A song of hope

Those who have been with this blog from the very beginning will remember that I once paid a great deal of attention to mash-ups – that is, to the genre in which songs are produced by taking two or more pieces of pre-existing music and thrusting them relentlessly together.

I had hoped to keep this up over the course of the blog’s lifespan, but it’s hard to remain interested in everything forever, and my attention to this field waned, somewhat.  I kept consuming them, to be sure, but my determination to write about them vanished entirely.

With that in mind, know that I bring the following before you with only the best will in the world.

When first he produced a “United State of Pop” mash-up, I don’t know if DJ Earworm was aware of the cult status such a production would achieve.  The premise is simple enough: he takes the Billboard Top 25 hits of a given year and combines them into a single song, the general tenor of which is entirely commensurate with the sentiments of the songs he’s combining.  2007′s was very heavy on the hip-hop, while 2008′s focused more on a sort of mellow R’n'B sound.  2009′s, however, is another story entirely.

In “United State of Pop 2009,” DJ Earworm has combined the aforementioned Billboard Top 25 from 2009 into a single track that hits all of the notes that the year’s pop music attempted to reach.  It’s a song of hope, and of frustation; of downfall, and of determined bouncing-back.  I’ve heard more of the songs for this particular year than I have for some of the previous years, which may be helping me in my appreciation thereof, buy I am still confident in proposing that he’s reached a level with this year’s production that had hitherto eluded him.  It’s a fantastic piece.  The video that accompanies it (compiled by I know not who) is also eminently worth watching, though I will state the necessary warning that, modern music videos being what they are, it may not be suitable for viewers of all ages.

Anyway, watch and listen:

Most of my favourite musical artists are dead – some died centuries ago.  I am of an older fashion.  Nevertheless, in an age where so much of our popular music seems awful, and so much of our discourse about same seems banal, I am still very glad to see someone taking such determined steps as this and producing something that, if not wholly original, is at least a fairly compelling synthesis of what has come before.

Finally, a word of warning.  DJ Earworm was asked the following question in another venue: “Doesn’t this prove how much pop music sucks nowadays and is basically interchangeable?”  His response, I think, is worth keeping in mind as you listen: “Not at all. If you alter the tempo and pitch of any music enough, you could get anything to fit together, whether it’s Bach or the Black Eyed Peas. What it does prove is how far technology has come to make these alterations sound convincing. I’ve manipulated some of these vocals HEAVILY.”

An important point, to be sure.  Don’t forget it.

EDIT: If the video isn’t working properly, just let me know in the comments.  I’ll do what I can.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNzrwh2Z2hQ

Good ol’ Nedroid

Anthony Clark is a talented fellow.  His webcomic, Nedroid, is a basically inoffensive descent into the absurd; it describes the adventures and exploits of Reginald, who is a talking bird, and his rotund friend Beartato.

Consider this recent offering (click to enlarge and clarify):

Check them out; the archives stretch back quite a way, and there are always more being added.

‘War of the Gods’ update

It seems that the next film by Tarsem Singh (director of the luxuriant and beautiful The Fall) will finally begin production next month.  This news comes from an article confirming a recent casting decision:

Twilight’s Kellan Lutz is going from vampire to living god for his next role, agreeing to play Poseidon for Tarsem Singh’s War Of The Gods.

[...]

Singh will start shooting the movie next month, with Jason Keller having written the latest draft of the script.

Mickey Rourke will be in it too!

Anyway, the approaching commencement of shooting is good to hear about.  For those who don’t remember, I noted in my review of The Fall (which really is stupendous – get out there and watch it) that War of the Gods is intended to be a film about Theseus, the Gods, and the Titans throwing down in an epic deathmatch that promises to have a visual style something like – in the director’s words – “Caravaggio meets Fight Club.”  If you’ve seen his two most prominent directorial efforts – The Fall and the earlier (and more repugnant) The Cell – you’ll know that this tantalizing description could only be the barest scraping of the surface when it comes to what this production will eventually look like.

Modern poetry and its problems

If I said all about this subject that I’d like to, the post would probably be as long as the aggregated contents of this blog thus far, and probably a goodly portion of the old blog besides.  There’s nothing stopping me from doing that, I guess, but I really don’t feel like it.  It would be a fruitless endeavour.

