For our soul track today...
"I'm So Tired of Being Alone," a 1968 song not released until 1971, on Al Green's album Al Green Gets Next to You. Rolling Stone ranked it #299 among the list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time (in 2011). Everyone knows the great R&B singer Green: "Let's Stay Together," "Take Me to the River," I'm Still in Love with You," "Love and Happiness." Born in Forrest City, Arkansas in 1946, Green started singing early on and had his own bands throughout his teenage years. He came into his prime working with producer Willie Mitchell for Memphis' Hi Records in the early seventies. His 1972 album Let's Stay Together is regarded as one of the all-time greats. Green is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and still tours; I've had the privilege of seeing him.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdw7kxD8eUc
Julia's been under the weather this weekend, and seems to be coming out of it. It's been a tough last couple of weeks for the Fischer family, but we all had a good time yesterday at a luau raising money for Gabriel's class. Gabriel had a ball, zigzagging all over the auditorium like a daredevil.
Julia starts summer classes tomorrow, teaching two two-hour classes a day Monday through Friday for five weeks. Wish her luck!
Movie Review
Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary about the Chauvet Cave in the south of France, site of the (to date) oldest prehistoric cave paintings ever discovered, is a wondrous film, meant and deserved to be seen by everyone. (Julia is showing it in class this week.)
Herzog's nonfiction films can be quirky and niche-y, often stylized and ponderous; his 2007 doc Encounters at the End of the World, about workers in Antarctica, drove me crazy because I thought Herzog only sought out the looniest, "idiosyncratic" of individuals, which served Herzog's purpose perhaps, but not ours - it was too flaky.
This one is a real winner. Herzog takes us inside the caves (the entrance of which, due to a landslide, had been hermetically sealed off for thousands of years) and allows us to share his wonder and awe at these rock paintings, the earliest forms of visual art known to man. It's not hard to be amazed and astonished by what we see and Herzog's crew, working under restricted conditions, do a marvelous job at showing us everything they can, clearly and respectfully. As the camera looms over the rhinos, horses, bears, and insects, one doesn't have to be an art historian to feel, grasp the importance and significance of what the long-ago people were trying to communicate.
The people he interviews are informative, funny, and Herzog's voice-over reflections are appropriate and incisive.
For the millions of people who will never get to see the Chauvet Caves, this is the next best thing, and something of a gift to us from Herzog and his crew.
(***1/2)
Seeing Juliette Binoche in 2011's captivating, puzzling Certified Copy, Abbas Kiarostami's film about a British writer and a French woman who go for a ride together and start acting like they're husband and wife (or are they husband and wife?), makes me certain that Binoche's career, particularly the last decade, could hold up and go toe to toe with any world actress' body of work with the exception of Streep. Proof?
- 2008's Summer Hours, a must-see film about three siblings who must sell of their childhood possessions when their mother dies
- Dan in Real Life, an appealing 2007 romantic comedy featuring good, unexpected chemistry between her and Steve Carell
- 2005's strange Cache, with Binoche and Daniel Auteuil as upper-class parents terrorized by a series of horrific, voyeuristic videotapes
- Binoche gave winning turns in the romantic comedies Jet Lag and Chocolat. The English Patient won her a well-deserved Oscar, but she was every bit as good in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Blue and 1992's Damage.
I haven't seen quite a number of her films because most of them are international, art-house affairs and sometimes hard to find, but she has a terrific oeuvre and has a few films in production right now, including one that features her playing Camille Claudel. Keep it up, girl!
Ready for some more photographers? Me too.
Slim Aarons (#39)
You think Aarons, you think the glorious mid-century Hollywood. His mantra: "attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places." He gained entrance to exclusive parties, yachts, palaces, summer homes, mansions, on good terms with princesses, movie stars, royalty. He was born in Manhattan, served as a World War II Army photographer, and soon after headed for Hollywood. It is rumored that Aarons served as the inspiration for Jimmy Stewart's character in Rear Window -as did his apartment. He worked for, among other magazines, Life and Town and Country. His 1957 photo "The Kings of Hollywood," (below) was acclaimed by Smithsonian as a "Mount Rushmore of Stardom."
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| The Kings: Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart |
William Eggleston (#40)
Known as the man who reinvented color photography, the southern Eggleston also plays with banal images and subjects. Born in 1939, Eggleston grew up on a plantation in Mississippi and was influenced early on by Cartier-Bresson. His work is controversial because the subjects are so mundane without being predictable. His visual landscape of the South - gas stations, restaurants, back roads, motel rooms - and his innovative use of color in art photography have made him a legend in his field; he's still working. It's important to understand how big of a break, a shift, his move to color photography was; at the time, almost everyone working in photography (Ansel Adams, Arbus, Weston, Garry Winogrand) was working in black-and-white.
How about I'll Have Another's win yesterday at the Preakness? One more to go: Belmont.
How about the Lakers' inability to close last night against OKC? One more to go and they can start re-building this mess of a team.
How about the Spurs? One more to go and they'll be in the Western Finals, ready to continue their dominance.
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