#to whom Dan dedicated an essay

[qwerty019283ytrewq]

Daniel looks at the cute photos of Max on his camera.

Daniel: No, it's just mine.

Posts photos of other friends.

[dinoandrade]

“DRACULA”: BOOK vs. MOVIES

Part 2: The Other Characters

Welcome to part two of my five part essay comparing Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” to those film versions most commonly referred to as those “faithful to the novel.” To understand why I wrote this please check out yesterday’s part one.

BUT FIRST...

This essay is NOT spoiler free. And whether you love or hate any of the films being compared here is beside the point and a subject best left to posts dedicated to film critique. This essay is SOLELY about which films are the most faithful to the novel... period.

As a reminder: those versions most touted as “faithful” that I compared are:

“Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror” (1922) aka “Max Schreck Version”.

“Count Dracula” (1970) aka “Christopher Lee Version”.

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1973) retitled “Dan Curtis’ Dracula” aka “Jack Palance Version”.

“Count Dracula” (1977) aka “Louis Jordan version.”

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) aka “Coppola version”.

And now...

PART TWO: THE OTHER CHARACTERS

JOHNATHAN HARKER

Johnathan is a young, naive English solicitor who, only having just passed his exams, travels to Castle Dracula in Transylvania in order to complete the sale of an English estate to the Count. No sooner is the deal signed that Harker becomes a prisoner and goes through Hell at the hands of Dracula and his three undead brides. All before an equally hellish escape and near loss of his mind leaving him psychologically and physically damaged. This drives him to become one of Van Helsing’s vampire hunters where he eventually helps incapacitate Dracula in the final battle by cutting the Count’s throat.

The Max Schreck, Louis Jordan and Christopher Lee versions all come pretty damn close in terms of matching the exact story beats of the novel but then all three falter after Harker’s escape. In both the Schreck and Lee versions Johnathan’s actions do not follow the book. While in the Jordan version they technically do follow the book but Johnathan seems to recover fully with no lingering physical or PTSD effects.

So, say what you will about the hinky British accent of Keanu Reeves in the Coppola version but the psychological scarring after the ordeal with hair turning grey as in the novel and the manic drive to kill Dracula, all leading to the throat slashing in the final struggle with the Vampire, all seals it for me as the most faithfully done.

Winner: Coppola version

MINA MURRAY/HARKER

Fiancé to Johnathan Harker, “Madam Mina” begins the story as a genteel and naive creature. Mina first suffers greatly over the death of her best friend Lucy (whom she loved dearly) at the hands (or fangs as it were) of Dracula and then over the sight of her mentally and physically traumatized fiancé Johnathan whom she then marries.

To her horror Mina realizes that Dracula is slowly making her one of his vampire brides, especially when he forces her to drink his blood in what Professor Van Helsing calls a “baptism of blood”. It is then that a hardening Mina forms a plan to use a growing telepathic link with the Vampire against him. Her plot involves partnering with Van Helsing and the use of hypnosis to track Dracula as well as lure and destroy him and his brides with Mina bravely offering herself as bait - but she almost loses her humanity and soul in the process.

By stories end, Mina has undergone the greatest of changes, from genteel and naive to cunning (with flashes of the demonic) and so resolute that while in a state somewhere between the living and the undead, Mina even wields a revolver in the final battle against Dracula’s minions and fights with no fear.

While both the Christopher Lee and Louis Jordan versions do give their Minas some backbone, they fall way short of the novel. And I MUST give a serious honorable mention to the stout-hearted Kate Nelligan in the Frank Langella version.

But, in the end it is Winona Ryder in the Coppola version that goes the extra step of showing Mina’s transition from small and timid to cunning and resolute, as well as flashes of her becoming possessed by a demonic evil that eats away at her soul.

Though due to the film’s Dracula/Mina love story most of Mina’s actions in the final battle run contrary to the novel (such as picking up a rifle not to battle Dracula but to defend him), yet her actions during the climax are bold, strong, fearless and driven by inhuman supernatural power as befitting the novel. Coppola even gives his Mina the will to eventually drive a blade through Dracula’s heart and then lop off his head to give him eternal peace. I can’t imagine any other cinematic version of Stoker’s heroine performing such actions except maybe Kate Nelligan’s.

I have always felt that the most tragic and repeated disservice to Bram Stoker’s novel have been all the cliched portrayals of Mina. In the novel it is she and Van Helsing who orchestrate the final battle with Mina actually fighting while the elder Van Helsing is only a spectator. And yet, almost every cinematic telling of Dracula changes the story into a singular battle of wits between Dracula and Van Helsing with the Professor almost always being the one to deliver the final death blow. Meanwhile brave Mina has been reduced to nothing but a “Damsel in distress”.

This is NOT what Stoker intended. For in the novel it is Mina’s fortitude in the face of horror that is at the very heart of the original story. So much so, that Stoker even ends his novel with these words from Van Helsing said to Mina’s future child:

“... this boy will someday know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how some men so loved her that they did dare much for her sake.”

Winner: Coppola version

PROFESSOR ABRAHAM VAN HELSING

A Dutch Professor who has studied the occult. He comes to England at the behest of his former student Dr. Seward when Mina’s best friend Lucy has become stricken with a mysterious illness of the blood. Realizing that they are facing a vampire, Van Helsing puts plans into motion to destroy Dracula and his brides - plans that turn all the younger heroes of the story into a band of vampire hunters. Soon Van Helsing becomes so moved by the growing bravery and fortitude of Madam Mina that he pledges his life to save her from becoming the demon that she is slowly turning into. In the end Van Hellsing himself kills the brides but it is traumatizing and he can only bare witness to the final battle with Dracula.

The Professor in the novel runs back and forth between scholarly, resolute and fatherly to overly-dramatic, eccentric and possessed of a passion for occult studies that boarders on mania. In short, Van Helsing is a bit of a loon. Unfortunately, like Mina almost all filmed versions only portray half of the character Stoker created, typically choosing to completely ignore the Professor’s manic, eccentric side.

There have been many fine portrayals of Van Helsing. Both Herbert Lom and Nigel Davenport in the Christopher Lee and Jack Palance versions respectively are wonderful, but Frank Finlay in the Louis Jordan version refreshingly is the first Van Helsing to truly display some of the oddball eccentricities, but he doesn’t go nearly far enough into that side of the Professor.

However, Anthony Hopkins in the Coppola version not only fully embraces the passion-filled, eccentric side of Stoker’s character (and goes a bit beyond it actually) but his actions in the film’s final act are also the most novel accurate.

The vast majority of screen versions of “Dracula” end with the cliche of Van Helsing killing the Count, even though in the novel Van Helsing was mentally spent after killing the brides and was only a witness in the finale. Coppola’s version is the only one that fully depicts the mental toll on Van Helsing from killing Dracula’s brides and his minimal participation in the final battle.

Winner: Coppola version.

COMING TOMORROW...

