Thousand by thousand

What is it about men that makes them make lists? Especially lists of the best--usually without qualification. I guess to name, to enumerate, to define, to exclude is to assert power; and guys tend to go for that kind of thing.

I was pointed to Piero Scaruffi's site by a Times article on him and it, The Greatest Web Site of All Time (I mean, how can you resist a headline like that, if only to scoff when it doesn't go here?!

It turns out Scaruffi and his self-titled site consist mainly of a very large collection of lists--primarily focused on music, but not exclusively. I shudder at how much time Scaruffi must have put into the site....

Since I know very little about music, I looked first at his Rock section, at the list of Best Rock Albums of All Time:

1. Captain Beefheart: Trout Mask Replica
2. Robert Wyatt: Rock Bottom
3. Faust: Faust I
4. Velvet Underground: & Nico
5. Doors: The Doors

Uh, okay--I mean why not, I really don't know that much about rock, and sure it's weird that no other similar list I've ever seen has even listed 1-4, but maybe I haven't come across the lists of true rock afficienados like Scaruffi.

Besides which, of all the arts music is probably the most intensely personal--it's in some ways the most accessible art form, with lower barriers to entry than the others (all you really need is ears, hence every 14-year-old can style himself somesortof expert on some genre), so I'm willing to accept Scaruffi's list as being valid, even if I have some doubts.

But then I took a look at his list of The 1,000 Best Films of all Times (copyrighted, like all his other lists), and found:

Orson Welles: Citizen Kane (1941)
Alfred Hitchcock: North By Northwest (1959)
Orson Welles: Touch Of Evil (1958)
Roman Polanski: Chinatown (1974)
Robert Altman: Nashville (1975)
Sam Peckinpah: The Wild Bunch (1969)
Francis Ford Coppola: The Godfather Part II (1974)
Elia Kazan: Splendor In The Grass (1961)
John Ford: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Lars von Trier: Riget/ Kingdom (1995)

Now I know a fair amount about cinema, and have seen most of the films on this list, so two things struck me right away: 1) Scaruffi's list is absolutely generic; 2) he has pretty pedestrian taste.

You have to go to #39 on his list to find a single film by a non-Western director (any guesses as to which director, which film?!); indeed, of his top 100 films, exactly 5 are from non-Western directors.

Having seen all five of his films, I can tell you they're the most accessible of the non-Western works that usually appear on film lists; the two Kurosawa films and the Ozu work usually appear much higher on serious film lists than they do on Scaruffi's. And the other two films, while interesting, are also the kind of films that people who think they're cinema insiders cite when asked for their 'sleeper' great films picks.

At least he qualifies his The best novels of all times list with 'in the English language.' This list is better than his cinema list, but even so it's the type of list an English major might pull together after his freshman year:

Henry James (USA, 1843): "The Golden Bowl"
James Joyce (Ireland, 1882): "Ulysses"
Emily Bronte (Britain, 1818): "Wuthering Heights"
Vladimir Nabokov (Russia, 1899): "Ada"
Thomas Pynchon (USA, 1937): "Gravity's Rainbow"
William Faulkner (USA, 1897): "Light in August"
Virginia Woolf (Britain, 1882): "To the Lighthouse"
William Gaddis (USA, 1922): "The Recognitions"
Joseph Conrad (Poland, 1857): "Nostromo"
John Barth (USA, 1930): "Giles Goat Boy"

Salman Rushdie is the only non-white author on his ranked list of 35, with no non-Western authors in translation represented among the first few hundred selections that I could see.

As for his section on politics... his 'analysis' pieces on the News of 2006 are little more than sophisticated twaddle--they have the rhythmn and sound of serious op-eds that you might read in the Times or the Post, but he both gets little facts wrong and piles up nutty conclusions. Plus the writing style is painfully convoluted and has that strident tone common to oblivious political dilettantes. A little knowledge, indeed....

Based on the Times piece, Scaruffi seems like quite an interesting guy. But if his website is any indication, he's less than the sum of his knowledge. You wonder if you'd even get a word in edgewise with him.

Uncredited photo of Piero Scaruffi from his website.