Uncouth Reflections

“The Great Beauty”

Posted on April 21, 2014 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

A fanciful jaunt through modern-day Rome seen through the eyes of a nearing-the-end-of-the-road libertine, “The Great Beauty” consciously evokes Fellini, though it’s free of Fellini’s attenuation and his lordly high-handedness. Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino has the advertising-soaked sensibility of an up-market vulgarian. Rather than fussily poke at decadence, as Fellini often did, Sorrentino revels in it; he has a love for polished surfaces and fever-dream exaggeration that rivals that of Paul Verhoeven or Brian De Palma. Sorrentino’s hero, Jep (the gallantly hangdog Toni Servillo), is a well-known writer. As a young man he wrote a novel that even he now considers pretentious. But rather than devote himself to his talent, he’s spent life in pursuit of leisure and sensual pleasure. (In his happier moments, Jep is proud to be Rome’s most beloved gadfly.) Though the movie offers scant explanation for his lavish lifestyle, he maintains his notoriety by puttering on the occasional magazine piece. This he takes only half-seriously. After interviewing a vapid performance artist — her act involves painting the Soviet flag on her pubis, then running face-first into a stone wall — he casually, bemusedly eviscerates her. Perhaps because Jep has so little time remaining (he’s just turned 65), he has little patience for moral or artistic preening.

The success of “The Great Beauty” is, I think, inseparable from its cynicism. It’s a cynicism that derives from Jep’s predisposition, his outlook. In its best moments the movie has a wry, observational quality that is reminiscent of the Italian social comedies of the ’60s, movies like “Divorce, Italian Style” and “Seduced and Abandoned.” And it’s often pleasingly, genially caustic. When Sorrentino tries to make points — about lost love, the death of high culture, the irrelevancy of the Church — he stumbles, as he does when he allows the movie to slip into the gloop of magic realism. Still, Sorrentino’s visuospatial sense is so keen, and Cristiano Travaglioli’s editing so quicksilvery, that you cruise right over the flaws. Watching it I felt as I do when a particularly mellifluous talker whisks away my better judgement in a gale of flimflammery. I hesitate to praise Sorrentino for what amounts to tricking me. But that trick is so much a part of the movie’s fabric that it hardly seems fair to complain. It’s part of Sorrentino’s (and Jep’s) Pirandellian put-on.

The Rome of “The Great Beauty” is a city shorn of its cultural heritage. Even its nobles have been reduced to sullen theme park attractions. When they’re not furtively visiting the public museums that were once their homes, they’re renting themselves out for parties thrown by the nouveau glitterati. While it’s tempting to compare the movie’s bustling, life-as-a-big-buffet vibe to the films of Robert Altman, “The Great Beauty” is perhaps too tightly wound to support the analogy. Structurally as well as metaphorically, it’s a death spiral. When we’re shown revelers engaged in a nightmare-lit conga, the face of each frozen in a rictus of semi-voluntary pleasure, it’s hard not to think of the danse macabre, or to wonder at Sorrentino’s ability to invest corrosiveness with a melancholy joie de vivre. (More than once I flashed on the work of that great contemporary nihilist, Gaspar Noé.) Sorrentino’s central conceit — that life is a phantasmagoria, a stream of highly personal sensations that abruptly ends when you die — isn’t much. But when a movie is this consistently fun to watch, I guess it’ll do.

Posted in Movies, The Good Life | Tagged Film, Italy, movies, Paolo Sorrentino, Rome, The Great Beauty, Toni Servillo | 7 Comments

Quote Du Jour: Joan Didion on J. Paul Getty

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

In a way [J. Paul Getty] seems to have wanted only to do something no one else could or would do. In his posthumous book, As I See It, he advises us that he never wanted “one of those concrete-bunker-type structures that are the fad among museum architects.” He refused to pay for any “tinted-glass-and-stainless-steel monstrosity.” He assures us that he was “neither shaken nor surprised” when his villa was finished and “certain critics sniffed.” He had “calculated the risks.” He knew that he was flouting the “doctrinaire and elitist” views he believed endemic in “many Art World (or should I say Artsy-Craftsy?) quarters.”

Doctrinaire and elitist. Artsy-craftsy. On the surface Getty would appear to have been a case of he-knew-what-he-liked-and-he-built-it, a tax dodge from the rather louche world of the international rich, and yet the use of that word “elitist” strikes an interesting note. The man who built himself the Getty [Villa] never saw it, although it opened a year and a half before his death. He seems to have liked the planning of it. He personally approved every paint sample. He is said to have taken immense pleasure in every letter received from anyone who visited the museum and liked it (such letters were immediately forwarded to him by the museum staff), but the idea of the place seems to have been enough, and the idea was this: here was a museum built not for those elitist critics but for “the public.” Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founders alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding, a place forever “open to the public and free of all charges.”

As a matter of fact large numbers of people who do not ordinarily visit museums like the Getty [Villa] a great deal, just as its founder knew they would. There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not. On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not. In the end the Getty [Villa] stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them the least.

