Reviews and News:
Victimhood and contemporary art: “It perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that Tate Modern decided to open its new ‘Exchange’ space, on the fifth floor of its new extension, with the Complaints Department, an installation by the Guerrilla Girls. As the late Robert Hughes wrote in his sharp critique of the contemporary art world back in the early 1990s, the ‘culture of complaint’ has become mainstream.”
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Samuel Beckett after winning the Nobel in 1969: “Here things are pretty awful and little hope of improvement.”
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Picasso’s portraits: “For him, it was not so much a question of getting a conventionally recognisable likeness — though he sometimes did that too. Certain faces, bodies and personalities permeated his consciousness so completely that at times everything he made was — in an extended way — a portrait of the person who was on his mind.” He also occasionally made fun of his sitters “as he did constantly with his loyal friend Jaume Sabartés.”
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The Italian mafia is trading arms for art with ISIL: “Italian mafia groups are reportedly handing over to ISIL weapons smuggled out of Moldova and Ukraine by Russian criminal groups in exchange for Roman and Greek artefacts illegally excavated from ancient sites including Leptis Magna, Cyrene and Sabratha in Libya—all Unesco World Heritage Sites. The objects are shipped from the former Isil stronghold of Sirte to Gioia Tauro in Calabria, a major port used by the ‘ndrangheta to smuggle cocaine into Europe.”
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Michael Dirda suggests a few Halloween books.
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Orestes Brownson and democracy: “‘To study Brownson is to learn from a man whose first concern was to be open to the truth about what it means to be a human person.’ And what it means to be human is to live in relationship (what Brownson called communion) with others, with the world, and ultimately with God.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Texas Monthly, Michael Hardy writes about Jay Hunter Morris, the “redneck tenor” from Paris, Texas:
“In 2001 Jay Hunter Morris was in Frankfurt, Germany, singing the lead role of Walther von Stolzing in Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The part was a major break for the then 37-year-old Morris, a journeyman tenor who had spent the previous decade bouncing from gig to gig, earning enough to survive but still struggling to crack opera’s top tier. Morris was feeling pretty good about his performance until one night after the show when he was approached backstage by an elderly German man who had a small role as one of the Meistersinger. Upon discovering that Morris spoke only a smattering of German, the man became enraged.
“‘You don’t speak German and you think you can get up here on this stage, in Wagner’s homeland, and sing one of opera’s masterpieces?’ the man fumed, in accented English, before storming off.
“‘I was humiliated,’ Morris recently remembered. ‘Mostly because he was right. He had cut through the makeup. The truth is, I’m a redneck. I grew up in Paris, Texas, and I did not belong there.’ The man had touched on Morris’s greatest fear: that he would be unmasked as a gauche interloper in the rarefied world of international opera. ‘I had the hardest time for the rest of the run getting up every day and standing in front of those people, because they all knew, and I felt like they all judged me.’
“Today, Morris is considered one of the world’s leading operatic tenors. He has headlined shows at the Metropolitan Opera, the Kennedy Center, and the Sydney Opera House, as well as on Broadway. He can sing five-hour operas in German, Italian, French, Russian, Czech, and Spanish. By any objective measure, he belongs in the opera world. But that doesn’t mean he’s overcome his self-consciousness about his small-town roots. ‘I’m frequently nervous about not measuring up, about being found lacking,’ Morris admitted. ‘The good ol’ boy Texas preacher’s kid is a glaring anomaly in most European opera houses.’
“For the first 25 years of his life, Morris dreamed of performing at the Grand Ole Opry, not La Scala. He grew up singing in the church with his parents—his father was a Southern Baptist music minister—and decided to become a gospel singer when he was 14, after seeing Larry Gatlin and the Gatlin Brothers play at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington. After studying voice at Paris Junior College and Baylor University, he followed that dream to Nashville, where reality quickly set in. ‘I learned that I really wasn’t very good,’ he recalled. ‘Those guys, the studio players, that’s all they do. They practice all the time, they sing all the time, they’re always writing. That wasn’t me—I wasn’t that good a singer. I knew pretty soon that I wasn’t going to make it.’
“One day, when he was back in Texas for a visit, a friend invited him to a production of Verdi’s La Traviata at the Dallas Opera. It was Morris’s first experience seeing a professional opera. Sitting in the orchestra section of the Music Hall at Fair Park, the Dallas Opera’s old home, Morris was enthralled by what he heard. ‘That’s where it hit me: that woman is lying on her back in a three-thousand-seat house, with no microphone, and singing beautifully. And I can hear her.'”
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Image of the Day: Lake Leitisvatn
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Poem: Jennifer Givhan, “The Gift”
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