The presence of the artist in the art - developing talent versus promoting it (Exhibits - Matisse: Radical Invention & Film - A Single Man)

I just stared and stared at this painting at the stunning show currently on at MoMa - Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917. Exploring its pleasures intertwined with the experience of the film I watched two night ago - A Single Man - to reveal to me something essential about my aesthetic taste. I like it when the act of creation shows (by design) in the work of art. Perhaps that is just because I made art myself for such a long time and because creative process is an obsession of mine. Perhaps the relationship goes the other way round - maybe I became obsessed with process because I have always been drawn to this kind of work. Whatever the case, this was very much evident in Matisse's work of this period. As he developed these paintings he adjusted the placement of figures as well as their form, he obscured details that he had earlier spent much effort in representing, and what's radical is that he leaves evidence of these changes rather than covering them up. It is a practice which creates a conversation between the subject of the art and the mode of its making, something I find interesting as well as inspiring. It is also a way for the artist to develop their talents, as awareness of technique progresses in parallel with the making of art, not separately from it. The simultaneous dialogue of the two is the artists' daily reality. That doesn't necessarily mean that it will always produce satisfying art, nor does it necessarily mean that this dialogue will be of interest to every member of the audience, but it is of great interest to me.

Matisse: Radical Invention is thoughtfully curated - it has a narrow thematic focus and therefore it is not too big (a pet peeve of mine with museum shows), it brings together different works of Matisse, not just the greatest hits, it creates a thoughtful narrative in tracing its theme of interest - a period of creative transformation in Matisse's art - seen against the backdrop of cubism in the art world and World War I in the world-at-large.

This experience was very much in contrast to that of watching A Single Man, photographer Tom Ford's feature film debut as both writer and director, adapted from the novel by Christopher Isherwood. I had heard a few interviews with Ford and his lead actor Colin Firth on the radio and was hoping for something better. The story concerns the last day in the life of a gay college professor in the 1960s who decides to commit suicide because of the sudden and devastating death of his partner of 16 years, and the unusual perspective that gives him on the things commonly around him in his daily life.

Ford, a visual artist, seems to have been captured by the notion of a unique perspective on the ordinary and perhaps felt his vision would express the lead character's heightened experience of the day. This was the film's defining feature, but the lack of access to other techniques was also its downfall. Every person in the film was beautiful - ridiculously so. Nicholas Hoult as the young student who becomes obsessed with his professor, was an expensive haircut draped in a pink mohair sweater that was glowed like cotton candy against his California tan. In fact, desserts are a good metaphor for the little visions of sweetness that Ford made of everyone George encountered, but there was no meal to accompany them. One could call this the heightened reality called for by the story, but I experienced it creating only an icy remove that destroyed any emotional impact this film could have had, despite Firth's intelligence, deep investment, and subtle portrayal. While this aspect of George's experience is important, it seems to me one should also be moved and this film's attempt at visual perfection held everything at arm's length.

One choice I particularly appreciated in this film was the lack of attention called to the sexuality of the lead character. Although his relationship was with another man and created interesting conflicts in the relationship between him and Charley (the female friend played by Julianne Moore), Colin Firth simply played George's circumstances and character qualities but did nothing to telegraph his gayness. He was middle aged, fastidious if a bit controlling, and was masculine. No limp wrist, no lisp. Thank you, Colin. Together the two of them captured that wonderful kind of friendship possible between a straight woman and a gay man that is full of intimacy but not sex and can be sustaining but can sometimes tip over into frustration for the woman if it is her primary intimate relationship, she is attracted to the man, and it cannot be consummated.

The actors were on their own (that or Ford could express his insight into the lead character but no other). The result was a beautiful performance from Firth but Julianne Moore's performance suffered for it. I find Moore a glimmering but delicate talent. Capable of flights of transparent vulnerability, she also reads to me across her body of work as wildly insecure. When she collaborates with a good director it is a joy to watch her. Here, while she communicated some of Charley's desperation to the screen it was too decorous. Her character is at the point where she can no longer control herself yet Moore's performance reeked of the kind of control exercised by an actor who is afraid to be unattractive. This coupled with Ford's own repressive control, motivated by his strictly visual talents, did not allow Charley the rawness a director like John Cassavetes and actress like Gena Rowlands might have brought to this part and this story. That, in my estimation, is what this film lacked. I wanted to feel the artistry, as with Matisse's painting, but not the artiness. I wanted to see the actor and film maker work together to make this story. I wanted to witness the beauty of the little accidents of human behavior, see her eye makeup smudge, see her nose run a little, not look at a Calvin Klein perfume advertisement. The limits of Ford's filmmaking were also evident in his use of music. With two composers, a music advisor, and a music consultant listed in the credits I felt as though too many cooks may have spoilt the sound track. The result was a hodgepodge of unspecific but superficially arty choices. I thought the choice of the aria "Ebben? Ne andro lontana" from the opera La Wally a particularly misguided choice, so associated is it with another high style film (and one I happen to love) - Diva. Similarly self-conscious choices visual choices also clouded the integrity of this film. The slow-motion sequences of waving children seen from a moving vehicle seemed to be straight out of Blue Velvet.

