An informal log of recent enthusiasms.

"Remarks aren't literature."--Gertrude Stein

"...criticism in and of itself, even when it is most rigorous and inspired, is unable to entirely account for the phenomenon of creation..."--Mario Vargas Llosa

 
With the help of two good reviews, one by Jonathan Rosenbaum and one from Errata, I have a better idea of what I think about the film, Stone Reader: a compelling story, an interesting look at writers and how they produce books, and a survey of why some books succeed and others fail, told by a somewhat unlikable narrator whose shortcomings as a filmmaker partially mar his results.
posted by James at 11:09 PM

 
Two recent short passages in the New York Times cast a strong light on one of my many criticisms of the Academy.

One article ("Lives of 60's Revolutionaries Have Quieted, but Intensity of Beliefs Hasn't Dimmed," Daniel J. Wakin, New York Times, August 24, 2003, p. 25) is about the Weather Underground and what they are up to today. Two of them are, surprise, at universities:

Mr. Ayers is distinguished professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Ms. Dohrn, his wife, teaches law at Northwestern University and is director of its Children and Family Justice Center.

Teaches law?! Is this a joke? Now, it is generally very hard for academic couples to find positions geographically close to one another, so obviously these folks are particularly doted on by their employers (one of whon is the state of Illinois)--at two different universities. I suppose if you're a baby boomer you get special points if part of your graduate work included making and detonating bombs.

The other article ("Harvard Radical," James Traub, New York Times Magazine, August 24, 2003, pg. 28) is about Lawrence Summers. This guy seems like a mixed bag to me. I've long had the same dispute with economics and economists reflected in this quote:

"By training and temperament, economists are intellectual imperialists," said the political theorist Michael Sandel. "They believe their models of rational choice can explain all human behavior." (p. 45)

I wish I could have put it so eloquently. Whatever Summers's intellectual motivation, however, I think his goring of the several academic oxen is long overdue.

Now consider this quote:

...one of Summers's oldest friends at Harvard, the economist Dale Jorgenson, said that Summers "feels that universities in general have forgotten that they're part of the nation." (p. 33)

I say true enough, and I don't mean in a narrowly "patriotic" sense (as that word has come to be corrupted for nationalistic purposes) but in the intellectual sense. Is it daring or reckless, challenging or contemptuous of the constitutional system to hire bomb throwers to teach at universities? This is not a conservative or liberal question. Imagine if the University of Alabama hired a Klan triggerman--or even simply a Klan "spokesperson"--to teach political science. Would not this outrage the conscience of those who seek non-violent resolutions to the many disputes and injustices that permeate our society?
posted by James at 12:18 PM

 
Jan-Edward's blog has a sobering piece on a Bombay street photographer getting pictures of the bombing aftermath at the Gateway of India.

This blog is mostly in what looks to me like Dutch (forgive me if I'm wrong, Jan-Edward) and sometimes in English. His photo selection is extraordinary and leans towards international photo-journalism. The downloads can be long because of the number of images, but it is always worth it.
posted by James at 11:03 AM

 
Robert Capa has been an interest of mine since I read Richard Whelan's biography of him. A founder of the Magnum agency, he lived life so dashingly as to strain credulity--as does his famous photograph of the fallen Spanish Republican soldier, according to the film critic David Thompson, in this review of a new biography:

What I am suggesting is not just that Capa's great shot is suspect, but also that by now, nearly seventy years after he took it, most photographs are vulnerable. This thought might have taken the great smile off Capa's face. The debate over "The Falling Soldier" has gone on for years, and there is no reason for it to be settled now. Kershaw (like Whelan before him) examines the case carefully, and fairly, and he is plainly struck by doubt. The most upsetting thing, you see, is that beneath the great picture Vu published another Capa shot of another falling soldier, in very much the same place at the same moment. (We know this from the clouds.) But it is a different soldier. It feels a little like a different take. And for years no one could put a name to the fallen militiaman.

Maybe it takes a film critic to adequately consider what we are asking of the photos we see:

A painter at the front lines could easily and legitimately paint a picture of a falling soldier. No one would object, if the painting was as strong as Capa's photograph. Nobody would cry deceit. Painting, after all, implies measured decisions regarding subject, size, composition, coloring, and so on. Why must photography be different? Is it so reliant on absolute fidelity to the moment? Or must we admit that, for a moment at least, Capa the journalist had become Capa the painter or Capa the novelist? If so, does that cheat the nature of photography or penetrate deeper than the happy faith in spontaneity?...

