Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity

Worth at least a three-hour drive: Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, at the Art Institute of Chicago. This exhibition gives us art devoted not to cathedrals, haystacks, and water lilies, but to well-dressed men and women (mostly women). Clothes in these works seem to both mask and reveal the human subject: one is what one wears. The studio portrait gives way to what appears to be a moment of everyday life (titles often carry a year): someone is reading a newspaper, someone is trying on a hat.

For Elaine and for me, the great discovery of this exhibition is James Tissot. His work seems more Pre-Raphaelite than Impressionist. I wish I had realized while still in the museum that Tissot’s The Circle of the Rue Royale depicts Charles Haas, the model for Proust’s Swann:

And yet, dear Charles Swann, whom I knew so little when I was still so young and you so near the grave, it is already because someone whom you must have considered a little idiot has made you the hero of one of his novels that people are beginning to talk about you again, and perhaps you will live on. If people talk so much about the Tissot painting set on the balcony of the Rue Royale Club, where you are standing with Galliffet, Edmond de Polignac and Saint-Maurice, it is because they can see there is something of you in the character of Swann.

Marcel Proust, The Prisoner, translated by Carol Clark (London: Penguin, 2003)

The perfect adjunct to the big show: Undressed: The Fashion of Privacy. Both exhibitions run through September 29.

[The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a gallery-by-gallery tour.]

Some rocks, some rocks

[“How to Keep Cool,” Zippy, August 2, 2013.]

I went a little crazy when I saw the middle panel of today’s Zippy. Because here is what I was planning to post today:


[From the Lassie episode “Rock Hound,” April 5, 1959. Lassie and Boomer Bates’s dog Mike visit a strangely similar memorial.]

If you’re wondering about “some rocks,” it’s a reference to the comic strip Nancy. Scott McCloud explains it, or them.

Please visualize these links in the form of a Venn diagram:

Nancy posts
Nancy and Zippy posts (with more rocks)
Zippy posts

[What is Zippy eschewing? His “usual styrofoam footwear.”]

Fragments from a musical

A little-known fact of musical-theater history: Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music started as a very different show, What Is the Sound of Music?

From the surviving manuscripts, in black pencil and blue ink on lined yellow 8 1/2" x 11" paper:

A Buddhist nun is torn between her dedication to the liberation of all sentient beings and her love for a wealthy landowner whose family [illegible ] as a governess.

[This sentence appears to be a synopsis of the story.]

*

“What Is the Sound of Music?”
“This Acolyte’s a Problem in the Sangha”
“How Do You Solve a Problem Like Samsara?”
“The Lonely Lama”
“Climb Ev’ry Mountain in the Quest for
    Enlightenment”
“Old Advice”
“Worldly Vice, Worldly Vice, Every Morning You
    Greet Me”
“Do-Re-Mi”

[From what appears to be a list of working song titles. Three of the titles are struck through.]

*

Totally unprepared are you to face a world of Zen,
Timid and shy and scared are you of koans beyond
    your ken.

[Partial lyric, “Sixteen Going on Seventeen Days of Unceasing Meditation”]

*

Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens,
Brown paper packages tied up with strings,
All are but fleeting, impermanent things.

[Partial lyric, “My Favorite Things Are All Utterly Impermanent”]

Perhaps you too, reader, have come across one or more manuscript fragments. Please, share your discovery in a comment.

[No disrespect to any tradition intended. It’s just fun.]

Store-brand cereals and their mascots

My friend Sara meditates on store-brand cereals and their mascots: “They’re A-Okay.”

Recently updated

The Old Reader, about to disappear Maybe not yet.

Hi and Lois watch

[Hi and Lois, July 31, 2013.]

Says Hi, “Housewives used to dress up to greet their husbands when they came home from work.”

Yes, and houses used to have their kitchens not in the living room. See the three little windows? You can’t tell me that that door isn’t front. It’s possible that Hi has walked around the house and entered through the kitchen — which would make him a back-door man in his own damn house. But that’s still a front door. And yes, there aren’t enough chairs.

And why is Hi under the impression that Lois is a “housewife”? Wake up, Mr. Flagston: your wife has been working since 1980. A 1984 chart tracking the strip’s history marks the event: “Lois Joins the Women’s Movement and Gets a Job Selling Real Estate” — aka Etatse Laer.

Related reading
All Hi and Lois posts (Pinboard)

[The chart appears in Mort Walker and Dik Browne’s The Best of “Hi and Lois” (1986).]

Antique music, antique phonographs

From WFMU, a podcast worth your attention: Michael Cumella’s The Antique Phonograph Music Program, old music played on old machines. Try the July 16 show, which explores the differences between acoustical and electrical recording, with back-to-back records for comparison.

I like this podcast for the expertise of its host, for the unfamiliarity of (most of) the music, and for the chance to think about what people not that long ago found entertaining. And guess what — much of it is still entertaining.

A discovery by way of this podcast and YouTube: the Bratislava Hot Serenaders. Try “Crazy Rhythm” (after Ben Bernie) and “Happy Feet” (after Paul Whiteman). Hot indeed.

Thanks to Mike at Brown Studies for recommending this podcast.

Domestic comedy

“Isn’t that pretty?”

[Rolls eyes for comedic effect .] “Beautiful. Put it on Pinterest.”

“I found it on Pinterest.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard, not Pinterest)

Populaire

Coming this fall, a new film with Bérénice Bejo and cinematography by Guillaume Schiffman:

Populaire takes place in the late 1950s and tells the story of Rose (played by Déborah François), a clumsy country girl who moves to a small city in the hope of becoming a secretary. She is hired by Louis (Romain Duris), an insurance agent, for her typing skills. As their relationship develops, Louis enters Rose into a regional speed-typing competition, becoming her coach and trainer with dreams of winning the world title.

Ms. Bejo stars as Louis’s childhood friend and former lover who champions Rose’s romantic interest in her boss.

Weinstein Co. Will Release a Movie Focused on a Speed-Typing Competition (Wall Street Journal)

It sounds wonderful.

Related posts
The Artist and typography
OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies
OSS 117: Lost in Rio

Life Without Reader

Searching for a satisfactory replacement for Google Reader (GR) has prompted me to rethink my online reading habits, in two ways:

Do I want to depend on RSS for my reading? No. That’s become clear to me as every GR substitute I’ve tried has turned out to have one or more problems: delays, downtime, missing posts, botched formatting.

Do I need to check most sites on a several-times-a-day basis? No. But that is, in effect, what I’m doing by checking a reader throughout the day.

So I’m trying Life Without Reader, any reader. I’ve created a Pinboard bookmark to hold the URLs for sites I’ve been following in GR and replacement readers. I will visit these sites on a regular basis, not daily but two or three times a week. Thus I’ll be able to read what people have written as they’ve chosen to present it, with distinctive typography, sidebars, the works. (How much one misses out on with RSS — comments too.) That I won’t be seeing posts in the timeliest way is of minor concern to me: very little of what I read is in any danger of turning into yesterday’s news a day or two after publication.

Life Without Reader is my suggestion for greater engagement with those whom one reads online. I’d like to see it catch on.