Richard Cory 2012

Intermission, Edward Hopper, 1963

And so this guy tick-tocks down the street, merry as a puppy that gets it all the time, the tit. His eyes are wide and the whites of them are bloodshot bright like crizzled candies—bloodshot  because there’s just so much living he’s doing. He is audacious America all by himself with his Levi’s and his Nikes and his Polo shirt and his blond hair and his candy eyes. His wife is named after jewelry or liquor or maybe a lamp to show how precious and consumable she is, and you know looking at him that she has long soft hair and pert breasts that pop in your mouth and hips so sharp you could bleed to death in her embrace.

He’ll talk to anyone, this guy whose name is Richard. He’s got one finger good for making points into your chest because that—goddamnit—is how things are! Lord, you love this guy on Sunday carrying the ball and on the news when he drops the bomb. Tick-tocking down the street, this guy, Richard. The people ladle smiles at him as he passes and that’s his due, his just desserts. He walks into a bar and they give him bourbon knowing he can hold his booze. He talks to his friends about the world and how the eskimos have four hundred words for snow just as if they really did and everybody—holy cow!—everybody listens to this guy.

Richard’s folks are still alive. His mom’s name is Sandra, Sandy to her friends, and she is a vital woman still because people would talk about her if she weren’t. Richard does not know that once a week she has it off with a retired plumbing contractor named Horace who can’t believe his good luck that an old guy named Horace can still get laid. Even if Richard did know he’s been trained to think “Good for her.”

So let’s all say that for him. Ready? “Good for her!”

Richard’s dad is Frank. Frank spends most of his time beside the condo pool with his cronies and because he didn’t bequeath his whole finger to Richard he can still make some pretty goddamned good points of his own. He and his fallow pals sit around a patio table. They’re dubbed the “dead pecker choir” by the meaner ladies in the condo association most of whom have their own secret Horaces tucked away. Every night Sandy and Frank go into town for dinner, steak and lobster on special, and drink just enough to get them home to drink in earnest. Their lives are full and vital and from time to time Richard calls them on his smartphone to tell them how much money he is about to be worth. It’s this felicity for making money that Frank and Sandy admire most about their boy; that’s what they would frame for their piano if they could.

Late at night Richard stares at the street below through a pane-gliding raindrop that eschers everything, bringing the street to bend back upon itself like the universe is said to do. Richard gains no insight from this power of water to change the pattern of light, to bend the world itself in its mystical waves, to create an infinite supply of humping plumbers from no more than an organic rag it belches onto the beach on some unwitnessed primordial Super Sunday. It all goes right past Richard who dreams instead of washboard abs, who sips his 5 Hour Energy contentedly, extending his busy day while the rain tick-tocks outside.

Interlude 8- I Am A Nighthawk

I was born June 21, 1954 in the town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. Today I am 58 years old. I should not have to write my blog on my birthday and so I won’t. Here is a short story for Albert about motherhood. He has a baby on the way, you see. He’s very excited. Heh-heh-heh.

My apologies for the un-indented paragraphs, but the wordpress format isn’t intended for people who prefer more traditional formats. Why is the first one properly indented? I have no idea.

Happy birthday to me.

The Baby

       For the past fourteen months, three days, the baby had been nine months old.  A wonderful, cuddly age, nine months, all sweet milk and soft talcum.  A baby knows its parents well by then, especially its mother.  He goos and smiles and waves his little arms reaching for her.  He laughs so hard he loses his breath.  He sits up almost all the time without help and without tipping over.  He experiments with crawling.  He is well into eating baby food.  He grows vocal and inquisitive, aggressively seeking out new adventures.  The baby was all those things, but he was not moving forward.  He was not growing older at all.

Terri’s eyes lit up whenever she talked about the baby, about how wonderful he was, how precious, and how she was the luckiest mother in the world that her baby stayed just the same.  It took all of Daniel’s love and forbearance just to listen to her.  Terri sat at the dinner table bubbling away about her day with the baby, and every word jabbed Daniel like a pin.

“We watched Mr. Rogers together today.  On the dvd.  You know that man was wonderful.  I could swear to you the baby knows it’s him talking.”

She turned and smiled tenderly at the baby who slowly gnawed at a melting vanilla wafer.

“He gets the wackiest grin on his face.  The baby, I mean.  He looked for all the world like a little—“

“Terri, this can’t go on.  We have to talk.”

“—that fat comedian who used to be on Mork and Mindy for a while.  The one from the sixties, you know?”

