The Bear Chronicles

Unintentional Breach of Graveyard Etiquite

Geohashing, July 2010.

(Expedition Report)

The Reading List: Bright Earth

Bright Earth; Art and the Invention of Color
Phillip Ball, 2001

Bright Earth -- a book that I had no knowledge of except that it had ended up on my Reading List, and somehow thought was going to be a novel set in India -- turns out to be a history of the pigments used in artists' paints. It was an eye-opener, even literally I suppose.  I had never really thought about the character of art being influenced by the available materials. I hope I am not alone in having unthinkingly sort of assumed that all pigments were available to all artists everywhere, and that color choices in art were pretty much just a matter of culture and aesthetics. I had another think coming.

The book begins with a brief outline of the science, physics, and chemistry of color, then progresses more or less chronologically from antiquity to the early 20th Century. Then, there is an especially interesting chapter on how and why paintings decay over time and another on art prints in reproduction. Ball closes with a pair of weaker but necessary chapters on new pigments in the paintings of the last 100 years and the use of color in newer, non-painted media.

It is in many ways a fun and thought-provoking book. Its strength, it must be said, is not in showing how the range of available of pigments in particular times and places influenced the history of art. Ball often gestures towards this kind of analysis, but outside of a very few cut-and-dried examples -- the wealthier Renaissance patrons liked their painters to use a lot of Ultramarine because it was conspicuously expensive -- it turns out to be pretty tough to draw many strict causative arrows from the materials to what ended up getting painted. Turns out that culture and aesthetics are pretty key, after all.

Yet there is still a lot to like in the Ball's materials-focused history. It is, for one thing, rich in quirky anecdotes. Chasing down the trail of paint history takes him through dazzlingly dense thickets of color linguistics, the lore and actual practice of alchemy, the early history of chemistry as a science, and the emergence of the chemical industry. Throw in centuries of quirky artists, and you've got a lot of great stories.  Ball tells them well and -- a  skill lacking in many modern non-fiction writers -- knows how to employ a long quotation to solid effect.

Too, looking at the paint shows new aspects of the paintings. I have, again naively, always thought of a painting being essentially a two-dimensional array of colored fields and figures. Ball shows how many pictorial effects are achieved through the layering of paints, with underpainting determining the overall tone of a piece and layers of translucent overpainting changing the character of a opaque original layer. It literally adds a new dimension -- depth -- to my conception of the painted surface.

Finally, for each historical period he covers, Ball tosses in a little capsule summary of the era's traditional art history. While not strictly necessary for a history of paint, these are so apt and engagingly written that they are a welcome addition to the text. Bright Earth is not, after all, a book with a powerfully argued thesis, nor does it provide anything like comprehensive coverage of any specific topic. It's really more of a scrapbook about paint, the painters who used them, and the industrial, proto-industrial, and chemical processes that brought them into being. It is an excellent leisure read for anyone who loves color, art, or looking at history from a new and unexpected angle.

NEXT UP: On the now-randomized Reading List: Albert Camus' The Stranger.  Far out.

More Movies: The Hangover

The Hangover
Todd Phillips, 2009

The Hangover is a comedy whose structure is of a type usually seen in a thriller or a mystery film. After a few initial minutes spent establishing the four generic main characters -- the Charismatic Jerk, the Weirdo, the Square, and the Normal Guy at the Eye of the Storm -- we jump forward in time to find that mysterious events have occurred. In this case, everyone has intense hangovers (hence the title) and many of the mysterious events that have occurred are humorously bizarre. The Normal Guy is missing, which is straightforward enough, but why is there a baby in the hotel room? Why is the Square missing a tooth? Why is there a tiger in the bathroom? And why can't anyone remember what happened during the night?

The rest of the movie is a comic version of the detective caper, as the three remaining hungover men run around Las Vegas looking for their missing buddy and for clues to the events of the night before. The things they find out, and their adventures along the way, are of course pitched way over the top for comic effect. The antics are very nicely filmed, with some great exploitation of surreal settings in the continent's gaudiest city.   The action is set to rap music of uneven quality.

