Elvis when you least expect it

Post by **spooky girlfriend** » Thu Dec 08, 2005 11:25 pm

Just flipped past PBS and they were airing Roy Orbison & Friends: A Black and White Night - with Elvis in the background.

double dutchess · Post by **double dutchess** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 8:27 pm

I got on the bus Monday morning and the driver was listening to "My Aim is True". As I was about to exit the bus on campus, I turned to him and told him it was good to know I'm not the only Costello fan at UMass (most of the bus drivers are students). He replied "No way! The guy's amazing!"

We're lurking everywhere, I suppose...

scielle · Post by **scielle** » Sun Dec 11, 2005 7:11 pm

Heard EC on a bone-fide classical radio station yesterday. And it wasn't even Il Sogno, or Secret Songs, but My Funny Valentine, the Marian McPartland version. Followed immediately by Mozart and preceeded by Shostakovich.

Goody2Shoes · Post by **Goody2Shoes** » Sun Dec 11, 2005 9:21 pm

Now that is cool.

Post by **spooky girlfriend** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:03 am

So I've been listening to this German cd that Doc brought back from Munich. I found this group while I was there in October - Wir Sind Helden. Not knowing anything more about the group, I go to their website and find this bio on the lead singer:

Judith Holofernes - Biography:

Where born: Berlin
When: 1976
How (headfirst-feetfirst-forceps-suction cup-caeserian): Head. My mother says, I looked like Nefertiti.

MUSICAL EVOLUTION (PASSIVE):
First record: The Fat Boys „Coming back hard again“
Favourite music up to age of 10: Grips –Theatre.
At age 10: Whatever. Nana Mouskouri, „Best of Dance Standards“, „Mel and Kim“.
At age 12: Die Ärzte. Dirty Dancing and Eskimo Limon soundtracks.
At age 14: Bob Dylan. Bob Marley. Hair soundtrack.
At age 17: David Bowie. Jacques Brel.
At age 19: Elvis Costello
At age 22: Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, still Elvis Costello
And now? Interpol. Jack Johnson. Feist. I also just rediscovered Deus and have fallen headfirst in love with them again. They’re great! Another rediscovery: Motown. Apart from that very much looking forward to the new Tomte and Kettcar records. Oh, and still Elvis Costello.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 8:54 am

spooky girlfriend wrote:... the lead singer:

Judith Holofernes -

Great name-- surely a pseudonym? Here's Caravaggio's take on Judith beheading Holofernes:

bambooneedle · Post by **bambooneedle** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 12:55 pm

I don't know much about art but I know what I don't like-- it looks like the painter couldn't decide whether he wanted realism or not.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 1:31 pm

Yeah it's true-- that Caravaggio was a hack.

scielle · Post by **scielle** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 2:35 pm

Found this in a Billy Joel article, of all things. Eeeek.

All this came to a head in my freshman year of high school when I discovered Elvis Costello, who, a friend informed me, "writes songs about why people like Billy Joel are just so bad." I didn't want to believe it; surely, I told myself, it was possible to be a fan of Costello and Joel, both of whom, after all, had a way with a tune. Later that year, I went to my first Costello concert. Midway through the show, Costello sat down at an electric piano and began playing a series of cheesy cocktail-jazz chords. "I'd like to sing a Billy Joel song for you now," he said dryly, as laughter rippled through the audience. "It's called 'Just the Way You Are.' " When I returned home that night, all the Joel albums got stuck away in the back of a closet.

The full article is here:
http://www.slate.com/id/2131184/

bambooneedle · Post by **bambooneedle** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 2:53 pm

selfmademug wrote:Yeah it's true-- that Caravaggio was a hack.

He's not that good. I checked out some of his other works and they look rather ordinary and quite forced to me.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 3:35 pm

Ah, the arbiter has spoken! Someone should alert those rubes over at the Uffizi. However if influence means anything, it can be said that your countrymate Velazquez (oh, and those centuries of other people more generally) rather disagreed with you on the matter, so perhaps they didn't make such a bad move after all.

sabreman · Post by **sabreman** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 6:05 pm

>>
He's not that good. I checked out some of his other works and they look rather ordinary and quite forced to me.
>>

Wow! Caravaggio was an UNBELIEVABLE painter. I suggest you go and see one of his paintings (they are very rare) in person. The guy was in a class by himself.

Otis Westinghouse · Post by **Otis Westinghouse** » Tue Dec 13, 2005 7:11 pm

Chiaroscuro al extraordinaire!

miss buenos aires · Post by **miss buenos aires** » Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:45 pm

Have to chime in with my love for Caravaggio. The man basically invented chiaroscuro. A hero to those of us who think everything could be a little more dramatic.

bambooneedle · Post by **bambooneedle** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 6:10 am

sabreman wrote:Wow! Caravaggio was an UNBELIEVABLE painter. I suggest you go and see one of his paintings (they are very rare) in person. The guy was in a class by himself.

