I'm so jazzed; very soon I'll be starting a new art open house series at the Ground Zero Teen Center in Bellevue. It's a great, welcoming place for teens to gather after school. The center is housed in what used to be a church, with funky corners and angles in unexpected places, and there's a friendly, laid-back, all-inclusive vibe. It's run on a shoestring, but the people in charge do a great job and set a welcoming but low-key tone. It'll be lovely to work with them and the kids.
Ground Zero is a very musical place. There are frequent concerts and people take music lessons there (my daughter goes there for electric guitar lessons with terrific local musician Amy Stolzenbach). There's often music wafting out the doors, a TV droning in the back room, a friendly dog or two wandering through the building and greeting anyone and everyone, and a snack waiting for hungry teens who wander in after school. Even the bathrooms are places of free expression; walls are covered in chalkboard paint and big sticks of sidewalk chalk invite people to draw or write what they feel. They have free practice rooms available for kids with bands to use, and they serve a big dinner once a week. There are posters everywhere reminding people that it's a place of tolerance, respect and kindness, and materials are prominently posted to help kids find information and people to talk to if they're having troubles. It's clear that there are people ready to help kids move in the right direction if they get lost. It feels safe and homey.
The center's walls have a few examples of teen art that crackle with energy and show how much their creators wanted to express what they feel through making something with their hearts and hands. Teens are often spilling over with a hunger to put their feelings into some positive form. I can't wait to see what they come up with during my time with them.
During October I expect to start drop-in art clinic afternoons. I'll bring in a different assortment of art supplies and cool materials the kids may not have easy access to elsewhere, and I'll share a variety of my own works and lots of other sources of inspiration and ideas. Sometimes I'll offer up illustrations of classic and important pieces, and if they're up for it we can talk about what makes them important and whether we actually like them or not. But I also want to bring in examples of art that we take for granted, stuff we find on clothing and packaging and magazines, and point out that they're works of art, too. I'll ask them to share what they find beautiful, and to talk about art that speaks to us even when we find it ugly. I'll work on something in real time, and show them what I'm up to, see what ideas they have, and we can talk about what works for us and what doesn't, how to work around what feel like artistic weaknesses or restrictions, and what is meaningful to them.
My daughter Lily creates intricate, glorious digital artworks with Photoshop. She'll be bringing in examples of her work, too, to spark discussion and to broaden our teen allure. She'll be my trusty sidekick, helping me set things up, making sure everybody's got what they need, and making our space more approachable; someone my age sitting alone at a table with a bunch of funky art supplies might not be as appealing to teens without another actual teen showing interest. Lily's comfortable working in many media, too, so she and I can dive in each week to break the ice.
If kids have no interest in my ideas for the day, that's absolutely fine; the last thing they need is for me to impose my visions on them or make them feel like they have to do things a certain way. I don't want to lecture or talk my way through the whole thing, just to make it easier for them to jump in and try things, get new ideas, see what gets other people excited and ask themselves what they find beautiful or meaningful. So often students feel forced to mimic other people's work or accept other people's beliefs and ideas at face value instead of asking themselves what they truly believe, what matters most, and what they can give to the world and feel good about. I want to help them to feel safe exploring these ideas. We all need to be reminded that beauty comes in many forms, and that our work doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful.
Friday, September 28, 2007
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Ooga Chakka
I have a brilliant idea. Let's create a new musical genre based on the opening to the song "Hooked on a Feeling." Yeah, a whole branch of popular music that incorporates the chant "Ooga chakka, ooga, ooga, ooga chakka" in the background of any song, old or new, from Bach's "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" to Amy Winehouse's "Rehab." (Try it; it works.) If you're really daring, make an ubercheesy video of yourself acting as stupid as humanly possible, heavy on the ooga chakkas. C'mon, baby, I dare you. Look, it worked for David Hasselhoff.
Monday, August 27, 2007
Memento mori
My mind and hands have been overflowing with new art ideas, techniques, materials and styles this year; it’s been an exciting and productive, if often challenging, year. I’ve engaged in some old artistic pleasures, such as making miniature pencil and pen drawings based on historical portraits and fashioning a few delicate pieces of jewelry, but I’ve also pushed myself in entirely new directions. I’ve done a lot of work with metal mesh and wire constructions; they run the gamut from looking like identifiable sea creatures to being completely conceptual abstract pieces based on the study of physics. (You can click through to a gallery of my recent pieces above.) I’ve done pieces that look like billowing curtains and shimmering bubbles, and brought my love of jewels and detail out of the world of jewelry by wiring gems and metal findings around, over and through canvas. I’ve built up assemblages of bits of twig, watch parts, pressed flowers, layers of wasp nests and phrases from encyclopedia pages, some showing a sort of strutting, geometric confidence and others twinkling shyly.
My work has become much more tactile and textural, sometimes invitingly and sometimes in a more prickly way. My calligraphy series of metal mesh and wire on canvas pieces includes shapes that to me evoke a meeting between the landscapes of Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, while my wasp (vespa) series is softer, mostly featuring the undulating lines created by a colony of wasps as they built an extraordinary striped paper nest. The gift of the nest was a surprise from a friend, and its texture, unevenness and the perfection of its imperfections have been wonderfully inspiring.
I’ve found another favorite source of inspiration this year in old pocket watch innards, small cogs and wheels, and delicate old watch faces. I’ve been gathering them for some time, and I find them physically pleasing for their meticulous and intricate construction and tininess. But I love them just as much because, cold little mechanical devices that they once were, they were also the intimate possessions of real, warm, living people, most now cold and dead, who relied on them to order their time and make sense of their days. Tiny, clicking, jeweled machines rested in their hands, around their wrists next to to their beating pulses, in their breast pockets, against their hips.
