Quiggin

Zizek was being playful, but his point was that the movement of fast capital of the last ten years -- totally untethered from any reality or responsibility, almost a pure abstraction -- has caused turbulence for lots of poor countries.

John Maynard Keynes -- hardly a Zizek (and married to Russian ballerina Lydia Lopovoka!) -- has pointed out roughly the same thing in his image likening capital to a school of goldfish lying in a pond in peaceful suspension at one corner. Then suddenly, in the flash of on eye, they are in another corner for no good reason. Keynes was for some sort of tethering of capital (one imagines Roman goldfish on chains).

Today's Financial Times "Long View" is, in the same way, nervous that the nervous capital of hedge and other hair-trigger funds -- the "dollar carry trade" -- will not stay in place long enough for solid "long-term buy-and-hold investors to put more more money into markets." Lots of everyday lives are tied to these marionette movements of money.

Zizek has made lots of complicated ideas fairly accessible -- Terry Eagleton and Frederic Jameson have some quibbles but have given him good marks -- and he spoke at the same forum Jane Jacobs and Joan Didion do here in San Francisco and also at a small down-at-the-heels book store on Valencia Street. At least in that context, he did look like someone having taken something of a of vow of poverty -- and genuine in his concerns about the loss of culture, in the broadest sense.

One of Z's themes was about fast middle class normalization of previous dangerous ideas and zones -- which as someone interested in city planning these days, I see in the shockingly rapid assimilation of the Meat Packing District in Manhattan into grand hipness, without a even decent period of mourning for the old.

Hopefully Mr. Koch's nervous capital is at finally at rest in its new seats, viewing Opera & Ballet.

John Maynard & Lydia lighting up

It's interesting that Gates who has developed the devilish software system is so publicly generous and that Apple which has developed the angelic software system has a rather obscure philanthropic program -- one of "America's Least Philanthropic Companies" :Stanford Social Innovation Review.

Even more devilish than DOS is Slajov Zizek's London Books riff on "Liberal [in the old fashioned economic-liberalism sense] Communists":

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the power of meditation can be measured scientifically).

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational, cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

... The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

"Nobody Has to be Vile"

Dale, this is indeed cause to celebrate. But public access to a great many of these tapes is sometimes iffy. In theory they're supposed to be available through research libraries, but in practice -- at least in my case -- it seemed not so easy to arrange.

The Guardian has a good overview of Levi-Strauss' life by Maurice Bloch, professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics:

The individual subject, the self-obsessed innovator or artist so dear to much western philosophy, had, no place for Lévi-Strauss, and indeed repelled him. He saw the glorification of individual creativity as an illusion. As he wrote in Tristes Tropiques: "the I is hateful". This perspective is particularly evident in his study of Amerindian art. This art did not involve the great individualistic self-displays of western art that he abhorred. The Amerindian artist, by contrast, tried to reproduce what others had done and, if he was innovating, he was unaware of the fact. Throughout Lévi-Strauss's work there is a clear aesthetic preference for a creativity that is distributed throughout a population and that does not wear its emotions on its sleeve.

... The philosophical implications of this position not only implicitly underlay so much of his thought, but were made quite explicit in the polemic against Sartre's glorification of individual choice, which forms the final part of Lévi-Strauss's most adventurous book, The Savage Mind (1962)

... Given his personality and, indeed, his theories, the extraordinary lionisation he received on the occasion of his 100th birthday seems ironic. It was as if the French establishment and the French state had decided that he was suddenly a major diplomatic asset ... We do not know what he thought of all this, since by then he felt too ill to respond, but his often-expressed preference for the anonymous creator, which seems to accord so well with his personality, does not square with all this fuss. He hated public occasions and was a very private person. He loved to be out of step with the received "correct" view of the moment. He was uncomfortable with disciples and fled from adulation.

• Claude Lévi-Strauss, anthropologist, born 28 November 1908; died 30 October 2009

Guardian obituary

And from Tristes Tropiques:

Written on board ship

No two phenomena could be more different from each other than night and morning. Daybreak is a prelude, the close of day an overture which occurs at the end instead of the beginning, as in old operas ... Sunset is quite a different matter; it is a complete performances with a beginning, middle and and end. And the spectacle offers a sort of small-scale image of the battles, triumphs and defeats which have succeeded each other during twelve hours in tangible form; but also at slower speed. Dawn is only the beginning of the day; twilight is a repetition of it ...

