Category Archives: Art

UPDATE II: Jackie Kennedy: enchantress (Style & Substance)

Aesthetics, America, Art, Critique, Etiquette, History, Human Accomplishment, Music, The State

Jacqueline Kennedy’s dowdy daughter Caroline Kennedy has released “never-before-heard audio recordings of interviews conducted with the former first lady in 1964, shortly after her husband’s assassination,” together with a book, “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy.” We know Jackie Kennedy for her style, sophistication, sense of history, and love and knowledge of music and art. We now know something about her well-formulated opinions and astute observations, delivered in dulcet tones and exquisite English. (The other day I used “hermetically sealed,” which was common usage when I was, well, much younger. My husband wanted to know why I was using a term used in engineering!)

Discussions with the late historian Arthur Schlesinger reveal Jackie to be not only a dazzling conversationalist, but a forceful, if ever-so feminine personae.

Especially appreciated is Jacqueline Kennedy’s opinion about the sainted Martin Luther King (whose real worldview I discuss briefly—and unfavorably—in my book). All the more so given how irreverent she is in coming out and dissing a legend in the making. PC was not an issue back then. My book also quotes Kennedy on affirmative action: the man was conservative as few conservatives are today.

From a performance of Pablo Casals in the White House to Beyonce’s bump and grind: how far we’ve fallen. To be fair, Bush was also without class and culture.

UPDATE I (Sept. 16): STYLE & SUBSTANCE. Myron Pauli: Like many a libertarian, you refuse to address issues of culture. A comment such as mine, dealing with an impressive, classy lady—Jackie was certainly mistreated by her husband, but never responded like a tawdry tart, as is the custom nowadays—is reduced to the problem of statism. In a universe in which everything is reduced to the state, is there any place for observations about culture, human accomplishment, personality, etc?

I suggest to you that things would not be so bad if more women today had the class and classical education of a Jackie O. At the very least, women with a similar frame of reference would not feel so obsolete and voiceless.

UPDATE II: “Go, Jackie,” writes Lew Rockwell:

Funny how the media are trotting out Mrs. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, to try to smooth over her mother’s taped views: that LBJ was an integral part of the assassination plot (of course, but not mentioned in this article), that she didn’t admire Martin Luther King, FDR, or Churchill, that she rejected feminism, etc.

UPDATE II: Oscar Offal (Salutations From the Stutterers)

Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

If Kirk Douglas stole the show, you have got to know that there was not much to steal. So blared an MTV online headline describing the 2011 Academy Awards. (Headline here.) Previously, I watched the Grammys for you guys and came away with the conclusion that the winner was Auto-Tune, “the ‘holy grail of recording,’ that ‘corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments in real time,” and without which the tartlets I watched ‘sing’ would have been even more inaudible and tuneless. (Here.)

The Oscar’s self-aggrandizing crowd proved too much for me. Stutterers are the cause célèbre (because of “The King’s Speech”). Helen Mirren, full of airs and graces, really does believe she’s a queen, and so does everyone else. When I see Mirren’s name paired with that of Simon Schama in the Financial Times, I ask myself what a well-known historian (and superb writer) like Schama is doing interviewing a woman who makes a living imitating other people? (Here) Shouldn’t she be interviewing him? I’m not in-sync with the times, I know.

The unfunny shtick, the specter of the poor, palsied Kirk Douglas spluttering incoherently while the pretentious onlookers cooed: You get the picture.

The last simply superb picture I watched was “The Secret In Their Eyes,” a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists. It won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards. Naturally I will be on the lookout for more such gems in this category.

UPDATE I (Feb. 28): TRUE PUKE.
Mike D.: For me film is not really about striking the right ideological tone; it’s about weaving a yarn and avoiding that wagging ideological finger. I will not be lectured by pin-heads. I’d like them to weave a story that I have not figured out in the first 5 minutes.

I would never watch—much less wax fat about (as some libertarians have been doing)–“Atlas Shrugged” when placed in the hands of Hollywood. (I believe Dagny takes to green energy, or something along those lines.) And the snippet I saw of the “You Go Girl,” aka “True Grit,” was the standard emotional rubbish from Hollywood. Mike, you seem no longer able to even detect the abiding themes that ought to repulse you: young courageous girl sets lax, libertine, drunk adult on the right track and awes all with her moral certitude. They should provide vomitoria in the cinema for this kind of fare.