— Joan Didion, “The Getty” from The White Album

Posted in Architecture | Tagged architecture critics, fuck you money, Getty Villa, J. Paul Getty, Joan Didion, museum, philanthropy | 2 Comments

Loners

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

In those days the one girl D.W. ever appeared with outside the studio was Lillian Gish, although none of us even dared whisper that their association was anything but platonic. Nobody had ever heard D.W. address Lillian except as “Miss Geesch,” mispronouncing her name as he did mine. Lillian was the personification of all the heroines D.W. ever created, so sweetly childlike, reticent, and timorous that even then her type of girl belonged to a far-distant past. The two made an extremely romantic-looking pair. I remember seeing them enter the grand ballroom of the old Alexandria Hotel in Los Angeles one night, when D.W. looked like one of his own Southern aristocrats of “The Birth of a Nation” and Lillian, in her pink ball gown and black lace mitts, was so breathtakingly beautiful that for a man not to be in love with her seemed inhuman. Astoundingly enough, D.W. seemed almost inhuman; he was of Welsh extraction, and the Welsh are a very peculiar breed, poetic, unpredictable, remote, and fiercely independent. For such a man to be in love must be terribly frustrating, because his deepest instinct is to be a loner.

— Anita Loos

Related

Loos’ memoir, “A Girl Like I,” is a fascinating account of early Hollywood.

Posted in Books Publishing and Writing, Movies, Performers | Tagged A Girl Like I, Anita Loos, D. W. Griffith, Film, Lillian Gish, movies, Silent Film | 2 Comments

Sunday Jazz Selection

Posted on April 20, 2014 by Fenster

Fenster writes:

Some Dirge, from A Genuine Tong Funeral (1967), Carla Bley and Gary Burton

Posted in Music | Tagged A Genuine Tong Funeral, Carla Bley, Gary Burton | Leave a comment

Federer/Djokovich in Monte Carlo

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

Lots of clay court magic to be enjoyed in this recent Roger/Novak battle, with Roger showing almost as much sparkle, wit and athletic resourcefulness as he routinely did when he was in his middle 20s.

Previous Federer highlight reels: here, here, and here.

Posted in Sports | Tagged Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, tennis | Leave a comment

Movie Poster Du Jour: “Repulsion”

Posted on April 19, 2014 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Posted in Commercial art, Movies | Tagged Cathering Deneuve, Film, Italy, Movie Posters, movies, Repulsion, Roman Polanski | 1 Comment

Naked Lady of the Week: Hayley-Marie Coppin

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Fabrizio del Wrongo

Fabrizio del Wrongo writes:

Hayley-Marie is a British model who got her start as a Page 3 girl about 11 years ago. She’s gone on to pose for a slew of websites, often working as what Wikipedia describes as a “pantyhose and lingerie model.” I guess that means she specializes in softcore/fetish material — closed-leg, Gil Elvgren-style stuff. She’s over 30 now, and the natural patina of age combined with her dee-luxe, ultra-healthy figure give her quite a MILF-y appeal. And, as you can probably glean by browsing the photos in the below gallery, she seems to really enjoy modeling. Lots of different moods and modes in evidence there. (Credit her photographers too, of course.) Her face really looks upper-crusty English, doesn’t it? I’d almost buy her as a member of the Redgrave clan.

These small sample photos come from Art Lingerie; Only Silk and Satin, where Hayley-Marie is described as a “legend”; Breathtakers; Girlfolio; and Ms. Coppin’s official site, Hayley’s Secrets. Pay ’em a visit for the real-deal goods.

Content below the jump is NSFW, albeit only in a mild, cheesecake-y sort of way. Happy Friday.

Continue reading →

Posted in Photography, Sex, The Good Life | Tagged England, Hayley-Marie Coppin, naked lady of the week, nude photography, Page 3 | 3 Comments

Andrew Dice Clay in 1987

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Paleo Retiree

Paleo Retiree writes:

(Do NOT play this video if you’re at work. It’s about as NSFW and un-PC as can possibly be.)

Andrew Dice Clay in his prime makes the very daring Bill Burr, my current favorite comedian, look sheepish and apologetic. The basic joke in his act is that this pudgy Jewish guy (born Andrew Clay Silverstein) is playing the role of the kind of leather-loving Italian hood who worships black guys for being so big, so strong and so cool. Somehow that lends him the license to give voice to all kinds of insults, jokes and outrageous thoughts. The clip I’ve linked to, by the way, is the seven-minute 1987 performance at Dangerfield’s that really kicked Andrew Dice Clay into the limelight.

To my mind it’s a really vivid reminder of how uninhibited life, or at least comedy, could be in an era before people became obsessed with their own thin skins, and convinced that anything that caused them offense not only deserves to be outlawed but is an enemy of freedom. Because, as far as I can tell, the word “freedom” has come to be redefined. No longer does it mean, roughly, “a relatively large amount of latitude to think, say and do as you please.” Instead it signifies “the ability to get through life without my feelings ever being hurt.”

