The End of the Trail

[Photograph by Michael Leddy. Click for a larger view.]

On the Santa Monica pier earlier this year. December 31 is the end of the 2012 trail. Where Route 66 ends is a more complicated question.

Familial music, no. 2

Our fambly interprets “I Want You Back,” written by The Corporation: Berry Gordy, Alphonzo Mizell, Freddie Perren, and Deke Richards.

Related posts
Familial music, no. 1
Semi-homemade music

Familial music, no. 1

Rachel Leddy and Ben Leddy sing and play “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” written by Randy Bachman and Burton Cummings.

Related posts
Familial music, no. 2
Semi-homemade music

Domestic comedy

“What song am I singing in my head?” [Begins to saunter.]

“Main Street!”

[Astonished.] “How did you guess that?”

“You were sauntering.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (via Pinboard)

[“Main Street,” music by Roger Edens, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, from On the Town (dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, 1949). And no, we had not just seen On the Town. It was a matter of father-daughter ESP.]

Garner covers 2012

Bryan Garner collects some news of the year in language and writing. A sample:

A Brooklyn resident contested a parking ticket based on the meaning of the preposition to. According to the New York Times, Mark Vincent parked under a sign that read: “No standing April to October.” He decided that to meant that parking was prohibited until the month of October began. Because it was October 2, he reasoned that he was within the law. Supported by Oxford and Merriam-Webster dictionaries, he argued that to means “up to but not including,” while through means “to and including.” Although he did not win his appeal, the new sign reads: “No standing April 1–Sept. 30.”

I wish that Garner’s compendium came with links: they’d make for hours of happy (and sometimes dismaying) browsing. If you were reading Orange Crate Art in April, you saw a a post with a link to the Times article on to v. through.

[Bryan Garner, author of Garner’s Modern American Usage (2009), offers a free Usage Tip of the Day. You can sign up at LawProse.org. Orange Crate Art is a Garner-friendly site.]

Seconds and hours and art

Johnny Misheff, a curator of “Moving the Still,” an exhibition of GIFs at Art Basel Miami Beach, explains the relevance of the GIF:

“You know, this is like such an era of ‘Wow me in the least amount of time that you possibly can ’cause I don’t have time to like invest in your stuff.’ It's like the ‘prove it to me’ generation. If you haven't roped somebody in within two seconds, then you lost, you know?”

No, I don’t know. It saddens me to hear a curator speak as if such an attention span should be a measure of artistic programming. I think for contrast of an observation from the philosopher Richard Wollheim:

I evolved a way of looking at paintings which was massively time-consuming and deeply rewarding. For I came to recognize that it often took the first hour or so in front of a painting for stray associations or motivated misperceptions to settle down, and it was only then, with the same amount of time or more spent looking at it, that the picture could be relied upon to disclose itself as it was.

I noticed that I became an object of suspicion to passers-by, and so did the picture that I was looking at.

From Painting as an Art: The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (1987), a series talks given at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1984.

Wollheim’s way of looking at art requires a worthy object, one that does not “disclose itself” in seconds and that rewards looking again and again.

[I quoted Wollheim’s words in a 2010 post. I like GIFs too. But not as the measure of my attention span.]

Literature and reverence

Diana Senechal again:

The Chorus in Antigone says that he who honors the laws of the land and the justice of the gods will be hupsipolis, that is, he will have a great city. One could say this about literature: if students learn to enter it and honor it, they will have the makings of a rich life. They will also have an opening to true difference; by immersing themselves in the sole voice of another, they will start to hear their own voice, assenting, questioning, disputing, singing along, starting a new poem or song. Much of this literature is difficult for readers today; the ideas may seem distant, the words obscure, or the sentences long and complex. It is the teacher’s duty to help the student enter the work, and this takes time and care. It cannot be done when students in a given class are reading many different works at the same time. It requires a certain reverence — not the reverence of calling an author “great” just because everyone else does, but the reverence of treating the work, for a little while, as the most important thing in the room and mind.

Republic of Noise: The Loss of Solitude in Schools and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2012).

Family accounting

Tickets for four to see Les Misérables: $34.

Champagne cocktails and one family member’s imitation of Anne Hathaway’s mouth: priceless.

[Les Misérables seems remarkably ill-conceived. Casting a musical with actors of limited vocal ability deprives those actors of any real chance to act. About all they can do is perform. Anne Hathaway seemed to our ears the best voice in the film. On another note: champagne cocktails — sugar, Angostura bitters, champagne — are delicious. Does the champagne cocktail immediately suggest to you, as it does to me, someone from “the movies”?]

Local man’s blog referenced in cartoon

George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Portrait today includes a veiled reference to Orange Crate Art. The veil is thin, almost transparent.

Thanks, George.

Fontella Bass (1940–2012)

Sad news in the New York Times: “Fontella Bass, the singer whose 1965 hit “Rescue Me” was an indelible example of the decade’s finest pop-soul, died on Wednesday in St. Louis.”

I know Bass best from her work with the Art Ensemble of Chicago and (later) with her once husband Lester Bowie. The Art Ensemble’s “Theme de Yoyo” is a great synthesis of funk, free jazz, and metaphysical conceits.