Checking out Rolling Stone's 100 Best songs of the decade list -- non-definitive, but fun; and interesting how one-of-a-kind most of the top ones were. Threw in some random, recent picks of my own:
Jori Finkel's portrait of the Art Institute of Chicago's director, A Man Who Loves Big Museums, starts out with one of those telling anecdotes journalists are so fond of:
WHEN James Cuno stepped into his job as director and president of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, employees were a touch nervous. The departing director, James Wood, had begun the most ambitious expansion in the museum’s history. But ground had not yet been broken. And although he had raised $120 million, at least twice that would be needed.
It was a pivotal time, and after 24 years at the museum Mr. Wood was handing the reins to a man who had led the Courtauld Institute in London for less than 24 months.
Then late one afternoon, one employee after another caught sight of Mr. Cuno moving into his office — by himself. Although the museum has a staff of nearly 600, he was carting and carrying stacks of books on his own. It was an early sign that Mr. Cuno, who goes by Jim and not James, would be a down-to-earth, hands-on leader, one with a deep commitment to recent art-historical scholarship.
“I’m a bit compulsive about my library — the way it’s organized, which is rather intuitive,” said Mr. Cuno, 57. “And physically putting the books away helps me to remember where they are.”
So far, so good. But then there's this startling sequence:
This month he can add a new title of his own to those shelves: “Who Owns Antiquity?,” published by Princeton University Press. While it is far from his first book (he has written about Jasper Johns and Joseph Beuys, among other artists), it is his first dedicated to the political minefield of cultural patrimony. A condemnation of cultural property laws that restrict the international trade in antiquities, the book doubles as a celebration of the world’s great border-crossing encyclopedic museums, among them the Art Institute and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ...
Mr. Cuno contends that “the accident of geography” should not give nations exclusive claims on archaeological material that happens to be found within their borders. He asserts that a country’s cultural patrimony policies reflect its political or diplomatic agenda more than a commitment to preserving culture. And he argues for the revival of partage, a practice in which museums or universities aid the excavation of an archaeological site in another country in exchange for some of the artifacts.
“People will assume my argument in favor of partage is a thinly disguised argument for imperialism,” he said. “But partage helped to create not just the university museums and encyclopedic museums in this country, but also museums locally on site — like the national museums of Afghanistan and Iraq.”
Yeah, an accident of geography! As if artists and craftsmen are somehow free agents, who pop up fully-formed in cultures, their creations unsullied by all that surrounds and nurtures them, nothing taken therefore nothing owed.
It's really an insane argument; Cuno's essentially arguing hey, if there's a group that's strong today--Western collectors and curators--there's no problem if they strip what they want from people who at this point in time can't outbid or defend their heritage.
That this universal class of masters of the universe should of course take precedence over the 'accidental' possesors of art.
And hey, after all, it's not like the rich are taking everything--they're leaving behind what they don't want in museums for the natives!
Sheesh.... It makes you reinterpret the opening anecdote.
Maybe the reason Cuno carried his own books in was to keep someone from coming along and taking them.
IN New York and elsewhere a “Messiah Sing-In” — a performance of Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” with the audience joining in the choruses — is a musical highlight of the Christmas season. Christians, Jews and others come together to delight in one of the consummate masterpieces of Western music.
The high point, inevitably, is the “Hallelujah” chorus, all too familiar from its use in strange surroundings, from Mel Brooks’s “History of the World, Part 1,” where it signified the origins of music among cavemen, to television advertising for behemoth all-terrain vehicles.
So “Messiah” lovers may be surprised to learn that the work was meant not for Christmas but for Lent, and that the “Hallelujah” chorus was designed not to honor the birth or resurrection of Jesus but to celebrate the destruction of Jerusalem and the Second Temple in A.D. 70. For most Christians in Handel’s day, this horrible event was construed as divine retribution on Judaism for its failure to accept Jesus as God’s promised Messiah.
While Handel scholars and enthusiasts say repeatedly that significant numbers of Jews attended the original performances of Handel’s oratorios, they offer no compelling evidence. Most Jews in 18th-century London were too poor to attend such concerts, and observant Jews would in any event have balked at the public use of the sacred, unutterable name of God in the oratorios, even though “Jehovah” was a Christian misunderstanding of the prohibited name.
Handelians often assert too that the composer’s practice of writing oratorios on ancient Israelite subjects (like “Israel in Egypt” and “Judas Maccabaeus”) is pro-Jewish. Handel and his contemporaries did have a high opinion of the characters populating the Hebrew Bible, not as “Jews” but as proto-Christian believers in God’s expected Messiah, Jesus.
But what about their stance toward living Jews and toward Judaism after the advent of Jesus? Relevant contemporary British sources have virtually nothing positive to say on that subject and very little that is even neutral.
The problematic relationship between some evangelical Christians and Jews is encompassed in this piece; some might read it as two-way street, in that only one religion can be true.
But I'd say only one religion requires the destruction of the other in order to become true; only one religion will celebrate that day.
Members of the artistic set--whether actors or sculptors or musicians or authors--like pretending they know more about politics than politicians. Because of course there's no better way to understand politics than spending your working hours in a studio.
Just as most non-artists have no idea how hard it is to create good art, so most non-politicians have no idea how complicated politics is.
Journalists, though, should know better. Which is why Holland Cotter's an idiot for suggesting that Barack Obama is lagging behind behind artists when it comes to talking about race.
His article sounds good, but let's be serious--Obama has done more to bring topics of race into the national discussion, and has better ideas about addressing problems related to race, than any artist you might catch in a gallery near you.
To play it any other way is just being silly.
The Topic Is Race; the Art Is Fearless: Recently a new kind of Mythic Being arrived on the scene, the very opposite of the one Ms. Piper introduced some 30 years ago. He doesn’t mutter; he wears business suits; he smiles. He is by descent half black African, half white American. His name is Barack Obama.
On the rancorous subject of the country’s racial history he isn’t antagonistic; he speaks of reconciliation, of laying down arms, of moving on, of closure. He is presenting himself as a 21st-century postracial leader, with a vision of a color-blind, or color-embracing, world to come.
Campaigning politicians talk solutions; artists talk problems. Politics deals in goals and initiatives; art, or at least interesting art, in a language of doubt and nuance. This has always been true when the subject is race. And when it is, art is often ahead of the political news curve, and heading in a contrary direction. ...
Today, as Mr. Obama pitches the hugely attractive prospect of a postracial society, artists have, as usual, already been there, surveyed the terrain and sent back skeptical, though hope-tinged, reports. And you can read those reports in art all around New York this spring, in retrospective surveys like “Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution” currently at the P.S 1 Contemporary Art Center in Queens, in the up-to-the-minute sampler that is the 2008 Whitney Biennial, in gallery shows in Chelsea and beyond, and in the plethora of art fairs clinging like barnacles to the Armory Show on Pier 94 this weekend. ...
