Over a seven-decade career, Hockney explored and reimagined classical portraiture, landscape painting and pop art, working in painting, collage, photography and digital drawing.

Hockney was born in the north of England but lived much of his life in Southern California, making its sun-drenched suburban views a major motif. …

Historian Simon Schama said it’s no mystery why the appeal of his work endures.

“His work is admired — loved is not too strong a word — by the millions who, worldwide, flock to see it because it presupposes an expectation of pleasure,” Schama wrote in an essay accompanying a 2025 Hockney exhibition in Paris.

I was not a big Hockney fan, but his work seemed pleasant enough. However, having lots of friends and in-laws in Southern California, I was and I remain exceptionally familiar with those “sun-drenched suburban views” in real life.

But I must say that this quote from that article endears Hockney to me:

In 2019, he moved to Normandy, where during the 2020 coronavirus lockdown he produced joyous iPad drawings of springtime for his friends. His message — “Do remember they can’t cancel the spring” — was emblazoned in neon across the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris when it hosted a huge Hockney exhibition that opened in April 2025.

RIP.

The post David Hockney dies at 88 appeared first on The New Neo.

Johann Sebastian Bach is one of history’s three greatest composers (along with Beethoven and Mozart), but his fame didn’t really blossom until the mid-19th century—75 or 80 years after his death. That fact contains both sadness (that he never enjoyed the fame he deserved) and joy (that his name rings out around the world and across the centuries). … I’ll share the stories of a handful of mid-20th century folk/pop musicians whose fame (in selected circles) was similarly deferred—along with some clips of their music.

That started me thinking about other arenas and other examples of late fame. I think the quintessential one is Van Gogh, who struggled tremendously in his life (from some unspecified and episodic mental illness, among other things like poverty) and sold very few paintings, although more than the one painting of legend:

We don’t know exactly how many paintings Van Gogh sold during this lifetime, but in any case, it was more than a couple. Vincent’s first commission was from his uncle Cor. He was an art dealer and wanted to help his nephew on his way, so he ordered 19 cityscapes of The Hague.

Vincent sold his first painting to the Parisian paint and art dealer Julien Tanguy, and his brother Theo successfully sold another work to a gallery in London. The Red Vineyard, which Vincent painted in 1888, was bought by Anna Boch, the sister of Vincent’s friend Eugène Boch.

Without the help of his brother Theo, Van Gogh would have been even worse off. But things were bad enough, and he killed himself at the age of thirty-seven in 1890. Now Van Gogh is one of the most popular artists ever, whose work fetches astronomical prices at auction.

But I think it’s somewhat of a myth that he was a complete failure in his lifetime. From his Wiki entry, I was surprised to see that he did have more recognition during his lifetime that I’d previously known, plus he was acknowledged with at least some praise and acknowledgement shortly after his death:

After Van Gogh’s first exhibitions in the late 1880s, his reputation grew steadily among artists, art critics, dealers and collectors. In 1887, André Antoine hung Van Gogh’s alongside works of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac, at the Théâtre Libre in Paris; some were acquired by Julien Tanguy. In 1889, his work was described in the journal Le Moderniste Illustré by Albert Aurier as characterised by “fire, intensity, sunshine”. Ten paintings were shown at the Société des Artistes Indépendants, in Brussels in January 1890. French president Marie François Sadi Carnot was said to have been impressed by Van Gogh’s work.

After Van Gogh’s death, memorial exhibitions were held in Brussels, Paris, The Hague and Antwerp. His work was shown in several high-profile exhibitions, including six works at Les XX; in 1891, there was a retrospective exhibition in Brussels. In 1892, Octave Mirbeau wrote that Van Gogh’s suicide was an “infinitely sadder loss for art … even though the populace has not crowded to a magnificent funeral, and poor Vincent van Gogh, whose demise means the extinction of a beautiful flame of genius, has gone to his death as obscure and neglected as he lived.”

Van Gogh’s fame and reputation started to build in the early years of the 20th century and he became quite famous in mid-century. So it did take a while for him to reach his present mega-fame.

Another example of a very different kind that comes to mind is Ignaz Semmelweis, who’s not really what you’d call a household name even now. But he was disgraced in his lifetime and rehabilitated only after death:

In 1847, he proposed hand washing with chlorinated lime solutions at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, where doctors’ wards had thrice the mortality of midwives’ wards. The maternal mortality rate dropped from 18% to less than 2%, and he published a book of his findings, Etiology, Concept and Prophylaxis of Childbed Fever, in 1861.

