I was going to post tonight about the 53rd Annual GINZA HOLIDAY, a Japanese cultural festival put on every August by the Midwest Buddhist Temple in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. But my allotted time was take up by a Cat Emergency: Thomas, our stupidest cat, got skunked again. We had to chase him down and towel him off with Nature’s Miracle Skunk Odor Remover. Then we had to deskunk ourselves.
Now it is late and I must beg Sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow’s eye, to steal me awhile from mine own company. (We’re going to see a Shakespeare play tomorrow.)
But I will not leave you entirely bereft. Look up there: that’s the Midwest Buddhist Temple Taiko Group joining in a thumping frenzy with the Kogen Taiko Group of Minneapolis. Down below is a picture of one of the drummers backstage rolling her drum. An Aikido group awaits their moment onstage.
The Ginza Holiday continues tomorrow. I’ll post some more pretty pictures then, and maybe some photos of First Folio Theater Group’s setting for Much Ado About Nothing.
Oh, what the heck, here’s one more picture of those Taiko drummers:
Nice Work, as you know, remains strictly non-political, except to make fun of that born fool, Obama. But now that the level of civility of the political dialogue has lowered — which took some doing when you consider how it started at the level of “chimp-hitler” — has lowered, we say, to at least one candidate’s playing of the “Race Card,” we at Nice Work can no longer remain on the sidelines.
We love to play cards! Sorry to say, though, we couldn’t find a deck of Race Cards anywhere, so we scrounged around on shelves and in drawers and look: we turned up a deck of Sanrio Cards!
Yes, we are going to play the Hello Kitty™ card.
Too bad Hello Klinton has stomped away from the (presidential) race — don’t count her out though. Obamocat is making a first class hash of things what with his 57 States and tire guage oil production scheme. Who would have thought McDenDen would have inched his way ahead in the polls by the simple policy of letting Obamocat self-destruct? Gotta give the old guy his props. Personally I was rooting for Romchacco but I can understand how that clean-cut look caused a lot of folks to worry he might hand them a tract. The point is moot, though, McDenDen and Pekklebee cut him neatly from the herd early on. Now we’re left with Cunning Old Age vs. Early Onset Midlife Crisis.
I know Takeshi Kitano mostly as an actor and filmmaker. His bios told me he was also well-known in Japan as an author, but since my Japanese is limited to “Byoin wa doko desu ka?” I haven’t been able to enjoy his writing until recently. His first book of fiction to be translated into English has been published by Vertical, Inc.
The title is simply Boy. It’s a collection of three independent stories about boys in Japan having varying degrees of difficulty in growing up. In Japanese the title is Shonen (which Manga fans might recognize from the title of the boys’ cartooon magazine, Shonen Jump).
Kitano is perhaps best known here for his breathtakingly violent yakuza films like Violent Cop or Brother. But I think of him mainly as the star, writer and director of one of my top ten favorite films, Kikujiro, a non-violent (mostly), sentimental and very funny film about a low-life who has to protect a young boy on an eventful cross-country journey in search of the kid’s mother. The deadpan humor of the stories in Boy, reminded me of Kikujiro. Also the sentiment: In the second story, two brothers are forced to rely on each other’s companionship when they are ostracized and bullied in their new school after a move from Tokyo to Osaka. They take comfort in their shared interest in astronomy passed on to them by their late father. They’ve covered the walls and ceiling of their bedroom with pins dipped in phosphorescent paint to form constellations which appear when the light is turned out. Their name for the bedroom is “Nest of Stars.”
The dust jacket has a bunch of holes neatly punched through it. The cover under the desk jacket is printed with a cartoon tableau of parents and children. When the dust jacket is slipped over the cover, the holes frame individual kids.
I had to get TheDark Knight out of my soul, so I went to see a movie ostensibly made for grown-ups: The Visitor. I figured a real movie would be just the antidote to the BatFest, but unfortunately, The Visitor turned out to be a — deep sigh — Message Movie. I really, really wanted to like it because people I respect like it, but… but… well, it’s a Message Movie, for heaven’s sake!