In essence, Photoshop or computer-generated imagery at the movies allows you to show as a photograph whatever you like. There are people in both fields sufficiently sophisticated to believe that they can still discern digitally altered images, but those people admit that not everyone has their sophistication. And these arts are still in their infancy. In other words, the single thing that was most special about a photograph for over a hundred years--its life-likeness (as witness our abiding and foolish faith in photo identification)--is gone.
posted by James at 9:17 PM

 
When I was in London last fall I saw the great Flamenco guitarist, Paco Pena, stage an incredible show, Voces y Ecos, with his Paco Pena Flamenco Dance Company. It has been too long for me to write any sort of a decent review of it except to say that the guitarists (Pena had plenty of company), singers, and dancers were beyond belief. For someone (me) who has little exposure to Flamenco, the nearest I can compare it to is the Blues--not at all in content, but in feel.

Enough of that. Paco Pena has a website full of information. I would like to link directly to reviews of Voces y Ecos, but his site uses a mysterious method of navigation whereby the URL never changes. So go there and have a look around. There is plenty of good stuff there, including reviews, a discography, a biography, and great pictures.

What prompted this reverie? A review of the dancer Pilar Rioja that is brief enough that I can quote it here in full:

At 70, Spanish dancer Pilar Rioja has a figure women half her age might envy and, more important, a carriage that comes from decades of embodying pride in all its guises: joyous, disdainful, enraged, malevolent, erotic, and undaunted by grief. Rioja's upper body, centered on a resilient spine, operates like a lyric dancer's—chest held high, head flung back to expose the throat, arms etching curves on the air. But where her feet meet the ground, she is all vehement percussion. Heels, balls of the feet, and toes stab, clatter, brush, and tap in complex shifting rhythms, sometimes echoed by precisely articulated castanets. A deft hand with fabric as well, Rioja grasps an outsize fringed shawl (pink) or a long skirt of tiered ruffles (dying-ember red) and swirls it around her body until the material assumes its own dancing life. With a single pose or gesture, she conjures up vivid stock characters— from a young beauty in love to a fatally dangerous witch. Rioja is not an abandoned performer—one misses the barely-in-control ecstasy possible in flamenco—but she's an extremely wise one, and time has increased her ability to calibrate and convey her effects. Her show, a geographical and historical catalog of Spanish forms, ably accompanied by guitar, piano, and plaintive song and aptly framed by its intimate playhouse, is a satisfying treat.

posted by James at 9:13 PM

 
We have a new poet laureate--Louise Gluck. Among the little known facts about her:

Her father invented the X-acto knife.

A great man!
posted by James at 12:46 PM

 
Some English sourpuss has written an article about how living in Rome is a nightmare that tourists know nothing about. I was in Rome last year, and though I loved the place, I could guess that this gentleman is right. It merits extensive excerpts. First, this:

...trying to organise a social event in Rome is simply a waste of time. No matter what inducements you offer, your Italian friends will not commit themselves. Basically, what happens, happens, and you're best off not worrying about it. There's a sunny expression that sums this up: Chi c'e, c'e; chi non c'e, non c'e - if they come, they come; if they don't, they don't.

And this:

...there are moments when you cannot help fuming at the amateurishness of this way of working; moments in which you suspect that when the Italians boast of their ability to improvise brilliant solutions, what they really mean is that they prefer the quick-fix to getting their act together.

Finally, this:

How, then, do you come to terms with it? The answer is that unless you wish to go round in a lather of impotent fury (and it must be said that this is what many foreigners do), you are best advised to shrug your shoulders and turn to the immediate pleasures of life for consolation.

The Italians, you realise after a while, believe in just three things: beauty and health; family and security; and football. In the final analysis, the Italians simply cannot be bothered with the enormous problems that beset their beautiful country. They are bored by them. They don't want to know.

Why is it I still wish I lived there?

