Rah Rah!

Word of the day : (no word today)

I know this was supposed to be a bi-weekly column, but sometimes it'll be a weekly one.

So a new week, a new Author Profile.

Evan S. Connell

Born: Kansas City, 1924

Career: He graduated from the University of Kansas with a B.A. in English in 1947 and later studied creative writing at Stanford and Columbia.  He was a pilot in the Air Force and then lived in Europe for a period in the early 1950s.  Most of his writing career he spent in San Francisco, but he now lives in Santa Fe.  He has never married.  Before he received some success in 1984 for his Son of the Morning Star, Connell worked as an interviewer in a S.F. unemployment office; he also founded a literary magazine, Contact.  He is somewhat reclusive - rumor is, he doesn't have a computer - and conducts few interviews.

Noted Books: The above-mentioned Son of the Morning Star, a daring, inventive biography on George Custer, and one of the Modern Library's 100 Best Nonfiction novels of the 20th century; Mr. Bridge (1958) and, a decade later, its companion piece, Mrs. Bridge (1969), poignant, short-chaptered accounts of a mannered, reserved, upper-class couple negotiating the changes of American life in the first half of the 20th century, Kansas City.

Style, Range, etc: Range is really the thing with Connell.  He isn't particularly prolific - nineteen novels, nonfiction bios, essay and short story collections, and books of book-lengthpoetry - in over 50 years, but he can seemingly do a little bit of everything.  His 2000 novel, Deus Lo Volt, was a novel of the Crusades.  His 1966 novel, The Diary of a Rapist, was a well-received, controversial novel about a man's descent into madness.  The Aztec Treasure House (2001) is a series of essays about humanity's search for treasures - with dips into anthropology, stories of the Anasazi, linguistics, etc.  He wrote a biography of Francisco Goya in 2004.  His latest work is 2008's collection of stories, Lost in Uttar Pradesh.     

Based on what I've read of his, he is a delicate, intelligent writer.  The American West is a common subject for him.

Books I'd Recommend By Him: Mr. Bridge and Mrs. Bridge, the latter in particular being one of my favorite books ever and one of the most underrated American novels ever written.  They are devastating, ironic, detailed, oblique and touching accounts of a particular, dying generation, a vanishing way of life.  They are extremely accessible, not difficult at all.  The style is unique - each book is divided into over 100 chapters - so that the novels read like, fleeting photos - almost journalistic accounts of the character's life.  (Bleh! James Patterson related on NPR once that these novels influenced his own style - 150+ chapters in a 300-page novel - more than any other).  I could read these novels once a year and never get tired of them; they are truly exhilarating.  I read Mr. Bridge and thought it was the greatest 'unsung' novel I had ever read.  Both works reveal Connell's subtle, stylish approach to characterization.   

The two novels were the basis of the 1990 film Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, starring Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman.  Newman was a Connell admirer and Woodward was nominated for a Best Actress Oscar for the role.

Son of the Morning Star was adapted into a popular, award-winning miniseries, starring Gary Cole, Patricia Arquette, and David Strathairn.

Books I Want to Read: The Connoiseur (1974), a man who becomes obsessed with pre-Columbian figurines, Son of the Morning Star, Francisco Goya, the hard-to-find Double Honeymoon (1976).

The author has no website, naturally.                 


It's a sporty time of year, isn't it?  We got the NFL Draft, the NBA playoffs, baseball wrapping up its first month, the Olympics hovering overhead...

That said, here are my 15 favorite sports movies... (I hope I'm not forgetting any here)...(and I'm not including documentaries)...

Bull Durham

Costner again, Field of Dreams

Hoosiers

The Wrestler

Win Win

The Fighter

Million Dollar Baby

Miracle

Secretariat

Tin Cup

Raging Bull

Bend it Like Beckham

White Men Can't Jump

A League of Their Own

For my last pick, I had a tough choice.  Without Limits, one of two films about ill-fated Oregon runner Steve Prefontaine?  The chess-prodigy drama Searching for Bobby Fischer?  The basketball underdog drama The Winning Season with Sam Rockwell?  Any of Paul Newman's pool dramas - The Hustler or The Color of Money?  Cool Runnings?  Caddyshack?  Rudy?

Let's go with Newman:

The Color of Money

Light Sunday

Word of the day : objurgation : a harsh rebuke

Well, I might have to go back and re-think some of my NBA playoff picks, in light of Derrick Rose's season-ending ACL tear, and Indiana's sleepwalking showing against a Dwight Howard-less Magic.

