Thursday, Feb. 24

Word of the day: alliaceous : smelling, tasting of garlic, onion

Slow week. Work = boring. Gabriel's been a sleep-deprived lil' crank, but he'll cheer up because he'll go to COSI this weekend and maybe the park.

I'm watching Zodiac for the first time and I'm riveted by its painstaking verisimilitude, its attention to detail, the tightly-wound, drawn-out suspense, a terrific cast (Jake Gyllenhaal, Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo). Win that Oscar, David Fincher!

And I'm sort of rooting for Annette Bening. A highly formidable actress who gave two knockout performances this year, she is a dark horse and the closest thing Natalie Portman has to competition.

I just finished a masterly book: Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow. It's a freewheeling, hypnotic, nickelodeon-esque look at the first decade of 20th century America and the various personalities loping across New York at the time: J.P. Morgan, Harry Houdini, Emma Goldman, Freud, Henry Ford, Evelyn Nesbit, among others. Doctorow breaks almost all the conventional rules of fiction: right when he's developing one character, he abandons him or her for a while; the story has no dialogue; the short, declarative sentences can make one feel they're reading a screenplay; he plays around with historical facts. But it all works, a big, spinning sensation.

The artist of the day is the Frenchman Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues. I am reading an interesting book about him. He was the first European artist to ever set foot in North America. He landed in America around 1560 with a group of French Huguenot explorers. Morgues drew local botanical and animal specimens but also created watercolor portraits of the native Americans, who, until this time, had only existed (for Europeans) in the stories brought back from explorers such as Columbus, who portrayed them as bloodthirsty, paganistic cannibals. Back in England, his patrons included Sir Walter Raleigh. Most of his actual drawings had been destroyed in a Spanish attack on Fort Caroline, which the French explorers had set up just outside present-day Jacksonville (the Spanish and the French were competing for territory in the New World). A Belgian engravist re-produced most of Morgues' works based on Morgue's own re-creations from memory. Morgues' paintings sell for great amounts today, but the legitimacy of them is highly dubious.

Sunday, Feb. 20

Kind of a lazy day around here. Julia is doing dissertation stuff and grading. I'm working on my novel and a screenplay, Gabriel is taking a long nap. Pizza tonight and some movies.

Last night, we watched a fantastic film, Mother and Child, a well-written, touching tale of interlocking stories about three women: Annette Bening is a 51-year old, disillusioned, embittered woman who gave up her daughter for adoption almost four decades ago; Naomi Watts is that daughter grown up, a cold, controlling lawyer having an affair with her boss (Samuel L. Jackson); Kerry Washington is a young wife unable to give birth, clamoring for a daughter, seeking out the help of an adoption agency (run by Cherry Jones). The stories unite in surprising, pleasing ways, and the characters are multi-dimensional and bracingly unsympathetic. Writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (the son of the great novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez) has a steady hand and writes fluid, intelligent dialogue. If the film was released in December rather than in the discarded days of mid May, it would certainly be up for awards (for Garcia, possibly Jackson, and most deservedly for the ever-splendid Bening, the ferociously cool Watts, the wonderful Washington) - alas, it's not, but it's certainly worth seeing.

Right now, I'm reading Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train. I'm crazy about Highsmith and I really enjoy the book... but I don't think it's as enjoyable as the film Hitchcock made out of it. I'm not really attracted to debates about whether a certain book is better or worse than that so-and-so movie made from it... We hear it all the time: "The book is always better." What's better? Define it. How can one adequately compare the merits of two wildly different cognitive experiences? The very nature of reading a book calls for greater absorption, more imaginative immersion - scenes playing out in your head, etc. Film is a less interactive medium and always will be - even if you're 3-Ding it up. Reading is participatory; watching is voyeurism. It's almost unfair to compare...

But since we are comparing... I'll play Devil's Advocate. Here are a lit of movies that are "better" than the books they sprang from:

Forrest Gump

Jaws

Psycho

Silence of the Lambs

Misery

Schindler's List

The Postman Always Rings Twice

The Wizard of Oz

The Bridges of Madison County (okay, I'll confess, I haven't read the book, but I'm going on faith with this one)

The Maltese Falcon

American Psycho

Apocalypse Now

Stand by Me

The Notebook

Frankenstein

L.A. Confidential

These are just but a few. There are cases out there for lots of others (The Godfather, The Shining, It's a Wonderful Life, Sideways, The Manchurian Candidate, Die Hard, A Clockwork Orange, Dances With Wolves, Jackie Brown, Children of Men) but in these cases, I haven't read the book. Can you think of any more?