PART THREE: THE REST OF THE CHARACTERS

[evansclinchy]

A supposedly fun thing I'll probably do forever

One of my favorite pieces of writing I've ever come across - perhaps my very favorite - was a lengthy essay that the late, great David Foster Wallace wrote a long time ago about tennis. Well, he wrote many. To be more specific, this one was entitled "Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness"; it was originally commissioned by Esquire in 1995, later republished in his essay collection, "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" in 1997 and popped up again on Esquire's website shortly after Wallace's death in 2008. In 2016, it found its way into another anthology, "String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis," released in May.

It's odd that I hold this particular piece of writing so dear, as I've never really been into tennis, at least not as anything more than a casual fan. And if you ask most readers, his piece on Michael Joyce isn't even considered his good tennis piece; Wallace the tennis writer is much better known for his "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," which ran in The New York Times Magazine in 2006. That was a once-in-a-generation writing talent at the peak of his powers chronicling a once-in-a-generation tennis talent at the peak of his, and there's nothing quite like witnessing greatness and greatness converge. That's what gets me about "Tennis Player Michael Joyce," though. It's not about greatness at all. Michael Joyce retired with a career record of 46–67 and only once advanced past the second round of a Grand Slam tournament. Wallace didn't write about him to profile someone great; rather, he was exploring what it's like to be good-but-not-quite-elite at something. He was probing into that weird gray area between futility and immortality, and I've always been fascinated by what he found. To me, the most profound line in the piece has nothing to do with tennis, at least not specifically. It's more of a general musing. "You are invited to try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something," Wallace writes. "At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard."

In the summer of 1995, Michael Joyce was the 79th-best tennis player in the world. Wallace dedicated 9,800-some-odd words, not including his trademark bevy of footnotes, to exploring the essence of his 79th-ness. He focuses on one match in particular - played early in the qualifying rounds of the '95 Canadian Open between Joyce and a college kid named Dan Brakus, whom Wallace describes as "a very good tennis player." Brakus is good but overmatched. He can serve 118 miles per hour; Joyce, meanwhile, can return that serve and then stay two steps ahead of Brakus the rest of the way, perfectly reading the geometry of each shot and outmaneuvering him point after point. "It's like watching an extremely large and powerful predator," Wallace writes, "get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator."

Joyce, meanwhile, is just as overmatched if not far more so when he takes on a real world-class player - like, say, Andre Agassi. It becomes apparent after a while that Joyce is a bit obsessed with the superiority of Agassi, who was in the midst of a 30-week run as the world's No. 1 player at the time. The word "Agassi" shows up 46 times in Wallace's profile, remarkable given that the profile isn't of him. Joyce spends his entire life pursuing greatness at tennis, yet he remains keenly aware the whole time that there's someone else on another level entirely, a level that he'll never reach. "Every once in a while," Wallace writes, "Joyce will look over at his coach next to me in the player-guest section of the grandstand and grin and say something like, 'Agassi'd have killed me on that shot.'" You get the sense that everything Joyce does is calibrated against this impossible standard. It's unreasonable and maybe borderline insane to compare yourself to the world's No. 1 at anything when you're No. 79, but Joyce seems unable to help himself. Among the Dan Brakuses of the world, Joyce is a god, but he always seems to have one eye on the bigger names above him. He's hopelessly stuck in the middle, and he's devoted every fiber of his being to reaching that middle.

So.

I play Scrabble. This is something I've put a great deal of my time and energy into for the last decade; my 10-year anniversary is coming up in May. It's something I've gotten pretty good at, all things considered. Of the 161,293 entries in Collins Scrabble Words between two and nine letters long, I've learned damn close to all of them (though plenty fall through the cracks in my brain, often at inopportune times), and strategically, I've developed a pretty good sense of what I'm doing (though lapses happen, and they can be quite ugly). I try to be self-aware about my aptitude and skill for the game and to stay honest about my abilities without being arrogant or - arguably worse - falsely modest. Right now, I'm ranked as the 36th-best player on Earth. This feels right to me. I'm confident I can beat most everyone outside of the top 40 consistently; I'm also mindful of how thoroughly outclassed I still am by many of those above me. Like Michael Joyce, I'm stuck in the middle.

Over the last eight months, give or take, I've come to realize how frustrating it can be when you're stuck in that good-but-not-quite-elite zone in Scrabble. To wit, I've had a string of good-but-not-quite-elite finishes at big events, dating back to mid-2016. At the national championship, I ranked second with two rounds to play, needing just one win to hold onto that spot for good; I went 0-2 and slipped to fourth. At the world championship, eight players cracked the playoffs, and I was competing in the eighth-place game in the final round; I lost and fell all the way to 16th. At a pair of mid-major tournaments in December, I went to sleep on the final night in first place; both times, I woke up the next morning and was beaten back down to second. At another pair in March, I suffered blowout losses in the late rounds that knocked me out of contention. Outcomes like this hurt, but they're also par for the course in my position. When you're almost the best player but not quite, you're sure to have plenty of results that reflect that.

These results are painful in and of themselves, but they're made even more so by all the effort it takes to achieve them. Being good-but-not-quite-elite is hard. You have to be born with a certain degree of aptitude to reach that level, sure, but a whole lot more than 36 people on Earth have that aptitude. The other pieces of that puzzle are a lot of hard work, a lot of mental energy and, frankly, a quite deliberate rejiggering of one's priorities in life. It's hard (impossible?) to reach the almost-top level of Scrabble without diverting a good deal of time and focus away from other things that are probably far more worthwhile. All of this just to be 36th, reaping all of the sort-of-glory-but-not-really-glory that comes with that.

Wallace writes at length about this same problem manifesting in Michael Joyce - and more broadly, in everyone who plays tennis at the same level. He argues that in a way, the problem is all of our collective faults for creating this culture - one in which we praise players for their successes while largely ignoring the process that makes them possible.

"Americans revere athletic excellence, competitive success, and it's more than lip service we pay; we vote with our wallets. We'll pay large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we'll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses. But it's better for us not to know the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so very good at one particular thing. Oh, we'll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the preflight celibacy, et cetera. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up with bovine hormones until they collapse or explode."

To equate my own struggle with those of any of the athletes Wallace alludes to above would be foolish. Obviously. I'm no hero, and luckily I can read decently well and need no performance-enhancing drugs. But on a smaller, less dramatic scale, I understand the rhetoric there and can relate to it. I think a lot about my sacrifices. I think about what I could have done with all the hours I've spent studying dictionaries and analyzing games. I ponder the choices I may have made differently if I'd prioritized "real life" more and focused less on preparing for the next tournament. There were job opportunities I didn't bother to pursue because I wanted more time to study (and more freedom to travel to tournaments). There were, to be candid, romantic relationships I allowed to stagnate because I wasn't as focused on them as I could have been.

I don't have any regrets, per se. My life's decisions are what they are, and they've made me who I am. I like myself, mostly. But this stuff is still interesting to think about.

