My Mother's Paint

As a child I used to sit for hours at my mother easel, watching in awe as she transformed a blank, white canvas into a work of art far beyond any I hoped to create myself. I longed for that visual medium that came like magic to my mother’s brush or pen or chalk. I cursed my clumsy fingers that lacked the ability to draw a straight line, much less anything more complicated than a stick figure in a field of thumb-print flowers. My admiration for my mother’s talent was boundless, and I still look on her work with the awe of a four year old on Christmas morning.

My mother always included me in “art time.” When we could afford to, we’d go to those ready-to-paint ceramics studios, and we’d paint plaques, or figurines together. And when Mom gave art lessons on barter or to friends, she would encourage me to join in. I would sometimes be able to draw with decent approximation whatever the day’s object might be...a flower on a window sill, or a table with different-shaped vases. I wasn’t half-bad at still-life once I really put my mind to it.

But I felt that I always went too far with my project, or not far enough. When we chose identical ceramic pigs to paint, Mom’s turned out lovely and delicate and life-like, with soft brown hair and sweet expressive eyes, and mine turned out…well…a bit more like a cartoon pig with far-too-vibrant peach hair and big never-found-in-nature-blue eyes. That pencil sketch of a flower that would really have looked quite lovely left as a sketch? I’d ruin it when I tried to color it in, smearing the pencil outline and muddying the reds and greens I tried to add. The drawing I made of children walking hand-in-hand on the beach remained forever half drawn, their incomplete faces never gazing into the soft waves I left out all together…

My mother would probably tell you a different story about my own abilities as an artist. She’d remind me that Wilbur, my favorite pig as a child, WAS a cartoon, so of course the ceramic pig I painted would emulate him. She’d say that the flower I ruined wasn’t ruined at all, that I was merely illustrating what I saw the way I saw it. Mom would point out that the children I began to draw, but didn’t finish, were in fact quite an accomplishment.

“It’s very interesting what you’re doing there,” Mom would say as I bent my head over the sketch pad she loaned me.

“How so?”

“Well,” said Mom, “you started with the feet first.”

“Is that wrong?” I asked, anxious now that I thought I had, once again, ruined what might have been my masterpiece.

“No, it’s not wrong, it’s just different. Hands and feet are the hardest to get right.”

It took me twenty years to really understand the things my mother tried to teach me through art. In my young mind, if I wasn’t getting the same outcome at the easel that my mother did, I was a failure. If the colors in my flower weren’t as crisp as Mom’s, then they were awful. If I couldn’t draw faces the way she did, or even finish a drawing, I had no talent. I never thought about the fact that my mother had been drawing and painting and honing her craft her entire life, or that I’d always chosen choir and drama over art class. It never entered my mind that perhaps one of the reasons I couldn’t create what my mother could wasn’t because I had no ability, but rather because I had not 1/100th of the passion my mother did for drawing and painting.

I didn’t grasp then that the reason my mother was so amazing with visual mediums, and so very gifted at crafting people, was because she loved it, and she nearly always drew what she loved. She wasn’t just being nice when she commented on how remarkable it was that I drew the feet and hands of those children first, she meant it. For her, feet and hands were truly exasperating because they weren’t what she was interested in. Feet and hands weren’t what she saw. Character was my mothers delight as an artist. The sadness in the eyes of a neglected wife, the beaming smile of a little girl with her favorite toy, the sagging jowls of an elderly man, the weathered creases in a farmer’s brow…if my mother was extraordinary at capturing someone on canvas, it’s because she painted what fascinated her, and she captured what she saw, the way she saw it.

I still wonder at my mother’s gift, and her ability to see through a blank white square to the portrait that’s waiting inside. And I hope that I can create characters on stage half as true to life as those my mother creates on canvas.

Oh lists how you bother me so...

I ran across this "Best of" list on Entertainment Weekly's website today. Of course, no one will agree with any of these kinds of lists...it's easy to see the list is more heavily influenced by characters from the most recent years in the 20-year span, and many characters have yet to prove they will stand the test of pop-culture time. But I will concentrate on what were, for me, the two most glaring errors.

6. Rachel Green from Friends

I want to be clear here - I am a huge fan of Friends and always have been. My husband is a near addict, and I must confess to being his enabler. We talk about episodes and characters as if they were our actual Friends. Hell, there were times in college when the Friends WERE my actual friends. I love all my Friends equally...ok mostly equally. And by mostly I mean depending on which season we're discussing. Let's just say were I to hand out cookies to my Friends, I'd make sure Chandler and Joey got the biggest ones, and I'd sneak Phoebe a second cookie when the others weren't looking. This is no slight to Ross, Monica, and Rachel mind you - they would still get cookies. But back to the glaring error...