(Via Arts and Letters)
posted by James at 8:35 PM

 
The Atlantic Monthly has a fairly interesting interview with Virginia Postrel. What leapt out at me, though, was this criticism of Portland (I agree):

All I can say is that the worst traffic I've ever been in in my life-and that includes L.A.-was in Portland, at 7:00 in the morning.
posted by James at 8:28 PM

 
Marry Me, a novel by John Updike

John Updike is as famous for writing about middle-class suburban life as his is dismissed and even loathed for his subject matter. In the recent film, Stone Reader, about Mark Moskowitz's search for the writer of The Stones of Summer, Moskowitz airily dismisses Updike's Couples during a roll call of writers he admires by saying something along the lines of, "Couples, about suburban adulterers. Yuck." What's more, in recent years both Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace have attacked their older rival's work in print, in part to clear the field for their own work. I can't speak about Franzen, but as for David Foster Wallace, I can understand why he would want to attack Updike; quite simply, he can't compete.

Marry Me is a novel about suburban adulterers. Published in 1976, it reads like an historical novel, so remote--already--are the mores of this characters he writes about. In fact, the story is set even earlier, during the Kennedy Administration, so it was composed as an historical novel. The first section, "Warm Wine," plays to Updike’s detractors and nearly led me to abandon the book. The weakest part of the story, it tries capturing the banality of feeling between the illicit lovers, Jerry and Sally. It either fails or succeeds too well, I can't be sure. The second section, "The Wait," is also seen from Jerry and Sally's consciousnesses and carries some of "Warm Wine's" laboredness. Interestingly, "The Wait" is set during a flight delay at Washington National Airport, and as I read that section while I myself was traveling by plane, I was amused to be reminded that air travel has always been a chore, that troubles at the airport weren't invented in the last ten years.

Marry Me begins to involve with the succeeding sections, about Jerry and Sally's spouses' reactions. The story benefits from the space afforded by the additional psychic distance from the lovers' self-delusions. Once the affair is revealed, the interactions between the four are handled with sensitivity, nuance, and utterly without sentimentality. Each time we think we are certain that the story can go not further, Updike takes us into fresh territory. Suffice to say that Jerry is indecisive, and his inability to act forcefully drives the plot.

So why the sometimes sour reception of Updike's writing? For one, he makes verbal brilliance look easy. His books cover yards of shelf space in several genres, and his prose is always dazzling (even if I admit to finding a handful of clunkers in this novel). More likely, it is because Updike most often writes about suburbanites. Literary culture is devoutly urban, in fact it is devoutly Manhattanite in this country. I sometimes wonder if Updike is dismissed because he's embarrassing, reminding us as he does that so much of this country lives in the suburbs, or aspires to, or flees there once that first child comes of school age. Shouldn’t writers depict that homely territory, too?

A prediction: after Updike's death, and the critical piling on that his reputation will then suffer, his Collected Stories will finally come out--he has not even published a Selected--and that book will find an audience that will understand it is reading one of the great works of twentieth century American literature.
posted by James at 10:35 PM

 
When I was in the Bay Area last weekend to see Bruce, I also stopped in at the San Jose Museum of Art, where they were showing a fairly tacky "surf art" exhibit. This morning I came across a blog of the father of one of the "artists." The father is screenwriter and mystery novelist Roger L. Simon. I look forward to exploring his site further when I have the time.
posted by James at 9:16 AM

 
This essay by Ann Patchett about the late writer Lucy Grealy is not for those squeamish about medical procedures or desperately sad stories:

Lucy worried as much about whether she would be a writer as about being alone: “I’m still racking my brains to figure out where I went wrong. I am very negative about ever getting any sort of luck in writing or love or anything at all. It’s not just luck, I know I have to make it happen, but in the end you can’t force someone to publish your work or accept your love,” she wrote.
posted by James at 8:11 AM

 
I posted a blog about the SF Bruce Springsteen concert the other day; here is one from a newspaper in the area:

In front of his people, no entertainer on earth has ever been more powerful, more persuasive than Bruce Springsteen. Part of his complex bond with his audience comes from this utter and complete dedication, his willingness to give himself totally, his need to overpower the crowd. He never takes their love for granted. Each new concert is a new test, a new challenge, and the stage becomes his proving ground.

(Via Altercation)
posted by James at 10:46 AM

 
A couple of links to articles about writers, with an emphasis on the book trade.

