While rooting around in my closet archives last night, looking for Indian artifacts, I found this pastel of my Grandpa, Walter Scott. I'm astonished at how the years have gone by--I did it way back in 1979--33 years ago?! There's some anatomical awkwardness in the drawing, but it captures his essence well.
He was a quite serious man, to put it mildly. But he showed a lighter side from time to time, such as during the day he sat for this portrait, wearing a yellow shirt.
Yves Tanguy was one of those guys whose lifespan is easy to calculate, born in 1900, dying in '55, at the age of 55. When I was young there were a lot of such figures, including my maternal grandfather, who were born around that time. It was always easy to know how old they were when they died. Now it takes better math skills to calculate lifespans.
I hadn't thought of Tanguy for some years, but his paintings were intriguing and important to me early on. Even when I was 7 years I gazed at this enigmatic painting, featured in a small art book:
The title, too, was strange:
"Mama, Papa is Wounded!" (1927)
Why are his paintings so accessible and intriguing to even the youngest minds? Perhaps it is because he used a variety of traditional strategies. He created a real world, full of great detail, sculpted with a uniform light source. Perspective is also uniform and linear, most evident in the shadows of the biometric forms.
This posting is actually inspired by reading an article by the art critic Herbert Reed, who interpreted this era while it was still avant guard. I especially like this photo of him gazing at a strange sculpture. "Biomorphic form" was big then; we were fascinated by archetypes and the world of Carl Jung and the surrealists. We invented and distilled forms, rather than merely copying and quoting images as we tend to do now, in this post-modern time.
The visual world sure had a lot of bite in those days. The space in paintings looked infinite.
Alfred Hitchcock was a filmmaker who liked to use artists who mastered this infinite sense of space, as shown here, a backdrop by Salvador Dali. He used backdrops and hanging miniatures to great effect in his films. That they were painted made his films not less real, but more real. The impression was visceral.I have the feeling now, when I look at art or film, that space is not so much infinite, as it is finite: numerical.
Many of the image-makers who come to the forefront now have some keenness as artists, but I have the increasingly common suspicion that they have gotten to their position not through their experience with the painter's palette, but more through their experience with number-crunching and codes.
For example: the current series Spartacus, despite its wish to impose a visceral feel (certainly enough guts splashed about!), leaves us with a removed, gray feeling. Space is digital, numerical. No longer are video games looking more like movies; movies are looking more like video games!
The other day I watched another beloved early Columbo episode, Exercise in Fatality, 1974. The guest star was the once ubiquitous Robert Conrad, not only a good character actor, but lead role of a few different series, the best being the surreal Wild Wild West.
In the Columbo episode he played a cocky health club owner and money launderer turned murderer. Conrad was perfectly cast, the actor exuding cockiness and vitality. A bit later on he became well known as the guy who "dares ya", to challenge him, sporting a battery on his shoulder.
I wondered if he was still alive. I hadn't heard or seen a scrap about him in decades; such a vital man long silent in the public ether does not portend well. But lo and behold, when I googled him, I found him to be still in the land of the living. Apparently his shyness toward the public eye is due not to age, (of which there is some debate), but to a drunk driving crash in 2003. Driving a jaguar, he veered into a head-on collision. Like the Columbo episode, it turned out to be an exercise in fatality for the other driver, who eventually succumbed to injuries after years (according to his family.) Conrad seems to have recovered.
I find it strange that I hadn't heard about any of this; Mel Gibson's incident got a huge amount of air time, chatter in the cultural ether, despite being more trivial. Perhaps it was the Iraq War, clanking into top gear that year, that overshadowed the interest.
I can't remember the last time I read or heard Hugh Kenner, the archetypal professor. Some days ago I was hearing some podcast from NPR featuring an author or authority, jogging my memory; something in the speaker's voice recalled Kenner's. There was an unusual quality about it, a sinus irregularity coupled with eccentric wit.
I wondered if Kenner was still alive? The prognosis was was not too good, being that I may have last seen him 2 decades ago on some program like William F. Buckley's Firing Line. Sure enough, he departed this mortal coil nearly a decade ago, in 2003. Pictured left is how I remember him: classic seersucker and bow tie, with professorial hair.
His field was literature, often a guest on PBS shows. I probably first heard him discuss Waugh on an epilog to the first broadcast of Brideshead Revisted.
Do we still have characters like this in the audio visual public realm? I tend to doubt it. The newer higher brow (and for that matter, lower brow) pundits are more telegenic. The topics discussed are more pithy, less idiosyncratic.
John Hadfield, editor and author, lived up into recent times (1999.)
Here is a bare-bones paragraph from Wikipedia, describing Hadfield's labor of love, and subject of this post:
The
Saturday Book
was an annual miscellany, published 1941-1975, reaching 34 volumes.
(It) provided
literary and artistic commentary about life in Great
Britain
during the Second
World War
and ensuing decades. It covered a range of arts, including ballet
and music. Many writers contributed verse as well as essays.
The
above paragraph is perfectly objective and correct, but arid. I am grateful that there is even a wiki entry; it would
not have surprised me if the book were entirely unacknowledged in
today's world. Its many thousands of beautiful pages have evidently fallen into
obscurity.
