left brain

Fall back into Film, part one

This past weekend I saw three movies, The Queen which was the opening movie for the NY Film Festival, A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, and Madame Sata, thanks to Netflix.  The trailer for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints follows:

First, the trailer for Death of an American President premiered before the film.  And people cheered.  I mean, fucking cheered.  A ruckus nearly.  I thought it was great and clearly every one else did as well.  I have never heard anything about this film but clearly it is causing a stir, not surprisingly.  It must say a lot when a film about the assassination of a sitting American president gets cheered enthusiastically.  I'd say that it is not a good sign for American politics or George Bush; not that there are many at this point.   A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints is excellent.  It is funny, well-written, well-filmed, and really raw and emotionally powerful.  It was a huge success in Sundance.  The movie takes place in the 80's  and I think the film stock they chose for displaying the gritty 80's was perfect.  It feels grainy and edgy.  Throw in some Kiss anthems and you have yourself a stellar indie movie.

The movie got pretty intense at certain points.  There is a scene where the druggie gay character (who was hysterical) screams outloud on the street, "How fucking loud is this city?  Christ!"  But when certain scenes became so intense, the film blacked out.  Scenes of absolute horror on a train track, a brutal fight, anything that pretty much you understood what was happening yet you really didn't need to see.  The scene instead just cut to black.  It was edited beautifully.  Pretty awesome actually. 

I never do well with movies that have a main character leaving and then returning to where they grew up.  I am sure that this goes deep into my psyche.   But, I don't know what it is.   This movie was mainly about exactly that.   Robert Downey Junior leaves Astoria, Queens as a teenager after constantly hearing his father say "he can't leave"  but he returns to his ailing father many years later having been begged by his friends who still are alive to talk to him.  The reaction and the ensuing scenes are like the time warp I feel when I return home.  Nothing has changed in my town, except everything has I guess.  The interaction between the RDJ and his mother and father is incredibly sad and overwhelming.  It is very hard to see that life goes on sometimes.  I cried at this point.

NYTimes:  "Though autobiographical, “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” is also a coming-of-age story set against a tough urban background, in which the protagonist’s emerging sense of his own individuality cuts against his loyalty to friends and kin. What sets the film apart, and makes it one of the more remarkable American directing debuts in recent years, is Mr. Montiel’s passionate, almost reckless engagement with the possibilities of the medium. Adapting his impressionistic, often rambling memoir for the screen, he demonstrates an autodidact’s exuberant self-confidence and the eye of a born filmmaker. Working with a large, mostly young cast, he has made a picture so full of life and feeling that the screen can hardly contain it.  Terrible things happen in “A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints.” Mr. Downey warns at the beginning that some of the people we meet in the movie will die before it’s over, and the nostrum that time heals all wounds is shown to be a lie. But though the picture is wrenching, at times devastating, it leaves you with that buoyant feeling of having encountered a raw, authentic work of art. All those howls of pain are its way of telling you that it is madly, defiantly, uncontrollably alive."

DOAP

Now wouldn't this be dreamy. The fucking theater I was in last night was in an AWESOME uproar cheering after the trailer.

Kenzie Roth

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Surfing the Web

New Orleans after the Flood

To continue with the art overload that I saw last weekend, I move on to another show that is taking place at the MET right now.  Another show that continues with the "world is fucked" theme.  Titled New Orleans after the Flood, the show is made up of photographs by Robert Polidori, an excellent photojournalist who traveled to New Orleans during the clean up. 

The show is incredible.  The photos are stark, powerful, mesmerizing, and horrifying.  Each one is an emotional rollercoaster.  You first feel awe-struck in their power, then incredibly depressed and sad, and then you feel like lashing out and starting a revolution to remove the idiots running this country.  I tended to feel anger, per typical.  However, they are also beautiful in detail and color.

One photo that stood out to me (pictured above) is actually one of the first photos you see because it is in the entryway to the show.  The image is pretty much how I imagine the day after the end of the world to look like.  No terrorists running amok in celebration.  No people.  No billowing smoke or fire.  Just absolute destruction and desolation.  The sky in the image is fantasticaly beautiful, though less so in the shit photo they put online.  A bright hue of blue and clouds sits atop the incredibly polluted body of water with piles of trash and debris so high you can barely see anything else.  The image is remarkable. 