It resonates with me when Wallace goes into depth about the impact of the sacrifices the Michael Joyces of the world make - specifically, how they tend to narrow the individual's worldview and dull his personality. He references the "vapid and primitive" quotes that athletes give in postgame interviews as a symptom of this - sporting people speak in dull clichés, he argues, not because they're stupid, but because they've channeled their intelligence into one very specific thing. This makes them great at that thing, but at what cost? That's the question. Wallace describes this life choice as "consent to live in a world that, like a child's world, is very small." I find it hard to dispute this.

I submit that in Scrabble, this world is even smaller. At least on the tennis court, you're playing a game that has some sort of connective tissue with the outside world. Millions of people have played tennis at least semi-avidly and developed an understanding for its complexity. Millions have also watched Federer on TV and seen the awesomeness of his abilities. They know he's on another level because they've seen it firsthand. They've watched him work his magic and thought to themselves, "Wow, I could never do that." Scrabble is different because so few people in this world can (or, should I say, choose to) grasp or contextualize what it means to achieve expertdom. The work that goes in behind the scenes - the countless hours of studying and analyzing - is anonymous and thankless and understood by painfully few. There aren't many people who know the drudgery of reinforcing for the 87th time that the word in AEGIMNSV is VEGANISM, or poring over the results of 2-ply simulations and reasoning out why this play is better than that one. And why should they? It takes a lot of discipline to keep learning words and a lot of self-flagellation to continually question your strategic thinking and challenge yourself to improve. Sometimes, this journey is exhilarating; other times, it's just lonely.

It's not that nobody understands the highs and lows you go through - but those who do, you're trying to kick their asses. That's the paradox here. There aren't many people out there who can fully, empathetically understand what it takes to win at Scrabble, and there aren't many who genuinely feel 100 percent happy for you when you win. The number of people who fit in both categories at once is mighty close to zero. So who are you playing for? Who, if anyone, are you trying to impress?

When describing the scene of a Canadian Open qualifying match, played between the world's 79th-best player and someone else below that level, Wallace writes that "The applause of a tiny crowd is so small and sad and tattered-sounding that it'd almost be better if people didn't clap at all." This sentence is depressing but wonderfully written, and it feels applicable across the board. It might be the Qualies in Montreal or Table 4 at the Nationals - the logic works just the same.

The difference is that the guy in the Qualies is playing for a chance to graduate from the Qualies and be something more. Wallace makes a point of the fact that even some of the all-time great tennis players began their careers in those sad, seemingly inconsequential play-in matches - even Pete Sampras, before he became Pete Sampras, had to compete at the Qualies level at first. There's a sense of satisfaction, I imagine, that tennis players feel when they make that climb from good to transcendent. But in Scrabble, what is there to transcend? Even if you're Nigel Richards - and last I checked, only one person alive is he - what are you fighting for? To prove to a small cadre of people who have mastered something that you've mastered it even better?

Plenty of people have given compelling reasons why they play. They play because they love the game and they love the people in it. The enjoyable gameplay and enduring friendships keep them coming back. That's all well and good, but it's not what I'm asking. There's why you play, and there's why you compete. They're two entirely different questions. That might seem to some like a small distinction, but it's one that's changed my life.

There's no shortage of past top players who have walked away because they've hit a wall and lost the desire to continue competing. One famously wrote in the early 1990s that he was quitting because "there's little satisfaction in beating someone whom one should beat regularly." More recently, one expert penned that "There are virtually no extrinsic motivators in Scrabble" while walking away; another quipped that "It's a law of diminishing returns," putting in more and more time to make less and less progress up the ladder. All of these are valid complaints, and compelling reasons to give the game up.

Me, I acknowledge all of the above statements to be true - and yet for some perverse reason, I use them to justify why I'm still here. A shrink would have a field day with this. Even though the games start to blur together and the results often feel proforma, I keep playing. Even though there's very little to keep motivating me - and almost certainly not enough to justify the amount of time I put in - I keep working at it. Why? I'm really not sure. At the risk of begging the question, playing Scrabble is what I do because it's what I do. I've come this far over the last 10 years, and turning back just doesn't feel right. I've already irreparably warped my life to center it around this dumb game; I might as well make the most of this bizarre situation.

At the end of his long essay, after a brief interlude to reflect on watching a few of tennis' bigger names like Jim Courier and Michael Chang and Mats Wilander, Wallace returns to his discussion of Michael Joyce. His closing paragraph describes Joyce as "a complete man, though in a grotesquely limited way." He asserts that "already, at twenty-two, it's too late for anything else; he's invested too much, is in too deep. I think he's both lucky and unlucky. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well."

Those last three words - "wish him well" - have always haunted me a bit. It's unclear whether they're meant as a statement of Wallace's personal sentiment (as in, "I wish him well") or an imperative to the reader ("You should wish him well"). Wallace weaves back and forth between the personal narrative and the persuasive argument, and I've never been sure of what note he closes on here. But no matter. The point is that when you devote seemingly your whole life to a given pursuit, be it tennis or Scrabble or whatever else, it has a strange way of making your life feel both complete and incomplete. It's immensely gratifying yet intensely painful. At this point, I think that's the feeling I'm stuck with. Wish me well, if you care to. I'm not sure what difference it will make. I plan to continue on, until I inevitably someday collapse or explode. Or, you know, maybe something a bit less apocalyptic. We'll see.

[biofunmy]

The Moon Sits for Its Portrait

Century after century, the moon adamantly refused to give up its secrets. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally considered it pristine, smooth and white, but did not have a good explanation for the dirty spots on its face that were visible to human eyes. Then, around 90 A.D., Plutarch wrote that those blemishes were the shadows of mountains and valleys and that the moon must be habitable.

By no means did everyone agree, but ignorance is seldom bliss. Faced with an unanswerable question, our species generally comes up with theories, guesses, myths and fantasies. Telescopes made viewing more precise, and photography did even better, but though no living creatures showed up, the notion that they might would not die. After World War II, one of several rumors was that the Germans had established a secret facility on the moon, and some even speculated that Hitler had faked his own death and lived out his days beneath the lunar surface.

A new exhibition, “Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a journey through an uncommon history, the history of representations of the moon across four centuries. This outsize and beautifully installed revelation of persistent astronomical searches is a trailblazing marriage of science and art — 300 images and objects (a telescope, a photograph used as a fire screen, two moon globes, Hasselblad cameras used by astronauts), plus film excerpts. The images shine a bright light on astronomers’ unstoppable pursuit of knowledge as well as on technological advances, artistic responses and fantasy, and also a generous serving of unabashed cuteness. The show amounts to a testament to the human drive to know and explore, and it quietly affirms the growing influence of visual representations of the moon from the invention of the telescope through the first manned moon landing 50 years ago.

Mia Fineman, the curator in the department of photographs at the Met, organized “Apollo’s Muse” with Beth Saunders, curator and head of special collections at the Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and they wrote essays for its informative catalog. (Apollo, god of the sun, never had a muse; he was leader of the nine muses. NASA, of course, wasn’t going to the sun. The moon landing project might have been named after Diana, goddess of the moon.)

