Category: Art

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Lazy Sunday

It’s a quiet Sunday here at Chez VM. Well, it was louder earlier in the day, when I was shredding bills and records as part of the process of rearranging my home office. The process started when I bought a new desk on Wednesday, replacing the two tables that occupied a wall of my room. The process continued yesterday, when I picked up a leaning bookcase from C&B, a desk organizer from Pottery Barn (they don’t list it on their site), and a couple of bulletin boards and paper drawers from the Container Store. Today involved figuring out where to put everything (hence the bill-shredding). If there’s good light tomorrow morning, I’ll take some pix and post them for those of you who are obsessed interested in such things.

Before buying up this stuff, Amy & I finally got to the local (within 30 miles) Imax to catch 300. It was

  1. a hoot
  2. utterly insane
  3. possibly the gayest movie ever (okay, the Gayest. Movie. Ever.)

I enjoyed it a bunch, even if it did overplay the “we’re fighting to defend reason and logic” angle. Gerard Butler was fascinating to look at, and this hearkens back to my original post about this flick: I’m more interested in the stylization of the movie, and the filmmakers managed to get the lead to resemble classical Greek art. I’m not talking about the chiseled abs phenomenon, which are major contributors to the “gayest movie ever” trophy, but the angles of his face, his beard, and his hair somehow gestalted into this living representation of a Greek bust, to me.

We had a laugh later in the day, when we noted that Gerard Butler’s filmography includes Beowulf (where I thought he looked a little like Paul Rodgers) and Attila the Hun. Looks like he can’t get away from historic slaughter flicks. Still, he did a great job in this one, making the Spartan king a, um, raging Scot. It’s not a movie to be taken seriously as history, but it was a thrill ride. My biggest problem with it is that it’s success means that the director is going to get the greenlight to make a movie of The Watchmen, which will be a disaster.

This morning, I realized that I’ve had a pretty strange run of Easter-weekend trips to the movies. I don’t tend to go to the movies often, but I guess there’s something about Easter: Hellboy in 2004, Sin City in 2005 and 300 in 2007. Can’t remember if I saw anything last year, and I’m not finding any references in the blog, which as we know is a backup drive for my brain.

Anyway, I hope all my Christian readers have a good Easter today.

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Yesterday’s meander

I took a half-day yesterday from work. Cousins of my wife were in NYC and we were meeting them for dinner. Rather than risk running late with traffic, I decided to head in early.

Based on the location of the restaurant where I thought we were eating, I parked down in the west Village. As it turned out, Amy’s cousins (Wade, Robin, and Wade’s parents) weren’t interested in Italian that night, so she switched plans and we met up at a BBQ place near Times Square. In-between, I had about 5 hours to meander.

You know what that means: you can just skip this post and check out my collection of photos from the afternoon, or you can read whatever ramblings I come up with as I recollect my walk. If you’re one of those stupid brave souls who wants to stick with me through thick and thin, you’ve been warned.

It was stupidly cold for the first week of April: around 35-40 degrees, after a week of 60-70-degree weather the previous week. I wore a warm coat and grabbed my gloves before I left the house in the morning, so I was taken care of for two-plus-mile walk uptown.

See, dear reader, I actually had a goal for this walk, and it didn’t involve buying a ton of Orwell books over at the Strand. (Sure, I made my obligatory stop there, but it was only to use the bathroom! I swear! Okay, so I spent some time among the art books on the second floor, but I managed not to buy anything.)

People with too much time on their hands Astute readers may recall my recent post about Muji, the Japanese “no brand” company, and its amazing products. The slideshow mentioned that the company has a store at the Design Store at the Museum of Modern Art, so I figured I’d see just how ingenious and wonderful their products are.

Look. I don’t tell you how to live your life, do I?

So I made my way uptown from the Strand. I walked through Union Square, was disappointed that no one was protesting Israel, and decided to give my buddy Mark a call. He’s a public school teacher, and I had no idea if he was on break this week. I left him a message and kept walking.