Now their watches are in pieces, showing parts of themselves that their long-dead, long-term owners never saw. They remind me of Dutch memento mori paintings, still lifes that included exquisite renditions of flowers covered in reflective droplets of dew, insects, hour glasses, skulls and ripe fruit and watches. Each lovely item, carefully collected and displayed, acted as a reminder that life is fleeting, that all is vanity, that even the most luscious peach or the most perfect tulip will someday wither, and that we must appreciate them today, but also keep in mind what is really lasting and what really matters. They tell us that the fragility of beauty makes it more precious, and that this is a good thing.
Memento mori pieces are sometimes seen with a Calvinist eye as dark reminders to repent and put away the things of this world. I think this view is mistaken, that they are actually delicate reminders to treasure each day and savor each blessing. The loveliest way I can think of to describe this view is to quote Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine”:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
These lines also happen to have been quoted and set to music by my mother’s friend of many years, Owen Goldsmith, a composer and arranger of great subtlety whose choral works are so painfully beautiful they invariably make me cry. Owen was a music director at Livermore High School when I was a tiny child, and he went on to a very successful career as a composer of choral works. Thousands of students have sung his works in concerts and competitions over the past forty years.
When I was little, my mother, who was a remarkable pianist, was often the first person to play Owen’s compositions after Owen himself; he would ask her over to play them for him so that he could hear them fresh from another pair of hands, and I was usually there, too, sitting on the floor reading his books of Charles Addams or Pogo comics in the room as his pieces hit the air. My mother also had a powerful and lyrical soprano voice, and she was often the first to sing his songs as well. Now I wish that I had recordings of those magical times; I remember hearing her play and sing them many times at home when I was a child, and I still play the pieces myself from old photostatic copies of the manuscripts, though not with her fluency at the piano.
I do have a recording of my mother and me singing his piece, Cleavings, which was comprised of three short songs, including the one above, about 25 years ago. I listened to my recording again last month, and immediately burst into tears for its beauty, for the pleasure of sharing it with my mother, for the way her voice and mine blended so sweetly, for the loss of her, her talents and her own passion for music and art. That bittersweetness is why we remember that death comes for us all: “memento mori” means “remember death” but implies “treasure life.”
My work has become much more tactile and textural, sometimes invitingly and sometimes in a more prickly way. My calligraphy series of metal mesh and wire on canvas pieces includes shapes that to me evoke a meeting between the landscapes of Tim Burton and Dr. Seuss, while my wasp (vespa) series is softer, mostly featuring the undulating lines created by a colony of wasps as they built an extraordinary striped paper nest. The gift of the nest was a surprise from a friend, and its texture, unevenness and the perfection of its imperfections have been wonderfully inspiring.
I’ve found another favorite source of inspiration this year in old pocket watch innards, small cogs and wheels, and delicate old watch faces. I’ve been gathering them for some time, and I find them physically pleasing for their meticulous and intricate construction and tininess. But I love them just as much because, cold little mechanical devices that they once were, they were also the intimate possessions of real, warm, living people, most now cold and dead, who relied on them to order their time and make sense of their days. Tiny, clicking, jeweled machines rested in their hands, around their wrists next to to their beating pulses, in their breast pockets, against their hips.
Now their watches are in pieces, showing parts of themselves that their long-dead, long-term owners never saw. They remind me of Dutch memento mori paintings, still lifes that included exquisite renditions of flowers covered in reflective droplets of dew, insects, hour glasses, skulls and ripe fruit and watches. Each lovely item, carefully collected and displayed, acted as a reminder that life is fleeting, that all is vanity, that even the most luscious peach or the most perfect tulip will someday wither, and that we must appreciate them today, but also keep in mind what is really lasting and what really matters. They tell us that the fragility of beauty makes it more precious, and that this is a good thing.
Memento mori pieces are sometimes seen with a Calvinist eye as dark reminders to repent and put away the things of this world. I think this view is mistaken, that they are actually delicate reminders to treasure each day and savor each blessing. The loveliest way I can think of to describe this view is to quote Swinburne’s poem “The Garden of Proserpine”:
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no man lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.
These lines also happen to have been quoted and set to music by my mother’s friend of many years, Owen Goldsmith, a composer and arranger of great subtlety whose choral works are so painfully beautiful they invariably make me cry. Owen was a music director at Livermore High School when I was a tiny child, and he went on to a very successful career as a composer of choral works. Thousands of students have sung his works in concerts and competitions over the past forty years.
When I was little, my mother, who was a remarkable pianist, was often the first person to play Owen’s compositions after Owen himself; he would ask her over to play them for him so that he could hear them fresh from another pair of hands, and I was usually there, too, sitting on the floor reading his books of Charles Addams or Pogo comics in the room as his pieces hit the air. My mother also had a powerful and lyrical soprano voice, and she was often the first to sing his songs as well. Now I wish that I had recordings of those magical times; I remember hearing her play and sing them many times at home when I was a child, and I still play the pieces myself from old photostatic copies of the manuscripts, though not with her fluency at the piano.
