Absolute Essentials to Experience the American Spirit:
OK: Take 2... there will likely be a take 3...
Absolute Essentials to Experience the American Spirit:
1. River of Dreams
2. Skimbelshanks the Railway Cat
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The Canon:
The Simpsons: Seasons 1-8 (f*** off it's my list...)
Citizen Kane-- dir. Orson Welles (a lot more entertaining than you remember)
West Side Story
Our Town by Thornton Wilder (I put it over Death of a Salesman as the Great American Play)
Stephen Sondheim:
Company
Follies
Into the Woods
Assassins
Gypsy
Merrily We Roll Along
Stephen Sondheim is the center of the American canon, the greatest of all American artists, what we have that competes with Shakespeare.
The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Alan Lomax Collections (collected recordings of often anonymous folk musicians, just dip in)
Louis Armstrong Hot Five & Seven:
West End Blues
St. James Infirmary
Louis Armstrong Plays W.C. Handy
New York City
Diego Rivera Detroit Murals (does for America what Michelangelo did for the Vatican)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
A Love Supreme by John Coltrane (jazz)
Mad Men (TV)
Do The Right Thing--dir. Spike Lee
Nobody Knows When You're Down and Out, Backwater Blues, by Bessie Smith (blues)
My Antonia by Willa Cather (The Great American Novel: a novel of deep connection between immigrants and the native born)
Old Man River (the Great American Song)
The Grand Canyon
On Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Boston Public Library
Runagate Runagate and Middle Passage by Robert Hayden (poems about slavery)
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Everything that Rises Must Converge, Revelation by Flannery O'Connor (short stories)
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (novel)
Mahalia Jackson (Gospel)
Move On Up A Little Higher
How I Got Over
Precious Lord Take My Hand
Come Sunday
Vietnam Veterans Memorial: designed by Maya Lin
Hellhound On My Trail by Robert Johnson (blues)
Scott Joplin (ragtime)
Bethena
Solace
The Cascades
Maple Leaf Rag
New York Movie, Early Sunday Morning, Gas, Automat, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper
Charles Ives (orchestral music)
The Unanswered Question
Central Park in the Dark
Decoration Day
4th of July
Three Places in New England
Symphony no. 4
Cane by Jean Toomer (interconnected short fiction)
Nina Simone (Nina Simone)
I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free
Sinnerman
Four Women
The Black Saint and Sinner Lady by Charles Mingus (jazz album)
Peanuts by Charles Schultz
Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne (short story)
The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Martin Scorsese:
Mean Streets
Goodfellas
The Irishman
Taxi Driver
The Age of Innocence
Killers of the Flower Moon
Peace Piece by Bill Evans (jazz)
Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson (blues)
Rear Window=dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Harlan County, USA (documentary)
The Stanley Brothers: They're so much more than bluegrass.
Rank Stranger
Angel Band
Little Maggie
O Death
Glory Land
I'm a Man of Constant Sorrow
George Carlin: Jammin' in New York (standup)
Aretha Franklin (soul)
Think
Do Right Man/Do Right Woman
I Never Loved a Man
Chain of Fools
How The Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis (photography book)
Maus by Art Spiegelman (graphic novel)
Hellhound On My Trail by Robert Johnson (blues)
Porgy and Bess by George and Ira Gershwin (opera/musical)
The Last Picture Show--dir. Peter Bogdanovich (New Hollywood movie about small town Texas)
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (short stories about small town life)
Nashville--dir. Robert Altman (movie: a cinematic democracy)
Mississippi River
Randy Newman:
Baltimore
Louisiana 1927
Marie
Dixie Flyer
Kingfish
Rednecks
Feels Like Home
Losing You
The Civil War (Ken Burns documentary)
Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange (photo)
Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
The Searchers--dir. John Ford
Rear Window--dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Prayer in Open D by Emmylou Harris
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin (essays)
Duke Ellington (jazz-classical)
Reminiscing in Tempo
Black and Tan Fantasy
Mood Indigo
Creole Rhapsody
American Graffiti--dir. George Lucas (not the other one...)