But it’s not as though even in 1987 Andrew Dice Clay got a free ride from respectable society. The tasteful and the tastemakers were both up in arms about him — something really needed to be done, don’t you know? Women’s groups were particulary outraged; MTV banned him for many years; and in 1990, when he was asked to host an episode of Saturday Night Live, both Nora Dunn and Sinead O’Connor refused to appear on the show. Meanwhile I was chortling happily at his cartoonish bravado, his loutish assertiveness and his high-spirited outrages.

I had some arguments, er, friendly and civilized disagreements about Clay with work colleagues, nearly all of them of the upper-middle-class white-liberal persuasion. What I struggled hardest to understand were their moral objections to Clay. How could people who had learned to enjoy Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor object on moral grounds to Andrew Dice Clay?

Flurries of reasons were thrown at me, but I couldn’t make sense of them until I woke up to the fact that nearly all the objections were class-based. While Bruce peddled Greenwich-Village-style hipster attitudes and Pryor’s act was hipster, lovable and black, Clay was a guy from the boroughs targeting a mainly working-class, white-ethnic audience. I saw Clay live once and I can report that 1) 90% of the audience really was working-class, and 2) the women in the audience laughed as hard as the guys did. The show was basically a celebration of hearty, uninhibited working-class camaraderie, as well as of defiance of bourgeois good taste. It was a celebration of vulgarity in the old sense — “the common people” — as well as in the current one.

Clay’s moment didn’t last long. He was everywhere you looked … and then, after about five years, political correctness caught up with him and did him in. His career collapsed; he’s been making failed and semi-failed comebacks ever since.

Incidentally, if you don’t get a kick out of Clay, it’s OK with me. As far as I’m concerned, The Diceman was one of the great comedy creations of the ’80s, right up there with the Cameron Crowe / Amy Heckerling / Sean Penn creation Spicoli from “Fast Times at Ridgemont High.” But tastes — maybe especially in comedy — certainly differ. My aim here is simply to point up how uptight American culture has gotten in recent years and to demonstrate how much rowdier it once was. Has this change really been for the better? Does nurturing hypersensitivity really solve anything, or does it simply lead to ever more absurd excesses of hypersensitivity? And isn’t it weird how — despite PC, and despite 21st century neo-Puritanism — crude hiphop is allowed by the official class to be? Anyone got an explanation for that?

Related

An HBO special.
A complete comedy concert.
Behold the extreme cultural-overlord distaste and sneering in this 2007 New York Times piece about Clay.

Posted in Humor, Performers, Politics and Economics, Sex | Tagged andrew dice clay, Bill Burr, Comedy, PC, political correctness, un-PC | 27 Comments

A Day at the Bowers Museum

Posted on April 18, 2014 by Blowhard, Esq.

Blowhard, Esq. writes:

Although I’ve lived within 10 minutes of it for almost a decade, it was only within the past month that I finally made it over to Orange County’s Bowers Museum, an art and cultural history institution located in Santa Ana, California. I picked a great day to go, as the museum almost seemed custom-tailored to my interests, with exhibits on ancient Egypt, Academic art, Beethoven, and the art of Oceania.

Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Art | Tagged Academic art, ancient Egypt, ancient history, Bowers Museum, brooklyn museum, Chinese art, French art, headhunters, Knohl Collection, Ludwig van Beethoven, mummies, Oceania, Orange County, painting, Papua New Guinea, Spanish colonial revival | 3 Comments

“And Meanwhile What Do We Eat?”

Posted on April 17, 2014 by Eddie Pensier

Eddie Pensier writes:

‘The only thing we can do is sell the rooster,’ said the woman.
‘We can also sell the clock.’
‘They won’t buy it.’
‘Tomorrow I’ll try to see if Alvaro will give me the forty pesos.’
‘He won’t give them to you.’
‘Then we’ll sell the picture.’ ` When the woman spoke again, she was outside the mosquito net again. The colonel smelled her breath impregnated with medicinal herbs.
‘They won’t buy it,’ she said.
‘We’ll see,’ the colonel said gently, without a trace of change in his voice. ‘Now, go to sleep. If we can’t sell anything tomorrow, we’ll think of something else.’

He tried to keep his eyes open but sleep broke his resolve. He fell to the bottom of a substance without time and without space, where the words of his wife had a different significance. But a moment later he felt himself being shaken by the shoulder.

‘Answer me.’

The colonel didn’t know if he had heard those words before or after he had slept. Dawn was breaking. The window stood out in Sunday’s green clarity. He thought he had a fever. His eyes burned and he had to make a great effort to clear his head.

‘What will we do if we can’t sell anything?’ the woman repeated.
‘By then it will be January 20th,’ the colonel said, completely awake. ‘They’ll pay the twenty per cent that afternoon.’
‘If the rooster wins,’ the woman said. ‘But if he loses. It hasn’t occurred to you that the rooster might lose.
‘He’s one rooster that can’t lose.’
‘But suppose he loses.’
‘There are still forty-four days left to begin to think about that,’ the colonel said.

The woman lost her patience.

‘And meanwhile what do we eat?’ she asked, and seized the colonel by the collar of his flannel night shirt. She shook him hard.

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years – the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute – to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied:

‘Shit’.