Beasley’s Christmas Party by Booth Tarkington My rating: 4 of 5 stars I got interested in Booth Tarkington via the credit from Orson Welles at the end of his adaptation of The Magnificent Ambersons. I assume that’s about the only way anyone becomes interested in Tarkington, except for academics seeking thoroughly eclipsed literary figures to investigate. Even in its studio-truncated form, Welles’ Ambersons was, well, magnificent, and I wanted to understand the literary source of this masterpiece. It was visually stunning and as literary a film as I’d ever seen. That’s not always a comfortable combination, but it was Welles’
Continue readingReview: John Martin
John Martin by Martin Myrone My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was awed by the ultra-detailed epic paintings by John Martin I had seen at the Tate and the Smithsonian. The ridiculous level of detail and the apocalyptic imagery oscillate between brilliance and kitsch. This book, tied to an exhibition I’d dearly love to see, tries to explain why. It turns out there was more to Martin than meets the eye. Click here to see images of Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still Upon Gibeon. View all my reviews
Continue readingReview: Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography
Believing is Seeing: Observations on the Mysteries of Photography by Errol Morris My rating: 5 of 5 stars Errol Morris brings the same brilliant curiosity to this book about the nature of photographs as he does to his films. To appreciate this book you need to care deeply about photography, but if you do you likely will. View all my reviews
Continue readingNew Topographics
New Topographics by Britt Salvesen My rating: 5 of 5 stars This catalog from a reprise of a 1975 photography exhibit at Eastman House includes some of my long-standing favorite photographers, Stephen Shore and the Bechers, plus some others that are growing on me. The show was not well-received when first mounted but proved to be extremely influential in the rise of deadpan landscape photography. View all my reviews
Continue readingPreoccupied
From my fat and lazy perspective I don’t have much standing to grouse about the tactics of the Occupy movement. Whether they’ve clearly articulated their goals, or whether I would agree with them all if they did, or whether I find the drumming annoying, at least these people are trying to do something active about the state of the nation. All I do is get depressed. Still, even if I envy the movement’s pluck, I don’t love the creation of spectacles aimed at media consumption. For decades this has been the Left’s tactic of choice. The realists have believed it’s
Continue readingMy Life With Apple
The first computer I ever seriously used was an Apple II plus. It was also the first computer (other than the typesetters) acquired by the little weekly newspaper where I worked in Santa Barbara, CA. We agonized a bit between the Apple and the first-generation IBM PC. But a comparably equipped Apple was a bit cheaper and, for an alternative newspaper, more culturally appropriate than an IBM device. Plus, we could get VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet program, which was available only on the Apple. I spent ungodly amounts of time with that computer, first setting up some basic financial reports
Continue readingWoody Allen’s Lifestyles of the Rich
Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad
Continue readingGreat Gyros Signs
Here are some more masterpieces of prosaic art from around the world.
Continue readingFast Art: The Pointlessness of so Much
Art Chicago is an orgy of fast art. Scores of galleries haul out scads of work so visitors can plow up and down endless aisles burdened with art regressing toward the mean. The work, mostly by living artists, is mostly a blur. Occasionally something lends a booth enough gravity to slow you down, more often than not modernist paintings that you’ll never see in a museum since they’re privately owned (and not necessarily museum-quality pieces even if they’re museum-quality artists). This year the highlights for me were Chicago Imagist pieces of relatively recent vintage – works by Karl Wirsum, Gladys
Continue readingFabulous Roadside Vistas
A sampling of wonderful vistas that line — or in some cases used to line — the roadside coast to coast.
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