“At the Oval Office, 1974. From left are Rose Goldsmith, mother of Alan Greenspan; President Ford; Greenspan; Rand; and her husband, Frank O’Connor.” (From the New York Times)
Ayn Rand might have been little more than a literary and political curiosity, except for one very important accident of history. In 1974, Alan Greenspan, one of her most devoted followers, was sworn in as the Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, with Rand standing by his side. Thirteen years later, in 1987, Greenspan would ascend to the most important economic position in the United States: Chairman of the Federal Reserve.
Greenspan was a member of Rand’s inner circle from the 1950′s. In fact, he was an “official” member: as part of the “Ayn Rand Collective,” he read chapters of “Atlas Shrugged” as Rand composed the book. He would later contribute an introduction to it, as well as essays (including one in support of the gold standard) to Rand’s 1966 collection, “Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.”
Luckily (we’re not fans of Rand’s theories over at The Devoted Intellect) Greenspan wasn’t able to apply all of his “Objectivist” ideals while heading up The Fed. (That’s right: the economic crisis could have been that much worse.) As he told the Fox News Network in 2007, he had to make compromises as an official in a democratic society (including, presumably, the compromise that prevented him from reintroducing the gold standard). A year later, he would famously concede that his ideologies about market economics (his views were far too irrational and fixed to simply be called “ideas”) were “flawed.” For a detailed description of those flawed theories, you can’t do better than to make your way through the 1,368 pages of “Atlas Shrugged.” Though we wouldn’t suggest that you actually do it…
Truman Capote, photographed by Richard Avedon in 1955.
In many artistic media — from painting to sculpture to film and beyond — aesthetic advances are made possible by technical innovations. The invention of oil paints, the creation of new methods of casting bronze, the syncing of sound and image in “talkies”—all of these scientific advances made certain artistic advances possible. Perhaps the exception to the rule is the art of writing. The technology never changes; it only has to occur to somebody to try something new. This happened (among hundreds of other times) in 1925, when Harold Ross, editor of a new magazine called “The New Yorker”, decided that his writers should start “profiling” people.
In a recent collection of profiles from “The New Yorker,” David Remnick, the magazine’s current editor, defined profiles as “a concise rendering of a life through anecdote, incident, interview and description (or some ineffable combination thereof).” He granted that something like this form goes back to the first-century Roman writer Plutarch, but Ross was definitely looking for something new. After a rough start with a piece on Giulio Gatti-Casazza, then the Metropolitan Opera’s manager, Ross’ writers (and then his successor William Shawn’s) created a brilliant new form, one of the great contributions of American journalism.
A pinnacle of that form was Truman Capote’s 1957 profile of Marlon Brando, “The Duke in His Domain.” (The entire piece is available for free on “The New Yorker” website.) It is a touching and adoring look at the actor, and also a prescient — and extremely funny — look at his impending decline from Stanley Kowalski to morbid obesity. Here, for instance, is Capote describing Brando ordering room service in a Tokyo hotel:
The maid had reëntered the star’s room, and Murray, on his way out, almost tripped over the train of her kimono. She put down a bowl of ice and, with a glow, a giggle, an elation that made her little feet, hooflike in their split-toed white socks, lift and lower like a prancing pony’s, announced, “Appapie! Tonight on menu appapie.”
Brando groaned. “Apple pie. That’s all I need.” He stretched out on the floor and unbuckled his belt, which dug too deeply into the swell of his stomach. “I’m supposed to be on a diet. But the only things I want to eat are apple pie and stuff like that.” Six weeks earlier, in California, Logan had told him he must trim off ten pounds for his role in “Sayonara,” and before arriving in Kyoto he had managed to get rid of seven. Since reaching Japan, however, abetted not only by American-type apple pie but by the Japanese cuisine, with its delicious emphasis on the sweetened, the starchy, the fried, he’d regained, then doubled this poundage. Now, loosening his belt still more and thoughtfully massaging his midriff, he scanned the menu, which offered, in English, a wide choice of Western-style dishes, and, after reminding himself “I’ve got to lose weight,” ordered soup, beefsteak with French-fried potatoes, three supplementary vegetables, a side dish of spaghetti, rolls and butter, a bottle of sake, salad, and cheese and crackers.
“And appapie, Marron?”
He sighed. “With ice cream, honey.”
Capote’s profile is a great companion to today’s entry on Brando in the Modern Culture edition. Take a look!
In 1970, the NFL Championship Trophy was officially renamed the Vince Lombardi Trophy, in honor of the coach who won the first two Superbowls. The Vince Lombardi Trophy is made by Tiffany & Co., and, according to Wikipedia, it “is valued at $50,000,[2] and depicts a regulation-size football in kicking position that is made entirely of sterling silver, standing 22 inches (56 cm) tall, weighing 7 pounds (3.2 kg), it takes approximately four months and 72 man-hours to create.”
Are those 72 hours well spent? Compare the image of the Lombardi trophy below with some other trophies of the world and let us know what you think.
