30 days meme: the epic update

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Stephen W. Hawking's A Brief History of Time. I read while on holiday, sitting on a beach near some palm trees while nursing a sunburn I had gotten from reading David Robinson's biography of Charlie Chaplin and being so enraptured by it that I hadn't found the time for sunscreen.

I felt like I understood what I read at the time (at least until the stuff about string theory) and was really pleased with myself but the knowledge I gathered slipped through my fingers because I have a really hard time retaining any information that book gave me. I re-read some of the book years later and the same thing happened, I understood but couldn't learn it.

But what I do remember about the book is a great sense of epic-ness. People usually don't talk about infinity and billions of years and billions of lightyears.

You know... I won't live a billion years, I will never travel beyond this solar system (and it is doubtful that I'll ever actually leave even this planet) and I certainly won't be around for the end of the universe but in the same way a good novel can transport you into another time and place you've never experienced, A Brief History of Time transported me far beyond that tropic beach. (Oh, the irony of being in a beautiful place reality and dreaming of a cold distant space and time.)




Andrei Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev/Andrey Rublyov. This is a movie but it's a movie about a painter (who actually existed but about whose life little is known), so it's basically Real People Fiction.

And it's basically it's one of the most expensive art house movies of all time. Adjusted for inflation the movie's budget is around 100 million dollars which is used to painstakingly re-create medieval Russia, a battle scene and a lot of other cool things you can put into a movie about a monk painter who takes a vow of silence halfway through the film and doesn't say much in the first half either.

It's epic but it gets really down and dirty and weird with its historical fiction. Historical movies are usually full of heroic moments of glory but this one lacks them. There's only the epilogue where after nearly four hours of black and white you see finally Rublev's paintings and in glorious color to boot and the climax of the story of the young bellmaker. The bellmaker's part of the movie is also the most engaging one because it is fairly conventional in the way it racks up the tension. (This is a good thing.)

But yeah, totally fanfic. But fantastic. I don't care much for medieval Russian painters but when I finally saw one of Rublev's paintings in person, I paused. Not because it impressed me more than the other medieval Russian painters but because I associated him with Tarkovsky's idea of who he was. When fan fiction positively changes the way you perceive the original, it's done the best it could.




It's a song I heard only once because that was enough and that's Bjork's Next to Last Song as performed in Dancer in the Dark. If you've seen the movie you probably know why. My ipod actually contains a copy of it but I've never listened to it again. I don't think I could take the way it ends.




The funny thing about a lot of paintings is that they usually surprise you with their size because you only know them from books or posters. (Except the Leonardos which usually are as bite-sized as they looked in the books.) The Nightwatch is like a small house.

The Impressionists usually impress with their colors showing the middle finger to modern printing methods. Nowhere is this more obvious than it with Van Gogh whose paintings look boring as fuck (color-wise) in print but in reality some of his paintings pretty much blind you with color. It's amazing.

This particular painting is actually pretty unremarkable. The painter (Sir Thomas Lawrence) is great but not one of the greatest who ever lived. But let me tell you, when first saw it I was surprised that the person he portrayed was Hottie McTrotterson:



So struck by the vague Daniel Day-Lewis, except not a hobo, vibe and those green eyes (They're greener in real life than in that picture) I did a little digging. Turns out that the only guy who was vaguely well-known and rich enough to get a portrait from Lawrence had some shady slave-owning going on and is related to the royal family. Maybe. All around fail, Hottie McTrotterson.