At this point, around 2:30, I was starting to get pretty peckish. See, I have this tendency to Just Keep Going when that happens, and I know for a fact that this leads to my doing incredibly stupid things, as it appears my IQ and my blood sugar have a linear correlation. I needed to stop somewhere to eat, but my decision to keep “Passover kosher” made this a problem. See, in my incredibly half-assed universe, I’ve decided that I’ll stay off the leavened bread (and ancillary stuff) this week, even though I was heading out for pulled pork and brisket at Spanky’s for dinner. It’s hard work, being this inconsistent.

As it turns out, I was already becoming stupid, because I ended up getting lamb from a street-meat vendor. This was a bad idea both in the short term (when I realized I had nowhere to actually eat the stuff, and had to stand on a street corner while I devoured the lamb, lettuce, tomatoes and onions) and in the long term (when I lay in bed that night gripped by heavy nausea and realizing that, since my wife and I shared our dish at dinner, that my lunch was the culprit). Anyway, the lamb was delicious, though indecorous and mildly poisonous. Since I didn’t get too ill from it (basically, I spent the day feeling hungover), I consider myself a stronger man, and none of you can convince me otherwise.

Mark called back while I was huddled under a construction awning, eating my lunch. We briefly played phone tag, but soon got in touch and made tentative plans to get together once I’d finished up at MoMA.

From there, I decided to walk up Madison till I reached 53rd, at which point I’d head west for MoMA, which is between 5th and 6th. I figured that, since 5th heads south, I’d stick with Madison and if I got too cold, I’d get a cab up to 53rd.

(Bonus VM wisdom: David Gates, one of my favorite contemporary writers, once mentioned a great mnemonic for the easterly progression of avenues in NYC: Fat Men Piss Less, which stands for Fifth, Madison, Park and Lexington. Just try forgetting that one.)

New York is composed of a bazillion neighborhoods and districts, so it’s always possible to discover new sites that everyone laughs at you for never having seen. In this case, it was the Morgan Library, which I’d never heard of. I was impressed by the 36th St. side (here’s a pic from my flickr set), but wasn’t so interested in the modern section on Madison. I’ll have to go back some time to check out the collections and reassess the new section, which was designed by Renzo Piano and is supposed to be All That.

Just because I didn’t spend time at the Morgan doesn’t mean I was in some sort of rush. I had hours before dinner, and was conscious of my tendency to start rushing to get somewhere for no purpose. I just felt that I should save the museum for some other trip, when I’ve some idea of what I’d be looking for there (I think they have some Rembrandt drawings in the collection, which could make it worthwhile).

A few blocks up, I headed over to the south end of Grand Central. I’ve made a few visits to the terminal lately, but I came from the north or west. So I stopped and took some pics of the facade, which was typically glorious. I tried to get angles where “MET LIFE” wasn’t in the background.

Paradoxically, I started to become absorbed by how little I was thinking about myself. By now, you’ve surely guessed that I’m my favorite subject of conversation, among other things. But despite the cold and the wind, I found myself simply enjoying a mid-day walk uptown. There was a background anxiety about making sure I could get together with Mark and still get back to the Village in time for dinner (the plans hadn’t changed at the point), but it wasn’t too pressing. It would sort itself out.

Instead, I just eased into the throng (as it were), making little observations about the styles of retail in this neighborhood, noting the flow of traffic on different blocks, and keeping my eyes open for good photos. (This generally involves buildings. I’d love to take pix of people, but worry too much about getting my ass beat. This afternoon, the town crazy was on his way into our supermarket, and I thought, “I oughtta take a picture of him,” and then thought, “That’s an awfully big walking stick he’s carrying.”)

So there’s no Joycean reverie about NYC for you, dear readers. Just a guy in a nice coat walking uptown, until he reached the Muji section of MoMA’s Design Store. If you wanna find out what I actually bought there, I’m afraid you’re going to have to go through the flickr set. I kept snapping pix as I walked, figuring I’d get up to the Time Warner Center, laugh at it, get a coffee, and call Mark.

He told me that he wouldn’t have time to come down there to meet me, since he was still cleaning up his apartment, and we’d likely only get half an hour together, but if I wanted to come up to his place, that’d be great.

