MoMA Marches to the Beat of History

Wall Street Journal
August 31, 2010

The faux documentary on Charles Foster Kane that follows his death at the beginning of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is one of the cleverest pieces in the movie's brilliant puzzle. With its mix of pristine and artificially aged footage, sternly detached narrator, newsreel-style editing, quirky grammar and grandiose title, News on the March sends up the newsreel series The March of Time, which entertained American moviegoers from 1935 to 1951.

The Museum of Modern Art is marking the 75th anniversary of that ground-breaking series—which brashly mingled actuality with Hollywood-style narrative techniques—by screening nine programs containing dozens of episodes, organized by curator Charles Silver. The retrospective is being presented in collaboration with HBO Archives, which has been managing and restoring the films. (On Sunday, cable viewers will be able to catch Turner Classic Movies' four-hour March of Time marathon.)

Mr. Welles had been a gung-ho performer on the radio version of The March of Time, which launched in 1931 after Time Inc.'s Roy E. Larsen had the idea of hiring actors to dramatize news items. The catchy title came from a Harold Arlen song written for Broadway, and such actors as Everett Sloane, Art Carney and Agnes Moorehead were enlisted to impersonate newsworthy figures like Adolf Hitler and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt (though the FDR skits were dropped after the president complained). Hugely popular, the broadcasts were a publicity gold mine for Time magazine.

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Journalist Walter Winchell appears in The March of Time episode 'What to Do With Germany,' from 1944.

The Tolstoy of the Internet Era

by Judith Shulevitz

Slate
August 30, 2010

A person who read only the first chapter of Jonathan Franzen's Freedom might be tempted to dismiss it as a pretty callow piece of writing. That chapter freeze-dries the novel's protagonists, the Berglunds, at a moment in history, the 1980s, when they and their kind were still relatively unselfconscious and thus shrink-wrappable. "Walter and Patty were the young pioneers of Ramsey Hill—the first college grads to buy a house on Barrier Street since the old heart of St. Paul had fallen on hard times three decades earlier." They drive a Volvo 240, listen to public radio, cook from The Silver Palate cookbook, worry about lead in their Fiestaware, use cloth diapers, fret about maximizing their children's brilliance.

The voice that checks off the items in this yuppie's handbook seems giddy and smug, amused by its own sociological precision. I kept thinking of it as a hectoring presence: that voice. Patty Berglund, says that voice, was "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee." "There were people," says that voice, "with whom her style of self-deprecation didn't sit well … as if Patty, in exaggerating her own minor defects, were too obviously trying to spare the feelings of less accomplished homemakers." The reader might be forgiven for feeling plunged into a faintly mean-spirited sendup of gentrifiers and overparenters. Franzen himself has called this sort of relentless cataloguing of bourgeois delusions "fault-finding fiction."

The reader of just that first chapter, however, would be wrong about Freedom. The novel aspires to be a portrait of America on a Tolstoyan scale—at least that's one way to interpret the many references to War and Peace in it—and Franzen has indeed absorbed some of Tolstoy's astonishing capacity for empathy. Gentrification and the fetishizing of parenthood occupy the foreground of Franzen's panoramic canvas but have not been reduced to caricature, except in that curious first chapter, which I'll get to later. Rather, they are made to seem like aspects of an urge to nurture that has run amok, two of the many ironies of life under late capitalism chronicled by this exuberant but keenly critical novel.

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What's the Big Idea?

The Chronicle of Higher Education
August 29, 2010

For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the defining idea of the coming decade, and why?

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The illustrated guide to a Ph.D.

Are you a Ph.D. student? Do you like charts that explain the nature of your scholarly pursuits? Matt Might, who works and teaches at the University of Utah’s School of Computing, has created a series of illustrations to explain exactly what your Ph.D. research looks like.

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Freakonomics Movie Trailer Released!

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An Illustrated Guide to the 5 Levels of Inception

Cinema Blend
July 18, 2010

Like a lot of you we’ve spent most of the weekend thinking about one thing: Inception. You can see our attempt to explain what’s going on the movie here but before you can even begin to guess at director Christopher Nolan’s intentions or what happens after the movie’s mind-blowing final sequence, you’ll need a clear idea of all the levels of Inception.

