Grrrl With the Dragon Tattoo
We liked David Fincher's "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo." When we read Stieg Larsson's books we made a point of counting how many times the characters Mikael Blomkvist, Lisbeth Salander or someone else made a sandwich (dark winter-wheat bread with a painfully thin slice of meat or cheese) and a pot of coffee. Which they always drank black. Fincher for the most part replaces the coffee with cigarettes——Daniel Craig as Blomkvist and Rooney Mara as Lisbeth smoke like there's no tomorrow. We couldn't even begin to explain the mysteries of the Swedish soul, but we've always been drawn to those qualities of coolness, restraint and extraordinary ordinariness. In modern parlance, they're tight. But as Stieg's books and this movie show, the Swedes are not without their deep kinks, as represented by the family of industrialist Henrik Vanger in all their nutty glory. "Dragon Tattoo" has its moments, and most of them go to Mara as the dark, pierced Svensk Avenger. In one scene Lisbeth wears a T-shirt that reads Fuck You You Fucking Fuck. We're a long way from Ikeaville.
It’s Just a Shot Away
Our second read of Keith Richards’ “Life” was even better than the first (the last 30 or so pages start to fizzle because, really, what we call the “Voodoo Lounge” days can’t compare with everything that leads up to and includes the glorious “Exile on Main Street” era), and it’s a surprising book that covers everything from his childhood in the village of Dartford (still very much feeling the effects of World War II) to the women in his life, including his beloved mom Doris. And drugs. Lots and lots of drugs, which Keith simply refers to as "maintenance"––first-grade, fluffy white Merck cocaine, Moroccan hashish, pills and heroin. For Richards, it all came down to a very fine art of calibrating a cocktail of intoxicants––neither too high nor too low––to keep him on the beam and fuel stretches where he didn't have to sleep for days (his record was nine). But then there were the crashes, and more attempts at going cold turkey to get off the smack than you could shake a syringe at.
Hot Water Heater Jesus
We don't do the outdoors very well at all. Beaches bore us. The thought of camping gives us the jitters (see: bears, the Donner Party and the "Blair Witch Project"). We once encountered a ranger's flier warning about "problem" mountain lions on a hike some years ago in Sabino Canyon in Arizona; then and there we decided that nature should perhaps best be treated as some sort of vast flyover country. So we approached our recent vacation in northern Michigan as kind of a test, the same way you might retry a food that you've always hated (like lima beans) just to see if your tastes have changed with the passing of some years. That's when you realize that your scorn for lima beans never really went far enough.
The House That Ludwig Built
This print advertising campaign for the Berlin Philharmonic orchestra, art directed by Bjoern Ewers and photographed by Mierswa Kluska, shows the inside of instruments. Seeing it, we just had to say: "Verdammte scheiße, that's brilliant." It reminded us of our one-time exploration into the underside of our old piano, a beautiful John Broadwood & Sons out of London, after being told that the company was the instrument maker for Beethoven. We were hoping to discover a scrawled "Ludwig was here," but no such luck.
Ach ja.
Kluska's small interior spaces flooded by light remind us of epic public spaces on the order of Grand Central Terminal. The translated copy reads "Closer to the classical." You can see more of the inner workings of a violin, cello, flute, and pipe organ here and here.
A Couple of Lads
On my desk I kept a tearsheet of a portrait of John Lennon and Paul McCartney taken by photographer David Bailey. The image was reproduced and ran with a piece about McCartney by John Colapinto in The New Yorker in 2007 (headline: "When I'm Sixty-Four"). There's something about the photograph that captured then and still holds my attention to this day. Like all great photographs it's hard to put into words why the picture is so affecting; in my case it's a feeling about the quality of the relationship between Lennon and McCartney. There's a tenderness there that belies their mythic Scouse cynicism from growing up in Liverpool. Lennon looks serene (or maybe just bored), McCartney slightly put out. Looking at the picture, Lennon's head tilts a bit to the right, while McCartney's goes left; his head seems to float against the solid shape of Lennon's dark jacket. Each a part of the other. Judging by other images found online, Bailey took this shot in a studio as part of a larger series. He cut his teeth on fashion photography, and his other portraits and photo-journalism efforts are amazing and beautiful. When I look at the original image of Lennon and McCartney online it's clear that The New Yorker took some liberties and cropped it (with a photographer of Bailey's stature, that's a no-no), but the crop did make the image even more intimate.