A sunset elevates and combines in mysterious patterns the accidents of wind, cold, heat or rain in which their mysterious physical beings have been buffeted. The operations of consciousness can also be read in these fluffy constellations ...

When the sky begins to brighten with the glow of sunset (just as in certain theaters, the beginning of the performances is indicated, not by the triple knocking customary in France, but by sudden switching on of the footlights), the peasant pauses as he walks along the country path, the fisherman lets his boat float idly and the savage blinks as he sits over his now paler fire.

It looks as though they've corrected the Firebird error. I remember the TLS captioning a photo of Balanchine and Allegra Kent as "Balanchine and his wife Maria Tallchief."

Bee Wilson is not a dance writer but does review for the London Review of Books and the New Yorker, and writes often about food. She does make the book sound perhaps like a better read than it is (maybe she should have written it!) but I'm always hooked when someone says something is like a story out of Chekhov:

Where did it come from, this mad drive? His childhood sounds like something from Chekhov. The Diaghilevs were artistic distillery owners from provincial Perm, where Serge attended elegant soirées organised by his stepmother Yelena (his own mother had died when he was a baby, the result, he falsely claimed, of his remarkably large head). Yelena — who knew Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky — comes across as the great love of his life. Despite having two younger sons of her own, Serge was her favourite. She encouraged him to write poems, compose operas, play the piano, and generally think of himself as wonderful. All his life he wrote her long letters, calling her his “darling mama”.

This glorious comfort was brought to an abrupt end, however, in 1890, when Diaghilev was 18. His father was declared bankrupt and the family house was auctioned off. It was, writes Scheijen, as if “Diaghilev’s entire childhood had been wiped out in the blink of an eye”. Now he was on his own.

In 1895, still only 23, he wrote to his darling mama, laying out this vision of himself: “First of all, I am a great charlatan, although one of brilliance; second, I’m a great charmer; third, I’ve great nerve; fourth I’m a man with a great deal of logic and few principles; and fifth, I think I lack talent; but if you like, I think I’ve found my real calling — patronage of the arts. Everything has been given me but money — mais ça viendra.”

Added: no, the Firebird reference is still there on second viewing.

Many of his ballets are unremarkable and some are plain dull. And some of his better things are performed better by other companies. (San Francisco Ballet as an example). And I can't see him taking on the mantle of Robert Joffrey. Their esthetic just isn't the same.

Wheeldon's ballets are stunning & virtuosic -- especiLly when done by SFBallet and he's just been here and put all the finishing touches in place -- but I can't sY they're wonderful. They don't really develop and I agree with alaistair M that he can't do variation form which is at the heart of ballet -- even Cunningham has maybe a form of it in his wit and Michael Clark Company despite its punky dishelvedness has a nice musicality and fills the stage like a painter does his or her canvas. I can't imagine seeing three W's on one program.

Disclaimer - typed on an iPod touch while hard drive is in shop being replaced. Many happy go lucky defaults -- especially it's / its --must be overridden.

Everything has a political component. This one is appears to be toxic.

I was originally upset about the Koch renaming, but a Marxist friend -- and a great Balanchine fan -- has said it's alright. Anyway it's better it goes to NYCB & the Opera than to a football stadium or a presidential library. In "The Recognitions" I think one of the benefactors, or someone like one, has happily confused Das Rheingold with Miss Rheingold.

Austerely beautiful, once a year I listen to a recording of Wozzeck -- Erich Kleiber/Annelies Kupper -- that I just happen to have because Szigeti is doing Berg's violin concerto on the other side (an Lp and mono!). This sounds about which Bart may have a word or two.

*

Regarding Benjamin and the reproduction of performances, I just reread the essay after even more than ten years -- and we should perhaps revisit it at another time when a film discussion is up and running. Thanks, Patrick -- and Drew. The original text is chock full of interesting things. Some favorites:

Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web.

For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else.

