Pix

Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, Venice 1967

Pix

    Ann Hathaway in Vogue, November 2010 by Mario Testino

This guy is fabulous.  Italians do things with fashion photography that nobody else can.  Worth looking at the whole series here.

Faves

    Bay of Baiae, JMW Turner, 1823, Tate Gallery

Turner is often said to be a precursor of the Impressionists.  There is some truth to this, but not much.  The Impressionists were literalists.  They did not paint what they could not see.  Turner, on the other hand, while perfectly capable of the most literal interpretations, loved injecting imaginary figures, geography and events into his paintings.  In the exquisite painting above, that's no fashionable picnic party on the left, its Apollo and the Sibyl.  You don't see classical Gods cavorting across the canvases of Monet or Renoir. The idealized landscape was what they fought against.

Turner was one of a kind.  His early work was very much in the tradition of Claude, but after he visited Italy in 1817, Turner struck out on his own path. 

In any case, Turner doesn't really reproduce.  I've seen the painting at the Tate and it has a lightness and color you don't see here.

Faves: Paradise Lost

Watercolour illustration of Paradise Lost by William Blake

I downloaded an audio book of Paradise Lost by John Milton.  This is the kind of thing I'd never read as the language is too difficult and obscure.  What put it in mind was news of a new translation of the work, into English.  Anyway, listening is a lot easier than reading.  Its an amazing work of imagination.  Describe the Fall of Man in 240 pages of blank verse.  Milton takes paragraphs from The Bible and spins them into pages of story. The book's reader was very good as well.  The torrent can be found here .  Interestingly, I found it because it was on Pirate Bay's Hot 100 audio books.  There was an enormous interest in the torrent.  The 139MB download generated more than 1GB of upload in three days.  This may be the most popular audio book on The Pirate Bay.  This audio book is not readily available through Amazon or other online retailers.  It would appear that downloading is the only way to get it.

Faves: Richard III

Olivier's fantastic, star studded 1955 movie was a key piece in my political education.  Shakespeare created a neat bit of propaganda for his Tudor patrons.  Whatever its historical inaccuracies, it created such a compelling narrative that there hasn't been a King Richard of England for more than 500 years.  But the play is more than just propaganda, or it would not have remained relevant beyond the Tudor's reign.  What keeps the play relevant is its keen political analysis and the fabulously villainous Richard.

 I first saw the movie when I was 17 or 18.    It taught me that getting power, using power and keeping power are three different things.  Just having a crown doesn't make you King.   That power and office are not the same was a significant revelation to me at the time.

Olivier's portrayal of Richard is definitive.  Nobody since has been able to play the part without taking Olivier into account. As my father says, Olivier's Richard raises skulking to an art.  The movie is very stagey, but reminiscent of contemporary paintings, like Frossart's. This is my favorite of all Shakespeare films.

    Killing of Wat Tyler by Jean Frossart.

Faves: Hiroshige

    Swimming carp - Utagawa Hiroshige - click the image for big version

Hiroshige is my favorite of the great 19th century Japanese artists.  His paintings and woodblocks have a unique delicacy and balance.  Others, like Hokusai, are better known, but I like Hiroshige best.

Top Singers List

    Aretha Franklin, New York, 1961 

Rolling Stone has a list of the top 100 singers of all time.  Its a bit predictable, and heavy on 60's R&B, but still fun.  Guess who was number 1?

Faves: Grindhouse

So maybe a double-feature tribute to '70's B movies wasn't such a good idea.  The film got mixed reviews and a relativly poor box-office reception.  Between foreign markets and DVD, the thing may have broke even.  The two movies themselves are very uneven.  But they have their moments.  What makes this a winning package, to me at least, is the trailers.  Especially the one for Machete.  This is an example of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts.

Faves: Everybody's Rockin'

I've got a soft spot for both Neil Young and Rockabilly.  So his 1983 Rockabilly album Everybody's Rockin' was a favorite from day one.

Rockabilly is the forgotten genre of American music.  Its an article of faith that Elvis' success came from re-packaging "colored" music for white audiences.  I've never agreed, because Elvis was Rockabilly through and through from the beginning.  His earliest and best records were made in Sam Phillips' Sun Records studios, the capitol of Rockabilly.  The same place that a young Johnny Cash was also making Rockabilly records before he went Country.

