Dancing About Architecture

I'm all for it.

But there are, it would seem, at least 2 documentary films currently in circulation about Klimt and the twists of fate and history that befell the portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer. You remember Schjeldahl's essay. And my strange fantasy.

Anyway, the films are Klimt ou le Testament d'Adèle, by Michel Vuillermet, and Stealing Klimt, by Jane Chablani, and you can read more info about the films through the links in the GreenCine Daily review. But I have to say, the descriptions there don't make me want to see the films. It may be the author's interest in the story, but it sounds like both of the films are all history, no art.

Is this so, and if so, why?

The Best Things in Life are Pink

The clothes, the hair, the music, the locations, the editing. One of the few movies I saw before age 10, ridiculously memorable in sound and image, and almost as good as I remembered it. Happy Valentine's Day, everybody.

Vampire Bats, Schjeldahl in the First Person, Poor Miss Shawn

Feb 12 issue.

I wouldn't want to miss Darwin Day. Does The New Yorker know about this holiday? And is that why they - oh so contrarian - published that excellent essay on Darwin's double, who "combines both halves of the debate over the meaning of evolution, cooling articulating the materialist mechanisms by which the simplest organisms morphed into human beings while arguing that our existence offers evidence of divine agency." (76)

Read all about Alfred Russel Wallace.

Carolita Johnson is right, that line about the beetles is outstanding.

I also liked that Rosen said of his subject, that he learned "the best defense against vampire bats" but did not tell us what that defense was! I'm dying to know.

But isn't every day Darwin Day at The New Yorker? Is there any other magazine that so responsibly covers the history of science?

Schjeldahl on Tintoretto is less easily quoted. But Carolita is right, again, there should have been more, and more appropriate pictures. I could hardly read the whole thing because I so badly wanted to pick up my computer and find the paintings. "So vast as to be essentially unseeable" (86) is one thing, but give it a chance, at least.

Schjeldahl's essays doesn't take to excerpts though, because the thing, from start to finish is an experience itself. I love the first person throughout and here, at the very end, the second person to - Schjeldahl asks, ""Who is Tintoretto's viewer?" [...] It might as well be you or me as some cinquecento ingrate, and, if we happen to think of people we know who might be interested, the artist encourages us to contact them without delay." (87)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, Gopnik on total war is strong and in any other issue, it's the piece I'd be posting on and praising. The fancy footwork that opens the article is right on, military history is experiencing a critical renaissance. Or something like that. I think it's due to an increased interest in the history of technology, but that's just me.

My least favorite moment has got to be, though, in the short review of Allen Shawn's book, "... Shawn, the son of a former editor of this magazine, analyzes the impact of coping with an autistic twin sister, who was institutionalized at the age of eight. He also lovingly and honestly traces phobic tendencies in his parents, who glossed over their daughter's condition and adopted "an across the board policy of secrecy" in front of their remaining children." (85)

Remaining? I would have chosen another turn of phrase, no matter how wordy it might have been.

View of the World From Behind Your Nose

The Electric Warrior drew my attention to this, an exhibit of Saul Steinberg's work at the Morgan Museum and Library in New York. I've said as much already, but I do love Steinberg's ability to imagine our bodies and senses and abilities as more than human.

korean film posters (sigh)

It's kind of hard to describe, but in the foyer of Pitt's Hillman Library right now are some really cool Korean film posters from the 1950s-1960s, with informative panels explaining a bit about the production history, a synopsis of the film narrative, this and that.

The posters themselves are in amazing condition, with soft, glowing colors.

The exhibit comes via The Korea Society (the link reveals the merest glimpse of the posters' beauty) in New York, where they will be showing some of the films (and, it looks like, others from the same era) starting Jan 18 and running through June.

There's some useful info in this flyer, including whom to contact if you want to host the exhibit. But before you click, please note that this flyer does not at all do justice to the breathtaking posters themselves.

incoherant and idiosyncratic thoughts on the dec 11 issue

Did I mention that I liked William Finnegan's "Letter from Maine, New in Town, Somali refugees find a home." I think I did. I liked how small the topic was and I don't mean that in a bad way. Do I mean local? Specific? I don't know. It gave more texture to the voices and perspectives used in the piece and kept the folks from becoming too Representative, if you know what I mean.

