Great among the Igigi
Apr. 2nd, 2004 01:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
malsperanzaWhen Anu the Sublime, king of the Anunaki, and Bel, the lord of heaven and earth who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, god of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi...
It's the first of the month, and as usual I changed my LJ profile text and the presiding deity. Yesterday, I had some very clever thing in mind to replace the Conan Doyle passage, but today I couldn't remember what it was. Brain was celebrating April Fool's Day, apparently.
So I fell back on Hammurabi, who is always a safe bet.
"Let the oppressed, who have a case at law, come and stand before this my image as king of righteousness; let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words..."
You can't really go wrong with the guy who invented lawsuits, now can you?
* * * *
After 6 weeks of getting nothing useful done (unless you count not murdering half my family as useful), I am having trouble turning back to the thing I was writing. It is a very mannered story, a stylized period pastiche, all artifice and self-conscious attitude, glittering surfaces. All along I've been struggling with the plot, which I can't get right, but I never had trouble before with the style. Suddenly everything sounds false and cheap. It is driving me crazy.
So I spent half the weekend watching period costume dramas on DVD. Got me nowhere, but was much fun. Enough frilly shirts to choke a cat:
Cyrano de Bergerac, the Depardieu version. Depardieu is not sexy (the sexy belongs to the young Vincent Perez, who plays Christian), but he owns that role. I am a sucker for the play, which is a kind of high-Victorian fantasy about what Moliere and Dumas were supposed to be about. Romance! Rhymed couplets! In French! And the wind sighing and sighing in the trees, in the long grass, in the shadows, mourning the tragedy of the lovelorn poet who abandons his words. All veryvery Animate Nature and Pathetic Fallacy.
Vatel, also with Depardieu, but in English this time (screenplay by Stoppard). Julian Sands as Louis XIV--need I say more? Tim Roth as the Evil Fop (reprising his brilliant Evil Fop from the otherwise forgettable Rob Roy). The costumes! The sets! The re-creation of a 17th century masque at the court of the Sun King! The food!!! Dull story, but that's pretty much irrelevant when everything visual is so much fun.
Shakespeare in Love. More Stoppard. I do love this movie, even though neither Joseph Fiennes nor the Blonde really thrills me.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, surely the ur-frilly shirt movie (damnable, useless cruelty). Not to mention a fascinating riff on the Evil Fop trope--or rather, a pair of opposing riffs, from Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey. Someone could do a nice conference paper on the homoerotic representations in this movie, and their connection to the French Revolution. The ghost of Foucault would be veryverypleased.
The Draughtsman's Contract. Possibly my second-favorite movie of all time--for sure in my top 5. I still can't figure out everything that happens in it, but I keep coming back for more. And when I get too frustrated with all the layers of art theory and games with the Invisible, and the endless meta, there are those clothes, and the insane wigs, and the gloves and hounds and fans, and the exquisite language.
Don Giovanni, the Joseph Losey version. This may be only for opera fans, but it has an incredible singing cast, and a brilliant conception of the opera (Hell, the Underworld, is a Venetian glass-blowing furnace; Hermes the psychopomp is an 18th-century androgyne in white powder and black frock-coat). And it is filmed in Palladio villas--not mine, not the one I call La Malsperanza, where my own story is set--but several others as beautiful, including La Rotonda in Vicenza, which is one of the most beautiful spaces ever created by mortar and stone and light. *sigh*
Orlando, Sally Potter's retelling of the Virginia Woolf novel, starring the amazing, the spectacular Tilda Swinton. My slash-loving friends: rent this movie; you will not be sorry. It is the genderfuck movie of all time. It is gorgeous. It is funny. It has Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I.
All of these movies should have been great inspirations to me, but of course they merely reminded me that whatever it is I am trying to do, I am not succeeding.
Fuck it, I'm gonna quit worrying and watch Black Orpheus now. After all, I have a day job that pays pretty well.
Elsewhere in the news, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has about 5 superb exhibitions right now.
-The big Byzantium show, which takes at least two visits and is beyond words
-"Playing with Fire," a smallish exhibition of Rococo terracotta sculptures. These are the sketches created by artists who later made large works in marble. They have a freedom and verve and beauty that is absent from the more formal stone sculptures
-Chuck Close prints. Even if you don't give a damn about Chuck Close, this show reveals amazing things about the magical, alchemical art form of printmaking
-Chocolate, Coffee, Tea--a small social-history show in the dec arts dept about the precieuse culture in Europe of these three exotic, courtly beverages from the far reaches of the earth
Each of these shows is wonderful, enlightening, seductive. Sometimes the MMA irritates the hell out of me; it is such an arrogant palace of culture, so sure its worldview is the correct one; curatorially, it can be stifling. But this spring it is a secret garden, a treasury, a cabinet of marvels.