See ya!

Thursday, Feb. 17

Sorry for the long wait, folks (i.e. Julia). I'll update more often.

Valentine's Day was great - pizza and The Town and the night before dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. I'm getting back into my novel and script and Julia is beyond busy with teaching work and dissertation work. Less than five months until we leave for the land o' peaches.

So what's new? Well, not too much. Work is work (suspicious sellers, human comedy - read: managers thinking their layout decisions came to them via afflatus) and the winter is coming to an end. Julia and I loved Ben Affleck's The Town, a roaring, tense, beautifully staged action drama with Affleck and Oscar-nominated Jeremy Renner as two of a bank-robbing quartet trying to pull off a heist at Fenway Park. The Boston locale is vividly essayed, the script first-rate (by Affleck, Aaron Stockard, and Peter Craig, the former two the scribes behind Affleck's auspicious helming debut, also set in Boston, Gone Baby Gone). The characters are compelling, the pacing and staging taut, the acting first-rate: Affleck, commanding; Renner, effortlessly lived-in and authentic; Blake Lively (as Affleck's drugged-out ex), grungily revelatory; Jon Hamm, compactly, tightly funny as the Fed on the gang's tail; the late Pete Poslethwaite and Chris Cooper are good in small parts too. And are there actresses out there as good as Rebecca Hall right now, actresses whose feelings bleed right through their skin, so appealingly life-sized? How is this film not nominated for Best Picture instead of the laborious, woodenly drawn-out Inception, one of the worst 'big' movies I've ever seen?

You Again is a lot of fun too. You can't go wrong with Sigourney Weaver and Jamie Lee Curtis and when you see Betty White in a movie, you know you're in for some off-color one-liners. It's good to see Kristen Bell having some genuine success, for her post-Veronica Mars career has been littered with duds, save for Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Today's artist: Thomas Hart Benton. Born in Missouri in 1889, named for his senator uncle, he was a larger-than-life, brawling, contentious figure who, after studying in France, attempted to make a name for himself in New York. Benton hated the New York art world, but mentored Pollock and all his contemporaries. He is largely associated with Missouri, drawing a lot of a controversy for his huge murals, including the one he was commissioned for at the state capitol building. His autobiography, An Artist in America, is a highly acclaimed, forthcoming look at the life of a working artist, maybe the work he'll best be remembered by. Essentially a regionalist painter, he spent the final quarter of his life or so traveling around the south and west, painting the places and people he saw. The above painting is titled A Social History of Missouri, from 1937.

Update

Will be back in a few days...

Thursday, Feb. 10

Word of the day: aprosexia : inability to concentrate

Gabriel and I went to COSI today and had a rip-roaring good time. Trouble is, he had too much fun and fell asleep for ten minutes in the car. Furthermore, he didn't take a nap at home, pretty much abrogating my plan to read some more of Gone With the Wind and check out the programs at a community college in Statesboro. In a little bit, we'll go get my haircut and maybe some cupcakes.

Here's the rest of my decade-in-film picks:

Best Actress:

Julie Christie, Away From Her (2007)

Vera Farmiga, Down to the Bone (2005)

Maggie Gyllenhaal, SherryBaby (2006)

Sally Hawkins, Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

Julianne Moore, Far From Heaven (2002)

Imelda Staunton, Vera Drake (2004)

Meryl Streep, Julie & Julia (2009)

Charlize Theron, Monster (2003)

Naomi Watts, Mulholland Drive (2001)

Kate Winslet, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Most Underappreciated Films:

17 Again (2009)

Birth (2004)

Black Book (2006)

Dark Blue (2003)

Drag me to Hell (2009)

Ghost Town (2008)

Insomnia (2002)

The Lookout (2007)

The Matador (2005)

The Mist (2007)

Nothing but the Truth (2008)

Open Water (2004)

Prime (2005)

The Proposition (2006)

Revolutionary Road (2008)

The Ruins (2008)

The Station Agent (2003)

Taken (2009)

Whatever Works (2009)

The Woodsman (2004)

Valentine's Day is this coming Monday and I haven't gotten my wonderful wife a gift yet, but I will. Sunday, Julia, Gabriel, and I will be going out to eat at either Ruby Tuesday or Cracker Barrel or Texas Roadhouse. Tonight, we'll watch a movie (The Romantics) and Top Chef and have some pizza. Can't wait!