I do have a recording of my mother and me singing his piece, Cleavings, which was comprised of three short songs, including the one above, about 25 years ago. I listened to my recording again last month, and immediately burst into tears for its beauty, for the pleasure of sharing it with my mother, for the way her voice and mine blended so sweetly, for the loss of her, her talents and her own passion for music and art. That bittersweetness is why we remember that death comes for us all: “memento mori” means “remember death” but implies “treasure life.”
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Schrödinger's Cat Toy & Luminiferous Ether
It's time for new art! Since I last posted a link to photos of my latest artworks here in February, I've been feverishly creating a few dozen new pieces; you can take a peek at them by clicking on the photo above and going to my online gallery.
I've started several new series this year; samples from each series are posted. Most of the new works fall into one of four categories: one is inspired by sealife, a second by calligraphy, another by poetry, and the biggest new series is inspired by the world of physics. More paintings and assemblages will be posted soon. Stay tuned!
I've started several new series this year; samples from each series are posted. Most of the new works fall into one of four categories: one is inspired by sealife, a second by calligraphy, another by poetry, and the biggest new series is inspired by the world of physics. More paintings and assemblages will be posted soon. Stay tuned!
Everything Is Illuminated
When Jonathan Safran Foer's book Everything Is Illuminated came out a few years ago, I read reviews of it and peeked at the book a few times, but I didn't sit down with the novel and really give it my attention. It looked like fun, but I could see why some reviewers found it too gimicky or cute with its quirky and surprising use of words as illustrations, which some found distracted them from the story. When I heard that one of my favorite actors, Liev Schreiber, was adapting and directing a film version of the story, I was delighted; he's a talented, versatile actor and his interviews are witty, self-deprecating and entertaining. I figured he would bring something fresh and original to the story. The result was lovelier, funnier and more touching than I imagined it would be, and with this single film his place in my heart as a favorite director as well as a fine actor is now permanent.
The film version of Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer of the novel and the fictionalized main character. Wood is well cast; his performance is appropriately odd and moving, and his discomfort in the world as well as in his own skin are palpable and amusing. A stranger in a strange land, he is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to see where his late grandfather lived before the Holocaust and to try to meet the woman who saved his grandfather from death. The result is one of the funniest and most touching road pictures I've seen. Jonathan's awkwardness, anxiety and obsessiveness are strangely compelling, and Elijah Wood's performance is certainly worth seeing.
However, the performance that steals the picture and makes me laugh out loud in astonished delight is by the wonderful Ukrainian actor and singer Eugene Hutz. The long-faced Hutz is also the front man for a band called Gogol Bordello, whose music sounds like a fabulous conglomeration of klezmer tunes, gypsy folk music and punk. British comedian Phill Jupitus describes this gypsy punk band as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe." Their biggest hit, "Start Wearing Purple," plays out the movie during the final credits, and it is as startlingly, infectiously surprising and life-affirming as the film before it. The juxtaposition of amusingly jaded lyrics with drunken wedding-party-style singing fits the feel of the movie perfectly in true traditional Eastern European fashion: life is hard, my youth will vanish and my sanity will follow, so let's start living right now!
Hutz plays Alex, a Ukraininan in his 20s who lives at home with his parents, his grandfather, and his grandfather's beloved dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior. (Yes, two juniors.) His father's company gives half-assed tours to American Jews touring the Ukraine seeking connection with their lost ancestors. Alex acts as translator and runs interference between his cranky old grandfather, who insists that he is blind but who chauffers confused tourists unwillingly in a run-down compact car, Sammy Davis Junior Junior at his side. Alex has supreme confidence in his style and brilliance and, gangly and ridiculous though he may be in his track suit and attempts at American-style bling, he is convinced of his extraordinary sex appeal. And somehow, like Tim Curry dressed in Transylvanian drag in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his confidence and lust for life make him sexy. To watch this lanky young man saunter down the street in a scene that parodies the opening to Saturday Night Fever, calling out to admiring passersby and telling you what a premium dancer he is, you can believe that he really is as "premium" as he believes himself to be.
The adventures shared by Alex, his grandfather, Sammy the dog and "Jonfen," as Alex calls Jonathan, are fun and surprising, but also ultimately meaningful and moving, to us as well as to them. Actor Liev Schreiber brings a sense of humor and decency to many of his roles; he has a great talent for making his characters so real, so in-the-moment, that any audience would be hard pressed not to be touched by the stories of the men he plays in movies like A Walk on the Moon (one of my favorites) and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Everything Is Illuminated he shows us that he has the same gift for creating a whole film that he has for creating a compelling character.
The film version of Everything is Illuminated stars Elijah Wood, who plays Jonathan Safran Foer, the writer of the novel and the fictionalized main character. Wood is well cast; his performance is appropriately odd and moving, and his discomfort in the world as well as in his own skin are palpable and amusing. A stranger in a strange land, he is an American Jew who travels to Ukraine to see where his late grandfather lived before the Holocaust and to try to meet the woman who saved his grandfather from death. The result is one of the funniest and most touching road pictures I've seen. Jonathan's awkwardness, anxiety and obsessiveness are strangely compelling, and Elijah Wood's performance is certainly worth seeing.
However, the performance that steals the picture and makes me laugh out loud in astonished delight is by the wonderful Ukrainian actor and singer Eugene Hutz. The long-faced Hutz is also the front man for a band called Gogol Bordello, whose music sounds like a fabulous conglomeration of klezmer tunes, gypsy folk music and punk. British comedian Phill Jupitus describes this gypsy punk band as "a bit like The Clash having a fight with The Pogues in Eastern Europe." Their biggest hit, "Start Wearing Purple," plays out the movie during the final credits, and it is as startlingly, infectiously surprising and life-affirming as the film before it. The juxtaposition of amusingly jaded lyrics with drunken wedding-party-style singing fits the feel of the movie perfectly in true traditional Eastern European fashion: life is hard, my youth will vanish and my sanity will follow, so let's start living right now!
