If you had to choose

NewMexiKen has mentioned the TCCI twice already but has decided, like other prominent bloggers, to post it directly with my choice (and a few I didn’t know or couldn’t decide).

  1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Kelly
  2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Sun
  3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Duke trumps Count
  4. Cats or dogs? Dogs
  5. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse
  6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats
  7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton
  8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Updike
  9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
  10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
  11. The Who or the Stones? Stones
  12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
  13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens
  14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Billie
  15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky
  16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
  17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
  18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Depends on who’s grilling
  19. Letterman or Leno? Letterman
  20. Wilco or Cat Power?
  21. Verdi or Wagner? German cars, Italian opera — Verdi
  22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn
  23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Cash
  24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
  25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando
  26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
  27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt
  28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Chopin
  29. Red wine or white? White (red better for you, though)
  30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde
  31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
  32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Prokofiev
  33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Baryshnikov
  34. Constable or Turner?
  35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
  36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy
  37. Fall or spring? Fall
  38. Manet or Monet? Monet
  39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos
  40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Gershwins
  41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
  42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunrise
  43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Porter
  44. Mac or PC? PC (for now)
  45. New York or Los Angeles? New York to visit, LA to live
  46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
  47. Stax or Motown? Stax
  48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh
  49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis
  50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blogs (plural)
  51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier
  52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Roy did a few songs well. Frank did them all well. Roy for this song.
  53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Faye and Jack over Faye and Warren
  54. Ghost World or Election?
  55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
  56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs
  57. Modernism or postmodernism?
  58. Batman or Spider-Man? Spidey
  59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Emmylou
  60. Johnson or Boswell? Boswell
  61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen
  62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Honeymooners
  63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
  64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
  65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Don Giovanni
  66. Blue or green? Blue
  67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Dream
  68. Ballet or opera? Opera
  69. Film or live theater? Film
  70. Acoustic or electric? What tune?
  71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo (Kim over Eva)
  72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler
  73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
  74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma
  75. Sushi, yes or no? No
  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?
  79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
  80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright
  81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Norah
  82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolor
  83. Bus or subway? Subway
  84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Igor, of course
  85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooth
  86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Cather
  87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart
  88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Fifties
  89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huck
  90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
  91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Prez
  92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Whitman
  93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Lincoln
  94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
  95. Italian or French cooking? Italian
  96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Harpsichord
  97. Anchovies, yes or no? No
  98. Short novels or long ones? Depends on the novel
  99. Swing or bebop? Swing
  100. “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper”? Supper, now that I’ve read The Da Vinci Code