The first one is about Martha Grimes:

She graduated from the University of Maryland and did postgraduate work at the University of Iowa. She wanted to be a poet and studied alongside Donald Justice and Philip Levine. Ms. Grimes married Edwin Van Holland and had a son, Kent, who today is her publicist. The couple divorced. For 15 years, while bringing up Kent in Maryland, she taught English at Montgomery College, a community college, at its Takoma Park campus, "an awful job," she said, and tried to write. In her late 40's, she began sending out "The Man With a Load of Mischief," about Richard Jury. A dozen houses rejected it before Little, Brown published it in 1981.

Grimes, who I have never heard of before, reminds me in some ways of the heroine of the film Swimming Pool.

Then there's this one about Larry McMurtry and his huge bookshop:

Explaining the appeal of owning a rare bookshop, McMurtry said, "Writing is an imaginative, emotional, emotive effort. The process of selling rare and out of print books is much drier. For me, it has always been a perfect balance."
posted by James at 10:40 AM

 
"My Dispatch to Vanity Fair from the Royal Houses of the Continent" (PDF)
posted by James at 8:09 AM

 
Bruce Springsteen at Pac Bell Park, San Francisco

A year ago I saw one of the first shows of this tour. Then, the songs from the new album, The Rising, were less familiar to both the band and the audience, as if we were all learning them together, and their ostensible subject, the victims of the 9-11 attacks, was still tender as the concert came not quite a month shy of the first anniversary. This time the songs played tighter--they are now better integrated with the older material, and they don't sound as downbeat, as we are that much further removed from 9-11.

This set was top heavy with songs from Darkness on the Edge of Town--three of the first six--a pleasant surprise, as that album is the fulcrum between his prolix, Dylan-influenced early work and the more direct narratives that came after. He didn't slow down until "Empty Sky," sounding like an ancient folk song in this acoustic arrangement. The first song of the show from Born in the USA, "Darlington County," brought the house down; "Across the Border," a ballad from the little-heard The Ghost of Tom Joad, sent lines snaking to the restrooms. One would think unfamiliar material might warrant closer attention, but not much more than a sing-along can be expected from a crowd in a ballpark. As always the encores were a mix of broad comedy and high energy. After twenty-five songs, I went home feeling like I hadn't missed a thing--even if "Thunder Road" wasn't on the set list.

The band provided its usual spectacular accompaniment, but what struck me most this time out was Nils Lofgren's guitar work. It occurred to me about the time he played his guitar behind his neck a la Jimi Hendrix that he is probably the best guitarist in whatever city they happened to be playing in. Who might be better? Jeff Beck comes first to mind, but those other Yardbirds, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, are past their best work, and the guitarists like Van Halen who came later are unlikely to ever sacrifice their virtuosity in the service of musicality for more than a few bars.

The only disappointment in this show is anticipatory: how much longer can we expect a fifty-four year old to sing his heart out for three hours a night?
posted by James at 8:02 AM

 
Edward Tufte's updated favorite website list. Outstanding resource for us inveterate web surfers.
posted by James at 8:13 AM

 
Jonathan Rosenbaum, with a survey review of several movies out right now, including Masked and Anonymous.
posted by James at 8:07 AM

 
I've certainly had my fun dismantling Edward Said's loose rhetoric in the past. Now it's Christopher Hitchens's turn.

How does Said, in his introduction to the new edition of Orientalism, deal with this altered and still protean reality? He begins by admitting the self-evident, which is that "neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stability; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other." Fair enough. He adds, "That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and the organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilizations of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance—much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side, 'we' Westerners on the other—are very large-scale enterprises."

This is composed with a certain obliqueness, which may be accidental, but I can't discover that it really means to say that there are delusions on "both" these ontologically nonexistent sides. A few sentences further on we read of "the events of September 11 and their aftermath in the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq." Again, if criticism of both sides is intended (and I presume that it is), it comes served in highly discrepant portions. There's no quarrel with the view that "events" occurred on September 11, 2001; but that the military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were wars "against" either country is subject to debate. A professor of English appreciates the distinction, does he not? Or does he, like some puerile recent "activists" (and some less youthful essayists, including Gore Vidal), think that the United States could not wait for a chance to invade Afghanistan in order to build a pipeline across it? American Orientalism doesn't seem that restless from where I sit; it asks only that Afghans leave it alone.

