Home » 2024 (Page 2)

Yearly Archives: 2024

In the Shadow of (Male) Genius

Posted on by | Leave a comment

French Sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943)

The 19th century was not a good time for a female artist of genius to enter the orbit of an older male genius. Can one ever escape that orbit? The above photo was taken of Camille Claudel at the age of nineteen, when she started working in Auguste Rodin’s sculpture studio.

Now there is no doubt that Rodin was one of the greatest sculptors who ever lived. I visited his museum on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris over twenty years ago. In fact, there was a whole room dedicated to the work of his young protegée.

But she deserved more. Today, I visited the Getty Center, where there was a traveling exhibit of Camille Claudel’s sculpture. Seen by itself, it was nothing short of amazing.

“The Age of Maturity” (1902)

There is something particularly poignant about Claudel’s female nudes. I was particularly struck by the pleading figures such as the nude in “The Age of Maturity” (above). Another impressive nude appears below:

“Wounded Niobid” (1907)

There was also something wounded about poor Camille. Around the time of the above sculpture, she appeared to be suffering from mental illness. In fact, in 1913, her younger brother, the famous French author Paul Claudel, had her committed to an insane asylum, where she lived out the last thirty years of her life. Was she in fact mentally ill? Some say yes and some say no. In any case, it is a tragedy considering what a great artist she was.

In 1988, a film of her life called Camille Claudel was made in France by Bruno Nuytten, starring the lovely Isabelle Adjani as Camille. When I first saw it years ago, that was the first time I had heard of her. Now, with this exhibit at the Getty Center, I think she is one of the all time greatest sculptors whose work I have ever seen.

Tolstoy on the 2024 Election

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Well, of course Tolstoy did not write anything about our upcoming presidential election, but what he said back over 125 years ago can still resonate with Americans today. Below is an excerpt from his diary entry for February 7, 1895.

The situation of the majority of people educated in true brotherly love and now oppressed by the deceit and cunning of those who wield power and who force the majority to ruin their own lives—this situation is terrible and seems to offer no way out. Only two ways out present themselves and both are barred: one is to break violence by violence, terror, dynamite bombs and daggers as our nihilists and anarchists did, to smash the conspiracy of governments against peoples, without our participation; the other is to enter into agreement with the government, make concessions to it and, by taking part in it, gradually unravel the net which holds the people fast and free it….

Dynamite and daggers, as experience shows us, only provoke reaction and destroy the most valuable power, the only power in our control—public opinion; the other way out is barred by the fact that governments have already come to know how far to tolerate the participation of people who want to reform them. They only tolerate what doesn’t destroy the essentials, and are very sensitive about what is harmful to them, sensitive because it concerns their very existence. They do tolerate people who don’t agree with them and want to reform the government, not only to satisfy the demands of these people, but also for their own sakes, for the sake of the government. These people would be dangerous for governments if they remained outside these governments and rose up against them; they would strengthen the one weapon which is stronger than governments—public opinion—and so they need to make these people safe, win them over by means of concessions made by the government, render them harmless like microbe cultures—and then use them to serve the aims of governments, i.e., the oppression and exploitation of the people.

Both ways out are firmly and impenetrably barred. What then remains? You can’t break violence by violence—you increase reaction; nor can you join the ranks of government. Only one thing remains: to fight the government with weapons of thought, word and way of life, not making concessions to it, not joining its ranks, not increasing its power oneself.

From Ghoulardi to Rollergirl

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Heather Graham as Rollergirl in Boogie Nights

She’s an attractive young star in the stable of go-to actresses around Burt Reynold’s porn studio in the 1970s and 1980s. Called Rollergirl because she never takes off her inline skates, even during sex, she helps to recruit Mark Wahlberg by seducing him in the nightclub where he works as a bus boy. She is an intriguing presence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Boogie Nights (1997).

