Well, now that the National Book Awards winners have been announced, and congratulations to all the winners, it’s time to share which lucky OUPblog readers will be getting free books in the mail!

In first place with five points was Shawn Miklaucic who gets the big prize, the Historical Thesaurus of the OED.

In second place with two points was Jilly Dybka who will receive a Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus.

In third place with one point was Christopher Elias who will get a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition).

A great big thank you to everyone who participated and to all the fabulous authors who wrote books we enjoyed this year.  2009 was chock-full of great literature and we can’t wait to read what you publish next year!

If you haven’t already heard, unfriend is the New Oxford American Dictionary Word of the Year. In honor of this announcement, I surveyed Facebook users across the country about why they would choose to unfriend someone.

1. They’ve turned into a robot.
“People send me Green Patches all the time,” said Jane Kim, a television research assistant in NYC. “It’s annoying. And that’s all I ever get from them. Clearly, they’re not interested in actually being friends.”

That’s because your friends are robots, Jane. Marketing robots. These are the friends you never hear from except when they want you to join a cause, sign a petition, donate money, become a fan of a product, or otherwise promote something. Farmville robots are increasingly becoming problems as well, but are not yet grounds for unfriending.

2. You don’t know who they are.
“A few days ago, Facebook suggested I reconnect with a friend whose name I didn’t recognize,” said Jessica Kay, a lawyer in Kansas City. “She’d recently gotten married, but I hadn’t even known she was engaged. I’ll probably unfriend her later. Along with some random people I met at parties in college.”

“You’re tired of seeing [that mystery name] your newsfeed,” said Jonathan Evans, a contract specialist in Seattle. “You haven’t talked to that person since the random class you took together, and you’ll probably never talk to them again.”

3. They broke your heart.
Jonathan Lethem, author of Chronic City, shared that his number one reason to unfriend someone is “because they just broke up with you on Facebook.”

So, maybe they didn’t break your heart. But if the only reason you were friends on Facebook is because you two were somehow involved, it might be time to play some Beyoncé, crack open the Haagen-Dazs and click “Remove from Friends”.

4. You don’t like them anymore.
In the early years of Facebook, users would  friend everyone their dorm, everyone from high school, and every person they had ever shared a sandbox with. But now, many people are finding they no longer like a number of their friends, and spend time creating limited profiles, customizing the newsfeed, and avoiding Facebook chat.

Teresa Hynes, a student at St. John’s University, pointed out that it’s silly to be concerned one of these people might find out you’ve unfriended them and get angry. “You are never going to see them again,” she said. “You don’t want to see them ever again. You hated them in high school. Your mass communications group project is over.”

5. Annoying status updates.
“I don’t want to see ‘So-and-so wishes it was over,’” said Andrew Varhol, a marketing manager in NYC. “Or the cheers of bandwagon sports fans—when suddenly someone’s, ‘Go Yankees! Go Jeter!’ Where were you before October?”

Excessive status updates are one example of Facebook abuse. Amy Labagh of powerHouse Books admits she is irritated by frequent updates. “It’s like they want you to think they’re cool,” she said, “but they’re not.”

A professor at NYU, agreed, and said he finds a number of these frequent updates to be “too bourgie.” “It’ll say something like, ‘So-and-so is drinking whatever in the beautiful scenery of some field.’ I mean, really?!”

The style and type of each update is also important. A number of users agree that song lyrics, poetry, and literary quotations can be extremely annoying. Updates with misspellings or lacking punctuation were also noted. “I once unfriended someone because they updated their statuses in all caps,” said Erin Meehan, a marketing associate in NYC.

6. Obnoxious photo uploads.
Everyone has a different idea about what photos are appropriate to post , but a popular complaint from Facebook users in their 20s concerned wedding and baby photos. “It’s just weird,” said a bartender in Manhattan. “I know that older people are joining now, but if you’re at the stage in your life when most the photos are of your kids, I mean, what are you doing on Facebook?”

“I think makeout photos are worse,” said his coworker. “My sister always posts photos of her and her boyfriend kissing. Sometimes I want to unfriend and unfamily her.”

Across the board, a number of users found partially nude photos, or images of someone flexing their muscles as grounds for unfriending. Another reason, as cited specifically by Margitte Kristjansson, graduate student at UC San Diego, could be if “they upload inappropriate pictures of their stab wounds.”

7. Clashing religious or political views.
“I can’t handle it when someone’s updates are always about Jesus,” said Robert Wilder, a writer in New York.