For many of the readers of this blog, the phrase “modern poetry” will likely have produced a slight frisson of unease.  This unease (if my own situation is anything to go by) will have a number of components to it.  The first might be the awkward tension that comes when those who love old-fashioned formal, metrical poetry are confronted with the omnipresent supremacy (in a publishing sense, but more on this in a bit) of what could generally be called “free verse.”  The second might be a sense that, given the enormous amount of free verse that is published, one has not really read enough of it to feel as grimly about it as one does.  The third might very well be a reflexive distrust of anything to which “modern” is attached as an adjective — which would almost necessarily problematise the first two rationales.  It bears all of the blasphemous baggage of our age, to be sure, but also has (more justified) resonances with the productions of the Modernists, many of whom seemingly pursued baffling incomprehensibility as an end unto itself.

This unease, anyway, is probably justified.  There are a number of reasons for this; I’ll get into most of them in later posts (oh look he’s committing to yet another lengthy posting project – I bet that will turn out well, and in a reliable fashion), but one of them is the more or less complete obscurity in which the bulk of established poets currently toil, however enormous their numbers.  The whole economy of poetry has become officially insane, as you might suspect (see the linked article, seriously; “if journals merely continue to grow at the current rate, there will be more than 35,000 of them by 2100, and approximately 86 million poems will be published in the 21st century”), and I don’t see any clear path out of this particular swamp that doesn’t involve a lot of universities being burned to the ground and a lot of Smart People being burned at the stake.  Fire is the answer 90% of the time; the other 10% of the time it’s at least an option.

There’s a lot of poetry being published right now, but a great deal of it is legitimately terrible and very few people read any of it anyway, good or bad.  Joe Average (that doughty exemplar!) seldom rises from his labours and declares that a collection of the most recent poetry would be just the thing upon which to spend his money.  Mere recentry isn’t even the only field of valuation being neglected; Mr. Average will not even rise (again, from his labours) and say that a collection of the best recent poetry would be the very thing for his idle hours.

He does not say this for a number of reasons.  The first and most important among them is that he cannot say it; he lacks utterly the competency to judge of value among the varied and difficult and alien works being published today, so he would have to submit to the judgment of external authorities in finding “the best” of what modern poetry has to offer, and those authorities are so often compartmentalised in their expertise and interests that Mr. Average would have no assurance that what they declare to “the best” is really very good at all, or taken from a fair, broad, fairly broad sample of the available work.  Another reason is that much of his education will have instilled in him the sense that “poetry” really is just stuff expressed in rhyme and meter; and so, finding that he did not like “The Road Not Taken” or “The Raven” or “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” he imagines that all “poetry” is like those Great Works to which he was forcibly exposed in his boyhood days, and will seek no comfort therein.  In the unlikely chance that these exemplary works (and those like them) awakened in him a real love of poetry after all (there’s always a chance), if he does rise from that aforementioned labour and decide to buy a book of poetry to enjoy in the pleasure of his leisure hours, it might very well be of much the same character as those poems with which he was originally instructed, and – what is more likely – from much the same time period.  That is good.  He should do that.  I am entirely in favour of that.  Still, it’s not his only option, and, if he views it as such, he’s possibly not doing it for entirely informed reasons.

Nevertheless, Joe Average does not lack poetry in his day to day world.  He will likely never buy a book of poetry in his life, or give the poetry industry a moment’s thought, but the desire for poetry – which he may periodically feel, since he is human – is easily satisfied by something else.  In a strictly production-based sense, Western poetry hasn’t died at all, as we’ve seen above, but is instead bigger now than it has ever been.

Poetry in the West has not died; it has rather transformed, and what it has become – the popular music industry – is both fascinating and nauseating.  The familiar and cherished meter and rhyme can be found in abundance, but the third component of classical poetry – authentic imaginative will – is sometimes lacking.  We have often (and rightly) complained about the stultifying superficiality and, when we get really heated, artificiality of modern popular music, but to denounce it completely would be foolish.  There’s a lot going on there, much as I hate to admit it, and, while not all of it is pleasant, some of it is intriguing enough to warrant attention.  Hell, it deserves our attention merely on the strength of its popularity.  This doesn’t mean it’s good, of course, but if we are to evangelize our neighbours and help them towards virtue, it would be worth knowing what songs they’ve willingly listened to hundreds of times, and what those songs are saying.

