January 2011

Most Overrated Photographer:

By definition, to be overrated, you have to be well known to a wide public. But how many photographers are? Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen? Ansel Adams and Annie Leibovitz? Herb Ritts and Helmut Newton? Margaret Bourke-White? Photographs are remembered, but not necessarily the names of the photographers who made them. My choice for most overrated photographer, Life magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt, is not only widely known but beloved. Indeed, I choose him not because his photos are without distinction but because the qualities in his work that made him beloved often render his pictures uninteresting.

Most Overrated Philanthropist:

Elihu Yale. In 1701 the Reverend James Pierpont (an ancestor of J. P. Morgan), minister of the First Church, in New Haven, pushed the General Court of Connecticut to charter a college. He thought that the colony should not be dependent on Harvard for training its ministers. The college operated in the various homes of its tutors for several years, and it was only when Jeremiah Dummer, the colony’s agent in London, donated an estimated one thousand books, a very substantial library in the early eighteenth century, that it was decided to build a permanent campus.

Most Overrated Songwriter:

Most Overrated Science Fiction Writer:

Isaac Asimov. Not that the books that established his name are notably more callow and formulaic than those by a dozen other writers of the bygone pulp era but that a quirk of fate has turned Asimov into a figurehead for the whole genre. The field’s most successful magazine is named for him, and in many Third World countries, his books are virtually the only SF vailable. His professional persona, that of a complacent forever-eleven egoist, is not uncommon in the SF frog pond, but Asimov’s version was purer even than that of Harlan Ellison, who has inherited his mantle as most beloved curmudgeon. Ellison, however, is a much superior writer.

Most Underrated Science Fiction Writer:

Twenty years ago that would have been an easy call: Philip K. Dick. However, Dick’s stock has rocketed since his death in 1983 and now stands at something like his true deserving, a step shy of the summit but above surviving rival claimants.

Most Overrated Journalistic Trend:

Most Overrated Invention:

Most Overrated Rock Band:

The Beatles. Lennon and McCartney cowrote one joyous and overwhelming rock song, “She Loves You.” Lennon was responsible for another, “Revolution.” McCartney was responsible for a third, “Oh Darling.” The great rave-up tunes of the Beatles’ early days all are covers. The great Lennon-McCartney tunes of their middle and later periods are ballads, music-hall spoofs, or jumped-up skiffle tunes. Furthermore, although they looked pretty good in the rooftop sequence in Let It Be, they were by all accounts a mediocre live band compared with many other British and American bands of 1963-70, most notably the Rolling Stones.

Most Underrated Rock Band:

Most Overrated Idea:

Progress. It is the notion that not only things but institutions and human nature get better and better and more and more rational as time goes on. This notion of linear or evolutionary progress is of course antiquated and has been disproved not only by history but by some “discoveries” in the natural sciences. It goes contrary not only to historical experience and reason but also to the appreciation of human nature and of the limits of human knowledge and character that almost all the Founders of the Republic understood and that is also an element in the essence of the Constitution. The unthinking American veneration of progress has been noted by most intelligent foreign observers of the United States. For one, Tocqueville in one of his letters assailed the very adjective progressif as, barbaric and senseless.

Most Underrated Idea:

Most Overrated and Underrated Historic Place:

Oahu is at once both. Many visitors make the memorable Pearl Harbor pilgrimage to the USS Arizona and now, close by, to the USS Missouri , where Gen. Douglas MacArthur accepted the Japanese surrender. After that, though, they settle into the tourist haven of Waikiki, unaware of far older historic treasures from Hawaii’s Polynesian past that lie literally at their feet. When I walk the beach, my landmarks are the Wizard Stones, monoliths said to contain the spiritual power of four priests who came from Tahiti before the sixteenth century. Situated next to a surfboard rental shop, they are an oasis of repose between the ocean and the city’s busiest street.

Most Overrated Motorcycle:

The classic sixties Triumph. A sleek, seriously fast machine of smashing good looks, this Briton is a go-go girl to Harley’s Bohemian clog dancer. In my experience Triumphs were spirited, high-maintenance bikes that spit bolts, leaked more than their share of oil, and at speed produced a vibration that set the handlebars buzzing like a kazoo.

Most Underrated Motorcycle:

The Harley-Davidson 45ci “WL” series. This low-revving flathead may still be one of the world’s most durable motors, a trait attested to by the ninety thousand produced for World War II military use. While it’s certainly no screamer, the Harley 45 will cruise rock solidly at 65 mph and cruise there day after day. With its prominent fenders and hard-tail panache, the Harley 45 is the definitive barhopper, a no-frills workingman’s motorcycle that will start on the first kick and will lope along, uncomplaining, into the next century.