In the same vein, Phil Lee, lead singer of The Muskies, said he’s extremely irritated by “religious proselytizing and over-enthusiastic praise and Bible quoting. Often in all caps.”

An anonymous Brooklynite shared that he purged his Facebook account after the last Presidential election. “It was a big deal to me,” he said. “I found it hard to be friends with people who didn’t vote for Obama.” After which his friend added, “I voted for McKinney.”

8. “I wanted a free Whopper.”
In January, Burger King launched the Whopper Sacrifice application, which promised each Facebook user a free Whopper if they unfriended 10 people. It sounded simple enough, but if you chose to unfriend someone via the application, it sent a notification to that person, announcing they had been sacrificed for the burger. Burger King disabled the application within the month when the Whopper “proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Since Facebook has made the home page much more customizable than it used to be, you might wonder, “Why unfriend when I can hide?” More and more, Facebook users are choosing to use limited profiles and editing their newsfeed so undesirable friends disappear from view. “I find lately I’m friending more people, then blocking them,” said Gary Ferrar, a magician in New York. “That way no one gets mad, no one’s feelings get hurt.”

Do you have another reason? Tell us about it!

Laura Pappano, co-author with Eileen McDonagh of Playing With The Boys: Why Separate Is Not Equal, is an award-winning journalist and writer-in-residence at Wellesley Centers for Women at Wellesley College. She blogs at FairGameNews.com . In the original post below, Pappano discusses  Elizabeth Lambert’s hair-pulling and sportsmanship in women’s athletics.  Read Pappano’s previous OUPblog posts here.

Outrage over New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert’s dirty play – including her ponytail-yanking an opponent to the ground – is justified given this egregious act of poor sportsmanship.

But as the conversation and video have gone viral – from SportsCenter to NFL pre-game shows to David Letterman – the subtext has become less about comportment and more about the gendered expectations of female athletes.

Guys fighting in sports – whether ice hockey or baseball – is considered a “natural” by-product of intense play and, well, testosterone. They can’t help it. When women get heated in competition (ask any high school female athletes about trash talking and you’ll get an earful) there is a perception that they’re supposed to act…differently.

In a season of throw-backs, you can add this to the list: Just as our grandmothers insisted that girls don’t sweat, they “perspire,” there remains a narrow range of acceptable behavior for female athletes. Such rigidity is not new (in previous eras women basketball players were required to wear makeup in competition and submit to half-time beauty contests), but until Lambert we had thought the rules had evolved – at least a little.

The increasing skill level and intensity of women’s sports even at high school and college levels should not be a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention. Problem is, of course, many have not been paying attention. Women’s sports remain poorly covered by the mainstream male sports media. News outlets hardly feel obligated to report on even major events (it took digging to get the result of the WNBA final). And chatter about Lambert on sports talk radio last week on the Boston station I listen to was preceded by the admission that “we have never talked about women’s college soccer on this program and we will probably never talk about women’s college soccer again, but…”

The fact remains that while female athletes have developed skills, hard-charging attitudes and leave-it-all-on-the-field seriousness about their play, we still view them as grown-up girls (in ponytails) who might be doing cartwheels in the backfield if they thought they wouldn’t get caught.

Some little girl-female athlete affinity is purposeful marketing. That’s the justification for Saturday afternoon college basketball games and cheap tickets. And, certainly, why shouldn’t women’s teams, from college basketball to professional soccer build a fan base from those who can relate to them as role models? Isn’t that the NFL’s goal fulfilled when millions of boys paste Ladanian Tomlinson Fatheads on bedroom walls and wear Peyton Manning jerseys to school?

Promoting athletes as role models, of course, is always tricky. But where men get a pass for bad behavior, women draw fire.

We forgive Michael Vick, and gasp when Serena Williams screams at a line judge’s late call at the U.S. Open.

We must get past the notion that female athletes are “nice” first and good second, and women’s games should be peddled as “family fare.” It is tiring to hear enlightened men describe themselves as “supporters” of women’s sports as if they are charitable donors. No one likes dirty play. But if Elizabeth Lambert just made people see that women’s sports are highly intense, competitive, and exciting, well, good for her.

Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber.  The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history.  In the original post below we learn five new things about West Side Story.

1. Did you know that choreographer Jerome Robbins insisted on making the Jets snap their thumbs against their index fingers instead of their middle fingers? Try it, it’s much harder. That’s the point. Robbins wanted to make the Jets stand out from other finger snapper.

