Not that this is an escapist festival, exactly. It is, instead, a heroic feat of counterprogramming, an assertion of the wonderfulness of movies in the face of a reality determined with each day to find new ways to be awful.
Wish I'd spaken that! Well: I have always done in a way. It was in fact the ever iridescent words of NYT critic A.O. Scott. How did the word 'awesome' ever get relegated to no more than a new ring tone. A new pair of sneakers. I mean: a new husband/wife/lover/whatever could be awesome. I'd buy that. But....
wake up
look around
memorise what you see
it may be gone tomorrow
everything changes. Someday
there will be nothing but what is remembered
there may be no-one to remember it.
Keep moving
wherever you stand is ground zero
a moving target is harder to hit.
And from mine ashes let a conqueror rise,
That may revenge this treason to a queen
By plowing up his countries with the sword.
Betwixt this land and that be never league.
(Dido, Queen of Carthage, Act 5 Scene 1-Christopher Marlowe)
J.M.W. Turner: Dido building Carthage, or The Rise of the Carthaginian Empire (1815, oil on canvas; National Gallery, London)
In the first draft of his first will in 1829, Turner stipulated that he should be buried in the canvas of Dido building Carthage, but changed his mind to make a donation of the painting and The Decline of the Carthaginian Empire to the National Gallery, on condition that his two paintings should always be hung either side of Claude's Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, a painting that Turner first saw when it was part of the Angerstein collection which later became the nucleus for the National Gallery. His revised will of 1831 changed the bequest, so Dido building Carthage would be accompanied by Sun rising through Vapour, and the two works would be exhibited alongside Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba and Landscape with the Marriage of Isaac and Rebecca (also known as The Mill).
One pale mermaid
tankers and cruise ships are caught between motion and understanding
or the very least questioning
She seems so small
not even worthy of a capital f- polite or no
yet she straddles the safe harbor of that
and the allowance of nature's black, blue utterance in that small benign blue strip beyond
Her color no longer needs interpretation
And as if her plinth were there for sole human industrial scale
grandeur beyond the grayest means.
New Jersey sputters.
New York complains. as always
as Her canvas itself wasn't enough.
she maintains a presence of being not defiance
ready as if at will
prepared to jump over the wobbly pale line of reason into adventure.
her Wordsworth farewell of "how arrogant is she when HER parents and neighbors heart is heard no more."
the Dutch made you and defeated you
did she ever realize how arrogant was build against her forbears' beautiful line of reason
and then was the darkness
And she stood alone.
© Andrew Lucre