Misgivings on this point turn into serious doubts when one gets to the next paragraph: "In the US, the hardening of attitudes, the tightening of the grip of demeaning generalization and triumphalist cliché, the dominance of crude power allied with simplistic contempt for dissenters and 'others,' has found a fitting correlative in the looting, pillaging and destruction of Iraq's libraries and museums."

Here, for some reason, "other" is represented lowercase. But there can't be much doubt as to meaning. The American forces in Baghdad set themselves to annihilate Iraq's cultural patrimony. Can Said mean to say this?

Hitchens's response, free of post-modernist BS (of course, he's not a professor):

We can be empirically sure of four things: that by design the museums and libraries of Baghdad survived the earlier precision bombardment without a scratch or a splinter; that much of the looting and desecration occurred before coalition forces had complete control of the city; that no looting was committed by U.S. soldiers; and that the substantial reconstitution of the museum's collection has been undertaken by the occupation authorities, and their allies among Iraqi dissidents, with considerable care and scruple. This leaves only two arguable questions: How much more swiftly might the coalition troops have moved to protect the galleries and shelves? And how are we to divide the responsibility for desecration and theft between Iraqi officials and Iraqi mobs?

This also came via Altercation. Attribution is a good way for fellow bloggers to acknowledge one another's contributions to this whole enterprise--too bad Eric Alterman himself chooses not to follow this practice in his own blog.
posted by James at 6:37 AM

 
Jeff Faux critiques "free trade" in this thoughtful opinion piece.

Protectionism is a straw man. The issue is not whether nations should trade with each other but what the rules should be under which they trade. The people of Mississippi are free to trade with the people of Michigan, and both states are the better for it. But because of our Constitution, they trade within federal rules that require worker, consumer and environmental protections that prevent a competitive race to the bottom. In contrast, the rules of the global marketplace that has emerged over the past quarter-century protect international investors while tossing the rest of society back to 19th-century-style laissez-faire.

(Via Altercation)
posted by James at 6:32 AM

 
New York, New York, it's a helluva town/The people ride in a hole in the ground: Today it's all New York City blogs, starting with this report from the Village Voice on the California recall election.

In 1998 I saw Liz Phair play the Roseland Theater in Times Square soon after she released her album Whitechocolatespaceegg. Now she's touring behind a record that everyone hates, and she recently played the Bowery Ballroom. Here's a review, also from the Voice.

And finally, NYC bloggers are lucky enough to have a website that organizes their blogs by borough and subway stop on an interactive subway map. Click on the map to see what you get. Not only clever, this website is an example of outstanding information design. But then, I've always been partial to maps.
posted by James at 9:23 AM

 
In time for the west coast dates of Bruce Springsteen's summer baseball stadium tour, I am posting an essay, "Reading Bruce: A Fan's Notes." Note that the file is a PDF.
posted by James at 9:37 AM

 
For a sobering graphic, watch the numbers at costofwar.com. They also have a links page for more information.

(Via Straight Up)

posted by James at 9:48 AM

 
Remainders are explained in detail in this article in the Washington Post, well worth reading if you are at all interested in the business of book selling.

Publishers are understandably cagey about discussing their overstock books, feeling it might reflect badly on their judgment or on their authors, yet at least part of the problem is due to something totally out of their control: a long-ago sales agreement unique to the book industry. During the Great Depression, many booksellers were unable to afford to pay money up front for books that looked like dubious sales prospects. In order to save the industry from total collapse, publishers assumed some of the risk by allowing booksellers to return the books they couldn't sell, a process resembling consignment. Not surprisingly, what was intended as a temporary solution for rough economic times became the industry standard -- or, as publishers are given to argue, an industry albatross. Book publishing is one of very few retail businesses that take back what shopowners can't sell.

After a certain period of time, usually 90 days, booksellers can return any unsold books for credit. While a percentage are repackaged and sent out to different retailers -- sometimes more than once -- others become "hurts," a growing category of books that are not reprocessed into inventory, either because they are damaged or defective in some way (a wrinkled cover or an ungainly ink stripe) or because it is not cost-effective to send the title out to the bookstores again. These are gathered into an unsorted lot -- anywhere from a single skid to a truckload -- and sold to wholesalers who undertake the labor-intensive task of sorting and cataloging them and selling them off at drastic reductions.

