I went to my first Little Salon on Tuesday night, at a condo in Parkview (a neighborhood near Columbia Heights that I didn’t even know existed before Google Mapping my directions).
There were some very nice paintings (okay – ‘mixed media,’ but can we just say they were things on canvass with paint and other stuff? because the term ‘mixed media’ makes me think there should be some electronics in there; actually, she was going to bring some music and computer accompaniments, but apparently there was some theft/car break-in thing happening, so that didn’t happen) by a Casey Snyder.
Bellwether Bayou, aka Laura Schwartz played violin and sang – using a loop machine to create a background and plucking her violin like a mandolin as much as she played it (or maybe it’s nothing like a mandolin; I have no music talent and while it might look like similar techniques to me, perhaps I’m just dead wrong).
Then a bit of a short story from a Lily Meyer and up to the roof deck to listen to a New York City based band called Rookin that has a lot of songs based on scraps of things by nineteenth century, Civil War era folks (note to Rookin: Drum Taps was by Whitman, not Melville). And they closed with Amazing Grace and that’s always awesome (the lead singer had one of those soft, fairly high pitched but still masculine voices that goes very well with something like that).
My only complaint is that it would have been nicer had been better half been around (she would have loved it, too).
So, I borrowed the second book of Erikson’s Malazan Empire of the Fallen series from my local library. It’s good; it’s rather like Cook’s Black Company, in terms of being a magic heavy, grim sort of military fantasy.
However, even though there are something like eight more books to go, I think I’m done. I’m not sure I really care enough about the characters, which is as much to do with the fact that it’s been too long since I read the first book and my memory’s a little vague. Erikson packs these books with characters and I would have to read them at a pretty good pace to keep everything reasonably fresh in my mind and I’m just not prepared to take that step.
I read this collection of James Baldwin essays while visiting the in-laws in Thailand (where do you go when you visit your in-laws? Ohio? Missouri? South Dakota? I go to Thailand, so suck on that). I’m sure that I wrote down some notes somewhere, but heck if I know where I put them.
But I decided to write a bit about it anyway because Baldwin is having a bit of a moment. This past weekend we celebrated what would have been his ninety-first birthday. And Ta-Nehisi Coates new book is earning him some very flattering comparisons to Baldwin (I haven’t read his book, Between the World and Me, but I love his essays in The Atlantic).
First of all, there’s Baldwin’s Protest Novel essay. It’s sort of the elephant in the room isn’t it? But I’m going to defend Wright against him, because I don’t think Baldwin gives Bigger Thomas enough credit for being a three dimensional character; he’s not a character able to express himself very well or even understand himself, but he’s not the cardboard cutout that Baldwin suggests. But, of course, does Baldwin really believe that or was it a deliberately Oedipal move against the older writer?
Beyond that, his writing about his father was heartbreaking and tender, a masterpiece of what it means to love a difficult man, an abusive man.
Finally, a reminder of my own privilege to be white and heterosexual and have the wonderful luxury of not having to think about race if I don’t want to.
The efforts to visit the Bangkok Museum of Contemporary Art were surprisingly arduous and I only finally managed to visit it on my next to last day in Thailand.
It was designed by a wealthy businessman, who seeded it with much of his personal collection, including a portrait of his favorite actress. Apparently, the museum was also designed as a tool of seduction and contains a room containing nothing by paintings of scenes from the actress’ most famous movie (this includes a couple of paintings of topless scenes from the movie). There is also a series of paintings of a woman in various symbolically spiritual poses and forms. The woman’s face looks a lot like that actress and the woman is also topless in every painting. It’s definitely art – and good art, a that – and it’s not even very erotic, but it reads like someone said to an artist, “I need some paintings – some fine art that will last the years. It needs to be your masterpiece! One more thing – its needs to have boobs. Lots of boobs.”
By the little coffee/snack place in the museum, was a wall of signed portraits of people like Andy Lau and… actually, there were very few pictures of men. Mostly they were signed pictures of famously beautiful models and actresses, about seventy-five percent of them western.
Once you get beyond that, though, I really liked. You could see these artists influenced by Western artists, particularly surrealists. But those artists were in turn influenced by Asian art, whether directly or indirectly (as through antecedents, like Klimt). So it’s almost a case of Asian artists being influenced by earlier traditions in Asian art, but mediated through the work of 20th century Western artists.
There was a room called the Richard Green Room, actually, it was two rooms, with nineteenth and early twentieth century genre paintings, mainly pictures of people in either eighteen century dress or sort of a fanciful version of Greco-Roman dress (the latter looked a lot like some of my favorite Pre-Raphaelite paintings). There were some wonderful painting and I enjoyed the room immensely, but what on God’s green earth was the motivation behind exhibiting them in a museum devoted to contemporary Thai art?
Apparently, Richard Green is a gallery owner, specializing in those sort of paintings. I reckon those were loaned to the museum, which also makes it free advertising for the gallery and which makes it ethically dubious (most museums would not engage in this kind of thing – exhibiting painting that are simultaneously available for purchase).
They had a large exhibit by Thawan Duchanee, Thailand’s most famous living artist.
When I first saw the exhibition, I wasn’t thrilled by him. Partly, it was the curation. He did a lot of painting in black paint on either white canvass or a saturated red canvass and in a couple of galleries, the walls were painted totally red. The saturation was too much. Bad design.
