Louis I. Kahn (1901-1974) was one of the 20th century's most influential and well-regarded architects. He designed such important structures as the Exeter Library at Philips Exeter Academy, and the Capital Complex in Dhaka (Dacca), Bangladesh, and his work was revered by high-flying architects such as I. M. Pei, Philip Johnson, and Frank Gehry. But his habits of overwork and overextension, bidding for too many projects and becoming obsessive about his all-consuming passion for architecture, led him to die of a heart attack, bankrupt and alone, in a Penn Station bathroom as he was on his way home to Philadelphia from New York. When he died, he left not only a wife and their daughter, but also a mistress and his second daughter, as well as a second mistress and his third child, his 11-year-old son, Nathaniel, who made a beautiful documentary about his father, "My Architect: A Son's Journey."
Nathaniel Kahn's documentary visits and discusses the works of his father, some of which Nathaniel had never seen before, and shows the emotional and artistic impact that Louis Kahn and his work made on others, both architects and clients. But more than being a simple homage to his father and his works, the film shows Nathaniel's search to understand his secretive, mysterious father's compartmentalized life and to strengthen his connection to the father he lost so early. Louis Kahn's charisma and charm, his love for his children and the feelings of great love and loyalty he engendered in the women in his life are all made clear, as are his self-absorption, his need to make every commitment in life secondary to his commitment to his work, his flashes of arrogance, and his lack of empathy for others. The question which underpins the whole film is whether the gifts of an artistic genius whose work engenders tears of appreciation from his clients and fellow architects can justify his remote, selfish, and disconnected life.
To his credit, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't try to answer any of these questions once and for all; he interviews his two half sisters and talks with his mother, who still nurses the belief that Louis Kahn was about to leave his wife and come to live with Nathaniel and his mother before he died. He asks difficult questions and presses his mother to be honest about his father's failings and selfishness. The responses are at times surprising and always sad and touching.
Although he admires his father's work, Nathaniel Kahn doesn't like every one of his father's buildings. As he makes his pilgrimage to each one, he asks the people who live with and use the buildings how they feel about them, and admits when he finds one cold or impractical. When he visits the Exeter Library or the Institute of Public Administration at Ahmedabad, India, or when he goes to Bangladesh and sees how the Capitol and Parliament Buildings in Dhaka are enjoyed and made into the center of life for the local people, he is clearly moved. Sometimes the technical mastery of his father's work, its appropriateness in shape, form, and function and its original and spare use of light and materials awe him, and we see him surprised and touched by the effect that his father's work had on others.
It's difficult to express what makes this film so watchable, moving, and fascinating. I suppose it boils down to three things I find endlessly illuminating: artistic masterworks, biographies of unusual and influential people, and bad family dynamics. This documentary is worth watching on any of those counts; as a work of art encompassing all three, it's extraordinary.
I found a lovely site with beautiful photographs of Louis Kahn's work; do check out "The Works of Louis I. Kahn: A Visual Archive by Naquib Hossain." Hossain describes Kahn's work elegantly as "A purposeful knot of complements and contradictions in a rich fabric of brick, mortar, and concrete, woven to being by natural light." "My Architect" is a purposeful knot of complements and contradictions, too, and a lovely work of art in its own right.
Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Monday, July 25, 2005
Mud-luscious and Puddle-wonderful
Here's the thing about works of art that we all grow up with, have to analyze as kids, and dismiss because they seem dated or obvious, hackneyed or over-explained:
Sometimes they're actually wonderful after all.
For example, the poems of E. E. Cummings. I love them. During my junior high and high school years (think 1970s) he was one of the more frequently taught poets, largely because his acrobatics with punctuation and wordplay are fun and accessible even to people who claim to hate poetry. I know a lot of critics and readers think him too over-exposed and expect to find him too cute to want to go to him afresh to find pleasure or insight. What a shame.
I reread his poems every few years (and even more often nowadays) in the expectation that, at last, I'll find them somehow embarrassingly old-fashioned and obvious. But they never feel that way to me. They still have those great lines that punch me or move me when I don't expect it, the casual colloquialisms, the thoughts that beg to be combined into one word to emphasize their speed or oneness. All of those devices can be found in "Buffalo Bill's," for example.
One of the most anthologized of his poems is the fresh, light poem "in Just-" which evokes the way children explode out into the world and splash and stomp and whirl through it in springtime. I still love its cadences, the way friends bettyandisbel and eddyandbill are so constantly with each other that they merge into single entities, the bittersweet everpresence of that little lame balloon man as he whistles far and wee.
The bitterness of the young Cummings, disillusioned by his experiences during World War I and unable to leave what he learned behind upon his return home, pops up regularly in his work. When we think of the "lost generation," the disillusioned postwar youth of the 1920s who populate the work of writers like Fitzgerald, we think of novels full of ennui, anger, and feelings of betrayal. We think of heavy works like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. But Cummings made his own jabs, often in wisecracking, cynical asides, such as in "my sweet old etcetera." In"next to of course god america i" his sarcasm and disgust for jingoism and militarism get considerably darker and more obvious. By the time one reads "Humanity i love you" Cummings' anger and disillusionment with not only his country but with humanity are made completely plain. But so are his ambivalence and sense of humor (dark though it is). This isn't the Cummings we were taught to consider so harmlessly affable and nonchalant, too easy, too fun or fey.
My favorite Cummings poem remains the one most people would probably consider the obvious choice, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," which so many high school anthologies have reprinted for decades with the same dull set of talking points and questions. Yet it's surprising how many different interpretations I've seen for this supposedly obvious poem. In my reading of it, I always find it terribly moving, in its sweet and small way. The poem contrasts the vastness of time with the anonymity of the little characters who populate it, including dear little anyone and noone. Seasons pass as the poem lengthens, children forget the essentials as they grow older, and while "anyone" and "noone" mean nothing to the world at large, they are everything to each other. The inevitability of death and anonymity are softened by the fact that, while busy folk bury the dead side by side, "little by little and was by was," and forget them (if they ever knew them in the first place), anyone and noone loved each other and were each other's everything, and in their little lives, that's all anyone and noone required.
This poem feels anything but gimmicky to me. Like Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech in As You Like It, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" boils the stages and essence of life down quickly, with bittersweetness, humor, a touch of cynicism, but also a touching empathy for the littleness and vulnerability at the heart of every human being. That's why children still learn these works today; because they're beautiful, because they're funny, because they're a little dark and surprising, and because they're true.
For my last two years of college, I had to commute an hour each way to Mills and back home again, and I found I could make good use of those hours on the road if I borrowed spoken word records from the library, taped them, and then listened to the tapes in the car. (This was in the olden days of the early 1980s when one rarely found prerecorded books on tape but all sorts of wonderful things could be found on record at public libraries.) I was introduced to some fine plays this way (Ibsen's The Master Builder and An Enemy of the People, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, lots of Shakespeare) and a lot of poetry. One of my favorite records was of Cummings reading his poems in the late 1950s. Often I find listening to poets reading their own work painful; so often they adopt a false tone and awkward phrasing, with self-conscious over-emphasis or an odd near-monotone, or a bouncing lilt at the end of each phrase, in a sort of questioning manner, like a Valley Girl? putting a question mark? at the end? of each small phrase? It's been many years since I listened to E. E. Cummings read, but I remember finding his readings surprising and a great relief from the artificial, stentorian tones of so many other readers and writers of poetry.
By the way, the long-standing stories that Cummings signed his own name e. e. cummings and hated capital letters are myths; Cummings signed his name with the usual capitals and often used capitalization in his poetry, just not always in the obvious or expected ways. He did like to be inventive and a bit subversive in his use of language, but not to the extent that he felt it necessary to take on the affectation of using non-standard punctuation for his own name. I think this oft-repeated error serves to underline the common (and I believe erroneous) belief that he was a gimmicky writer of sing-song verse. To my mind, he was an original thinker with a light touch and a sense of humor who influenced a lot of (often bad) poets by snubbing long-established convention in ways that grab attention. Nowadays nearly every school child is asked to mess with English a little after reading a bit of Cummings in hopes that this mild subversion of all he or she has been taught will shake loose some creativity and instant love of poetry: Drop your capitals, Betty! Start a verse in the middle of the line, Isbel! Scrunch those words together into one long line, EddyandBill! We've all seen and done it so many times it feels quaint. It wasn't in the 1920s when Cummings did it. And it still feels fresh to me, 80 years later.
Sometimes they're actually wonderful after all.
For example, the poems of E. E. Cummings. I love them. During my junior high and high school years (think 1970s) he was one of the more frequently taught poets, largely because his acrobatics with punctuation and wordplay are fun and accessible even to people who claim to hate poetry. I know a lot of critics and readers think him too over-exposed and expect to find him too cute to want to go to him afresh to find pleasure or insight. What a shame.
I reread his poems every few years (and even more often nowadays) in the expectation that, at last, I'll find them somehow embarrassingly old-fashioned and obvious. But they never feel that way to me. They still have those great lines that punch me or move me when I don't expect it, the casual colloquialisms, the thoughts that beg to be combined into one word to emphasize their speed or oneness. All of those devices can be found in "Buffalo Bill's," for example.
One of the most anthologized of his poems is the fresh, light poem "in Just-" which evokes the way children explode out into the world and splash and stomp and whirl through it in springtime. I still love its cadences, the way friends bettyandisbel and eddyandbill are so constantly with each other that they merge into single entities, the bittersweet everpresence of that little lame balloon man as he whistles far and wee.
The bitterness of the young Cummings, disillusioned by his experiences during World War I and unable to leave what he learned behind upon his return home, pops up regularly in his work. When we think of the "lost generation," the disillusioned postwar youth of the 1920s who populate the work of writers like Fitzgerald, we think of novels full of ennui, anger, and feelings of betrayal. We think of heavy works like Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front or the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon or Wilfred Owen. But Cummings made his own jabs, often in wisecracking, cynical asides, such as in "my sweet old etcetera." In"next to of course god america i" his sarcasm and disgust for jingoism and militarism get considerably darker and more obvious. By the time one reads "Humanity i love you" Cummings' anger and disillusionment with not only his country but with humanity are made completely plain. But so are his ambivalence and sense of humor (dark though it is). This isn't the Cummings we were taught to consider so harmlessly affable and nonchalant, too easy, too fun or fey.
