We just got back from the Boston MFA (Musem of Fine Arts) where a new Art Deco exhibit has just opened. It’s organized into three sections, roughly 30-50-20 percent respectively. The first presents various ideas and styles that influenced art deco – everything from Classical Greek and Egyptian, through African and Meso-american patterns and colours, to Russian ballet costumes.
The second section is art deco proper: the tsunami of styles – individual yet linked – that were launched on the world at the 1925 Paris Exhibition. I felt that the organizers of this show cast their net a little wider than I would have done. Man Ray’s Electricity, while brilliant, doesn’t feel as though it has anything to do with art deco. Nor do the wonderful miniatures (postcards, really) of Josephine Baker; not everything in Paris in the 1920s qualified as art deco. But enough quibbling: overall, this section was superb. My favourite piece was Tamara de Lempicka’s stunning nude La Bella Raphaela (shown above; click for full size). The scanned image doesn’t do justice to the work, particularly the breathtakingly sumptuous reds of her lips and the cloth she’s lying on.
The final section showed the impact of art deco on design in the USA. (Recall that the USA was offered a place at the original 1925 exhibition, but, as the MFA’s program notes, The USA declined to participate on the grounds that �there was no modern design in America�.) There are some gems here, illustrating especially the distinctive “streamline” twist that America introduced. And the huge boxwood model of the Rockefeller Center shows how art deco ideas were incorporated into the design of New York’s skyscrapers.
Overall, a very cool show. I bought the t-shirt.
I may be distracted for a few days weeks….
I just picked up a copy of Doom 3. My investment in an ATI Radeon 9600 when I bought this PC is about to pay off. (Of course I could always step up to an x800 XT Platinum and crank up my pixel fillrate from 1.3Gpixels/sec to 8.3Gpixels/sec. A snip at $499… which is almost as much as I paid for the rest of the PC! Yeah, yeah, yeah….)
Actually, the choice of a 9600 was deliberate. I didn’t want to have to upgrade my power supply to 300 Watts, which a 9800 would have required. I wasn’t just being a cheapskate: I’m a software guy, and I don’t do hardware upgrades.
"Traffic at 12 o'clock" "Got him on TCAS…."
Photo of the day, from the fantastic collection at Airliners.net. (Other air-to-air favourites here and here.) Not mine – I wish….
Fahrenheit 9/11
We finally saw F9/11 this morning. Brilliant agit-prop. I don’t care about categories: if critics complain that it isn’t a documentary because it doesn’t follow journalistic standards of being “fair and balanced” (oops….), then find another category for it. Emotional? Damn right! How do you talk to a woman who’s lost a son in Iraq without dealing in emotions? And if you can look at the broken bodies of Iraqi children and American soldiers without emotion, I pity you.
A lot of people have latched on to the wrong issues from this film. And many people are criticizing it without even seeing it. (See, for example, Rep. David Dreier on Real Time With Bill Maher.) Please, make up your own mind. If you haven’t seen it, I really think that you should. If you are from the USA, or the UK, or Australia, you need to see what is being done by your government in your name. It isn’t pretty. You’ll see blood, bodies, coffins, amputated limbs: that’s what war is all about. I hope you won’t use Barbara Bush’s beautiful mind excuse. In the words of Lou Reed, “This is no time for my country Right or Wrong/remember what that brought/…/This is no time to turn your back.
CD of the Week: Bob Dylan's "Live 1966"
1966. How old was I – 15, 16? Just starting 6th Form at the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. (I was in 6T1, taking maths, physics, and economics – a combination that drove my teachers crazy.) I was listening to more classical music than pop, folk, or rock. I was most aware of the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, Eric Burdon and the Animals, and Manfred Mann. However there were a number of American artists getting my attention – the Byrds, who had hit with Mr. Tambourine Man the year before, and then the Beach Boys, the Mamas and Papas, and the Supremes. (The last three mostly because my best friend John Hughes never stopped playing them, and I spent a lot of time at his house hanging out with his sister, Gwyneth… but I digress.)
