welcome back cyndi!

I’m really taken with the new album. Maybe I’ll write more later. Right now I’m too busy dancing! The youtube vid above is the first single “Into the Nightlife.” An actual video for the song is forthcoming.

a quibble

Here’s a young dapper Nathaniel Hawthorne:

Good looking guy, right? Here’s the picture for Hawthorne at Wikipedia:

Why choose this picture from the 1860s? Hawthorne dies in 1864, his last novel The Marble Faun is published in 1860. By the time this picture is taken, his corpus is behind him. Maybe there are house rules at Wikipedia about needing an actual photograph? I’m not trying to be ageist, here. It’s just that for an author as concerned with youth and beauty as Hawthorne frequently is to be made a period piece strikes me as inimical.

I could be wrong. In “The Artist of the Beautiful,” Hawthorne writes “when the artist rose high enough to achieve the beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes…” I realize I’m conflating Hawthorne’s opinion about his image with his fiction, and taking the narrator of his story at his word. These are problems. Nina Baym goes so far as to suggest that “At the core of ‘The Artist of the Beautiful’ is Hawthorne’s recognition of how inadequate a figure Owen [the protagonist of the story] is for the vocation he has chosen [watchmaker], how timid and shrunken his conception of art. The narrative belies the narrator’s claim for Owen’s artistic stature and calls for another kind of artistry than his” (Norton Critical Edition 431).

Baym argues as follows:

When the narrator brings the tale to a close with the assurance that ‘when the artist rose high enough to achieve the Beautiful, the symbol by which he made it perceptible to mortal senses became of little value in his eyes, while his spirit possessed itself in the enjoyment of the Reality,’ he claims a dignity for Owen Warland that the story will not support. The conflict here is directly related to Hawthorne’s own literary dilemma, for if Owen’s audience is faulted for its indifference to his art, so is he faulted for devoting himself to the realization of ideas that have so little connection to the life around him. (430)

I find the use of passive voice in the the last sentence suspicious. Exactly who, other than Nina Baym, is faulting Owen for the realization of ideas that have so little connection to the life around him? Baym blames Owen because his “impulse to attain the beautiful springs not from a desire to enrich life but from the need to escape it.” Again, enrich life for whom? The suggestion, I guess, is that the Beautiful only counts if other people’s lives are enriched by it. This move cancels the Beautiful as transcendent and personal. I’m unconvinced that Hawthorne recognizes Owen as inadequate to his vocation, and further that there is a contradiction present between the narrative and the narrator.

The bottom line, vulgar though it may be, is that Hawthorne, if we take Owen as his type, might not care a twit about what picture Wikipedia uses. But I do, and want the beautiful.

Real Estates

Ghost stories are typically about contested real estate. In film, the estate must visually represent what is at stake in the narrative’s conflict. Thus a particularly heavy burden falls to the production designer who must show the quality and character of the terrain at issue. The film’s credibility and coherence rest on visual foundations.

In Beetlejuice, Bo Welch admirably presents thesis-antithesis models for the contested home.

We begin with a nice Connecticut house upon a hill

and its model equivalent,

replete with a nice, if somewhat stylized couple

who quickly die.

Adam and Barbara’s vacation at home has thus turned into an eternity. This could be heaven, as Adam muses, except that the bourgies are moving in

and quickly take to home improvement.

Adam and Barbara can’t really leave, lest they contend with these guys:

So they try to take things into their own hands:

with no success, though they do befriend their adversaries daughter Lydia, whom Welch has done up as a perfect graveyard girl, or Robert Smith knockoff:

Unfortunately getting institutional help in the afterlife is much like seeking institutional help in this life, difficult or impossible. Welch washes the dead bureaucracy in a gaseous green:

No help. So Adam and Barbara turn to this guy:

Beetlejuice has an ulterior motive. He’s looking to get married.

The wedding is fortuitously interrupted and the families learn to live with each other. Barbara and Adam, who were possibly infertile in life, gain a surrogate daughter

who is clearly happier than formerly.

Death, it turns out, is just as human as life. Beetlejuice is a weird delight, to which, in large measure, we can thank Bo Welch for his credible textures.

This post is a contribution to the production design blog-a-thon.

just a quick reminder

The production design blog-a-thon begins Monday!

Mcsame

A Democratic Ticket? Edwards Endorses Obama

Today John Edwards endorsed Senator Obama for President. They look good together. Is this the beginning of a populist-progressive one-two?

Here’s the endorsement in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

warcatz

I can’t strongly enough recommend the “best of the left” podcast, from whom I take the above image. The music is fantastic, the radio clips great, and the mixing of music and dry congressional testimony regularly rousing. Give them your love, your clips, or at least an ear.

Murdoch Freaks

“My Wall Street Journal” is here.

Larp Documentary — Monster Camp

Hey, they’re in it for the culture. Who doesn’t want to escape the tedium of selling your labor to fight and band with relatively safe, similarly alienated people. I’ve not yet seen Monster Camp, and it might be too much to call it a priority, exactly, but one wonders…

My live action experience is limited to one Vampire session on the creative arts floor of my undergrad institution. I had smoke blown in my face by a zealous toreador who really had it in for tremere. If not thoroughly non-plussed, I was at least less than impressed. But I get the urge, and approve of counter public spheres as always in some way containing a utopian impulse. There’s plenty of regressive feudal wish fulfilment present, alas, too. As Dani Filth puts it, “I still played vampire aristocrat.”

Production Design Blog-A-Thon

My filmclub partner is hosting a production design blog-a-thon! He writes:

production design blog-a-thon: call for participation

At this stage in the development of the discipline, I think we’re all prepared to recognize the benefits that auteur theory has bestowed upon film studies. However, critics of auteur theory are quick to point out that any theory that champions the director as “author” also has the unfortunate tendency of eclipsing the deeply collaborative nature of film production, and will inevitably underplay the contributions of other people such as the screenwriter, the editor, and the cinematographer.

Perhaps even more maligned in this hierarchy is the production designer: the individual responsible for the overall “look” of the film, coordinating set designers, property masters, and costume designers to create an overall visual “feel.” With a little effort, it isn’t difficult to think of films where we have been delighted by the product of production designers’ labor and aesthetic, but they have nevertheless received a saddening lack of sustained appreciation, even from the most attentive of critics.

Film bloggers may not be able to change this state of affairs permanently, but I’d like to call for us to take just one week to focus our collective attention on the role of these under-recognized creators. So for the week of May 19-25, I am inviting your participation in the Production Design Blog-A-Thon. During this week, I will use the Film Club blog to collate posts in which you write on any aspect of production design or art direction. Use this week to celebrate your favorite production designer (or lambast one you can’t stand). Inspect your DVD collection for the most striking costumes and sets. Look for recurring interests in a production designer’s overall body of work. Have fun with it.

If you’re thinking about participating, send me an e-mail at projects [at] imaginaryyear.com so I know to check your blog during the week; if you could also ping me once you’ve got something up that would be helpful.

I hope you’ll consider participating!! I’m going to post on Bo Welch of Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, and Batman Returns, fame.