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Arne Glimcher's Picasso and Braque Go to the Movies (2008) has been assailed by critics from various angles, but I disagree with their spirit. This film brings back the time, barely a century old yet gone forever, right before the first of the first two world wars. There is a lot of footage from early silent pioneers such as the Lumière brothers, and it's wonderful, short enough even for an ADHD attention span.
Of course Picasso and Braque were influenced by the movies -- their exhuberance about everything around them, including the first successful attempts to represent time in motion through moving pictures -- must have felt impossible to contain. These were people fully alive and very observant and on the move all at once.
Moving pictures transformed the way we as human beings can reflect about ourselves -- before photography and movies, one had to rely on paintings, etchings, sketches or verbal descriptions, at best, to "see" a subject beyond the imaginary projections of written description.
Today's Rune: Defense.
Gaston Bachelard's La poétique de l'espace (1958) / The Poetics of Space (1964, 1994, translated by Maria Jolas). Here's a book that probably cannot be fully absorbed but rather acts as a touchstone into other ways of perceiving. For me, it's a textual equivalent corresponding to the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St (1972), Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti (1975) and John Coltrane's A Love Supreme (1964-1965). Perpetually mindblowing and otherworldly, yet grounded in this world.
Bachelard roams through architecture small and large via the scrim of poetry, fiction, daydreams, memories, dreams, light, shadow, color, sound and touch, scent and imagination. Our abode, if we are lucky enough to dwell in one, "shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace." "Imagination augments the values of reality."
The English version I picked up in Philadelphia was published by Beacon Press, "under the auspices of the Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations."
Bachelard's poetics dovetail nicely with feng shui ("wind-water"), another way of considering the harmonics of space.
Do you have favorite nooks and crannies?
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
Casino Jack (2010), George Hickenlooper's final film, with Oliver Stone-like glee details the shenanigans of numerous real people including Jack Abramoff, money-grubbing greedmeisters who, up until the very near past, operated like clones of Spiro Agnew in the corridors of American power. Some will recall that Agnew, Richard Nixon's Vice President, took cash bribes for years while castigating his enemies as "pusillanimous pussyfooters" and "nattering nabobs of negativism" -- until he was finally caught and brought low and later finally departed this world for good. As for Casino Jack Abramoff, he is played like a partly sympathetic villain by Kevin Spacey, much as Oliver Stone projected some humanity onto Nixon (in Nixon) and George Bush (in W.). The system, however, reeked in Nixon's day and reeked again among Abramoff and his numerous cronies and allies, people like Tom "Dancing with the Stars" Delay, Grover "No New Taxes" Norquist and John "Panama Jack" McCain.
Though convicted in 2006 for fraud and various other public misdeeds, the real Casino Jack is already on the loose again in 2011, supposedly wanting to "clean up" the system now that he can directly suck its blood no longer. Not to say he won't be cruising for payola in other ways. It may only be a matter of time before he, too, Dances with the Stars. The only thing that astonishes me about Abramoff is that he is still only 53 years old.
Today's Rune: Protection.
Bruce Robinson's Withnail & I (1986), set toward the end of 1969 in England, delivers punchy banter and sly humor, a sort of virtuoso verbal blending of Don Quixote, Sergio Leone, Oscar Wilde, Zorba the Greek and Spinal Tap with Richard E. Grant in the title role. Mad props!
Robinson's latest film is The Rum Diary, based on the Hunter S. Thompson novel.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Early US leadership put many Enlightenment ideals into practice. One major Enlightenment ideal was to become more rational, using scientific methods where possible, becoming pragmatic and visionary at the same time. The census was a case in point and is built into the US Constitution. Prior to the development of the democratic republic, with its built-in representative election schedules at local, state and national levels, the need for accurate population statistics was not considered quite as crucial from the perspective of, say, a king, who was for most practical purposes satisfied with an estimate. The problem with estimates, though, is that they may be off-kilter, and often were, once actual counts were attempted.
True to Enlightenment ideals, the implementation of the US census was clever, practical and visionary. In retrospect, the US census is also of great help to historians, providing useful social data, especially for studying certain characteristics of the "common people."
The population in 1790?
About 3.9 million.
In 2010?
About 308.8 million, including more than 3.9 million with significant Native American ancestry.
For any of those conservative fantasists who think the US can roll the grandfather clock back to 1790, they may want to think again. There is no going back. Feel free to look back all you want, though.
Today's Rune: Harvest.
In terms of air travel, a lot has happened since 1783, when the first big balloons went up at well-attended demonstrations in France (such as the one pictured above).
I took a heavier-than-air-ship tonight and traveled many hundreds of miles, in fact, over the course of a few hours, from a height of many thousands of feet above the land. Is this something to take for granted?
Here's what Ben Franklin observed about balloons (i.e. Luftballons) in a letter to Jan Ingenhousz, a Dutch scientist, dated January 16, 1784:
It appears, as you observe, to be a discovery of great importance, and what may possibly give a new turn to human affairs. Convincing sovereigns of the folly of wars may perhaps be one effect of it; since it will be impracticable for the most potent of them to guard his dominions. Five thousand balloons, capable of raising two men each, could not cost more than five ships of the line; and where is the prince who can afford so to cover his country with troops for its defence, as that ten thousand men descending from the clouds might not in many places do an infinite deal of mischief, before a force could be brought together to repel them?*
*(Franklin, letters; this one came to my attention via Jack Fruchtman, Jr.'s Atlantic Cousins: Benjamin Franklin and His Visionary Friends, 2005, page 217).
Of course, airships have not convinced sovereigns of the folly of war at all. Nor have zeppelins, dirigibles, blimps, aeroplanes, jets, rockets, missiles or remotely-piloted drones. They've simply made more things possible from greater distances, at greater velocity.
At least one government in 2011 -- that of the USA -- can launch some form of airstrike anywhere in the world within sixty minutes of initiation, or so it has been said.
What next?
Today's Rune: The Self.
Sandwiched between Black Friday and Cyber Monday is an ample filling of memory. Je me souviens, amarcord, I remember, we remember: it's been a great trip.
It's sometimes astonishing to think how little of the past is remembered, absorbed, or understood on a conscious level, and how little we can really know about the details of the future. But being surrounded by people with quite a bit of shared experience can be so refreshing, renewing, and memory-inducing -- especially in a peaceful and stable environment. And here in Saxapahaw it has been that way. Any number of memories have been induced by conversation, of course, and also by sights and aromas, things like the enclosed wooden cabinet lined with hundreds of small vessels and containers filled with spices and other food-related accessories. I'd never thought to ask until now, but turns out this finely refinished cabinet just around the corner from where I'm writing goes back at least three generations to Mary Daley St. Bonnet McGinnis, one of my maternal great grandmothers. This is just a small sampling.
I could also write about escorting one of my sisters in the cold of winter from Durham, North Carolina, to the Twin Cities, Minnesota, many years ago now, and once having arrived, going back to see where our whole immediate family at the time had lived when I was a little kid in the late 1960s in Mendota Heights (St. Paul). But I'll save that one for another post. If I remember, in the near future, as sharply as I do right here and now.
One thing's certain: this revelry expands my memory.
Happy Cyber Monday to all, but meanwhile, to all a good night!
Today's Rune: Gateway.
