Category Visual Arts

I’d like it known that I read the book first.

Which, as all literarily inclined people know, is the right and proper order of things in a modern media age when Hollywood regularly absconds with your favorite tales and more often than not turns them into something  shallow and alien. This inevitably causes you to exhort those who reversed the natural order of things by walking in blind to see the movie: “Oh, you just have to read the book!”

In the case of Noah and its film iteration from director Darren Aronofsky and Paramount Studios, we have the good fortune that most everyone grows up at least hearing about this strange tale involving a very ticked-off God telling his obedient servant to build a humongous ark that will literally save the last living things on the planet.

Still, it had been a while since I visited the real story, which, for all its epic grandeur, plays out in a compact 2,300 words ...

A slew of almost electrically talented backup singers grappling with never quite breaking the stardom barrier and a lonely man with his new girlfriend-the-operating system filled up a dreary weather Saturday last weekend, reminiscent of the “double bill” presentations that were de rigueur in the movie houses of my boyhood.

Oh, what a filmy weekend it was.

Synopses of the movies in question: Twenty Feet From Stardom and Her, can be gleaned from the trailers below, so what will concern us here is but one thread that works its way through both films, dominantly in Her and as an interesting side story in Twenty Feet.

Boiled down to its essence, the issue is: Are other people all that necessary?

Late in Twenty Feet, one of the fabulous, magnetic backup singers the film so lovingly depicts is reflecting that at some point in recent years “the phone stopped ringing” as much as it used to...

Few filmmakers convey the desolation of the physical landscape and its various reflections in the human heart as well as the Coen brothers. Their current film, Inside Llewyn Davis, takes this desolation to new (and cold!) heights in its portrayal of a marginalized, barely surviving folk singer wandering the unforgiving winter streets of Greenwich Village and Chicago in the early ’60s. Davis is homeless, which requires him to spend inordinate amounts of energy searching for a couch where he and his guitar can flop for a not-overly-imposing night or two while he awaits some kind of break or affirmation that his hope of making it in the music world isn’t completely misguided.

Among his many problems, though, is that even hope itself seems to have been beaten down in him by the time the film picks him up as a sad-eyed, occasionally mendacious soloist, pushing into his 30s with nary an asset nor credential to...

In this “Special Holiday Edition!” of the Traversing blog, I’m going to severely crimp on the words. Instead, I’ll let us all scroll and feast on just a sampling of the vision and verve exemplified by the photographers who have helped fill out the picture, as it were, of the world we have been exploring, questioning, and elaborating upon over the last year.

I offer this specifically as deep and lasting “nutrition” rather than the popular phrase “eye candy,” because photography such as this is calorically dense and nutritious fare that feeds us in untold ways. It is life-enhancing, with the power to stay with us and suggest new ways of pausing, seeing and absorbing the world in front of us.

So let’s get right down to it.

By Mahesh Telkar

“Lovely” and “beautiful” seem just hopelessly inadequate here…

By Bahman Farzad

How delicate yet powerful those wings.

By Pétur Gauti Valgeirsson

Is it possible for art to cross a line into such monstrous or simply offensive or empty moral terrain that it is no longer deserving of categorization as “art?” A quick look at dictionary.com’s basic definition of art yields this: “the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.”

“According to whose aesthetic principles and using what metric of the ‘beautiful,’” I can hear First Amendment civil libertarians and self-styled avant garde artists asking already. Good questions.

The questions have particular relevance to post-modern art, that period from roughly the post-World War II years and extending into the present day.

Post-modernism, in brief, can be described as an effort across the art and philosophy and larger cultural worlds to extend the conversation after classicism and modern...