Photograph by Barbara Cole.

Gearin’ up for the week…

[Photo Credit: TW Collins]

Another one from the vaults by our man Peter Richmond. This one from GQ, reprinted with the author’s permission.

“Hopper’s World”

By Peter Richmond

It’s not that a ’70 BMW 2800 CS Coupe isn’t the most magnificent machine ever designed by man. It is. Or that I wouldn’t orchestrate a major drug deal to own one—or even drive one, just once, along an autumnal Vermont mountain road, en route to a fire-placed inn, with a case of ’85 Canon Saint-Emilion in the trunk, next to a Crouch & Fitzgerald valise stuffed with Thomas Wolfe first editions. I would. These are a few of my favorite things.

But they do not constitute the good life. I find the good life a little farther off the beaten path, in a world full of unsmiling figures, brooding tenements and shadowy streets-although the sunsets are pretty nice. Edward Hopper could always paint light. Hopper’s light is a corporeal thing, heavy and tangible, illuminating a quiet, unhurried place unbeset by the swarm of the modem species—a place where time has stopped,

My idea of the good life wouldn’t be to own a Hopper; it would be to live in one. Maybe in Gas, with its darkening road to unknown destinations, and its overwhelming sense of stillness in the forest of pines through whose needles wisps a wind making music that cannot be heard in my world. Or High Noon, in which a woman wearing only a bathrobe stands in the front door of a clapboard house. In the fashion of all Hopper’s solitary figures, her mouth is closed; her face is passive and yields no clues. It’s a mask of mystery. Unlike her modern-day counterpart, she feels no need to spill her secrets, to yammer endlessly on daytime television about the bad luck that has befallen her. She is at rest.

This stillness must be what people are trying to find when they spend enormous amounts of money vacationing at remote Caribbean resorts or buy whole islands in the South Pacific. I’ve found it a little closer: In 1978, before a minor league hockey game, in an art museum in Rochester, New York. In 1992 in an art museum in Cincinnati. In 1973, in a library in Massachusetts, I even held some Hopper etchings. The curator of the collection made me wear gloves, but I felt the calm just the same.

Does my consideration of a Hopper painting feel as good as the night I persuaded my tenth grade girlfriend to flee her prep school on an interstate bus to meet me in my older brother’s college dorm in Boston, where we fell asleep on the bare wooden floor in front of the fireplace and she slept on her side with her back to me and I awoke to sputtering firelight to find the palm of my right hand resting in the valley of her soft waist between the top of her jeans and the bottom of her ridden-up blue sweater, and it felt as if all of the currents at the heart of the universe were flowing beneath her skin? Does looking at a Hopper feel that good?

Well, no. But the two have something in common. In the contemplation of both (and that’s more or less what my tryst entailed—contemplation), there is something being stirred and stoked that physical pleasures can’t fuel: the imagination, with its promise of the infinite. Of anything you might want. Just beyond the frame of a Hopper, there’s always something more.

Take the country road in Gas: It’s a road to nowhere in particular, but wherever it’s going, things are probably better there. Or the faceless city in Manhattan Bridge Loop: You’d think it nothing but a cold pile of brick. But I know better. I know that inside the buildings, there is more to be found; there’s the soul of a city. And when I spend time in front of the canvas, I find it.

Or take High Noon. The woman’s bathrobe has fallen open, but shadows demurely cloak her. She is turning her face to the sun. Upstairs, behind waving curtains, her bedroom is dark. There might be someone in it. There might have been someone in it not long ago. There might be someone in it soon. Me, maybe.

You may remain unconvinced. You may find it a preposterous notion that the good life could be made up of windows into a state of mind. You may insist that the good life must comprise the sensory pleasures and the sensual ones. But when your Mondavi Cabernet is drained down to the sediment, your Jag needs new valves and your woman has dismissed you like an empty can of cat food lobbed into the trash, I’ll still have this place where, even if the sun reveals a world that’s haunting and bleak, it’s a sun that never sets.

Grandmother in Cuba. Photograph by Marion.

House to Haus gives New York-style Coffee Cake.

Here’s more true crime in Vanity Fair from Mark Bowden:

Greg Fleniken traveled light and lived tidy. After so many years on the road, he would leave his rolling suitcase open on the floor of his hotel room and use it as a drawer. Dirty clothes went on the closet floor. Shirts he wanted to keep unwrinkled hung above. Toiletries were in the pockets of a cloth folding case that hooked onto a towel rack in the bathroom. At the end of the day he would slide off his worn brown leather boots and line them up by the suitcase, drop his faded jeans to the floor, and put on lightweight cotton pajama bottoms.

