La Gioconda

La Gioconda, a.k.a. the Mona Lisa

This is interesting: according to some German scholars, the identity of the woman in Leonardo da Vinci’s most famous painting has been confirmed by an ancient note scribbled in the margins of a 500-year-old book. They believe this note indicates she is Lisa Gherardini, also known as Lisa del Giocondo, who was the wife of a wealthy Florentine merchant named Francesco del Giocondo. (Curiously, the Mona Lisa is also known as “La Gioconda,” Italian for “the happy woman,” a little factoid I never knew and which seems to support the Germans’ theory.)

I’m somewhat ambivalent about this discovery, myself. On the one hand, items like this always catch my eye, because I enjoy history and the pleasant “a-ha” feeling that comes from making a hither-to unknown connection. I also find it fascinating that there can still be a book with the handwritten notes of a centuries-dead man in it kicking around after five centuries, and that someone can be idly paging through it and suddenly notice something that no one has ever caught before and suddenly we have an answer to an age-old question. And yet there is also pleasure in mysteries, especially the ancient and essentially unsolvable ones, and part of the appeal of this particular painting is the questions that surround it: who is this woman, and what (if anything) is she smiling about? Wouldn’t finding that woman’s diary and answering those questions once and for all defuse some of that magical quality that surrounds the painting?

To use another example, it’s a lot more fun to think about the possibility that there might be a Loch Ness Monster than to definitively know one way or the other. If you find the rotting corpse of the thing washed up on the shore, then you know that it was never anything more than a giant mutant otter or something, and it becomes mundane. And if you somehow prove that there’s absolutely nothing in that lake, well, then you lose all the fun of thinking that maybe there was something there.

Ultimately, of course, it doesn’t really matter who the woman we call “Mona Lisa” actually is. The painting remains what it has always been, a beautiful work of art and a touchstone of Western culture. As SamuraiFrog asks, does knowing the identity of the woman in the painting enhance your appreciation of the work? It doesn’t for me, and in fact it arguably diminishes the experience of viewing it… but damn if I didn’t rush to click through to that news item anyway.

Jan142008

A Close Call…

The other night, I was at a gathering of The Girlfriend’s entire fam-damn-ily — her mother turned 60 last week, so we were celebrating her achievement of that particular milestone — when the conversation turned to the subject of twins. The Girlfriend’s sister-in-law is a twin, and as she and The GF’s brother are currently trying to spawn for the second time, everyone was wondering if twins are a possibility.

Anne’s twelve-year-old niece — the daughter of the other sister-in-law — was having a very difficult time wrapping her head around the difference between identical twins and fraternal twins. She seemed to think that twins = identical, and it didn’t matter if there was one egg or five involved in the production process, or if the twins in question are opposite genders or a matched set. If you’re a twin, you’re identical to your other twin.

Sister-in-Law #1 — the one trying to get pregnant — patiently ran through it all again, pointing out that she and her twin brother couldn’t be identical because he was a boy and she was a girl.

The Twelve-Year-Old framed her face in her hands and said, “But your faces are the same, right?”

There are times when I just can’t help myself. I really should try and keep from blurting things out, but, well, I tend to just do it anyway. This was one of those times. I couldn’t just sit there and listen as the explanation cycled back to Line 1 and continued running in an endless loop. So I leapt into the conversation and said, “Try looking a little south of the face and see if you can spot the difference.”

You know in the movies how they interrupt party scenes with that hackneyed needle-scraping-across-a-vinyl-record sound? (Does anyone under the age of 30 even know what that sound is these days?) That’s pretty much what happened here. Silence instantly fell across the living room, almost like someone had dropped a big glass bell jar over my head. A fork clattered against a plate, no doubt dropped from numb fingers. I felt my face flush as I realized I had just uttered — gasp! — an innuendo. In the presence of Anne’s very conservative and religious parents. I felt all the goodwill credits I’d racked up during the Great Disneyland Vacation in October start to ooze down the drain, like soap scum.

Then Sister-in-Law #1 laughed as if that was the funniest thing she’d heard all week. She laughed even harder when I compounded my initial remark by referring to what lies south of the face as a person’s “bits.” As in girl-bits and boy-bits. The laughter spread through the room, and the tension was broken. I’m still in the black in the goodwill ledger.

While I breathed a sigh of relief, The Twelve-Year-Old continued looking confused and ultimately dropped the subject. Meanwhile, The Teenage Niece’s Boyfriend caught my eye and said, “You know, two or three years from something will click in her head and she’ll say, ‘That’s what Jason was talking about!'”

No doubt.

Jan112008

More Torches and Pitchforks…

Aw, jeez… apparently the busybody brigades, frustrated that the Blue Boutique managed to reopen in its new location without brimstone raining from the heavens, have found someone else to pester with their crusade against healthy adult interests.

Jan112008

TV Title Sequences: The Incredible Hulk

It’s Friday, let’s watch some TV! And since I mentioned The Incredible Hulk the other day, I’ll bet you can guess what today’s selection is, can’t you?