Book Review

Carl Hiaasen's lightning-paced, funny romp Star Island comes on like gangbusters.  Before the end of the first chapter, we're knee-deep in Hiaasen's satire.  We know what he is sending up, ridiculing -  scummy, amoral paparazzi; vacuous, no-talented pop artists; detestable, manipulative showbiz parents; soulless, conniving south Florida real estate folk; clueless, blissfully ill-equipped housing lenders.  Indeed, Hiaasen's entire world has gone wicked mad.  And if it's fun to read about, nothing cuts very deep, nothing sticks.

The plot basics: A highly-sexed, insipid Britney Spears-ish recording artist, Cherry Pie, is so often intoxicated and strung-out, that her greedy parents have hired a lookalike to pose as Cherry during the moments when Cherry is toxically indisposed.  This lookalike, Ann, is kidnapped by a corpulent paparazzo who mistakes Ann, of course, for Cherry.  And then...

Well, I could layout the plot shenanigans over the course of the next few hours, but why bother?  I will say that Hiaasen's characters are one-of-a-kind: I especially was fond of Cherry's new bodyguard - a severely pockmarked, 'six-foot-nine ex-con with a weed whacker surgically enhanced to his arm.  Skink, a character who has appeared before in Hiaasen's ouevre, returns - the one-eyed, alligator-eating ex-governor is still living deep in the Everglade's mangrove swamps, now stuffing sea urchins into shady developers' crotches.

Hiaasen almost never runs out of steam. but I think the reader just might.  It's all so silly and because almost every character is uniquely revolting, there's no one really to root for, nothing emotionally at stake.  Hiaasen's imagination is fertile, his narrative voice unique, but it all just becomes too much.

(***)

In honor of John Cusack's The Raven opening up this weekend, let's go ahead and list our (okay, my) favorite Cusack movies:

Hot Tub Time Machine

High Fidelity

Bullets Over Broadway

Runaway Jury

Say Anything

Let the Playoffs Begin

Word of the day : hendiadys : the expression of an idea by the use of usually two independent words connected by 'and' (as in 'nice and warm' or 'sound and fury')

Gabriel had his first ever vomit yesterday.  He's feeling better now, which is good news.  We think he ate something that didn't really agree with him (it's probably not a good idea to but yogurt from a Statesboro grocery store), combined with being overtired, dehydrated, maybe overly full.  He's recovered, though.

Julia posted an interesting piece on her blogsite:

http://arthistorymusings.tumblr.com/

And my the teams that I root for in the NFL - New England, Cincinnati, Jacksonville, San Francisco, Philadelphia - have all had good drafts.  Only Atlanta has been a comparative letdown - mainly because they haven't really had any high picks.

Andre Kertesz (#30)

Kertesz (1894-1984) had a remarkable career in three different countries.  In Hungary, where he was born, he joined the army and made a series of photographs that showed soldiers away from battlefield - in "unimportant" moments.  Making use of the revolutionary handheld camera, his images were fresh and unique.

In Paris in the twenties and thirties, he worked for a variety of magazines.  Of course, as we can imagine, he knew many artists in the city and photographed them: Brancusi, Calder, Chagall, Mondrian, Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.  He studied the people of the street, began to play around with light and shadow.  During this period, he was most well-known for his series of distorted nudes, for which he used three mirrors and an early zoom lens, experimenting with reflections.

 
He moved to America, where he more or less spent the rest of his life, where his popularity wasn't anything to write home about until he was re-discovered in the mid-60s.  From the early 50s on, he began photographing, from his apartment balcony, NYC's Washington Square Park with a telephoto lens.  He evokes an intimate sense of loneliness, ephemeral images of solitude.  

I think he might be one of my favorites of the photographers we've looked at so far.

Thanks:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/episodes/andre-kertesz/about-andre-kertesz/645/
http://www.berry-hill.com/exhibitions/050101/detail/kertesz.html 

A good article in Smithsonian about an upcoming Futurism exhibition in New York:

http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/art/2012/04/futurism-is-still-influential-despite-its-dark-side/

One of the leading 20th century Futurist artists was Italy's Carlo Carra, a radical who signed a Futurist manifesto in 1908.  By 1916, Carro, having been inspired by Italian Interventionism, Picasso, Cubism, and collage, had pretty much rejected Futurism.  In 1911, he created his masterpiece, The Funeral of Anarchist Galli. 

Galli was an Italian anarchist (duh) killed by the police during a 1904 strike.  The police, fearing a politically-demonstrative funeral, had the internment proceedings held in a square in front of the cemetery, rather than in the cemetery.  The anarchists were outraged and decided to bury Galli properly.  The police rioted and attacked the anarchists, nearly knocking the coffin down! 