So you think Caravaggio was the best painter ever then?

I think Velázquez's works (for one) are markedly better in all respects, including far more striking chiaroscuro. I need look no further than my computer screen to see that Caravaggio didn't possess the same mastery of proportion, of composition, of colour, of creating believable scenes with congruent human expressions, with palpable emotion... Caravaggio was an innovator in chiaroscuro and he had some stylistic influence. And, he pumped out a load of religious paintings in Rome that ensured much fuss would be made over him for centuries (what better way was there?).

As ever, he is open to personal taste. But, despite his "influence", his works lacked that ineffable level of transcendence that works of genius have.

Diego Velázquez - 'An Old Woman Frying Eggs', 1618 (chiaroscuro at unsurpassable heights)

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 7:28 am

This thread morphed in an interesting way. Vermeer's my favorite artist, though he doesn't have much to do with early chiaroscuro. If you're ever in New York, you need to see the three stunning Vermeers at the Frick Collection, a great little museum just a few blocks down from the Metropolitan...

This one's just up the road, at the Met...

bambooneedle · Post by **bambooneedle** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 7:33 am

He seems to like leadlight windows...

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 8:15 am

bambooneedle wrote:He seems to like leadlight windows...

Lots of those in Amsterdam and Delft, I suppose.

Each one of his canvases is like a little jewel. The incredible rarity (only 35 are known to exist) makes them even more special. I've probably seen about half of the 35 now - the Rijksmuseum has several excellent ones as well, as you would expect. One of them was included in the Rijksmuseum traveling exhibition that we saw at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne earlier in the year.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 9:42 am

Vermeer's fascination with windows serves two purposes-- to emphasize the fact that he is directly portraying natural light (as opposed to his countrymate and predecessor Rembrandt, for instance), and to serve as a symbol.

This one was tragically stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewrt Gardner Museum in 1990 (along with a dozen other works, including 3 Rembrandts, some Degas drawings and a Manet):

Luckily I got to see it quite a bit before it was nabbed, but it's a major loss for the art world. Art crime experts say it may never surface again because of its extreme value and fame.

These are all super virtuosos we're talking about here and we could start a paintings thread in the annex if we wanted (I think someone did start an art thread a looooong time ago, maybe it was Otis); I just couldn't abide the arrogant and laughable meaninglessness of a statement like the one 'Boo made about Caravaggio (i.e., along the lines of, I checked him out, he's not that good).

Why some people (here on the board but everywhere else too) have to treat art and artists as if they were football teams or brands of sausage-- yours sucks, mine's great-- is beyond me but I think it's a bad sign. Testosterone maybe? It's why I don't like the rankings and why the tower stuff drove me nuts.

Anyway, back to ELVIS WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT HIM...

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 9:55 am

Wish I had more time to sit in museums and stare at paintings. I'm going down to the city with my brother on December 26. Maybe we'll drop by the Frick. I haven't been there in years. I also have not been to MoMA since it re-opened.

Who Shot Sam? · Post by **Who Shot Sam?** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 10:11 am

selfmademug wrote:This one was tragically stolen from Boston's Isabella Stewrt Gardner Museum in 1990 (along with a dozen other works, including 3 Rembrandts, some Degas drawings and a Manet)

I remember that heist. I was a junior at Harvard at the time. So, did they ever recover any of the stolen works?

I suppose I'll have to cross that one off my list of the 35. Sounds like it's gone for good.

Post by **spooky girlfriend** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:04 am

Boy, I really brought up a topic that apparently led to lots of discussion. Don't worry about the thread straying Mug. I'll start a Fine Arts thread so you guys can go on about it all you like - free of guilt.

selfmademug · Post by **selfmademug** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:15 am

Who Shot Sam? wrote: I suppose I'll have to cross that one off my list of the 35. Sounds like it's gone for good.

Or at least for a very long time. Experts in the field have said that the Vermeer in particular is SO rare, and SO valuable that it could only have been stolen out of a desire to OWN the painting, not to sell it. Because it's unsaleable (is that a word?) it is literally priceless-- valueless-- outside the legal art market. Even when its current 'owner' dies, it will be hard for anyone (an heir, say, or a legal representative) to return it to its true owner without bearing some culpability.

miss buenos aires · Post by **miss buenos aires** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 11:45 am

bambooneedle wrote:I need look no further than my computer screen to see that Caravaggio didn't possess the same mastery of proportion, of composition, of colour, of creating believable scenes with congruent human expressions, with palpable emotion...

I dare say that looking at paintings on your computer screen is one of the least illuminating paths to judging their artistic worth. Second only to checking out a black and white photocopy, perhaps.

crash8_durham · Post by **crash8_durham** » Thu Dec 15, 2005 1:16 pm

Alison was on our oldies station today. I want to call and complain