SPOILER WARNING: What follows should only be viewed by people who have already seen Inception. It contains heavy, critical spoilers which will impact your viewing of the film. If you haven’t seen Inception yet, stop reading and don’t come back until you do.

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Everything you wanted to know about "Inception"

by Sam Adams

Salon
July 19, 2010

Even before it hit theaters on Friday, Christopher Nolan’s Inception was one of the year’s most talked-about movies, and one of its most argued-over. But before you can form an opinion, you need to know what’s going on, something even a few seasoned critics seem to be having trouble with.

Like Nolan’s breakthrough movie, Memento, Inception is an elaborate, deliberately disorienting maze of interlocking time frames, only here the stakes are raised. Rather than challenging us to figure out what happened, Inception presents events that may not have happened at all. Set in the world of dreams, and dreams within dreams, the movie is the narrative equivalent of a set of Russian nesting dolls. Every time you think you’ve reached the center, Nolan pulls the film apart and shows us another world hiding within.

By structuring Inception as a subconscious heist movie, following a team of dream thieves led by Leonardo DiCaprio as they infiltrate the mind of business heir Cillian Murphy, Nolan provides a strong thread for us to cling to as we bounce between the concentric layers of dreams. But if you want to truly understand the mechanics of Inception’s world rather than simply go along for the ride, you need to see the film more than once and spend some serious time untangling its mysteries.

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Read the film review by Roger Ebert

Chopin's Small Miracles

by David Dubal

Wall Street Journal
August 28, 2010

Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849), whose 200th anniversary it is this year, is the overwhelming favorite composer for the piano. He possessed the most subtle intuitions and fathomed the mysteries of the world. Oscar Wilde once said of him, "After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."

Most of the 24 Chopin Preludes were sketched out between 1837 and 1838. They are the ultimate miniatures. In an age when the symphony and sonata still held sway, writing these aphoristic Preludes was revolutionary. All except two contain a single musical idea, each boiled down to its essence. Never had brevity been so brief. Ten are under a minute in length; nine last just over a minute. Only the celebrated No. 15, the so-called "Raindrop Prelude," attains the length characteristic of a small piece, clocking in at 4½ minutes.

Fourteen of the Preludes are full of light, gaiety, serenity and a kind of happiness. Seven contain anguish, rage and fury. Three are simply sorrowful. No matter how tiny, the Preludes loom large musically. Each one is a masterpiece of compressed emotion blended with an unequaled pianistic ingenuity and originality. Many of them are horribly difficult to play. When Robert Schumann read them, he proclaimed Chopin to be the "proudest poet soul of the age."

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Brooklyn Museum: Andy Warhol: The Last Decade

Andy Warhol: The Last Decade is the first U.S. museum survey to examine the late work of American artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987). Encompassing nearly fifty works, the exhibition reveals the artist’s vitality, energy, and renewed spirit of experimentation. During this time Warhol produced more works, in a considerable number of series and on a vastly larger scale, than at any other point in his forty-year career. It was a decade of great artistic development for him, during which a dramatic transformation of his style took place alongside the introduction of new techniques.

Warhol continued to expand upon his artistic and business ventures with commissioned portraits, print series, television productions, and fashion projects, but he also reengaged with painting. In the late 1970s, he developed a new interest in abstraction, first with his Oxidations and Shadows series and later with his Yarn, Rorschach, and Camouflage paintings. His return to the hand-painted image in the 1980s was inspired by collaborations with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, and Keith Haring. The exhibition concludes with Warhol’s variations on Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper, one of the largest series of his career. Together, these works provide an important framework for understanding Warhol’s late career by showing how he simultaneously incorporated the screened image and pursued a reinvention of painting.