The 'making of' extra provided on the DVD was particularly embarrassing - self-aggrandizing and affected, with Ford's narrative scripted to death, interviews with each of the actors edited down to nothing but glib praises of Ford's filmmaking talents. Me thought the ladies did protest too much. It read like an advertisement - over controlled and pretentious - exactly the same problems as with the film itself. There is a difference between leaving elements of the creative process present in the work so it becomes a discussion between the artistic content and the art-making, and using the work of art to showcase one's talents at the expense of the content. Ford doesn't yet have the talent to recognize the difference.

Our recent past celebrated by the music of the Beatles, a trip down Penny Lane (Film - Across the Universe)

Although I was alive in the 1960s, I was a little too young to have seen the Beatles live. That didn't keep me from being an avid fan of their music, with it's sophisticated lyrics, irrepressible melodies, and variety of musical textures. The first "grown up" record I ever bought my sister was their Revolver. Enough reminiscing. The reason for this stroll down memory lane is director Julie Taymor's 2007 homage to the Beatles and the context in which they made their music - Across the Universe. This was an era of immense culture clashes between the old ways of thinking and new, repression and freedom, experimentation and tradition, cynicism and idealism. A time when unjaded political activism mattered deeply in this country - which makes it an era very unlike our own. Through it ran a current of music, visual art, theatre, and writing, which was expressive of the spirit out of which is was born. Some of these passionate experiments look or sound silly today, but not the music of the Beatles. Taymor and her team took about a dozen of their songs and stapled them loosely to an iconographic story of the times - a string of cliches really, if I'm honest - but that doesn't matter in the end because they provide a dramatic scaffolding upon which these songs are reborn with a striking freshness. This is due, in part, to the qualities she draws from her talented, youthful cast - Evan Rachel Wood, Jim Sturgess, Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs, Martin Luther,and T. V. Carpio. The story is but an excuse for an exercise in nostalgia, but the vision could only be Taymor's. The recreations of a 1960s Greenwich Village apartment feels just right, and the larger-than-life-sized puppets, the painted bus, and loopy Cameos from Bono and Eddie Izzard made me feel like I had woken up in Yellow Submarine. The cast do some beautiful singing-acting - they do the songs superficial musical justice too - but it is the way the life of their character finds a natural expression in songs that is the striking and effective accomplishment of this film, particularly as these songs are so well known it is hard to separate them from their original performances. Despite the hackneyed book, it is a touching paean to a valuable part of our recent past, one out of which our own era was born, and an unrestrainable celebration of an impressive body of creative work by a few artists of that time whose impact resonates afresh in Across the Universe.

Hat tip: Sheila (thanks, friend)

New York, the ecosystem

It is not usual for me to think of the island I live on (Manhattan) as an ecosystem, but whether an environment is urban or rural it is still made up of flora and fauna, its materials exist uncultivated or are put to use as food, shelter, clothes, and means of travel. I live in an ecosystem as much as the next kangaroo and Manahatta, an exhibit currently on at The Museum of the City of New York, means to encourage its visitors to occupy that point of view for a while. It projects the viewer back to Manhattan in 1609 before Henry Hudson arrived, when it was inhabited by the Lenape people, forward to our own time, and beyond to a possible version of Manhattan in 2409. It's interactive maps let you view the island city block-by-city block, with every buildings and subway stations visible, or to see its many plants, its voles, bear, and bird species, where its springs and streams were, and where the Lenape had their trails to walk from camp to camp. Whether you live nearby or are coming for a visit (prior to mid October), I found it a provocative view of a place I generally think of very differently. If you can't make it, Manahatta is also a book and a website. Come and meet New York - the ecological community.

Cultural prescription vs seeing art for pleasure (Other culture - Dali and Kirschner at MOMA)

From MOMA's website

We visited The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) yesterday and took in three exhibits - one on the architecture of modular housing which was fairly interesting, the giant Dali exhibit which I found an unfocused monster of a show, and the highlight for me: Kirschner and the Berlin Street. With shows like the Dali, I cannot understand what anyone finds pleasurable about them. One room after another was as crowded with canvases, boxes, and articles on the wall as the viewers were in the room. The conceit was to tie together his paintings and his film designs but as usual in these blockbuster shows, too many works meant I was able to see almost nothing at all. These big shows featuring popular artists end up attracting so many people to the gallery that we stood three deep to glance at little canvases hung too closely. Families line up with their children offering this experience as a kind of cultural prescription - no wonder there is so little appreciation for art in the U.S.

