Tag: art

More from the Department of Interesting Stuff

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Here . . . have an article from the LA Times about a pair of stolen paintings – a Gauguin and a Cezanne – that turned out to have spent the last 44 years hanging in the kitchen of a retired Sicilian auto worker “who was unaware of their value” (he apparently picked them up at an auction for the equivalent of $30.)

It’s an interesting tidbit of news, and I’m only inclined to take issue with one statement in it.  The Sicilian auto worker in question may have been unaware of the paintings’ monetary worth, but – considering that he kept them in his home while he was working in Turin, and went to the trouble of taking them with him and hanging them up in his kitchen when he retired to Sicily – he was clearly aware of their value.  They were pictures he saw, and bought, and kept where he could see them every day, and it was all about him and the paintings, and nothing to do with who might have painted them or how much a collector might say they would bring at auction.

There are some critics out there, I am sure, who would assert that Sicilian Auto Guy wasn’t loving the pictures enough, or in the right way – because there are critics out there who say the same sort of thing about works of literature.  But I say that those critics are guilty of snobbery and intellectual arrogance – and I ought to know intellectual arrogance when I see it, because it’s my own second-favorite besetting sin.

(My very favorite is Wrath.  But after several decades of hard work, I’ve managed to tamp it down it to “at least I mostly behave myself in public” levels.)

More Tokens of Respectability

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The Washington Post now has a regular science fiction and fantasy column.  (And they’re going to be getting a regular romance column soon, too.)

I’m not sure how I should feel about all this.  It used to be that no good ever came of science fiction and fantasy trying to gain literary respectability.  All that ever happened was that the sf and the fantasy thus produced were unpleasant mutant products that were – as the saying goes — neither flesh nor fowl nor good red herring, and the arbiters of literary respectability didn’t like them anyway.

But now it seems that establishment respectability is finding us whether we go looking for it or not.  Which is fine with me, so long as sf and fantasy don’t lose their pipeline to those deep wells of don’t-give-a-damn-about-being-respectable which are the source of so much of their energy.

The liveliest art is always made on the wilder side of town.

Today’s Nifty Link

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St. Chad Gospel detail

Digitalized images with historical overlays of two manuscripts – the illuminated St. Chad Gospels, dating from about 730 AD, and a Wycliffe New Testament from about 1410 — in the possession of Lichfield Cathedral.

Zucchini, Redux

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As a follow-up to yesterday’s post, here’s the zucchini bread recipe:

Zucchini Bread

Ingredients

  •         3 cups flour
  •         1 teaspoon cinnamon
  •         1 teaspoon salt
  •         1 teaspoon baking soda
  •         1/4 teaspoon baking powder
  •         3 eggs
  •         1 cup brown sugar
  •         1 cup white sugar
  •         1 cup vegetable oil
  •         1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
  •         1/2 cup sour cream
  •         2 cups zucchini
    (This is one of those recipes that having a food processor with a shredding blade makes oh so much easier; otherwise, you and your grater are going to become very good friends.)
  •         1 cup raisins

Directions

  •     Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.
  •     Grease and flour 2 bread loaf pans.  (Or take the easy way out and spray them with Baker’s Joy cooking spray.  It’s what we do around here.)
  •     Sift together the flour, cinnamon, salt, baking soda, and baking powder.
  •     In a separate bowl combine the eggs, brown sugar, white sugar, and oil.
  •     Add the dry ingredients slowly to the egg mixture.  It’s going to be fairly stiff by the time you’re done.
  •     When everything is thoroughly mixed, add the sour cream and the vanilla.
  •     Finally, mix in the shredded zucchini and the raisins.
  •     Pour the batter into the two loaf pans.  (They say, “pour” all the time in these recipes, but using a ladle and transferring the batter a ladle-full at a time makes the process easier to control, and helps you keep the amount of batter evenly distributed between the two pans.)
  •     Bake at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 1 hour and 20 minutes.
  •     Test with a toothpick or a skewer; if it comes out clean, the loaves are done.
  •     Let them cool on a wire rack in their pans for a few minutes, then turn them out onto the rack to finish cooling.
  •     Have a slice, warm, with butter, if you want to. (Just to check for quality control, you understand.)

So there you are — zucchini bread.  If you’re looking for story ideas, or for recipes for Zucchini Lasagna or Zucchini Pickles, you’re on your own.

When Life Gives You Zucchini

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You make zucchini bread.