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Andy Warhol (American, 1928–1987). The Last Supper, 1986. Acrylic and silkscreen ink on linen, 116 x 390 in. (294.6 x 990.6 cm). The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh

Cloak and Swagger

by Justin Cartwright

New York Times
August 26, 2010

Since the publication of Night Soldiers in 1988, Alan Furst has made a considerable reputation as a ­writer of historical spy thrillers. These are set in that fraught period of European history starting in 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, and ending in 1945. Though Furst is a native New Yorker, he lives some of the time in Paris and has adopted a European sensibility ­— perhaps aiming to evoke the atmosphere of his books, which have been compared to the works of John le Carré and Graham Greene.

His latest, Spies of the Balkans, is set in the winter of 1940-41 in Salonika, in northern Greece. Greece is threatened by the Axis powers; the Greeks have driven the none-too-fervent Italians back over the mountains toward Albania but believe Hitler will soon exact retribution.

Salonika is a louche and exotic port full of brothels, bars, international trade and Byzantine intrigue. In its sleepy police department is Constantine Zannis, called Costa, whose qualities of tact, bravery, honesty and charm have ensured him a special position as a fixer. He sorts out indiscretions by politicians’ children, supplies travel papers and keeps tabs on foreign security services. Lately he has taken to helping Jewish refugees from Berlin complete the increasingly difficult route to safety.

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Change Agent

by Isaac Chotiner

New Republic
August 26, 2010

Like a number of successful novel sequences or film franchises, the James Bond movies have spawned a stream of books that analyze, often too solemnly, the artistic merit and the cultural relevance of the original works. These books tend to be written by people who take great pleasure in complete immersion in their subject. A book on, say, Arthur Conan Doyle’s famed detective is likely to know what kind of pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked, or where Dr. Watson underwent his training in medicine. The James Bond scholar (there’s a phrase!) is likely to know that Noël Coward was considered for the role of Dr. No, and that if Cary Grant had been willing to sign on for more than one film, he very well might have been cast as the lethal British spy.

Very well and good, you say—an author ought to know his subject. The problem is that such arcane trivia tends to cloud out the bigger picture; fandom, with its purely obsessive approach, does not always produce the most considered or insightful judgments. Most James Bond books (and I do not mean the fiction on which the films are based) tend to get lost in the universe under review—and, to paraphrase Ian Fleming, this world is not enough. Fans of Conan Doyle or P.G. Wodehouse or Star Trek know what I mean, however loathe they may be to admit it.

Another danger stems from the opposite problem: a tendency to condescend to the subject. There are few things worse than a 007 obsessive who pens an entire book about his hero, but, out of an apparent need to appear serious or highbrow, ends up trashing what he most worships. Where is the fun in that? This is a longwinded way of saying that Sinclair McKay’s new book is one of the very best attempts to take stock of the Bond films. It has its share of quirks, and is by no means appropriate for someone with a minimal interest in the series. But his analysis of the movies is smart and unexpected, and his grasp of Bond is obviously the result of thought and study.

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Life, literature and dogs

by Bob Minzesheimer

USA Today
August 26, 2010

Writer Caroline Knapp was 42 when she died, seven weeks after being diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002.

She's best known for Drinking: A Love Story, her 1996 memoir about life as a "high-functioning alcoholic." But she also wrote Pack of Two (1998) on why people, including herself, are so attached to their dogs.

And it was dogs — not books — that connected Knapp with book critic Gail Caldwell, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for her reviews at The Boston Globe.

Theirs is "an old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too," Caldwell writes in the opening sentence of Let's Take the Long Way Home, a heartbreaker of a memoir.

If grief can ever be graceful, then Caldwell gracefully weaves a thread of stories that describe and ponder friendship and loss.

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The stuff of life

Economist
August 26, 2010

Jonathan Franzen’s brilliant new novel studies the planet, happiness and marriage

It was John DeForest, a writer of the civil-war period, who defined the Great American Novel in an 1868 essay for the Nation as “painting the American soul within the framework of a novel”. DeForest was arguing over the relative merits of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Harriet Beecher Stowe, two writers who definitely fit the bill. Others have laid claim to the title (or had claim laid to it by their hopeful publishers), including J.D. Salinger, Don DeLillo, Tom Wolfe and John Updike.

