Recently in Literature & Arts Category

I'm obviously getting old—my heroes are dying. Patrick McGoohan went yesterday, at 80 years. McGoohan created and starred in a 1960s British TV series entitled The Prisoner. It was a superb creation, sort of a mix of Orwell's 1984 with some Salvador Dali and Albert Camus mixed in. Yes, it was quirky, and it was about secret agents which were all the rage with the Cold War and all, but it was also thoughtful and intelligent. It dealt with issues of mind control, individualism and privacy. Those of us who saw it, will not forget the prologue to the show:

Prisoner: Where am I?
Number 2: In the Village.
Prisoner: What do you want?
Number 2: Information.
Prisoner: Whose side are you on?
Number 2: That would be telling. We want information..information..information.
Prisoner: You won't get it!
Number 2: By hook or by crook we will.
Prisoner: Who are you?
Number 2: The new Number 2.
Prisoner: Who is Number 1?
Number 2: You are Number 6.
Prisoner: I AM NOT A NUBMER, I AM A FREE MAN!

The show's thematic phrase was the enigmatic "Be seeing you" which is both friendly, and given the prisoner's lack of freedom, upsetting. In today's world where the Internet has stripped away layers of privacy from almost everyone, the message from the Prisoner remains timely.

I understand there's a re-make in the works. I don't have much hope for it.

McGoohan may be gone, but The Prisoner will live forever in The Village driving around in his Lotus 7 SII and espousing the deep and true principles of libertarianism. Everything about that is cool.

Update: Here is McGoohan's obituary from The Guardian. I've also come across a story about McGoohan being offered the role of 007 in the first James Bond movie, but turning it down because he though Bond was too promiscuous. He was not one to be swayed by the tide.

At 7:45 a.m. on August 7, 1974 a twenty-four year old Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped off of the roof of the World Trade Center on to a ¾-inch steel cable and walked to the other tower, then--without stepping off of the cable--he walked back. For forty-five minutes he stayed on the cable, eventually making eight traverses while dancing, kneeling, saluting and laying prone on the wire 1,350 feet above the plaza far below. Seven years before, while sitting in a dentist's office, Petit had been paging through a magazine and had seen a drawing of the twin towers proposed for lower Manhattan. For seven years he had practiced, schemed, and dreamed. James Marsh's thrilling documentary "Man on Wire" tells the story of how that dream came true.

The New York Times recently (December, 2007) published an article which starts off with this sentence: "ANDREA GEYER, a German-born artist, would later describe her first encounter with the famous statue as a moment of intimacy between two living beings" and containing the following quote:

"What becomes of the artists' models?" she asked in a column published in 1921. "I am wondering if many of my readers have not stood before a masterpiece of lovely sculpture or a remarkable painting of a young girl, her very abandonment of draperies accentuating rather than diminishing her modesty and purity, and asked themselves the question, 'Where is she now, this model who was so beautiful?'"

This was written by the beautiful and not entirely forgotten Audrey Munson, model for the awesome and alluring Star Maiden. It is nice to see the New York Times reporting on her career and ultimate strange fate. Read the article here: The Girl Beneath the Gilding.

So you do a little surfing. And you find out that Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker magazine is back from vacation and is blogging again. One of his posts about Tikhon Khrennikov makes one wonder if maybe he wasn't such an evil person after all, but the interesting thing about the post is that it's entitled: "Mithridates, he died old."

Now, where have I heard THAT before? Oh, yes! That poem by Housman. Quite good, but not the best known of the poems from A Shropshire Lad. Just like music, the best poetry is stylistically unique, you can recognize it immediately, which also makes it easy to parody. Which, of course, Sir Owen Seaman, future editor of Punch Magazine, couldn't resist doing which led to these memorable and very funny lines:(*)

What, still alive at twenty-two,
  A clean upstanding chap like you?
Why, if your throat is hard to slit,
  Slit your girl's and swing for it!
Like enough you won't be glad
  When they come to hang you, lad,
But bacon's not the only thing
  That's cured by hanging from a string.
When the blotting pad of night
  Sucks the latest drop of light,
Lads whose job is still to do
  Shall whet their knives and think of you.

And that is how the world-wide-web works. But you knew that already, didn't you.

(*) This is probably funny only if you are familiar with Housman's work. If you are not, I'm sorry I ruined the joke for you.

I am guessing that not everyone will find this funny, but for those select few that love Mahler songs (small set) and have seen Butch Cassidy and... (much larger group) I present: Strauss and Mahler Re-enact Your Favorite Movie Moments. What next? Messiaen in The Birds?

(A tip of the hat to The Rest Is Noise, for the link And for more on the Mahler piece mentioned in the cartoon, Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen).

Bad reviews are so much more fun than good reivews:

Sarah Ruhl is officially trendy. Not only did the 32-year-old playwright just win a MacArthur "genius grant," but she's making a high-profile New York debut: "The Clean House," which has been staged at the Yale Repertory Theatre and numerous other top regional houses and was a Pulitzer finalist last year, has now come to town in a glossy production starring Blair Brown and Jill Clayburgh. As if that weren't enough buzz for one human being to generate, Ms. Ruhl says she's working on a new play about the history of... the vibrator.

If I sound skeptical about Ms. Ruhl, there's a reason. It's possible to be both trendy and talented, and I suppose it might be possible to write a good play about vibrators, too. I can even think of a few genuine geniuses who've won MacArthurs. But when all these suspicious-looking items turned up on the same résumé, the red light on my Faux-O-Meter started blinking, which is why I wasn't surprised when "The Clean House" failed to live up to its hype. It's clever -- too clever by at least half -- but scrape away the postmodern trickery and it's nothing more than a soap opera for pseudointellectuals.