In stark contrast to the Dali was the tightly focused Kirschner and the Berlin Street, I knew I would like it just comparing the on-line descriptions of the two shows. The first thing you learn about the Dali in the intro is that it features 130 of his paintings. Wow - and how many cans of paint did he use to paint them? The exhibit of German expressionist Ernst Kirschner chooses only works painted or drawn between 1913 and 1915. They feature evocations of Berlin that narrow the streets with an angular perspective seeming to cut at the viewer like knives. The acid colors and 'primitivist' influence tell a story of a violent end to bourgeois politesse and places the prostitutes and dancers of the city center stage as World War I encroaches on an old way of life. It's ironic that the critics of the day (members of the bourgeoisie themselves) called these works primitive, as the paintings called to mind African masks, sculpture and dance that were making their way into the awareness of twentieth century artists. World War I would seem to indicate that the bourgeoisie were no less primitive. In this exhibit, boldly drawn lithographs, vivid paintings, and sketchbooks sit side-by-side so that you can see an evolution from rough idea to finished work. One can comfortably walk through the rooms in half an hour if one chooses and Kirschner, not having been in the employ of Warner Brothers, although well attended did not attract nearly the number of viewers the Dali did so you could actually see the paintings. Having just a few themes to focus on and a reasonable number of works spaced comfortably on the walls, one could string together one's own narrative and move back and forth among the images to relate vision and theme. The show is on through November 10.

Culpability - It Takes a Village (Spitzer and the new Peter Grimes at the Met)

In this week of scandal mongering over Eliot Spitzer's frailties, it seems to me the entire press corps and the finger-wagging public could use a dose of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, which I saw in a very effective new production at the Met yesterday. I've linked you to the Met's website which offers lots of background on the opera and production - video interviews, music clips and the like if you are interested. Britten was always a champion of the social outcast, whether from a comic angel with Albert Herring or a majestic one with Grimes. I wish Britten's work were programmed more often in New York's opera houses. His music is contemporary but accessible. You can tell it's of recent past (as opposed to, say, hearing strains of a Viennese waltz wafting through it) it pulls on the sonorities of hymn, folk tune, and the sounds of nature in such a way that you can nod with familiarity. It is definitely modern but its harmonies are not so cacophonous that you must merely endure them and each opera offers some memorable melodic themes if not exactly humable songs. They are written in English that is usually made understandable to the ear by the way the words are set in the music. The stories he chooses can be surprising and many have a message - often one about the responsibility assumed when judging others. Britten also does fine adaptations of great literary works - Melville's Billy Budd, Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Finally, all his operas are real music dramas that are complex not because you can't follow the stories, but rather because they cannot really be pulled off without complex human beings in the central parts rather than the usual opera stick figures.

This production directed by John Doyle who just did the recent Sweeny Todd revival on Broadway, creates a looming landscape of blacks and greys that is visually really effective. A front "curtain" the entire width and height of the Met stage - and that is big - is a facade of wooden houses that is reminiscent of a Louise Nevelson sculpture. It is intentionally monolithic and non-realistic and yet you clearly know what it is. Doors and windows pop open and the town's people stand in them. Doyle makes good use of the narrative nature of the libretto by having this facade force both principles and the town's people well down stage (near the audience) addressing their narration full-front to the audience. He suggests the atmosphere of a fishing village rather than trying to recreate it in excruciating detail. As I mentioned, I found the opera's themes of individual and collective culpability as timely as ever. I don't think Doyle and Anthony Dean Griffey (Grimes) entirely solve the dramatic problem of who Peter Grimes is and from whence springs his violence, particularly in the first two acts. Griffey's performance in the third act has some moments of vulnerability in it that I wish he could dramatically "trace back" to the earlier part of the opera rather than relying on a histrionic sort of disorientedness. Even if Grimes doesn't know where his behavior comes from, it would help if we saw the seeds of his Act III behavior in Acts I and II. Patricia Racette as Ellen Orford had a nice moment or two. She is a very open performer which I always appreciate amidst the overwrought antics usually seen at the Met. Her music lies low for a soprano, and Racette has a rich voice, however I thought all that full singing low in her range compromised the beauty of her singing later in the opera. There were so many overtones in her sound by Act III that I could no longer hear the actual center of the pitch. There is also some "stage business," as people like to call it, that reeks of convention, with no roots in the drama of the moment. Auntie, her nieces, and other principle characters suddenly leap onto boxes to deliver solo lines in crowded scenes. While this may temporarily solve a problem of drawing attention to them on a crowded stage, the director and artists have made no sense of what they are doing from the point of view of their character's behavior in the story. This type of lazy stage craft removes me temporarily from the experience of the story. Ultimately it was usually the music in this production that drew me in. The tremendous sweeping tide of this score was captured in all its grandeur by conductor Donald Runnicles and the fantastic Met orchestra.

P. S. I hope the Met can find a way to silence the squeaking of the heavy set as it moves on its track after the quietly emotional exit of Grimes at the end of Act III. It is rare that an audience can be drawn in to respond with pure silence that hangs in the air for a moment. That build up and the entrance of the opera's narrative epilogue are squandered as we listen to the horrible tearing and squeaking sounds of the set.