“Terri—“

“…Jonathan Winters.  I knew I’d remember it. He looked just like him.”

Daniel stared at his dinner, trying to control himself.  He rarely commented on the things she said about the baby.  It was too hard.  He knew most of the time what he wanted to say, but her focus, her incredible  knack for motherhood seemed to sap him of his arguments.  It hadn’t been that way at first.  He was sure it had been different.  They met and married in mere days.  Sometimes he worried that had been a mistake.  The baby had been nine months old, then too.  Maybe it had been nine months old for years before.  But how could he have known?  A little ready-made family he’d thought.  Her first husband had passed away.  She needed a man.  The baby needed a father.  And he had wanted her.  God, how he had wanted her.

He tried to make himself stay on the point.  “Did you see Doctor Winfield this afternoon?”

Terri paused, her fork hovering over her plate.  “You know, I didn’t.  Now don’t be angry, Daniel.  I just didn’t.”

“Damn it, Terri.”  Daniel’s breath deserted him.  Panic swept over him as it always seemed to do when the subject of the baby came too close to the truth.  But he had to continue.  She had to face facts.  As he struggled to speak his eyes met the baby’s and he imagined he saw a spark there, a hope.  He felt encouraged.  He forced himself onward. “We have to get help,” he finally managed to say, “find out why this is happening. Can’t you see that something is wrong?”  He dropped his fork on his plate with a clatter and pushed it away with a trembling hand.

Terri pouted.  “Don’t be a grumpy Gus.  Everything is fine.  The baby was sleeping so peacefully I just didn’t have the heart to wake him.  Besides, I don’t see the point in going to that doctor anyway.  The man is obviously a lunatic.”

She speared some salad, started to shove it in her mouth, then stopped and pointed to his plate with it instead.  “You eat the rest of that, or I won’t let you have dessert.  It’s apple pie.”  She popped the salad in her mouth and winked at him.

Daniel sighed, looked down into his lap.  He could not confront her.  He pulled his shirt sleeve back from where it came to below his hand.  He scooted on the chair a little bit, confused.  The table seemed so high.  Terri watched him from her chair near the baby.  She seemed to shimmer.

“Eat, Daniel.”

Daniel stuck out his bottom lip, but he scrunched up and pulled the plate back in front of him.  He ate slowly while Terri beamed in a glow of maternal radiance.  As he moved he felt his worries ease; he felt calmed, supported.

“Look at you, so stressed.  Why, you’ve lost so much weight you’re just swimming in that shirt.”

Daniel’s love for her calmed him.  So long as she sat and watched him like that, her love pouring into him like a physical force, he could handle anything.  Everything would be all right or she would kiss it and make it better.  She had that power.

He finished his dinner and smiled at Terri.

“See, now you can enjoy your pie.”  Terry scooted the chair back and picked up their plates.  She carried them off to the sink.  Daniel looked thoughtfully at the baby, dimly aware that something was supposed to be bothering him.  Now what could that be?

Behind him he heard Terri at the sideboard.  “A slice for Mommy and a slice for her big boy, Daniel.  Oh darling, aren’t you happy?”

She placed his dessert before him and touseled his head.  “I’m so lucky.  The best baby ever, that’s what I have.  And you.  It’s almost perfect.”

Daniel felt so nurtured, so complete.  He scooped a big piece of pie on his spoon.

“You know what could make it better?” he said.  “Ice cream.”  He laughed and gobbled it down.

“No, not ice cream,” she whispered, her eyes dark yet gleaming.  “Twins.”

The baby laughed so hard he lost his breath.

Jean-Antoine Watteau

Pilgrimage for Cythera, 1720, Oil on Canvas, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin, Germany

I have a new word processor program, and I am feeling a little unqualified. There are so many bells and whistles I am almost paralyzed by choice. I have gone through so many word processors over the years, from Word Star to Word Perfect to whatever that thing is on Google Docs to this brand new Microsoft product. Very pretty, this is. My words rest, nested in a frame of tranquil blue. And I adjust, burrowing more deeply into the body of the machine, nursing at its fluids. Quiet. Safe. Content?

Harlequin Emperor in the Moon, 1708, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France

In Watteau’s age few people felt any connection to the machine. The early 18^th century was wide open for the brash and brave individual. Europe swarmed with strong young men and women to whom the onerous obligations of the Middle Ages were long lost in the mists of history. Leave your life, your family, your God and strike boldly outward to seek your fortune. Some like Watteau were lucky and able to pave the way to a singular life through apprenticeships gained through family influence.  There were steps and stages for the artistic young man that would lead him on to eventual success on his own terms, and if not, if he did not have the basic talent and intellect to press on to greatness he still could work on for his master, copying work and building the foundations of his patron’s oils.