Decades before the film was made, the director’s father, Ernie Anderson, was a big star on WJW-TV, Channel 8 in Cleveland. He played a character named Ghoulardi who hosted horror films between 1963 and 1966. In between scenes of the films he showed, he made fun of Cleveland¹s Polish population with their polkas and white socks and flamingo lawn ornaments, and particularly when they lived in the southwestern suburb of “PAHR-ma?” His catch phrases were “turn blue” and “stay sick.”

If you were a teenager in Cleveland during the 1860s, you watched Ghoulardi and adopted his mannerisms the next Monday in the school cafeteria.

One final note: If you watched reruns of the Carol Burnett Show, you may recall that in the opening scene, when Carol comes out on stage to answer questions from the audience, she occasionally gave a call-our to Ernie Anderson, who was a frequent member of the studio audience. Ernie typically smiled and gave a little wave to acknowledge. That was Ghoulardi, who had come to Los Angeles and served a number of years as announcer for the show after Lyle Waggoner had left.

It’s a long way from horror films in Cleveland in the 1960s to his son’s explicit study of the emerging L.A. porn scene filmed in 1997.

My Cities: Cleveland

Posted on by | Leave a comment

This is the first in a series of posts on cities where I have lived or traveled to or even just yearned to visit. It is natural that I begin with the city in which I was born, namely, Cleveland, Ohio. Once I left to go to college in 1962, my visits have all involved school vacations, family visits, or family funerals. In the 1960s, Cleveland was a city that was going nowhere. Jobs were vanishing, particularly from what had once been a healthy industrial base.

And, to make matters worse, my parents’ marriage seemed to be coming apart, after almost twenty years. (Fortunately, it never did.) Nonetheless, I didn’t want to stick around for the escalating nastiness.

So when, during a family truce, my folks drove me to the wilds of New Hampshire, I was already not planning ever to return to Cleveland unless I had to. It was only when I wound up in Los Angeles to attend grad school that Mom and Dad realized that I would never again live in the family home on Lawndale Drive.

Yet after almost half a century on the West Coast, I no longer have any negative feelings about Cleveland and the monster that, according to Seymour Krebs of “Dobie Gillis” fame, devoured it. On the other hand, there is no longer any reason for me to go there. My mother and father have both passed on (in 1998 and 1985 respectively), and my brother now lives in the Coachella Valley of California. My uncle and aunt are no more, and my cousin Emil is also gone. The only remaining members of my family are my cousin Peggy and her three daughters—but I was never particularly close to them as I was to Emil.

Cleveland has some wonderful museums, a world-class symphony orchestra, and some top-notch colleges and universities. But lost forever is the Hungarian neighborhood that helped nurture me—all moved to the distant suburbs and become deracinated.

Morning

Posted on by | Leave a comment

The following short poem from William Blake’s MS. book and is typical of his best work early in his career (around 1800-1903).

Morning

To find the Western path
Right thro’ the Gates of Wrath
I urge my way.
Sweet Mercy leads me on.
With soft repentant moan
I see the break of day.

The war of swords & spears
Melted by dewy tears
Exhales on high.
The Sun is freed from fears
And with soft grateful tears
Ascends the sky.

Hats Off to Eddie Muller!

Posted on by | Leave a comment

Turner Classic Movies (TCM) Host Eddie Muller

Most every Saturday around 9 PM Pacific Time, I turn on the television to watch the “Noir Alley” show on TCM hosted by the amiable Eddie Muller. He is one of the reigning experts on film noir, which he defined in an interview hosted by the World Literature Today website as:

A noir story is about people who know what they’re doing is wrong, and they do it anyway. And, typically, there’s hell to pay. We love watching them break the law; we love watching them reap the consequences.

Although in the interview, he is talking about literature, one can easily see how that translate into film. Just think of such Hollywood films as John Huston¹s The Maltese Falcon (1941); Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944); Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946); Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947); and Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The genre reached its apogee during the 1940s and 1950s.

