Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

Saki Knafo wrote a fantastic article/profile of Spike Jonze and his movie adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are in the NYT Magazine.  Apparently, Warner Bros. got uncomfortable and was ready to pull the plug. Jonze said it was like I gave birth to a girl, and they were expecting a boy. “And now they’re learning to love and accept their daughter.”

Hearst & Gamble: Stories of Collaboration

Yesterday, while on vacation in California, I had the privilege to visit the Gamble House in Pasadena.  The day before, Hearst Castle in San Simeon.  The juxtaposition of the two, whose architects were contemporaries, was startling.  Hearst spent $4.7 million building the Enchanted Hill from 1919 to 1947.  The Gambles spent $50,400 (still a small fortune for the time) on an unpretentious bungalow built in 11 months in 1908.  Hearst Castle is filled with priceless artifacts from Europe, the Gamble House a unified masterwork executed to perfection from the design for the carpets and furniture to the workbench in the garage.

What the two structures have in common is that they both respond to the mood of their occupants.  Whether contemplative, social, or just comforting–both places are masterpieces.  Hearst would fly his guests in from Los Angeles and elsewhere for lavish parties.  Lindbergh and Earhart are examples of the combinations of guests that, I’m sure, made for amazing conversations.  

While Greene & Greene are famous for the Gamble House, Julia Morgan, educated at Ecole des Beaux Arts, architect of Hearst Castle is less well known.  But perhaps most overlooked are the Hall Brothers, Swedish immigrants, who actually built the Gamble House and its furniture.  And, Emil Lange who executed the leaded glass masterpieces throughout the house.  The patience and sympathetic ear of Julia Morgan brought Hearst’s immense resources and vision to fruition.  The collaboration between architect and craftsman is the true story of the Gamble House.

Avoiding the Riff-Raff

Colin Peterson, Representative from northwestern Minnesota, and Chair of the Agriculture committee, was quoted in Politco describing his district (and perhaps why he’s a Blue Dog Democrat):

Twenty-five percent of my people believe the Pentagon and Rumsfeld were responsible for taking the twin towers down, That’s why I don’t do town meetings.

Kinda disturbing…like a blue dog with yellow eyes staring you in the face, eh?

I prefer Huckleberry Hound:

Citizen Sabo

As I boarded the train home last night, sitting there across from me was none other than former 5th District Congressman, and Chair of the Budget Committee, Martin Olav Sabo.  He was riding the train to the Twins game.  We both remarked that it was a nice night to have a dome — next year at Target Field, the game would have been canceled due to the rain.  I asked if he got back to Washington much.  He said, “not if I can help it.”  

The Twins went on to beat the Pirates 8-2.  Mauer went 4 for 4 bringing his average to .429.

Frank Lloyd Wright + Legos

If ever there was a match made in heaven, it is Prairie Architecture a la Frank Lloyd Wright and the iconic Danish toy, Legos.  In the 70s, I played with my mismatched, monochromatic Legos for thousands of hours as a child.  No longer mismatched and monochromatic–I admit, that as a father of three boys, I have over indulged in more fancy (read: expensive) Lego kits than should  be allowed (Star Wars, Pirates, City, etc, etc, etc).  But, the coup de gras is Falling Water and the Guggenheim are now available in Lego form.  I’m sure I will buy them, but not for my sons.

And, I can’t wait to tell fellow Fight Clubber, Dave, as he is a former docent atTaliesin in Spring Green and father of two sons.

What Car?

What happens when a rocket traveling at 650 mph crashes into a Geo Metro?  Total awesomeness!

The Value of Arts

For video, see below.  This approx. 60 minute speech (with music at the end) is an investment in time but well worth it and works as a supplement to our last book, Promised Land: Thirteen Books That Changed America.

Wynton Marsalis ties together our Constitution’s founding fathers with bebop’s pioneers, Emerson & Thoreau with Thelonious Monk & Louis Armstrong, 1850’s minstrel music with 1992 rap.  He teases out the emergence of “rock and roll” and the debt it owes to its predecessors while demonstrating how much of what we know today is part of a cultural legacy we forget too easily or don’t bother to understand.

Nobody remembered that the American arts were integrated before baseball, but by the time the dust of the rock revolution had cleared, some kind of way, rock ended up being white, and the definitive “national music” and the blacks ended up with the minstrel show again. But this new minstrelsy was complex too – as suburban whites imitate the inner city blacks who embrace the bourgeois disaffection expressed in heavy metal nihilism fueled by the white misconception that black people are freer with their emotions and sexuality.

…

When I met Benny Goodman, there was absolutely no feeling of any mutual experience between the two of us. I knew his name and had heard a few of his recordings, but I didn’t know who he was. With all my education I was the perfect product of a disrespectful American youth culture…I didn’t understand what it took for Winslow Homer to paint black people with dignity in the 19th Century. I had never heard of him. And I definitely didn’t understand why any of this could be important to me.

…

The best of the American arts and the way they’ve been sung and swung provided human meaning to the questions posed by the Founding Fathers more than 150 years earlier…It told you we have a history, a depth, a tradition that requires skill and study but demands you apply those skills to search the frontiers of your soul. It told you that innovation and creativity hold hands with the tried and true.

…

The primary justification for the value of education is not some competition with other countries for technological jobs, or to win the so-called science race, or to beat anyone. Our arts demand and deserve that we recognize the life we have lived together.

From WE Dubois, “Education must not simply teach work, it must teach life.”

