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Notes from Underground

  And, indeed, I will ask on my own account here, an idle question: which is better—cheap happiness or exalted sufferings? Well, which is better?---Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Fyodor Dostoevsky ---Notes from Underground Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. I have many evil memories now, but ... hadn’t I better end my “Notes” here? I believe I made a mistake in beginning to write them, anyway I have felt ashamed all the time I’ve been writing this story; so it’s hardly literature so much as a corrective punishment.  Why, to tell long stories, showing how I have spoiled my life through morally rotting in my corner, through lack of fitting environment, through divorce from real life, and rankling spite in my underground world, would certainly not be interesting; a novel needs a hero, and all the traits for an anti-hero are expressly gathered together here, and what matters most, it all produces an unpleasant impression, for we are...
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Hope

To be human is to be a miracle of evolution conscious of its own miraculousness — a consciousness beautiful and bittersweet, for we have paid for it with a parallel awareness not only of our fundamental improbability but of our staggering fragility, of how physiologically precarious our survival is and how psychologically vulnerable our sanity. To make that awareness bearable, we have evolved a singular faculty that might just be the crowning miracle of our consciousness: hope.-- Erich Fromm


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Art and Craft (2014)

 


Documentary is often only as good as its subject, and Art and Craft has a truly unique and astonishing one. Mark Landis is a balding, soft-spoken middle-aged man who lives in a messy Laurel, Mississippi apartment where he drinks wine, smokes cigarettes, watches old movies on TV, and makes forgeries of artwork that he then donates to Southern museums free of charge, convincing the institutions to take them via wholly phony stories and by using various made-up aliases. The most brazen of Landis’s personas is that of a priest, which goes hand in hand with the religious works he reproduces, and his copies are so good that he spent decades giving them away—and having them hung in galleries—without being detected. His pastime was eventually discovered by University of Cincinnati curator named Matthew Leininger, whose due diligence tipped him off to Landis’s ruse and drove him to notify the victims of his crime. Except, that is, that what Landis does isn’t actually illegal, since—loophole!—he doesn’t receive any money for his philanthropic gifts.

Directors Sam Cullman, Jennifer Grausman, and Mark Becker profile the prolific Landis with a non-judgmental straightforwardness that allows the sheer brazenness of his scams to generate both shock and amusement, especially given Landis’s own on-camera discussions about his work. With slumped shoulders and a meek voice, Landis seems more than a bit “off,” and it’s no surprise to learn that, as a teenager, he spent a year in a mental hospital after a nervous breakdown following his father’s death, or that he was diagnosed with, among other things, schizophrenia. His regular, affectionate talk about “Mother,” whose wedding album he pores over, and whose picture sits in his home, makes him come across as a more mild, harmless Norman Bates. Art and Craft, though, makes no case for either his inherent goodness or insanity, so much as it allows his story to unfold as one about obsession—both with regard to Landis’s own pathological work as a forger and Leininger’s own, equally dogged pursuit of the man, which cost him his career.




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