Wish I could be in London now

Word of the day : spoonerism : a transposition of usually initial sounds of two or more words  (ex:
                                                   "sighing flossers" for "flying saucers") 

I won't be updating as much the next two weeks because I'm really into the Olympics and will be trying to find broadcasts of my new favorite sport - handball!

Gabriel starts school Wednesday.  Today, the whole family went to an open house at the new school and we all were real impressed.  

Born today: 
Henry Moore (1898-1986) 

Moore was an English sculptor and artist, best known for his abstract bronze sculptures.  He was born in Yorkshire, the son of a collier.  He fought in World War I and attended the Royal College of Art afterwards.  In the mid-1920s, he traveled in Italy and France, studying the masters (Michelangelo), but also, perhaps more importantly, primitive art, such as the pre-Colombian sculpture, the Chac Mool (below). 

By the end of the decade, he was teaching at Royal College of Art and getting his first commissions.  In the 1930s, he was associated with, briefly, surrealism, and the generally informal modern art movement led by Pablo Picasso. 

During the 1940s, he was one of his country's leading artists, becoming a patriotic war artist; after the war, his works were full of humanism.  For the rest of his life, he continually engaged with large-scale public sculpture.  He is best known today as a radical innovator of the form, with an enduring interest in the reclining figure.

"Knife Edge Two Piece" is a memorable Moore work - a bronze sculpture (1962-1965) that stands right outside Parliament.

*

Movie Review  

Flowers of War (2011)
Directed by Yimou Zhang
Starring: Christian Bale
***1/2

I can't praise this historical drama highly enough.  Though Zhang is a well-known, outstanding filmmaker (Hero, Curse of the Golden Flower, Raise the Red Lantern), the film flew under the radar and I knew little about it going in, despite the presence of Bale. 

It's a moving, emotive, sometimes violent, florid drama about the 1937 Japanese invasion of Nanking.  Fearing for their lives (for the invaders, of course, rape most of the left-behind Chinese women), a group of Chinese courtesans seeks shelter in a government-protected church occupied by abandoned Chinese convent girl students and a Western mortician (Bale).  Of course, social clashes occur between the very different girls, but eventually they must look out for each other when the Japanese come knocking and demanding. 

The material has a strong emotional pull to it, and the filmmakers wisely pull no punches in showing us the shocking brutality of the time and place; this is not a movie for the squeamish.  The filmmaking is showy without being distracting, and the characters are compelling enough for us to get invested in them; by the end, we're fully, tensely absorbed in their plights.  There's more to Bale's character than meets the eye, and the actor acutely portrays his character's complete turnabout from louche apathy to involved, selfless determination. 

Good stuff.  And reputedly the biggest-budgeted Chinese film in history - and a huge smash in the country.   

* 

An entry for the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time: 

Christian Bale
as Dicky Eklund in The Fighter (2010)

Bale won his Oscar for his riveting, can't-take-your-eyes-off-him performance as the real-life brother of boxer "Irish" Micky Ward.  Bale acts up a storm here, almost going over-the-top, but he invests the part with so much heart and soul that it doesn't matter.  Displaying mesmerizing technique, Bale lost a ton of weight for the role (as he did for 2005's The Machinist) and scurries around like he has ants in his pants.  A crack addict who won't admit how disillusioned he is, he has a thin, attenuated jumpiness, haunted eyes.  He babbles incessantly.  But underneath the scuzzy facade, Bale shows us Dicky's tenacity and resilience.  He even turns out to be a pretty good brother too. 




Images: 

http://www.sweetmedicineshoppe.com/ProductImages/sacredimages/statues/ChacMool.jpg

http://www.kew.org/henry-moore/explore/slideshows/sculpture12/sculpture12-04.jpg

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/2011/12/baleflower_a.jpg

http://0.tqn.com/d/movies/1/0/H/P/W/fighter-christian-bale-photo2.jpg



Information: 

http://www.biographyonline.net/artists/henry-moore.html

Sweating in the south...

Word of the day : plage : the beach of a seaside resort
                                       : a bright region on the sun caused by the light emitted from clouds of     
                                         calcium and hydrogen and often associated with a sunspot

HOT!  HOT!  HOT!  Merciless heat, and I'm staying out of it.  No walk for Daisy today.  Gabriel has speech therapy and Julia has to meet with some colleagues today.

A lot of famous people were born today: George Bernard Shaw, Carl Jung, Aldous Huxley, Robert Graves, Stanley Kubrick, Mozart, Mick Jagger, Kevin Spacey, Sandra Bullock.  (There will be no profile today.)

*

New Movies Opening This Weekend:

The Watch    The release date of this sci-fi comedy was pushed back due to the Trayvon Martin, but it sounds too goofy to really offend anyone with sensibilities.  It wasn't screened for most critics, which is surprising for a film with stars who are genuine box-office gold: Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill.  Filmed in and around Atlanta, the film is about four suburban guys who get together to form a sort of neighborhood watch group, only to discover that their 'burb is being infiltrated by aliens.  
Verdict: Mildly Interested 

Killer Joe    An NC-17er!  Director William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection) brings to the screen another Tracy Letts play (after 2006's Bug) and this one is earning some good reviews, especially for Matthew McConaughey's turn as a genteel hit man.  Emile Hirsch stars as a drug dealer whose stash is stolen by his rotten mother (Gina Gershon), forcing him to get it back.  Thomas Haden Church and Juno Temple co-star.  Everyone is rotten and amoral, and the rating is due to graphic violence, sexuality, and brutality.  It will be interesting to see if McConaughey gets an Oscar nod for his work.
Verdict: Mildly Interested

Step Up Revolution   What else do you need to know?  It's the fourth entry in the Step-Up series.  Fun movies, but if you've seen one you've seen them all.
Verdict: Not Interested  

Ruby Sparks   Paul Dano, not the most charismatic of performers, and his real-life girlfriend Zoe Kazan (who wrote the script) star in this quirky romantic comedy from the directors of Little Miss Sunshine.  Dano is a young writer who has come down with a case of the Block.  He creates a female character (Kazan) who soon enough comes to life!  Good reviews, though it's said to create only mild sparks.  Co-stars Annette Bening (in a tiny role), Elliott Gould, Steve Coogan, Antonio Banderas (blink and you'll miss him!), and Chris Messina. 
Verdict: Not Interested 

*

Today's promised work of art by yesterday's birthday boy Thomas Eakins? 

Max Schmitt in a Single Skull
1871
oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 

Eakins, arguably the greatest portrait painter to come out of America in the nineteenth century, studied in Europe and then returned to the states in 1870.  Almost immediately, he began painting rowing scenes.  Schmitt, a champion oarsman and boyhood friend of Eakins, is in a skull on Philadelphia's Schuylkill River.  Eakins himself, rowing away, is in the distant boat.  For one of the first times in his career, Eakins captures outdoor motion, but here each figure seems temporarily paused, as if in mid-motion.  The details are clear and bright.  It's a big, luminescent example of American Realism.    

* 

Speaking of Matthew McConaughey.  He definitely deserves a spot in my list of the 500 Greatest Performances (English-language) of All Time?  For what?  Well...

 
Matthew McConaughey
as Mick Haller in The Lincoln Lawyer (2011) 

McConaughey continues to grow and grow as an actor.  Here he's at his slick, rhythmic best, giving a jazzy, infectious performance as a slick criminal defense lawyer taking on the case of a pampered rich boy (Ryan Phillippe, chilling) accused of beating and raping a prostitute senseless.  Just watching McConaughey walk, you know how in character he is.  The actor makes Haller flawed, smart, a little misguided, strong, certain, cunning.  I frankly couldn't see any other actor in this role and doing it with so much sexy verve and charisma.  The only reason this film and performance wasn't recognized at last year's Oscars was because of it's early release date (March) and, I guess, because voters saw it as a dime-a-dozen genre pic.  I've seen the film three times now and I'll probably watch it again soon. 