Carra, an anarchist who attended the funeral, depicts the scene as a colorful, chaotic stampede.  There is something almost mechanical about the frenzied raid.  Violence and energy were important themes and ideas for Futurists, depicted here by Carra with bold, sweeping brushstrokes.  Red and black, the colors of anarchism, are utilized boldly, and, strikingly, so is the reddish brown of the workers, whose very skin hues seems to have been stained with the oxidized, burnished hue of an increasingly-industrialized Milan - workers colored by their jobs.

So, in essence, this a history painting.    

Thanks: http://ardfilmjournal.wordpress.com/2009/04/07/carlo-carras-funerali-dellanarchico-galli/
              http://raforum.info/spip.php?article893

It's Playoff Time... almost

Word of the day : unabashed : unapologetic ; undisguised; not disconcerted

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Book Review

 

Dennis Lehane's Mystic River is a scorching, gut-wrenching experience.  If you haven't seen the movie, I'll briefly summarize the plot: Three kids in 1975 Boston are approached one day by a couple of guys calling themselves cops; one of the boys, Dave, is taken away by these pedophiles for four days.  Cut to 2000: Two of the boys - legendary criminal-gone straight Jimmy, and Dave, meek, timid, haunted - still live in the neighborhood.  The other kid, Sean, works for State Homicide.  The murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie brings all three of them together, and before long Dave is the chief suspect.

There is so much so sorrow and power in Lehane's books, and this is probably the best novel he's written to date.  He knows Boston like the back of his hand, and the environs are depicted with clarity and ugly truth.  They mystery itself is a whopper, but what you're most likely to remember about this book is how honestly and nakedly Lehane carves his main characters, showing them warts and all; he's unafraid to make them unlikable, devious, hypocritical, ruthless, bewildering.  You know you're in the hands of a master when even the most throwaway of characters, the ones most authors wouldn't even bother giving a personality, stays with you, due to succinctly illuminating detail by an imaginative author.  At heart, the book is a love letter to Boston and its clannishness, and by the end, Lehane's story has run through all the great themes of literature - forgiveness, betrayal, guilt, love, loyalty.

(*****)

New Movies Opening This Weekend:

The Raven    Poor reviews for this film about Edgar Allan Poe's involvement in the hunt for a serial killer in 1849 Baltimore, the murders involving various means of torture and execution as featured in several of Poe's books.  John Cusack plays the famous author.  A dreary-looking picture, it co-stars Alice Eve, Michael Shannon, and Brendan Gleeson.

The Five-Year Engagement    Positive reviews for this one, though.  A romantic comedy starring the appealing team of Emily Blunt and Jason Segel as a couple forced to move from San Francisco to Ann Arbor when Blunt's character is forced to move to Michigan for doctoral studies work; Segel happily goes along, but becomes depressed when he can't get his career kick-started up in Wolverine country.  Co-written by Segel and Nicholas Stoller, and directed by Stoller - the lineup that brought us the winning Forgetting Sarah Marshall - the movie charts the couple's long, drawn-out pre-nuptial period.  Anything with Emily Blunt, at this point, is probably worth a look.


Safe    You wanted Jason Statham, you got him!  Here he is in what looks like a critically-approved, brainless knock-off of 1994's The Professional with Statham as an ex-cage fighter (?) who rescues an orphaned 12-year old Chinese girl being pursued by gangsters.  With reputedly witty, fast-paced direction from the guy who gave us Remember the Titans (uh, thanks?), the film... Forget it, I'm sold.

Bernie    Richard Linklater is one of my favorite working directors: Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, Dazed and Confused, School of Rock, Fast Food Nation.  So I'm always curious what he's up to, but this true-events inspired tale just looks odd.  Jack Black stars as an assistant funeral director and all-around swell community guy who begins a friendship with a needy, wealthy widow (Shirley MacLaine), who soon enough ends up dead, with Bernie as the main suspect.  Co-starring Matthew McConaughey, the film has a 74% rating (which is good), but even the critics who like it are baffled by the tone, the structure, the way the story's told.  Hmmm.

Born on this day in 1798, Eugene Delacroix was the most renowned of the Romantic painters.  His most iconic work, Liberty Leading the People, memorialized the 1830 July Revolution.  Less famous, but perhaps no less visually interesting, is the above work, shown in the Salon of 1827, The Death of Sardanapalus.

