Saturday, June 30, 2007

La Vie en Rose


** ¼

A PUSILANIMOUS PINTSIZE PORTRAIT OR/
A PICKLED PIAF PUZZLE
(A SEMI-SURVEY OF SOOTHSAYERS` SAYINGS!)

Edith Piaf had a wretched (she was a champagne hound), excrutiating, winding, rapturous, sinuous, miraculous (at times)...(oh yes!) a very painful life, and this is what I took away from the screening as I exited the Arbor theater-house, smitten with jet-lag from the topsy-turvy flashbacks, on a muggy, rain-belched... dreary, primal, summer day. Good art comes with a price, and “The Little Sparrow” paid her toll, rung her bell for a tide, but then her moonbeam was switched off, yet fortunately she left us with a cache of timeless tunes. “La Vie en Rose” was heart-breaking, it was tears and flapdoodle all the way, when I attended a matinee on Sunday the 24th of June to a pert near packed house. Marion Cotillard as Edith Piaf was superb, and will likely be up for an Oscar for 2007-a radiant performance that left you quaking! Ms Cotillard portrays "The Little Sparrow" in a bewildering gamut of roles over shuffled, beaucoup time-from when she was a waif of a teenager to when she morphed to a decrepit morphine addict after a bad tumble in a car accident. The use of make-up and costumes surely was the crowning touch here as the poor old girl was all bent over, crusty and shaking, quivering for another shot for an ample allotment of frames, and the good-olde torch-singer was just in her early forties. Most of the time I was lost in space as the random recollection of events unfolded on the picture screen; fractured-revery, no doubt, of a drug-addled Edith in the South of France in her final days (early 1960s).

Nonetheless the saving grace herein is Marion Cotillard who has freed herself up to give an open interpretation of the “Little Sparrow". Her eyes are expressive and she looks a little like Peter Lorrie, one critic said, but she is more a delightful little marionette that flops and bops on the stage and lip-synchs all the Piaf classics with verve. Her gutteral use of the French at Maxims in New York shows off her good acting. I adored the hunchbacked, frizzle- haired scenes (or the several scenes) too, in terms of her performance! Marion is a lively sprite that prances about and keeps you excited. The acme or turning point, in terms of finding her way, was when "La Mome Piaf" sings "La Marsailles", the French national anthem, in the streets of Paris with her freak show paps. Thus, her destiny was carved in stone!

A streamlined summary of her misfortunes would be apropos for any duck soup fan of Piaf, though you should get yourself to a library, read up on her life with persnickety, in order to fill the twinkie with cream, but here`s just a short shot. Her mother was a singing waif, a loser who went nowhere. Her father was a circus contortionist who parked her in a bordello of Normandy, with his Madam Mamma; then doomed her to a flaky, unbalanced childhood. She was sickly in her youth, and was nearly blind from illness. Edith was in two bad car accidents that left her a morphine addict. Her manager, Louis Lepleé (Gérard Depardieu), was murdered and she was implicated. She drank way too much booze, especially champagne. Her boxer-beau died in an untimely plane crash. She roved the streets of Paris begging for morsels with sweet song. She died at the ripe age of forty-seven a broken spirit.

The really stirring scenes were when she was on stage singing her songs, and Olivier Dahan actually used Piaf`s original songs. I will make a point to drop by Waterloo this weekend (today is the 26th) and pick up a platter of her songs. I may try to get a different collection from the soundtrack. This is the real test of all of this sound and flurry: her art! Too, I liked the scenes with Raymond Asso, who really hammered her into shape, from a barroom belcher to a classy art-house singer, sort of the way that Brian Epstein boldly led The Beatles out of the concrete alleys of Liverpool. Piaf seems to bridge the social classes here from the rigorous training. A lost idea that boomeranged, after seeing a delightful "Paris, Je T`Aime" at Dobie, was her worship of St. Theresa, who the sisters attributed to her return to good health and eyesight; Piaf prayed to St. Theresa prodigously thereafter!

I eyed a good many reviews (ayed some, denied others), but had the good sense to do so after I saw the film. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 75% on its Critics Tomatometer, a sterling reading. Many of the points made by critics had gummy-adhesives as I continue to weigh the merits (or demerits) of this feather-brained biopic. The point made by Laura Clifford about the scrambled, circuitous timeline was fully accepted, appreciated, and internalized by this here author, aye, she was truly on-the-mark in her assessment! I was on rollercoaster ride the whole time and never knew if it was 1958 or 1918. The entire thing is a flashback of alcohol dementia, so it is alphabet soup all the way. Roger Ebert loved it, but his review is very as-a-matter-of-fact; not too much flare in his lines. Rex Reed recognizes the superb performance of Marion Cotillard as the saving grace of “La Vie en Rose”; this seems to be a consensus of many, including myself. Carina Chocano with the Los Angeles Times really sung its praises, but wisely notes that it: “suffers from trying to cover too much territory in too little time.” Boo Allen from the Denton Record Chronicle pipes in that writer-director Olivier Dahan is just interpreting Piaf`s life, and that it is not suppose to be a documentary. Dan Callahan from Slant has a really creative and funny piece; he seems to praise it but his comical use of words makes the film out to be ridiculous in many ways.

The greatest fault of the film was the mumbo-jumbo, scrambled time sequencing, where WWI and the Fifties blur like watercolor and agua. Some found this as a virtue, but I gleaned this as confusion boats, where you never knew which decade you were in (especially if you ocasionally take a trip to the snack bar or lavatory). Someone should have put the Sherman and Peabody time machine in storage, and snatched it away from Olivier Dahan. Another bothersome aspect is that all the famous people that Edith knew were not really touched on. Say Marlene Dietrich or Jean Cocteau are not really properly explored in the way their lives interacted with hers, and these free-loops carried on for more than two hours. And where was Maurice Chevalier, the most jovial male cabaret singer in France? And Yves Montand-why didn`t he play a central role in the movie? And as for the French Resistance, shouldn`t this have been dealt with in particular? Surely Edith Piaf was the shimmering chanteuse of France, and she represented the free-spirit of France, but this was not investigated at all! To my way of thinking these are fatal errors. A chronological or linear presentation of events would have been more effective.

We really need a substantial biographical documentary on Edith Piaf. There is ample testimony, photos, sound recordings, and film footage to put together something firm. Her real story is far more interesting! In the meantime I will be running these YouTube clips. "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien" for this somewhat negative call.

Magically you are reading this on your iPhone at this canonical crossroad!

Saturday, June 23, 2007

LANDFILL OMEGA




All my life I`ve had my hands on bits and pieces of funny trifles,...miniscule thing-a-ma-giggies or scraps of ephemera that I sometimes have considered as art-but what I really mean-is rather simple products of everyday life-odds and ends that are usually only scrutinized by garbologists (you may want to hum "Fresh Garbage" by Spirit here). With "Landfill Omega" I decided to get my ya-yas out and create a collage with a wide variety of media. In this one I used oil paints, acrylic paints, photographs, xeroxes, molding paste, interior flat wall paint, movie ticket stubs, and film negatives. I thought of the concept while I was taking a shower one morn, and thus I fancied it would be a Neo-Platonic expression of perfection, GOOD ideals that exist dormantly in the Solar Plexis. The ideals that I chose were: PEACE, HARMONY, NON-VIOLENCE, BENEVOLENCE, IMAGINE, & SOLAR-LOVE. I had been reading about the Egyptian Pharoah Akhenaten and his non-traditional worship of the sun. This appealed to me, and I decided to create a cosmos with a Sun God in the center, and all of the other perfections radiating outward, and flinging their spendour throughout my personal synthetic universe. I was also thinking of the Beatles` song "Here Comes the Sun King"...yea that was cascading through my mind!



