Applying my movie list idea to TV shows before the movie list is even released! One show for each year of my life. Unlike movies, there have only been a few years of my life sans much television. Those busy times were great, and so were the dinners mixed with TV and bits of family conversation from the 70s to present. Here, a nod to different program genres so as not to overwhelm or monotonize the brain. Roughly, the first twenty-five were viewed in my younger years, the second group viewed in my older, more adult years.
I’ll add a new one every year and maybe tinker by adding links and other stuff as the weeks pass.
Reflecting on the two lovely blue-covered books I just read, I’m struck by two things, one seemingly superficial, one psychological, both important to me. The first book is “Hour of the Beaver” by Hope Sawyer Buyukmihci, from the early 1970s. The other is from the early 1980s, “Tennis My Way” by Martina Navratilova. That decade span is a nice envelope around my childhood.
The first thing is just the sheer quality of the books from back then. There are many better examples, but the beauty and durability of the hardcovers from that era is comforting and speaks to a time when publishers could afford to “care.” The textures of the covers, the quality of the paper, the fonts, the white space on the pages, the generous illustrations, all speak to me and reflect the value of the book’s contents. (Dustjackets are shown in the second group of photos.)
The second thing is just how much we are made in our formative years. Luckily, in my case, the person who was developing in this time—and continues to develop, I hope—was influenced by enlightened people like these two authors. “Hour of the Beaver” is a passionate argument for conservation and seeing other creatures’ point of view, with simple, eloquent seeds of the arguments against hunting and converting wild lands into human ones. Martina’s book is a no-nonsense guide to tennis, shedding light on one of its greatest player’s opinions and mindsets, with lessons that can be applied by anyone who wants to apply themselves to any pursuit!
As much as we’ve learned and been tidal-waved by data and developments since these books were written, the fundamentals these authors share are touchingly written and are good reminders that there were indeed people in the past who had ideas that are point the forward to this day. In fact, Navratilova and Buyukmihci build upon foundations laid long before they took to the pen. They certainly seem to influence me more strongly than many a contemporary figure. Why is this? The aesthetic or style of their message? Their roles as “elders” in my formative years? It’s hard to say, but I’m happy they’re (still) around.
Incidentally, Martina’s autobiography (also written in the early ’80s) is also well worth reading, a real testament to her directness through her detailed story of emerging from the Iron Curtain and finding her way in the world.
You can find mini-reviews of these books, and many more, on my Amazon profile page. Here’s the link to them. Keep an eye on my conservation thoughts here, at squirreloftheweek.org.
In golden days, I used to read a little blue book of Matthew Arnold essays that my mom used in college. I sadly no longer have that little pocket book and should probably re-read its contents, but the essay titled Culture and Anarchy is what I’m thinking of as I type today. I haven’t thought about it in years.
Its most celebrated idea, “Sweetness and light” is a phrase that’s lost its cultural power. But for Arnold, the phrase as a powerful antidote to contemporary over-utilitarian, staid practices and thinking. For him, “sweetness is beauty, and light is intelligence” and is part and parcel of his counsel to pursue and implement “the best that has been thought and said.” A kind of thing we might call a “canon” of knowledge to be consulted in time of need or just as a part of wholesome daily life.
Arnold uses the past tense, “the best that has been thought and said,” but I don’t see his advice as stodgy or antiquarian: he had his eye on reform and truth. Besides, once something is thought AND communicated, it’s done and technically in the past, even if it’s a brand new utterance. I held this ideal as I read my way through my 20s and 30s, confident in my reading choices, and confident that the past held many answers for today. The sheer weight of all that’s gone before us surely has generated just about everything we need to consider as we move forward, so I thought and still mostly do—we were and remain humans. And with solutions to problems and ideas being generated all the time, there’s always a fresh “recent past” to comb through.
