Hubris

A great two part interview with Maurice Sendak on the npr show bookworm.  It's generally a great show but this interview always picks me up when I'm feeling bad.  Who doesn't want to know how Sendak feels about Henry James?

Also Essa Pekka Salonen conducting The Rite of Spring.  I know for certain that I have posted this before but I listened to it again the other night and thought it bore another chance.  This is the first of nine parts, just click on the vid and the rest will present themselves.

I think its my favorite fucking piece of music

JD Salinger also died

Howard Zinn is dead.

In spite of some of his more sanctimonious followers he was a very important guy.

Even by Jim Woodring standards THIS is pretty amazing.

I almost cried

"Berg, of Hancock fame, was previously set to direct, but has decided to work on the forthcoming adaptation of board game Battleship instead."

You can't just carry a meerschaum around in your coat pocket!!!!

ok im already giving up

Beethoven makes it worth it.

Once in awhile the world gives you a gift.

Verily, pursue it yonder

2010 is already awesome...

Or is it awful?

I'm an interview junkie

Here is a great interview with David Simon, creator of The Wire. I finally got around to watching the whole series a couple weeks ago. What they accomplished is pretty totally amazing, but Deadwood is still my favorite for what I suppose are largely personal reasons.

Be warned that the interview does contain spoilers.

 I was talking to my friend Max last night for a couple hours and was reminded that I haven't checked out his art blog in awhile.  I just remedied the situation and jesus fuck has he gotten good.  He seems to have made that leap some cartoonists make from being merely excellent to being amazing.  Really great stuff.  You should check it out



The world needs a book of this stuff to exist inside of it.

 Is it possible that Synecdoche New York is the best American movie of the decade?  Much as I love There Will Be Blood?

It's not a particularly pleasant viewing experience, one might even call it a certain kind of harrowing, but Kaufman's obsessions with time, identity, and decay throw up the image of a man who in some ways is the mirror image of an America that's breaking down.  That probably isn't something that Kaufman had in mind but it does seem like the metaphor of the Hoffman character however personal and specific is in some ways universal to human experience and consciousness. The themes are so big and unwieldy that the movie is big and unwieldy but I for one love the big and unwieldy, beautiful uneven messes. 

Anyway, I don't even know if I'll ever see the thing again, it's fucking dark, and also particularly depressing for artists, but I think it might be, at the very least, the most artistically underrated movie in quite some time.  Yeah it's a big mess but it hits on something original and profound

Whatever, just throwing it out there.

I will post some drawings again someday I promise.

The great cartoonist David Levine has died.

The world is a better place without Oral Roberts.

It turns out that death does not exist.

This is a great relief to me because I am very afraid of death.

Google just informed me that it is Segar's birthday. The Popeye in the heading looks more Sagendorfy than Segary but what are you gonna do.

An interesting review of Crumb's Genesis by Robert Alter, (The fellow who did the translation that Crumb relied heavily on for his interpretation.)

Alter is an interesting guy in his own right, I recommend any interviews or lectures you might find with or by him on the interwebs. He sort of reminds one that the english versions of the bible are largely politically motivated, and/or just lousy.

I appreciate that the flaws he points out, are flaws that he seems to think are manifest in Crumbs style of comics, and not flaws in comics as an art form.

Anyway, food for thought.

"In a world where Zack Snyder is a visionary"

There has been a lot of writing on the internets about Anti Christ, the new Lars Van Trier movie, and its over the top hysterical fever dream style mutilations and violence. Having not seen it, and not having any interest in seeing it, I obviously can't exactly critique it specifically one way or another. BUT I can't help but notice that Anti Christ appears to be the latest entry, or perhaps just the codifying entry, in a series of very well made films that revolve around inhumanity and savage violence.

The cinema of brutality.

I'm not talking about the Saw films or the Hostel movies or what have you, because who gives a shit about that stuff anyway. I'm thinking of the recently released Bronson by Nicolas Winding Refn, Michael Haenke's recent American remake of Funny Games with Naomi Watts, and Gaspar Noe's ouvre (I had the misfortune of seeing about half of Irreversable a few years ago, and I'm still recovering) among others.