2. Did you know that in Arthur Laurents first two libretto drafts Maria kills herself with dressmaking shears. Starting with the third draft, five more drafts, and the final draft, a mortally wounded Tony finds Maria alive, and the lovers are able to share a few final moments together.

3. Did you know that some of the great tunes in West Side Story contain recognizable connections with famous classical melodies? My favorites are the allusions to Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet and the theme Wagner created to depict the Redemption through Love in his Ring cycle, since in these cases Bernstein’s references are so interesting dramatically as well as musically.

4. Did you know that Sondheim was originally listed as a co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein? When the early reviews ignored Sondheim’s contribution, Bernstein offered the Broadway newcomer sole lyricist billing and the royalty split that went with it. In an unthinking moment he would always regret Sondheim replied, “Don’t be silly. I don’t care about the money,” and turned down the opportunity to split the 4% lyric royalties. Instead of receiving 2% of the lyric royalties, Sondheim thus retained his original 1%.

5. Did you know that the film soundtrack of West Side Story was the Number 1 best selling album of 1962 from May 5 to June 16 and again for the week of October 6-13?

Our OUP-UK friends Helen Eaton, Assistant Commissioning Editor, Academic Science and Dewi Jackson, Publishing Editor, Higher Education, recently went on a trip to South Africa.  In honor of our 2009 Place of the Year selection they have shared their experience with us and some stunning photos.  Be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here

We recently spent 20 days in South Africa split between Cape Town, the Garden Route, and Kruger National Park.

Cape Town is a beautiful and unique city filled with plenty of things to do and see whatever your taste. It is watched over by Table Mountain – an imposing 1000m rocky mountain that fills every vista. The views of the city and surrounding sea from the top are incredible – you can either hike up it or take the easy cable car option (as we did). Day trips to Cape Point (the site of many shipwrecks) and inland to the famous Cape Winelands are highly recommended. We certainly enjoyed eating and drinking in the ‘Mother City’!

The Garden Route is a verdant strip of coast stretching east from Cape Town. Its towns are small and friendly and its beaches pristine. South Africa is famous for having some of the best whale watching in the world and it didn’t disappoint. The whales swim so close to land that you can easily watch them from the shore, but we took the boat option and got within feet of 18m long Southern Right Whales. Just inland from here we visited Oudtshoorn in the Little Karoo, the home of ostrich farming, where we saw, rode, and ate the largest bird in the world.

You can drive yourself around National Parks and Game Reserves in South Africa – in a VW Polo in our case – making for a more personal experience. Be aware, however, that this means if you get into trouble there may be no one around to help you, as we found when trapped between a lone elephant bull walking down the road towards us and a large herd crossing behind. We’ve never wanted a Humvee more.

In the Kruger National Park we were lucky enough to see the Big Five (Africa’s ‘trophy’ animals) – Elephant, Lion, Leopard, Buffalo, Rhino. But there’s much more to the Kruger experience – its smaller creatures and bird life, the views, the unique sounds of the African bush at night, and cooking an enormous steak on your braai make it truly memorable.

South Africa is a worthy winner of ‘Place of the Year’. Nowhere else in the world can you experience beautiful landscapes and incredible wildlife at the same time as eating in exquisite restaurants and relaxing on empty beaches. We had a wonderful holiday there and I’m sure that anyone who visits after reading this will do too!

1. Table Mountain viewed from Cape Town harbour. Photo by Dewi Jackson
2. Growing wine outside Cape Town. Photo by Dewi Jackson
3. Ostriches in the Little Karoo. Photo by Helen Eaton
4. Spectacular scenery on the Garden Route. Photo by Helen Eaton
5. Buffalo in the Kruger Park. Photo by Dewi Jackson
6. Lions in the Kruger Park. Photo by Helen Eaton

Jancis Robison, wine connoisseur and editor of  The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition, recently revealed the drawbacks of South Africa’s stringent wine standards: because South African wine law mandates that 100 % of the grapes must be grown in the appellation (geographic location) specified on the bottle, consumers usually have no idea exactly where their wine is from. According to Robinson this is a shame given that there are more than 80 appellations in South African wine country; terroir clearly shapes how a wine tastes and this law precludes wine drinkers from learning anything about “the Cape’s wonderfully varied geography.” But on the plus side, the average quality of wine being exported from South Africa has improved immensely.