Watteau did not have this kind of time. The machine of his century was far too primitive and chuggish for his circumstances. He had to break away, to jump the system faster, and fortunately in this early age this was easier to do. His health had always been poor. He knew deep inside that he was not destined for long in this world, so he simply set out to create as quickly as he could. Although he made strides and found a measure of acceptance from the art community, he remained relatively unknown outside his little world of painters and paintings.  It would be a very long time before the machine chanced to turn its cold steel eyes on his paintings and offer a reassessment. Today there are those who see the first glimmer of impressionism in his work.

Love in the French Theater, 1716, Oil on Canvas, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

Perhaps.

Love in the Italian Theater, 1716, Oil on Canvas, Gemaldegalerie, Berlin

For me, his charm lies in the sly ways he chose to comment on his culture. His heroes are not from society but are the scoundrels and rascals of commedia dell’arte; they are the dashing and hale youths gone to Cythera to celebrate Aphrodite in the lush pelvis of her island; they are the poor who mock the scandal of a noble patriarchy that pretends to Christianity even while auctioning its daughters like cattle to the marriage bed.

The Marriage Contract, 1710 to 1716, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

And as for the august society of artists (There always is one.) who machined up to decide what is good and what is bad in the world of art, well, he had a little something for them, too.

The Monkey Sculptor, 1710, Oil on Canvas, Musée des Beaux-Artes, Orleans, France

Watteau had so little time. He must have sensed after years of ill health that he had but few years, and in fact he died at only thirty-six. He knew that he could not afford to spend even an extra second in the service of another’s dream.  He knew that it was imperative to follow your art. Better to be penniless and on the road, to perform for your wine while thrilled and tingling in the moment’s torchlight than to sit fuming in the dark sucking at some meager beer from the machine.

Arise!

Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury is dead. Now all the other science fiction writers can wonder if they are the best living SF author. They couldn’t wonder about that on Tuesday because Ray Bradbury was still alive on Tuesday.

I wept more for his passing than for the death of my own father. He was that much more important to me. Much of my emotional vision of America comes directly from his words. There was a time when I had no one, when my life was an endless chain of days in schools where I was not liked, and trailers and apartments where I knocked around alone because whichever reluctant relative I’d been shunted to was always working or away, when I cooked and cleaned and made do for myself. To escape that loneliness I lost myself in books. I read the comics and imagined myself as Spider-Man, or novels and dreamed of being witty like Archie Goodwin, or cold-blooded like Matt Helm. They were all fun and fine, but only Ray Bradbury could write a story that made me want to be me.

• At ten o’clock the house began to die.—There Will Come Soft Rains

He was the first SF writer to be claimed by the serious literary writers as one of their own. That’s because he was better than almost all of them. There was nothing precious or cute about his work; he was not pretentious or coy. He could be corny in the same way that E. B. White could be corny, the corn of real conviction and real emotion. His words could dazzle and dance on the page, but it was never done to show off his technical chops but was rather the honest means through which he might share his joy. He had no fear.

•             He brought out a yellow nickel tablet. He brought out a yellow Ticonderoga pencil. He opened the tablet. He licked the pencil.
•             “Tom,” he said, “you and your statistics gave me an idea. I’m going to do the same, keep track of things. For instance: you realize that every summer we do things over and over we did the whole darn summer before?”
•             “Like what, Doug?”
•             “Like making dandelion wine, like buying these new tennis shoes, like shooting off the first firecracker of the year, like making lemonade, like getting slivers in our feet, like picking wild fox grapes. Every year the same things, same way, no change, no difference. That’s one half of summer, Tom.”
•             What’s the other half?”
•             “Things we do for the first time ever.”—Dandelion Wine

Was he visionary? You tell me. From 1953.

•             “More sports for everyone, group spirit, fun, and you don’t have to think, eh? Organize and organize and superorganize super-super sports. More cartoons in books. More pictures. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, somewhere, somewhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee. Towns turn into motels, people in nomadic surges from place to place, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept this noon and I the night before.”
•             …”Now lets take up the minorities in our civilization, shall we? Bigger the population the more minorities. Don’t step on the toes of the dog lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors full of evil thoughts, lock up their typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, so the damned critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily let the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn’t come from the government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure turned the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time.”—Farenheit 451

He could be irascible and strange. He could be inconsistent. He wrote of Mars but never flew because he was afraid of airplanes. But he inspired everyone. Rod Serling and his Twilight Zone might never have existed had Bradbury not been there to inspire the young screenwriter.  And all of fantasy and SF owes him for showing that you could reach for glory in language and still tell a cracking good yarn.

•             “Maybe once it was just one man walking across Europe, jingling his ankle bells, a lute on his shoulder making a hunchbacked shadow, before Columbus. Maybe a man walked around in a monkey skin a million years ago, stuffing himself with other people’s unhappiness, chewed their pain all day like spearmint gum, for the sweet savor, and trotted faster, revivified by personal disaster. Maybe his son after him refined his father’s deadfalls, mantraps, bone-crunchers, head-achers, flesh-twitchers, soul-skinners. These laid the scum on lonely ponds from which came vinegar gnats to snuff up noses, mosquitoes to ride summer-night flesh and sting forth those bumps that carnival phrenologists dearly love to fondle and prophesy upon. So from one man here, one man there, walking as swift as his oily glances, it became scuttles of dogmen begging gifts of trouble, pandering misery, seeking under carpets for centipede treads, watchful of night sweats, harkening by bedroom doors to hear men twist basting themselves with remorse and warm-water dreams.
•             “The stuff of nightmare is their plain bread. They butter it with pain…”—Something Wicked This Way Comes

He wrote for pirates. He wrote for poets. He wrote because he could never stop writing. And he built for us all a body of work that we may visit again and again and again.

• “When I was a boy my grandfather died, and he was a sculptor. He was also a very kind man who had a lot of love to give to the world, and he helped clean up the slum in our town; and he made toys for us and he did a million things in his lifetime; and he was always busy with his hands. And when he died I suddenly realized I wasn’t crying for him at all, but for the things that he did. I cried because he would never do them again, he would never carve another piece of wood or help us raise doves and pigeons in the back-yard or play the violin the way he did, or tell us jokes the way he did. He was individual. He was an important man. I’ve never gotten over his death. Often I think what wonderful carvings never came to birth because he died. How many jokes are missing from the world, and how many homing pigeons untouched by his hands. He shaped the world. He did things to the world. The world was bankrupted of ten million fine actions the night he passed on.”—Farenheit 451

I have not been alone for a very long time now and that is good. My wife and I have been married going on thirty-seven years, and neither she nor my children hate me very much and that is good, too. But there is a part of me that is always that little boy, scared and lonely and a little sad. Bradbury knew very well we always keep that child inside us and hold him close for that is the closest thing to what we really are.

Ray Bradbury is dead and I am a little bit sad and there are no pictures in this blog today.

And no damned 3D, either.

Margaret Bourke-White

Louisville Flood sequence, 1937

Eisenstaedt once, in a 60 Minutes interview, was challenged about his work. The question was something like, “You take so many frames to get your eventual shot. At the end of the day, isn’t a lot of it luck?” “Of course it’s luck,” he answered. “The amazing thing is how that luck keeps happening to the same people.”

Buchenwald 1945

Margaret Bourke-White was beyond lucky. Throughout her career she was admired, resented, shot at, marooned, torpedoed, and just generally damned near adventured to death. She was the photographer who rode with Patton through Germany, and recorded the first unflinching look into  Buchenwald.

Buchenwald, 1945

Some of the dead at Buchenwald, 1945

Her list of gender triumphs— first woman to do this, first woman to do that—is only barely longer than her list of photographer firsts. She achieved so much with such incredible artistry and passion that she seems like a novelist’s construct, a bit of fantasy for little girls to tie their dreams to. But she was very real. Why no one has ever seen fit to make a movie about this woman is beyond me.

People tend to remember her for her industrial pictures taken in steel factories, or the fascinating shots of bridges and cables and dams. She graced the cover of the very first issue of Life Magazine, a magazine that virtually defined the American photographic ideal for the twentieth century. But for me, it was her eye for humanity which created her strongest pictures.

Greenville, SC 1956

For me, as a child of the segregated south, her photos about race ring particularly true. This photograph seems to encapsulate the flavor and mood of the South in those times far better than any novel or movie has ever done. Look at those faces. Nothing is hidden here.

