LA museum wrap

Art was the main reason for stopping over in LA for a couple of days so it was a pleasant surprise none of the three big museums I've visited were over-crowded, albeit maybe in part because large areas of two - LACMA and MoCA - were closed for installation.

The Broad

The temporary exhibition, "A Journey That Wasn't", was about representations of time and included a few standout pieces from artists I didn't know, alongside some I did (a Ron Mueck, some Andreas Gursky F1 pitstop photos, a few from Gregory Crewdson's Cinecitta series):

Sharon Lockhart - "Pine Flat Portrait Studio" series (from 2005)

Marlene Dumas - "Wall Weeping" (2009) (painting inspired by a photo of Palestinians being searched by Israeli soldiers, with the soldiers cropped out)

Neo Rauch - "The Store" (2005) (I also liked the other of his own display, "Treasure Trove")

The general collection display contained plenty of large and colourful pieces, including - ubiquitously, here and elsewhere, Jeff Koons (in the background of his "Tulips" below is a Takashi Murakami, itself splashy enough to hold its own in the central room).

Robert Therrien - "Under the Table" (1994)

The highlight was discovering Mark Tansey, a Californian painter whose careful, meaning-saturated images grabbed me.

"Four Forbidden Senses" (1982) ... the 'missing' one is sight 

"Achilles and the Tortoise" (1986) ... one of the philosophers, scientists and mathematicians depicted is Xeno, of the paradox

Also:

Jenny Saville - "Strategy" (1994), which arrived with a shock, this image that's so familiar and in fact iconic to me from The Holy Bible, and so much larger and more imposing in the flesh, so to speak

Anselm Kiefer - "Deutschlands Geisteshelden" (1973)

It was interesting to see a Lichtenstein sculpture ... I liked it more than I usually do his prints ("Goldfish Bowl", 1977)

I liked the roomful of Ellsworth Kellys too.

LACMA

A fairly miscellaneous visit. A few that caught my attention, all in an abstract expressionist vein:

Joan Mitchell - "East Ninth Street" (1956)

Willem de Kooning - "Montauk Highway" (1958)

Sam Francis - "Toward Disappearance" (1957)

MoCA

This wasn't the first time I've encountered one, but a room full of Rothkos - seven in all - still felt like magic.

Apart from that, a not overly large selection from the museum's permanent collection, though thoughtfully arranged to illuminate each other in each room:

Joan Miro - "Personnages dans la Nuit" (1950)

Max Ernst - "Capricorn" (1948-63); large, amusing, bemusing

Arshile Gorky - "Betrothal I" (1947)

Giacometti - "Tall Figures" II & III (1960), as moving as his pieces always are

John Chamberlain's "Red Beatts" (1988), my first encounter - as far as I can remember - with the idea of abstract expressionist sculpture; in the background, Franz Kline's "Black Iris" (1961)

And Helen Levitt's photographs of children playing in New York in the 1940s.

The Great Battle

Korean blockbuster (watched in Koreatown LA). So-so but in the many movie sieges I've seen there's never previously been one in which the aggressors try to overcome the high walls by building a gigantic mound of dirt right outside.

The Candidate

1972, Robert Redford, idealistic community lawyer runs for office, runs into the political machine. Ticks over very smoothly without ever rising to great heights - perhaps because its tone stays so even throughout rather than ever tipping into outright anger.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

I know there was a backlash and all but for me Three Billboards lived up to the hype, especially in the way that it stares you in the face with all its many emotions and the unabashedly heavy hand with its plotting - and, also, the performances, from all three of the principals (McDormand, Harrelson - how does he manage to always be so likeable? - Rockwell).

Incredibles 2

Good fun. Feminism appreciated!

Jennifer Down - Our Magic Hour

I felt like reading this again, and it went down so easily. If anything I felt it in my chest even more this time round.

(first read)

Muriel's Wedding

What a great movie, especially in its heavier elements and how it treats gender. About time I watched it.

Crazy Rich Asians

Fun and good in the ways it promised to be, and with more depth than I'd expected.

(w/ R)

The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug & The Battle of the Five Armies

(last time: Smaug, Five Armies)

Searching

Quite twisty and with some nicely fitting together plotting and foreshadowing around the mystery of what happened to 16 year old Margot Kim (although I could tell the film wasn't going to go too dark, which made some of the possibilities it raised fairly easy to discount). The telling of the whole story through screens of various kinds (mostly internet-based) worked well. Neat that the main cast was Asian without a big thing being made out of it too.

(w/ Rob and Laura)

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

(last time)

Lovesong (Abi Morgan, Red Stitch)

I liked the device of having the lovers played - often on stage at the same or overlapping times - in their old age by one pair of actors and in their younger growing together and apart by another, and I appreciated the quietness and lack of showiness to the writing. It's a nice play, reasonably well staged (but with varying performances), but didn't have any special spark to it for me.

(w/ R)

Ocean's 8

The fun here is mostly in the performance - Cate Blanchett of course, but even more so the different slynesses of Anne Hathaway and Awkwafina (not to mention Helena Bonham Carter).