Delacroix took inspiration from an 1821 play by Lord Byron (Sardanapalus), which itself was based on other ancient sources, particularly the work of the Greek historian Diodorus (around 60-30 BC).  The story: Sardanaplus is the last king of Assyria.  He has failed in battle.  His city, his home, is being looted.  His concubines, his horses, and slaves are all being burned by rebellious enemy forces.  He takes it upon himself to destroy his own possessions before the marauders do.

Delacroix's women resemble those of Rubens or Correggio.  He distributes his colors well,  the reds and yellows leaping off the painting, making the center of the piece more vibrant, dynamic.  His brushstrokes are swift, tight.  Delacroix uses light to illuminate some of the horror, while other sections of the work seem to be draped in a hazy, sooty fog.  

It's a big, bright, vigorous, messy work, with action all over the place.  There really is no structure to it, no central stage of activity. - the bodies, really, are the stage.  The bed seems to be on a wave, floating almost.  Filled with lusty, turbulent energy, the picture reveals a world in flux, spatial, perhaps moral (for the king appears almost apathetic) dissociation.  Like many Romantic or Neoclassicist artists, Delacroix looked to the past for inspiration, trying to find ways to apply ancient struggles and inevitabilities to the present.  Critics found the work to be unfavorable, without order, too barbaric.    

If you want to see this painting, then please do so.  You'll just have to be happen to be at the Louvre.

For my information, thanks to:

http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/death-sardanapalus
http://www.artble.com/artists/eugene_delacroix/paintings/the_death_of_sardanapalus
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/great-works/great-works-the-death-of-sardanapalus-1827-eugegravene-delacroix-2015856.html

And finally, the NBA season ends tonight.  Here are my awards - that is, if I were a voter.

MVP: Kevin Durant, Oklahoma City Thunder
Coach of the Year: Gregg Popovich, San Antonio Spurs
Sixth Man : James Harden, Oklahoma City Thunder
Defensive Player of the Year : Tyson Chandler, New York Knicks
Most Improved Player : Andrea Bargnani, Toronto Raptors
Rookie of the Year : Kyrie Irving, Cleveland Cavaliers

Playoff (though they're not quite set in stone) predictions?

Eastern Conference, Round 1

(1) Chicago over (8) Philadelphia
(2) Miami over (7) New York
(3) Indiana over (6) Orlando
(5) Atlanta over (4) Boston

Western Conference, Round 1

(1) San Antonio over (8) Utah
(2) Oklahoma City over (7) Dallas
(3) L.A. Lakers over (6) Denver
(4) Memphis over (5) L.A. Clippers

Conference Semifinals

(1) Chicago over (5) Atlanta
(2) Miami over (3) Indiana

(2) Oklahoma City over (3) L.A. Lakers
(1) San Antonio over (4) Memphis

Conference Finals

(2) Miami over (1) Chicago
(2) Oklahoma City over (1) San Antonio

Finals

MIAMI HEAT over Oklahoma City Thunder, 4 games to 3.

Let's have a little fun today.  A time-out from all the esoteric, highbrow stuff usually discussed ad nauseum on here.

I present you 10 of My Favorite Things... Ten Times Over... That way, you can get to know be better, what I like.

10 Favorite Movies

- L.A. Confidential
- Unforgiven
- Crazy Heart
- Match Point
- Chinatown
- Only Angels Have Wings
- Rio Bravo
- Babe
- Sideways
- Psycho

10 Favorite Actors

- Jeff Bridges
- Gene Hackman
- Sean Penn
- Kevin Spacey
- Jack Nicholson
- Robert DuVall
- Robert Mitchum
- Bill Murray
- Cary Grant
- Tommy Lee Jones 
 

10 Favorite Actresses

- Meryl Streep
- Vanessa Redgrave
- Julianne Moore
- Annette Bening
- Cate Blanchett
- Kate Winslet
- Naomi Watts
- Jessica Lange
- Ingrid Bergman
- Charlize Theron 
  

  
10 Favorite Books

- Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry
- Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
- The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
- Empire Falls, Richard Russo
- The Ruins, Scott Smith
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
- True Grit, Charles Portis
- The Shadow of the Wind, Carlos Ruis Zafon
- The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
- The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith

10 Favorite Male Authors

- Philip Roth
- Richard Yates
- John Updike
- Graham Greene
- Richard Russo
- Larry McMurtry
- Ken Follett
- Dennis Lehane
- William Boyd
- Jeffrey Eugenides

10 Favorite Female Authors

- Ruth Rendell
- Patricia Highsmith
- Jhumpa Lahiri
- Alice Munro
- Carson McCullers
- Anne Tyler
- Jennifer Egan
- Willa Cather
- Agatha Christie
- Kate Morton