Despite his research, Semmelweis’s observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no theoretical explanation for his findings of reduced mortality due to hand-washing, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis allegedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. In the asylum, he was beaten by the guards. He died 14 days later from a gangrenous wound on his right hand that may have been caused by the beating.

His findings earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory of disease, giving Semmelweis’s observations a theoretical and scientific explanation, and Joseph Lister, acting on Pasteur’s research, practised and operated using hygienic methods with great success.

Another extremely well-known example of the “late fame” genre is poet Emily Dickinson, reclusive and nearly unpublished in life but now considered one of the greatest American poets:

Although Dickinson was a prolific writer, only 10 of her nearly 1,800 poems were published during her lifetime.Today her poems are widely regarded as groundbreaking with their use of short acerbic lines, lean descriptions, and slant or off-rhyme. Her poetry primarily deals with nature and mortality.

One thing all three – Van Gogh, Semmelweis, and Dickinson – had in common was that their work was unconventional for the times, trailblazing even. It took the passage of time for them to be appreciated. I’ll let Dickinson have the last word:

Success is counted sweetest,
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purpose Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory

As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

The post The phenomenon of late fame appeared first on The New Neo.

It happens nearly every time. I’ll be reading a short story, let’s say, enjoying myself, lost in the experience—when suddenly, there it is: the gratuitous and mean-spirited and out-of-context slap at Bush, or at those who support him. It’s not as though the story is even tangentially about politics, either; it can be about anything at all, it doesn’t really matter.

The Bush-dissing will be thrown in when you least expect it, just to let the reader know—well, to let the reader know what, exactly? To let the reader know that the author is hip, kindly, intelligent, moral—oh, just about everything a person ought to be. And that the reader must of course be a member of the club, too—not one of those Others, the warmongers, the selfish and stupid and demonized people who happen to have voted for Bush.

Back when I was one of the gang, too, back when I was in with the in crowd (“if it’s square, we ain’t there”), did I notice when authors dragged in their political credentials from left field? Or perhaps it wasn’t quite as commonplace back then for them to do so?

At any rate, now it seems positively obligatory. I’m reading along, sunk deep within the story, bonding with the characters—and then, suddenly, it’s as though the author has reached a hand out of the pages of the magazine (OK, I’ll confess, sometimes it’s the New Yorker—yes, I still read it for the fiction, just as some people claim they read Playboy for the interviews) and slapped me across the face.

Authors, do you really want to do this? Because, with a single sentence, you’ve managed to alienate and offend (not to mention insult) up to half your audience.

Well, it’s only gotten worse since then. Sometimes it works out for the artist; after all, one-half of the population of the US is still a lot of people. Plus, if the person is offering something of value – is a good singer or actor or writer – people on the opposite side of the political divide may decide to still buy their product rather than boycott them. But what of someone like Jimmy Kimball? Unfunny, unentertaining; all he’s got is dissing Trump and even the way he does that isn’t the least bit clever. Plus, he seems to consider himself some sort of hero.

Therefore, should anyone be surprised at his perhaps-pending cancellation? Of course not. But Jimmy seems to think he’s being persecuted, poor thing:

The “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” host opened up in a new interview with Vulture about the future of the genre following the cancellation of Stephen Colbert‘s “Late Show” on CBS and his own run-ins with Trump, including his suspension following comments made about the death of Charlie Kirk.

“I feel a little bit defeated about it,” Kimmel told Vulture after Colbert’s final episode aired on May 21. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”

Kimmel went on to say he was assured by the network that his show is still profitable, and yet they only renewed him for a year. Plus:

Asked if he has thought about retirement, Kimmel said he’s still unsure when his time will come. “It’s important to me to be responsible,” he said. “I know I could go out in a blaze of glory and get a lot of applause for it, but it would be a very selfish thing to do.”

That is, if he isn’t ousted first. Trump has repeatedly called for Kimmel to be fired, most recently when he made a joke about Melania Trump having a “glow like an expectant widow.” In that case and that of Kirk, Kimmel said he “had the truth on my side as a defense. What if I actually do do something wrong? I mean, that’s inevitable.”

Of the president, Kimmel said: “I don’t love him. I don’t hate him, either. I feel sorry for him. He obviously didn’t get hugged a lot.”