In a 1980 performance video, “Free, White and 21,” Ms. Pindell wore whiteface to deliver a scathing rebuke of art-world racism. In the same year Ms. O’Grady introduced an alter ego named “Mlle Bourgeoise Noire” who, dressed in a beauty-queen gown sewn from white formal gloves, crashed museum openings to protest all-white shows. A few years later Ms. Piper, who is light skinned, began to selectively distribute a printed calling card at similar social events. It read:
Dear Friend,
I am black. I am sure you did not realize this when you made/laughed at/agreed with that racist remark. In the past I have attempted to alert white people to my racial identity in advance. Unfortunately, this invariably causes them to react to me as pushy, manipulative or socially inappropriate. Therefore, my policy is to assume that white people do not make these remarks, even when they believe there are not black people present, and to distribute this card when they do.
I regret any discomfort my presence is causing you, just as I am sure you regret the discomfort your racism is causing me.
Sincerely yours,
Adrian Margaret Smith Piper...
In a television interview a few weeks ago, before he formed plans to deliver his speech on race, Mr. Obama defended his practice of backing off from discussion of race in his campaign. He said it was no longer a useful subject in the national dialogue; we’re over it, or should be.
Cotter gets it exactly backwards--Obama has never said we're over race in this country. To think that an intelligent black man could believe that is every white person's dream, their 'I told you so' silver bullet.
What Obama's been trying to do is get people to look beyond his race when judging his fitness to be president, which, as far as we know, is not a job that requires scruity of someone's race. To get to a point where every discussion of him doesn't mention his race.
It's too bad that Cotter seems to only value and assess the works of these black artists in terms of their contribution or lack thereof to the discussion of race in this country.
Lucky for us, Obama's candidacy is about so much more.
I’M dancing on the top deck with a 71-year-old feminist and psychotherapist whom I’ve come to think of as the Twirler. We’ve spent two days attending seminars on The Nation magazine’s Alaska cruise; we’ve talked about the Bush presidency and prison reform and single-payer health care. Now, at almost midnight, my fiercely intelligent and opinionated new friend Charlotte is putting all the heady political talk behind her by bodily twirling.
“If I start to get dizzy then I twirl in the opposite direction,” she tells me as the live band revs up its throbbing Motown beat. ...
The five hours of discussion provided ample opportunity to see some of the cruise’s speakers in action; by day’s end it was clear that the encyclopedic and oratorically gifted Mr. Nader was gradually winning people over, and that most of the cruisers thought the Nation publisher and editor-in-chief Katrina vanden Heuvel was, as one gentleman put it to me, “a total fox.”
At one point, the director of the Nation cruise addressed the audience and told us that the cruise sponsored by the conservative National Review was one day behind us. Warning us about being prompt when reboarding the ship at each port, he said: “If you miss the ship, you’re going to be with National Review tomorrow. That’s your penalty — you’ll have to spend time with John Bolton.” ...
FUELED by these two anecdotes, I searched in vain for examples of kicky, unhinged Nation-based fun. Instead, I saw much seriousness of purpose — I saw one Nation reader, apparently unfinished with his conversation with Ralph Nader in the hallway, follow Mr. Nader into the men’s room; I overhead another cruiser express disappointment to his wife that the casino’s roulette “has a double zero, thus giving a 5 percent advantage to the house in the game that already has the worst odds for the player.”
If you’re the sort of traditional PBS viewer who likes extended news broadcasts, say, or cooking shows, old movies and shows about animals gnawing each other on the veld, cable now offers channels devoted just to your interest. Cable is a little like the Internet in that respect: it siphons off the die-hards. Public television, meanwhile, more and more resembles everything else on TV. Since corporate sponsors were allowed to extend their “credit” announcements to 30 seconds, commercials in all but name have been a regular feature on public television, and that’s not to mention pledge programs, the fund-raising equivalent of water-boarding.
THE audience members, 325 people who had waited outside for nearly three hours, shivering in the wet breezes of a California midwinter storm, were going nuts before he even walked onstage, screaming as if they were at a pep rally, dancing in the aisles, chanting his name, making so much noise they barely even noticed that he’d begun speaking, that Drew Carey was already asking, “What’s the first item up for bids today on ‘The Price Is Right’?”
The ratings for “Price,” America’s longest-running game show are down — by 9 percent since Mr. Carey took over as host from Bob Barker in October — but you’d never know it from the enthusiasm of the crowds that still pour into Studio 33 (since last year also known as the Bob Barker Studio) of CBS’s Television City complex in Hollywood. They show up wearing their homemade “Drew Is the Man” T-shirts, erupting with high-decibel elation whenever Rich Fields, the announcer, asks one of them to “come on down!” ...
“And for every single person that makes it onstage, it’s like a Joseph Campbell journey, an everyman plucked from obscurity to attempt a journey, with obstacles placed in their way. And I just want to be a good guy for them, so they can win money. I’m there to help them on their journey.”
Mr. Carey, 49, said that in the past two years he has undergone a “huge spurt of spiritual growth,” having immersed himself in texts from the Bible to books by Wayne Dyer and Marianne Williamson. The result is a changed attitude about comedy, show business and himself.
“I’ve thought about changing my name, I’ve changed so much,” he said, “If Drew Carey now met Drew Carey from 5 or 10 years ago, I wouldn’t recognize him.”
Although he was known as a generally good guy, famous for those big tips and hanging out with fans before and after stand-up shows, Mr. Carey said he was carrying a chip on his shoulder through all the successful years of his sitcom. In his 1997 autobiography he wrote about a difficult childhood and adult battles with depression. He was not as carefree as he seemed.
“That chip on my shoulder, that’s a fear of not being accepted, a fear of not being good enough,” he said. “It was like: ‘Here’s little Drew Carey from Cleveland, and they’re not recognizing that I’ve done something with my life. Hey, why aren’t you recognizing it?’
People's candidate Out of Office, Will He Be Out of Sorts?, Diane Cardwell:
Six years of wielding the power of government office and reveling in the ego boost of broad support from ordinary New Yorkers have fueled Mr. Bloomberg’s desire to run the country, these associates say, and diminished his excitement over his oft-stated plan to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.
And as his presidential hopes have appeared to fizzle of late, friends say, Mr. Bloomberg has been acting grumpy as he faces decisions about what to do next.
“He was extremely successful, and then he was extremely successful as mayor,” said Michael H. Steinhardt, a hedge fund manager turned philanthropist, and a longtime friend of Mr. Bloomberg’s who played host to an early presidential strategy session. “Now where does he go from here? He doesn’t really care that much about his philanthropy. I think he likes hearing himself talk publicly — terrible way to put it, but I think that’s right.” ...
Some of those close to him say that Mr. Bloomberg gets a charge out of being able to change things and was itching to take advantage of the elaborate operation created by his political aide, Kevin Sheekey, to support an independent presidential campaign.
Even his denials of interest in running for president show how he has been bitten by the bug of government influence.
Being mayor is “a real executive job,” he said at a forum at Cooper Union in September. “I’d say, ‘Tomorrow I want Fifth Avenue to run northbound rather than southbound.’ It may be a dumb idea, but tomorrow morning, there’d be a cop on every corner. Every sign would be changed. I mean, it would go northbound. That’s pretty heady stuff.”