I once spent about six weeks listening to nothing but Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61 Revisited (1965), several times a day, and at all times while writing and reading.  Some might raise their eyebrows at such a choice, but I stand by it.  It was excellent.  The trouble is, however, that while some people will listen hundreds of times to “Desolation Row” or Long John Baldry’s “Mr. Rubin” or The Beatles’ “In My Life” or Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water”, there are others who will do the same with the latest hip-hop outrage, or bubblegum pop, or heavy metal opus, or any number of other novel things.  This will happen, for good or ill, and we’ve got to deal with it.

People once screamed in the streets for the latest works of Byron, or threw themselves to their knees at the sudden appearance of Alexander Pope.  While I wish people would still do this when it comes to those specific authors (and those like them), it should be admitted that those days aren’t really over, per se – it’s just that the objects of these exuberant reverences have changed.  If we’re to live in this world, and function as artists, or critics, or students, or anything, we have to try to come to grips with this.

What I’m proposing is that we – as academics (and, indeed, as Christians and virtuous folk) – are more or less obliged to consider the philosophical and moral ramifications of the modern poetry that actually dominates the West’s imagination.  Never mind the latest bewildering self-published free-verse chapbook from some dude you’ve never heard of; even the author of the book isn’t sure what’s in there, and only he would ever be interested in it in any event.  No, I mean that we ought to care about – and grapple with – what Lady Gaga and Kanye West and Taylor Swift and Beyonce Knowles are saying.  It may hardly ever be fun, and the works studied may hardly ever be good, but there are things at work that cannot safely be ignored.

Ms. Gaga’s latest hit, “Bad Romance” (for example; a line from the song is this blog’s current subtitle), seems to have become the sort of success of which most artists only dream.  The song’s music video – which is a psychosexual nightmare, and not easily recommended for viewing in spite of its technical excellence (I do not include a link) – has been viewed on YouTube alone roughly 150 million times.  At the peak of their careers, a Browning or a Tennyson would have simply been unable to find that many people who had even heard of them, much less read any one of their works with such comprehensive gusto.  A hell of a lot of people read “Childe Roland” and “Ulysses;” a hell of a lot more have listened to “Bad Romance” and “Poker Face.”

The ways in which these two sets of work are being enjoyed differ substantially, of course; one might read “Childe Roland” but once and have his world forever changed, while “Poker Face” is heard dozens of times and generally becomes just another strain of the background noise of which the West is never completely free.  Still, even this passive reception (not to speak of the reception by people who really love modern pop and follow it with a poetry-fan’s voracity) will likely have some impact on the listener.  Hearing the same words over and over, until the point they become internalized, has necessary consequences.

I’ve gone on too long, here, so I’ll wrap it up.  Have to save something for later, after all, and I need to think about what direction I’ll be going in first.  A look at Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism (which deals with some of these issues very fruitfully) seems like it would be useful, when I’ve the time to do it, and an exemplary review or two of the poetic, philosophical and moral contents of some popular song might set the stage for the thing in general.  I’ll see what I can whip up later.

In the meantime, here are two key points in recapitulation of the unwieldy paragraphs above:

1. There is a lot of poetry being published today, and a lot of poetry being “consumed,” but it’s not the same poetry in each case.  Hundreds of thousands of entirely forgettable free-verse poems are being published in tens of thousands of mostly unread journals every month.  The poetry that is being consumed, however, is that which has been set to music and presented to the public through television, the radio, and the internet.  That poetry is what might very loosely be called “pop music.”

2. We may analyze the form, meaning and effects of popular songs just as we might analyze the same features of the popular poetry of bygone times.  A preliminary examination of Reel 2 Reel’s “I Like to Move It” suggests that he likes to move it, but the “it” is ambiguous and there may be more at stake.  How will we know if we don’t try to find out?

Fallin’

Watched Tarsem’s The Fall again last night.  I stand by what I said about it the first time.

The trailer that used to be embedded in that post seems to have been deleted from YouTube for some reason.  I don’t feel like going back to edit a new one in, at the moment, so I’ll just embed it below instead:

Watch it.  Find the movie.  Watch that.