Hutz plays Alex, a Ukraininan in his 20s who lives at home with his parents, his grandfather, and his grandfather's beloved dog, Sammy Davis Junior Junior. (Yes, two juniors.) His father's company gives half-assed tours to American Jews touring the Ukraine seeking connection with their lost ancestors. Alex acts as translator and runs interference between his cranky old grandfather, who insists that he is blind but who chauffers confused tourists unwillingly in a run-down compact car, Sammy Davis Junior Junior at his side. Alex has supreme confidence in his style and brilliance and, gangly and ridiculous though he may be in his track suit and attempts at American-style bling, he is convinced of his extraordinary sex appeal. And somehow, like Tim Curry dressed in Transylvanian drag in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, his confidence and lust for life make him sexy. To watch this lanky young man saunter down the street in a scene that parodies the opening to Saturday Night Fever, calling out to admiring passersby and telling you what a premium dancer he is, you can believe that he really is as "premium" as he believes himself to be.
The adventures shared by Alex, his grandfather, Sammy the dog and "Jonfen," as Alex calls Jonathan, are fun and surprising, but also ultimately meaningful and moving, to us as well as to them. Actor Liev Schreiber brings a sense of humor and decency to many of his roles; he has a great talent for making his characters so real, so in-the-moment, that any audience would be hard pressed not to be touched by the stories of the men he plays in movies like A Walk on the Moon (one of my favorites) and the remake of The Manchurian Candidate. In Everything Is Illuminated he shows us that he has the same gift for creating a whole film that he has for creating a compelling character.
Friday, February 02, 2007
A Sampling of My Recent Artworks
At last, I can offer you a virtual gallery of my artworks. Most of the pieces in my online gallery were created over the past year, but I've included a few older favorites as well.
Since last summer, I've turned my focus back toward my lifelong love of creating art and away from words. Of course, I still love delicious writing and I feel sad not to have kept up my blog, but rather than turn my thoughts and energies outward to share with others, I've been turning them inward, asking myself big questions, and expressing my visions, thoughts and hopes with imagery rather than text.
While I still enjoy drawing and doing detailed watercolors, I've recently delighted in branching out into assemblages and working with three-dimensional forms displayed on canvas. It's fun to tweak the idea that art on canvas is more valuable, more genuine, or finer art than works created on paper or other arts often considered to be lesser pieces because they come from the world of handicraft rather than from the fine arts universe.
I enjoy the way balance and negative space become so important in assemblage and collage. My delight in assembling these little pieces is an outgrowth of my love for creating small, intimate artworks and crafts pieces that invite the viewer to get close and share the physical space in which the artwork is displayed. In the past I made a lot of jewelry because I enjoyed the idea of wearable art that the wearer could play with, notice and handle more than pieces that hang on walls or sit on mantels. Jewelry becomes part of the owner's personal physical space. Whatever media I use, I always want my works to be like little jewels: portable, personal, intricate and intimate.
Since last summer, I've turned my focus back toward my lifelong love of creating art and away from words. Of course, I still love delicious writing and I feel sad not to have kept up my blog, but rather than turn my thoughts and energies outward to share with others, I've been turning them inward, asking myself big questions, and expressing my visions, thoughts and hopes with imagery rather than text.
While I still enjoy drawing and doing detailed watercolors, I've recently delighted in branching out into assemblages and working with three-dimensional forms displayed on canvas. It's fun to tweak the idea that art on canvas is more valuable, more genuine, or finer art than works created on paper or other arts often considered to be lesser pieces because they come from the world of handicraft rather than from the fine arts universe.
I enjoy the way balance and negative space become so important in assemblage and collage. My delight in assembling these little pieces is an outgrowth of my love for creating small, intimate artworks and crafts pieces that invite the viewer to get close and share the physical space in which the artwork is displayed. In the past I made a lot of jewelry because I enjoyed the idea of wearable art that the wearer could play with, notice and handle more than pieces that hang on walls or sit on mantels. Jewelry becomes part of the owner's personal physical space. Whatever media I use, I always want my works to be like little jewels: portable, personal, intricate and intimate.
Sunday, October 08, 2006
Nihilism and Nightlights
In December 1984, when I was 21 and just seven months out of Mills College, I got what was supposed to be a six-week temp job at Apple Computer testing word processing software for Macintosh computers. I’d beta tested software on an early Lisa computer (the Mac’s big sister) when I worked as a Jill-of-all-trades at a computer consulting firm during and after college, so a friend at Apple thought I might be a good fit. I figured it would be a good stopgap job on the way to a career as a writer or museum curator. What I thought would be a short career hiccup grew into 7-1/2 years at Apple, first as a software test engineer and later as an R&D division newsletter editor.