Images: 

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Max_Schmitt_in_a_Single_Scull.jpg

http://www.cinemablend.com/images/news_img/22178/the_lincoln_lawyer_22178.jpg

http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/dam/assets/120509013840-killer-joe-story-top.jpg


Information: 

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/34.92

 

In which I name the Greatest Living Rock and Roll Band...

Word of the day : yawp : to make a raucous noise, squawk
                                       : clamor, complain

Humpety-hump hump, everybody.  Are we all getting excited for the Olympics?  I know I am.  For me, it's something to do here in the dog days of a Statesboro summer, other than going to the pool. 

Born today:
Josephine Tey (1896-1952)

Tey was one of the great female mystery writers - really, of either gender - of the 20th century, her name commonly bandied about with Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and others.  But Tey stood out on her own.  Her 1951 novel, The Daughter of Time, was voted in 1990 by the British Crime Writers Association as the greatest mystery of the century. 

Tey was actually a pseudonym.  Elizabeth Mackintosh was born in Inverness, Scotland.  Her life, about which little is known compared to other writers (Tey was fiercely private, avoiding interviews, photographs, and the press at large), seemed pretty normal.  She was educated at Inverness, then at a physical training college in Birmingham.  During WWI, she taught fitness classes for factory workers.  She also taught at various schools and worked as a nurse in a convalescent home. 

Her first novel, Man in the Queue, came out in 1929, the culmination of a lifelong love of writing; it was reputedly written in two weeks for a contest.  It was published under a pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, a name she preferred to go by in public and private.  For the rest of her literary career, she would go by the pseudonym of Tey.  It was this novel that introduced her Inspector Alan Grant, a gentleman police officer; he would appear in four more of her novels. 

1948's The Franchise Affair, about two women accused of kidnapping and beating a teenage war orphan, is probably her second best-known novel.  The 1949 crime novel Brat Farrar, NPR book reviewer (and Book Lust author) Nancy Pearl's all-time favorite mystery, is about a young man posing as the heir to a fortune.  It is The Daughter of Time, still on high school reading lists, that will go down as Tey's most popular book and undisputed masterpiece, an inquisitive puzzler that features Grant, bed-ridden in the hospital, trying to plunge through the history books and figure out what exactly did happen with Richard III and the Princes in the Tower. 

Tey, who passed away from liver cancer in 1952, left her entire estate to National Trust of England.  She had many friends in the theater (she wrote plays under a third pseudonym!), enjoyed fishing, horse racing, and the cinema. 

* 

I'm sad today.  Yesterday I finished reading The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth entry in Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley series.  I've now read all five books.  It's a great series, and although the fourth book is the weakest of the five, I still really enjoyed it.  It features Tom taking in a teenage American boy who has fled from his Maine home after killing his wealthy father and is, Tom fears, potential prey for kidnappers.  Soon enough, he is indeed kidnapped in Berlin and Tom has to find a way to get him back.  The book goes on a bit long, considering how abruptly it ends, but Highsmith lets loose in this novel in a way she doesn't - admirably - in the rest of the series, with Tom even dressing in drag at one point to meet with the killers at a gay disco!  I'm making my way through the Highsmith oeuvre, but it's somewhat a solemn affair knowing I'll read these Ripley novels for the first time ever again.  Why in the world isn't Highsmith adapted more for the screen?    

*

In the 2012 comedy Wanderlust, everyone in the cast gets his or her licks: Ken Marino, Kathryn Hahn, Malin Akerman, Alan Alda, Lauren Ambrose, Michaela Watkins, Kerri Kenney, and, of course, Justin Theroux.  Even Jennifer Aniston, in a relatively straight role, is funny too, but lord of all is Paul Rudd, who just might be the funniest actor in America.  As a man who loses his job in New York City and, on his way to his obnoxious brother's in Atlanta, ends up waylaid in a commune in north Georgia, where nudity is okay, free love is better, and goofiness is the order of the day, Rudd is flat-out hilarious.  He has two scenes, in which he seems to be just going off on an improvisational whimsy, that had Julia and I in stitches, much as he did in I Love You, Man.  I wasn't expecting much from this comedy (from director David Wain, co-writing with Marino) but it had me laughing nearly as often as their previous outing, Role Models, did.
So the question is... Has Rudd been in every great comedy of the last seven or eight years?  Well,let's see:  Anchorman, check.  The 40-Year Old Virgin, check.  Knocked Up, check.  I Love You, Man, check.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall, check. 

*

No painting today (although it is Thomas Eakins' birthday - I'll have to post something by him tomorrow) but I will plow on in in my list of the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time.  How about it, guys?  Have we enjoyed this list so far?  I hope so.

Gary Busey
as Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly Story (1978) 

Though he has long since become an eerie, possibly self-aware reality-TV joke and was a decade too old for the role, Busey (in an Oscar nominated turn) is electrifying as the ill-fated early rock and roller.  He lost over thirty pounds for the role and, most impressive, did all his own singing!  Busey accurately captures the nasally, hiccupy sound of Holly, and his energy is infectious.  He is so immersed in the character, it's astonishing.  It's a good movie, with a one-of-a-kind lead performance.  Sadly, it would be one of Busey's first and last quality parts, before his career (say, after 1993's The Firm) would turn into a travesty.  He was talented, often typecast (as weird, mouth-breathing creeps), and has probably appeared in more direct-to-dvd crap than any five or six bad actors you can round up has.  A shame. 


* 

If the formula for Greatest Rock and Roll Band is something like this -

(# of great albums x 2) + (# of good songs) + (# of years of fertile longevity) + (peer recognition) + (multi-generational appeal) / (# of bad songs) + (media saturation + played-out songs + over familiarity) + (dated-ness)

- Then one could make an argument that Los Lobos would be a legitimate contender for Greatest Rock Band of the last 30 years.

Why not?  I've never hears a bad song from them.  Their music mixes... well, take your pick: soul, blues, swing, rock and roll, Mexican cumbia and boleros, R&B, and country.  They have a familiar sound that you never get tired of.  They've had a few "hits" (most notably, a cover of "La Bamba" for the 1987 biopic of Richie Valens) but have largely flew under the pop radar since their first album in 1976.

You want great albums?  Sure, I'll give you them.  1984's How Will the Wolf Survive?, their major label debut, features incredible guitar playing, a lot of Mexican roots and terrific songwriting, and superb songs: "Don't Worry Baby," "I Got Loaded," and "A Matter of Time."  1992's Kiko, their ninth album, is about as good as it gets: "Dream in Blue," "Saint Behind the Glass," "That Train Don't Stop Here." 

Their reputation as a great live band is probably justified, but David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas are incredible guitar players and would probably sound so in any setting.  What's more, four of their original members, are still in the band, with the fifth member (Steve Berlin) joining them in 1984 and staying with them today... 

Which means they're consistent.  They don't have a "Gimme Shelter" or a "Comfortably Numb" and nothing that's ever gotten any substantial play on commercial radio, but you're talking about versatility, you're talking about these guys.  When an album thirty-three years into your career (2010's Tin Can Trust) shows no sign of creative drop-off, you know you're doing something right.

So, Los Lobos, I salute you.

    




Images: 

http://d.yimg.com/ec/image/v1/release/24020019;encoding=jpg;size=300;fallback=defaultImage

http://static.gigwise.com/gallery/4323115_buddyhollystory.jpg

http://josephinetey.homestead.com/Josephine_Tey_April_7_1934.jpg

http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Film/Pix/pictures/2012/2/29/1330539139692/Wanderlust-007.jpg



Information: 

http://josephinetey.net/Index.html

Olympics around the bend

Word of the day : welkin : the vault of the sky, firmament 
                                         : heaven
                                         : the upper atmosphere

Top of the week, readers.  On the agenda today?  The pool.  And job applications.


Born today:
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

The most famous writer of American noir, Chandler was born in Chicago but moved with his divorced mother to England at the age of seven.  He studied international law in France and Germany but returned to Britain with aspirations of the literary life.  Early ventures included loads of book reviews and rotten poetry.  He then returned to America, worked an array of odd jobs, and later joined the Canadian Army during WWI and saw action along the front in France.  After his discharge, he ended up in L.A., married a woman almost twenty years his senior, and worked his way up the ladder of an oil syndicate.

