Deep Culture

It has to be said we had a deeply cultured and civilized weekend.

Saturday afternoon I went to the world premiere of a locally-made low-budget Western called The Righteous and the Wicked.  (This was not the civilized part.)  It featured a number of local actors, some of whom I know, and was made for a budget of $14,000, which included a lot of riding lessons and the rental of an entire Western town set for, I dunno, a few days.  (It’s also the only Western film to be named after a song by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.)

The movie looked great.  The sound, which is usually the downfall of most low-budget films, was excellent.   My guess, however, is that the director couldn’t afford a lot of closeups.

A filmmaker can do an amazing amount for $14,000 these days.

Afterwards I joined Kathy and our friends Patricia, Nadine, and Nadine’s Mom for a terrific French meal at La Provence.    I had pate, rack of lamb, and shared a bottle of a very fine pinot noir.  We had to scuttle to the theater before dessert.

Kathy, Patricia, and I scuttled to a local production of Much Ado About Nothing, where I met a couple of my old professors: Dr. Witemeyer (in the cast) and Dr. McPherson (in the audience).  In the tiny little box of the Vortex, another old professor of mine, Dr. Jones, managed to bring off a fine version of the play.  The two leads, who strangely were not former professors of mine, just sparkled.

On Sunday we hosted five of Kathy’s friends for brunch, then sped to Albuquerque for the last day— actually the last ninety minutes— of an Impressionist exhibition at the local museum.  This was choice bits from the collection of the Davies sisters, rich Welsh noncomformist spinsters who displayed their excellent eye for art around the first part of the 20th Century.  The exhibition has been traveling around the country, and if you get a chance to see it, do.

It’s perhaps a bit misleading to call it an “Impressionist exhibition,” because it starts with Turner and ends with Fauvists and Augustus Johns, but the heart of the exhibition is French Impressionists, and it has to be said that they are well represented— the males, anyway, since a single painting by Berthe Morisot is made to represent all womankind.  No Mary Cassatt at all, oh well.  I guess she wasn’t being collected in the early 1900s.

A series of Turners opens the exhibitions— none of the huge canvases I’d seen elsewhere, featuring the blazing optical effects inspired by the eruption of Mt. Tambora, but some small watercolors and a couple medium-sized paintings, among them my favorite, The Storm, featuring a boat being inundated by waves and wild spray.  Turner’s optical effects are well displayed in this one.

Kathy’s favorite was a Monet of a Venetian scene.  I had passed by it earlier, looked at it from close range, and thought it nothing much: it was Kathy who pointed out that it was intended to be viewed from about thirty feet away.  From a distance, what look like a series of random brushstrokes blend together into a shimmering shining simulacrum of water.

How did Monet do that, I wonder?  Run back and forth from the canvas like a sprinter?

Another painting also featured water.  It happens to be Van Gogh’s last painting before he shot himself, a rather depressing landscape all blue with rain, which comes down in diagonal black slashes like cuts from a sword.  It’s not one of your really distinguished Van Goghs, but it may point to his state of mind in his final hours.

The exhibition was small enough to be well viewed in ninety minutes, but high-powered enough to merit the journey.

And what have I been doing with my sudden onload of culture?  Mostly playing Dragon Age. Which made me wonder— are there any video games with Impressionist-type graphics?  What would such a game be about, I wonder?  Water lilies, sunflowers, racing trains, lawn parties, Rouen cathedral, boats, weather, Tahitians, the ballet, and absinthe.

Hell, I’d play it.