This afternoon with Stefania in town we opted for culture, which brought us to The Telfair Museum’s exhibit on contemporary American visual artist, Sam Gilliam. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective, organized and circulated by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. is an interesting collection of draped art, sculptural pieces and paintings that benefit from unique use of materials. I particularly liked seeing how much paint the man places on a canvas. For Gilliam, in many cases paint becomes a structural element, like wood or metal.
Sam Gilliam (b. 1933) established himself as a major artist in 1968 when he jettisoned the wooden stretcher bars that had previously determined the shape of his paintings and allowed his vivid, sometimes ecstatic, rushes of color-stained canvas to hang, billow, and swing through space. This was not the first time an artist working in the venerable tradition of painting had decided to abandon the conventional rigid support. But it was the only time someone had done so to create a complete painterly environment. Gilliam’s idea that modernist painting could be sculptural and, moreover, theatrical, radically distinguished him from his contemporaries, including minimalists Donald Judd and Robert Morris, color-field painter Helen Frankenthaler, and the artists associated with the Washington Color School, such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. Since that time, Gilliam has gone on to create work in an astounding variety of styles and media. Sam Gilliam: a retrospective explores many of the artist’s most important innovations while highlighting the aesthetic ideals that have remained constant throughout his career. Most important among these is his consistent disregard for the boundaries that have traditionally separated the disciplines of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
Geoff Boucher, a Los Angeles Times staff writer notes the Dixie Chicks center of gravity has moved westward.
The Dixie Chicks are now officially an L.A. band.
The trio started in Texas and soared to fame in Nashville but, after their well-documented odyssey through partisan politics, they were frozen out of the country music establishment, which denied them radio airplay and awards.
The Grammys stepped in Thursday to embrace the genre refugees in dramatic fashion, giving them five nominations, including album, record and song of the year for the music of “Taking the Long Way,” an album recorded in Los Angeles with rock musicians and a rock sensibility.
[UPDATE 2/12/07: Dixie Chicks won five Grammy’s last night, sweeping each category they were nominated in.]
Science Fiction writer, Cory Doctorow, wrote a piece for Forbes on the business value of giving his work away for free on the internet.
I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.
How did I talk Tor Books into letting me do this? It’s not as if Tor is a spunky dotcom upstart. They’re the largest science fiction publisher in the world, and they’re a division of the German publishing giant Holtzbrinck. They’re not patchouli-scented info-hippies who believe that information wants to be free. Rather, they’re canny assessors of the world of science fiction, perhaps the most social of all literary genres. Science fiction is driven by organized fandom, volunteers who put on hundreds of literary conventions in every corner of the globe, every weekend of the year. These intrepid promoters treat books as markers of identity and as cultural artifacts of great import. They evangelize the books they love, form subcultures around them, cite them in political arguments, sometimes they even rearrange their lives and jobs around them.
Doctorow argues that eBooks are viral artifacts that want to be passed from one friend to another. He also says they are, in essence, ads for the printed and bound versions of his work, which many of his readers eventually purchase.
There’s something befitting about a preppy storyteller wandering his way toward a storybook marriage with a member of America’s most famous media family. There’s also something very Hemingway about it.
According to today’s New York Times, McInerney, 51, has wed Anne Randolph Hearst, 48. The bride’s father was the president of The San Francisco Examiner and the chairman of its parent company, the Hearst Corporation, which was founded by the bride’s paternal grandfather, William Randolph Hearst.
Mr. McInerney, 51, is the author of seven novels, including “Bright Lights, Big City” (Vintage, 1984) and “The Good Life” (Knopf, 2006). In October Knopf published “A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine,” a collection of Mr. McInerney’s wine columns for House & Garden, a Conde Nast magazine. He graduated from Willliams and received a master’s degree in English from Syracuse.
The bride’s two previous marriages ended in divorce, as did the bridegroom’s three previous marriages.
YouTube user “dianeables” has archived a treasure trove of Jefferson Airplane videos. Including the video above, which appears to be a scene from the unfinished Jean Luc Goddard film, “One American Movie.”
This 1968 spontaneous rooftop performance in New York was conducted a year in advance of The Beatles’ more famous public art display in London.
Matthew Shaer of The Boston Globe has a go at Pitchfork Media in a Slate piece I enjoyed reading.
Pitchfork needs to provoke to survive–a strategy that arguably extends to publishing verbose and unreadable writing. (Pitchfork prose can be) dense without being insightful, personal without being interesting. In the realm of Pitchfork, though, a writer being obtuse and personal has a similar effect to that of a writer being deliberately confrontational: It’s good for business. As the popularity of political blogs has proven, informal, intimate writing can often trump serious, “public” writing.
Pitchfork founder, Ryan Schreibe’s big wager is that music journalism should be an even more intimate affair than politics–that musical taste is deeply idiosyncratic and that writing about music requires writers who are closely in touch with what makes a band or a song matter to them.
There’s little doubt that indie media companies like Pitchfork rattle some cages. Journalists are used to being acknowledged as experts in their chosen subjects. But now, a blog written by some kid in Dayton can have greater reach and influence than a 150-year old newspaper with a highly paid staff. That is disruptive, but in a good way. In general, citizen media is disruptive for the people.
I don’t often link to the National Review (in fact, I never have), but I’m compelled to do so today.
According to Think Progress, right-wing radio host Dennis Prager wrote a column earlier this week bitching about U.S. Representative-elect Keith Ellison’s (D-MN) intent to take his oath of office not on the Bible, but on the Koran. Ellison is the first Muslim ever elected to Congress. Prager claimed this “act undermines American civilization,” and compared it to being sworn in with a copy of Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Thankfully, Eugene Volokh, Professor of Law at UCLA, has a much more measured approach to the subject.
The U.S. Constitution is a multiculturalist document. Not in all senses, of course: It tries to forge a common national culture as well as tolerating other cultures. But it is indeed multiculturalist in important ways.
The Constitution expressly authorizes people not to swear at all, but to affirm, without reference to God or to a sacred work. Atheists and agnostics are thus protected, as well as members of certain Christian groups (like Quakers, who don’t believe in swearing oaths). Why would Muslims and others not be equally protected from having to perform a religious ritual that expressly invokes a religion in which they do not believe? Under the Constitution, all of them “are incapable of taking an oath on that book,” whether because they are Quakers, atheists, agnostics, or Muslims. Yet all remain entirely free to “serve in Congress.”
Presidents Franklin Pierce and Herbert Hoover (a Quaker) didn’t swear at all, but rather affirmed.
Clearly, knowledge of American history and the U.S. Constitution are not prerequisites for being a radio talk show host.
The Florida Theatre has a great show coming up later this month. On their website, they describe it as “one unbelievable couple creating downhome melodies for their local fans.”
The two bands then play Tampa and Pompano Beach before heading to Atlanta’s Fox Theatre for New Year’s Eve.
New York Times reporter Ben Stein recently had the pleasure of visiting my hometown and meeting its most famous person–Warren Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett told Stein (who also happens to be an economist and lawyer) he’s not pleased with the current tax system in this country. But not for reasons typically associated with the wealthy.
Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.
It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”
Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.
“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Many of the richest people in the nation look to Buffet for answers on how to increase their holdings. But Buffet’s philosophy by example goes far beyond mere numbers and business analysis. Maybe the rich could begin to ask deeper questions. Like how shall we best reform ourselves and the nation in the process?
