The Beatles - In My Life
Frank Herbert - Dune
Carl Sagan - Cosmos
Tchaikovsky - Piano Concerto No. 1
J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord Of The Rings
Metallica - Fade To Black
Santo and Johnny - Sleepwalk
Alfred, Lord Tennyson - Ulysses
Chicken Korma
Dangerous Angels by Francesca Lia Block
Commedia Del’Arte
Mucha prints
Fraggle Rock
Amen! It also seems to lasts 4 minutes, whereas it’s really 2 minutes and three seconds. Hypertime.
Things that cannot be improved upon.
Ode an die Freude, the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th. The bombastic music combined with Schiller’s lyrics… just sheer perfection.
Vermeer’s Milk Maid
The Ferrari 250 GTO.
and Kylie Minogues bottom
the tortilla chips at El Rancho Grande, in the stockyards in Ft. Worth, Tx.
“Stray Cat Strut” by the Stray Cats
“The Persistence of Memory” by Dali
the Eiffel Tower
“Pied Beauty” by Hopkins
my husband’s butt
Don’t know if it qualifies as ‘creative’ expression but I’ve always been a big fan of the wheel.
There’s also Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman. Written some twenty-five years before his death the manuscript sat untouched in his top drawer. Upon posthumous publication his wife said that he’d meant to get around to re-writing it in the third person. The mere notion of doing so sends shivers up my spine.
Cassablanca
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Amadeus
Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
Malcolm McDowell as Alexander DeLarge
Alister Sim as Scrooge
Speedy AlkaSeltzer
As mentioned… Classic Coke
Physical Graffetti
'69 427 Corvette
Rib Eye steak
'93 Stag’s Leap Cabernet Savignon
Spencer Tracy’s speech at the end of Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner
Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes in Now, Voyager and handing one to Bette Davis.
“Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues.
“Dead” by the Pixies
The Joshua Tree–U2
The combination of capers, butter, white wine, and garlic.
The Simpsons–barring recent discussion of suckitude, when it’s on, it’s bloody on.
The way the combination of perfume and cologne samples inside Vanity Fair magazine create a near-Proustian scent that sublimely describes wealth, snobbery, aristocracy, egotism, and the most conspicuous consumption imaginable.
The movie adaptation of Wonder Boys.
The movie adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs.
Ooh, I gotta disagree. I think the film version is a great improvement over the book.
And I’m pretty sure that is the first and only time I will ever say that regarding a book-film discussion.
My addition: riding a bicycle. Life gets no better.
Beethoven, 7th Symphony, 2nd movement (Allegretto). My single favourite piece of classical. Just incredible. Stirring, powerful, complex, deep, varied… just Ludwig showing off, if you ask me.
Time from Dark Side Of The Moon. I’m referring to the actual song, not the lengthy sound FX preceding it. Just about everything that’s great and good and raw about rock music encapsulated in a provocative, scintillating piece of songwriting, with a pure gold Gilmour guitar solo for good measure.
Michaelangelo’s David. No matter how far you have to go to see it before you die, it’s worth it.
Linda Eder singing just about anything, but especially ‘Someone like you’ from the musical ‘Jekyll & hyde’. I don’t know what more anyone could want from a singer. Audacious technical brilliance (she can hit notes purer than the Pope’s diary and hold them forever) plus tremendous reading of a lyric, amazing depth of emotion and evocation of mood, and great wit and flair as well. How can someone this good not be more famous than she is?
Mantegna’s Oculus from the Camera Picta, Castello di San Giorgio, Mantua. A stunning technical achievement from the 15th century, which still casts its trompe l’oeil spell on countless visitors every year.
Side 1 of Ommadawn by Mike Oldfield, from 1975. A young rock instrumentalist absolutely burning up with invention, talent, effortless melodic mastery and a dark, angry, passionate fire that climaxes with a “controlled scream” of a guitar workout that still thrills me over 25 years later.
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Her first book. Her only book. It’s as if she decided that since she was only going to have one book to her name, it may as well be a timeless masterpiece demonstrating supreme mastery of every facet of the novelist’s craft. There are very, very few thngs worth reading as much as WH.
