Aventurina King

There is a sea of breasts in the first scene of The Curse.  Tens of petite female servants wake up and help each other tighten their sashes to the beat of the drums.  They apply rouge on their cheeks and then scurry off in the palace like mice in a test labyrinth.  Cut to the Empress, walking among the kitschy rainbow glass columns of the gilded corridors.  The sea of breasts presents her with her medicine.  She knows the Emperor has infused it with a poison that slowly cripples a human brain.  She drinks it.

Thus begins The Curse of the Golden Flower.  Huge stars implode under their gargantuan weight and director Zhang Yimou has been conquered by the increasing budget of his films.  With more money, more people have a vested interest and it’s clear that The Curse is the product of compromise, from the anachronistic medieval male choir (a nod to the Da Vinci Code’s box office?) to the featured pop star, Jay Chow.  Zhang Yimou didn’t get to production in time and director Feng Xiaogang raked up the talent of set designer Tim Yip and action choreographer Yuan Heping for his competing film, The Banquet. 

The plot is Shakespeare with an incestuous twist: decadence, the rotting stench of human lust and sin packed within the treasure chest of the Tang dynasty palace.  The Empress copulates with the Emperor’s first son for a whole three years. The Emperor knows, and his revenge slowly poisons the Empress.  But the Empress has two sons of her own, and the elder will help her take over the throne during the Chrysanthemum festival.  The sea of breasts ominously hovers over and destroys any credible drama.

 Yesterday, I bought myself an unexpected present two weeks before christmas: a digital camera.  Mesdames et Messieurs, I present the results of the new Canon Xti (I baptized it Camille). 

I went to the Whitney.  Two exhibits: Picasso and American Art; Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World.

The first was impressive: impressive paintings, impressive names–Jackson Pollock, Stuart Davis, Willem de Kooning, Arshile Gorky.  Most memorable (for me) was this small charcoal cubist sketch that greeted visitors with its indiscernible smile.  After that it was all confident pitch black lines and bright colors that popped out at you like bubblegum.  A room of Pollocks splashed around Picasso’s provocative colors and the artful messiness of his sketches.  Roy Lichtenstein’s plastic women grinned amid a dotted sky and beach.

I liked the second exhibit better.  Time was running out by that point, and I admit I only spent 20 minutes running through it, but it impressed itself on me.  Maybe because its organizational structure was simpler–there were only two artists–or maybe because its theme moved me. 

An introduction crawled up the opening wall: in the 1920s, amid the viral distribution of industrial art and kitsch, these two artists stood up like beacons and redefined the boundaries of high art and commercial art. (I’m supposing they were trying to place themselves among high art.)  They both adopted mechanical precision and abstraction in their paintings. 

Albers seemed obsessed with squares and color experimentation.  I remember reading once about Matisse’s color theory: that the larger a colored area is, the stronger that color will be in the painting, and that certain colors are inherently stronger than others (red for example).  The painter is like a visual conductor, at times giving immense breathing space to a vivid green, or shrinking its prairie to let a red bloom fully.  

Matisse’s color boundaries are curvy, like the warm marble of a breast.  Albers’ colors are steel cut into squares.  There are violet and magenta squares, and blue squares.  There are squares within squares, and squares overlapping squares–their colors overlap too.

Moholy Nagy experiments with shapes.  He is a bit like Kadinsky.  No, this sort of simile makes describing art toooooo easy.  He places an opalescent circle over a criss-cross of red lime lights.  Over black, a white ring marches towards a delicate intersection of white lines like a trapeze artist.  There is a glass sculpture, a clean sheet of glass that twists itself into itself until its shadow becomes beautiful to the eye.

www.aventurinaking.com

The Fountain received a 50 on metacritic.

I can understand why. After all it’s not a blockbuster, nor a crowd pleaser.  It’s visually stunning–a kaleidoscope of colorful precipitations–but understanding requires a considerable amount of digging.

The basic storyline: a medical researcher is losing his wife to cancer and has to choose between spending her last moments looking for a cure, or looking after her.  The whole film is about her death, and his desperate fight against it.  Glum enough.

But instead of sucking the reel into its entropy, her death sends hundreds of thematic tentacles out to illuminate the viewer.  The first of these is the novel which the wife writes.  It tells of a Spanish conquistador who buries himself in the South American rain forest to find the tree of life, and with its power, save the queen.  The Christian theme of redemption is coated with Mayan mythology.  According to the Incas, the First Father sacrificed himself to give birth to the world, upon his death; his body became a tree, the tree of life.  He died to give birth to something bigger and more important.

The next tentacle or parallel world that the film haunts is the imagination of the medical researcher.  In it, he is a futuristic angel that sails through the golden clouds of a dying star.  His vessel is a glass ball, his earth, a patch of dry land with an old massive tree.  At times, he lightly climbs towards the venerable trunk and cuts off a piece of it to eat.

These worlds interweave and illuminate each other like chapters in a book.  They are attempting, with their multiplied scope, to wrap themselves around the idea of death and understand it.  Death means the birth of something else.  What that something else is remains to be discovered.

I saw Al Gore’s documentary on global warming yesterday.

It was convincing enough to make me start recycling.  But I couldn’t help feeling that all the crucial information was the background, and that the voice, the cinematography and the music it came packaged in was the foreground.  Every changing tone in Al Gore’s voice felt calculated.  Early on in the documentary, there was a chuckle gliding under its silk: to communicate that this was going to be a fun, entertaining experience to the college students of his audience. 

Footage of Al Gore staring at his Mac like a Rodin slid in between the cliffhangers of his presentation for a good measure of relaxation.  These images spread out over the subtle although impending clockwork of the score. Tic Tac Tic Tac, time is passing and the earth is getting warmer.

Its true, the earth is getting warmer, the glaciers are melting, the hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more destructive… All this is true, but the Hollywood slapped onto these facts pushes the truth off pitch.

Nevertheless, recycling is on my to-do list.