But the larger category of discount books is remainders -- titles that have gone out of print or are a year or more past their publication date. Almost all of these have never left the publisher's warehouse, and they will be sold to chains, independents, mail-order companies and the remaining spectrum of retailers. A number of changes in the book business during the '80s and '90s have made the past decade a boon time for remainders: advances in printing and binding that make it easier to manufacture books, changes in tax laws that affect how publishers' inventories are valued, and the rise of the mega-bookstore, which has displaced the more modestly stocked independents. Over the past three or four years, that glut of over-publishing has slowed as publishers have adjusted to economic pressures and become smarter about the flow of supply and demand. Yet the remainder business continues to thrive, partly because any book is inherently a gamble and partly because the improved computerization of inventory has led to closer tracking and a gradual increase in returns.

(Via Bookslut)
posted by James at 10:45 PM

 
Jazz master Keith Jarrett is well served by his record company's artist bio and discography.
posted by James at 10:38 PM

 
Alan Lightman's new novel, Reunion, reviewed in the Guardian:

The tone of Lightman's retrospective narrative is such that we know from the outset it cannot end well. Reunion is a melancholic little book partly for this reason, but more because of Charles's attitude to his former self. Watching the young Charles, he is 'sickened with envy' and, at the same time, 'terrified by what I have seen. The endless potentialities held dangling by threads. I have been a forced voyeur, paralysed, watching the destruction, the destruction that has happened and the destruction that will happen'.
posted by James at 10:36 PM

 
An Introduction to English Poetry, a book James Fenton

In a brisk book of 132 pages and twenty-two chapters, Fenton gives us a gloss on some of the specifically technical aspects of metrical poetry, and though his concern seems to reside primarily with meter he is mostly free of prescriptive passions on the question of whether or not free verse has been a catastrophe for modern poetry or the dawn of a new epoch. Perhaps only a British poet could approach poetry so non-denominationally; a similarly slender book, also published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, The Sounds of Poetry by Robert Pinsky, in addition to being written for a less sophisticated audience also seems troubled by what poetry should or shouldn't be--troubled as much for the writer as for the reader. I wonder if the difference lies in an English poet being able to take for granted the whole of English verse as his direct inheritance, whereas an American poet, though obviously sharing the lineage, is a part of a project started by Whitman, that of inventing and refining a distinctly American poetry. Fenton hints at this in his chapter on free verse (page 106). He writes:

"...free verse began to look very democratic. Whitman was after all a democratic spirit...Free verse seemed democratic because it offered freedom of access to writers."

I don't know Fenton's work, but my guess is that Auden and, to a lesser extent, Larkin, are his exemplars, though his witty and informative glossary has this entry for "light verse:"

Even Milton wrote some. Don't hold it against us.

I don't recall his ever using the term "traditional forms" in his book, but I might be wrong. To frame metrical poetry as such automatically gives it a sense of mustiness if not antiquity, as if to write in metrical patterns is as foolish as trying to write in Latin. Maybe it is. But if rhythm in music is so universally pleasing, even to the point of being a necessity for physical well-being, wouldn't recreating rhythm in language be as satisfying?

I don't have an answer to this question, but in trying to develop one I found Fenton's knowing essay to be both useful and entertaining.

Postscript: Fenton also has a long review of the new Robert Lowell collection in the latest edition of the New York Review of Books, that, alas, is not available online. You'll just have to do the old fashioned thing and buy the magazine if you want to read it.
posted by James at 12:02 PM

 
In the New York Review of Books, Hussein Agha and Robert Malley have written an innovative piece that attempts to divine the motivations of Ariel Sharon, Yasser Arafat, and Abu Mazen imaginatively. How else to understand people whose actions so flagrantly contradict their stated intentions?