500 Clowns - Daring to Show Up in Performance

500 Clowns is a company that combines circus, heart-in-your-mouth acrobatics, improvisation, and the free adaptation of a well-known text (usually) to make a kind of theater you have probably never experienced before, unless you've experienced 500 Clowns. Full disclosure: they were founded by good friends of mine. Now, that said, they are fabulous. They continually play with the imaginary border between performance and reality that most productions take very much for granted. You know the normal routine: they turn the lights out, you sit in the dark, that means everything is different now, holy cow she's really sad, that dress means it's 1890, etc... 500 Clowns play this game differently. You've arrived in a space, they've arrived in a space, we both know it's a performance. They usually have one or two physical elements and a very limited number of props - in their current show Frankenstein, it's a table-ish sort of contraption which ingeniously becomes, well, anything they need, and they have a candlestick, I think that's it. In 500 Clown Macbeth it was a precarious scaffolding, some crumpled pieces of cellophane, and the crown. Whoever wore the crown was the king, the action of the piece was ambition (surprise, surprise) and that was expressed by trying to climb this scaffolding. The whole company (all 3 of them) also played the witches. But don't think they're all fun and games. The best thing about 500 Clowns is, ok two things, 1) is that they distill what the story is about to a nugget that can be physically expressed and then they play mercilessly with that theme through improvisation, acrobatics, and their own honest emotions. They played in Frankenstein with how we create enemies - through all their antics, this was the core of their piece and it really resonated. We think we're forced to be fearful, and initially fear is a reflexive response, but we can participate in it too, just as we do every other emotional response we have to circumstances. 2) In flirting with the edge between theater and "life" there is nothing that is not real to them in the performance. There are no distractions, there is only what they're doing or what we're doing there in that space on that day. They build their performance around playing with that moment and around physical risk taking, and it's all real - no nets - the result is really involving because they're really doing it - no pretense here - even though they're telling a story and playing characters. They are clowns, so they are frequently very funny, their shows have the delight of kids playing in mud, but they find a way to build their action to involve their emotions as well (you know, like "real" actors) and when they do, there are no nets here either. I'm not going to ruin how they do this in Frankenstein, but I found the result really effective. Frankenstein and a second show with music called 500 Clown Christmas are playing at PS122 in New York through New Year's. If you are in the New York area here is where you go for tickets. But they tour as well - check out their website at the link at the top of this post to see if they're coming anywhere near you, and if they are, run for your life! That is, go and see them.

R. B. Kitaj - maverick colorist dies

I just found out at wood s lot (natch) that one of my very favorite painters has died - R. B. Kitaj. Here are the Guardian and Times and NY Times obituaries. When everyone was painting abstractions, he was painting figures and urban landscapes - magnificent clamors of color - he was an architect of dreams.

A thousand ways NOT to connect (Film - Babel)

We borrowed Babel from the library, as we had never seen it in the theater when it was released. Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett and Gael Garcia Bernal are the familiar faces in it. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu directed, Guillermo Arriaga wrote the script - they are probably best known in commercial feature films for Amores Perros. The plot of the film is almost immaterial, it's set in Morroco where a privileged American couple have come without their young children to get away. The wife is shot and they cannot return as planned. The children are in San Diego in the care of their devoted Mexican housekeeper. She is supposed to attend her son's wedding in Mexico and is compelled to take the children with her when she cannot find anyone to care for them. The gun by which the American woman was shot was given to a Moroccan who served as guide for a Japanese hunter. His story, and that of his deaf adolescent daughter, forms the third panel in this triptych of parallel but linked stories.

The central idea is a good one. The film takes its title from the biblical story in which the people try to build a tower to heaven to unite humanity but god thwarts them by confusing their formerly shared language so that they can no longer understand one another. Hmmm. No wonder. Anyway, in the film people from different cultures and with different languages desperately need something from each other. The Japanese girl needs love following the death of her mother, the Mexican nanny needs to cross the border, Brad Pitt's character needs help for his wife, but the people from whom they need this help don't communicate as they do - they don't share their values, their goals, or their languages and so conflict ensues and you have drama.

The film strains a little for a sense of profundity it cannot muster, but when it doesn't pretend, it becomes compelling. I particularly enjoyed the clear work of Adriana Barraza as Amelia, the nanny, all the Japanese young people in the film, whether deaf or hearing were wonderful - it is so rare to see kids act like kids in film. For once, Brad Pitt is cast to act a character to whom something actually happens. If he had been asked to do this a bit more often, he might be further along in his ability to act. He seemed to revel in the fact that he was playing a middle aged man. His beard and hair spotted with gray and with make-up assisted wrinkles beneath his eyes, the film seemed interested in paying attention to what he was doing instead of what he looked like and so he was forced to communicate more than a general sense. He is an actor who works with a tremendous amount of tension. He always seems to want to be feeling more than he is - to let you know he's doing his job. He really almost ruined 12 Monkeys (a terrific Terry Gilliam film) that way. He played a crazy character and just couldn't stop telling us he was CRAZY. I get it Brad. He did that a lot in Babel too at the beginning, but as his character must settle down and wait, and since he got to do that with Cate Blanchett and Mohamed Akhzam - two actors who are relaxed enough to inhabit a space and do only what is necessary, not what is interesting - he was actually forced to do the same sometimes. And in that space things bubbled up for him. It must be way more interesting that the other stuff he does, so I hope he does some more of it.

