: flying or capable of flying
: quick, nimble
Happy holiday eve, readers. Today, knock on wood, will best be remembered in the Fischer household as the day Gabriel got his first Christmas present of 2012.... an aquarium!
Because he is obsessed with fish and does nothing but stare at them when we take him to Petco, we have decided to go ahead and bring some more pets into the household.
More on this to come....
R.I.P...
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Because it is a new month, it's time for 10 more entries in Charles' 200 Essential American Films.
(Due to a busy day, I won't go into detail about the films.) If you want to see my early selections (1-60), go to this earlier post from last month:
http://wwwconsideringcjf.blogspot.com/2012/06/new-month.html
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| The Docks of New York |
Here are my selections for July:
About Schmidt (2002, Alexander Payne)
The Docks of New York (1928, Josef von Sternberg)
Driving Miss Daisy (1989, Bruce Beresford)
Five Easy Pieces (1970, Bob Rafelson)
The Godfather, Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola)
The Kids Are Alright (2010, Lisa Cholodenko)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford)
Notorious (1946, Alfred Hitchcock)
The Palm Beach Story (1942, Preston Sturges)
Sunrise (1927, F.W. Murnau)
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While we're at it, let's add another turn to my 500 Greatest Performances of All Time:
Jack Nicholson
as Bobby Dupea in Five Easy Pieces (1970)
You think of this movie, you probably think of Nicholson insulting the waitress, telling her what to do with the chicken salad. Or maybe you think of his breakdown scene in front of his long-demanding, wheelchair-bound father. Whatever image or scene is summoned, it's not worth it trying to deny what sort of emotional impact Nicholson's arrogant, misunderstood, lonely, ultimately inexpressive Bobby Dupea has on the viewer. Bob Rafelson's classic is a profound character study of an alienating man, drifting through life. Working as an oil rigger, unable to truly love his girlfriend (Karen Black), a disappointment to his family, never figuring out what to do with - or how to cash in on - his remarkable talent at the piano, Dupea seems to be his own worst enemy. In the devastating final scene, he has no idea how to react to anything. Bracingly hostile and finally, very, very sad, Nicholson's Bobby Dupea is a figure we we will never quite really know how to react to.
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Today's Author Profile?
Tom Perrotta
Born: 1961, Garwood, New Jersey
Career: Perrotta graduated from Yale University in 1983 with a B.A. in English and then received an M.A. in English/Creative Writing from Syracuse University; one of his teachers there was Tobias Wolff (This Boy's Life). Though he wrote stories for his high school and college literary magazines, his first professionally-published stories were in 1988. He married his wife, writer Mary Granfield, in 1991. The couple have two kids and have lived on the east coast for their marriage. In the mid-1990s, Perrotta taught creative writing at Harvard.
He wrote a collection of short stories (Bad Haricut: Stories of the Seventies), which came out in 1994, and then had a hard time getting his first novel published; in fact, the movie rights for the novel were bought before the book was even published - of course, this would go on to be Election. In 1997, his comic novel The Wishbones, about a New Jersey wedding band, came out.
Since the film version of Election, which was director Alexander Payne's first big breakthrough in Hollywood (and featured great performances by Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon), Perrotta's status has risen. He has written six novels in all, the biggest of which was probably 2004's Little Children, two years later made into the Oscar-nominated film of the same name with Kate Winslet, Jennifer Connelly, Patrick Wilson, and a very creepy Jackie Earle Haley.
Noted Books: Election, which I haven't read, wasn't as popular as the movie it was based on, but Little Children stood on its own, grandly. It was a perfect suburban drama/satire about a housewife who has a torrid affair with a local stay-at-home dad, during a summer when a sex offender moves to the neighborhood, an event that brings out the worse in her neighbors. Perrotta followed it up with 2007's acclaimed, provocative The Abstinence Teacher, a pointed take on this decade's culture wars, with a divorced, opinionated sex ed teacher coming into conflict with her conservative suburban neighbors (while falling in love with a born-again soccer coach). His latest book, 2011's The Leftovers, is his most ambitious yet. Again, we're in suburbia, only this time the Rapture has happened. People just disappeared into thin air and their friends, neighbors, and families have tried to get on with their own lives, never entirely sure that such an event won't happen again.
Why You Should Read Him: Because he pens good old accessible American suburban satire (sort of Updike-y or Cheever-y without some of the pretentiousness) in comfortable prose. He writes about suburban problems that plague America as a whole. His books are scathing but never mean-spirited, and he is almost always funny. His work has a wide appeal, too. Plainly put, it's a nice meeting ground between serious literary fiction and palatable, popular fiction.