The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera, as Pirandello describes it, is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one's image in a mirror ... But now the reflected image has become separable, transportable. And where is it transported?

And Benjamin brings up the difference between a clock on stage that should never tell time, and the clock in film which is "made beautiful" because it does.

I don't think it's often read that way--quite the contrary in my experience--though it's characteristic of Benjamin that he can plausibly be read in very different ways.

It is difficult with that essay -- I've never quite figured it out. But it was addressed to how the "aura" is missing in photography, in duplication and mass dissemination. Benjamin seems rather melancholy about it. A good topic perhaps -- I think Patrick's point that more is lost in reproduction of music is true -- part of its very soul. In the mechanical reproduction of ballet the mundane and and extraneous details are "noticed" and raised to the level of the good stuff. Again it's another topic.

Or Hedy Lamarr.

Thanks, sunday. I forgot about Hedy Lamarr as a scientist -- or mathematician. She was indeed the inventor of Wifi, along with George Antheil who helped her set up the 88 or so frequencies specified. Thanks to them all our phone calls or rather emails now go through a sort of Ballet Mecanique before they finally get to their destinations!

I tend to be suspicious of "realists" like Ross Douthat, especially peevish comments like --

It’s voted on and handed out by a committee of five obscure Norwegians.

Hardly worldly and statesmanlike ... The problem with Friedman is that he goes "on this hand" & "on the other hand," for example on Egypt: I see elevator operators with prayer rugs in the corners of their elevators saying prayers before we go to another floor (=the past, to be jettsoned), but from trains I see camel drivers with mobile phones (+the future, heart thumping in his chest). His waffling on Iraq War II didn't help -- he ended up seeing a shining peaceful kingdom just within hands' reach, on the windowsill of history -- though he had previously done so much on the spot reporting that would have told him to be very, very skeptical -- as were most other Middle Eastern reporters of all political persuasions.

The Nobel was a real hot potato and I don't think Obama could have refused it. It would simply have be too impolite and insulting, and it wouldn't be in his character to do so. We'll have to see what he says in Stockholm. (And JFK didn't do much but give inspiring speeches and yet he seem to have a good effect on the world.)

(The FT suggests that one of the worse things to have happen to Obama was the resignation of Tom Daschle; with him on board none of the health care craziness would have happened.)

And OFF TOPIC, I did like this award to Carol W. Greider by the "obscure Norwegians." A bit of an interview with her from the Times (warning: a mild but substantial slap at Lawrence Summers ahead). The part at the end about her children is nice:

Q. MANY REPORTERS HAVE ASKED WHY TELOMERES RESEARCH SEEMS TO ATTRACT SO MANY FEMALE INVESTIGATORS. WHAT’S YOUR ANSWER?

A. There’s nothing about the topic that attracts women. It’s probably more the founder effect. Women researchers were fostered early on by Joe Gall, and they got jobs around the country and they trained other women. I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women because there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men. The derogatory term is the “old boys network.” It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.

When Lawrence Summers, then the Harvard president, made that statement a few years ago about why there were fewer successful women in science, I thought, “Oh, he couldn’t really mean that.”’ After reading the actual transcript of his statement, it seems he really did say that women can’t think in that sort of scientific fashion. It was ridiculous!

I mean, women do things differently, which is why I think it would be important if more women were at higher levels in academic medicine. I think people might work together more, things might be more collaborative. It would change how science is done and even how institutions are run. That doesn’t mean that women necessarily have a different way of thinking about the mechanics of experiments. I think it’s more a different social way of interacting that would bring results in differently.

Q. DO THIS YEAR’S NOBELS MEAN THAT WOMEN HAVE FINALLY BEEN ACCEPTED IN SCIENCE?

A. I certainly hope it’s a sign that things are going to be different in the future. But I’m a scientist, right? This is one event. I’m not going to see one event and say it’s a trend. I hope it is. One of the things I did with the press conference that Johns Hopkins gave was to have my two kids there. In the newspapers, there’s a picture of me and my kids right there. How many men have won the Nobel in the last few years, and they have kids the same age as mine, and their kids aren’t in the picture? That’s a big difference, right? And that makes a statement.