10 Favorite Artists

- Pablo Picasso
- Edouard Manet
- Edward Hopper
- Francisco Goya
- Peter Paul Rubens
- Mark Rothko
- Vincent Van Gogh
- Paul Cezanne
- Rembrandt Van Rijn
- Diego Velazquez

10 Favorite Music Groups

- The Band  
- The Bee Gees 
- Wilco 
- The Kinks
- Creedence Clearwater Revival
- ABBA
- Led Zeppelin
- My Morning Jacket
- The Rolling Stones
- Coldplay

10 Favorite Musical Artists

- Paul Simon
- Mary Wells
- Otis Redding
- Josh Rouse
- Elvis Presley
- Bob Dylan
- (tie) Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson
- Nick Lowe
- Bob Marley
- Neil Young

 10 Favorite Sports Teams

- L.A. Lakers
- New England Patriots
- Cincinnati Bengals
- Chicago Bulls
- Green Bay Packers
- Kentucky Wildcats
- North Carolina Tar Heels
- Philadelphia Eagles
- San Francisco 49ers
- Tampa Bay Buccaneers


 
This is as definitive as it gets, folks; of course, I'm sure there are people/teams/artists/films that might have slipped my mind, but that's how it goes.  Until tomorrow! 

Down Florida Way...

Word of the day : kowtow : to show obsequious deference, fawn ; to kneel and touch the forehead to the ground in token of homage, worship, or deep respect

Poison ivy, allergies, and a stye on my eyelid that will likely need to be lanced - Egads!  

So I've thought a new bi-weekly section for my blog.  Every other week, I will do an Author Profile of an author I have read and liked, giving you information on him or her, what books by the author that I recommend, facts about his or her life, etc.  Sound good?  Let's begin with...

Carl Hiaasen

 

Born: Plantation Florida, 1953

Early Career: Hiaasen attended the University of Florida and was hired soon after graduating by The Miami Herald, where he has been ever since.  In his tenure there, he has been a general assignment reporter, an investigative reporter, and, since 1985, arguably the paper's most famous weekly columnist, a position that allows him dig into and satirize everything Floridean.

Noted Books: He has written (or collaborated on) sixteen novels, written four young-adult novels, and four non-fiction books.
His more well-known, acclaimed adult novels: The Tourist Season (1986), Striptease (1993), Skinny Dip (2004), the young adult novel Hoot (2002).  Striptease and Hoot were made into movies.

Themes, Style, etc: Since his first non-collaborative novel, The Tourist Season, Hiassen's novels are essentially screwball, madcap farces, with over-the-top violence and viciousness, always set in Florida.  They're funny and fast-paced.  Because they're always set in the Sunshine State, there's a certain amount of preachiness in them, for the author is one of the most highly recognizable observers of what has happened to Florida over the last half-century.  He wittily (and snidely) comments on the destruction of the Everglades, the rampant tourism and Disneyification of it all, the polluters, the incessant corruption at all levels of government, etc.  He is a fine satirist, and his zany plots are like Elmore Leonard lite - if more fun.  One complaint, I guess, could be that if you've read one of his novels, you've read them all. 

Why You Should Read Him: Isn't it obvious why?  He's funny and his satire is easy-earned immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever been to Florida, especially Dade County and below.

Books I'd Recommend: Skinny Dip and Stormy Weather (1995), a romp featuring a bunch of outlandish characters, a breathtaking pace, and a devastated post Hurricane-Andrew Florida.
  
Books I Want to Read: Star Island (2010) and Hoot (2002)

Author's Website: http://edu.glogster.com/media/4/29/20/26/29202649.jpg 

Our next stop on the list of Photographers is the Zurich-born

Robert Frank (#29) 

I could give you a quick summary of Frank's career, but it almost all revolves around his landmark book of photography, one of the most important of the 20th century in the genre, The Americans.  If you're interested, here's an NPR story about it:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100688154

This book was so influential - and, as the article states, so hated by American photographers - that it has become a landmark in the genre.  With a trademark style - blurred, out-of-focus foregrounds, tilted horizons - and alienated, lonely images ( jukeboxes, gas stations, empty/endless highways) Frank was able to convey an outsider's view of a particularly iconic and telling moment in American history.

Ah, yes, and a Happy 108th would-be birthday to Willem de Kooning.  Above is a painting from his set of works from the 1950's, the notorious Woman. 