Now, there are two things you need to understand about my reaction to this invite:

a) it involved using the subway, which is fine in theory, but I’m always convinced I’m going to get on the wrong or mislabeled train, and end up on Staten Island;

b) Mark lives in Harlem and, to paraphrase Avenue Q, I’m a little bit racist.

But Mark walked me through the subway setup (that is, which line to pick up, and where to exit the station near his place), and I remained a little bit racist.

See, when I came up out of the subway stop, I saw a neat building, took a picture, and immediately thought, “I shouldn’t show that camera around here.” Why? Because I’m a racist. I was only a few blocks from Mark’s place, and it was broad daylight, but the lack of people in the neighborhood just made me nervous. “But only because I’m wearing a nice coat” and because I’m white. It was utterly moronic of me. Within a block or two, I said, “Mark’s lived here for years, and never had any incident,” and concluded that it’s Just A Neighborhood. But it was one of those instances where my point of view of white-guy-in/from-the-suburbs really made itself known.

Passing a black guy in a tracksuit, sitting on a stoop, I felt a little nervous. Then he smiled and called out to the UPS guy, and I realized, “This is where the guy lives. Don’t be such a douchebag.”

So, of course, I got to Mark’s place, and we shot the breeze for a while about books, friends, economics, his dad, my dad, his dog (whom I got to meet), Harvey Pekar, Robert Moses, Ben Stiller, and Mark’s unexpected invite to the previous night’s Knicks game, which he enjoyed (he’s not a huge basketball fan). Somehow, this all took place in about 30-40 minutes.

Eventually, I got the call that our dinner plans had changed, so Mark joined me on the trip to the BBQ joint. We had a drink at the bar while waiting for Amy, and continued our rambling conversation. It was a nice way to cap the day, since our conversation tends to be very easy. Even when we’re talking about complex subjects, I always have this feeling that Mark’s able to parse my sentences, and that frees me up to speak better. Because it’s rare that I can use a ton of clauses when I speak, and I really do find them necessary to make and qualify my points.

There’s not a lot more to tell. Amy arrived, and the breeze-shooting continued. I took a picture of the two of them, and realized that we need to get a nice pic of Mark, a good-looking guy who doesn’t photograph well in bars. Her cousins soon showed up, and told us about their day-tour in southern Manhattan. A rowdy Yankees fan kept cursing at the TV over the bar, which led me to say, “It’s only the second game of the season, dude. There are 160 more of ’em. Pace yourself.”

But the meal was good, and the conversation was fun. I like getting the perspectives of out-of-towners. Wade’s dad commented about the walk over from Times Square: “There were some burlesque shows over there.”

It was a phrase so astonishingly archaic that I could only reply, “The Square was a lot seedier in the ’70s and ’80s.”

There isn’t much more to write about. I’m really sorry about the lack of introspection, angst or anything else that you’ve come to expect from my posts (literary references, naked chicks, etc.). But it was a nice day, it yielded some good photos, and there’s always the story of how I scorched my finger while trying to put up a cork board earlier today.

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Turning Japanese

Muji, “the Japanese Ikea,” is opening a store at the Time Warner Center (a.k.a., a little bit of New Jersey right here in midtown). You really need to check out this slide show of some of their impossibly minimalist products. The CD player (slide #5) just blows my mind. Not sure I’d trust them to build my house, though. . .

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Response and responsibilities

For a month or two, Slate has been running excerpts from Clive James’ new book, Cultural Amnesia, which it describes as a “re-examination of intellectuals, artists, and thinkers who helped shape the 20th century.” The excerpts are presented as A-Z profiles, and some are compelling enough that I put the book on my Amazon Wish List. (However, since I know I won’t get around to reading it for quite a while, I’m figuring I’ll end up buying the paperback in 2008 or ’09. Or I’ll find a remainder/surplus copy at the Strand, as is my wont.)

I thought the Terry Gilliam one went off the rails a bit, pursuing a discussion of torture that probably could have been written without including Gilliam’s masterpiece, but it’s still an engaging essay. With a number of the other essays, James appears to be pursuing the question of artists’ responsibilities in the world, vis a vis the political tumult of the 20th century. (It’s not only about artists, but they seem well represented in the 110 profiles the book contains.)