Indeed, there has never been a shortage of candidates for this peculiarly American compulsion, and disagreements over who should wear the laurels are as long as the continent is wide. This year, though, the award may enjoy almost universal acclaim. The novel that America will be talking about in the coming weeks will be Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.

A mop-haired Midwesterner who looks far younger than 51, Mr Franzen rose to fame a decade ago. This was when his third novel, The Corrections, a multigenerational family saga about American yuppies and their square parents, was first selected as a candidate for Oprah Winfrey’s book club and then very publicly dismissed by the television star. (Ms Winfrey did not care for Mr Franzen’s complaint that her book club appealed only to women readers.) The brouhaha did his book no harm. Though largely plotless, uneven in structure and weighed down with sarcastic observation, The Corrections went on to spend 29 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and win the 2001 National Book Award.

Mr Franzen’s work will not appeal to those seeking sharp-edged experimentalism in their fiction. But for readers who believe the novel to be an old-fashioned thing that, at its best, should bring alive fully imagined characters in a powerful narrative with a social context, his new book will be a huge draw. The author has spent the past ten years doing what he does well and making it better. Freedom has all its predecessor’s power and none of its faults.

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Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom"

by Ron Charles

Washington Post
August 25, 2010

So what is it about Jonathan Franzen and poo? In 2001, his wonderful breakthrough novel, The Corrections, was momentarily stunk up by a scene in which a senile old man imagines his feces talking back to him. A decade later, Franzen's more staid, more mature, but all around less exciting Freedom reaches its comic zenith when a young man searches through his own excrement with a fork. What seemed like a sophomoric indulgence in that earlier tour de force now smells stale.

Which is one of the problems with Freedom. We've read this story before in The Corrections, back when it was witty, when its satire of contemporary family, business and politics sounded brash and fresh, when its revival of social realism was so boisterous that it ripped the hinges off the doors of American literature. The most anticipated, heralded novel of this year gives us a similarly toxic stew of domestic life, but Franzen's wit has mostly boiled away, leaving a bitter sludge of dysfunction.

Cannily, the slyest part comes up front: a 23-page preface that outlines the rise and fall of Walter and Patty Berglund's marriage in St. Paul, Minn. (You may have read this section last year in the New Yorker.) "Walter's most salient quality, besides his love of Patty, was his niceness," Franzen writes, while Patty was "a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee . . . famously averse to speaking well of herself or ill of anybody else." It's classic Franzen, a smart, acidic take on suburban life and particularly green yuppies, "the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege."

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The Soulful Side of Bordeaux

by Eric Asimov

New York Times
August 24, 2010

Compared with the grand chateaus of the Médoc, the tiny Domaine du Jaugaret may seem irrelevant. The critics don’t score its wines, it’s barely mentioned in guides, it doesn’t play in the futures game. The winemaking facility is no more than a series of stone sheds with floors of dirt and gravel and walls covered in a mushroomlike mold. Calling it rustic would be putting it kindly.

Yet for me, the importance of a place like Domaine du Jaugaret in St.-Julien cannot be overstated. In globalized, commercial Châteaux Bordeaux, a world of brand-name products sold like luxury goods, where too many wines seem polished and lustrous yet lacking in character, Jaugaret brims with soul. Its proprietor, Jean-François Fillastre, epitomizes the French vigneron, one who tends the vines and makes the wines.

Vignerons like Mr. Fillastre make up the backbone of wine regions all over France, from Burgundy to Languedoc to the Loire, embodying the essential truth that wine is both agriculture and culture, a centuries-old expression of French character. (Indeed, Jaugaret has been in Mr. Fillastre’s family for more than 350 years.) But in the famous terroirs of the Médoc like St.-Julien, Margaux, Pauillac and Sauternes, such vignerons are the rare exception.

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Popcorn Reverie

by Dave Kehr

New York Times
August 20, 2010

Scratch a film critic, and you’re likely to find a jazz buff. That the opposite is also true was suggested as far back as the 1930s by Otis Ferguson, the startlingly prescient critic who covered jazz, when it was a genuinely popular art, along with Hollywood movies, then entering their classical phase, for The New Republic. It’s demonstrated again by Gary Giddins, the eminent jazz critic of The Village Voice from 1973 to 2003, and more recently the DVD columnist of The New York Sun (which ceased publication in 2008).