The Art of Fielding

Word of the day : malediction : curse, execration

Well, it's been a few days.  Hope all my thousands of readers are doing well.  What did we do this past weekend?  We went to Augusta, did some shopping, went to the library and a furniture store, tackled some yard work (and I got a few ropy strands of poison ivy to show for it!).  Julia did a lot of work on Sunday... and I watched a lot of basketball.  And I finished...

Book Review

I thought Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding was a shoo-in for at least a Runner-Up mention from the Pulitzer peeps, but I was wrong.  It's a lofty, ambitious, long, years-in-the-making debut that is also one of the more acclaimed books about baseball in a long while.

I've heard readers and reviewers say that the book isn't just about baseball, but it is, really.  There are five main characters here:

- Mike: a banged-up, multi-sport athlete, the catcher on Westish College's long-underachieving baseball team, a wise, pill-popping, seen-it-all scholar rejected from all the law schools he applied to 

- Henry: a wunderkind shortstop from North Dakota plucked from post-high school obscurity by Henry and trained and trained and trained until he's one of the finest shortstops in the country

- Guert Affenlight: the president of Westish, a man responsible for bringing to light a historical anecdote about the college involving Herman Melville; a long-time bachelor, he gets romantically involved with one of the students

- Pella: Guert's daughter, who arrives on campus ready to start anew, despite still being married to a stuffy man she ran away with when she was in high school

- Owen: Henry's roommate, a dreamy bookworm who becomes entangled in a risky relationship with Guert.
 
Harbach knows this world inside and out - not only the details of college life - the cafeteria food, the messy dorm rooms, the off-campus dives, and his thoroughness and knowledge of what goes on during the baseball season is breathtaking.  Harbach makes the locker rooms, busses, hot tubs, sunflower seeds, cold morning laps up the stadium's steps tangible, well-etched, indelible.

The story takes many twists and turns, and even if, at times, you grow frustrated by the characters, there's never a moment when they feel static or flat.  However, I found Henry to be too inscrutable for most of the book, and Guert's behavior is too naive.   

The book is funny, and, yes, there is a Big Game at the end.  Harback's prose style is smart, accessible, and he achieves the not-insubstantial task of making baseball not the boring sport it is for people like me.   And to those who love the sport, this book should only make you admire it even more.  

(****1/2)

Other thoughts from the weekend:

- Okay, next year, I think I need to start putting money on my Fantasy Sports leagues.  Last fall, I got in 6 Fantasy Football leagues and won 3 of them, coming in 4th in the other three (all leagues had ten teams).  This winter-spring, I entered a Fantasy NBA league, thinking my team was a little above average (Kevin Durant being my one surefire stat-stuffer); besides, my bench stunk and there were 20 teams in the league.  Well... There are only four games left in the league's playoffs and my team is int he finals and has a big advantage over my opponent.  I think I'm going to win this league too!  (If only it meant something.)

- There are few movie experiences as satisfying as an an action movie, be it studio warhorse (Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol) or B-movie no-brain-a-thon (Colombiana) done with verve, style, commitment.  
              
- Fact: Even good TV shows can grow so wearisome, especially one whose end, whose should-be narrative closure, is foreseeable in the distance.  I'm looking at you, Revenge.  Unless, of course, the writers want to drag the thing out in pointless episodes and seasons, which makes ratings sense, I guess, but jettisons believability.  It's kind of boring - not turn-it-off boring, just the kind of boring that reminds viewers that its better, soapier days are behind it.   

- I'm a big fan of writer Dennis Lehane, but the reason I'm just now reading his modern suspense classic Mystic River is probably because I found Clint Eastwood's heavily-laureled 2003 film so comprehensive.  And the book is great, but I defy anyone reading the book after viewing the movie to not visualize Sean Penn in the role of Jimmy Marcus.  Is this the greatest dramatic performance of the century so far?  It gets my vote.

Today in History:

James Buchanan, the 15th U.S. President, was born today in 1791

Okay, you're at a cocktail party and some geeky, garrulous know-it-all comes up to you and starts talking your ear off.  And he starts in on telling you, in his know-it-all way, nine things he knows about the 14th President of the United States, Franklin Pierce.  Well, haha, here's your chance.  Get all up in this walking encyclopedia's face and tell him that you can do him one better.  Here's what kind of knowledge you can drop about the Buch:

1) He was a Democrat with 36 years in public office before being elected President in 1856, serving as various foreign ministers (to Russia, to England) for various presidents.  

2) He was out of touch on the slavery issue.  He tried to appeal to the southern, pro-slavery cause, thinking that the states could decide whether or not to abolish slavery for themselves, leaving the federal government out of it.  To the North, this was a no-no.