For society in general, though, is such a canon a blind tyranny, a crude “survival of the fittest”? There’s something to be said for a society being held closer-knit through a common fund of knowledge, though it would need to quite varied to keep all perspectives and experiences in view. But there’s little need to worry, we never did have a common canon and never will. And the world seemingly only grows more multifarious, with more people, more cultures, and more avenues of communication to reckon with. On the other hand, we are also becoming more homogenized by all of this global communication and product-buying; we don’t want to become trapped in those limits. Still, ideas do eventually come to fruition and the best problem-solvers seek far and wide, and dig deep within, for the best of them.
Do I still believe in a personal canon, a group of best and brightest? (A more “Herodotean/Whiteheadean” attitude might say that “the best” is ever-changing even for an individual person, proceeding with time and place and context and company and more figuring into it.) I thought about compiling my canon of sound wisdom and beautiful strains of poetry and prose into a book, but it would be a never-ending compilation, for certain.
I’m still confident in my reading choices, although I have a nagging feeling I’m often putting off the better things to read while sweeping up bits and pieces and leftovers, just so I have them settled before moving forward. That’s something I need to fix.
And there’s my ephemerality on this planet to consider. Is there ever a time to sit back and be refreshed by the best you’ve encountered, to abandon the spirit of outward exploration? I could endlessly revisit my favorite authors or times in history or places on this planet; I could endlessly mine the various Impressionists, for example, finding variations on the theme the more I explore, but still remain inward in that era. Or I could branch into something else that’s always caught my eye, just not as strongly—Hindu or Sumerian art, for example.
Some say highest wisdom is in focusing on a particular—a Napoleonic history enthusiast once said he focused on the era and all its goings-on to feel like he really understood it. Others might see a broad mind always exploring and digging and dancing around as the wiser. The answer for me, a fundamentally non-specialist person, remains a little of both—I will continue to spread out where my mind or necessity beckons, and also sometimes revisit old favorites, either to recapture an old, wonderful experience or in hopes of finding something even better than I did before. I haven’t felt the urge to read Matthew Arnold in decades, but maybe I’ll give him a look soon, acknowledging how his ideas are part of me, and maybe to find something new to grow on.
Early May in recent years has been subject to the feeling in one of my posts, namely this one and this one. That sadness is coupled with another, more invigorating feeling, in mid- to late May. As I sit in early June listening to a lovely piano concerto by Saint-Saëns, I thought I’d turn to it for a moment, if I may.
I’ve long had a vague notion that back in 2008, a certain love was developing rapidly in late spring, so since then my music-playing in May has been Bic Runga and The Go-Betweens—music from Down Under. I’d already listened to the Go-Betweens and their catalogue full of associations, so this year it turned into a season of Crowded House, with some Split Enz thrown in at the end—more music from Down Under.
May 11.Little did I suspect that May would be a month of my own shadows, a subject that seldom shows up in my pictures.
Long-neglected World Party also crept in as did The Red Hot Chili Peppers. These two groups, and the tones of regret and nostalgia and loneliness they strike at favorite moments, fit into the general spell. For, not only was it May 2008 that I was in this mood, but I’ve come to realize it was also this way in 1997: both are years that love really struck me.
I wasn’t listening to some of this music back in those days, in media res, but gradually this music came to sum up everything—the feeling then as well as the place the romance holds in my psyche now.
May 26. The month really did seem to last a long while, and its Wonderland was indeed full of trees and grass for me as well as these feelings and songs.
So, what exactly is this feeling, and where are the songs? The songs first. I listened to most of my Crowded House music, with “Sacred Cow,” “I Love You Dawn,” “World Where You Live,” and “People Are Like Suns,” bringing back a lot of that 2008 feeling. World Party chimed in: “I Fell Back Alone,” “She’s The One,” “Is It Like Today?” bridging back to the ’90s more so than the ’00s.