My favorite Cummings poem remains the one most people would probably consider the obvious choice, "anyone lived in a pretty how town," which so many high school anthologies have reprinted for decades with the same dull set of talking points and questions. Yet it's surprising how many different interpretations I've seen for this supposedly obvious poem. In my reading of it, I always find it terribly moving, in its sweet and small way. The poem contrasts the vastness of time with the anonymity of the little characters who populate it, including dear little anyone and noone. Seasons pass as the poem lengthens, children forget the essentials as they grow older, and while "anyone" and "noone" mean nothing to the world at large, they are everything to each other. The inevitability of death and anonymity are softened by the fact that, while busy folk bury the dead side by side, "little by little and was by was," and forget them (if they ever knew them in the first place), anyone and noone loved each other and were each other's everything, and in their little lives, that's all anyone and noone required.
This poem feels anything but gimmicky to me. Like Shakespeare's "Seven Ages of Man" speech in As You Like It, "anyone lived in a pretty how town" boils the stages and essence of life down quickly, with bittersweetness, humor, a touch of cynicism, but also a touching empathy for the littleness and vulnerability at the heart of every human being. That's why children still learn these works today; because they're beautiful, because they're funny, because they're a little dark and surprising, and because they're true.
For my last two years of college, I had to commute an hour each way to Mills and back home again, and I found I could make good use of those hours on the road if I borrowed spoken word records from the library, taped them, and then listened to the tapes in the car. (This was in the olden days of the early 1980s when one rarely found prerecorded books on tape but all sorts of wonderful things could be found on record at public libraries.) I was introduced to some fine plays this way (Ibsen's The Master Builder and An Enemy of the People, Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, lots of Shakespeare) and a lot of poetry. One of my favorite records was of Cummings reading his poems in the late 1950s. Often I find listening to poets reading their own work painful; so often they adopt a false tone and awkward phrasing, with self-conscious over-emphasis or an odd near-monotone, or a bouncing lilt at the end of each phrase, in a sort of questioning manner, like a Valley Girl? putting a question mark? at the end? of each small phrase? It's been many years since I listened to E. E. Cummings read, but I remember finding his readings surprising and a great relief from the artificial, stentorian tones of so many other readers and writers of poetry.
By the way, the long-standing stories that Cummings signed his own name e. e. cummings and hated capital letters are myths; Cummings signed his name with the usual capitals and often used capitalization in his poetry, just not always in the obvious or expected ways. He did like to be inventive and a bit subversive in his use of language, but not to the extent that he felt it necessary to take on the affectation of using non-standard punctuation for his own name. I think this oft-repeated error serves to underline the common (and I believe erroneous) belief that he was a gimmicky writer of sing-song verse. To my mind, he was an original thinker with a light touch and a sense of humor who influenced a lot of (often bad) poets by snubbing long-established convention in ways that grab attention. Nowadays nearly every school child is asked to mess with English a little after reading a bit of Cummings in hopes that this mild subversion of all he or she has been taught will shake loose some creativity and instant love of poetry: Drop your capitals, Betty! Start a verse in the middle of the line, Isbel! Scrunch those words together into one long line, EddyandBill! We've all seen and done it so many times it feels quaint. It wasn't in the 1920s when Cummings did it. And it still feels fresh to me, 80 years later.
Friday, July 22, 2005
Horror Vacui
I’ve heard jazz pianist and singer Shirley Horn say that her mentor, trumpet legend Miles Davis, always liked the way she uses space in her singing and playing. I liked that description so well, since Shirley Horn is a master of slow, careful, pared down musical expression. There’s never an extraneous note in her playing, and she could never be accused of playing anything too fast. Sometimes there are such long rests between her lyrics that I worry, Shirley, may, never, get, to, the, end, of, the, phrase. But I have to admit that her singing and playing are very elegant, and the lack of adornment does focus the ear and the mind on the sound and the meaning. (And her version of Kermit the Frog's anthem, "Being Green" is exquisite; check it out on iTunes.)
I admire minimalism in architecture and fashion, too, but I’d be bored out of my mind living in minimalist clothing and surroundings all the time. My stays at the W Hotel in San Francisco and Ian Schrager’s Paramount and Hudson hotels in New York have left me thinking how fun it was to be in such a stark, angular space for a little while, and how chic and clean the lines are, how pure and streamlined the sensibility was, and how I could never live like that at home.
In autumn and winter I wear a lot of black, and I feel very good in it. I love to travel in black so that strangers can’t tell that I’m a tourist, or where I come from, or what I sat in on the subway. I love the classic, crisp, elegant anonymity of it. But my lavender shoes and my bright pink coat and the crazy, oversized floral patterns on some of my favorite skirts are just as necessary to my wardrobe, and to the vision I have of myself and how I must sometimes present myself to the world.
I think a lot of us fill up the spaces in our lives carelessly to make ourselves and those around us less afraid. We feel we have to talk through an entire visit with a friend, have the TV on in the background, fill every shelf, and try every dish at the buffet. (And I include myself very honestly and openly in that "we.") My mom, who found the study of art and art history thrilling, as I do, laughed with me when she realized that the Latin term “horror vacui,” which describes the fear of empty space which makes some artists decorate every inch of a surface, applied to her and to her life as well. She feared too much quiet or extended contemplation in much the same way that she feared a bare wall. She found it too easy to project her fears of inadequacy, loss, and emptiness into those spaces, both literal or metaphorical. A lack of adornment meant a lack of value to her; less was less and more was always more. I’m often guilty of this sort of thinking, too. I collect too many things and crave too many distractions, accumulate to fill up voids in my life and avoid winnowing my collections so I can focus on novelty and expansion, on all the things I might do with them in the future, all the possibilities open to me because I have such a collection of stuff. Winnowing would mean admitting that there are limits to my life and its possibilities, that I may never need that unused German language workbook, might not create a work of art incorporating vintage mah jongg tiles and dominoes after all, probably won't review my Chinese history notes from 1983 again, and don't need a dozen Depression glass candlestick holders after all, even if they are 70 years old and very cool.
I think there’s an optimism to accumulation and void-filling, a belief that I’ll use this, I’ll enjoy that, my life will be better if I expand and decorate and dress it up with one more thing. I really will be fluent in French someday! It's not too late to learn to become a goldsmith! Those broken plates could make an amazing mosaic facade for a bedside table! I'd always be sad if I got rid of that Singer sewing machine from 1924! But of course, this sort of self-confidence through accumulation bases value on the ephemeral and external rather than on the lasting and innate. Emphasizing that expansive optimism is how our culture justifies binge spending, over-extended credit (both personal and governmental) and constant expansion. It’s a sign of fear and a lack of discipline or forward thinking, I believe; evidence of a fear of growing older, of growing bored or boring, of appearing outdated to others, of having to make do or invest more energy or time in something or someone, of facing what we really are, have, need, or are capable of. Stuff dulls the senses and brings comfort. I love it and buy too much of it every week. But I think it’s time to stare down that horror vacui a little bit, and see what riches I’m missing in my life by focusing too much on the riches that cost me money.
I admire minimalism in architecture and fashion, too, but I’d be bored out of my mind living in minimalist clothing and surroundings all the time. My stays at the W Hotel in San Francisco and Ian Schrager’s Paramount and Hudson hotels in New York have left me thinking how fun it was to be in such a stark, angular space for a little while, and how chic and clean the lines are, how pure and streamlined the sensibility was, and how I could never live like that at home.
In autumn and winter I wear a lot of black, and I feel very good in it. I love to travel in black so that strangers can’t tell that I’m a tourist, or where I come from, or what I sat in on the subway. I love the classic, crisp, elegant anonymity of it. But my lavender shoes and my bright pink coat and the crazy, oversized floral patterns on some of my favorite skirts are just as necessary to my wardrobe, and to the vision I have of myself and how I must sometimes present myself to the world.
I think a lot of us fill up the spaces in our lives carelessly to make ourselves and those around us less afraid. We feel we have to talk through an entire visit with a friend, have the TV on in the background, fill every shelf, and try every dish at the buffet. (And I include myself very honestly and openly in that "we.") My mom, who found the study of art and art history thrilling, as I do, laughed with me when she realized that the Latin term “horror vacui,” which describes the fear of empty space which makes some artists decorate every inch of a surface, applied to her and to her life as well. She feared too much quiet or extended contemplation in much the same way that she feared a bare wall. She found it too easy to project her fears of inadequacy, loss, and emptiness into those spaces, both literal or metaphorical. A lack of adornment meant a lack of value to her; less was less and more was always more. I’m often guilty of this sort of thinking, too. I collect too many things and crave too many distractions, accumulate to fill up voids in my life and avoid winnowing my collections so I can focus on novelty and expansion, on all the things I might do with them in the future, all the possibilities open to me because I have such a collection of stuff. Winnowing would mean admitting that there are limits to my life and its possibilities, that I may never need that unused German language workbook, might not create a work of art incorporating vintage mah jongg tiles and dominoes after all, probably won't review my Chinese history notes from 1983 again, and don't need a dozen Depression glass candlestick holders after all, even if they are 70 years old and very cool.
I think there’s an optimism to accumulation and void-filling, a belief that I’ll use this, I’ll enjoy that, my life will be better if I expand and decorate and dress it up with one more thing. I really will be fluent in French someday! It's not too late to learn to become a goldsmith! Those broken plates could make an amazing mosaic facade for a bedside table! I'd always be sad if I got rid of that Singer sewing machine from 1924! But of course, this sort of self-confidence through accumulation bases value on the ephemeral and external rather than on the lasting and innate. Emphasizing that expansive optimism is how our culture justifies binge spending, over-extended credit (both personal and governmental) and constant expansion. It’s a sign of fear and a lack of discipline or forward thinking, I believe; evidence of a fear of growing older, of growing bored or boring, of appearing outdated to others, of having to make do or invest more energy or time in something or someone, of facing what we really are, have, need, or are capable of. Stuff dulls the senses and brings comfort. I love it and buy too much of it every week. But I think it’s time to stare down that horror vacui a little bit, and see what riches I’m missing in my life by focusing too much on the riches that cost me money.
