At home or in the theater: What's the last great movie you watched?
That's easy!
The only movie that you could sum up as "Sophia Coppola meets Dario Argento."
Advertised at my local theater as a mirror rival to Twilight, Let the Right One In makes you intimately aware of the everyday horrors of an ordinary 12-year-old in suburban Stockholm: bullying, silence, and drunken indifferent parents. What's new: the young protagonist, Oskar, finds respite in the kindness of a barefoot, blithe vampire girl next door. When she shows him how to solve his Rubik's cube, that boy's in love.
The sound crew placed microphones in the most unusual places, recording sounds below eyelashes and next to throats, falling snow and corduroy pant legs (source: Kristen McCracken's interview with the director Tomas Alfredson). The result is a movie that's stylized but not pretty-pretty. The sound and visuals mean that certain little events are extra-perceptible in this movie, as if you'd borrowed heightened perception of a sensitive boy and a restless vampire.
Show us your favorite landmark in your current hometown.
The light-swamped, intuitively designed Hennepin County Library, Cesar Pelli's latest gem.
Sculpture by Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, south of downtown Minneapolis.
The most romantic place: the Stone Arch Bridge, for trains in 1883 and now for pedestrians only, over the Mississippi, near the old Mill district north of downtown. Photo by Adam G.
Today is Roy Rogers's birthday. Bigger still, it's the day when an honorable, ethical, powerful 44th president begins to prepare his administration. Up against a series of power-mad aristocratic cowboys, he stands strong.
Thanks to Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger, 1940s America saw a wave of "cowboy codes," folksy ethical rules. The codes appeared in radio shows, political pamphlets and television commercials.
This one is the least dated, and the most concise summary of the Obama campaign:
1. A cowboy never takes unfair advantage, not even of an enemy.
2. A cowboy never betrays a trust. He never goes back on his word.
3. A cowboy always tells the truth.
4. A cowboy is kind and gentle to small children, old folks, and animals.
5. A cowboy is free from racial and religious intolerances.
6. A cowboy is always helpful when someone is in trouble.
7. A cowboy is always a good worker.
8. A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents and his nation's laws.
9. A cowboy is clean about his person and in thought, word and deed.
10. A cowboy is a patriot.
I live across the street from one of the world's best modern art museums. In that collection of decorative art, nothing rivals this amazing photograph of a starlet clutching a parking ticket:
With this proof of intelligent life, my long hiatus from blogging is finito, terminé, finished. Consider the day seized!
"My mother was right: when you've got nothing left, all you can do is get into silk underwear and start reading Proust."
A VOX request:
post your favorite found image!
Last week I lost a folder of found JPEGs, curated over the past eight years from diverse sources: the images were devoured by a Trojan horse (a kind of virus, but so romantic) on my external and internal hard-drives. Nothing else on the computer suffered. Aestheticism, begone!
Now I create a fresh collection of strange and dear images of Congolese trees and cloisonne art, of modern dancers and mountain ranges, of nanobots and battlebots and American boxers with French ambassadors.
Where have you found your favorite odd photos?
What's your greatest find?
Today, this is the first image in my new collection:
I. Five sources of eminence, judged irresistable by people of different training, taste, age and manner:
1. The power to conceive great thoughts
2. Strong and inspired emotion
3. Figures of thought and figures of speech
4. Noble diction, particularly use of metaphor and artificial language
5. Dignified and elevated arrangement of words
II. Faults incident to the effort to achieve eminence, stemming from the quest for novelty of thought:
1. Turgidity, or the attempt to go beyond the sublime
2. Puerility, or the affectation charm with an ignoble and pedantic end
3. Emotion irrelevant to the subject at hand, unmoderated to audience
4. Frigidity, resulting from sophistry or facility
Ô Vox! August's technical difficulties now surmounted and summer's unemployment-blues mostly converted to warm colors, let us write...
What question do you hate being asked?
"What do you do?"
Lawzamercy!
I answer this question creatively. Trust me, brother, it's easier this way.
This lady rebuffs the question:
She reads a pamphlet titled "Women in Necessary Civilian Jobs": Rosie the Riveter was just one of many public attempts to motivate women to take on extra jobs, most of them blue-collar and ill-suited to pencil skirts and silk stockings.
The woman clad in sable brown and saffron yellow holds a matching yellow pencil where a cigarette once was: during this era's wartime, the homefront tried to spend and consume moderately to conserve resources for the war, and cigarettes were little luxuries. The hardship of war wasn't shuffled off to a record-breaking deficit, nor to the McCain campaign's "mental recession." Back then, even Vogue chipped in with fashion portfolios for job-hunters.
As it happens, I've inherited from my sister an armful of vintage suits, one of which is chocolate brown with a pencil skirt and a sharply tailored jacket. Très Rosalind Russell. Come autumn weather I'll summon the same jaunty pride as this Vogue lady while stalking through the skyways of downtown Minneapolis, job listings in tow.