After 1608, when the telescope was invented, the moon seemed approachable. In 1609, Galileo drew its first closely observed portraits: maps of a portion of the surface. The English mathematician and astronomer Thomas Harriot made telescopic observations a bit earlier than Galileo, but his were not published until later, and he could not explain the “strange spottedness” he saw. Galileo, expertly trained in perspective and art, realized that the “spottedness” was actually the shadows of mountains. His published drawings, two of which are included in the exhibition, represent the dawn of modern astronomy.

The 17th century brought to human vision both extremely distant and extremely tiny objects, as telescopes rapidly improved and the power of microscopes, invented at the end of the previous century, vastly increased. Accomplished artists collaborated to provide scientists and the public ever more detailed and delectable illustrations of information obtained au clair de la lune. Johannes Hevelius’s highly successful Selenography — a lunar atlas published in 1647 and named for Selene, the moon goddess in Greek mythology — is thought to be the first book entirely dedicated to the moon. Hevelius surrounded one lunar map with baroque flourishes: cherubs brandishing pronouncements, looking through telescopes or studiously drawing.

Astronomers drew what they saw; artists made the drawings better. But some images were of little use to astronomers without good scientific texts, and most were not widely seen by anyone but scientists. The French artist Claude Mellan’s 1635 engravings were not simply beautiful but also so accurate that they were not surpassed until two centuries later. In 1805, the British portraitist and amateur astronomer John Russell made a superb engraving of the moon titled “Lunar Planisphere, Flat Light,” showing the moon not as we see it but rather in flat, even light. It’s a choice that reflected Russell’s belief that an artist should “correct’’ nature in order to produce an ideal.

The idea that earth’s mysterious companion might be inhabited kept being broached by imaginative people, mistaken people and hoaxers.

The name of Sir John Herschel, a noted British astronomer, was slyly stolen in 1835 by The New York Sun for the sensational “great moon hoax,” which reported that Sir John had observed houses, roads and sophisticated cities on the lunar surface. The story was reprinted across Europe, and a wide international audience ecstatically bought both paper and hoax.

The invention of photography four years later meant that more accurate and believable imagery was about to take center stage. “Apollo’s Muse” has several of the earliest photographs of the moon, including John William Draper’s remarkable 1840 daguerreotype — exposure time: a half-hour. (Daguerreotypes required more light than the moon produced, hence the long exposure, during which the earth and moon both moved.) Draper’s photograph gives us a glimpse into a rare moment of double discovery, comparable to Galileo’s: a more precise understanding of the moon’s surface, and one obtained with an instrument able to see more accurately than the eye.

Until mid-19th century, photographs could be reproduced only with great difficulty, and photography by the light of the moon as the earth rotated was no mean feat, so for years the public saw less than visitors to the Met will.

The British astronomer James Nasmyth, despairing of photography’s power to capture the minutiae and three-dimensionality he saw through his scope, made detailed plaster casts. In 1874, his photographs of his artful stand-ins for the moon were published and lauded as the most “truthful” representations ever seen. So much for photography’s reputation for veracity.

In fact, photography did not simply run artistry out of town. As late as 1882, the French astronomer Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, working at the Harvard College Observatory, believed that photography had limitations that art did not. He published “The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings Manual,” illustrated with stunningly drawn prints of craters on the moon and an eclipse of the sun. His scientific drawings were published in a large portfolio and collected; public interest in science was growing.

New and more accurate information does not always move minds. (Consider the Flat Earth Society.) Technological and scientific advances never produced evidence of lunar inhabitants, but the moon was too fascinating to be held back by mere science.

Literary voyages to our constant companion existed long before Jules Verne’s influential “From the Earth to the Moon” (1865). Illustrations included humanoids and fanciful animals, but more charming was the first science fiction movie, Georges Méliès’s “Le Voyage Dans la Lune” (“A Trip to the Moon”), from 1902. A group of astronomers are shot off the earth by a cannon, land smack in one of the man-in-the-moon’s eyes, and barely escape hostile natives. A colorized excerpt (as well as clips from Fritz Lang’s “Woman in the Moon,” from 1931, and Irving Pichel’s “Destination Moon,” from 1950) plays in the exhibition.

By the early 20th century, the moon had become cuddly. Portrait studios acquired sturdy, smiling crescent moons (and at least one that was implacably grumpy). Nudes, lovers, friends, families and pranksters sat on the crescent curve to be immortalized on postcards.

By the time NASA came along, the moon was a pretty serious matter again. Before the launch of Apollo 11, on July 16, 1969, cameras were surveying the moon from unmanned Lunar Orbiters, looking for a landing site. (Spy satellites had already taken photographs, and in 1966, Lunar Orbiter 1 took a picture of Earthrise two years before the astronaut William Anders took the more famous image.) Some of the photographs taken from 239,000 miles away were converted into three-dimensional moonscapes and carefully studied for a landing site, but Neil Armstrong eventually, and breathtakingly, used his eyes to find a safer landing spot than the one to which he had been directed.

The exhibition usefully supplies some Soviet propaganda photographs — the first dogs in space, the first woman in space — that were stoking popular support for their outstanding space achievements when the United States was still feverishly working to surpass them.

These proved to be forerunners to the hugely successful American public relations campaign that followed the first moon landing. Images of the Apollo 11 astronauts — Buzz Aldrin walking near the lunar module, for example, or standing by the American flag — still resonate 50 years later.

Critics initially dismissed the Apollo program as a “moondoggle.” After Apollo 11 landed, a few declared it a fake. But Americans generally saw it as an affirmation of national greatness after a decade of tragedy, upheaval and Cold War, and the whole world thrilled to this intimate encounter with the moon, which had been aloof since something like forever.

Perhaps nothing can live up to the moon landing. Less exciting is the artistic response in the last gallery of the show. In 1962, the NASA administrator James Webb and the artist James Dean founded the NASA Art Program. A NASA website suggests one reason: “An artist also could bring something that engineers and managers loathe to admit to: emotion.”

The program commissioned well-known artists including Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, all of whom made tiny drawings in 1969 for a small ceramic wafer that was attached to the Apollo 12 spacecraft and left on the moon. (It has become known as the Moon Museum.) Also left behind, in 1971, was Paul Van Hoeydonck’s small sculpture “Fallen Astronaut,” a replica of which is at the Met.

The space program’s impact on popular culture is represented by Harry Gordon’s “Rocket” dress (1968), which depicts an alarmingly phallic rocket exploding upward through the mannequin’s middle. Made of paper, the dress could be cut apart and displayed on a wall. And it makes clear how just about everything, including history, is grist for the commercial mill.

The American flag was planted on the moon in 1969, not to proclaim our satellite an American colony but to memorialize our achievement. A 1971 photograph by Stephen Shames of a message spray-painted on a brick wall in a vacant lot in Brooklyn says it all: “THE MOON BELONGS TO THE PEOPLE!!!”

The images collected here read like a love letter from all its ardent suitors.

Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography

Through Sept. 22 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.

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[tenaciouspoetrytimemachine-blog]

What advantages and disadvantages does social media present to the modern writer?