Sewing lesson, Greenville, SC 1956

Human powered carousel showing black children pushed around by kindly white politician. Not a metaphor or anything. 1956

White girl spending a lazy morning watching chain gang. No messages here, either. 1956

The photos from this project are so simple.

You Have Seen Their Faces 1937

During the Depression years she worked on a project with her then husband, Erskine Caldwell, titled You Have Seen Their Faces. It was a story about poverty, about the cycle created when the very poorest among us are exploited by the wealthiest. This is not a cycle unique to America. It is the story of mankind. As the lady sings, “Them that’s got shall get, them that’s not shall lose…”

Astronomer Edward Hubble (Yes, that Hubble) at Mt. Wilson Observatory, 1937

You may have noticed that almost all her greatest pictures are in black and white. Yet, for her segregation series she made a conscious decision to shoot in color. Huh. Lucky choice, I guess.

Bourke-White could have easily done the artsy thing; she could have been the darling of everyone. Certainly, she could make a camera walk and talk and dance to an organ, so it would have been easy for her to go the Stieglitz route and talk about the big artistic picture.

DC-4 over Manhattan, 1939

That was simply not her way. Instead she thought about the pictures she wanted to take and then set about taking them. Just like in the photo above. No dithering. No excuses.  She considered herself a photographer. She probably thought she was the best photographer in the world, but I think maybe she was just the luckiest.

Photo of Margaret Bourke-White getting lucky, 1934,  photo by Oscar Graubner

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, painted as Vertumnus, Roman God of the seasons, 1590, Skokloster Castle, Sweden

If you bop around the web reading the various articles about this artist you learn pretty quickly that plagiarism is alive and well on the internet. So it is nice to discover an artist I can say almost anything about and remain original. Our boy Arcimboldo here is a man who went from this…

Bust of a Daughter of Ferdinand I, 1563, oil on panel, 44cm x 34cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

…to this…

Autumn, 1573, oil on canvas, Musee de Louvre, Paris, France

…right in the high point of the Renaissance when people couldn’t help but notice. Now this is the middle of the 16^th century, and while the Church in Italy was, for a change, somewhat tolerant of the suddenly explosive Italian culture, everywhere else people were being burned at the stake and hung for almost anything that poked at the status quo. I suspect the very first patron to get a look at one of these Man-As-Salad masterpieces (also known at the time as a “Big Salad” which is how Arcimboldo became known as the “Father of Seinfeld.”) must have thought long and hard about whether he was the butt of some joke. If so, we can thank goodness that he was, apparently, a man of character and wit, and his thumbs-up set Giuseppe on the path to immortality.

One of the many cool things about these works is that from a distance they look perfectly ordinary. Arcimboldo had to imagine this effect for himself, he could not rely on computer simulations or studies on the human eye and its ability to register data. He just had to recognize that things blur with distance and can be morphed into each other sometimes just by squinting.

Winter, oil on canvas, 100 x 140cm

Within each work he reinforces his own metaphor. Spring is composed entirely of spring plants and flowers; Autumn likewise is rendered by things of the harvest. Sometimes you have to stare a bit to figure out the portrait, and once you see it you gasp at the way it springs to life. Winter is like that for me. (His portraits of the seasons are one of the many reasons we call him the “Father of Calendar Art” which leads us to call him the “Father of the Pin-up” which in turn leads us to call him “the Guy Who Did Betty Grable.”) (Do you sense the inter-connectedness here?)

Vegetables in a Bowl or the Gardener, 1590s, oil on canvas, Museo Civico, Cremona, Italy

Several of his paintings can be stood on their heads to surprising effect. A bowl of vegetables becomes a gardener…

The Cook, 1570 approx, oil on panel, 53cm x 41cm, National Museum, Stockholm, Sweden

…a platter of meats becomes a cook. This kind of tomfoolery, of pictures as puzzles, is still enjoyed today whether as optical illusions or as fold-ins on the back of kids’ comics. (This is one of the many reasons Arcimboldo is often referred to as the “Father of Mad Magazine.”)

Fire, 1566, oil on panel, 67 x 51cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

His pictures are more than curiosities. His picture of the Librarian troubled scholars of the time who felt he was mocking them. Perhaps he was. His portrait of Fire, the substance we are told our world will end in, is comprised primarily of tools of war. It would be easy to pronounce him the “Father of Political Cartooning.”

But there is always more to discover the deeper you look and think about a thing. Smart, talented people don’t spend months at a time to create an eternal piece of art if it is meant for no more than a joke. Perhaps once in a while, but as a calling? I don’t think so. His paintings seek to connect us as human beings to all the things of life and nature that surround us, to remind us that we are fragile, temporary beings made up of the same stuff that makes up that life over which we presumably hold dominion.

