art cat

There's something about this recent photo of our black Siamese kitten Harry ...


... that reminds me of this famous Japanese print, Cat and Spider, c.1868 - 1912 by Oide Makoto (Toko).


Art from life, art is life, etc.

the two (hundred) faces of alec guinness

The other night we watched two movies starring Alec Guinness—the classic Kind Hearts and Coronets and lesser The Captain's Paradise. In fact the second film really ticked me off, as it presented, all in the name of comedy, a beyond-sexist situation as comedy—a man decides he can have the "perfect" woman by setting up two households, one with the stay-at-home domestic, the other with the ready-to-go babe. Of course all the stereotypes backfires, and the women get the better of him, but the old madonna/whore attitudes towards women are still omnipresent for most of the film. Guinness, and his costars, including Yvonne DeCarlo, were better than this.

I'm sure most people, if they recognize the great actor's name at all, immediately think: Obi Wan Kenobi. And he was great in Star Wars. But I come from a movie buff family, and that is only one of very many Alec Guinness movies. He's been in so many—from comedies to dramas to science fiction—that it's hard for me to think of him as only Obi Wan. Although that is my favorite Star Wars movie, and the only one that I think really holds up as a movie. Apparently Sir Alec thought the same:

[his diary entry after viewing Star Wars (1977) for the first time] It's a pretty staggering film as spectacle and technically brilliant. Exciting, very noisy and warm-hearted. The battle scenes at the end go on for five minutes too long, I feel, and some of the dialogue is excruciating and much of it is lost in noise, but it remains a vivid experience.

Guinness played many parts, big and small: A Passage to India, Lawrence of Arabia, The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Lavender Hill Mob, Great Expectations. In Kind Hearts and Coronets he actually, hysterically, plays eight different roles in one film—all the unfortunate victims of society-climbing Dennis Price. Guinness is amazing, but Price gets all the great lines.






Kind Hearts and Coronets | Robert Hamer | Alec Guinness | Dennis Price | Movie Trailer

Probably his most memorable performance for me would be as the painter Gulley Jimson in The Horse's Mouth. I must have seen this ten times while I was at art school, as it always seemd to be playing in the Parsons auidtorium. And I had already seen it before then on public television. I'm not sure anyone has ever captured so effortlessly an artistic obsession. And made it funny. Much more fun to watch than the other tortured artist biopics that they also showed us back in art school—Kirk Douglas's Van Gogh or José Ferrer's Toulouse Lautrec, or even Charlton Heston's Michelangelo.

THE HORSES MOUTH: Movie Trailer. Watch more top selected videos about: Alec Guinness, Renee Houston

An actor is an interpreter of other men's words, often a soul which wishes to reveal itself to the world but dare not, a craftsman, a bag of tricks, a vanity bag, a cool observer of mankind, a child and at his best a kind of unfrocked priest who, for an hour or two, can call on heaven and hell to mesmerize a group of innocents.

Another favorite Guinness role is as the criminal mastermind Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers. Forget that Tom Hanks tried to remake this classic comedy. I sure did, and avoided it like the plague. Guinness always looks like he is having fun in a role, especially when he is being villainous. And he is especially, evilly, delightful here.

So for a Professor Marcus and a Gulley Jimson and an Obi Wan I can surely forgive him the occasional Captain's Paradise. I hope TCM plays The Ladykillers soon ...



The Ladykillers 1955 Ealing comedy of the same name ...

Flamboyance doesn't suit me. I enjoy being elusive.

[All quotes from Guinness courtesy of imdb]

Related articles

• Kind Hearts and Coronets: No 9 (guardian.co.uk)
• The Ladykillers: No 5 (guardian.co.uk)

to all the rooms i've loved before ...

I was thinking of all the different places I've lived.

When you live in older houses or apartments you are coming into spaces lived in, loved in, by others. Do the former inhabitants leave traces? The only place I have lived so far that was "new" was a model home ranch house that my parents bought when I was ten. But it wasn't brand spanking new. It was the ranch-style model for a South Jersey development, so had scores of families trooping through, wondering if they could fit their lives into its spaces. It had a typical seventies-style decor, with gold wall-to-wall and a kitchenette with gold appliances and wallpaper in tones of gold, rust and olive. What was it about the seventies and flat, fall colors?