And opening right after a couple of these shows close in May will be August Sander's extraordinary photos from the 1910s and 1920s, his famous "Portrait(s) of the Twentieth Century." This is a near-perfect work of art in many parts; that it survived the Nazis is extraordinary. The show is, according to the press release, "accompanied by a seven-volume publication." Glad to see that the MMA has not altogether lost its sense of its own magisterial grandeur. Sheesh.
So it's a good time to be in NYC. The forsythia is out, the weather is improving. I got a call yesterday from the Riverside Park Fund, telling me that next week they are going to plant the two trees I sponsored this winter with a little legacy I had: a crabapple at 99th St. and an elm up on the Drive at 120th. An elm! The most beautiful of trees, if such a thing can be decided. They assure me that the new elms have been bred to resist Dutch elm disease.
Thoreau is right: "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down! ... The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get 'a good job,' but to perform well a certain work... There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving..." (from Life without Principle, 1863)
It's the first of the month, and as usual I changed my LJ profile text and the presiding deity. Yesterday, I had some very clever thing in mind to replace the Conan Doyle passage, but today I couldn't remember what it was. Brain was celebrating April Fool's Day, apparently.
So I fell back on Hammurabi, who is always a safe bet.
"Let the oppressed, who have a case at law, come and stand before this my image as king of righteousness; let him read the inscription, and understand my precious words..."
You can't really go wrong with the guy who invented lawsuits, now can you?
* * * *
After 6 weeks of getting nothing useful done (unless you count not murdering half my family as useful), I am having trouble turning back to the thing I was writing. It is a very mannered story, a stylized period pastiche, all artifice and self-conscious attitude, glittering surfaces. All along I've been struggling with the plot, which I can't get right, but I never had trouble before with the style. Suddenly everything sounds false and cheap. It is driving me crazy.
So I spent half the weekend watching period costume dramas on DVD. Got me nowhere, but was much fun. Enough frilly shirts to choke a cat:
Cyrano de Bergerac, the Depardieu version. Depardieu is not sexy (the sexy belongs to the young Vincent Perez, who plays Christian), but he owns that role. I am a sucker for the play, which is a kind of high-Victorian fantasy about what Moliere and Dumas were supposed to be about. Romance! Rhymed couplets! In French! And the wind sighing and sighing in the trees, in the long grass, in the shadows, mourning the tragedy of the lovelorn poet who abandons his words. All veryvery Animate Nature and Pathetic Fallacy.
Vatel, also with Depardieu, but in English this time (screenplay by Stoppard). Julian Sands as Louis XIV--need I say more? Tim Roth as the Evil Fop (reprising his brilliant Evil Fop from the otherwise forgettable Rob Roy). The costumes! The sets! The re-creation of a 17th century masque at the court of the Sun King! The food!!! Dull story, but that's pretty much irrelevant when everything visual is so much fun.
Shakespeare in Love. More Stoppard. I do love this movie, even though neither Joseph Fiennes nor the Blonde really thrills me.
The Scarlet Pimpernel, surely the ur-frilly shirt movie (damnable, useless cruelty). Not to mention a fascinating riff on the Evil Fop trope--or rather, a pair of opposing riffs, from Leslie Howard and Raymond Massey. Someone could do a nice conference paper on the homoerotic representations in this movie, and their connection to the French Revolution. The ghost of Foucault would be veryverypleased.
The Draughtsman's Contract. Possibly my second-favorite movie of all time--for sure in my top 5. I still can't figure out everything that happens in it, but I keep coming back for more. And when I get too frustrated with all the layers of art theory and games with the Invisible, and the endless meta, there are those clothes, and the insane wigs, and the gloves and hounds and fans, and the exquisite language.
