Not Really The Best

Okay, I admit I was caught by the headline to this article:

‘Masterpiece’ period drama based on ‘best book ever written’ is free to stream on Netflix

Ignoring for a moment the inherent inability of Netflix to make a “masterpiece” anything, I was nevertheless curious to see what constituted the “best book ever written”.

Alas, no.  While One Hundred Years of Solitude  isn’t a bad book, it’s nowhere close to being the best book ever written — hell, even in the “magical reality” genre (to which it belongs) John Fowles’s The Magus  has it beaten all ends up — but while One Hundred  may entertain, it’s not going to change your world in the same way, perhaps, that Les Misérables  might.

Feel free to discuss in Comments, or to nominate your own submission for the greatest.  (Oh gawd, here come the Heinlein / Pratchett groupies…)

Smart Move

To many people, this little move would be astonishing, nay even incredible:

France will ban smoking in all outdoor spaces frequented by children, including beaches, parks and bus stops, the country’s health minister said.

The restrictions will involve creating a perimeter outside schools where members of the public will not be able to smoke a cigarette.

“Tobacco must disappear where there are children,” Catherine Vautrin, the health minister, said in an interview with the Ouest-France newspaper.

The freedom to smoke “stops where children’s right to breathe clean air starts”, she said.

The ban on smoking outdoors will come into force on July 1.

As one of many who has had to endure the clouds of smoke from the Gitanes/Gauloises that form a permanent fixture of any French establishment, I first asked myself:  The French?  Of all people, the French?

It’s like asking them to have only one kind of cheese, or banning wine.  C’est incroyable!

But they’re sneaky, the Frogs, as any old doughboy or G.I. will tell you.  Note this little wrinkle:

Café terraces will be excluded from the ban.

So that lifestyle choice — essentially, involving most of the places outside the home where Frogs would be found smoking — can carry on as before.

It’s the “outdoor spaces frequented by children” that’s the kicker.

If anyone loves them a good strong cigarette more than the French, it’s the… Arabs.  And where there are Arabs, you’ll always find hordes of screaming ill-behaved… children.

If you put those two facts together:  I think that this smoking ban is a subversive move to get Arabs to leave France in disgust.

Surprising Turnaround

…from me, that is.

I’ve made fun of that skinny little Brit actor with the fey name, Timothee Chalamet, currently the bonker of one of the Kardashian coven (Kimmy, Kluless, Kunty, whatever).

But the other night I watched him play a young Bob Dylan in  –Out Of Nowhere   A Complete Unknown  and his performance blew me out of my socks.  And I’m not even a fan of Dylan’s, to put it mildly.

Not only did Chalamet nail Dylan’s speaking voice and attitude, he also got the singing voice almost perfectly.  And the movie was a gem:  a little time capsule of the early 1960s — the best compliment I could pay it is that I wished it was longer.

Do yourself a favor, and watch it, and him.  (I can’t remember which channel it’s on, but whatever.)

In Defense Of Nudity

I read this article at The Federalist (“The fact that celebrated works from the past contain nudity doesn’t justify us including it in our films, literature, and other mediums”) and much of what Meg Johnson says — and what Tolstoy said — is true.

However, as someone who enjoys nudity in art and pretty much everywhere else, allow me to come to its defense (so to speak).  The problem is that people (like Tolstoy) conflate nudity with its effect on the viewer’s libido, but I’m not sure I agree.

Michelangelo’s Statue of David:  art.
Michelangelo’s Statue of David Sporting A Massive Erection:  not art.

In times when nudity was rare, or frowned upon by the pezzonovanti  in the Church or government [some redundancy], then yes, the sight of a nude buttock or breast might have been titillating or arousing.  And yes, with the relaxation of those rules, simple nudity became much less so.  One has only to compare early Playboy  magazines with modern-day Hustler  to see the truth of that.

People always thought that publishing nudity was the thin end of the wedge, the start of the slippery slope and all the other clichés.  I’m not going to argue with that, because one inescapable fact of nature is that humankind will always push boundaries, whether it’s nudity in art or legal confines.  (Not all that long ago, theft used to be punished by hanging;  now, even murder isn’t always faced with the same consequence.  Speed limits are always tested, to the point where enforcement has had to apply a 10% “grace” allowance so as not to appear too tyrannical.)

Similarly, while “prurient” artistic nudity was banned in the past, “classical” nudity — i.e. nudity drawn to depict a Classical morality tale — was grudgingly accepted, an allowance that almost all classical artists took advantage of.  The example used in Meg Johnson’s article, Bernini’s Rape Of Proserpina in Rome’s Galleria Borghese,  is an excellent example:

It is, of course, exquisite — as much for Bernini’s skill as a sculptor as its reticence.  Note that Bernini is showing the act of rape by displaying Pluto’s massive muscles compared to Proserpina’s slender feminine ones, the violence of her abduction revealed by her breast, rendered naked by her clothing having been ripped off, and Pluto’s brutally-joyous facial expression contrasting with her fearful one.

Bernini is not depicting the act of rape by showing Plato’s erect phallus plunging into Proserpina’s tender vagina — although he was quite clearly perfectly capable of sculpting it.  But that would have been pornography;  what he did is Fine Art.

I don’t have to show any examples of this comparison, because were I to do so, that would be showing pornography by using artistic criticism as its fig leaf.  (See what I did there?)

But by displaying nudity in art and acknowledging that this could inevitably lead to pornography, does that mean society’s moral ruin is inevitable?

Of course not.  And Johnson’s premise of “The fact that celebrated works from the past contain nudity doesn’t justify us including it in our films, literature, and other mediums” is in fact fatally flawed because it is denying that modern films and literature are themselves forms of artistic expression.

Where a movie director, for example, draws the line is the defining characteristic.  I’ve often deplored the modern movie trend of showing love scenes as sex scenes, instead of simply hinting at it — you know, a close-up of a passionate kiss fading to black and the next scene showing the couple lying together in bed the following morning (or not even that explicit).  To me, showing the sex between a couple denies us, the audience, the opportunity of using our imagination — and that’s a primary artistic flaw if ever there was one.

But simple nudity?  I’m all in favor of it, if for no other reason that it upsets those who insist on their womenfolk wearing maxi-dresses, burkas or niqabs.

The hell with them.

Wallpaper

This one got my attention, so up it goes:

It’s funny:  you think it’s just a rendition, and then you go to London’s King’s Cross or the Gare du Nord in Paris on a chilly misty morning… and it looks almost exactly like that.

R.I.P. Val

I’m sorry to see that the Big C finally ended the life of Val Kilmer, who I’ve always thought was a fine actor.  If he’d played no other part, his role as the dying Doc Holliday in Tombstone  would make a hell of an acting legacy.  In The Saint, Heat  and even the silly Real Genius:  likewise brilliant.

As for the rest… pick your favorites.

(Apparently, according to some directors, Kilmer could be a total asshole to work with, but I don’t care about that.  Sometimes, talent excuses a few peccadilloes, a.k.a. the Barrymore Exception.)