Wednesday, July 20, 2005
An Extraordinary Evening with Jessica Williams
Two nights ago I was invited to share in a magical, memorable evening, and I'm still a little dazed and amazed that I got to be part of something so special. Jessica Williams, the extraordinary jazz pianist, played an intimate and elegant concert at the home of Richard, my very dear ex, on Monday night. He had spoken to her after a couple of her concerts in Seattle over the years, and had the good fortune to be seated next to her on a flight from San Jose to Seattle some months back, which gave them time to share a friendly conversation. Richard is a jazz pianist himself and the owner of a fine piano, and he and Jessica spoke recently about the idea of her performing at his home for a small group of local jazz aficionados after she finished her bigger Seattle gigs. Happily, the idea became a reality. Seattle is a great town for jazz; the jazz community is avid, active, and friendly, and small enough that everyone gets to know everyone else before too long. This little group knew Jessica's music well, and the buzz of delight and amazement that we could all get so close to a true jazz master had us all feeling a little tipsy before anyone had a drop to drink.
Jessica is very well-known and loved among true jazz fans and jazz players; the great and frequently repeated question is, why isn't she better known to the rest of the world? She's famous for her improvisational brilliance, and has played with jazz greats such as Dexter Gordon and Leroy Vinnegar, and has received lavish praise from the likes of Dave Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, and Marian McPartland, on whose NPR radio show, Piano Jazz, Jessica has performed. Her pieces are often played between interviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross; Terry is a great fan of hers and Jessica was interviewed on Fresh Air and performed an in-studio concert for Terry's listeners in 1997. I highly recommend listening to the 2002 rebroadcast, available free online, which includes pieces by Monk and Gershwin and some of Jessica's own beautiful compositions.
What makes her playing unique and exciting is a combination of dazzling technical skill and warm, melodic, lyrical feeling. Her touch is sure, she plays with conviction, and she has the chops to knock any other player out of his socks if she wants to. Yet at the same time, she breathes warmth and life into pieces that can feel cold in other hands. She can take a tricky, atonal, dissonant piece that others might treat as an exercise to show off virtuosity and find the spirit at its core, the life force behind the string of impressive notes, the hush in the middle of the chord that a show-off performer would miss.
Jessica finds great inspiration and pleasure in playing compositions by Thelonious Monk, who's notorious for being tricky to follow or hard to get. Despite having written the accessible but wonderful ballad "'Round Midnight," Monk can sometimes be rough, bouncy, and dissonant. When Jessica plays him, however, she isn't afraid to lighten him up, play up the humor behind the notes, to show the subtlety in his compositions so one can feel the thought behind the dissonances, and understand why they're right and not random.
Jessica was classically trained, so early on she still believed that there were rules that couldn't be broken and techniques that must be followed when playing piano. She told Terry Gross the first time she heard a record of Monk playing, she thought he sounded like he was wearing boxing gloves at the piano. But with continued listening, she grew to love his openness to new techniques. She incorporated some of them into her own playing and has developed other innovative techniques that amplify the feeling in her music without ever getting lost in tricks for the sake of tricks.
Sometimes Jessica reaches into the piano to strum the strings while playing keys, incorporating a sound like an autoharp into her playing, as she did at the beginning and end of "Getting Sentimental Over You" when she played it during her Fresh Air concert. She's careful not to overuse it, however; she doesn't want to become gimmicky but likes to explore the variety of sounds that a piano can make and integrate these devices into the tunes to add color. During this week's concert, she reached into the piano to strum it at several points, and she occasionally shuffled the soft soles of her shoes across the wood floor to create a sound like a drummer would with a brush, or like a softshoe dancer might. She also likes to "quote" other jazz compositions when she plays, a common tip of the hat from one jazz musician to another, throwing a few measures of a well-known jazz standard into a piece for humor and as an homage. She improvises these surprises and tosses them as little treats for the audience, each one a lagniappe to lighten the heart when listeners get too earnest and caught up in the piece.
On Monday night, she began with a piece by John Coltrane, "Wise One," followed by "The Very Thought of You" by Ray Noble, "Paul's Pal" by Sonny Rollins, and two pieces by Monk, "Ugly Beauty" and "Nutty." I've never enjoyed Monk as much as I did that evening. She has said that record producers have often pushed her to show off more of her impressive technique, focusing on speed and flash, and playing Monk certainly allows her that, but she plays him with more subtlety and insight. There's intelligence in her playing without cold intellectualism, an awareness of exactly what note, what chord, what sense of space is necessary to make a phrase work while still holding the meaning of the song, its essence, the point of it all, in her heart. For her, the most satisfying playing involves a spiritual element. As she told me, she can emphasize flash and technique when she's playing in a wild or distracted venue or on a bad piano that can’t hold up to subtlety; she can adapt and please the audience when that's what’s called for. But when she is in the right space with a good instrument and a receptive audience, this nuanced and spiritual essence of her playing emerges, and a thrilling pleasure in being right there, right then, with her, in the palm of her hand, fills the audience, or, in the case of someone lucky enough to own her CDs, fills the listener sitting alone at home if she or he gives her pieces the attention they deserve.
Jessica's playing is so lovely and lyrical that it's more accessible than many jazz pianists without ever crossing over into that scary "lite jazz" territory. She began her second set with Irving Berlin's "They Say It's Wonderful" from the musical Annie Get Your Gun—songs don't come much more accessible than that. And yet in her hands it was anything but trite; it was fresh again, and pure, as it was when Berlin wrote it. One of my favorite moments in the evening came when she played Dexter Gordon's "Don't Explain." I've always loved Billie Holiday's version so much that it's hard for me to give other artists due credit when they play it, it's so associated with Lady Day in my mind. But I was right there with Jessica, note for note. Her love for Dexter Gordon the man, as well as for his music was evident in her playing, and it was an emotionally rich piece.
She followed it with her own eloquent ode to her friend, "I Remember Dexter," and two more of her elegant compositions, "Poem in G minor" and "Sheikh." She ended with a gorgeous rendition of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" that left me so touched I had to compose myself before I could shake her hand and tell her what a wonderful evening it had been. Ellington himself would have pronounced her performance "beyond category." At the end of that second set, I realized I'd been staring rapt at her hands the whole time and hadn't even looked up once to see the faces of the other people sitting around me. At the end of the concert I saw the same grateful wonder in their eyes that I felt, that we could be sitting 10 feet from greatness and share in this experience.
Before the concert, I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica in the kitchen. For all her skill and mastery, and despite all the swooning and kudos afforded her by fans and fellow artists, she is anything but a diva. I’d heard that she enjoys deviled eggs, so as I made a plate of them before the party, I kept hoping that I could at least do that simple thing well for her. That evening, even in the act of accepting something so humble as the eggs, she was gracious. She spoke of the pleasure she takes in her art and in sharing life with friends, of the places around the world in which she's lived, of the kindnesses shown her by several jazz artists, like Dexter Gordon and his wife. She'd never met me before, but asked me about myself as well, and listened and cared about what I had to say. She was there, standing in a kitchen with a stranger, present in the moment and open to the experience. She showed a respectful, commonsense kindness with me and everyone present which I wish was shared by all people of such accomplishment and fame.
Jessica's lived courageously and taken risks, turned corners when she was told what a mistake it was and been true to her heart, her music, and her passions. She's been open to new techniques, to new styles, to resurrecting older ideas or creating new sounds that resonate with her heart. The result is a lovely, gracious, multifaceted woman who creates exquisite beauty and cares about the world around her and the people in it.
Andrew Gilbert wrote beautifully of Jessica and her art for the San Jose Mercury News: "A tremendously assured musician, Williams marks her style with ravishing lyricism and daring improvisational flights. But what really sets her solo performances apart is her gift for seamlessly weaving together various jazz keyboard styles, encompassing the highly syncopated stride school of the '20s and '30s, the light, effortlessly dancing approach of the swing era, the jagged single-note runs of bebop and the rhythmically diffuse sound perfected by Bill Evans in the '60s, all integrated into an organic whole by her compelling sense of narrative flow."
Jessica's well-put-together and satisfying eponymous website, www.jessicawilliams.com, features links to some of her pieces, to interviews, photographs, and, best of all, allows one to order her CDs, some of which are only available through the site. On her homepage she quotes one of her favorite musicians and people, John Coltrane: "I want to be a force for good. I know there are bad forces here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the force which is truly good." This quotation is so apt for Jessica; she lives her life in a way that brings pleasure to others, and shares her remarkable talents and hopes with others through her musical gifts. She lives her values and speaks through her art. What an extraordinary person. Thank you, Jessica, and thank you, Richard, for making such a magical evening possible.
Jessica is very well-known and loved among true jazz fans and jazz players; the great and frequently repeated question is, why isn't she better known to the rest of the world? She's famous for her improvisational brilliance, and has played with jazz greats such as Dexter Gordon and Leroy Vinnegar, and has received lavish praise from the likes of Dave Brubeck, McCoy Tyner, and Marian McPartland, on whose NPR radio show, Piano Jazz, Jessica has performed. Her pieces are often played between interviews on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross; Terry is a great fan of hers and Jessica was interviewed on Fresh Air and performed an in-studio concert for Terry's listeners in 1997. I highly recommend listening to the 2002 rebroadcast, available free online, which includes pieces by Monk and Gershwin and some of Jessica's own beautiful compositions.
What makes her playing unique and exciting is a combination of dazzling technical skill and warm, melodic, lyrical feeling. Her touch is sure, she plays with conviction, and she has the chops to knock any other player out of his socks if she wants to. Yet at the same time, she breathes warmth and life into pieces that can feel cold in other hands. She can take a tricky, atonal, dissonant piece that others might treat as an exercise to show off virtuosity and find the spirit at its core, the life force behind the string of impressive notes, the hush in the middle of the chord that a show-off performer would miss.