No excerpt here; it's best to read the whole article. But here's the funny drawing of the three of them.
posted by James at 12:07 PM

 
In his blog yesterday, Terry Teachout speculates on a possible future for Internet reporting on the arts:

My own feeling, for what it's worth, is that as the print media become increasingly obsessed with reaching the mass audiences necessary to keep them profitable, serious arts commentary and news coverage are destined to migrate to the Web, which is the ideal medium for niche marketing and niche journalism (and we arts-crazed folk are definitely a niche, though not the smallest one in the world, either).
posted by James at 11:56 AM

 
Recently, I posted my review of Diane Johnson's novel, Le Divorce. Now, Jonathan Rosenbaum has a review of the movie adaptation. Given his usual disdain for Merchant-Ivory films, it's surprising how much he likes this one. In general though, he doesn't seem to go in for this kind of thing (neither do I):

Several years ago this glossy form of art cinema seemed to be all the Fine Arts movie complex on South Michigan was willing to show on a regular basis. I sometimes felt that this House & Garden, Vanity Fair, or Gourmet (or in the case of The Wings of the Dove, Playboy) cinema -- nearly always in English and directed chiefly at yuppies -- was crowding out every other kind of art cinema, especially the kind that offered glimpses into cultures different from our own.
posted by James at 8:19 AM

 
Writing about painting is nearly as hard as writing intelligently about music; one of the best art critics is Ingrid D. Rowland. Here she writes about the Titian (Tiziano) exhibits at the National Gallery in London and the Prado. Though she does a brilliant job describing the paintings, the easiest, and most humorous, passage to excerpt has to do with the relative snobbishness of the two venues:

The two versions of the Titian show in London and Madrid overlap only partially; the same is true of their catalogs. The National Gallery relegated its forty-two paintings to a basement of the modern concrete Sainsbury Wing, and managed the exhibition in classic blockbuster style: long lines for timed tickets, audio guides, gifts galore. Paintings hung in corners where crowded conditions made viewing in either direction impossible, especially when much of the crowd wanders in a state of audio-guide hypnosis. Artificial light brought out every flaw in paintings whose surfaces are often ravaged, and yet the same pictures, in the natural sunlight of the Prado's spacious central hall, took on entirely different colors and seemed to live again.

The Prado, furthermore, opened vistas from the Titian show into its other galleries, where it was possible to see how profoundly he would influence Rubens and Vel?zquez (from one vantage point, the curator, Miguel Falomir, made it possible for a viewer to see equestrian portraits by all three painters). In order to make the same kind of comparison between Titian's Paul III and Raphael's Julius II in the National Gallery, a viewer was compelled to traipse into another building altogether, after facing the supercilious manner that the National Gallery's personnel tend to reserve for a colonial accent. By contrast, the Prado staff's response to a visitor's Mexican Spanish was simply and unfailingly polite. In short, one show stifled, one breathed gloriously free. Titian, one feels sure, would have preferred the latter.
posted by James at 9:27 PM

 
At the risk of sounding like a Bush defender (I'm not), or worse, a Bush supporter (not remotely), this dust-up over WMDs is a lot more complicated than simple-minded finger pointing allows for. Francis Fukuyama has an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that is must reading for anyone interested in where pro-war arguments came from:

The source of this failure does not lie in the political agenda of this administration. The Bush people are right in saying that their estimates of WMD stockpiles were no different from the conclusions of the Clinton administration. And the latter would say, if asked, that their assessment was drawn from Unscom, the U.N. weapons inspectors who operated in Iraq from 1991-98. The intelligence failure is thus ultimately traceable to Unscom, and deeply embedded in an intelligence process that in the 1990s was biased toward overestimation of threats.

And:

Both Unscom and U.S. intelligence were unpleasantly surprised by the extent of the Iraqi WMD programs uncovered in 1991. Thereafter, both had strong incentives not to be made fools of again. Unscom developed estimates of the extent of covert Iraqi research and stockpiles not accounted for, but whose existence could not be verified. The Clinton administration used the Unscom tallies as a baseline, and supplemented them with worst-case estimates based on intelligence it gathered. The Bush administration simply continued this process. Overestimation was passed down the line until it was taken as gospel by everyone (myself included) and used to justify the U.S. decision to go to war.

The media's focus on whether President Bush or his advisors were lying is thus totally misplaced. Most in the administration honestly believed there were significant stocks of weapons and active programs that would be found, even if they let slip a false assertion about yellowcake in Niger. Why else would Centcom have been so concerned to protect U.S. forces against possible chemical/biological attack?