Bart, until recently I had Pierrot Lunaire on my ipod Touch and would listen to it on my walks through the financial district. I associated it with someone on the 1 California in bankers pinstripes who would scramble up onto the bus each morning in a zig zaggy way.

I tend to like lieder more than opera, Elizabeth Schumann singing Hugo Wolf, and the stray paths the voice and piano take, criss-crossing here and there.

Cristian's Callas clip appealed to me, the concentration and barebones simplicity of it.

I second your idea of developing a set of common denominators.

What evidence is there of successful ballets surviving or were even staged in Russia in the mid 1920's?

Stephen Press in his solid "Prokofiev's Ballet's for Diaghilev" says this in the Pas d'acier chapter:

With the appearance of Rolf de Mare Ballet Suedois in the early 1920’s Diaghilev’s company was no longer perceived as being the leader of Parisian theatrical modernism...After the financial crisis in late 1922 and early 1923 Diaghiliev’s company was forced into a chameleon-like existence, dependent on the whims of wealthy French and British patrons... "Le Pas d’acier" became the return to bankable Russian exoticism ... Constructivism, futurism, and poster-like agitprop of contemporary Soviet theater would be transplanted to Paris and London through “Le Pas d’acier". ... Russian theatrical precedents existed for Diaghiliev’s planned ballet, the closest being the second act from the first Soviet ballet Krasniy vikhr’ (Red Whirlwind), choreographed by Lopukhov.”

Regarding Balanchine -- who seems a force apart from the Ballets Russes (look at his 1933 season without Diaghiliev) -- Elizabeth Suritz says Balanchine was exposed to and participated in the best of the Russian avant garde: Lopukhov, Goleizovsky, Gorsky, he worked closely with the Factory of the Eccentric Actor, he saw Meyerhold, Tairov, Vakhtangov, he was exposed to Tatlin and Malevich and Akhmatova and Acmeism (Tim Scholl makes the literary connections). Suritz:

Lopuhov’s "Firebird" was a very different version from that of Fokine premiered in October 1921, so it was possible that Balanchine danced in its corps de ballet. Seeing Lopukhova’s keen sense of style in his reconstruction of the classics must have been an important experience for Balanchine the young dancer, who had already begun to choreograph.

There was most likely no equivalent to what was happening in the arts in Russia in Paris -- or London: who was the equivalent to Tatlin and Malevich in England: Duncan Grant? Vanessa Bell? (O K maybe Wyndham Lewis). Cubism was in the doldrums and Picasso was in his conservative neo-classissism stage, as was Stravinsky.

Kochno was the person who talked about the changing Ballets Russes audience and it was admittedly very late:

The last season of the Ballets Russes in Paris, in 1929, attracted a new audience -- unfashionable but young and enthusiastic. During the previous seasons, everyone in the boxes and orchestra knew each other, and people chatted among themselves as if they were in a private drawing room. This year the theater was invaded by a nameless crowd for whom the dance seemed to be a discovery, and they applauded the performers warmly...

Massine was the choreographer with unruly accents, not Nijinska -- apologies. According to Kochno, 'Rossignol' had to be rechoreographed by Balanchine:

... its failure was due to Massine’s hermetic choreography; he had followed the principle of imposing a rhythm on the dance steps that was independent of the musical rhythm ... the ballet gave the impression of having been poorly rehearsed and led people to say that the dancers ... had no ear.

Toklas I misremembered. She was talking about Post World War II Paris:

What is going on in Paris is hard to say. Sartre is condsidered demode --- Jean Cocteau’s new piece -- 'L’Aigle a Deux Tete' -- is praised but not enthusiastically. There is a great deal of mediocre music played at far too many concerts. Lifar is dancing again in London and Monaco -- not in Paris yet. He has his lovely green color but looks too heavy for good dancing.

She does later add this interesting observation:

I learned a lot about the Russians from knowing very intimately a Russian brother and sister -- emigres of the early twenties. He was the painter Tchelitchew. He was an absolute cannibal, he devoured everythig -- men, women, children -- flats, furniture -- everything but the Russian Ballet which he caressed. His sister was like one of the sisters in Turgenev [Chekhov?]

