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