Considerations...: 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.
(*)

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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.

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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.

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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.