Author: David Ross

Ayn Rand & Atlas Shrugged

Ayn Rand.

By David Ross. What sufficed the growing boy suffices the grown man. I read Ayn Rand’s entire oeuvre between the ages of fourteen and eighteen. It made an enormous impression in the usual ways, confirming my nascent conservatism and even more my nascent romanticism, on which paths, political and literary, I remain to this day. Rand led to Victor Hugo and George Sand, which led to my life’s work as a student of literature and circuitously to my permanent preoccupation with a certain romantic and conservative strand in modernism whose great avatar (if James Cameron has not entirely compromised the word) is William Butler Yeats. Rand also helped engender my reverence for the great achievers and achievements of civilization, which is, I believe, my greatest asset as a teacher to this day. Rand might not approve my heroes, but she would approve my penchant for hero worship. I have never sympathized with industrialism as a symbol or model of human creativity, nor desired to remake myself into an unsmiling and inflexible hero of what Rand calls rationalism, nor felt the need to hammer my haphazard libertarianism into consistent and rigid doctrine, but all the same I am her progeny. For better and worse, I have been formed by her in uncountable ineffable ways.

The Obama era was, for me as for so many others, an open invitation to reread Rand, so thoroughly does she seem to diagnose the psychology of our present slide into statism (Obama’s constant rhetoric about sibling-keeping might as well be plucked from the mouth of Wesley Mouch). News that Atlas Shrugged is finally being filmed also helped inch the book to the top of my pile (see Libertas’ interviews with director Paul Johannson here and here).

I was trepidacious, however, not sure to what extent I might have outgrown Rand. I was not concerned about the palatability of her philosophy, to which I have never specifically subscribed, but about her prose and her craftsmanship, which self-congratulatory journalist types constantly deride as second-rate, the kind of thing that only a teenager or cultist could fail to smirk at. This passing reference in a December article in the Weekly Standard is typical:

Atlas Shrugged, while a perennial bestseller and an important artifact of 20th-century culture, is not exactly great literature (stilted dialogue and cardboard characters have ranked among the defects pointed out by critics).

I have now reread the first half of Atlas Shrugged, and I can offer my very educated opinion that it is great literature, not necessarily at the sentence level, but in the unstoppable propulsion of its narrative (has a philosophical novel ever been so engrossing?), in the massive, dauntless sweep of its ideas, and in its enormous imaginative feat of creating a myth of our entire world (Dante and Milton are Rand’s compeers in this limited, formal respect).

Against the leveling instinct.

Even more, Atlas Shrugged is a great work of literature in its comprehensive taxonomy of modern men, in its comprehension of all their hidden springs and insecurities and frustrations and ambitions. Rand fancied herself a political theorist and metaphysician, but she misunderstood herself; she was a psychologist foremost, and Atlas Shrugged is a formidable system of psychology to contraindicate that of Freud. Eschewing the usual bedroom and bathroom preoccupations, Rand grasps that behavior is driven by what she calls ideals, conscious or unconscious structures of value that provide the context for everything we do and everything we are. Freud tends to reduce these structures to underlying psychosexual dynamics, but Rand insists on their primacy and irreducibility, and she illustrates their role as the ceaseless motive forces of life. She is also a particularly shrewd diagnostician of a certain kind of resentment and leveling instinct – James Taggart is the obvious embodiment – and she is nearly alone in realizing that this mindset is no trivial phenomenon but the rotting core of our world, explaining everything from the Soviet world-blight to our failing schools and lousy art.

Rand’s characters are ‘cardboard’ in the sense that they speak for philosophical positions and represent certain types, but each character embodies something slightly different; there is no overlap or redundancy. In the aggregate, they form a spectrum of humanity – a human comedy – that is convincing and powerfully explanatory. Rand is accused of engaging in moral black and white, but this is not entirely fair; while her scheme is moral in logic and purpose, many of her characters – Dr. Stadler for example – represent subtle, equivocal positions. They are not gray, but an intricate admixture of black and white.

Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart.

Rand sketches her characters in only a few clean strokes, but these strokes are rendered so deeply and forcefully as to be ineffaceable. Who can forget Hank Reardon or Dagny Taggart? Who can forget their triumphant inauguration of the John Galt Line? Who can forget their strange, violent lovemaking? What character drafted by Henry James, by contrast, does anything but deliquesce and drift imperceptibly from consciousness, becoming a vague haze of inflection and velleity?

