strictly seymour

This photo of the great actor Seymour Cassel is from a Daily Nebraskan article detailing Mr. Cassel's appearance at Lincoln's Ross Media Arts Center last Saturday. Seymour was attending a screening of his new film, Reach for Me, directed by LeVar Burton, and beyond the movie preview he was just hanging out talking to the audience about life in Hollywood and beyond. I have a very dear friend who's a hip university librarian and she happened to be in town for the event. She and Mr. Cassel got along swimmingly, then she called me and handed him her cellphone, so I'm the person he's talking to in the photo! I was making tortellini for Valentine's Day dinner and was totally caught off-guard; I don't remember much of what I said but it was a thrill to hear Seymour's deep and distinctive voice in person and to be able to ask him questions about John Cassavetes and whatever else I could blather out in five minutes.

Click here for Seymour's imdb profile and all the films and television shows he's been in through the years, along with his 1968 Academy Award nomination for Faces. I know that the Daily Nebraskan interview noted Seymour's unhappiness with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, but I'd still like to see him actually win one of those little golden Oscar guys. I'm sure the acceptance speech would be priceless!

(Daily Nebraskan photo by Andrew Lamberson)

a gist from the gist of art

"Don't be afraid to borrow. The great men, the most original, borrowed from everybody. Witness Shakespeare and Rembrandt. They borrowed from the technique of tradition and created new images by the power of their imagination and human understanding."

(John Sloan -- Gist of Art, 1939)

(pictured: John Sloan's 1912 A Window on the Street; Bowdoin College Museum of Art)

lincoln, douglas, and the rivalry

I just posted a blog item at suite101 about the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's 2009 calendar honoring what would have been Abraham Lincoln's Bicentennial birthday this February 12th. The calendar features 12 distinctive portraits of Lincoln by 12 different artists, and can be purchased for just $7. The portrait for February from the calendar pictured here was done by William Camm and was apparently reproduced and used as a banner for the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates.

The 1858 debates themselves were the focus of The Rivalry, a play by Norman Corwin restaged this past fall at the L.A. Theatre Works. Paul Giamatti who put such great energy into HBO's John Adams starred as Stephen Douglas, while David Strathairn played a Lincoln probably more classically handsome than the original, but then again he's managed to transform himself into all kinds of men -- Murrow, Oppenheimer, Kefauver -- so why not Abe. I liked this quote about Douglas and Lincoln size-wise by Giamatti in an NPR interview: "These two guys, they were physical freaks...Douglas was 5'4" and Lincoln was like 8 feet tall, and they both weighed like 90 pounds!"

Click here to read the full NPR interview and to hear an audio-clip from the play itself.

{1860 Portrait of Lincoln by William Camm from the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency's 2009 Lincoln Calendar}

painting of the month

Magpie (detail) -- Claude Monet, 1868/9 (Musee d'Orsay)

"I didn't have an identity. It was manufactured. My identity now? It was written on the wall by ancient forces."

Quote by Robert Downey, Jr. -- Rolling Stone Magazine, 8/21/08

Painting by Thomas Hovenden -- Self-Portrait of the Artist in His Studio, 1875 (Yale University Art Gallery)

Street Scene, Christmas Morn -- Childe Hassam, 1892 (Smith College Museum of Art)

the curious mind of f. scott fitzgerald

On this day back in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald had a fatal heart attack and left us too early at the age of 44. His last years were troubled and decades of heavy drinking had taken a toll on his health; he was also receiving very low earnings on book royalties, despite the successes of his youth. Fitzgerald would probably be thrilled to see how his 1922 short story "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is now a movie starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and even appears to be a critically acclaimed and well-made movie at that.

Benjamin Button is a man born not as a baby, but a seventy-year old, and his life progresses backward as he becomes younger instead of aging. There were times when Fitzgerald was most likely churning out stories to sell to magazines and pay for the cost of his high living with Zelda, but among those many other tales of flappers and gin were some true gems. Ernest Hemingway complained that Fitzgerald tended to write stories that depended on "magic," and I figure he might have also been referring to the time tricks with Benjamin Button. But then that was Hemingway and he just seemed to have issues with Fitzgerald for reasons of lifestyle, temperament, choice of spouse, who had been in actual combat in World War I (Hemingway) and who hadn't (Fitzgerald), and so on.

Click here to read the original Benjamin Button on-line, from Tales of the Jazz Age. It does of course depend on "magic" and suspension of disbelief, but it's still an interesting twist for someone writing a story at the age of 25/26 in 1922 to have come up with. And I hope the movie lives up to its Oscar murmurs, not only for the actors and director, screenplay author and crew involved, but to give Fitzgerald a fresh wave of attention and some worthwhile recognition.