Such hackneyed, corrupting pabulum ought to repel the intelligent viewer. It’s Hollywood’s revival of the Noble Savage, only applied to kids; they are always the prescient sages; adults are the dolts needing the guidance and direction of babes barely out of diapers. Puke.

And if saintly, snotty-nosed kids are not enough, then you have “The Social Network”: fast talking, hubristic Millennials, making, if to go by Mike’s advisory, “profound” statements about the Culture of the Commons. Yeah, that’s just what I crave. Wisdom from Meghan McCain’s peers. Remember the dot.com kids to whom errant adults were praying, not so long ago?! Get a grip!

UPDATE II: Salutations From the Stutterers. A disease has been born. A new adversity to diagnose, medicate, write soppy stories and scripts about overcoming, launch campaigns for, and discuss, if you are lucky, while plonked on Oprah’s load-bearing couch.

UPDATE IV: Grammy Awards: And The Winner Is … Auto-Tune (Quality Vs. Longevity)

Art, Music, Pop-Culture

The tartlets I watched “sing” at the Grammys would have been even more inaudible and tuneless were it not for the Auto-Tune: the “holy grail of recording,” that “corrects intonation problems in vocals or solo instruments, in real time, without distortion or artifacts.” (See “Antares.com”) With the exception of Lady Antebellum, a group that was passable compared to the rest, the In Memoriam segment featured the event’s better talent (all passed, sadly). (I missed the classical section.) I had never before heard Rihanna, Katy Perry, and Gaga, who with all her pretentious Yoko Onanisms, actually proved, surprisingly, more hard-working and polished than the first two. This is not saying much, I know. But, as a studio musician explained to me, this T & A line-up (to which you can generally add Talor Swift, the Britney Spears of country music) would be reduced to embarrassing grunts, out-of-tune yelps, and bedroom whispers, if not for the Auto-Tune. As to “The Suburbs”/Arcade Fire as Album of the Year: For once, I’m without words to describe their sheer ineptness.

I did not catch the entire thing, but Iron Maiden are good.

UPDATE I (Feb. 16): TRY TRUE TALENT. Mike D: You might like “Arcade Fire,” but they are G-d-awful as musicians. They sustain one or two pitches and exhibit zero proficiency on any of the instruments they belabor. The guitarist strums wildly, producing a cacophony with almost no melodic momentum or variation. One of his guitar strings was broken, but it made no difference. Not only are their songs lacking any chord progression, but, again, they cannot play their instruments. Why learn to play like virtuoso Tony MacAlpine plays guitar (and piano), when you can get a contract and sell your crap without it?

Standards are dead. To those who wish to reclaim a feel for such an unhip concept, here’s a start:

Here’s the same chap, who’ll never get honored for artistic achievement at the Grammys or the Trash House, playing Chopin, no less (bloody difficult):

UPDATE II: WOW: Thanks to Graham who sent a clip of Gaga “before she went gaga.” Not half bad. I knew my instincts for music were good (was brought up listening critically to music—everything from the Beatles to chamber music from a tender age), when I wrote above that “Gaga, with all her pretentious Yoko Onanisms, actually proved, surprisingly hard-working and polished.” Stephanie Germanotta was okay, at least far better than Madonna (although I thoroughly dislike the wailing and the agonized style of singing, in general).

UPDATE III (Feb. 17): QUALITY VS. LONGEVITY. Robert, you too seem to confuse the immutable quality of art with its longevity. Most young people can’t tell you who Bach is. If the Idiocracy has the upper hand, in 100 years or so, he too will have been forgotten despite his unparalleled genius.

“Arcade Fire” are categorically horrid as far as music goes. But they were sweet. Quebecers are nice. Very un-American. Regular folks. Not arrogant, and without airs and graces. Perhaps there is an art to being pleasant?

UPDATE IV (Feb. 18): Michel, thanks for the invite to Montreal. I adore that city; spent time there in 2003. What food! What sweet people. So beautiful too; good-looking and thin folks; what’s not to like? However, I was not prepared for the cold.