THE plots of art heist movies are about as multifarious as the canvases of the paintings pilfered by their main characters — the postmodern heroin-cool of Nick Nolte in “The Good Thief”; the playboy-billionaire boredom of Pierce Brosnan in “The Thomas Crown Affair.” But one thing art theft movies tend to have in common is that they dwell on the heist and not on the aftermath, for reasons that are probably more than cinematic: art is an exceedingly dumb thing to steal.
The most valuable examples, usually paintings, are also the most highly recognizable and therefore almost impossible to resell or to display anywhere. When thieves try they are often caught. And so most real art bandits don’t exude quite the élan of a Nolte or Brosnan or even of a good, methodical jewel thief. In fact, they are often found pretty far down the ladder of professional purloining, acting on impulse or opportunity in a world in which museums are still relatively unguarded public spaces. And in many cases, to put it bluntly, art thieves are just not very good.
They are more like a Dutch man named Octave Durham — a k a the Monkey — who was sentenced to prison in 2004 for stealing two paintings from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam two years earlier. He and an accomplice had little trouble breaking into the museum but then left behind a feast for crime scene investigators — ladders, ropes, cloths, hats — that easily provided the DNA evidence that led to their arrests.
In the latest heist to shake the art world, three men wearing ski masks walked into the E. G. Bührle Collection in Zurich on Feb. 9, grabbed a Cézanne, a Degas, a van Gogh and a Monet together worth an estimated $163 million, and tossed them into a van and sped off. Though one thief brandished a gun, there were signs that the job was probably not up to robbery’s highest standards: the most expensive of the collection’s paintings were left behind (the four that were stolen were in one room) and the police said the stolen paintings appeared to be poking out of the back of the white van the men used to make their getaway.
“No one theory can fit all examples of art theft, but I think it’s often an I.Q. test for not-so-smart criminals, and a lot of them fail,” said James Mintz, the principal of a corporate investigations firm with offices in New York, London, Zurich and other cities that has handled art cases. ...
Thomas McShane, a retired F.B.I. agent who led many art investigations in the 1970s and 1980s, said the motivations and methods of many of the thieves he came across could only be described as humorous. One man tried for years to fence a Rembrandt stolen in 1971 from a museum in France, dropping his street price from $5 million to $25,000, Mr. McShane recounted in his 2006 memoir “Stolen Masterpiece Tracker,” written with Dary Matera. “His only accomplishment,” Mr. McShane wrote of the criminal, a would-be Mafioso nicknamed Johnny Rio, “was expanding the ever-widening circle of people who knew he had it.” (He was caught and served a short prison sentence.)
IMAGINE a letter slipped under an apartment door, and then a warning of a lawsuit in the offing: “As you may not be aware, we are both lawyers and both litigators, for whom the usual barriers to litigation are minimal.”
That was the curt beginning of a lawsuit at the Ansonia, a condominium on Broadway and 73rd Street, filed this month by two Ivy League-educated lawyers against a neighbor, a restaurateur, over secondhand smoke they said was wafting into the hallway from her apartment. Jonathan Selbin, whose field is class-action cases, and his wife, Jenny Selbin, represented themselves, without a fee, according to state court filings.
The case has raised concern among managing agents and lawyers about secondhand smoke in co-ops and condominiums as well as the appropriateness of lawyers’ using their knowledge of the legal system to take on neighbors.
“It is not unethical — it is unneighborly,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University who specializes in legal ethics. “It is contrary to what we think of when we use the word cooperative. It is unwise, unless you are desperate.”
Gleanings from Sunday's Times--as always, half-oblivious.
All Together Now Shared Song, Communal Memory, Ben Ratliff, in East Lansing, Michigan:
From Hawaii to Santa Cruz to the Philadelphia suburbs, in living rooms, churches and festival tents, similar gatherings — called community sings, or singalongs — draw together the average-voiced and bring old songs into common memory. ...
Much of this impulse descends from Pete Seeger, who has championed the cause of group-singing for more than 60 years. “No one can prove a damn thing,” Mr. Seeger said in a recent interview, “but I think that singing together gives people some kind of a holy feeling. And it can happen whether they’re atheists, or whoever. You feel like, ‘Gee, we’re all together.’ ...
In 1973 Peter Blood, a Quaker, political organizer, teacher and folk musician in Philadelphia, put together a homemade songbook called “Winds of the People,” which quickly took off in the group-sing scene. “There was a demand for it in the circles we ran in, which were religious and summer-camp circles,” said his wife, Annie Patterson. In time Movement for a New Society and other nonreligious activist organizations adopted it for singalong events.
A decade later Mr. Blood and Ms. Patterson were envisioning a more ambitious book. They compiled and cleared the rights to 1,200 songs for “Rise Up Singing,” which was published in 1988. Mark Moss, editor of Sing Out! magazine, the pre-eminent journal of the folk movement, and also the publisher of the songbook, said it has sold about 800,000 copies, at $17.95 each. ...
Perhaps the book’s greatest strength is its tacit proposal that there are many, many songs Americans should know by heart. In 1943, when he was in the Army, Mr. Seeger conducted an experiment on his fellow soldiers, asking them to write down the names of the songs whose words and tunes they really knew. In his own memory file he counted about 300, but he was impressed by the competition.
“I was surprised how many the average person knew back then,” he said. He supposed that the number of songs crossing lines of generation, class and sex would be much lower today, outside of “Over the Rainbow” and “Happy Birthday to You.” ...
“In our little community,” he added, “the economy is horrible, and people are scared and sad. But you go to something like this, and you think, ‘Wow, our community is resilient.’ ”
Margaret Kingsbury, 67, a nurse who is involved with peace groups, sounded a similar note. “I honestly believe that this is one of the ways to create peace,” she said. “You go away from here, and you’re uplifted.”
Ms. Potter isn’t surprised by such reactions. “I think it’s all a result of people needing to come together and find some power somewhere,” she said. “It’s a political need and a spiritual need. How many people left early tonight? It’s a Monday night. They’re tired. But people didn’t leave. That’s how you know.”
Still, for a variety of reasons, no actor has successfully made the transition from Bollywood to Hollywood.
Schedules and expectations are difficult to match. Bollywood superstars are generally unwilling to play supporting roles in American movies, and there just aren’t many movies coming out of Los Angeles that feature Indians as leads.
IN “The Meaning of Sunglasses,” her uproarious dictionary of style (or what passes for it), the journalist Hadley Freeman reveals that Condé Nasties aren’t the only ones who jockey for position during Fashion Week: even top designers agonize over their show’s time slot.
“If it’s at, say, 9 a.m., they are generally pretty much down there with Wal-Mart in terms of fashion credibility,” she writes. Ouch. Or as Carine Roitfeld, editor of French Vogue, would say, “Aieee!” ...
Ms. Freeman also dismisses de rigueur nail grooming as “panicure” and reveals two of fashion’s most closely guarded secrets. 1) Why do collections change so drastically, so often? “The public just likes new things.” 2) Why is Anna Wintour the only fashion editor who doesn’t arrive late to the Bryant Park shows? Because she is the only one who doesn’t need to prove her status, “seeing as she is the big kahuna of the whole shebang.”