A collection of Giddins’s film columns for The Sun, filled out by work for other publications, including DGA Quarterly (a journal from the Directors Guild of America) and The New York Times Book Review, has been published under the alarming title Warning Shadows: Home Alone With Classic Cinema, which somehow conjures a 1970s baby sitter watching The Late Show while waiting for the neighborhood slasher to show up. The book itself is considerably cozier: an anthology of informed, engaged, illuminating writings, mainly concerned with American movies of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s.

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Peace and War

by Sam Tanenhaus

New York Times
August 19, 2010


Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, Freedom, like his previous one, The Corrections, is a masterpiece of American fiction. The two books have much in common. Once again Franzen has fashioned a capacious but intricately ordered narrative that in its majestic sweep seems to gather up every fresh datum of our shared millennial life. Franzen knows that college freshmen are today called “first years,” like tender shoots in an overplanted garden; that a high-minded mom, however ruthless in her judgments of her neighbors’ ethical lapses, will condemn them with no epithet harsher than “weird”; that reckless drivers who barrel across lanes are “almost always youngish men for whom the use of blinkers was apparently an affront to their masculinity.”

These are not gratuitous observations. They grow organically from the themes that animate Freedom, beginning with the title, a word that has been elevated throughout American history to near-theological status, and has been twinned, for most of that same history, with the secularizing impulses of “power.”

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The New Adventures of Old Elaine

by William Van Meter

New York Times
August 18, 2010

On a recent August night, young women in stilettos teetered precariously through the cobblestone streets of the meatpacking district in Manhattan. Appropriately for the neighborhood, they were squeezed into minidresses that were as snug as sausage casings. But a few blocks south, far away from the blare of Hummer limousine horns, at the fashionable opening of the Algus Greenspon Gallery on Morton Street, a more demure look prevailed.

Like a modest Robert Palmer-girl army, the women mingled in floor-length print dresses and brown lace-up boots with their hair in messy secretary buns. The genesis of the look could have been those unforgettable images of fundamentalist Mormon women that dominated the news a couple of years back. But if you squinted, what you saw was a sea of Elaines. Listen and you could almost hear the funky slap bass that played as segue music on Seinfeld. Could it be that the stars have somehow aligned to make Elaine Benes the summer’s downtown fashion muse?

Over the years, Elaine has stood out as a beacon of a faded era, in long floral skirts, blazers with padded shoulders and granny shoes with socks. Just about every inch of her skin was covered as if she were photosensitive. Unlike other 1990s series with a more easily imitable style (see Melrose Place), Seinfeld was decidedly anti-fashion. But now, if you happen upon an old episode, Elaine just looks cool — and of-the-moment.

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A Film Unfinished

by Jeannette Catsoulis

New York Times
August 17, 2010

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw Ghetto, simply titled Das Ghetto and discovered by East German archivists after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic record of ghetto life. Shot over 30 days in May 1942 — just two months before deportations to the Treblinka extermination camp would begin — this hourlong silent film juxtaposed random scenes of Jews enjoying various luxuries with images of profound suffering.

Like the flickering shadows in Plato’s Cave, these images were subjected to a radical rereading with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged. Over and over, in multiple takes, we see well-dressed Jews enter a butcher’s shop, ignoring the children begging outside. In a similar scenario, prosperous-looking passersby are directed to disregard the corpses abandoned on the sidewalk. The propagandists’ manipulation of their half-million prisoners was now clear, even as its eventual purpose — perhaps more than just to manufacture scenes showing callousness on the part of wealthy Jews toward their less fortunate brethren — remained as murky as ever.

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Trailer

Jonathan Franzen picks up the torch for US literary tradition

by William Skidelsky

Guardian
August 15, 2010

Last week an event took place that hasn't occurred since 2000: a living author appeared on the cover of Time magazine. The recipient of this accolade was novelist Jonathan Franzen, best known – until now – for his multi-generational epic about a midwestern family, The Corrections, which came out in the week of 9/11 and was one of the most talked about (and bestselling) novels of the last decade.