UPDATED: “The Secret In Their Eyes”

Aesthetics, Art, Film, Hollywood, Pop-Culture

Imagine a film without loud-mouthed, humorless, self-referential Hollywood hedonists, congratulating themselves on their American exceptionalism (and sensitivity). Imagine a film with a plot you don’t figure out in the first minute of the movie (because it’s a fairly typical ad hoc abomination, like “Salt,” with Angelina Jolie). Imagine actresses sans silicone who act rather than act-out. Imagine actors who transport you into a world that goes beyond their bathroom mirrors (and every other surface that reflects … their image). Imagine no political correctness—no invisible wagging finger suggesting The Right Political Perspective; no ideology, only a story, and interactions between the sexes that are positive and natural; the kind that happened before women became menaces and men were made over in their image.

“The Secret In Their Eyes,” directed by writer-director Juan José Campanella, is such a film. It “won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film at the 82nd Academy Awards [2009], making Argentina the first country in Latin America to win it twice …” (Wikipedia.)

The New York Times’ review of this exceptional film did not do it justice. American film reviewers labor under the chauvinistic impression that Hollywood is where it all begins, and that there is no filmic life outside it. I guess this could blind a reviewer to excellence elsewhere.

The New Yorker gets it, writing that this “legal thriller” is “powerfully and richly imagined: a genre-busting movie that successfully combines the utmost in romanticism with the utmost in realism.”

Writer-director, Juan José Campanella, working with the screenwriter and novelist Eduardo Sacheri, sends us deeper into mystery and passion; the movie presses forward with a rhapsodic urgency and with flashes of violence and pungent humor. “The Secret in Their Eyes” is a finely wrought, labyrinthine entertainment whose corners and passageways will be discussed by moviegoers for hours afterward as they exit into the cool night air.

Watch it. It’s achingly beautiful and deep, “an effortless mastery, from moment to moment, of whatever the dramatic situation requires.”

UPDATE: And imagine wit and humor, organic to a situation— as people use colloquially—instead of the American, “I kicked him in the butt, ha, ha, ha, ha. I’m Brad Pitt.” Funny conversational lines from the better-than-decent effort that is “The Secret In Their Eyes”:

“Hurry up or you’ll find not a crime scene but a wake.”

The hero’s “antic partner,” Pablo Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), answers the phone in the criminal-court office (he doesn’t really want to answer): “No, wrong number, this is the sperm bank …”

The love object, the lovely Irene Menéndez Hastings (Soledad Villamil), a judge’s assistant, must get hero Benjamin Espósito (Ricardo Darín) off the hook for his investigative zeal. She mentions having had to win some official over with her smile (she’s being self-deprecating). Espósito (who loves her deeply and desperately), a subordinate, teases her gently: “What is this smile? Have I seen it?”

There is a powerful scene in which Irene walks in on Espósito’s interrogation of the killer. It’s amateurish if penetrating compared to the American power protocol.

Sensitive woman that she is, she catches the creep undressing her with his eyes. Then and there “she turns the questioning into a sexual duel, taunting Gomez’s manhood, her words more wounding and more effective than a beating with brass knuckles.” She’s brave, smart and politically incorrect.

There is also considerable depth to perceptions related; ordinary conversation which make you say to yourself, “That’s so true.” The victim’s husband, “a bank employee named Morales (Pablo Rago), who remains obsessed with his dead wife for the rest of his life,” is relating to Espósito how he knows no longer if his memories of his beloved are true memories or memories of memories. (How often have you wondered whether what you remember even happened?)

Sandoval, a drunk, gives his life for his friend, Espósito. An opportunity presents itself, and out of the delirium of drunkenness, Sandoval finds the presence of mind to do a great thing. Or did he really? So subtle and unassuming is this act of sacrifice performed by a flawed, if delightful, character, that it almost goes unnoticed. It is certainly not accompanied by the soaring, sentimental f-cking sound/music/noise that masks similar, but staged, moments in your typical Hollywood production.

I don’t want to sully my impressions of this gem of a movie, but watching “Salt” last night was unsettling. America’s XBox, special effects, language-less movie culture reflects a certain reality-averse atavism. Up-close, Jolie the star is frightening. She has cultivated a comic-book look with a newly sculptured nose and cheekbones that might have been enhanced. Her mouth is hemorrhoidal. The chick is scary. And her come-hither glances! A CIA agent, or whatever she is supposed to be in this moronic movie, struts her stuff in a skirt slit up to her panties, which she promptly removes to make a bomb (an underwear bomber). My G-d; that’s not even Avatar-like clever. (Well, they say Avatar was clever. I don’t know; I would never watch such far-removed rubbish about a blue people fighting for their invaded fairy forest.)

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