He was a bit of a scoundrel, engaging in heavy drinking and affairs.  He soon started writing for pulp magazines.  His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939.  The novel, made into a famous, if impenetrable 1946 film with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, introduced Chandler's greatest character : private eye Philip Marlowe, a hard-bitten, wisecracking, world-weary, sharp-as-tacks private dick investigating the labyrinth of rot of late mid-century Southern California.

He wrote six more Marlowe books - including Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953), all of which were adapted for the screen.  Chandler also tried his hand in Hollywood, garnering Oscar nominations for his sterling adaptation of James M.Cain's (a a peer) Double Indemnity and his original script The Blue Dahlia, a noir with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake.

Despite a relatively small literary output, Chandler was considered - and is seen today by critics and readers - as one of the masters of the genre.  He wrote fast-moving, complicated plots, imbuing them with sadness, sensationally witty, hard-shelled dialogue, lawlessness and dignity.  His L.A. was a bleak, rotting mess, with Marlowe wading through it like a knight searching for honor.  The author influenced at least one generation of writers - from Ross Macdonald to Michael Connelly, from Walter Mosley to Robert Parker.     

*

Film Review

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)
Directed by Lasse Halstrom 
Starring: Ewan McGregor, Emily Blunt, Kristin Scott Thomas
***

It's almost impossible to dislike this movie.  An adaptation of Paul Torday's novel (the script is by Oscar winner Simon Beaufoy, who wrote Slumdog Millionaire, 127 Hours, and The Full Monty), directed in a warm, comforting way by Lasse Halstrom, the film gets by on the unique, odd winsomeness of its concept and the charm of it leading players.

Ewan McGregor plays a fubsy, socially awkward fish expert is plunged against his will into the vision of a rich sheik to bring the sport of fly-fishing to the very un-salmon-y climes of the Yemen desert.  Emily Blunt, who could probably summon up some good chemistry with a catatonic invalid, plays the sheik's consultant.

What follows is a gentle, engaging drama about faith and fish, with McGregor's character coming to realize that, against all facts and figures, this crazy plan might just work; he falls in love with Blunt, who is still mourning for a boyfriend away in Afghanistan.  The movie more or less avoids melodrama, and Kristin Scott Thomas adds some snap and bite as the Prime Minister's press secretary.  McGregor is terrific as always.  Morocco fills in for Yemen, and if the film probably doesn't bear much scrutiny (would it be a good idea to introduce invasive fish to an environment they've never been in?) it does leave you with a smile on your face.

*

Today's entry in my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time is...

   
Elizabeth Taylor
as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966)

The finest, most powerful of the Taylor-Burton vehicles, director Mike Nichols' and legendary screenwriter Ernest Lehman's triumphant, lacerating adaptation of the classic Edward Albee play is an acting showcase, but Taylor reigns above all in a role any actress would kill for: alcoholic, embittered, catty, crumbling, acidic, flirtatious, flinty Martha, the wife of a small-potatoes professor at a New England college.  Taylor slugs away here, giving her at all, getting under everyone's skin (including ours), tiptoeing the line between blowsy bravura and overacting.  This is the perfect introduction to what the big deal about Taylor as an actress was, and by the end, when the source of Martha's sadness is more or less revealed, we realize we've seen a tour-de-force. 

* 

A painting today?  How about a work by birthday boy Jean-Jacques Henner, a portrait and landscape painter who won renown for his nudes, nymphs and naiads.  

L'Alsace.  Elle Attend
1871
oil on canvas
Musee National Jean-Jacques Henner, Paris

Henner (1829-1905) was born in the southern Alsace region of France.  Following the 1870 war, Alsace-Lorraine switched over to German hands, and this painting was given as a gift to Leon Gambetta, a French statesman opposed to the loss of Alsace-Lorraine.  Henner too lamented the loss of his birthplace.  The painting was not of a real person, but of an allegorical figure, of Alsace herself, seen here as a lady in mourning.  It was done during a naturalistic period for the painter.  The tri-colored cockade worn by the woman on her bow of course represents France. 








Images courtesy of:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/images/chandler.jpg

http://www.film.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/salmon-fishing-in-the-yemen03.jpg

http://www.movieactors.com/freezeframes-77/VirginiaWoolf21.jpeg

http://www.histoire-image.org/photo/zoom/bes01_henner_01f.jpg


Information:

http://www.thrillingdetective.com/trivia/chandler.html 

http://www.musee-henner.fr/en/alsace_elle_attend

Saturday! Sat-a-day! Sat-uh-day!

Word of the day : slew : a large number

Howdy, folks!  It looks like it's going to be a fine, sunny Saturday down here in Georgia.  Hope everyone has a nice weekend.  We're leaving for the pool here soon.

I'm resolved to not talk about the Colorado shooting other than to say it is a despicable, horrific tragedy, a reason to never go to the movie theater again, and further, needless evidence that the gun-ownership laws in this country are way too lenient.

Julia and I found a great new cupcake place yesterday in Savannah, Gigi's Cupcakes, which, unbeknownst to us, is a chain.  If there's one near you, check it out.  Fantastic.  I got my haircut too, which is always a slightly depressing experience, because it makes me aware how little hair I actually have!

Gigi's just might just have the best cupcakes I have ever tasted, really.  I just wish we had one here in Statesboro, but that would mean one less Dollar General, I suppose, and that must be a no-no, because this town seem to take a peculiar pride in being the Dollar-Store capital of North America.  Christ, they just keep coming!


Born today:
Louise Blanchard Bethune (1856-1913)

I had never heard of her before, but it turns out that she was the first professional female architect in the United States.  Born in Waterloo, NY, Bethune graduated high school and then gave up her plans to study at Cornell for a job as a draftsman at an architectural office in Buffalo, where she would spend most of her working life.  Five years later, she had her own office.

She would go on to design a wide variety of buildings: housing developments, a bank, schools, hotels, factories.  A music store she designed was one of the nation's first structures that used steel frame and poured concrete slabs.  In 1888, she was elected a member of the American Institute of Architects.  She designed a modern lithography factory, police stations, and an armory, at least seventy-five buildings in all.  She specialized in school buildings.  Her style was Romanesque. 

Only one of her public buildings still stands: Buffalo's Lafayette Hotel, on Lafayette Square, a Renaissance-style hotel built in 1904.    

*

Book Review

Gone Girl
by Gillian Flynn  
***1/2 (out of 5)

A talked-about bestseller since its release at the beginning of summer, Flynn's third novel has an irresistible, grabby premise: A thirtysomething NYC couple gets married and spend the first year or so in relative bliss.  Nick, the husband, is a magazine writer, and Amy, the wife, is of inherited wealth; her parents are authors of a long-running series of bestselling young adult books detailing the life of Amazing Amy, a character loosely modeled on their daughter.  When Nick and Amy lose their job and Nick's mother gets cancer, the couple is forced to re-locate to middle Missouri.  Boredom and bickering sets in, and Nick starts spending more time with his sister than his wife.  And then on the day of their fifth anniversary, Amy disappears.  All signs point to a struggle, and the evidence begins to pile up against Nick, because it's always the husband, right?

The first half of the book is my favorite, a skillful, beautifully-written, savvy account of the interior life of a married couple.  Flynn switches point-of-view each chapter, contrasting Nick's sense of panic and befuddlement (and odd indifference) with Amy's voice, revealed over five years of diaries leading up to her disappearance.  In particular, I appreciated how Flynn's characters are smart and meta; Nick knows everything about the ensuing police investigation because he's seen so many movies and shows.  What's real anymore?  What's novel, capable of surprising us?  Is it even possible for a generation raised on crime TV and movies to not be one step ahead of the cops?