3) The granting of statehood to Kansas really stuck a nail in Old Buchanan's coffin.  He endorsed a pro-slavery constitution for Kansas.  This belief riled Northerners and split the Democratic Party.

4) In 1860, the Democrats were defeated by the Republican Abraham Lincoln.  It didn't help matters that Buchanan didn't even support the Democratic candidate, Stephen Douglas.  

5) The last president born in the 18th century, Buchanan studied law and set up practice in rural Pennsylvania.  He married Ann Marie Coleman, the daughter of a very wealthy man who made his money in iron.

6) The father accused Buchanan of being a gold digger!  Rumors began that Buchanan was seeing another woman.  Ann's spirits were crushed.  Soon after, she die, possibly of suicide.  Her family cast out James, refused to allow him to attend the funeral services.

7) Buchanan never married again.  He was, and is, the only bachelor U.S. president.

8) It was rumored, though never verified, that he was gay.  For a period during his days in Congress, he lived with a North Carolina senator (and future Pierce VP), the two sharing lodgings in Washington and being referred to, by friends, as Miss Nancy and Aunt Fancy.

9) By refusing to take a side on the slavery issue, trying to appease both the North and the South, his presidency was seen as a failure, and Buchanan, rightly or wrongly, is viewed as one of the reasons for the Civil War.  He was too passive when the southern states began to secede.

10) He had a twitchy eye.

Thanks: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/james-buchanan-is-born
              http://millercenter.org/president/buchanan/essays/biography/1

Here's a cool website I found that lets you track your favorite authors and gives you all sorts on info about book signings and events:

http://www.harpercollins.com/members/authortracker/

Politi-Fim

Word of the day : bedizen : to dress or adorn gaudily

Yep, we're headed back to Augusta tomorrow for a full-day of shopping, mixed in with a little Five Guys, this bakery that was featured on the Food Channel, and, of course, 2nd and Charles - the main reason for the northern excursion.

Sad to hear about the death of Dick Clark yesterday.  Too bad it wasn't Joan Rivers instead.

Julia and I finished up the first, shocking season of Damages yesterday, and I started to wonder.  Is it just me, is it just the shows I watch, or are almost all the best shows out there right now those that feature despicable lead characters?

There's Dexter - charming, funny, but a serial killer. 
There's Don Draper on Mad Men - an adulterer.  Again, charming - and charismatic.
There's Patty Hewes on Damages - grotesque, vile.
Nurse Jackie?  Nuts.  Another adulterer.  Pill-popper too.
Breaking Bad's Walter White?  Drug dealer.
Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David?  Well...

HBO must have started this trend with The Sopranos.

Photographer #28 on our way to 100...

Stephen Shore

Shore (b. 1948), born in New York city and a resident of upstate New York, was self-taught.  Early on, he was influenced by Walker Evans and, more so, Andy Warhol; he hung around Warhol's Factory in the mid-60s.  Shore is one of the defining figures in the new color photography movement, a movement that started, critics argue, around 1970 but really hits its stride in the early 1980s.  The movement, to be extremely succinct, reductive, and overly simplistic, showed that color photographs of the everyday, of the banal, could be works of art.

Shore's work is firmly in this vein, showing commonplace subject matter - typically found on his long road trips across America - in sparsely-populated places.  His formal sense, his serene compositions are widely acclaimed.  His work is distinct too: dusty Main Street movie theaters, gas stations, pancakes.  His work is deadpan but not distractingly ironic.  These aren't postcard pictures, exactly.  Rather they ask us questions: What is natural?  What does natural look like? 

Thanks: http://gregcookland.com/journal/2011/02/24/stephen-shore-speaks/

Let's look at what movies are opening tomorrow:

The Lucky One    You gotta love Nicholas Sparks.  He's a terrible writer, putridly sentimental and hackneyed, continually recycling the same gunk, but he's one of the best-selling, most wide-read authors in the world.  And his books make, at best, pleasing movies; at worst, they're harmless.  His newest book to hit the big screen is one that probably had studio heads salivating: "Give me Sparks and give me... Zac Efron!"  Do you really need to know what it's about?  It ain't gonna be The Notebook, folks! Although I'm curious to see Efron segueing into adult roles.

