Word of the day: nostrum : a questionable remedy or scheme; a panacea
It's a beautiful Monday, which means that Julia is home for a longer stretch of time than she usually is; that'll be the case on Wednesdays too!
Mother's Day weekend was nice. Julia got two pairs of shorts, a new wallet from Fossil, a nice new sleeveless shirt that shows off her nice cleavage and upper body. We had dinner at Whole Foods ("Where?" in Grandma Pooch's words) last night and today we'll have a nice dinner and see a good movie (hopefully). This past weekend, we saw Something Borrowed, a really enjoyable romantic comedy taken from the Emily Giffin novel. It was really charming, frothy and funny, with an attractive cast (I found Kate Hudson's performance blissfully insouciant and winning). We had a wonderful dinner at Bravo's, bought The King's Speech, and had some divine Tiramisu. Julia also cleaned my clock at Scrabble, which was expected since I exhibited too much braggadocio beforehand.
Speaking of The King's Speech, I loved it! I didn't want to love it. I'm not sure I even wanted to like it, assuming it would be stodgy, old-person cinema, but it was fresh and funny, with a moving central relationship and flawless turns by Oscar winner Colin Firth and nominee Geoffrey Rush.
From Prada to Nada shouldn't work at all, but it does - modestly, moderately, of course, but it's breezy and harmless.
The Way Back has more impressive cinematography and location shooting than the last ten movies you've seen, but the story is pretty compelling too. Ed Harris is superb (but when is he not?) as the lone American in a group of escapees from a Soviet Gulag camp forced to trek through Mongolia, the desert, and over the Himalayas to freedom in Peter Weir's exciting, vivid account of a really remarkable, unfathomable story. (Kudos too to Colin Farrell for consistently underappreciated work.)
Books: Jonathan Dee's The Privileges, a runner-up for this year's Pulitzer, is so perceptive, acute, and laceratingly generous, it deserves more than reasonable comparisons to the work of Jonathan Franzen, whose blurb on the back says it all. How Dee gets us to empathize with a class of people it's almost impossible not to envy and hate (wealthy New Yorkers), is something of a miracle. The opening chapter, in which we jump in and out of the thoughts and feelings, of a group of people in Pittsburgh for a wedding, is flat-out stunning, inspiring.
Harold Robbins' A Stone For Danny Fisher (1951) is an earnest, heartfelt tale about a boy growing up in New York City during the Depressions, forced to scrape by as a pugilist and, later, a vending machine salesman. Full of feeling, tons of melodrama. This was actually the blueprint for the Elvis Presley movie King Creole, a silly, snarling little piece of fluff.
Stephen Carter's New England White is informative and intelligent, but way too long. It starts out well enough as a thriller about an influential African American power couple at a Yale-like campus and the body of a dead economist (the long-ago lover of the wife) they discover along a back road. The story traverses academia and black politics and has more than its share of juicy White House intrigue, but it should have climaxed far sooner than it did.
Two thanks to Julia:
1) For being a fantastic mother, compassionate, tender, lenient, loving.
2) For getting me into books on CD!
Today's artist, who I know little to nothing about but who was referenced once or twice in The Privileges, is the French avant-garde painter Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), who left the family wine business during World War II to focus on his simple, distinctly primitive style. He was the definition of an "outsider artist" and was fascinated by the naive art of children and the insane, coining the phrase "art brut," which simply meant 'raw art,' to describe their pictures' unrefined, antagonistic, violent force. Quite a few of his works can be seen at the Guggenheim. He was fond of assemblages, combining found objects and various other elements into a larger, multi-dimensional whole. He painted in oil a lot too, using an impasto often thickened with sand, tar, and straw, creating an unusually textured surface. Towards the end of his career, continuing to focus on art free from intellectual concerns, he turned to sculpture, producing works in polystyrene. The above painting is Cyclist With Five Cows, a work from 1943 on display at the MOMA.