A precious oil

I encountered a question yesterday – for what seemed the thousandth time – about how, if Jesus preached against material wealth, the Church can justify all those palaces and castles and art treasures she possesses.  It’s an important question, but also a wearying one; the answer is not short or simple, and many of the times it’s been asked have been in a bid to show that there was no answer rather than because the asker thought there was an answer and wanted to know what it was.

Nevertheless, there really is an answer.

First, “Jesus preached against material wealth” is an oversimplified reading of the situation. He certainly preached against giving wealth the status of an idol, or being so attached to it that you’d be unwilling to give it up if it had become a stumbling block to you. One cannot serve God and Mammon simultaneously, but being wealthy is not necessarily service to Mammon, just as being poor is no necessary sign of virtue.

The most famous passage relating to wealth can be found in Jesus’ encounter with the rich man who wants to know how he can be saved (Mark 10:17-25). Jesus tells him the standard things; be good, follow the commandments, etc. When the rich man says that he’s doing that already, Jesus, though pleased to hear it, also tells him that he should also sell all he has and give the proceeds to the poor, thereafter taking up the cross and following Jesus to better things. The rich man isn’t gladdened by this news, and he goes away “grieving.”

This encounter serves as a prelude to Jesus’ warning to the Disciples that it’s difficult for the rich to get into Heaven – like a camel passing through the eye of a needle, in its most famous rendering. In the face of their astonishment, he elaborates, saying that the difficulty lies upon those who “trust in riches” (emphasis mine). That some Christians can still adhere to a “prosperity gospel” in the face of statements like this astounds me, but that’s a discussion for another day. In any event, the point is that wealth is no indicator of merit or assurance of salvation, and can often be a hindrance to both if improperly understood.

Nowhere in the Church’s understanding of her assets will you find any suggestion that having palatial castles redounds to her credit, or is a sign of her divine provenance or authenticity. She just has them, is all, and because she has them, uses them. They don’t just sit around gathering dust.

This question of use is important, too, because we must also remember Matthew 26:6-13, in which a woman brings a very expensive bottle of oil for Jesus to use. The Disciples make the same basic complaint as those asking the question above: why should we have (and keep, and use) luxurious things when we could instead sell them and use the money to help people who have less? Jesus’ answer is clear: “Why do you trouble the woman? She has done a beautiful thing for me. You will always have the poor with you, but you will not always have me.” This is significant in terms of the fate He would suffer shortly thereafter, but it also has broader implications.

There’s the question of the relationship of utility to beauty, for example; in theory the strictly utilitarian is “good enough,” but the lived experience of the human being routinely shows that good enough is not enough. We need ornament and eye-pleasingness, though both can be taken to extremes; indeed, ornament can lose its excellence when it begins to infringe upon the utility that it was meant to augment in the first place. However, that one might crank it up to 11 is no argument in favour of forever leaving it at 0, just to be safe.

There is much to be said for beauty and grandeur put into the service of God. It appeals greatly to the spiritual faculty of the human being, delights artistically, edifies intellectually (particularly when it comes to objets d’art), and does honour to the Church’s particular relationship with Christ. He Himself exists in a glorified body, after all; it would not do for His Bride to be shabby.

Economically, however, there are further important considerations. One of the Church’s chief functions in a temporal sense is as a charitable institution, and in this she has been (and continues to be) extraordinarily successful. One notable source of revenue is the artistic and architectural collection under discussion.  The Vatican City tourist trade is a large one, and other sites around the world – whether metropolitan cathedrals that dominate the skyline or tidy little chapels in the middle of nowhere – benefit greatly from the fact that people want to go to them. Not just Catholic people, to be clear; and, even among Catholic people, not just for spiritual reasons.

Much of the money this raises can be (and is) directed towards the charitable ends noted above. Crucially, that money comes in every single year. It’s a constant flow. To sell those buildings and art treasures and so on would secure a one-time cash infusion, but that would be it.

Look at it like this:

Say you have a nice statue. There are hungry people in the world, though, so what good is a statue? Let’s sell it off! Great idea; you just made a million dollars. That will help a lot of people.

But what if we instead keep the statue and charge people a dollar each to come look at it? Woah! A million people came to see it this year! And they’ll come back next year, too, and the year after, and the year after, and so on. Likely not the same people, of course, but the dollars are functionally the same. Now we’re getting that million dollars every year (minus the modest cost of statue polish) rather than just once, and we can pretty much rely on it into the future, too. Excellent.