More like the other Americans, actually The Other Iran, James Vlahos:
If you’re going to get lost, Esfahan (also spelled Isfahan), a city of 1.3 million about 200 miles south of Tehran in central Iran, is an extraordinary place to do it. There’s a centuries-old saying that Esfahan is “half the world,” meaning it contains fully half of the earth’s wonders.
Jean Chardin, a 17th-century French traveler, wrote that Esfahan “was expressly made for the delights of love”; in the 1930s, the British travel writer Robert Byron rated it “among those rarer places, like Athens or Rome, which are the common refreshment of humanity.” ...
The mullah, Abdullah Dehshan, didn’t shy away from asking meaty questions: Do you think Islam is violent? If you could have one wish for the world what would it be? Do you believe in God? Maybe, I said, but people often get in the way.
Do we need priests, rabbis, mullahs? I asked him. Mullah Dehshan smiled at this theological softball. If you want to go to Shiraz, he said, you would need a car, a road and a map. It is difficult to reach a far-off destination without help. “And so it is with God,” he said. ...
A waiter brought tea, sugar and a qalyan. The smoke was sweet and rich; there was so much in the air that the people across the room were hazy.
The man on my right asked where I was from. “America,” I said.
The room got quieter. Everyone seemed to be looking my way. Then the man clapped my shoulder and smiled.
“Our governments are bad,” he said. “But the people are good.”
KAREEM ABDUL-JABBAR, the 7-foot-2 basketball legend, seemed a fitting subject for a children’s coloring book about tolerance in the age of the war on terror. Mr. Abdul-Jabbar is a Muslim, and he has a distinctly Arabic name. With his status as a celebrity athlete, he seemed a perfect illustration of the principle that people defy stereotypes.
“He transcends religion in popular consciousness,” said F. Bowman Hastie III, the author, with Ricardo Cortés, of a new book carrying the provocative title “I Don’t Want to Blow You Up!”
That, at least, was the writers’ thinking. But when Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s representatives learned in October of his forthcoming appearance in the book, they demanded that the authors, who both live in Brooklyn, remove any reference to him.
In an e-mail message, Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s manager, Deborah Morales, declined to comment, beyond saying that her client “does not endorse this book or the unauthorized use of his image.” In response, Mr. Hastie and Mr. Cortés retained a lawyer, who argues that the First Amendment protects the right of artists and writers to depict public figures.
In the 32-page book, which is being released this weekend, simple text and graceful pen-and-ink drawings — not photographs — of 13 subjects, not all of whom are Muslim, are used to introduce young readers to figures like Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss academic and theologian; Omar Ahmad, a former executive with Napster; and Anousheh Ansari, a wealthy Iranian-American who became the first female space tourist. Despite Mr. Abdul-Jabbar’s protests, there he is on page 11, hitting a sky hook. ...
Mr. Cortés, an illustrator and publisher who has worked as an artist-in-residence in city schools, said the idea for the book arose in 2006 when he and Mr. Hastie were discussing how to show children that, as he put it, “the war on terror affects everyone.”
“That’s a kid’s way of talking,” Mr. Cortés said. “ ‘Is that person going to blow up New York? Are they going to blow up the train?’ It’s funny and ridiculous.”
The coloring book is being sold online and at independent bookstores. The two men are also hatching plans for a second installment. The short list of characters who might be included, they said, includes Muhammad Ali, Steve Jobs (who is half Syrian) and, of course, Barack Obama.
Things are rarely as they seem Brothers in Arms, Adam Ellick and Jigar Mehta:
On this historic Thursday, however, neither the television nor the incessant callers from around the world managed to wake him. The previous day, Mr. Farooqi, the editor and publisher of The Pakistan Post, a free, Queens-based newspaper that reveres Ms. Bhutto, had completed his weekly 34-hour sprint to churn out his 20-page issue.
Among the more persistent callers was Khalil ur Rehman, a journalist who is Mr. Farooqi’s counterpart on the other side of the political fence.
Mr. Khalil, a stout, bearded 55-year-old who lives in Shirley, Long Island, is the editor of The Urdu Times, the city’s other top Pakistani weekly. His publication fervently supports President Pervez Musharraf, the former general who had been Ms. Bhutto’s chief rival since 2002 and who was immediately accused by some members of her party of orchestrating her assassination. He has denied the charge. ...
The contrast between these two men transcends politics and publishing.
Mr. Farooqi is a disheveled, chain-smoking Muslim who boasts of his journalistic exclusives. Mr. Khalil is a dapper, entrepreneurial atheist who enjoys his whiskey and boasts about the lucrative advertisements he garners for his publication.
While their Urdu-language pages exploit the divided political loyalties within New York’s 400,000-member-strong Pakistani community, these two editors are physically divided only by the wall between the unmarked storefronts in which they work, on Hillside Avenue in the Pakistani enclave in Jamaica, Queens.
With parliamentary elections in Pakistan scheduled for Feb. 18, these neighboring storefronts offer a window into Pakistan’s embattled politics. Yet in a nation haunted by 60 years of political turmoil, the situation is never as it appears. Nor is the 17-year relationship between these men, who, despite their differing styles and ideologies, were business partners and are now best friends. ...
“I’m a psych patient today,” he said, lighting a cigarette. “I’m talking, I’m walking, I’m driving, but I have no will to do anything.”
A year ago, on one of Ms. Bhutto’s final visits to New York, Mr. Farooqi had urged her to return home from exile. “I said to her: ‘You keep saying Pakistani people should speak out against the regime. Why should they when you’re in New York with a big car, a driver and kids in Dubai? You have to face the problem.’ ” Now he feels guilt-stricken. ...
“My only skill is journalism,” he said a few days after Ms. Bhutto’s death, taking a break from drafting an editorial. “I can’t do anything else, can’t fix a car. My children always say, ‘Turn off the phone.’ But you know, it’s an addiction. To educate people on what is going on, this is my love, this is my passion, this is my romance, this is what I believe my body desires. It’s my peanut and butter.” ...
Their publications, meanwhile, became local heavyweights, so much so that in 1995, Ms. Bhutto’s party, which was then in power, offered each newspaper $95,000 for a year of positive coverage. At the time, both editors declined the offer and publicized it.
Last May, the two had a full-fledged reconciliation, which they both attribute to “old age.” Now they talk several times a day and are bound by a shared skepticism of many groups within the Pakistani community, which, they contend, do not have local interests at heart. And each man is the other’s favorite companion.
“If I don’t find Mr. Khalil in the evening,” Mr. Farooqi said, plopping a cigarette butt into a stale cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, “I go directly home.”
On another occasion, Mr. Khalil said: “The moment I walk into my home, my wife says, ‘You’re hanging around him?’ I say, ‘How do you know?’ She says, ‘Because you smell like cigarettes.’ ”
“And believe me,” Mr. Farooqi interjected. “When I get drunk, my wife says, ‘You’re with Khalil.’ ” ...