This shot above is simply the center of the work. I painted a small Greek God for the central portrait. The large acrylic rays project out from the center, beaming the ideals down on ye sinful mortals in an effort to cleanse y`all of fatal flaws, such as: WAR, VIOLENCE, HATRED, JEALOUSY ETC...Not a bad idea in a more perfect world! There are flourishes of house paint done in a Jackson Pollack technique of random droplets of paint or color flecks flung about whimsically. Just below LOVE is a photo of a work by Violet (I lost track of her a few years back), who paints within the Futuristic School, by my way of thinking, where globs of paint hold pulsating energy, or spiritually charged ions of energy, that radiate forth into the atmosphere, and electrify you just like a battery charger will revivify a cheap cell phone. To the top is a photo of some masks that I shot at the cactus nursery, The Living desert, that I go to frequently out by Lake Travis. I can gain more creativity in a couple of hours, when I go there, than I can obtain in a lifetime at my microscopic downtown condo! And by the way, the bars are piled with paint, in order to emphasize the intensity of the solar rays that project the ideals. On the right is a negative film strip. The colors are bright, intense, even psychedelic-but this was purposely done to draw your attention to the ideals, which have been buried `neath some cobwebs of propaganda by the Current Regime (see The Children of Men again to get the right feel of my message here).




Above is more the top of the painting. It has the two movie ticket stubs of Slither and The DaVinci Code, so it was about a year ago that I was working on this baby. There are two Mona Lisa images to the top and also two Quadrafoils. I got this idea when I read an interesting NY Times piece in the Science Times section that is published on Tuesdays. John Noble Wilford had written a piece about the Mayans and Quadrafoils had been discussed as a symbol that represented the Mayan Cosmos; anyway, I figured that if it was good enough for the Mayans, then it was fine for Bovee! For the title of landfill it is pretty obvious, as that is where we as a society dump everything that we do not want. This is also what I did, and stuck all the disposable junk, that was hangin` `bout my pad, on the canvas to create a piece of catch-all art, or maybe scrap-yard-art might apply. I suppose this is Freudian in a way, with beaucoup fallic symbols tossed in, but this is the good subconscious, the white witch of the mind. For omega it is a: subatomic particle in the baryon family having a mass 3,276 times that of the electron, a negative electric charge, ...a yea...that is what I meant...or maybe it is a reference to a fraternity house such as in Animal House.



This is the bottom section above, and it has two more Quadrafoils, two more Mona Lisa`s, a photo of my work L, a snap of me, and two images of Andre The Giant. I included him because he is in a lot of street art around here and he seems to represent something important, but I don`t know exactly what that is? I saw him once in Dallas at the Sportatorium, and he leaves a permanent imprint on your brain, as if you have seen Goliath hisself from the Olde Testament!

III

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever

To sage or poet these responses given-

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

Remain the records of their vain endeavor,

Frail spells-whose uttered charm might not avail to sever,

From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance and mutability.

Thy light alone-like mist o`er mountain driven,

Or music by the night-wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,

Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life`s unquiet dream.

HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY-PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Sunday, June 17, 2007

The Warhol Fragment

POPTONES

Drive to the forest in a Japanese Car
The smell of rubber on country tar
Hindsight done me no good
Standing naked in the back of the woods
The cassette played Poptones
I can`t forget the impression you made
You left a hole in the back of my head
I don`t like hiding in this foliage and peat
It`s wet and I`m losing my body heat
The cassette played Poptones
This bleeding heart looking for bodies
Nearly injured my pride
Praise picnicking in the British countryside
Poptones

(Public Image LTD-Second Edition) [we called it The Metal Box]-1979

Andy Warhol initiated a revolution in pop-art barnone. He was never totally original, but he never claimed to be either; sometimes he said he was a fake! Some have suggested that George Seurat`s A Summer Sunday on the Island of the Grande Jatte, 1884 was the beginning of “Modern Art”, and is suggested in the above line by John Lyden, but rather it is in France. “Modern Art” modulates profusely with all the Ism-hues vaguely defined by art historians through time. At last comes Abstract Expressionism, nicely expressed by Jackson Pollack or Mark Rothko, and it was really a rebellion against this that defines Andy Warhol. I believe he did not want to get caught up in all the endless painting that would be required to produce works. Somehow he came to silkscreening images on canvas, then adding a bit of paint to them, in order to produce more works for the market. Andy was coming from a designer background, had very clever instincts, and used these to mass-produce images of Campbell`s soup cans, cows, or Mao Tse Tungs. He was playing with us, teasing us, or maybe just entertaining himself, in a most narcissistic manner. Whatever the deal was, it started to take, and now his works command the most money, only second to Pablo Picasso.

Second Edition née The Metal Box (the latter perhaps the greatest packaging concept in history, and I don`t give a damn about the price, I`ve bought two copies already and how much else is there that`s worth any money at all?) is one of the best records I`ve heard since, oh say, maybe White Light/White Heat. It`s assured. It`s no joke unless you want it to be, in which case you`re welcome to all the Gary Numans. This is a real ensemble making passionate music out of noise and sonic scraps. Quote me: “the first music of the Eighties.” It`s not entirely new; there`s Spanish guitar in “Memories,” and the ending of “Swan Lake” harkens back to the Velvets` “Loop” and the ending of the original “White Light/White Heat.” “Radio Four” even sounds a little bit like Eno, but all those hours in the studio and remixes (there are between three and five-I`m not entirely sure which-mixes of “Swan Lake” a.k.a. “Death Disco” on various records) paid off. It`s not arty, either-what it is is bitter and variform, an hour well-spent. It hasn`t a commercial chance in hell and wasn`t even necessarily designed that way, nor is it particularly obscure-you can`t get much more blatant than the group`s name itself.
Lester Bangs-John Lydon Across the Border-The Village Voice, March 24, 1980.
(That is Lester Bangs in the photo below when he visited Austin in 1980. He is at the New Wave Club, Dukes Royal Coach Inn, grimacing as the photo was snapped by Ellen Gibbs. This would be the time that he lived at the Contempo Culture House, the domicile where a fanzine was published by Stewart Wise, Ellen Gibbs, and Cathy Darr. Lester too made some worthy contributions to it!)


Andy Warhol did the same thing as Public Image Limited, he made terrific art out of scraps-advertising, publicity snaps, or grocery store shelf products. The way that it was originally packaged does synch with Warhol`s MO; three 12” 45s with eight songs altogether, were included in just a generic metal box-unique industrial packaging, most original for 1979.

great pictures from that party: Bowie staring intensely at nothing, looking best; Jagger looking tattered, old, used-up, unelegant, plain bad, definitively flaky, head bent as he stares into his wineglass and purses his lips as if about to spit a rancid sip back; Lou Reed pudgy faced, matted shock of hair, nervously glancing to the side, beginning to resemble Porky Pig…as good as the famed Iggy-David-Lou pic in its way, because this time everybody really looked like garbage…and other pix of Mick dancing, incredibly stiffly, with that bitch he supposedly immortalized in song on his new album. This is rock aristocracy?...Lester Bangs-“1973 Nervous Breakdown”-Creem, December 1973

By the time the seventies rolled around, lots of the mega-stars of the sixties were moldy, mostly shrink-rapped, and puffy-eyed from too many photo-ops! Andy himself was wasted out-remember, he had been shot just a couple of years before!


Photo Falling ///
“The Subliminal Kid” moved in seas of disembodied sound-He then spaced here and there and instaff opposite mirrors and took movies each bar so that the music and talk is at arbitrary intervals and shifted bars-And he also had recorder in tracks and moving film mixing arbitrary intervals and agents moving with the word and image of tape recorders-So he set up waves and his agents with movie swirled through all the streets of image and brought back street in music from the city and poured Aztec Empire and Ancient Rome-Commuter or Chariot Driver could not control their word dust drifted from outer space-Air hammers word and image explosive bio-advance-A million drifting screens on the walls of his city projected mixing sound of any bar could be heard in all Westerns and film of all times played and recorded at the people back and forth with portable cameras and telescope lenses poured eddies and tornadoes of sound and camera array until soon city where he moved everywhere a Western movie in Hongkong or the Aztec sound talk suburban America and all accents and language mixed and fused and people shifted language and accent in mid-sentence Aztec priest and spilled it man woman or beast in all language-So that People-City moved in swirls and no one knew what he was going out of space to neon streets-Nova Express-William S. Burroughs-1964


I`m seeing “The Subliminal Kid” as Andy here, because that is just what he did, he tape-recorded everything and filmed everything in sight. I can only speculate as to whether Burroughs was hearing about The Factory, as he wrote, a possessed shoman, down in Tangier, Morocco, circa 1964.

that was wonderful.