Love was growing in those Mays, and two songs really do capture what came of it all. For 2008, it’s “Poor Boy” by Split Enz. That year, the impetus to give it a go gathered serious steam with someone I’d known for years when she re-appeared in my life. Back when we had first met, it was she pursuing me from about as “afar” as you can get on this planet:
My love is alien, I picked her up by chance She speaks to me with ultra-high frequency A radio band of gold Gonna listen ’til I grow old
For 1997, it’s “Dosed” by the RHCPs. I had just met her in 1997, but this song speaks to how it all turned out in the short and long term:
I got dosed by you and Closer than most to you and What am I supposed to do? Take it away I never had it anyway Take it away and everything will be okay
Rather than provide the details, I’ll let the lyrics hint at them. The impact of those times will never change, I suspect. For all the pain and sadness, there’s deep pleasure in those loves and what they brought me.
It’s amazing what a few words and bits of music can do. And there you have it, along with one more shadow photo.
May 31. But is any of it art?Actually, that’s about as “Who cares?!” a question as you can pose.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend and I exchanged Top 10 Songs by The Cure lists. He’s an exact contemporary of mine, age-wise, with the fundamental difference here being he discovered the group several years after I did, my awakening coming around 1988, his 1991. Perhaps that has made all the difference, but in reality his tastes are quite different than mine, his seeming stubbornly obscure even to me, not to mention terrible. And then there’s my possibly extreme belief that The Cure really dropped off after Disintegration, much as my R.E.M. experience.
Neither of our lists is in any particular order. Here’s his:
1. A Letter to Elise 2. Pictures of You 3. There Is No If 4. Pirate Ships 5. Strange Attraction
6. The Caterpillar 7. Burn 8. Wrong Number 9. In Between Days 10. The Lovecats
I’d never heard of half of his. Here’s mine:
1. Three Imaginary Boys 2. Do The Hansa 3. Just Like Heaven 4. Catch 5. A Forest
6. The Caterpillar 7. A Night Like This 8. Close To Me (horns version)
9. The Perfect Girl 10. Grinding Halt
And there is a “secret” order to mine. It’s the order I built the list, mostly in my head, by the gut, with a bit of quickly moving through the albums chronologically to be sure I didn’t miss something obvious.
As he pointed out, it’s pretty cool that our overlap is “The Caterpillar,” which makes it fitting that this is the link I provide. We have some near overlap in his numbers nine and ten, which I’d put on a greatest hits of a decent length. He mentioned personal stories (unknown to me) attached to many of his picks; one or two of mine are here partly because of an incident behind them.
There’s so much more that could be said and done with this. For now, I’ll listen to his list sometime soon. The Cure figured pretty greatly in my early life and there’s a lot that reflection upon that, their albums, their songs, their continued existence could bring forth.
For now, I’ll recommend this to those who’d like to explore the breadth of their work over the decades: Cureation: From There to Here From Here to There. A song from each album, starting with the oldest, then back again. A kindred soul in music pointed their efforts like these to me a few years ago and for that I am forever grateful. I know this person hated by #2 song. Maybe we’ll meet again one day.
Just a few days ago, it was the 149th anniversary of first impressionist exhibition, held at 35 Boulevard des Capucines in Paris from April 15 to May 15, 1874, doors open 10 am – 6 pm, 8 pm – 10 pm. This little fact led me down a blooming spring path of reading up on the event and the subsequent seven exhibitions, the last of which was in 1886. All in all, the recurrence of these exhibitions was amazing, especially given the number of artist egos and practicalities (such as money) involved.
I began with this excellent Artchive summation and wound up reading all of the summaries from Impressionist Art.com, which covered seven of the eight with a wealth of images, facts, plus a few typos and opinions (e.g., Caillebotte was handsome), and then the quick summary from ThoughtCo.
These artists, from Morisot and Monet to Degas and Cezanne, and the rest of the lot (e.g., Marie Bracquemond, and paternal Manet hovering in the background) are some of my very favorites, and the world they inhabited with its art dealers and crowds, internal and external politics, and witty prose reactions, is, in a word, rich. And obscurities abound, such as the notoriety of Jean-François Raffaëlli, who I knew only from one painting in one of the Art Institute’s 19th-century galleries.