Cosmos with Carl Sagan (TV show)
The Godfather Saga--dir. Francis Ford Coppola (TV edition putting both movies in chronological sequence with an hour of restored scenes is the best version)
George Bellows:
Cliff Dwellers
Stag at Sharkey's
Pennsylvania Station Excavation
New York
Both Members Of This Club
Grand Central Terminal: New York
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Companion Room:
Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville (philosophy/travelogue that predicts the American future)
Henry Cowell (piano music)
The Tides of Manaoun
The Harp of Life
The Fairy Bells
The Banshee
The Fairy Answer
Lambeau Field: Green Bay (football--American)
Anthology of American Folk Music--compiled by Harry Smith
Steven Spielberg:
Jaws
ET
Schindler's List
Lincoln
Close Encounters
The Fabelmans
(If you want to experience West Side Story for the first time, Spielberg's movie is the way to go)
Touch of Evil--dir. Orson Welles
Golden Gate Bridge: San Francisco
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee (photoessay book about the Great Depression)
The Wizard of Oz--dir. Victor Fleming
Pryor: Live in Concert (standup comedy)
The Education of Henry Adams (autobiography)
Appalachia Region
Emily Dickinson:
This World Is Not Conclusion (her greatest IMneverHO)
I heard a Fly buzz--when I died
Because I could not stop for Death
Much Madness is Divinest Sense
Lincoln Memorial: DC
Maus by Art Spiegelman (graphic novel)
Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (comic novel)
The Florida Project--dir. Sean Baker
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel (graphic novel)
On Experience, The American Scholar by Ralph Waldo Emerson (essays)
Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
Louis CK: One Night Stand (standup)
Martin Scorsese:
The King of Comedy
Last Temptation of Christ
Silence
After Hours
Bringing Out the Dead
USA Trilogy by John Dos Passos
Robert Altman (movies)
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
The Long Goodbye
Thieves Like Us
California Split,
Short Cuts
Groundhog Day--dir. Harold Ramis
US Capitol: DC
This is Spinal Tap--dir. Rob Reiner
I'll Take You There, Respect Yourself, I am His by the Staples Singers
Try A Little Tenderness, I've Been Loving You Too Long and Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding
One for My Baby sung by Frank Sinatra
New Orleans
Raging Bull
Sunrise--dir. FW Murnau (America's greatest silent film)
We Can't Make It Here Anymore by James McMurtry
Chinatown--dir. Roman Polanski
King of the Hill (Animated TV Comedy Series)
Apollo Theater: Harlem
St. Louis Blues by WC Handy (blues)
African American Spirituals: Deep River, Go Down Moses, Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
Cross Road Blues, Hellhound On My Trail, Love in Vain by Robert Johnson (blues)
A Veteran in the New Field, A Visit from the Old Mistress by Winslow Homer (paintings)
The Truman Show--dir. Peter Weir
The Irony of American History by Reinhold Niebuhr (theological historiography)
Vertigo, Psycho, Shadow of a Doubt, Strangers on a Train, The Wrong Man, -- dir. Alfred Hitchcock
Duck Soup--dir. Leo McCarey (Marx Brothers movie)
Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya (novel)
Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locusts by Nathaniel West (novellas)
This Land is Your Land, Pastures of Plenty, 1913 Massacre, by Woodie Guthrie (folk)
Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner (graphic novels)
I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry, I Saw The Light, Lost Highway by Hank Williams (country)
Absalom, Absalom! and Light in August by William Faulkner (avant-garde novels)
Go Down, Moses by William Faulkner (short story collection)
Word Association--Saturday Night Live--Richard Pryor & Chevy Chase
Norm MacDonald: Hitler's Dog (I know he's Canadian...)
The Manchurian Candidate--dir. John Schlesinger
The Sopranos
Eddie Murphy: Delirious (standup)
Washington Square and Daisy Miller by Henry James (brief novels)
The Sweet Science (boxing), The Earl of Louisiana (local politics) and Between Meals (food) by A J Liebling (journalism)
Barbecue
Madison Square Garden: New York
Niagra by Frederic Edwin Church
Poems by Robert Frost: Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall, Home Burial, The Road Less Travelled,
Strange Fruit, God Bless the Child by Billie Holiday (jazz--vaguely)
Hiroshima by John Hersey (journalism)
Boston Public Library
Ah-Um by Charles Mingus (jazz album)
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (novella)
Ellis Island: New York
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (long picaresque novel)
Guardian Building: Detroit
The Fillmore: San Francisco (rock venue)
Can the Circle Be Unbroken by the Carter Family (country)
M*A*S*H: both movie and the sitcom
String Quartet 1931 by Ruth Crawford Seeger
Blue Yodel No. 1 by Jimmie Rodgers (country)
Cheers (sitcom)
Ohio, Find the Cost of Freedom by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (weird supergroup with a Canadian...)