The Vince Lombardi Trophy, awarded to the winner of the National Football League (NFL) Superbowl
The Heisman Trophy, awarded to the most outstanding player in collegiate football
The Stanley Cup, awarded to the winner of the National Hockey League (NHL) Playoffs
The Thoroughbred Trophy, awarded to the winner of the Kentucky Derby
The World Cup, awarded to the winner of the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup
Neil Young’s career has been a varied one: folk rock and hard rock; vocoders and rockabilly, duets with Pearl Jam and duets with Devo. But music (and film) haven’t been the only places where Young’s made an impact. Until 2008, he was also a part-owner of Lionel Trains.
Young was an avid model railroader for many years, but one thing about the available models always bothered him: they didn’t sound right. Sound has always been important to Young, in a way that even his fellow musicians might have found obsessive. He carefully oversees the mixing and mastering of every album and every re-release, and he’s been using the same road crew for years, customizing a speaker setup for each of his shows with absolute precision. Not surprisingly, when the trains in his sets didn’t sound just so, Young decided to do something about it.
In 1992, Young, along with his partner Richard Kughn, created Liontech, a sound system customized for Lionel trains. They introduced the first model two years later: Railsounds II. (They followed it up with a remote-controlled command system that same year.) It was a hit, a huge hit. Young took it to train shows, and he was always the star—often among people who’d never heard of his music. Within a year, Young was a part-owner of the company, a position he held for over a decade.
Wolfe produced his original articles about Kesey and his crew for the Sunday magazine of the now-defunct “New York Herald Tribune.” (The newspaper is gone, but “New York Magazine” is still around.) It was published in three installments in January and February 1967, and then revised for book publication a few months later. Wolfe was never on the Pranksters’ bus, but, as Jack Shafer explains in an article about the book for The Columbia Journalism Review, he was able to reconstruct the experience by interviewing Kesey and the Pranksters; reading Kesey’s letters from Mexico to the novelist Larry McMurtry; watching 45 hours of film that the Pranksters shot; and listening to even more hours of audio that they recorded. And finally, Wolfe, dapper don in the white suit, took the acid test himself, and ingested 125 milligrams of LSD. The result? A book that has been in print for over 40 years, and gives Kesey’s classic a run for its money.
When the Modern Culture Edition of The Intellectual Devotional was released in 2008, the best available introduction to Leonard Bernstein’s TV persona was his Young Person’s Concerts—the subject of today’s entry. Since then, Bernstein’s Omnibus lectures have been released on DVD. It’s an embarrassment of riches for Devoted Intellectuals.
Omnibus ran every Sunday afternoon from 1952 to 1961, migrating from CBS to ABC to NBC over the years. Bernstein was among the most popular presenters on the program. He spoke on a wide range of musical topics, from “grand opera” to “modern music.” In one particularly thrilling episode, Bernstein conducted an orchestra through some of Beethoven’s discarded drafts, in order to show the work that went into creating the “Fifth Symphony.” In another, he runs through the history of “tonality” in music: starting with a single note in a Gregorian Chant, working his way through Wagner’s operas, and making Schoenberg’s most avant-garde compositions sound like inevitable products of musical evolution.
The clip below has been particularly inspiring to all of us over at The Intellectual Devotional. Did you know that “the blues” is, in Bernstein’s words, “a strict poetic form”? We didn’t, until we heard him explain it:
Today’s entry about Samuel Beckett’s 1952 play Waiting for Godot in the Modern Culture edition points out that “words and ideas take precedence over events” in the play. Though this is already the case in Beckett’s first major play (Godot was preceded by Eleutheria, which was written in 1947 but wasn’t published until 1995). It is even more true of later works like 1963′s Play (“three characters trapped in urns onstage”) and 1972′s Not I (“a lone actress delivers a lengthy, jumbled monologue in pitch blackness, with only her mouth visible to the audience”). But no play of Beckett’s is more stripped-down than Breath.
In 1969, the British theater critic Kenneth Tynan decided to celebrate the end of theater censorship in the UK with an all-nude review. Well, not quite. A few articles in clothing pop up throughout <>Oh! Calcutta!, but not many. (The title is a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as!“, which means “Oh! What a great butt!”) The show was conceived as an avant-garde erotic revue, but turned into a gigantic hit: it’s 5th on the list of longest-running Broadway musicals.
Many writers were invited to submit skits for the revue, including Beckett. As a sardonic spoof of the whole enterprise, Beckett submitted Breath. The instructions for performance are extremely detailed, but the entire play lasts well under a minute: amidst a stage covered with rubbish, we hear a woman cry out as she gives birth (or “an instant of recorded vagitus”), inhale and exhale as the lights brighten and dim, and then another birth-cry. That’s it; the whole piece usually takes about 30 seconds to perform.
Recordings of Oh! Calcutta! are hard to come by, but the British artist Damien Hearst did a particularly elaborate version of Breath for the BBC’s 2002 Beckett on Film project:
