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Wednesday, September 17, 2003

I watched the movie "Falling in Love" tonight, starring Robert DeNiro and Meryl Streep. WOW! Talk about watching to acting pros at work. It's an old movie from the 70's or 80's with totally cheesy bad movie music, but their acting was just so incredible.

They played ordinary people having awkward ordinary conversation. You don't get the feeling they're saying lines or they're even in a movie, but that you're a fly on the wall watching some very human drama taking place.

I was watching some bad TV movie a few months ago about two people falling in love, and the acting was so bad! It was such a pleasure to see Streep and DeNiro show how acting is really done, and done brilliantly.

Now granted the TV movie had a really bad script, and this movie's script was much better, but so what. A really good actor can deliver a great performance from a bad script.

What was so amazing was their delivery of the lines. It was so natural and unforced, like they were real people falling in love, and not bad actors looking like they were trying to fall in love. They made it look so easy, whereas the TV actors made acting look so difficult because they were doing it so badly.

Tuesday, September 16, 2003

This was a nice deal: Life
-- Warren Zevon, Songwriter / 1947-2003

Monday, September 15, 2003

Thanks to Josh, here's the link to what Howard Dean is saing about Hamas, Dean takes heat for Hamas statement.
My modern art teacher told me I made an original comment about modern art that no one else is saying. I think this is good. Here's what I told him.

Jackson Pollock's drip painting are a physical rendering of performance art. Pollock painted as if in a trance, like a performance, and it's captured in physical form in his drip painting.

If you took a movie, which is made up of frames, and laid the frame on top of each other you'd get a Jackson Pollock drip painting. Time is layered like the painting, one of top of the moment, moments are layered together to make one physical piece.

The concept of snapshop in time, what the impressionists were trying to achieve, doesn't exist in Pollock's work because his work is result of hundreds of snapshots in time, layered one on top of the other, to create one cohesive work of art.

In Pollock's drip paintings, you can also see the influences of cubism because in cubism you saw on one painting, faces, body parts from different angles, as if they were in different time periods. You get the same in Pollock's work because you can see how over time he layered the paint over and over again.

I think Pollock was also borrowing from Dada art, because of the performance aspect of his art, but also taking Dadaism and turning it on its head.

Dadaism is where performance art start, but really performance art for Dadaism was anti-art, a reaction against art, questioning what is art if it's not physical. Pollock took performance art and made it physical, made it art.

In studying how Jackson Pollock made his famous drip paintings, you can also see the birth of conceptual art, especially some of the pieces created by Yoko Ono, and the birth of performance art, in the work of Laurie Anderson and even Andrew Goldsworthy.

I can't believe no one else is making these connections, especially about Pollock's work being performance art, and him birthing conceptual and performance art, not as anti-art, but as an art form.