In continuation of our “Place of the Year” celebration, I offer you some quick facts on the growing South African wine industry from The Oxford Companion to Wine, Third Edition. After successfully gleaning two or three talking points for your next tasting or wine/cheese mashup, be sure to check out other “Place of the Year” contributions here.

Beginner
You have a case of “Two Buck Chuck” in your kitchen. Wine falls in two categories: white and red.

• South Africa has only 1.5% of the world’s vineyards, but it is one of the world’s top ten wine producers.
• The winelands are widely dispersed throughout the Western and Northern Cape, some 700km/420 miles from north to south and 500 km across, strung between the Atlantic and Indian oceans.
• Just as Europe and America people are drinking less, but better, South Africa has shifted away from a beer-and-spirit-only consumption pattern. This coupled with a tenfold increase in exports between 1993 and 2003 has shifted the focus to quality not quantity for South African vine-growers.

Intermediate
You have been a member of the Wall Street Journal wine club (WSJwine) for over a year now. When out for drinks you are confident in returning a glass to the bar because “it has turned.”

• The father of the South African wine industry was 33-year-old-Dutch surgeon Jan van Riebeeck, sent to establish a market garden to reduce the risks of scurvy on the long sea passage between Europe and the Indies. In 1652, seven years after sailing into Table Bay, he recorded: ‘Today, praise be to God, wine was pressed for the first time from Cape grapes.’
• The Benguela current from Antarctica makes the Cape cooler than its altitude may suggest, which means many new vineyard areas south towards Agulhas as well as on the west coast offer the prospect of a long, slow ripening seasoning.
• White varieties constitute by far the majority of Cape vineyeards. Chenin Blanc, known sometimes as Steen, has for long been the dominant grape variety in South Africa.

Advanced
“Education and Work” on your Facebook profile includes “seasoned viticulturist.” If you are a devout Catholic you steer clear of the chalice—even on religious holidays. And you have this commited to memory.

• Controlled malolactic fermentation, reduced dependence on flavour-stripping filtration and stabilization processes, as well as new canopy management strategies and increasing vine densities have all played a role in the increase of wine quality.
• The definition of ‘dry’ in relation to South African wines sold on the domestic market has recently been changed: the maximum residual sugar content is now 5 g/l rather than 4 g/l/.
• Pinotage, the Cape’s own crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, is becoming increasingly popular and was the single most planted new red vine variety in 1996 (Chardonnay was the white) although it still represented only 6.7 per cent of the nation’s vines in 2004.

For more than 30 years of his life Albie Sachs lived as both lawyer and outlaw in an apartheid South Africa—working through the law in the public sphere, and against the law in the underground. As a result, he was detained in solitary confinement, tortured by sleep deprivation, and eventually blown up by a car bomb which cost him his right arm and the sight of an eye. Later he returned to play an important part in drafting South Africa’s post-apartheid Constitution, and was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a member of the country’s first Constitutional Court. As Sachs wrapped up his 15 year term this fall, Oxford published his book The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law. Below Sachs tells us why people all over the world visit the South African Constitutional Court every year.

Following his post is an excerpt from the opening of The Strange Alchemy of Life and Law which features artist Judith Mason. She explains the inspiration behind her Blue Dress, one of the art pieces acquired by Albie Sachs for the South African Constitutional Court gallery and the image on the cover of his book. To learn the full story behind Mason’s Blue Dress collection go here. And for more first hand perspective on South African culture and history, be sure to check out all of our Place of the Year contributions.

Justice Albie Sachs on the Constitutional Court Gallery

I recently had the great pleasure of visiting the new Supreme Court of the United Kingdom in Parliament Square. Its site is wonderful, and the rather unprepossessing building it occupies has been artfully adapted to give it a friendly, functional and stylish character. The one feature that I thought worked badly, however, was the presence in strategic places on the walls of large oil portraits of dead white, male dignitaries who had occupied the building in the past. One day I will be a dead, white male judge myself, nothing wrong with that in itself. But if it is the only imagery you see, the story is one of unjust exclusion, at odds with the very notion of doing justice to all without favour or prejudice. And even those less afflicted with political correctness than myself would recognise that apart from one elegant Gainsborough portrait, the pictures represent rather gloomy dead souls haunting a building in which the evolving wisdom of the ages is intended to resolve the problems of today in a clear, transparent and convincing way. I couldn’t help comparing the paintings with those that hang in the Constitutional Court in Johannesburg, from which I have just stepped down as a judge after my fifteen year appointment came to an end. And this reflection made me realise what a remarkable place South Africa is to be in these days.