It has taken Franzen nine years to complete his follow-up, Freedom, which is about to be published in the US. (It doesn't hit UK bookshops until late September.) Understandably, Franzen hasn't significantly departed from the template that served him so well last time. The novel is another multi-generational epic that microscopically examines the tensions within an outwardly successful but inwardly unhappy midwestern family. There are striking plot similarities: both books feature get-rich-quick schemes and copious extra-marital affairs. It has been suggested, in fact, that the main difference between the two is that, while the family in The Corrections had three children, the family at the centre of Freedom – the Berglunds – have just two.

Time's decision to make Franzen its cover star is intriguing, for reasons both obvious and less straightforward. Ever since The Corrections appeared, Franzen, who is 50, has been regarded as one of America's most important novelists, a leading member of the generation down from the "old guard" of Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and John Updike that dominated US fiction from the 1950s until at least 2000. The appearance of a new novel by him, especially after such a long absence, is a major literary event, which it is appropriate for Time to honour.

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Good and Plenty: The Creative Successes of American Arts Funding

Americans agree about government arts funding in the way the women in the old joke agree about the food at the wedding: it's terrible--and such small portions! Americans typically either want to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts, or they believe that public arts funding should be dramatically increased because the arts cannot survive in the free market. It would take a lover of the arts who is also a libertarian economist to bridge such a gap. Enter Tyler Cowen. In this book he argues why the U.S. way of funding the arts, while largely indirect, results not in the terrible and the small but in Good and Plenty--and how it could result in even more and better.

Few would deny that America produces and consumes art of a quantity and quality comparable to that of any country. But is this despite or because of America's meager direct funding of the arts relative to European countries? Overturning the conventional wisdom of this question, Cowen argues that American art thrives through an ingenious combination of small direct subsidies and immense indirect subsidies such as copyright law and tax policies that encourage nonprofits and charitable giving. This decentralized and even somewhat accidental--but decidedly not laissez-faire--system results in arts that are arguably more creative, diverse, abundant, and politically unencumbered than that of Europe.

Bringing serious attention to the neglected issue of the American way of funding the arts, Good and Plenty is essential reading for anyone concerned about the arts or their funding.

Tyler Cowen is professor of economics at George Mason University. His books include Creative Destruction (Princeton) and Create Your Own Economy. He frequently writes for the New York Times, Slate, and the economics blog Marginal Revolution.

A Lot of Everything on the Upper West Side

New York Times
August 7, 2010

Crowded with shops, serviced by multiple subway lines and bordered by Central and Riverside parks, the Upper West Side has no problem attracting residents.

Traditionally a working-class neighborhood, the area has been transformed in recent years by an influx of affluent young families and more than a few local and national artists, musicians and actors.

Celebrities known to have an address on the Upper West Side include Yoko Ono, Alex Rodriguez and Sting. They're living side by side with longtime residents and Columbia University students, who have a quick walk to campus. It's not surprising to catch a celebrity or two strolling through the neighborhood, or come across blocked off streets due to a television show or movie filming. Recent sightings: Al Pacino, Kelsey Grammer and Keanu Reeves, according to Torrey Taralli, co-founder of the My Upper West Side blog and an eight-year resident.

The neighborhood is made up of a mix of prewar buildings, many originally built as rental properties before being converted into cooperatives and condominiums. High-rises constructed in the 1960s often went co-op in the 1980s. Rental conversions continue today at such high-end buildings as the Apthorp. The neighborhood is also stocked with tenements, brownstones, a few low-rise brick buildings and some public housing.

There's no shortage of cultural attractions. Parents and children flock to the Children's Museum of Manhattan and the American Museum of Natural History. There's also the New York Historical Society, where current exhibitions include Slavery in New York.

