ESSAY: Desecrations

ghost trees cut and burned in Australia - they were important markers of a songline and sacred to the indigenous peoples of Australia“

...the tree was alive and well; it was just fantastically rare. So rare, in fact, that it warranted its own scientific name: Picea sitchensis 'Aurea.' Picea sitchensis is the Latin name for the Sitka spruce, and Aurea is Latin for "golden" or "gleaming like gold," but it can also mean "beautiful" or "splendid." Sixteen stories tall and more than twenty feet around, the golden spruce was unique in the botanical world.” (from the book).

The rare yellow tree was destroyed by a maddened environmentalist who took its life in a illogical statement about conservation to his fellow passengers on earth. 

ESSAY: Conceptual Art Exhibit at The Brooklyn Museum

FILM: Les Misérables

The title is the description of those viewing it, perhaps.  Was this a good film?  It’s an OK film.  It’s very literal:  extreme close up shots of the actors as the sing during the take, so we see their nostrils and bulging eyeballs. A scene in which the heroes are drenched with sewage, so only the whites of their eyes are visible. I wanted to laugh but it was too sad.

Hugh Jackman does a remarkable job of playing Jean Valjean.  The storyline was so abbreviated it was hard to understand why Javert was so raveningly bent on apprehending this one man. Helpful here to recollect The Reign of Terror and the cruel justice administered by Robespierre, which Javert represented.  He was a slumboy himself, and resented Valjean’s strength and moral enlightenment.  

The issues of mercy vs. justice, of sacrifice and repentance make a serviceable but obscured scaffold to tell the story of the injustices and sufferings of the French underclass as the country struggles to create a society that truly embodies its motto.

I see operas, I am tolerant of bombastic and awkward narratives.  It was helpful to me remind myself that this was popular music, voices not classically trained, nor intended to be so. 

The opera’s ending, with the death of Valjean after all his sacrifices, reminds us that present freedoms are paid for with past blood and treasure given.  I really don’t see why he couldn’t have lived to see his grandchildren.  And Fantine, played by Anne Hathaway, disappears so quickly from the movie. Russell Crowe, at his best a wooden actor, is a wooden soldier here.  His character commits suicide because he cannot accept mercy;  to do so would be to admit his wrongful life of judgment and enforcement. Of course, it’s the death of monarchical systems, too.  

The music and lyrics are all lush and expressive, urgent and fervent songs about feelings.  

I think the book might be worth reading; a more interesting moral exposition.

“...harmonic mush...The director is Tom Hooper, fresh from “The King’s Speech,” and you can’t help wondering if this shift into grandeur has confused his sense of scale. The camera soars on high, the orchestra bellows, and then, whenever somebody feels a song coming on, we are hustled in close, forsaking our bird’s-eye view for that of a consultant rhinologist.”  - Anthony Lane, The  New Yorker

“...We’re all familiar with the experience of seeing movies that cram ideas and themes down our throats. Les Misérables may represent the first movie to do so while also cramming us down the throats of its actors: plodding...four-square rhythms...sonic sludge...tuneless...bombastic...maudlin...gimmicky...Les Misérables is a long, windy, thematically repetitive musical; if you didn’t understand a plot point or get to hear quite enough of a favorite song, just sit tight and it’ll come back soon.” - Dana Stevens, Slate Magazine

“...It’s also gorgeously filmed, almost perfectly acted and one of the most emotionally devastating and gratifying movies I’ve ever seen.”  Joy Tipping, Dallas Morning News

ESSAY: Landscape Art, I Still Love it Best

Rockwell Kent, Whiteface Sunset, no date given

 I still want to paint the beautiful scenes and places I’ve been, the beautiful creatures I’ve seen.  They connect me to the godly spiritual world, the only sensibility I wish to hold.

ART: Astrid Preston, New Work

ESSAY: Dave Hickey Resigns

Tim Bavington, Heart Above Head #1, a painter championed by Hickey

His (Dave Hickey’s) ideas as an art critic are incompatible with the art world's absorption in theory. 

Dave Hickey, the Art Market's self-appointed hygienist, retires after diagnosing himself with accidie.

Dave Hickey an art critic and professor of art theory living in Santa Fe after mostly Las Vegas (because he is a gambler?) announced recently he would write no more art criticism.  My reaction to this was ho-hum:  another one of the boys just picking up their bat and ball and going home, soured and burned out when his critical perspective finally came up short.  You’re 74, so just retire already, without having to use that endless supply of cynicism to grease the exit skids.

Hickey fought his generation’s worthy battle against mediocrity and academicism. You’d think he was the only one out there explaining with great gusts of iconoclasm and Whitman-esque vigor, how unbecoming are the Emperor’s clothes.  Yet he sheltered within academia, playing the rogue outsider in the system.  

I think Hickey’s role was to keep punching the dynamic to prevent entropy.  But the horse he rode in on, the fusion of pop and high culture, really has needed to be shot. And he remained compromised, because he really was an elitist, trapped by a sort of ornery appreciative nature.

 For the most part, widening art to include pop and vernacular art was simply a strategy to attract viewers.  I’m not sure that pop culture was and is anything more than shallow superficial reactionary escapism.  That really isn’t what art is all about, is it?  So why seek it out?  Because social reality is so disheartening:  who wants to serve democracy when they can be served a Big Mac instead?

Suspiciousness is a fault of mine; these gritty battlers debunking the system that feeds them - and what other kind of system would better serve art? The dynamics of purging commodity systems of mediocrity are built into it for our amusement and hygiene.  Mustn’t get suckered by all those sales pitches.  We are even amused by those who bite our hands as we feed them, indeed, seem to require it to maintain focus and attention.

I like it that Hickey is concerned with beauty.  Likely he is concerned with original thinking, too, as long as it’s clear and vigorous.  The older I become, the less I can defend popular culture.  It’s a familiar arc, n’est pas?  I do apologize for that.  But I was beguiled by the market’s and Post-Modernism’s great assertion that high and low culture had fused.  

  I don’t think I want much hi-lo fusion, anyway.  It’s simply more democratic mediocrity, with the majority tyranny of taste ruling.

ESSAY: The Parrots Are Back

I hear the raucous squawking early.  I haven’t heard it for months.  Thought they were gone for good, but I’m glad they are back.  The parrots perched in an old palm tree in our front yard, off and on, all day long, most of last year.

How astonished I was to see them return!  A neighbor told me that they were orphans from the Busch Gardens Brewery Attraction that closed some years ago in the central San Fernando Valley.  

Well, being a bird watcher, I guess I have to love them all.

I didn’t take the photo - it’s by Ken Rudine, 2009, from a website about parrots that live on the Rio Grande in Texas.  Ours are a more beautiful iridescent green.