I appreciated the breathless paced, hi-tech style of the film - the crystaline photography, the incredibly disparate settings, the sound track had some good stuff in it. There were many scenes depicting the press and tumult of a life, whether in downtown Tokyo or on the highway to Tijuana, or on bus in Morocco - the tourists seemed to bustle through the slow dusty lives of the place they toured through. Never needing to touch or be touched by the people they photographed. They could even order their cous-cous in English. People in this film generally live in the close proximity of many others and yet few of them ever connect. All live parallel existences to one another and yet, when speaking, usually speak only from their own needs never another's. With an abundance of ways to communicate, this film seems to say - visual and auditory languages, technological devices, government functionaries whose sole purpose is the bridging of cultures - we seem only to have found a thousand ways not to connect.

All tricks and no magic (film - The Illusionist)

After a day of following charged ions in and out of neurons, I thought I would sit down and watch a different kind of hocus pocus. We borrowed the film The Illusionist from the library. Based on a short story of Steven Millhauser Eisenheim the Illusionist. It featured a promising team - Paul Giamatti, Ed Norton, Rufus Sewell, composer Phillip Glass - alas, it was all trickery and no magic.

Set in fin de last siecle Vienna, a poor boy loves a woman of royal blood. Their friendship cannot be, he travels the world and becomes an illusionist, she the intended of the heir to the throne. He comes back to town to perform tricks, like making the crowned Prince's sword stick in the ground, and the prince does not like that very much - or are they tricks? I won't entirely ruin the plot for you as it is quite good and in case, after this you are still tempted to see the film.

I could have forgiven the film its obviousness if they hadn't done two things - one was to make the setting and period ridiculously dear - you know, people speaking in foreign accents when they are in their home country - why?!? It was interesting watching how the British actors handled accents versus the Americans. Somehow, Sewell was freed by his mask to let something loose akin to character, while it absolutely muzzled Paul Giamatti. Norton was somewhere in between. But when it came to the life beneath the lines, Giamatti and Norton both had an underground fire blazing (sometimes with the flame a little to high), but Sewell (who I've liked in plenty of other films) was reduced to shouting to be dramatic. They also insisted on shooting the whole thing in sepia tones - I know, I know it was supposed to be a long time ago - but could someone please tell me in what year the earth blossomed into technicolor? Because I've never read about it in the history books and you would think someone would have noticed. They had another reason for this choice I won't discuss because it's a spoiler.

The second even bigger gaffe, in my estimation, was an over use of camera tricks - slow-mo shots, moody framing, and especially to try to create the magician's illusions with film. In other words, we see the ghosts materialize, etc... The whole point of this story is to wonder. That people were convinced of his powers is the point, not that he could actually perform illusions. Sometimes, the computer manipulation of the digital image was simply obvious - oops, there goes the illusion. Other times the effect resembled a hologram - we're all used to them from science fiction films now and they carry much different connotations than do the ghostly spectres to an audience of, say, 1899. Oops - no illusion. Showing me the illusions meant not creating them for me. If I had experienced their effect on others - had hints of what he was doing so that I could imagine the rest (as the viewer contributes to the illusion they see), the film would have been much more convincing. Fewer camera tricks and subtler character development would have drawn a little more magic from this film.

Expressed in language and about language (books - The Welsh Girl II)

I'm continuing to enjoy how The Welsh Girl's author, Peter Ho Davies, uses language to fashion his story, not just to relate it by description, or to evoke it with form - but language is itself a player in the story. The Welsh locals and the English - like the officers at the local POW camp, have a continual power struggle - they identify friend or enemy through language and accent, they can hide things from each other through language, they have notions of class that are tied to how they speak. Esther, the Welsh Girl of the title and the character through whom we experience the English/Welsh side of the story, was educated to speak beautiful English - a feature that makes her unusual among her compatriots. There is a parallel struggle between the German prisoners and their captors (here, the English/Welsh barrier dissolves and there is sudden national unity). Most of the soldiers do not speak English, but Karsten does and it is through his eyes we experience the part of the story told from the point of view of the Germans. Karsten and Esther form these dual voices - English and therefore understandable to the English reader, but something of an outsider to their own set.

There's a lovely scene in which Karsten knows he will soon be able to send a post card home to his mother, so he struggles to write something that will inform her but not worry her and will still reflect his situation honestly.

As a boy, one of his jobs around the pension had been to carry the guests' mail to the post office. He liked to practice his reading skills with the cards, trying to recognize the town and the landscape, which he took for granted, in the exuberant descriptions. Glorious weather. Spectacular views, Charing locals. He wondered if he would see his world this way if he was at leisure...

Karsten's struggle to write a satisfying line in the POW camp takes hours. When he finally produces one sentence he can live with he is exhausted...

