Some great basketball games yesterday! I'm looking forward to the Kentucky-Florida and OSU-Michigan State rematch today. We didn't go to Savannah yesterday because of the ominous, rainy weather, so we'll go tomorrow when Gabriel gets out of school. I'm looking forward to going to the Book Lady and getting Five Guys too.
If I could read Norwegian mysteries the rest of my life, I would be content. As an example of the pleasures they provide, I submit to you Jussi Adler-Olsen's remarkable The Keeper of Lost Causes, which, either fortunately or unfortunately, is of course compared, for readers' sake, to Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. For me, it easily holds its own; it's just as exciting. There is, to be expected, some sentences and sentiments expressed oddly in translation, but the story is thrilling as hell.
Carl Morck, a barely-tolerated, unliked member of the Danish police, has been demoted to Department Q - cold cases. He's a character readers of the genre are long familiar with: dour, surly, accompanied by a messy personal life, haunted, a bit of a loose cannon. He finds a case that intrigues him: A beautiful, strong-willed female member of the Democratic Party, whom mysteriously vanished five years earlier.
She's still alive. But she wishes she were dead. It's agonizing to learn about the state she has been kept in by her captors. Carl and his lone assistant, the odd but iron-willed Syrian Assad, delve into the case and find lying politicians, a mute mental patient, a long-ago car crash that destroyed two families, and a farmhouse with some odd camera monitors lying around.
The suspense is beautifully maintained, almost unbearable by the end. The plotting isn't too convoluted, although I certainly thought it might be after the first few pages; it's actually quite accessible. As par for these books, the barrage of unfamiliar street names and regions can be intimidating, but plow through it. My nerves were shot by the end. And the ending is indeed perfect too - sad, troubling, but inevitable.
(*****) out of 5
The Double is the kind of film passes from your mind the morning after seeing it. Richard Gere, still in the midst of a late-period flourishing, shows how well he has aged and he's just right for the role of a CIA agent who has spent his career tracking down an elusive Russian assassin known as Cassius. Topher Grace, not bad if kinda miscast, is the FBI agent working with Gere. When a politician is murdered, all signs point to Cassius's handiwork. Is he still alive? If you've seen the trailer, you know that it is confirmed that Gere's character is Cassius! But we find that out a half hour in, which still leaves another hour for shoot-outs and gamesmanship and a fairly Bigger Twist. It's all reasonably entertaining - if you ignore all the questions skidding around in your brain that start with Okay, so why is he... and But why would he...
Photographer (#5) on our list.
Guy Bourdin
The Paris-born Bourdin (1928-1991) was a very stylish fashion photographer whose early career was influenced by his surrealist mentor Man Ray. After a stint in the French Air Force, Bourdin returned to Paris and began a provocative career for French Vogue. Fashion photography was fairly formulaic in the mid-50s - models traditionally posed, in front of traditional backgrounds (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe). Bourdin went against the grain by having his models in front of places like butcher shops, etc.
In 1960, Bourdin met and forged a working relationship with Roland Jourdan, the head at Charles Jourdan Shoes. Bourdin revolutionized and altered the course of fashion photography at this time. He photographed the shoes, of course, but his work, which was more about the image and not the product (the shoes). Bourdin began concocting creating strange narratives around the shoes.
His leeway increased (shoe sales flourished) and he began getting stranger, more sexual, perverse, fetishistic, abstract, violent, rife with gender-power dynamics. He began to do up to ten pages per issue of French Vogue, not all of which were photos advertising the shoes. His red-headed models were as vampires, his colors are spectacularly bright. He began to film his photographing sessions.
Feminists hated him - they hated his sexist, oppressive images. He was, by common regard, a bastard to women and, specifically, his models. Many of the women in his life were cruelly, almost sadistically mistreated by him, depressed.
So why bother with him? Well, he brought the idea of narrative to photography, something that we now accept as a given. He worked alongside Helmut Newton (#3 on our list) at French Vogue.
(Thanks to http://www.utata.org/salon/37437.php for info on Bourdin!)
- In what will be last day of reading David McCullough's The Greater Journey, here is one more fine tidbit brought to my attention from the author. Fifty highly respected, important figures in French art signed a petition urging that the monstrosity that was (in their eyes) the Eiffel Tower not be allowed to loom hideously over their great, eternal city of art and architecture. They included: Emile Zola, Alexandre Dumas, writer Guy de Maupassant, Charles Garnier (architect of the Paris Opera), painter Ernest Meissonier (Classicist painter famous for his portraits of Napoleon III), and composer Charles Gounod (creator of the opera Faust).
And by the way, did you know that Charles Eiffel designed the interior wrought-iron skeleton that was the framework for this:
What a guy!
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