Matt Foley--Saturday Night Live (Chris Farley)
Sugarshack by Ernie Barnes (painting)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Collected Stories of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Yiddish short fiction)
Boulder to Birmingham, Red Dirt Girl, To Daddy by Emmylou Harris
The American Political Tradition, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter (history/essays)
The Right Stuff--dir. Philip Kaufman
The Nutcracker choreographed by George Balanchine (ballet)
It's An Honor by Jimmy Breslin (article about the man who dug President Kennedy's grave)
Freaks and Geeks (TV comedy)
Mr. Robinson's Neighborhood--Saturday Night Live (Eddie Murphy)
Eyes on the Prize (Civil Rights documentary)
Robin Williams: Live at the Met
The Apartment, Ace in the Hole, Some Like It Hot--dir. Billy Wilder
The Great Plains
Tender Mercies--dir. Bruce Beresford
Paris, Texas--dir. Wim Wenders
Church Lady--Saturday Night Live (Dana Carvey)
Tap Dancing
Studies nos. 21, 37, by Conlon Nancarrow (music for player piano)
The Vietnam War (Ken Burns Documentary)
Blue Velvet and Mulholland Dr. dir. David Lynch
Make Our Garden Grow by Leonard Bernstein and Lilian Hellman (opera ensemble/showtune)
The Audition Sketch: Mr. Show (David Cross and Bob Odenkirk)
The Power Broker and The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro (long biography of Robert Moses, multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson)
Six Feet Under (TV)
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The Gallery:
Revelations: chreographed by Alvin Ailey
Fascinating Rhythm, The Man I Love, But Not For Me, George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin (cocktail)
Appalachian Spring by Aaron Copland and Martha Graham (ballet)
Billy the Kid, Rodeo, El Salon Mexico and Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland
Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (nature writing about pesticides, called 'biocides' in the book)
Village Vanguard: New York (jazz venue)
Statue of Liberty
Night of the Hunter--dir. Charles Laughton
Sunday Morning by Wallace Stevens (poem)
The Wild Bunch--dir. Sam Peckinpagh
Boyhood--dir. Richard Linklater
Sun Treader by Carl Ruggles (orchestral music)
Carnegie Hall: New York (classical venue)
Psycho, Vertigo--dir. by Alfred Hitchcock
Ebbets Field--Brooklyn (lost)
Pennsylvania Station--New York (lost)
Ten Days that Shook the World by John Reed (eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution)
Hollywood (the place)
Errol Morris: (documentaries)
The Thin Blue Line
Gates of Heaven
The Fog of War
All The King's Men by Robert Penn Warren (political novel)
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest--dir. Milos Forman
The Bridge by Hart Crane (book-long poem)
It's Alright, Ma, I'm Only Bleedin', A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, Chimes of Freedom by Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan)
The American Language by H. L. Mencken (cultural commentary)
Preservation Hall: New Orleans (jazz venue)
The Crack-Up by F. Scott Fitzgerald (autobiographical essays)
All in the Family (sitcom)
Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion (new journalism)
Swing Dancing and the Lindy Hop
Concerto for Violin with Percussion Orchestra, La Komo Sutro, Solstice, Concerto for Piano with Javanese Gamelan by Lou Harrison
American Tune by Paul Simon
Mississippi Burning--dir. Alan Pakula
Disney Hall--des. Frank Gehry
Call It Sleep by Henry Roth (novel about Jewish immigration, trauma and abuse)
America Today by Thomas Hart Benton (mural series)
The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois (sociology)
Northern Exposure (TV)
Fight the Power by Public Enemy (hip-hop)
Negro Folk Symphony by William Dawson (orchestral music)
Beloved, Song of Solomon, Sula by Toni Morrison (novels)
What's Goin' On by Marvin Gaye (soul)
The Guns of August, The Proud Tower, The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman (history)
The Gross Clinic and The Agnew Clinic by Thomas Eakins (paintings)
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth by Chris Ware (graphic novel)
Friday Night Lights (TV)
Little Nemo in Slumberland (newspaper comic)
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor (novel)
Serenade and Agon: chreographed by George Balanchine (ballets)
Working by Studs Terkel (oral history)
Rockefeller Center
A Worn Path by Eudora Welty (short story)
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese (long profile of Frank Sinatra)
Trinity Church: Wall Street
The American Family (70s reality show on PBS)
The Crowd--dir. King Vidor
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (short feminist novel)
Roots (TV miniseries)
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (long, half-avant-garde novel)
Richard Cory and Miniver Cheevy by Edward Arlington Robinson (poems)
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Truman, John Adams,1776 by David McCullough (biographies)
The Best Years of Our Lives--dir. William Wyler
Kindred by Octavia Butler (science fiction)
Las Vegas
The Message by Grandmaster Flash (hip-hop)
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell (poem)
Eve's Hollywood by Eve Babitz (memoir)
Reservation Dogs (TV)
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (short story collection)
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (new journalism)