And as these two men ponder an uncertain future, they are haunted by one dispiriting thought: despite 16 years of weekly reports, little if anything has changed in their homeland.
“I’m born in chaos, and I’m now working in chaos, and I have a feeling that when I die, Pakistan will be in the same position,” Mr. Farooqi said. “Since my childhood, I haven’t heard any good news about my country.”
-Rehab, Amy Winehouse Art informing life, and vice versa... I almost feel bad liking this song, given what Winehouse has put into the life. The YouTube embeds have been disabled, but the link is here.
-Istanbul, They Might Be Giants The faves of college kids everywhere; and geography teachers. Again, embeds disabled, link is here.
-Come on Eileen, Dexys Midnight Runners Ah, what a ridiculous video, with those overalls--those poor down-trodden Brits.
-Safety Dance, Men Without Hats If they went on American Idol, I wonder if the judges would love or hate their unique vocal tone? What a bizarre video....
-Nessun Dorma, Paul Potts A live audience makes such a difference--check out Paul Potts doing part of Nessun Dorma from Puccini's Turandot. As one of the YouTube posters suggest, compare it to Pavarotti's version--it'll seem thin and pale, but Paul's moment of discovery (with a Simon I like better than on Idol) is about something different than music.
-1 2 3 4, Feist I really am worried at how many songs I'm introduced to through commercials.
-You Are Always on My Mind, Willie Nelson He's an American treasure, right up there with Mount Rushmore if you ask me--his distinctive twang, the simple effectiveness of his songs, and Farm Aid too. If you had to explain the U.S. to a space alien, you could do a lot worse than play it some Willie. This is a great, sincere performance.
-Hey There Delilah, Plain White Ts Simple, yet totally infectious; the real-life story is pretty interesting too.
This parody is comedy gold--from the consistently subtle way he interprets lines like 'Hey There' to all the rest of his earnest-seeming hipster miming; it reminds me how shrewd kids can be about the world around them.
See more of the kid's work (if he were less fat how less funny would it be?)
Yemen’s Exotic Secrets, headline writer's name not known. The article is forgettable (Tom Downey manages to write about Yemen while talking to and citing only fellow Westerners), what's interesting is this list of Travel articles where the Times uses the word exotic--they're always non-white countries, and in a city that's 60% immigrant or children of immigrants, it's ridiculous that places like 'the Middle East', China, Thailand, Brazil, etc. get labeled "Intriguingly unusual or different; excitingly strange."
You forget the Nazis were great patrons of classical music
Anthony Tommasini, A Patience to Listen, Alive and Well: In recent years a spate of articles and books have lamented classical music’s tenuous hold on the popular imagination and defended its richness, complexity and communicative power. I’m thinking especially of the book “Why Classical Music Still Matters” (University of California Press, 2007) by Lawrence Kramer, a professor of English and music at Fordham University.
Just this month classical music emerged as pivotal to international relations. With the blessing of the State Department, the New York Philharmonic announced that it would present a concert in North Korea during its Asian tour in February. Some consider this plan an outrage that will allow a totalitarian regime to use the Philharmonic musicians as puppets for propaganda. Others see it as at least a chance to pry open a door and share Western culture with a closed society, which is pretty much my view.
Either way, implicit in this plan is the idea that classical music matters. It’s not a sports team or pop group that has been enlisted to begin a thaw with the government in Pyongyang. It’s the musicians of a premier American orchestra.
What effect might this concert have on an audience in a repressive society? To Professor Kramer, as he recently told The New York Times, classical music by definition “is addressed to someone who has a certain independence of mind.” It “almost posits for its audience a certain degree of Western identity, which includes that sense of individual capacity to think, to sense, to imagine.”
At some point, they'll just call it looking out the window
Matthew Gurewitsch, Learning to Move Under the Sea, on Wheels: Two years ago Mr. Mear was pondering the challenge on a Christmas visit to Disneyland, when a little boy walked by and then all of a sudden whizzed away. “I literally chased after him and asked his parents what he was wearing on his feet,” Mr. Mear said. That was his first exposure to Heelys, the shoes built with a wheel in the heel, now ubiquitous at every mall and playground. As Ms. Zambello said: “Serendipity guides you. More ideas come walking down the street than from sitting in think tanks.”
By his own account Mr. Mear was mesmerized. “You can walk,” he said. “You can glide. You can turn. You can spin. You can jump. Once I saw them, I knew.” ...
Recreating that “Eureka!” moment in Disneyland, 12-year-old Cody Hanford, as Flounder, whizzed in from the sidelines to join the multiracial, multicultural sextet of Ariel’s mersisters in the sassy number “She’s in Love.”
“We didn’t just want to have tall, skinny girls,” Mr. Mear said from the sidelines as the women ran their engines, one of them with the curves and charisma of a junior Jessye Norman. “We wanted bodies of all shapes and sizes. That way, people relate: ‘If they can do that, so can I.’ We chose people for their personalities. You can’t beat character.”
Let them? How about howled for blood
Manohla Dargis, War Stories, What’s really been shocking about this year, though, aren’t the idiocies of “Hostel: Part II,” but rather the rage radiating off the movie screens. Brian De Palma’s “Redacted,” about American soldiers who rape and murder an Iraqi girl (and her family), falls short in many ways, but the director’s anger is itself a tonic. I think that Mr. De Palma’s focus is misplaced — you can certainly blame these soldiers, though the tougher film would blame people like us, who let them be sent to Iraq — yet I am grateful for his fury. Just as I am heartened by the anger of Sidney Lumet’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” and Paul Thomas Anderson’s “There Will Be Blood,” each a savage moral reckoning of the contemporary American soul.
He's Scottish. Not that you can tell from the article
Rebecca Milzoff, A Sampler of Roles: It's not every young actor who, free of a rigorous schedule of interviews, takes his father and sister along for an evening on the town. Then again, Khalid Abdalla, the 27-year-old star of the new film adaptation of “The Kite Runner,” has not followed the path most traveled in his career.
Last year, Mr. Abdalla (who is of Egyptian descent and grew up in Scotland and England) played a terrorist in “United 93,” the Paul Greengrass film about the 9/11 attacks. In “The Kite Runner,” Mr. Abdalla stars as Amir, an Afghan writer who has moved to the United States but is haunted by memories of his native country.
Composite photos from Marc Jacobs' 'Arabian Nights' event from the Times, as compiled by Bill Cunningham
The Times' Arts section is doing its annual review of the year's best, much of which seems unalluringly foreign to me and--especially in the television and film sections, notably not in the music lists--reflective only of how white and myopic the Times' critics are as a group.
You'd think in a country that's 1/3rd non-white, in a world that's trading everything back and forth furiously, it'd be impossible for a Times critic as prominent (if tin-eared) as Alessandra Stanley to present, with a straight face, her ten fave tv shows, every one of which is aggressively all-white (go ahead, try to imagine a non-white person driving shows like Mad Men, 30 Rock, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Gossip Girl, House, The Riches, and Friday Night Lights)--with the exception of not-set-in-our-world Battlestar Galactica.
