books report

Nancy G. Heller, Why a Painting is Like a Pizza: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying Modern Art (Princeton UP)
This book was recommended to B., who was looking for something of the sort. It didn't work for her, nor for me. Despite a clear enough writing style, the book mostly regurgitates a lot of tired old arguments: that new art has always been criticized (the classic "They laughed at Einstein, so I must be a genius too" fallacy), that modern abstract art uses the same principles of composition as traditional representational art (but value lies not in the elements you use, but in what you do with them), that it's such hard work to, e.g. paint a series of perfectly straight vertical lines (the "an A for effort is a final grade" fallacy), and - and here Heller is scraping the bottom of the barrel - that a photo of a monochromatic painting doesn't convey the texture and minute variations in the original.
True enough that sometimes it doesn't. I once saw an exhibit of a Korean-American artist named Il Lee, who creates random hair-like objects by scribbling wildly with a ballpoint pen on paper. True enough that when you've seen one or two of these you've seen them all, but viewed in person the maniacal energy of it - even the solid black areas are filled with the texture of the pen going over and over it - is striking enough that I said, "That's pretty neat." But I have also seen in person monochromatic paintings that produce only the reaction of "this is putting me on." And I've heard equally pointless monochromatic music too, like that of Elliott Carter, whose proponents are particularly subject to the "A for effort" fallacy, but whose work has defeated some of the most stringent admirers of modern music that I know.
My exposure to modern art, modern music, modern anything, has taught me that there is abstract and difficult art that works, and other that is but useless crap. That's true of any kind of art, but the strictures of modernism are more likely to produce proponents and cheerleaders for these styles who cannot tell the difference between the Whizzo butter and this dead crab. Consequently they cannot be trusted as guides to what work is valuable in the likes of abstract art, and they cannot tell you what is actually good about the good stuff: that it's energetic, that it's imaginative, that it's neat to look at, and strikingly often that it's fun, though that quality is deprecated by the more serious critics. If you look at, or listen to, something modern and difficult and it's not giving you a reaction like that, odds are it's not any good, no matter how praised by aesthetic critics like Heller.

Edward Gross & Mark A. Altman, The Fifty-year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek, The First 25 Years (Thomas Dunne Books)
Ordinarily I avoid multi-contributor oral histories, since they tend to make such fragmented reading experiences. But this one, after the unfocused introductory chapter, is craftily constructed out of what must have been a vast variety of sources (considering that some of the contributors have been dead for decades), forming a coherent story that yet juxtaposes totally contradictory viewpoints on many questions: on whether Roddenberry was justified in massively rewriting every script that came through his hands, on whether Shatner and Nimoy got along, on whether the guy who took over as producer in the third season did a good job or not. It clarified a lot I didn't understand - for instance, the badness of the third season was due basically to increasingly tight budget restrictions - and some stories I didn't know: like that after Mr. Spock proved popular in the first season, Nimoy demanded a raise, and the studio was ready to fire him and replace Spock with another Vulcan character, and even had the actor lined up to do it, until the network - which had opposed having Spock in the first place - said, "Are you crazy? Pay him whatever it takes to keep him!" (Increasing actor salaries made life more challenging among decreasing budgets.)
I read mostly the TOS part, though the book also covers the animated series (which I've never seen) and the early movies (some of which I saw, but only once each) up to just before the launch of TNG. (There's a sequel book.) Also covers the viewer letter-campaigns and early Trek fandom. Very interesting stuff, if you care about the topic at all.

David Weigel, The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Prog Rock (Norton)
While the previous book was unexpectedly well-written, this one was unexpectedly poorly written, being infected by a stream-of-consciousness style that sometimes afflicts rock journalism. I was hoping to learn something about a musical style that passingly interests me but about which I know little and have only heard intermittently, but any overview was drowned in a soup of band history details, overwhelmingly filled with arguments, resignations, firings, and breakups, all laid out at top speed with little delving into the art. Has a tendency to either introduce some guys and then suddenly drop in the band name without identifying it as those guys (see Rush, p. 147-8) or the opposite, introducing a band with its breakup without telling you its history or who was in it (which is particularly glaring when the band's name is Giles, Giles and Fripp [p. 40-42]: Fripp and one of the Gileses had already been introduced earlier, but the other hadn't, and is then discussed as if you already knew who he was).
I was hoping for something about my favorite prog band, Renaissance (which avoids the flaws that have dampened my interest in other groups), but it's only mentioned in passing once, and isn't in the index. There's more about the Roches, who are neither prog nor rock, because Robert Fripp produced their first album.
This book is really designed for people who already know everything in it.