With all I learned, the most interesting must be that in some instances the artists chose how to display their pictures contrary to academic ways (no surprise there, I guess, since this is what the exhibition was all about). Pissarro’s and Cassatt’s frames were two discussed, along with the ways some artists were given their own galleries and some featured in the front of the exhibition, some (the more challenging ones) at the back.
This led me to this little illuminating article from Australia’s AnArt4Life blog, highlighting both the simple colored frames used, the color of the paint on the walls behind the paintings, as well as how the paintings were displayed to as to be appreciated much more easily and individually. It just so happens this article’s writers are in Melbourne, Victoria, where I once happened to visit some of their museum galleries with a person who had a knack for pointing out how the frames of the paintings affected and enhanced the experience.
Well, there you have it, a dully prosaic write-up on one of the most lyrical times in art history. I hope you find something to enjoy in it, despite the stilts. I’ll leave with a couple images from Pissarro, whose role (and work) I came to appreciate more thanks to this exercise. I am enjoying imagining how we would have preferred to display these: venue, wall, frame, and all.
Gelée blanche (Hoar Frost / White Frost) by Camille Pissarro, 1873. Displayed at the First Impressionist Exhibition. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Les châtaigniers à Osny (The Chestnut Trees at Osny) by Camille Pissarro, 1873. Also displayed at the 1874 exhibition. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
As much as I’d like to use a Greek “k” when spelling disc, I’ll go with a standard that’s been around for decades. This British staple is not so well-known here, but it seems about time for me to appear on this radio show where eight tracks are selected, plus a book and luxury item to have at one’s disposal while stranded on a desert island. What are yours?
I came up with my selections off the top of my head after only briefest musing. I wonder how they’ll hold up.
Eight Discs 1 “Swan Lake Suite” by Tchaikovsky. I figured I could be granted this if not the entire opera. Drama, beauty, melody, atmosphere, birds, ballet.
2 “Moonlight Serenade” by Glenn Miller & His Orchestra. I love Big Band vocals, but the beauty of the sound, mood, and feel of my grandparents’ generation makes this the one.
3 “The Rain, The Park & Other Things” by The Cowsills. My favorite of a certain 60s genre and subject matter.
4 “Everybody Is A Star” by Sly & The Family Stone. Captures so much in its brief stay.
5 “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)” by Talking Heads. For certain moods.
6 “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” by The Smiths.
7 “Streets Of Your Town” by The Go-Betweens. Everything comes together perfectly for a band’s music that is full of associations with many of my favorite people on this planet.
8 “Hurricane” by Natalie Imbruglia. One in my quests for the best of the female voice. A song I didn’t know until recently, so good to have something fresh to get to know on this island. And it might be quite à propos for a desert island regardless.
Many important figures in my life are left out. I did an exercise in picking five songs with some friends years ago, with different tunes, but this is how this one turned out. I’ll share those sometime too.
Book Contestants are granted a copy of the complete Shakespeare (thank you) and The Bible or other religious tome that suits them (not so keen). I apparently echo Eleanor Bron and others in my selection of Homer’s Iliad in dual language (original and the Richmond Lattimore English translation). Could I put this in the place of The Bible and pick another one?
I hear the opening bars and how can I resist? I’m back in the 1970s again, Barbra Streisand’s “Evergreen” bringing me there. This transport is instantaneous. Resisting isn’t even an option; there’s no time for it. Hearing that song again after a long time, I think it would be fun to pull together a collection from Streisand’s peak era, that decade. I tried the same with Bette Midler and that failed miserably due to lack of quality material, but in this case it worked out, as it has recently for in-depth looks at Natalie Imbruglia, Laura Nyro, Lisa Loeb, Sarah McLachlan, and an over four hour sampler of Olivia Newton-John’s entire career. With Streisand, as I collect the songs I remember that I once owned her second greatest hits cassette. No wonder this is so familiar.