Patti Smith is right about the power of r&r. My parents have 8mm film of me about four or five years old, dancing like a maniac (later called pogoing) and in a state of ecstatic bliss. My parents told me that it happened every time they played “Great Balls of Fire” and I wanted to hear it over and over. I still find that song kind of thrilling.

Years later, in 1975, I had moved to Austin a few months earlier and had managed to make a lot of friends in a very short time. I struck up a friendship with a guy from El Paso named Chico. Chico was a music writer for the Daily Texan. One day I went to his house and he brought out an advance copy of an lp he`d just received in the mail earlier that day. He couldn`t decide what he thought about it and wanted to hear my opinion. It almost affected me the way “Great Balls of Fire” once did. I`d never heard anything like it. It was a revelation, a point of epiphany and it changed the course of my life. It was Patti Smith`s “Horses”.

Once I started listening to this music and the later flood of new stuff from NYC, CBGBs, and England, I found myself less and less inclined to hang out with my friends who didn`t listen to or like this music. In fact I was verbally attacked at a party by someone I considered a good friend simply because I was wearing a t shirt with the Ramones logo on it. Within a couple of years I had pretty much shed my old crowd and managed to work my way into a totally different circle of friends who mostly listened to this new music. It`s weird, but I view my life in Austin as two separate experiences and you could date them bd. And ad. That stands for before Dobie and after Dobie.

Stewart Wise-March 15, 2007-The CasaGrandeEast Yahoo Group

And even more than that, Patti`s music in its ultimate moments touches deep wellsprings of emotion that extremely few artists in rock or anywhere else are capable of reaching. With her wealth of promise and the most incandescent flights and stillnesses of this album she joins the ranks of people like Miles Davis, Charlie Mingus, or the Dylan of “Sad Eyed Lady” and Royal Albert Hall. It`s that deeply felt, and that moving; a new Romanticism built upon the universal language of rock `n` roll, an affirmation of life so total that, even in the graphic recognition of death, it sweeps your breath away. And only born gamblers take that chance.
Lester Bangs-Patti Smith: Horses-Creem, February 1976.

Back in the 70s I wasn`t really familiar with this seminal record for rock.

The death of the Beatles as a symbol or signification of anything can only be good, because like the New Frontier their LOVE nirvana was a stimulating but ridiculous, ephemeral and ultimately impracticable mass delusion in the first place. If the Beatles stood for anything besides the rock `n` roll band as a communal unit suggesting the possibility of mass youth power, which proved to be a totally fatuous concept in short order, I`d like to know what I have missed by not missing the Beatles. They certainly didn`t stand for peace or love or true liberation or the brotherhood of humankind, any more than John Denver stands for the preservation of our natural resources. On the other hand, like Davy Crockett hats, zoot suits, marathon dances, and bootleg alcohol, they may have stood for an era, so well as to stand out from that era, totally exhumed from it in fact, floating, light as dandelions, to rest at last on the mantle where, neighboring your dead uncle`s framed army picture, they can be dusted off at appropriate intervals, depending on the needs of Capitol`s ledgers and our own inability to cope with the present.
Lester Bangs-June 1975 Creem

Lester could be an ornery iconoclast, but like a smooth gazelle he chops the rock-gods down to a soggy straw hut; but in hindsight he is right, the Beatles were over-inflated with adulation by fans and/or their dogs. I am seeing this phenomenon of hero-worship in light of art too. That is, I am seeing a clear parallel or analogy between the Beatles for pop-music, and Andy Warhol for pop-art. One observable difference, however, is that no-one is pulling Andy back to earth from the misty stratospheres, where dudes like Peter Max dwell. En contre, he is drifting further afloat on his air-balloon into the bloated pantheon of the gods-ala Leonardo, Massacio, and Jackson Pollack! And for reasons unknown, this is his proper, righteous domicile. The Beatles as little menageries on the mantle is perfect; Andy liked to collect these and rove over the flea markets on a Sunday afternoon. The Fab Four as trinkets is apropos; I am reminded of the glass children on the mantle of the film “Little Children” that stare out at you in the opening shot. Later I remembered the little toy Stones on the cover of “Let It Bleed”-Andy saw celebrities as abstract objects that titillated the fancy of a ravenous audience. Lester too saw the Beatles as plastic objects, ogled victims, icons of mindless admiration by banal baby-boomers.

The boy sacrifice is chosen is by erection acclaim. universal erection feeling for him until all pricks point to “Yes.” Boy feels the “Yes” run through him and melt his bones to “Yes” stripped naked in the Sacred Grove shivering and twitching under the Hanging Tree green disk mouths sucking his last bone meal. He goes to the Tree naked on flower floats through the obsidian streets red stone buildings and copper pagodas of the Fish City stopping in Turkish Baths and sex rooms to make blue movies with youths. The entire city is in heat during this ceremony, faces swollen with tumescent purple penis flesh. Lightening fucks flash on any street corner leave a smell of burning metal blue sparks up and down the spine. A vast bath-town of red clay cubicles over twisting geological orgasm with the green crab boys disk mouths` slow rasping tongues on spine centers twisting in the warm black ooze.
William Burroughs-The Soft Machine 1961
This seems to be a description of one of Warhols manic films. Burroughs and Warhol were kindred spirits; I have seen one photo of them together. They were projecting similar ideas very early in sixties.

Jackie O in crimson, the pill box hat sequence repeated black and white, or tinted blue the down turned head as LBJ is sworn in…beaming bliss before the shots, frozen sorrow afterwards as the paranoia filters through…four snaps times four, first lady stacked on cornflake and brillo boxes…Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building into the night…distorted, tinted green and vermillion, silk-screened ad infinitum or Uncle Sam his martial scam bring GIs home in a box… red, white, and blue or dove-tailed joints with rivelets of marijuana smoke billowing to the skies…Silver Factory wing ding with motor scooters, mini-skirts, polka-dot Nehru shirts. Ray Bans, eye-liner, cocktails and one-liners, tin foil with gargantuan cow-print wallpaper…signing soup cans or silk printing Campbell`s Cans with Gerald Melanga, the wizard of this technique…the rock & roll music pulsates as more canvas is printed with the dead and famous. Marilyn is more of an image as sticker print on a flagpole that movie idol…Andy transforms her and Jackie O…car crash idealized, electric chair in reversed exposure is more the throne of Louis XIV than a Sing-Sing death Row victim. Gothic handgun stained with red, grim reminder of a violent society. Converting the banal to high theater…Elvis is not Elvis anymore, but rather a Hitlerian Cut-Out-Doll that is frozen in quick draw mcdraw…a cartoon but not a cartoon, fake but not fake, anti-fake actually…a spoof but not one, who is the joke on? Is it Andy himself? Is everything a self-portrait? Maybe…The reversed Marilyns of 1979-1986 are a fresh take on a very withered idea, recycled and used over and over again. Just like American Corporate Carnage, wee-willy-winkies & twinkies…Hostess Snow Balls electric & sugar rush to homicide, remember White in San Francisco, sugar-coated powder donuts as art, why not? But bigger than life or John Wayne combined! These paltry pieces fetch millions of dollars! If only this word puzzle would portion a grand prize, then me thinks i`d take a little trip to Tunesia or Singapore in a sling some muggy night, but that ain`t right…Grandma Moses spent her days painting pretty pictures…manichens on display with spacemen of the future…Crabby Grablocks plays her flute with brilliance so outstanding, drag queens walk the shanks of paltry peacocks swaying, orange goblins lick their chops for sumptuous piglets playing, floral patterns thousand fold can make your daydreams brighter, petals blossom through the air, whilst sky cranes glisten lighter, galleries stacked with Chairman Mao and Flower Power kites and silver balloons, and the Velvets pulsate with vitality! Nico swings her hair and croons in the microphone over clever chord changes and dissonance from the viola. Silk-screening madness, work for 24/7/365 and still total masterpieces, flying hamburgers not billboard signs but better Huh??? More delicious than the burgers themselves…caches of cash, more than Blackbeard, actually on Death Row but making millions in the meantime…a tad bit cruel but total Catholic with cowlick and a mustard dog Coney Island Baby, so Manhatten, but from the Bronx & Queens too, oh yea? From Pittsburgh, Pa. and Chuck Berry doowap, Charles Baudelaire rules, Tom Wolfe saw it too…Has anyone ever seen all the movies? Life is a big scrapbook or a crap game cock-a-doodle-doo Mister Greenjeans, how do you do what you do to me? I wish I knew! 4,000 audio tapes sitting in a museum waiting to be heard! In the gallery the camaflouged head of Jesus from the Last Supper subtly buys your time just like he has for 2007 years. Was Andy religious? Is his rendering more important than Leonardo`s? The answer is yes! The Beatles are bigger than Jesus. Warhol is bigger than Pablo Picasso. I`ve wanted to say that for a very long time. Is anything art? Maybe. Think Frank Zappa`s “Freak Out.” That is art (me thinks). The head of Jesus repeated a zillion fold, until it finally sinks in: Man as God! God is Dead! “Rosemary`s Baby” cult ruined the sixties. Charles Whitman doomed the Vietnam War, right? Why did Andy so dwell on disasters? Was he a gloomy person by nature? Did he think about death and destruction a lot? Perhaps. What were his main grooves? Shoes, shoes, shoes. Did he help the gay cause? That is a certainty! He improved the lot of homosexuals. Did he make Campbell`s Soup a lot of money? Of course…Was Lester Bangs the Andy Warhol of rock criticism? That is absurd, but rings Yes. El Fino!
Grandma Moses spent her days painting pretty pictures..