I would definitely recommend seeing the show if you are heading to the MET to see the Vollard show, but I probably wouldn't make a special trip to see it.  So check off both from your Fall calender of things to do.

Fall back into Art

Last weekend was a bit of an art whirlwind.  I have been meaning to see a bunch of shows and wander through Chelsea galleries.  I ultimately did everything I have been wanting to see in two days, after a pretty good sandwich at 'wichcraft in Bryant Park.  I feel VERY inspired. 

It began with the show called Ecotopia at the ICP (Institute for Contemporary Photography).  A show that shows us that the Bush administration has fucked us all and that terrorism isn't the most pressing issue of the moment.  In fact it nearly seems like a joke how much attention we pay to it daily (unless you watch Katie Couric on TV then well you would think spinach is our biggest worry).  Ecotopia is mostly photography though some video and multimedia presentations are thrown in.  The show ranges in being incredibly serious and outright depressing to comedic and childish.  Works by the awesome Simon Norfolk, Stéphane Couturier's, and Thomas Ruff are presented along with Diana Thata whose video of two tigers playing in a pen are shown in a room glowing green.  The video and the glowing green room provide the sense that the two tigers are in your backyard and your relationship with them is like having a household cat or dog.

I then headed up to the Metropolitan to see the Ambroise Vollard: Patron to the Avante Garde (Cezanne/Picasso/Gaugain) show along with New Orleans after the Flood by photographer Robert Polidori.  The Vollard show was overwhelming in its scale.  The art is interesting because all of the pieces have passed through his hands and he made most of these artists careers so with just thought  it is impressive.  There is a whole entry I have been meaning to write about how the art world has become a business and all of the art is pretty much becoming less edgy as artists are becoming businessmen, an idea that I detest. 

Metropolitan:  This is the first comprehensive exhibition devoted to Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939)—the pioneer dealer, patron, and publisher who played a key role in promoting and shaping the careers of many of the leading artists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It includes 100 paintings, as well as dozens of ceramics, sculpture, prints, and livres d'artistes commissioned and published by Vollard, dating from the time of his appearance on the Paris art scene in the late 1880s to his death in 1939.

First you enter a massive room of Cezannes that have come from everywhere in the world.  Russia, France, England, Chicago, etc.  One of them looks more like paintings by Peter Paul Rubens than they do actual Cezannes.  Two others are just mind boggling that they ever came from him.  Early work, clearly.  Now just repeat that sentence and let it sink in.  These three Cezannes were like nothing I have ever seen by him and one of them titled "The Feast: Orgy" is so colorful and outlandish (not just because of the title) that it just leaps off the wall.  Pictured left.  The others are obviously equally as spectacular but my favorite Cezannes always fall into the French landscape idea.  They are just majestic and beautiful and now remind me of my travels through rural France.  I remember going to the countryside and thinking to myself, "Shit, it looks like a Cezanne!" because of the colors, the actual terrain, and the light.  It is just astonishing and breathtaking, like most of his landscapes.  I now gravitate towards them.

Then you enter the Van Gogh room where a rendition of a starry night is the assumed show piece along with a painting of a carriage cart but I gravitated towards this smaller sunflower painting unlike the known sunflower pieces he created.  It was a smaller piece that was getting little attention and after intense study, it for sure turned out to be one of my favorite pieces in the show.  I went back to see it I liked it so much, though I usually walk through a show twice.  I do have to say that I am kinda not into people walking around with the headphones on giving them an art history lesson on each painting or sculpture or whatever the curator or historian deems interesting.  They walk around the museum like horror movie zombies, being led by the institution hand, and still without any clear understanding of the piece and utter disregard for ANYONE around them.  lol.

I kinda picked up my pace in the Gaugain room.  I am not a huge fan usually.  Fast forward through paintings of Vollard, videos of Renoir for some weird reason, and a quote saying that "The most beautiful woman in the world has never been painted, drawn, or depicted more than Vollard," which I found incredibly hysterical.  Clearly the man was a homo.  (He wasn't.  But, have you noticed how obsessed gay men are with photographing themselves?  I remember how my friend Donna used to constantly point that out when I showed her photos of boys).

