Posted on: November 16, 2011
Melancholia, by Lars Von Trier
Melancholia is Lars Von Trier’s conflicted ode to German Romanticism, Wagner, Depression and life itself. It starts off with one of the most beautiful openings of any movie I’ve seen in recent times, with Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde merging with stunning, slow motion images. They look like paintings come to life, moving incredibly slowly, awakening to new shocks, new horrors.
The beginning prefigures the end beyond the usual trajectory of Hollywood films. It in fact gives away that ending in the first few minutes. But we don’t care. Because the journey is everything, and we don’t even mind that this is a cliché. Coming full circle seems poetic and right, and circles dominate the night and day skies.…
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Posted on: November 8, 2011
Georges de La Tour’s Magdelen and the Smoking Flame. 1640
I’ve always been fascinated with high contrast. Baroque painters, building on the legacy left them by Da Vinci, among other Italian Renaissance heroes, experimented with cast light and its effects in a way not yet seen before the 17th century. The best of them was Caravaggio, and he had many followers, among them one Georges de La Tour.
The painting above is a meditation on mortality, on life, on death, on the miracles one witnesses with or without a messiah in the picture. It is one of La Tour’s finest, and shows a tremendous growth from his early, rather clumsy and derivative work. In this painting he demonstrates his mastery of shadow and light, of the human figure and the drama a simple candle can create.…
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Posted on: November 4, 2011
The Civil Wars — Poison and Wine
Just bumped into this duo on, of all places, Paul Krugman’s blog. They are truly gifted and harmonize together as if they were born to follow each others voices up and down musical scales. To get a stronger sense of that, it’s necessary to hear them sing a wide range of songs, and listen to them more than once. Their richness grows on you. It fills empty spaces with the unsaid, with an echo of tradition, a hint of two or three or twenty worlds.
Joy Williams and John Paul White met in Nashville in 2008, and released their first album in February of this year. She’s from California; he’s from Alabama. Their music is a beautiful conflict of culture and ideas.…
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