In the case of the Church, there are thousands of statues, and paintings, and buildings, and more than a mere million people who routinely take long trips just to see them. It would be insane to get rid of them.

Anyway, the alternatives for these particular buildings are not good. Would you rather have some Italian bureaucrat or – alas – shady American investment banker living at Castel Gandolfo? Would you rather see the Lateran and Vatican palaces simply boarded up because the state trust that purchased them from some freewheeling pontiff could no longer secure the funds to maintain them? I sure wouldn’t, but it’s happened to heritage sites before in any number of cities. Their governance by the Holy See guarantees that these breathtaking structures – and the artwork they contain – will remain in good repair and accessible to the public. This is part of the artistic patrimony of the West, and it really would suck to see it dispersed into private collections or neglected into ruin.

Finally, castles and palaces are awesome.  Of course the Pope should have one.

Providence

Sometimes accidents work out for the best:

A woman who was taking an art class at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has accidentally fallen into a Picasso painting and damaged it.

The painting called The Actor sustained a vertical tear of about six inches (15cm) in the lower right-hand corner.

Now we just need this to happen a few hundred more times and the overall quality of the world’s artistic heritage will have gone up by a small yet crucial amount.

Every silver cloud has a black lining, however:

[T]he damage did not affect the “focal point of the composition” and should be repaired for an exhibition later this year, the museum said.

October 6th – The Jazz Singer

I had two choices when it came to picking a topic for today’s October post, and they could scarcely differ from one another more than they do.

On the one hand, there was the death of the legendary Irish patriot and nationalist Charles Parnell on Oct. 6th, 1891 – a man who spent all his waking life in service of his cause and who died more or less because of it.   If I were to dedicate this entire month to nothing but astonishing, inspiring and controversial figures, there’d simply be no choice but for me to spend a good thousand words or so describing the slowly-grinding wheels of Irish independence in the late nineteenth century and how Parnell – declared even by his enemies to be one of the most incredible men who ever drew breath – figured in those alternately dull and ferocious events.  That would have been nice, but it would have required a lot more research than I’m prepared to conduct at the present hour, and would have been yet another in what will be a long line of sad, impressive men doing sad, impressive things.

We’ve got some truly horrific stuff coming, anyway, so I figure I might as well give us a bit of a break every now and then.  As such, I’m happy to report that it was on this day in 1927 that the first-ever feature-length movie with synchronized dialogue – The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson – was released.

There had been sound in movies before, in a fairly limited capacity; smaller, shorter productions had toyed with the presentation of sound-synchronized visuals for their own sakes, demonstrating the ability of modern technology to allow the audience to both see and hear the striking of a gong, or the dropping of a glass, or any number of other things that, mundane in themselves, had never before been recorded in more than one sensory sphere at the same time.  It’s very similar to the earliest movies, in fact, which were often only a few minutes long and which showed things like somersaults or galloping horses.  Perhaps it sounds funny to us at so many years’ distance, but such experiments were the essential first steps towards something far more grand.

The process by which these talking pictures were produced and presented was known as “Vitaphone,” an early manifestion of the sound-on-disc system of producing audible moving pictures.  The basic principle of the Vitaphone system was simple enough: the sound that corresponded with what was happening on screen was recorded on a vinyl disc that would be played in unison with the film reel.  The projectionist lined both reel and disc up to their respective starting spots, turned on the specially-designed Vitaphone projector, and knelt in hopeful prayer as the anything-can-go-wrong process began.  If either the disc or the reel encountered a problem during the course of playback, getting them synchronised again would be a nightmare, if not entirely impossible.  If one were damaged, the other became useless.  The film could be spliced and edited; the disc was unalterable.  Further research refined the competing sound-on-film process (which is exactly what it sounds like) to the point where it became strictly better, and the sound-on-disc approach was largely abandoned.  For the time being, though, the disc-based Vitaphone method was used by Warner Bros. for most of the audible shorts they produced.