The second half of the novel completely toys with our expectations.  Nothing is what it seems.  Everyone is lying.  It was around the 200-250 page mark that I began to like the book less.  I was still intrigued with the mystery, but I began to realize that I wasn't going to like how it was going to play out.  Part of that has to do with the fact that Flynn gives us not one but two unreliable characters,  Not only are the main characters not sturdy enough, not forthright enough to gain our trust, neither Nick or Amy is ever for a moment remotely likable; I got tired of them, their whining, their deceits.  The third act isn't believable, but nevertheless I found myself thinking about the book for a while afterwards.  It is certainly original and well-thought out and Flynn is a first-rate writer, an astute social commentator.  I only wish I liked the story, and characters, a little bit more.

*

Movie Review      

Friends With Kids (2012)
Directed by Jennifer Westfeldt 
Starring: Jennifer Westfeldt, Adam Scott, Jon Hamm, Maya Rudolph, Kristen Wiig, Chris O'Dowd, Megan Fox, Edward Burns
*** (out of 4)

A smart, well-written comedy in the vein of a late-1970s, mid-80s Woody Allen movie, Jennifer Westfeldt's directorial debut stars her and Adam Scott, in a terrific performance, as best friends from college who live in the same New York apartment.  Both of them are in their 30s, bouncing from relationship to relationship, and soon enough Westfeldt's Julie finds that she is wanting kids.  All her and Jason's (Scott) friends have kids: Ben and Missy (Jon Hamm and Kristen Wiig) seem both settled-in and frisky, and Alex and Leslie (Chris O'Dowd and Maya Rudolph) certainly appear to be harried yet happy.

Julie's plan is for Jason to impregnate her, and the two can then raise the child together, sharing custody, and still see other people.  And it certainly seems to work out at first.  Julie starts dating a recently-divorced hunk (Edward Burns), and Alex goes out with a flexible, limber, anti-child dancer (Megan Fox).  Their friends, more worn and frazzled by parenting than they perhaps let on, don't understand how the couple manages it.

Of course, complications set in.  You'll guess where it's going, undoubtedly, but the movie, if it doesn't ever really break any new ground, is full of good, fresh talk, and the characters are interesting enough to hold your attention.  There's good insights too: Kids can either make or break a marriage.  Scott's work is really good, and it's a treat to see a Bridesmaids cast reunion, though I wish Wiig had more, or something, to do; I was entertained by Fox's work as a hottie both more and less shallow than you might expect.  By the end, Julie and Jason are fully-realized characters, and the final scene, both sad and encouraging, really delivers.

*

Today's entry in my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time?  

Frances McDormand
as Jane in Laurel Canyon (2003) 

Before she made the great The Kids Are Alright, writer-director Lisa Cholodenko gave us this fine indie about an uptight young man and his fiancee (Christian Bale and Kate Beckinsale - holla!) who move in to his mother's house in the title locale.  As the mother, a libertine, free-spirited music producer who still smokes pot and sleeps with decades-younger members of bands whose albums she's producing, McDormand is a force of nature - sexy and lived-in and sharp-tongued, with smart eyes that take everything in.  You don't want to think of what this woman has done in her prime with guys like Greg Allman and Robert Plant - it's best to not even ruminate on it.  But there's something lovable and recognizable about McDormand's Jane too, even if it takes us the whole movie to figure  out what it is.  She's strong-willed and no-nonsense, and McDormand constantly shows us how aware and keen she is, taking what could be a caricature and giving her depth and perspective.  She'd be a cool person to be around.

*

Today's painting?  Well, because it's your birthday, Arshile Gorky, we dedicate July 21 to you!

The Artist and His Mother
1926-1936
oil on canvas
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

 
Gorky was a survivor of the Armenian Genocide of 1915.  His family survived, but three years later, his mother died, and Arshile (falsely claiming he was the nephew of Russian writer Maxim Gorky) made it to Ellis Island, New York.  He was an art teacher and avant-garde painter in New York City, closely associating with the Abstract Expressionists; he was friends with de Kooning, and Mark Rothko was one of his pupils.  In 1948, he committed suicide.

In the painting, Gorky stands by his mother, who died of starvation in 1918, wanting but unable to get back to the family's home in the Lake Van region of eastern Turkey (Turkey decided to eradicate its minority Armenian residents in 1915).  Gorky drapes her in a muslin-like material and her face has a stone-like, mask-ish quality, as if she is dead, and though little space separates the two, there is the impression of a great remove, distance.  The boy too seems sad - deeply, ineffably pained.

Gorky's father went to America in 1908 to avoid conscription into the Turkish Army.  Four years later, Arshile and his mother had a photograph taken of the two of them to send to his father.  His father received the photograph and Arshile later found in his father's apartment in America.  The above painting shows Gorky trying to re-imagine the photo.  But nothing could ever be the same.  His mother is gone, dead, and the window behind her, all brown, has no view, no window to anything.

Here is the original photograph:

  
 






Images:

http://rlv.zcache.com/bethune_louise_blanchard_postcard-p239514160768465983baanr_400.jpg

http://media.cleveland.com/ent_impact_arts/photo/11162684-large.jpg

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FuPVObV6VYA/T2Fj49UjODI/AAAAAAAAF5k/deIiSeYZ9zo/s1600/friends-with-kids110912073810.jpg

http://blog.winstonwachter.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/TheArtistAndHisMother_c1926_36.jpg

http://image.toutlecine.com/photos/l/a/u/laurel-canyon-2002-22-g.jpg



Information:

http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/bethunel.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2002/mar/30/art

School's Out For... Two weeks?

Word of the day : wifty : eccentrically silly, ditzy ; giddy, inane

Gabriel's last day of summer school is today.  To celebrate, we're taking him out to Isabella's, a reputedly nice Italian restaurant here in town.

Don't forget about my wife's blog:
She hadn't posted for a while, by she's back and she's unleashed a flurry of links this week!
http://arthistorymusings.tumblr.com/ 

Born today:
Lizzie Borden (1860-1927)

Star of one of the 19th century's most famous murder trials, Borden was born in and was a lifelong resident of Fall River, Massachusetts.  Borden's mother died when she was three and Lizzie had one sister, Emma.  Her father, Andrew, eventually re-married, to Abby Gray, and the family remained comfortably wealthy.  There was an odd tension in the family, though: Lizzie claimed that her father didn't provide sufficiently enough for her or Emma, and neither her nor Emma trusted or particularly liked their new stepmother.

In July of 1892, the Borden sisters went away to visit friends.  Lizzie came back early.  A few weeks later, Andrew and Abby came down with a sever came of vomiting - Abby suspect poisoning.  Around this time, Abby's brother came to visit and on August 4, he and Andrew went into town, Andrew returning early to lie down.

It was during this time that Lizzie allegedly went out to the barn to rifle through the barn for fishing equipment and to eat some pears (!).  When she returned to the house, she found her father hacked to pieces with an ax.  Lizzie and the maid called a doctor and the three of them found the stepmother, Abby, upstairs in her room, also hacked to death.

Tests later showed that Abby was killed 1 or 2 hours before Andrew.  Andrew didn't have a will, so all of his estate (up to half a million) would go to his daughters and none to Abby or her heirs.

Lizzie was arrested and charged with the murder.  She was put in prison for a mere ten months pending trial.  Her trial ran for a few weeks in mid-June of 1893, and Lizzie never took the stand.  There was no direct evidence, no murder weapon.  Hence, she was acquitted.

She lived out the rest of her life in relative comfort in her hometown, with her sister until 1905 or so.  They took in many pets.  She left part of her estate to the Animal Rescue League.

She is buried beside her father and stepmother.

(The house she lived in is now a Bed and Breakfast museum:  http://www.lizzie-borden.com/index.php/about-us/contact-us)

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Emmy Nominations came out today:  http://www.imdb.com/emmys/nominations

I won't analyze the picks too much because I haven't seen or just flat-out don't watch a lot of the shows and performances.  I'm glad to see love doled out to Homeland, Modern Family, Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and New Girl, though.  I don't think Mad Men will win again, though - not five straight years.  No way.  I love the show to death, but even I'll admit this wasn't its best season.      
Here are my picks for who I think is going to win on September 23. 

