All the cool kids are doing it, so I figure I’d better knock one of these out. Readers, if any remain, of my overwrought treatment of The Substance of Style (Part I; Part II; Part III) would understandably flee this blog right now, so I’ll try to be less, well, overwrought in my treatment of An Army of Davids …
Arts & Letters
So, does it matter?
The London Evening Standard trumpeted for all to see: Britons triumph at the Oscars. After the humiliation of the BAFTAs, when all the major and most of the minor prizes were carried away by the Americans, we got our revenge.
Alas, it was not so. Apart from Rachel Weisz getting an award for looking pretty in trying circumstances, the only British film to win anything was “Wallace and Gromit”. As it happens, I have seen it. (Well, how could I resist a film which was titled “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit”?) It is very good, indeed. When it comes to amusing animation, the Brits can occasionally come up with the goods.
This has been the year of the least watched nominations, as anyone who has read Mark Steyn or various other commentators knows. The most popular of the winners is the documentary, “The March of the Penguins” and that only in the United States. The first Narnia film that was awarded various prizes also did well.
Grace & Virility Embodied
Stanley Crouch appreciates that great Nebraskan, Fred Astaire, who
looms not because he seems more masculine than anybody else or more handsome or less corny. He remains more pure than all categories because of his ability, in motion, to transform all things through grace, which is the fundamental dream beneath the gaudy exterior of American civilization.
(Thanks to A&L.)
Meanwhile, over at WSJ, Kimberley A. Strassel laments the passing of the “real” hero. As Astaire showed, he didn’t have to be barrel-chested, though it helped – few could replace that weighty manliness with Astaire’s supreme grace. And Astaire shared with the “big” guys a sense of control, of wit & energy, of the manliness that comes with maturity, of the grace that comes with an assurance hard-won but real. Astaire projected the virility of style & class, of charm & harmony.
Rothko & Edna at Sea
Lex’s post asks what drives demography and notes Spengler’s answer. They seem often right and provocative. (More.) Surely, those who refuse to defend themselves & choose not to reproduce themselves are troubled. And Lex & Spengler demonstrate at least for some it may be a lack of faith. That lack reverberates in the center of the Rothko Chapel, where the ecumenical becomes negation.
As the mother of three daughters, I, like everyone else, has always been pulled by the the nurturer & the bitch, the submerged & the awakend self; I like to talk about the alienation of twentieth century modernism from the biological as Lex sees it solipsistically moving from the spiritual. Or, as my children say, there Mommy goes again – its all life force & castration with her.
Bamiyan Buddhas in Seattle
West Coast courage.