American Eyes
The Caning of Charles Sumner in the U.S. Senate: White Supremacist Violence in Pen and Pixels
Peter H. Wood and Harlan J. Gradin place the attack on the Capitol in an American historical context…
Broadway by Light
Watch the classic short film from 1958 by William Klein (with help from Alain Resnais and Chris Marker). Click on “Read more” for a bigger screen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2x144mSwtM&t=2s
Fires in the Night (A Sequence from “Candy Mountain”)
Robert Frank’s magnificent picture of kids with sparklers on the beach reminded your editor of night scenes near the end of Candy Mountain–the 1987 road movie directed by Frank along with Rudy Wurlitzer. (Forgive the German subtitles!) Click “Read more” to see a bigger screen. [P.S. THE EMBED HAS BEEN IFFY – IF THE MOVIE STARTS AT THE BEGINNING, CLICK ON AROUND 1:22.50 TO GO STRAIGHT TO THE NIGHT.] B.D.
Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving was Joel DeMott’s first movie. It was screened at Tom DeMott’s Memorial on Dec. 1 (nearly 50 years after she made it). Tommy–Jo’s first roommate/fan–would be beaming now if he revisited her visions of him and the DeMott fam. Click on “Read More” to watch Thanksgiving. Use the following password: Amherst
Requiem For a Not-So-Heavyweight: Hockney at the Met
David Hockney is a master conjurer of placid images and what such images conjure.
“Wild and Blue”: Celeste Dupuy-Spencer’s Populist Visions of America
Celeste Dupuy-Spencer has been painting up a storm. The artist told art blogger Brienne Walsh she usually takes 6 months to a year and a half to finish a picture but for “Wild and Blue,” her first solo show in New York (which runs until October 7th at the Marlborough Contemporary Gallery), she only had the summer and the “paintings just got ripped out of me.” More than a few of her pictures hint at hurricane weather. And Dupuy-Spencer, who’s lived in New Orleans (though she’s based in L.A. now), knows from floods of feeling. Pictures like Cajun Navy and Lake Pontchartrain look back to Katrina’s aftermath but are all up in this time of climate change.
Dupuy-Spencer is “painting the news” as one reviewer has written in New Republic, citing her picture of the Confederate monument torn down last month in Durham, which “amounts to a kind of monument to the search for social justice.”
What America Looks Like
The first two days of the Trump administration, complete with swearing in and swearing.