There were three problems that kept this movie from realizing its potential. One problem is that it telegraphs its ending.  There are, early on, a couple little transitional scenes of the kind that veteran movie watchers have learned to recognize as plot giveaways. A made-up example: if the camera lingers on an unopened box of ammunition as the hero walks out his door in the background, we know he will face a frustrating situation with regards to his gun sooner or later. To anyone who notices this kind of thing, it is pretty obvious from the get-go where the missing character in The Hangover is.

A second problem is that a story structured in this fashion becomes satisfying through a thorough resolution of the problems it sets up. Every strange thing that has happened must be given a compelling explanation. In The Hangover, there are several flaws in this necessary symmetry. Most notably, the men are savagely attacked at one point by a Hispanic gang for something that happened the night before. It is never revealed why these men are so very angry, nor do any consequences ensue from them shooting a bystander (for that matter, I believe that a windshield that they bash in heals itself in subsequent scenes, but I wouldn't swear to it). I assume that the original screenplay involved a few more twists and turns, and that when bits were cut to bring the film down to the magic hour-and-a-half it wasn't possible to keep the balance of cause and effect intact.

But then, perhaps I'm applying too strict a set of criteria to a light comedy. After all, not every film can be elegant, and the important thing with a comedy is that it is funny, am I right? And this brings up the third issue about The Hangover: it isn't especially funny. I did laugh at one point, but it was at a character's scream of agony upon being tasered so I don't feel especially good about it; the gag was immediately repeated two more times. The bulk of the jokes are juvenile crap about hookers and how people act funny when they are drunk and how it is funny when people act weird. At one point, a fat man falls on the ground, and a campy gay man says "It's funny, because a fat man falls on the ground." Except, a fat man falling on the ground isn't really very funny, and a campy guy indulging in schadenfreude isn't especially funny either.

Prognosis: * 1/2 -- Although well photographed, and despite making a respectable try at doing something interesting with genre and structure, The Hangover ends up being just another lame-ass American comedy.

Your Wednesday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

View of Baxter Boulevard, Portland, Maine

Published by Portland Candy Co., Portland, Me.

Provenance: Unknown.

The Wall Maps, part II

The third of our little series of classic school wall maps is of a more recent vintage than the previous two, but it is no less classic.  A dazzlingly appropriate gift from Niece #1, it is photographed at an odd angle here because we have it hanging in a hallway.

Like the older maps we've looked at in this little series, it reveals nearly as much about the mindset of the cartographers as it does about Michigan.  In this case, it's revealing what the mapmakers thought was important to include on a map, whether it was especially relevant or not.  We see the full spectrum of elevation tones used here in the towering mountains of the Upper Peninsula, for instance, implying that Iron County is some sort of towering Tibetan Plateau set high above the Midwestern prairies. A closer look reveals that the black color represents areas above a not-especially-impressive 1800 feet.

It is an awfully detailed way of saying "Michigan is basically pretty flat."

The best of the supplementary thematic maps shows an important and significant pattern:

...and the old-school economic map is precisely attuned to a c.1955 vision of what's what in money-making: iron and coal, fields and farms.

The inclusion of oil fields seems a little optimistic; Michigan is currently the, um, 17th-ranking state in terms of oil production.  The inclusion of "salt fields" seems a bit c.1455, but whatever.  Michigan is apparently a pretty big state for salt production, but then the same website that told me so claims that "The greatest rock salt production in the U. S. is obtained from the Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario."


My favorite of the thematic maps, though, is this one.  Can you see why?

A map of its own, with those carefully-drawn isohyets (real word!) describing the intricate pattern of Michigan's rainfall... which ranges from a little under 32 inches/year to a little over 36 inches/year.  Which is to say, the felt need for a precipitation map ran roughshod over a sensible statement to the effect of "eh, it rains 34 inches a year everywhere in the state, give or take."

But What About Dorkfest?

It always takes a while to choose a new Dork.  Be patient.

Your Sunday Boring Postcard from Michael5000

Home office of National Life Insurance Company, Montpelier, Vt., one of the most beautiful office buildings in the United States. Founded in 1850, National Life now ranks in the top 1 1/2 per cent in assets among the 1800 life insurance companies in the nation, of which it is the ninth eldest.

Provenance: Sent by L&TM5K reader nichim, September 2010.

The Bear Chronicles

Keeping an Eye Out for Picts

On Hadrian's Wall, August 2004