This has been around the blogosphere for nearly a month, but it's new (and cool) to me, so
here it is, from Terry Teachout's About Last Night. Some of these are incredibly tough choices, and some are a breeze. My 'score' is 65.
: If you had to choose
1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Astaire
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? The Great Gatsby
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Count Basie
4. Cats or dogs? This is tough....cats
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso
6. Yeats or Eliot? Eliot
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton
8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Flannery O'Connor
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? To Have and Have Not
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock
11. The Who or the Stones? Stones
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Larkin
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Ella
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? another toughie...The Moviegoer
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Balanchine
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Hamburgers
19. Letterman or Leno? Letterman
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Wilco
21. Verdi or Wagner? Verdi
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Johnny Cash
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Kingsley
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Mark Morris
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Vermeer
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Tchaikovsky
29. Red wine or white? Red
30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Oscar Wilde
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? High Fidelity
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Shostakovich
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Baryshnikov
34. Constable or Turner? Turner
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy
37. Fall or spring? Fall
38. Manet or Monet? Manet
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos (sigh)
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Gershwin
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Johnny Mercer
44. Mac or PC? Mac
45. New York or Los Angeles? New York
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Partisan Review
47. Stax or Motown? Motown
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis Costello
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? magazine
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Gielgud
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Only the Lonely
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown
54. Ghost World or Election? Ghost World
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Daffy
57. Modernism or postmodernism? postmodernism
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Spiderman
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Emmylou
60. Johnson or Boswell? Johnson
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Dick Van Dyke
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Eames
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Out of the Past
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Marriage of Figaro
66. Blue or green? Blue
67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Midsummer Night's Dream
68. Ballet or opera? Ballet
69. Film or live theater? film
70. Acoustic or electric? electric
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo
72. Sargent or Whistler? Sargent
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Naipaul
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? The Music Man
75. Sushi, yes or no? yes
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Shawn
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Portrait of a Lady
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Merce Cunningham
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Frank Lloyd Wright
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Norah Jones
82. Watercolor or pastel? watercolor
83. Bus or subway? bus
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Stravinsky
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? crunchy
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Dreiser
87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? the Fifties
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Moby Dick
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? James Joyce
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Lester Young
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Walt Whitman
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Abraham Lincoln
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Aimee Mann
95. Italian or French cooking? French
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? harpsichord
97. Anchovies, yes or no? yes
98. Short novels or long ones? long
99. Swing or bebop? bebop
100. "The Last Judgment" or "The Last Supper"? Last Judgement
Comments