While I love the character Rachel (almost) as much as I love all the other Friends, I would not have singled her out as one of the top 100 characters of the past 20 years. Yes I know, Rachel abandoning her fiancé at the alter was the inciting incident for the series. Yeah, I know she did the whole spoiled-girl-strikes-out-on-her-own-and-gets-a-job thing. Believe me, I KNOW the Ross + Rachel will-they-won't-they-on-off romance will live on in TV infamy.

But what was so special about the character Rachel? What made her so iconic? Was it that her stylists gave her a haircut millions would emulate? Perhaps it was because Rachel was played by a beautiful actor? Maybe it’s because said actor would marry the most coveted man in Hollywood during her 10-year run as Rachel? None of these things make Rachel viable in the "best in 20 year" list. Let’s not confuse huge star with huge character. If we're talking greatest characters of the past 20 years EVER? No way. I wouldn’t say Rachel was the best character on the show, let alone in the past 20 years.

Not only are there regular characters on Friends that are greater (see who got the best/most cookies above), but there were some phenomenal guest characters as well. How about Eddie, Chandler’s short-lived crazy roommate? Who else could emote such feeling for a gold fish cracker, or delight so heartily in food dehydration? And – Oh…my…gosh, who could forget Janice? She could quite possibly be one of the most memorable girlfriends-you-just-can’t-stay-away-from-no-matter-how-much-you-want-to-kill-her of all time!

But the true beauty of Friends, the real magic, was never about one particular character in the show. Think about your favorite episodes…How would “The One Where No One Is Ready” “The One With The Embryos” “The One Where Everyone Finds Out” “The One with All The Football” “The One Where Ross Got High” or “The One With Chandler In The Box” rank on your list of favorites? There’s a reason why these episodes (and others like them) are listed over and over as favorites. In each of these episodes, all or most of the 6 Friends spend all or most of their time in the same location. These Friends were greater than the sum of thier parts, and they were always at their best when they were together.

Friends was about ensemble work, period. Hell, it’s all right there in the name. If this EW list pairs others as a whole due to the iconic tethering of their characters (see Thelma + Louise and Lorallie + Rory Gilmore) then so should they list the characters of Friends as a whole.

I posit spot #6 should be "Monica, Rachel, Phoeby, Ross, Chandler and Joey from Friends."


to be continued for the second glaring error...

So we're gonna watch movies like it's 1999

I was browsing a list on yahoo (100 Movies to See Before You Die: Modern Classics Edition) and noticed that 1999 was a banner year for modern film. Of the 19 years included (1990 - 2009) the year 1999 had more inclusions than any other - 10% of the 100 listed to be precise. According to Yahoo (who chose movies based on their artistry, originality, and pure cinematic entertainment) 1999's 10 prized films are:

All About My Mother (Todo sobre mi madre)
American Beauty
Being John Malkovich
Election
Fight Club
The Matrix
Princess Mononoke (Mononoke-hime) R
un Lola Run (Lola rennt)
The Sixth Sense
Three Kings

There are a couple on that list that I might not list as my all-time favorites, but they would qualify as runners-up (Election, Run Lola Run) and a few I thought were very good upon initial viewing, and still get sucked into when they're on the tele (The Sixth Sense, The Matrix). But if I were stranded on an island and could only bring 10 films with me, well, I'd have a very hard time narrowing the list to only 10...But 3 top contenders are on the 1999 list - American Beauty, Being John Malkovich, and Fight Club.

After seeing these movies, I remember thinking that the art of filmmaking was experiencing a renaissance. I thought, FINALLY Big Hollywood (BH) was opening up to story telling that didn't follow the same beaten path. After all, these weren't small indie films; they were big studio, big budget, big star movies. I thought the financial success of these fantastic films meant that American audiences were FINALLY relinquishing their hold on standard realism and opening themselves up to the possibility that great stories with incredible intelligence and heart could be told in non-traditional ways, and without the cookie-cutter BH happy ending. These films took so much "American Dream," cracked it wide open, and exposed its corrupt and deadening underbelly for all to see. And we, the audiences, looked at these film-as-mirror reflections and sighed with relief - "It's not just you" these films said "it's everyone. The insurance guy with the sterile IKEA apartment? The seemingly-perfect family? John Malkovich? Every single one of them is fucked up."

I wonder now, looking at this list, if 1999 was a special year in film because it was 1999. Was there some great underlying fear of Y2K pushing us (and BH) out of our comfort zones a la Lester Burnham? Was it turn-of-the-century collective conscience opening us all to a twisted search for self on the 7th-and-a-half floor of an office building in the middle of the night? Perhaps we were finally giving in to our own Tyler Durdens, and giving a big fat blow-up-the-credit-card-industry finger to our self-help loving, furniture-assembling, status obsessed culture.

I can’t say for certain that timing had any quantitative effect at all on the makings of these films – they were likely in some stage of concept or production well before the last year of the last century of the last millennium any of us will know to begin with the number 1. I do know these films were brave, they were letting it all out, partying like it was the year of their release, and if they taught us nothing else we should all remember this: if we are not our fucking khakis, then neither should be our art.