Atlas Shrugged is a great novel, finally, in its astonishing originality. It has no precedent in terms of style, tone, mood, or philosophy, as far as I know. Victor Hugo may account for its sweep and social engagement, and someone like Zamyatin may have influenced its anti-totalitarianiasm and latent dystopianism, but nothing accounts for its strangeness, for everything powerfully eccentric and not infrequently repellent that Rand herself brings to it, everything rooted in the passionate kinks and quirks of her personality. In the end, it belongs in the category of the sui generis along with modern masterpieces like Ulysses, The Castle, and Pale Fire. It does not rival the artistry of these works, but it similarly emerges from a unique and bizarre mind.

Rand’s ultimate strength is her unswayable belief in herself as an arbiter of value and reality, and her passionate self-investment in every page she wrote. Her intent was doctrinaire, but her triumph is romantic.

Addenda:

  • See Rand on YouTube in all her rebarbative glory: here, here and here.
  • Whittaker Chamber’s fascinating, fiercely antagonistic, latently Christian review from the December 28, 1957, issue of National Review.
  • National Review’s contemporary take, likewise antagonistic.
  • The New York Times notes some of the book’s contemporary admirers, including Alan Greenspan.

Posted on December 17th, 2010 at 3:10pm.

The Genius Child



By David Ross. I make my living stumping for high modernism, so I am not exactly an enemy of the avant-garde and the experimental, and yet I am diffident about the extraordinary reputation of Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988), the Brooklyn-born Haitian-American wunderkind who during the early eighties vaulted from graffiti artist to Warhol protégé and Madonna boy-toy in a mere ten years before dying of a heroin overdose.

I turned to Tamra Davis’ documentary Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child (2009) for a glimmer of an explanation. The documentary turned out to be a trove of vintage footage and articulate commentary provided by those who stood just at the perimeter of Basquiat’s spotlight, but in the end I could find no trail of breadcrumbs to lead me out of the postmodern funhouse in which fame multiplies by some hidden law of light and reflection and desire. Basquiat wrote meaningless koans with spray paint and became famous; he founded a band with some downtown types, none of whom could play instruments, and become even more famous; he mooned around the trendiest clubs and become more famous still. He painted childlike hieroglyphics on whatever he could find and became a superstar. Dying young, he became a legend, which is precisely what he had set out to be.

Really, though, what is the substance of his achievement? His art is certainly vivid and energetic, and its neo-expressionist assault on the minimalism and conceptualism of the seventies is impossible not to cheer (“white paintings, white people, white wine” is how one interviewee recalls the pre-Basquiat era). And yet his art does not – for me at least – resolve into meaning. Its presumptive symbol language is too private and haphazard, and it is not tantalizing enough on its face to rouse my analytic energy and resolve. We kill ourselves to make sense of Finnegans Wake because we intuit that there is sense to be made; Basquiat’s art demands a gamble of time and energy that seems to run against the odds of an ultimate payoff.

The film’s numerous interviewees note Basquiat’s influences: Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, William Burroughs, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning. There’s something to be said for each of these connections, but Basquiat’s art seems to me closest to that of De Kooning: stark, nightmarish, garishly and luridly childlike, suffocating in its self-enclosed logic. I would say, though, that De Kooning’s punch is more concerted and harder thrown, his vision more ordered and hefty. Basquiat may have been more talented – I have no idea – but I doubt he had reflected nearly as carefully about what he was up to or exercised the same kind of winnowing intelligence. He seems to have worked by spontaneous trial and error, adding, subtracting, and overlaying in accordance with some inner sense of arrangement and meaning. This kind of improvisation can be electrifying when executed with supreme technical command (Keats, Coltrane, Pollock) but Basquiat was very far from virtuosic.

I can comprehend Basquiat only as a talented and perhaps semi-inspired cipher whose most superficial accouterments – name, hair, race – won him the role that had to be filled one way or another: that of the boy genius, the tragic naïf, with royalties and two-hundred years compounded interest owed to Keats. Basquiat was particularly suited to this role, being soft-spoken, dreamy, and vague in a way that might be misinterpreted as poetic. In comparison to Patti Smith, perhaps the only genuine genius of the punk-era downtown scene, Basquiat seems flimsy; his flourishes may or may not dazzle, but they are never more than flourishes.