Schiller starts to saunter on, down the alley of tents, but turns back, fishes in his tunic pocket. "Almost forgot. They were issuing these outside the mess." He hold out a bright square of paper, and after a second Karsten takes it. It's a Red Cross postcard.

He watched Schiller amble off, then turns the card over in his hands. It's already preprinted with a curt message:

Dear __________:
This is to inform you that I am a prisoner of the British/American/Soviet forces.
My health is poor/fair/good.
Sincerely/Love, __________________

He's furious at these words, thrust in his mouth like a gag. But then, he realizes, he's hardly been able to think of much more to say for himself despite his agonizing. He's reminded again of those postcards of his mothers' guests - delightful, lovely, charming - their repetitious, interchangeable sentiments, and he's suddenly relieved by the anonymity of the card before him, the impersonality.

This is a struggle not only expressed in language but its subject is language. Often when writers write about writing it bugs me. But Karsten and Esther's relationships to language are well developed and become tools to further the story in Davies' deft hands, rather than to detract from it. I enjoyed how Karsten's relationship to these same words could, in the space of seconds move from prison to freedom. It makes me think of what I wrote about the actors Jake Gyllenhaal and Mark Ruffalo in the my other post this morning on the film Zodiac. Gyllenhaal would be freed by a printed postcard - his acting can be open when it is empty of choice but it is never quite original. Ruffalo 's seems all choice - even if it was printed for him, the way he wrote in the spaces and circled his choices would be original and would communicate more than was printed.

I hope to have enough reading time in between my studying to finish this lovely book this weekend.

A Good Old Fashioned Mystery, Charles Ives, and Mark Ruffalo (film - Zodiac)

Went it came out, Zodiac was hyped as a bang-em-up, bloody, serial killer movie and was further criticized for a lackluster performance by Jake Gyllenhaal, but we borrowed it from the library and I didn't have that reaction at all. It's a good, old-fashioned thriller mystery - a puzzle to be solved - with good suspense, interesting characters, and a real idiosyncratic soundtrack. That's a big plus with me, I find as the opening credits roll, that most feature film soundtracks sound so obviously imitative that I want to walk out of the film. I know that if that's the music they chose, the film is likely to be built on cliche. But this was really original, some of it jazzy, and some of it quoting Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question, for good reason.

Jake Gyllenhaal was playing a uncharismatic character, so his performance seemed spot on. It seems to me he's often stretched in the wrong way when he's cast as edgy or unusual, but when he's playing white-bread ordinary he's relaxed and open, willing to do whatever is asked - he just doesn't bring much individuality to it. To be honest, I can't tell if he has any depth. Zodiac also features Robert Downey Jr. who turns in a fun performance as a quirky, boozy reporter (surprise, surprise). He's such a good actor, I hope people will think to cast him as something other than a drug addict. But the performance to see this film for is Mark Ruffalo's. In fact, there is no film I've seen him in where he isn't the reason to see it. He's always a whole, complicated person really behaving - when he's woken up out of bed by a phone call, he's not just squinting his eyes, it seems as though he's really been asleep. When he eats half his partner's BLT, he takes off the tomato. He just does whatever he does - it's all individual - no one else would do it that way. At the same time, that's never the point, he's creating a character and if that character requires a certain behavior then he's really behaving. And you can see the thought driving that behavior, and the emotion bubbling below the thought that not even he knows is there. A real actor. If you haven't yet seen him in You Can Count on Me, I can't recommend it enough. He's beautiful in it, so is Laura Linney. But back to Zodiac, it's good, satisfying mystery and suspense that will keep you guessing. Get the popcorn.

A meditation on guilt and insecurity in the guise of thriller (Film - Caché)

Michael Haneke's film Caché with Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche, released in 2005, is the latest film in our effort to catch up with movies we missed by borrowing them from the library. As I've mentioned before, I love French film - in fact I really love the place the arts are given in French culture. Their writing, film, music, even their television is considered a serious way to express the ideas running through their culture. A movie is a way to have a dialogue, not merely a commodity produced to make money, win admiration, or decorate our leisure time (although they make some candy films too). The quality of the artistry and the ideas expressed by it are both endlessly discussed in respected magazines and television talk shows. It's a culture I feel I really fit into better than my own, in some ways. I love the language, the wine and the food and the value the enjoyment of simple sustenance has in their culture, and I cannot get enough of Paris. Anyway... I'm a fan, so part of my response to French films is probably living out a 2-hour fantasy of being in France.

