Category: Art

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The Sidewalk Suplex, and other lessons learned

Another Wednesday, another evening in the city! I’m happy to report that the St. John’s College alumni NYC chapter seminar featured far less formalwear than last week’s JoB gala. The trip was a bit more harrowing than my previous one, since it involved getting to 38th St. during rush hour. I wish I had the patience for mass transit. And the people on it.

Which, in a sense, gets me to the subject of the alumni seminar! Those of you who’ve had to put up with my crap all these years know that St. John’s College (my graduate school, a.k.a. SJC) is based on study of the “Great Books,” and that our seminars consisted of the conversation that spins out of a leading question. Rather than professors, we had “tutors,” and everyone gets referred to as “Mr.” or “Ms.” There was also ritual scarification, but I heard that was only for the undergrads.

Anyway, a month or so ago, I received a card about the upcoming alumni seminar. I hadn’t attended one in five years, for whatever reasons I can muster. But I noticed that this one was

a) on a quickly readable work (Moliere’s comedy The Misanthrope), and

b) being led by one of my favorite tutors (Chester Burke).

Again, if you’ve had dealings with me over the years, you’ve probably heard me ramble about how my two years in Annapolis (1993-1995) were my most formative. Sure, I’ve gained plenty more experience over the years, and a lot of my views have changed as a result, but the foundation of who I am and how I read the world was laid during that span. [Obligatory joke about what else got laid back then, followed by a Dice-like”OH!”.]

The funny thing is, while I consider Mr. Burke to be a strong influence on my life and learning, I never actually had a class with him at St. John’s. No, our relationship consisted of countless hours on the basketball court, plus locker-room shooting of the breeze, and conversation on the way to and from the fieldhouse. In fact, I’m hard pressed to recall an encounter with him that wasn’t somehow related to basketball. I believe the only time we met off campus, it was to attend a Washington Bullets game at the Cap Center. In other words, I viewed much of our relationship through Worthy-esque Rec Specs.

The opportunity to catch up with Mr. Burke — whom I’d last seen in 1995 when he handed me my master’s degree and uttered, “Knicks in 7,” under his breath (unprophetically, since they wound up losing to the Pacers in 6) — was one I couldn’t pass up, even if I was a little disappointed that the seminar was being held at the boardroom of the Theatre Communications Group, rather than Basketball City over at Chelsea Piers.

A bunch of alums met up beforehand at a sushi restaurant, so I got to catch up with Mr. Burke for a bit. The 12-year hiatus in our conversation made it necessary for us to use broad strokes, but that’s one of the ways in which we start to figure out what’s important to us. When you only have a little time to talk, you have to figure out the essentials. Or you have to talk faster than a tweaker with logorrhea, and hope the other person can keep up. But I really did TRY to talk only about the big changes. And so did Mr. Burke, who told me about his new marriage and how he played in a pair of intramural hoops games the day before. He’s in his early 50s, which left me embarrassed that I’ve only picked up a basketball once in the past two years.

For a while, I was the youngest person in our pre-seminar group by at least 10 years. Some of the early arrivals were from early 1980s classes, and one was from the class of 1949. Mr. Burke, in fact, graduated from St. John’s in 1974, which provides more evidence for my thesis that the best career a St. John’s education prepares you for is . . . being a tutor at St. John’s! (According to SJC’s Wikipedia page, it looks like the best-known alumni from the Great Books era are Ahmet Ertegun, Charles “Quiz Show” Van Doren, and the guy who created MacGyver.)

As more alums arrived, I found myself in conversation with someone from the class of 1982, who explained to me how and why George Bush, Sr. may have ordered the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. At one point, he said he was having trouble remembering a name; I suggested that the CIA may be shooting a pink laser beam of information into his brain. I think he found that funny. Here’s his website.

Later, one of my oldest friends joined the group. John attended SJC as an undergrad. We haven’t really talked in more than 4 years — a subject I’ve written about before — so we pretty much just acted as though we knew each other, even if we still managed to complete each others’ sentences a couple of times during the seminar.