And into the Picasso room after the Degas room.  Again, never a huge fan.  Somehow it never clicked until the moment that I walked into the room that the Vollard suite I used to work with at my old gallery in Boston was created by Picasso for Vollard.  Shit, haha, I have touched some of these pieces.  Though, there are many editions.  The piece to my right was one of my favorites and was centered between two "blue period" pieces that reminded me of how my ex used to call me "pessimistic, opposing, dark, negative, depressed, angry, violent."   haha.  This piece to the above right, along with many of the harlequin series, are in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, which I desperately need to visit before they destroy the art. 

Soho Photos

The graffiti shots.

Brian and I in the East Village.

Myself in Soho

I kinda like that I am blurred in this photo.

The Science of Sleep

Last night I went to see The Science of Sleep which just opened in Manhattan.  It stars Gael Garcia Bernal, my short Mexican dream boy who appears nude in a lot of his films including this one.  lol.  The film was one of the most wackiest and original movies I have ever seen.  The animation and sets are ridiculous yet amazing.  The storyline is a tad confusing, especially near the end, but it is ultimately a lot of fun.  The character that Gael plays is hysterical and if you can identify with him (which I couldn't really), you will really enjoy the movie like the two people I went with.  It wasn't as thrilling or mindblowing as I was hoping for though so I don't know if it really is needed to see in a theater.

The Science of Sleep - New York Times.

Filmed in not-especially-glamorous parts of Paris, the film takes place in a zone where dreams, wishes and fears mingle with, and at times obliterate, the literal facts of everyday existence.

Beginning deep inside the head of its hero, an anxious young man named Stephane (Gael Garc�a Bernal), “The Science of Sleep” creates a world of intense peculiarity, where time seems to move in loops and curlicues, and where the basic axiom that a thing and its opposite can’t both be true seems not to apply.

Plot summary, therefore, is both irrelevant and impossible. Which is not to say that the movie lacks a story, only that, like a dream, the narrative moves sideways as well as forward, revising and contradicting itself as it goes along. Mr. Gondry, who would rather invent than explain, makes a plausible case that a love story (which is what “The Science of Sleep” is) cannot really be told any other way. Love is too bound up with memories, fantasies, projections and misperceptions to conform to a conventional, linear structure.

Afterwards we boarded various subway lines to make a 50 minute commute to the restaurant Saul in Brooklyn.  Saul is a one star Michelin restaurant (we know how obsessed I am already so don't act surprised) started by Saul Bolton who honed his skills in the kitchen of David Bouley who runs Bouley
(a three star) and Le Bernadin.  Boerum Hill is where the restaurant resides and I really didn't get to notice the neighborhood because it was ten at night when I was trying to find the restaurant but supposedly it is one of Bk's prettiest neighborhoods.  The restaurants decorations are simple and delicate.  The only thing that beckons to be paid attention to inside is the food.

The meal was stellar.  There is a less than exciting prixe-fix menu so we ordered directly a la carte.  Every piece of food was incredibly fresh and seemed straight from a New England farm or body of water it originated in.  I had the duck confit for an appetizer which came to my table surprisingly still on the bone and nearly in duck form.  My salmon was exceptionally delicious; flaky yet juicy, beautifully pink, and in a sauce so tasty thoughts of "the old French sauces" dance in your head.  We had the signature baked Alaska for dessert and it was pretty much standard yet a perfect way to end the meal.  Per typical of Michelin restaurants and "French"-like meals, the amuse bouche of cauliflower soup was a totally new idea of cauliflower soup.

It was great and memorable.  It certainly stands out in Brooklyn and is one of the better restaurants in the NYC boroughs.  The movement of a chef into a quieter neighborhood and is still able to draw you outwards is very European and this restaurant was worth the hike.  Though, I am not sure if it is worth two hikes.

 

Brazilian HOTness

WANT MORE BOYS ?

Progress: 25%

From the above to the below :

These are only progress shots I take so I don't spend time getting lighting correct, cropping the frame, etc, etc.  And it is really looking green in this photo.  It is more Tiffany blue, lol.