I also read Tad Friend on the US The Office. And then I watched about 5 minutes of the show myself, what with the hotel room cable TV I had access to. But frankly it didn't do it for me. I know the show isn't actually on cable, but here at home we don't get any kind of TV reception at all. Seriously. I can't even watch the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which is about the only time it's come up. Maybe there was a World Series I wanted to see too, somewhere in the last 5 years.

Speaking of television viewing, you know how I was watching all that well-meaning middle-brow TV? It was all leading up to one event, that is, watching The Constant Gardener. Or, Friends with Money go to Africa and Lose the Irony.

The Constant Gardener came at a bad time too, because I'd been recently getting all antsy about how restricted the color palettes and textures are of big arty movies. It's like every movie now is an over-designed period film in which no stray nothing - face, hand, surface, space, sound - can jar us aesthetically out of a kind of absolute OCD dream. Is all of Kenya really organized into orange and blue-green? It's like everyone has taken Martha Stewart too much to heart.

While this kind of control isn't new (at all, I mean) it's present manifestations are getting on my nerves.

So it was quite refreshing to see, also via cable TV, the intentional opulent-matchy-match-ugliness of War of the Roses and Laura Dern, in Jurassic Park, wearing a pair of long shorts made hideous by the passing of time. I'd never seen Jurassic Park before and I was impressed by the amount of danger the kids were in while inside an SUV. Prescient.

kids lit and the reality effects of occupation

I haven't read Elizabeth Kolbert's article on kids' lit in the Dec 4 New Yorker. But please check in with two other readers and writers of diverse natures, Electric Warrior, An Actual Native of Pittsburgh (though now removed to points North), who read it and enjoyed it, and Our Friend Madame Librarian, who posted on the article at her very own Brookeshelf.

As for whether or no reading to children is a form of control, well, I'd say it is clearly a question of Discipline. And the Electric Warrior, like so many of us, seems to have been "properly disciplined," as it were, as evidenced by her feelings for Shakespeare and Dahl and Andrew Lloyd Weber. I myself have been watching a lot of well-meaning-middle-brow TV (NYer withdrawl symptom, I guess), including:

CNN's "Autism is a World" This was good, and much better than the title suggests. The program, rather, argues that autism exists within, as part of, intimately bound with The World and is not, or at least need not be, A World unto itself in which lost souls may not be found. Note she's looking wistfully out the window. Oh my God, stop it. Honestly, it's not that bad a piece.

A PBS POV documentary titled My Country My Country inspired by The New Yorker and made by Laura Poitras. Again, it was a bit plaintive. But what was really interesting about this (follows rampant speculation) is alright, so the filmmaker probably set out to make a film critical of "US, I mean, coalition" (everyone in the film says it this way) occupation.

But as she is assembling her footage of US troops being instructed and contractors and Kurds and Iraqis and Baghdad residents and The Good Doctor she finds that the language that US occupation uses to describe the upcoming (as were) elections emphasizes the word "show." In the many senses of the word: the elections will show this or show that, or this is a "showstopper," the show must go on, etc, etc and then, finally, one of the men being trained as the Iraqi police force for the elections calls his instructor on it - "What do you mean show?"

And then this, um, linguistic tic is paired with constant visual presence of television screens (even when they are off, which is rare) within the frame, as everybody watches the war on television. At first, watching the war seemed like the kind of news watching (or radio listening) many people have been represented as doing during times of war and election, but with the emphasis on the "show," well, you're back to thinking about how and why we watch and what we're being shown and why. Maybe it's just a reality effect of a slick documentary (well, not slick, but very well made) but even if Poitras went in there thinking the election was a big show, I doubt that she expected the symptoms of occupation to show themselves so readily in the language she captured. I could probably figure out how this theme developed so very literally (so to speak) by spending much time at linked website.

This whole idea of symptoms, well, if it's a little slight here, I'm under the influence of a paper I wrote years ago and just found when I was tidying up my computer on the symptoms of occupation as, you know, indexes of its unease/disease.