It’s a Daily Operation.

[Photo Credit: Razor Burn]

Here’s a nice appreciation of Ross Macdonald’s The Underground Man by Malcolm Forbes:

Throughout his career, Ross Macdonald—the pen name of Kenneth Millar—was hailed as the true heir to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler as master of the hardboiled mystery. But accolades beyond the reach of a genre writer still eluded him—until towards the end of his career, when he was finally acknowledged as not “only” a crime writer but a highly regarded American novelist. Macdonald subverted the genre by delivering the riddles and intricacies demanded of the crime novel in language that could be stark but also subtly nuanced and beautifully cadenced, while never slowing the requisite pace or diluting the excitement. In doing so he silenced those naysayers who had previously scoffed at the idea that the humble detective novel could possess any intrinsic literary worth. Praise finally came from both sides of the literary divide, with James Ellroy acknowledging his debt to Macdonald’s Lew Archer books and Eudora Welty lauding him as “a more serious and complex writer than Chandler and Hammett ever were.” Five of the gripping Lew Archer novels have just become part of the U.K. Penguin modern classics series. For many, this anointment is long overdue.

The Underground Man is the only Lew Archer mystery I’ve read. It’s enjoyable. The private eye helping out the lost hippie kids. Like Altman’s Marlow without the satire.

Now, here’s a meal. From the most beautiful site: Manger.

Robert Motherwell collage over at Just Another Masterpiece.

Tomorrow at BAM check out one of the Marx Brothers’ classic Paramount comedies: Horse Feathers (1932).

From High to Low…

Over at the New York Review of Books, here’s Joyce Carol Oates on the mystery of Charles Dickens:

Biography is a literary craft that, in the hands of gifted practitioners, rises to the level of art. Yet even its most exemplary practitioners are frequently left behind, like hunters on the trail of elusive prey, in the tracking of genius. Claire Tomalin’s biography is likely to be one of the definitive Dickens biographies in its seamless application of “the life” to “the art”—and what a perilous balancing act it is, in which, just barely, Dickens’s art isn’t lost amid a smothering welter of facts. “This may be more detail than one normally wants about anyone’s life,” Tomalin acknowledges. And indeed there is an inordinate amount of detail in this biography, particularly in regard to Dickens’s frantically busy social life, his scattered interests, and his grinding public career. (How many reading tours Dickens embarked upon before, finally, his “last farewell to the London reading public” in 1870! The reader begins to be as fatigued as Dickens.)

The problem with such assiduously recorded lives of great artists is that one is drawn to an interest in the artist’s life because of his or her accomplishments, primarily; the “life” in itself is of interest as it illuminates the work, but if the often banal details of the life detract from the work, the worth to the biography is questionable. Even an ordinary life, cataloged in every detail, will bloat to Brobdingnagian girth, distorting the human countenance. Only a very few encyclopedic biographers—Richard Ellman most illustriously, in his long yet never dull biographies of James Joyce and Oscar Wilde in particular—transcend the weight of their material, and make of it an intellectual entertainment commensurate with its subject.

[Photo Credit: Cecilia Majzoub via Film is God]

Word to DJ Matt B.

[Photo Via: American Idolatry]

Smitten Kitchen gives us charred pepper steak sauce. Oh, sure, that’ll do.

“Landscape 2 Women” By Xaviera Simmons (2007)

You talk about penance and you send this through the door.

Plus

Equals a tasty summertime meal. From Ceramic Canvas.

Franz Kline.

What a Doll.

My pal the Ill Chemist has a dope 15-minute jam up on Mixcloud. It’s called Too Much Information Vol I and it features, among others, Lord Buckley, The Who, Yma Sumac, Sly and the Family Stone, Mr. Magoo, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Biz Markie, Duke Ellington, the Beastie Boys and Buddy Hackett.

Listen, laugh and shake…your…rump-ah!

From our pal Diane Firstman:

Serious Eats vs. Food52: Are you kidding me?

Picture by Mariya Kozlova via Stars in My Dreams

Cold be walkin with a bop and my hat turned back.

The original mix from the slang-spitter.

[Photo Via: Gruesome Twosome]

Rest in Peace, Robert Hughes, a wonderful critic and author.

The Daily Beast has a nice collection of Hughes’ best quotes. Here’s an interview he once did with R. Crumb.

Go to You Tube and look up The Shock of the New or American Visions. You’ll be entertained and will learn a ton.

I met him once, briefly, in the New York Public Library. Mark Lamster introduced us. This morning, Mark posted a funny bit on his Facebook page:

My most memorable conversation with Robert Hughes, in the NYPL Allen room:

Me: “What are you working on now?”
Him, with gruff humor: “Another goddamn book.”

[Photo Credit: News Image Limited Library; featured painting by Richard Diebenkorn]