Eventually, we made our way upstairs. John & I lagged behind, helping guide a stone-deaf member of our group out of the restaurant and up to the seminar. By the time we reached the boardroom, two dozen alumni were already gathered, spanning 60 years of SJC classes. I noticed that we were all white, and there was only one woman among us, but this was St. John’s, not Hampshire College, so hey.

The seminar was a pretty intense two-hour take on the play: the nuances of its characters, its word-choices (among our various translations and Mr. Burke’s French edition) and, of course, its plot. It was a great seminar, and I’m sorry that I can’t really provide a ton of details it. Like all good conversations, it was organic, covering a million topics and perspectives. We explored the nature of the Alceste’s misanthropy, the self-centeredness of his love for Celimene, the redemptive vision of love offered up by Eliante, and the utter strangeness of 17th century French court, among other things.

I thought I made a pretty good point about the structure of comedy and how Moliere either missed a great payoff or was trying to make a point about the delusional self-importance of Alceste. It got derailed by the next person who spoke up, and I felt it would’ve been, um, self-important of me to push back to that point. But deep down, I know I was right.

My old pal John had a much better time of things, making excellent points about the play and the growth of two characters, nudging the conversation when it began to go awry, and getting some of the alums to re-ask their questions, in a bid to get them to better grasp what they were trying to say. We hadn’t shared an academic setting since our junior year of high school, so it was nice to see how he explored both the play and the dynamic of the seminar group.

(John also got the biggest laugh of the night when one of the “elder statesmen” talked about how flattery was the key job requirement for the French court in Moliere’s time. John remarked, “God, you are so perceptive! That is the best thing I’ve heard tonight!” It beat out my rendition of Alceste’s pal Philinte defending him, as channeled by Mink La Rouie of Miller’s Crossing: “He’s a right guy! He’s a straight shooter! I know he’s got a mixed reputation, but for a misanthrope he’s got a lot a good qualities!”

(Those goddam eggheads don’t know comedy when they hear it . . .)

That dynamic reminded me of how much I miss those Annapolis days. Living and working where I do, there aren’t many opportunities to talk about books the way we did Wednesday night. I still read an awful lot, but conversation helps bring books — and life — into their fullness.

After the seminar ended, we were to re-gather at a nearby café for a late dinner. Amy was waiting for me at the café, having stayed in the city for dinner with a friend. I wanted to introduce her to Mr. Burke and get a little more time to chat with him, but unfortunately, it was almost 9:30 at that point, and the lot where I was parked was closing at 10:00. So I gathered her up and we headed back to my car, meeting up with a bunch of the alumni who were on the way (I had used my mutant superpower of walking very fast to get out to the café and back before the rest of the crowd had gotten its act together).

I got to introduce Amy & Mr. Burke briefly out on the sidewalk, and John asked us to head back to the café. I explained that the lot was closing, but he wouldn’t take that for an answer. I then said, “We have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” which people never take seriously, even when I add “. . . seriously”. But you try getting up at 5:15am every weekday and see how ready you are for the nightlife, okay?

John wanted to shake hands, but I gave him a hug instead, which led to my near-suplexing, since John’s as big as a bear. Now I know how my wife feels, since I tend to hug her off her feet at least twice a day.

I didn’t take any pictures from the evening, which I’m sure is bumming you out, since you made it this far. Also, there was no tearful reconciliation or anything with my pal John. I wrote him a day after the seminar, but haven’t heard back from him. French comedy beats NYC drama.

I haven’t written to Mr. Burke yet, because I’ve been trying to get this post finished first. Now that I’m at the end, I feel that I’ve failed pretty heinously at describing just what I feel gained by knowing him during my time at SJC. I know I haven’t conveyed that sensation I had that he always heard music in his head, that some of his words were an attempt at translating that divine harmony. I certainly haven’t mentioned his deceptive first-step and the quick release of his jumper. Fortunately, there’s a new generation of students who are getting burned by that very shot.

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The Man Who Wasn’t There, or The Mystery of Pittsburgh

Saturday night before my San Diego trip, we watched Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture, a documentary I had TiVo’d off the Ovation channel a few weeks ago. Neither Amy nor I like Warhol’s work particularly, but I’ve long been fascinated by his place in the contemporary intersection of art, commerce and celebrity, so we gave it a try.

