Friday Countdown - Art Is Life
Was seriously not in the mood last Friday, and thus skipped the Countdown for the first time since it began. In part to atone for this grievous dereliction, here’s a meaty one. The most significant 37 works of American art since I ambled out of the womb on the last day of 1962. Don't confuse most significant with best (in some instances) or your favorite (in most instances). And while I did think really hard about what painting could make the list, just couldn’t come up with one.
37. The Artist is Present - Marina Abramovic camps out at MoMA. The highbrows dig it existentially. I could think of better places to sit motionless, except motionless ain’t my thing.
36. Bass line, My Sharona - The Knack lays down a most auspicious groove.
35. Walk This Way - The Run DMC version.
34. Sharbat Gula Picture - National Geographic photographer takes a picture of a 12 year old, and the big world collapses into the eyes of an orphan.
33. Homicide - Television’s mostly a wasteland. But every other decade or so, something good makes its way through the gloam.
32. Black Power Salute, 1968 Olympics - On a world stage, Tommie Smith & John Carlos precede Colin Kaepernick by decades. With no rich white guys, profiting off the systematic killing and maiming of their peers, who can stop them.
31. 1963 Buick Riviera - Bill Mitchell’s masterpiece. As taut, masculine and clean a line that’s ever been stamped into metal. Little known fact - this is the reason silver was invented as a color.
30. I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelo’s early life, and freedom.
29. Born to Run - The screen door slams, and we all imagine Mary dancing across the porch as the radio plays. Springsteen’s third album is determinedly an album; its own national anthem of blue color yearning for redemption.
28. Cloud Gate - Anish Kapoor has an idea, and Ironworkers Local 63 heroically welds 168 sensuous plates together, and then grinds and polishes 2,442 linear feet of those welds into invisible joinery to draw you into a space where everything - every bit of sky and you and city and park - is childlike again.
27. A Pattern Language - The best book on settlement space. Expansive. Quirky. Ethereal. Charming in the extreme, and too little known.
26. Meigs Field Closure - Mayor Daley orders a midnight attack of bulldozers on the landing strip of Meigs Field. The Man sticks it to The Men, closing their elitist airport on a spit of public land that is now a public park.
25. The Words of Cesar Chavez (2002) - A latter day The Jungle, and one which should give you pause about how healthy that salad you’re eating is, for all involved.
24. Chicago Skyline - From the town that invented the skyscraper, the tour de force continues. Hancock, 333 Wacker and Aqua are the highlights, in my lifetime. I’m telling you, the boys of Local 63 are artists of the highest order.
23. Sociobiology - E. O. Wilson explains how we are who we are. And plausibly, at that.
22. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions - Thomas Kuhn explains how we change.
21. MAGA hat - You voted for Donald Trump because he’s an economic nationalist, or maybe not a Party before country sycophant like those fouling state capitals and the District of Columbia? Or maybe you just dig the rotating assortment of prenup signatories? Sure. Whatever you say. No need to explain yourself to me. But that racist, sexist - lets party like it's April 14, 1947 again ! - doofus standing next to you in the same insipid ballcap? See what you can do with him or her. Good luck.
20. Stonewall Riots - Every fight for freedom and equality - for any group - is a fight for us all.
19. The Morning Show - Officially, “the David Letterman show”, it ran for just four brilliant months as daytime television’s Island of Misfit Toys from June to October of 1980, before something which more effectively sold household cleaning supplies could fill the void. An exercise in the essential character of human existence (we’re all ill-fating our way to the dust of mortality, so don’t take yourself too seriously) it paved the way for what late night television became.
18. 1980 USA v. USSR Olympic Hockey Game - Spirit vs. the machine. Herb Brooks is a group psychology genius, and a snappy dresser too.
17. The Seasides - The California one hosted the first integrated military base in America, and remains a proudly diverse beachhead in the battle for an inclusive American Dream. The Florida one was a kick to the rotting, corpulent groin of suburban-sprawl mongers. So wonderful, it priced itself out of the running as a real neighborhood.
16. Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - We spin, we circle the sun, we mark time. And Dee Brown’s treatise on how different life looks whether you’re facing westward or eastward documents the human condition.
15. The Things They Carried - Storytelling is life, by Tim O’Brien.
14. El Cap Free Solo - Alex Honnold expands human possibility, scaling El Capitan with nothing more than sticky shoes, a chalk bag and penetrating wonder.
13. Kalamazoo Promise - Some guy makes a ton of money, decides to give every kid in his hometown a future. See also: Sheena Dooley and the Quad City Times for how not to give a damn about Davenport children.
12. Hamilton - Challenging the status quo. Necessary then. Necessary now.
11. (tie) Citizens United / New York Times v. Sullivan - Both essentially the same case - actual humans vs. corporations. Take note - the corporations really hate to lose.
10. (tie) Brown v. Board of Ed / Eisenstadt v. Baird - But every now and then, humans win.
9. The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan has had just about enough of this.
8. Star Wars - Again, by “Star Wars”, I mean a film than includes Harrison Ford.
7. Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling gets kids to devour books. The single greatest gift for children since Dr. Salk’s polio vaccine.
6. Silent Spring - Rachel Carson’s book begins the environmental movement for some, propels it for others.
5. Mac ad - This space could be occupied by the first computer, or the internet, or Zerox’s first graphical user interface. But the Mac ad during the 1984 Super Bowl is the winner, because it captured (and prefaced) the power of the handheld wonder tools we have today.
4. “Napalm Girl” Picture - Photographer Nick Ut captures kids, including a naked nine year-old girl, fleeing from a napalm attack in Vietnam. It’s Guernica, but real.
3. Abbottabad Raid - 9/11 was horrific and cowardly. It was also an exercise in asymmetric warfare as theater. Here’s the thing. Asymmetry is temporary. The rise of the West, with personal autonomy - and science - wins. Scumbag hides in scumhole. World’s longest-running democracy (with faults, to be sure) tracks scumbag down and comes knocking. With free men of purpose, defending liberty and dispensing justice.
2. Earthrise - President Kennedy says let’s go, and a great national effort ensues (check the office wall). Major Bill Anders, aboard Apollo 8, captures humanity’s first glimpse of the Earth as a background element, rising above the cold, gray lunar surface. It’s Christmas Eve, 1968. That little blue marble is all we got, folks. Let’s not screw this up.
1. I Have A Dream - Trust me, I’ve heard more than my share of oratory (it comes with the gig). But - just eight months into my lifetime - nothing has come close to Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have A Dream speech.