Jessica finds great inspiration and pleasure in playing compositions by Thelonious Monk, who's notorious for being tricky to follow or hard to get. Despite having written the accessible but wonderful ballad "'Round Midnight," Monk can sometimes be rough, bouncy, and dissonant. When Jessica plays him, however, she isn't afraid to lighten him up, play up the humor behind the notes, to show the subtlety in his compositions so one can feel the thought behind the dissonances, and understand why they're right and not random.
Jessica was classically trained, so early on she still believed that there were rules that couldn't be broken and techniques that must be followed when playing piano. She told Terry Gross the first time she heard a record of Monk playing, she thought he sounded like he was wearing boxing gloves at the piano. But with continued listening, she grew to love his openness to new techniques. She incorporated some of them into her own playing and has developed other innovative techniques that amplify the feeling in her music without ever getting lost in tricks for the sake of tricks.
Sometimes Jessica reaches into the piano to strum the strings while playing keys, incorporating a sound like an autoharp into her playing, as she did at the beginning and end of "Getting Sentimental Over You" when she played it during her Fresh Air concert. She's careful not to overuse it, however; she doesn't want to become gimmicky but likes to explore the variety of sounds that a piano can make and integrate these devices into the tunes to add color. During this week's concert, she reached into the piano to strum it at several points, and she occasionally shuffled the soft soles of her shoes across the wood floor to create a sound like a drummer would with a brush, or like a softshoe dancer might. She also likes to "quote" other jazz compositions when she plays, a common tip of the hat from one jazz musician to another, throwing a few measures of a well-known jazz standard into a piece for humor and as an homage. She improvises these surprises and tosses them as little treats for the audience, each one a lagniappe to lighten the heart when listeners get too earnest and caught up in the piece.
On Monday night, she began with a piece by John Coltrane, "Wise One," followed by "The Very Thought of You" by Ray Noble, "Paul's Pal" by Sonny Rollins, and two pieces by Monk, "Ugly Beauty" and "Nutty." I've never enjoyed Monk as much as I did that evening. She has said that record producers have often pushed her to show off more of her impressive technique, focusing on speed and flash, and playing Monk certainly allows her that, but she plays him with more subtlety and insight. There's intelligence in her playing without cold intellectualism, an awareness of exactly what note, what chord, what sense of space is necessary to make a phrase work while still holding the meaning of the song, its essence, the point of it all, in her heart. For her, the most satisfying playing involves a spiritual element. As she told me, she can emphasize flash and technique when she's playing in a wild or distracted venue or on a bad piano that can’t hold up to subtlety; she can adapt and please the audience when that's what’s called for. But when she is in the right space with a good instrument and a receptive audience, this nuanced and spiritual essence of her playing emerges, and a thrilling pleasure in being right there, right then, with her, in the palm of her hand, fills the audience, or, in the case of someone lucky enough to own her CDs, fills the listener sitting alone at home if she or he gives her pieces the attention they deserve.
Jessica's playing is so lovely and lyrical that it's more accessible than many jazz pianists without ever crossing over into that scary "lite jazz" territory. She began her second set with Irving Berlin's "They Say It's Wonderful" from the musical Annie Get Your Gun—songs don't come much more accessible than that. And yet in her hands it was anything but trite; it was fresh again, and pure, as it was when Berlin wrote it. One of my favorite moments in the evening came when she played Dexter Gordon's "Don't Explain." I've always loved Billie Holiday's version so much that it's hard for me to give other artists due credit when they play it, it's so associated with Lady Day in my mind. But I was right there with Jessica, note for note. Her love for Dexter Gordon the man, as well as for his music was evident in her playing, and it was an emotionally rich piece.
She followed it with her own eloquent ode to her friend, "I Remember Dexter," and two more of her elegant compositions, "Poem in G minor" and "Sheikh." She ended with a gorgeous rendition of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo" that left me so touched I had to compose myself before I could shake her hand and tell her what a wonderful evening it had been. Ellington himself would have pronounced her performance "beyond category." At the end of that second set, I realized I'd been staring rapt at her hands the whole time and hadn't even looked up once to see the faces of the other people sitting around me. At the end of the concert I saw the same grateful wonder in their eyes that I felt, that we could be sitting 10 feet from greatness and share in this experience.
Before the concert, I had the pleasure of talking with Jessica in the kitchen. For all her skill and mastery, and despite all the swooning and kudos afforded her by fans and fellow artists, she is anything but a diva. I’d heard that she enjoys deviled eggs, so as I made a plate of them before the party, I kept hoping that I could at least do that simple thing well for her. That evening, even in the act of accepting something so humble as the eggs, she was gracious. She spoke of the pleasure she takes in her art and in sharing life with friends, of the places around the world in which she's lived, of the kindnesses shown her by several jazz artists, like Dexter Gordon and his wife. She'd never met me before, but asked me about myself as well, and listened and cared about what I had to say. She was there, standing in a kitchen with a stranger, present in the moment and open to the experience. She showed a respectful, commonsense kindness with me and everyone present which I wish was shared by all people of such accomplishment and fame.
Jessica's lived courageously and taken risks, turned corners when she was told what a mistake it was and been true to her heart, her music, and her passions. She's been open to new techniques, to new styles, to resurrecting older ideas or creating new sounds that resonate with her heart. The result is a lovely, gracious, multifaceted woman who creates exquisite beauty and cares about the world around her and the people in it.
Andrew Gilbert wrote beautifully of Jessica and her art for the San Jose Mercury News: "A tremendously assured musician, Williams marks her style with ravishing lyricism and daring improvisational flights. But what really sets her solo performances apart is her gift for seamlessly weaving together various jazz keyboard styles, encompassing the highly syncopated stride school of the '20s and '30s, the light, effortlessly dancing approach of the swing era, the jagged single-note runs of bebop and the rhythmically diffuse sound perfected by Bill Evans in the '60s, all integrated into an organic whole by her compelling sense of narrative flow."
Jessica's well-put-together and satisfying eponymous website, www.jessicawilliams.com, features links to some of her pieces, to interviews, photographs, and, best of all, allows one to order her CDs, some of which are only available through the site. On her homepage she quotes one of her favorite musicians and people, John Coltrane: "I want to be a force for good. I know there are bad forces here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the force which is truly good." This quotation is so apt for Jessica; she lives her life in a way that brings pleasure to others, and shares her remarkable talents and hopes with others through her musical gifts. She lives her values and speaks through her art. What an extraordinary person. Thank you, Jessica, and thank you, Richard, for making such a magical evening possible.
Sunday, July 17, 2005
Oompa Loompas Go Oingo Boingo
To celebrate my daughter's birthday today, she and her dad and I went to see the new version of "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory." We were a bit disappointed with it, largely because of the occasional scenes of gratuitous nastiness and Johnny Depp's unsympathetic portrayal of Willy Wonka. The book's author, Roald Dahl, is a favorite of ours, and while he was never afraid to expose young readers to scenes of characters getting pleasure out of bringing dismay or suffering to children, his willingness to show us brutish and nasty antagonists serves only to bring us closer to his protagonists and empathize with their pain. The nastiest things happen to those who aren't pure of heart.
Tim Burton's new twist on "Charlie" introduces Wonka with an awkward animatronic display in the style of Disney's "It's a Small World" ride (on an intimate scale) and then proceeds to burn, melt, and destroy the Hummel-like plastic figures of children to the alarm of real children and to Wonka's delight. Right off the bat, this introduces a sociopathic streak to the character. It doesn't carry forward the spirit of the original book, nor does it serve to make the film more appealing or enjoyable.
The Wonka of the book and earlier movie did get pleasure from surprising and even frightening the children some, especially when they were being selfish. Gene Wilder's Wonka was mercurial, well-read, nimble with language, the inscrutable mix of wit, joie de vivre, charm, alarm, entertainment, warmth and unexpected temper that he is in the book. Wilder's Wonka was philosophical, quoted Shakespeare, and showed evidence of introspection, which made his tender moments with Charlie affecting and meaningful. Wilder (and the script, penned by Roald Dahl himself) showed Wonka to be a wild genius but also a man of caring and conviction. The Willy Wonka created by Roald Dahl was wounded but determined to find faith in the future again by putting his masterpiece in the care of someone who would appreciate it for its magic and creativity, and who wouldn't turn it into a crass, commercial, soulless enterprise.
Depp's Wonka is completely lacking in introspection or empathy until the very end, and even when he arrives at some awareness of his own shortcomings and Charlie's value, it's really only as an adjunct to his narcissism, as a means to getting positive attention, not because of a drive to better the world. Rather than showing signs of wit and erudition, he makes two-word pronouncements that are less articulate than any of the children who have come to him with Golden Tickets: "You're weird." "That's gross." Gone are the wonderful spirals of wordplay that flew out of the pages of the book, the arch insights into the crassness and self-absorbed nature of modern culture. What we have instead is a flattened world and a diminished Wonka, Godiva truffles reworked into Hershey's Kisses.
This take on the story is especially sad because Johnny Depp is an actor of range and depth when given the direction or inspiration. In last year's film "Finding Neverland," in which he starred as J.M. Barrie, he was delightful and nuanced, as was the young actor Freddie Highmore, who plays Charlie in the new film. All the scenes with Charlie's family were more affecting and appealing than the analogous scenes in the Gene Wilder version of the film. This Bucket family is warm, engaging, and loving, and the scenes with them bucking each other up in their hovel were a tender contrast to the brash bright production numbers featuring scores of Oompa Loompas. They also underscored the flatness of Wonka's character. In the book and the Gene Wilder film version, Wonka's anything but flat. But I will give Depp credit for saying much more with his facial expressions than the script allows him to say with words.
The new "Charlie" features several scenes involving killing and tasting the entrails of a large flying insect and lots of caterpillars. Tim Burton's style of humorous sadism is gooier than Dahl's, and he draws out the "ew" moments in this film in a way that is at odds with Dahl's subtler and funnier wit. Tim Burton's vision requires Johnny Depp to play a Willy Wonka so completely out of touch with both the world of children and the world of adults that he comes across as a sort of disturbing mixture of Emo Phillips, Michael Jackson, and a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome.