I think discussions of Warhol’s work tend to center more on “the art world” than on art per se, and whether he was perpetrating a massive fraud on such. Unfortunately, I’m not versed enough in art history to give you guys a real critique of Warhol; I’m sure some of you have enough knowledge of it to beat any of my assertions to death on the rocks of my ignorance. Since the documentary raised enough questions about Warhol as a person, I’m gonna follow that lead.

The early stages of the movie — chronicling Warhol’s family history in Pittsburgh, his work as a commercial artist in NYC, and the rise and significance of pop art — tease out a number of elements that hint at the “boy behind the myth.” Perhaps it was a simplification of his formative years, but at least it yields a singular idea of who Warhol was. It’s a straightforward story, described mostly by his brothers, of a kid who was overly attached to his mother and didn’t really fit in at school.

(Note: I’m really want to see a documentary about the lives of his two brothers. It seems that they knew their brother was an artist in New York City, but had no clue as to how famous he was. One is filmed in a Harley-Davidson trucker cap, and it seems that he and Andy talked often, if not daily. At his death, Andy left each of the brothers $250,000, but his estate ended up valued around $600 million. No word on how they felt about that.)

What piqued my interested was the explicability of that young Warhol as contrasted with the ambivalence of the later edition(s).

Once Warhol becomes famous, there’s an explosion in the number of perspectives on him — understandably, since many more people knew him — but the figure they describe becomes much less clear. The more material there is, the less it makes for a coherent picture. This phenomenon seems to arise partly from the nature of the interviewees — artists and hangers-on, in a particularly drug-addled era — and partly from some elusive aspect of Warhol himself. The more they had to say, the less of a Warhol there was. I found myself wondering how this multiplicity of self paralleled one of his main forms of art: silk-screening. Do these prints, meaningful in their repetition and reduction, tell us something significant about the life of this artist?

Watching the documentary, I kept trying to resolve this issue of identity, especially as Warhol becomes a stand-in for the concept of celebrity and fame throughout the ’70s and ’80s. One of the interviewees talks about watching O.J. Simpson’s low-speed chase in 1994 and how similar it was to Warhol’s movie Empire, which consists of eight hours of a static shot of the Empire State Building.

Flipping through websites like the Superficial, I wonder what he would’ve made of today’s celebrities — even the marginally talented ones — who are followed by dozens of photographers every time they step outside. I suppose Paris Hilton, famous for being famous, would’ve made perfect sense to him. But that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” aspect of Warhol doesn’t describe him.

What perplexes me about this is the fact that Warhol was an obsessive recorder of his activities, a “recording angel.” One of the interviewees considered this an attempt at staving off death; that is, by accreting so many moments, they can never really be lost (there’s a reason I call this blog Virtual Memories). The downside of such voluminous recording is that the task of sorting through it all becomes overwhelming. And, as Kierkegaard tells us, we need to be able to forget. (I think he said that.)

Even though there are mountains of tapes, I think the documentary only has one brief segment of Warhol’s voice: after his mother’s death in 1972, he calls his brother and tells him that he won’t be coming out for the funeral and that she would’ve wanted the cheapest arrangements possible. Occurring near the end of the film, it’s a perplexing choice. The only time we get “the man” in his own words, he’s essentially tossing his mom into a cheap pine box. (He was buried next to his parents at the “Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.” According to Wikipedia, he was buried in a solid bronze casket with gold-plated rails and white upholstery. And, of course, a platinum wig.)

As Virtual Memories go, I saved the answering machine tape of my dad informing me of his mother’s death. I’m not sure why I did that, but the likeliest reason was because of the emotion in my dad’s voice. Warhol, on the other hand, could almost be making a call to a caterer, for all the feeling he shows on that tape.

Far be it from me to judge how someone relates to his family. Cutting off his family and excising his past would’ve been explicable — I’ve known enough artists and poseurs who’ve followed that route — but that’s not who he was. Warhol kept his mom with him in NYC from around 1949 to 1971 or so. There’s a cute anecdote about how some visitors to his apartment assumed this elderly woman with the heavy accent was Warhol’s cleaning lady.

