For years I’ve remembered Woody Allen was rumored to have said he once visited the country but didn’t like it because there was no scenery. But internet searches could not find or verify this.
I just happened to stumble across it in Richard Kostelanetz, “I’ll Take Manhattan,” Liberty (Jan. 1995) (pdf), pp. 43–44. Sub-titled “City air makes men free,” it has the line I’ve been remembering all these years:
Scenery? The great painter Ad Reinhardt inherited enough money, 40
years ago, to take a trip around the world. He took slides of whatever caught his eye. These slides, which I’ve seen, represent a wealth of verticals and horizontals, which is to say that everywhere he went Reinhardt captured a “nature” parallel to ours. I too prefer the urban landscape to any collection of trees. To my professionally estheticized sensibility there are few views in the world equal to that of the New York skyline—which, incidentally, I can see from the rooftop of our eight-story house. Murray Rothbard and I may not agree on much nowadays, but on these issues we’ll stand united, taking on all comers. Woody Allen once complained that whenever he visited Mia Farrow in the country, he couldn’t go out at night to look at people on the street. To him, as to me, that is compelling “scenery.”
This reminds me of a talk or panel discussion at PFS in recent years where Hans-Hoppe mentioned that Rothbard hated the Rocky Mountains in the US and much preferred the cultivated Alps; he described the Rockies as “Yuck!”
Found it. From KOL272-2 | Q&A with Hülsmann, Dürr, Kinsella, Hoppe (PFS 2019):
HANS-HERMANN HOPPE: I agree, in that regard, largely with my teacher, Murray Rothbard, who said nature as such is mostly yuck. What we like about nature is, of course, precisely culture. That is gardens that are taken care of. If you look—if you compare, for instance—let’s say it’s the Alps with the Rockies. I mean the Alps are far more beautiful than the Rockies because it’s culture. And the Rockies is just mostly yuck. So I have—but of course we have to know something about nature to cultivate nature.
