Friday, January 30, 2009

Better Than Chocolate


Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sings Handel's Theodora.

I've Come Home And Am Having Chocolate First Thing

For some reason coming home I became very stressed.

1. Because UAMS hospital is going to turn Ray Winder ballpark into a parking lot
2. Because I listened to pop radio and civilization really is doomed
3. Because there was a multiple car wreck on I-630

Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Friday, January 23, 2009

Hello Philip Martin

On Fridays the Arkansas Democrat Gazette publishes its movie review section. Which means I will go by Community Bakery on my way to work in a minute and buy a paper with my cafe au lait. Reading movie reviews over my coffee first thing trivializes Friday into an extension of the weekend. Plus Oscar nominations came out yesterday. With any luck Philip Martin will be grousing about that in today's paper. Stephanie Zacharek has already started at Salon. So has Chris Orr at The New Republic. And Slate is so excited at the prospect of grousing it is making the process a continuing series.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

EU Art Scam

Now how about a post on art serving as monkey-wrench-in-the-gears to stated political aims. The EU presidency has recently rotated to the Czech Republic. The Czech government commissioned a work of art celebrating all 27 member states as a grand ecumenical gesture to kick off their term. Instead they got one guy pretending to be 27 different artists and using the forum to poke fun at the other member states through blatantly politically incorrect stereotypes.

Like Germany as a freeway system in the shape of a swastika. Or Bulgaria as a Turkish toilet. That did not go over well.

Here is an early review before anyone realized it was a hoax. Notice how it quotes different artists on their contributions to the piece.

Here is the fall out.

Here
is a slideshow of the actual work. Which on viewing makes you wonder why it took so long for people to realize this was not a celebration but a blatant send up.

Here
is artist David Cerny apologizing after the hoax was discovered.

The Poster-fication of Obama


The Obama "Hope" poster is the iconic image of the 2008 presidential campaign. Ever wonder what photo was the source for the poster? Tom Gralish tracks it down.

It is amusing, given all the ponderous significance an image like this is meant to convey, that the source photo apparently comes from a George Clooney event at the National Press Club.

It serves to remind us that there remains a disjunction between the ways in which we love our politicians and the grounds upon which they earn our love. They go to hear an actor speak at a press club and we turn it into a Christos Pantocrator.

Anne Althouse, who voted for Obama, has a reflection in a similar vein here.

"By contrast, the entire plan to bring Obama into office depended on the glorification of the man, whose actual experience was so bizarrely limited that it took some nerve to claim to be ready. Magic was required. The cult grew up not as he held power and needed to respond to a crisis. The cult was the campaign to bring him into power. It depended on our projecting all sorts of hopes and dreams onto him, and he knew it. Inside, he may have felt embarrassed by the whole enterprise, but he'd figured out that it could work, and he was right. Now, I think this worked because he really is a solid, normal person who remained grounded in the middle of all this craziness. And I like to think that, now that he's President, with his steely nerve, his intelligence, and his groundedness, he'll do the job that must be done. The trickery is over."

Update

Did you wonder as I did what it was that Rev Lowery was reciting at the beginning of his inaugural benediction? It was the Negro National Anthem by James Weldon Johnson. Ross Douthat has the full text up here.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Will Obama Have a Septimius Severus Problem?

I just like saying that...

Mary Beard wonders here

Obama and His Books

Omnivoracious speculates on Obama's reading lists here.

Michiko Kakutani of the NYT Book Review explores the relationship between Obama the speaker and Obama the reader here.

Arts and the Inauguration

Elizabeth Alexander's poem Praise Song for the Day and John William's Air and Simple Gifts are getting some feedback. The Times (UK), the LA Times, and the NY Times parse Alexander. The AP loves John Williams. Terry Teachout is less impressed.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Inauguration Day

At the door heading into work, H said that she was going to watch on a little TV in her office. In facility manager's J's office, rows of screens devoted to security cameras had a couple turned to the inauguration. Boss N told us to be flexible with our lunches, so I took her at her word and went down to Mosaic Church, which opened its doors to lunch crowds with two big screens turned to CNN.


