The Burning of the Leaves

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves,
They go to the fire; the nostrils prick with smoke
Wandering slowly into the weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin, and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.
The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust:
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! the reddest rose is a ghost.
Spark whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.
Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before,
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there:
Let them go to the fire with never a look behind.
That world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.
They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

Laurence Binyon, The Burning of the Leaves

Image: Sunflowers, October's End, © Jan McCartney 2011

Mother and Son

Among the many highlights of Marcel Proust's magnum opus In Search of Lost Time is the death of the writer Bergotte. Despite a potentially life-threatening case of uremia, Bergotte goes to a Parisian museum to view a favorite painting (Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft) after a local art critic points out a heretofore unseen detail, a patch of yellow wall "so well painted that it was, if one looked at it in isolation, like a precious work of Chinese art, of an entirely self-sufficient beauty..." As Bergotte, increasingly lightheaded from his illness and mistaking it, rather comically, for indigestion, stares at and contemplates this new discovery he says to himself, "That is how I should have written," then repeats "little patch of yellow wall" several times before being fatally felled by a stroke.

Aleksandr Sokurov's Mother and Son is itself a "little patch of yellow wall," a film to die to. The brilliance of Mother and Son is how it turns perspective and perception against us. Inspired by 19th century German painter, Caspar David Friedrich, this is a film compulsively aware of itself as two-dimensional; through the use of special distorting lenses, Sokurov collapses foreground, middle-ground, and background, erasing the illusion of depth. A static blur hangs, like an immovable fog, around the sides of the frame, effectively eliminating peripheral vision—and perhaps foreshadowing, as an artist's work is wont to do, Sokurov's recently rumored, slowly impending blindness.

This collapse of perspective applies equally to Mother (Gudrun Geyer) and Son (Aleksei Ananishnov), both of whom, as is clear from an opening scene in which they recall having the same dream, are elemental presences playing out an intimate and ritualistic death-rattle pas de deux. And yet there's a strong subversive undercurrent running through Mother and Son, suggesting its protagonists are somehow in collusion, attempting to cheat and ultimately escape divine law. This only becomes explicit in the film's final scene when the Son attends to his Mother's corpse and whispers, "We will meet where we agreed. Wait for me."

Full review at Slant Magazine.

Image: Sunflowers, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Lines

Draw a line. Write a line. There.
Stay in line, hold the line, a glance
between the lines is fine but don't
turn corners, cross, cut in, go over
or out, between two points of no
return's a line of flight, between
two points of view's a line of vision.
But a line of thought is rarely
straight, an open line's no party
line, however fine your point.
A line of fire communicates, but drop
your weapons and drop your line,
consider the shortest distance from x
to y, let x be me, let y be you.

Poem by Martha Collins from Some Things Words Can Do, Sheep Meadow Press, 1998

Image: Parking Lines, © Jan McCartney, 2011

The Monoliths

Zombie faces don't scare me, but the Monolith, with its mindless determination and relentless advance, makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The stuff of dreams, and there is no escape. The stuff of reality as well.

2011 - A Space Odyssey: In the most literal narrative sense, the Monolith is a tool, an artifact of an alien civilization. It comes in many sizes and appears in many places, always with the purpose of advancing intelligent life. Arthur C. Clarke has referred to it as "the alien Swiss Army Knife"; or as Heywood Floyd speculates, "an emissary for an intelligence beyond ours. A shape of some kind for something that has no shape."

(thanks, Wikipedia!)

Image: Monoliths, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Acquainted With The Night

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

Poem by Robert Frost

Image:  Skydome, Toronto, from the Gardiner Expressway, Rainy Night, © Jan McCartney, 2011

Caught: The Paintings of Heiko Muller

I'm inspired by painter Heiko Müller whose work turns over the log of Mother Nature and exposes quite another world. His work is informed by renaissance and flemish art as well as comic culture, and you will find hints of Durer and Ensor.

This one, though, caught my attention today as I look forward to the opening, at the Art Gallery of Ontario, of the paintings of Jack Chambers, a local artist whose art film, The Hart of London, exposed our uneasy relationship with nature as our towns encroach on habitats. This is particularly poignant today as we read about the 50 animals from an exotic zoo in Zanesville, Ohio, most of whom were summarily gunned down by police after their owner set them loose then committed suicide.

Like the doe that was hit by a car then shot four hours later by police a few blocks from my house last month. Like The Hart of London.

Woman on Subway

It wasn't Monday or even a week-day morning. Everyone else in the subway car  was checking their e-mail, watching a video, listening to music or playing an online game. This woman was just deep in thought. The only person in the subway car that I could see that wasn't detached from herself.

Shug: More than anything God love admiration.
Celie: You saying God is vain?
Shug: No, not vain, just wanting to share a good thing. I think it pisses God off when you walk by the colour purple in a field and don't notice it.

Excerpt from The Colour Purple by Alice Walker

Image: Woman on Subway, © Jan McCartney, 2011

The Dream World of Chris Friel

'the dazed state of chris friel's images provoke uncertainty - a memory that may or may not have happened; dream matter, foggy and interrupted'
- raji kaur

"I am more interested in interpretation than representation".

In an interview on his website, Chris describes the solitary working process of walking long distances along the southeast English coast, usually in the rain, and taking far too many pictures. His images incorporate tilt-shift and blur, He cites the late UK photographer, Fay Godwin, as an inspiration, although his portraits remind me of some of Diane Arbus' images.

Prepare to be amazed at the landscape and portrait photography by Chris Friel

Magic theatre. Not for madmen only.

Chris Friel's website