Neil Young captured the weird undercurrents in Rockabilly on Everybody's Rockin'.  You can see in Rockabilly the precursors of Las Vegas, Liberace, and over-the-top elements of white working class culture.  Fins, pompadours, leather jackets, motorcycles, electric guitars.  See exhibit A below:

    Gene Vincent and his Blue Caps in the studio, mid '50s.  These guys are intense.

Neil Young has been the most consistently inconsistent musician out there.  Going his own way has often left his fans behind.  Its been a struggle for relevance. I sympathize.  Getting people to pay attention has been a struggle in my various creative endevours.

Anyway, a Rockabilly album was natural for Young, and he delivered.  He made a bizarre and funny video for the single Wonderin'.  The only version online is this poor quality one, but its a little better than nothing.

Faves: Katamari Damacy

I've been playing video games since the late 1970's.  This is my favourite.  You play the role of a very small royal prince with a very uncaring father who is king of the Universe.  You roll things up in a ball to make things he has mislaid, like Jupiter.  You start with paper clips and by the last level, you are rolling up continents. That's the entire game.  Rolling up objects into a ball.  Its a totally Japanese game.  Except for the little bit of English sub-titles, its all Japanese and captures a very odd Japanese sensibility.  But that's not why its fun.  Its just really calming and satisfying to roll things up into a ball.  I can't really explain it, its just great.

Faves: Burn On

There's an oil barge winding
Down the Cuyahoga River
Rolling into Cleveland to the lake


Cleveland city of light city of magic
Cleveland city of light you're calling me
Cleveland, even now I can remember
'Cause the Cuyahoga River
Goes smokin' through my dreams


Burn on, big river, burn on
Burn on, big river, burn on
Now the Lord can make you tumble
And the Lord can make you turn
And the Lord can make you overflow
But the Lord can't make you burn

From Randy Newman's Burn On, an ode to Cleveland and the Cuyahoga River, so polluted that it famously caught fire in 1969. It was not the first time. The photo is from a similar eruption in 1952. One of many. The 1969 fire, however, did make a difference. Time magazine said the river: "oozes rather than flows". The publicity led to a realization about the extent of industrial pollution in North America.

Faves: Cape Light

    Joel Meyerowitz - 1979

When I got started, all serious photography was done in black and white.  Colour was for snapshots and commercial work.  There were a few colour photographers who's work was considered art, but they were idiocyncratic.  People like Ernst Haas and Eliot Erwhit.  Then, in 1979, Joel Meyerowitz published the book Cape Light.  He used an 8x10 camera to take colour photos.  This was unheard of and exploded the cult of black and white dominant since Edward Weston and Paul Strand.  Now people can use whatever they like and be taken seriously as artists.

Faves: Sandinista

London Calling is considered by many to be among the best albums ever made.  I've always thought their best material was on Sandinista.  Its The Clash's Exile on Main Street, a band at the height of its powers that couldn't stop cranking out fabulous material fueled by unapologetic political sophistication.  I remember hearing the triple album the day it came out in December 1980.  It was amazing.  I've never stopped listening.  Unfortunately, this was the last gasp artistically for The Clash.  Subsequent material was embarrassing, if popular.  But I don't begrudge them selling out, they earned it.  I'll always have Sandinista.

Faves: Greek Sculpture

Besides their other contributions to Western Civilization, it is worth noting that Classical Greek sculptors were the best anywhere anytime.  Other civilizations have produced great sculputre, like the Assyrians, India, various Chinese eras.  But nobody ever came close to the ancient Greeks.  Even during the height of the Roman era, when portrait busts became supernatuarally realistic, the actual artists were all imported from Greece.

      You could recognize Augustus on the street from his busts.
Scientists have established that these sculptures were painted in gaudy colors.  However, their reconstructions seem unconvincing.  Possibly because they are scientists, not artists.  In any case, the modern eye is used to the bleached look in classical sculptures.  It gives them a pure, abstract look reinforced by missing pieces.  But the real magic is in the detail.  Has cloth or muscle ever looked so real in stone?  Has any other statue such casual naturalness as the goddess above?  Most of all, there is nothing forced, no irony whatsoever.