Darling Companion    Writer-director Lawrence Kasdan was kind of a big deal in the 1980s.  He co-wrote the screenplays for Raiders of the Lost Ark, a few of the Star Wars movies, and wrote and directed Body Heat, The Big Chill, The Accidental Tourist, and Grand Canyon.  The fact that this is only the third film he's directed since 1995's French Kiss, combined with the fact of an Oscar-kissed cast (Diane Keaton, Kasdan regular Kevin Kline, Dianne Wiest, Richard Jenkins, Sam Shepard), a cute story about a man who loses the family dog, some lovely Utah settings... Well, I thought it would be a good one.  But SURPRISE!  A 0% rating on RottenTomatoes.  Critics hate it!  "Cloying," "annoying," "insufferable characters."  Yikes.

Think Like a Man    Comedian Steve Harvey wrote a humorous, best-selling nonfiction book a few years ago, Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, and now it's been made into a film.  Four men date ladies who buy Harvey's book and then take his advice to heart!  The cast includes Taraji P. Henson, Regina Hall, Romany Malco, Gabrielle Union, R&B beater Chris Brown, and some NBA stars.  I'll pass, but the reviews aren't too bad.

Chimpanzee    Disney's latest Earth Day G-rated adventure follows Oscar, a baby chimp, as she makes her way through the African forest.  Review-proof, really, these films; impossible to dislike.  As a less than 80-minute long documentary, it's supposed to be impressive.

To the Arctic    Another Disney documentary, this one a 40-minute, Meryl Streep-narrated portrait of a mother polar bear and her two twin cubs as they try to navigate the Arctic wilderness.

Marley    From director Kevin Macdonald (State of Play, The Last King of Scotland) we get a two-and-a-half hour documentary about the late, great Jamaican reggae star, the Rastafarain whose bearded locks and face fuzz still, I'm sure, grace the poster of many a dorm room.  Well-reviewed, comprehensive, and full of great, great music.


We are surely in the political season (for worse or for worse) maybe not the full flush of it, but what better time then to recommend some of the best political, non-documentary films around?  Here are ten of my picks, all films dealing in some way with American politics and none of them having anything to do with Oliver Stone:

- Milk (2008) : I'm not going to give in to easy sentiment and sat Sean Penn is a jerk.  Maybe he is, maybe he isn't.  What he is is an astonishing actor.  

- All the President's Men (1976) : Crackling, exciting, full of good dialogue with wonderful casting in every role, including Jason Robards as Ben Bradlee.

- The Contender (2000) : Sure, it's lurid, and the Republicans are roasted in this spin on "my personal laundry is none of your business," but it's a fun film, with chewy, enjoyable turns by Jeff Bridges and Gary Oldman, and a persuasive, dignified one by Joan Allen.

- Nothing But the Truth (2008) : From the writer-director of The Contender, Rod Lurie, comes this enthralling, sinuously compellingly veiled account of the Judith Miller scandal.

- Frost/Nixon (2008) : Ron Howard did a fine job with the film version of the Tony winner about the dialogue/debates of Nixon (a towering Frank Langella) and British TV personality David Frost (a winning Michael Sheen).

- Good Night and Good Luck (2005) : A tour-de-force from writer-producer-director George Clooney about Edward R. Murrow's conflict with Joseph McCarthy.

- Primary Colors (1998) : John Travolta as Bill Clinton, Emma Thompson as Hillary, fine, fine, fine support from Kathy Bates, Billy Bob Thornton, and Larry Hagman, sturdily directed by Mike Nichols.
 - The Manchurian Candidate (1962) : I have mentioned this one a few times in the last couple weeks.
 - The Last Supper (1995) : Low-rent fun, jokey and funny - not a classic, but forgettable, ripe, B-movie nastiness.  A bunch of liberal grad students (including Cameron Diaz and Courtney B. Vance) invite their right-wing friends over, one by one, and murder them.

- Citizen Ruth (1996) : Long before gifted writer-director Alexander Payne made great films like Sideways, About Schmidt, and The Descendants, he made this funny, crazily energetic comedy about a wayward, confused young woman (a brilliant Laura Dern) in the middle of the abortion wars.  Both sides, Payne says, are prone to rampant nuttiness.

150 years ago today, the eternally-great Austrian Art Nouveau painter Gustav Klimt was born near Vienna.  We've all seen a Klimt sometime in our life - those glittery, gold leaf paintings like The Kiss.  Let's take a brief look at his 1916 oil painting Death and Life, held in a private collection.

   
This is arguably one of Klimt's most ambiguous works, allowing for expansive interpretation.  I think how you view it tells it whether you lean more towards a glass-half-full view of life or glass-half-empty outlook.  For me, it's a little bit of both.  I think Klimt is showing that death is always present, always hovering, a real thing.  But another way of interpreting it is that life can be lived fully, from generation to generation, without fear, keeping death (or depression or worry or hypochondria) at bay.  Make your own inferences.