The frenetic energy surges from the granite and marble plates, dinosaurs with thorny shields, and color magma boils to the surface. Orange/yellow synthetic polymer paint over Debbie Harry silkscreen, thick blue eyeliner & painted ruby lips and she is what she is not. Wild silver wig flaring, New York streets o`erflowing with Macys and Bloomingdale bags of excursion-extended, 8 millimeter brownies drinking, punctuating, recorded time, the happy sequences of urban bustle palpitating in real time perspiration & suffering, the guts of urban decay, the panophobia. Andy swishes polymer paint whilst bouffant hair-do queens dance the disco to blue film, plotless, seething with monotony, nothingness with scratches & pops & grainy bits. Motion and music, calm ocean breezes in Cannes…vacant vacations, orange groves & paisley palms as exhibits…department store fragments, colliding collages, memory moondreams-Americana is Pittsburgh but through a looking glass refracting back on itself…reflecting pools of image, Narcissus peers through a mirror…upper East-Side blueprints, primordial perception, anti-art & anti-fashion, a predilection for closure, mirrors to moving matter. A universal globe of burning magma comes jetting, twirling, glazing through space…a bundle of tumult-race riots, political shootings, napalming Vietnamese landscape, jabbing the veins with white heroin, orange trips to the devils lair, somehow survive and all is photographed and filmed. The sex & glamour-still dancing, Keith and Mick pumping it out…the Rolling Romp an` grind of NYC swinging frantically with molten lava motion, shaking an` jiving, aluminum foil, rabbit ears an` black & white portable TVs rattle…machine guns rat-a-tat-tat-super vixen models go-go-queens an` the Chelsea Hotel scenes with Edie mangled in a snakepit of seething false-merriment, doused with drugs and mental illness, abandoned by Andy, lost, a fading star, holding on for dear life, rejected by her parents, a swarm of junkie bees an` blue movie birds…but still famous, living a deprived junkie life…preserved in mag ads and underground celluloid viewed by millions through the ages…photogenic, rich, and wasted-out? Promethian reptiles wail and whine their meat-eating chants for flesh…filming the riot on a stormy noon in Watts…Black Panther funeral or Stokely Carmichael standing up for his black brothers, shoot the cops here before going to Vietnam to kill yellow people…but tabloid silkscreens of pandemonium, car-crash victims on 40” x 40”, larger than life in the very instance of death-& why not? A new art where the terrible is captured and objectified, distant and cold, a cheap funeral for his own dear mother, and why? Why so frugal when you are worth a half-billion dollars? So utilitarian & using everything for pieces…Cut a new path for us all. Heard a new song and sang it. Saw a superstar in drag queens & served um well. Flowers were celebrated, but twisted autos too-loved Shirley Temple and went on to shake your booty at Studio 54. Mesmerized a generation by converting the ordinary to extraordinaire! That is it in a nutshell. Our whole pop culture shifted after 1962, and colors vibrated, shapes pulsated, hearts were open & free, happiness came to NYC, the Museum of Modern Art morphed to rhythm…Mao was a Mayan, Andy was an Aztec?...Mao was a kaleidoscope villain for China…took cold mug shots and plastered them on the New York State Pavilion, 1964-collage was censored but many saw…start from the beginning, flash to the end…Catholic through an` through-tolerance for others, eclectic borrower, introverted, hidden spiritualist, blue-tinted “Last Supper”, Polaroids of the upper crust, 25 grand a pop, look at Roy Lichtenstein`s cartoons and compare to Andy`s Dick Tracy? Waves pounding on the shore! Herculanean hero plasters another Elvis, the gun-slinging one, the King of Rock & Roll elevated skyward by the Pope of Pop!

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

A Welcome Visitor To Texas-The Dahesh Museum!

The exhibition at the Blanton, A Century of Grace: 19th-Century Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York, really filled up a black hole that has existed in my art education for some time. The question is: why did the Impressionists rebel so vehemently against academic art? Some of the answers to that question are contained in this humble show of about 50 paintings, prints, and sculpture from the Dahesh Museum in New York. I mean in his day, Jean-Leon Gerome was a big star, but now we mock his works, flog him with a whip for his feelingless brushstrokes and their lack of realism. Was he pulling the wool over our eyes with all of his pretty pictures? "Aint true", said the little red hen, who realized that he thought he was doing the right thing!

You can walk through the exhibit in about an hour, and even still look at all the works thoughtfully. I took a break on one of the fancy benches, and also picked up a couple postcards from the Dahesh Collection at the Blanton Lilliputian giftshop. I then went back around the show again, and took a few notes with the teeny pencil donated by the Blanton Team Member. I would drink each painting up for five intense seconds, sucking in the colors and forms, medium or theme meticulously. Then when I walked away, I shut my eyes, and conjured the image back to life on my cerebral desktop, and so long as it uploaded, I fancied I had total recall. In this way I was enabled to write about it afterwards, with some clarity. Then I would completely forget about it until the next morning, then after drinking beaucoup java, I shut my eyes pensively, and then would see if a slideshow of the opi reappears. It did in this case, so case closed!

As you walk around the square room the walls or panels are a rich blue against alternating ones of a lighter blue. There are many large background placards that explain important topics such as the Academie des Beaux arts, Orientalism, or the large timelines of political and cultural milestones of the 19th century. The former did much to keep things in perspective for me, such as the French Revolution, the Commune of 1871, the Franco-Prussian War etc... I realized that these events were altering the thinking in Europe, and that different camps of artists were starting to crop up in reaction to the turbulent events of the day.

My favorite piece was Lord Frederic Leighton`s Study for "Captive Andromache", a depiction of Hector from Book Four of the Illiad, imagining the fate of his wife Andromache, who stoops to drawing her own water. This is mainly a color study, and the blues, pinks, ochres, and whites really spring out and dazzle the eye. I haven`t seen the major work, but this one had a most sweeping impact on me.




Moses before the Pharoah 1883-Paris, by Gustave Dore was done in charcoal, pen, and ink wash on paper. The placard says that it influenced early cinematographers; I was seeing Cecil B. DeMille as I contemplated it. Dore`s illustrations of Dante`s "Inferno" are some of my favorites! Right next to it was The Massacre of the Innocents by Dore as well and this pen and ink cast its spell over me magically. The only actual painting by Dore was The Black Eagle of Prussia, 1871, and it fares from the Symbolist School. Since Dore illustrated a lot of poetry, such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Colleridge, this is not surprising. You may want to pick up "Symbolist Art" by Edward Lucie-Smith, one of my favorite writers of art history. In the same camp, and seeming to simulate the work of William Blake, this striking pencil and watercolor titled: Influences, 1904 by Henry John Stock takes me to the place of fantasy.