In particular I thought of the image of the Blue Dress in our Court. The Court was the first major new building of the post-apartheid era, constructed in the heart of the Old Fort Prison where both Gandhi and Mandela had been imprisoned. Thousands of visitors from all over the country and the world, visit the Court each year, not only to watch justice being done, but to journey through a remarkable building filled with extraordinarily rich and soulful artwork. And always, visitors pause for some minutes, and sometimes cry, when they see the Blue Dress.

The work on the cover of this book commemorates the courage of Phila Ndwandwe and Harald Sefola whose deaths during the Struggle were described to the Truth and Reconciliation Commision by their killers.

Phila Ndwandwe was shot by the security police after being kept naked for weeks in an attempt to make her inform on her comrades. She preserved her dignity by making panties of of a blue plastic bag. This garment was found wrapped around her pelvis when she was exhumed. ‘She simply would not talk’, one of the policeman involved in her death testified. ‘God…she was brave.’

…I wept when I heard Phila’s story, saying to myself, ‘I wish I could make you a dress.’ Acting on this childlike response, I collected discarded blue plastic bags that I sewed into a dress. On its skirt I painted this letter:

Sister, a plastic bag may not be the whole armour of God, but you were wrestling with flesh and blood, and against powers, against the rulers of darkness, against spiritual wickedness in sordid places. Your weapons were your silence and a piece of rubbish. Finding that bag and wearing it until you were disinterred is such a frugal, common-sensical, house-wifey thing to do, an ordinary act…At some level you shamed your captors, and they did not compound their abuse by stripping you a second time. Yet they killed you. We only know your story because a sniggering man remembered how brave you were. Memorials to your courage are everywhere; they blow about in the streets and drift on the tide and cling to thorn-bushes. This dress is made from some of them. Hamba kahle. Umkhonto.

Richard Barrios has lectured extensively on film, served as a commentator on numerous DVDs, and co-hosted a series on Turner Classic Movies. He currently lives outside Philadelphia. His book, A Song in the Dark: The Birth of the Musical Film, 2nd edition, illuminates the origins of the movie musical from the smash hits of The Singing Fool and Sunny Side Up to bizarre flops like Golden Dawn and Cecil B. DeMille’s Madam Satan. In the original post below, Barrios looks at the 10 worst musical films ever made.

Musical films, as most of us are aware, are among the greatest mixed blessings in American art. They can be transcendent and glorious at times, and quite often they can be inept, foul, and obnoxious. On a few choice occasions, some individual movie musicals can offer us all these at once. They are part of our lives and our culture and our subconscious, and yet often we are not permitted to adore them unreservedly; they have let us down too often for that.

While I was writing my history of the early movie musical, I was struck again and again by the trial-and-error nature of how the musical was born, and how the mistakes counted for as much as the successes. The two coexist steadily, especially in early musicals, which usually lack the smooth-grained professionalism of later efforts. The filmmakers learned as much from what they got terribly wrong as what they did correctly, and sometimes more so. The resulting films demonstrate this so vividly that, as a historian, I found myself steadily compelled to reflect on both sides of the coin. This naturally sets aside the entire fact that the dogs are often a great deal of fun to write about.

Fourteen years after Oxford first published it, A Song in the Dark now sings anew in an extensively revised and updated second edition. In celebration, I’ve compiled a “Ten Worst” list—technically, it’s “Eleven Worst”—that spans nearly the entire 80-plus year history of musical films, with the genre’s most odious cinematic mistakes and annotations of how and why they got that way. While it may strike some as a somewhat perverse celebration of musicals to offer a list of their worst achievements, I remain gleefully unapologetic. We all learn from our errors, and if they should not be celebrated they must still, ever, be recalled. Naturally it all must remain subjective, much like politics and religion, and I hope that readers will feel free to compose their own lists as well. As a palate-cleanser, I promise a “Ten Best” list in the near future.

The Singing Fool (1928)
A major film, in fact the biggest sensation of its time. Far more important in many ways than The Jazz Singer, beloved by many millions, one of the highest-grossing films made prior to Gone With the Wind. Alas, all this history and triumph don’t count for much when you just try to sit through it today. The annoying technique—back and forth between silent and “talkie”—is the least of it. The most is Al Jolson, who redefines “star ego” for all time. For anyone wondering why The Jazz Singer is shown so frequently and this follow-up so seldom, spend a few minutes communing with Jolson and his excesses, and you’ll know. If you were ever inclined to like the song “Sonny Boy,” seeing it introduced here, and driven into the ground with bathetic repetition, will cure you.