Pictured to the left are the actors, someone and someone else, who play a couple of guys. One guy is an uptight white guy — he’s a professor — and the other is a spirited illegal jazz immigrant from Syria. Syria jazz guy teaches uptight white guy to beat on a drum, and loosen up a bit. This tickles uptight white guy who is sick to death of teaching economics in Connecticut and is more than ready to start a new life as a subway busker, so when Syria jazz guy gets nabbed by Homeland Security or something, uptight white guy goes to the detention center in Queens to spring him. Instead, he sleeps with Syria jazz guy’s mom. This loosens him up.
I give The Visitor a rating of Four Stars (out of a pickle jar filled with many gold foil stars).
I’ve been taking a lot of photos at art museums lately, because I’ll be leaving this area soon and I want to record some of my faves before I go. Mostly I don’t take snapshots in museums, though. A camera is a pain to carry and it can be annoying to other visitors (especialy if you forget to turn off the flash). I’d rather hold the art in my memory than in a photograph.
My mnemonic trick in art galleries is to carry a little sketch book and quickly make a visual impression of something that interests me. When you make even the most rapid drawing of an artwork, it forces you to really look and see things you might have passed by otherwise. Here are a couple of pages from my book:
This is about the actual size of the open book which fits in my shirt pocket. The paintings I made these scribbles from look more or less like this in my blurry (sorry!) photos:
The top painting — left sketch — is from 1790. It is a an oval portrait of some lucky citizen of the newly minted United States: the handsome dude had just won the Massachussetts Lottery. Well, he holds the ticket anyways, and I doubt he’d have wanted to be portrayed holding a dud. The artist remains anonymous, perhaps fearing libel. The sitter appears to be Keith Richards.
The bottom painting is by Richard Lorenz who lived from 1858 to 1915. He was born in Prussia, but spent most of his working life in the U.S. where he had a big influence (or so I read) on the Western genre. The painting, from 1912, is titled, alternately, “Lost” or “Lost in the Blizzard.” It’s about two and half feet wide.
Well, better people than me saw the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and loved it. So I must be wrong: I just saw the movie and it seemed like no more than a big bag of wind. Lots of noise. Lots of movement. Lots (lots!) of time. That’s all. I defer to the opinions of more insightful reviewers, but, me, I just don’t get it.
However, I am in complete agreement with everyone who raves about the stellar performance of the late Charles Nelson Reilly as the Joker. There’s even talk of a Best Actor Oscar, which would finally vindicate those of us who always wondered how he missed getting an Emmy for his unforgettable work on The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
Did you know that Andy Warhol was a devout Catholic? Well, that’s what it says on Wikipedia and that’s good enough for me. I guess I should be surprised, given Warhol’s self-created image as a Decadent, but it makes sense in a Huysmans or Waugh kind of way.
Where Huysmans and Waugh were both bitter critics of modern times, though, Warhol was more like Oscar Wilde: a jolly critic. Sure, it’s a gawdawful century, he seems to say, but I’m having a swell time and so are you.
Look at one of his silkscreens of Mao or Marilyn or Elvis or Tomato Soup or Brillo Pads: you can’t help feeling a little emotional lift. The cheerfulness of his iconoclasm gets you every time.
We were dining al fresco at The Standard here in Elmhurst while a “showing” was being made of our house by our Realtor. Conversation turned to songs that sounded like each other. Maybe not to the point of litigation, as in the case of “My Sweet Lord” (by a Beatle) and “He’s So Fine” (by the Chiffons), but close enough to segue easily from one tune to the other.
For instance, see how easy it is to shift from “The Third Man Theme” to the Turtle hit, “Happy Together.” I’ll give you a moment to perform the experiment… See?
Third Man Theme (a lousy midi version)
Here’s another. You know the theme from the old Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show? It was a 19th century composition by Charles Gounod called “Funeral March for a Marionette.” It happens to blend beautifully with the theme from another TV show from the same period: Leave it to Beaver.