We got there just as Rick Warren was winding up his prayer. Was it just me or didn't he pronounce "Malia and Sasha" with some extra verve? I started to laugh before choking it down.

Aretha Franklin was great. I loved her outfit.

And then Justice John Roberts screwed up the oath! Dad tells me that Roberts once had the sort of screw-up lawyers have nightmares about. He was one day late filing a Writ of Certiorari for a case to be considered by the Supreme Court. The Court is strict about those things; one day late and your client is out. He only had one job today. Just one. Give the oath. It isn't even long. And he blew it. The first African American president sworn in. A sound bite for the ages. But instead both men will stumble through that oath for digital eternity. Somewhere out there, a former client who got his appeal killed by a late filing is saying, "I knew that guy would screw it up!"

Listening to NPR afterword, the critiques said more to me about what we have come to expect from inaugural speeches as opposed to the virtue of the speech itself. I liked that it wasn't built for applause lines. I liked that it was more sober than soaring. I did wonder at the emphasis are hard times. That is more the posture of a candidate. As a president the emphasis necessarily shifts. Stick to the FDR/Reagan model of optimism in the face challenges vs the Carter model. Beware the Carter model. Obama skated close to Carterian gloom in content, but it speaks to his skills as a speech maker that he can pull off an unimpassioned reality check as an inauguration address.

The Lowery benediction was hilarious. Was that a hymn he was reading to start or was he purposefully rhyming? And then the ditty at the end. The crowd I was in of mostly African Americans groaned at the "white will embrace what is right" line, but given the context of the original I can't imagine anyone minding. Then there was the call and response and the shot of Obama grinning with his head bowed. That might have been my favorite part.

Saturday, January 17, 2009

At the Symphony

Mother is out of town and Dad had an extra ticket to the symphony, so we went and heard a Brahms's concerto for the violin and cello and Shostakovitch's Symphony No. 5. The guest violinist Giora Schmidt was very good. He is only 25 years old and quite good looking, although he has deep set eyes and combined with a head tilt downward and a looking up from under his brows turns his eyes into pockets of shadow. The cellist also seemed good, but her portion tended to get lost in the orchestra and I had a hard time hearing her. David Itkin, our musical director/conductor, said there was a problem with "balance" in the Brahms's piece, by which he meant you can expect the cellist to get lost. He also used words like "texture" and "palette" and "wash" in a little pre-concert lecture walking us through the movements of the music. What other words was he supposed to use? Dad and I didn't know, but we both agreed it was borrowed language and not very precise anyway. How are you supposed to describe music? English is insufficient to it, and maybe human language generally. Maybe we should go through Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century and circle all the adjectives.

Dad said in advance he was more excited about the Brahms, but when it was all over I liked the Shostakovitch best. I closed my eyes as it started and tried to place myself in the Mikhailovsky Theater, which according to an article I read this week on the neoplasticity of brains, is possible to a surprising degree. So why not? And then I tried to recapture the street outside the Mikhailovsky, because if you were there at the theater that is the place you would have come from and the world that would be waiting for you as you listened. The 5th Symphony started out angular and hard edged (again with the non-pertinent adjective problem, but how do you describe music?) and then develops a softer theme, and the whole symphony plays out those two ideas. It was over before you knew it and left me wanting to hear it again.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Andrew Wyeth 1917 - 2009


There is a gush of obituaries out. Wyeth was one of those artists for whom there was a real gap during his lifetime between public appreciation for his work (high) and critical opinion of those same works (low). True, "Christina's World" is in the Musuem of Modern Art. And the Metropolitan held a major show of his under the leadership of controversial former director Thomas Hoving. But neither move had much of a sanctifying effect. The exposure and popularity of "Christina's World" at the MOMA only demonstrates for its critics its status as museum boilerplate.

The obits are focusing heavily on this disjunction between general and critical popularity.

Most defenders hint at the bones of abstraction in his watercolors or in his empty sweeps of space.

