Yearly Archives: 2010

DEMPSEY'S

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My grandfather ran a men's clothing store in Wilmington, North Carolina.  He made regular trips to New York on buying expeditions and his favorite place to eat there was Jack Dempsey's restaurant, just north of Times Square.

It was still open when I moved to New York in the early Seventies and it quickly became my favorite restaurant in New York, too, though I could rarely afford to eat there.  It had white padded booths and a famous round bar in the center of the place, and Dempsey was sometimes on hand, keeping watch over a failing business.  Once I was there in the afternoon with a date, just having drinks, and he sent over two autographed postcards of himself.  One of my favorite New York memories.

It closed in the late Seventies — I was there on the last night.  It was jammed and the crowd was manic and unpleasant.  My girlfriend and I managed a quick drink and then fled.  Not one of my favorite New York memories.

I still go back there in my dreams.

THE VENUS D'URBINO

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By Titian.

The Venus d'Urbino doesn't look classical or Byzantine.  It looks Italian, which made it famous.  The painting was decided to be cool.

                                                                                — Dave Hickey

THE WESTERNER

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A color publicity still of Gary Cooper in The Westerner by William Wyler, which was shot in black-and-white.  Cooper injured his hip as a child in a car accident and had a kind of crooked seat in a saddle, but his balance and grace were uncanny — it's always beautiful to watch him ride.  He does some terrific riding in this film.

ONCE UPON A TIME

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An early 20th-Century autochrome of the Plaza Hotel in New York, from the amazing Albert Kahn Archives Of the Planet.  The autochrome was one of the first processes for color photography.  It was patented by the Lumière brothers in 1903 and first marketed in 1907 and it remained the most popular process for taking color photographs until the mid 30s.

SEAFRET

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New tests seem to confirm Darwin’s theory that all life on earth shares a
single ancestor.  But what would this microorganism have looked like?

One scientist says, ” . . . to us, it would most likely look like some sort of froth, perhaps
living at the edge of the ocean, or deep in the ocean on a geothermal vent.  At the molecular level, I’m sure it would have looked as complex and beautiful as modern life.”

So we were all born, like Aphrodite, from the foam of the sea.  Above is François Boucher’s visualization of the event.

Seafret, one of my favorite words, is sea foam blown by the wind.

AN A. E. HOUSMAN POEM FOR TODAY

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WHEN I was one-and-twenty
I heard a wise man say,
‘Give crowns and pounds and guineas
But not your heart away;

Give pearls away and rubies
But keep your fancy free.’
But I was one-and-twenty,
No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
I heard him say again,
‘The heart out of the bosom
Was never given in vain;

’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
And sold for endless rue.’
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

ONE REASON HOLLYWOOD MOVIES SUCK

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Story meetings.

Teacher and cultural critic Dave Hickey (above, looking like the Benjamin Franklin of the 21st Century) explains what's wrong with them:

“My one rule is that I do not do group crits.  They are social
occasions that reinforce the norm.  They impose a standardized discourse.”

Story meetings always find the most clichéd angle of analysis, the stuff everyone can agree on because everyone has heard it a hundred times before.  This is where the “problem-solving” plot comes from — because too many people in the film industry have gone to business school and are comfortable with problem-solving case studies involving corporate turn-arounds.

This is where the “character arc” concept comes from.  Very few great characters in literature or film have “character arcs” — Achilles doesn't, Odysseus doesn't, Hamlet doesn't, Lewis Carroll's Alice doesn't, Charles Foster Kane doesn't, Ethan Edwards in The Searchers doesn't.

These characters are inconsistent and ultimately mysterious, even to themselves, as we all are.  They reveal themselves, gradually and partially, through what they do, surprising and intriguing us (and undoubtedly themselves, too) along the way.  They may end up in different places than the ones they started out in, for better or worse, but they don't “progress”, they don't move from point A to point Z along a perceptible curve.  This is why these characters are inexhaustibly fascinating, and thus immortal.

The character arc is an attempt to reduce the complexity of human nature to a graph chart, suitable to illustrate a presentation in a corporate boardroom.  Characters in great stories, like human beings in real life, change, when they do change, for irrational reasons, for unfathomable reasons — if we could think ourselves rationally into positive change we'd all be happy, well-adjusted people.

Do you know any happy, well-adjusted people?  Yeah, me neither.  And I wouldn't want to.  They'd be robots.

And characters in great stories don't need to change at all — Hamlet doesn't change in the course of Shakespeare's play, he just reveals layer after layer of an ultimately unknowable self.  We may change watching this revelation, but that's another story — another story that can't be charted on a graph.