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July 6, 2004
OGIC: What I chose
1. Fred Astaire over Gene Kelly2. The Great Gatsby over The Sun Also Rises
3. Duke Ellington over Count Basie, I guess.
4. Cats over dogs
5. Matisse over Picasso
6. Yeats over Eliot
7. Buster Keaton over Charlie Chaplin
8. Flannery O'Connor over John Updike
9. To Have and Have Not has been sitting on my tv for months, courtesy of Netflix, and I fully expect to prefer it to Casablanca. Terry and the Cinetrix can't be wrong.
10. Jackson Pollock over Willem de Kooning
11. The Stones over the Who
12. Philip Larkin over Sylvia Plath
13. Dickens over Trollope
14. Billie Holiday over Ella Fitzgerald
15. Tolstoy over Dostoyevsky
16. The End of the Affair over The Moviegoer
17. George Balanchine over Martha Graham
18. Hamburgers over hot dogs
19. Letterman over Leno in a landslide.
20. Cat Power over Wilco
21. Verdi over Wagner
22. Grace Kelly over Marilyn Monroe
23. Johnny Cash over Bill Monroe
24. Martin over Kingsley Amis
25. Robert Mitchum over Marlon Brando
26. Mark Morris over Twyla Tharp
27. Vermeer over Rembrandt
28. Chopin over Tchaikovsky
29. White wine over red, this being summertime.
30. Oscar Wilde over Noël Coward
31. Grosse Pointe Blank over High Fidelity
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Pass!
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov over Rudolf Nureyev
34. Constable over Turner
35. Love Rio Bravo, have not seen The Searchers. Pass.
36. Comedy over tragedy
37. Fall over spring
38. Manet over Monet
39. The Sopranos over The Simpsons
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Pass!
41. Henry James over Joseph Conrad
42. Sunrise over sunset
43. Johnny Mercer over Cole Porter (a relatively uninformed choice).
44. Mac over PC forever, or as long as Apple stays in business.
45. New York over Los Angeles
46. Partisan Review over Horizon
47. Motown over Stax, and always GM
48. Van Gogh over Gauguin
49. Elvis Costello over Steely Dan
50. Reading a blog over reading a magazine
51. Laurence Olivier over John Gielgud
52. Only the Lonely over Songs for Swingin' Lovers
53. Chinatown over Bonnie and Clyde
54. Ghost World over Election, but a toughie.
55. Minimalism over conceptual art
56. Bugs Bunny over Daffy Duck
57. Modernism over postmodernism
58. Batman over Spider-Man
59. Lucinda Williams over Emmylou Harris, but couldn't do without either.
60. Johnson over Boswell
61. Jane Austen over Virginia Woolf
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Before my time, so pass.
63. An Eames chair over a Noguchi table. Pleases the eye, and you can nap in it.
64. Out of the Past over Double Indemnity
65. The Marriage of Figaro over Don Giovanni
66. Blue over green
67. As You Like It over A Midsummer Night's Dream
68. Ballet over opera
69. Film over live theater
70. Acoustic over electric
71. North by Northwest over Vertigo
72. Sargent over Whistler
73. V.S. Naipaul over Milan Kundera
74. Oklahoma over The Music Man
75. Sushi, yes
76. The New Yorker under Ross over Shawn
77. Tennessee Williams over Edward Albee
78. The Wings of the Dove over The Portrait of a Lady
79. Paul Taylor over Merce Cunningham
80. Mies van der Rohe over Frank Lloyd Wright
81. Diana Krall over Norah Jones
82. Watercolor over pastel
83. Bus over subway
84. Stravinsky over Schoenberg
85. Crunchy over smooth peanut butter
86. Theodore Dreiser over Willa Cather
87. Mozart over Schubert
88. The Twenties over the Fifties
89. Huckleberry Finn over Moby-Dick
90. James Joyce over Thomas Mann
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Pass.
92. Emily Dickinson over Walt Whitman
93. Winston Churchill over Abraham Lincoln
94. Liz Phair over Aimee Mann, but just.
95. Italian over French cooking
96. Bach on piano over harpsichord
97. Anchovies, not in any identifiable form, which I'll take as a no.
98. Long novels over short novels
99. Swing or bebop? Pass.
100. "The Last Judgment" over "The Last Supper"
This gives me a TCCI of 68%. To be honest, it's rather lower than I would have predicted. What about you, Terry? We've certainly influenced each other's taste a great deal over the years, and we started out with some considerable overlap, but it's interesting to see which of our predispositions have stubbornly resisted such influence. You surprise me sometimes here, but seldom and mildly: The Who, Conrad, Constable (my efforts not wasted!), The Searchers, Daffy Duck, Emily Dickinson.
I would be really interested to see how you scored on a similar test designed by me. You know I'd make you squirm.
Posted July 6, 2004 3:03 AM