Simon and Leonid, I'm off for an architectural walking tour, but I'll look for my notes this (California) evening. My immediate sense is that the Russian avant garde in the late teens and early twenties was a highly significant factor in all the arts, not quite the father of it all but of a lot, my bias of course ... Leonid, who were the dancers in the Scheherazade you saw in the 1960s -- and in some of the revivals of the other Ballets Russes pieces that you especially liked?

I don't know if it's been posted here but I read somewhere that Willy Brandt got his Nobel fairly early on and Gorbachev did too. I think it helps nudge the President to his best side and give him some backup.

Here is a tuber of a link, hopefully not too controversial, by Gary Wills, on how President Obama is somewhat a prisoner of history --

But the momentum of accumulating powers in the executive [since World War II] is not easily reversed, checked, or even slowed. It was not created by the Bush administration ...

A president is greatly pressured to keep all the empire's secrets. He feels he must avoid embarrassing the hordes of agents, military personnel, and diplomatic instruments whose loyalty he must command. Keeping up morale in this vast, shady enterprise is something impressed on him by all manner of commitments. He becomes the prisoner of his own power. As President Truman could not not use the bomb, a modern president cannot not use the huge powers at his disposal ... He is a self-entangling giant.

New York Review article

There may be a bit of rose colored glassiness to our admiration of Ballets Russes. I don't have my notes but according to Alice B. Toklas and Boris Kochno, the audience had changed greatly by the mid twenties -- the smart people weren't going any longer, and the real innovative work was being done in Russia -- that's why Diaghiliev commissioned Prokofiev to compose "Le Pas d'acier" and why he hired Balanchine who had cut his choreographic teeth on the Russian avant garde. Diaghiliev gave him some guidance but he was pretty full formed, and D's attentions were then on Igor Markevitch ("half-Igor"), I believe. Some of Nijinska's choreography had to be abandoned, the accents were so impossible, even "Les Noces" is supposed to be hellishly difficult to bring off -- I can't remember if it's Maria Tallchief who talks about this. "Petrushka" does holds up, but does "Sheherazade" -- as much as say "La Bayadere"?

I thought I'd add some of Anthony Tommasini's review of Gustavo Dudamel's inaugural concert with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It touches on some of the points discussed above. The concert consisted of the premiere of John Adams' "City Noir" which Tommasini found "riveting" but whose architecture was a bit elusive, and the Mahler First ...

Like Mr. Dudamel’s Beethoven Ninth at the Hollywood Bowl, the Mahler performance was not what you might expect from a young conductor. For all the sheer energy of the music-making, here was a probing, rigorous and richly characterized interpretation, which Mr. Dudamel conducted from memory ...

In the rustic second movement, he captured the music’s beery, galumphing charm, and milked the Viennese lyricism with the panache of a young Bernstein. He and his players uncovered the slightly obsessive quality of the songful slow movement, with its droning repetition of tonic-dominant bass patterns. And he viscerally conveyed the fits and starts of the mercurial finale, building to a brassy climactic fanfare almost scary in its ecstasy.

The musicians were with him all the way, though the playing was rough at times, with patchy string tone and scrappy execution. For all the important accomplishments, of Mr. Dudamel’s predecessor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, he was not the most gifted orchestra builder. The vitality of the playing was always inspiring. No one wants the slick virtuosity that some orchestras are content with. Still, Mr. Dudamel and his players may have work to do.

... Mr. Dudamel returned to the stage again and again. But he never took a solo bow from the podium. Instead, he stood proudly with his players on stage.

This concert will be broadcast in PBS’s Great Performances series on Oct. 21; check local listings.

Los Angeles Glows ...

Great post and development, Patrick, especially how with France...

you get a pretty balanced bourgeois society that is NOT based primarily on outrageous acts

The Anglo-Saxon world -- perhaps with the help of the Murdoch press -- seems now to be structured so that it's only defined by outrageous acts -- or just the endless possibility of outrageous act.

French art, especially literature is endemically louche

Simon, I'm not try to argue, just calm things down a bit. This is a very slippery slope ... what will we do with Rimbaud and Baudelaire and even Diaghliev if we follow out this thinking? And the English Baudelaire, Swinburne?