Golden Dawn (1930)
Seldom has terrible ever been this irresistible. A monstrosity of a Broadway operetta—think Emperor Jones meets Rose-Marie—transferred to the screen with all its excesses utterly intact, and for good measure it’s almost as racist a tract as The Birth of a Nation. Stalwart British soldiers try to keep the peace in East Africa, and the native heroine is considered a goddess because she wasn’t born black. There’s lots more, including a fearful idol who resembles a Smurf, a put-upon cast who somehow manages to keep straight faces, and songs such as “My Bwana” and “Africa Smiles No More.” Until you’ve seen and heard a darkly made-up Noah Beery sing “The Whip Song,” you don’t know from bad taste.

Down to their Last Yacht (1934)
Have you ever seen a film destroy itself while it runs through the projector? Behold, then, this ridiculous indigent-millionaires-meet-randy-Pacific-islanders concoction, so incoherent that it appears to be slabs of several unrelated movies glued together. Sidney Blackmer (Ruth Gordon’s husband in Rosemary’s Baby) stars as one of the most ill-at-ease musical heartthrobs in history. There are lots of jokes about cannibals and sex, and if it had been made in recent years there probably would’ve been a song about Viagra. The climactic number, an enormous and incoherent “South Sea Bolero,” seems to have been done by Busby Berkeley while high on drug-spiked papaya juice. Depression audiences weren’t fooled, and Yacht lost so much money that the angry studio fired the producer.

Rosalie (1937)
Overblown, overpriced, overstuffed, overproduced, overlong, overeverything. There’s a teeny princess-meets-commoner story, which is buried under so many tons of rotten MGM meringue that watching it gives you a headache. Eleanor Powell was an incredibly skillful tap dancer, but this thing doesn’t give her enough opportunities to redeem tons of excess and inertia. Nor are Ray Bolger and the beautiful Ilona Massey treated well, while Cole Porter’s songs range from wonderful (“In the Still of the Night”) to stupid (the title song). And chunky, placid Nelson Eddy as a college football star? In what universe?

Panama Hattie (1942)
Ann Sothern, a talented and appealing performer, wasn’t a good fit for Ethel Merman’s stage role. Strike one. Most of Cole Porter’s Broadway songs are cut or mangled, and replaced with lesser work. Strike two. And the strike three nail in the coffin is some interminable and boring slapstick relief involving Red Skelton and a haunted house. Only Lena Horne emerges unscathed, probably because she’s only given two songs and no role in the wretched script. The producers reshot and tinkered with the film, and must have felt redeemed when wartime audiences, eager for escapist relief, made it a hit. Just remember that the public isn’t always right.

Pal Joey (1957) and Can Can (1960)
Sure, Frank Sinatra was a great singer and could be a fine actor, but these two Broadway adaptations were made around the time he decided that he would only need to do one take of any scene. The results of such a blasé lack of commitment? A pair of lavish, worthless dinosaurs. Pal Joey lost all the nasty cynicism, and many of the Rodgers/Hart songs, that made it so striking and innovative onstage, and Can Can—set in 1890s Paris—is about as French as a small order of McDonald’s fries. Some of the other performers do try, but Frank’s phone-it-in Rat-Packy attitude sabotages them. Definition of a dispiriting experience: watching an expensive movie whose center is occupied by a star who doesn’t give a damn. Listen to the soundtracks, and skip the rest.

Paint Your Wagon (1969)
The late 1960s was rife with expensive and bloated musical blockbusters that were totally out-of-step with the time. This was the worst of all of them, and further proof that even an accomplished stage director like Joshua Logan shouldn’t necessarily be allowed near a movie camera. There’s a dumb Gold Rush plot, Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood and poor Jean Seberg form a musical ménage-a-trois, both men do their own vocals (alas!), and the whole thing comes off like a suburban dad trying to pass as a hippie. Lerner and Loew’s Broadway show deserved better, but as Lerner was co-producer he doesn’t rate a pass. With overblown rubbish like this, no wonder audiences turned to films with smaller budgets, bigger brains, and less music.

Lost Horizon (1972)
A debacle that deserves its near-legendary reputation, this abomination spelled finis to the film career of producer Ross Hunter. There had already been a failed attempt at a Broadway musical version of Frank Capra’s classic romance, but this one, with painful songs by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, was worse. Poor Peter Finch and Liv Ullmann head a worthy, completely misbegotten all-star cast, and the details, script, and musical numbers are all minor classics of wrong-headedness. Choicest detail: the shelves of the Shangri-La library, supposedly a repository for the world’s finest literature, upon which can be clearly seen a number of Readers Digest Condensed Books.

