Like most people, I never cared very much about fine art except for the occasional stroll through MOMA or the Whitney or the Guggenheim or LACMA, or some random visit to a gallery in West Hollywood or Tribeca. And so I never read the late Hilton Kramer‘s art criticism, which appeared in the N.Y. Times from ’65 to ’82, and also in Arts Magazine, the N.Y. Observer, New Criterion, The Nation, etc. Not my world, didn’t give a hoot…sorry.

Art critic Hilton Kramer (1928 — 2012)

I’m such a fine-art peon, in fact, that when I read yesterday about Kramer’s death my only vivid recollection was from a famous passage in Tom Wolfe‘s The Painted Word (’75). It stayed in my head because it suggested that not only Kramer but perhaps an entire community of art critics had crawled into their own posterior, and that this, perhaps, was why I never found their articles compelling.

While reading a 4.28.74 Kramer piece in the Times about a Yale University Art Gallery exhibition (it was called “Seven Realists: Pearlstein, Bailey, Mangold, Wiesenfeld, Fish, Posen, Hanson”), Wolfe wrote that he was “jerked alert” by Kramer’s pronouncement that “to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial — the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

Kramer’s statement left Wolfe elated and flabbergasted because in his head it was a key that opened a proverbial lock. “Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon,” Wolfe wrote, “and the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first time.

“All these years, along with countless kindred souls [whom Kramer has characterized as that ‘larger public that knows nothing about modernist art’]… I had assumed that, in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well — how very shortsighted!

“Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not ‘seeing is believing,’ you ninny, but ‘believing is seeing,’ for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.”

Kramer was a conservative-minded fellow who allegedly took a dim view of various Marxist-lefty-nihilist undercurrents in modern art, and it was apparently this that led to his resignation from the Times in ’82. But don’t take it from me.

I was actually bullied by certain “friends” of mine in high school. Not constantly but now and then. I felt engaged by school studies from time to time (I liked history and English) but mostly I was bored to tears, and I hated the repressive “no” atmosphere in my home, which was partly due to my rebellious nature but was largely a product of my alcoholic dad’s personality. So I acted out in order to break out. I was impish, snarky, theatrical, intimidated, angry. I wanted attention.

And so a few obstinate assholes took it upon themselves to let me know that my attitude and manner were socially out of line. I don’t want to talk about it. It was a venal culture. I wasn’t the only one to go through the gauntlet. Every now and then a new victim would be chosen and guys would get “de-pants-ed,” to use an expression of the day. Different guys would be punished by the mob for being a little bit (or a lot) different. I myself was a mobster from time to time. You don’t want to know.

My early high-school days weren’t all hell, but it was basically a time of imprisonment. The truth is that it was partly them and partly me. I clung to adolescence for a long time. I was a late bloomer. I didn’t discover what I wanted to do and be until my early 20s, and my maverick nature presented problems in journalism until the online thing took off in the late ’90s, and then I was finally in a good place. And then HE took off ad-revenue-wise about ’06 or so, and stability came from that.

Warner Home Video’s A Streetcar Named Desire Bluray (streeting on 4.10) is close to perfect. It’s never looked better. Some portions are between okay and nice, and others have that shimmering silvery dreamcicle vibe that can make you fall in love with a black-and-white film all over again.

The older I get, the sadder this film feels.

In a way, Blanche’s speech about “hanging back with the brutes” is a condensation of much of what I’ve written in this column about CG ComicCon cowflop and general all-around Hollywood action crap.

Variety‘s Andrew Stewart is reporting that the AMC theatre chain has decided on a very liberal policy when it comes to under-17s wanting to see Bully. AMC management will accept written approvals or verbal cell-phone okays from parents…which can be very easily faked, of course. But who cares? And what kids are going to want to see Bully enough to go to any trouble?

Still, AMC deserves a pat on the back for essentially saying to hell with the rules when it comes to Bully. They’re like the management of those Staten Island bars who were cool about serving beer when my friends and I would visit when we were 15 and 16.

James Cameron has become one of the biggest achiever-adventurers of our times. He’s become mythical. The Mariana Deep dive is the kind of thing that Teddy Roosevelt used to be known for. He’s on the level of Sir Edmund Hilary or T.E. Lawrence.

Rick Santorum knows how to hold himself in check, but he was clearly only one or two anger levels away from taking a poke at N.Y. Times reporter Jeff Zeleny.

Sociopathic corporate malfeasance and gangster banks are easily the biggest evils and the worst predators around. But the second- and third-worst factors are (a) the butt-plug teabaggers who think that slapping constraints on corporations is un-American and (b) cultural hee-haws who allow themselves to be played by corporate rightwing tricksters who feed them what they want to hear and get them to vote against their economic interests by persuading them that a Presidential election is about supporting heartland values (i.e., no abortion or gay marriage).

Get rid of the rightwing heartland element and you’d have a lot less support for corporate evils and a political climate that would be a whole lot healthier and more progressive.

I’ve offered mock solutions like green concentration camps and hypotheticals like clapping your hands three times and making all the yokels disappear. But there’s a realistic solution that I honestly think would work, and that both sides would be happy with. Seriously.

Break the country into two nations like Czechoslovakia did. A red Slovakia and a blue Czech Republic. Most of the economic vitality and enlightenment are concentrated in the blue states (I think), and a lot more could get done if the blues could run things in a reasonable, less-crazy fashion. Let the reds have their retrograde, anti-healthcare, let’s-preserve-our-white-heritage attitudes with their higher divorce rates and fatty foods and worship of old-school, fossil fuel lifestyles and “drill, baby, drill.”

