The Misery Memoirist

by James Hall

Wall Street Journal
September 10, 2011

In the Renaissance, a man's soul was believed to be mirrored in his body, and an artist's soul in his art works. Artists had nowhere to hide. Leonardo was said to have imbued all his figures with his own physical beauty and elegant manners—and he complained that devout artists gave all their figures bowed heads, and good-for-nothing artists painted figures who looked lazy.

No Old Master has been more praised—and blamed—for "painting himself" than Caravaggio (1571-1610), the archetypal bad-boy genius. Few commentators have strayed far from the verdict of Giovanni Pietro Bellori, writer of the first detailed biography (1672):

Caravaggio's style corresponded to his physiognomy and appearance; he had a dark complexion and dark eyes, and his eyebrows and hair were black; this coloring was naturally reflected in his paintings . . . the dark style . . . is connected to his disturbed and contentious temperament.

For Claudio Strinati, curator of last year's exhibition in Rome (one of more than a dozen marking the 400th anniversary of the painter's death), Caravaggio's art was revolutionary not simply for the bold stylistic and thematic innovations but because for the first time in Western culture the autobiographical impulse is explicit and ever present: "The master speaks of himself from beginning to end and interrogates the spectator." For Caravaggio's latest biographer, the British art critic and television presenter Andrew Graham-Dixon, the style is the man: "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights. . . . When Caravaggio emerges from the obscurity of the past he does so, like the characters in his own painting, as a man in extremis. . . . Caravaggio always paints himself."

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A Trove of Faulkner Recordings

Wall Street Journal
July 26, 2011

William Faulkner will be forever linked to Mississippi, but he was also the first writer-in-residence at the University of Virginia, arriving on that campus in 1957.

As it happens, many of his readings, speeches, classes, and Q & A sessions in Charlottesville were recorded. (He’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949, so there was no question about his place in the canon by that point.) Very Short List today points to a trove of recordings from that period.

One section of the website “Faulkner at Virginia” is organized by novel. You’ll find the usual fare of author’s-talk questions: What’s your favorite book? Which novel of yours should a reader begin with? But also lots of questions about authorial intent, and plot points.

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Memories of Chekhov

New York Review of Books
July 5, 2011

Memories of Chekhov, from which this excerpt is drawn, is the first documentary biography of Anton Chekhov to be based on primary sources: the letters, diaries, essays, and memories of Chekhov’s family, friends, and contemporaries that I collected from Chekhov archives in Yalta and Moscow, as well as the New York Public Library, the Russian State Library, and the Library of Congress. All of this material appears in English translation for the first time. My favorite discovery was a rare editorial by Chekhov dedicated to the life of Nikolai Przhevalsky, a famous Russian geographer. At the very end of the nineteenth century Chekhov wrote, “Reading this biography, we do not ask: ‘Why did he do this?’ or ‘What did he accomplish?’ but we say, ‘He was right!’” These words also describe Chekhov’s own life.

—Peter Sekirin, Editor, Memories of Chekhov

I got to know Chekhov in Moscow at the end of 1895. I remember a few specifically Chekhovian phrases that he often said to me back then.

“Do you write? Do you write a lot?” he asked me one day.


I told him, “Actually, I don’t write all that much.”


“That’s a pity,” he told me in a rather gloomy, sad voice which was not typical of him. “You should not have idle hands, you should always be working. All your life.”


And then, without any discernible connection, he added, “It seems to me that when you write a short story, you have to cut off both the beginning and the end. We writers do most of our lying in those spaces. You must write shorter, to make it as short as possible.”


Sometimes Chekhov would tell me about Tolstoy: “I admire him greatly. What I admire the most in him is that he despises us all; all writers. Perhaps a more accurate description is that he treats us, other writers, as completely empty space. You could argue that from time to time, he praises Maupassant, or Kuprin, or Semenov, or myself. But why does he praise us? It is simple: it’s because he looks at us as if we were children. Our short stories, or even our novels, all are child’s play in comparison with his works. However, Shakespeare… For him, the reason is different. Shakespeare irritates him because he is a grown-up writer, and does not write in the way that Tolstoy does.”