The above image is sculpture called Walking Man by the Swiss sculptor and painter Albert Giacometti. I posted it because I remembered that in Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty one character was quoted as saying that Giacometti was one of the six most important (the only important) artists of the 20th century. I had never heard of him! Looking him up, I see that he travelled back and forth from Geneva to Rome to Paris from the 20s to the 40s, met Dali and other surrealists, befriended Sartre and other Existentialists, focused extensively on the human body (its frailty, in particular), usually the head. Consistent themes were human alienation, the misery in the faces of the silent oppressed all around him. His sculptures, mostly conceived from memory, were thin, often featureless. He was intensely self-critical, from an avant-garde turn-of-the-century family. He tried to introduce perspective into sculpture and in February of 2010 his above work, "L'homme qui marche I," sold for 65 million pounds, the largest amount ever at an auction house.

Super Bowl Sunday?

Word of the day: assoil : to atone for, absolve

The big game is today and for the first time since 1999, I can honestly say that I am completely indifferent to it. After a fun morning with Gabriel, I plan on getting some work done on my novel (or play), watching a movie on-line, and then watching some basketball. We'll probably go to the store later, pick up a movie from Redbox, and have some soup for dinner.

Last night, Julia and I watched the fascinating documentary Catfish, a chilling, completely absorbing film about a New York photographer who begins Facebook friendships with an 8-year old painter in upper Michigan, her mother, and the girl's stunner of an older sister, whom he finds himself attracted to. He begins to suspect that something is off-kilter, fishy about the whole set-up, though and, along with two filmmaker friends, decides to go up north to investigate. What he discovers might be obvious for viewers, but it's poignant and frightening in equal measures, a sad, alarming commentary on modern life.

Other news to report? Well, Statesboro is looking more tempting and inviting than ever, as some dumb ol' Mexicanos moved in upstairs. Fantastic... A three-month spell of silence, and then of course the return of the wetbacks...

More favorite performances over the last decade. My Oscars... the Chascars, we'll call them...

Best Actor:

Christian Bale, American Psycho (2000)

Jeff Bridges, Crazy Heart (2009) and The Door in the Floor (2004)

Adrien Brody, The Pianist (2002)

Michael Caine, The Quiet American (2002)

Chiwetel Ejiofor, Dirty Pretty Things (2003)

Paul Giamatti, Sideways (2004)

Philip Seymour Hoffman, Capote (2005)

Bill Murray, Lost in Translation (2003)

Sean Penn, Mystic River (2003) and Milk (2008)

Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler (2008)

Best Supporting Actor:

Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men (2007) and The Sea Inside (2004)

Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder (2008)

Gene Hackman, The Royal Tennenbaums (2001)

William Hurt, A History of Violence (2005)

Sergei Lopez, Pan's Labryinth (2006)

Ulrich Muhe, The Lives of Others (2006)

Dennis Quaid, Far From Heaven (2002)

Mark Ruffalo, You Can Count on Me (2000)

Peter Sarsgaard, Shattered Glass (2003)

Christoph Waltz, Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Today's artist of interest for me is John James Audobon, the great painter of aviary wonders whose Birds of America was released to staggering praise (more so in England than America)

in 87 parts from 1827 to 1836. Audobon was born in Haiti in 1785, escaped conscription from Napoleon's army, and eventually settled in Henderson, Kentucky, owning a dry goods store. He encountered bankruptcy and was largely without prospects when he set off across America with some materials and a gun. Yes, a gun. Audobon was a weirdo, whose techniques included shooting birds, even rare ones (sometimes up to a dozen at a time, desperately trying to find the appropriate one), would kill the bird or animal, and then insert a flexible wire frame inside the creature so that its pose would be life-like, if even theatrical. He used mixed media (watercolor, pastels, oil, and gouache, pencil, charcoal, and chalk). The above painting, Roseate Spoonbill, is from Birds of America.

Thursday, Feb. 3

Word of the day: abderian : given to incessant, idiotic laughter

It has already been an exciting day. Gabriel and I went to COSI this morning and had a blast, running all over Kidspace, checking out the ocean and gecko exhibits. Tonight, the fam will have some pizza, Julia and I will watch the claustrophobic Ryan Reynolds thriller Buried, and maybe we'll watch some Top Chef.

