Napoleon III For Me
'Joyeux 208e anniversaire, mon Roi' (Napoleon III by Franz Xaver Winterhalter)
Happy 208th birthday, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte! He was a true Frenchman – his instincts on things that matter (except the defence of the Empire) were sound. For example, he stood up for the artists against the salon. Modern governments bleat about public infrastructure – he just did it. Perhaps major infrastructure can’t be built anymore without an emperor. He also appointed an infrastructure guru, M. Haussmann, to rebuild Paris, which, overall, he did brilliantly. He was a fan of the arts! So what if he didn’t see the Prussians coming! He was a fan of the arts! He oversaw Paris’ Palais Garnier,…
Continue Reading →The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana
See "The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" instead.
(by Umberto Eco). Umberto Eco may have been a gift from God (Ex Caelis Oblatus) but this novel is not divinely inspired. Yambo (Giambattista Bodoni), the narrator, is fog-bound. Following an ‘incident’ (a stroke?), he loses his episodic memory. His doctor explains, “It’s episodic memory that establishes a link between who we are today and who we have been, and without it, when we say ‘I’, we’re referring only to what we’re feeling now, not to what we felt before, which gets lost, as you say, in the fog.” This concept is applied rather loosely by Eco in the service of allowing Yambo, now in his sixties, to…
Continue Reading →Assumption of Genius
500 years ago, the great Titian began his massive work, The Assumption, at the Church of the Frari in Venice. We recall this, having recently seen the very curiously intriguing documentary on Renoir, which spoke of the Frenchman’s sojourn in Italy, whereupon he commenced his ‘neo-classical’ phase, inspired by the work of Titian. O the cruel downside of inspiration! It can lead to humiliating comparisons. The Age of cultural relativism cannot combat the visceral power of aesthetic comparison, and short of some official arts guru with the instincts, puissance, and paranoia of, say, Stalin, it probably never shall.
Continue Reading →Shattered Glass
'This is BS, and worse, it's rife with comma errors!'
(Dir. Billy Ray) (2003) All is not well at the o-so-holy New Republic…the in-flight magazine of Air Force One (well, when Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton or Barack Obama are aboard). It seems their star reporter, Stephen Glass, has been cooking-up stories! Hold the presses! Has he dissed Bernie Sanders as a Marxist? Pointed out that Obama has sub-contracted US foreign policy to the Russians? No. He’s made up stuff. This is an earnest, pretty well-made morality tale, with solid performances, but it suffers from over-earnestness, tin and thin character development, and, mostly, a lack of scripting to sell-us against a prevailing…
Continue Reading →Crochet Cabaret
BIG REVEAL TIME! I have finished the blue Juliet Jacket The buttons are little clear ones with blue flowers. Problem is, I decided to crochet only one buttonhole because I was too lazy at that time to bother with measuring for placement. I also thought that I would not do up the buttons. But now that I see it finished, I think it needs to be done up. So one day I must be very brave and get out the seam ripper, carefully cut buttonholes and then buttonhole stich around the cut quickly. Eeep! Can anyone think of a better way…
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