Category Archives: art

The weirdest museum I’ve ever seen

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The MONA (Museum of Old and New Art) museum in Hobart, Australia may not be the weirdest museum in all the world, but it has to be in the running. Created by billionnaire David Walsh, a math genius who made his money playing the odds, this museum has to be a much better contribution to the world than spending his billions on, well, many of the other things that other billionnaires spend their money on. And let me say right off, Huzzah Mr. Walsh!

How to describe it? First, it’s built into a cliff underneath some existing buildings, cut into the solid rock. If you’re interested in architecture, this interview is worth reading. Also, you have to take a ferry to get there, and you know it’s going to be strange the moment you walk inside.

And it gets stranger after that. Yes, there’s artwork, old and new and new-mimicking-old. There are entire installations. There’s music to experience it all by. There are jazz musicians creating new music real-time on the spot. There are artists creating paintings real-time on the spot. There’s a restaurant and a winery, too. And it’s still being built.

I’m really a little at a loss for words. Fortunately, I have pictures. So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, here goes.

I see I’ve added a number of photos of pictures on walls. This is an impression that is seriously misleading, and I must correct it. This museum is not about pictures on walls. I mean, it *is* about pictures on walls, but it’s also so much more.

White books, white pages
Room of crystals
Soft car

Is it worth a visit if you happen to be, say, anywhere in Tasmania? Yes, absolutely. But is it worth a journey? Let’s just say that Tasmania is worth the journey, and so, yes, please don’t miss this unique museum!

The dragon within

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Most people are familiar with the image of St. George and the dragon. Here’s one, for example, in Budapest:

St. George & dragon in Budapest

Pretty classic, right? Guy on a big horse slays a wicked-looking reptile with a long spear from a pretty safe distance. (Well, not so much for the horse, of course, but they have to put the man and the beast into the same statue, right? So there are space constraints. 

There’s a classic St. George on the facade of Casa Amatller in Barcelona, too. (Casa Amatller, designed by the architect Josep Puig i Cadafalch in about 1900, is right next door to Gaudi’s somewhat more famous Casa Batllo.)

Despite the lack of a horse, it’s pretty easily recognizable. The guy’s on the top, and he has armor and a shield. And (if you look closely) the obligatory spear, with which he has skewered the beast through the head and the heart.

When it comes to St. George and the dragon, let us be clear, there is not much of a contest. The beast is ferocious, but we are given the surety that the brave-hearted (and well armored) man wins.

But the artist is playing with us, as it turns out. There are not just one but three St. Georges with their dragons on the facade of Casa Amatller. 

This second St. George appears to be a parody. It shows a rather extreme version of the man-over-beast story. The man is a performer with a tambourine not a spear, and the beast has turned into a dancing bear. No harm to anyone here. Not a chance of nightmares. But look at what has become of the man. He makes a living with this defeated creature, but that’s all. If the beast isn’t much of a dragon, neither is the person much of a man.

The third St. George speaks to me deeply. Here, the man wears only a thin cloak, and he is wrestling with a beast that is his own size, maybe bigger. It’s not clear who will win. Look closely. If the man is strangling the dragon, the dragon also has his claws into the man, raking his arm. Leaving wounds that could be slow to heal. 

This one, at least, is an even contest. 

This one feels real to me, for we all struggle with our beasts. We all struggle to be more than beasts ourselves. Every psychologist will recognize this conflict. Every artist will see in it the creative process. Even Plato described the act of creation as “reason persuading necessity.”

For a long time, I placed this image of the creative struggle on the top of my home page, but it’s dark, and it’s difficult. It may capture you, and it may draw you in, but not in a way that will invite you and make you feel at home.

Please do come in. Please do feel at home in these pages. There is much of beauty and of joy here. But let’s just remember that it’s not a dancing bear lurking there in the dark corners–it’s a dragon.

Chihuly

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I’ve been meaning to share some photos of the Chihuly exhibit in Boston for the last couple of months, but the Southeast Asia photographs preempted everything for a while. But these are just too beautiful to keep under wraps any longer. I don’t have any commentary. The glass is everything.

           

A Serious Man

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Dan and I just finished watching the Coen brothers’ movie, A Serious Man. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that this is a story in which pretty much just when things can’t possibly get any worse–they do. And weirdly, it gets pretty funny.

So, we were sitting there stunned as the credits rolled by, and there was this job title: “The last of the just”. Right in there with best boys and gaffers and stuntmen and drivers and all the rest of them. The last of the just. I am not making this up.

What I can’t figure out is whether this is a job title I’d like to have, or whether this is a job title no one should wish on the entire world, that there should be one final just person.

In all this grimness, you will perhaps be pleased to know that the credits also declare that “No Jews were harmed in the making of this movie.”

Mt. Auburn Cemetery

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I took my mother to Mt. Auburn Cemetery last week at her request to see the graves of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Isabella Stewart Gardner. She had a map from the Boston Globe that was–I guess I shouldn’t say that it was criminally inaccurate. Let me say rather that it wasn’t sufficient to actually find these graves. With a 91-year-old woman in tow on a hot summer’s day, the map was particularly insufficient.

The cemetery, however, was astonishingly beautiful. And interesting. I confess here that I’m not particularly interested in seeing the final resting places of notables of New England’s last century (or two). In many cases, the people we’d never heard of were more interesting (based on their memorials) than those we had. But the trees were more noteworthy than those of most arboretums. And the gravestone art–we could have wandered looking at interesting tombstones all day, if we’d had all day to do it in.