Twenty years ago, Tim Burton took another childlike misfit character, Peewee Herman, and built a brilliantly original film around him, "Peewee's Big Adventure." But Paul Reubens' Peewee had an appealing inner core; he was wildly immature, but he also cared for people (like Simone the waitress) and animals (whom he rescued from a burning pet store). He was a goof, but he was harmless, and while he could get angry at Francis, his nemesis, he didn't want to cause others suffering. He was a sympathetic character, so he could stand up to the Tim Burton treatment, and even benefit from it; the slight darkness of Burton's vision burnished the edges of Peewee's primary-colored world, and the scene involving Large Marge is priceless. Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" (also played by Depp, and beautifully) was an incredibly sympathetic figure, a tender-hearted artist trapped in a body with monstrous and dangerous hands. Burton's "Batman" with Michael Keaton was such a successful mix of dark and dangerous with quirky and humorous that it launched a whole series of films trying to capture some of the magic and excitement of the Burton treatment. But I've found most of Burton's films of the past decade a bit colder and meaner at heart. "Big Fish" was just an odd mess; it was trying for emotional connection with the audience but I just found it poorly scripted, boring, and overacted. Usually excellent actors like Billy Crudup and Albert Finney gave annoying and vaguely embarrassing performances (which I blame largely on the loopy direction). I hope that Burton's soon-to-be-released animated film, "The Corpse Bride," will once again mix his gothic cynicism with the sense of childlike wonder that some of his earlier films held. I miss the fresh visions and psychological insights of those works.
I will give applause to Danny Elfman for the (as usual) exciting score and fresh, funny, original songs. I've enjoyed his work for nearly 25 years; I used to go to see him and his clever, brash, brassy band, Oingo Boingo, when they came up to the Bay Area and loved them every time I saw them. Their energy was intense and focused, the band was tight and great, the lyrics were unique and cynically funny. He was clearly a man of strong opinions and endless energy. His score for "Peewee's Big Adventure" was a perfect jumping-off point for his talent and his style, and his theme for "The Simpsons" fits the feel of the show and the characters; it's hard to imagine it without that signature theme and all the visual cues we all associate with its musical phrases. His orchestral work for the movies is so lush and evocative that I always enjoy his scores, but I've missed the darker, edgier, bouncier Danny I saw in San Francisco and Berkeley years ago. The new songs for the glitzy Oompa Loompa production numbers in the new "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" will stick with me and entertain me longer and better than the film itself. That's a soundtrack I'll be happy to own. But I'll skip the DVD; I'd rather drag out my old "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" videotape and watch Gene Wilder sing "Pure Imagination" again. And again. And again.
Tim Burton's new twist on "Charlie" introduces Wonka with an awkward animatronic display in the style of Disney's "It's a Small World" ride (on an intimate scale) and then proceeds to burn, melt, and destroy the Hummel-like plastic figures of children to the alarm of real children and to Wonka's delight. Right off the bat, this introduces a sociopathic streak to the character. It doesn't carry forward the spirit of the original book, nor does it serve to make the film more appealing or enjoyable.
The Wonka of the book and earlier movie did get pleasure from surprising and even frightening the children some, especially when they were being selfish. Gene Wilder's Wonka was mercurial, well-read, nimble with language, the inscrutable mix of wit, joie de vivre, charm, alarm, entertainment, warmth and unexpected temper that he is in the book. Wilder's Wonka was philosophical, quoted Shakespeare, and showed evidence of introspection, which made his tender moments with Charlie affecting and meaningful. Wilder (and the script, penned by Roald Dahl himself) showed Wonka to be a wild genius but also a man of caring and conviction. The Willy Wonka created by Roald Dahl was wounded but determined to find faith in the future again by putting his masterpiece in the care of someone who would appreciate it for its magic and creativity, and who wouldn't turn it into a crass, commercial, soulless enterprise.
Depp's Wonka is completely lacking in introspection or empathy until the very end, and even when he arrives at some awareness of his own shortcomings and Charlie's value, it's really only as an adjunct to his narcissism, as a means to getting positive attention, not because of a drive to better the world. Rather than showing signs of wit and erudition, he makes two-word pronouncements that are less articulate than any of the children who have come to him with Golden Tickets: "You're weird." "That's gross." Gone are the wonderful spirals of wordplay that flew out of the pages of the book, the arch insights into the crassness and self-absorbed nature of modern culture. What we have instead is a flattened world and a diminished Wonka, Godiva truffles reworked into Hershey's Kisses.
This take on the story is especially sad because Johnny Depp is an actor of range and depth when given the direction or inspiration. In last year's film "Finding Neverland," in which he starred as J.M. Barrie, he was delightful and nuanced, as was the young actor Freddie Highmore, who plays Charlie in the new film. All the scenes with Charlie's family were more affecting and appealing than the analogous scenes in the Gene Wilder version of the film. This Bucket family is warm, engaging, and loving, and the scenes with them bucking each other up in their hovel were a tender contrast to the brash bright production numbers featuring scores of Oompa Loompas. They also underscored the flatness of Wonka's character. In the book and the Gene Wilder film version, Wonka's anything but flat. But I will give Depp credit for saying much more with his facial expressions than the script allows him to say with words.
The new "Charlie" features several scenes involving killing and tasting the entrails of a large flying insect and lots of caterpillars. Tim Burton's style of humorous sadism is gooier than Dahl's, and he draws out the "ew" moments in this film in a way that is at odds with Dahl's subtler and funnier wit. Tim Burton's vision requires Johnny Depp to play a Willy Wonka so completely out of touch with both the world of children and the world of adults that he comes across as a sort of disturbing mixture of Emo Phillips, Michael Jackson, and a teenager with Asperger's Syndrome.
Twenty years ago, Tim Burton took another childlike misfit character, Peewee Herman, and built a brilliantly original film around him, "Peewee's Big Adventure." But Paul Reubens' Peewee had an appealing inner core; he was wildly immature, but he also cared for people (like Simone the waitress) and animals (whom he rescued from a burning pet store). He was a goof, but he was harmless, and while he could get angry at Francis, his nemesis, he didn't want to cause others suffering. He was a sympathetic character, so he could stand up to the Tim Burton treatment, and even benefit from it; the slight darkness of Burton's vision burnished the edges of Peewee's primary-colored world, and the scene involving Large Marge is priceless. Burton's "Edward Scissorhands" (also played by Depp, and beautifully) was an incredibly sympathetic figure, a tender-hearted artist trapped in a body with monstrous and dangerous hands. Burton's "Batman" with Michael Keaton was such a successful mix of dark and dangerous with quirky and humorous that it launched a whole series of films trying to capture some of the magic and excitement of the Burton treatment. But I've found most of Burton's films of the past decade a bit colder and meaner at heart. "Big Fish" was just an odd mess; it was trying for emotional connection with the audience but I just found it poorly scripted, boring, and overacted. Usually excellent actors like Billy Crudup and Albert Finney gave annoying and vaguely embarrassing performances (which I blame largely on the loopy direction). I hope that Burton's soon-to-be-released animated film, "The Corpse Bride," will once again mix his gothic cynicism with the sense of childlike wonder that some of his earlier films held. I miss the fresh visions and psychological insights of those works.
I will give applause to Danny Elfman for the (as usual) exciting score and fresh, funny, original songs. I've enjoyed his work for nearly 25 years; I used to go to see him and his clever, brash, brassy band, Oingo Boingo, when they came up to the Bay Area and loved them every time I saw them. Their energy was intense and focused, the band was tight and great, the lyrics were unique and cynically funny. He was clearly a man of strong opinions and endless energy. His score for "Peewee's Big Adventure" was a perfect jumping-off point for his talent and his style, and his theme for "The Simpsons" fits the feel of the show and the characters; it's hard to imagine it without that signature theme and all the visual cues we all associate with its musical phrases. His orchestral work for the movies is so lush and evocative that I always enjoy his scores, but I've missed the darker, edgier, bouncier Danny I saw in San Francisco and Berkeley years ago. The new songs for the glitzy Oompa Loompa production numbers in the new "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" will stick with me and entertain me longer and better than the film itself. That's a soundtrack I'll be happy to own. But I'll skip the DVD; I'd rather drag out my old "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" videotape and watch Gene Wilder sing "Pure Imagination" again. And again. And again.
Friday, July 15, 2005
Running Wild in the Summer
The neighborhood's so quiet with all the kids in various summer camps while their parents work. While parents slog away at jobs or housekeeping, the kids in my neighborhood are endlessly busy with exciting, stimulating, enriching activities. My own daughter is booked all summer long so that her folks can work and she can have fun outings and new experiences with old friends and new.
But when I was a kid, not all that long ago, huge blocks of summertime were my own to fill. From the age of six on, I was wandering all over the neighborhood on trike, bike, or foot, alone or with a friend, in and out of the houses and apartments of kids I hardly knew whose parents were sometimes around and sometimes not. If a pal and I wanted spending money, we'd walk a couple of blocks to the railroad track and gather some of the plentiful discarded empty glass bottles, as many as we could carry, then cash them in for the nickle a bottle deposit at the local liquor store. Everybody did this; all the kids were pretty much left to their own devices during summer, riding bikes far afield and only coming home for dinner.
Once in the liquor store with our found empties, a friend and I would loiter by the fan, sneak peaks at the girlie magazines until the guy behind the counter shooed us away, and turn in our new nickels for Pop Rocks or Popsicles in the 90+ degree California heat. Then we'd wander the neighborhood in filthy bare feet trying to eat our frozen treats before they melted down our shirtfronts. The asphalt would be so hot that it would melt onto our callused feet in little black patches, but by July our soles were so summer-hardened that we could walk across glass-sharp gravel along the railroad tracks without suffering.
A lot of summer was spent avoiding the heat. My town was in a hot East Bay Area valley which regularly got up into the 90s in summer, and went over 100 a few days each year. When it got hot enough, I'd lie on my grandparents' linoleum floor in front of the box fan, singing into the airflow two inches from the grille so that my voice was cut into a thousand tiny, vibrating, reverberating pieces of air. I'd get to drink lots of Cragmont colas and raid their bookcase while Grandpa watched the fights on TV in his undershirt and Grandma read lovely novels about British countryfolk like "How Green Was My Valley" or "To Serve Them All My Days" or "Goodbye Mr. Chips." I'd pore over books on North American birds or 20th century poets or whatever was at hand, and my mother would provide me with huge piles of novels and oversized coffee table books she'd get from the library to expand my world and tickle my visual sense. I remember books on Faberge eggs and classic cars, Michelangelo and Mozart, frogs and stars and the human body.