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French Roast sits at Broadway and W. 85th St. in the Upper West Side

Upper West Side businesses along Broadway include Coach at West 84th Street

A statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback at the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History

Larry David: Earth to America

Earth to America! Live at The Colosseum at Caesars Palace, Las Vegas, November 17, 2005

In the Catacombs: Paris's True Underground Scene

Wall Street Journal
August 6, 2010

Sixty-six feet under the City of Light's scenic streets, people are gathering each weekend to explore Paris's true underground arts scene. The 160 miles of centuries-old tunnels have become a unique gallery for artists.

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Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913-1917

The Scout Report
August 6, 2010

The Art Institute of Chicago website has a wonderful online interactive feature that complements its in situ Matisse exhibit, called "Matisse: Radical Invention 1913-1917". The focus of the exhibit is the aforementioned time period, but the Art Institute of Chicago, in collaboration with the Museum of Modern Art, New York, takes it one step further by using technology to uncover how Matisse's painting, Bathers By a River, and the sculpture, Back, evolved. To understand the technology used to uncover the evolution of Matisse's work, visitors should check out the "Glossary" in the menu at the top of any page. There, x-radiography, infrared reflectography, and overlays are concisely explained to visitors interested in learning about this x-ray approach to art. Finally, visitors interested in seeing Matisse working on an actual painting, will definitely want to check out the 26-minute film from 1946, "A Great French Painter, Henri Matisse". Some of the film is even shot in the Issy studio where he created many of his works from 1913 to 1917.

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Beyond the Blockbusters at the Met

New York Times
August 5, 2010

Wall Street may be fattening up, but New York’s art institutions aren’t. There’s a conspicuous recessionary logic behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s two marquee spring-summer exhibitions, one devoted to Picasso, the other to American fashion. Both were homegrown, low-overhead productions, pulled entirely from the permanent collection.

The good news is that self-reliance has worked.

Thanks to the Met’s oceanic closets and to its long, shrewd effort to shape itself into a popular entertainment hub, the two exhibitions have been hits, the Picasso in particular — even with B-level art — generating a blockbusterish frisson.

And both are closing soon, on Aug. 15, which means — doesn’t it? — that we’ll be on short exhibition rations till the new season kicks off in September. No. August is prime time, with the Met full of shows that many of us have had neither the time and stamina nor the healthy curiosity to catch earlier. Manageable in scale, cogent in theme, with material often unfamiliar even to experts, they are some of the hidden highlights of the season.

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Emily Dickinson: Sweeping up the heart

Economist
August 5, 2010

Emily Dickison, who was born nearly 200 years ago, has long been an enigma. She was so reclusive that the townsfolk of Amherst, Massachusetts, where she spent her life, called her “the myth”, as if her very existence were in question. Few got so much as a glimpse of her white dress—as an adult she only wore white—and only ten of her poems were published in her lifetime. After her death in 1886, hundreds of others were discovered in a wooden chest, and a new legend grew up, sweet with pathos, of a woman too delicate for this world, disappointed in love.

Yet the mysterious poems were anything but sweet. Their startling violence and strange hiatuses—Dickinson’s trademark dashes for punctuation—seem to hint at a secret both precise and unknowable. Something was happening in the mind of the poet, the “funeral in my brain”, the volcanic “throe”. In “Lives Like Loaded Guns”, which was published in Britain in February and has now also come out in America, Lyndall Gordon, a South African-born literary biographer and academic, presents new and compelling evidence that there was an unsentimental reason behind the poet’s seclusion: the mysterious “It” to which Dickinson refers in her poetry was congenital epilepsy, a condition which also afflicted her cousin and nephew, and which was regarded as a stigma in the 19th century.

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Oktapodi

Oktapodi is a 2007 French computer-animated short film that originated as a Graduate Student Project from Gobelins L'Ecole de L'Image. Oktapodi was directed by Julien Bocabeille, François-Xavier Chanioux, Olivier Delabarre, Thierry Marchand, Quentin Marmier, and Emud Mokhberi. Music was composed by Kenny Wood.

Oktapodi was well received, winning a number of awards, as well as an Oscar nomination for Best Short Film (Animated) for the 81st Academy Awards.

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