I see social media as something that can be invaluable to many writers working today. The Internet is experiencing a period of unprecedented growth, during which it is becoming available to more and more people across the world, almost on a daily basis. Whether they utilise the Internet or not, writers need an audience to be successful, and the ever-growing one that can be found on social media can bring a multitude of advantages to them and their work. This essay will focus on discussing these alongside the disadvantages that are also present, since the Internet can be an unpredictable place for professional and casual users alike, and it should be treated with caution.

According to Tom Standage’s book Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2,000 Years, we “collectively spend around three hundred billion minutes, or the equivalent of six hundred thousand years, on Facebook” every month. The fact that one platform alone – albeit one with the domineering presence and established profile of Facebook – can provide these astonishing figures is testament to the power and outreach of social media in general. If it did not provide a single adequate service, such numbers would simply be impossible to achieve, and users from all walks of life would simply refrain from relying so heavily on it. There is evidently massive potential for social media to boost professional prospects, and when these are viewed from a writer’s perspective, there is an equally large untapped readership to reach out to. In the UK and US alone, social networking sites of various shapes and sizes “are used by 98 per cent of all Internet users, and the figure is above 90% in many other countries.” To a writer, these are audiences that may previously have been completely inaccessible to them, and if they are connected with in the right way, the possibilities may be endless. Social media is, according to Jill Walker Rettberg, “a form of blogging”, and keeping a regularly updated profile can help writers to gather loyal and consistently interested followings. This can in turn allow them to connect and respond to those who engage with them, all while promoting work and – where necessary – pinpointing a specific demographic to target in a project. Commercially speaking, trends are important things for writers to identify prior to the writing process, and by gauging readers’ responses to their work as it is published, they can determine what does or does not resonate with consumers. If their early efforts on social media are rewarded with a large audience, writers can prove to potential industry connections, such as agents and publishers, that their output is worth both time and investment. Many well-known writers have indeed amassed such a following online, and are taking full advantage of this through extensive interaction with their fans.

Among these is Neil Gaiman, whose Tumblr page features a page entirely devoted to answering questions from his readers; he does this in a warm, honest, informal and conversational manner, which may help to increase his standing among his followers and make them feel as though they have established a relationship with him. Indeed, The Guardian notes that his chosen approach demonstrates that he “respects his readers as fellow creative souls”, meaning it has had the noticeably positive impact he would have wanted to achieve. Other writers attract followers in different, more inventive ways, demonstrating the versatility of some social media platforms. Novelist and lyricist Paulo Coelho, for instance, uses his Instagram account to juxtapose quotes that he deems to be of interest with miscellaneous images, relating to both his personal and professional lives. His relaxed attitude to the latter part of his life can allow his readers, no matter who or where they are, to feel connected on a deeper level, in much the same way that Gaiman’s might. Through the quotes that he selects, which are mostly motivational or inspirational in nature, he shows a desire to play an active part in improving or enriching their lives, and this can also be effective in bringing people closer to him and his work. Elsewhere, writers who have diversified into other artistic fields can use social media to draw interest towards their alternative output, just as Teju Cole has. He is described by Wikipedia as a “writer, photographer and art historian” – and in order to draw attention to all three mediums, he has utilised various social media platforms. Interestingly, those that rely on the written word the most have been largely neglected in favour of Instagram, an almost entirely visual medium, where Cole showcases his art. He freely admits on his website that his use of Twitter in particular has lapsed, and a glance at his page will confirm he has not been active there since July 2014.

I believe that by rejecting Twitter as a relevant platform, Cole is sacrificing one of the very best forms of social media for a writer wishing to connect with readers, whether they are established or not. The very nature of a tweet, which can be a maximum of 280 characters long, means that Twitter can be a very manageable website to use for anyone – they can discover a lot from very little actual information and an easily attached picture or video. As means of visual stimulation, these have the potential to be especially popular with audiences; Rettberg notes that such things can appeal to them as “a drive-by audience” much more than “a mass of text”. Direct messages, which allow for conversations that are unseen by other users, can also be located and exchanged simply. Many writers and literary professionals have seized the chance to utilise this simplicity as much as they can, and to great effect. They often gain success through offering tips on how best to get published, and by offering relevant advice to those who ask for it on a daily basis. Dan Blank’s bio claims that he helps writers “create meaningful connections with readers”, and to look at his profile reveals that he adopts a professional but warm and optimistic tone with his followers, for whom he tweets links and resources several times a day. He currently has 7,893 followers – it is likely that they have been enticed by the uncomplicated, unintimidating and accessible nature of his account. Mridu Khullar Relph tweets for similar reasons; her style juxtaposes the professional with the personal, making it highly relatable for her own followers, of which there are currently 6,262. Her tweets are often motivational in nature and this is reflected in some of the replies she gives; in response to one user who claimed that she continued to inspire them on a daily basis, she said that she was “so happy to hear it!” Warm engagements like these, when widely seen by the scale of audience the Internet affords, can prove to be very endearing, and they can lead to the writer being raised even higher in the estimations of the public.

Despite the clear advantages presented to writers by Twitter and social media use in general, there are also disadvantages to be found. Firstly, the amount of dedication required to effectively run an account can take away from the time actually used for writing – and a large following needs actual finished work to engage with. Emily Benet of Publishing Talk alludes to this by stating that to be successful in writing a novel, “you need to have powers of concentration”, and she goes on to explain that excessive focus on an online presence can lead to an equally large amount of time being wasted. A writer must therefore see time management as essential if social media use is to work well for them. In addition, users are susceptible to hurtful comments or feedback from others, and these can be emotionally damaging or demoralising, although Benet suggests that in a writer’s case, it is beneficial to develop “a tough skin” around them as this can allow them to accept criticism easier. A third disadvantage comes with the connections actually made online. Even if they are many and widespread, they still exist in the virtual world at the expense of the real one – as such, they make it appear that “a real social connection exists when it does not.” A writer’s positive experience with social media should not take away from the fact that personal connections with readers are just as valuable; this reiterates why they should not be overly distracted in using it.

Having looked at both the advantages and disadvantages of social media from a writer’s perspective, it is still clear to me that there are more of the former than the latter. In an increasingly digital age, where technology is prominent in much of what we do, writers would impose a significant hindrance on themselves if they were to ignore the benefits social media can bring to their work. It is apparent, however, that they should be vigilant and considerate whilst doing so, as the difficulties presented by other people and the platforms themselves can limit what a writer is able to achieve online and the subsequent impact this can have on their work. As long as their time and usage is monitored sensibly, though, there are plenty of opportunities for writers to succeed online, and they have a variety of popular platforms – all proven to be effective - at their disposal to assist them with this.

 Bibliography

·       Standage, Tom. Writing on the Wall: Social Media, The First 2,000 Years. Croydon: Bloomsbury, 2013.

·       Walker Rettberg, Jill. Blogging, 2nd edition. Polity Press, 2014.

