February 14

Synchronicity, or something: A couple of weeks ago -- February 3, to be precise -- I watched Frank Borzage's interesting Southern film noir Moonrise on TCM, and discovered a useful essay on it at Senses of Cinema that gives full credit, as such pieces often don't, to the source novel (by Theodore Strauss):

http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/42/auteur-theory-moonrise.html

A few days later, the blog mardecortesbaja published a post that was completely apropos:

http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/blog/_archives/2010/2/8/4449067.html

Drunk late at night in 1955, Jack Kerouac watched Frank Borzage's Moonrise on TV, and wrote this poem about it ["Dumb Poem about Moonrise'], in his notebook of religious meditations eventually published as Some Of the Dharma.

The full text of the poem is given, and it's a perceptive and imaginative response to the movie.

More synchronicity: On February 6, two posts about exhibitions of river photography showed up in my RSS feed. First, Mark Swope's exhibition of black-and-white photographs of the Los Angeles River was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/culturemonster/2010/02/art-review-mark-swope-at-craig-krull-gallery.html

Hours later, Artdaily alerted me to a London exhibition of color photographs of the Blackwater River by Scottish photographer Steve Macleod:

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=36111

Also on the photography front: The Milwaukee Art Museum has put together an important exhibit, and accompanying monograph, of American street photography of the 1940s and 1950s:

http://www.themillions.com/2010/02/photography-comes-of-age-street-seen.html

http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=35851

At first I thought it was odd to omit Garry Winogrand, but he didn't exhibit prominently until 1963, and is more associated with the Sixties.

I'm always interested to read about the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/06/arts/design/06outsider.html

Be sure to check out the accompanying slideshow. A spot-check at Wikipedia reveals entries on most of the artists mentioned by Ken Johnson in his review -- although not the interesting sounding Pearl Blauvelt and Eugene Andolsek, but Google turns up plenty of material on them as well as the others. Outsider art is such a vast field, I admire those who work to map it.

Another Times art critic, Roberta Smith, is a little dissatisfied with the current exhibition season in New York:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/arts/design/14curators.html

Good slideshow with this piece, too, and plenty of references to artists that I wouldn't mind knowing more about. It is difficult to keep up, but exciting that there is so much to keep up with!

(....and this might be a good place to sneak in a parenthetic mission statement: No one who reads more than a handful of these daily entries will have missed the point that I'm aiming for a multiculturalism that is not simply cross-national, or alert to identity, but that takes in a pretty full range of cultural and intellectual fields, traversing the film turf and the literary turf and the history and music and art and theater turfs, ad infinitum -- partly because, despite all the wonderful bloggers and commentators out there, I don't see people doing that much -- most web and print endeavors are pretty focused, often to their benefit, while PMD is quite deliberately unrestricted. I see myself as a bit of a free-form disk jockey, here -- I always admired those guys, Vin Scelsa and Jonathan Schwartz and the whole WNEW-FM gang, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWFS and http://www.wfmu.org/freeform.html for the scoop on them if you're not from the New York area....)

Among notables born on this date are memoirist Frank Harris, comedian Jack Benny, German sociologist Max Horkheimer, soprano Renee Fleming, journalist Carl Bernstein, dancer Gregory Hines, magician Teller, folk singer Tim Buckley, actors Thelma Ritter, Vic Morrow, and Meg Tilly, and film directors Alexander Kluge, Alan Parker, and Masaki Kobayashi. I went to a Penn & Teller show in San Francisco in 1988 or 1989, completely awesome experience, and the guys were hawking their own paraphernalia in the theater lobby afterward. I was in my usual garb -- suit, tie, overcoat, fedora -- and Teller, the silent, hailed me as I went by: "Great hat!" I'll always treasure that.