You can read it as much a commentary on tv as on the famously vacant Alessandra, except for the fact she has no awareness of that fact, and contributes to it with her passion for shows set in her world. It so fits that her favorite show of the year was AMC's Mad Men, she's essentially living 40 years in the past.
Then there's the list of Stanley's equal in cringeworthy, miss-the-point reviews, A.O. Scott, who also without irony manages to serve up a list of more-than-10 films he loved in 2007, not a single one of which stars a non-white person.
I mean, at a certain point you've got to wonder if the comedy duo of Stanley and Scott--who theoretically live in a city where 60% of the residents come from another country or have parents who do--have any awareness of how much they're missing, or if they're just keeping their heads down and hoping they can pass off their myopia as universal for a few more years.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only Times arts field that wasn't dominated by whiteness is music, where it's possible to listen without seeing, making it easier to 'like' or 'connect with' things you wouldn't think you would.
Based on the Times' music critics list of what they liked best in 2007....
Ben Ratliff's jazz-inflected best of music, 2. GILBERTO GIL: ‘GIL LUMINOSO’ (DRG). This is the album I have listened to most: a master Brazilian singer-songwriter, alone with guitar, sanding down old and new songs to the core. Few records are as beautiful.
9. ALICIA KEYS: ‘AS I AM’ (J Records). This is new R&B as new R&B, with no deeper guiding philosophy. But these cagey, obsessive songs on the good old themes of innocence and experience can grow on you wickedly, and some of the grooves, whether electronic or live band, are deep enough to roast a pig in.
Kelefa Senneh's list: 1. FEIST: ‘THE REMINDER’ (Cherry Tree/Interscope). Her modest, beguiling CD is full of carefully composed songs that sound like happy accidents. And even after a ubiquitous iPod commercial, that famous first line — “1-2-3-4 tell me that you love me more” — still sounds inviting. In a year with shockingly few big albums, Feist made the best small one.
10. NINA NASTASIA AND JIM WHITE: ‘YOU FOLLOW ME’ (Fat Cat). The American Ms. Nastasia writes songs about love, doubt and fear and sings them with acoustic guitar; the Australian Mr. White plays drums in sketchy, painterly phrases. It’s a concise, mysterious record.
6. TRACEY THORN: ‘OUT OF THE WOODS’ (Astralwerks). The year’s most pleasant surprise: After a five-year absence the singer from Everything but the Girl returned with a beautiful solo album that expands the boundaries of grown-up pop. Gleaming dance tracks, glimmering ballads: How did this CD stay a secret?
7. JENS LEKMAN: ‘NIGHT FALLS OVER KORTEDALA’ (Secretly Canadian). This mild-mannered Swedish indie-rocker is also a shameless flirt, an alternate-universe disco star, a witty raconteur and a first-rate crooner. Never underestimate the power of pure ambivalence: “Sometimes I almost regret it, like I regret my regrets/I see myself on my deathbed saying, ‘I wish I would have loved less.’ ”
10. THE-DREAM: ‘LOVE/HATE’ (Island Def Jam). In which Terius Nash, the songwriter behind Rihanna’s “Umbrella” and J. Holiday’s “Bed” recommits himself to gooey, robotic ’80s-influenced R&B. He calls himself The-Dream, and his debut album captured the ecstatic sound of pop radio in 2007.
The always-interesting Times magazine had a memorable piece last Sunday on Anna Netrebko, the incandescent--to quote the Metropolitant Opera's website--Russian star who it calls A New Kind of Diva.
She strikes me as the kind of person you find in all kinds of fields, people who are driven to succeed by their force of personality, and who are often smarter than people think.
Some telling details from Charles McGrath's piece:
Anna Netrebko is a gifted opera singer who at 36 has already mastered many of the roles — Mimi, Violetta, Lucia, Manon — that used to go to the queenly, temperamental sopranos of the old school, with their furs, their atomizers, their entourages. She is also a media-savvy entertainer from the new school, with the knockout looks, the fans, the celebrity of a pop star. Her “Traviata” at Salzburg two years ago was such a hot ticket that scalpers were reportedly charging $7,000 a seat, and her records regularly top the charts in Europe. In the summer of 2006 she was part of a concert in Berlin that filled a stadium.
Netrebko, whose appearance at the Metropolitan Opera on Dec. 15 in Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be broadcast live in movie theaters around the world, has a captivating voice that is both high and deep, lustrous and velvety, and she is one of that growing breed of opera singers who can actually act. She is sometimes compared with Natalie Dessay, the French singer whose face has been on posters all over New York this fall, advertising her mad scene in the Met’s “Lucia di Lammermoor,” and who may in fact be technically superior. But Netrebko is the larger presence. She has an earthiness and impishness — a daredeviltry — that may prevent her from ever attaining the kind of rarefied, disembodied sainthood that has been awarded, for example, to the American sopranos Renée Fleming and Dawn Upshaw but that also makes her more fun to watch. ...
It is not true, for example, that she had an affair with Robbie Williams and bore his love child. On the other hand, the reports that she loves to party and to shop and can swear like a trooper in five or six languages are probably not inaccurate.
Netrebko is more of a homebody than she is sometimes given credit for. She spent her 36th birthday, in September, in her apartment in New York cooking dinner for her publicist and his girlfriend. But she is also a serious clotheshorse. In August, when I had lunch with her in Vienna, where she also has an apartment, she turned up wearing purple pumps (which matched her eye shadow), a bright orange duster and the shortest miniskirt I’ve seen anywhere except on Carnaby Street in 1969. The face of her wristwatch was encrusted with what must have been diamonds, because you’d be embarrassed to have rhinestones that big.
“I’m so fat,” she said as she sat down. She explained that she had just come back from a few days’ rest in Italy. “My crazy friends,” she said, “They don’t think about nothing but food, food, food.” (Netrebko, who is a very quick study when it comes to languages, used to speak English with a noticeable Russian accent, but it’s almost gone now, her Russianness apparent only in certain vowels and infrequent lapses into Russian syntax.) ...
Netrebko, for her part, is looking forward to the 2012 production of “Manon.” This is an opera she loves (with reason, her detractors say: it’s about a materialistic airhead), and she delighted in a production that Vincent Paterson created for her in Los Angeles. It was set in Paris in the 1950s and showed Manon evolving from a Leslie Caron character to one modeled on Elizabeth Taylor and Marilyn Monroe. In one scene she even did a pole dance. “This production was so good,” she said, “because it understands that ‘Manon’ is not a deep story. She’s not a deep character. So it has to be funny, silly, charming, erotical — not dark. She’s not evil. She’s like, I screw up my life, but, well, too bad!” ...
