Cultural News

New movie to look at the life of Peggy Guggenheim
-The film, by art advisor Eleanor Cayre and Emmy Award-winning producer Nikki Silver, is expected to begin production in 2012

New York-based art advisor Eleanor Cayre has partnered with Nikki Silver, the Emmy Award-winning producer of On Screen Entertainment, to make a movie about the life of collector Peggy Guggenheim, whose birthday was celebrated last week.

Past Cayre projects include the Art Basel Miami Beach exhibition, ‘The Station’, 2008, in which she teamed up with former Whitney curator Shamim Momin and artist Nate Lowman to display the work of 40 artists, including Ryan McGinley, Ed Ruscha and Rita Ackermann.

"I have always been fascinated with Peggy's collection and life story,” said Cayre of the art world maven. “She was an eccentric figure who not only championed, but also had intimate relationships with some of the most creative minds in modern art history.”

The film, which is still untitled, is expected to begin production in 2012.

-The Art Newspaper

Quote of the Day

"Wise wretch! with pleasures too refined to please,
With too much spirit to be e'er at ease,
With too much quickness ever to be taught,
With too much thinking to have common thought:
You purchase pain with all that joy can give,
And die of nothing but a rage to live."


— Alexander Pope

Art of the Day

Albrecht Durer
"Turf"

Literary Pick (****)

Birthday Letters
-Ted Hughes





















In this collection of poems by Ted Hughes, one only gathers glimpses of what his relationship with Sylvia Plath was like. Each poem is slightly obscure yet enjoyable. In these writings one gets the sense that Plath was unstable and emotionally unpredictable. I'm sure she was, given the nature in which she died, but you can also sense Hugh's egoism, superior-lism and control. There is a sense of deflected responsibility on his part in blaming Plath's instability on the death of her father. Ted martyrizes himself to the reader.
The poems are effortless and smooth. "woody" feels like a right word to use to describe them.

Poetry

Drawing

Drawing calmed you. Your poker infernal pen
Was like a branding iron. Objects
Suffered into their new presence, tortured
Into final position. As you drew
I felt released, calm. Time opened
When you drew the market at Benidorm.
I sat near you, scribbling something.
Hours burned away. The stall-keepers
Kept coming to see you had them properly.
We sat on those steps, in our rope-soles,
And were happy. Our tourist novelty
Had worn off, we knew our own ways
Through the town's runs. We were familiar
Foreign objects. When he's sold his bananas
The banana seller gave us a solo
Violin performance on his banana stalk.
Everybody crowded to praise your drawing.
You drew doggedly on, arresting details,
Till you had the whole scene imprisoned.
Here it is. You rescued for ever
Our otherwise lost morning. Your patience,
Your lip-gnawing scowl, got the portrait
Of a market-place that still slept
In the Middle Ages. Just before
It woke and disappeared
Under the screams of a million summer migrants
And the cliff of dazzling hotels. As your hand
Went under Heptonstall to be held
By endless darkness. While my pen travels on
Only two hundred miles from your hand,
Holding this memory of your red, white-spotted bandanna,
Your shorts, your short-sleeves jumper-
One of the thirty I lugged around Europe-
And your long brown legs, propping your pad,
And the contemplative calm
I drank from your concentrated quiet,
In this contemplative calm
Now I drink from your stillness that neither
Of us can disturb or escape.


-Ted Hughes (Birthday Letters)

Flourish Design + Style

The Neo-traditionalist

Keen


Sabbespot

Literary Pick (***)

Brideshead Revisited

-Evelyn Waugh

I began reading this book not knowing anything about it and the reason I chose it was because it kept resurfacing as a essential read on many Goodreads members lists. Since my goal is to hopefully read most, if not all highly regarded pieces of literature, I decided to give it a shot.

The prologue concerned me immediately. It reminded me of A Farewell To Arms, not a novel I particularly enjoyed. Also, when I started reading the first chapter it changed themes so drastically that I felt I was going to have issues with visualization, which normally happens to be the main reason I stop enjoying a book. If I have trouble visualizing scenes, themes and characters the story is usually a bust. I mean, who wouldn't need a little assistance visualizing a full grown man driving around with a teddy bear? Then this book went from having a semblance of Farewell to Arms to shades of The Great Gatsby... and I didn't enjoy The Great Gatsby at all either You should read my review for that one!). I was also having a little bit of trouble following the narration, and since I was only on chapter one, I felt discouraged. I didn't plan on abandoning it so I went online to do a bit of research to help familiarize myself with it's theme. I came across a movie clip of Brideshead Revisited (with Jeremy Irons) which I've never seen nor heard of before, and upon viewing a few minutes of it I got the visual I needed.

First of all, anything Jeremy Irons is in works for me, so it was very easy for me to imagine it's style, theme and mannerism.

It is one of those books you have to read carefully and pay close attention to at the beginning because it starts off unclear and complex, but the more I read it, the more I got into it, and I became quickly absorbed by the anxiety of Sebastian's drinking problem and all the family drama that followed thereafter. Other than that, the story is amazingly told. I think Waugh is one of the best writers I've experienced. Not since Nabokov has another writer been able to stimulate me so.

I could tell this book would be much better the second time around. I enjoyed how it challenged me at the beginning and I think Waugh's writing is beautifully succinct. There was nothing excessive about his style at all. It was perfect for it's subject matter. The story matched the tone of writing exquisitely.

