Emphasis is Everything

The documentary My Kid Could Paint That is about a precocious four year old abstract painter named Marla Olmstead-- and there are two ways to interpret the title: My Kid Could Paint That or My Kid Could Paint That . . . and that makes all the difference.

The Flu: A Big Thumbs Down

I am giving this season's flu a big thumbs down (and so next year I'm getting the flu shot, as my wife and children -- who all got the shot -- remained perfectly healthy while I suffered) as this flu's plot was repetitively long (a week? when does the flu last a week?) and boring (fever, chills, fever, chills, ad nauseam) and there were no twists to speak of -- you'd think vomiting and diarrhea would be a bad thing, but I would have welcomed intestinal problems to break up the sweats, aches and glassy eyes, plus an embarrassing and graphic puking episode is always fun to recount here on the blog, but instead all I could do was read for very shorts stints and watch marathon amounts of Portlandia; I must admit, the illness was not a total waste of time, as I did find three things that I will use in school during my minimal reading and maximal TV watching, which I will list here so that I can reference them and add them to my lesson plans when I finally return and so you can enjoy them as well, as they are perfect examples . . .

1: the Brunch Village episode of Portlandia, which is a perfect example of a mock-epic, something we cover in Creative Writing . . .Tim Robbins has a fantastic cameo at "the end of the line,"

2: the Alexandra episode of Portlandia also works in Creative Writing, as the episode satirizes post-modern "art projects," which will connect nicely with the documentary My Kid Could Paint That,

3: and an example to go along with my "logical fallacies" unit in Composition class . . . David J. Hand's The Improbability Principle describes the "cargo cults" of the South Pacific, these tribes saw Japanese and Allied soldiers build airstrips and landing fields during World War II, observed them marching and dressing in a military manner, and then large ships from the sky would come with loads of valuable and exotic loot . . . so when the war ended, the natives "built airstrips out of straw and coconut, and control towers out of bamboo and rope, and dressed themselves to resemble the military personnel they'd encountered during the war . . . they sat wearing carved wooden headsets and duplicated the waved landing signals" but, of course, no cargo planes ever came . . . this is the most vivid example for the old statistical maxim "correlation does not imply causation" that I've ever heard.

Who Cares? Not Tom Ripley. Not Banksy. You.

The talented Tom Ripley is at it again in Ripley Under Ground, the second book in Patricia Highsmith's "Ripliad" series-- this time his victim is an unlucky art patron named Thomas Murchison, who rightly suspects that the painting he has bought is a forgery-- unfortunately he has stumbled into one of Tom Ripley's sophisticated con games-- and because he can't adopt Ripley's amorality, he ends up a corpse, but Highsmith has bigger fish to fry than just murder: Ripley asks Murchison, "Why disturb a forger who's doing such good work?" and this raises one of my favorite artistic/philosophical debates, which is portrayed in both the documentary My Kid Could Paint That and Banksy's perplexing film Exit Through The Gift Shop . . if there is any way to objectively judge art, then it shouldn't matter who painted the picture-- if it's good, then it's good-- but, of course, our brains don't work like that; art buyers want to be sure that it is prodigy Marla Olmstead that painted the canvases they spent so much money on, not her dad, and when Oprah revealed that James Frey's "memoir" A Million Little Pieces is actually part fictional, people were outraged-- including me!-- and so I suppose I should come clean here and reveal that Sentence of Dave is actually written by a trained donkey, not a computer program . . . but I'm sure you all suspected that from the start.

Catfish Smells Fishy

I can't put my finger on exactly what it is about the documentary Catfish, but the story seems too neat, too contrived, and too perfectly captured -- every important moment is caught on film, everyone in the story bestows "documentary gold" into the hands of the filmmakers, and Vince's metaphor about the catfish keeping the cod nimble may be a parallel for Angela "schooling" the city boys . . . schooling them in a sad manner, but deceiving them for enough time to make them confused and embarrassed . . . but it may also work in the way that the film fools us . . . in the end, it doesn't matter if it's real or fake, or some odd combination of both (which is probably the truth of the matter . . . I think the creators knew there was something rotten in Ishpeming at the start, when they were "opening" the box that contained first painting) because the film isn't brilliant or all that moving, and it doesn't raise profound aesthetic questions, like its kissing cousin, My Kid Could Paint That, but I still think it's worth watching Catfish: though Nev is immature and annoying, his chest hair is something to behold.

Art Doesn't Have To Make You Feel Stupid

Art doesn't have to be the way it's portrayed in the inconclusive and unsettling documentary My Kid Could Paint That . . . I just watched it again (this time with with my own kids) and the film can be pretty cynical about the values of the current art scene: there is the recurring theme that modern art may be a scam and a lie-- and then it ends ambiguously, and we still don't know the answer to the puzzle; if you don't want to tackle opaque issues like that, then just take your kids to Grounds for Sculpture, and enormous outdoor sculpture "museum" outside of Trenton, they have just installed a Seward Johnson retrospective on and around the grounds-- many of the pieces are of pop culture icons and famous paintings, and some of them are enormous . . . and while the kids had a blast exploring the park and discovering all the surprises, we had the most fun in one of the buildings, where they set up life-sized tableaus of several famous paintings, and put them on camera-- so that when you entered the tableau, you appeared inside the framed version on the wall (which was in another location in the building) and this concept took a little while to understand, but once we had it figured out, we had people stationed at paintings, others running and getting inside the tableaus, and lots of zany antics . . . if you can get there before they take this stuff down, do it.

Thierry Guetta Is Like Marla Olmstead (Except Not As Cute)

If you have kids or you're interested in modern art, then you should watch the documentary My Kid Could Paint That -- it's about a precocious four-year-old abstract painter named Marla Olmstead; the film investigates what defines art as much as the mystery of whether Marla painted her paintings or not-- but now there is a new documentary on the same theme and it is even better . . . it's called Exit Through the Gift Shop and it is ostensibly about documenting street art-- the obsessive Frenchman Thierry Guetta devotes his life to filming these ambitious and talented vandals on their midnight missions to make odd, skillful, often beautiful and essentially disposable art, but like all great documentaries (Capturing the Friedmans, Street Fight, Mr. Death, etc.) the film takes an unpredictable turn . . . Thierry Guetta transforms into "Mr. Brainwash" and the theme moves from the aesthetic to the absurd . . . I won't spoil it, but things might not be exactly what they seem . . . I'm giving it ten spray cans out of ten and I think Banksy-- the faceless and heralded street artist who directed-- will win an Oscar.