Which we didn’t.

Today we returned with a better map.

I became fascinated by those stones that showed a draped object. Mostly vases, but it began to seem that almost anything might be portrayed as draped and carved in stone. I didn’t have my camera with me that first day, but today I captured a few. Here are a small number of vases (the most popular), a sheaf of wheat, and a broken column.

And yes, we found Isabella Stewart Gardner (in a family crypt) and threw in Winslow Homer for good measure (tombstone not as art-noteworthy as his paintings, but then he wasn’t the one who designed or selected the tombstone).

I could make a coffee-table book of the trees, if no one has done that yet. Oh, the breathtaking trees! For now, I’ll show only an unexpected Dawn Redwood.

Feeding the movie queue monster

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Dan and I are having trouble keeping our Netflix queue full. We just don’t hear of good movies to add to the queue as quickly as we watch the movies that are already in it. Most of the methods we’ve tried to find more movies we might like haven’t succeeded very well:

  • Adding movies that look good in the trailers that come with other movies. This system works well for weeding out movies we *don’t* want to see, but there are some real duds out there whose only good moments are those incorporated into the trailer. Great trailer, lousy movie. Who was to know?
  • Adding movies to the queue based on recommendations from friends. You’d think this would work really well, but we were surprised. Some of our extraordinary, smart, and delightful friends recommend the most ordinary and dull movies. In particular, we’ve learned never to trust the “hot” movies that everyone is seeing and talking about right now. By the time they make it to DVD they are no longer “hot” and often of little inherent worth.
  • Using the Netflix recommendations (“Movies You’ll ‘Heart’”). The results of this, as nearly as I can tell, are totally random and useless.
  • Adding movies directed by the same person as other movies we like. This isn’t a bad system if the director is consistently good. For example, Ridley Scott was, for the most part, a great success for us. However, any director’s oeuvre is limited, but our Netflix queue never ends.

But finally we have hit upon a system that works.

We ask my mother.

She is unerringly on the mark.

It’s gotten kind of scary. Dan always puts my mother’s recommendations at the top of the queue. And we always really like them. I think my mother is nervous now about recommending additional movies to us. The stakes keep getting higher.

Her most recent success was Vantage Point, a movie that tells the story of an attempted terrorist coup from a number of different but unexpectedly related perspectives, each layer adding depth and complexity to the story. It’s also a nonstop action movie that would do the TV series 24—the only ongoing TV show that I like—proud.

The movie that this reminds me of the most is Crash, which portrays the multifaceted interactions in the lives of a number of complete strangers in Los Angeles, some of whom meet by automobile crash or hijacking and some of whom never meet. We actually saw Crash twice, and enjoyed it both times. Frighteningly, this was another of my mother’s recommendations. Tonight I discovered that there is a name for this type of movie, and there are members of the genre Dan and I haven’t yet seen. Food for the queue monster.

Other movies that share this quality are Memento, Run Lola Run, and Babel. We liked all of these, too. I wish there were a Web site where you could enter the names of some particular movies, and it would tell you others that are in some way similar.

But meanwhile, Mom, you’ve scored again. Please keep those recommendations coming.

And, dear reader, I’m open to *your* recommendations, too!

Watchmen

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“Who’s watching the Watchmen?” Dan and I are… finally… that’s who. What’s odd about this is that Dan is watching. Avidly.

Dan is not a fan of speculative fiction. He’s never picked up anything that might be called a “graphic novel”. He has little tolerance for the fantastical. Science fiction leaves him cold.

But he likes good design and he likes action. And Watchmen has these in abundance. Despite its bleak mood and noir atmosphere, it is an “up” movie. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether we are watching the plot, the effects, or the sheer beauty of the film.

Dan won’t say he likes this movie. In fact, he doesn’t have much to say about it at all. But he was on the edge of his seat. I was the one watching the watching man. He was glued to the screen for two and three quarters hours, about as long as I have ever seen him sit still.

That movie was good!

Blown Glass

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I have always had a weakness for the beauty of blown glass, but never, until this weekend, have I seen it actually being blown. So everything going on at the Icefire Glassworks in Cannon Beach, Oregon was new to me: how many layers of glass and color; how many times the work in process goes in and out of the fire; how many different fires are used; how many different ways the color can be applied; how many times the glass is blown and blown again before it is finished.

How like a dance the process is! The molten glass is always in motion, and the creators work together in choreographed teamwork.

The process is elemental; in days of fantasy and yore, glassblowers would have been mages and sorcerers, combining in their secret rhythms the glass and powders and grains of the earth, the air of their breath, the fire of three forges. And—yes—water, essential for shaping the glass and insulating the tools. Steam so hot that it is invisible and does not burn.


Beowolf: Director’s Cut

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Well, you may just happen to be asking yourself, “How bad could a movie be, after all, that combines the classics with great special effects, that was written by Neil Gaiman, and whose cast includes John Malkovich, Anthony Hopkins, and a naked Angelina Jolie? Not to mention a villain that looks like Gollum on some very heavy-duty steroids, a villain even whose saliva is terrifying.” The answer is: Pretty darn bad.

The other thing you may be asking yourself is, “If summer daylight is so gloriously long in Scandinavia, how long are the nights there in the winter?” The answer is: Pretty darn long. At least 114 minutes too long.

So now you know. And you don’t even have to watch the movie to find out.