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Moonlight in the Brooklyn Museum, or, How to See a Landscape

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  American landscape painter Ralph Blakelock rose to fame in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries on the popularity of his moonlight paintings.  He would shatter a record for an American artist when one of his paintings sold at auction for $20,000 in 1916.  The art-buying public was finally ready to invest in American art and its homeland subject matter which would in turn shift the focus of the art world from Paris to New York.   Unfortunately, Blakelock would not enjoy the financial windfall suddenly generated by his work - he was locked away in an asylum while his family toiled in extreme poverty.  Dealers who had exploited his desperate situation soon found themselves with years-old landscape paintings worth thousands.  To add salt to the wound, Blakelock and his family were also about to be the subject of one of the most extraordinary scams in art history.  More on that fascinating (and sad) story, another time.  It needs multiple post...
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Of Martyrs and Men: Brecht's Galileo and the Shaping of Historical Myth

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  Of Martyrs and Men:   Brecht’s Galileo  and  the Shaping of Historical Myth In the Academy Award-nominated film The Trial of the Chicago 7, the character based on real-life activist/war protestor Abbie Hoffman has been arrested for conspiracy to incite violence at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. When asked by the Prosecutor, Richard Schultz, if he intended to have a confrontation with the police when he came to Chicago, Hoffman pauses to consider the question.   Incredulous, the prosecutor expresses dismay that he needs to think about it.   Hoffman responds, “Give me a moment, would you friend?   I’ve never been on trial for my thoughts before.” Chicago 7 writer and director Aaron Sorkin synthesized hours of testimony into a single line that any one of the witness could have said, had it occurred to him in the moment, while also expressing a primary thesis of his film:   these men were on trial for who they were, not what they...
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The Secret Court of David Stacton

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  The Secret Court of David Stacton  In 1963, Time Magazine included author and sometimes-historian David Stacton in its list of the best American writers, alongside the likes of John Updike, Joseph Heller, Phillip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and Ralph Ellison.  These authors were identified as the future of American literature in the wake of Hemingway and Faulkner.  (Harper Lee merely got an honorable mention and James Baldwin is only noted through a comparison to Ellison, the only black writer on the list).  Of these chosen authors, several would fall out-of-print or into obscurity.  Sometimes both.  As is the curious case of David Stacton.  Dead by the age of 44, Stacton still managed to pump out more than a dozen literary novels, several books of history (most widely known is his biography of the Bonaparte family, as in, Napoleon Bonaparte) short stories, poems, and numerous mid-century pulp fiction books under various pseudonyms ('David Stacton' i...
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