Most evenings he never left the room. He would crank up the air conditioner—he liked a cool room at night—and sit on the bed, leaning back on two pillows propped against the headboard. Considerately, to avoid soiling the bedspread, he would lay out a clean white hand towel, on which he placed his ashtray, cigarette pack, lighter, BlackBerry, the TV remote, and a candy bar. He smoked and broke off candy bits while watching TV. This is where Greg was on the evening of Wednesday, September 15, 2010, in Room 348 of the MCM Eleganté Hotel, in Beaumont, Texas—lounging, smoking, snacking on a Reese’s Crispy Crunchy bar, sipping root beer, and watching Iron Man 2.

He missed the ending.

Beautiful pictures by Harold Feinstein

…over at Everday I Show.

“S’posin'”–Fats Waller

[Picture Via: Aberrant Beauty]

S”long, Mr. Winters.

Food 52 gives 9 simple spring salads including this one: Pea Shoot and Baby Arugula Salad with Meyer Lemon Vinaigrette.

Drawings by Massimo Carnevale.

From Colossus of Clout: Happiness.

Via Kottke, this here looks like funski:

And there’s this:

[Photo Credit: David Sprague/L.A. Times]

Houba.

Here’s Glenn Stout on Race, Jackie Robinson and the Red Sox:

At approximately 10:30 in the morning on Monday, April 16, 1945, Boston city Councilman Isadore Muchnick and sportswriter Wendell Smith and three African-American baseball players from the Negro leagues arrived at Boston’s Fenway Park. One month earlier the Red Sox reluctantly agreed to hold a tryout for African American ballplayers. Shortstop Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs, second baseman Marvin Williams of the Philadelphia Stars and outfielder Sam Jethroe of the Cleveland Buckeyes came to Boston nearly a week earlier in anticipation of the tryout.

The audition of the three players took a little over one year to arrange and lasted only ninety minutes. Yet the fallout from that day echoes through Red Sox history almost to the present as an example of the institutional racism practiced by the ballclub under the tenure of Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey. Only in the last few seasons, at the conclusion of the Yawkey era, did the ballclub begin to shed a reputation for racism that many trace to that April morning.

Still shrouded by significant misconceptions and errors of fact, that day deserves examination. Not only do the facts of the tryout deserve explication, but the manner in which both the press and the ballclub reacted to the episode and portrayed it since then is telling. By calling into question the details of the event the defenders of Yawkey and the Red Sox attempted to use it to absolve the ballclub, the owner, and by extension, the city of Boston for any racial liability, perverting the significance of the tryout.

“I believe that Jack is one of the best actors in Hollywood, perhaps on a par with the greatest stars of the past like Spencer Tracy and James Cagney. I should think that he is on almost everyone’s first-choice list for any role which suits him. His work is always interesting, clearly conceived and has the X-factor, magic. Jack is particularly suited for roles which require intelligence. He is an intelligent and literate man, and these are qualities almost impossible to act. In The Shining, you believe he’s a writer, failed or otherwise.” -Stanley Kubrick

I think Kubrick is right. It’s one of the differences between Nicholson and Robert De Niro. I’ve never believed De Niro when he played cerebral guys, like in The Last Tycoon or True Confessions. I always get the sense that when he tries to play brainy guys De Niro is exposed as a mook. But Nicholson, or Robert Duvall, or Gene Hackman, for that matter, can play a certain kind of brainy intelligence convincingly.

I said as much to our pal Matt Blankmon in an e-mail and he replied:

I think DeNiro connects more to Brando and Dean – that emotional physicality. You can buy him as a streetwise guy, a clever guy, but not bookish or cerebral. I don’t know about Duvall as a brainy guy – he’s another guy I feel more as wise, but not intellectual – Tom Hagen, but not Michael Corleone. Nicholson is a guy who just comes across as smart and that’s part of his energy, even when he’s playing a mook like in The Last Detail. The connection to Cagney is apt–Nicholson, however, wouldn’t have been a very good Travis Bickle. I think Paul Newman always projected a certain braininess on screen, so much so that I had trouble buying him as a dumb guy in Pocket Money.

And speaking of The Passenger, what Kubrick is talking about is why you have no problem accepting Jack as a semi-famous world-traveling journalist.

Interestingly – how often has William Hurt played a guy who looks and seems smart, but then is actually kinda dumb? He’s very easy to buy as a scientist in Altered States, but he’s so well suited as the superficially, seemingly brainy guys in Broadcast News and Body Heat who are actually not so smart.

Good points by Matt, especially how all intelligence isn’t the same. And De Niro doesn’t lack intelligence just not the same brand that Nicholson has.

Baguette, anyone?

[Picture via: Roost]

Painting by Richard Diebenkorn.

Over at Flavorwire, check out this gallery of photographic meditations on Edward Hopper by Richard Tuschman.

Put the needle to the groove.