Ivan Bunin, “Chekhov,” from The Russian Word (1904)

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Star Wars - Binary Sunset

Episode IV: A New Hope
Music: John Williams

A Mash-Up of Actors Playing Woody Allen

FilmDrunk
June 14, 2011

Writers of fiction strive to create compelling characters who feel real, and managing that almost always requires drawing on your own personality and experiences. Protagonists often end up as thinly-disguised stand ins for the author, and for someone like Woody Allen, who hasn’t gone a full calendar year without putting out a film since 1978 (between Annie Hall and Manhattan), it naturally happens quite often. In celebration of Woody Allen’s latest critical darling and legitimate box office hit, Midnight in Paris, our video editor, Oliver Noble has gone through thousands upon thousands of hours (approximately) of footage from past Woody Allen movies and put together this compilation of quasi-fictional stand ins for Woody Allen, showing what Oliver believes to be the central tenets of the Woody Allen persona, the character traits and idiosyncrasies that most often shine through. And Oliver has particularly keen insight into Woody Allen’s mind, being that he is also a Jewish man who has sexual thoughts about his daughter. In fact, we frequently engage in turgid discussions about categorical imperatives.

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No, pagliaccio non son

Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)

Metropolitan Opera
New York, 1994
Conductor: James Levine
Stage Director: Fabrizio Melano

Canio: Luciano Pavarotti
Nedda: Teresa Stratas
Tonio: Juan Pons
Silvio: Dwayne Croft
Beppt: Elijah Chester

Luciano Pavarotti, "Vesti la giubba"

from Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo (1892)

performed: Budapest, 1991

Jerry Seinfeld in Oprah

Robots Retrieve Books in University of Chicago’s New, Futuristic Library

Wired
May 11, 2011

If Google Books was a physical place instead of a web service, it would probably look a lot like the University of Chicago’s new library

The Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, opening next week, is designed to accommodate the way people study and research today — online. The structure’s large spaces are made for computer work and have no traditional bookshelves.

Instead, the library boasts a massive underground storage area holding 3.5 million volumes on 50-foot-high shelves. The collection is managed by robotic systems that help create an environment where scholars can scour the web for hours for academic papers and still get a hard-to-find volume from the stacks.

As more books and journals become easily accessible online, it’s easy to wonder if brick-and-mortar libraries could go the way of the video store. But research at the university has shown that the more people look to digital resources, the more they consult physical materials as well, according to Judith Nadler, director of the University of Chicago Library.

“For scholars, the two formats complement each other, opening the door to a new era in research — and new libraries designed to make the best use of print and digital options,” Nadler said in a message e-mailed to Wired.com announcing the library’s upcoming opening.

Designed by architect Helmut Jahn and covered in 700 panels of glass, the library looks like a half-buried crystal Fabergé egg from the outside. Under the dome sits the library’s 8,000-square-foot main reading room.

All books can be requested online, then pulled up to the surface by an automated retrieval system that keeps track of every volume through barcodes. (The video below explains the process.)

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When Mahler Took Manhattan

by Peter G. Davis


New York Times
May 17, 2011

Here's an often overlooked bit of music history: Gustav Mahler, who died in Vienna a century ago today, was a New Yorker for the last three years of his life and, for that brief time, arguably the most famous musician in town. It’s not a trivial point — as a conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and then at the New York Philharmonic, he set musical standards that resonate even today.

New York has always held its conductors in chief close. Mahler was followed by Arturo Toscanini, who ruled the musical scene for nearly half a century. New York’s love affair with Leonard Bernstein was long and adoring, while James Levine is no less appreciated today, as we celebrate his 40 years at the Met and worry over his health.

Despite his short time among us, Mahler left as large a footprint as his successors. Already a world-famous composer and conductor, he was hired by the Met in 1907, and he arrived with a reputation as an autocrat who demanded nothing less than perfection.

In his previous post at the Vienna Court Opera, this newspaper reported at the time, this “martinet” had “reformed everything ... He was orchestral conductor, singer, actor, stage manager, scenic painter, costumer.” Worse still, Mahler was rumored to be a difficult, even neurotic personality more interested in composing endless symphonies no one wanted to hear than in working in an opera house.

All that was bad news for Met artists and administrators accustomed to more easygoing managers. They were also used to conductors who specialized in one style, be it Mozart, Wagner or the latest contemporary novelties. Mahler could do them all, and expected his performers to follow suit.