The first few seconds of this, with the flashing red light, big intimidating machine powering into place, and the urgent tinkle of a piano, still raise the hair on my arms, and the line “don’t make me angry… you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry” is, of course, a classic catchphrase that still lives in the pop-cultural zeitgeist. But what I really notice watching this sequence now is how bloody long it is. Many TV shows these days don’t have any opening titles at all, of course, but even by the standards of the late ’70s and early ’80s — the heyday of cool opening title sequences, in my not-so-humble opinion — this one must be a contender for the longest. (The person who posted this clip on YouTube does note that this is the original version of the opening and that it was cut down somewhat for later episodes, but even losing 20 seconds, this thing still runs over a minute!) I also like how it explains through the voice-over exactly what the show is all about. That’s not so critical on a typical drama about cops or doctors, but genre series often fail because newcomers have a hard time getting up to speed if they don’t see the first episode or three. Would it have made a difference if the much-lamented, dead-before-it-had-a-chance series Firefly had had some kind of opening narration every week to explain why people in that show were riding horses and dressed like extras from Little House on the Prairie while spaceships thundered by overhead? Maybe, maybe not — Firefly had a lot of cards stacked against it — but it probably wouldn’t have hurt.

As I said in my previous Hulk entry, this show wasn’t one of my favorites — I’ll be honest, I don’t remember any specific storylines or scenes the way I do from other series, even ones I saw when I was very little — but I was a fairly regular viewer of it, and I did enjoy it. One aspect of the show that did make a huge impression on me was the typical episode ending, in which David Banner walked away from the camera along an (often) deserted road, occasionally putting his thumb out to try and hitch a ride, while an incredibly melancholy piano tune (appropriately called “The Lonely Man Theme”) played in the background. I was a sensitive kid, keenly aware of the suffering of others, and these endings always struck me as unbearably sad and horrible that poor David was all alone like that. I remember my eyes welling up on more than one occasion as I sat on our living room hearth with the fire hot on my back, the TV on the other side of the warm, bright room, and my parents in their chairs (no doubt wondering why the hell their weird son was crying over the friggin’ Hulk), and imagined what it must be like to have no friends or allies, no home, no destination, just the open road and a gathering thunderstorm up ahead. As lame as it sounds, that damn piano still makes my eyes burn a little:

Jan092008

The Last Trolley Theater Calls It Quits

The Salt Lake Tribune‘s film critic Sean Means is reporting that the Trolley Square Cinemas will go dark by the end of the month, a casualty of the extensive renovation project that is converting Trolley Square from an interesting, funky, uniquely Salt Lake shopping mall into a less-interesting, brighter-lighted, and no doubt utterly homogenized shopping mall. There is no word on whether a new movie theater will be incorporated into the redesigned Trolley, but my hunch is that there won’t be. And that seems like real shame to me.

Jan082008

An Observation

So, when you’re taking a sick day from work because you’re suffering through a nasty case of food poisoning brought on by a bad tub of Bacon ‘n’ Onion-flavor chip dip, and you’re dozing intermittently in front of the TV, Gatorade commercials set to the tune of “Carmina Burana” are an evil thing. I don’t remember the dream, but it had something to do with mounted Klingons thundering across a vast plain beneath a glowering sky.

In full-on clown make-up.

Yeah, just try to get some rest after that one, I dare you…

Jan062008

The Hulk Returns…

Interesting… I just learned from Michael May’s Adventure Blog that there’s another Hulk movie in the works, something of a surprise considering that Ang Lee’s dismal and ridiculous take on the character didn’t exactly set the world on fire. I guess you can’t keep a good (potential) movie franchise down.

This new film, titled The Incredible Hulk, is apparently intended to be something of a reboot, even though it’s not explicitly billed as such. The entire cast has been changed out, with Edward Norton now playing the modern-day Jeckyll-and-Hyde character Bruce Banner, and, while the Hulk’s origin story isn’t going to be retold, I gather that the events of the first film will not be mentioned. The tone of the movie is said to echo the old ’70s-vintage TV series, and Norton reportedly won the role of Banner in part because he reminded the filmmakers of the late Bill Bixby, who starred in the TV version.

The echoes of the old Incredible Hulk are pretty obvious in this photo from the new film:

Compare that to this screen-grab from the opening credits of Bixby’s Hulk:

Look familiar? I’m sure it’s no coincidence, and I hope this obvious homage is a sign that the filmmakers know what they’re doing. The Hulk isn’t one of my favorite superheroes, but I enjoyed the TV series when I was a kid, and I’d like to see a good feature film version. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that this will be it.

There are a few more photos here, if you’re interested. Oh, and as a technical note, that screen-grab from vintage Hulk is my very first one. Cool, eh? Well, I thought so…

Jan052008

Book Review: The Happiest Days of Our Lives

I’m not one for making New Year’s resolutions — nobody ever keeps them, and frankly I don’t need an extra dose of self-loathing because I failed to live up to some arbitrary and cliche’d promise to lose weight and improve my life — but there is one thing I’d like try to do in 2008, and that’s to get back in the habit of writing book and movie reviews here on Simple Tricks. Partly just because I used to enjoy doing them and I’ve missed it, but also because I think I need the mental exercise. My analytical skills have gotten pretty rusty the last few years, and I’m tired of feeling like a dunce when someone asks me for my opinion on something. And I think it’ll help with my retention, too; I was surprised and disheartened last night while writing my media wrap-up entries at how genuinely difficult it was to remember enough to comment on the stuff I’d read or seen only a couple of months earlier.

For my own sanity, I’m going to try and keep these reviews short. As I’ve repeatedly said, I just don’t have that much leisure time anymore, and I’m not sure people read all my really long entries anyway. Besides, there’s a real art to writing concisely, and that too is probably something I need to practice.

So, first up is a nifty work of memoir called The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by actor, writer, and all-round hoopy frood Wil Wheaton:

Jan052008