Random thoughts: Early Super Bowl prediction: Pittsburgh Steelers 27, Green Bay Packers 24.

In honor of the upcoming Academy Awards, the first of the new decade, I want to go back over the last decade and present my own Oscar nominations for my favorite films and actors in the six main categories, critics be damned. (I'll do two a day...)

Best Film:

Before Sunset (2004)

Far From Heaven (2002)

Happy-Go-Lucky (2008)

The Hurt Locker (2009)

Lost in Translation (2003)

Match Point (2005)

Once (2007)

Sideways (2004)

The Squid and the Whale (2005)

Wonder Boys (2000)

Best Supporting Actress:

Amy Adams, Junebug (2005)

Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There (2007)

Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008)

Viola Davis, Doubt (2008)

Rosemarie Dewitt, Rachel Getting Married (2008)

Laura Linney, Kinsey (2004)

Virginia Madsen, Sideways (2004)

Melanie Laurent, Inglorious Basterds (2009)

Mo'Nique, Precious (2009)

Rachel Weisz, The Constant Gardener (2005)

More to come...

I'm happy to see that FX is bringing back their wonderful show Justified for a second season. It's tense, chewy hour of television, with terrific writing (it's based on an Elmore Leonard short story), a vivid sense of place (Appalachian Kentucky), a smokin' lead (Timothy Olyphant, at his best), fine pacing, well-drawn characters. A real winner.

I just finished an outstanding book, a truly great novel, Evan Connell's Mr. Bridge. In 1959, Connell wrote Mrs. Bridge and ten years later, in 1969, Connell wrote its companion piece, Mr. Bridge. It's about 369 pages long, portioned out over 140 chapters, and it tells the story of one half of a well-off Kansas City couple experiencing life in the 1930s and 1940s. Society changes, their three kids grow up, and Mr. Bridge, recalcitrant, opinionated, racist, conservative, begins to understand what exactly his life has amounted to. It's a very subtle book, ridiculously easy to read, nuanced, funny, and its impossible not to see some bit of ourselves (even the bits we must not like) in the Bridges. The dialogue is pinpoint and we learn a lot about the thirties too, about the upper classes. Connell is particularly adept at both satirizing his characters and humanizing them at the same time, all the while portraying them with spare, blunt, unvarnished realism.

Finally, the painting at the top of the page is Early November: North Greenland, a 1933 work by Rockwell Kent. Kent studied under William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri, fully immersed in the Ashcan school of early 20th century America. Kent was mostly known for his pen-and-ink, black-and-white illustrations in adventure novels like Moby Dick and Two Years Before the Mast and paintings of distant frontiers such as Alaska, Greenland, and Newfoundland. He had strong Soviet and Communist ties and was suspected of left-wing activities under McCarthyism and blacklisted.

Tuesday, Feb. 1

Word of the day: mentimutation : the act of changing one's mind

Today, central Ohio is covered in ice, with more to come early this evening. Julia is off school today, snug and smug at home, and will most likely be home tomorrow. The question is, will I get an early dismissal from work? Hard to say, knowing those middle managing clowns.

Not much to do today. I got caught up on the new episode of NBC's Monday night show Harry's Law, a product of David Kelley and bearing all the hallmarks of some of his past courtroom dramas: snide humor, long courtroom speeches, flippancy/mouthiness, a strong, no-nonsense female character equal parts brusqueness and sarcasm, and a likable cast (led by the impeccable Kathy Bates).

Another show that Julia and I watch is ABC's Castle, which keeps getting better and better, culminating in this week's episode, which might have been the best in three seasons. The two leads, Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion have genuinely exciting, palpable chemistry. The show doesn't take itself too seriously, the characters are funny, and the cases have tons of twists (one before every commercial break).

I posted the painting above, Ed Ruscha's Los Angeles County Museum on Fire (1965-1968), because it is referenced in Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty, which I just finished. The book was breezy enough, full of insight and sly knowingness, reminiscent of the work of Edith Wharton in the way that Martin focuses so much of his attention on the surface of an enclosed world, an exclusive enclave, but he doesn't do a whole lot with the characters and the story is, in large patches, bland.

Ruscha is a contemporary American artist, based in Los Angeles, whose works (a conglomerate of painting, drawing, and photography) often essay the banality of American life as seen through an assault of mass media images.

Off to work!