Drama :  Homeland
Comedy: Modern Family (again)  
Miniseries/Made-for-TV movie: Game Change
Lead Actor, Drama: Damian Lewis, Homeland (no more Bryan Cranston!)
Lead Actress, Drama: Claire Danes, Homeland
Supporting Actor, Drama: Aaron Paul, Breaking Bad
Supporting Actress, Drama: Maggie Smith, Downton Abbey
Lead Actor, Comedy: Louis C.K., Louie
Lead Actress, Comedy: Amy Poehler, Parks and Recreation
Supporting Actor, Comedy: Ed O'Neill, Modern Family 
Supporting Actress, Comedy: Julie Bowen, Modern Family 
Lead Actor, Miniseries: Idris Elba, Luther
Lead Actress, Miniseries: Julianne Moore, Game Change 
Supporting Actor, Miniseries: Ed Harris, Game Change 
Supporting Actress, Miniseries: Jessica Lange, American Horror Story 

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Today's selection for the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time?  

Humphrey Bogart
as Dixon Steele in In a Lonely Place (1950)

Nicholas Ray's lovely, lonely, fatalistic (as ever) adaptation of Dorothy Hughes' noir novel has a perfect part for late-period Bogart as a burned-out, moody, possibly homicidal screenwriter.  Bogart tears up the screen here.  He seems so wired, so edgy, so crazy (I mean, look at the image above), that he just may have all the characteristics of a killer.  As the neighbor across the way, Gloria Grahame isn't sure one way or the other.  But there's a sadness to him, a been-around-the-block weariness too.  Damn it, he's impossible to read!   

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Since today is also Edgar Degas' birthday, let's feature one of his paintings.

The Rehearsal on Stage
c. 1874
pastel over brush-and-ink drawing on thin, cream-colored wove paper, laid on bristol board, mounted on canvas
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

By the 1870s and 1880s Degas was a regular painter of the Paris ballet.  Degas didn't paint or draw actual dancers.  Instead, what he did was hire dancers to come to his studio to pose for him - often uncharacteristically, with their poses and contortions atypical of an actual ballet dancers'.  Several of the characters in the painting look bored or exhausted: the gentleman on the right, who may or may not have paid to see the girls practice; several of the dancers look stressed too.  Degas, who frames the scene as if from the point of view of someone sitting in a box near the stage, liked to paint modern city institutions - the opera, the racetrack.  Everything about the scene suggests the humdrum banalities of rehearsal, of practice, of long hours of toil.  As ever, Degas focuses on movement, particularly paying attention to the fleet, floating legs of the young girls. 

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Movie Openings This Week:

Well, there's only one of note.  Perhaps you've heard if it?

The Dark Knight Rises

I'll be indifferent when this trilogy concludes; I've liked other superhero series' more. While critics are saying this doesn't reach the Ledger-propelled heights of 2008's The Dark Knight, the reviews are still really good for this one: 86% on Rotten Tomatoes, as of this writing.  Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Morgan Freeman, and Gary Oldman are back.  Tom Hardy, the physically imposing British actor who had made a name for himself the last couple years (Inception, This Means War, Warrior), plays the villain, Bane; some critics are saying that his dialogue is hard to make out, being that his character wears a steel-mandibled breathing apparatus.   Joseph Gordon-Levitt will be a welcome addition as a Gotham City cop, as will Anne Hathaway as Catwoman.  Marion Cotillard is here too.  A lot of it was filmed in Pittsburgh, but I have no idea why it runs two hours and forty-five minutes.
Verdict: Interested




Images:

http://a.abcnews.com/images/US/ap_lizzie_borden_ll_120313_wg.jpg

http://www.altfg.com/Stars/photo-actors-j/julianne-moore-sarah-palin-game-change.jpg

http://pixhost.me/avaxhome/71/7c/000a7c71_medium.jpeg

http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings/artists/d/edgar_degas/big/The_Rehearsal_on_Stage_1874.jpeg

http://img2-2.timeinc.net/ew/i/2012/04/17/SMP/Dark-Knight-Rises_320.jpg

http://charactergrades.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/curb-your-enthusiasm-season-7-dvd-boxset-86_2.jpg


Information:

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/criminals/p/lizzie_borden.htm

http://www.all-art.org/history480-5.html

A song to you...

Well, five days from today will be the one-year anniversary of our moving to Georgia.  It's been an interesting year, to say the least (doesn't everyone say that, to say the least?).  I think it would be fitting to look back on the year and try to come up with 50 Things I've Learned, Liked, Hated, and am Puzzled About Living in Statesboro, Georgia:  

1)  It's no lie: Georgia Southern University is a knock-out campus, very scenic and pedestrian-friendly, with all almost all the buildings looking new. 
2) Julia has a big, spacious office, and the library is really nice.  There's a wildlife center and botanical garden to show off to guests and visitors. 
3) People down here are crazy about football (the Georgia Bulldogs as well as GSU), but not in the insane, claustrophobic way they were in Columbus; it's not unpleasant to be around campus on Saturday. 
4) If you need to run a bunch of errands in town, you'll only be gone an hour or so. 
5) Why?  Because there's no Target, Kohl's, decent mall, decent bookstore, any places really worth lingering around in to kill time: There's Petco, TJ Maxx, and Walmart, Lowe's, and Office Depot, that's it. 
6) Restaurants?  Solid.  We have Cracker Barrel, Steak N'Shake, a frozen yogurt shop, Olive Garden, Ruby Tuesday, Panera, and Longhorn. 
7) There's plenty of produce stands (one of which has been disappointing) and a good meat market. 
8) The school Gabriel is in is good, and he loves his sweet teacher, Mrs. Evans. 
9) The gnats and bugs?  Annoying.
10) Every morning, half the year, you are guaranteed to be greeted to at least one dead roach or spider somewhere in the house.  Spray, spray, spray!  That still takes a while to get used to: so much chigger bugs and flying things.  BUGS!   

11) Everyone's allergies have been triggered down here.  I have had a recurring scratchy throat since I've been here.
12) We live in a ghost neighborhood.  Some of our neighbors are crazy, possibly dangerous. 
13) There was a scorpion in our house the other day! 
14) Dogs run all over the place and crap. 
15) It's a birder's dream.  In the past year, I've seen, just in our neighborhood, ospreys and red-tailed hawks, hundreds of cardinals, blue jays, bluebirds, mockingbirds, herons, hummingbirds, egrets.
16) I've gotten up-close to deer, foxes (relatively speaking), snapping turtles, snakes.
17) We were told it would be sunny two-thirds of the year here; it actually seems sunnier more often than that. 
18) It's easier to be bored here, but it's also easier to be in a good mood, largely because of the weather.  
19) Everything, and I mean everything, moves so much slower here.  I won't get into this! 
20) Our dog, Daisy, has made life incredibly more interesting.  It doesn't seem like people around here treat their pets particularly well, however. 

21) Julia and I aren't snobs, but sometimes when we're out and about, we feel like we have absolutely nothing in common with the people around us. 
22) Almost anyone dressed nicely or professional-looking must either work for the university or the hospital. 
23) When it rains or storms, there's a good chance the power will go out briefly. 
24) Downtown Statesboro, with its scenic courthouse, sounds better than it is.  There's almost nothing there. 
25) Most of the seasonal events - the Farmer's Market, Halloween on the Square, Easter Egg Hunt - are rinky-dink and shabby.
26) GSU has a good theater program and puts on quality productions. 
27) The movie theater in town sucks.  I mean, sucks.  In two of the three times I've been there, I've encountered issues I never have before.
28) I don't think I'll ever get a job at GSU, no matter how many jobs apply for, no matter what sort of connection I have.  I don't know who they hire and where all these unemployed, college-educated folks live.  All I ever see are hicks. 
29) Julia dreads the weekends because our neighborhood and town is so boring.  If it's during football or basketball season, I have something to look forward to.  If not, yeah, it's the pits. 
30) That's why we say the only thing to do in Statesboro is to go to Savannah. 