Everyone could still travel around and visit the other sector any time they want. Nothing would change access-wise. Northerners could still drive down to see relatives and visit Texas any time. Manhattan hipsters could still visit Austin during South by Southwest. They could still go down to Louisiana and get drunk and buzz around on the bayou on flatboats. Everything would be the same except that most of the foul people would be running their own red nation, and would have a lot less to say about the progressive shape of things as far as the serious money and real power centers are concerned.

Abraham Lincoln said that a nation divided against itself — a Northern United States vs. a Confederacy — cannot stand. He may have been right in the early 1860s, but today geographical unity isn’t what it used to be. And a nation like ours, paralyzed by the refusalism of the corporate-fellating loony-tune right, is pretty much a stagnant and ungovernable thing. Cut out the fungus, let the cultural conservatives have their own Dogpatch Nation and things will be better. And we could still enjoy each other’s company when we feel like it. Hell, I had a great time when I was in Shreveport two or three years ago.

The Island President, a better than decent climate-change doc, opens tomorrow. Bully opens Friday, and I’ve opined about that. I haven’t seen Dark Tide and I wouldn’t watch Goon on a bet. I saw Intruders months ago and it didn’t think it had enough. I’ll see Mirror Mirror tomorrow night, but a friend who’s seen it says “it’s a kid’s film.” I ran my review of Turn Me On, Dammit! last January. Wrath of the Titans screens tonight at 7:30.

Oh, and Blurays of A Streetcar Named Desire and the 70th anniversary, Robert Harris-approved edition of Casablanca (i.e., an allegedly grainier rendering) arrived today.

I’ve been watching Elia Kazan‘s A Streetcar Named Desire since the ’70s, but I noticed something new today when I looked at Warner Home Video’s new Bluray version. The sailor who says “can I help you, ma’am?” to Vivien Leigh‘s Blanche Dubois at the very beginning is Mickey Kuhn, the actor who played young Matthew Garth in Red River. This is the Bluray benefit — you wake up to details that have always been there, but had somehow escaped detection.

(l.) Mickey Kuhn as helpful sailor in A Streetcar Named Desire; (r.) as young Matthew Garth in Red River.

Kuhn was born in September 1932 — 14 when he acted in Red River (which was shot in ’46) and 18 when he performed his scene in Streetcar. He worked steadily from the late ’30s to mid ’40s. Things started to slow down for him in the late ’40s. He’s still with us — 79 years old — and living in Massachucetts

A teaser for the big whoppo-socko-poppo Total Recall trailer that’ll debut on Sunday, 4.1, on the ABC network and online. The opportunistic Underworld director Les Wiseman guiding Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale (Wiseman’s wife), Bryan Cranston (who’s in everything), Bill Nighy, Bokeem Woodbine, Ethan Hawke and John Cho. Digital, gravity-free reboot of the 1990 Arnold Schwarznegger film, which wasn’t bad at the time.

My entire morning was consumed by matters of distraction that had nothing to do with posting stories. It happens.

The trailer suggests that Phillip Montgomery‘s ReGeneration, which Ryan Gosling produced and narrates, is a thoughtful and incisive portrait of the GenY malaise. The problem is that it was first seen two years ago at the Seattle Film Festival, which means it was probably completed in late ’09 or thereabouts. It might have been conceived and formulated by Montgomery earlier that year, or the work could have begun sometime in ’08. Documentaries can take a long while to get off the ground.

At its most current. therefore, ReGeneration might be, culturally speaking, an early Obama administration film, and if so then I’m sorry but no. Because the world has moved on in a thousand different ways. You can’t diddle around for two years waiting to release a film like this.

The ReGeneration talking heads include Howard Zinn (who died two years ago), Noam Chomsky, Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman, Adbusters Foundation’s Kalle Lasn, Talib Kweli and former MSNBC guy Tucker Carlson.

I finally popped for a multi-region Bluray player — a Sherwood BDP-5004. I just couldn’t cough up $500 for an Oppo. You’d never know it from the Amazon product description, but the Sherwood is a clone of the Momitsu BDP-899, and it plays all regions as long you tap out a six-digit code beforehand.

“For a multi-region Blu-Ray DVD player, there are several Momitsu clones that are sold in different countries under the different brand names. The one sold in USA is the Sherwood BDP-5004. While none of the Blu-Ray DVD players at this moment offer the ability to play different zone Blu-Ray DVD players just by putting another DVD in, this is the only one quality affordable Blu-Ray DVD player that allows you to play any Region regular DVD, and as well to play any Zone Blu-Ray DVD by putting a six digit remote control sequence before playing it.

“To change the code on Sherwood BDP-5004, make sure there is no disc loaded and enter 9735XY on your remote, replacing X with the Region code you want for DVDs (0-6) and Y with the Zone code you want for Blu-Ray Discs (1-3 -note that 1 stands for Zone A, 2 stands for Zone B, 3 stands for Zone C). There is no single Region-Free setting for Blu-ray discs, but you can change your player’s region coding at any time within seconds.

“For example, here are probably the only two codes you will ever need: 973501 , which sets the unit to Region Free mode for DVDs and Zone A mode for Blu-rays. This should be the factory default setting. And 973502, which sets the unit to Region Free mode for DVDs and Zone B mode for Blu-rays.”

“These are probably the only two codes you will ever need to use, but here are a few more settings just for your reference: 973532 -DVD Region 3, BIu-Ray Zone B; 973522 -DVD Region 2, BIu-Ray Zone B; 973541 -DVD Region 4, BIu-Ray Zone A, etc.”

I know the codes aren’t going to work exactly like they should. I know they’re going to play little infuriating mind-fuck and Zen-patience games with me. I just know it. The important thing will be to keep calm and stay calm when I call the Sherwood tech support guy, and just try to learn.