Showgirls (1995)
Perhaps not a musical in the conventional sense of the word, but why pass up any opportunity to call out this classic backstage stinker? Trying oh, so hard to be a scorching erotic exposé, it succeeds in being asinine, juvenile, and very funny. Writer Joe Eszterhas cribbed his plot from All About Eve and his dialogue from old issues of True Confessions and Hustler, forming a worthy setting for Elizabeth Berkeley’s star-breaking acting and hysterical (lap) dancing. Given the appalling musical numbers, it’s somewhat of a surprise to note that Marguerite Derricks is the credited choreographer, not St. Vitus. It’s all cheaper, in every sense of the world, than a trip to Vegas, and if you’re in the right mean mood a whole lot more fun. Viewing note: the hilarity is even greater if you have a pitcher of Cosmopolitans.

Glitter (2001)
Mariah Carey’s high-powered, multi-octave vocalism is not to all tastes, but at least it demands a certain amount of respect. Then there’s her acting… As with Rudy Vallee, Kate Smith, Johnnie Ray, and many other pop singers, she tries to make the leap onto the big screen and fails utterly. A downtrodden-waif-makes-good saga, this is a glaring of example of old, bad wine poured into a new, cheesy bottle. Nobody wins, Mariah can’t read lines and isn’t photogenic, and the single worthy moment is a shot—one of its final screen appearances—of the World Trade Center. It was fortunate that Chicago came along the following year to rescue movie musicals after Glitter nearly killed them.

IGNOMINIOUS MENTION

Mother’s Boy (1929), The Lottery Bride (1930), Take a Chance (1933), George White’s 1935 Scandals, Anything Goes (1956), Song of Norway (1970), Man of La Mancha (1972), Mame (1974), At Long Last Love (1975), A Chorus Line (1985), From Justin to Kelly (2003)

Roger Scruton is currently Research Professor for the Institute for the Psychological Sciences where he teaches philosophy at their graduate school in both Washington and Oxford. He is a writer, philosopher, and public commentator and has specialized in aesthetics with particular attention to music and architecture. In his book Beauty, Scruton explores various notions of beauty and comes to the conclusion that beauty is not determined by subjective feelings, but universal values that are rooted in rational thought. In the following excerpt Scruton  discusses beauty in the form of art.

A century ago Marcel Duchamp signed a urinal with the name ‘R. Mutt’, entitled it ‘La Fontaine’, and exhibited it as a work of art. One immediate result of Duchamp’s joke was to precipitate an intellectual industry devoted to answering the question ‘What is art?’ The literature of this industry is as tedious as the never-ending imitations of Duchamp’s gesture. Nevertheless, it has left a residue of scepticism. If anything can count as art, what is the point or the merit in achieving that label? All that is left is the curious but unfounded fact that some people look at some things, others look at others. As for the suggestion that there is an enterprise of criticism, which searches for objective values and lasting monuments to the human spirit, this is dismissed out of hand, as depending on a conception of the art-work that was washed down the drain of Duchamp’s ‘fountain’.

The argument is eagerly embraced, because it seems to emancipate people from the burden of culture, telling them that all those venerable masterpieces can be ignored with impunity, that TV soaps are ‘as good as’ Shakespeare and Radiohead the equal of Brahms, since nothing is better than anything and all claims to aesthetic value are void. The argument therefore chimes with the fashionable forms of cultural relativism, and defines the point from which university courses in aesthetics tend to begin – and as often as not the point at which they end.

There is useful comparison to be made here with jokes. It is as hard to circumscribe the class of jokes as it is the class of artworks. Anything is a joke if somebody says so. A joke is an artefact made to be laughed at. It may fail to perform its function, in which case it is a joke that ‘falls flat’. Or it may perform its function, but offensively, in which case it is a joke ‘in bad taste’. But none of this implies that the category of jokes is arbitrary, or that there is no such thing as a distinction between good jokes and bad. Nor does it in any way suggest that there is no place for the criticism of jokes, or for the kind of moral education that has an appropriate sense of humour as its goal. Indeed, the first thing you might learn, in considering jokes, is that Marcel Duchamp’s urinal was one – quite a good one first time round, corny by the time of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes and downright stupid today.

