COLLAGE CHARACTERS

The legs (above) are facing the wrong direction but what the heck.

Above, the neighborhood chick magnet. He's never without a girl in his arms.

Haw!

Oops! The legs are facing the wrong direction again!

WHAT I'M READING NOW: JANUARY 2015

Some good books here! I'm reading a biography of film director, Geoge Cukor (that's him, above). It's a library book but I'm considering buying a copy of my own just so I can underline it...it's that good! The book is just brimming with practical information about how he did what he did.

With a couple of well-known exceptions Cukor got along remarkably well with his producers and writers. That's because he was only too happy to take their advice, and why not? Those guys were interested in plots, Cukor was interested in performances. He believed it was his job to maximize a good actor's charisma, to see that it got into every frame of every shot.

According to the book he was gay, but he turned that to his advantage. Being secretly that way prompted him to perceive his screen characters as outsiders like himself. He got good at making us sympathize with their attempts to fit in. If the script wasn't written that way he'd subtly add it in the handling. An interesting technique, eh?

Another book I've started is Ann Radcliffe's 1790 Gothic novel, "The Mistress of Udolpho" (above). It's full of castles and sepulchres, trap doors, sealed rooms and underground passages lit by torches. What do you think of this sample.....

"From Beaujeu the road had constantly ascended, conducting the travelers into the higher regions of the air, where immense glaciers exhibited their frozen horrors. Around on every side far as the eye could penetrate, were seen only forms of grandeur...the long perspective of mountaintops, tinged with ethereal blue, or white with snow, valleys of ice and forests of gloomy fir."

And this:

"...the waxen figure of a woman, made by her lover who had found her dead and buried upon his return...a lizard is sucking her mouth, a worm is creeping out of one of her cheeks, a mouse is gnawing one of her ears, and a huge swollen toad on her forehead is preying on one of her eyes." 

You don't have to buy it; the book is free on Project Gutenberg. I warn you though, the prose can be frustratingly dense and old-fashioned. It's strange to think that this book with all it's novelties and ghosts was popular in George Washington's time. The British soldiers who fought at Yorktown might have read similar books in their tents at night. Come to think of it, maybe the Americans did too.

The last thing I have to recommend is a Jon Favreau film called "Chef." It's about a chef who tires of working for other people and sets off on his own. It's a wonderful tribute to every small businessman who's ever rolled up his sleeves and taken the plunge.

The film is rated "R," which is too bad because it glorifies hard work. That's something every kid needs to see.

WILLIAM MORTENSEN: PHOTOGRAPHER [EXPANDED]

A cartload of thanks to Mike for turning me on to this photographer! I'd used the photo above in a previous post but I had no idea who did it. I thought some anonymous glamour photographer just got lucky. Boy, was I wrong! I should have known that only a fine artist could have made a picture like that.

Here's (above) another of Mortensen's portraits, this time of writer and mystic Manly Hall.

Above, a bust of Manly by an unknown artist. Haw! A room with that picture and that bust must have made quite an impression.

You'd expect Mortensen to have been the subject of universal acclaim but that wasn't the case. Read this excerpt from his Wikipedia entry: 

Geez, even Ansel Adams disliked him. Apparently modernists saw his return to Romantic, touched up, Steiglitz-type photography as retrograde. Even Steiglitz failed to support him.

Mortensen worked for the Hollywood studios but his real passion was for occult subjects (above).

He must have had a hard time keeping his professional and private life separate. Here's (above) a portrait for hire that must have shocked the people who commissioned it. At first glance it's a conventional portrait but stare at it for a moment and you get the creepy feeling that the picture is staring back at you. It's as if you're being watched by someone in Hell.

Mortensen was certainly flaky. He's the kind of guy who, if he were alive today, would be obsessed with Atlantis and crystals and hippie theories about levitating babies. Even so, he was capable of remarkable depth.

Mortensen's black and white portrait of the young girl reminds me of Delacroix's even more drastic "Orphan Girl" (above). Delacroix's girl is simultaneously ignorant and dignified. It seems to make a theological point, that even the most debased humans have a divine spark. Looking at this picture you can imagine the repugnance Milton's Satan felt when looking at humans. You can imagine him saying, "What kind of obscene joke is this, to give the gift of nobility and free will to creatures so horribly stupid?"

Mortensen took the old, unresolved issues of philosophy seriously and by doing so threatened to derail the whole project of modernism. I guess that's why he aroused such fury in other artists. They saw the 20th Century as sunlight streaming into a room previously dominated by mildew and shadows.

Okay, that's enough of this!

IS JAZZ DEAD?

Above, that's a caricature of Al "Jazzbo" Collins the famous New York jazz DJ from the 50s. Below is an excerpt from a fairly recent Washington Post article which declares that jazz is dead. The upbeat tone of the pictures contradicts the negative tone of the article but I think I'll run them together and see what happens.

