A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
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
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
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.)
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).
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.
Here’s an article about how Perseus Books Group is closing down two of its imprints: Carroll & Graf and Thunder’s Mouth Press. The further away I get from my indie-publishing days, the less I can understand how any of them stay afloat. This passage summed up how I tried to see things back then:
“When you see the book world conglomeratizing, it can only mean less diversity of voices,” said Johnny Temple, publisher of Akashic Books, a Brooklyn-based imprint distributed by Perseus. “When I sign up a book, it matters more that I love it than that I’ve identified a good marketing niche for it. That’s the real essence of independent publishing — it’s not a deal, it’s supposed to be a labor of love.”
Then I lost the love.
I hope the founders of those presses got a decent purchase price when they joined up with Avalon Publishing (which was later acquired by Perseus), but I have a feeling that I can see where the “labor of love” part collided with the “good marketing niche” part:
“At Carroll & Graf, we bridged the gap between small, lesser-known presses and the larger houses when it comes to gay literature,” said Don Weise, a senior editor who is losing his job. “In the four years that I’ve been here, I’ve acquired more than 100 books, and no one has ever told me no, I couldn’t do that. In the book world, that’s unheard of.”
I probably would’ve moved his attribution, along with the “senior editor who is losing his job” part to the end of the paragraph, to make my point.
Alan Bacchus at Daily Film Dose offers us a list of great long tracking shots in cinema (with clips)! Because there are 10 bazillion commenters, he’s supplemented the post since it first went up two weeks ago. There are some great ones, so if you like the long tracking shot — I’ve been a sucker for them since I saw The Player when I was in college — check it out.
Unfortunately, this Kylie video doesn’t exactly qualify, but it is ingenious:
The Milan Design Fair started this week. Read a preview and check out the slide show!
Back in college, I remarked that the weirdly pointillized head-shots on the front page of the Wall Street Journal looked like they’d been put through the “Drew Friedman-izer”. I’m not sure if it was funnier to make a joke about a cartoonist best known for The Incredible Shrinking Joe Franklin, or to make a reference to the Wall Street Journal at Hampshire College.
Anyway, if there was ever a perfect example of the Journal‘s Drew Friedmanizing process, it’s this pic of Tom Ford from an article in today’s ish:
The article’s about Ford’s post-Gucci career, because he’s about to launch a line of menswear, which will include “classic custom-made suits, shirts, ties, shoes, luggage, jewelry and fragrances.” Here’s some drivel about it:
Mr. Ford says he isn’t aiming only at fashionistas but also at rich businessmen in the U.S. and developing countries who “have been deprived of luxury.” He doesn’t plan any womenswear, “having nothing new to say.”
To me, the only interesting things about the article are that incredible pic and the fact that Ford is launching TWELVE fragrances this month with Estee Lauder. I’m holding out hope that one of them is “Friedman.”
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
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.