Stone Pilgrim

2003-06-30T22:00:00.000-04:00

It's hard to believe it's been so long since I've been a blogging. I'm just now getting my balance back since a lot of personal stuff took over.
Went to Boston last week and spent the AM in Forest Hills cemetery. It's a lovely place, a Victorian Garden Cemetery filled with beautiful memorial sculptures and famous old bodies like Eugene O'Neill and ee cummings. I don't go to cemeteries for the memories (thanks, anyway...), but for the art. Forest Hills realizes that there are plenty of people like me and it now features a sculpture trail in which contemporary artists get to install their stuff around the grounds. Each piece has something to do with death and/or memory.
http://www.foresthillstrust.org/path_intro.html
The idea was grand, though there were plenty typically ill-concieved pieces along the trail. The most effective, I thought, were the ghost gowns hanging in trees (schlocky at first, but they were haunting and they did stick with you), a woman peering over a low wall in back of some graves and a group of asian influenced forms in a field in the back of the cemetery.

2003-06-20T14:42:00.000-04:00

I went hunting statues today for the documentary. I was just about to leave Colt State Park when the statue of John Chaffee (former Senator from RI) came into view. It's an unpretentious thing. The figure is caught in the act of striding toward yet another appointment. It reminded me a lot of the John F Kennedy at the State House in Boston. But what really made me stop to shoot it (with the camera) was the fact that I had read an article just the other day about it. It seems that Chafee's wife likes to go to this place and be with him. He seems so real to her. Far more than sitting on a grave and talking to the dirt. And his aide said he likes to go behind the piece, because that's the way he mostly saw Chaffee- chasing after him. I took pictures from behind and closeups of the worn shoes, a point both aide and wife remarked on as being remarkable lifelike. It made me think of how wonderful it would be to have a lifelike cast (even if it were considerably less than life size) of all of our dead relatives. Touching them, talking to them, at a graveyard could be so much more satisfying that talking to a stone. Of course, the tradition of putting a picture into the stone would work as well. Against my will, I'm being drawn more and more to cemeteries and their art...

2003-06-14T09:40:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I saw a new French film called "The Housekeeper". It was about a recently divroced older man who hires a young girl as housekeeper and falls in love more or less. The reason that it worked so well was that it was really a study of loneliness and what people do to counteract it. The man, obviously, was lonely and his life, shown in a series of vaguely connected episodes (going to a jazz club, shopping for groceries, working) was aimless and flat. The housekeeper's life wasn't really shown except insofar as it interacted with his. She really had no life of her own, which seems to have been the point. But she was the one who initiated and moved the relationship along. Each movement was her idea. And, it was obvious, she was moving not out of any real feeling, but as a way to combat boredom. Somehow a romance would pierce the solid ennui that surrounded her. Otherwise, she watched vacuous TV and listened to radio- both loudly enough to drown and numb her own feelings and/or thoughts. He, on the other hand, had enough of a life to be able to read or sit quietly. The ending was predictable. He, who responded dreamlike to her advances, began to drift into some sort of feeling, and she, looking for more excitement, moves on.

2003-06-12T15:51:00.000-04:00

I went to a lecture today on the use of sculpture in gardens. The speaker was actually addressing private garden sculpture, but the theories between that and public sculpture obviously bleed into each other. The big lessons I learned was that a garden is no spot for small works. They need to be large scale, even if the garden is small. it makes sense, because even if the immediate vicinity is cramped, it is set against the sky, nature and the unvierse. it's no spot for dainty devices. Maybe that's why garden gnomes are so irritating (aside from the fact that they're downright UGLY!). They're little and don't belong in a garden, except with slugs and snails, who have the good grace to blend in with their surroundings. Another point the speaker made was that modern (read, abstract) large pieces require empty spaces. They don't do well among flowers and hedges and trees as a rule. They need to dominate an empty-ish landscape. I'm not sure why this is true, but I suspect it's because of the scale of abstraction. It simply elbows out the "real" world and demands to be noticed. This, I think, can be seen as a weakness, rather than a strength.