I know this is getting all over the place, but that’s what I’m trying to get at, this electron-cloud of self. The movie portrays a man who starts out somewhat “normal” and winds up bifurcating over and over into a range of human experience that no one can put a finger on. While this isn’t such an extreme phenomenon — I’ve written about the impossibility of biography before — it raises the question of whether there was an “essential” Warhol behind all the mysteries.

Far too early, the documentary mentions how Truman Capote once described Warhol as a “Sphinx without a secret.” I thought it was an ingenious metaphor for the man. When I looked up the phrase, I found out that Oscar Wilde used it first.

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Best Possible News

There is no better way to start the week than to find out that R. Kelly is about release the second installment of Trapped in the Closet! The NYPost kindly provides a tongue-in-cheek synopsis of the first part!

Amy & I caught part of the first run on TV, and a friend kindly bought us the DVD of the whole TWELVE episode “cycle.” We’ve held off on watching it, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. But now that we’re up to TWENTY-TWO episodes? Time for a party!

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Light

Ingmar Bergman’s death seemed like a good occasion for me to finally watch a movie I’d been saving for a while: Light Keeps Me Company, a documentary about Bergman’s great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, who died last September. The irony is that the only Bergman film I’ve seen is The Seventh Seal, but that’s one that Nykvist didn’t shoot.

Anyway, following the standard model, the documentary consists of talking head interviews with people he knew professionally and personally, short clips of movies on which he worked, on-set footage, and “present-day” scenes of Nykvist in the Swedish countryside. Within that framework, Carl-Gustaf Nykvist assembles a glorious and sad portrait of his father’s life.

The movie’s a gem, and the array of reminiscences shows how many lives Nykvist touched during his career. Of course, the key moments are the interviews with Bergman, who implies that he and Nykvist were more perfectly attuned to what they were doing than any other two people have ever been:

Nobody, while practicing their profession, during our work on films together, has been as close to me as Sven. However, we have never ever had a private acquaintanceship. But the intimacy between us, our belonging together, the sense of parallel minds, of thinking, of feeling the same way, when it comes to practicing our craft, that feeling was total.

What’s interesting to me is that he doesn’t fall into condescension, doesn’t cast Nykvist as his “eyes” or any other tool to pursue his own vision. Near the end of the movie, there’s footage of the two men walking hand-in-hand through a garden, as Bergman’s voiceover recounts Bibi Andersson‘s plans for the men’s old age: they’ll give Sven an empty camera and reassemble the actors and let the men keep ‘filming’ away.

My introduction to Nykvist’s gorgeous work was Another Woman (1988), one of Woody Allen’s “Bergman-esque” dramas. It’s a movie I’ve gone back to many times over the years, and one that I try to foist off on friends so I’ll have people to discuss it with. Light Keeps Me Company offered a little revelation about his experience on that movie.

Following the heartbreaking segment about his son Johan’s suicide (c. 1977), Nykvist cryptically remarks, “Mia became very important to me. She helped me back to life,” as we see home-movie footage of a beautiful Mia Farrow in a tropical setting, playing peek-a-boo with a straw hat. (Okay, so maybe it’s not so cryptic. Still, it does come out of the blue, and doesn’t get mentioned again.)

Shortly, there’s a segment about working with Woody Allen, who says

All the crew love working with him. . . They’re never happier than when I tell ’em that Sven is going to be the cinematographer on the picture, because they know that he’s sensitive, and sweet, and they’re going to be able to do a high-quality visual picture, but without any personal or emotional cost.

Soon, we see various New York settings at night, and Nykvist says,

Despite the fun of working with Woody, I wanted to get away from New York. I was disturbed by Mia and Woody’s marital co-existence, even if my relationship with her had ended long ago. It was the first time that I’d felt really lonely on a shoot.

Woody Allen: king of missing the obvious.

It’s good to see, throughout the film, that Nykvist was regarded so highly within the industry. Stellan Skarsgard has a wonderful moment explaining how, whenever he tells anyone in movies that he’s from Sweden, they always ask him about working with Nykvist. They all want to know ‘how he does it.’ “Except for actors,” he says. “They want to know what Bergman’s like.” But the crews are more interested in Sven, because he’s the bringer of light.