I did buy a book about him called Thawan Duchanee, Modern Buddhist Artist. First of all, caveat emptor: author Russell Marcus is neither an art historian nor an erudite amateur with a keen eye for art. He’s more of a fan boy. But, it did give me an opportunity, as I read it over several days, to revisit him and get a slightly better than understanding of what Duchanee was trying to accomplish. Certainly, he aims to be very traditionally Thai, in many ways, which hampered by ability to appreciate him at first.
I’ve made it sound horrible, but it was actually pretty wonderful and I would go again. But keep an open mind and a sense of humor.
My friend and I saw this play performed in Chicago (FYI – amazing!), so when I saw a nice, affordable copy from New Directions (the publishing company that singlehandedly keeps Modernist poetry in print), I had to pick it up.
Reading it, I got a much better understanding of some of the rhetorical choices of the performance. Anne Carson wrote this play very much as poetry – as a long narrative poem, with carefully chosen line breaks. I could actually hear bits of the performance in my head and see how closely they followed and used the script.
Also, my waning faith in Anne Carson was renewed by Antigonick… again.
Honestly, even though author John Scalzi has become kind of a big deal in science fiction, I hadn’t intended to read this – and wouldn’t have had it not been available for $1.99 or some such amount.
It’s a solid read, with an old school, pulp feel (only with better writing and a pleasing lack of obvious sexism/racism) and I enjoyed it. The action sequences were few, but decent. It’s very much like those dusty books from the 40a, 50s, and 60s that I love discovering in used bookstores. But, let’s be honest. I’d rather read one of those, which offer an esoteric thrill of discovery/archaeology, if nothing else.
The premise of Old Man’s War is interesting, though underdeveloped (people on Earth are kind of trapped there unless, at age 75, they join a military for the colonies; except for the whole joining the military, that aspect of it reminded me of a series of Asimov books where tall, beautiful, intelligent ‘spacers’ who colonized the stars look down on the poor folks on Earth who are not allowed to migrate because we’re so icky. Asimov, however, went into the sociology of all this. Scalzi, at least here, does not.
I’ll read the sequel if it is cheap or it is at my local library branch.
I read the (relatively) recent novel, The Golem and the Djinni while I was in Thailand.
It’s got fantasy elements – I mean, c’mon, it’s got a golem and a djinni (and also an embittered, somewhat inept, yet also villainous, reincarnating wizard; but that’s neither here nor there) – but it’s not really intended to be a fantasy novel. Or it is, but like Atwood, it writes genre fiction that is, or is intended to be ‘literary’ fiction.
Ok, but that does that even mean (though I do love Atwood)?
I liked the book, but what did I take from it? Not much.
After thinking about it, I have a revelation. I suddenly understood Dwight MacDonald’s concept of ‘midcult.’ It’s not great fiction. It doesn’t come close. It’s intended to make us feel good for not reading trash and reading something that maybe we can pretend is great, but which is really just middlebrow ‘meh.’
Also, for a moment, I kept getting him confused with McLuhan and I remembered that scene from Annie Hall which has to be my favorite scene from a movie not involving Harrison Ford or Godzilla.
Flying from Abu Dhabi to Washington, DC, I was sitting next to a window on the starboard side of the plane.
I had fallen asleep and when I looked out the window, we were above an enormous frozen sea, white and faint blue, abutting an ice-scarred landscape of islands and mainland cut with straight and narrow lines, some filled with snow and ice. In the frozen sea, I swear, I saw a castle. The landscape was like something from a Professor Challenger story or the further, strange travels of Arthur Gordon Pym.
It was Greenland as it turned out, but not long after I first saw it, we flew past the western edge of it and it was gone and it was one of the saddest moments of my life.
Metropolitan opens rather like a cyberpunk novel and maintains that veneer, but really, it’s a fantasy novel in disguise. ‘Magic’ is named ‘plasm’ and is generated by natural forces, but despite the science-y sounding name ‘plasm,’ and some of the science-y trappings about its use (copper grips and wires and batteries), it’s just another name for magic.
The main character, Aiah, is pretty well done. A somewhat desperate woman, whose risen as high as an ethnic minority (she is part of a darker skinned immigrant group) can in her ‘metropolis’ (the world is a single city, by the way, so place states are really city-states; also the earth is covered in a silvery shield and no one knows what is beyond, except that long ago, some ‘Ascended’ went up there and presumably locked the rest of folks in). She’s smart and reckless and you do fear for her in her desperation and recklessness. The titular Metropolitan, a sort of king in exile from another metropolis, Constantine, is decently done as a larger than life, charismatic figure. A good guy, but also willing to sacrifice a lot of lives to accomplish nebulous goals. Certainly, his appeal gets across. Also, he’s black, so credit to Williams for making the two main characters people of color and the lead a woman of color.
I enjoyed, but didn’t love it. And I probably won’t read the sequel. If you see it in a used bookstore, go for it, but that’s the most recommendation I’m giving.
On another note, I read this on my Nook app on my phone – mostly while stuck in Bangkok’s snarling, scrotum tightening traffic (I was not driving; there is a whole list of painful and possible fatal thing that I would do before driving in Bangkok, including taking career advice from a box of broken glass that has hated me since I was two and three quarters years old).
the coffee philosopher 