Savannah

31)  Despite its sketchy neighborhoods, Savannah is one fine town.
32) The Historical District is charming and ageless.
33) Oatland Island Wildlife Center, Tybee, Bonaventure Cemetery, the National Wildlife Refuge - all pleasurable.
34) Good places to eat in Savannah, but we almost never pass up on a trip to Five Guys.  Two Smart Cookies has sweets to die for.
35) Savannah has the good grocery stores, the good bulk-item stores.
36) We're only an hour-and-a-half from Beaufort and Hilton Head.  Hilton Head we visit for the outlet malls.  Beaufort, a beautiful city by the bay, provides plenty of walking enjoyment, good stores, a fine bagel joint, a good bookstore.
37) Atlanta, we can only visit two times a year, because it's three hours a way.  The Georgia Aquarium is magnificent, mid-town is great, the zoo is barrels of fun.  Good restaurants, good Guy Fieri joints.
38) St. Simons Island, down the coast, is a worthy place to spend a day or weekend.  There's Guy Fieri joints there too, along with a nice beachfront.
39) Brunswick, just inland from the Georgia Isles, is a nice old town whose downtown has been lovingly restored.
40) Charleston is only 2 and a half hours away.  A fantastic city.  Columbia's the same distance.

Augusta

41) Augusta is about 90 minutes,  We go every once in a while because we enjoy the bookstore 2nd and Charles and some of the shopping there.  We've even gone up there once just to get the hell of of Statesboro.
42) Julia and I can't figure out what students do here in town.  There are almost no bars, just the one crappy theater, no place to really walk to from campus, and this is a county that doesn't sell liquor.
43) There are no parks in this town except one.  One park in this whole town!  No wonder why Gabriel seems bored half the time.
44) If it wasn't for the waterpark Splash in the Boro, there would be absolutely nothing to do here in the summer.  We all love it - there's a lazy river, a couple of kiddie pools, etc.
45) The town is definitely expanding but not fast enough, considering how fast the university is growing - 20,000+ students.
46) Julia and I shudder to think what this town was like, say, five to seven years ago: all the newer restaurants and the waterpark, etc. - they're all relatively new.
47) There are no places around here to take a good walk.
48) This Bermuda grass in everyone's yards is strange.  Strands of it grow really high while the strands next to it hardly grow at all.
49) Fire ants!  Fire ants!  Fire ants!  Fire ants!
50) Thank God for Redbox.    

Monday

Word of the day : skirl : to play music on the bagpipe
                                      ; to emit the high shrill tone of the chanter


Happy Monday, folks.  An outing to the pool is in our future today, which is always a fun, tiring experience.  Julia is back at school, furiously working on her dissertation. 

It's my uncle Stevie's birthday today.  I can't believe that guy is 51, just can't believe it.

Who else was born today?
Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot
(1796-1875)

Corot, one of the most famous French painters of the mid-19th century, was born in Paris into a bourgeois family.  Corot showed almost no interest in art until he was in his twenties.  As a young man, he apprenticed to a draper and worked in the business until he was twenty-six.

Landscapes were in vogue during this time in Europe, particularly the landscapes inspired by the Englishmen John Constable and J.M.W. Turner - more realistic landscapes, naturalistic, featuring more accurate topography and flora, etc.  It must be said that the other trendy form of landscape painting - a Neoclassical approach, more idealized and fancied - Corot also excelled at. 

Like most French artists, Corot went to Italy to study and live, which he did from 1825-1828.  Here he studied light and shadow, contour, scale, mid-range and panoramic perspective.  Back home, he began working in plein air, his large landscapes coolly, almost indifferently received by the Salon.  He returned to Italy a few times and kept working, bolstered by peer praise.  He traveled frequently, remained very close to his family, had no long term relationships with women, and taught briefly, Camille Pissarro being one of his students.

His style was increasingly Impressionistic in the 1850s (a fact that might have led to the Salon's eventual acceptance of him).  He continued to mix landscapes both Neoclassical and Realist for the rest of his life.  He lived humbly and modestly and had many friends, some of whom thought he was undervalued during his career.  He died of stomach cancer in 1875.  A contemporary of Manet, Courbet, and Millet, Corot's pupils include Pissarro, Berthe Morisot and Eugene Boudin.   

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Book Review

This is my third book by Oscar Hijuelos, and while it's probably the lesser of the three, it's still a worthwhile, valuable read.  If it doesn't have The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love's energy and invigorating prose, it shares a similar story.  Like the brothers in the earlier Pulitzer Prize winner, Hijuelos follows the life of a Cuban musician, Israel Levis, as he comes of age in Cuba and pens a song that makes him famous worldwide ("Rosas Puras").  Hijuelos accurately, lovingly evokes a time and place - the novel makes one appreciate Levis' music (zarzuelas) more and it has a sweet, singing, tangy style in which Hijuelos makes the sights and sounds pop.  Real musicians and celebrities - Buster Keaton, Jose Marti, Hemingway - come and go, and that's fun.

Unlike Hijuelos' Mr. Ives' Christmas, though, the novel doesn't have a whole lot of emotional substance.  Because Levis just kind of drifts through his life, his biggest problem being his timidity at declaring his love to his longtime soulmate, singer Rita Valdares, he doesn't morally engage us: he's kind of naive and obtuse.  It is occasionally poignant and informative, but the book's awkward structure really proves a problem in the final third.  The story seems to be building up to a centerpiece when Levis is mistaken as a Jew and yanked out of Paris and sent to a concentration camp, but then Hijuelos almost completely forgoes any scenes in the camp!  Like Mambo, there is a lot of sex, which Hijuelos writes about fluidly and sensuously, sometimes invigoratingly - although if you read more and more of Hijuelos, you might come to conclude that he is a bit of a perv.
(****)

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Movie Review

Big Miracle (2012) is a fine family film, based on a true story.  In 1988, in the weeks before the presidential election, a family of three killer whales get trapped under the ice, which has frozen over far too early in the season.  Their plight, which is first brought to light by a small-town reporter (John Krasinksi), becomes a nationwide story (a big one, according to the filmmakers), bringing all sorts of assorted types to the small town of Barrow, Alaska.  Among those involved in the quest to break the ice and allow the whales to go south for the winter are: an ambitious, big-city NBC reporter (Kristen Bell); an oil driller (Ted Danson); an overly passionate Greenpeacer (Drew Barrymore); a hard-shelled National Guard commander (Dermot Mulroney); a conniving, vaguely disgusted anchorman (John Michael Higgins).  It's a good movie, both earnest and passionate, with director Ken Kwapis having appropriate fun with the period footage and references.  The characters are colorful, and the script manages to see the issue, and the political, environmental hoopla surrounding it, equitably from all perspectives.  Good job, too, with the location shooting:  The sets don't look like sets, either, and the whales (which surely are animatronic or something) look real too.
(***)


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Today's entry in the 500 Greatest Performances of All Time?  Why, that's easy?

 
F. Murray Abraham
as Antonio Salieri in Amadeus (1984)

I don't think this is a great film ('84 was a bad year at the movies) but it is a pretty good one, and it's driven by three compelling performances: Tom Hulce as the childish Mozart, Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph II, and, above all, by Abraham as the also-ran, envious, seething Salieri, a composer destined to always be in Mozart's shadow and without an inkling as to why this should divinely be so.  Abraham, a New York stage actor who went on to become the least-known Oscar winner in history (a title he still might hold), makes Salieri a fuming hot mess; he has a great face, a great bemused face - we can feel the heat coming off of him.  He is eloquent and wary, and very possibly mad - and all the more charismatic for it.

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Today's painting?  Well, since it's Corot's b-day...

First Leaves, Near Mantes   
c.1855
oil on canvas
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh 

One of Corot's more intimate, naturalistic landscapes, the painting depicts an early spring morning.  Corot contrasts the firmer, more solid trunks and branches with the wispy leaves.  A woman works in the woods, while a man and a woman walk along the road, talking.  These kind of works were catnip for Parisians, at the time in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution and the boom of a noisy, crowded, ever-expanding, construction-hampered city.  It's an atmospheric piece, redolent with the early touches of Impressionism.     

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There will be no author profile today since, I guess, I kind of already did yesterday, when I featured a few of the works of Ross Macdonald.  He's my writer for the week.

