Splatter Paintings

The damn scene goes on forever. Someone yell, “Cut!” please. The Italian painter Carvaggio flails around in slow-motion, his sword all a blur as he lets out the cheesiest scream since Hayden Christensen became Darth Vader in Star Wars III: “Noooooooooo!” Boris Karloff would have made a great Carvaggio. Pity the BBC Documentary Simon Schama’s Power of Art couldn’t get him. The series shows eight artist, their works, their lives and their horror-show quirks.

In fact, they showed everything short of Rembrandt in a hockey mask, prowling the mean streets of Amsterdam after dark. Rembrandt could have gotten even with all the patrons that abandon him. It would have been in keeping with the tone of the series. Schama’s stated aim is not a bad one. He wishes to strip away the solemn reverence we have for great artist, but were they all really psychopaths.

Let’s review his monsters on parade: Scarface Jacques-Louis David is Monsieur Guillotine, Bernini is a girlfriend-slashing, brother-beating thug, Vincent Van Gogh slowly eats a tube of yellow oil paint -- the actor mistakenly thinking he’s up for the role of Renfield in a West End version of Dracula (and I had no idea Van Gogh was a Cockney lad), dirty-old-man William Turner fights his personal sea monsters, Picasso is a has-been Commie-stooge -- and the twitchy, chain-smoking way Schama shows Rothko? Simon smugly judges: “I knew this kind of kid -- grew up with him. Went to Hebrew school. Reads ever kind of book he could get his hands on. Played not just the violin, but the mandolin. Wow! Grownups called him a chochom, a know-it-all... He wanted to please his mother. He was just your super-educated, ungainly, sentimental Jew, in the grip of mighty ideas and desperate to tell you all about them. Fidgeting on the sofa and waving his arms around, a big heart and a BIG mouth to match. You know the type?”

Type? All the artists in this series are types -- cartoon villains from a James Bond film. They should be stroking a white cat and giggling. Actor portrayals in documentaries tend to go horribly wrong, but none worse than these. They are so earnest and heavy handed. Listen to actors like Tom Hanks, Garrison Keillor or Morgan Freedman tossing off the lines in any Ken Burn’s documentary. They make me cry by underplaying. I cried for a different reason here. All the slick glibness to make it entertaining, but no attempt is made to understand the artists’ problems (including mental illness that is shown as a freak show for the viewers titillation). They are never are they shown as real humans.

The title sequence for the series is a drop of blood billowing out in a tank of water while Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata plays. The creepier theme for “Swan Lake” had already been taken by Universal’s 1931 Dracula, so the producer had to settle. These aren’t documentaries -- they’re splatter films.

I view other artist not as perfect geniuses but as people like myself struggling to connect with the world -- maybe they have to be a little broken to put all their energy into saying, “This is what it is like.” If they were normal they wouldn’t spend a life time trying to say that. Yet as I watched each episode, I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to be the subject of one of these horror shows. I’ve made enough stupid mistakes that the tough part would be figuring out which of my screw ups to highlight and which hack actor to play me badly. Mariah Carey in a beard and balding would be cool. But I hope a portrait of any of us isn’t merely a smart ass parade of our mistakes -- entertaining though that may be.

Popping the Big Question to Diva

Yesterday, Diva received a gift card. It was a thank you for volunteering for Warmline (a hotline run by the local NAMI office to help people with mental illness). Did I just mention a gift card? Yep and that my friends could only mean one thing: we girls were goin’ shopping!

Hopping in the fab-mobile, we set out sights on Target. Her haul? A set of bed spreads and pillow covers (hot pink with big-ass white polka dots all over them) and a DVD set with four chick flicks -- including a heartwarming Christmas story with Linda Hamilton and Nazis. Needless to say, our next slumber party will rock! The administrator who mailed the gift card would be amazed, but send a gift card to a woman with adult attention disorder -- and this shit will happen. Girlie fun and mayhem will ensue.

As we sat munching at Taco Bell, I got my courage up and finally popped the question to Diva: would she please be my partner in blogging? This is a big step in any writer’s life. It wasn’t all about me anymore. It was all about Diva, as it should be. After all, if you are unfortunate enough to talk to me, I will find a way of turning the conversation to Diva like some Star Trek geek going on and on about Shatner. Kerry is my hero, and she doesn’t even have a starship -- yet. We just have an empire of dreams and that’s enough.