And then there was Bob Dylan. From my perspective, he made an almost magical transformation: one minute he was a conventional socially-conscious folk singer, hanging out with Joan Baez and the Greenwich Village folk crowd; the next, he’d become a surrealistic poet. I didn’t have any connection to the beat scene; I didn’t listen to jazz, but enigmatic poetry was cool. Burroughs. Ferlinghetti. Ginsberg. Brautigan. Even Gerard Manley Hopkins (ignoring the religious metaphors – how pretentious). With no Google to help, I carefully transcribed the lyrics to Desolation Row and Ballad of a Thin Man, and marvelled at them. Was there some deep meaning there, or were the immediate impressions the beginning and end of it? At 15, such questions can seem profound… and perhaps they still are. No matter.
For Dylan’s early fans, his “plugging in” was a really big deal. Not so to me: Dylan, along with Simon and Garfunkel, Laura Nyro, and Leonard Cohen, was primarily a poet, and in my teenage head “poetry” and “pop music” were quite distinct categories. It took a couple of years for that to break down. The Beatles didn’t do it – they were sui generis – but albums like the Jefferson Airplane’s “Surrealistic Pillow” started the rot, and with “Electric Ladyland” Jimmy Hendrix blew the doors down. And of course one of the songs on that album that did the damage was All Along The Watchtower – that guy Dylan again.
Bootleg albums? Of course: every self-respecting student in the late 60s and early 70s had a couple of bootlegs in their record collection. And I remember that I had the chance to buy the most frequently bootlegged Dylan recording: the legendary “Royal Albert Hall” set. But at the time my interests were elsewhere: I chased Cream, and Led Zeppelin’s “Blueberry Hill” instead.
Fast forward 35 years: I find myself reading a review of the official CD release of Dylan’s “Royal Albert Hall ’66” set. It turns out that it was actually recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester (a venue with fond memories, but that’s another story – maybe). And according to all the critics, it’s one of the best live rock’n’roll recordings of all time. So last week I bought it. And the critics were right. It’s the best. (I guess I forgot the pantheon: Dylan, Lennon, Hendrix, Miles. Only one left….)
I sit here, trying to remember what it was like to listen to Dylan when I was 15, and then hearing the sheer presence in this live recording. The imagery of Desolation Row is still as powerful, and enigmatic, and breathtaking as ever. And when my guard is down, Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat sneaks up on me, and I find myself savouring the glorious absurdity of:
You know it balances on your head
Just like a mattress balances
On a bottle of wine
Your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat
What a time.
dive into mark
At the suggestion of my colleague Doug, I’m adding dive into mark to my blogroll. Reading his piece on corporate blogging, including all the comments, was delightfully reminiscent of chats with Tim Bray… and then I pop over to Tim’s blog only to find him citing Mark. So if Tim’s a connector, is Mark a maven? We’ll see. Exit humming…..
Odd stuff in the mail
As a resident alien in the US, I don’t get to vote, or sit on juries, or various other stuff. And although it wouldn’t be illegal, I refrain from participating directly in US politics – I don’t contribute to or work for political campaigns, PACs, or advocacy groups.
Yesterday I was surprised and amused to receive an unsolicited piece of mail from the Bush campaign. It contained a letter, urging me (not once, but three times) to contribute “$1,000, $500, $250, $100, $50, $35, or even $25 today“. It spent more time blasting the spending of “hundreds of millions of dollars [by] liberal special interests” that it did actually talking about Bush’s policies and values. (And the policies weren’t particularly coherent: more “Cutting taxes”, not a word about the deficit, energy, or health care.) And it encouraged vandalism! The envelope contained a “W’04” bumper sticker which I was encouraged to put on my car “or that of a neighbor or family member who’s backing me.”
Compared with the up-beat Kerry-Edwards mailing that my wife received the same day, this Bush piece felt negative and threatened. Portraying the President as an underdog may be realistic, but (unlike us Brits) America seems to prefer winners. In this mailing, Bush certainly didn’t come across as a winner. And ranting about the “attacks” in Liberal “TV ads” is a bit rich, in view of the fact that media analysts rate the Bush campaign as the most consistently negative in modern history.