Books I'd Recommend: 2000's Joe College (*****), about a Yale student who works at his father's lunch truck in the summer, is one of the best coming-of-age novels you could ever read. It's the perfect introduction to Perrotta: somewhat autobiographical, quirky, solidly-crafted, with appealing characters, a familiar setting, funny, intelligent. It's one of my favorite books - in fact, I think it was the very first book of mine I ever let Julia borrow!
Little Children (*****) made a great movie, but the book was something special. I wasn't as crazy about The Abstinence Teacher (***) because it got a little too political for me, but I would still recommend it, as I would The Leftovers (***), a book that had a bracing premise but then, in my eyes, fell back into a too-familiar groove for Perrotta, with suburban characters I felt I had read about before.
Perrotta's been called the "American Chekhov" by The New York Times for the way he vividly delineates American lives. His influences include: Kafka, Camus, Conrad, Raymond Carver, Stephen Crane, Hemingway, Wolff.
He co-wrote the screenplay for Little Children with director Todd Field; they were nominated for an Academy Award (but lost out, shamefully, to William Monahan for The Departed).
According to his website, he has written the screenplay for The Abstinence Teacher's film version, but it has long been in-development and there are still no indications that it will be out anytime soon - if at all. Director Lisa Cholodenko (The Kids Are Alright) is reputedly directing it (yay!) and various reports indicated that at one time Steve Carell and Sandra Bullock were to star. I don't think that is happening. We'll see.
Read this guy!
Author's Website: http://www.tomperrotta.net/content.php?page=about&n=1&f=2
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In the biography of Grant Wood that I'm reading at the moment, I came across a painter I was completely unfamiliar with: John Steuart Curry. Curry's career mimicked Wood's in the sense that they were both Midwestern farm boys who spent some time in Europe and then were marketed as homegrown American talents, free of European influences and affectations. The two spent a summer working together at Wood's Stone City Art Colony (outside Cedar Rapids), and Curry and Wood were two of the three painters (Thomas Hart Benton being the other) featured in NYC art dealer Maynard Walker's landmark 1933 exhibition titled American Art Since Whistler. America, Walker reckoned, needed her own painters. A new name for this school of painting was coined - Regionalist. Curry would never gain the fame the other two did, and his work was much more different - if not necessarily in theme - from Wood's, in particular: Unlike Wood's, Curry's paintings were full of storm and action, often featuring athletes, raw violence, politicized evocations of racial injustice and corruption. His works exhibited a masculine force. One of his best known paintings, in the collection at the Whitney Museum of art in New York, is 1928's Baptism in Kansas.
As a satire/creepy portrait of the Midwest, Curry's work - his first major critical success - was received in some of the similar terms as Wood's American Gothic. Is it a portrait of down home reverence and understanding? Or a take on religious fanaticism?
An adult baptism takes places in the open air of a barnyard in front of a group of humble, earnest, suitably-dressed observers. The subject itself is matter-of-fact, and Curry himself denied the satire of the scene (he was inspired by a recollection of a baptism he observed in 1915), but critics and even fellow Kansas-ers felt that it was a bit of freak show. Something indeed just seems off. Curry had recently returned from Europe and was inspired by the Louvre's collection of Rubens, Delacroix, and David, masters who could take great history paintings and infused them with the issues of their time. That didn't necessarily mean people had any idea what to do with something like Baptism. For people on the east coast, their reactions were akin to: So this is how they baptize people out there?
As one of the Big Three of American Regionalist painting, Curry might be worth a second look.
Images taken from:
http://sensesofcinema.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/The-Docks-of-New-York.jpg
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Y1r3o-m0d8w/TyLh2ITZjCI/AAAAAAAACA4/vgHLg6bU2Os/s1600/five-easy-pieces-screenshot-jack-nicholson-495x-2.png
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Books/Pix/pictures/2009/2/20/1235146171030/Tom-Perrotta--001.jpg
http://diesel-ebooks-cdn.make-a-store.com/mas_assets/image_cache/1/0/3/b/500x500_1063933_file.jpeg
http://predella.arte.unipi.it/predella24/immagini/figure4.jpg
Information:
http://www.tomperrotta.net/content.php?page=about&n=1&f=2
http://www.johnsteuartcurry.net/JohnSteuartCurry/Essays/Vivian_Kiechel.html
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/july-dec98/curry_8-13.html
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