Author: JA

Old People.
Reds, a 1981 film by Warren Beatty.
Many reasons to watch. Or 1.
The long lens of experience gets close up on the living faces of history.
Old People.

A raging fire of criticism grows out there.

Evaluation, minus opinion, is harder to come by but much more rewarding.

This approach pays me dividends, with more pleasure and more insights from what I see read and hear. That even goes for movies that suck, like Eragon. Plenty to think about there.

Last night I saw The Lives Of Others, which has a lot to offer in the way of insights. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s certainly worth your time and your $10.

One might find gifted designers or great engineers, but rarely does one find an artisan.
Here’s one.
Dario Pegoretti:

My buddy Garth is about to publish his book A Field Guide. I read it. I was moved. You can upload photos to contribute as well. A good idea, well executed.

Below, Tom Steels gets “checked” by Graeme Brown in a sprint going 60km/h.

Recently, I was reading about the following: In 1906 Picasso painted a portrait of Gertrude Stein who was, at the time, a smart rich girl with a big personality, a taste for art and no job or direction. Picasso was penniless, represented by a middle-of-the-road gallery in paris, and showing virtuoso talent that was, as of then, unfocused and under-appreciated. But stein saw something in his work and in him and became his patron.

The portrait effectively marks the beginning of Picasso’s great innovations in art, and it does so by way of some clear borrowing, inspiration and competition from, by and with other painters. It also marks the beginning of Stein’s life as a seriously committed and innovative writer.

They both sensed that something important was happening with the painting and themselves. Neither took it lightly, and both almost immediately mythologized it.
Throughout her life, Stein chose to highlight the intense struggle that Picasso seemed to go through while painting and re-painting the portrait. A lot of it was BS, but we do know that he worked and re-worked her head. Her re-worked head, became such a head of reworking, where she worked and re-worked Picasso.

If you can get your hands on the Met’s ’07 Winter Bulletin, do so. It gives the story in great detail. Or go to www.metmuseum.org for a lightweight version of the story. Very cool.

“If I’m obsessed with anything, it’s the problem of failure. As human beings, working in medicine, you’re going to have to think about that as a surgeon. At a certain point along the way you’re going to hurt people, and trying to find that balance between harm and good is your constant struggle, and that’s the largest struggle of anyone who works in anything with moral dimensions.”

Dr. Atul Gawande – McCarthur Grant Fellow, on Charlie Rose

“It has always been an advantage to have direct contact with eminent men, if only because proof positive of their essential mediocrity spurs younger talent. So long as talent is remote from those of eminence, it droops in awe and paralysis.”

Marshall McLuhan – “Space, Time and Poetry”

“For me, success is not about accolades. It’s about fucking up on your own terms. If there are
mistakes in the
movies–and they all have mistakes–at least they’re yours, and you can learn from them.”

-Guillermo del Toro, in The Onion

“Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

– Samuel Beckett