While being a software test engineer was fun and enlightening and it let me play with cool prototypes for fab new products, what I really wanted to do was write, so during my months as a temp I also wrote ad copy, software documentation, humor pieces and film reviews on the side. I wrote reviews not only for actual films but also for films that existed only in my imagination. One night during the first week of my time at Apple, I got an idea for what I thought could be a funny little film review parody and I came up with a couple of ridiculous ideas for foreign films, then reviewed the fictional movies as if I were the most pompous film reviewer around. I typed up my little piece, edited it and printed it out within the course of a couple of hours. It flowed more easily than just about anything else I’ve written since. The next morning it still looked funny to me, so I decided I’d send it to The San Francisco Chronicle to see whether they might like to put it in the Sunday Punch, their popular arts and entertainment section, in the space they usually saved for humor pieces on the flipside of Herb Caen’s legendary column. Had I thought about the paper’s 750,000-reader Sunday circulation figures or the facts that I was right out of college with a background in history and art history and no journalism background, I might have been daunted. But I was 21 and my youthful belief in endless possibilities saved me from such fears, so I popped my little parody in the mailbox and drove to my supposed six-week job at Apple to crash the MacWrite application as fiercely and often as I could.
A few days later, Rosalie Muller Wright, then the Chronicle’s managing editor of Features and later the editor-in-chief of Sunset Magazine, called to tell me they liked it and would like to publish it. My first attempt at publication was accepted at a big-deal metro paper just like that. It was clear to me that this writing for publication business was much easier than everyone said it would be. (If only all my subsequent efforts could have been as popular with editors.)
Ms. Wright passed my work along to Peter Sussman, who was an editor at the Chronicle for 29 years and went on to teach journalism at Stanford and to become an important writer and editor of articles and books about California’s criminal justice system. He became my editor. I had no idea that my little parody would let me work under two such impressive and important journalists. Mr. Sussman edited my piece, calling me with small but excellent suggestions for changes, and I got my check for $50. I was hooked. It had all been so easy that I sent them another parody funnier than the first to see what would happen. They liked it so much, they offered me the chance to write a series of parody reviews. I grabbed the chance with both hands and wrote one a month for six months. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.
My favorite of the six parodies was the second one, “Nihilism and Nightlights.” Here it is.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, “Ciao Chow Chow,” and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, “Nightlight.”
Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.
Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.
These influences can be seen clearly in “Ciao Chow Chow,” in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.
“Ciao” is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.
Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.
Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s “Nightlight” tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.
Filmed in black and white, “Nightlight” captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.
De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include “The Teddy Bear with No Face,” Scream, Barbie, Scream” and “Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids,” in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.
“Nightlight,” the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of “Murder on the Trampoline.”
Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of “The Music Man.”
While being a software test engineer was fun and enlightening and it let me play with cool prototypes for fab new products, what I really wanted to do was write, so during my months as a temp I also wrote ad copy, software documentation, humor pieces and film reviews on the side. I wrote reviews not only for actual films but also for films that existed only in my imagination. One night during the first week of my time at Apple, I got an idea for what I thought could be a funny little film review parody and I came up with a couple of ridiculous ideas for foreign films, then reviewed the fictional movies as if I were the most pompous film reviewer around. I typed up my little piece, edited it and printed it out within the course of a couple of hours. It flowed more easily than just about anything else I’ve written since. The next morning it still looked funny to me, so I decided I’d send it to The San Francisco Chronicle to see whether they might like to put it in the Sunday Punch, their popular arts and entertainment section, in the space they usually saved for humor pieces on the flipside of Herb Caen’s legendary column. Had I thought about the paper’s 750,000-reader Sunday circulation figures or the facts that I was right out of college with a background in history and art history and no journalism background, I might have been daunted. But I was 21 and my youthful belief in endless possibilities saved me from such fears, so I popped my little parody in the mailbox and drove to my supposed six-week job at Apple to crash the MacWrite application as fiercely and often as I could.
A few days later, Rosalie Muller Wright, then the Chronicle’s managing editor of Features and later the editor-in-chief of Sunset Magazine, called to tell me they liked it and would like to publish it. My first attempt at publication was accepted at a big-deal metro paper just like that. It was clear to me that this writing for publication business was much easier than everyone said it would be. (If only all my subsequent efforts could have been as popular with editors.)
Ms. Wright passed my work along to Peter Sussman, who was an editor at the Chronicle for 29 years and went on to teach journalism at Stanford and to become an important writer and editor of articles and books about California’s criminal justice system. He became my editor. I had no idea that my little parody would let me work under two such impressive and important journalists. Mr. Sussman edited my piece, calling me with small but excellent suggestions for changes, and I got my check for $50. I was hooked. It had all been so easy that I sent them another parody funnier than the first to see what would happen. They liked it so much, they offered me the chance to write a series of parody reviews. I grabbed the chance with both hands and wrote one a month for six months. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.
My favorite of the six parodies was the second one, “Nihilism and Nightlights.” Here it is.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Among the new foreign film releases this season are two films by female directors: Bebe Francobolli’s ode to Dada, “Ciao Chow Chow,” and Christiane de Geronimo’s children’s thriller, “Nightlight.”
Francobolli is the daughter of the Suprematist painter Mazlow Molotov (“The Black Russian”) and Constructivist painter Kiri de Kulpe Kloonig (a former courtesan known as “The Dutch Treat”). Bebe’s parents met in Rome at an international stamp-collecting convention and became Italian citizens before their only child was born.
Named Bebe Francobolli (literally Baby Postage Stamps) after her parents’ avocation, she refused to become a philatelist and rejected the art of her ancestors. She turned to Dada, the nihilistic movement that created “non-art,” laughed at overly serious artists and spawned Surrealism.
These influences can be seen clearly in “Ciao Chow Chow,” in which Bebe herself stars. Translated from Italian into English, and then back into Italian again, with no subtitles, the film begins and ends with Bebe waving goodbye to her beloved Chow dog, Antipasto, symbol of her lost youth and of her ridiculous early films.
