Home
The Gallery Opening...
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 450
A new show, finally, at the local art gallery. Long overdue, these shows occupy the mind for maybe half an hour - tops, then hang around town another 3-4 months afterwards.
We need a quicker turn-around.
Anyways, I'd tried to go on Friday night, the shows opening, possibly of interest to me as the artist made mention of "local geology" which, as you might expect, got me going.
But Friday night it's packed, to the gills, and moving through the the hoi polloi, all of whom are too busy hob-nobbing to make way or for easy passage through the gallery. It's impossible.
So I return Saturday, when the gallery's empty, and ....
Well, it's discouragingly "modern", by which the artist is simply using words like "geology" to drag me in, there's very few rocks, and the rocks she's used are boring, and instead of being lovingly sculpted she's simply added shapes to them with modelling clay (I'd had the same idea, but imagined it carved from the living rock...). A few curtains dusted with mica, a few map-type thingies which are hardly art, this is bollocks.
The other gallery opening is tomorrow, and I'm not sure I want to invest any hope in this...
The Fiery Angel - A Sixteenth Centure Romance - Valerii Briusov (Valery Bryusov)
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 815
This was a beautiful book, purportedly by an anonymous author around 1535, about the adventures of a certain Rupprecht, who following a campaign in Italy and years in "New Spain" returns to the Old World and meets all manner of historical (and otherwise) figures in his adventures about Germany, including Agrippa of Nettesheim, Iohann Weier, Doctor Faustus, Mephistopheles, amongst many others.
It is beautifully written (criticisms would include: although I noted, on the second reading, a few clumsy turns of phrase that could be better addressed or corrected in a new edition, without affecting the quality of prose or style, and translations for the Italian, German and Latin would be appreciated, footnotes or an appendix to seperate the invention of the author from real people, places and events -eg. the many hostels he names, personages he references, etc, etc. While I knew quite a few it is presumptive to expect the reader know them all. And perhaps a map to guide us on his travels.).
IN any event it tells of the various adventures of our narrator, Rupprecht, who exists in a sort of spiritual limbo, accepting at once the Catholic Faith, A humanist who while denouncing the Inquisition yet himself attempts to subdue demons, who believes in a Kind, Just and Merciful God yet bears witness to and narrates the most improbable and impossible of miracles, all narrated as if these were the most ordinary things in the world...
And this is the trick, to provide the reader with a variety of ways to interpret his story - and no one solution, which - in a nutshell, captures his ambiguity about everything that he experiences.
Formidably well researched, Briusov has taken great pains to explore the struggle of the protagonist, this person exists, or existed in the character of the author himself, the tortuous romantic triangle depicting reflecting his own relationship with Andrei Bely and their shared lover, the nineteen-year-old Nina Petrovskaya.
It reminds me of nothing so much as one of those more contemporary war movies, where it becomes impossible to sort out the heroes from the villains and you follow an inadvertent spectator or participant through a perpetually shifting moral and spiritual landscape. Liminal Spaces.
In finishing it - even upon the second reading, I am cast into the slough of despond, afflicted with a profound melancholy. It is odd that it is so out of print, and doubly odd that the translation available has not been better proofed. Still a masterpiece, one that directly inspired "The Master and Margarita", and completely up my alley. A great book that recommends me to a thousand others...
And a happenstance, a lucky find at "The Wee Book Inn" on Whyte in Edmonton.
Big Trouble in Little China
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 472
By director John Carpenter, a fever dream of a movie that even Kurt Russel couldn't save.
Had no clue what was going on, but that was the point, possibly John Carpenter went through an "Acid" phase and we'll just have to leave it at that...
Stagecoach
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 396
Waiting for my movies to come in, there's a few I been hoping to see, but small town and they're taking there good time getting here. Meanwhile I'm stuck with "The Marvels" and some other Disney garbage at the cinema, but it will pass, and I'm waiting on the Nicholas Cage "Dream Scenario" (and a couple of others).
(1939, John Ford)
Loved this. Every Western Convention ever - the honorable outlaw (Ringo, played by John Wayne) meets whore with a heart of gold, the terrifying Apache raids led by Geronimo, the sidekicks, evil banker, drunk doctor, vaudeville gambler, Dead-Mans-Hand, Saved by the Cavalry, it's a movie of stereotypes all put together in service of narrating the imaginal American History. Whether these tropes existed before John Ford put them together, or whether they became tropes after the movie, I don't know, and I don't care enough to go searching, I only know it was a darned good movie.
Went down a few rabbit holes afterwards looking up Geronimo, who was quite the character. His own history is every bit as interesting as the movie.
Page 114 of 875