I disagree with his statement that "the media's focus on whether President Bush or his advisors were lying is thus totally misplaced." Let's face it, using the impeachment criteria that was established in the Clinton case, Bush should be up on charges right now for specific lies regarding uranium from Niger. That instance of bald lying does not mean that all intelligence on WMDs were invented by this administration. Would that they were.

(Via Arts and Letters)
posted by James at 7:31 PM

 
Who knew? Bobby McFerrin's father was a pioneer black opera singer:

In the late 1940s and early '50s, McFerrin sang on Broadway and performed with the National Negro Opera Company and the New York City Opera Company. In 1953, McFerrin won the Metropolitan Opera national auditions. His 1955 debut with the Metropolitan Opera as Amonasro in "Aida" made him the first black male member of the company. He performed in 10 operas over three seasons.

(Via Arts Journal)
posted by James at 9:51 AM

 
The Rolling Stones once made great records. The reason Exile on Main Street is so great, according to this article, is because

Everything revolved around Richards, then stepping out of his role as Jagger's foil to stake his claim as the soul of the Stones. With Mick commuting between the pregnant Bianca and Nellcôte, it was Keith's buccaneer spirit that marched proceedings along. Recording happened when Keith was ready, which was usually several hours behind schedule, and sessions were regularly interrupted while he put Marlon to bed, knocked off for a drink or became otherwise distracted.

posted by James at 3:12 PM

 
Greg Sandow looks at Dylan like someone who knows how to read music, rather than just giving the old lyrical analysis:

But back to Dylan. I started listening to him all over again and quickly I found all kinds of dissonances. One I'd noticed before, in one of his most famous songs (and one of my favorites), "Like A Rolling Stone." "How does it feel?" he keeps shouting in the chorus, over a basic V7 – I progression in C. But often he'll sing notes that shouldn't go with the chords, like repeated Cs over the G7. Sometimes he'll sing an E on "feel" that's so high it sounds like an F, grating over the C chord below.

As I relistened, I began to see that those Cs over the G7 are one of Dylan's tropes, a tonic root held over a dominant. He holds a tonic that way in a short harmonica solo in "Like A Rolling Stone," about 4:25 into the song.
posted by James at 7:55 PM

 
The occupation if Iraq is a mixed bag of success and failure, according to Max Rodenbeck:

America has not yet lost the peace. Slowly but steadily, Iraqi grievances are beginning to be addressed. The repair of infrastructure in Baghdad itself has lagged, but progressed elsewhere. In mid-July, Paul Bremer, the American proconsul who heads the Coalition Provisional Authority, initialed a half-year budget that doubles the expenditure level of Saddam's government. A rush of new goods and fresh opinions has begun to give Iraqis a taste of the potential rewards of freedom.

Still, the fact remains that America's first one hundred days have been far from glorious. The path so far has been marked by multiple failures, many of them avoidable. Failure to articulate coherent goals, both before and after the war, for example. Failure to invest in and build on initial Iraqi goodwill. Failure to understand the nature of Iraqi suffering, or to recognize the part America itself has played in it. Failure to apply appropriate instruments and adequate resources to the problems at hand. Failure to appreciate the gravity of needs for things like justice, self-respect, and compassion. Failure to encourage and embrace outside help.

Much of this litany describes intangible things, the kinds of things that are difficult for a large army and hastily assembled bureaucracy, approaching out of a starkly alien culture, to deliver. Yet it is a fair bet to say that the present simmering guerrilla war would never have reached its current heat if some of these things had been properly considered. Iraq may still be "turned around," but the squandering of its people's trust has made the whole process slower, more painful, and far costlier than it need have been.

posted by James at 10:51 AM

 
Yesterday I linked to a bad review of the new Bob Dylan movie, Masked and Anonymous; here is one that neither takes the film as a total failure or as a masterpiece.

Dylan has an extreme effect on people, especially baby boomers, who seem to always be expecting for transcendent work from him. No wonder he's so cranky.
posted by James at 10:50 AM

 
Joyce Carol Oates found it necessary to rewrite an old novel when it came out in a new hardcover version. Apparently, she's not the only writer to do this.

(Via Bookslut)
posted by James at 7:18 AM