This is LeGouter (The Snack), 1885 by Jules Breton and is a most cute and simple little oil. It was included in a petite section that had more to do with common people (people-ie); okay, actual French peasants. Hey, this truly gives off an Impressionist vibration or perhaps a Pissarro vibe. The colors are vaguer and more smudgy! Oh, a principle vein of this show is the depiction of the human body, both male and female. This is idle, bucolic fodder, but lovely nonetheless. Joseph Bail`s Un letter de son pere, 1921 was adjacent, and seems to render the struggle over Algiers in the background, a topic that has captivated me over the past year.

Jean-Leon Gerome probably has the most important pieces to the history of art in the exhibition. He was the most literal practitioner of Academy values. Le Travail du marbre or L`Artiste sculptant Tanagra, 1890 (below) shows his sterile use of color, a very stiff marble, and a self-portrait of the bland artist practicing his trade. No wonder Courbet, Degas, Renoir, and Monet were down on his case. His paintings project photographic precision, and were the popular gems of their day, but now are objects of contempt for the apparent suppression of feeling or obvious lack of naturalism. You feel nothing when you stare at his work! You sense that everything has been arranged to hide something else that may be important.

Orientialism played a major role in much of the academic art that is included in this amazing exhibition of the Dahesh Museum. This trend was especially present in the work of Lawrence Alma Tadema with his piece Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh`s Granaries, 1874. The detail is particular enough that you feel as if you were actually with the granary keeper, although this happened more than 3000 years ago. Aye, I gazed at this one quite a while in awe! Too, look at The Egyptian Chess Player, 1865 on this link to see a similar work to the one that I saw by Lawrence Alma Tadema. Some of the aspects of Orientalism, albeit negative, were to portray the orient as exotic and even erotic, with harems available for the male hierarchies` pleasure. This was all propaganda on the part of the French government and had an obvious imperialist and even rascist component to it. You may want to probe the issue of Orientalism a little further, because it is a very interesting phenomenon. Look at the Women of Algiers carefully on this Wiki page! One other artist that reflected this trend was Henri Regnault and his work A Toreador, 1869 that shows a Spaniard with fulsome swaggart as a bullfighter. There is something very staged about some of these works? Yea, there seems to be a lack of sincerity to many of these paintings.
Jules Dalou (1838-1902) had two bronzes to view, one was the Bather, 1901 and the other was The Punishment, around 1885, and I detected some influence from Degas on the Bather. Dalou was involved in the Paris Commune of 1871, and had to flee from Paris after the mini-revolution collapsed. More baroque in style were two bronzes by Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875) from Paris. Lion and Serpent, 1833 was luxurious and could adorn my condo with domestic panache! Again, I could detect the safe qualities of his work, calling to mind the Ecole des Beaux-Arts or the fluffy grandeur of Academic Art. Be sure to look at The Birth of Venus on the Wiki page, because that one was in the show. It is actually a copy of Alexandre Cabanel by Adolphe Jourdan and has the pillowy splendour of Versailles under Louis XIV, but was done in 1864.
The thing that I take away from this show, is that the Impressionist break from the Academy wasn`t as drastic as it was claimed to be by Art History teachers, who I got my ideas from early on. Orientalism, for example, continued on with say Renoir. Yes, there were many changes in reaction to the stiff and somewhat unnatural predilections, of say genre painting. The amazing thing is that I have never seen in person what they were so stirred up about. Now I know when I stare at Gerome, what it is all about!
Just a small plug for my piece on "The Seventh Seal". It is featured on News Blaze and seems to be getting read quite a bit. Also, my Best of 2006 can still be read there. I had emailed Judyth Piazza back in February to read my review of "The Quiet", because she had reviewed it and it was on Rotten Tomatoes. We must have been the only people who saw that quirky film. She manages News Blaze along with the Student Operated Press, and they give opportunity to novice writers to get published on the Internet. I am very thankful for this outlet.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

THE SEVENTH SEAL

******
A MEDIEVAL TALE IN CLOTH,
BUT NIETZSCHE`S “GOD IS DEAD” IN FLESH

“Yo so la Muerte cierta á todas criaturas,”
“I am Death, known to all creatures”

-A Spanish danse macabre

The charms of the “The Seventh Seal” were first manifested to me when I was a student at the University of Texas in 1972. Disciples with flutes, some medieval muses, were piping cordial chimes of mirth in our recitation hall, “Have you heard the good news, “The Seventh Seal” is offered up on Friday night at Batts Hall, I`ll be there with ribbons and bows”. Then, as if in quest of the Holy Grail I resolved to appear on the occasion. I had been meandering in the direction of medieval studies anyway, took a liking to Arthurian legend, Beowolf, or the fiefdoms of Charlemagne, and rumor was rampant that “The Seventh Seal” contained such antediluvian treasures. I took my humble presence with the hordes in the university hall that Friday eve, with great anticipation for the Swedish bard of cinema, Ingmar Bergman. Suddenly, an ethereal phantasm flickered forth; I grasped for winsome concord in the shimmering shadows of fleeting dreams, and the contemplation of spirits appeared; the shadow of Death looms as he bargains for souls as prizes to his swarthy fold. `Twas a wayfarer who had lost his way in the walls of Dis, where heretics burn throughout eternity. And the primeval forest was teeming with wolves, cunning serpents, and the most grievous plague. But the sprightly song of the comic troupe lifted me up in mirth just for a pause . Then the woeful flagellants` pouting parade lumbers lazily, the taskmaster`s scolding tongue chastises the meek. A spell was cast over me, I realized in a flash that this world was mine, the one of the Knight and the Squire, and I then vowed to dedicate my studies to the Middle Ages. My days at UT were fifteen years hence the release of this landmark work in 1957, and it was a cult film by then, fully adored and scrutinized by people seeking cosmic answers.

In those days many of the youth-culture-types would wear medieval costumes, period-fairs sprang up, and events such as midnight screenings of underground films would happen; people frequently would attire themselves as fools, jugglers, or damsels in distress, all in a spirit of fun. I participated in some such events, such as at the Festival Theater in Dallas or the early Eeyores Birthday bashes here in Austin. These were the rituals of Bacchus anew with beating drums, shaking tambours, and/or dancing dervishes, twirling `bout maypoles (that is the way I remember it). And at the Festival Theater the zany kids, pied-pipers of change, would bounce balloons and toss frisbees merrily, and a pungent aromatic smoke would tickle the air. A passion bubbled forth in me to dedicate myself to medieval studies, and the inspiration I received from this film contributed to this. The other major source of revelation was Michael Baylor, a professor in the History Department at UT, who taught Renaissance and Medieval European History. I still have my notes from his classes, and review them from time to time. Michael Baylor emphasized intellectual history more often, and inspired me to look at history similarly, as a history of ideas.

“The Seventh Seal” is anything but mod, and its black and white format is worthy for the sharp atheistic pattern that is its heartbeat to the core. As you view it on the surface you see all the trappings of Swedish medieval Christendom, but when you look closer you see something altogether different. A flailing Hegelian dialectic prevails, and two opposing forces, two fiery dragons, act as bookends `gainst one another; they hither battle ferociously, but are at wits-end simulating the role as love birds. This is essentially what was occurring in the grander history of ideas, first with St. Augustine, then with St. Thomas Aquinas; how do faith and reason combine in harmony? I am perceiving “The Seventh Seal” as a clever little allegory, an anti-morality play with medieval forms as the cloth, but nihilism as the flesh; a wolf in sheep`s clothing-innocent on the outside, but experienced within! Occam`s razor, or a simple answer is the best way to understand some of the central motifs here. An implicit theme running freely through “A Seventh Seal” is that since the Superpowers are at odds with each other, and since the world could end in a nuclear holocaust at any moment, life is senseless and absurd, there is not really any positive take on anything in this life. The decorum used in the film effectively promotes the above theme with very simple, stark sets, modest costumes, and a jagged and rancorous soundtrack; Eric Nordgren`s music is stirring, you just might think of Bernard Herrmann as a comparison. I will look at a few of the forms present in “The Seventh Seal” and try to make some sense of them.

Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets struck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London`s ghoul-haunted darkness-nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain.
Albert Camus-“The Plague”

Albert Camus` “The Plague” was published in 1948, and Camus was given the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. I do not know whether this is a coincidence, but that is the same year that “The Seventh Seal” was released. They are both speaking in similar tongues, and espouse the notion of the ‘hopelessness of life’ when the plague comes to town. I have not done enough research to know whether Ingmar Bergman was a devoted fan of Camus, but I do know that many critics have characterized him (Bergman) as an Existentialist. However, the setting of this movie is The Great Plague (1347-1351) that stimulated the popular imagination, and was viewed with great portend as The End. Froissart`s Chronicles give much detail of these events in France and England. Really, since so many people died, perhaps one-third of the population, it caused shortages of labor, raising the fee for a peasant farmer, and this then fomented rebellion amongst the poor, such as the Peasants Rebellion of 1381 in England. A Revolution of Rising Expectations; thus, when peasants realized they could get more, they in turn expected more. This dissatisfaction was largely due to the fiery preaching of Wat Tyler, who would incite the poor with the abuses of the wealthy landlords. The plague is more hinted at than graphically displayed in the film. The skeleton of a dead monk again comes to mind. The best obvious instance of the plague is Raval, the seminarist, dying a slow death in the forest, and the cast looking on helplessly as he writhes and shimmies, doing the dance of death for his mortal sins. Camus also uses the pestilence of the plague to portray a mortified society in North Africa on the breach of panic and denial; their despair is more a numbing and dearth of feeling, they are reduced to nothing-it`s not really despair, just hollowness. This is what the Knight and Squire see when they look into the eyes of the witch: nothingness!

Ingmar Bergman uses medieval forms to provide a compelling story of skepticism regarding the catholic vision. The occasion of this is the mid-14th century, when the Bubonic Plague took away every third person in western Christendom. At the church the Artist shows the Squire his new frescoes depicting the ravages of plague on all types of folks. Our best source for the Great Plague in Florence is given in Boccaccio`s Decameron. The appearance of black spots, vomiting of blood, the large black buboes that appear in the arm-pits and groin, and then inevitable death after the third day are vividly described in his introduction. Imagine everywhere you gaze, there are bodies of the deceased in the streets of your little village. Mothers weep (or what few are still alive), and displaced children scurry in the streets, then the corpse-gathers cry out: “Throw out your dead,” as petrified love-ones toss the departed on carts bound for quarantine and incineration. Things are getting a little unhinged in your village; maybe the wrath of God is upon us? Or maybe the world itself is about to end. Focus now on Jöns the Squire unveiling the cloak of the monk on the beach, and instead he sees a decayed skull as scary as Norman Bates` mother in the cellar.


Surely the plague must signal the Second Coming, judgment day when all souls will be granted their final verdict, eternal damnation or angelic bliss. The opening scene quotes from the Book of Revelations, and too the commons in the tavern speak of the end. The opening sequence on the beach first: “And when the lamb had opened the seventh seal…there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour. And the seven angels which had the seven trumpets, prepared themselves to sound.” Then later in the tavern rustics and clerics utter portents unto themselves: Merchant:“The plague is raging everywhere. People are dying like flies. I can`t sell anything. Barmaid: It`s judgment Day, and the awful omens—A woman has given birth to a calf`s head. People are mad. They flee and take the plague with them. Eat, drink, and be Merry! Many have purged themselves with fire and died. But better than hell, the priests say. No one dares say it aloud, but this is the end. People are crazy with fears. You`re scared yourself. I`ll warrant it. Judgment Day. The angels descend and the graves open. It will be horrible.”

The popularity of Revelations in the mid-fourteenth century is yet another of the medieval forms coveted by Bergman to frame his story. It brings immediacy and symbolism to the events of the day, such as the strawberries and milk feast, a humble Swedish take on the Last Supper. It is also a clever way to introduce the theme of skepticism regarding religion.

Early in the film the image of Death appears playing chess with the Knight. If the Knight can hold his own, he will remain alive. If Death triumphs, he will go the way of parted souls. This game is presented comically but its gravity is cunningly sequestered by casual chit chat. The entire movie is staged around this striking metaphor, and really the action takes place over only one day, as the pensive and downtrodden Knight and his trusted Squire are returning from the Crusades to their nearly forgotten home in Sweden. This image of the chess game was present in medieval art in Sweden in this work by Täby Kyrka, but in this representation Death is a skeleton and his companion resembles a merchant. Bergman`s Death more mimics an Anchorite monk with a ghoulish black cloak and oodles of white cake makeup. He is a veritable hybrid of Bela Lugosi`s Count Dracula and Vincent Price`s Egghead on the 1960`s television series “Batman”. Death keeps reminding the Knight in a menacing fashion that he always wins his games of chess.

The procession of flagellants is a distinct medieval form introduced into “The Seventh Seal” to bring immediacy and drama to the film. This ascetic movement saw the Second Coming, or the end of mankind on this earth imminent, if not in just a few seconds from now. This was a reaction to the Great Plague, and is a reasonable one given the circumstances of multiple casualties throughout Europe. This scene with the flagellants, while not an actual phenomenon of fourteenth century Swedish history per se, for the sake of histrionics, is clipped cleverly into the script, according to Peter Cowie, author of “Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography.” The existence of this ascetic ritual sect was omnipresent in Italy and other parts of Northern Europe at the time of the Black Death (1347-1351); and in this caliginous epoch both urban and bucolic village life was unraveling at the seams. It is also true that there were no detectable major Crusades evident in mid-fourteenth century Sweden. Nonetheless, with this in the storyline, and the implication that the Knight and Squire were fighting for Christendom `gainst the godless Saracens, their returning to a land of trouble raises the pitch of irony to a merciless, plague-ravaged Sweden. Of course, with Bergman`s background in theater, he selected only the best ingredients for his screenplay, choosing tidbits, morsels of medieval melodrama. To the scene, the somber procession breaks up the charades of the comic troupe with chants of doomsday. The bass kettle drums beat ominously, as the smoldering canisters of incense swing about like rusty pendulums, the hordes brief swagger halted. The eerie wails of raggedy clad commons resound. Humble village folk kneel in supplication, their visage racked with guilt and fear. The gnarly faced preacher with a threaded Benedictine cloak, and with the wild rag-scarves chastises; the dangling silver-crossed preacher flogs them orally and vituperates bile: “God is punishing us. We shall all perish by the Black Death…Death is behind your back. His scythe flashes above your heads. Which of you will he strike first? …You are doomed, do you hear? Doomed! Doomed! Doomed!...” The sermonizing of the memento mori or the “reminder of death” is a recurring topic for clerics of the mendicant order. Finally, a birds-eye shot of the fleeing parade, incense smoke billowing, deep voices chanting…trepidations, trembling-woe is me!

An incorporeal interlope of the Mary Cult in an early scene is a cool breeze, when Jof (Nils Poppe) beholds the Virgin and Child in a meadow, the Virgin arrayed in a flowing bliaut and period headdress. Jof has the extra-sensory talent of seeing beyond the pale; he witnesses events in the spiritual realm. Jof and Mia (Bibi Andersson) are remotely allegorical figures, mirrors of Joseph and Mary with a mystical protective force about them. The introduction of the vision early in the film firms up the celestial talents of Jof and may safeguard him and Mia from the curse of the plague. The motif of the Mary Cult, lightly dusted with eroticism, acts as an anchor `gainst the dark apparition of Death (Bengt Ekerot) as gleaned by the Knight Antonius Block, (Max von Sydow) otherworldly of course.

The burning of the witch by the soldiers leaves an indelible imprint on the mind. The entourage (the knight, the squire and his girl, Plog the Smith, Jof, and Mia with child) forge through the thick, tangled forest on horse or wagon, a dirge-like commencement undeniably. They run into the execution team, and help them push the witch cart to the rendezvous spot, a misty secluded alcove, for final prosecution. A soldier comments: “The devil is with her.” The prosecutors build up the loose firewood for the hovering conflagration. Death himself makes a brief appearance reminding the Knight of his patient circumspection, a bedeviled pursuit of his utter soul . The youthful Witch girl, played by Maud Hansson, is tied to the ladder that will be inserted in the massive pile of wood for the galling roast. The Knight has a chat with her probing for data on the eternal cosmos. “They say you`ve had commerce with the Devil?” The Knight wants to meet the Devil so that he can see God. The Witch says that he can see the Devil anytime, just by looking in her eyes. Truthfully, when the Knight looks in her eyes he sees nothing. The priests and soldiers see the Devil in her, but not the Knight. The Knight gives her an anodyne to still the pain shortly before her confirmed burning at the stake. The flames rise higher and higher as the proceedings begin. The Witch`s eyes are filled with terror; the strains of soundtrack music accent the sorted affair. The Squire postulates that the girl is discovering emptiness. He comments that there are no angels, God, or Devil-only emptiness. We see what she sees-pure terror!