Very sad. He was the first love of me and my photographer friends -- we'd flirt with the idea of Avedon but always return to Penn. Penn & Avedon -- and other gods of photography such as Diane Arbus and Louise Dahl Wolf all came out the head, thigh of the same crusty and enigmatic teacher -- Alexei Brodovitch. Like Brodovitch ("Ballet" 1933-37 ~ Cotillion) Penn took great ballet pictures, like the one of Tanaquil Laclercq from the Balanchine's (he's at her feet) "Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne." Here's the likewise crusty John Szarkowski on Penn:

“The calm spareness of his vision and manner in his pictures was breathtaking,” John Szarkowski, director of photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art once wrote. “Seen against the background of the various trilling, ornamental styles that seemed intrinsic to the very substance of fashion magazines, they seemed to represent a new beginning.”

from

Boston Globe obit

There are some good conductors still out there. No one does Mahler like Abbado -- incredibly textured and nuanced though a bit sweet -- and there is the subtle Vladimir Jurowski with the London Philharmonic and Russian National Orchestra -- whose quiet and intricate hand gestures are endlessly fascinating to watch. It's not the goldenest of ages but pretty good.

Regarding differences in conductors, it was always interesting to hear what Klaus Tennstedt could get out of the New York Philharmonic that others couldn't -- struggling and calming their nervousness and nervyness to get the slow movements just right. The reclusive and demanding Sergiu Celibidache took the student orchestra from Curtis Institute and got an amazing sound from them, played like one person, at Carnegie Hall.

And Los Angeles Philharmonic seems to have been fortunate to have Dudamel succeed Esa Pekka Salonen and Carlo Maria Giulini, all with their own way of doing things.

Regarding the salaries, they're tiny compared to financial experts and bankers -- who have conducted some very bad music lately.

Do you mean some of this YMCA activity was with adults? Counselors, teachers and such?

Two or three year differences at most. And this all seems to have been happened in a much more naive and trusting time ... But I didn't intend to sidetrack the discussion and agree that we should return to the ongoing developments of this case.

Camille Paglia, herself lesbian in which she argued, convincingly that the flip side of widespread acceptance of homosexuality within ancient cultures was synonymous with the end days, destruction and dissolution of those cultures - she wasn't saying it was against nature but was kind of a societal horseman of the apocalypse.

Simon, Camille Paglia is so nutty and unscholarly and uncitable and the least good part of your argument. Homosexuality is a part of human nature -- a constructive one -- and has run through history like Prokofiev says like a red thread of a minor key through a Beethoven symphony. There is no love poetry in all of ancient Greece that is not same sex driven, check out Mary Beard at the TLS or K J Dover. Only in the late Hellenistic novels does heterosexuality come in the picture, so you could argue the opposite.

The case Cristian cited is not so different than what happened when I was a child at Young Mens Christian Association camps in the Sequoias in the part of California known as the Bible Belt. Young people, same age, older and younger, had their crushes and meaningful and trivial romances under the big trees and stars and then went back to real life and school and it was all part of growing up. Didn't Margaret Mead cover this ground years ago?

But eros and youth has nothing to do with the Polanski case.

Can I add that like Simon G. I was very sad that Pedro Almodóvar chose to sign that vile petition.

Again I can't help but wonder what combination of things people were thinking when they signed the petition. Nadine Marquand, whose daughter's was killed by a popular singer, who got off to her dismay with a light sentence, signed it. It may have had something to do with another case of the US overreaching or cynicism about the Swiss protecting swindlers' bank accounts. So maybe we should withold judgment a bit on this. -- And again if we stop seeing and discussing their movies here on Ballet Talk, it's going to be pretty slim pickings movie-wise from now on. (Hopefully Claire Denis did not sign -- 35 Shots of Rum is well worth seeing!)

The Bauhaus ideal and that of the Chicago school was not to make beautiful things but honest and utilitarian ones -- their beauty came in years later. Manet and the Impressionists did not create beauty -- they were juxtaposing things from high and low society, factories and leisure painted in coarse brushwoork -- that had never been shown together before. Mahler was a plumber's bag of odd sizes and harsh tricks. Balanchine's works had some of this coarse, ugly ducking quality.