It seems that Wyeth's death is going to be a thrashing ground for a lot of dead horses - debates on modernism, marketing, critical vs. popular taste etc. For my part, it doesn't really concern me whether or not Wyeth will ever fit one of the numerous evolutionary progressions, technical or conceptual, that serve as rubrics for criticism. Neither do I think it matters to the work itself that some by fault of popularity have been consigned to a Hallmark hell. Art of any kind asks a viewer to stand in front and try and make a case for it. Wyeth repays that effort. His work is technically proficient, displays a great eye for composition, and is at its best evocative and moving. One critic paired Andrew Wyeth with Andy Warhol as the two most well known American artists of the age. Of course Warhol enjoyed/enjoys a much higher critical reputation than Wyeth. I'd take Wyeth easily on those terms.

New York Times obit and
evaluation

The Times obit and evaluation
The Wall Street Journal
NPR
The Village Voice

Next Up, Entire Nation Takes To Genre Painting


Masses of Dutch are ice skating the (rarely) frozen canals in a wave of nostalgia for the past.

More fun pictures here

Depressing

I renewed my driver's license today. That old driver's license was my favorite ID. I loved that picture. Everybody needs at least one ID that does not induce soul cringing embarrassment. Passport photo? No makeup and wet hair. Work badge? Eyes closed. Driver's license? My best and truest self. And now it's gone. The new one is OK. But I miss the joy of having one representation of yourself that is a secret source of pride. No longer can I offer to show people my driver's license as an icebreaker. No longer can I use my driver's license as a morale booster. Like the flower of grass...

Sunday, January 11, 2009

Other People's Closets

Indian pottery shards, stacks of dinosaur vertebrae, 19th century land deeds, 15th century folios, books on the Civil War, books on Arkansas History, books on Indian history, books on Creole culture, books in French, books in Latin, books in Spanish, surveyors maps, letters, writs of indentured servitude, photographs, newspaper articles, folk art paintings by Clementine Hunter and Mose Tolliver, Spanish crucifixes, a receipt signed by Stephen Austin of Texas fame, a panel carved by Japanese Americans during a stint in an internment camp at Rowher, a puncheon, a rusty Civil War bayonet, an old erector set, ancient Tom Thumb toys, fossils by the pile and the list goes on.

Roy Dudley is selling the estate of the late Sam Dickinson.

I didn't buy anything, but browsing around it is impossible not to have a spasm of admiration for the human tendency toward pack rat.

Sam Dickinson was an associate editor for the old Arkansas Gazette, which went down in a newspaper war to the Arkansas Democrat and is now the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.

Paul Greenberg reminisces here.

Evin Demirel (how does he always get the quirky good stuff?) has an article on the sale up here

Saturday, January 10, 2009

A Great Curious Movie

Went and saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button tonight, and I am only just thinking now how great the title is. "Curious" is quite the understatement for the case of Benjamin Button, a man born old who ages backward. There's a kind of old timey demureness in calling something that is absolutely bizarre "curious." There is a sort of reserve in the word that is old fashioned, a withholding of judgment that I imagine was once very effective when society required more by way of polite or deferential filler in conversation. "That's curious" is less committal than "that's ridiculous" or "that's crazy" and it seems like in older literature one comes across it more. "Curiouser and curiouser" says Alice in wonderland. And that's the other thing that is nice about a word like "curious" in connection with events: it holds out the possibility that the fantastical actually could happen. "That's curious" is a suspended state of puzzlement in absence of an explanation. I imagine parents saying this to children who come in from a day outside with impossible accounts of supposedly natural phenomena. "That's curious, dear," they say, instead of "that's impossible," and in doing so allow for the whimsy of the world.

"Curious" is a great word for the title of Benjamin Button's case, both as an observed detail of an older means of expression and as an introduction to the fantastic, because Benjamin Button the movie plays its whimsy straight as if it all could have happened, rather than giggling over its own cuteness or basking in an implied imperative to make room for a little fairy dust in life. No one's life is made fuller by "believing" in Benjamin Button. Quite the opposite, he is taken for granted, and while the story is heart warming it is not life affirming. This curious case is a long (really long, over two hours) meditation on aging and death.