Mom was a high school teacher, and she'd borrow film strips from the school library over the summer and a film strip projector to view them with, and I'd have little film strip showings on the family room wall. She also borrowed school district musical instruments over the summers, so instead of languishing in a cupboard all summer until some vaguely bored adolescent checked them out for classes in September, I'd get to play with an accordion or a trumpet or a banjo. I never got very far with them, but it was magical to have a full-sized harp in the living room all summer and sit at it in an oversized peignoir set borrowed from my mother and strum it, pretending to be a fairy, and get sounds that weren't half-bad despite my lack of lessons.
There was always lots of music in the summers, since my mother was a fine pianist and accompanied all the high school's summer school musicals for years to make extra money during those long summers. I got to hang out with the teenagers and be let into the periphery of their lives, and I'd hang with the less-popular teens and be a sort of pet for them. I'd learn all the lines and all the songs to every musical, and sometimes I'd get to be an extra in the chorus. It was heaven. In the evenings, my mom and I would sit at the piano, and she'd sing harmony to my melody line and play the most intricate musical scores effortlessly. We'd read plays aloud together or drive to my aunt's house in the country 10 miles away so my mom and aunt could chat while I ran wild on their property until dusk.
Those summers were pretty wonderful.
But when I was a kid, not all that long ago, huge blocks of summertime were my own to fill. From the age of six on, I was wandering all over the neighborhood on trike, bike, or foot, alone or with a friend, in and out of the houses and apartments of kids I hardly knew whose parents were sometimes around and sometimes not. If a pal and I wanted spending money, we'd walk a couple of blocks to the railroad track and gather some of the plentiful discarded empty glass bottles, as many as we could carry, then cash them in for the nickle a bottle deposit at the local liquor store. Everybody did this; all the kids were pretty much left to their own devices during summer, riding bikes far afield and only coming home for dinner.
Once in the liquor store with our found empties, a friend and I would loiter by the fan, sneak peaks at the girlie magazines until the guy behind the counter shooed us away, and turn in our new nickels for Pop Rocks or Popsicles in the 90+ degree California heat. Then we'd wander the neighborhood in filthy bare feet trying to eat our frozen treats before they melted down our shirtfronts. The asphalt would be so hot that it would melt onto our callused feet in little black patches, but by July our soles were so summer-hardened that we could walk across glass-sharp gravel along the railroad tracks without suffering.
A lot of summer was spent avoiding the heat. My town was in a hot East Bay Area valley which regularly got up into the 90s in summer, and went over 100 a few days each year. When it got hot enough, I'd lie on my grandparents' linoleum floor in front of the box fan, singing into the airflow two inches from the grille so that my voice was cut into a thousand tiny, vibrating, reverberating pieces of air. I'd get to drink lots of Cragmont colas and raid their bookcase while Grandpa watched the fights on TV in his undershirt and Grandma read lovely novels about British countryfolk like "How Green Was My Valley" or "To Serve Them All My Days" or "Goodbye Mr. Chips." I'd pore over books on North American birds or 20th century poets or whatever was at hand, and my mother would provide me with huge piles of novels and oversized coffee table books she'd get from the library to expand my world and tickle my visual sense. I remember books on Faberge eggs and classic cars, Michelangelo and Mozart, frogs and stars and the human body.
Mom was a high school teacher, and she'd borrow film strips from the school library over the summer and a film strip projector to view them with, and I'd have little film strip showings on the family room wall. She also borrowed school district musical instruments over the summers, so instead of languishing in a cupboard all summer until some vaguely bored adolescent checked them out for classes in September, I'd get to play with an accordion or a trumpet or a banjo. I never got very far with them, but it was magical to have a full-sized harp in the living room all summer and sit at it in an oversized peignoir set borrowed from my mother and strum it, pretending to be a fairy, and get sounds that weren't half-bad despite my lack of lessons.
There was always lots of music in the summers, since my mother was a fine pianist and accompanied all the high school's summer school musicals for years to make extra money during those long summers. I got to hang out with the teenagers and be let into the periphery of their lives, and I'd hang with the less-popular teens and be a sort of pet for them. I'd learn all the lines and all the songs to every musical, and sometimes I'd get to be an extra in the chorus. It was heaven. In the evenings, my mom and I would sit at the piano, and she'd sing harmony to my melody line and play the most intricate musical scores effortlessly. We'd read plays aloud together or drive to my aunt's house in the country 10 miles away so my mom and aunt could chat while I ran wild on their property until dusk.
Those summers were pretty wonderful.
Thursday, July 14, 2005
A Pretty Good Season for Blockbusters
I've been having more fun at the movies this summer than I expected. Really enjoyed "Batman Begins" for its darkness, cleverness, brooding psychological torment, tasty special effects, and the ability of Christian Bale to breathe life into a two-dimensional icon. I liked "War of the Worlds" better than I expected (though it can't hold a candle to the previous Spielberg/Cruise vehicle, "Minority Report" and the story didn't stick with me beyond the door to the theater).
"Mr. & Mrs. Smith" was quite entertaining; the first half-hour's over-long exposition, showing the marital difficulties between Brad Pitt's and Angelina Jolie's characters, was disappointingly drawn-out and short on humor, but once things started kicking into gear, action built consistently and humor galloped along well. I loved director Doug Liman's "Swingers" and have been a big Vince Vaughn fan ever since, so it was a treat to see Vaughn in a small part under Limon's direction again. Pitt and Jolie could have engaged me by just appearing in the succession of attractive outfits and turning their sculpted heads at their best angles, they are so pretty and charismatic, but damn, they actually made some effort to act in this thing, clearly practiced their moves so that every crazy showdown, each death-defying gunfight, all the scenes of twisting and triangulating had a beautiful sleekness to them. The editing was excellent and kept the adrenaline flowing, much as in Limon's two films with Matt Damon, "The Bourne Identity" and "the Bourne Supremacy." And I give the set designer props for building a modern dreamhome with every fabulous built-in amenity, knowing that the whole wonderland of high-end tech toys and appliances would be laid waste by movie's end.
Pitt was, at times, stiff in the role, and he's pretty consistently outfoxed by the Jolie character, so he uncharacteristically has to play the outsmarted, outclassed second-banana. He's a good sport and I admire him for it--the previous generation's most similar movie star, Robert Redford, would never have allowed himself to play this sort of role and lose a little of his sheen. But, of course, it's Brad Pitt, so even roughed up a little he's still, you know, Brad Pitt. Jolie was a real pleasure to watch, not only because of her interesting, fetish-worthy looks, moves and outfits, but because, as usual in her roles, one can see the character's mind working through each action as she performs. She never just walks through a scene; even in disappointingly small roles like the one she had in the pretty but hollow "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" she can steal the movie, and she's able to take comic book-style roles, as in her Lara Croft movies, without diminishing her stature in Hollywood.
My favorite Angelina Jolie role is still in "Pushing Tin," an underrated comedy with some wickedly good acting by Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, John Cusack doing his ever-enjoyable, charmingly angst-ridden, articulate, angry young man schtick, and Cate Blanchett doing a funny, touching, and surprising job as a New Jersey housewife. It's definitely worth a rental.
"Mr. & Mrs. Smith" was quite entertaining; the first half-hour's over-long exposition, showing the marital difficulties between Brad Pitt's and Angelina Jolie's characters, was disappointingly drawn-out and short on humor, but once things started kicking into gear, action built consistently and humor galloped along well. I loved director Doug Liman's "Swingers" and have been a big Vince Vaughn fan ever since, so it was a treat to see Vaughn in a small part under Limon's direction again. Pitt and Jolie could have engaged me by just appearing in the succession of attractive outfits and turning their sculpted heads at their best angles, they are so pretty and charismatic, but damn, they actually made some effort to act in this thing, clearly practiced their moves so that every crazy showdown, each death-defying gunfight, all the scenes of twisting and triangulating had a beautiful sleekness to them. The editing was excellent and kept the adrenaline flowing, much as in Limon's two films with Matt Damon, "The Bourne Identity" and "the Bourne Supremacy." And I give the set designer props for building a modern dreamhome with every fabulous built-in amenity, knowing that the whole wonderland of high-end tech toys and appliances would be laid waste by movie's end.
Pitt was, at times, stiff in the role, and he's pretty consistently outfoxed by the Jolie character, so he uncharacteristically has to play the outsmarted, outclassed second-banana. He's a good sport and I admire him for it--the previous generation's most similar movie star, Robert Redford, would never have allowed himself to play this sort of role and lose a little of his sheen. But, of course, it's Brad Pitt, so even roughed up a little he's still, you know, Brad Pitt. Jolie was a real pleasure to watch, not only because of her interesting, fetish-worthy looks, moves and outfits, but because, as usual in her roles, one can see the character's mind working through each action as she performs. She never just walks through a scene; even in disappointingly small roles like the one she had in the pretty but hollow "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" she can steal the movie, and she's able to take comic book-style roles, as in her Lara Croft movies, without diminishing her stature in Hollywood.
My favorite Angelina Jolie role is still in "Pushing Tin," an underrated comedy with some wickedly good acting by Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton, John Cusack doing his ever-enjoyable, charmingly angst-ridden, articulate, angry young man schtick, and Cate Blanchett doing a funny, touching, and surprising job as a New Jersey housewife. It's definitely worth a rental.
Wednesday, July 13, 2005
Before the Parade Passes By
Why are Broadway songs about parades always so good? Parades themselves are often long, boring marches filled with occasional snatches of hokum and surprise, but as a metaphor for life, Broadway has used them to good effect.
In earlier times, a parade with carefully-coiffed beauties, local celebrities, big brass bands, uniforms, and girls in cute little costumes marching through town was probably the biggest, flashiest, most exciting public spectacle around. The combination of so many forms of visual and aural splendor and entertainment all in one long line, passing by so quickly, too flashy and fast-moving to keep up with, must have caused a fevered excitement in the crowd, and a true sense of loss and disappointment when it disappeared around each corner.