“Look, I am normal,” Netrebko told me last summer. “Normal, normal, normal!” And she is, though at the animated, high-energy end of normality. She laughs easily and gestures broadly, waving her arms, rolling her eyes, sticking out her tongue. When a man suddenly materialized at our restaurant table bearing not one but five copies of her “Figaro” CD, which needed to be autographed on the spot, she sweetly complied and went out of her way to chat with him a bit. When I was trying to discuss her Carnegie Hall concert this past May with the Russian baritone Dmitri Hvorostovsky, and compliment the fine points of her performance of the Letter Scene from “Eugene Onegin,” she found it necessary to explain that I didn’t know what I was talking about. She did so gently, however, and added, “You are very nice.”
I mean, what a great quote--you get an exact sense of her. And not just her; as McGrath notes:
Netrebko’s friend and mentor, Renata Scotto, herself a diva in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, says that an important clue to Netrebko’s nature is her Russianness. “She’s very humble, very truthful,” she remarked of Netrebko. “And I think a lot of Russians are like this. She’s full of the joy of life and also a very hard worker.”
Netrebko concedes that there may be something to this, but also says that another Russian trait, which she clearly does not share, is melancholy, passivity and being unable to decide what you want from life. A phrase she uses a lot is “I try” or “I will try,” and you get the sense that she is very much the stage manager of her own story. ...
At the time, to make some pocket money and for the chance to watch rehearsals, Netrebko was also washing floors at the Mariinsky Theater, St. Petersburg’s famous opera and ballet house, and this has given rise to a myth that is the Russian version of “La Cenerentola,” the Cinderella opera, with Valéry Gergiev, general and artistic director of the Mariinsky, swooping in and rescuing her from the mop and bucket. In fact, by the time she auditioned for Gergiev she had already retired from scrubbing and had even won the Glinka, perhaps Russia’s most famous vocal competition.
Anyone who'd take a job washing floors to watch rehearsals isn't any kind of diva, I'd say.
Uncredited, as far as I can tell, photo of Netrbko via an Italian blog.
Some great works for classical guitar, inspired by Virginia Heffernan's (ugh!) blog post on meeting "Funtwo", aka Jeong-Hyun Lim, aka YouTube guitar legend.
The funniest part of her post, incidentally, was this:
But most importantly, to me:
3. He asked me why, in Auckland, New Zealand, the only people interested in neoclassical shred solo guitar work–as he is–were other Koreans? The Europeans, he said, only seemed to want to listen to Green Day and post-punk. Why not the complex digital stuff, like Dream Theater (his example)?
I ventured a couple of answers, and then he blew me out of the water with a reply that seemed to explain the earth, the universe and everything.
At the very least, it explained Asian attention to technique versus European expressionism. Wow.
Uh, okay; she leaves it at that, I guess like she says we'll have to read her piece Monday to find out what his reply was, and read more about Virginia's reduction of cultures to: Europe creative, Asia methodical.
(Even as we live in a video game age dominated by designers from Asia).
Pachelbel's Canon in D
Funtwo's version is absolutely amazing; it has 28,245,680 views, 5th all-time on YouTube. it's funny reading comments from the kids who have no idea what piece this is. Like Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet and 10 Things I Hate About You, I'm all for modern updates of classics--which themselves were often contemporary takes on the ancients.
Vivaldi's Four Seasons
Funtwo again, playing the Summer movement. I think he should join forces with the East Village Opera Company and tour the country on a twin bill playing the classics.
Asturias movement from Isaac Albéniz's Suite Española
Played by Andrés Segovia, considered the father of the modern classical guitar.
Joaquín Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez
Rodrigo's a blind Spanish composer who died in 1999; his piece, as Wikipedia notes, sounds older than it is, like something out of the Moorish 15th century. The lyric, soaring second movement is so unlike the first, which is pleasing in its own right. This version is played by John Williams with the Berliner Philharmoniker conducted by Daniel Barenboim.
Paganini's Caprice no. 24
Su Meng plays the piece generally heard on a violin.
At some point, Kate Nash is gonna become big; Maz Azria used one of her songs, Merry Happy, for his show at fashion week, it was totally infectious and was stuck in my head all day.
It's hard finding a non-mushy version of her song online, but try this (the funny lyrics are here):
There's a slower, not as great version but cleaner audio on her Myspace page; which also has her catchy song Foundation. The rest of her music is good, too.
Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer turned into an unexpected treat. I didn't know anything about O'Day going in--but I always try to watch music documentaries at Tribeca, they're usually very good.
This one started out pretty unevenly--the filmmakers choose a very disruptive editing style, with lots of random graphics and distracting transitions. Maybe they feared otherwise it'd be just another Ken Burns talking head documentary--there are worse things than that style, and one of them is going MTV on a subject that requires gazing.
Plus some of the interviews were shot in an amateurish fashion, with bad lighting and awful backgrounds. There's one extended interview with O'Day, intercut throughout, that seems like she shot it herself in one of those 4-photos-for-a-buck booth. She's constantly out-of-frame or too close to the camera--if it weren't for a bad zoom at one point of the interview I'd have believed that she did just film herself.
But try forget all that, and just listen to her O'Day's voice. Oh, my, gosh. I had no idea. I've never seen facial expressions like O'Day; never seen songs performed like she does, with arm movements and shoulders and body positioning--not over-the-top, just totally apt. Her voice isn't unbelievable, but it suited the songs she chose and her persona so well.
All I really knew about her was that line from Let Me Off Uptown, where (a famous black trumpeter, Roy Eldridge it turns out) wails "A-nniiii-ta, oh A-nniiii-ta... say, I feel somethin'". There's a clip of it, via YouTube.
It turns out the back story is Anita doing that duet with Roy was a pretty risky thing in 1941; I hadn't realized she was white, and obviously all the back-and-forth of the song between Anita and Roy would've riled up people back in the day.
O'Day was just like that--she did her thing, and let the chips fall where they may. There's a lot in the documentary about her drug problems; initially, she was jailed for marijuana--which she says just made her say if people think I'm like that, then I'll become like that (to the point of clubs advertising her as the 'Jezebel of Song').
Then later in life O'Day was on heroin for like 15 years, in a very serious way--to the point that she really should've died, except for luck and some of her many devoted friends (including Carroll O'Connor) helping her quit.
Aside from the drugs and a lot of sleeping around, she also spent a lot of years in Japan when jazz in the 60s fell out of favor in the States; and also seemed to love horse racing, and talking people's ear off.
But in the end, the documentary's memorable because of her music, more so than her story. As one of the many interesting jazz commentators said, she did "wonderful things with time"--and that's it, she had a great sense of when to speed, when to slow, when to play with a phrase, when to let it out rat-a-tat-tat, when to scat, when to go silent.
The filmmakers said afterwards her personality--which totally comes across in the film--was uninhibited; she spoke her mind and let it all out. There's a hilarious interview with a younger Bryant Gumbel, who's actually being a good journalist in repeatedly asking in different ways why she did drugs; she keeps putting him off, until saying in a tart tone: "That's just the way it went down... Bryant."
There's also interesting interviews with Dick Cavett, and Harry Reasoner. In one of them, displaying her wonderful cadence, the interviewer asks, "How could you ever get involved with all that junk?"
Her pitch-perfect 'response' which isn't done justice by type: "How couldya."
