Horizon

Wot, not Homer Simpson?

Off the top of my head, I could easily drop Dr. Phil, Sam Walton, Tom Cruise, Rush Limbaugh, and Michael Moore, and substitute Andrew Jackson, Sitting Bull, Bobby Jones, U.S. Grant, and Meriwether Lewis.

What a ridiculous list - but no more so than the UK one was.

To add to Bobby's, and again off the top of the head:

...Tom Paine, Henry Thoreau, John Peter Altgeld, Lucy Parsons, Eugene Debs, Ring Lardner, Groucho Marx, Randolph Bourne, Henry Adams, Tecumseh, John Dewey, Emily Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald, James Madison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Robert Benchley, Herman Melville, Aaron Copland, Walt Whitman, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Charles Ives, Louis Armstrong, Stephen Crane, TS Eliot, George Gershwin, James Monroe, John Crowe Ransom, Elliott Carter.....

It certainly is ridiculous but we humans do love our lists, don't we?

I'd like to throw in William James and Alan Lomax.

Tom, I've been meaning to give Elliott Carter a listen. Can you recommend any recording in particular?

The Great Britons list was a nonsense and this looks the same. In the words of the Specials:

it's all a load of bollocks
And bollocks to it all.

The thing with Elliott Carter is that he has enjoyed great creativity in his ninth and even tenth decade.

For 'earlier' works (choosing only one) try the Oppens/Gielen recording of the Piano Concerto and the Concerto for Orchestra.

For later work (again just one), try the Knussen/BBC SO recording of Symphonia: sum fluxae pretium spei which won the Gramophone Award for contemporary music in 2000.

Try also http://www.boosey.com/pages/cr/composer/composer_main.asp?composerid=2790

and related pages for lots more information.

Another of my nominees for 100 Greatest Americans is Randall Jarrell. I'm quietly proud that when I reviewed Jarrell's Letters, I mentioned (as an example of RJ's almost unfailing good taste) that he commended Elliott Carter to Robert Lowell as a "really good" composer back in 1953.

Well, at least they remembered Harriet Tubman.

Batting cleanup:

...Ernest Hemingway (yes, I know; nevertheless), Clarence Darrow (yes, I know; nevertheless), Nellie Bly, Jacob Riis, Heywood Broun, Bayard Rustin, Varian Fry, Woody Guthrie (yes, I know; nevertheless), Phil Ochs (yes, I know; nevertheless) Bill Moyers, Paul Wellstone, Thurgood Marshall, William O. Douglas *and* Fred Korematsu, Felix Frankfurter, Clarence Gideon, Thomas Pynchon, Shirley Chisholm, Fiorello LaGuardia, Harvey Milk, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Joseph Mitchell, Toni Morrison, John Peter Zenger, Conrad Weiser, Sacajawea, Will Rogers, Humphrey Bogart, William Lloyd Garrison, Charles Schulz...

...wc Fields, Buster Keaton, Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Orson Welles, James Brown, John Ford...

Batting cleanup

All getting rather contemporary this, and swayed towards artists and feel-good icons who achieved relatively little: Thurgood Marshall and Fiorello LaGuardia are the only two i'd definitely add from that lot, and maybe Sacajawea too, though I think there are better American Indian candidates.

Well you have to have some artists in there among the politicians--every one I mentioned is an artist; 'feel-good icon' on the other hand is debatable--and snotty.

Sorry I have to object to Jackie Robinson if Curt Flood is not listed along side of him.

John Chapman aka Johnny Appleseed planted the US creating the apple orchards in Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Ohio-some of those trees still bear apples-'entertainers' plant themselves fan drunk in front of the US. Need a map?