Most people know who Kate Blanchett is. She is a famous movie actress, right? Sure. But she also happens to be a really interesting person. Here is a link to a short profile of Kate that brings this out and explains her interest in devulcanized rubber. It’s by Dorinda Elliott from Conde Nast Traveler. Errr …. Conde Nast Traveler? I was surprised too about the quality of the writing.
Last night I watched part 3 of Sir Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation series (you can find links to the whole series on the Classic Film list). I am watching one part per night and enjoying them more and more each time I see them.
Part 3 is about the Gothic world and one of the heroes of the story is Giovanni Francesco di Bernardone. Who? We know him as St. Francis of Assisi. What an incredible character he was! It is one thing for a well to do person to embrace a life of poverty. That is extreme but it has been done many times. It is quite another to do it out of courtesy to others and to do it with such good humor. St. Francis was apparently a very light hearted person who developed an extraordinarily powerful but simple spiritual connection with his environment. Just amazing. And fascinating how this linked so well with the Gothic world where, as Sir Kenneth says
serious things were done with a sense of play. Where even war and theology could become a sort of game.
Game did he say? Does that mean that we are not the first gaming generation? Or perhaps by comparison, we do not take our gaming seriously enough.
Gloria Winters passed away the other day. Here is a link to her obit. Gloria had a long standing supporting role in the 1950’s TV show, Sky King. Here is a nice image of Gloria in her working outfit (from Airport Journals)
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So? Well, I found this odd quote from Gloria at the end of her obit
“Being attractive is the most important thing there is.”
Hmmm … that is a very strong statement. The MOST important thing? More important than being honest? More than being caring?
Well, I am not sure that I agree with Gloria. But her statement is provocative. And there may be a kernel of truth in there somewhere. BTW, I think that it reflects an attitude that was much more common back in the early 1960’s in the US (especially among women) than now. Making attractiveness such a high priority presupposes the importance of connecting with other people. And I would agree that connecting is important in life. But in order to become more attractive as an activity, one has to reverse engineer what makes the connection work and fake that pose. To try to say and do the right thing in order to fit in. In the end, it is a rather weak position, isn’t it?
Just by coincidence I read this morning that one of the most common regrets that people express when they are dying is
1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
Ouch! And
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
Many people suppressed their feelings in order to keep peace with others. As a result, they settled for a mediocre existence and never became who they were truly capable of becoming.
Double Ouch!
The quotes are from the blog Inspiration and Chai. Here is the link. I sourced it from Paul Graham’s tweet. Something to think about. Especially the word “courage” (I think). On a day to day basis, we don’t often think of ourselves as having issues with courage. But …
Getting back to Gloria, perhaps we would do well to summon the courage to believe that we are attractive enough when we are just ourselves.
Should we be surprised?
Sports are supposed to build character, but the evidence is that some of the great athletes of our time — Bonds, Clemens, Marion Jones — believed they could say and do whatever they wanted because of who they were.
From NYT. Here is the link.
Sports can build character — when they are not played for money. But when a sport becomes a business, we should expect athletes to act like anyone else in the business world (especially the entertainment business world). They will fill out the range of good, bad and ugly just like the rest of us.
But there is something else that builds character — being truly terrible at something. As Dan Coyle points out
… being bad contains a potential silver lining: character development, teaching the invaluable skill of resilience. We see this all the time, not just in the work of psychologists like Albert Bandura, but also in the biographies of luminaries like Beethoven, Churchill, Darwin, Emily Dickinson, Harry Truman, and John Grisham — all of whom endured excruciating stretches of ineptitude before they got good.
Here is the link to Dan’s blog, where you can get a look at the truly awful golf swing of former basketball star Charles Barkley (it is so bad that it is worth watching).
Here is a link to a short description of the work of Albert Bandura, the father of the cognitivist movement, if you would like to learn more.
So … time to do something that you are terrible at?
One usually thinks of criticism as negative, or even worse negative and obtuse. But not all critics see their role in that way, and Frank Kermode was one of that group. He just passed away at the ripe age of 90, and here is a link to his obit. I enjoyed this comment about his work
“(he wrote about) the conflict between the human need to make sense of the world through storytelling and our propensity to seek meaning in details (linguistic, symbolic, anecdotal) that are indifferent, even hostile, to story.”
And he wrote about these things for the “rest of us” not just for critics. Bravo Frank!
I will be travelling back from the US to Estonia today and tomorrow, so no more posting until Monday - thanks for stopping by!
A new book by John Paul Rathbone has come out about pre-revolutionary Cuba, and it focuses on the rather odd story of Mr. Julio Lobo. Here is the link to the NYT review by Michiko Kakutani.