Don Giovanni, the Joseph Losey version. This may be only for opera fans, but it has an incredible singing cast, and a brilliant conception of the opera (Hell, the Underworld, is a Venetian glass-blowing furnace; Hermes the psychopomp is an 18th-century androgyne in white powder and black frock-coat). And it is filmed in Palladio villas--not mine, not the one I call La Malsperanza, where my own story is set--but several others as beautiful, including La Rotonda in Vicenza, which is one of the most beautiful spaces ever created by mortar and stone and light. *sigh*
Orlando, Sally Potter's retelling of the Virginia Woolf novel, starring the amazing, the spectacular Tilda Swinton. My slash-loving friends: rent this movie; you will not be sorry. It is the genderfuck movie of all time. It is gorgeous. It is funny. It has Quentin Crisp as Elizabeth I.
All of these movies should have been great inspirations to me, but of course they merely reminded me that whatever it is I am trying to do, I am not succeeding.
Fuck it, I'm gonna quit worrying and watch Black Orpheus now. After all, I have a day job that pays pretty well.
Elsewhere in the news, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has about 5 superb exhibitions right now.
-The big Byzantium show, which takes at least two visits and is beyond words
-"Playing with Fire," a smallish exhibition of Rococo terracotta sculptures. These are the sketches created by artists who later made large works in marble. They have a freedom and verve and beauty that is absent from the more formal stone sculptures
-Chuck Close prints. Even if you don't give a damn about Chuck Close, this show reveals amazing things about the magical, alchemical art form of printmaking
-Chocolate, Coffee, Tea--a small social-history show in the dec arts dept about the precieuse culture in Europe of these three exotic, courtly beverages from the far reaches of the earth
Each of these shows is wonderful, enlightening, seductive. Sometimes the MMA irritates the hell out of me; it is such an arrogant palace of culture, so sure its worldview is the correct one; curatorially, it can be stifling. But this spring it is a secret garden, a treasury, a cabinet of marvels.
And opening right after a couple of these shows close in May will be August Sander's extraordinary photos from the 1910s and 1920s, his famous "Portrait(s) of the Twentieth Century." This is a near-perfect work of art in many parts; that it survived the Nazis is extraordinary. The show is, according to the press release, "accompanied by a seven-volume publication." Glad to see that the MMA has not altogether lost its sense of its own magisterial grandeur. Sheesh.
So it's a good time to be in NYC. The forsythia is out, the weather is improving. I got a call yesterday from the Riverside Park Fund, telling me that next week they are going to plant the two trees I sponsored this winter with a little legacy I had: a crabapple at 99th St. and an elm up on the Drive at 120th. An elm! The most beautiful of trees, if such a thing can be decided. They assure me that the new elms have been bred to resist Dutch elm disease.
Thoreau is right: "If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down! ... The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get 'a good job,' but to perform well a certain work... There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living. All great enterprises are self-supporting. The poet, for instance, must sustain his body by his poetry, as a steam planing-mill feeds its boilers with the shavings it makes. You must get your living by loving..." (from Life without Principle, 1863)
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Great among the Igigi
Date: 2004-04-01 10:39 pm (UTC)S
Lady_of_asheru@yahoo.co.uk
no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 05:40 am (UTC)Often I find that watching really interesting things makes me *less* inspired...I begin to feel that all these fine things already exist, and my poor imagination could just not rival them.
I have only been to the Met twice, and both times was rushed through in a most annoying way. *envies*
If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer. But if he spends his days as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is deemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.
Go Thoreau!
no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 07:08 am (UTC)Vatel sounds really interesting - will go on my list of movies to pick up. Re Scarlet Pimpernel - I saw the miniseries on A&E, and really liked Richard E. Grant as Blakeney. I'd like to see this movie, though; I'd like to see the story in a condensed version. I'm glad for the recs, thanks.
Thoreau strikes me as having a philosophy that works best for those already well off financially. Though I completely agree with his view on the treatment of forested land.
Re: Great among the Igigi
Date: 2004-04-02 07:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 08:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 08:10 am (UTC)The Leslie Howard version of Scarlet Pimple is a hoot--a sort of artifact of 1930s Hollywood style. But it's actually a delightful movie in its own way. I haven't seen the miniseries, but I have adored Richard E. Grant since Withnail and I. *puts on list*
I fear that most philosophies work best for those already well off financially. ;-)But I think what Thoreau is saying is that whatever work you do--by choice or necessity--to earn your living, you mustn't let it take over your life. To walk in the woods costs nothing, and one mustn't therefore think that it's worth nothing. Because once you give up on those values, you are a slave.
no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 11:49 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 02:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 03:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-02 07:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-03 07:53 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-03 09:18 am (UTC)