Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index

“The latest parlour game”:http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/archives20040704.shtml#82118 , via both “Norm”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/07/choose.html and “Chris Brooke”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_07_01_archive.html#108912007834711318 .

1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Astaire.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Gatsby
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Ellington, by far.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats and I get on so much better.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso, by a long long way.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats, definitely.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? A tie.
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Don’t know O’Connor …
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock.
11. The Who or the Stones? The Stones – no question.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? I find I have more and more in common with gloomy dirty old men…
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Has to be Billie.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? A real divider of people this one: Dostoyevsky!
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? The End of the Affair.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Pass.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Hamburgers, but either with enough mustard.
19. Letterman or Leno? Pass
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Pass
21. Verdi or Wagner? Wagner, by a country mile.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Kelly.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Cash.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? I was going to go for Kingsley on the same basis as Larkin, but the way Martin’s going, I have to declare a tie.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando.
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Pass.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Vermeer.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Tchaikovsky, for the Pathetique.
29. Red wine or white? Rouge.
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Come on! Oscar of course.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Haven’t seen GPB, found the film annoying after the book.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Shostakovich! The 8th String Quartet gets onto my desert island some days.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Don’t know enough here.
34. Constable or Turner? Turner.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Pass.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Hard, but in Shakespeare, the latter, certainly.
37. Fall or spring? Spring.
38. Manet or Monet? Monet. In reproductions, Manet, but the distance between a reproduction of a Monet and the real thing is so huge.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Gershwins.
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset.
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Porter.
44. Mac or PC? I’ve never owned a Mac, though I’ve coveted them. But honesty has to say PC, for now.
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York (though I’ve never visited LA).
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Partisan.
47. Stax or Motown? Stax
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis by a mile.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Depends on the blog ….
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Pass.
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Pass.
54. Ghost World or Election? Pass.
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism, of course.
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Batman.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Pass.
60. Johnson or Boswell? Johnson, especially if played by Robbie Coltrane.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Come on! Gimme a break. There’s only one winner here: JA.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Anything’s better than DVD.
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Like Eames, don’t know Noguchi.
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? DI.
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Depends on my mood, probably Figaro though.
66. Blue or green? Blue.
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? AYLI
68. Ballet or opera? Opera!
69. Film or live theater? Film, usually.
70. Acoustic or electric? If Dylan then electric.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Really really hard. Saw NBNW most recently and was really knocked out by it, but a viewing of Vertigo might cause a switch.
72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Naipaul.
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Pass.
75. Sushi, yes or no? Yes.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? DK.
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Portrait.
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Pass.
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Mies, I think.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Pass.
82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolour.
83. Bus or subway? Subway.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Schoenberg (early post-Wagnerian S though).
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooth.
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Pass.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Schubert.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? 20s.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Moby Dick.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Mann.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Hawkins.
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Whitman.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Lincoln.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Pass.
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian.
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Piano!
97. Anchovies, yes or no? Yes yes yes.
98. Short novels or long ones? Some short ones can be awfully long and some long ones can be very short.
99. Swing or bebop? Bebop.
100. “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper”? Which?