palmerpink

I, generally speaking, love art. I wish I understood it better; sometimes I can articulate its effects on me and what I think; at other times, that's tough for me. This is an attempt at understanding art, if only by trying to understand my experience of it.¹ The title of this post is a bit funny, tho: "New" is misleading—I first drafted it 6 years ago in Dec 2017, updated it in Aug 2018, and revised it a bit this week (Feb 2024). I'll write more about visual art and my ability to interact with it another time, but here's what I've got for now. So I finally went. There's a show right now at the Phillips Collection on Pierre-Auguste Renoir, my longtime favorite artist, and I went. I got to see more of his work at one time than I ever have before. And I found myself a new favorite painting among them—not just a favorite out of Renoir's work, but perhaps a favorite among all art I will ever see. The exhibit itself explores the story behind one of Renoir...

Does it kind of hurt you, too, that that doesn't rhyme? Yeah, me neither. Yup. Totally. A couple of weeks ago, I went to see two plays by Harold Pinter-- The Lover  and The Collection --put on by the Shakespeare Theatre Company , and it was a pretty damn great experience. Overall. A caveat before digging in: These were my first Pinter plays in performance. I've only really ever read him before, although I did once perform a scene from Betrayal for a class. (I was, of course, spectacular in the role.) So it's hard, then, for me to speak much to Pinter as a whole or to how these plays and their staging that particular night stack up. But I'll do what I can. What I like about Pinter is how twisty and intellectual he is. He's not necessarily intellectual in the way Tom Stoppard is, to be sure, but there's something almost... mathematical about him, or so it's seemed to me. Take Betrayal , for example. There's something almost clockwork about how i...

I have a favorite painter. I even remember the exact moment I discovered him. Well, not exactly --maybe not the date or time or the context beyond barest detail. But I do remember it, mostly, and that it--and his work--still moves me. I was in Boston for one reason or another, and I went to the Fogg museum, for one reason or another. I remember it being an impressive building, but that's about it; it was right before some major renovations, so who knows what it's like now. That being said, philistine that I am (or was, hopefully), I can't remember anything I saw there. Except that one painting--one painting and one pivotal moment I can otherwise only slightly remember. It was Renoir. It was always going to be Renoir, it seems now. It was his self-portrait  at age 35. Something about his face and its intimacy, its immediacy; something about the way it popped, without leaping, from out of those drab colors. It caught my eye, and I was transfixed. I've never stopped ...

I recently finished watching the anime Gate . While an overall enjoyable show, it does have its flaws. I've been thinking about it now and then since finishing, and two problems in particular keep bugging me. The story begins when a gate from another world appears in Ginza , a shopping district in Tokyo. After repelling the incursion of ogres, dragons, and centurion-like soldiers who came through the gate, the JSDF  mounts a counter-invasion and sets up a base on the other side of the gate--in the "Special Region." From there, the JSDF encounter all manner of monsters and mischief, usually either slaughtering it with their military might or wowing them with the superiority of Japanese culture--but more on that when I get to the second problem. This constitutes the first problem, which is mostly amusing: Basically, the series is about as masturbatory an exercise in Japanese pride as any I can imagine. Well, actually, I can imagine more extreme cases, but the series get...