May 2010 archive

Frank Frazetta, the fantasy painter and illustrator whose images of sinewy warriors and lush vixens graced paperback novels, album covers and comic books for decades and became something close to the contemporary visual definition of the sword-and-sorcery genres, died Monday after suffering a stroke the night before. He was 82.

Frazetta was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Feb. 9, 1928. By age 8, he was studying at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Art. One of his key influences was Hal Foster, the great comic-strip artist whose “Tarzan” became a compass point for Frazetta’s own jungle scenes.

By 16, Frazetta was working in the booming field of illustration in New York. He toiled under Al Capp on “Li’l Abner” and on his own strip, “Johnny Comet,” in the early 1950s. In comic books, he worked on “The Shining Knight” and a western hero called “Ghost Rider,” but his fame would come with a paintbrush and in a more sensual sector when, in the 1960s, he began painting covers for paperbacks and magazines.

Mr. Frazetta began drawing for comic books of all stripes – westerns, mysteries, fantasies – when he was still a teenager. He was also a good enough baseball player to try out for the New York Giants.

Sigh.

I promise to try and get away from the stranglehold of Middle Europeans and explore some more western composers, but I can’t help recalling that commercial for 100 famous classical music themes.

You know, the one that intones- “And who can forget Polovtsian Dance #17 (Stranger in Paradise) by Borodin?” as screen after screen of titles scrolls up.

Yeah, well, Borodin.

His day gig was as a chemist where he is justly famous for his research on aldehydes and unjustly famous for the Hunsdiecker reaction.

His ouvre as a composer reflects his amateur status, consisting of 2 Symphonies and an Opera, Prince Igor, that contains the Polovtsian Dances and was finished by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazunov after his death in 1887, as well as some Chamber Music.

He was a big proponent of absolute music as opposed to the programmatic music embraced by many of the popular composers of the time (for instance the Sibelius piece we looked at last night).

His most powerful statement of this philosophy is found in his 2 String Quartets.  His second one is more famous, but I have included both below the fold.  Each is perfomed by The Borodin Quartet which, since they are moderately famous and have recorded many composers, made my search… interesting.

The First Quartet (which starts on the left) was posted by novichok3, the Second by truecrypt.

Is a restructuring of Greek sovereign debt inevitable? What would restructuring entail? Does the current E.U. plan envision restructuring? Is the current plan more concerned re the health of certain European banks than Greece? – kathaa, West Bloomfield, Mich.

Yves Smith: Yes, it is inevitable. The Greek austerity program is the most daunting in modern times. Argentina defaulted under a much less demanding program. The Greek population also appears to understand intuitively the record of Latin American austerity programs, that they are a transfer from the public to the banks, and they do not appear willing to make the depth of sacrifice demanded of them. Many experts believe the euro zone is wasting valuable firepower and credibility on Greece, when it would have done better to restructure Greece now and use any backstop funds for the other euro zone members under stress.

….Unless a country can engineer a very large increase in exports, which usually happens by depreciating its currency, trying to reduce public- and private-sector debt at the same time results in a big economic contraction. That’s happening now in Ireland, where nominal G.D.P. has fallen over 18 percent. A fall of that magnitude makes it even harder to pay off existing debt.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes….

So, France and Germany are basically paying Greece to pay  their own banks. And contracting the Greek (and soon all of southern Europe) economy.  Remember that one of the conditions Germany placed on bailing out their own auto industry, was that the jobs created/saved would be in Germany-not in Spain or somewhere else. Likewise, their various stimulus packages were local as well. But now they’ve forced Greece to cut jobs, cut entitlements and retirement benefits, and raise taxes.

And of course this:

…Papandreou had recently met Sarkozy and French Prime Minister Francois Fillon in Paris. “Mr Fillon and Mr Sarkozy told Mr Papandreou: ‘We’re going to raise the money to help you, but you are going to have to continue to pay the arms contracts that we have with you’,” Cohn-Bendit said.

“In the past three months we have forced Greece to confirm several billion dollars in arms contracts. French frigates that the Greeks will have to buy for 2.5 billion euros. Helicopters, planes, German submarines.”

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/d…

Before following up on the strategy that college and university administrators were adopting to defuse the strike on many campuses, I want to tip the hat to the Canadian radicals who took a page from Richard Nixon and invaded the border town of Blaine, Washington from Vancouver on May 9.

Declaring they were doing it to strike at “sanctuaries for aggression,” the 500 or so young militants vowed that they’d go no further than 19 miles into US territory, the limit Nixon had placed on his Cambodia invasion. That far they didn’t get, retreating in good order into British Columbia after trashing the Bank of Commerce and most of the vehicles on a freight train hauling new autos. A joke, certainly, but a pretty pointed one and the first foreign invasion of any of the United States since the War of 1812.

Yesterday I wrote of how University administrators around the country were adopting or contemplating a strategy of proclaiming agreement with their protesting students and shutting down the campuses., declaring the school year ended early. This, folks who have read the third installment of this retrospective study may recall, was the strategy adopted by Yale president Kingman Brewster as he faced the May Day protests in New Haven.

A month and a half ago, I posted this essay on the state of the Supreme Court. In it, I stated:

Also, it must be noted, that the Obama administration has already signaled that it will use indefinite detention.  In addition, his administration has already floated the idea of preventive detention.

So… who do YOU think is going to be his next pick?

The quote finishes my essay which details out how if President Obama is serious about pushing an indefinite detention law, Elena Kagan would be his natural choice to replace Justice Stevens.

Guess who his nominee is to be?

You can take many of the reports we’ve been given and just imagine what happened when the rig exploded and since. There are always many story lines that can be followed, we can only be witness to what’s shown to us and stated by our media and others.

One of the tragic story lines, and now being finally mentioned in these tragic incidents, is the possibility of Post Traumatic Stress that may start to develop and what might cause the growth of in some of the individuals who survive.

Joseph Shapiro had a series of reports on NPR and tonight a video report and discussion with one of the survivors on the PBS News Hour.

There’s only one thing left to say to these dirtbag oil companies and their pukishly ingratiating servants in Washington….