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The National Gallery: 30 Highlight Paintings

Vincent van Gogh, "Sunflowers" (1888)

Vermeer, Seurat, Gainsborough, Rembrandt - the National Gallery in London presents this website with thirty "greatest hits" of their collection. Visitors to the site can zoom in on the details of any of the paintings, such as a close-up of Venus' elaborately braided hair in Sandro Botticelli's Venus and Mars, 1485, or get close enough to see the individual brushstrokes in Van Gogh's Sunflowers, 1888. Each painting is accompanied by commentary, for example, this version of Sunflowers is one of four that Van Gogh painted in 1888 (not counting several in other years), and "the various versions and replicas remain much debated among Van Gogh scholars."


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Source: The Scout Report (April 29, 2011)

Sandro Botticelli,"Venus and Mars" (about 1485)

CLAUDE-OSCAR MONET, "BATHERS AT LA GRENOUILLERE" (1869)

Canaletto,"The Stonemason's Yard" (about 1725)

Paul Cézanne, "Les Grandes Baigneuses" (about 1894-1905)

Joseph Mallord William Turner, "The Fighting Temeraire" (1839)

Raphael,"La Madonna dei Garofani" (about 1506-7)

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, "The Supper at Emmaus" (1601)

Diego Velázquez, "The Rokeby Venus" (1647-51)

Georges Seurat,"Bathers at Asnières" (1884)

A God's-Eye View of the World

Wall Street Journal
April 22, 2011

A wave of ambitious social-network experiments is underway in the U.S. and Europe to track our movements, probe our relationships and, ultimately, affect the individual choices we all make. WSJ's Robert Lee Hotz reports.

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Your name, sir?

Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie perform a hilarious short comedy sketch in a police station. A man making a statement has a surname that is pretty hard to pronounce! Watch this classic moment from the ground-breaking comedy sketch show A Bit of Fry and Laurie for free with BBC Worldwide.

Steve Breen (March 23, 2011)

Bureaucracy

"036"

directed by Juan Fernando Andrés Parrilla and Esteban Roel García Vázquez
written by Andrea Gómez
cinematography by Ángel Amorós
music by Paco Martín

with Carolina Bang and Tomás del Estal

Only somebody brave, with a rebel soul, may enter the jungle of the outlaw and fight face to face against the most dangerous men at this side of the river...

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Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila

Zach sits down with Tila Tequila who may become his new best friend and also welcomes another guest on the show who some people may recognize.

Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis: Tila Tequila from Between Two Ferns

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman

Zach interviews Natalie Portman and her dog, Whiz.

Between Two Ferns With Zach Galifianakis: Natalie Portman from Between Two Ferns

Paul McCartney Wins Grammy for Helter Skelter

McCartney won for a rendition of the Beatles tune Helter Skelter, which he recorded for his 2009 live album "Good Evening New York City.".

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Esperanza Spalding

Jazz bassist Esperanza Spalding has won the Best New Artist award at the Grammys.

The Welsh soprano Dame Margaret Price has died

Gramophone
January 29, 2011

Dame Margaret Price has died at her home near Cardigan in Wales aged 69. Her pure, warm, lyric soprano will always be associated with the music of Mozart, a composer whose music ran through her career like a thread. In 1962 she made her stage debut as Cherubino in Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera and, as a young singer at Covent Garden later that year, she took over the role from an ailing Teresa Berganza: her career took off overnight. Her first major recording was as Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte under Otto Klemperer (EMI). And she would go on to perform and record the roles of the Countess (Figaro), Pamina (Die Zauberflöte) and Donna Anna (Don Giovanni). She also sang the soprano part on Peter Schreier’s Gramophone Award-winning recording of the Requiem (a disc that had critic Robin Golding commenting that she sang the part “more beautifully than I can remember ever hearing it”).

Though her career took to the world’s great houses, her dislike of travel meant that she always preferred to make her base with a particular company, first Covent Garden, then the Cologne Opera and finally the Bavarian State Opera in Munich where she lived until her retirement in 1999.

Like many Mozart sopranos, Price also excelled in the music of Richard Strauss and her stage roles included Ariadne auf Naxos. Sadly, she never made a commercial recording of a work she was perfectly suited to, Strauss’s Four Last Songs (though she was due to record the work for CBS with Michael Tilson Thomas). She also included a number of Verdi roles in her repertoire and was a memorable Desdemona in Otello (the role with which she made her Met debut in 1985, and which she recorded twice – once with Solti for Decca and then with Alain Lombard for Forlane). She also sang Amelia (Un ballo in maschera – an opera she recorded alongside Pavarotti for Decca). The most surprising addition to her repertoire was on record as Isolde in the DG recording of Wagner’s opera under Carlos Kleiber, a conductor with whom she often worked.

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