Tag: #Painter

  • Personal Review: The Real World, Season 1, 1992

    The wife and I have been looking for a TV show to watch at night. Something to wash the pallet clean at the end of the day, but not too serious, but also not totally dumbed down. After searching around all the streaming services, we landed on The Real World from MTV on Paramount+.

    When we started season 1, which took place in 1992 New York City, it was a fun reminder of what early 90’s life was like, as we were in high school when the show premiered, and it was a neat snap shot of what pre-Giuliani New York was like. Also, this was the show that birthed the “reality” genre, so to go back to the source, so to speak, was enlightening; not only for the way things were, but how they are now.

    I was 15 when I watched the show originally, and my memory of the show had holes, but it was rather intact. Now, 44-year-old me watched it with a more cynical eye, and found the show slanted to a very specific perspective.

    Of the seven cast members, six of them were currently living in New York at the start of the show, while one member, Julie, was from out of town, Alabama, but she has aspirations to be in New York as a dancer. Thus, the fish out of water storyline that followed through the whole season. The other six members were all in the arts, at the start of their careers; one writer, three musicians, one painter, and one model. A very liberal arts group.

    15-year-old me remembered that this was my first experience with seeing people of my generation pursing the arts, and struggling. Before this show, if I wanted to see young people in the arts, it was either the Lost Generation of the 20’s, the Beats of the 50’s or the Hippies in the 60’s. What the 44-year-old me saw was that some of the people were working much harder than others. My memory of the show was that it had a very voyeuristic quality, but remained true to the proposition that it was showing people being “real.” Older me, having experienced other “reality” shows, could see the manipulation of the cast and certain situations.

    As I finished the first season, it was much tamer than I remembered. Knowing what is coming down the pipe with the reality television genre, you can see the start of how things will be edited and presented to have a desired effect. It was like a quarter of the way through the season, the producers realized that this wasn’t a documentary, but a story that needed to be compelling, so the audience would tune in next week.

  • Personal Review: New Yorker Profile on Nicole Eisenman

    Do you know who Nicole Eisenman is? I didn’t until this weekend. I got another gift of a Sunday, and was able to do an hour of uninterrupted reading on the couch while listening to music. I chose to make my way through the March 1st issue of The New Yorker, and landed on a profile on the artist/painter/sculptor Nicole Eisenman. I do give a great deal of credit to the article’s writer, Ian Parker, for doing a great job of making visual art come to life through the written word. Not an easy task.

    There are many great parts to the piece, sharing how Eisenman works, and has survived and flourished as an artists in NYC. One part of the article that really struck me was Nicole speaking about how in college, after she came out to her parents, her father, who is a psychiatrist and believed that being gay was a mental disease, would write her long letters trying to dissuade her from being a lesbian, to “save her.” It struck as so depressing and heartbreaking. Her parents not accepting her for who she is bad enough, but to think when she would receive mail from her dad, it was just a dense letter to say how awful she was. I can’t imagine what that does to one’s self esteem, and how hard it must have been to move past that.

    The other thing that struck me about Nicole Eisenman, was how she moved between different forms of expression. Painting is clearly her main focus, but she is also a sculptor. Then if you pay attention and read between the lines, you learn that she was a DJ for a good bit of time, and blogged, and Nicole refers to many cartoons she has drawn in sketchbooks. She struck me as a person who is continually looking for ways to express, and share, and try new ideas. I admire her ability to stay in creative motion, which now I feel bad that I didn’t know of her before.

  • Lawrence Ferlinghetti; Literary Passing

    I always agreed with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that Ferlinghetti was not a Beat Poet. He was like a Beat Older Brother; A Beat Renaissance Man. Bookstore owner, poet, publisher, painter, advocate, champion, and everything else.

    I did feel the loss of his passing the other day. Another tangible connection to the last major literary movement in America is gone. Sure, there have been great writers since the Beats, and styles like Modernism, Post-Modernism, and Absurdism, but all of that was created and existed in an intellectual definition sort of a way; Disparate blips on a literary map that had data points in common. But the Beats did meet up, discuss, drank, and traded anti-establishment ideas in person. Overly romanticized? Clearly, but it still was a flesh and bone movement with connections between artists. And again, another of those figures is gone.

    I made it to City Lights Bookstore once, but I wasn’t able to go inside. I had a job interview at a theatre, which ran long, so I only was able to do a pass by on the street, before I had to run and go catch my ferry ride back to Larkspur. I thought I would be back, and have a chance to spend time in the store, but I didn’t get the job, and well… life got in the way. I stood in front of City Lights for just a moment, looking at it. A place I had read about forever, or at least high school, and it was more a confirmation that it did exist, it was real. That these people did the things I read about.

    Ferlinghetti ensured that we heard voices, and ideas, and thoughts that went counter to prevailing winds. It took courage to publish Howl, and to follow it all the way through the court case that established the redeeming social importance of the poetry.

    Thanks, Lawrence. We needed you.