A typically high-quality photo from the Saturday Book, which accompanied a history and guide to London street markets
I
rarely meet a Briton who has heard of The Saturday Book; this seems odd, for the publication looks to be an institution
spanning decades (1941-75), printed yearly around Christmas with
craft and care as a substantial hardcover book. I have collected it
for years, owning about half of the volumes. They are becoming rarer
these days, but not overly valuable. Each new acquisition is the
subject of anticipation, every page worth poring over.
Respective
volumes have loose themes, amply illustrated with line art,
photographs, and reproductions of various artifacts both in color and
black and white. The books themselves are works of art, the typeface
crisp as each engraving, printed with the slight relief of
letterpress. Chapters and sections are printed on varying tints and
textures of paper; this was the era when a great deal of thought and
effort was put into printing.
A photo of a painting by James Pryde, which accompanied a monographic article, by Derek Hudson, on the unusual artist. Such essays were the norm in the Saturday Book, bringing to light forgotten and strange curiosities at each turn of the page, recalling the thrill of turning a corners within a quixotic, private museum.
The
name Saturday Book implies leisure, weekend, or something done
outside of one's real vocation. The entries seem to be products of
extremely competent amateurs—amateurs in the old sense of the word,
such as Sherlock Holmes being an Amateur(hence, the best) detective. Eccentricity reigns.
Authorities and historians stroll down lanes of memory, opening up to
us dear niches. Early cigarette trading cards, seaside paperweights,
taxidermic dioramas of nursery rhymes...
What
makes the Book so compelling is that it is a nostalgia for a
nostalgia. Inevitably the writer will be describing some phenomenon
wistfully, thinking of Victorian or regency times, around 1890 or
1912. That does seem to be a span back there, but it is within the
living memory of the writer.
In 1962 he is describing 1912—a scant
50 years previous: the same amount of time that now divides his
writing from my reading of it.
In this way there is a mystery and mysticism within each and every photo and word. The author's nostalgia transfuses
into my own nostalgia. I imagine and smell the wooden desk and typewriter
of that time, as well as the poignant smells of taffy, cigars and
seaside from the earlier time, subject of the author's memory.
The Saturday Book offers a window into a world that seems whole and wholesome, glazed or preserved not by one nostalgic layer, but two. Double-glazed!
The cold, crispy snows of January in Norway function as a mirror. The antiseptic sheen blankets stimulus from the outside environment, turning the mind inward, grasping for associations, to ancient memories.
So was it just now, when I poked through a shopping cart of remainders from Christmas, in search of goodies for half price. My eyes settled on a small plastic bucket of large, candied cockroach carapaces (or so it seemed.) No, those are... oh yeah, those things that were also hallowed and known in the US during Christmas... Figs--no, that's not what they were... Dates! Dates, that's what they're called.
That's right, hadn't thought of them in a while. I never liked them much, cloyingly sweet things with a crispy, exoskeleton texture on the outside. They were things of tradition, from an era before the world was not awash in processed sweets. My immediate family did not have them, but I associate them with my grandparents, who had an abundance of such traditional things at Christmas.
There, also to be studied and wondered over, examined in wooden bowls, were unusual nuts, never seen before. I didn't particularly like these either, again perhaps due to their skeletal or mummified looks. One strange one recalled a dried peach pit, itself full of pits that looked deep enough to prevent there being much of a nut inside. There was the visceral wall nut, a hard brain, whose flavor was underwhelming after the effort required to crack it, using the finger-pinching, toothy nut-cracking pliers, quick to slide off the smooth, hard shells, plowing into, pinching and gauging finger flesh.
The most grotesque of all these nuts was the swarthy, armored fossil of hardness, the nigger toe (or so my grandpa called it.) Later I learned its more appetizing name, the Brazil nut. I don't go out of my way to find these.
So, did I buy any dates from the half-priced cart? No, that's OK--just seeing them was food for thought. I'll just buy some peanuts and chocolate.
In December I was walking down the street in Milan, window-shopping galleries. What is that strange little canvas?...
What in the world? It looks like a silkscreened face of...
Gary Coleman!
Oddly, this is not the first time I've seen his mug smiling in the Northern Italian city of fashion and art. The face has become a glyph in the lexicon of street art, stenciled mysteriously on the tag-sotted nether quarters of many buildings, along with Andre the Giant's acromegalic grimace (Obey!)
Gary Coleman was a cherub, full of cheer, an early Micky Rooney Puck, a sputtering mirthful spirit, quite different from Andre's bulk and portent. Some writers might be able to dig out psycho-histories involving minstrel shows and such.
He has become a meme, a sign; put your story in as you like...
There is something going on!
He was very small in stature, but I wouldn't want to have tangled with him. He managed to take on larger people, putting them in the hospital both with his bare hands, and with machines. Throughout his post-cherubic life the tabloid press kept track of his many adventures and misadventures in courts of law.
Numerous health problems dogged him and lead to great financial stress. His coup de grace fell in 2010.