Terry Teachout in the Wall Street Journal (excerpted in Terry's blog).

TELEPHONE, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary (1911)

Bierce would undoubtedly have been horrified by the cellphone, though —perhaps—somewhat mollified by the invention of Caller ID.

Except for Citizen Kane and A Touch of Evil, both of which are probably seen only in college cinema courses, the films of Orson Welles are mostly ignored today. This is a shame. He was a bigger than life character with great creative energy, and besides that, he spoke highly of Wolfgang Puck's cooking (the results of which no doubt inspired one of his great quotes: "Gluttony is not a secret vice".... see prior post).

So, I'm bummed that I missed the Welles documentary Edge of Outside on TCM last night. I'll be sure to catch the rerun at 11:00 p.m. on July 19th though.

The greatest marriage of food and literature I know of is Babette's Feast, the short story by Isak Dinesen, but there are other intersections of good food and literature. I've been reading "My Antonia" by Willa Cather. It is a story about pioneer life on the prairie and the relationship of young Jim, the protagonist, with Antonia one of the daughters of an immigrant family, the Shimerdas. In the section below it is the first winter for the Shimerdas and they have sunk into a deep poverty and are in danger of starving. Jim's family visits and leaves them with a good supply of food. In gratitude, they receive something in kind...

On, of all places, an on-line bulletin board devoted to wine, someone started a thread asking about everyone's favorite old movie. It turns out that the poster's favorite film was from 1982! Since I had been shaving for close to twenty years by then, I didn't think that a film released in 1982 qualified as "old." I added a few films I thought were old, and others started chiming in with suggestions.

Surprisingly, these wine collectors were quite knowledgeable about old films and had remarkably good taste (at least I agreed with a great deal of the suggestions). For no especially good reason, I compiled a list of the suggestions, imposed an arbitrary cut off of 1969 and with some editing, made a list of 100 "old" films that I think are well worth watching. Because there were only 100 slots, some good films had to go. Although the Marx Brothers, Hitchcock, Chaplin, Harold Llyod and Buster Keaton are represented, the list could have easily included more films from each of them.

Here they are in chronological order:

Artist Liz Hickok models and molds the city of San Francisco in Jell-O(tm). She then makes color prints and videos of the result.

I am certain there is ample room for a snarky comment here about San Franciso politics & culture (after all, the artist did model City Hall in "red" Jell-O—which seems right to me) but as strange as it sounds, this really is art and it trancends the snide and snarky. Cleverly, one video of the results is named "Earthquake." It all seems exactly right and it is surprisingly fascinating.

I first came across the technique of making something "unreal" and then taking a photograph (which is always "real", right?) in the art of Sandy Skoglund. I've got a copy of her "Radioactive Cats" poster.

(Via Virginia Postrel and LiquidTreats.)

When Bob Denver died last week, I sent out a note to some friends lamenting his passing and noting that I remembered him best for his portrayal of the ineffably cool Maynard G. Krebs, the beatnick sidekick of Doby Gillis. I think the rebellions of youth were much more sophisticated in the 1950's than they were in the 1960's. I prefer Jazz to Rock and Roll, beatnicks to hippies, and Ken Nordine to the Smother's Brothers. It's nice to see that Meghan Daum agrees with me in this piece in today's Los Angeles Times: What we dug about Maynard. UPDATE: Original link had aged out. Current link is to the LA Times archive where, unfortunately, one has to pay for the full text.

It was love at first sight. She was beautiful and mysterious, and I had to find out more about her. The story I found involved high culture in New York, spectacle in San Francisco, scandalous behaviour in the nascent film industry, the leading lights of American Beaux Arts sculpture, murder, insanity, the U.S. dime and half-dollar, and sad and strange biography that I will remember for a long time.

Someone my age should have had more sense than to fall head over heels for a complete stranger. After all, there was the age difference —she was ninety years old— and besides that, it was obvious she had a heart of stone. She was created by Alexander Stirling Calder for the Pan Pacific International Exposition held in San Francisco in 1915.

She was also a clone. The Star Maiden and her ninety-four sisters stood atop the parapet above the Court of the Universe, a Colonnade of Stars: "looking down on the activities of men." Her pointed headdress was hung with cut-glass Novagems which were illuminated at night by spotlights.

How I wished I could have stood in the Court of the Universe and looked up at those stars. I was reminded of, and consoled by a poem by W.H. Auden:

If they do so at all, most people probably remember Barbara Belle Geddes as Miss Ellie, the matriarch in the long running Dallas television series, but I remember Barbara from her role in I Remember Mama, a jewel of a film from 1948 set in San Francisco dealing brillianty with the usual things: life, death and coming of age. I also remember Barbara from Vertigo (the ultimate San Francisco tour film), where she plays Jimmy Stewart's old college flame, Midge, who watches sadly and helplessly as Kim Novak leads Jimmy's character, Scottie, deep into romantic obsession.

Some (including Ann Althouse) have commented that Barbara just wasn't sexy, but I thought she was a babe. Scottie would have been a lot better off spending more time with Midge, and spending less time pursuing the mysterious blonde Madeleine/Judy. Terry Teachout agrees with me about BBG's attractiveness, and suggests that the Western, Blood on the Moon is another film that fans of Barbara Belle Geddes should seek out.

Babe or not, she cartainly was an actress of distinction who left the world richer for having been here.