Thus, the discussion of Borges has to get at his relationship with Argentina’s junta, while the take-no-prisoners profile of Sartre posted today questions the nature of JP’s resistance during the war as well as his avoidance of the truth about the Soviet Union. (It also touches on the subject of the necessity of bad writing, a favorite topic of mine.)

The excerpt that I enjoyed the most — I haven’t read them all — is the one discussing Rilke and Brecht, even though I haven’t read much of Rilke beyond his poetry and know nothing of Brecht’s work. The essay contrasts Rilke’s art-for-art’s-sake with Brecht’s art-as-politics, and finds Brecht wanting. (Okay, it finds Brecht a noxious scumbag.) But James goes on to make an interesting and subtle point about the relation between the artist — particularly the ‘word artist’ — and his beliefs, and perhaps between the artist and the audience.

Give it a read (and go check out some of the others) and let me know what you think.

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Lynch Mob

I was grooving through Guy Rundle’s review of Steven Soderbergh’s recent film noir, The Good German, for a while. I thought the writer did a good job of explaining why the film is not the experimental triumph some critics have lauded it as, but rather a nice little mannerist exercise:

You could say it’s an interesting experiment, but the trouble is we already knew what it establishes. We’ve been theorising film noir for a half-century now, and no genre in cinema history has been more written about. In other words, The Good German is not an essay in experimentation, but in mannerism — the characteristic of mannerism in any art form being the exhaustive exploration of permutations for their own sake, beyond any usefulness they might once have possessed. Mannerism tends to break out when there has been a tremendous burst of artistic innovation and quality — as there was in Hollywood in the Thirties and Forties, and again in the Seventies — and a way to further revolutionise the form has not yet been fully conceived.

I thought he was making a good argument against overpraising movies such as Far From Heaven and Kill Bill; I enjoyed the latter, mainly for its affection for trashy movies. It wasn’t high art, and it had some dull moments, but it entertained me.

That said, Rundle lost me when he tried to compare the development of movies to the novel. He complains that cinema is stuck in “the existing framework of popular film – that of externalised third-person realism – has been utterly exhausted in the 70 years since the classic Hollywood style came together.”

What does it need to do? Go Joycean!

The next step — a popular cinema that incorporates the significant representation of internal psychological states, shifting points of view, discontinuous story as more than novelty elements within a traditional presentation — has not yet been substantially attempted.

And who’s going to lead the way? David Lynch! [insert sound of record-needle skipping off its groove here]

In that respect it’s no coincidence that the one director to come from outside the film world — David Lynch, a one-time surrealist painter — has been the only mainstream director to at least make the attempt at such a leap into the full incorporation of non-realist techniques into popular genres. But by now half the movies in the multiplex should be using the techniques that Lynch and others have developed in works such as Lost Highway and Inland Empire.

Wow. I don’t know where to begin. I can understand complaining that art films should be taking more chances, but to complain that big budget multiplex films should be incorporating techniques from Lost Highway is mind-blowing. I’ve seen my share of attempts at “portraying psychological reality” in moderate-budget movies (like In the Cut and Demonlover) and let me tell you: they make for awful, self-indulgent movies with storytelling that comes off as arbitrary and half-assed.

Moreover, the reason they’re not part of “popular cinema” is because the public avoids these flicks in droves. Which is to say, I can understand blasting the critical fawning over mannerist exercises, but I don’t see how that leads to the thesis that hundred-million-dollar movies (the aforementioned multiplex flicks) need to venture into the realm of “non-realism.”

In fact, you could argue that the implausibility and impossible action sequences are a filmic reaction against “realism,” but I’m just talking outta my butt.

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Major, Burns!

Charles Burns, one of the finest cartoonists currently practicing the craft, recently released a book of “paired photographs” called One Eye. Chris Ware, another of the finest cartoonists around, wrote about Burns and the photos at Virginia Quarterly Review. Some of the photos are in the article, and they’re gorgeous, so check it out.