Leftism by Left Field. Sonic wit and perfection that drills into your pleasure centres and refuses to leave. How much care, craft, ingenuity and sheer exhuberant joy went into this genre-warping masterpiece?
Pretty much anything by Jacques Loussier. I don’t think he actually knows how to play anything that isn’t artistically and creatively and technically flawless.
Stanley Jordan playing ‘Eleanor Rigby’. For me, the sound of a genius, dripping with raw talent, having one hell of a party with his music and deciding to prove that really, honestly, there are no limits to human ability.
Christine McVie singing ‘Songbird’ from the Rumours LP. There are love songs better than this? If so, sorry, but they’ve all passed me by.
Sinatra Sings the Select Cole Porter. Songs: Cole Porter. Arrangements: Nelson Riddle. Voice: Sinatra. There will never be a better single album than this. How could there be?
David Copperfield’s presentation of the Death Saw. The greatest stage magic illusion ever devised, presented and performed brilliantly.
Penn & Teller’s Card Stab. The smartest, funniest, wildest, most inventive piece of magical theatre ever, and only Teller could have dreamed it up.
Penn & Teller’s King Of Animal Traps. I’m not even sure what this is. Stunt? Poetry? Mini-drama? Magic routine? Whatever it is, it cannot be improved upon.
Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome. Wonderful, timeless, funny, wistful, and so perfectly written you can’t improve a word of it.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. No-one could write like Capote, and he knew it. This was him showing off.
The short stories of Damon Runyon. Pick any one. They can’t be improved upon. The Idyll Of Miss Sarah Brown, later adapted as Guys & Dolls, wins my vote for the greatest short story ever written.
The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats. No-one has ever written poetry like this.
The White Album. 'Nuff said.
I could go on and on, but I won’t.
Are you forgetting the 1997 “Just Add Wampa” Special Edition? The additional CGI vistas of Bespin might not be considered improvements, but ILM was finally able to correct the compositing of the snow speeders during the Hoth battle. So while the SE may not have represented an overall improvement, it shows there was room for correction in the original version.
I’ve remixed the “Requiem” to delete that awful cattle-calling and that irritating pinjakan. Which means losing much of the organ bit, but I can live with that. And I usually listen to only the last segment of “Shohmyoh.” A perfect soundtrack wouldn’t force me to fast-forward through one of the tracks. And “Illusion” is too long; if I want a recording of Noh, I’ll get a separate album.
So perhaps I disagree with the premise of this thread: Anything can be improved, I say.
The paper clip
The post-it note
Acid-free paper
Ink
The Swiss Army knife
The comb
Steely Dan
Whole Milk
Milk Chocolate
Peanut Butter
Kurosawa’s Ran
The orgasm
Johnny Cash’s I Walk the Line
The Godfather – the movie
Blackhawk Down – the book
Ooops! You misspelled, “I agree with you 100%. While the movie was an excellent interpretation of one person’s vision of the novel, nothing can compare to experiencing Tolkien’s masterful creation first-hand.”
The P-51 Mustang
The Spitfire (After they were done improving on it)
Kraft Dinner
Janis Jopling singing Me and Bobby McGee
The Shelby GT500
The Colt M1911
The Leatherman Wave, my friend.
That’s what someone said about the ‘fork’. Now all school kids have to deal with the ‘spork’, a utensile with prongs too short to grab food yet long enough that the soup pours through them.
But then there’s stuff like the The P-51 Mustang. Pretty cool plane in its day but if it couldn’t be improved upon, why does the Air Force fly F-15s?
There are some things that are so perfect in their simplicity that people will still be using them 1000 years from now. What the heck would replace a comb? A fusion powered nano-fiber laser comb?
Nah, everyone will have evolved to baldness in 1000 years. Some of us are just ahead of the curve.
The tin can of Bandaids. Al you needed to do was to squeeze the can and the top would pop open. You could all but eliminate the need to involve the injured hand (which is, after all, where most bandaids go).
Alison, by Elvis Cosello Breakup music that cannot be improved upon.
Monty Python Pure comedic genius.