2003-06-11T18:17:00.000-04:00

I'm fascinated by the history of public sculpture. It's not just the work itself (which can sometimes be fairly boring), but the stories around it, the way it reacts to its world and its world reacts to it, that intrigue me. For example, when the Declaration of Independence was first read in NYC, the listeners were so inflamed that they tore down an equestrian statue of George III and smashed it into pieces. The shrapnel were sent to CT to be melted into bullets. In return, the British soldiers toppled the William Pitt (champion of the colonies' rights). In France during WWII, the Vichy Government destroyed many of the bronze statues of the Enlightenment. They told the people that they were to be used for the farmers, but everyone knew they were going to foundaries to feed German guns. The photographs that were taken of the process were like seeing death camps in operation. And just last year, a theatre producer in London decapitated Maggie Thatcher's statue for political reasons. When he was brought to trial, the jury was hung due to questions of motivation. I love this stuff!

2003-06-09T10:16:00.000-04:00

FREE Counter

2003-06-08T22:36:00.000-04:00

I spent yesterday searching the byroads of Rhode Island for War Memorials for my new doc. A lot of them are plaque on a rock stuff, but there are a lot of granite soldiers in vairous poses, mostly straight and ready. In the 1890's one woman sculptor was asked what she thought of modern men's garments and she replied that they were ugly, certainly for sculpting. She longed for the retun of tighter fittting clothes, knee breeches, etc. that were easier to model. I filmed some Civil War soldiers on posts and found their coats, split backs and neat uniforms to be somehow graceful and appealing. There was a certain flow, a certain "fitness to what they wore. They surely held their attractiveness to me 140 years later.

2003-06-02T21:12:00.000-04:00

Just got back from a few days in Florida for a family wedding. On the last day there, we drove into downtown St. Petersburgh to drop my sister's friend off at her apartment. I'd never been downtown before and was eager to see what kind of public sculpture they had. Since outdoor statues are my passion, I've come to view any trip to a city (any city) as a safari. I've learned to spot the sculptures' natural habitats. I can spot a potential watering holes from blocks away. Even when others drift by unseeing, I'll usually notice a flash of metal, a curve of stone behind a tree. Near a pond. Atop a fountain. At the entrance to a driveway. We moved through the evening light slowly. I spotted prime nesting territory. Wide lawns surrounded by hedges. Public buildings with open areas surrounding them. Nothing. I began to doubt my skill. The only sculptures I saw were the ubiquitous dolphin mailbox holders. Three blocks from my sister's house there was a front yard full of tacky statues, garden gnome ugly, but in such profusion and color that I was swept away. It was a mating ground of statues, small universe of the sculpted. Now that I'm home, the home page that listed the art work of St Pete's, is back up. There are some really haunting pieces, like the one outside the holocaust museum, the Pleasures of Dolphins in neon and the Fleet security Lizard. Las ttime I go on Safari without a guide...

2003-05-26T12:35:00.000-04:00

I'm in a Spanish/ Latin American reading loop these days. Garcia Lorca for drama and poetry, Vargas Llosa for prose. I do love both of them. Perhaps it's my Catholic upbringing that sees nothing unusual about entwining the mudane and the mystical. I loved Llosa's words in War of the End of the World- "His voice was persuasive; it reached a person's soul without passing by way of his head". I've noticed that the new Japanese writers I really enjoy like Banana Yoshimoto and Haruki Murakami employ the same balance of the surreal. It goes without saying that Lorca is the master, though he does at time seem to drown me in it all and I'm conufsed, adrift, and slightly angry at not being able to grab anything solid in the wreckage of reason. I wonder if all of this is a reaction to my last major literary passsion, Zola, master realist. I still love his work. He creates the most involving worlds of any writers I've read. There is no surface, all depth, all identification. But he requires an antidote after six or seven of his novels. I will, prehaps, return full force after a year or so wallowing in the magical realists.