Executive Assassination Wing

As part of the University of Minnesota’s Great Speakers series, Seymour Hersh spoke with former VP Walter Mondale, now director of the Center of the Study of Politics and Governance at the Humphrey Institute.  Eric Black was in the audience and took note when Hirsch said Dick Cheney managed an “executive assassination wing.”  Later Black reported this in his blog and has since caused quite a stir.

Terry Gross interviewed Hersh and asked him about his comments.  First, he was dismissive of Minnesota and our climate…and I paraphrase, “what else are going to do in Minnesota on a cold and snowy March day besides create a dust up over a few comments in a West Bank auditorium?”  Despite his condescension, I think he was flattered by all the attention and no doubt increased the readership of the current issue of the New Yorker.

Anyhow, the substance of his remarks was that Cheney was running the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which has/had(?) a list of “high value targets,” would go into random countries, find these people and execute them.  What’s worse, Hersh leaves us with this:

I’ll make it worse. I think he’s [Cheney] put people left. He’s put people back. They call it a stay behind. It’s sort of an intelligence term of art. When you leave a country and, you know, you’ve driven out the, you know, you’ve lost the war. You leave people behind. It’s a stay behind that you can continue to contacts with, to do sabotage, whatever you want to do. Cheney’s left a stay behind. He’s got people in a lot of agencies that still tell him what’s going on. Particularly in defense, obviously. Also in the NSA, there’s still people that talk to him. He still knows what’s going on. Can he still control policy up to a point? Probably up to a point, a minor point. But he’s still there. He’s still a presence. 

End of an Error, But An Historical Pivot?

One of my favorite bumper stickers from the campaign last fall was: “1.20.09: End of an Error.” Because it was not only the end of W. but really the end of the conservative era that began with Reagan.  But, isn’t there a better descriptor for the last 25 years than “conservative era”?  Isn’t there a book or other work of art that defines the seismic shift in American spirit today?

To that end, our fair Fight Club recently read “Promised Land: 13 Books That Changed America” by Jay Parini.  Parini skillfully makes the case that these 13 books each captured (in some cases precipitated) an historic pivot point in American history.  Parini takes a chronological approach beginning with “Of Plymouth Plantation: 1620-1647″ by William Bradford and ending with “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan first published in 1963.  This begs the question: what book (or other medium for that matter) captures or defines the American zeitgeist since 1963? 

For once, Fight Club was speechless.  No one could think of a book that describes the many pivot points we’ve had since 1963.  Finally, Rich H. threw out Google, the search engine.  Though Google does not provide any commentary on our current times, it provides a means to an end and certainly represents the disruptive nature of the Internet.  Everyone seemed to agree that was a good choice.  Then, Matt H. threw out Star Wars, the pop culture phenomenon created by George Lucas.  Given that we’re all men in our 30s, the Star Wars demographic, we all agreed.  I thought this was an interesting choice because, although the first movie came out in 1977, it nicely sums up the 80s for me.  Reagan was elected, we were fighting a good war (if by proxy) against the “evil empire,” and the “force” (recently deregulated and unfettered capitalism) was on our side.  There was an optimism and bullishness about our future, especially after the dissolution of the USSR.  

But, it seems to me to be a sad commentary that, in the company of Walden, Huckleberry Finn, and On The Road, the best we could come up with is Google and Star Wars.  Is there no work of art that broadly captures the huge changes in our lifetime?  In the 46 years since “Feminine Mystique” is there no book that resonates broadly on the pivots of Vietnam, AIDs, end of the Cold War, ever-growing income gap, 9/11, Iraq, Barack Obama?  Perhaps there have been too many pivot points and we’re just disoriented?  Maybe the great American road story has run out of pavement and our Great Expansion is over?  Maybe we lit out for the territory in search of the promised land and, like Sal, simply found that the road ends at the Pacific.

In any case, we find ourselves a year into this Great Recession and, upon looking around at the flotsam and jetsam, are disgusted with the 25 years of binge-consumption, greed and avarice it represents.  We were too tolerant and permissive with men like Bernie Madoff, Rod Blagojevich, Mark Foley, Ken Lay, Bernie Ebbers, and Charles Keating.

In spite of our transgressions with these scoundrels, they do not define us. We call out to the better angels of our nature – to the grown-ups, The Greatest Generation.  What do our grandfathers say about our current situation?  Well, they’re wringing theirs hands – some saying I told you so, others like Arthur Levitt and Alan Greenspan are actually apologizing.   But, mostly they’re implicated, swept up in the “New Economy” and “New World Order” – guys like George H.W. Bush, Warren Buffet, Jack Welch, and Dick Cheney.

The American character is both Ben Franklin and Sal Paradise.  Some of the time we embody the Yankee ethic ofsobriety, practical ingenuity, common sense and fair play.  At other times, it’s all sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll.  But, it’s not to say that we’ve experienced some moral decline (see Dr. Spock).  This dual nature of the American character was there from the beginning.  William Bradford chronicles the virtuous and God-fearing Plymouth Plantation while scolding his fellow colonist  Thomas Morton who had the nerve to…

… set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together (like so many fairies, or furies rather) and worse practices. As if they had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of ye Roman Goddess Flora, or ye beastly practices of ye mad Bacchanalians.

Fair reader, what say you?  Does the Campbell’s soup painting by Andy Warhol, “Bonfire of the Vanities” by Tom Wolfe, or “An Inconvenient Truth” with Al Gore, capture the zeitgeist?  Or, maybe that’s what makes Parini’s 13 books that much more remarkable – they only come around once in a great while.

Recession: The Musical

Finally, the recession is fun again!  Good news via Rolling Stone.