Earth, 1566, oil on panel, 70 x 49cm, Private Collection

It is interesting that his perception of the Earth uses only mammals. These are the creatures, the things of the earth that men of his time most often equated with the biblical notion of “dominion.”  But it is clear he equates earth with life. I wonder how many of the creatures in this painting are now extinct, if any. I wonder how long it will take humanity to remember that “dominion” implies service and stewardship equal to the expression of power. I wonder when we will all get off the web and go into our back yards and streets and parks and forests and start looking for life again. I wonder when I will learn to take my own advice on that.

I wonder if Arcimboldo would have liked Basil Wolverton.

Nighthawk Movies: Harold and Maude

Created by John P. Glynn

In February 1972, tired of working to little purpose in Milford Fortenberry’s dairy in Mississippi, I decided to enter the US Navy. I was only 17, but a signature from my father, who owned me, was enough to transfer ownership to Uncle Sam. Because of my background in the dairy learning about cows, as well as a year of working in my father’s bakery where I learned about cakes, it naturally followed that I was selected to receive instruction in the Arabic language out in Monterey, so after boot camp I drove my Datsun to California and checked it out.

This was the raggedy end of the hippie era, superior to the sixties in that there was more sex and fewer body crabs. I was to enjoy my year in Monterey very much, but when I first got there I didn’t know anyone, so I went to the movies. Harold and Maude was playing as the “B” half of a bill with Play It Again, Sam at a theater in Carmel, California which is joined at the Clint to Monterey. I was there to see the Woody Allen movie. I had never heard of Harold and Maude, and had it been presented as the second feature, I might well have missed it, but it came on first and my poor country mind was forever twisted.

Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon, Harold and Maude, 1971, directed by Hal Ashby, written by Colin Higgins

Harold (Bud Cort) is the property of his fabulously wealthy mother, played by Vivian Pickles. Harold is a master of the spectacular fake suicide, and we meet him at a stage when his mother has long since grown used to it. He is barely a man and looks even younger than he is. His mother has money. We are reminded again and again of his enormous wealth. People have expectations of Harold, but they arise from a sterile, artificial place. Harold is a little like a masterwork clock that keeps poor time; his mother would throw it out were it not made of such fine materials.

Harold is drawn to death and darkness. His primary recreation is attending funerals for people he does not know. It is there he meets Maude, and it is there Ashby and his writer, Higgins, discover the sublime. Ruth Gordon is simply perfect in this role.  Her Maude is over the top, played as broadly as if it were a stage play instead of a movie. And her relationship to Harold is both charming and dangerous. It is dangerous not because a very, very young man has an affair with a very, very old woman, but because we are made to understand it, to agree with it. Gordon is sexy as hell in this movie, her face flowing from wrinkled and worn to radiant and beautiful all in the scan of a single shot. She moves like a leopardess on cocaine, bouncing back and forth between a wild energy and a luxuriant loll.

The sublime Ms. Gordon

Maude is trying to teach Harold to come alive. I will not labor the ways the movie uses symbol to reinforce its theme, or the cleverness of scenes, or any of the bits of business that enrich the story. I will not embed video from Youtube. Many of you have already seen this movie and don’t need it, and if you haven’t seen it, I do not want to spoil it for you. But to both groups I would say, “Watch it soon.”

Harold and Maude is now, and has always been, regarded as a cult film. “Cult film” is often pejorative, but not for this movie. I think Harold and Maude is a cult film because it is a movie meant for smart people. Despite being thoroughly set in its time, it plays as freshly today as it did all those years ago when I first saw it, when I knew little more than the difference between a cow and a cake.

Cow

 

Cake

What is this movie’s theme? Partly, it is the rather obvious one: Don’t let yourself be owned. Be yourself. But that is the phony theme for humanities professors to nanner on about. For us smart folks, Maude tells us the real theme in three short words to Harold: “Aim above morality.”

That, my friend, is a dangerous idea, indeed.

Richard E. Miller

The Milliner, 1909

Today’s images are brought to you from the breathtaking site called Large Size Paintings. I have no idea how my friend manages to get so many amazing images of art, but I am very glad she does. If you have not visited before, please go and linger. There are layers upon layers there and it is well worth your time.