Until tomorrow! 










Images:

http://cdn.sheknows.com/filter/l/gallery/big_miracle.jpg

http://content6.flixster.com/photo/99/04/03/9904032_ori.jpg  


http://www.1artclub.com/uploads/15-0762.jpg

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/upload/img/corot-jean-baptiste-camille-c-face-half.jpg 


http://www.goodbooksinthewoods.com/pictures/003077.jpg

http://cdn.sheknows.com/filter/l/gallery/big_miracle.jpg 

Information:

http://www.jean-baptiste-camille-corot.org/biography.html   

http://www.cmoa.org/searchcollections/details.aspx?item=1012252

Respite, Be Gone

Sometimes you just need a good old-fashioned break from blogging.  Which I what I took this week.
And now I'm back.

I've thought of a slightly more structured format for this daily blog.  Each day, there will be the following features:
- Word of the day (as before)
- Brief news and opinions (as before)
- A brief paragraph celebrating the life of someone born on this day
- Book, Movie, or TV reviews
- A selection for my list of 500 Greatest Performances Ever
- A brief painting (w/analysis)
- Any other columns (Movie Openings, Photographer Bio, weekly NFL predictions, etc.)

Hope you enjoy! 

Word of the day: tetralogy : a series of four connected literary, artistic, or musical works

Well, it's been a nice, enjoyable week.  We've gone to the pool a few times, went to Augusta (where we bought a load of books), and Julia had a beyond-productive week at a writing workshop, where she wrote a huge chunk of her dissertation. 

And that's the key thing, her diss.  She's ready for it to be done with, behind her.  She's ready to defend it and be Dr. Fischer.  Both of us hope she gets the tenured position at GSU (which starts fall, 2013), but secretly we hope she gets other offers in places that aren't Statesboro, Georgia.  And then, as the saying went, see ya, wouldn't want to be ya, Stinksboro!

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Born today : Rembrandt van Rijn (1506, Leiden - which is, presently, in the Dutch province of South Holland)

Rembrandt, born into a modest family (his father was a miller), set himself up as an independent painter in his hometown.  But his career took off when he moved to Amsterdam in 1531.  Rembrandt had a great career as an artist, teacher, and art dealer, but his life in Amsterdam was marked by tragedy: the death of three of his children, the passing of his wife (at the age of 30!), and eventual bankruptcy.  An auction of all his belongings - weapons, ancient sculpture, Italian Renaissance works, Far Eastern art - couldn't stave off insolvency; he lived a bit too ostentatiously.    

Rembrandt was the greatest of the Dutch artists of Holland's Golden Age.  Although the artist never went abroad, he studied extensively: Italian artists, fellow Dutch artists, Caravaggio, Rubens.  Rembrandt was a master at observation, the practice of directly studying people from life a guiding principle of his.  He was a highly successful portraitist in the 1630s (thanks to works like The Anatomy Lesson of  Dr. Rulp).  His most fertile period ended around 1642, with the group portrait, Night Watch - one of the most famous paintings in the history of the world.  Reputed to be initially met with customer dissatisfaction (at least some falsely claim), the work shows a company of civil guardsmen, eighteen in all, led by Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenhurch.  (I won't even begin to go into these paintings; thousands of articles have been written on them - they're easy to find, if you're interested).       

He was an extraordinary draftsman, etcher, and printmaker, with many pupils and assistants.  He would go on to influence many painters from the next two centuries.       


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Book Reviews

I have been on a bit of a Ross Macdonald kick lately, and for good reason: I've never read him before and have no excuse for it.  If you don't know of him, he was the creator of Lew Archer, the tough Southern California detective (played twice on film by Paul Newman), making his way up and down the Golden State of the 1940s-1960s, solving incredibly complicated noir mysteries.  His real name was Kenneth Millar (his wife was acclaimed mystery novelist Margaret Millar) and he was, and is, considered the next-in-line in the chain of tough, dry, snappy, dark mystery writers of American noir, from Hammett to Chandler and so on.  He was an American-Canadian (California born, Ottawa-raised) who wrote eighteen Archer novels in all, on top of short stories.

1959's The Galton Case, the eighth in the series, sets the tone if you want a proper introduction to the  author: dialogue over action; terse character descriptions; tough, sardonic talk; post-war sleaziness; human weakness; dangerous, sly-eyed women; mysteries unbelievably convoluted; West Coast rot; characters with too much money, just enough Oedipal concerns and too little morals; a past that won't stay there. The plot is almost too sinuous to lay out for you, but it involves Archer embroiled in the decades-old disappearance of the scion of a wealthy family.  The lawyer who hires Archer has an unstable wife and a murder on his hands, so naturally Archer finds a connection between both cases.  It's a strong mystery, with autobiographical elements.   
(***1/2)   

Let me say this about 1964's The Chill.  As I'd heard from critics and other mystery writers, it is without a doubt one of the greatest mysteries of the 20th century.  It's the mind-screw of all time, with a plot so twisty, so labyrinthine, that it nearly defies description.  You either go with it or you don't.  If you do, you'll have a great time.  How Macdonald thought up a plot so elaborate is a mystery itself.  Be warned: It's a book you should almost just go ahead and read in one or two sittings; if you put it down for an extended period of time, you might be lost and disoriented when you pick it back up:  Who is he?  How is she related to him again?

Here goes: A man hires Archer to find his runaway bride.  Archer tracks her down to a local college, where, soon enough, the bride's counselor (and new faculty member) is found murdered.  And then there is a long-ago murder in Illinois somehow related to the new murder, and there's a plum imbroglio of suspects: college deans, a bitter cop, Reno scumbags, a long-absent father among them.  It has to be read to be believed, but it all leads to a stunning revelation on the last page, one of the creepiest, most alarming, most stunning twists I've ever read.
(*****)

Movie Review

A word about Safe House, the new movie starring Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds.  Better yet, two words: it stinks.  The first half hour, which like the rest of the film is for no beneficial reason takes place in South Africa, is boring, but I stayed with it, hoping maybe it would get better.  Denzel Washington plays a rogue CIA agent who is taken to an agency safe house manned by Ryan Reynolds.  Bad guys break in, try to kill Denzel, forcing the two movie stars to go on the run.  Blah blah.  The movie makes little to no sense, is loaded with incoherent action scenes that are badly shot and blocked (more of that Bourne Identity crap with shots incapable of running longer than two seconds), features forgettable performances: Denzel continues to not challenge himself;  Reynolds is largely disposable; Vera Farmiga stares at screens and gives us character back stories, an inscrutable, thankless role reminiscent of her part in Source Code.  We fast-forwarded a good half-hour and nothing was missed; the device Denzel has that everyone is willing to kill him for is, depressingly, a list of rogue agents and corrupt higher-ups - how original.  Directed by Daniel Espinosa, the film features some of the worst cinematography I've ever seen.  The damn thing is hell to look at.  It's shot in this murky green, bluish-brown palette that too closely resembles glaucoma - Seaweed Strobe, I call it.
(*)      


*

 
Next up in my list of the 500 Greatest Performances?

I'm not much of a fan of silent-movie acting.  Yes, I recognize how hard it was, but it always seemed too kitschy, theatrical, larger-than-life in a phony way.  Cinema was meant for the close-up, I get and appreciate that, but those old actors always seemed too hammy.  That said, one of the period's most beguiling, touching performances?

    
Janet Gaynor
as The Wife in Sunrise (1927)

Gaynor won an Oscar for her role in one of the eternal silents, a truly great film by F.W. Murnau that bears a repeat viewing or two.  It's an allegorical work about a married farmer (George O'Brien) allured by a striking, slovenly femme fatale from the city (Margaret Livingston), who encourages him to drown his wife.  It's a heartbreaking tempest of moods, as the farmer finds that he cannot carry out the act.  Why?  Because, as played by Gaynor, the woman is too sweet, too simplistically charming, too elemental.  She's also his soulmate.  It's a film with fat themes - doubt, temptation - that plays out in a striking way, thanks in big part to Gaynor's ingratiating work, in which the actress pulls off a remarkable feat: making an independent, strong-willed woman innocent and guileless.  How do you play innocent?  I don't know, but Gaynor does.