The question of class structure in “The Seventh Seal” has surfaced clamorously as I have been reviewing “The Structure of Medieval Society” by Christopher Brooke. I thought it would be telling to try to observe if Bergman scientifically portrays the social classes (by the book, mind you) in their clear, original medieval forms. There are no detectable references to Popes, Kings, or Barons as such, and the Knight himself is of humble standing. From the evidence of the story all of the characters appear to be from the lower estates; such as say, Plog the smith, the Church Painter, or Raval the nefarious seminarist. As to whether this is intentional or accidental, one can only speculate? Certainly, it would be imprudent to suggest that this film has a Marxist message, nor does it comment in any noticeable way on medieval social structure per se, but perhaps there is a subconscious or subliminal message in the film that belies a proletarian ethos. Marxism is not easily traceable in the footage, but the after-dew of a socialist curry is palate-lingering. Things remain folksy and simple throughout; remember the homey meal with strawberries and milk or the terraqueous drinking raucous in the tavern scene. Keep in mind that the theme of the leveling of the social classes by the plague is clearly expressed in the common art of Tuscany, and that these references are sprinkled graciously on the movie. More than one third of the population was wiped out as a result of the plague, and do not forget that just as easily the worms would devour the flesh of the secular nobles and church fathers too. I visited Pisa in 2000, and saw the frescoes of the Master of the Triumph of Death, showing the carcasses of lords o`erwhelmed with crawling worms! I was racked by the frescoes, and realized that the Black Death had its crestfallen grip on the natives of Tuscany in the mid-fourteenth century, such that there was an omnipresent gloom that permeated all their days, and each felt as if their present moment would certainly be their last one!

In a later locale, as Death comes to take away souls at the Knight`s house, the Squire`s girl says: “it is finished”. Indeed, the end is here for the lot of them. The final instance of the movie opens with Jof and Mia together on the beach. Mia looks out angelically at the fresh morn, the birds chirp chimerically, and the ocean rays beam brightly. Jof has an interlude of clairvoyance: “I see them Mary! Over there against the stormy sky. They are all there. The Smith and Lisa, the Knight, Raval, Jöns, and Skat. And the strict master Death bids them dance. He wants them to hold hands…and to tread the dance in a long line. At the head goes the strict master with the scythe and hourglass. But the fool brings up the rear with his lute. They move away from the dawn…in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands…while the rain cleanses their cheeks, of the salt from their bitter tears. All the while a chorus of murky monks chant in the background `gainst Jof`s words.

The medieval form of the danse macabre is handled delicately by Bergman. In art and literature the danse macabre has an array of characters from the social stations. Guyot Marchand in a 1486 publication with woodcuts includes the Pope, a noble, and skeletons. The source for this was the 1424 wall painting from the Hall of Columns in the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris (“The Vision of Death”-The Autumn of the Middle Ages by Johan Huizinga). Primarily these representations included Death, the pope, the emperor, the nobleman, the day laborer, the monk, a small child, and a fool. In contrast, the movie only has people from the lower estates; not to ascribe more significance to this than is necessary, but it is observable, this proletarian panoply of shadow, as the danse macabre unfolds. Also, in the art of Hans Holbein we see the smoothing down of the upper orders by Death; all will meet the same fate as the curtain falls. In the very last shot of “The Seventh Seal” we see the miraculous shot of the hand-holding caravan of silhouetted souls, and all of them are common people. This is a new take on the danse macabre, theatrical, lyrical, and cinematic too!

"The Seventh Seal" is inextricably injected with symbolism and allegory; Bergman is simply playing along with these forms that are prevalent in art and literature of the late Middle Ages. You can view the whole movie as an allegorical morality play, something akin to Piers Plowman, where every character represents an abstract vice or virtue. Let me sketch a fanciful scenario, and realize this is not etched in stone. You may want to formulate your own list of character/atributes and see what you come up with! Lisa would be Lust, Raval is Avarice, the Knight is lost salvation seeking God through Lady Philosophy, Mia is Mother Mary (duhh!), Jof is Joseph, the Church Painter is Visual Truth, the Witch represents Misunderstanding, the Squire mirrors Existential Reality, and Skat resembles the Doomed Fool etc…Bergman, no doubt, had the tradition of medieval church allegory at his command when he wrote this quirky little script. This is a very clever little film play, mostly fourteenth century, but with a twentieth century message.

When using the term Symbolism, I prefer to think of this loaded word in a visual context; that is, that images are used in the film to sharpen some medieval forms significantly in the shape of their original bravura, and this reinforces the veracity of the film as a period piece of medieval Dom. When dwelling on this term of symbolism, and while we are careful to use a remote or even mystical frame of mind, we are reminded that there is the literal aspect of the image, then afterwards its inner meaning, be it religious or at other times philosophic. By way of reference, in the flagellant scene the camera focuses singularly on the wooden Christ effigy that the devotees carry with a brutal burden. The symbolism is the suffering of Christ, revealed in the tormented eyes, crown of thorns, and trickle of blood from the forehead. Similarly, the flagellants suffer and struggle in this age (mid fourteenth century Sweden), whipping themselves in preparation for the Second Coming. The barefaced visage of Death playing chess with the Knight conjointly conjures to the surface of frail memory. The translation or meaning for the viewer would be: we struggle daily to remain alive, and we have to defeat irksome Death one pawn or bishop move at a time, but he will remain all our days to tax our souls. Truly, his scythe-toting malevolence will probably prevail at the end of the day, as the hourglass sands sift through to the final granule. Symbols are ubiquitous throughout the film, such as the strawberries and milk, the plethora of startling, white skulls on the sets, or the apparition of Madonna and Child experienced in a daydream vision by Jof. These images tend to persuade you of the authenticity of the story, that you are really in the Swedish countryside in nearly 1350. I have been marveling at the woodcuts of Albrecht Durer, and specifically: Knight, Death, and the Devil-1513-1514, where Death is holding an hourglass and his countenance gawks irreverently from the grooves of the woodcut. I would suggest that Bergman`s Death is more a figure from a Samuel Beckett play, such as the tramp in Waiting For Godot, stylishly modern in appearance, and may represent emptiness or nihilism-the threat that after you die there will be nothing for all eternity.

“Do we not wander through an endless Nothingness?” The Joyful Wisdom-Friedrich Nietzsche

The setting of The Great Plague (1347-1351) in Sweden was particularly chosen by Ingmar Bergman when constructing the screenplay. This is a very bleak landscape indeed, where plague and pestilence rule the day. The burned-out countryside, dotted with skulls, empty chapels, and wayward waifs revivifies Hiroshima, a cardinal, catastrophic event, a nightmare that had rampaged Japan some twelve years prior to this 1957 movie. When the Knight takes confession, his priest is unveiled to be Death himself, a paling irony when Antonius Block lost in the confessor`s cell, fathoms mere emptiness in his sinful soul. The infiltration of the church by Death, who here more mirrors the blasphemy of nihilism, by way of a symbolic image, rather than an evil curse of the Devil, and verily this signifies a decline of the church and religion. According to William Barrett, author of Irrational Man, first published in 1958, a primer that I have carried with me for countless years, the decline of the church and religion is the trumpet blast of the Existentialists. And so the knight is a lonely soul who seeks spiritual sustenance, but is somberly smitten with wormwood. The theme of Existentialism is rearing its gnarly coconut in these early scenes; “God Is Dead!” is the subliminal message between the cracks, craftily filtered through medieval forms, such as the crippling plague or the withering witch who only cries out in despair, solitude, and dripping with fear-no real devil curse is upon her, just the curse of idiocy and superstition. “God Is dead!” does not scream from the rafters, as such in Rosemary`s Baby, but is subtly woven in the story. My very last thought is that the character of Death represents Nietzsche`s “Will To Power”; this is his world and he presides over it. The beautiful thing about this film is that you can continue to tweak the meaning of it, it has that kind of elasticity!