2003-05-25T10:17:00.000-04:00

Saw the moive "Dinner Rush" for the 4th time last night, this time after I'd actually had a big Italian meal. It was the first time I haven't been ready to eat the pillows by the end of the film. What I can't understand is why this film didn't have a bigger impact at the box office. Ture, it was popular on the festival circuit a couple of years ago, but that was aobut it. I can hardly find any reviews... The storyline was so well crafted and the script so layered that everyone I know who's seen it feels as I do. They can watch it several times before it begins to drag. The key word here is SUBTLETY! I don't think I know of nay other movies of this genre that have this complexity and satisfaction. Thank god for videos.

2003-05-24T17:22:00.000-04:00

Just saw a fashion show by the students at RISD, one of tghe nation's top design school. It was so energizing, using everything from jigsaw puzzle pieces to grey muted silk for the designs. The students' imagination wasn't staggering (I think it's hard to think outside the box when the walls of that same container have been exploded so many times before). But the energy was there and that was worth everything. Dress designing the art follows the rules, I think, of all other disciplines and media. One of the most interesting designers said that she thought there were enough beautiful dresses in the world that she didn't have to make any more. What she wanted to do was to make a fashion statement that would make the buyer think about those who made the clothes- the sweatshops, the factories, the animals... Like most political art, it was dicey and marginal, not particularly good at one or the other. But her attempt was inspiring.

2003-05-18T09:47:00.000-04:00

One of the things that struck me most about yesterday's tour was the imagination it required. We saw the James' home (now intact but moved from its original site), part of LaFarge's (his best friend) studio (now moved from its original spot), heard James's thoughts on his ferry ride from Jamestown, etc. They all required that we enter into a memory mode and see what wasn't there, that which was and is now gone, etc. The only exception to that rule was the Congregational church decorated by LaFarge, and with those decorations still extant. Anyone could walk in the same spots and not know about the history, which is transient, ephemeral. That's what attracts me so about public sculpture. When we read about encounters with Boston Garden's Washington or the skullduggery that surrounded Anne Whitney's Sumner, we can see the things themselves. Eyes long dead saw what we're seeing. We don't have to imagine. We can touch history. We can see the stimulus for other people's accounts.

2003-05-17T15:28:00.000-04:00

I went on a literary tour of Newport today, following the footsteps and life of Henry James. I still feel he is the single most boring novelist in the English language. But he has his followers. Where I call him soporific, they call him languid. Where I call him tedious, they call him relaxed. As the guides excitedly recounted the stories of his mysterious injuries that kept him out of the Civil War, I was overcome with ennui. He, like so many others of his age, seemed to live in a cocoon, one that doesn't appeal to me at all. I think his fiction reflects this. Though he was a wizardat plots and had great characters in mind, he padded them in cotton. By the time you dig to the core of his work, you're asleep. And wonder if it's worth digging. The guide also read from Edith Whaton's work. She was James' old pal and wrote so like him I was snoring at the end of the first sentence.

2003-05-15T10:13:00.000-04:00

The first subtitled film I ever saw was "Jules and Jim" back in the sixties. There weren't many foreign films being shown then, and the art houses that did try to provide them tended to be seedy spots, disreputable, specializing in naughty stuff. We've come a long way since then, thank god! Now, between zillion channel cable and a growing number of video outlets that take a chance on production around the world, film fans have a real choice in what they see. Though there are a lot of people that still label you a snob if you prefer character driven pieces from other countries, rather than action/plot driven American work, it's easier to find companions who are interested in subtitled work

2003-05-14T21:59:00.000-04:00

I have become a fan of Iranian films, at least those of Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Just watched his, "The Silence". In it, a 10-year-old blind boy travels to the market each day, where he works as a musical instrument tuner. We hear what he hears, and the music of voices, hammers, animals and machines blend and separate to make a symphony. Eventually, it creates the ultimate music and meets a surprising "god" who helps him break through to his ultimate vision. The sensuality of sound, picture, color and movement are the ultimate experience of what film is about. I realized while watching it that I feel safe with these films. I know that they're not going to rely on huge violence, terror, or perversion for their power. They are small, are painted equisitely, like Persian miniatures.