I love jazz myself. I don't see why it should be singled out for criticism when every other art form, even the best ones, have suffered the same decline over time. Even so, a site that calls itself "Theory Corner" shouldn't avoid controversy. Here's an abridgement of the article by Justin Moyer called "All That Jazz Isn't All That Great." See what you think.

Well, it goes on. Here's a link to the entire article, which is almost double the length of what you see here.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/opinions/wp/2014/08/08/all-that-jazz-isnt-all-that-great/

BTW, I stumbled on this jazz article from a mention on Mike Barrier's site. I went there to see if his new book is out. Apparently it's been out for a couple of weeks now, and it's on Kindle, too.

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/

WHAT I SAW IN THE 1950S

I had a wonderful Christmas but there was a lot to digest and it may be a few days or weeks before I can post about it. In the meantime here's something I reminisced to my kids about when they were here. It's an account of things I witnessed when I was a little kid in the 50s.

I was just a dimwitted kid in those days but even I could sense that it was a good time to be alive.

WWII vets must have dreamed of having their own house while they were freezing in foxholes, and in the 50s that dream became a reality for millions.

People were proud of their new lives and they liked to have their pictures taken with  symbols of prosperity. Here's (above) one symbol: formal clothes for kids, the kind that make little boys look like ventroloquist dummies. When I was forced to wear them I'd pray that other kids wouldn't see me. 

  Believe it or not, parents initially wanted their kids to watch TV. They thought it was educational. Haw! That didn't last long!

It must have been a great time to be a Dad.

It was the era of The Bombshell, the cinematic vamp who could turn men into drooling idiots.

The most worldly suburban women imitated the bombshells, I'm guessing by stuffing socks into their bras. It was only years later that I discovered that breasts don't naturally point straight up when women recline. 

Anyway, I didn't pay much attention to bombshell movies. I preferred the fare at the local kiddie matinee. This Theory Corner blog owes a lot to what I learned while watching sci fi in the dark.

It's worth mentioning that suburbia wasn't just for the middle class. Newspapers were always running articles about how it would soon be a feasible choice for anyone who could swing a loan for a few thousand bucks. Pre-fab was supposed to make it possible. Later on pre-fab fell into disrepute...I don't know why.

Once you had a house, the next step was to save up for a tail fin car. Check out this (above) Plymouth Belvedere convertible, just the thing to drive to...  

....the local Twist party! How do you like this room (above)? It looks like something out of Wally Wood. It only lacks driftwood sculpture and a mobile!

Actually few people in the 50s had a whole house full of furnishings that were up to date. My house was full of Art Deco with only a few 50s pieces. By the time we completely updated to 50s "moderne" it was the 60s and it was considered passe. 

Yes, the 50s suburbs were pretty darn good but that didn't stop dreamers from imagining something even better.

That something better was flying cars which every kid from that era desperately wanted. I think we're all traumatized because we didn't get them. 

  

So what happened to all this? Well, it's still with us in many ways, but people are a bit different now. 

Now we all like to think of ourselves as rebels.

BTW: Thanks to Steve for the great photo of Diana Dors.

THE ART OF CONVERSATION

Hi everybody! 'Hope you had a good Christmas! Me, it's a holiday morning and I just got out of bed after lying there for an hour daydreaming. Usually I forget thoughts like that but today I had a pen and paper handy and I managed to write down some of them. See what you think.

Okay, lying under the covers I found myself wondering if there ever was such a thing as conversation.  I don't mean that conversational skills are lacking today, I'm questioning whether they ever existed at all, in any period of history. We all assume they did because they're embedded in things like novels, but did they? What if novelists made it up?

Storytellers are always doing that. Torrid love scenes, super villains in mountain fortresses, Gothic mansions with insane caretakers...they make up all sorts of things to keep you turning the pages. Maybe they make up the idea of conversation, too. After all, they have to have something to put between the action scenes.

In real life dialogue never ends the way it begins. It meanders all over the place. A conversation that begins with "Hmmmm...I wonder if drug abuse is an unintended consequence of Prohibition?" immediately takes a right angle turn with a reply like "Drugs? I have a nephew who takes drugs" which provokes the reply, "My dog used to eat aspirin" which provokes, "I don't like dogs. They bark too much." which provokes "Well, cats are no better." Real world dialogue constantly digresses like that and nothing is ever resolved. I figure there's half a chance that it was always that way.

I know what you're thinking, that smart people don't talk like that. Actually they do. A professor might say to another professor: "I can't forgive Plato for wanting to censor art" then his friend says "He didn't want to censor art. You'd know that if you read the whole book instead of the first half." then the first guy says, "Look who's talking, you never finish a book." then the other says, "And you never bus your own dishes in the cafeteria."

Maybe that's why bookish people are so mad all the time. They crave novel-type conversation which is something that's rare in the real world.

'Just a thought. I'm going back to sleep now to resume what I was dreaming about before.