What would F. Scott Fitzgerald have thought of Hollywood’s expansive take on his story, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button?
Some well-grounded speculation at The Smart Set:
the Fitzgerald who worked his ass off in Hollywood, who failed over and over again, who was humiliated many more times than that, would tell you that Benjamin Button the film is pure treacle. He’d probably then go off on a bender, but not before first giving you the pages of “Crazy Sunday” — a Fitzgerald story that hardly anyone reads, and the ballsiest piece of Hollywood fiction ever written.
Read on… [here]
Style: Before Hippies but after Beatniks, there was… Mod!
Some very interesting styles, clothes, art, and music from a totally unique era of studied disaffection and universal nonchalance.
Design: The Glorious P-51 Mustang
Cadillac of the Skies
Somewhere, there must be poetry about this beautiful and lethal machine. The ever-engrossing blog A Continuous Lean has a nice feature [here] on the plane made famous by men like Chuck Yeager and the Tuskegee Airmen.
And here’s a goosebump-inducing multimedia presentation from a 2007 gathering of pilots and still-flying Mustangs… [listen to that engine rip the sky!] And more… [here]
Laptop Arts and Culture: Exploring Big Ideas and Great Art during a Great Recession
Looking for things to do when you are unemployed, underemployed, or just plain scared of spending money?
If you can afford to stay connected to the Internet, you now have access to a vast repository of enjoyable, intriguing, and edifying cultural content. And a lot of it is free, cheap, and/or legal.
As mentioned here recently, science fiction author John Scalzi recently put together his own comprehensive family entertainment package for less than $100 per month with things like Netflix, Rhapsody, and a public library. Scalzi’s list is a good starting point, but there are many cultural resources available for less than, say, the $20 it costs for the privilege of entering the Museum of Modern Art.
Cultural enrichment can be free or low-cost, especially if you look beyond “blockbusters.” Today, there is more enlightening material available more widely than ever in human history. From highbrow to lowbrow, and everything in between, there is an explosion of expression… more than any one person could digest in a lifetime.
Now is the time to explore that long tail of cultural production other than the biggest and latest thing.
From Project Gutenberg’s electronic editions of classic literature to historic music performances on YouTube, the most enduring works of our culture are suddenly the most accessible. The Library of Congress has been steadily digitizing its treasures of American history, music, and culture… it’s all free at the American Memory website.
For more contemporary fare, there is a flowering of creativity and energy to be found in podcasts, online video, ebooks, blogs, etc. The only problem is how to start drinking-in this ocean of expression.
A great place to look for digital gems is the outstanding website, Open Culture, which is indexing these free cultural riches.
Which brings us to another advantage of the digital age… the ease with which people can share discoveries and insights with others. Blogs, aggregators, and magazines can help us search out the best and most interesting content on the Internet. Online social media provide unprecedented opportunities to converse with others who share idiosyncratic enthusiasms. It is a wide open frontier for growing knowledge and experiencing art, and it is almost always free for the taking.
Where does this advice leave booksellers, public media, performing arts companies, arthouse movie theaters, and museums? Anyone who can afford it should patronize and support these institutions as much as possible. They are far more valuable than the nominal fees they charge. Still, many of these institutions are adapting to the current environment.
Many museums have dropped admission charges entirely. One way of engaging in cultural activities that would be otherwise out of reach is to volunteer on their behalf. Who knows, maybe helping out for free could lead to a new career?
The arts and the humanities have always been sources of consolation, rejuvenation, information, or distraction in tough times. Reading in history, matching music to mood, satisfying long-deferred curiosity… these are all important activities for mental and spiritual health and for a practical understanding of the world we inhabit.
As our Great Recession continues, these seemingly ephemeral things will only seem more important. Thank goodness they are more available now than ever before.
Playing with Fire
“Are all sociopaths so charming?”
One play just closing in New York offers a “humanized” portrait of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh… Another, scheduled for import from London, has “raised questions” of anti-semitism for its depiction of Israelis as… basically a bunch of bloodthirsty sociopaths. Are these playwrights and producers just baiting controversy, or do they generate light as well as heat?
The former play, “Terre Haute,” imagines a death row conversation between thinly veiled stand-ins for McVeigh and the strangely sympathetic Gore Vidal. It sounds like an interesting character study and a nuanced, even clinical examination of a terrorist. Contrast it with, say, Steven Soderbergh’s cinematic celebration of the pompous words and bloody deeds of Che Guevara. A play about a certain person need not be an endorsement of that person’s views and life. “Terre Haute” sounds as though it carries “redeeming social value.”
“Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza,” on the other hand, is a straightforwardly vicious little piece of work. In the voice of Jewish parents in Israel wondering what to tell their children, the script is only about ten minutes in length. The words bounce around various sentiments and perspectives, before winding up to deliver this wow finish:
Tell her we’re the iron fist now, tell her it’s the fog
of war, tell her we won’t stop killing them till we’re safe, tell her I
laughed when I saw the dead policemen, tell her they’re animals
living in rubble now, tell her I wouldn’t care if we wiped them out,
the world would hate us is the only thing, tell her I don’t care if
the world hates us, tell her we’re better haters, tell her we’re
chosen people, tell her I look at one of their children covered in
blood and what do I feel? tell her all I feel is happy it’s not her.
Read the whole script for yourself here in pdf format. Regardless of your opinion on Israel’s military adventures, it’s not hard to recognize the rancid odor coming off that language.
Now Listening…
Splice Today has produced a “mix tape” of traditional folks songs interpreted by a bunch of indy/alt musicians… The Old Lonesome Sound is available for free (with registration) at this locale.
The End of Newspaper Book Sections
There is an aversion to long chunks of sentences.
Indeed. [more]
Now Listening…
Howard Fishman sifts through about a century’s worth of American popular music, takes it apart, mixes it up, and puts it back together in compelling, fun, and beautiful ways…
Explore more:
Tom Cruise and the Stauffenberg Plot
It’s not really Hollywood’s fault, but there are a lot of ambiguities left out of Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie. Surely, plotting to kill Hitler was a heroic act. But Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, the Nazi officer portrayed by Cruise, acted from motives that were less than 100% “progressive.” And there’s the question of whether a leader of the cult of Scientology carries a little too much authoritarian baggage of his own. Now that the film is playing in Europe, Bernard Henri Levy picks at some of the film’s tensions, oddities, and omissions [read it here].
By the way, Sign and Sight, the online magazine in which Levy’s essay appears, is a resource worth exploring and visiting again. The editors provide English translations of selected articles from across the European press. It’s a one-stop shop for keeping tabs on the cultural scenes of many lands in many tongues.
Now reading…
Edward Luce, a correspondent for the Financial Times, drew on his years in India and his eye for business and policy to explore the emerging Indian economy. So far, it appears to be a judicious and balanced account of the rise of a new, democratic world power. It’s not all a tale of “India Shining,” as the boosters call it, nor is it a story that ends with last November’s massacre in Bombay. More later.
