Beautiful Horizons

No racial profiling in Arizona

After passage of a law requiring suspicious types to prove their citizenship to local police and another putting an end to ethnic studies programs, Arizona goes into the "you can't make this stuff up" zone.  From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.

"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"...

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the "Mural Mice."

The public art, funded by a $5,000 state grant through the Prescott Alternative Transportation Center, was selected by school students and faculty.

"The parents and children love it," Lane said.

Worst New York Times Book Review Piece Ever ?

I'm generally a fan, but...

This:

 

Augie Wren's Christmas Story - by Paul Auster (as told by Harvey Keitel, with music by Tom Waits)

A Holiday classic...the finale to Wayne Wang's "Smoke":

Leonard Bernstein on the St. Matthew Passion

When I was a kid I used to love watching Leonard Bernstein's Young People's Concerts on the tube.  Bernstein was a wonderful composer, a brilliant conductor, but also a path-breaking music educator. I happened on his discussion and presentation of excerpts from Bach's St. Matthew Passion here (Part One) and here (Part Two.)  I don't observe Good Friday but I often find my thoughts drawn toward the events of Holy Week, in what feels like serendipity - as an example, my stumbling on this Bernstein/Bach/St. Matthew youtube.  If, like me, you love J.S.Bach's epic evocation of the ritual of sacrifice central to Christian theology, you'll likely enjoy Bernstein's commentary.

Mailer RIP Redux (a BH Veteran's Day special)

Via Huffington Post, here's a link to a classic Norman Mailer journalistic venture from Esquire, circa 1960. "Superman Comes to the Supermarket" - his reflections on the Los Angeles Democratic convention and JFK. (Also here's his provocative 1957 "White Negro" essay from Dissent and a 1964 interview for Paris Review on the art of fiction available as PDF here.)

My favorite of all the commentary being unloaded on Mailer as fallen lion is an old one from his only real rival in the culture, Gore Vidal. It captures Mailer - and Vidal - for all of their brilliant grandiosity in one sharp blow:
"Mailer is forever shouting at us that he is about to tell us something we must know or has just told us something revelatory and we failed to hear him or that he will, God grant his poor abused brain and body just one more chance, get through to us so that we will know. Each time he speaks he must become more bold, more loud, put on brighter motley and shake more foolish bells. Yet of all my contemporaries I retain the greatest affection for Norman as a force and as an artist. He is a man whose faults, though many, add to rather than subtract from the sum of his natural achievements.”

UPDATE: A recent Paris Review interview here, again on the art of fiction.

The Best Vonnegut Obit You Never Read

Here's an obit that was written years ago by another terrific writer - who died before Vonnegut did - for a Bay Area newspaper that doesn't exist anymore, except as an advertising throwaway. (These things, of course, are kept on file for famous folk when they approach a certain "expiration date". Trivia alert - I never knew that Geraldo Rivera was KV's son-in-law. Nor, non-trivial, that copies of "Slaughterhouse Five" were actually burned by a local school board.)

Harold Pinter Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

Back when I was in college at San Francisco State University I took a two part course on Harold Pinter: one part was taught in the Theater Department and the other in the Film Department. We read and analyzed his plays, staged some as well, read his screenplays, saw the films he wrote, saw films of his plays and immersed ourselves in his work.

Few writers have had as profound an impact on me through their creative output. There is probably no more subtly touching, yet somewhat twisted love story than The Caretaker and one wonders if Tom Stoppard drew some of his inspiration for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead from The Dumb Waiter. The screenplay for The Servant may be one of the best examples of a screenwriter's exerting effective control over the tone of a film. Nobody used the pause better than Pinter.

So while the right-wing is in a lather over Pinter receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, I am compelled to side with two of Great Britain's other supremely gifted playwrights, Tom Stoppard and Alan Ayckbourn:

"It's wholly deserved and I am completely thrilled. As a writer he has been unswerving for 50 years," said Tom Stoppard, another of Britain's greatest post-war dramatists. Playwright Alan Ayckbourn called it "a most fitting award."

I couldn't agree more.