Faves: Marylin

       click image for a printable size
It took me a long time to get Warhol.  Robert Hughes helpfully explained that this is not a portrait of Marylin Monroe, its a sign that says Marylin Monroe.  The industrial quality of the image makes sense in this context.  Iconic is the point, and that's what its become. 

Faves: The Power Broker

 Photo by the brilliant Arnold Newman
Mein Frau tells me that when Obama took up politics, he was told to read several essential books.  One of them was Robert Caro's The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.  Too right. This Pulitzer winning biography explains the hidden politics that underlies public life.  Its not concealed, just below the journalistic radar.  What I learned particularly is how power is wielded through institutions.  Nobody but a king has intrinsic power.  Everyone else needs to hold an office to exercise power.  You either gain a powerful office, or you create one.  President of the United States is an example of the former, Beloved Leader is Kim Jong Ill's example of the latter.  Caro shows that power has structure, and explains the principles of that structure, the underlying pattern.

Apart from the politics, and the nauseous Mr. Moses, the book is well worth reading because of Caro's writing.  The man could write the telephone book and make it interesting.  Besides being a biography of Moses, the book is a first-rate biography of New York City from 1900 through 1970.  And a fascinating biography it is.  Caro also provides mini-biographies of the many interesting and important people that Moses crossed paths with.  They include Fiorello La Guardia, FDR, Nelson Rockefeller, Al Smith, Tom Dewey and Averell Harriman.  Some of these, like La Guardia's are brilliant in their own right.

Its a long, dense book.  But for anyone that wants to know how power really operates in a democracy, this is a must-read.

The Power Broker on Wikipedia
The Power Broker on Amazon
Robert Caro on Wikipedia
Robert Caro's site

Faves: A Night At The Opera

This is just about the only movie made before 1970 that I can get my kids to watch.  The Marx Brothers made a lot of good movies.  This one has that something special.  I can watch it again and again, still laughing at the same jokes.  The manic edge is just enough under control so the story, such as it is, can unroll properly.  So it seems like a real movie rather than just a bunch of sketches strung together.  But its not like they let the story get in the way.  And the manic moments are among their best.  There are lots of little touches I love.  Like when the orchestra plays Take Me Out To The Ballgame, or when Groucho says "booga booga".

Faves: Abbey Road, The Double White Christmas Album

Sooner or later I was going to have to deal with the Beatles.  Let's do it now.  Abbey Road and The Beatles are two of my alltime favorite albums.  Abbey Road is the only album I invariably listen to in its entirety.  IMHO, the finest work they did individually and together can be found on The Beatles.

After the Beatles broke up, Abbey Road was long considered their best album, apart from Sgt Pepper which had instantly gone to the top of the pantheon and was no longer discussed in comparison to anything else.  As time went on, through the mid-late 70's, opinon shifted with The Beatles being favoured more highly.  Nowadays, Rubber Soul and Revolver are more highly thought of.

At the time it came out, Abbey Road was a sensation for side 2.  Nobody, as far as I know, has really tried something like it, at least not with any success, until Jesus of Suburbia by Green Day.   Anyway, I like Abbey Road because it is so comfortable, cozy, like your favorite comfy chair.  It really delivers a bit of everything the band did well.  No rough edges, no outraged political statements, no wild experimentation, just a good solid, thorough album from a band that had not actually tried to do this in some time.  Not to impugn their previous efforts, but they did have other things on their minds besides a solid, professional, fast-ball-across-the-plate type album.  As it turned out, this was their last release.  How many other bands have delivered such a great last album?  Not a lot.  Just a note that although Abbey Road came out in 1969 and Let It Be in 1970, Abbey Road was recorded after Let It Be and released before.  She's So Heavy was the last track all four recorded together.

Until sometime in the '80's, I had never heard The Beatles referred to as anything except the double white christmas album, or the white album.  It came out in December 1968 and its length was considered by fans to be a present from the band.  Younger readers may not remember how tumultuous 1968 was.  It started out with the Tet Offensive and went downhill from there. A lot happened.  But the year of epic upheaval ended on an epic high note with the excellent white album and Apollo 8 orbiting the moon.

The funny thing about The Beatles was that they evolved into a backup band, backing up each other.  This arrangement worked pretty well, and never better than on the white album.  Sexy Sadie, Revolution, Back in the USSR, Blackbird, Helter Skelter, Mother Nature's Son, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, Long, Long, Long; these are among the best songs the three wrote.  For an album so contentious in its making, there are a lot of magic moments.  Not all of it stands up, particularly John Lennon's material.  But the best stuff is among the best stuff ever by anyone. 