·       Leonardi, Paul M, Huysman, Marleen, and Steinfeld, Charles. ‘Enterprise Social Media: Definition, History and Prospects for the Study of Social Technologies in Organizations’. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Volume 19, Issue 1 (2013), pages 1-19, accessed 18 November 2018. https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/19/1/1/4067484#94892604

·       Kate Gwynne, ’10 authors who excel on the Internet’, The Guardian, 11 May 2015, accessed 18 November 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/may/11/10-authors-who-excel-on-the-internet

·       Emily Benet, ‘Social media – the pros and cons for writers’, accessed 18 November 2018. http://www.publishingtalk.eu/marketing/pros-and-cons-for-writers/

·       Wikipedia. ‘Teju Cole – from Wikipedia, the free encyclopaedia’, accessed 18 November 2018. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teju_Cole

·       Dan Blank, Twitter bio. https://twitter.com/DanBlank

·       Khullar Relph, Mridu. Twitter post, 17 November 2018, 7:40pm. https://twitter.com/mridukhullar/status/1063879648713560064

[caveartfair]

How Galleries Support Their Artists

Exterior of Jack Shainman Gallery’s Chelsea location. Photo courtesy of Jack Shainman Gallery.

A regular reader of the news has likely seen headlines about a Damien Hirst show, a record price fetched for a Jeff Koons sculpture, or a new work of street art by Banksy. And there’s some visibility to the touchstones of an artist’s trajectory: group and solo shows at galleries, price appreciation and a good showing at auctions, and ultimately an appearance in a museum show or collection.

What’s less immediately visible to the wider world is the role that galleries play, and how a gallery itself becomes established. There are a handful of so-called “mega-dealers” whose names may be familiar even to those on the fringes of the art world, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Pace, and David Zwirner among them. But galleries are still the beating heart of the art world, the mechanism through which many artists find their way to institutions, the world’s great collections, or just the homes of people who love their work.

Galleries have multiple roles, both visible and invisible: to incubate and support their artists, often by going above and beyond the normal work of putting on shows, promoting their artists, and selling the works; and to providing services such as financial management or book publishing, in order to help their artists focus more fully on their work.

“There’s the things that you see in our gallery that are in front of the scenes, which are obviously the exhibitions, the publications that we make, then there are things that are behind the scenes, which could be everything from working with an artist on their archives or working on research for an exhibition for years or maybe researching artworks that passed through the gallery in terms of secondary market,” says Julia Joern, a partner at David Zwirner.

Galleries come in all ages, shapes, and sizes too. Art Basel and UBS’s Art Market | 2017 report estimated there were roughly 296,000 dealers and gallery businesses in 2016. Just under 40% of them had annual sales of less than $500,000, while a similar share had sales totaling between $1 million and $10 million.  Nearly two thirds of all galleries employed five or fewer people, and only 4% had 20 or more employees.

Regardless of size, at the core of a gallery’s identity is its “program.” The term generally refers to the roster of artists a gallery represents, but can also describe a conceptual framework or area of focus that guides that roster, as well as other activities such as collaborations with other galleries, performances and lectures, or fair appearances. Most will stress that their primary role is to facilitate their artists’ production of great work, in any way they can.

We spoke to representatives from three galleries of different sizes and ages, recognized for their strong programs, to learn more about how galleries serve their artists, evolve as institutions in their own right, and what it means for them to succeed.

Night Gallery

Night Gallery started in 2010 in a strip mall in Los Angeles’s Lincoln Heights neighborhood, and has since moved to roughly 5,800 square feet, spread across two spaces in the city’s gallery-heavy downtown. Founder and artist Davida Nemeroff initially opened the gallery with a roster of her peers, fellow Columbia University MFA students whose common thread, she says, is a visual language that references or critiques the popular vernacular. While it’s not necessarily obvious in each work, she sees it in the work of Rose Marcus, which often includes photographs of New York City landmarks or icons, or the signage that sometimes works its way into Mira Dancy’s figurative paintings.

In the early days, Nemeroff and her former partner Mieke Marple had a modest goal: Be able to hire a gallery assistant. Although Marple is no longer with the gallery, Nemeroff now has a staff of four full-time employees (not including herself), which allows her to spend more time outside of the gallery, including about eight hours a week on studio visits with her artists as well as others she doesn’t represent. She also sees her role as helping ensure her artists are consistently engaged in work they’re excited about, and ideally achieving “breakthroughs.”

She also devotes a good deal of time to traveling and supporting artists in person, going to openings and shows in other cities, such as Winnipeg, Canada, and Durham, North Carolina. Especially for a younger gallery, collaborating with other galleries is “huge,” she says, helping create a “multicity support network” for her artists. It’s also part of her role to serve as an intermediary between her artists and the wider critical conversation.

“One of the strengths of any great gallerist is really knowing what’s going on in the scene and in the conversation,” Nemeroff says. “Knowing that will also help your artists be part of that conversation and leading the conversation.”

She’s also seeing more evidence that she and her team are doing something right: more sold-out shows, more placements of her artists into public collections and prestigious private collections, and acceptance into higher-profile art fairs. These are all assurances Night Gallery has come to be “regarded as a serious gallery, and not just a cool party gallery,” she says. But even as she savors what she and her team have accomplished, she knows there’s much more to do.

“It’s a battle,” she says. “I’m of the mindset that it could always be better and we could always do more and we could always sell more.”

Jack Shainman Gallery

Jack Shainman has garnered a reputation as a prescient advocate of artists whose works galleries and museums initially overlooked. He was struck early on by the intricate bottle-cap sculptures of Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (one hangs in the Met in its African hall), the depictions of everyday African-American life by painter Kerry James Marshall, subject of a recent retrospective at the Met Breuer, the photography of Malian artist Malick Sidibé, and other talents including Carrie Mae Weems, Hayv Kahraman, and Leslie Wayne. Senior director Tamsen Greene says that one thing unites the artists, in Shainman’s eyes: They’re all producing “extraordinary and innovative work that doesn’t look like anything we’ve ever seen before.”

Helping their artists realize their goals for the short, medium and long term can in some cases means turning down opportunities in favor of achieving long-range objectives, says Shainman. The critically acclaimed Marshall retrospective was one gratifying example, he says, representing the culmination of a intention he and Marshall set when they first began working together two decades ago.

“It’s always important to keep in mind the big picture, even when you’re getting approached with day-to-day inquiries, and constantly assess how everything has the potential to move that bigger picture forward,” he says. “Sometimes saying ‘no’ is the most responsible response.”

That approach extends also to placing artworks. After museums, the gallery prioritizes collectors who will be “excellent stewards” for the art. That means not “flipping” work at auction, but cherishing it and loaning it out for institutional shows when asked. The 25-person strong gallery also tries to ensure its artists get coverage in “the right types of critical press,” as Greene puts it, such as industry journals and catalogues.  

The gallery’s expansion, too, has been more focused on cultivating a dedicated audience for its artists rather than explicitly going after new commercial markets.

