Category Archives: art

Casino Royale

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Although it seems a bit oxymoronic to speak of James Bond and intelligence in the same sentence, Casino Royale is James Bond with a lobotomy. I seem to remember the James Bond of forty years ago, as played by Sean Connery, as not only intelligent but also suave and elegant. Our twenty-first century Bond is, er… well muscled. So one has to wonder: Does the stupidity lie with the script writers, directors, producers — or with the audience of today that they’re producing for? Have we really gotten this dumb?

INLAND EMPIRE

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Dan and I just got back from seeing INLAND EMPIRE, a three-hour stream-of-consciousness dark David Lynch movie extravaganza which — oddity of oddities — just might possibly perhaps (if you look at it a certain way) have a Happy Ending. In a nightmarish David Lynch sort of way. This is not a spoiler. Some of the best, or, well, the paid critics see it differently. Your mileage may vary.

The way I see it is colored by the fact that I’m currently clinging mercilessly to the characters and plot and world of a novel that I’ve just completed and am still polishing. So I’m sensitive to how easily one’s characters take on a life of their own; how much the author/creator has vested in them; how deeply one loves them; and how strong a draw they have on the author’s life energy when one should be doing other things.

So I think I understand just what the inland empire of INLAND EMPIRE is. Laura Dern plays at least two nested characters (an actress and the character in the movie she’s playing) and possibly as many as four. And it’s just possible (I’ll try to do this without spoilers, which, in any case, might be wrong) that an even higher level of creation envelopes the whole enterprise. Maybe two.

The Week of Memorable Dreams

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This must be the Week of Memorable Dreams.

First Adam had a mystical Jewish spiritual mysterious revelational knockout and then I woke up with half a poem (alas, the last half) all finished in my mind. Here is an approximation of the poem. I had to reconstruct the first half, and it’s not as good as the ending, but I think it does okay in setting the ending up the right way.

The sun, the stars, the planets call, and still all of them fly.
While trees’ leaves drop to earth in fall, their branches reach toward sky.
To all things God allows no rest, and so do thou and I.
I see the love that moves thy breast, the darkness in thine eye.

Adam’s museum

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Today, Dan and I went to see the movie “My Architect,” which is about the architect Louis Kahn. The film was made by his (illigitimate) son Nathaniel, who knew his father very little during his life, and twenty-five years after LK died, was trying to understand just who he really was. Despite some quibbles I have with it, the film is overall excellent and very moving. I recommend it.

But that’s not why I’m writing this journal entry.

As part of this project, Nathaniel visited every building that Kahn created. This includes the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. I’ve been to the Kimbell twice. When the movie first showed sweeping shots of the museum’s beautifully lit, timelessly elegant interior, it all came flooding back to me.

The Kimbell is a gem of a museum, not only because of its architecture and light, but also because it has a small but completely first-rate collection. To quote its Web site: “The Kimbell Art Museum’s holdings range in period from antiquity to the 20th century, including masterpieces by Duccio, Fra Angelico, Mantegna, Caravaggio, El Greco, La Tour, Rubens, Velázquez, Rembrandt, Houdon, Goya, David, Monet, Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Mondrian.” One or two of just about everything that any museum would give its eyeteeth to have. All displayed in perfect light, in uncrowded harmony.

The first time I visited the Kimbell, Adam was just two years old. Dan had gone off to live in Texas for several months to help in the start-up of his firm‘s then-new Dallas office, returning home only on (most) weekends. But this particular week, I had a conference to go to in Dallas myself, so I took Adam and went to live with Dan at his apartment on Turtle Creek. On this particular day we didn’t have to work, so we went to the museum.

I remember carrying two-year-old Adam through the galleries, and stopping to look at the pictures and sculptures. At each one, Adam wanted me to tell him its story. Not who painted it and when, but who is that woman in the picture, and where is she, and why is she there, and why is that man looking at her in that funny way, and what’s going to happen, and…

And so we stopped at various pictures and sculptures, and at each one I invented a story for Adam that would be as long as it needed to be so that I could really look at the object and that would incorporate elements that might draw his attention too to some of the significant aspects of the object. And so we spent a pleasant afternoon at our own pace, my two-year-old son and I, going through the Kimbell Art Museum.

Today, twenty-one-year-old Adam is working on a capstone project at Brown University. It is a hypertext Web site in which a group of people meet and go through a museum. They stop and look at various objects. The reader can click on the highlighted objects if he wishes, and can then read a story associated with the object.

Now I have to ask you: Do you think this could possibly be a coincidence?