 I forgot about the dark brown cabinets.

The house before that one was a Victorian that I still wish I could scoop up today and restore to its former glory. I don't think my brother or I have forgiven my parents for taking us away from this house. It had two sets of stairs, a storm cellar with a dirt floor where my dad had his photo enlarger set up. There were some great trees—there was a crab-apple grove in the back and a gigantic willow tree in the front yard where you could hide under the weeping branches. It had an arbor with wisteria bordering a garden my mother had lovingly planted. There was a detached spooky garage and a gardener's shed that I used to sneak into and play all sorts of make-believe games. We moved when I was in second grade. They came and pulled me out of class, actually, and took me home to see a moving van in the driveway. Somehow my parents thought it would be better to not tell my brother and me until the last minute that we were moving, or not tell us at all. It wasn't better. It sucked.


The house had two porches, one at the side and one at the front and a flagpole in the front yard.

By the wisteria arbor.
Other members of my family still like to go to that part of the Jersey Shore on summer vacation and on the years that I join them there for a day or two I always drive past that house, looking for a "for sale" sign. But there never is. The people who live there now cut down the willow tree and put a huge abomination of a swimming pool right in the middle of the front yard. They had to destroy the garden and the wisteria arbor and chop down the willow to fit that in. Idiots.

The house these days.
After the beautiful Victorian we lived in a small town where we could walk everywhere—to school, to the store, to the water. My brother and I didn't realize that this house was rented. Apparently my parents were trying to build or buy in the neighborhood, but it never worked out, so we moved even further south in New Jersey, leaving our new set of friends once again.



The house was painted a bright, canary yellow with dark brown trim. Check out the striped jeans. On my brother and my mom. No need to tell you the decade.
 This was when we moved into the model ranch house. At least we finally stayed, long enough for my brother and me to finish elementary school and get through middle and high school. When I left home and went to art school in New York I lived in the dorm for a year, but was shuttling home to New Jersey so often, or out to Long Island to visit my aunt and uncle, that it never really felt like home.

I had my first home, beyond the scope of my parents, when I moved the summer between freshman and sophomore year at Parsons into a fourth floor railroad apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn. It was a crazy apartment. It actually tilted, so if you spilled water or dropped something on the floor that could roll, roll it would, from one wall to the other. That tilt feature became an endless source of amusement for guests and spilled drinks. My cats especially enjoyed playing with marbles. or not exactly playing, but whacking a marble and letting the apartment do most of the work. But there was also beauty in that apartment. The afternoon light, between 3 and 4 p.m. would pour in and give the wooden floors and the old moldings a gorgeous glow. No matter what was going on in my life at the time, just hanging out in the front room in the afternoon was always a soothing and reinvigorating experience.

The afternoon light of Park Slope, Brooklyn.

When I left New York for Washington, D.C. I always seemed to live somewhere near the zoo in Northwest. The apartments of D.C. are not that much different from New York, except that the rooms are a tad more spacious, but with lower ceilings. As much as I loved living in Washington, the outside surroundings were more enthralling than our indoor ones. The trees, flora, buildings and statuary were what appealed to me most.

Always bright and full of light

I'm still getting used to our new life and my new space in Florida, but I can't complain about the view. I find myself outside here even more than Washington. And I'm an indoorsy type by nature, Bookish, computerish.

Getting ready to walk on the beach.

But I could walk by the beach forever. It's always changing, always offering up new discoveries.

turkey buzzards

They came with October, circling the beach, our apartment building.

They seem to endlessly circle the nearest, tallest, building, one I've dubbed "The Pink Building," across the bridge. 

At first I thought they were hawks, not turkey buzzards or turkey vultures.

I was puzzled why they always seemed to hover over that particular building, joking that maybe human sacrifices were performed upon the roof.

They are so beautiful and graceful in flight, as they soar above, but a different story all together once they land, where they can't hide their predatory, hideous aspect.