Sure thing, Jimmy; you don’t hate Trump at all. And that remark about not being hugged is about the typical level of Kimmel’s wit.

Makes one yearn – positively yearn – for the days of Johnny Carson, who must have had his political preferences but kept them to himself while being genuinely entertaining. But that was a long long time ago.

The post JImmy Kimmel – the art of offending at least half of your potential audience appeared first on The New Neo.

A mountain lion forced residents of Santa Monica and their tiny pets indoors as officials scoured the area for the apex predator.

The Santa Monica Police Department descended on the residential area of 14th and Montana Friday morning after someone allegedly saw the animal in the area. …

The mountain lion was first located sleeping in a residential backyard, and did not move from that location for several hours, a SMPD spokesperson told The California Post. …

After about six hours, the animal was reportedly hit with a tranquilizer, sending it running through the neighborhood. Officials were seen in a video chasing after the big cat in an attempt to wrangle and capture it. …

Finally, nine hours after it was first reported, the animal was successfully tranquilized and removed.

Just a few years ago I was staying with a friend in the suburbs of Los Angeles. It was April, and I went for a walk in a very built-up area of many homes. And yet I saw a mountain lion walking through a group of bushes not more than 50 yards away from me. I turned and slowly walked in another direction, heart pounding but trying not to transmit fear although I was quite frightened.

When that happened to me, it made me think of this old Kingston Trio song from my youth. It’s a California song:

And now of course we have to have the song “Wimoweh,” later called “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” I prefer this older Weavers version (1955) to the later pop version by the Tokens:

Here is the original South African group who created the song. You can see how closely the Weavers stuck to this version:

The post The mountain lion sleeps tonight appeared first on The New Neo.

No one will come away unmoved by the book, and no one will be able to put it down. … There is no way of reading Alive without a heightened sense of one’s own life and its value.

The book is not only an extraordinary survival saga, but it has tremendously moving stories involving family, friendship, love, and sacrifice. It is a sort of reverse Lord of the Flies, where the cooperation among the survivors was extremely impressive, and it also contained deeply spiritual and religious elements despite its horrors.

Over the years I’ve read other books on the subject, including several written by the survivors. I’ve watched several documentaries as well. In 1993 an American movie came out on the subject, and although I was looking forward to it immensely I was sharply disappointed. It just didn’t ring true, plus it left out or truncated very important parts of the story, in particular involving the astounding trek by two of the young men who survived the initial crash.

So when I heard recently that there was a newer movie, made in 2023 in the Spanish language, and using previously-unknown Uruguayan and Argentinian actors, I was extremely eager to see it. I had to wait till I was in a certain mood, because the story is a grueling one even to watch, and from the trailer I could see it was very realistically as well as poetically done:

And so I watched the film, and I have mixed feelings about it. I would recommend it, although you need to be prepared for a harrowing journey. Compared to the previous movie it’s better. But compared to the book it simply doesn’t work for me. That surprised me, and I’ve been pondering why I found it ultimately very inferior to the book that some of the survivors thought was already inadequate.

For one thing, I think a book has the ability to give so much more background on the entire situation and the people in it, which deepens the story and its significance. Just to take one example, in the book you learn a great deal about a woman who was one of the initial survivors, Liliana Methol. But in the film she’s almost an afterthought and somewhat of a cipher. There just isn’t enough time to render each person in his or her fullness.

Plus, there are an enormous number of characters, and the actors (who look a great deal like the real life people they are representing) somewhat resemble each other, especially as the movie goes on and many become bearded and all become thinner (the actors were forced to lose weight as the film went on, for the sake of realism). It wasn’t that easy to tell them apart, and I knew a great deal about the characters already.

Films with big casts need to pay particular attention to this potential problem. I think that, for example, The Great Escape (a film favorite of mine although of a very different type), which also had a very big cast, dealt with the numbers more successfully because the protagonists were from different countries, and there were many stars in the cast and that helped the viewers remember who’s who. That movie was also about a half hour longer than Society of the Snow, and although both movies are long they both move along quite quickly because there’s so much to tell. But The Great Escape has more time in which to tell it.

In the book Alive, there’s a great deal of emphasis also on the stories of the families searching for their lost relatives; many did not give up hope, and their tales are especially moving and make the eventual reunions even more poignant and deeply felt. There was virtually none of that in the movie; you merely see reunions with parents and girlfriends which are generic because we don’t have much of the backstory.