One “watershed moment” Greene cites in the gallery’s growth was the 2014 opening of The School, a 30,000-square foot space in Kinderhook, New York, near where Shainman keeps a farm. The School puts on only two shows a year, and the dimensions of the space allow for larger works, including, says Greene, “one of the biggest photographs we’d ever produced,” a 160-inch by 276-inch work by Richard Mosse. As a destination, rather than one node on a Chelsea circuit, it also gives people “the mindspace to spend a lot longer up there,” which Greene says is more rewarding for the gallery and its artists.

David Zwirner Gallery

Throw a dart at a calendar and chances are you’ll hit a day when one of David Zwirner’s artists has a major museum show on somewhere in the world. The 24-year-old gallery represents major names such as Yayoi Kusama and Luc Tuymans, some of whom have been with Zwirner for decades. The gallery’s nearly five dozen artists run the gamut from the biggest names in minimalism, like Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, to figurative painters such as Marlene Dumas and Neo Rauch, to young artists like Oscar Murillo and Jordan Wolfson.

Partner Julia Joern says the gallery’s 150-person staff means it can offer its artists a huge array of services, such as archival help, research assistance, photography and publishing, and institutional (or museum) relations. Zwirner has two spaces in New York and one in London, with a fourth to open in Hong Kong in early 2018. But it wasn’t always like that.

For example, when Joern joined in 2008, she created an in-house photography and imaging department, which allowed flexibility as to where and when the gallery could organize shoots for upcoming shows, press coverage, artists’ books, and other purposes.

Similarly, a three-year-old in-house publishing arm is not necessarily a huge contributor to the gallery’s bottom line, but its existence is justified by allowing the gallery to produce books in the way it feels best serves its artists. Joern has commissioned art historians like Richard Shiff and Robert Storr to write essays and books for their artists, and most recently had The New Yorker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic Hilton Als write the catalogue for the Alice Neel show he curated, “Uptown.”

The high-touch, multifaceted approach stemmed in part from the 2001 loss of Austrian sculptor Franz West to Gagosian, says Joern. That experience forced Zwirner to think seriously about how to grow his business to be able to better serve his artists.

“Of course we need to get to the point where we can justify [these investments] financially and operationally,” says Joern. “Everything goes hand-in-hand when you’re growing a business.”

Now, the breadth of the workforce means there are multiple types of expertise the gallery can call on. Some employees are gifted at managing young artists, while others have art history backgrounds or longstanding relationships with museums.

“Some of the staff that’s been with the gallery 10 years, 15 years, 20 years,” says Joern. “With that comes just incredible institutional knowledge about the artists, the museums, the business, and all of those intersections.”

With all this expertise at its fingertips, the gallery can position itself as one of the premier homes for the world’s most recognized artists, artists who also tend to command the market’s highest prices. A 2013 New Yorker article quoted Zwirner saying an estimate of annual revenue in the $225 million range was “low.”

—Anna Louie Sussman

from Artsy News

[thebeautyoftorah]

Vayechi

bs'd Shalom, I hope you are well. My second book "Healing Anger" is about to be published. If you want a dedication for a relative or sponsor the book please send me a message. I am also offering all of you the opportunity to share in the mitzvah to honor a loved one by sponsoring my weekly parsha review, or for refua shelema (healing), or for shiduch, Atzlacha (success), etc. My weekly review goes out to over 5000 people in English and Spanish all over the world. Please contact me for more details. Feel free to forward these words of Torah to any other fellow Jew. Enjoy it and Shabbat Shalom. Vayechi-Esav's Burial, Just the Head? In the Mearat Ha'Machpelah (the Double Cave) in Hebron are buried The World's Most Famous Couples - Adam and Chava, Abraham and Sarah, Yitzchak and Rifka, and Yaacov and Leah. There is one other famous biblical personality (or should we say, part of him) buried in this cave as well – Yaacov’s twin brother and nemesis, the wicked Esav. The Gemara [1] describes the funeral procession of Yaacov (which is recorded in this week's parsha) as he is being escorted from Egypt to Israel to be buried in the Double Cave. Along comes Esav who attempts to block his brother from being buried there, claiming that, as the firstborn, he is the one who has the right to be buried in their ancestral burial place. In order to prove to Esav that Yaacov purchased the birthright from him, thereby gaining the privilege of burial in the cave, the sons send their fastest brother, Naftali, all the way back to Egypt to produce the necessary documentation. Meanwhile, one of Yaacov's grandchildren by the name of Chushim the son of Dan, who was almost deaf, inquired of his brothers as to the unusual delay in the funeral procession. When he was told that Esav was behind the delay, he immediately took an axe and chopped off his great-uncle Esav's head, which then promptly rolled into the Double Cave, to be buried together with Yaacov's body. There is some deeper and mystical meaning to this seemingly strange episode, that is beyond the scope of this essay, but on the surface, this story tells us an important message about how we should live our lives. You see, even though Yaacov and Esav were polar opposites - Yaacov was extremely righteous and saintly, and Esav was a despicable lowlife - they actually attended the same exact Yeshiva and Day Schools and had the same wonderful parents and grandparents at home. So why did they turn out so radically different? The answer is that it is simply not enough to attend Torah classes and listen to lofty lectures where our brains absorb all that wisdom and moral values. That just means that our head is really spiritual and religious! But that's not good enough. The trick is to take all that knowledge and to bring it down to the rest of the body – in other words, to live our lives according to the principles and teachings that we have been taught. As the Torah tells us [2] "And the study [of Torah] is not what is essential, but the action." Intellectually we may be aware of many things but if we don't take it into heart, it's just nice information. Our job is to shorten the million mile distance between our brains and our hearts, even though physically there is only one foot separation. Esav's “head” was very righteous, so it merited to be buried in the Mearat Ha'Machpeilah. But he took all that knowledge and did absolutely nothing with it. He didn't do the real connection between the body and the head (the cave is in Hebron which comes in Hebrew from the word Chibur-to connect-). In fact, he lived just the opposite of what he knew to be true. Our forefathers did accomplished to put everything they intellectually knew into practice, and that is the reason why their bodies and heads as an unit merited to be buried in the Mearat Ha'machpela. They connected -chibur- the double -machpela- brain and body.   So the next time we attend a Torah class or hear an inspiring lecture, let's make sure that we don’t waste a precious opportunity for spiritual growth by keeping all that wisdom and insight stuck just in our heads. We need to get our bodies involved by concretizing those ideas into something tangible that can positively change how we act and ultimately enhance the way we live our lives. This way, we will be way a-“head” of the game! ___________________________________ [1] Sotah 13a. [2] Pirkei Avot 1:17. Le Iluy nishmat Eliahu ben Simcha, Mordechai ben Shlomo, Perla bat Simcha, Moshe ben Gila,Yaakov ben Gila, Sara bat Gila, Yitzchak ben Perla. Refua Shelema of Yaacov ben Miriam, Gila bat Tzipora, Tzipora bat Gila, Dvir ben Leah, Abraham Meir ben Leah, Elimelech Dovid ben Chaya Baila, Noa bat Batsheva Devorah and  Dovid Yehoshua ben Leba Malka for whom you can donate to a life saving cause http://www.causematch.com/en/projects/love-your-neighbor-challenge/. Atzlacha to Shmuel ben Mazal tov and Zivug agun to Marielle Gabriela bat Gila.