I loved the way Waugh described the ship scene with the passengers becoming sea-sick. I don't think anyone else could have pulled it off in such a way that would've made me enjoy it so much.

This is the reason why I don't like giving up on books, because you never know which is going to capture you. I look forward to re-reading this one again down the road.

I don't know why this book seems to teeter between 3-4 stars to me..I feel like there's a lot of room to enjoy it even further with more reads.

Botanical Brouhaha

Tracery Designs

Literary Pick (****)

Married To Tolstoy -Cynthia Asquith


 

Quote of the Day

“I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.”
-William S. Burroughs

Literary Pick (**)

The Divine Comedy 
-Dante Alighieri

I once read a biography on Modilgiani (one of my favorite artists) where it stated that his favorite piece of literature was The Divine Comedy. He use to walk around quoting Dante all day long, to the point of being annoying to his colleagues. Other artists and writers would look at him and be like "God, don't you have a life?". For some reason he seemed to have a deep connection to this work, and It's a funny coincidence that one of the women in Modilgiani's life was also named Beatr...more 




I once read a biography on Modilgiani (one of my favorite artists) where it mentioned that his favorite piece of literature was The Divine Comedy. Apparently he use to walk around quoting Dante all day long, to the point of being utterly annoying to his friends and colleagues. Other artists and writers would look at him and be like, "God, don't you have a life?!". For some reason he seemed to have had a deep connection to this work. Also, It's a funny coincidence that one of the women in Modilgiani's life was also named Beatrice, just like the seraph who guides Dante through the later part of his journey.
Since I was a child I've always had a morbid curiosity about the tortures and torments of hell and evil. I remember the first time I heard the story of Jim Jones, I cried. I was terribly upset and terrified. It was horrifying to learn that forms of evil could exist so close to us, mortals, here on earth. Aside from that traumatizing childhood experience, my father use to have a collection of vintage saint illustrations, and I came across this collection when I was about 6 years old, and in these illustrations were depictions of angelic images who were tortured and tormented by unseen evil forces. There always seemed to be an evil form trying to pull them down into hell, as the saints gazed upwardly with their eyes pleading for mercy from the God above. These are the kinds of images that sparked a curiosity that made me want to tackle a massive masterpiece such as this one.
I prepared a lot for The Divine Comedy before actually reading it (about a year). I found a mint condition copy in a used bookstore and snatched it up immediately. Personally, the translation was a bit tough for me, fortunately I had familiarized myself enough with it's theme before attempting to read it and felt I had a pretty good understanding of what is what about, so that helped a lot.
Finally, one of the things that attracted me to The Divine Comedy was the fact that Dante put the people he disliked through different stages of hell, which I think was brilliant in and of itself. There are a couple of people I too strongly dislike (hate) who I wish to see burn in several layers of hell as well. I've come to terms with the fact that I am not benevolent enough to forgive the wrongs and trespasses of others. I can't say I've reached that level of enlightenment in my life, and to be quite frank, I don't know if I ever will. However, I know that Dante himself ultimately reaches this point of spiritual enlightenment during his journey, and I was hoping that by the end of the book some of it could have rubbed off on me, but I'm afraid that didn't quite happen. My main issue with The Divine Comedy is that I had problems with visualization and imagery. In my minds eye I wasn't able to see or feel his experiences through these phases of afterlife. Perhaps if I had read a better translation I could have appreciated it more. I do however appreciate the work as a concept. The funny thing is that every now and then I'll come across brilliant passages or quotes from this book and wonder why I don't remember coming across  them while I was actually reading the book. I definitely have to re-visit this one again.

Literary Pick (***)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
-James Joyce

I honestly didn't know what to expect from Joyce. I've added and removed Ulysses from my to-reads list too many times to count. So here I compromised and decided to start off with "A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man" to get a general sense of the flavor of Joyce's work before I would dare attempt Ulysses. I began reading this book slowly and cautiously. I felt like if I wasn't careful I could reach a point in the book where I could get irrecoverably lost, and that's exactly what eventually ended up happening.
I don't enjoy reading books just for the sake of reading them, so it was important for me to get involved in all topics that involved this novel. However, when I reached chapter 5, I was lost in the discussion of beauty and aesthetic theory. I decided to cheat a little and consult sparknotes, but it turned out to be a topic that was over my head. The shame is that up until that point I was really enjoying the book. My favorite part was when the priest preached about eternal damnation. I think that's one of the best sections of literature I've ever read in my life. In fact, a while back I had printed a piece on my blog that Umberto Eco had copied in his book "On Ugliness" by St. Alphonsus Liguori, called "Preparation for Death", and I remember thinking how similar it was to the preachers' sermon, and sure enough, later in the chapter it mentioned that Stephen Dadelus often referred to another work which was also written by Ligouri. So that was pretty cool since I always wondered if I would ever read anything similar to that piece again.
Another funny coincidence is that at the same time I was reading "Portrait", I was also reading The Divine Comedy, so I was getting a pretty unhealthy dose of the perils of hell. I have to admit, that piece about hell in Portrait has left such an impression on me. Now I understand what people mean when they talk about the catholic guilt-trip.
Anyway...at least I got some enjoyment out of the book even if the end wasn't exactly to my liking. I think Joyce is an amazing writer. I just wish he was more approachable. I still plan on reading Ulysses someday... although I'm in no rush to read it anytime soon.