The film, incidentally, adopts as epigraph Langston Hughes’ bad poem “Genius Child”:

This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can –
Lest the song get out of hand.

Nobody loves a genius child.

Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?

Nobody loves a genius child.

Kill him – and let his soul run wild.

The suggestion that the world “kills” the “genius child” in a snit of aggressive philistinism or atavism is ludicrous and particularly ludicrous in this case. Everybody loves a “genius child” and certainly everybody loved Basquiat. He was surrounded by benefactors. They paid his rent, slept with him, bought him paints, canvases, whatever he needed, furnished him with studio space, collected his paintings from the very start. Basquiat, in his early twenties, was fast on his way to substantial wealth and permanent celebrity. Had Basquiat lived only a few more years he would have been showered with a MacArthur Genius Grant and other remunerative goodies, and he would have wound up splitting his time between a downtown duplex and the south of France, with occasional appearances on Oprah to pontificate on the strain of being a genius.

Has society ever genuinely killed a “genius child”? It’s very hard to think of a case. Shelley initiated the accusation in “Adonais,” his bloated elegy for Keats, alleging that John Wilson Crocker’s savage review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review had done in the young poet. He writes in his preface:

The savage criticism produced the most violent effect on his susceptible mind; the agitation thus originated ended in the rupture of a blood-vessel in the lungs; a rapid consumption ensued, and the succeeding acknowledgements from more candid critics of the true greatness of his powers, were ineffectual to heal the wound thus wontonly inflicted.

Hating this kind of misty whining, Byron did his best to stab the trope in its cradle. His wry retort comes in Don Juan (Stanza 60, Canto XI):

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate:
‘Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.

Byron did his best, but it was no use. Every suicidal, immuno-compromised, coke-snorting, sport-car-gunning boy-genius would be laid like some pierced fawn on society”s doorstep.

The only figure who begins to make sense of Hughes’ silly poem is Oscar Wilde, though his genius was only part of the problem. Wilde was genuinely destroyed; all of the others – from Shelley himself to Michael Jackson – destroyed themselves for reasons of their own.

Posted on December 14th, 2010 at 9:45am.

Rear Window

From Wafaa Bilal's "Domestic Tension."

By David Ross. Here’s the latest odor emanating from the moldering flesh of the art tradition. Wafaa Bilal, a professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, has in manner had a camera implanted in the back of his head. On December 15, the camera will begin to upload constant footage to a website (www.3rdi.me) associated with the new Arab Museum of Modern Art in Qatar (see here). The project will raise “important social, aesthetic, political, technological and artistic questions,” Bilal told the AP (see here). According to the AP, Bilal’s recent works “have invited debate and controversy”:

In a 2007 online installation, “Domestic Tension” in 2007, virtual users could shoot a paintball gun at Bilal 24 hours a day. The Chicago Tribune deemed it “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time” and named him Artist of the Year that year.

A 2008 video game piece, “Virtual Jihadi,” was censored by the city of Troy, N.Y. where it was shown. In it, Bilal inserted an avatar of himself as a suicide bomber hunting then-President George W. Bush. The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a claim against the city of Troy for closing the arts center showing the work.

The artist has said the work was meant to shed light on groups that traffic in hateful stereotypes of Arab culture with video games like Quest for Saddam.

In a recent live performance piece titled “…and Counting,” Bilal had his back tattooed with a borderless map of Iraq covered with one dot for each Iraqi and American casualty. Bilal, whose brother was killed by a missile at an Iraqi checkpoint in 2004, used the piece to highlight how the deaths of Iraqis are largely invisible to the American public. The dots for the Iraqis were represented by green UV ink only visible under black light, while Americans were represented by permanent ink.

The AP story on Bilal’s latest opus generated a mountain of vituperative user comment. Some of this response has a racist and right-wing cast, but most of it indicates deep, genuine, and politically neutral bitterness at the cooption of the arts by leftwing stunt-pullers and theoreticians of the fundamentally empty. The people crave art of the eye, hand, and mind as they have since the cave painters sat in smoky meditation with their berry juice and charcoal. Their comments grope for words like those of Yeats’ great injunction from “Under Ben Bulben”:

Poet and sculptor, do the work,
Nor let the modish painter shirk
What his great forefathers did.
Bring the soul of man to God.