In the fifties, and sixties there was a hemorrhaging of great world film makers into the popular culture, there was Fellini, and Passolini, and Rosselini, Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, Antonioni, Visconti, Rivette, Tarkovsky, Bresson, Ozu, Mizoguchi, Bergman, Satyajit Ray and on and on. Some of them belonged to given schools or movements but in spite of this they generally made films that were all over the map. They were concerned with the human heart, human ambition, death, the poverty of pocket and soul. Each unspooled his subject with a touch and speed unique to his own character. If audiences found the films by these artists confrontational it was not necessarily because they were making any effort to confound, or offend it was because the audience never fit into the creative equation. They refused to engage audiences, and instead demanded that the audience engage with what they had created. When this engagement was successful it fused, artist, and viewer in a way that Hollywood pablum, no matter how entertaining, could not. The audience was let in on the process through the artists demand and in turn became a part of it.

I've always sort of thought that shock was the laziest form of audience engagement. Which is why I find the apparent rise of the cinema of brutality kind of troubling. Haenke, Von Trier, Noe, and Refn, are all ostensibly master craftsmen. That is to say that they know their lighting, their composition, their acting, their, pacing, and so forth. But if it's all to the end of punishing their audiences, as opposed to confronting them then I can't help but think something has really gone off the rails... Like Republican Party sized gone off the rails. I think I first started putting all this together when I was reading reports from some of the big film festivals this year. Cannes was apparently filled with art film horrors and the Toronto film festival was noted for its bleak offerings. Haenke won the Palm D'or for his White Ribbon, and Charlotte Gainsbourg won best actress for her role in Anti Christ (Von Trier himself was bizarrely awarded an "ad hoc" anti-award for most misogynist film). The reports tell of a mood of provocation at Cannes. The goal was to select films that disturb, and upset, to fuck up bourgeois notions of a comfortable experience of art. Fine, but to disturb, and upset, and provoke, these are means to ends, not ends in themselves, and I would argue that nothing is more bourgeois, and hollow, and superficial than an artist who makes this error. I also think I'm not falling back on my bourgeois sensibilities just because I don't want to watch a woman cut off her vaginal lips with a pair of scissors (Which occurs in Anti Christ.) Who knows though, maybe I'm wrong about that.

Then there is that movie Precious that Oprah got made about the obese black teenager from the ghetto who has been pregnant multiple times by her own father. This may be something else. Maybe there is a fine line between the cinema of brutality and socially responsible filmmaking. Bronson has been compared to A Clock Work Orange, but there is a reported disparity in the content. Clockwork is a highly stylized meditation on the nature of evil, in a society that relies on evil to reflect it's "positive" acts. And Bronson appears to be a highly stylized meditation about a crazy man acting weird and beating people up. Anyway, I don't plan to see Precious either, but one gets the sense that while it is no doubt a punishing film, the hearts of the makers are "in the right place" and that they are trying to put a genuinely troubling American story on display, and not merely pandering to their own depressive fantasies.

I don't want movies to be sunshine and rainbows, I've made no secret of my love of Bergman's best films, but there is a poetry in Bergman that transcends his technique. Cries and Whispers for example is not the most pleasurable of movie going experiences, but we watch the artist deftly peel back layers of experience from its opaque opening scenes, until, by the end, we are part of the pulsing core of the thing. It contains scenes that repulse, and nearly terrify but at the end it's not those feelings that linger. We may be exhausted but we are not beaten.

I don't have a problem per se with nihilism either. Bergman's Shame ends in an almost comically bleak manner, but the world of the film has been so honest and rich up to that moment that the end, instead of being simply incongruous, causes the viewer to reflect on just what it is he is doing with his life anyway. And again, there is poetry, resonate images that do not bludgeon, but instead throw their fingers back into our brains to feel the creases. Isn't nihilism in art almost always instructive anyway? King Lear? Requiem For A Dream? Even artists who think themselves genuine nihilists probably aren't because they can't help the fact that their work exists in a context that gives it meaning whether they like it or not.

Why am I so worked up about this? I guess I'm just worried about the death of the art film. I have a feeling that it, like America, is destroying itself from within. I'm worried that content is going away. I'm also a notorious alarmist so I dunno. Still though, these are the films that the world cinematic community want to take seriously?

Writing this has actually made me realize how ignorant I actually am of the current state of world cinema. I know there are great sensitive poetic films out there and I have no idea what any of them are because they are tilled under by the cinema of brutality which wins awards and recognition. There is almost something fundamentalist in its credo, we must trust that the punishment is good for us. Pleah.

All this from a guy who is about to draw the most unsparing torture scene in the history of comics.

"Good Joke"

WTF

“I made Eeyore a little more proactive so he's not the victim all the time"?

UGH!!!!