Rebel Prince

Watched About Schmidt yesterday. It was a lot better than I’d expected. Well, okay, I don’t know what I was expecting, but the writing is fresh and unwavering, and the acting is great–I actually found Jack Nicholson endearing, which is a miracle, so apparently they’re doing something right.

Today’s movie was Igby Goes Down. It was all right. Here I was expecting more–I really wanted to like it–which is why I’m a little disappointed. It tiptoed between being a quiet character drama and an all-out dark comedy, and I kind of wished it’d picked one or the other and ran with it. (The movie “drifts uneasily between satire and realism,” as the Times puts it.) That said, Kieran Culkin helms the movie pretty well, and has some surprisingly moving moments. Aside: as nice as Ryan Phillippe is to look at, his stilted line delivery undermined any credibility in his character. I suppose that also speaks to the flat characterization in the script, but he slightly overplays as the seeming role-model older brother, making him Cruel Intentionally tedious. (I just had to throw that in there.) Otherwise, good performances from the cast of other well-known actors: Susan Sarandon, Bill Pullman, Jeff Goldblum, Claire Danes, and Amanda Peet.

Happy Independence Day, kids. Here’s a little Fourth of July mood music: “Stars and Stripes Forever” (RealAudio).

As if you needed another reason to take off: Vancouver was just elected the host city of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games. Olympic travel destinations in the meantime: Athens 2004, Torino 2006, and Beijing 2008.

When I found out a handful of San Francisco museums were granting free admission today, I put the idea to my parents: visit three museums, spread in a narrow triangle across the city, all in one afternoon. They were suprisingly game.

First we visited one of my favorites, the Legion of Honor, which focuses mainly on West European art from the Renaissance forward, and has a large collection of Rodin sculpture. I particularly enjoy Galleries 18 and 19, which house Impressionist works, including a very large piece from Monet’s series of waterlilies. Itself an impressive building, the Legion is in Lincoln Park, on the northwest edge of the city, with fantastic views of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Next on the list was the Asian Art Museum, in its new home at Civic Center. What a huge and amazing collection: lots of intricate, millenia-old statuary, metalwork, carvings, and more. My only quibble is with the design of the museum. It’s very uni-directional. The idea is to enter through one area and see all the exhibits in a kind of ordered pageant. (You can of course start at the “exit,” or at intermediate points, but these are not clearly marked.) This sort of linear design has its merits, especially when telling a singular, cohesive story, but here the exhibits are arranged geographically, so I think multiple entry points to the galleries would have served the purpose just as well.

Lastly, we headed past the Yerba Buena Gardens south of Market, to the Museum of Modern Art. I went straight to the Matisses, and loved them. Such boldness. I was also impressed by the “Art of Design” section, and an exhibit called “Reel Sculpture: Film into Art,” which uses video in very interesting ways.

“Sleepers,” by Iranian film director Abbas Kiarostami, projects a looped video of a life-size sleeping couple onto the floor of a darkened gallery. I was mesmerized. Two people sleeping, how boring is that, you think. But no. Each tiny movement the man and woman made–yawning, moving the covers, tossing and turning–takes on such significance in an otherwise static image. And it forces one into a viewer-as-voyeur situation. It’s as if you shouldn’t be watching, but to fully experience the art, you have to.

So, considering we took in thousands of years of art in the span of a few hours, I think we did rather well.

Info: the Asian Art Museum and the MoMA have free admission the first Tuesday of every month. The Legion of Honor is free every Tuesday. Not to dissuade your valuable financial support of these fine institutions, but a couple more San Francisco museums with free days: California Academy of Sciences and Exploratorium (first Wednesday).

Happy Canada Day!

This afternoon my parents, my aunt, and I took a little road trip down scenic 280 to Stanford, where the weather was warm and breezy. We picnicked in the Rodin Sculpture Garden, strolled through the Quad and Mem Chu (“mem choo”), and made our way to the bookstore. [Before college, I’d heard about the over-abbreviated Stanford lingo and thought it was a cheesy PR gimmick, but as a freshman I was surprised to find that everyone actually does say things like “the Co Ho” (the Coffee House), “Mem Chu” (Memorial Church), and “Pro Fro” (prospective frosh), etc.] Anyway. Today at the bookstore–no, not the “Bo Sto”; that would just be silly–I picked up a couple of t-shirts, and consistent with my inability to say no to drastically reduced-price books, I bought:

• The Erotic Whitman, Vivian R. Pollak
• The New Gilded Age: The New Yorker Looks at the Culture of Affluence, David Remnick, ed.
• Queer Burroughs, Jamie Russell

Wow.

I was going through my referrer logs, noting a spike in website visits today, and found out Rebel Prince is mentioned–okay, not mentioned per se, more like linked–in Slate, in an article on blog maps (“City Wide Web“). My contribution… “intellectual nitpicking”! An excerpt:

There are 18 blogs listed at the Dupont Circle stop, including Bureaucrat by Day, the “musings of a government lawyer, pop culture addict, political junkie, comic book enthusiast, and former child star,” the Cultural Elite, and … With the Rest of Our Jewelry, which features “rants and raves from four fabulous queens.” Taken together, they paint a pretty decent portrait of the liberal, gentrifying, largely gay neighborhood in Northwest D.C. Just like Dupont Circle’s coffee shops, Dupont’s blogs are teeming with earnest social commentary, intellectual nitpicking, and a healthy dose of Bush-bashing.

Woo hoo. The entry picked out for linkage is one about my annoyance at the History Channel’s misuse of Cyrillic characters. Uhh, that’s not one of my more entertaining entries, but hey, I’ll take what I can get.

[Update: I changed my blog’s archive structure since the Slate article appeared, so while the bolded link above works, the link as published in the original article does not.]

And Gene’s blog is mentioned as well: “At the Pentagon City stop, blogger Gene Cowan laments the fact that being close to the Pentagon makes it impossible for him to get terrorism insurance.” Go us!

I went out to dinner with a few high-school friends whom I hadn’t seen in ages. Oh, it was fabulous. Quite a trip, gabbing about practically everyone we knew back then, and what they’re up to these days. Let’s just say there were some interesting revelations.