Thomas Kinkade has grown rich speciously filling this void (see here). Why can’t someone fill it genuinely? Where is the Martin Luther of art with his 95 theses? The reviver of the arts will need incontestable artistic genius, intolerable arrogance, and a scathing polemical or satirical tongue. I envision some combination of Beethoven, Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and Wyndham Lewis. He or she will have to clear the way by force, because institutions like the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art have decades of dubious decision-making to defend, and they are not going to let their multi-billion-dollar collections evaporate in a puff of punctured theory.

Wafaa Bilal and his camera.

There are certain promising developments in architecture, where the brutality of modernism, the juvenility of postmodernism, and the sheer laziness of the strip-mall remainder have been answered by a resurgent aestheticism with both neo-classical (see here) and neo-modernist manifestations. Julian Bicknell’s Henbury Hall (1986), Cheshire, epitomizes the former development, Santiago Calatrava’s Tenerife Concert Hall (2003) the latter. Le Corbusier’s corrosive notion that “a house is a machine for living” seems to be in retreat, and tendrils of extraneous beauty are beginning to peep through the cracks in the modernist concrete.

Might fine art follow this pattern? It’s possible, but there’s the important point that architecture is a relatively unfettered and unmediated arrangement between client and builder (cf. the tale of Henbury Hall), while art is tangled up in the bien pensant folly of museums, government agencies, and universities, and subject always to the media-driven fads of the marketplace.

The Tenerife Concert Hall.

Three salutary if fantastic measures: 1) Fire all the artist/professors, 2) Close the museums of contemporary art, and 3) Eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts and similar troughs of largesse. Let artists sell their wares in the street and relearn of necessity the language of the human. Let them rediscover how to carve, draw, and shape with their hands, and let them try to create what people might actually covet and save and pinch to own. Let them sketch passers-by in parks and squares, dawn to dusk, until they rediscover what Yeats calls the “old nonchalance of the hand.”

What? Return the arts to the bondage of the masses! The Dutch Golden Age was built on the tastes of burghers and merchants, men who drank beer and drove hard bargains. Turner was the son of a barber, Ruskin the son of a suburban wine merchant. As the comments on Bilal’s work suggest, the “masses” can at least spot a charlatan, which is more than can be said of so many museum mandarins.

In the worst case, Thomas Kinkade and his kind win out. So be it. I prefer juvenile notions of beauty to sophisticated denials of beauty. I prefer a saccharine village scene to a dead shark in formaldehyde. The former can at least evolve in the direction of genuine beauty because it has not broken ranks with the human. The latter is hopelessly estranged; nothing can be built on its example.

Posted on December 10th, 2010 at 9:43am.

LFM Review: Tangled

By David Ross. Is Disney finally laying the ghost of its lost decades? To some extent it is. Its last, The Princess and the Frog (2009), laudably reprised the look and feel of the Disney Golden Age (see my comments here), while its latest, Tangled, builds on the example of Bolt (2008) and does its best to mime Pixar. Disney has not mastered what it takes to be the Pixar formula (which it never will because Pixar’s only formula is the rejection of formula), but even so Disney was wise to place itself under the supervision of Pixar chief John Lasseter, who is now chief creative officer of both companies. Disney’s recent films may not be the deepest or most poignant, but they are at least energetic and entertaining.

Tangled is the story of Rapunzel with a revamped plot for an age of campy glitter. In Disney’s telling, Rapunzel is not a peasant but a princess (inevitably), and her hair, which seems to be about fifty feet long, is both magical (cures wounds, reverses aging, etc.) and handy (recollect Indiana Jones with his whip). The old crone Gothel pilfers the golden-haired infant from the castle of her parents and sets her up in a tower as an all-purpose Botox substitute. She is eventually rescued, not by a prince, but by Flynn Rider, a charming rogue supposedly in the Errol Flynn vein but actually in the mugging mode of Brendan Fraser.