Streisand’s never meant too much to me. Stoney End is a great album I invested in some time ago. But, otherwise, of her films, her life, and her earlier and later songs, only her ridiculous version of “Jingle Bells” figures in my active consciousness as I find myself singing it once every year or two. And, although she didn’t write anything I can think of, she did have a way of making songs her own, as singers of earlier eras and her ilk do. (Sometimes—even in the era of sing-songwriters—it’s surprising to learn that they did write a lot of their own material, as is the case of Melissa Manchester.) In the 70s, Streisand’s songs were beautifully arranged and lovingly orchestrated—she definitely cultivated a sound.
So, spurred on, I started listening to a bunch of her songs from my early life and created a 17-song “golden hour” group. Some are from that old hits collection and some I’d never heard or heard of. I left out the duets with Neil Diamond and Barry Gibb, wanting to keep it her voice—although the Donna Summer song is included (“No More Tears: Enough Is Enough”) as they meld well in their womanly sentiments.
I wound up grouping them haphazardly, but by album. Along with “Evergeen” and “The Way We Were,” two songs written to make me want to cry, there’s “All in Love Is Fair” and the towering “Woman in Love.” I hadn’t heard “Prisoner” in ages. “Superman” and the touching “Songbird” were faint memories.
Hearing “My Heart Belongs to Me” again for the first time in decades is a grand reunion; it might be her very best song. Possibly more exciting, there were songs I’d never even suspected existed: “The Summer Knows,” the surprising (based on its eyebrow-raising title) “Wet,” and best revelation of all “Lazy Afternoon,” a truly amazing atmosphere you can enjoy during any season (winter especially?), which I link you to here.
With all of the music coursing through my veins and across my ears, I should be doing posting daily to squeeze this all into what’s left of my lifetime. One day I’ll pursue my “Women of Song” or “1970s Epitome” ideas. Maybe I’ll analyze just what this 1970s feel is; for now I think of it as beauty unfiltered by experience. But for now there’s this, the song that’s haunted me in and out, off and on, for days: click here.
Time this time. I was looking through Instagram photos of soccer teammates, the joy and camaraderie they find in each other, then thinking how ephemeral sports teammate-dom often is, in a world of trades, injuries, and retirements. A thing of a season or a few seasons. Many things appear this brief to me now, having nailed down a few decades of life, but when you’re young and doing something among well-liked peers, the impacts and memories are deep and long-lasting; time seems to slow to allow you to really take hold of a moment, or at least it takes hold of you in retrospect. Schopenhauer pointed this out.
These thoughts, and some listening to Arcade Fire (whose best topic will always be nostalgia), particularly “We Used To Wait” (a song I will always identify with in our cellphone-changed world), got me wondering, how can we slow down time? In younger days, the novelty of what life set before me and the lack of self-conscience and relative lack of busyness and worry all added up to a slowed-down time. But could I, as an adult, get time to slow down?
I think of my multifarious life: the places I’ve lived, people I’ve known, pastimes I’ve pursued for pay or other (mostly other), the multitude of subjects I’ve read about and explored. I think of my time on a soccer team or at my junior high school or with a certain group of friends or minoring in Classical Studies in college or studying dragonflies and damselflies. With all of these, and the countless other things I have spent time on, it feels like I have just scratched the surface of what they could be.
Time and change go hand in hand, but I wonder what if I had stayed with my group of 7th grade schoolmates through my whole life, would I still feel I really had plumbed the depths of the relationships? There were so many people I barely knew, not to mention my friends and all the things we left unexplored. Or if I’d stuck it out in my DC job at age 30, where some people I used to work with remain colleagues. Would moving through time with this same set have made time seem richer and slower?
Put another way, imagine living in a year, say 1992, for a whole lifetime, meeting the same people, maybe traveling a little, but essentially exploring everything that was 1992 for a lifetime, the people, the places, the topics, the issues, etc. Not exactly a “Groundhog Day” recurring over, but time stood still allowing for all the world’s texture to be experienced.
But, of course, time doesn’t stand still, ever.