If she were a different type of person you could say she was vulgar, even low-class based on some of her life experiences; but in the package she was it wasn't true at all, the opposite actually.
As one of the commentators says, "there was a lot going on under the surface that catches you unaware because it's mysterious, restrained--it's kind of secret."
O'Day died about a month after the filmmakers showed her one of the final cuts; we're lucky some of her performances were caught on film in her lifetime. My favorite:
-Sweet Georgia Brown, in Newport Jazz Fest 1958 (from the very idiosyncratic documentary Jazz on a Summer's Day)
The drawn-out junglish opening and snycopated timing works perfectly for the song; it's funny watching the (very white) audience in the first part, before the camerman focuses more on her. (The second song, Tea for Two, has a shot of the famed 'ice cream lady.')
And oh that outfit, in combination with that saucy voice punching it out; she's totally in her element. This is one of the greatest performances I've ever seen on film; it's so interesting.
And she alludes in the film to being high at the time.
Uncredited Anita O'Day photo at Newport from Time magazine in various places online. She tells the story in the film of how she pulled together the outfit at the last second.
The Times is doing a series looking at "China's embrace of Western classical music"--soon to be followed by a series on America's love affair with Eastern cars?--that is riddled with the expected exotic Orient tone.
Despite his extraordinary ability and success, Mr. Wang, like many Asian-born musicians, has had to confront preconceptions about his ability to connect with Western classical music. At the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where he studied with Richard Woodhams of the Philadelphia Orchestra, a German conductor said he would be happy to show Mr. Wang how to play Brahms, since it was not in his culture, he recounted.
“You don’t have to be German to play Brahms,” Mr. Wang said. “I was very hurt. People think that way? It never occurred to me.”
Mr. Woodhams counseled him to work extra hard because some critics would blame stylistic failings on his nationality, Mr. Wang said. “I had to go the extra mile,” he added. “It may seem like I won a lot of auditions. But I worked harder.”
Sometimes, Mr. Wang said, he gets naïve questions like, “Did you listen to classical music when you were growing up?”
“There are things called CD players,” he said with some sarcasm. He pointed out that he probably grew up listening to far more classical music than most American youngsters. “The thing I don’t understand is why it should make a difference,” he said. “I am a Chinese guy when I look in the mirror, but I’m a world citizen of music.”
A. Nowadays a Moss Hart would want to be Aaron Sorkin because no play on Broadway is as interesting as “The West Wing.” It’s the best dramatic writing in the last 30 years.
Q. And is that all right with you?
A. No. But no one’s asking me. When Cool came in, it was the end of theater. Cool is not eloquent. Cool is: “What are you rebelling against?” “What have you got?” If you can say that, then theater is dead, because theater is moral, it’s glamorous, it’s about being smart, it’s about sophisticated gay people helping the heteros understand that they’re stupid and boring.
Q. This is, no doubt, an example of your famous overstatement.
A. Well, that’s gay people’s role in the culture, isn’t it? Now, though, they’re liberated from that role. They can be real boys; they don’t have to know about Auntie Mame. They still have an ironic perspective on the world because they grew up pretending to be straight. But they don’t have what I call the Knowledge.
Well, Mordenn does have a discerning eye when it comes to the West Wing.
Even if (especially if?), sometimes, the things they try make you raise an eyebrow, which was my reaction after reading Mia Fineman's Times piece, Travels Abroad Lead to Journeys Within:
On a recent Thursday afternoon the photographer Lynn Davis sat nursing a cappuccino in the airy, ground-floor cafe of the Rubin Museum of Art in Chelsea. The Rubin, which opened in 2004, is primarily devoted to the Buddhist art of Himalayan Asia, and that afternoon Ms. Davis, a slender woman with translucent skin and a gleaming mane of white hair, seemed to radiate an air of inner tranquillity and relaxed contemplation. ...
Although Ms. Davis’s photographs don’t relate directly to the Rubin’s mission of promoting the art and culture of the Himalayas, the committee felt that her work “was in line with the values and energy of the place,” said Mr. Melcher, who helped organize the exhibition and published the accompanying catalog.
“It couldn’t be more appropriate because Lynn has traveled a spiritual path,” he said. “She is a student of Buddhism, and it’s an undercurrent in her work that people haven’t looked at before.”
Of the 30 photographs on view several depict important Buddhist sculptures and monuments in China, Japan and Thailand. In others the religious reference is more oblique. A tightly framed photograph of stone steps half-covered by desert sand in a cemetery in Dunhuang, China, powerfully evokes the Buddhist principle of impermanence. The relationship between form and emptiness, another fundamental concept in Buddhist philosophy, finds expression in a dramatic view of the sky through a hollow rock formation at Arches National Park in Utah.
In order to integrate the show more fully with the Rubin’s collection of more than 2,000 Himalayan paintings, sculptures, textiles and prints, the museum invited Ms. Davis to choose a group of artifacts to be displayed in the galleries alongside her pictures.
At first glance the eight objects she selected — all elaborately detailed, metalwork sculptures — seem to have little in common with the spare, elemental forms in her photographs. But for Ms. Davis the objects and images have a deeper resonance.
“I don’t want to use the word spiritual,” she said, “but the spirit behind them is the same.”
Although Ms. Davis has some familiarity with Eastern religious art from her travels in Asia, she chose the objects on the basis of their beauty or emotional appeal, not necessarily for their art-historical significance. (She replaced several of her initial selections with artifacts that the Rubin’s curators considered more noteworthy.) ...
An eighth-century statue of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara with 10 radiating arms had a somewhat more prosaic appeal. “That’s how I feel when I’m on the road with all my bags and cameras,” she said. “I often wish I had a few extra arms when I’m working.”
I don't know; I'm planning to go see the exhibit, and will probably 'like' it.
But the knock on non-Western art collections in the West for years has been its amateurish nature--I have literally seen items in museums that were encased behind glass just because they looked 'exotic' or were from some 'remote' corner of the world, rather than on the grounds of any artistic merit.
I mean, even if the artistic judgment of Western curators isn't that developed when it comes to non-Western art, at least they should apply it, rather than in essence saying well, it/they all looks/look the same, it's not Picasso so who cares.
This Rubin exhibit could be a return to those days; it's definitely all very New Agey, which in my book means an insulting denial of merit, even as the practioners mouth platitudes.
True knowledge doesn't come easy; I'm not sure museum exhibits should be built on someone browsing through the collection, picking out what makes them 'feel' a certain way, judging entirely based on looks.
I mean, that's the job of the museum visitor.
“Iceberg #6, Disko Bay, Greenland, 1988" by Lynn Davis via the Times
An otherwise uninteresting--to me--Times Sunday Arts section had Alan Riding's piece on the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, Aalto’s Renown Rises From the Chair .
Most memorable to me was Aalto's Church of the Three Crosses in Imatra, Finland. It's a great photo, even greater form. Less memorable to me, but attached to the church photo is Villa Mairea, which the Times says many consider Aalto's finest work.
Photos by Gustaf Welin/Alvar Aalto Museum and Kalevi A. Makinen/Alvar Aalto Museum in the Times