“Ciao” is a parody of a self-parody, masterful in its simplicity and in its bold statement that life is to be laughed at, and that nothing is serious or sacred.
Basically nihilistic, with Dadaist subject matter and camera angles, this film is convoluted and uneven, personalized and stylized, and will make no sense to anyone who has not seen Bebe’s early travelogue films. Yet, Bebe promises that it will be her last film work, and that alone has prompted critical acclaim.
Avant-garde director Christiane de Geronimo’s “Nightlight” tells the terrifying story of the night the Mickey Mouse nightlight burned out in the Turner household. Little Bobby Turner is forced to face The Clown Puppet, The Vicious Animal Slippers and The Dreaded Man from Under the Bed.
Filmed in black and white, “Nightlight” captures the shadowy horror of every child’s bedroom, and forces even the adult viewer to come to grips with The Thing in the Closet. Not for the squeamish.
De Geronimo’s earlier attempts at children’s thrillers include “The Teddy Bear with No Face,” Scream, Barbie, Scream” and “Revenge of the Katzenjammer Kids,” in which comic-strip characters from the past are set loose on an unwitting Nebraska farm town.
“Nightlight,” the third of her bedtime stories series, features the late French film star Estella de Lumiere in her final role before the dreadful accident on the set of “Murder on the Trampoline.”
Next month, two recent remakes: Canadian filmmaker and ice-hockey champion Pete Steed’s sport-oriented version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”; Fujiko Shiatsu’s sumo wrestling remake of “The Music Man.”
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
An Embarrassment of Riches
Over the past month I’ve started three blog entries that I abandoned because they didn’t inspire me enough to want to share them with you. I’ve felt like there was a lot to say, but that too much was going on in my world to let me focus on any one thing carefully and completely enough to write about it properly. Rather than produce and polish a variety of small pieces and scatter my energies, I had to devote those expansive but still finite energies to making sense of my own personal soap opera, and my writing for public consumption had to be shelved for a spell.
I spent most of the past night ruminating, twisting and torquing in bed as I overanalyzed my little universe and all that orbits within it. All these revolutions on my own axis helped me realize a great deal. Forgive my switching metaphors abruptly, but I see that I’ve been in collecting mode for years and especially for the past few months. Now, like a museum curator, I need to take stock of the collection and determine which pieces need special handling, which are underappreciated gems, which need to be shared with other collectors and which need to be, as they so awkwardly put it in the art world, deaccessioned.
Collecting things and thoughts, dreams and relationships, inspirations and art project parts, beautiful experiences and thoughts and possibilities has absorbed my attention for some time now. I have trouble letting go of or giving up some of these fabulous entries in my personal life museum, since each new part of the collection represents a new opportunity, a new understanding, a new chance at finding or creating beauty. Each new art project, essay, book idea, friendship or purchase has been exciting, but each has also opened the door to doubt and questions, leaps of faith forward as well as a lack of faith in myself, bursts of great confidence and moments of weakness, a feeling of being overwhelmed, cluttered, presented with much possibility but unable to attend to it all properly. What a roiling, rolling and relentless time it’s been.
This has been a time to gather stray bits and pieces for art projects and assemblages rather like a magpie does, looking for the sparkly bits that catch my eye and work well with other things in my collection, until I have so many delicious art supplies that I can’t find half of what I want among the tasty rare papers, the hand-carved buttons, the bits of gnarled twig carefully collected with a friend or the pens that feel so good in my hand that I never want to put them down. I’ve collected images and ideas, notes and photos, cards and fabric swatches until my source file of amusing and inspiring oddments has spread beyond reasonable confines and overwhelms rather than delights me. The books and articles I’ve gathered to help me research not one but two important writing projects lie next to two biographies of Shakespeare I want to read after I catch up with my New Yorker back issues, my unread short story collections, my books of essays and videotapes and notes to myself. Piled up in too many places are the endless design and fashion magazines I love to flip through for ideas on combining pattern and color, shadow and space, movement and stasis in my art, my writing, my home.
In addition to collecting things and information, I've collected people. I’ve made concerted efforts to meet engaging, endearing and sometimes exasperating new people these past few months and realized anew the importance of prioritizing relationships and art above other things in life. I’ve recognized a wellspring of creative ideas and exciting possibilities within myself and faced fears about braving the unknown and perhaps failing to focus my talents in a way that elevates and expands upon my ideas. This has been a time of expanding and opening up my eyes and ears, considering, cogitating, questioning, and of acquiring things and thoughts, ideas and opportunities, friendships and goals. Sometimes it’s good to open one’s arms to all the possibilities, and sometimes it’s necessary to choose what to hold onto and what to put down. My arms are too full now and the treasures are getting heavy, so it seems this is the time to rest and regroup, to choose and in some cases, to let go of possibilities to make room to foster those most appropriate for my life, my abilities and my opportunities.
So it is that I’ve been choosing and sorting and prioritizing my things, my work and my life. I’ve felt my energies, thoughts and talents scattered all over the place and have worried that it was a bad thing, a difficult thing, a sign of error or an excess of desire for novelty, perhaps a lack of direction or discipline. Now I’m realizing that it was a process of learning and preparation in more ways than I was aware of. I’ve collected too much stuff in hopes of making it into something greater as well as in an effort to comfort myself during a tricky time, I know. It’s not hard to find elements of the excessive and extraneous in my home right now. I’ve had trouble relinquishing things that remind me of my history or of people who have touched me, and I’ve had difficulty saying no to things that might make wonderful art works, sewing projects, inspiration for stories or essays, unusual gifts or decorative displays. I’ve made myself tired writing or talking with or meeting too many new people too late into the night or too early in the morning so that I could learn from them and expand my world by trying to see it through their eyes. It’s now time to sort through the experiences, the thoughts, the books and photos, beads and silks, plants and pillows and papers, and to give some of my riches away and turn others down in order to clear a space in my mind, heart and home for the necessary things.