Sonny's Blues by James Baldwin (short story)
Midnight Cowboy--dir. John Schlesinger
America Trilogy by Philip Roth (American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Human Stain)
The Art of Losing by Elizabeth Bishop (poem)
These Truths by Jill Lepore (history of the US that dares to suggest the American experiment failed)
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson
I'll Fly Away (TV drama)
You'll Never Walk Alone and If I Loved You from Carousel (showtunes)
Hoop Dreams (documentary)
American Playhouse (PBS versions of American theater)
American Gothic by Grant Wood
Chimes of Freedom, It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding, Tangled Up in Blue by Bob Dylan
Symphony no. 2 "Mysterious Mountain" by Alan Hovhaness (orchestral music)
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall by Katherine Anne Porter (short story)
The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson (history of the Great Migration)
9 to 5, Travelling Man, The Bargain Store by Dolly Parton
Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific (showtune)
Rectify (show on SundanceTV)
The Lottery by Shirley Jackson (horror short story)
American Photos by Walker Evans (Great Depression photos)
Patrice O'Neill: Elephant in the Room (standup comedy)
Taliesin West--des. Frank Lloyd Wright
The Wonder Years (TV)
Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber (string music)
Paul Thomas Anderson: (movies)
Boogie Nights
Punch-Drunk Love
Licorice Pizza
One Battle After Another
Salesman (documentary)
Thunder Road, Jungleland by Bruce Springsteen
Killer of Sheep--dir. Charles Burnett
Woolworth Building: New York
The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam (historical journalism)
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (comic novel)
American Splendor by Harvey Pekar (graphic novels)
Treme and Homicide (TV drama)
Nova (PBS Nature documentaries)
Black Angels by George Crumb (avant-garde chamber music)
The Mojave Desert
All About Eve--dir. Joseph Mankiewicz
No Country for Old Men, Inside Llewyn Davis,
Fargo, The Big Lebowski, O Brother Where Art Thou, A Serious Man--dir. The Coen Brothers (not under protest)
Symphony no. 1 by Florence Price (orchestral music)
It and The Stand by Stephen King
John Ford (classic Hollywood, mostly Westerns)
Stagecoach
How Green Was My Valley
My Darling Clementine
The Quiet Man
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance-
Hester Street--dir. Joan Macklin Silver
Woody Allen (apologies...)
Radio Days
Purple Rose of Cairo
Bullets Over Broadway
Zelig
The Civil War: A Narrative by Shelby Foote (no apologies)
Up in the Old Hotel by Joseph Mitchell (interconnected vignettes of non-fiction about the old New York)
Eddie Murphy: Delirious (standup)
Paths of Glory--dir. Stanley Kubrick
Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains by Steve Reich (modern classical)
Monument Valley
The Graduate--dir. Mike Nichols
Oklahoma (musical)
Brooklyn Bridge
Luck be a Lady and Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat from Guys and Dolls (showtune)
Five Easy Pieces--dir. Bob Rafelson
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler (detective novel) or movie dir. by Howard Hawks (and written by Faulkner)
The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes
Empire State Building
Zap Comix by Robert Crumb
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown (history of Native Americans)
Gateway Arch: St. Louis
First Cow--dir. Kelly Reichhart
Fallingwater: designed by Frank Lloyd Wright
Matewan, Lone Star--dir. John Sayles
Red Rocks Amphitheater: Colorado (outdoor rock venue)
Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (crime novel)
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False Canon--doesn't mean it's bad. Does mean it feels, in some way, spiritually 'false':
Quentin Tarantino
Seinfeld (this one hurts)
Girls (Lena Dunham)
Jackson Pollock
Ye
The Eagles
Easy Rider--dir. Dennis Hopper
Mount Rushmore
Fight Club--dir. David Fincher
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Dr. Horrible--dir. Joss Whedon
Marvel Movies
Taylor Swift
Howl by Alan Ginsberg
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Hamilton
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Noah Baumbach
La-La Land--dir. Damien Chazelle
Robert Rauschenberg
Royal Tenenbaums--dir. Wes Anderson
The End of History by Francis Fukuyama
The Clash of Civilizations by Samuel Huntington
The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker
Annie Hall and Manhattan--dir. Woody Allen
late Henry James
John Hughes
Norman Rockwell
Modern Broadway
South Park (this one hurts)
Breaking Bad (my mind is arguing with itself on this one)
Star Wars
Indiana Jones
Game of Thrones
Aaron Sorkin
B F Skinner
Howard Zinn
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I Know There's Sublimity Here But I Don't Get 90% Of It:
Bob Dylan
Moby Dick
2001
As I Lay Dying
There Will Be Blood
Blood Meridian
Gravity's Rainbow
Infinite Jest
No Country for Old Men
Edgar Allen Poe
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
Frank Zappa
Captain Beefheart
The Sun Also Rises
Seven--dir. David Fincher
Nine Inch Nails
Steely Dan
John Rawls
Henry David Thoreau
Mark Rothko
Bill Hicks
Dave Chappelle
Stevie Wonder
The Grapes of Wrath
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