Brian Wilson, getting through high school

Brian Wilson, at the Beach Boys’ 1988 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction: “When I was a teenager, I listened to the Four Freshmen and Frank Sinatra. That got me through high school.”

What music got you through high school? Me: the Beatles, Canned Heat, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt.

The Beach Boys’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, 1988

Brian Wilson was a model of humble eloquence at the Beach Boys’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. But Mike Love — the story is that he’d been fasting for a week. His monologue stands as one of the most embarrassing moments in Beach Boys history. My favorite bits: “intersistine sqaubbles” and “Okay, I don’t care what anybody in this room thinks.“

The Beach Boys’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, 1988 (Language a little NSFW at the end)

Music for cello, uke, and two hands

“Sweet Georgia Brown,” as performed by Mike Karoub (cello), Rob Bourassa (tenor ukulele), and Gerry Phillips (The Manualist).

(Thanks, Elaine and Carrie!)

Orange telephone art

[Photograph by Rachel Leddy.]

My daughter Rachel spotted this telephone in an Anthropologie. It’s not faux-old: it’s a 1950s–1960s telephone, refurbished and painted. “Hand-restored in Argentina,” says the Anthropologie website. Steep price ($198) and mixed customer reviews, but lovely to look at.

Thanks, Rachel!

Other posts with orange
Crate art, orange : Orange art, no crate : Orange crate art : Orange crate art (Encyclopedia Brown) : Orange flag art : Orange mug art : Orange notebook art : Orange soda art : Orange timer art : Orange toothbrush art : Orange train art

Domestic comedy

“But two days ago you liked her!”

“But that was before I knew her!”

Related reading
All “domestic comedy” posts

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)