I've still got to post a picture of our new dog Daisy. She's a sweet treat! Funny and happy, playful, a good listener, house-trained, not a mean bone in her! We're all just waiting for surly Clive and hissing Kit to warm up to her. I'll post pictures soon!
We all watched Straw Dogs last night. I know it was supposed to be an ugly and provocative film (the original 1971 Sam Peckinpah version wasn't particularly easy to watch), but it was too silly, too unrealistic. The deck was stacked - the villain (True Blood's Alexander Skarsgard and an overdoing-it James Woods among them) and his cronies were too Hollywood-redneck: 38. Special-loving, football-and-beer crazed, hunting good 'ol boys; so any queasy ambiguity about the inevitable denouement is pretty much nil - and the question about whether the raped wife was "asking for it" pretty much irrelevant. James Marsden is an adequate fill-in for Dustin Hoffman, and Kate Bosworth is fine enough, but there are too many nagging questions, and only the final scene ignites.
David and I went and saw Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol yesterday, and it was fantastic, the best of the series so far. The director this time around is animation virtuoso Brad Bird (The Incredibles, Ratatouille) and he does a remarkable job keeping the film moving tautly along, and some of the set pieces display a how'd-they-do-that wizardry, including a sequence outside the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, the tallest building in the world, that will leave you amazed. The team (Paula Patton, Simon Pegg, Jeremy Renner) is appealing, but it's Tom Cruise's show and he's all sublime, beautiful movement (the actor is still in remarkable shape). This is now a series I don't want to end.
Larry McMurtry's Sin Killer, the 77th book I've read this year, is an amiable opening act in his tetralogy of the Berrybenders, an English family traveling through the American west in 1832 for sport. As usual, there are a wide array of colorful characters (McMurtry can do 'colorful' as effortlessly as anyone), an absence of pokiness, a well-researched portrayal of various Indian tribes and beliefs, romance, humor. The only flaw is that there is no real ending, no wrapping-up (inevitable, I guess, since it's part if a series), and that, maybe, this all comes too easy for McMurtry; really, how can you top Lonesome Dove?
Check out this article from NPR's website on Diego Rivera:
http://www.npr.org/2011/12/21/144028225/unusual-diego-rivera-work-restored-in-mexico-city
This week's American masterpiece: Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World, 1948.
On display at the MOMA, this famous work of loneliness and isolation, unreachability and physical and emotional distance, was one of Wyeth's most personal works, composed during a time when the American art scene was dominated, defined, by abstraction. Here are two excellent summaries about the painting and the house within the work:
http://www.andrew-wyeth-prints.com/article-christinas-world.html
http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_paintings/ss/andrew_wyeth_christinas_world.htm
Quick mention. In the Lawrence Block book I'm reading right now, the author references Lincoln Steffens' 1904 work Shame of the Cities. Having no idea what it was, I went digging (well, one doesn't 'dig' so much on the internet, but, rather, lightly prod) and found that Steffens was one of America's early muckrakers, those writers and journalists who exposed the issues of the day: political corruption, prison conditions, exploitation of natural resources, pension fraud, etc. Shame of the Cities wasn't so much a book as it was a collection of articles Steffens wrote for McClure's magazine. The collection was a series of portraits of various U.S. cities - St. Louis, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, mong others. It was meant to inspire reform, for Steffens saw the widespread corruption as ruining the very ideals of democracy the country was founded on; Steffens' U.S. was marked, dominated by, powerful, all-prevailing special interests. For Steffens, the whole country was a business - and that was a problem. (Another, more famous work of muckraking? Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.)
Today's bird? The brilliantly blue indigo bunting (the male that is, the female being dull brown), a small, thick-billed songbird found in the abandoned lands throughout most of the U.S, its preference being for oil fields and roadsides. This bird migrates at night, using the stars as its compass, wintering in weedy and neglected fields and beneath power-line right-of-ways south of the border, the Caribbean, and South America. Its population is dwindling slightly in the southeast but nowhere else. Solitary, socially monogamous birds.
Take care!
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