Oscar's Best Picture Firsts

The very first movie to win an Academy Award for Best Picture was a war film. It was 1927, the first year that the Oscars were held, and the winner was “Wings.” The most recent Best Picture winner was also a war film, “The Hurt Locker.” The shared genre is just about all that these two movies, 82 years apart, have in common. “Wings” was a silent movie shot in black and white and directed by a man, while “The Hurt Locker” was very much a “talkie” shot in full color and directed by a woman, Kathryn Bigelow. In fact, “The Hurt Locker” was the first film directed by a woman to win an Oscar for Best Picture.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Street painting originated in Europe in the 16th Century, when artists known as “I Madonnari” created images of the Madonna on street surfaces in exchange for bread and olive oil. Modern day “Madonnari” continue this artistic tradition by creating fine art with chalk as their medium and the street surface as their canvas.

"To Russia With Love"

Nelson Shanks just may be the most famous American artist you've never heard of. Shanks is primarily a portraitist and teacher, who has studied all over the world, but resides in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where he paints almost everyday.

“Mother and Father Worked Hard So I Can Play”

The billboard outside the museum shows a headless mannequin child at play, dressed in an outfit that looks Victorian, yet makes me think of Africa.

Anne Carson's Nox

Anne Carson has credentials when it comes to fragments.  She’s a professor of classics and translator of ancient Greeks who says, of using brackets when translating Sappho, “Brackets are exciting.”

The Best Onion Rings You'll Ever Eat

“Myran’s has the best onion rings you’ll ever eat.”  Onion rings?  We were in the heart of crawfish country, headed for Myran’s Maison de Manger for lunch.  Among her many talents, our friend K. is a supremely good cook.  While we didn’t doubt her, we were surprised that, in this context, she’d give onion rings a starring culinary role.

Eyjafjallajokull - The Inconvenient Volcano

For 7 days I tracked its every move vicariously through BBC TV, SKY News and CNN in hotel rooms in London and Paris, waiting for the go-ahead to get back on an aeroplane bound for Atlanta, secretly hoping that it wouldn’t come too soon. Though I knew had to get back.

I Am Not Me, The Nose Is Not Mine

In the teeming collage of text that forms a backdrop for the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of The Nose are the words “spine," smashed,” and “beautiful, pitiful age.”  While in the thrall of the opera’s swirl of sound and image, I held tight to those words in hope of discovering where they came from and what they meant.

The Beauty of the Object: Megan Barron’s wrack line

The grains shall be collected
from the thousand shores
to which they found their way

--Kay Ryan, from “All Shall Be Restored”

Sometime in her early twenties, Megan Barron took some slides, one of which “was intriguing but sadly underexposed.”

It occurred to me to remedy the mistake by trying to make a painting of the image, which I did by peering through the slide held between my fingers.  . . . While I probably gave myself a headache, I was surprised at its turning out well & thought, “Maybe I can do this—paint.”

In her current project, wrack line:  one year of beach finds, illustrated, Barron demonstrates her considerable artistic talent every single day.  The wrack line project, as described by Barron, is “a daily visual journal of what washes ashore.  Every day for a year I will post a new painting or drawing of treasures found during beach walks.”

Nature's Museum at the Ringling

The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota presents a wonderful blend of art and story. From its birth in the "roaring twenties", the dream child of John Ringling - circus magnate, art collector, investor, financier - through the Florida land boom and the Great Depression, to Ringling’s bequest of the property to the State of Florida on his death in 1936; the history of this place contains enough drama, romance, and intrigue to fill an epic novel.

Wondrous Strange: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves at the Morgan Library

Horatio:  O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

Hamlet:  And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

When contemplating the flaying of St. Bartholomew, one can be forgiven if pretzels don’t come immediately to mind.  Yet in the Morgan Library’s spectacular exhibit, “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” the artist’s depiction of St. Bartholomew sports a border of interlinked pretzels with a line of crackers down one side.  We’ll never know why:  what the artist intended is lost to time.

Riding the Magic Carpet: Daily Painting on the Internet

“Elizabeth says the internet is like a magic carpet,” our artist-friend Barbara reported.  That took me aback.  I’m on the computer all day, every day, for work.  So when it comes to time behind a screen, magic carpet isn’t the phrase that comes to mind.

Armchair Traveling: Japan at the Met

When I enter the Asian wing of New York City’s Metropolitan Museum, I am transported to a realm like no other.  I turn one way and arrive in a land of bamboo and cranes, or another and travel with philosophers on their long, slow journeys to sit and draw and write and talk.

Things As They Are

"Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar."

-Wallace Stevens

I’ve been troubled by computer problems and an inconstant internet these past few days.  I had to remind myself there was a time when such things were not only unnecessary, but not even available.  I had to think:  what, then, were the things I used to use?

I no longer own a typewriter, so I looked around for a notebook and a pen.  I found them foreign objects, and inefficient.  I looked for a dictionary, but had only a small paperback that didn’t contain what I required.  I wanted confirmation of something I’d been told:  that the etymological root of the word “poet” was “maker.”  Without my usual tools to search, I was thrown back on my own experience for proof.

Boats That Won’t Float: Sculptures by Gwyn Metz

Open the door of Chrystoph Marten’s salon and out float dulcet strains of music reminiscent of the sea.  Marten himself may greet you at the door, hairbrush in hand, and, with a welcoming smile, wave you toward a wall along which are arrayed some of Gwyn Metz’s “boats that won’t float.”