The Artist

When I was growing up my mother watched all those British drama series on PBS. All I got from the exposure what a lot of Ohh blah blah blah in a Monty Python accent.

My father---loved classical music. I didn’t quite inherit his appreciation. The only piece of classical music I ever understood was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—and it was mostly because the inference was obvious: spring, summer, winter and fall.

I have also been to the Opera several times—but unless it is sung in English or there is a screen in front of me translating I do not follow the storyline. And I prefer modern dance to ballet because I can usually guess based on the choreography and the music what is being expressed. So. While I dabble in the arts my appreciation is not intuitive. And the challenge of figuring it all out tends to frustrate me.

A year and a half ago Kara took me to the High museum in Atlanta to see an exhibit of Salavador Dali—his latter works. I did not think I would like it. Surrealism tends to be too abstruse for my taste. But in Dali’s later works there were no rhinoceros plunked randomly in paintings. There were no melted timepieces. The paintings were not weird. Dali’s later works looked nothing like an acid trip on canvas. I understood what I was looking at.

And this past weekend I saw the movie The Artist. And while a black and white silent film would ordinarily not appeal to me based on my previous experiences I chose to go anyway. And the movie was wonderful. At no point did I think why would people like this? To my delight  I did not miss the Technicolor and dialogue at all.

Sometimes it is good to retry things you previously disliked. Sometimes you are pleasantly surprised. Sometimes after tasting  garbanzo beans 57 times and disliking them every one of those times on  the 58^th tasting you decide they are not so bad after all. In fact—they are pretty good—especially when they are disguised as hummus.

So maybe that’s what they need to do with all those British PBS mini-series—forget the Shakespearean actors and cast the Kardashians—maybe then I wouldn’t find those dramas so damn boring.