Jerry Herman's "Before the Parade Passes By," Stephen Sondheim's "A Parade in Town," and of course, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's "Don't Rain on My Parade" are all thrilling songs, partly because of the element of anxiety in each one, as well as the singer's determination not to go back to her dull pre-parade existence. There's the expression of lost opportunities as well as the belief expressed by each singer that this time things are going to be better, that this is my chance and it's all up to me to make it happen. Sort of a Tony Robbins-style self-help seminar rolled in each big, brassy song.
When I was a kid in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s, I remember random unplanned parades wending their way past my grandparents' home. These were just practice sessions for the local high school; a line of kids in ill-fitting uniforms announcing their approach from blocks away with booming brass and rat-a-tat drums, then snaking around a corner all of a sudden, marching earnestly past me as I sat on the curb in front of Grandma and Grandpa's run-down duplex and presenting me with a free, personal parade. Other, older kids were all at school, dads and a few mothers (like mine) were working, and the housewives left at home had no interest in trotting out to their driveways in their housecoats and wire-and-brush curlers to watch some high school students march around, so I was usually the only spectator. The kids nodded my way when they could afford to take their eyes off the music, which made me feel even more important, like a queen serenaded by her own personal troupe of troubadors. Then off they'd go around a corner, and I would watch after them, their green and gold costumes only a memory but the melody lingering on until they had marched too far from my grandparents' neighborhood to be heard.
Marching bands were always worth running out of the duplex and slamming the screen door for, as were ice cream trucks and sonic booms. Running outside after a sonic boom was sort of like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but there was always a hope that there'd be another window-shaking CRACK in the atmosphere as a jet broke the sound barrier, and I didn't want to miss it if I didn't have to. When none came, I'd lie in the grass and look up at the cloudless blue California sky through the leaves of the stately old trees in our slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood, think about my inevitable upcoming career as a brilliant and famous actress and singer, and sing earnest little songs of my own composition. I remember singing melancholy little "they just don't understand me" sorts of songs as early as age three and four, but realized that adults found my lyrics cute rather than insightful, and I found this condescending attitude so insulting even at that age that I mostly just kept them to myself.
Parades usually conjure up images of old-style, small-town America for me: Flag-wavers, Shriners in funny cars, ersatz clowns, and convertibles filled with big-bellied local politicians and shiny-faced beauty queens, cops on horseback and little crepe-paper-covered floats. On the other extreme is the big Macy's Thanksgiving extravaganza filled with giant floating balloons representing icons of American popular culture and marching bands from across the land featuring majorettes wearing almost nothing in New York's late-November chill.
Seattle's Solstice Fair, which runs through the center of the city's wonderfully funky Fremont district, does it right. This year's parade began with over 100 nude bicyclists zooming up and down the street, showing off their painted bodies, feathers, and finery not just once, but multiple times as they drove up and down the main drag while waiting for the rest of the parade to show up, then reappearing at various times, mixed in with the Caribbean-themed float decorated by a local elementary school or among people on stilts or men in drag. Little groups of nude bicyclists infiltrated the parade years ago to much consternation and threats of arrest by the Seattle police, but locals have welcomed them and cheered them on over the years, scoffing at local authorities' half-hearted threats to stop the public indecency, and now they're the true stars of the parade, riding unhassled and seeming to the cheering crowds as wholesome, family-friendly, and right as the funny-cars and beauty queens of my childhood parades did to spectators then.
In earlier times, a parade with carefully-coiffed beauties, local celebrities, big brass bands, uniforms, and girls in cute little costumes marching through town was probably the biggest, flashiest, most exciting public spectacle around. The combination of so many forms of visual and aural splendor and entertainment all in one long line, passing by so quickly, too flashy and fast-moving to keep up with, must have caused a fevered excitement in the crowd, and a true sense of loss and disappointment when it disappeared around each corner.
Jerry Herman's "Before the Parade Passes By," Stephen Sondheim's "A Parade in Town," and of course, Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's "Don't Rain on My Parade" are all thrilling songs, partly because of the element of anxiety in each one, as well as the singer's determination not to go back to her dull pre-parade existence. There's the expression of lost opportunities as well as the belief expressed by each singer that this time things are going to be better, that this is my chance and it's all up to me to make it happen. Sort of a Tony Robbins-style self-help seminar rolled in each big, brassy song.
When I was a kid in the San Francisco Bay Area of the 1960s, I remember random unplanned parades wending their way past my grandparents' home. These were just practice sessions for the local high school; a line of kids in ill-fitting uniforms announcing their approach from blocks away with booming brass and rat-a-tat drums, then snaking around a corner all of a sudden, marching earnestly past me as I sat on the curb in front of Grandma and Grandpa's run-down duplex and presenting me with a free, personal parade. Other, older kids were all at school, dads and a few mothers (like mine) were working, and the housewives left at home had no interest in trotting out to their driveways in their housecoats and wire-and-brush curlers to watch some high school students march around, so I was usually the only spectator. The kids nodded my way when they could afford to take their eyes off the music, which made me feel even more important, like a queen serenaded by her own personal troupe of troubadors. Then off they'd go around a corner, and I would watch after them, their green and gold costumes only a memory but the melody lingering on until they had marched too far from my grandparents' neighborhood to be heard.
Marching bands were always worth running out of the duplex and slamming the screen door for, as were ice cream trucks and sonic booms. Running outside after a sonic boom was sort of like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, but there was always a hope that there'd be another window-shaking CRACK in the atmosphere as a jet broke the sound barrier, and I didn't want to miss it if I didn't have to. When none came, I'd lie in the grass and look up at the cloudless blue California sky through the leaves of the stately old trees in our slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhood, think about my inevitable upcoming career as a brilliant and famous actress and singer, and sing earnest little songs of my own composition. I remember singing melancholy little "they just don't understand me" sorts of songs as early as age three and four, but realized that adults found my lyrics cute rather than insightful, and I found this condescending attitude so insulting even at that age that I mostly just kept them to myself.
Parades usually conjure up images of old-style, small-town America for me: Flag-wavers, Shriners in funny cars, ersatz clowns, and convertibles filled with big-bellied local politicians and shiny-faced beauty queens, cops on horseback and little crepe-paper-covered floats. On the other extreme is the big Macy's Thanksgiving extravaganza filled with giant floating balloons representing icons of American popular culture and marching bands from across the land featuring majorettes wearing almost nothing in New York's late-November chill.
Seattle's Solstice Fair, which runs through the center of the city's wonderfully funky Fremont district, does it right. This year's parade began with over 100 nude bicyclists zooming up and down the street, showing off their painted bodies, feathers, and finery not just once, but multiple times as they drove up and down the main drag while waiting for the rest of the parade to show up, then reappearing at various times, mixed in with the Caribbean-themed float decorated by a local elementary school or among people on stilts or men in drag. Little groups of nude bicyclists infiltrated the parade years ago to much consternation and threats of arrest by the Seattle police, but locals have welcomed them and cheered them on over the years, scoffing at local authorities' half-hearted threats to stop the public indecency, and now they're the true stars of the parade, riding unhassled and seeming to the cheering crowds as wholesome, family-friendly, and right as the funny-cars and beauty queens of my childhood parades did to spectators then.
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
Regina Spektor
I discovered a new musician this week: Russian-born, New York-based Regina Spektor. I saw the video for her song "Us" on the DVD that came with my April/May issue of Paste Magazine (a fun treat available to Salon subscribers) and was instantly taken with her, as was my daughter. Each of us had "Us" running through our heads throughout the following day. The video looks like it was made for about $100 and is all the more enchanting for it; the quick cuts and cheap sets are fun and quite clever, and the resulting video is unique and charming to watch. The song is catchy and quirky; the piano and strings back her up in a vaguely classical style while Spektor's voice swoons and catches and stretches words out in odd ways, flattening vowels and adding others in unexpected places. In "Us" she changes registers from a tentative head voice down to a broader, more nasal tone and slides around notes or adds glottal stops for emphasis. She does so many of the things I was taught emphatically to avoid in all my years of voice training, and yet her odd and uncoached style is so fresh and so perfectly fits her song that I can set aside my years of instruction and just relax into it.
I bought "Us" (from her "Soviet Kitsch" album) from iTunes, and also chose two other songs from her "11:11" album: "Rejazz" and "Love Affair." These show a warmer, more supple voice than she uses in "Us." I hear shades of Tori Amos in her voice and music, especially in "Love Affair," but sung in a jazzier, more accessible register, with less shreiking and mumbling. (Some of Tori's work is delicious, but sometimes I find the self-indulgence tiring.) Interestingly, she resembles Tori Amos physically as well, but with larger eyes and brown hair. To see and hear them sing together would be esthetically striking, both musically and visually.
I bought "Us" (from her "Soviet Kitsch" album) from iTunes, and also chose two other songs from her "11:11" album: "Rejazz" and "Love Affair." These show a warmer, more supple voice than she uses in "Us." I hear shades of Tori Amos in her voice and music, especially in "Love Affair," but sung in a jazzier, more accessible register, with less shreiking and mumbling. (Some of Tori's work is delicious, but sometimes I find the self-indulgence tiring.) Interestingly, she resembles Tori Amos physically as well, but with larger eyes and brown hair. To see and hear them sing together would be esthetically striking, both musically and visually.
More on "The Motorcycle Diaries"
A friend pointed me to an interesting and very well-written article published in Slate last year (September 24, 2004) by Paul Berman titled, "The Cult of Che: Don't applaud The Motorcycle Diaries." I don't know how I missed it, since I check in with Slate and Salon every day, but the kernel of it is this:
"Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries."
"Che was an enemy of freedom, and yet he has been erected into a symbol of freedom. He helped establish an unjust social system in Cuba and has been erected into a symbol of social justice. He stood for the ancient rigidities of Latin-American thought, in a Marxist-Leninist version, and he has been celebrated as a free-thinker and a rebel. And thus it is in Salles' Motorcycle Diaries."
