CULTURAL QUIZ….The latest little internet quiz is a series of 100 cultural preference courtesy of Terry Teachout. I’m sort of a sucker for this kind of thing, so my answers are below.
It’s kind of an intimidating list, though. It’s a little embarrassing how many of them I had no preference for because I didn’t really know much of anything about either choice. I had to leave over a third of the questions blank….
1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Gene Kelly.
2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Gatsby. I’ve never really warmed to Hemingway.
3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Pass.
4. Cats or dogs? Cats, of course.
5. Matisse or Picasso? Picasso, I suppose. Not a huge fan of either, though.
6. Yeats or Eliot? Pass.
7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Chaplin. My father the film professor was a big Keaton fan, though.
8. Flannery O?Connor or John Updike? Pass.
9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca.
10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning? Pollock.
11. The Who or the Stones? The Who. Strange as it sounds, there’s hardly a single Stones song that I like.
12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath? Pass.
13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens, although I haven’t read enough Trollope to really be certain.
14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Pass.
15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? I’ve never read any Tolstoy, but I really like Dostoyevsky. So Dostoyevsky it is.
16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair? Pass.
17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham? Pass.
18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Hamburgers.
19. Letterman or Leno? Letterman.
20. Wilco or Cat Power? Huh?
21. Verdi or Wagner? Wagner.
22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Kelly.
23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Pass.
24. Kingsley or Martin Amis? Pass.
25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Neither.
26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp? Pass.
27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt by a hair.
28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Tchaikovsky.
29. Red wine or white? Red.
30. No?l Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde. Coward’s plays have always struck me as too forced and artificial to really be funny.
31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity? Grosse Pointe Blank.
32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Pass.
33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Pass.
34. Constable or Turner? Turner.
35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Pass.
36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy. But only because really good comedy is so much rarer than really good tragedy.
37. Fall or spring? Spring. Even in Southern California, it’s nice for winter to be over.
38. Manet or Monet? Monet.
39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Simpsons.
40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Pass.
41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Hmmm, Conrad I suppose.
42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunset. I’m not a morning person.
43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Pass.
44. Mac or PC? PC.
45. New York or Los Angeles? Oddly enough, New York.
46. Partisan Review or Horizon? Pass.
47. Stax or Motown? Pass.
48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh, although I’m not really a big fan of either.
49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Steely Dan.
50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? In theory, magazines, but in practice, blogs.
51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Gielgud.
52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin? Lovers? Pass.
53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Chinatown.
54. Ghost World or Election? Election.
55. Minimalism or conceptual art? Minimalism, although conceptual art is good for its comic value.
56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs.
57. Modernism or postmodernism? Modernism.
58. Batman or Spider-Man? Batman. I was a DC kid.
59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Pass.
60. Johnson or Boswell? Pass.
61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Pass.
62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Honeymooners.
63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table? Pass.
64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity? Double Indemnity.
65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Pass.
66. Blue or green? Blue.
67. A Midsummer Night?s Dream or As You Like It? MND is one of my least favorite Shakespeare plays, so As You Like It.
68. Ballet or opera? Opera.
69. Film or live theater? Film. It’s cheaper, more convenient, more comfortable, allows a greater range of storytelling techniques, and has great special effects.
70. Acoustic or electric? Acoustic.
71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Pass.
72. Sargent or Whistler? Sargent.
73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera? Pass.
74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Pass.
75. Sushi, yes or no? No, no, no.
76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Pass. Give me a break.
77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams.
78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove? Pass.
79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham? Pass.
80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright.
81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Pass.
82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolor.
83. Bus or subway? Subway. I love subways.
84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Pass.
85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Neither. I don’t like peanut butter. I like peanuts, though.
86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Pass.
87. Schubert or Mozart? Schubert. No, Mozart. Wait, no….Schubert.
88. The Fifties or the Twenties? The Fifties. Flagpole sitting never did much for me.
89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Finn. I got bored about halfway though Moby-Dick and never got around to finishing it.
90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce? Neither.
91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Pass.
92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Pass.
93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Lincoln. They were both great war leaders, but Lincoln was also a pretty good commander in chief.
94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann? Pass.
95. Italian or French cooking? Italian.
96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Harpsichord. I like harpsichords.
97. Anchovies, yes or no? No.
98. Short novels or long ones? Long ones. But only good ones, although I suppose that goes without saying.
99. Swing or bebop? Pass.
100. “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper”? Pass.