I heard somewhere, though I'm not sure if this is true, that the original story by F. Scott Fitzgerald was set in Baltimore, and director David Fincher moved the setting to New Orleans for the movie. If true that was an inspired choice, because a tale like this to me fits more easily into the fabric of things in the South than it would on the East coast. The South too likes its whimsy straight. It's geography, its heat, its layers of passersby feel like the environment that might harbor pockets of the unexplored or unexplained pressure cooked into curious incident. And the South is obsessed with aging and death. It is shot through with nostalgia, a fondness for the way something was, that is the reaction to the aging of the world and the passing of the familiar. I'm not referring here to the Civil War or a lost southern culture, although only today I saw a regiment of men in confederate gray fire muskets over a memorial to David O. Dodd, boy martyr of the Confederacy, next to the Arts Center. Rather I'm referring to communal memory, the way old houses and old spaces develop oral histories that are not allowed to die, the treasuring up of how people are connected, or if they are not now then how they once were. Who is related to whom and what were the spaces where it all played out. Southern cities are riddled with that sort of relational and spatial nostalgia. By choosing New Orleans for his movie, Fincher tapped into that nostalgia, that regret of age. This is a regret far more powerful to me than the regret of an aging body. Maybe this is because I am from the South or maybe because I am still young. Still my favorite thing about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was that along with the aging bodies there was an aging city. Houses were old and in various states of disrepair. Houses were sold and the family histories on the walls went with them. New Orleans itself was on a clock, ticking down to Hurricane Katrina, as if it weren't simply the characters who were going to die but their stage too. I love the closing shot of the waters of the flood sweeping into the basement where the old backward-ticking clock was stored, implying that very shortly the waters would stop the clock that occasioned the tale of Benjamin Button. Of course they would sweep the city under too. This puts a new cast on the movie's repeated line about death requiring us to let go, because the whole movie is structured around not just the decay of individuals but of a city too. Was New Orleans itself a backward ticking clock, a reprieve from a natural decay that was no reprieve at all, but like Benjamin Button, just a different route to the same end? Maybe these devices will feel heavy handed to some, but to me they are what makes the movie. I'm calling it great.

Thursday, January 8, 2009

Apropo to Nothing

Two bits in the news this morning. First, the US porn industry wants a bailout. I can't imagine Flynt is serious, but it does show up the random, scatter shot logic of our government's approach to the financial crisis. Not that I fault the governments actions up to this point, since I think they had no choice but to bail out the finance industry and the Bush bailing the autos was required responsible behavior vis a vis an incoming Obama administration. At least opponents of everything the government does can rage against the machine. The rest of us are stuck in theater of the absurd. As long as we are propping up private enterprises, why not use taxpayer dollars to role play rescue with Larry Flynt? The depressing thing about the news lately is that the news is terrible and even when you laugh at something you feel a little disgusted that it is not absurdist theater or even reality tv but rather an alternate reality made flesh in which the usual buffoons come off with more financial acumen and just as much dignity as the one-time sober guiding institutions of the country.

Second, two German lovers - aged six and five - try to elope to Africa. This is from the Guardian newspaper, and the Guardian newspaper is depressing because it is always down on its own society's institutions and possibly even the principles on which those institutions are based and certainly on the heritage of those institutions. So it is depressing. I myself was on the website because I was anxious to read "West Will Pay For Bloodbath." So in that context it almost makes your eyes well up with tears that even in this absurd and angry world where I and my descendants are going to pay for the Guardian's bloodbath it is still the case that young lovers will decide to go Africa. Adults will know that this trajectory of Europe to Africa adventurism conjures up shades of imperialistic appropriation of an entire continent's symbolic meaning as loci for concepts of the "exotic" and "escape". But despite the fact that even at a tender age these young people had absorbed stereotypes, still there is something touching about leaving winter with the one you love for swim trunks and a "stroll in the sun."

Thursday, January 1, 2009

Credit Crunch vs Art Market

Dan Bischoff reports on the carnage, plus a little historical context.

New York Art Fair canceled

On the other hand, if your show is struggling financially, you can always show nothing

Random extra links: Christie's, Sotheby's, old Pop and new Pop drop together

Best in Show

ArtForum surveys the best of 2008.

The show I miss missing most

About Me

Little Rock, Arkansas
I work at a local museum, date a lovely boy, and with my free time procrastinate on things like blogs.