I think the story is odd for several reasons. Lobo himself was an unusual man. He was very clever at business and became the richest man on the island, and perhaps one of the richest men in the world. Here he is
Yet Lobo was not able to see that the revolution was about to sweep all of that away. Indeed, he even supported the revolution against Batista before he found out that Castro was a communist. Something blinded him. Love of country? Or was it a determined denial that something could be more powerful than he was himself? Good question. And I guess we will never know the answer to that. Even more interesting is the current love of this old story. Nostalgia still grabs hold of people, blocking the path (I think) to find a better future
One might call it the ‘dead hand of the past”. Creepy.
After watching Alan Marshal in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, I thought I would watch him play a TV role in the old show, Perry Mason. It was the Case of the Terrified Typist shown in 1958 and you can see it in full at the above link). Marshal was good (though he didn’t have to work very hard), and as usual, the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger (played by Bill Talman), lost the case and his composure by the end of the show. Here is Bill in character (from the Perry Mason site)
But when I read Bill Talman’s real life bio, I got a different impression of the man behind the scenes. This bit caught my eye
… Near the end of his life, Talman did something that, while common nowadays, was an extraordinarily courageous thing for an actor to do at that time. A heavy smoker for most of his life, he was angered by a newspaper article he read about actors being afraid to make anti-smoking messages for fear of losing opportunities to make lucrative cigarette commercials. He decided to do something about it. Talman volunteered to make a short film for the American Cancer Society, part of which was shown in late 1968 and 1969 as a television anti-smoking commercial. He was the first actor to ever make such a commercial. When the message was being filmed, Talman knew he was dying, was in a great deal of pain and was in fact under heavy sedation for it. The short film begins, “Before I die I want to do what I can to leave a world free of cancer for my six children . . . ” William Talman died of cardiac arrest due to complications from lung cancer at West Valley Community Hospital in Encino, California, on August 30, 1968, at the age of 53.
I like that story.
Actually, I do not know that much about Oprah Winfrey, other than the fact that she is wildly successful. I didn’t know, for example, that she started a magazine called “O”. Here is Oprah on the cover (from Fishbowl NY)
I just found out that she hired a new editor in Chief. And I loved this comment from Oprah on why she selected Susan Casey for the job
“I recognized her talent as superior to my own, in the magazine world,” Ms. Winfrey said in an e-mail message. “I have never met a person more open to saying yes to life on an everyday basis than Susan Casey. While others may ‘want to be like Mike,’ I aspire to be more like Susan (minus the sharks).”
From NYT. Very cool. But minus the sharks? Right. Ms Casey just wrote a book about great whites called “The Devils Teeth“. Here is a quote
“Great white sharks … occupy the bean-shaped niblet of our cerebral cortex reserved for fear of being eaten by something — particularly something that lurks, hidden, in another element, waiting to burst into ours. Great white sharks, emerging out of lightless depths with a maniac smile, neatly encapsulate every fear on our list.”
I agree. Minus the sharks.
The types of stories that we tell speak volumes about us. Two recent biographies of writers — Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster — bring this out in a stark contrast. Maugham suffers in the comparison because he was not a sympathetic person. Forster was. But left out of the comparison was Maugham’s willingness to tell stories about the unpleasant aspects of life in a realistic way. Here he is
Here is the link to a review his biography. He was one of the first of the anti-romantic writers and we have gained from his honesty.
Forster, on the other hand, wrote about the difficulty people have in expressing affection and love. Here he is
Forster thought that
the main fact for fictional people, people in novels, is their preoccupation with human relationships.
Here is the link to a review of his biography. I would argue that the world has not listened to Forster, prefering instead to glorify violence and roughneck adventure — individualism.
But back to the main point. What types of stories do you want to tell?
There are many things that I love about our era. We enjoy, for example, a capacity to learn and innovate that no era before us could imagine, let alone copy. Yet there are a few things that I find a tad “subpar”. One is in matters of style. I don’t know about you, but I am very bored with our infatuation with fake rebellion. I have nothing against rebellion as such, but the rebellion you see these days is bought and sold rather than felt. Garbo was different. She was a rebel. But her rebelliousness was personal. Here is a wonderful image from a 1932 Vanity Fair cover by Miguel Covarrubias that captures her attitude
Interesesting, not just “in your face”. BTW, QT is collecting links to the work of Miguel Covarrubias and a few other artists. Here is a link to that page. Here is a brief intro to Covarrubias himself
Covarrubias came to the U.S. from Mexico City in 1923 when he was not yet 20 years old, and he was an immediate sensation. Cultural relations between the U.S. and Mexico were flowering and the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing. The charismatic Covarrubias quickly entered a world of famous personalities and before long he was publishing caricatures of Babe Ruth and Will Rogers.
From the University of Texas at Austin feature on selected artists. Just for fun, here is Covarrubias’s image of the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth
from Kandaka
