Poetry in Motion

Over the weekend I saw Bill Cunningham New York , a documentary about the legendary New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham.

Later that evening, a passage I read several years ago in Joan Didion's The White Album about Georgia O'Keeffe came to mind:

"...I recall an August afternoon in Chicago in 1973 when I took my daughter, then seven, to see what Georgia O'Keeffe had done with where she had been. One of the vast O'Keeffe 'Sky Above Cloud' canvases floated over the back stairs of The Chicago Art Institute that day, dominating what seemed to be several stories of empty light, and my daughter looked at it at once, ran to the landing, and kept looking. 'Who drew it?' she whispered after a while. I told her. 'I need to talk to her,' she said finally. My daughter was making that day in Chicago, an entirely unconscious but quite basic assumption about people and the work they do. She was assuming that the glory in the work reflected a glory in its maker. That the painting was the painter as the poem is the poet, that every choice one made alone -- every word chosen or rejected, every brush stroke laid or not laid down--betrayed one's character. Style is character..."

Besides capturing the unique and overlapping worlds of New York City fashion and society and Bill Cunningham's very important role in it, it was the pure delight of watching an 82 year old man biking around New York City for the complete and utter joy of his work.

Though to him it's not work, it's for the fun of it.

The internet is full of amazed film and blog reviews of the film. I enjoyed reading Esquire's which linked to a classic Bill Cunningham "On the Street" column which now has a multi media video online to complement Sunday's paper. And NPR's notes:
"...Given the boundlessness of his enthusiasm and youthful energy, it's apparent that this is a man who found exactly what he was supposed to be doing, in exactly the city that needed him to do it."

"He who seeks beauty will find it," he says in a scene in the film.

Thank you Bill Cunningham for the reminder that It's a Wonderful Life...