I had not watched this film when it came out because I assumed it would be a more commercial venture, given the casting, I'm such a snob. But that was not so. The casting of two of France's super-stars does not compromise the film in any way, they turn in committed, relaxed, and multi-layered performances. I also enjoyed the fact that Binoche, known not only for her acting but also for her physical beauty, is middle aged now and the film revels in her current beauty as a forty-something actress as opposed to casting someone younger or trying to disguise who she has become. The lens adores her and she remains as open as ever, never hiding. The film's setting is the upper middle class life of a Parisian couple George and Anne - book critic and publisher - so I have everything to keep me happy - books and Paris! The couple begin receiving several-hour-long videos of their house, focused on their front door, taken with a hidden camera. Later those videos venture further afield and include George's childhood home. They are never able to see the photographer and the feeling of being watched increasingly invades their sense of safety for themselves and their son, Peirrot. I don't want to say any more about the film's plot because the film is driven by the tension is slowly stirs up - some of it insidiously and some of it suddenly and shockingly. I admired that this film worked not only on the level of a creepy thriller - some people are in danger and as the viewer I seem to share in this danger - but it also worked on a philosophical, exploring the ideas of culpability and political insecurity. It was a study of how the assumptions that ground individuals or political entities can be disturbed and what kind of behavior can result given our impulses to defend. But here we don't know the face of the attacker for sure, so what to attack is in question. There is another theme of guilt on a personal or a national level, but I will ruin the experience of this film by discussing it too much, I recommend seeing it when you're in the mood for a thoughtful film dressed like a thriller.

Factory town turned Modern Art Destination - Dia: Beacon

I didn't read two continuous sentences all day yesterday - even though I did some studying for the GREs - but there is no reading to report on. The Ragazzo and I did, however, take a drive up to Beacon, New York - a little over an hour north of our fair city - to visit friends and to see Dia Art Foundations upstate home for its collection of art from the 1960s - present.


Beacon was a forgotten, working-class hamlet among a sea of estates, historical sites, and country clubs with views of the Hudson River (except for its appearance in Nobody's Fool the 1994 film with Paul Newman) until Dia decided to open a companion gallery to its location in Chelsea to house its collection. They converted a 300,000 square foot box-printing factory, right on the Hudson River line's railroad tracks, into an immense museum for modern art. While not everything we saw was to my taste - the current exhibit of Sol LeWitt's drawings, for example, did absolutely nothing for me - four exhibits really stood out.

A show of Agnes Martin's work, a painter characterized as a minimalist because almost all her works feature pale horizontal stripes, although I learned from an interesting film about her that she considers herself an abstract expressionist because she sees those forms as a medium for feelings (although NOT for ideas, she insists).

I want to draw a certain response,” Agnes Martin stated in an interview in 1966. “Not a specific response but that quality of response from people when they leave themselves behind, often experienced in nature–an experience of simple joy…the simple, direct going into a field of vision as you would cross an empty beach to look at the ocean.

The film, With My Back to the World played as a double feature with a film about a completely contrasting contemporary artist - Kiki Smith - at the Film Forum earlier this year. I love films about artists' process, especially when we get to see their work spaces. Here's a link to them both.

Fred Sandback created constructions of colored string that span floor to ceiling and create an illusion of planes of rectangular and triangular shapes - it's probably hard to see them in this image, but you can see the gorgeous exhibition galleries:


Dia is the perfect home for two artists in their collection - Richard Serra's massive curved two-inch-thick slabs of rusted steel - standing inside the space - create these shapes like nuclear plant smoke stacks or the hull of a ship, when inside them they are like a metallic maze:


Lastly, an entire room of Andy Warhol's paintings built on the shape of shadows. The room does for his work what collecting Rothko or Monet's Water Lillies in one place does - it surrounds you with a certain esthetic and allows you to appreciate it on its own terms. I really enjoyed this room:



Their bookstore allowed me a chance to do what I like to do best, browse through and acquire books! But I still managed to not string together two sentences buy finding a book of cartoon drawings 100% Evil, silly fun.

The town of Beacon is not frilly and gentrified as neighboring Rheinbeck, or even sedate and upper-middle class as Garrison - which is a plus as far as I'm concerned. It has a Main Street lined with craft and antique shops, galleries, and a handful of restaurants, but it has some seedy stretches as well. Beacon is an easy day trip and was a welcome change. And now it may be Saturday for the rest of you, but I have to go to work.

Creating a life of the heart when there is none. (Film - Notes on a Scandal)

Judi Dench's character, Barbara Covett, is what might kindly be referred to in old fashioned parlance as a spinster. She is the sad product of someone terrified of risking intimacy, and cloaks her longing in idealized friendship. She creates a harsh and chilly narrative in obsessive journals to keep herself the cool observer of her love object, rather than risking the terror of passion. Cate Blanchett plays Sheba Hart, the young art teacher, as an aimless bohemian - someone who never really got it together professionally, but has ended up surrounded by a life with enough daily chaos that she's always occupied. Life happens to her and she seems to not have enough strength or good sense to resist when sexual attraction arises between her and a 15 year old student. The film establishes differences in character in lovely simple ways, there's a great scene in which Hart invites Covett to dinner at her house, after which she, her older husband and her children put on some music and dance around the living room. Covett sits stiffly on the sofa, smoking, unable to join. I believed her body no longer could move as the others did, so hard had she become. Yet Judi Dench allows you to see the pain and loneliness that drive her actions rather that just playing the manipulative harridan. This is not the mustache twirling antics of Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (great though that is), this is a subtler more human creation.

