, of course, I had to go check out the famous towers, which are just as surreal and yet oddly serene as reproductions would suggest. As I’m sure everyone has heard, they were the creations of Simon Rodia, who in 1921, at the age of 42, decided to leave a legacy of himself to the world and built his own quasi-architectural sculptures on a lot next door to his suburban house for the next 33 years. A construction worker and apparently the only Italian living in Watts (at the time not yet an African American community), Rodia began to build his unique sculptures out of rebar and concrete, decorated with glass bottles, sea shells, and various objects his highly irritated neighbors routinely threw at him. The structures grew and overlapped so that that the final result includes more than just towers; rather touchingly his “Nuestro Pueblo” includes walkways and seating areas for a social life that apparently eluded the solitary Rodia. In short, the creation of a true original, a folk artist, a nut-job, an “outsider,” despised by all of his right-thinking, upwardly mobile neighbors. But wait, he ultimately won that battle, didn’t he? His art is world famous, a scene of pilgrimage. Well, not exactly. Local politicians and community leaders have clearly clasped Mr. Rodia’s creation to their bosoms, but one suspects that their interest in his art is rather more superficial than Mr. Rodia would have preferred. The community has memorialized the site by surrounding it with a huge metal fence, knocking down other homes... posted by Friedrich at June 2, 2003 | perma-link | (7) comments

Sunday, June 1, 2003


The Anti-PPP Party
Friedrich -- Do you understand Primarily Political People? ("PPPs," I think of them as.) I don't. I mean, I do, but only intellectually: drawn to the action, and eager to do good and, oh yeah, get famous and snag power while doing so ... Temperamentally, though, I don't have a clue where the PPPs are coming from. I can't imagine a worse life or, generally, a worse set of people. Politics to me is, at best, an unfortunate necessity. We don't seem to be able to do without politics -- alas to that. But PPPs can't seem to stop scheming; they can't stop dreaming up ways to suck up to power, or imagining things they'd like to see government do. When I, anti-PPP person that I am, think of politics, what comes to me is ways of hogtying politicians into near-immobility, and things I'd like to see government get out of the business of doing. My general -- and highly sophisticated -- theory of government is that 95% of the time nothing really needs to be done. Did I mention that I'm contemplating a run for office on an anti-PPP platform? Care to donate to the cause? Best, Michael... posted by Michael at June 1, 2003 | perma-link | (12) comments

Manny Farber
Friedrich -- I know you read Manny Farber's film criticism back in our movie-nut college days, but I forget whether or not you were a fanatical Farber-head. Did his writing speak to you much? Has it stayed with you? (Isn't it funny, by the way, to remember how important a half a dozen film critics seemed not just to film buffs but to the culture more generally in those days? Unimaginable today.) If I remember right, during our years in college Farber was making a hard-to-explain turn. He'd become known in the '50s and '60s for championing little, masculine B-movies -- guy-stuff, often directed by people like Raoul Walsh, Anthony Mann, Don Siegel. But in the mid-'70s, his interests were turning to hardcore art movies, Straub and Huillet, Akerman, Herzog... My mind's on Manny Farber today because I noticed that a show of his paintings is going to open at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego's La Jolla location in September. Have you ever paid attention to Farber's paintings? I like them even better than I like his criticism, which I like plenty. Manny Farber: "Story of the Eye" But it's fun to think about his criticism too. It's all in that one book, a collection of essays and reviews that's been published several times, each time with a few new pieces added. (It's best known as "Negative Space," though it was once published, if I remember right, as "Manny Farber on Movies." His more recent essays and reviews were co-written with his wife, the painter Patricia Patterson.) I suspect I've stayed in closer touch with the battier reaches of the filmbuff world than you have since college, and it's been interesting to take note of how immensely much Farber's writing means to a certain class of film geek. I love Farber's writing and brain. But for some film geeks, his criticism isn't simply what I take it to be -- the journal of a brilliant crackpot, full of bizarrely wonderful perceptions about the visual and rhythmic qualities of movies. It means a whole lot more than that to them. Which isn't to say I'm not a fan. Farber can go off on speedy jags that make your head buzz, and make you think you're seeing movies in a whole new way. His writing is, as far as I'm concerned, about the excitement of getting off on your own intellect -- it's an intellectual-on-a-roll high: all mental/visual crackle. He's freewheeling in a west-coast way. People I know who took his classes and attended his lectures remember how intuitive they were. He didn't do anything systematic, let alone pedantic; instead, he made one nutty, provocative connection after another. He was famous among buffs for not studying movies as whole entities, but for making comparisons between bits of them -- drawing a line between a shot in Herzog and some lighting in an American crime movie, for instance. He was famous as well for letting a passage run unsually long --... posted by Michael at June 1, 2003 | perma-link | (2) comments