"We are going head to head with Rothko, Pollock, de Kooning and Newman," he says. "The goal for us is to put Still back in, to show the greatness of him and that he was the great innovator of the movement. He creates Abstract Expressionism before all the others."
Creating a constituency for a one-artist museum can be tricky even when, like Georgia O'Keeffe or Andy Warhol, that artist is widely known (and loved) and has a local base (Santa Fe, N.M., and Pittsburgh, respectively). Still, a loner who was born in North Dakota in 1904 and died in Maryland in 1980, with several stops in between, had decreed that his life's work should go to any city that would erect a museum solely for his works—and nothing else, ever. Denver just happened to win the competition.
Museums for single artists are tricky. They’re monuments to figures who loom larger than life and, as a result, they can skew all-too-easily toward cliche or, worse, outright cartoon. But architect Brad Cloepfil, of Portland-based Allied Works Architecture, was the right man for the job here. His best designs, like the low-slung Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis and the forthcoming National Music Centre in Calgary, are tough on the outside, sweet on the inside, with big, bold gestures and thoughtful floorplans. Plus, he’s some kind of genius with light, feeding sun indoors through slits and crevices and peepholes in the architecture, like little blasts of heaven.
You will see that in the sample drawings for Stuart Little Mr. Williams did one picture in different techniques. We like the more detailed technique, don’t you? He was careful about lots of small but important details. For instance, in the picture of the doctor examining Stuart, Stuart is standing up. Mr. Williams had him lying down in the first sketch but changed it because he was afraid he might look like a little dead mouse if he were lying down. (That is probably a silly detail to pass on to you, but it was somehow encouraging to us.)
On #1 Garth has changed the position of the door. On #2 he re-did it so that Fern has hair more consistent with the other drawings. On #3 he re-drew it so Mrs. Arable looked less like a young girl, more like herself in other drawings. (On #3, if you agree, Mrs. Arable looks a bit whiskery-y and we can have a couple of the little lines taken out. I may be imagining it through.)
As I went along, I compared my results against national data, and I began beating the averages. My rates of complications moved steadily lower and lower. And then, a couple of years ago, they didn’t. It started to seem that the only direction things could go from here was the wrong one.
Most journalism in our country lacks the sense of joyous discovery one gets in Radiolab. There’s none of the enthusiastic “Yes!” “No!” “Yes!” “You heard me right!” “Get outta here!”
I've posted this before, but if you haven't read it yet, and any part of what you do involves trying to tell people a story that they will be moved by and remember, you should: Ira Glass's radio manifesto.
I tend to have big pretentious, tiresome thoughts about how important that is. Real journalism – and by that I mean fact-based reporting – is getting trounced by commentary and opinion in all its forms, from Fox News to the political blogs to Jon Stewart. Everyone knows newspapers are in horrible trouble. TV news continually loses ratings. And one way we broadcast journalists can fight back and hold our audience is to sound like human beings on the air. Not know-it-all stiffs. One way the opinion guys kick our ass and appeal to an audience is that they talk like normal people, not like news robots speaking their stentorian news-speak. So I wish more broadcast journalism had such human narrators at its center. I think that would help fact-based journalism survive. But like I say, I’m kind of a nut on this subject.
In Muck City, the children have nervously followed their fathers and grandfathers into the mud and the fire and emerged with a fearlessness that most of us cannot understand. Soon we will gather in front of our televisions and watch receivers run over the middle and linebackers dive headfirst at loose footballs. We will tell ourselves we could do this too, if we were paid millions, or if we were famous, or if we took steroids. But we'll forget how the game of football is born out of hunger, and courage, and desperation, and community, and hope. And how sometimes it's played in spite of everything else.
In the lecture, titled "God said, Let Newton Be": Alexander Pope and the Scientific Revolution Professor Walls will explain that Pope, like his contemporary Jonathan Swift, mercilessly satirised scientists.
"They were part of a reactionary movement—science was seen as a fad, an addiction and as a waste of time. It didn’t seem to be producing any practical benefits."
Professor Walls says it is not surprising that poets were opposed to science. "Poetry plays with words. It delights in paradox and ambiguity. Scientists value precision and clarity—the mentality is utterly different."
However, Professor Walls believes Pope's attitude to science was complex. "Pope attended a series of lectures given by one of Newton's disciples, and the scientific discoveries of the day clearly influenced his thought."