*

Today's painting?  Let's stick with Rembrandt:

The Artist in his Studio
c. 1626-1628
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston        

This was one of the first of many self-portraits Rembrandt did of himself in Holland (this one in Leiden).  Rembrandt the artist confronts the toughest stage of the creative process: getting something down on easel.  It's a work of thought, not action.  The use of shadow and light is striking too, as is the perspective, with the artist almost a distant figure, dominated by the size of the easel.  The life of a painter is evoked, but mysteriously so: Rembrandt looks the part, but his work environment is almost comically bare.  There's an air of indecisiveness, uncertainty.  

* 

Tim Walker (#55) is next up in Professional Photographer's list of the 100 Most Influential Photographers of All Time. 

After graduation from college in 1994, the London-based Walker (b. 1970) moved to New York City and became an assistant to Richard Avedon.  Back in England, he did documentary and portrait photography for UK newspapers.  At the age of 25, he did his first photographs for Vogue, where he has been at ever since - the British, Italian, and American editions.  His first major exhibition took place in 2008.  His work is full of romantic motifs and elaborate, extravagant staging; there's something magical and eccentric about his work.

     

Images:

http://www.thelmagazine.com/binary/82f3/1270128636-sunrisewife2.jpg

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Z_6fFYU5X0A/T4G37XX_DyI/AAAAAAAALJU/Gg7Z4XNGxuE/s400/rembrandt015.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_MgfBNd2e4us/TTMmCSahJeI/AAAAAAAAGM8/QybIuWtroDs/s1600/tim%2Bwalker%2B1.jpg

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-CZYKAyQI880/T-IbcBakevI/AAAAAAAACMA/k1ePinlTG7U/s1600/tumblr_l1naw2zKeV1qzdtgxo1_500.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2169/2284354424_aa6502d51d_o.jpg

http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2005/rembrandt/flash/p11/TileGroup0/1-0-0.jpg

http://bloodymurder.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/n60407.jpg

http://www.vintagelibrary.com/pulp/detect/art/rmacd02.jpg

http://i2.fc-img.com/fc03img/Comcast_CIM_Prod_Fancast_Image/39/894/1323893698869_allmoviephoto-safe_house_001_2x1_Overlay_640_320.jpg

http://hoocher.com/Rembrandt/Rembrandt_The_Artist_In_His_Studio.jpg


Information:

http://www.rembrandtpainting.net/rembrandt_life_and_work.htm

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rmbt/hd_rmbt.htm

http://timwalkerphotography.com/biography.php

I will not be posting for a while, readers. 

I will return with all new blog posts Sunday, July 15th. 

Sunday, Grumpy Sunday

Word of the day : bruit : rumor, report; (usually used with about)

Just another hawt Sunday in the south.  Julia and I (and Gabriel) went up to Augusta yesterday in order to take advantage of our favorite bookstore's great Buy 5-Get 5 Free sale. 

Today, Gabriel is taking a nice long nap, I'm doing some yard work, and Julia's upstairs hard at work! 

Book Reviews

R. Tripp Evans' 2010 biography of Grant Wood certainly proved to be illuminating.  I knew next to nothing about Wood's life or art outside of American Gothic, and I thought Evans did a thorough, admirable job at taking the reader through Wood's childhood, influences, family life, teaching career, early work, fame, fall-out, and last years.  It's accessible and never boring - Evans writes lucidly and gives informed, intelligent analyses of Wood's works.  It doesn't take long, however, to realize that Evans has a bit of an agenda - although that may be too strong of a word.  Something's up, though.  Evans is awfully interested in Wood's covert homosexuality.  The author can't seem to ignore it, almost going so far as to claim that homosexuality informed everything in Wood's life: his relationships with his friends and sister; the troubled marriage to his second wife; his fractured teaching career at the University of Iowa; his major works.   I got a little tired of Evans' implications and one-note digging.  So I would recommend this (if you are interested in Wood or American art of the 20th century), but with reservations.  This is as much a Gay Studies book as it an art book. 
(***)

This 2011 young adult thriller by prolific bestselling YA writer Todd Strasser delivers the goods.  It works as a mystery and a suspenseful page-turner.  A high school senior, Shelby, becomes the object of scorn at her school when her father, a well-regarded fashion photographer, is suspected in the disappearance of three young wannabe models.  If her dad is innocent (and he appears to be guilty of something), then, Shelby reasons, that must mean that someone at her dad's office is behind it:  Is it her dad's hunky, dreamboat assistant?  The office manager with a questionable past?  Someone from school possibly?  Everyone is a suspect here, and it's to Strasser's credit that the red herrings don't pop up here so much as evolve naturally from Shelby's growing sense of confusion and uncertainty; you don't feel like the writer is jerking you around, goosing you.  The subject matter gets admirably skeevy and dark, but it has a god twist ending.  I think it would make a solid movie.
(****)       

* 

The Italian Baroque painter Artemesia Gentileschi was born on this date in 1593.  Born in Rome, Artemisia was the daughter of a painter.  She trained under her father, who introduced her to some of the leading Roman artists of the day, including Caravaggio (whose chiaroscuro style influenced Artemesia).  Artemesia never went to school; she didn't learn to read and write until she was an adult.  Artemesia was the plaintiff in a seven-month long rape trial in 1612.  Artemesia, nineteen at the time, claimed that Florentine artist Agostino Tassi cornered her in her bedroom and raped her.  Afterwards, he told her that he would marry her; this promise gained him access to her bedroom time and time again, but he never fulfilled his promise.  He claimed that he she was a whore and insisted that he never had sexual relations with her. 

He was convicted and jailed for a year. 

When the trial (whose transcripts still exist!) ended, Gentileschi afterward soon started work on one of her masterpieces. Judith Slaying Holofernes.  While working on the painting, Gentileschi married another Florentine artist and moved to Florence and had a daughter; she began work on another painting of Judith after the first was finished. 

The first Judith painting shows the Jewish widow Judith in the tent of the Assyrian general Holofernes, whose army had besieged Judith's town of Bethulia.  In the tent, she captivates the general with her beauty, makes sure he is good and drunk and passed out, and then, along with her maid, decapitates him!  She took his head back into town.  Upon seeing it, the inspired townspeople revolted against and defeated the leaderless Assyrians.  Judith, hence, served as a symbol of fighting oppression.  One can't help but see Judith as a stand-in for the artist herself, standing up to (and defeating) her male oppressors.  

Caravaggio painted the same subject, with the same title, in 1598-99.  Like Gentileschi, he chose to portray the actual moment, the act, of the murder.

To see the Gentileschi, you gotta go to the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples.

*

My 500 Greatest Performances of All Time pick for today?     

Susan Sarandon
as Sister Helen Prejean in Dead Man Walking (1995) 

After going home empty handed during her four prior nominations, Sarandon finally took home Oscar gold for her beautiful portrayal of the real-life Prejean, who comforts and provides a final friendship to a convicted murderer Matthew Poncelet (a brilliant Sean Penn) in the days before his execution.  Sarandon evokes Prejean's uncertainty and strength in equal measures, and her scenes with Penn really shine.  The final scene, with Sarandon mouthing her love to Penn, is very powerful, but in a way this is largely an interior performance, and Sarandon is as good as any actress (or actor) at conveying a world of emotion and character through her eyes. 
















Images: 

http://grantwoodalife.com/templates/grantwood/images/grant-wood-a-life-book.png

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-DbEpsg3PhUE/Thc4ENCZ8oI/AAAAAAAAAW4/HghDzVlcOT8/s1600/Artemisia+Gentileschi+Judith+Slaying+Holofernes+Detail+1620.JPG

http://www.foozago.com/indies/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/k/i/killyoulast.jpg

http://rudrasofttech.com/rockying/art/susan_sarandon_.jpg



Information: 

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/ws200/gentil.htm

http://www.artemisia-gentileschi.com/judith1.html