A McChrystal thought

At least General Stanley McChrystal hasn’t attempted to explain his remarks to Rolling Stone as “a poor choice of words,” the usual fallback after someone lets us see what’s inside their head. But still, he’s gotta go.

(Yes, singular they. It’s okay sometimes.)

Five sentences about life

Another Google search for other people’s homework —five sentences about life — has brought someone to Orange Crate Art. Game on:

Life is like a box of chocolates.

Life is one damn thing after another.

Life, like a box of chocolates, is one damn thing after another.

That’s life. That's what all the people say.

If the last two sentences aren’t familiar, Frank Sinatra will explain.

Homework-doers: do your own homework. That’s the way to learn something.

Related posts
Five sentences from Bleak House
Five sentences about clothes
5 sentences about life on the moon
Five sentences on the ship
Five sentences for smoking
Write 5 sentence [sic] about cat
Write five sentences in the past
Five more sentences in the past

Orange notebook, moonlighting

Found out: my little orange notebook has been moonlighting at YouTube.

By day, this notebook is at work recording all the words from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest that I need to look up.

Grades in law school, rising

In the New York Times, Catherine Rampell reports on “grade reform” in law school:

The process schools refer to as grade reform takes many forms. Some schools bump up everyone’s grades, some just allow for more As and others all but eliminate the once-gentlemanly C.

Read all about it:

In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That (New York Times)

Review: Liza Kirwin, Lists

[Adolf Konrad (1915–2003), packing list, ca. 1962–63. Watercolor and ink. Click for a larger view.]

Liza Kirwin. Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerations from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Foreword by John W. Smith. New York. Princeton Architectural Press. 2010. $24.95.

There are, as they say, two kinds of people:

1. Those who have no interest in lists.

2. Those who are still writing or reading this review.

Liza Kirwin, curator of manuscripts at the Archives of American Art, has assembled seventy-seven lists and list-like documents from nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists (and the occasional architect, gallery owner, and writer). The items catalogued in Lists expand and complicate the idea of the list by moving beyond the purely verbal: it’s wonderful to realize that a color chart or page of thumbnail sketches of paintings is indeed a list in visual form.

Some of the lists in Lists place the artist in the world of everyday to-dos: “Pay bills,” says a Janice Lowry list, even as that list appears on a journal page alongside fragments of commercial art, a photograph, a postage stamp, and the rubber-stamped word LONGEVITY. Leo Castelli’s and Franz Kline’s shopping lists speak to us of Anacin and tooth powder, cornflakes and milk. Some practical lists are of far greater complexity: Francis Alexander Durivage makes a handwritten chart of bodily proportions for a sculptor’s use; George Peter Alexander Healy writes out sizes and prices for his portraits (“children the same as ladies”). A century later, Elaine de Kooning types up income and expenses for a joint tax return with husband Willem (they lost money in 1953). Other lists result from the impulse to make art for lists’ sake: Philip Evergood’s mobile-like taped assemblage of business cards and contact information and Adolf Konrad’s visual packing list (reproduced above) are in glorious excess of all practical considerations.

Sometimes, perhaps most excitingly, a list becomes a way to think about art. Robert Morris types out a prose-poem of alternatives to the term “earthworks.” A sample: “Bogs. Geometric quagmires. Square swamps. Minimal muck. Suspicious spongy unsound sod.” Joan Snyder offers items in a series (in colored pencil? lipstick?) to answer the question “What is feminist art?”: “HOUSES, INTIMACY, DOORWAYS, BREASTS.” Ad Reinhardt writes out long columns of “undesirable” and “more adequate” words with which to think about art. Bad: “communication,” “document,” “social agent.” Better: “discovery,” “possibility,” “vision.” And Hans Hoffman lists seven propositions concerning “the relation of students and teachers.” Number seven: “Ignorance is the mother of arrogance.”

In what seems to be a gesture of hope in difficult times, Kirwin closes out Lists with a typed Depression-era page by Grant Wood. It looks like a piece of concrete poetry but is in fact an inscrutable mapping of economic downturns of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A typical line:

6 ..   DO   DO   DO   DO   DO   DO 1873   DO 30  DO

The list concludes, “ALL CAME TO AN END EXCEPT THIS ONE.. MEBBE THIS ONE WILL.”