Short story wrap-up

By way of a punctuation mark in my explorations of a few collections:

The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis

I can't think of another word than 'genius'. Davis has hit upon and refined a style so much her own and so elegantly muscular. I can't read too much of her at any one time, but I can't imagine tiring of her either.

Clarice Lispector - Complete Stories

I've really only dipped into these and they are fabulously strange. Deep waters.

Alice Munro - Runaway

I've read the title story - which is pretty much perfect - and the three after it, which are all about Juliet: "Chance",  "Soon" and "Silence". I admire these more than love them; they're deep and fine; they shed light on life.

(a gift from Sarah M & Ben)

Alistair MacLeod - Island

Quite definitively not the types of stories I'm drawn to (too slow, too rural, too much description of the weather and landscape), yet each that I've read, slowly, winds its way to being very affecting: "In the Fall" (about a horse, and also endurance), "The Boat" (father and son and the sea), "The Lost Salt Gift of Blood" (my favourite I think - man returns to visit the parents of his dead former lover, and finds his son) and "The Road to Rankin's Point" (in which death hangs over a mountain road and the house at its end).

(the second time someone's given this to me - this time Hayley, previously and more than a decade ago Ruth)

Lorrie Moore - Birds of America

As it happens I'm also four stories into this, but by contrast to the Munro and the MacLeod, Moore is a breeze to read (which I already knew from Self-Help). Funny and sad, and in the patterns of her narrator-protagonists' thinking I can see her influence on more than one of my latter-day favourites, most notably Rivka Galchen.

Grease

Good things about at long last watching this movie: 1. young Stockard Channing, 2. learning where the name 'Kenickie' comes from, 3. the songs obviously.

Alex Prager - Silver Lake Drive

Career-to-date retrospective monograph, both photos and video stills. So great.

David Eddings - The Elenium

Time reveals the many flaws in this trilogy; I thought I was going to stop after the first one, The Diamond Throne, but found a couple of days later that it was still occupying some mental real estate so re-read the other two as well.

"Japonisme: Japan and the Birth of Modern Art" (NGV)

Not really the exhibition's fault that I'd hoped it would be much more heavily about the way Japanese art influenced western art (as in paintings) than it actually was; the tilt was more heavily towards decorative design and objects. Quite a bit of Streeton. At least I saw one enjoyable woodblock of Oniwakamaru subduing a monstrous carp (mid 19th C, Utagawa Hiroshige) ... to be honest there were probably other good bits, but I wasn't in the zone.

Blasted (Malthouse)

Powerful stuff. The shift from the first section to the second, when the realistic (if touched by unexplained elements, especially the ambiguity of the setting and whether Ian's fears are justified) register of the first section with Ian and Cate in the hotel room transitions to a more stylised and overtly symbolic mode, was spot-on, as the intimate violence of Ian's behaviour towards Cate is echoed and amplified through the soldier's actions and the destruction around them, as things devolve ever further - there were not one nor even two but three times when I thought 'surely it's not going there' and the play immediately did (the second-section rape, the eyes, the baby's unearthing) - increasingly what was on stage felt like something from the realm of the unconscious, an experience that theatre is uniquely able to generate. At various times it reminded me of mother!, Beckett and the Michael Kantor Woyzeck from several years back. (This one directed by Anne-Louise Sarks.)

(w/ R)

Elif Batuman - The Idiot

"That seemed to do it for our conversation. I looked around at the rest of the class. They were all still talking, laboriously, like seals."

Of The Idiot's many charms, the greatest may be how funny it is; in an interview, Batuman has said she worked hard to keep the number of jokes and surprising or delightful observations up there, and it shows. I can't remember the last book I read that made me laugh as much, and as continually unexpectedly, as this one did - occurring as frequently due to Selin's observations (sometimes for how they reveal her misunderstanding of a situation) as to the things that happen to her along the way.

I do like a good campus novel, and this one has the additional advantage of being set in the 90s, a period setting whose flagging is most evident, and significant, in the way it shapes the novel's themes and action - in particular, the novelty of email (and how it ties in with the way self, communication and relationships are in play at that time of life and via language, writing and online-ness), and the restriction to fixed-line phones (which is a major part of the plot, such as it is).

Part and parcel with the above is many of the characters making up its sprawling cast, most of whom are young (from Selin's 18/19 up to mid-20s, both at Harvard and in the Hungarian village where Selin finds herself teaching English - just one of a few stagings of the theme of education in a 'narrative' whose main focus is its main character's education, or lack thereof, in life over the period it covers) and idiosyncratically exhibit many of the typical flaws, anxieties and unwarranted instances of confidence and beliefs about themselves and the world, as well as typical behaviours (e.g. everyone has dreams and tells each other about them all the time) of that time of life. Crucially, though, most are noticeably likeable - Selin herself, for all of her flaws and blind spots, her friend Svetlana and roommate Hannah, even the spikier Rózsa ... not so much Ivan, though his behaviour is certainly recognisable.

The Idiot is enjoyable and easy to read, despite the - extremely deliberate, I think - absence of much in the way of plot. Many of its elements suggest a certain frothiness, but actually it's quite a demanding, cerebral book, albeit in some ways that aren't obvious, while its use of language is quite the marvel. A very good one.