You can read all about Richard E. Miller at Wikipedia. It doesn’t really tell us much. Nor does it have to tell us much. He isn’t one of those world shattering artists who command so much attention, but he is an excellent artist just the same. In his day he was very successful and respected, and his works remain very high in the public regard.

Spring, 1914

For me, these are among my favorite dreamy images, the kind that pluck you from modern hassles and drop you smack in the middle of a genteel paradise. They have a Victorian feel to them for all that they are American. I can see these places and remember being in gardens like them, out of doors under splendid trees. A cool breeze, gravid with the smells of a nearby bustling river, whispers about me, gently teasing my hair as if I were a scoundrel child, the touch so delightful I am afraid to move and ruin it. The teas they serve here are black and sweet, the cakes dry and almost savory, or soaked in rum and bursting with citron fruit. These images celebrate more sensuous times when we were given the grace and leisure to experience on our own without the clamorous rattle we endure almost every moment of our modern lives.

1911

These are ladies who “lunch,” who sit and dish on their children and their men as if they were the same thing, which of course, they are. They are witty and blunt, even coarse with each other at times, and laugh with deep, knowing chuckles like valkyries sharing a clumsy lover. They are wise and we admire and desire them all at once even as we fear what they might think of us.

Miss “V” in Green, 1920

There are those who disparage decorative art, who say it is empty and without purpose. That’s okay, I suppose. But I wonder if we have not become too judgmental over all. We are so quick to offer negative opinions on virtually everything that we have almost forgotten how to simply admire someone. People gripe because their favorite actor isn’t making one fabulous movie after another, or their favorite singer doesn’t repeatedly outdo herself. I know I catch myself dwelling on the negative all the time. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

Goldfish, 1912

I would prefer to be a better person than that. I want to respond to work that makes me feel happy, or wistful, or anything, really, with simple innocence. I want to turn my cynicism off; I want to stop judging.

I see these women and I want to go be with them, to fit within my surroundings as they do, as if I were just another piece of the world, another flower, another tree, another blade of grass. I want to be with the world and not against it.

I want my tea black, and sweet, and cold.

Black Mantilla, 1910

William Blake

Satan Pours Boils on Job, 1826-1827, Tempera on Mahogany, 31 x 43cm, Tate Gallery, London, UK

William Blake was “too good for the room.” Despite all his work and all his gifts he remained largely ignored or else outright mocked during his lifetime. Even the patrons who assisted in the publication of his etchings and illustrations, poetry and sociological texts, did so more as a favor for a friend than with any conviction that Blake’s work was any good. Blake’s genius was so grand he did not merely toil before his time, but in fact had lapped humanity a few times over.

As a people we Americans are used to the swamp of hyperbole through which we wade. Every entertainer is a superstar; every mildly capable person is a genius; anyone not actively killing kittens in front of pre-schoolers is a saint. Even I, angry at the trend, cannot help but exploit it willy-nilly to overstate my own argument.

William Blake was the genuine article, an intellect on the order of a Newton or a da Vinci.  He was so comfortable in his gifts that he didn’t even mind being shabbily treated by his contemporaries. He had a clear conviction about the nature of the universe and was content to wait for society to catch up to his work. In the meantime he carried on creating. The work was all that mattered.

The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun, 1805-1810, Watercolor, 40 x 32.5cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA

His visual style has inspired everyone from Gustave Doré to Hannibal Lecter.  His poetry is so well known that countless people could recite it even while claiming the name “Blake” is unfamiliar to them. “Tiger, Tiger burning bright, in the forest of the night…” All his body of work is self-referent linking back to itself, slowly building a canvas of words that almost begs to be considered as a whole. Every time the Monty Python crew climb into the box because someone said “mattress” to Mr. Lambert, all their fans get to hear Blake as they sing, “And did those feet in ancient times…” a bit of poetry that is today the hymn, Jerusalem.

Newton, 1795, color print with pan & ink and watercolor

Blake casually knew about a whole hell of a lot of things. Consider his painting of Newton, the mathematician. Notice how Newton’s posture mimics the curve and coil of the chambered nautilus, as does the end of the sheet on which he draws at the right hand of the picture. The elaborate, unnatural musculature on Newton’s back enhances this effect, thereby alluding to the miracles of nature as revealed in a Fibonacci sequence, a magical series of numbers which is also key to the theory behind the Golden Ratio, which in turn is followed in the painting’s composition.

Coincidence?

