Archive page 046
Friday, March 21, 2008
Kinetic Man: Buster Keaton
From the Hugh Kenner book "The Countfeiters" page 68:
"Buster Keaton's subject was kinetic man, a being he
approached with the almost metaphysical awe we reserve for
a Doppelganger. This being was, eerily, himself, played by
himself, then later in a projection room, watched by himself: an experience never possible to any generation of
actors in the previous history of the world. He could watch
himself, moreover, doing again things that in much earlier
phases of his life he had actually done: being blown about
by a cyclone, for instance, as he was in Kansas at the age
of two and one-half. And his father in more than one film
was his father, Joe Keaton, and the bride he plucked off
the ledge near the waterfall was indeed his bride of two
years, Natalie Talmadge Keaton...'
Keaton above and below: The young man who was a silent film dynamo. The older fellow who was trying to make ends meet.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
"Intelligentsia"
From the Feb 2008 issue of New Criterion:
"A few salient characteristics defined the
intelligentsia. To begin with, an intelligent was expected to identify first and foremost
as an intelligent. Before the birth of the intelligentsia, and in societies without an intelligentsia, a well-educated person might
regard himself first of all as a nobleman, a
scientist, a Christian, or an Anglophile, but
to be a Russian intelligent one had to renounce all other identities or, at least,
regard them as secondary. For an intelligent,
revolution, not his profession, was his true
calling: thus the joke in The Possessed* when
one character asks whether it is wise to
hire an engineer committed to universal
destruction.
Intelligents were also expected to share a
set of beliefs. To be sure, these beliefs varied
from generation to generation and allowed
for some diverse positions, but, until the
twentieth century, they always included a
commitment to materialism, atheism, socialism of some sort, and revolution. As the
government had its censorship, the journals
controlled by the radicals had their own
"second censorship" to enforce orthodoxy.
Chekhov deeply resented that pressure.
"Under the banner of science, art, and oppressed free-thinking among us in Russia,'
he objected, "such toads and crocodiles will
rule in ways not known even at the time of
the Inquisition in Spain' a prediction that,
of course, turned out to he a gross under-
statement."
From the review by Gary Saul Morson of the book Motherland: A Philosophical History of Russia, written by Leslie Chamberlain.
*The Possessed is a1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
The Dogwoods Herald Spring
Dogwood Trees in Chesterfield, Virginia
Click to enlarge
New Jack Kirby book from Art Book Publisher Abrams
Kirby: King of Comics
Abrams Publishers
224 Pages
by Mark Evanier (Author), Neil Gaiman (Introduction)
$40 list price; approx $26 from amazon.com
This review of the book has been moved to the Jack Kirby Page on this web site.