However there was one positive item: the letter concludes with the assurance that “This is my final political campaign”. Amen. And so this morning I compromised my principles (just a bit) by putting a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker on my car. Hey, I can always say that one of my neighbors did it!
I almost forgot to mention the project….
A few weeks ago I decided that it was time to start reading Stephen King’s epic series The Dark Tower. I figured that if I timed it just right I’d be ready to start on the final, seventh volume when it’s published on September 18th. So far things are on track: I’m half way through Wizard and Glass, the fourth volume in the series. Volume 5, Wolves of the Calla, is sitting on the table, ready and waiting. And I’m enjoying the whole project immensely.
Oddly, I’ve never been a great reader of Stephen King until this year. I don’t enjoy horror for its own sake, in literature or film. (A couple of days ago I started watching the movie of Dreamcatcher on TV and wound up turning it off and walking away. The image of a guy sitting on a blood-spattered toilet seat trying to stop a monster from getting out just didn’t appeal to me.) Now this may seem odd, since I’m a huge fan of Clive Barker: I think that Imajica is a true masterpiece, even if Barker’s version of Dante’s Inferno includes many fearsome monstrosities. It works because it’s a great story. Whatever the genre, first there has to be a story, and too much horror fiction subordinates narrative to adrenaline. (Frankly, I though that The Silence of the Lambs was unwatchable.)
I came to Stephen King via George R. Stewart. His classic 1949 novel Earth Abides posed some deep questions about the nature of “civilization” through the device of a plague that wipes out most of humanity. After reading it, I was curious how Stephen King had used the same idea in The Stand. Instead of philosophy, I found a fragment of an epic, apocalyptic story. Only a fragment: there were clearly many chapters preceding and following what I was reading (even if it was 1200 pages long). After this, I read The Green Mile, and I was hooked.
So the time is right. I’m usually a fast reader, but I think I can pace myself. By early September I’ll be ready for Song of Susannah, and then The Dark Tower itself.
"The Corporation"
So as I blogged last month, I’ve seen the Control Room. I’ve seen The Fog of War. I own the DVDs of OutFoxed and Uncovered. I missed The Hunting of the President, but I read the book. This is clearly the summer of the political documentary.
So yesterday we were planning to go to see Fahrenheit 9/11 (which we still haven’t seen – are we the only ones?) But on Saturday we talked to my son Chris, and he urged us to go to see The Corporation first, so we did. It’s a study of the rise of the modern corporation over the last 150 years, from groups that were specifically chartered for limited purposes through the emergence of the corporation as a legal “person”, to today’s supranational entities.
It’s a very good documentary – it’s 145 minutes long, and the time flies by. It’s not a great documentary, in part because the film-makers tried to cram too much in, and lost focus. But on the other hand if you’re only ever going to watch one documentary on the subject, it’s probably a good tactic to cover as many bases as possible, to plant as many seeds for future reading, research, and – just maybe – action as they could.
My (un)favourite person: the woman psychologist who works on ways to make advertising targeted at pre-school children more “effective”: specifically, by making the children more productive naggers of their parents. She managed to keep her composure when asked whether she regarded what she did as “ethical”, but as she replied that she “didn’t know about ethics” her eyes told a different story.
More on Great War poetry
In my earlier piece on Some Corner of a Foreign Field I forgot to mention that one of the poems is The Volunteer by Robert Service. 
I also have a powerful collection of Service’s wartime poems set to music by Country Joe McDonald, called War, War, War. It came out in 1971, was briefly reissued on CD in 1995, and is well worth getting hold of. The most gut-wrenching piece is the last: The March of the Dead (and yes, I know that this is about the Boer War, not the Great War – but the sentiment is timeless).
Speaking of Country Joe, check out the new song by the Country Joe Band, Cakewalk to Baghdad. It’s a cheerful little ditty in the spirit of the immortal I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag ; and as they sing, it’s Easy to cakewalk in … not so easy to cakewalk out.