The fact that Diva has border line personality doesn’t mean she is on the boarder line of having a personality, it means she has an excess of it. She is the most beloved Minnesotan since Mary Richards. Diva is the show pony in my stable. And yes, I get the irony. Using the word “stable” in connection with either of us is damn funny.

The only other thing we had to come up with was her alias, Diva, for this blog. We had to make sure none of you freaks surfing the net in your underwear, sipping Mountain Dew, could start stalking her ass. That, from now on, is my job and my job alone.

Here are a few changes to make us better cartoons -- easier to digest for public unaccustomed to having strange people like us in their living room. Yes, Diva, I’ll wipe my feet and won’t touch their white walls. Here are the changes:


Strange Light: The True Adventures of Diva and Vincent.

This is the story of two underdog artist with mental illness, a romance with each other and with art.

I am Vincent, a writer trying to understand creativity and my own broken mind. Diva is a painter/photographer who vowed to get her college degree after surviving cancer in 2009. Together we make up the most beloved couple since Hitler and Goebbels. Welcome to our world and play nice.

Duck Season

Ode to an Actor with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

Director John Dante was praising Bugs Bunny, claiming Bugs always won and was a good role model for kids. “Something one could never claim of Daffy Duck.” Funny but a cheap shot, Mister. You only worked with Daffy on a movie or two, director Chuck Jones (who did so much to coach Bugs and Daffy into defining their cinematic characters in the 1930’s, 40’s and 50’s) knew him better, “Bugs Bunny is everything I wanted to be, Daffy Duck is what I really am.” You could tell Daffy was his favorite... mine too. After all I know Daffy, I have been Daffy. He is me, right up there on the screen.

It is odd to watch his body of work in chronological order and see his pluck vanish. He wasn’t always the cartoon most likely to need therapy. No, in the beginning he was just a duck -- a wild, mad, impetuous duck in love with the world and out to mess up Porky Pig in 1937’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” (It was Daffy’s first film and the audience loved him. On the test sketches, Daffy was known as “The Crazy-Darnfool Duck.” Thank god for the name change.)

To see him then, his world was so full of hope and possibilities. He always won. He was a force of nature that couldn’t be stopped but something happen in the intervening years. It is funny, yet tragic. He became Bob Hope to Bugs’ Bing Crosby. The comic paring was inspired to be sure: Bugs confident and in control, Daffy using his wonderful acting talents to play a duck more and more exasperated as his plans kept exploding in his beak. (Odd, somewhere alone the way his god-given snout was replaced with a fake snap-on one that he is forever chasing. Yet, Lord love a duck, he has the confidence to show he has fake bits. I’d love to see William Shatner or Pamela Anderson chasing their fake parts around a soundstage.)

That said, their is a fly in the ink: I have to wonder, is it all acting? His oft repeated routine, where he is a duck who’s just one gun shot to the beak from snapping, seems to have a real pathos to it. It must have taken its toll over the years. He just doesn’t get the respect that a fowl of his considerable talent deserves.

Everyone writes books about Bugs -- praises bugs, but Daffy? Dang. He is so worthy. He is a hero for the rest of us: a role model for those of us with anxieties and low self-esteem. As I think of heroes I can look up to in the movies with mental illness, I keep coming up short: Daffy and... and... Norman Bates? No wonder the world has a distorted view of mental illness. Couldn’t we make one of the Smurfs bi-polar? Mental illness in the movie industry shouldn’t be confined to a Mel Gibson press conference.

I also suspect the studio is keeping Daffy in that state artificially with rather questionable practices (a kind of webbed-footed Judy Garland). You just know he is hopped up on cartoon amphetamines and probably increasingly strong doses of toon-town crack. A screwed-up duck is a box office duck. A well adjusted duck? An empty theater.

I long to free Daffy and let him stretch his wings as an actor. I know he is capable of so much more than doing a sad take to camera as his beak and feathers vanish in yet another explosion. It is bittersweet for me to see his dreams (and the TNT) go boom. I laugh, but feel a tug at my heart too. Even more than Chaplin, he represents us -- a put upon soul who just wants respect -- and his old beak back.