Thursday, March 24, 2011
F for Fake!
In odd moments, been continuing to turn the pages of Boon on copying. See February 10th for the first mention of the same. I am now starting to think that maybe the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University had a point when he got stuck in. There is a lot of high flown, not to say over blown stuff there. A bad attack of what, as a very wise third year undergraduate I would have called bubbles and planes. Bubbles of philosophy and planes of reality, often brought on by overdosing on Afghan Bloom and/or the Moonies, a cult which was big at the time.
However, I did come across a reference to a film called 'F for Fake' by Orson Welles, which I promptly procured through Amazon - and for once in my life I had to pay considerably more than a fiver for a DVD, very nearly a tenner in fact. Which turns out to be in the same league of pretentiousness as the Boon book - and more or less incomprehensible the first time around. But a bit of work on Google overnight and I have got the plot sorted out and the film was then much better the second time around. All about one forger called Elmyr de Hory and another called Clifford Irving, with far too big a role for Welles himiself. Very self indulgent altogether. Elmyr de Hory comes across as an entirely likeable and very successful forger of modern art. Clifford Irving comes across as rather unpleasant.
But the film ends with a splendid story. I have no idea whether it has any truth in it, but rather fun. So we have a rich, famous and libidinous Picasso, more or less in his dotage, in his flat in some sunny part of the world. A beautiful model parades up and down in front of his window until Picasso decides that there is enough left for one last fling. Model enters flat and strikes a deal. I model, you paint and I get to keep the pictures. Some time later, she pays a visit to some swanky art gallery clutching 22 late masterpieces by the master. They are duly authenticated by various experts and start selling for splendid prices. Gold digging good. At this point Picasso emerges from hiding and denies the masterpieces. The model is still clutching her copy of the agreement. The experts say they are real. But then Elmyr de Hory is lurking in the background and everybody agrees that he was quite capable of knocking out the masterpieces.
Intrigued, I thought to buy the Clifford Irving book all about it, but at £20 plus for a second hand one in fair condition I thought I would leave it until the pile of unread books has shrunk a bit. If I still remember after that, maybe. Rather irritated to think that this splendid scandal must have passed me by in the seventies, leaving not a trace now. And I thought I took an interest in such matters.
I close with two moans about the new computer.
First, Chrome or Gmail keeps telling me that Flashdance or something has crashed. I go to Google help where it seems that there are pots of people out there moaning about this problem. With some of them getting quite heated and rude. From what I could see, the solution is all kinds of uninstall and reinstall; all very painful. Is it time to test the BT online help people again?
Second, the Adobe PDF reader does a search OK and comes up with search results. But I cannot find out how to get from the search result to the document. I had thought that clicking on the search result you were interested in would take one to that place in the document, but no go. I even tried scanning the document for highlights but couldn't see any. And in any case in a document which is hundreds of pages long not a very satisfactory proceeding.
# posted by Jim @ 2:12 AM 
