Monthly Archives: May 2012

MORE ON THOMAS KINKADE

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Joan Didion wrote:

A Kinkade painting typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.

I myself don’t feel a sinister aura in Kinkade’s work — the home pictured above seems like a cheerful and inviting place — but Didion at least identifies a kind of power in his images.

It’s interesting, too, that no homey refuges like the ones he depicted were accessible to Kinkade in real life. He suffered from depression, over money, over the reception of his work by critics and over a painful divorce. He struggled with alcohol addiction, had had a relapse just before he died, and the cause of his death was an accidental overdose of anti-anxiety medication and drink.

His images of well-lit, inviting homes are usually pictured from the outside, often with paths through the winter snow leading towards the warmth inside.  He saw himself apparently as forever stalled on the path, like the deer in the image above, on the outside, dreaming of a comfort that would always be just beyond his reach.

Kinkade rarely created explicitly surreal images, but look at this one:

It’s not terribly compelling as a painting but it may well represent a deeply-felt self-portrait.  It’s called Pathway To Paradise — a pathway the artist, in the person of a sad clown, feels he will never walk, is perhaps not worthy to walk.

[You can read some earlier thoughts on Kinkade, with interesting comments, here — Light.]

SUBLIME CINEMA

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Click on the image or here to see something amazing.

This lip-dub musical number was staged as a surprise wedding proposal. As a gesture it’s heartbreakingly beautiful, but its also an exhilarating piece of cinema — it works because it’s all done in one shot, the performance tension just builds and builds, instead of getting dissipated in hysterical Baz Luhrmann or music video cutting. Hollywood once understood the power of elaborately choreographed musical numbers done in long takes — Busby Berkeley and the Freed Unit at MGM specialized in them — and people are still drawn to them, only now they have to make them themselves, because Hollywood is currently run by idiots.

This video will go viral because it’s so joyful and astonishing — the Hollywood mediocrity machine will take no notice.

SMOCKED DRESSES

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My grandmother made these for her daughters, my mom made them for her daughters, then for her granddaughters — now she makes them for her great granddaughter Stella Grace.

This is mom sporting her chic new haircut:

“First time in my life,” she says, “I have no curls.”

LUCIFER IN STARLIGHT

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Jefferson Davis, President of The Confederate Sates Of America, spent the last years of his life at Beauvoir, a home on the Gulf Coast near Biloxi, Mississippi. In 1889 he made a trip from there to Brierfield, his plantation in northern Mississippi. Falling sick at Brierfield he stopped in New Orleans on the return journey to recuperate at the home of his friend Charles Erasmus Fenner, an Associate Justice of the Louisiana Supreme Court.

That’s the house above, today, in the Garden District of New Orleans, a couple of blocks from where I stayed on my recent trip to The Crescent City.

Davis appeared to recover at his friend’s home but then relapsed and died there. Davis’s last years were strange. Vilified in the North, lionized in the South, he inhabited a sort of Twilight Zone. Shelby Foote described him in those years, in a phrase from a poem by George Meredith, as Lucifer In Starlight.

SIX HOURS FROM NOW

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. . . it will be beef stew. Trust me on this.

[Update — two hours later the apartment is filled with the aromas of beef, onion, garlic and mushrooms stewing in red wine.  This is the most difficult time in the preparation of slow-cooked food, knowing that another four hours must pass before the first meal can be made of it.  Those four hours, however, help build moral character.]

THE SEARCHERS

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We will probably never again, in our lifetimes, see a movie like The Searchers. It was made by grown men. They may not have been the best of men, but they were real men, and such creatures are no longer welcome in Hollywood. If a grown man wandered by mistake into Hollywood today he would be hunted down like a dog by the pussies who run the place and ridden out of town on a rail, to the accompaniment of high-pitched hysterical screams.

There are of course real men hiding out in Hollywood in 2012 but they keep a low profile and dream of escaping.  They are relics of a vanished time.

This is all just a way of saying that Hollywood has become a place of terminally arrested adolecence and as such is doomed, will pass away shortly into nothing.  To quote The Searchers, “Maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come,” but that’s what our bones are for — to mark the fight against what’s pathetic and shameful.

And don’t mistake me — the virility of The Searchers is not about guns and horses and action and moving through wide open spaces.  The widest open space in the film is the emptiness inside Ethan Edward’s heart, and inside the heart of the woman he loves, and who loves him, his brother’s wife Martha.

Ethan doesn’t become a real man until he can look into that abyss with clear eyes and live with it.  It costs him everything — costs him all his pride and self-regard, his construction of himself as a tough guy.  He becomes a man when he’s ready to pay that price.  This is something only a man who’s paid that price, or knows he needs to pay that price, understands.

THE TRACK

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The New Orleans Jazz Fest has to be seen to be believed. It’s held on the grounds of a racetrack. There are eleven stages on each of which music plays non-stop from eleven in the morning to seven at night, one act after another, almost all of which are worth a listen. So you have to chose and dash between the venues efficiently.

My friends Adrienne and Bill (on the left in the picture above) are New Orleans residents and old hands at Fest-going. They know that the quickest (if not always the shortest) route between stages is often the track itself, where the crowds are thinnest.

Bill is also an expert on New Orleans music, and roots music in general, and thus an invaluable guide to the choice acts.  Paul Zahl (on the right in the photo) and I would have been lost without his advice.

Between the tented and open-air stages are food booths serving first-rate Louisiana dishes — cochon de lait po’ boys (and just about every other variety of the sandwich), beignets with café au lait, and many crawfish concoctions, including crawfish in a sack (a crisp and beautifully sculpted pastry pouch).

It’s overwhelming. At the end of a day there (and The Jazz Fest runs for seven days) you find yourself repeating the famous Cajun complaint — “These good times are killing me!”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY

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. . . to Mr. Bob Dylan, forever old, forever young.

Dylan was 21 when this picture was taken, I was 12.  I heard my first Dylan album later that year, when I was 13 and Dylan was 22.  That seemed like a huge age difference at the time, but now that Dylan is 71 and I’m 62, he feels like a contemporary.  In any case, it’s been a blessing to grow old with him — a spirit guide like no other.