So that I might have a clearer sense of direction and purpose, I’ve had to make difficult choices about which possibilities to cling to and which to turn from, which projects to put aside, and which treasures to scatter among those who don’t have the luxury of living among this embarrassment of riches in which I find myself floating. Some of my dearest treasures have been friendships that haven’t blossomed as I might have liked, but even those have bred understanding and enlightenment, and I bless and thank each friend who helped me along my journey, even if our paths were sometimes unsteady or poorly lit. I hope the dear people I've met along my path will find joy, humor, illumination and pleasure in being with people who delight them. I wish them all the awareness, confidence, humility and peace that can come with self-knowledge. Each remarkable person who has walked with, sat with, spoken to or written to me during these past months has given me a gift and allowed me to give the gift of myself, my insights, my enthusiasm or my talents in a way which enriched me. I hope each feels he or she gained something valuable from the experience. I know I have. I am grateful to each of them.
Going out into the world to gather these experiential and material riches has taken a great deal of energy. I’m not by nature comfortable pushing my way out into the world or presenting my viewpoints, my art or myself to those not already within my circle of friends. Having the chance to have fine, thoughtful, clever and insightful people get to know me and open their hearts to me in return has been a gift, but sometimes gifts come at a price. To be truly heard, seen and understood may be exciting, but it also means risking being misunderstood, being rejected, being undervalued or being challenged. Learning experiences are enriching and sometimes inspiring, but they also jog loose old fears and expectations and invite navel-gazing and self-critical moments that can shut out the light of the world around. Enlightenment may be a noble goal, but the path to it can be steep and the road rocky. And when two paths diverge in that famous yellow wood, sometimes there really is a right or a wrong road to take or have taken, and it’s not always clear which is which before one gets to the dark and winding bit in the middle.
Gathering, collecting, building and amassing are more fun than sorting, clearing out and making the hard choices about what treasures stay and which ones must go. But once the winnowing is done, true treasures stand out more clearly and their preciousness is easier to acknowledge. And after all the gathering, considering and analyzing, I have some true treasures in my life now which weren't there a few months ago, and which I wouldn't have if I hadn't been willing to dive in, carry more than I could hold easily and ask difficult questions of myself and sometimes of others. And, of course, I wouldn't have some of my greatest treasures if I hadn't also had some outrageously good fortune and been shown some generous and openhearted love and kindness. Part of what I have has come from being a keen-eyed magpie who knows what to gather and how to find the good stuff, but the greater part of what I've been blessed with comes simply from being a very lucky duck. This little hopping bird is fortunate, indeed.
Sometimes it’s more important to gather wits than bits and pieces, and giving away can enrich one more than hoarding can. I hope I can find joy and opportunity in the winnowing phase now; part of me fears it will be a hard slog that makes me face more fears than I can or should. But part of me knows that the only way to get safely past these fears will be to walk right through them and shed them as I do so, so on I go.
I spent most of the past night ruminating, twisting and torquing in bed as I overanalyzed my little universe and all that orbits within it. All these revolutions on my own axis helped me realize a great deal. Forgive my switching metaphors abruptly, but I see that I’ve been in collecting mode for years and especially for the past few months. Now, like a museum curator, I need to take stock of the collection and determine which pieces need special handling, which are underappreciated gems, which need to be shared with other collectors and which need to be, as they so awkwardly put it in the art world, deaccessioned.
Collecting things and thoughts, dreams and relationships, inspirations and art project parts, beautiful experiences and thoughts and possibilities has absorbed my attention for some time now. I have trouble letting go of or giving up some of these fabulous entries in my personal life museum, since each new part of the collection represents a new opportunity, a new understanding, a new chance at finding or creating beauty. Each new art project, essay, book idea, friendship or purchase has been exciting, but each has also opened the door to doubt and questions, leaps of faith forward as well as a lack of faith in myself, bursts of great confidence and moments of weakness, a feeling of being overwhelmed, cluttered, presented with much possibility but unable to attend to it all properly. What a roiling, rolling and relentless time it’s been.
This has been a time to gather stray bits and pieces for art projects and assemblages rather like a magpie does, looking for the sparkly bits that catch my eye and work well with other things in my collection, until I have so many delicious art supplies that I can’t find half of what I want among the tasty rare papers, the hand-carved buttons, the bits of gnarled twig carefully collected with a friend or the pens that feel so good in my hand that I never want to put them down. I’ve collected images and ideas, notes and photos, cards and fabric swatches until my source file of amusing and inspiring oddments has spread beyond reasonable confines and overwhelms rather than delights me. The books and articles I’ve gathered to help me research not one but two important writing projects lie next to two biographies of Shakespeare I want to read after I catch up with my New Yorker back issues, my unread short story collections, my books of essays and videotapes and notes to myself. Piled up in too many places are the endless design and fashion magazines I love to flip through for ideas on combining pattern and color, shadow and space, movement and stasis in my art, my writing, my home.