Yesterday, Eddie outdid himself. He introduced two great noir films produced in Argentina. However tired I was, I stayed up late to watch two masterpieces by Carlos Hugo Christensen (1914-1999): Never Open That Door (No abras nunca esa puerta) and If I Should Die Before I Wake (Si muero antes de despertar). Both films were produced in 1952.

I particularly liked If I Should Die Before I Wake, a film about a child killer which even today might run into censorship problems. A son of a Buenos Aires detective finds himself identifying and running to ground a child molester who had kidnapped a female classmate whom he had befriended. It’s even more exciting than Fritz Lang’s classic M (1931) with Peter Lorre on the same subject.

By the way, if you want to read a really good book about film noir, I highly recommend Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (New York: Running Press, 2021).

What I’m about to say may be counted as heresy, but I think these films out-Hitchcock Hitchcock. Apparently, there is more than one master of suspense, and I am grateful to Eddie Muller for screening these two subtitled films.

Bad Food

Posted on by | 2 Comments

Want to Live a Short Life?

If one looks at what Americans eat, it’s easy to be pessimistic about their health. Scads of fatty fast foods kept on the edge of acceptability by strange petrochemicals, gallons of super-sweet brightly colored beverages, loads of sugar and salt in everything—it’s not a happy prospect.

On Memorial Day weekend, Martine and I went to a Greek festival in the San Fernando Valley. We were shocked to find that, within a short few years, the ability of the church kitchen volunteers to produce good Greek food has declined precipitately. I’ve always loved fried calamari, but what I got was super thin slices of calamari with heavy, slightly burnt breading.

Go to the supermarket, and you will find whole aisles of what purports to be food and is all to frequently of low or no nutritional value. And that is what tends to predominate in the shopping carts of the people in line in front of me. It appears that more and more people are buying prepared food and not bothering to put ingredients together in the kitchen and cook them.

I think that the Covid epidemic is partly responsible. Curiously, it had the opposite effect on me. I started cooking more—and enjoying it more! The only unfortunate thing is that Martine and I are heading in different directions insofar as food is concerned. No matter, I think it’s important to compromise so that, in the long haul, we both get what we want.

Back Online

Posted on by | Leave a comment

I am finally back online. Although I have some sixty years of computer experience, I am not much of a do-it-yourself systems man. My friends who are spend great gobs of time in frustrating attempts to make their computers work. I find it easier to hire a professional, who also happens to be my friend.

The reason my blog was down so long was that my friend was in high demand by his big clients. But in the end, he came through with a new computer that was custom configured to use Microsoft Windows 11 as if it were an earlier version of the system, so I wouldn¹t have to spend so much time reacting to every new major release.

In the end, it would have taken twice as long—amid great frustration—to do it all myself. In the end, it may well even have cost more, as I could take advantage of his professional discounts.

The Paprika Connection

Posted on by

Otto’s Hungarian Deli in Burbank

Things were starting to get serious. I was running out of Hungarian paprika, and my supplier of füstölt kolbász (smoked Hungarian sausage) had gone out of business months ago. Normally, I am not a big fan of what I call Eurochow, but in the case of Hungarian cuisine I make an exception.

In Greek mythology, there is a character named Antaeus, who would “challenge all passers-by to wrestling matches and remained invincible as long as he remained in contact with his mother, the earth.” Likewise, I have to remain in contact with my Hungarian roots. Plus, unlike me, Martine is a hardened carnivore; and Hungarian cuisine is definitely a cuisine for carnivores.

On Saturday, Martine and I drove out to Burbank, where, in the middle of a residential block, sits Otto’s Hungarian Import Store and Deli. We used to go there more frequently, but lately Martine has been reluctant to go on long drives due to a pinched nerve in her back.

Fortunately, Otto’s had some good kolbász and big jars of Szegedi and Kalocsai sweet Hungarian paprika. And since Martine had been such a good sport about coming along, I got her some dobos torte and dios baigli.