Alfred Hitchcock (the actual soundtrack)
“Magic Bus” (by The Who) and “I Want Candy” (by, well, everyone) could have been separated at birth.
On a different tack: have you noted some of the vocal similarities wafting around out there on the fetid currents of pop music? I don’t mean only Bob Dylan and the five thousand Bob Dylan soundalikes. I mean like whoever was the lead singer for the 60s band Canned Heat. [Wikipedia break... Hmm... Long boring article... ah, here it is: Alan Wilson.] My daughter and I were listening to that Canned Heat classic “On the Road Again,” and Liz, a child of the 90s, looked perplexed and asked, “Is that Strongsad singing?”
And finally, I leave you with a question I’ve been asking for decades: “Did Jimi Hendrix do the voice for Bullwinkle J. Moose, or was it vice versa?”
I drove pajama-clad to the airport in the pre-dawn hours to pick up my wife who had taken the Red-eye from L.A., and so I am too groggy to write coherently. For example: The squirrel is not to the dog. See?
So, I will skip the audio portion of this program and just give you some nice photos to look at. Here is the firstThat’s a detail of a painting, An Angel, by Abbot H. Thayer (1849-1921). I guess he did lots of paintings like these. The Wikipedia article describes them as “idealized figures” of women “equipped with feathered angel wings.” Now, personally, if I were to list the attributes of my ideal woman, feathered wings would not be included, but we must allow Mr. Thayer his little quirks. Here is a photo that shows the scale of the painting. The woman in the foreground is fifteen feet tall:
The same Wikipedia article informs us that Mr. Thayer was a leading authority on the art of camouflage painting. He worked closely with the U.S. military, designing camouflage patterns for ships and for soldiers’ uniforms. The article doesn’t say whether or not the designs included feathered angel wings, but we can hope.
I was going to end the post there, but since we are all having such Mussorgsky-like fun wandering through the galleries, let’s stand about nine inches from a painting by Bastien-Lepage from 1881 called “The Wood Gatherer.” It shows an old guy in the woods, bent under the weight of the tree branches he’s gathered for… uh… tree branch soup, I guess. In the foreground his little granddaughter (the model for whom was the painter’s actual granddaughter) gathers posies. Here’s a detail of the kid:
There now. My day is better and so is yours. For a look at the full painting — it’s big; about six feet square — try going to… let’s see now… ah! Try this link: WOOD GATHERER AND HIS GRANDKID.
It takes a pro to photograph a painting. Neither my little Kodak EasyShare™ nor my amateur self are up to the task of capturing color, eliminating glare, correcting for parallax or even getting the focus right. But here’s a little close-up I took of a Renoir where the glare from the gallery lights — usually my nemesis — works to my advantage:
La Grenouillère - Renoir
The sparkles of light exaggerate the brush strokes so you can really get a feeling for how Renoir smacked this canvas around. It’s called “View of Bougival,” in some places, like this New York Times article. But the frame carries the title “La Grenouillère” which I like better because it means “The Frog Pond.” Frogs trump Bougival every time, and you can quote me.
The NYT article includes a photo of the entire painting, so you can see my close-up detail in context. If you decide to go there and you actually read the review (of a Renoir exhibit from last year), I would kindly beg of you to have mercy on the writer, Roberta Smith. The piece abounds with clauses like “Less interested than Monet in surface coherence or underlying infrastructure…,” It’s tempting to smirk at that sort of art-educationese, but play fair, kids: art is just plain hard to write about.
No, not hard, impossible. When an artist makes a painting and you view it years or centuries later, an encounter takes place between you and the artist as solid as a handshake. The encounter that occurs between a writer and a reader is no less solid, but it’s so different from the painting experience that something inevitably is lost in the translation. Think of how descriptions of romantic love by previous generations sound so goofy to us today, and how future generations in their turn will laugh themselves silly at our attempts. Same with painting. If you don’t believe me, try reading Ruskin.
So don’t pick on the art writer. She’s doing her best.