We all know how it is with zucchini.  Somebody in the neighborhood has a garden, and they have a zucchini plant.  Maybe even they have two (if they’ve never grown zucchini before.)  And the zucchini does as zucchini plants do, and sometime around the end of summer everybody in the neighborhood is receiving gifts of abundant zucchini, because the alternative is seeing their neighbor’s kitchen fill up with zucchini and possibly even explode.

And there’s only so much zucchini you can steam or saute or stir-fry before you start to bring out the recipe books.  And you think about Zucchini Lasagna, but not for very long, because the voice in your head that says “lasagna” also says, “That isn’t lasagna, that’s a vegetable casserole,” and your stomach says, “If you’re making lasagna, I want the real thing or nothing.”  And you think about zucchini pickles, but not for very long, because you don’t want to get involved in the whole pickling and canning thing.

And besides, zucchini bread isn’t imitation anything else, it’s real zucchini bread; and it doesn’t require specialized equipment and messing around with vats of boiling water and worrying about lids and seals; and you already know that everybody in the house will eat it.  And if they don’t, that’s okay, too, because you happen to like zucchini bread just fine.

Sometimes story ideas are like that.  You’ll get a story idea that comes out of nowhere like a gift of random zucchini, and it’s not your usual sort of story . . . maybe it’s a little over-the-top for your normal style, maybe it’s not your usual subject matter, maybe it has a bit too much of the guilty pleasure about it for your artistic peace of mind.

When something like that happens, you can try to make zucchini lasagna out of your story idea — slice it up and sauce it up and generally try to turn it into something more like your usual thing — but unless you really truly like zucchini lasagna, your readers are going to see what you did and know that your heart wasn’t in it.  Or you can go the pickling-and-canning route, taking that story idea and using all your hard-won tools and techniques to make it into something you can point to and call art.  And the critics may praise what you’ve done to elevate zucchini into something better and longer-lasting, but the voice in your head that doesn’t shut up is going to say, “And why does zucchini need elevation, anyhow?”

So you might as well make zucchini bread.  Don’t try to make that story idea into an imitation of something else, and don’t try to make it into something fancy and difficult just to please the critics.  Make it into good honest zucchini bread, and serve it to the people who will like it that way.

And don’t worry.  Eventually the frost comes, and the zucchini flood will dry up until next summer.

Hold the Cheese

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This past weekend we saw Pacific Rim, and — unsurprisingly — I have some thoughts about the movie.

At this point, I don’t think it counts as spoilery to say that the plot of Pacific Rim involves using giant armored fighting robots to defend against monsters invading Earth through a dimensional rift in the Pacific Ocean.  As concepts go, it’s exceptionally well-suited for a treatment featuring  a heavy layer of cheese — consider, for example, what Michael Bay did with a similar premise in Transformers.

Michael Bay, though, is the King of Cheese, and Guillermo del Toro, the actual director of Pacific Rim, is something else altogether.  The man who directed Pan’s Labyrinth may do genre, but he does not do cheese, and Pacific Rim is more than just a loud and flashy mecha-and-monsters movie.  At the same time, it doesn’t for a moment pretend that it’s something else —  the film is dedicated to stop-motion animation artist Ray Harryhausen and Godzilla director Ishiro Honda, for heaven’s sake, and contains references and shout-outs to more famous monsters and monster-fights of film and legend than can be conveniently listed here.

What keeps it from being cheesy is that it takes the initial admittedly silly premise–that the obvious and appropriate response to monsters invading from the deep is to construct giant armored robot suits to take them down in single combat–and plays it straight.  It never goes over the edge into parody; and it never gives the audience that “look at how clever I’m being” smirk.  It does give the audience moments of genuine beauty in the midst of all the action (I don’t think there’s an accidentally ugly image in the whole film.)

In short, the movie respects both its audience and itself, and that’s the best way I know of for all art, and not just film-making, to avoid turning into a pot of Velveeta fondue.

Snow Out of Season

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It’s April, but with all due respect to T. S. Eliot, no one up here in far northern New Hampshire is breeding any lilacs out of any land, dead or otherwise.

Instead, we’ve got the freeze-thaw cycle still going on, putting frost heaves and potholes into all the roads, and turning the frozen ground into deep, thick mud of the sort that used to sink Tiger tanks on the Eastern Front.   When I was an undergraduate doing a seminar on Robert Frost, I thought that mud-time was something Frost had made up for poetic purposes. Then I moved up here, and found out otherwise. (He wasn’t making up the bent-over birches, either.)

It’s always odd when you encounter in real life something which you’ve previously only encountered via art. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for legions of science fiction fans on the day the space aliens finally arrive.