Sunday, June 10, 2007

Century of Grace-A Simple Sneak !

This single image is Michelangelo by Jean-Leon Gerome from the art show that I attended yesterday at The Blanton, now the Louvre of the Lone Star State. A pupil is showing the Belvedere Torso to the Godfather of Renaissance art. The exhibition`s title is: A Century of Grace: 19th-Century Masterworks from the Dahesh Museum of Art, New York. The Dahesh collects academic art, such as many of the drab paintings of the Academie des beaux-arts. This is the variety that I`ve read about, studied in school, but have never witnessed in person. The larger modern public has never seen these varieties, it is of little interest to most; `tis the barren school of stuff that the Impressionists (Wikipedia is monopolizing the information market-duhh) rebelled against! However, the PreRaphaelites embraced much of it, especially the orientalism. Yes, it`s stiffer and more paint-by-numbers, but much of it is very exquisite. This prudent/pruned post just acts as a preview for the full review, which will take some more time to bring to the table. This is true because many of the artists are unknown to me; hey, have you ever heard of Jules Dalou or Lawrence Alma Tadema ? I am starting to familiar myself with them and will do some digging over the next several days. Gerome`s work has photographic clarity and is a delight to gaze at when you`re staring at an actual breathing canvas. But you sure can understand better after going to this exhibit what artists like Monet were reacting to, or even shunning violently, with their free-form dappling of pastel paint, imitating natural light, as they say. And it sure is good to get a speck of culture from Europe via New York, because I don`t want to look at any more Remingtons, and hey, they had quite a few works by Gustave Dore! Orientalism is a topic that I can really get underneath, with its romantic distortions of Eastern lands. Just a morsel for now, but deep thoughts wrapped around vivid images will soon come to you, if you will be patient with his royal highness, Monsieur Bovee, your most gifted art critic.

Flowers & Cactus

I bought this Gerbera at Whole Foods, then snapped it very close. I altered the color for an Andy Warhol thing I was tinkering with. That project had to be shelved, but maybe I will show you the ruins of it sometimes! (This entire post is a test, & apparently a failed one! I was testing out how I will do this art review that I`m just starting, with maybe four or five images. Looks like I will have to write it "Over Under Sideways Down", [backwards, forwards, square, & round] just like the Yardbirds song! Rock on Jeff Beck! When will it end...)

I changed the color on this gerbera using Micky Soft Picture Me. I used it in a collage I made.


Beautiful sunflowers:




Lovely orange flowers:


Bodacious succulents:


Oops! Had to get political I guess. This is from the war protest at the Pentagon in 1967 that Norman Mailer wrote about in "Armies of the Night".


Cactus is my favorite plant; don`t know exactly why? Hopefully no Freudian psychologist will put some kind of bizarre twist on that!


This is the best shot of the lot. Good color, composition, & the butterfly adds oodles to it!


There are quite a few shots here (but some of them are different) of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. A fun day for all with plenty of flowers & cactus, shrubs, & butterflies.

Saturday, June 9, 2007

Flannery O`Connor-Little Miss Southern Discomfort

I got this here book at Book People after I read a story in the New York Times. It was in the travel section, where I can go anywhere in the world for free, and appeared on February 4th, the day after my birthday, and was titled "In Search of Flannery O`Connor" by Lawrence Downes. He took a trip to Andalusia, which is the farmhouse where Flannery grew up; that`s Milledgeville, between Atlanta and Savannah, Georgia, a fairyland for we Texans. Yea, rather deep in the heart of Dixie! There were photos of the dary farmhouse and a snap of her old typewriter; one could deflect a thimble of inspiration from seeing her bedroom where she wrote religiously for three hours everyday. I was drawn to her because I was curious what is meant by "the Southern writer"? What does that really mean? I picked up "The Sound And The Fury" by William Faulkner a couple of weeks ago, and I am about half way through it. This Norton Critical Edition has some essays that discuss the "Southern Thing", but this novel was published in 1929, just as The Depression was beginning. Flannery O`Connor`s stories were published more from the mid-fifties to the early sixties. She died from Lupus in 1964, and thus she must have experienced the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. She deals with the issue of race, but mainly through the bigotted veneer of her raspy, rascally heroes and villains.

I`ve only read maybe five short stories so far, but am just blown away; the impression I get is like Bonny and Clyde, bullets and romance, the lonely, or the lost and forgotten ("The Grapes of Wrath" is recalled) . I think I will go back to Book People today and see if I can grab "The Violent Bear It Away" or "Wise Blood", her only two novels. I heard that many of her letters may soon be published too, and this will reveal more about her peculiar demeanor, her take on the South, and the tense religious chasm that bubbled under her feet like Dante`s Inferno. This is a general page from which you can read more `bout the belle Flannery and her peacocks, cornpone or jangling trolleys! I just read "The Artificial Nigger" last night and really came away with unusual feelings in my gut. I had grown up in Houston in the early sixties and was use to the two-tiered society and the symbolic division between the have and have nots, between the suburbs and alternative society across the railroad tracks. What I take away is that when Mr Head and Nelson see the little black yard effigy in an upper-crust anglo neighborhood, they were relieved that those people had been put back in their place(they saw the effigy as this type of symbol). When they visited a real black town of Atlanta, and talked to the sultry, sassy mamma, they were frightened out of their wits! Oddly, the epiphany experienced by Mr. Head is more the conviction that the social stratas remain firmly in place. This is a twisted irony as such, and his struggle with God for his sins of denial, when Nelson was in need of service, do not retain a strain of sincerity. Rather, his bigoted world remains in tact! Indeed, very unusual-but maybe that`s the way it really went down with many of these rapscallions. Also, the language is a literary gold mine, and many of the lines require innumerable re-readings, where the meanings shift as shades of light on a Monet haystack. The treetops, fencing the junction like the protecting walls of a garden, were darker than the sky which was hung with gigantic white clouds illuminated like lanterns.

I really wonder how Flannery could of thought up all these stories, unless she just had an incredible,...a vivid or even wild imagination. She most certainly did have one. I read that Sherman`s March went right through that area of Georgia. I had just seen a good special on Sherman on The History Channel about a month ago, and I knew that the resentments felt by Southerners were yet still smoldering, if not flaming. I`m inclined to believe that some of that is baked into Flannery`s cake mix, her literary daffodils. When I was reading "A Good Man Is Hard To Find" I kept thinking of Key Largo and Humphrey Bogart as the crook holding those good people captive. Yea, he seemed like the Misfit, very ornery and up to no good-hey, down right pure evil! When I was young, in the early sixties, we drove through the deep south, and I saw cotton fields, wooden shacks with poor children playing, run-down gas stations with rinky dink coca-cola machines, home-cookin` diners, town folk scurrying to the bus stop....some of this must have been part of Flannery`s world? "The River" has a bad ending and "The Life You Save May Be Your Own" is about a flim-flam man, a confidence artist who takes an old woman and her over-ripe daughter for a ride, but you still sympathize with him when he abandons the daughter...uncooth but whew, he got away! I kept thinkin` of Jack Nicholson in "Five Easy Pieces" bailin` and leavin` Karen Black at the truck stop. I just found out that Wise Blood had been made into a movie (1979) with Brad Dourif, Ned Beatty, and Harry Dean Stanton-gonna snatch it up quicker than a flapjack on a Kettle griddle! I`m gonna read more of her works and skirt some of the issues about her Southern-ness. An undulating (developing) theory I have, is that the closer the writer is to the Civil War, or maybe to the Antebellum Period, the more unique they are...the more Southern by nature. Thus, since Faulkner wrote much in the twenties, he is more Southern than Flannery O`Connor! No doubt, this theory may have to jump many treacherous, fiery hoops... but hopefully the circus tent won`t burn down?? Last night a funny moniker came to mind, and it has been stickin` so far-Little Miss Southern Discomfort! She is a fireball, an enigma where Catholicism and Protestantism are wrestling furiously, with her surprise endings and characters who long for redemption but are tethered by their own gremlins!