This is not the way of humans, the world, but if you look at a lifelong poet or a professor specialized in a narrow topic, you get a hint of the possibility of just how long time can seem. Imagine poring over the literature on a couple of specialized topics for the entirety of life, tweaking courses you are teaching, creating studies, honing pieces of writing that you are proud of, that benefit from a life’s focused gathering of expertise. Getting to know your colleagues in these endeavors, how their views differ or harmonize with yours, how change and evolution or stubborn resolution not to change points of view manifest themselves.
Maybe these minor adjustments and permutations really do slow down time in our minds, more than changing places and ideas and people incessantly as the months roll by. I’ll have to think more about this, and apply it to my life if it sounds like a better way.
As a former Classics minor and regular museum attendee of minor prestige, I have off-and-on read bits and pieces about how ancient sculpture was anything but monochromatic. If you go to museums these days you start to notice casts of color on ancient objects more than ever before, either because of the buzz about the topic and/or because these pieces are now being showcased.
It’s one of those times of year I wish I was visiting NYC. I spent a lovely summer there long ago and used to visit now and then when I knew people who lived there. Add to that an out-of-the-blue recent conversation I had on a cool New York Public Library exhibition of their collection’s treasures. And then there’s this article from yesterday’s New York Times on the Met’s “Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color” show, which features “colorized” versions of ancient sculptures, a public culmination of the studies of the Brinkmanns, a scholarly couple who have been at this for decades. Well, it makes me wish I could hop on planes and trains like I used to, or at least makes me think about studying something interesting like this in depth.
The article covers a lot of ground on ancient polychromy, including a new angle I’d not encountered, namely that by seeing only monochromatic (usually white/whitish marble) human figures in ancient art, our aesthetic and racial views of the world are significantly affected. Check this out for more on that.
Well, that’s plenty of links for you to peruse. But what really intrigued me about the Times article was this:
“However, some historians worry that the Met Museum has elevated the increasingly ubiquitous Brinkmann replicas to an iconic status that is becoming the default representation of ancient polychromy, when the couple’s research is just one among dozens of competing theories. The debate now encompasses more than a disagreement about pigments and scientific method; some academics see the reconstructions as a larger discussion on who gets to define the past.”
As much as I’d like to see the Chroma exhibit in person—and there’s a lot to it, including a fascinating glossary that includes ancient pigments—what I’d really love to see is an exhibit covering these dozens of competing theories, including replicas, succinct write-ups, lectures, evidence, etc. Maybe Chroma will feature some of this—I have not consulted its calendar. I can always resort to books and journals, but what a wonder such an exhibit would be. For that I would hop on the next plane and figure out somewhere and some way to stay in New York for a spell.
Ancient statue of a woman with blue and gilt garment, fan and sun hat, from Tanagra, Greece, 325–300 B.C. Exhibited in Berlin’s Altes Museum. Source: Wikipedia.
Watching Black Swan the other day, I thought about how few movies I see. Thinking about it slightly more, how many great movies do we need to have per year anyway? One or two seems fine as the years go by and we keep busy at other pursuits.
So, here we have 50 56 films for my years, with a nod to some I might not feel like seeing these days, but had an impact at the time. Sometimes once or twice is enough anyway. Not every film I loved from way back when is here either, so no E.T. or Indiana Jones here. Consideration of wanting at least one film by certain actors factors in as well.
I used to keep meticulous track of all the movies I saw, but tossed it aside and now form this list from a list of a bout 140 movies that I whittled things down to. My film-viewing history is neither complicated or interesting. As a kid in the ’70s and ’80s, I saw plenty of those decade’s lesser offerings, onward into the ’90s to now, seeing only a few here and there. The only era into which I have delved deeply, as an aficiandao, was during the ’90s when I avidly recorded ’30s and ’40s films thanks to channels like AMC and TCM.
So, here we have the first 55, more difficult to narrow down than the follow-up TV post that actually was posted before this! Four that I wrote up have been deleted to make it 55; seems like the coming years will bring more than one induction each. We only live once, and two movies a year isn’t so bad anyway.
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