Understatement is at the heart of what makes Notes on a Scandal a terrific film. Desperate loneliness, manipulation, and sexual longing would all seem to provide ample excuses for teeth gnashing - but the writer, actors, and director seemed to be able to keep it in check until it really rises unbidden, the result being a more terrifying film because it is about 'us,' and not 'them.' This is a major motion picture, with star power behind it, but it never smells like one.

Actually both characters, despite their superficial differences, share immense passion that is expressed in ways society does not tolerate. Both are also possessed of creative drive. Interestingly, Hart, the artist, never produces art - her energies are too dispersed, but Covett must be highly imaginative - not only in producing volumes of elaborate journals, but she creates relationships with others that never really exist. It a sort of desperate act of self preservation - she becomes an artist of fantasies, engineering a life for her heart when there really isn't one. Dench allows you to see this with painful clarity. Great performance. Terrific film.

The Erin Isle - James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Stoneage burial mounds, and Guiness

Nothing like a little vacation. The Ragazzo and I spent the last 10 days in Ireland. Neither of us had ever been there before. We spent a few days in Dublin and the rest in the countryside and smaller towns (Kilkenny, Athlone, Sligo and The Burren). Despite incessant rain, we hiked, visited ruins and burial sites like Carrowkeel (above) 6,700 years old - can you imagine - something built by people that long ago. We even stayed on an 18th century estate with 1,600 sheep, housed in a palatial country mansion that has been in the Percival family for 100s of years. That's Percival as in the fellow who sat at the Round Table!




Oh! And, of course, The Writer's Museum in Dublin. Which has lovely little cases full of notebooks, letters and typewriters and provides a primer and all writers Irish.



Also looked at the work of some contemporary visual artists like Sean McSweeny who had a show at the Niland Gallery in Sligo. His works are abstracted landscapes, mostly smaller in scale; they capture the darkness and wildness of the shorelines, pools, bogs and pastures of Ireland (particularly the western coast) with bold, thick applications of paint, the colors roughly mixed, the brush marks evoking the roughness of the landscape. Pale blue paint presents the light as it glints against dark grey-green waters. Swathes of spring green and splashes of bright yellow play against deep browny-greys capturing the contrasts of flowers and meadows to the bogs.

Unfortunately I got a sinus infection on the trip and spent a couple of miserable days shivering and hacking. The bright side of that was that we both got a little more reading done than we might have. Me on the summer reading list and The Ragazzo on Iris Murdoch.

I somehow restrained myself from returning with more than 1 new book. But this one looked so cool I just couldn't resist. Reading it will have to wait at least until August when I'm done w/the SRC, but Sam over at Book Chase wrote an interesting post on it just a few days ago.



Perhaps more details or even a couple of more pictures on the trip will follow. But for now, on to the books I've finished for the Summer Reading Challenge

New York Culture: An afternoon in Venice and Leipzig, an evening in Lisbon, and all in New York

It was a gorgeous spring day in New York, and, no, this is not the view from my window. But both my partner and I had some odd hours free in the afternoon today and took off for the Metropolitan Museum where there were a number of things we wanted to see.

There is a great show on Islamic Art in Venice. It is a large exhibit, providing a great deal of historical context on the extensive trade relationship between the Islamic world and Venice from around 828 - 1797. It demonstrated through maps, navigational instruments, books, textiles, lacquer, and everyday objects made of metal and glass - goblets, trays, boxes - and paintings, the influence what we would now call the Middle East had on Venetian culture, their language, use of materials and design. The contextual information really adds to the experience of the exhibit and I was struck how modern some of the objects such as this goblet seemed.

There are also two smaller and very worthwhile exhibits, one on a contemporary German painter named Neo Rausch, based in Leipzig. He did perhaps 15 new paintings specifically for the small exhibit space they now hang in. They are odd, somewhat dark, folksy paintings, the people posed like the opening of Blue Velvet but the painting with a very 30s feeling to it. I enjoyed the ones with peculiar fantastical twists in them the most. Here is one not in the exhibit:
There is also a small show of german drawings and paintings from the 1920s through the 1980s that asks the question - is there a particular look that is specifically German? It includes Dix, Klee, and Baselitz, to name a few. Based on what they showed, I'd probably answer 'no.' Normally this room in the mezzanine of the modern art section way, way, way in the rear of the museum's first floor features a nice, tiny show. I tend to prefer seeing smaller shows so this was perfect.

Then we walked across Central Park. It was one of those days when all of New York seemed to be out. Women and men in their business suits had put on sneakers to walk through the park, a young woman stopped to sit on a bench and finish reading a book, kids could not be kept in their strollers and whenever they saw empty space in front of them wanted to run, people lay on the lawn, which was shining with a color like Granny Smith apples, to catch the last hours of sun, the stage crew at the Delacorte Theater was putting finishing touches on their production of Romeo and Juliet, puppies strained at their leashes to sniff at other puppies - it was an irrepressible sort of day.

Portuguese tapas followed. Yum.