And so too this one.

Lists is well designed and well made, with sturdy binding and thick non-glossy pages. Each listmaker is presented by means of a photograph, some biographical details, and a full-page reproduction of her or his document. There are full descriptions of all documents and blazingly accurate transcriptions of less readable (handwritten) documents. In other words, the book is a bargain, and would be a bargain at a higher price. Lists should be of interest to any reader interested in

1. Painting and drawing.

2. Handwriting and typing.

3. The list as a tool for thinking.

Thanks to the Princeton Architectural Press for a review copy of this book.

Posts with lists
Blue crayon (Supplies for an imaginary camping trip)
Whose list? (A found list)

Errol Morris and David Dunning

There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

Errol Morris talks with David Dunning about the Dunning-Kruger effect and “unknown unknowns”:

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma (New York Times)

A related post
The Dunning-Kruger effect

Sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson

In honor of his sixty-eighth birthday yesterday: sixty-eight things you didn’t know about Brian Wilson. Several are new to me. Brian Wilson and Thomas Pynchon?

Forty years apart

Where do songs come from? Listen:

Canned Heat, “Going Up the Country” (1968).

Henry Thomas, “Bull Doze Blues” (1928).

Hear?

Canned Heat

My son Ben and I traveled to the delightfully-named city of Effingham, Illinois, to see Canned Heat yesterday afternoon. Canned Heat: as in “Going Up the Country,” Monterey Pop, Woodstock. I’ve been a fan for a very long time, since 1968 or so. (Yes, I was a blues geek.¹) Canned Heat was to my mind the most adventurous, innovative blues-rock group of all, largely because of the musical abilities of Alan Wilson (guitar, harmonica, vocals), whose often-psychedelic reimaginings of pre-war acoustic blues took the band far beyond the more usual blues-rock territory of twelve-bar Chicago blues.

Canned Heat is still a group thanks to the dedicated stewardship of drummer Fito de la Parra, who joined in 1967. He’s been there ever since, through the deaths of three original members (Wilson, Bob “The Bear” Hite, and Henry Vestine) and several later ones. Also playing yesterday: Barry Levenson (guitar), Dale Spalding (bass, guitar, harmonica, vocals), and Larry Taylor (bass, guitar, vocals). Taylor was with Canned Heat from 1967 to 1970 and has played on and off with the group ever since. If you think you recognize that beard: Taylor often plays with Tom Waits.


[Larry Taylor, Dale Spalding, Barry Levenson. June 19, 2010.]


[Larry Taylor. June 19, 2010.]


[Fito de la Parra. June 19, 2010.]

Songs played: “Bullfrog Blues,” “On the Road Again,” “Time Was,” “Fine Little Mama,” “Amphetamine Annie,” “Going Up the Country,” “Future Blues,” “The Story of My Life,” “So Sad (The World’s in a Tangle),” “Sugar Bee,” “Let’s Work Together,” and “Woodstock Boogie” (or at least something with similar lyrics). The musical highlight: Larry Taylor’s comprehensive bass solo on the final boogie. The other highlight: stepping up into an RV after the set to meet the musicians and get autographs.

Canned Heat tours and plays everywhere. We saw the group at a birthday celebration for a motorcycle dealership, Legacy Harley-Davidson. (Bikers and blues geeks alike are fans.) The group’s next stops: Texas and Montana. Then it’s two months in Europe. Take care on the road, Canned Heat.

If you’ve ever wondered: the name Canned Heat comes from Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues” (1928), a song about the dangerous pleasures of drinking Sterno.

[Photographs by Michael Leddy.]

Further reading
Canned Heat (Official website)

Related posts
Alan Wilson
Hooker ’n Heat

¹ Still am.

(Thanks, Ben, for making the trip with me.)

Happy Father’s Day

[Photograph by Louise Leddy, February 10, 1957.]

That’s my dad, James Leddy, and me. Happy Father’s Day, Dad. And Happy Father’s Day to all.