There’s no denying that the film is fast paced, action packed, and funny, and that Rapunzel’s hair makes a clever and innovative prop. My five-year-old daughter writhed in laughter throughout, especially enjoying the scene in which Rapunzel beats the crap out of Flynn with a frying pan and tries to stuff him in a closet (an axiom of kiddy humor: traumatic brain injury is always good for a giggle). In a just world, the horse Maximilian – a hilarious version of Hugo’s inexorable Javert – would be standing on four legs at the podium in March receiving the Oscar for best actor while Sean Penn restrains the impulse to clutch the throat of whoever happens to be sitting in front of him and to shake until certain silicone parts pop out of alignment.

What’s subtly wrong with the film is what’s wrong with so many post-Shrek kid movies. Filmmakers insist on a winking referentiality, as if fairy tales are dusty old irrelevancies that must be rescued by pop cultural in-jokes and Lettermanesque (now Stewartesque) insouciance. These Generation X artistes are aware enough to recognize clichés but not inventive enough to transcend them. In the end, the clichés appear in horn-rimmed quotation marks, but they are clichés all the same. In Tangled, every last facial expression and turn of idiom has an antecedent in some movie or TV show or music video. It would take a team of hyper-caffeinated Tarantinos to trace them all, but the aura of tedious familiarity is unmistakable. The tune “Mother Knows Best,” a pastiche of the controlling (Jewish? Italian?) mother delivered in belting Broadway style, gives the tenor:

Go ahead, get trampled by a rhino
Go ahead, get mugged and left for dead
Me, I’m just your mother, what do I know?
I only bathed and changed and nursed you
Go ahead and leave me, I deserve it
Let me die alone here, be my guest
When it’s too late
You’ll see, just wait
Mother knows best
Mother knows best
Take it from your mumsy
On your own, you won’t survive
Sloppy, underdressed
Immature, clumsy
Please, they’ll eat you up alive
Gullible, naive
Positively grubby
Ditzy and a bit, well, hmm vague
Plus, I believe
Getting kinda chubby
I’m just saying ’cause I wuv you

Mandy Moore, who plays Rapunzel, is the perfect pawn of this approach. Her medieval princess is a perky cheerleader type: a young Kelly Ripa in medieval drag. I can picture her wielding an iPhone, but not wielding a scepter.

Tangled is less heavy-handed than Shrek in this regard, and its jokes are somewhat less stupid, but its general approach is so unnecessary and evinces so little faith in the enduring power of mythic narratives. Movies like this entertain in the superficial sense, but at the cost of initiating young people in the traditions of Western imagination. The great Disney fairy tales of yore – Snow White and Sleeping Beauty especially – were unforgettable in their vivid realization of dim pasts and mythic destinies. They belong to the worlds of Grimm and Perrault, but also to the neo-medieval fantasy tradition of Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites, with Keats and Malory lurking in the remote recesses. Tangled, by contrast, is like a Steve Madden ad set in motion: encephalitic dolls bounce in a color-saturated wonderland that connects to nothing in our collective unconscious.

These objections, admittedly, are unlikely to be shared by anybody who is not on the lookout for signs of cultural demise. The average moviegoer will have no complaints, and the average little girl will resist her next haircut with tears and threats. By its own standards, Tangled is a success; it delivers the promised ‘fun.’

From "The Secret of Kells" (2009).

Tangled has its precise opposite – its anti-self – in the The Secret of Kells (2009), a masterful Irish cartoon that gives an fanciful account of the creation of the Book of Kells, one of the greatest medieval illuminated manuscripts (now housed at Trinity College, Dublin). Under constant threat from the invading northmen, the monks of Kells labor to complete their great book. Brendan, the young nephew of the abbot, is wonder-stricken by this labor and becomes a secret apprentice. He ventures into the forest to locate the necessary berries and there meets the streaming, gliding, shape-shifting Aisling, at fairy at once unsettlingly inhuman and lovable. Even more terrible, Brendan must venture into the cavernous depths to find a prismatic crystal upon which the monks’ work depends; the crystal turns out to be the eye of the snake-demon Crom Cruach, whom Brendan must defeat. In the end, the northmen ravage and burn the monastery and Brendan flees with the manuscript to continue the monks’ labor on his own, in a hut by the sea.

The Secret of Kells ponders the selflessness of the monks who toiled for decades in fire-lit scriptoriums to create their monuments of faith. In this sense, the film stands at the farthest possible remove from our own ethic of not particularly bothering. Beautifully and intricately rendered in the flat stylized manner of the Book of Kells itself, the film is full of dreamlike beauty and horror, evoking a world that has the fluidity and mystery of living imagination.

