stumbling virtue

Wallflower

Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet. Yes, I know you know, but I have to caption just to be fair.

The first time I went to Paris, my friend and I made sure, like any good American tourists, that we went to the Louvre. Mostly we meandered through the galleries, trying to make sure we saw the museum's greatest hits. The greatest hit of all in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa, of course. We made our way into the room where it hangs, and there was a crowd about six people deep in front of the roped off picture. We got as close as we could, and looked at the painting. After a minute I turned to my roommate and said, "Well, it looks just like the postcard." And we left.

Famous paintings travel different routes through history. Some were immediate stars, some spent years being ignored until they were "discovered." If they become famous enough, they become prints, posters, postcards, and t-shirts, their ubiquity all but obscuring what once made them startling and different. Once avant-garde, now part of the furniture, these paintings, although quite well-known, can become lost again in our familiarity with them. 

Cynthia Saltzman tells about one such painting in The Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece. The painting of Dr. Gachet, a physician who was treating van Gogh for his various, unidentified ailments, was described by the artist as having "the heartbroken expression of our time." The painting has become famous for that expression, but to me, it seems more pensive than heartbroken (and ladies and gentlemen, I know my heartbreak). Then again, I know nothing about art.

One Woe Doth Tread Upon Another's Heel

I. Am. Miserable.

Just thought I'd mention.

Open Sesame

The original cast of Sesame Street. Groovy times.

Within the first few pages of Michael Davis's Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street, I was faced with a dilemma--should I quit on the book right now or plow on through to the end?

It's hard to decide whether to quit on a book or keep going. I always try to stick with even the most problematic book to the end, because I want to feel that I've given it a fair chance. In many cases, the decision to bail out is determined by how far I am into a book. If I'm more than halfway into it, I'll go on; if I'm within the first few chapters, I may give myself permission to walk out on it (though I'll still feel guilty).

I don't think the temptation to give up has ever come earlier than it did with that feeling I had on about page three of Davis's book. It was one sentenct that did it. I returned the book to the library, so I don't have the exact quote, but it was something to the effect of, "Sesame Street was born during a unique time when people with good jobs who lived in comfortable neighborhoods took an interest in people less fortunate than they were." I read the sentence over and over (the exact one, though the above is a pretty close rendition) with a sense of staggering disbelief--was Davis really suggesting that the late 1960s were the only time in American history when the upper middle class were involved in trying to improve the lot of their social inferiors? What about the progressive era of the late 19th/early 20th century? Or the abolitionist movement in the 19th century? The vanity and eternal self-congratulation of the Baby Boomer generation is both mind-boggling and awe-inspiring.

Super Pom

More pictures of my sister's painfully cute new dog. Yes, I am living vicariously (and enviously).

 

The camera loves me...

 

Rub my tummy, human servant.

Past Curfew

Spread the news, Mr. Revere.

The Rest is Silence

 

Hamlet and Horatio in the Cemetery, by Delacroix. My goodness, we don't look at all like this.

We did indeed open last night. No disasters. Actually, it seemed to go quite well; I think it clocked in around 2 hr 35 minutes (too bad we didn't start on time, sigh...), which for Hamlet is pretty good. I felt I could have been better, but isn't that always how it is? Hopefully I'll have pictures soon.

By the way, I named our skull "Frank." He claims to have been in a production with David Garrick in the 18th century--as an actor, of course. But I wouldn't listen to him. He looks like a liar.

The Romantics

 

Grasmere, because I must, I suppose.

After reading Adam Sisman's The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge I wrote that I thought Dorothy Wordsworth was one of the most interesting characters in the book and that I wanted to know more about her. I counted myself lucky, then, when I read an excellent review of Frances Wilson's The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth. I was wrong.  

First, a bit about Miss Wordsworth. The Wordsworth family's mother died when Dorothy was six and William seven. Dorothy was sent away to live with another relative and spent little time with her brothers until she was in her teens. When they did reunite, Dorothy and William formed an intense attachment and lived together for the rest of their lives, most famously making their home in England's Lake District. Even after William married Mary Hutchinson in 1802, Dorothy continued to be part of the household.

Most of what we know about Dorothy comes from "the Grasmere Journals." Dorothy began writing these small diaries in 1799, when she and William moved into Dove Cottage in Grasmere, and kept them until 1802, during the first year of William's marriage. Other information comes from the numerous letters Dorothy wrote to friends, both before and after, and the depictions of her from others, notably Thoma DeQuincey.The journals, though, have become an endless source of fascination because of the poems Wordsworth--and his then-close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge--composed during that period, with Dorothy as their seeming muse. Dorothy was a close observer of nature, and her journals' descriptions of what they saw on their long walks can be found verbatim in Wordsworth and Coleridge's poems. Coleridge hailed her extraordinary sensitivity, and everyone seemed to feel that somehow, in this small, thin woman with the "wild" eyes, there was the very essence of Romanticism.

At the Turn

 

Manet's The Railway confounded critics in 1873.

"He is the incontestable master of our epoch...amongst all of us, surely he is most certain to survive."

The French painter Eugene Delacroix wrote those words about Ernest Meissonier, the most popular, best-known, and highly paid artist of the mid-to-late nineteenth century. You might not have heard of Meissonier; few people have these days. You may, though, have heard of Edouard Manet. At the same time that Meissonier was at the height of his profession and one of the most highly regarded men in France, Manet's work was scorned and reviled by both critics and the public--people actually came to exhibits to laugh at his paintings because they were thought to be so bad. Yet now Manet is one considered one of the masters of French art, long having overshadowed his contemporary Meissonier. You might want to look at a Delacroix painting, but you wouldn't have wanted him to pick your lottery numbers.

In The Judgment of Paris, Ross King tells the story of the intersection of Meissonier and Manet's careers during the 1860s and early 1870s. The two artists are stand-ins for the changing of the guard in art, with Meissonier representing the classic Ecole des Beaux Arts school, with its emphasis on photorealism, grand historical scenes, and classical ideals of beauty. Manet is portrayed as the leader of the new wave of artists who valued expressions of meaning rather than precise technique, who favored scenes of modern life and real people over gods, goddesses, and a sanitized past.

The Time Is Out Of Joint

 

We tend to wear less clothes in our Hamlet.

We open on Thursday, but have been off this whole weekend; the confluence of holidays got the best of schedule making, so a strange break that you usually don't expect to get at this stage of a production. So I guess just some general notes.

Less Than Zero

 

Yeah, everyone's a superhero.

Have you ever been at a party, or maybe on a subway platform, and someone's talking to you, and you can't hear a word the person is saying, but you don't want to ask the person to talk louder, maybe because you already have or maybe because you're not that interested and just want the conversation over, so instead you just kind of half-smile and try to look vaguely interested, although not too intense, in case that might prompt the speaker to go on longer? You know what I mean, right? Okay, well, that's how I probably looked almost the entire time I was reading Charles Seife's Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.

(And if you think that my admitted puzzlement means this is going to be short, well, you're right. Okay, short by my standards...)