Gordon Thompson is Professor of Music at Skidmore College. His book, Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop, Inside Out, offers an insider’s view of the British pop-music recording industry. Earlier in the week we posted a musical riddle by Thompson and below he explains the answer.  Check out Thompson’s other riddles here.

Riddle me when, riddle me why; can you name the song this time?
Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.
More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.
Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Forty years ago, the Beatles were in the process of disintegrating: John Lennon and George Harrison were performing separately from the band and Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr would individually begin recording material for independent release. In the past, a separate but equally new single would shortly follow a new Beatles album. The first time they had done this had established the pattern: “From Me to You” (11 April 1963) came slightly less than three weeks after their first album, Please Please Me (22 March 1963), with both reaching the top of British charts in early May.

On 26 September 1969 (and on 1 October in the US), the Beatles had released the last LP they would record together, Abbey Road (see last month’s riddle). Returning to the studio to record a separate single presented an unlikely scenario: the fab four no longer functioned as a unified entity. Consequently, on 31 October 1969 (and on 6 October in the US), Apple released George Harrison’s “Something,” with John Lennon’s “Come Together” on the flip side of the 45 rpm disk. The recordings had already appeared on Abbey Road and the choice of these two songs suggested at least a partial symbolic ostracizing of Paul McCartney, the odd-man-out in the internal group negotiations.

Ole blue eyes thought this was the best, even if he named the rest.

George Harrison in the Beatles Anthology video seems to relish the ironic humor of Frank Sinatra (ole blue eyes) declaring “Something” to be his favorite Lennon-McCartney song. After years of laboring in the shadows of two of the most successful songwriters of the sixties (if not the century), George Harrison had grown into a consummate songwriter who saw his material routinely rejected by his band mates. These rejections meant more than simple social dismissal: a song on a Beatles album meant substantial income from royalties. While Lennon and McCartney held a substantial share in their publishing entity Northern Songs (a company their manager Allen Klein would soon let escape from their grasp), Harrison had recently established Harrisongs to handle the royalties accumulating from his material. “Something” would be one of the most substantial contributors to the coffers of that company.

More than nothing, a quiet plateau; some friendly help, a bass concerto.

“Something” (definitely more than nothing) began an era (a plateau?) of successful songs by the “quiet one” (as press coverage had characterized George Harrison). Songs like “My Sweet Lord,” “Wah Wah,” “Isn’t It a Pity,” and “All Things Must Pass,” which appeared on his first post-Beatles album All Things Must Pass, displayed a songwriter-producer-musician of substantial talent. They also revealed a musician who had discovered the art cooperative and communal creation. As he had initially with the Beatles and would later with the Traveling Wilburys, Harrison had learned how to let other musicians graciously and generously contribute to his recordings. In the case of “Something,” Paul McCartney’s spectacular bass playing compliments Harrison’s singing and guitar playing such that it almost takes the center of the listening experience, much the way a concerto is meant to contrast a soloist with the rest of the ensemble.

Sthā’ī-antarā gat nahi; an unknown answer to a desperate plea.

Although Harrison had first tried his hand at pop imitations (e.g., “Don’t Bother Me”), he made his mark as a songwriter-composer with his explorations of Indian music. His sitar contribution to “Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)” demonstrated his interest in the textures he had heard percolating in London in 1965. “Love You To” on Revolver showed he had the ability to merge the basic ideas of the South Asian tradition into a pop format. However, after studying in India with Ravi Shankar, his contribution to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, “Within You without You,” revealed a masterful combination of the Hindustani tradition and British pop. Taking the core instrumental idiom that North Indian classical musicians call “gat” (consisting of contrasting sections they identify as sthā’ī and antarā), he wove them together to produce perhaps the best representation of mid-sixties Indian-western musical fusion.

However, in the post-Sgt. Pepper world, he had found his own voice (e.g., “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”) and, in “Something,” Harrison’s musical sophistication shone brighter than it ever had previously. In Hindi, “nahi” negates what has just come previously. Not only did he forgo use of the sthā’ī-antarā gat form, he adopted a new style of musical composition built on what he had written in the past, but that had evolved into something new.

Part of the song’s charm lies in its internal contrasts. Where the verse finds the singer obsessed with the beloved (“Something in the way she moves…”), the chorus surprisingly questions the very nature of the attraction. In response to a question that the author perhaps asks of himself (“Will your love grow?”), he responds with an expression of ignorance: he does not know the answer, a strange acknowledgement for someone who otherwise finds himself transfixed by the beauty of his lover.