Tangled is a mirror held up to our silliness; The Secret of Kells is a looking glass in which we may for a time disappear.

Posted on December 6th, 2010 at 10:45am.

Race & Crash

Thandie Newton in "Crash."

By David Ross. I finally saw Paul Haggis’ Crash. I laughed (at it), I cried (out in disgust!). Here is the liberal imagination crazed by its own clichés: a vision of American life in which each of us ceaselessly ricochets between mindless acts of racism and violence with barely enough time to catch our breaths and reload our guns. The question is whether the film is a searing expose (prostrate thyself, Oscar!) or a ludicrous caricature. I can comment only on my own experience. In forty years spent in five states, northern, southern, and mid-western, I have never heard a racist peep much less witnessed a racist tirade of the kind Matt Dillon’s character specializes in, and I have entirely evaded the kind of Wild West crossfire that Crash takes for the norm.

I have a dear lifelong friend who is black (raised on the campus of a small Bible college, now a hedge fund manager living in North Carolina). I once asked him whether he had ever encountered the racism that the media infallibly describes as omnipresent. He said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” “Nobody ever called you a nasty name or demeaned you in some way?” “Nope.” He then asked me whether I had ever encountered anti-Semitism. I said, “Honestly, I haven’t.” Later, in Europe, I did experience the electric shock of authentic Jew hatred, but to this day I have never suffered so much as an American raised eyebrow or skeptical sidelong glance. Americans, as far as I can tell, are the most Judeo-tolerant people in the history of the Western world. Racism and anti-Semitism undoubtedly exist, but they do not dominate every interaction and waking moment, and they are nothing like the essence of our daily or national experience. Crash wants us to see ourselves in its mirror, but I see nothing I recognize.

Matt Dillon in "Crash."

What I witness from my seat on the city bus is an astonishingly successful experiment in pluralism, in which people are consistently polite and deferential and not infrequently cross racial and religious lines to become friends and more than friends. I am a Jewish-American married to a Taiwanese. Our little girl is a red-headed Chinese-Jewish daughter of the South. Her best friend is half North Dakotan, half Indian. Dr. Apuzzo is an Italian-American married to an Indian-Canadian, our own glamorous Govindini Murty. They are residents of the very city that Crash demonizes as a strip-mall Yugoslavia simmering with civil war, and yet they seem hardly torn apart by its supposedly vicious cross-currents. Is Libertas or Crash the true American microcosm?

The antidote to Crash is The Wire: an urban vision no less dark, but infinitely subtler, truer, and smarter, and far less given to hysterical generalization. Crash is cheap farce camouflaged by a self-important grimace of hate. The Wire is tragedy of the old kind, in which social and economic forces function as ineluctably as the Greek fates.

The contemporary definition of ‘serious’ art: that which confirms and dignifies liberal cliché.

Posted on December 3rd, 2010 at 9:40am.

Jazz Casual

John Coltrane.

By David Ross. Between 1961 and 1968, Rolling Stone co-founder and music critic Ralph Gleason hosted twenty-eight half-hour episodes of Jazz Casual on public television. There wasn’t much glitz: Gleason would say a few words of introduction and his musical guest would be off to the races. Even so, Jazz Casual was probably the purest dose of cool ever delivered by American TV. In 2006, all twenty-eight episodes – 840 minutes worth – were released as a DVD box set titled The Complete Jazz Casual, but the set is now, alas, unavailable. Netflix offers three episodes – Basie, Gillespie, and Coltrane – on a single disc, as well as discs devoted exclusively to Coltrane, Brubeck, and B.B. King.

John Coltrane & Miles Davis.

Coltrane, of course, is like some astral event that comes around only once in many lifetimes; to see and hear him is to witness something epochal.

These excerpts are available on YouTube:

Jazz aficionados should also make a particular point of viewing, via Netflix, Miles Davis: Cool Jazz Sound (2004), a 25-minute dose of the Miles Davis Quintet – Davis, Coltrane, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb – filmed in New York in April 1959. Davis and Coltrane are such spectacularly paired opposites, the former’s angular reserve balancing the latter’s delving, groping virtuosity.

Posted on November 24th, 2010 at 12:58pm.