[dinoandrade]

“DRACULA”: BOOK vs. MOVIES

Part 3: The Rest Of The Characters

Welcome to part three of my five part essay comparing Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” to those film versions most commonly referred to as those “faithful to the novel.” To understand why I wrote this please check out parts one & two.

BUT FIRST...

This essay is NOT spoiler free. And whether you love or hate any of the films being compared here is beside the point and a subject best left to posts dedicated to film critique. This essay is SOLELY about which films are the most faithful to the novel... period.

Reminder: those versions most touted as “faithful” that I compared are:

“Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horror” (1922) aka “Max Schreck Version”.

“Count Dracula” (1970) aka “Christopher Lee Version”.

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1973) retitled “Dan Curtis’ Dracula” aka “Jack Palance Version”.

“Count Dracula” (1977) aka “Louis Jordan version.”

“Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992) aka “Coppola version”.

And now...

PART THREE: THE REST OF THE CHARACTERS

LUCY WESTENRA

Mina’s best friend and Dracula’s first victim in England that is a major character. Lucy is a free-spirit who is so vivacious that she has not one, not two, but three suitors for her hand in marriage. Tragically, Lucy becomes a vampire that preys on children who have chillingly come to think of her as a sort of boogie man they call the “Bloofer Lady” - all before Van Helsing and the vampire hunters destroy her.

The depiction of Lucy in the Jordan and Coppola versions are the most novel accurate to Stoker’s shockingly modern, effervescent character. The Coppola version is more stylized, bawdy and horrific while the Jordan version is more gothic Hammer Horror. If not for Coppola’s embellishments regarding her free-spiritedness (and Dracula’s beastial/demonic seduction of Lucy) the end result would have been a tie.

Winner: Jordan Version

ARTHUR HOLMWOOD & QUINCEY MORRIS

These are two of Lucy Westenra’s suitors and future vampire hunters under Van Helsing. Arthur Homewood is the rich son of an English Lord. Arthur wins the heart of Lucy only to then be the hand who stakes her when she’s turned, thus freeing her soul. Quincey Morris is a rich Texas Cowboy who wields a Bowie knife to great effect against Dracula in the final battle before losing his life to Dracula’s Gypsy minions. In the epilogue of the novel Johnathan and Mina have a child whom they name Quincey in honor of the fallen cowboy.

These characters are left out of most tellings of “Dracula”, or transposed for other characters. In the Palance version Arthur is a leading character taking the place of Johnathan Harker who in that film never escapes Castle Dracula. In the Christopher Lee version only Arthur Homewood appears and while largely novel accurate he oddly has the name Quincey Morris.

They appear in the Jordan version as a composite character named “Quincey Homewood” an American aristocrat with a hinky Texas accent (rivaling Keanu Reeves’ hinky British accent) who wins Lucy’s hand but winds up staking her. Though still a Texan he is no cowboy, nor does he carry a Bowie knife. He is shot by the Gypsies in the final battle, but appears to survive.

However, the Coppola version is the only one in which both characters appear and are portrayed with surprising accuracy to the novel. In fact, Coppola’s is the ONLY version to depict the tragic hero cowboy at all.

Winner: Coppola version

DR. SEWARD

A brilliant young psychologist who runs an asylum. He is the 3rd suitor for the hand of Lucy Westenra and is crushed when she chooses Arthur Homewood over him. When Lucy’s mysterious illness baffles him, he’s the one who brings in Van Helsing, eventually becoming one of Van Helsing’s vampire hunters alongside Johnathan Harker, Arthur Homewood and Quincey Morris.

Next to Mina, this is the character who gets short-changed the most. A third of the way into the novel Dr. Seward’s audio diaries become the most frequent entries and longest in the novel. If word count alone determined billing, Dr. Seward would be the star of “Dracula”. I mean the guy even rides into the final battle against Dracula’s minions with a blazing Winchester rifle. Instead, in most filmed versions Dr. Seward is reduced to a stuffy old doctor, more akin to Lucy’s father than a young heartbroken suitor willing to go to war against evil. And that’s if at all... he doesn’t even appear in either the Max Schreck or Palance versions.

Once again the Louis Jordan and Coppola versions come closest but both fail to be absolutely faithful. In the Jordan version Dr. Seward is screwed by way of omission. Here he is no longer a suitor of Lucy. With no romantic interest he is merely there as a concerned friend and clinician. In Coppola’s version he’s screwed by way of embellishment. Here he’s so heartbroken by Lucy choosing Arthur that he turns to using drugs from his asylum to kill the pain. Poor guy.

Despite the embellishment I’d have to go with Coppola’s for like the novel, it is his broken heart that is his chief motivator in bringing in Van Helsing and eventually riding into battle for vengeance against the Count.

Winner: (by default) Coppola version.

RENFIELD

A lunatic in Dr. Seward’s asylum who is psychically connected to Dracula. He foretells the coming of the vampire and is promised eternal life by the Count. Upon meeting Mina he has a turn of conscience and warns her to escape Dracula before it is too late. For this transgression Dracula savagely beats Renfield to death in his cell.

Personally, this is the one character in the novel I always had a problem with as Stoker never truly explains how Renfield acquired his psychic connection with Dracula as it precedes the Count coming to England. Nor the purpose of the connection or why Dracula would even care. It’s like the author had this vague idea of Dracula’s powers including power over the insane (though apparently only one) but then Stoker forgot to flesh it out.

Side Note: this perceived flaw was brilliantly corrected in both the 1931 Lugosi and Spanish versions (and by extension the ‘79 Langella version) wherein, Harker was replaced with Renfield as the solicitor who first goes the Castle Dracula. There he is set upon by Dracula and his brides. Renfield is then driven mad as he is telepathically enslaved, making him a minion, bound to do the Vampire’s bidding in daylight and protect the Count on the journey to England. Once captured and thrown in Dr. Seward’s asylum, Renfied struggles to escape so he may return to his master.

To these alterations that finally gave Renfield true purpose, I have a feeling Stoker might have said: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

And on a more personal note, I admit that some of my disappointment also comes from the fact that I played Renfield a zillion years ago in a high school production of the Deane/Balderson play which is what lead me to read “Dracula” in the first place. Imagine my shock as I read Stoker’s novel for the very first time and screamed: “Really?! That’s it?! THAT’S RENFIELD???!!!

Anyway... as it stands, the Louis Jordan version’s 100% faithful depiction of Renfield reveals the same flaw as the novel in that the viewer might find themselves wondering why this character was even necessary? Though not as unnecessary as the Renfield in the Christopher Lee version who is just this morose figure who eventually keels over and dies in peace for no apparent reason making that depiction of Renfield the most pointless. But which version is the “most pointless” is not the focus of this essay, so....

Winner (as it were): Louis Jordan version

COMING TOMORROW...

PART FOUR: NOVEL DETAILS