I like both of these albums better than any of the earlier ones, even the deified Sgt Pepper.  The only thing the earlier albums have is a 100% there John Lennon.  His sad life became an object lesson in the danger of drugs. Except for a few very notable exceptions, he went away some time in 1967 and never really came back.  By the time of his death, he was a shadow.  Nothing more than another self-indulgent, coddled junkie in a terminal stupor.  When asked his opinion of Elvis Presley's death in 1974, Lennon replied that Elvis died in 1957 when he went in the Army.  This was cruel, but entirely true.  The ironic thing is that John Lennon didn't die in 1980, he died in 1967 when he became consumed by drugs and Yoko Ono.

Faves: Rear Window

Hitchcock's cage match.  He wanted to see if he could make a film in what amounts to one room.  The camera is trapped with James Stewart in his apartment.  Of course, he pulled it off.  Its a terrific movie.  The kind of movie where if you happen across it on TV and watch for two or three minutes, you always end up watching the whole thing.

I have a theory about Hitchcock and Grace Kelly.  This was the second of three films he made with her; Dial M for  Murder (1954), Rear Window (1954), and To Catch A Thief (1955).  In 1956, she married Prince Ranier, moved to Monaco and stopped making movies.  I think she broke Hitchcock's heart.  He was so mad, he killed her twice in Vertigo (1958), again in Psycho (1960), then tormented her on and off for the rest of his career.  This theory is refreshingly free of facts, but its plausible.  Hitchcock was an exceedingly strange man.  I'm tempted to say he could never have flourished in the modern media microscope age.  But as this media culture developed in the 1960's, he not only survived, he mastered it.

In any case, there are few directors that have ever combined such thinly disguised examination of personal obsession with such  unadulterated artistic and commercial success. 

Faves: The Stranger Song

Songs of Leonard Cohen - 1967

I've spent my life looking for the card that is so high and wild I'll never need to deal another. Card sharps, artists, opportunists, entrepreneurs, addicts... they're all strangers. This song is kind of the other side of Bob Dylan's "Shelter From The Storm"  You can listen to a snippit here at Amazon.


The Stranger Song - Leonard Cohen, 1967
It's true that all the men you knew were dealers
who said they were through with dealing
Every time you gave them shelter
I know that kind of man
It's hard to hold the hand of anyone
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender,
who is reaching for the sky just to surrender.
And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind
you find he did not leave you very much
not even laughter
Like any dealer he was watching for the card
that is so high and wild
he'll never need to deal another
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger
He was just some Joseph looking for a manger

And then leaning on your window sill
he'll say one day you caused his will
to weaken with your love and warmth and shelter
And then taking from his wallet
an old schedule of trains, he'll say
I told you when I came I was a stranger
I told you when I came I was a stranger.

But now another stranger seems
to want you to ignore his dreams
as though they were the burden of some other
O you've seen that man before
his golden arm dispatching cards
but now it's rusted from the elbows to the finger
And he wants to trade the game he plays for shelter
Yes he wants to trade the game he knows for shelter.

Ah you hate to see another tired man
lay down his hand
like he was giving up the holy game of poker
And while he talks his dreams to sleep
you notice there's a highway
that is curling up like smoke above his shoulder.
It is curling just like smoke above his shoulder.

You tell him to come in sit down
but something makes you turn around
The door is open you can't close your shelter
You try the handle of the road
It opens do not be afraid
It's you my love, you who are the stranger
It's you my love, you who are the stranger.

Well, I've been waiting, I was sure
we'd meet between the trains we're waiting for
I think it's time to board another
Please understand, I never had a secret chart
to get me to the heart of this
or any other matter
When he talks like this
you don't know what he's after
When he speaks like this,
you don't know what he's after.

Let's meet tomorrow if you choose
upon the shore, beneath the bridge
that they are building on some endless river
Then he leaves the platform
for the sleeping car that's warm
You realize, he's only advertising one more shelter
And it comes to you, he never was a stranger
And you say ok the bridge or someplace later.

And then sweeping up the jokers that he left behind ...

And leaning on your window sill ...

I told you when I came I was a stranger.