Pictures do not need to be brilliant for a book to have power, and one like this, in particular, in which an artist is taking control of her own narrative, often gets extra-juice from that context. There is an audience for every style of photography, for sure, and this is not exactly to my taste.īut I’ve written countless times, books are experiential, not just a collection of successive images.
It arrived in December 2020, and features a series of self-portraits, in which the artist took her clothes off, in nature, in a feat of self-empowerment, declaring the aging female form should not be ignored.Īs an honest critic, I’ll say these images are not the type I’d typically review, just as art. This morning, I looked at one of two remaining 2020 submissions, a slim, self-produced book of poems and images, by Roxanne Darling, called “I AM: For the Love of Nature.” I mention all of this for a reason, of course.
The scene reminded me of the unbelievably cool fight in the steam room, in “Eastern Promises,” in which a nude Viggo Mortensen takes out a Russian Mafia thug.īut that scrap is brutal, lacking grace, while Olivia Cheng’s triple-murder is filmed as if she barely breaks a sweat.
It did take me out of the narrative, just a touch, because I empathized with the actress, wondering how vulnerable she must have felt, to be in front of the camera like that, without even the meagerest of fabric defenses? She does this, it should be said, entirely naked. There is a scene, relatively early in the first season, where to show off her skills, (to the audience,) she fights, and kills, three soldiers intent on raping her. Olivia Cheng in “Warrior,” Courtesy of Elle Olivia Cheng played a concubine/assassin, (a combo she reprised in the underrated “Warrior,”) and she is such a badass. I could shout out so many of the actors, but Olivia Cheng deserves particular mention. (That Benedict Wong, who was genius as the lead, Emperor Kublai Khan, is now a side-player in the MCU is definitely ironic.) (Shout outs to Tom Wu and Michelle Yeoh.)ĭoing a bit of research, I learned the show runner, John Fusco, also created “Young Guns,” “Thunderheart,” and “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron,” so the Dude is obviously a unique talent.īut massive productions like this rest on the collective skills of hundreds of people, not just one, and that kind of lucre is now only dropped on Marvel movies. To achieve that degree of verisimilitude alone was a feat, but the acting is also terrific, the story-telling taut, (well, they do drag things out a bit,) and the kung-fu is stupendous. The costumes, thousands of extras, the palaces, the horses, the piles of corpses no expense was spared. The amount of money spent, to recreate 13th Century China and Mongolia, must been seen to be believed. (I read Netflix lost $200 million on the production.) It’s also the kind of content no one is making anymore, as it was far-too-expensive. I was just telling Jessie, it’s the kind of entertainment that helped launch Netflix, paving the way for all the streaming services to follow. I really don’t know, but hopefully the new Biden infrastructure package will help those left behind without sufficient bandwidth. How could I have Zoomed without the good WiFi? Now it’s 2021, and I wouldn’t have been able to work through the pandemic, without Obama’s largesse. The funds were allotted in 2009, as The Great Recession began crushing so many Americans, yet it took 6 years for them to wire up our home.Īnd we were lucky, as the money ran out soon after, and some people got screwed. He’d given a massive chunk of money to the Kit Carson Electric Co-Operative, here in Taos, to bring fiber-optic cable to every rural home in the County. It was the first thing I binged, when we finally got high-speed internet in 2015, thanks to Barack Obama. “…it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive…”įrom “Badlands,” by Bruce Springsteen, written in my hometown of Holmdel, NJ, 1978.
“Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king,Īnd a king ain’t satisfied ’til he rules everything…”