Sunday, July 10, 2005
Al Otro Lado Del Rio
The film "The Motorcycle Diaries" has a lovely, ambling feel to it, a beautiful storyline that tells of the young Ernesto "Che" Guevara before his revolutionary years, and it humanizes a legend.
Gael Garcia Bernal is such an affecting actor; I loved him in “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” and I look forward to seeing him in “Bad Education.” Bernal’s gentleness and empathy for the unfortunate make his Che extraordinarily appealing. It seems to me that this is at the expense of history, to some extent, but to the benefit of the film. Che must have been a remarkable man to know, and he must have had extraordinary charisma. “Ernesto” was a perfect name for a man of focus and devotion.
But Che could be a cold-blooded killer, murdering people before they’d had a chance at a trial, and so sure that his Marxist beliefs justified homicide. Knowing, as a man of his intellect and worldliness must have, what excesses and extremes had been undertaken in the Soviet Union and in China in the name of Communism, it is hard for me, coming from my affluent, modern, anglo world, to understand how he could embrace such a system.
Had Che lived twenty years earlier in the young flush of Communism and seen hope in it for poor South Americans then, I could understand his embrace of it, but coming along when he did, it is hard for me to understand how he (and Castro) could ignore the obvious excesses of regimes which crushed the souls, the freedoms, and hopes of so many millions of people. His last words (supposedly something like “Go ahead and shoot me; you're only going to kill a man") are so coldblooded, they couldn’t have come from the man we met in “The Motorcycle Diaries.” He must have had that steeliness in his personality before he became a revolutionary; to determine to become an athlete despite severe asthma, to become a doctor, to travel around South America, and to work and live intimately with lepers all show a sense of purpose and discipline, but the harder sides of that determination never show up in Bernal’s portrayal. Again, perhaps that is to the benefit of the film, and certainly to the benefit of Che’s legacy and in keeping with revolutionary propaganda.
It is to the eternal shame of the United States that we have reacted out of fear of Communism by infiltrating and overthrowing governments ourselves, ignoring the choices of the citizens of other countries when it was not in our interest, and had a hand in Che's death. It does bother me some when a historical figure of such importance is reintroduced so engagingly to the public in a way that denies what had to have been lifelong and fundamental elements of his personality. It is not always the job of the artist (in this case, the filmmaker) to give us the full, balanced, and sweeping story of Guevara's life if it does not serve his or her artistic purpose. I think, however, in presenting what purports to be a true story about such a historically significant person, it is always a good and responsible thing for those who make the film to tell as even-handed and as accurate a story as they can. But that is an artistic choice, and even if I do not always agree with it, I must respect it.
It is harder for me to respect a filmmaker who alters reality to enhance the narrative of a biography when large and important aspects of a subject's life or behavior are whitewashed, altered, or excised in order to heighten the drama at the expense of getting to know the person. I know, whitewashing biographies is as old as the art of writing them, but I appreciate it when the biographer at least makes an effort at honesty. In "The Motorcycle Diaries" Che's harder side was not much in evidence, but we were not led to believe it did not exist. The so-called biography of John Nash presented in the wildly inaccurate film "A Beautiful Mind" angered me not because of the fantasy sequences and the imaginary friends, but because of what were billed as the "true" parts of the story, which left out his divorce from his wife and his bisexuality because of fears that these truths would render Nash less appealing to the average film-goer. But these omissions built a false and misleading understanding of his relationship with his wife, which is at the core of the film and is supposed to be the rock upon which his recovery is based. I think taking such license with the truth and billing the result as an honest portrayal is manipulative and mendacious, and I have great difficulty enjoying the resulting film because of this lack of honesty. (And I dislike it even more because of what I find a false-sounding, obvious, and hackneyed script.)
Obviously, Che still has millions of fans, had a big heart, and was willing to suffer torture and death for his ideals of equality and dignity for all South Americans. Still, I would have liked a little more hint of the dichotomy between his tender side and his ruthless devotion and determination. In the film, we see him risk his life rather than spend his girlfriend’s money, ignore the wishes of the nuns who run the leper colony at which he works, lie to get his friend's motorcycle fixed for free and to get free food and drink from women he meets on his trip, but those actions are gently and appealingly, even comically, portrayed. I just have the feeling there must have been a darker, steelier core to the man than what we saw in this film. That said, it is still lovely filmmaking.
The song at the end of the film (“Al Otro Lado Del Río”) is quite beautiful. I fear many viewers will turn off the film during the credits and miss hearing Jorge Drexler sing it. I wish he had been allowed to sing it at the Academy Awards presentation this year, rather than Antonio Banderas, whose performance had more brio and less of the lyrical quality which makes the song so delicious. Like the film, the song is a quiet work of art and should be appreciated as such.
Gael Garcia Bernal is such an affecting actor; I loved him in “Y Tu Mama Tambien,” and I look forward to seeing him in “Bad Education.” Bernal’s gentleness and empathy for the unfortunate make his Che extraordinarily appealing. It seems to me that this is at the expense of history, to some extent, but to the benefit of the film. Che must have been a remarkable man to know, and he must have had extraordinary charisma. “Ernesto” was a perfect name for a man of focus and devotion.
But Che could be a cold-blooded killer, murdering people before they’d had a chance at a trial, and so sure that his Marxist beliefs justified homicide. Knowing, as a man of his intellect and worldliness must have, what excesses and extremes had been undertaken in the Soviet Union and in China in the name of Communism, it is hard for me, coming from my affluent, modern, anglo world, to understand how he could embrace such a system.
Had Che lived twenty years earlier in the young flush of Communism and seen hope in it for poor South Americans then, I could understand his embrace of it, but coming along when he did, it is hard for me to understand how he (and Castro) could ignore the obvious excesses of regimes which crushed the souls, the freedoms, and hopes of so many millions of people. His last words (supposedly something like “Go ahead and shoot me; you're only going to kill a man") are so coldblooded, they couldn’t have come from the man we met in “The Motorcycle Diaries.” He must have had that steeliness in his personality before he became a revolutionary; to determine to become an athlete despite severe asthma, to become a doctor, to travel around South America, and to work and live intimately with lepers all show a sense of purpose and discipline, but the harder sides of that determination never show up in Bernal’s portrayal. Again, perhaps that is to the benefit of the film, and certainly to the benefit of Che’s legacy and in keeping with revolutionary propaganda.
It is to the eternal shame of the United States that we have reacted out of fear of Communism by infiltrating and overthrowing governments ourselves, ignoring the choices of the citizens of other countries when it was not in our interest, and had a hand in Che's death. It does bother me some when a historical figure of such importance is reintroduced so engagingly to the public in a way that denies what had to have been lifelong and fundamental elements of his personality. It is not always the job of the artist (in this case, the filmmaker) to give us the full, balanced, and sweeping story of Guevara's life if it does not serve his or her artistic purpose. I think, however, in presenting what purports to be a true story about such a historically significant person, it is always a good and responsible thing for those who make the film to tell as even-handed and as accurate a story as they can. But that is an artistic choice, and even if I do not always agree with it, I must respect it.
It is harder for me to respect a filmmaker who alters reality to enhance the narrative of a biography when large and important aspects of a subject's life or behavior are whitewashed, altered, or excised in order to heighten the drama at the expense of getting to know the person. I know, whitewashing biographies is as old as the art of writing them, but I appreciate it when the biographer at least makes an effort at honesty. In "The Motorcycle Diaries" Che's harder side was not much in evidence, but we were not led to believe it did not exist. The so-called biography of John Nash presented in the wildly inaccurate film "A Beautiful Mind" angered me not because of the fantasy sequences and the imaginary friends, but because of what were billed as the "true" parts of the story, which left out his divorce from his wife and his bisexuality because of fears that these truths would render Nash less appealing to the average film-goer. But these omissions built a false and misleading understanding of his relationship with his wife, which is at the core of the film and is supposed to be the rock upon which his recovery is based. I think taking such license with the truth and billing the result as an honest portrayal is manipulative and mendacious, and I have great difficulty enjoying the resulting film because of this lack of honesty. (And I dislike it even more because of what I find a false-sounding, obvious, and hackneyed script.)
Obviously, Che still has millions of fans, had a big heart, and was willing to suffer torture and death for his ideals of equality and dignity for all South Americans. Still, I would have liked a little more hint of the dichotomy between his tender side and his ruthless devotion and determination. In the film, we see him risk his life rather than spend his girlfriend’s money, ignore the wishes of the nuns who run the leper colony at which he works, lie to get his friend's motorcycle fixed for free and to get free food and drink from women he meets on his trip, but those actions are gently and appealingly, even comically, portrayed. I just have the feeling there must have been a darker, steelier core to the man than what we saw in this film. That said, it is still lovely filmmaking.
The song at the end of the film (“Al Otro Lado Del Río”) is quite beautiful. I fear many viewers will turn off the film during the credits and miss hearing Jorge Drexler sing it. I wish he had been allowed to sing it at the Academy Awards presentation this year, rather than Antonio Banderas, whose performance had more brio and less of the lyrical quality which makes the song so delicious. Like the film, the song is a quiet work of art and should be appreciated as such.
Saturday, July 09, 2005
Wings of Desire
I've just watched Wim Wenders' film, "Wings of Desire," and was taken by the lovely quality the black and white photography imparts to even the ugliest, saddest scenes of Cold War Berlin: bombed-out buildings never rebuilt after World War II, ugly brutalist architecture, vacant lots, graffiti-covered sections of the Berlin Wall all have the crisp yet shadowy beauty of a platinum print. The faces of the angels, two worry-lined, middle-aged men, are so much more sympathetic in shades of black and grey than they are when the film stock changes to color. The angel who becomes human in order to experience rather than simply observe life finds the garish colors of graffiti characters (who look like a cross between the figures of Easter Island and Kilroy Was Here cartoons of the 1940s) ravishing. One of his first acts as a human is to learn the names of their colors, and he finds these painted cartoons, a cheap cup of snack bar coffee, his first puff of a cigarette, and his stroll through grimy Berlin streets exhilarating.
How lovely to find breath-taking beauty in the dingy and mundane after living in the rarified but impersonal realm of angels.
How lovely to find breath-taking beauty in the dingy and mundane after living in the rarified but impersonal realm of angels.
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