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NOPE
Sesame
I am an artist, and my
medium of choice is neon. I just read Michael Dolan's "Sign o' the Times," which
was very informative and accurate.
As someone working in neon,
I have made a couple of OPEN signs. As an artist, though, with a thing for
language and how it is transformed by how it is represented, I had been
thinking about the power that the blazing OPEN sign has in our culture. To that
end, I made an OPEN sign sculpture in which the letter "N" swings from one end
of "OPE" to the other, alternately spelling OPEN or NOPE. I only made one
because I had to engineer the mechanical arm to swing that "N"--plus, I had a
small microprocessor designed and programmed to control the swing over when a
gear motor turns on and switches the letter position.
The whole
idea comes from the OPEN sign phenomenon where one might be rushing to the
store just before closing time, or maybe during imagined weekend hours, only to
find, upon arrival, that one is too late or too early. NOPE!
-- Michael R.
Flechtner
Boogie
Man
For the most part, I have to
agree with Alex Ross' contention in "Bogus Nights"
that indie films have been overpraised by critics. Deconstructing Harry
was one of the most joyless, excruciating moviegoing experiences I've ever had,
and I'm glad to know I'm not the only person who thought Boogie Nights
was wildly overhyped (for a movie that was declared "brilliantly original," it
sure looked derivative to me--there was hardly a shot or sequence in the film
that didn't echo a similar, usually superior, shot or sequence in another
film). And while I enjoyed Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men for its
amazing trio of performances, it's true that the film itself was little more
than a rigged stunt--David Mamet Lite.
However, Atom Egoyan's The
Sweet Hereafter does not, I feel, belong in this group. Though it has flaws
(Egoyan's decision to romanticize the father-daughter incest blunted the force
of the ending), The Sweet Hereafter has none of the insufferable
smugness found in so much indie film in this Sundance era. The ambiguity in
this case is necessary, and the fact that we are never given a final solution
to the mystery of what happened to the bus is central to Russell Banks' and
Egoyan's premise that it is the nature of some tragedies to be
incomprehensible--better to spend our energies fighting the evils we ourselves
make than to rail at the unfeeling universe.
As for the
Coens: Yes, it's true, their movies have no third acts. But I can't help it,
I'm a fan of their hyperliterate, "look what I can do with a movie camera"
show-offiness. They may never be great film artists (but then, how many great
American film artists have there been, other than Griffith and Welles?), but
they are reliable entertainers. Sometimes that's enough.
-- Russ
Evansen Madison, Wis.
Coenhead
In his review of
The Big Lebowski , Alex Ross shows himself to be a true spokesman for the
film establishment. The Coens have "reserved an independence they haven't
earned"? I'm sorry, but the only earnings that count come from the audience. As
long as the Coen brothers continue to please their audience, they have earned
the right to be free of the discipline Ross imagines will spring from having
studio executives second-guess their every move.
Instead
of lambasting studios for abandoning artistic principles in favor of the
almighty dollar, Ross attacks the Coens for abandoning film school principles
in favor of their own. He doesn't quite have the courage to say The Big
Lebowski isn't a good film, so he's reduced to saying it could have been a
better film. Please, Mr. Ross, take a job with a studio so the Coens and we
don't have to listen to you.
-- Bob
Foster Minneapolis
Plathos
Regarding Franklin Foer's
"Gist" on Sylvia
Plath and Ted Hughes: What hasn't quite been picked up by reviewers and critics
is the extent to which Hughes' rewriting of Plath in Birthday
Letters --even the less allusive poems--takes on the voice of its subject. A
poetic homage, for sure, since the two writers exemplify the stylistic divide
between the confessional poets of the postwar United States (count Lowell,
Berryman, Jarrell, Sexton, and others) and their more objective British
counterparts (think of Hughes, Geoffrey Hill, etc.).
So, for
Hughes, this volume is a deliberate suppression of his natural voice. Writing
of his dead wife, he writes under her stylistic regime. And that makes
sense.
-- Nick
Sweeney Oxford, England
If It
Doesn't Fit, You Must Omit
Knock off
the cheap O.J. jokes ("Today's Papers," March 6). It comes across as an attempt to
build camaraderie on the assumption that we're all in the 80 percent of white
Americans who think O.J. got away with murder, when in fact some of us are in
the 50 percent of African-Americans who believe that reasonable doubt was
established. In any case, why use any divisive devices at all--would the editor
use sexist anecdotes these days? Surely you can find alternatives to being too
PC on one hand and going for easy O.J. laughs on the other.
-- Hillard
Pouncy
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