By our modern standards, Blake was a sad failure. Critics considered him at best a kind of addled, innocent lunatic and at worst a dangerous heretic. And how much did all this discouragement slow him down? None. Toward the end of his life Blake worked on a series of engravings to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was nowhere close to completing them, yet he worked feverishly on the project right up to his dying day, knowing it was his end. He talked to his wife that evening about his passing on. He had worked all day knowing he would expire in just a few hours. Nothing could stop him. Not the doubt of others, not the disapproval of his society, not poverty nor even death. It wasn’t hubris that kept him at it this way, but a simple commitment to the work. He knew the work was more important than he was.

The Whirlwind of Lovers, Francesca da Rimini, Inferno, Canto V, 37-138, pen, ink, and watercolor, 374 x 530mm, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham, UK

Indeed, Blake believed the body and the soul were part of the same construct, but that the body was simply the limit of what the physical part of our being could perceive. The bigger part of our body/soul package was energy. He believed our energy was immortal and that it could connect with the living. Dying might be just the push his Dante project needed.

Blake began to sell better once he snuffed it. For years after his death men would come to bargain with his wife over his manuscripts and prints. She was always polite, and she always explained that they would have to wait until she’d had a chance to “…discuss the business with Mr. Blake.” She meant it, too.

We have an industry devoted to convincing us how great our modern artists are. It means money for them. Nothing is more important to them than our regard. That is how we know them for frauds. True artists don’t give a damn what we think. Because we don’t matter. To a real artist the work is what matters.

Just the work.

Ancient of Days, 1794, Etching/Watercolor, 23.3 x 16.8cm, British Museum, London, UK

Maxfield Parrish

From the Story of Snow White, 1912, Oil on Panel, Collection of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor

Once upon a time publishers sought to print children’s books which were themselves little pieces of art from cover to cover. The language had been honed to perfection over many generations of telling so that children would be enthralled and amazed at stories of giants and dragons and gnomes. The pictures were not simple drawings but paintings designed to enhance the written word, that together they might create a mood and landscape suitable for dreaming. Without the constant distractions of movies and television young minds were free to fantasize, to wander on their own; they were given just enough data to spur their own creative faculties. The inquisitive child becomes autogenitor of the creative adult, and thus humanity enhances itself with each generation.

I don’t think modern publishers would care for Maxfield Parrish. They wouldn’t want to fund him, for one thing. His paintings are very involved, and take a long time to produce. He used a peculiar glazing technique to create his amazing colors and textures which provide a near three dimensionality in person but are impossible to duplicate in a book.  Max, baby, you are trying too hard. Pull back a little. That will be good enough. It’s just for kids and what do they know? We need to make a little money on this, capice?

Almost every single fantasy illustrator you can name borrows from the technique and style of Maxfield Parrish. When you have colors named after you, you know you’ve made an impact. In the category of art reproduced as art for people to own (as opposed to Snoopy appearing on a million Met-Life billboards) Parrish is the single most reproduced artist in human history. In the mid twentieth century it was estimated that one in five Americans owned and displayed a Parrish print in their home.

Daybreak, 1922, Oil on canvas board, private collection of Robyn Gibson

More copies of  Daybreak have been sold than copies of  Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Give yourself a moment to really think about that. Despite this stunning popularity there is no real artifice in Parrish’s work. To paraphrase a famous article on Parrish, here  “kitsch meets the sublime.”

Even with the emergence and subsequent dominance of modern and abstract movements, Parrish remained popular until his death in the sixties. He was openly admired by almost everyone in the art world, and remains among the most popular artists selling today. I think he is held in such regard because of his purity. He did not pretend to a sense of irony. He considered what he did important, and he approached his task appropriately. He took himself seriously, and he presumed a level of responsibility unheard of today. When the paint on a mural he had painted for a patron began to deteriorate, he refused to charge her for a second, independent mural.

Sometimes I watch a movie or read a book and begin to feel uncomfortable before it is barely begun. The director or the writer is in a rush to assure me that he is somehow personally above what he is offering me. “I’m much hipper than this stuff I’m showing you,” he seems to say. And I want to grab him by the neck and snarl, “Well yes, almost everyone is, you silly little gob. You and your kind are all patination and no bronze. Give me something you care about or stop wasting my time.”

Maxfield Parrish cared deeply about what he did. Once upon a time he was the best selling artist in the world. Who knows? Maybe he still is. But whether he is or not doesn’t matter, because his approach to art proves something important.

It pays to give a damn.

The Lantern Bearers, 1908, Oil on canvas board, for Collier's Magazine, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, Bentonville, Arkansas