It’s a wonderful film, even as it must portray Nykvist’s descent into dementia characterized as aphasia. Mercifully, the son doesn’t expose too much of the father’s decline, instead choosing a wonderful progression of scenes that illustrate Nykvist’s bonds with his family. (Given that they’re Swedish, there’s a certain distance/coldness by our standards, but it remains poignant.)

So do me a favor and put this in your Netflix queue. It’s an amazing portrait of a man who saw light as beautifully as Rembrandt did and brought some wonderful visions to the screen.

(He also shot Sleepless in Seattle.)

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Getaway

Work is under control: the July/August issue landed on my desk yesterday, the Top Companies report’s website is live, our conference enrollment is rolling along, and our September issue looks like it’ll be a big one. So I’m taking a vacation day!

I’m heading down to Philly to visit a friend of mine (Drake, not Butch) for a while. No worries, dear readers: I’ll have my camera with me and will likely end up somewhere where I can take some neat pix. Maybe I’ll meander downtown in Philly or visit the suburbs near Swarthmore where I used to live. Or I could stop in Princeton on the way home and stop in at the campus art museum (and the Record Exchange, of course).

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Monday Morning Montaigne: Of books

I’m back! As with other forms of exercise, it was difficult for me to return to Montaigne’s essays after putting them off for a while. As Bizarro Aristotle says, “You make the excuses, and the excuses make you.”

What better essay to mark my return to this project than one entitled  Of books? In this one, M. discusses what books mean to him and why he reads. With his typical disingenuousness, he begins, “I have no doubt that I often happen to speak of things that are better treated by masters of the craft, and more truthfully.” He blames himself and not the books, claiming, “If I am a man of some reading, I am a man of no retentiveness.”

He proceeds to write about particular histories and memoirs that mean a lot to him, but I’m taking this opportunity to discuss another aspect of the essays, namely their strange relationship to art.

That’s because M. makes a digression to cover “books that are simply entertaining.” He finds Rabelais and Boccaccio “worth reading for amusement,” then writes, “As for the Amadises and writings of that sort, they did not have the authority to detain even my childhood.”

I was struck by the irony of that comment, since “writings of that sort” inspired Cervantes to write Don Quixote. In fact, this brings me to one of the complaints I have toward M.’s writings; his lack of interest in fiction or poetry. Now, I know that the novel wasn’t All That during his life (1533-1592), so I’ll let him off the hook with regards to the former.

Regarding verse, M. takes the opportunity to praise Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, Horace and Lucan, but chiefly for the beauty and grace of their writing. Throughout the essays — at least, in the first 375 pages — the ancient poets get used as “color commentary,” a line or stanza here or there to illustrate a point M. has made, not as the center of an argument or a passage from which to learn. It’s clear that he knows his poetry, but it’s not clear that he gained much from it, beyond rhetoric and a sort of “beauty for beauty’s sake.”

Don’t get me wrong; I understand that the project in which he’s engaged is learning “how to die well and live well,” and that he finds essays, philosophy and histories much more useful to that process. Praising the work of historians, M. comments:

[M]an in general, the knowledge of whom I seek, appears in them [histories] more alive and entire than in any other place — the diversity and truth of his inner qualities in the mass and in detail, the variety of the ways he is put together, and the accidents that threaten him.

It’s a pity that he died before Cervantes and Shakespeare got their groove on, even though there’s a strong possibility he’d have missed the point of their work, too, given his dismissal of “Amadises” and his criticism of writers who rely on ancient plots. My reason for this crops up a page or so later, when M. dismisses long-windedness in the works of Cicero. He writes,

For me, who ask only to become wiser, not more learned or eloquent, these logical and Aristotelian arrangements are not to the point. I want a man to begin with the conclusion. I understand well enough what death and pleasure are; let him not waste his time anatomizing them. I look for good solid reasons from the start, which will instruct me in how to sustain their attack.

I’m all for a cut-to-the-chase mentality, but I think the same things he complains about in Cicero may also render M. unable to grasp the life-changing-ness of art.

Since it’s almost Monday Afternoon Montaigne, I guess I’ll have to let this go for the moment.