Category: Art

Rest and recreation

I got home yesterday 7:30 ish and upon considering all of the options I read Michael Caine’s autobiography instead.  I haven’t finished it, but it sure is entertaining.

I visited the folks at Pondside – briefly – and dropped off a small token of my birthday esteem to Juliana and admired the koi pond under the brilliant sunshine.  That house has everything a house should have, in my opinion, with the possible exception of a treed lot.  Then I think about raking leaves and figure it is all good….   It’s definitely a big house.  With a LOT of musical instruments.  Various filkers were there including Dr. Filk and Lady Miss Banjola, whose visible cast is a beautiful colour… I never had a cast when I was a kid, but it would have been white.   I mean, I couldn’t even manage to break my arm properly.

I had a loverly weekend and look forward to a productive week at work.

Jarmusch festival

Coffee & Cigarettes & Donnie Darko & Night on Earth. 

After Ghost Dog we figured Time for a Jim Jarmusch Festival.  Woo Hoo! 

Donnie Darko SCARED ME.  Worse than a zombie flick.  Every time that ****ing rabbit showed up, I’d be cowering on one end of the sofa looking through my fingers.  What the heck is wrong with me that a really bad rabbit costume and cheesy f/x could freak me out?  Am I channeling Anya?  What’s happening to me??  Afterwards, Jeff said, “Well, did Jacob’s Ladder scare you?” and I said HELL YA.  “Oh.”

Has anybody noticed that Drew Barrymore doesn’t look like she belongs to this century, or the previous one?  She’s beautiful, and she can act, but she doesn’t really belong in these parts.

Coffee and Cigarettes was interesting and uneven, just like the reviewers said. I enjoyed the ongoing Ghost Dog references.  There were particular segments I enjoyed, including Iggy Pop trying to be ingratiating with Tom Waits.  Parts of it were a very aesthetically arranged and choreographed kick in the goolies to the whole contemporary notion of celebrity.  To slide between “I am your fan”  “You are my fan” “I think you are trying to sponge off me” “No, you’re trying to sponge off me!”  “Do you like me as a person?” “Do you like me as an artist?” “Why isn’t your stuff on the jukebox if this is your favorite hangout?” “Well your stuff isn’t on the playlist either!” “Look, somebody recognized me and didn’t recognize you!” “Look, I’m talking to somebody you want to talk to!”… without losing the humanity of folks involved – that was artistic, and troubling too.  I watched as friendships would blossom and die in the production and interpretation of a single word.

I think ego to art is like the sun to the earth.  The right amount makes a flowering; too little makes ice; or rotten mould; too much a desert.

Night on Earth, while having the same sort of episodic structure as Coffee and Cigarettes, was a lot more satisfying movie.  The drunken Finns at the end are classic. Roberto Benigni talking a prelate to death is pretty funny too; his character’s description of a sheep he was once in love made me gasp with laughter.

This morning mOm came over and she and Jeff pulled weeds; I wandered around Jeff’s garden taking pictures, including what looks to be an entertaining one of Eddie sticking his head out through a hole in the side screen.  Getting pictures of Gizmo is harder; he never bloody well sits still long enough.

So to breakfast, and then to lunch at the parents’, then a flying visit to Esquimalt, then home.

Sweet Bachelor days.

Ah, yesss…

So, last night my boss, may he be praised and venerated, gave me a lift to Scott Road Station, which was the only thing which allowed me to arrive in Victoria at a decent time.  Then I immediately cracked open beer and watched 28 Days. I had heard a great deal about this movie from one of my beloved coworkers, a guy who only gets animated when he’s talking about what happened to him before he turned 18 and movies.  Anyway, I really liked the movie, except the parts where I had to put my head into my own armpit, and Cillian Murphy is one neotenous looking dude.  If you want a scary, unstoppable image stuck into your skullfat… picture him and Bjork having babies.  Zar.

There are so many brilliant moments in 28 Days that it’s hard to line them all out. I know I won’t buy it, but I will definitely watch it again.  Script, cinematography, casting, MUSIC, editing, all great. Plot holes like a screen door in a submarine (just like Patricia told me when it was first released), but o well.  You don’t want zombie movies to be too realistic, that’s part of their charm.  They are fairy tales for adults where, even though things turn out badly, you’re still alive at the end.

And so to bed, where I holed up with Sarah Dunant’s In The Company of the Courtesan that’s bopping around the best-seller lists lately. As a Dunnetteer, I have to read this stuff.  Well, it’s set in Venice in 1527 – 1528, during and after the sack of Rome by the combined German/Spanish forces. 

The Romans, like the feckless duckwits that they were at the time, all riddled with corruption and internal factions and lacking army, intelligent leadership and anything like planning, shot the leader of the incoming army dead in the first moments of the battle. You know how leaderless armies who haven’t been paid in weeks react when they have an undefended, unimaginably wealthy city in prospect, and when half the incoming army is motivated by intense hatred of the tenants’ religion – Papism….  Yeah, it was not pretty, and a lot of folks got put to the sword.  First thing that happens to Our Heroine – an intelligent and energetic young woman – is having her hair cut off with violence by the army’s Calvinist campfollowers.  Way to spend a Sunday.  The story is recounted by her dwarven servant and in the voice of the omniscient author, alternating.  (I’m sorry, it’s just that I don’t get to say dwarven servant in public very often).

Woke up and lay in bed and read some more until 9:30ish, when I stirred my stumps and by our unspoken agreement cooked a somewhat low key repast.  The coffee was amazing.  I had three cups.

Then we went through the PILE, and there’s always a bloody pile around here, of Films in Prospect.  I picked Ghost Dog out because it was a Jarmusch film – I find him consistently interesting and watchable – and settled in with the movie from the first frame.  Forest Whitaker was mesmerizing.  Once again, script, music, casting, all uniformly excellent, and I closely followed the excerpts from the Way of the Samurai, which I now wish to read.  This is a buy and hold, in my opinion.

Then to phone my mother and tell her, “I’m having TOO MUCH FUN.  See you whenever.”  You can do this when you are 48.    Then a shower, and a walk perhaps, and then a renewed attack on the dreaded pile of celluloid. 

There are explosions coming from the living room.  What is that man blowing up now?  (later)  No harm done, he’s just flying an ME 2somethingerother in the leaden skies over a European city.  And blowing pixels up.

Impressionist and post Impressionist art

So Katie K and I went to the Vancouver Art Gallery (odd to go there when there’s no zombies, protesting or dope smoking) and saw the current exhibit which I highly recommend. I almost started crying in front of a Van Gogh – it was SO EMOTIONAL and the difference between the painting and any reproductions is very startling.  I spent a LONG time in front of Tissot’s Specimen of a Portrait and ended up buying a print of it in the gift shop.  The lace on the dress is unreal.  Picasso’s “Life” is worth seeing in life.  There were some Rodin sculptures that just had me shaking my head.  After all this time, his Balzac is still an amazing bloody feat.
Then to Granville for sashimi and Asahi beer and Katie K had plum wine.  Then we poked our heads in to a couple of clothing stores, including Bedo, but there’s no goddamned way I’m spending 40 bucks on something so poorly made!!!  It was a cute top but the seams were a disaster.  I bought a couple of nose thingies for daughter Katie from a street vendor.
Lots of ear flapping.  Katie K is going off to see her mum sometime next week… who is rapidly recovering from a stroke, out in the wilds of Maine.

I did my back exercises this morning but I hurt worse now than I did then. That probably has more to do with standing and gawking at pictures than the exercises.