The Jazz Singer, though, was another matter entirely.  Based on a popular play by Samson Raphaelson (the 1922 short story upon which the play was based had also been written by Raphaelson, and had itself been inspired by a performance by Al Jolson, who would eventually star in the movie version of the play version of a short story that was dubiously about him to begin with), it was an 89-minute tale of a young Jewish singer who has to choose between the Synagogue and the night-club.  When you put it like that it sounds monstrous, and indeed there are elements to it that don’t hold up particularly well (Jolson’s blackface shenanigans have become notorious, for one), but the story is mostly blandly fun and Jolson’s character does the right thing in the end.  It’s also largely silent, oddly enough: the recorded dialogue only accounts for some two minutes of actual screen time, with the rest of the film’s events being described by title cards.  There are a number of songs, however, and the Vitaphone system was put to good use in recording them.

It was very popular, anyway, and though few at the time thought it would spell the end of the silent movie, naturally enough it did.  Now that an entirely novel dimension had been added to the movie-making process, no studio could afford to lag behind and still remain relevant.  The many irritating problems involved in this change-over from silence to sound form the backdrop for Singin’ in the Rain (1952), a movie every bit as excellent and wonderful as The Jazz Singer is merely okay.  Singin’ covers it all: the initial shock of a feature-length talkie; the disastrous realisation that one of the most popular actresses in Holywood has a shrill, unbearable voice; the necessity of converting silent films already in production into talkies so as not to lag behind the curve; the pitfalls of the new technology, and the unintended hilarity they occasion; and so on.  Singin’ did all this while popularising a truckload of excellent songs, synthesizing old-time elegance with modern camp, giving Gene Kelly another excuse to dance his heart out and Cyd Charisse another opportunity to destroy the entire world in some legs-related calamity.  Most movies can only do one of those things, if they’re lucky.

It also nearly killed Donald O’Connor, which would have been unfortunate:

Anyway, the consequences of the success of The Jazz Singer should be pretty obvious.  Sound-synchronized movies went from being an unusual novelty to being the baseline standard for this sort of entertainment, necessitating the invention of a new term – audio-visual – to even describe it.  Some production groups continue to make silent movies out of nostalgia or to make some sort of point – or, if they’re the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, because they’re completely awesome – but sound has pretty much universally triumphed.  Attempts to add further sensory dimensions to visual entertainment (scent seems like it would be easiest) have not been very successful, and I doubt very much that it’s a development for which the world eagerly waits.

Tutta l’opera del Caravaggio

Some enterprising Italians, recognising the difficulty (in fact the impossibility) of getting all of Caravaggio’s works together for a single exhibition, have instead created excellent digital versions of them to be displayed both online and in specially designed galleries.  I’ve never been to Italy and as such have no idea what the effect is like up close, as it were, but their website is simply wonderful.

Just click “enter” on the right, there, and it will open up the viewing window.  You can navigate around the virtual gallery by clicking and dragging the mouse on the image that appears, or click on the “works” tab up near the top of the screen.  In the virtual gallery you can just click on a picture you want to see to bring it up, and in the works tab there’s a list of (oddly blank) buttons on the left-hand side of the screen that correspond to each painting.  They display the painting’s name and a thumbnail when you hover the mouse over them, though, so they’re not useless.  Once you’ve got the picture you want, you can do all sorts of detail observation and some truly epic zooming.  Check it out.

It’s pretty Flash-heavy, so be warned.  It’s also entirely worth it.

Innocent man taken advantage of

It’s actually hard to say what happened, but he sure feels like he’s a victim and now he’s suing to redress the damages:

They may not have realized it, but the folks who snapped up as much as $4-million worth of limited-edition prints by artist Takashi Murakami two years ago at the special Louis Vuitton boutique inside his exhibition at L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art apparently were getting nicely mounted handbags — minus the snaps and straps.

At least one buyer, Clint Arthur, is steamed enough to have sued Louis Vuitton for fraud. “Louis Vuitton . . . knew that neither [Arthur] nor anyone else would pay $6,000″ if it was clear they were getting factory leftovers from handbag production[."]

Man, just stop buying art that could secretly be a handbag, or which could be mistaken for a handbag even when it wasn’t one. Just stop doing that in the first place. Problem solved.

When you’re dealing with Caravaggio, you’re not in any danger of suddenly discovering that what you thought was the Crucifixion of St. Andrew is actually a handbag. When you’re dealing with Bernini, you don’t have to worry that the Ecstasy of St. Theresa is actually just a small white square on a wall, or an empty pedestal, or some garbage a janitor swept into a corner and which was mistakenly roped off as an installation.