There are many exchanges and scenes in the book that seem naturally cinematic, and some are left out of the movie. I don’t know why; it wouldn’t take much to have included them. Instead, there are repetitive scenes of the suffering endured by the survivors and their decline – as well as a tremendous emphasis on the most sensationalistic part of their story, the fact that in order to survive they very reluctantly decided they must eat the bodies of those who had died (and the living made a pact to allow the others to eat them if they died before rescue came), Any movie about this incident must deal with that fact, but I think that after a while this particular movie could have left out some of the redundancy and gone for some more of the background stories.

Most of all, I was surprised that the movie seemed to leave out or gloss over one of the most salient characteristics of the group, which is that they were Catholics and mostly believers, and that their specifically Catholic beliefs helped them endure. That is, many of them explicitly likened their eating the flesh of their dead companions to the Eucharist, although they were well aware of the differences. Instead, in the movie there was a vaguer spirituality that was emphasized. Even the part where, after the survivors returned to civilization and priests told them they would not be condemned by the Church for what they did in extremis – that entire aspect was left out. Instead, there was an almost-throwaway scene in a church at the beginning of the film, with a priest talking about the Host while some of the young men pass notes among them. Unless you already know the plot, you could easily miss its significance.

This omission and de-emphasis seems to me to be a deliberate lessening of the religious message and slant of the entire event, a trend toward the universal rather than the specific. But the specific can have a universal message, and I felt the omission keenly although I’m neither Catholic nor Christian.

The movie caused me to get out my old copy of Alive and start re-reading it. In the introduction, the author writes:

When I returned in October 1973 to show [the survivors] the manuscript of this book, some of them were disappointed by my presentation of their story. They felt that the faith and friendship which inspired them in the cordillera do not emerge from these pages. It was never my intention to underestimate these qualities, but perhaps it would be beyond the skill of any writer to express their own appreciation of what they lived through.

I think that’s an honest assessment; it’s an impossible task. Nevertheless I think that Piers Paul Read came as close to accomplishing it as anyone could. For me, he certainly came closer than any movie could.

The post I watched the movie “Society of the Snow,” about the 1972 Andes plane crash and survival appeared first on The New Neo.

The attacking Ottoman Army, significantly outnumbered Constantinople’s defenders …

The fall of Constantinople and of the Byzantine Empire was a watershed moment of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1,500 years. For many modern historians, the fall of Constantinople marks the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern period. The city’s fall also stood as a turning point in military history. Since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and walls to repel invaders. The walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian walls, protected Constantinople from attack for 800 years and were noted as some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. However, these fortifications were overcome by Ottoman infantry with the support of gunpowder, specifically from cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare.

But I first learned about this as a child through a rather silly song, popular in 1953. I was exceedingly young, but popular music nevertheless still seeped down to me, and the song was very catchy:

“Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” is a 1953 novelty song, with lyrics by Jimmy Kennedy and music by Nat Simon. It was written on the 500th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. The lyrics humorously refer to the official renaming of the city of Constantinople to Istanbul. The song’s original release, performed by The Four Lads, was certified as a gold record.

The lyrics can be found here, and they treat the whole thing like a light joke. Back in 1953 it must have seemed that way to most of the Western world. But who’s laughing now? An excerpt:

Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
(Oh) every gal in Constantinople
(Oh) lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
(Oh) so if you’ve a date in Constantinople
(Oh) she’ll be waiting in Istanbul …

So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks’

Actually, it’s everybody’s business these days – and by “it” we’re not talking about Constantinople/Istanbul per se. We’re talking about the Muslim world versus the Christian world (and the Jews, of course). We’re talking about various kinds of conquest and not just the military kind – perhaps not even primarily the military kind. The siege involves the human mind, and it’s been going on far longer than two months. The main fronts are academia, the press, and politics.

NOTE: Here’s the original song:

The post “You can’t go back” – the fall of Constantinopole appeared first on The New Neo.

In the meantime, I think I’m just going to post something that has nothing to do with politics, and then go take a walk.]

Walk like an Egyptian and run like a ballerina:

The greatest practitioner of the ballet run was Galina Ulanova, whose ballet heyday with the Kirov and then the Bolshoi was during the 1940s and 1950s. She was the child of two ballet dancers and felt she never had a choice about ballet, but she certainly made the best of it. She was unique as a dancer and as an actress, earning praise such as these statements:

Sergei Eisenstein: “Ulanova — cannot be grouped together with, compared to other dancers. In terms of what is most cherished, By the very nature of her secret…She belongs to a different dimension.” …

Margot Fonteyn: “I cannot even begin to talk about Ulanova’s dancing, it is so marvelous, I am left speechless. It is magic. Now we know what we lack.”

But it is this comment by dance critic Arnold Haskell with which I most agree:

My memories of Ulanova are, to me, a part of life itself, bringing a total enrichment of experience. To me, hers are not theatrical miracles but triumphs of human spirit. Where Pavlova was supremely conscious of her audience and could play upon its emotions as upon an instrument, Ulanova is remote in a world of her own, which we are privileged to penetrate. She is so completely identified with the character she impersonates that nothing outside exists.

But it’s running we’re talking about here. Ulanova originated the role of Juliet in the Prokofiev ballet, and it featured this famous run. Here Ulanova is running to Friar Lawrence’s cell in desperation. I believe she’s in her forties in this clip:

The post Running in ballet appeared first on The New Neo.

That’s “just” as in “social justice” or what Thomas Sowell called “cosmic justice.” I guess the Canadian left just isn’t satisfied with the present status quo, nor is Obama.

He also met with PM Carney, which – according to Newsweek – has MAGA “seething” (rather than pouncing, as is customary).

Carney wrote:

“Welcome back to Canada, President @BarackObama,” Carney wrote. “Thank you for joining us in Toronto for important conversations on how we can build a better and more just future—and empower more people to build with us.”

There’s that “just” business again.

I’m not seething about this; there are plenty of more seethable things around, vying for attention. But I became curious as to whether, if Obama became a Canadian citizen, he could run for PM? The answer is “yes,” because Canada has no “natural born citizen” requirement.

By the way, I’ve never thought Obama was anything but a “natural born citizen” of the US. When he was running for office, there were a lot of discussions here on the subject, so I’m not going to go into it again now. I’ll just add that the whole controversy makes me think of Macbeth – the prophecy that Macbeth couldn’t be defeated by anyone “of woman born,” and then the revelation of the fact that Macduff was “from his mother’s womb untimely ripped.”

The post Obama meets with the Canadian PM appeared first on The New Neo.

It was Judith Anderson’s (later Dame Judith Anderson) role as the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers that especially creeped me out. The movie was made in 1940, and although Anderson had been acting for ages, the role made her far more famous and earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Here she is with the shy and nameless second wife of Maximilian de Winter (Laurence Olivier) played perfectly by Joan Fontaine:

Anderson almost overacts but keeps it under tight control. There are oodles of subtexts there, and her extremely polite malevolence is palpable.

Compare to a modern remake from 2020:

The video is entitled, “Kristin Scott Thomas is terrifying as Mrs. Danvers in REBECCA (2020) movie clip.” Oh, really? Terrifying? They wish. To me, she just comes across as a Mean Girl.

But perhaps it’s unfair to compare anyone to Anderson in the role. I happen to think it’s not just the actresses that makes the difference, but the passage of time and taste: black-and-white versus color, and a certain conviction and gravitas about how to portray evil. And of course, Hitchcock.

The post On portraying Mrs. Danvers appeared first on The New Neo.

Osipova may come closer than most dancers of today do to Plisetskaya’s athletic jumping and “attack,” and in fact may surpass her jumps in height. But I prefer Plisetskaya. Of course, every dancer is different and we don’t want duplicates – although I think I’d make an exception in the case of Plisetskaya.

There is something very naturalistic in Plisetskaya’s movement and flow, although ballet choreography is anything but natural. Nevertheless, she seems to be free in her movements, departing from strict style in order to convey something of the character’s personality. Here, that something is joyful abandon, and I think the key to what she does – and what Osipova does not do – is that little head and upper body dip that Plisetskaya makes as she runs into her preparation for the leap. Osipova keeps her regal ballet posture right through, and it gives the movement a somewhat stilted although beautiful effect. It’s subtle, but that’s what I see.

There are longer clips of each dancer doing the same variation. You might notice other things – for example, as is very common with today’s dancers, Osipova dances somewhat more slowly, which I think takes away from the dramatic effect but allows for more posing and her technical perfection as well as her jump’s height

Here’s Plisetskaya in a somewhat longer clip that shows more of her acting ability and upper body freedom and fluidity; the variation in question begins at 3:47:

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