In addition to collecting things and information, I've collected people. I’ve made concerted efforts to meet engaging, endearing and sometimes exasperating new people these past few months and realized anew the importance of prioritizing relationships and art above other things in life. I’ve recognized a wellspring of creative ideas and exciting possibilities within myself and faced fears about braving the unknown and perhaps failing to focus my talents in a way that elevates and expands upon my ideas. This has been a time of expanding and opening up my eyes and ears, considering, cogitating, questioning, and of acquiring things and thoughts, ideas and opportunities, friendships and goals. Sometimes it’s good to open one’s arms to all the possibilities, and sometimes it’s necessary to choose what to hold onto and what to put down. My arms are too full now and the treasures are getting heavy, so it seems this is the time to rest and regroup, to choose and in some cases, to let go of possibilities to make room to foster those most appropriate for my life, my abilities and my opportunities.
So it is that I’ve been choosing and sorting and prioritizing my things, my work and my life. I’ve felt my energies, thoughts and talents scattered all over the place and have worried that it was a bad thing, a difficult thing, a sign of error or an excess of desire for novelty, perhaps a lack of direction or discipline. Now I’m realizing that it was a process of learning and preparation in more ways than I was aware of. I’ve collected too much stuff in hopes of making it into something greater as well as in an effort to comfort myself during a tricky time, I know. It’s not hard to find elements of the excessive and extraneous in my home right now. I’ve had trouble relinquishing things that remind me of my history or of people who have touched me, and I’ve had difficulty saying no to things that might make wonderful art works, sewing projects, inspiration for stories or essays, unusual gifts or decorative displays. I’ve made myself tired writing or talking with or meeting too many new people too late into the night or too early in the morning so that I could learn from them and expand my world by trying to see it through their eyes. It’s now time to sort through the experiences, the thoughts, the books and photos, beads and silks, plants and pillows and papers, and to give some of my riches away and turn others down in order to clear a space in my mind, heart and home for the necessary things.
So that I might have a clearer sense of direction and purpose, I’ve had to make difficult choices about which possibilities to cling to and which to turn from, which projects to put aside, and which treasures to scatter among those who don’t have the luxury of living among this embarrassment of riches in which I find myself floating. Some of my dearest treasures have been friendships that haven’t blossomed as I might have liked, but even those have bred understanding and enlightenment, and I bless and thank each friend who helped me along my journey, even if our paths were sometimes unsteady or poorly lit. I hope the dear people I've met along my path will find joy, humor, illumination and pleasure in being with people who delight them. I wish them all the awareness, confidence, humility and peace that can come with self-knowledge. Each remarkable person who has walked with, sat with, spoken to or written to me during these past months has given me a gift and allowed me to give the gift of myself, my insights, my enthusiasm or my talents in a way which enriched me. I hope each feels he or she gained something valuable from the experience. I know I have. I am grateful to each of them.
Going out into the world to gather these experiential and material riches has taken a great deal of energy. I’m not by nature comfortable pushing my way out into the world or presenting my viewpoints, my art or myself to those not already within my circle of friends. Having the chance to have fine, thoughtful, clever and insightful people get to know me and open their hearts to me in return has been a gift, but sometimes gifts come at a price. To be truly heard, seen and understood may be exciting, but it also means risking being misunderstood, being rejected, being undervalued or being challenged. Learning experiences are enriching and sometimes inspiring, but they also jog loose old fears and expectations and invite navel-gazing and self-critical moments that can shut out the light of the world around. Enlightenment may be a noble goal, but the path to it can be steep and the road rocky. And when two paths diverge in that famous yellow wood, sometimes there really is a right or a wrong road to take or have taken, and it’s not always clear which is which before one gets to the dark and winding bit in the middle.
Gathering, collecting, building and amassing are more fun than sorting, clearing out and making the hard choices about what treasures stay and which ones must go. But once the winnowing is done, true treasures stand out more clearly and their preciousness is easier to acknowledge. And after all the gathering, considering and analyzing, I have some true treasures in my life now which weren't there a few months ago, and which I wouldn't have if I hadn't been willing to dive in, carry more than I could hold easily and ask difficult questions of myself and sometimes of others. And, of course, I wouldn't have some of my greatest treasures if I hadn't also had some outrageously good fortune and been shown some generous and openhearted love and kindness. Part of what I have has come from being a keen-eyed magpie who knows what to gather and how to find the good stuff, but the greater part of what I've been blessed with comes simply from being a very lucky duck. This little hopping bird is fortunate, indeed.
Sometimes it’s more important to gather wits than bits and pieces, and giving away can enrich one more than hoarding can. I hope I can find joy and opportunity in the winnowing phase now; part of me fears it will be a hard slog that makes me face more fears than I can or should. But part of me knows that the only way to get safely past these fears will be to walk right through them and shed them as I do so, so on I go.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Tasty Web Sites
Ah, babies, I am so busy enjoying the sheer ultrafabulousness of my life that I've been too overwhelmed by the swirling vortex of wonderment I'm spinning in to take a moment to fashion another show-stopping delight of a blog entry for you.
Or something like that.
So while I change from this little sequinned, split-level, scanty-but-sensational evening gown into my whirly-girly perfect party dress for another champagne-soaked night on the town with my coterie of adoring admirers, let me just take a quick minute to share these scintillating sites with you for your perusing pleasure.
• The Fagat Guide: Wickedly witty site, home of insights from darling gay guys, including dish on Bravo's brilliant fashion reality show, Project Runway (the only, only, only reality show I will watch, not only for the drama but especially for the chance to watch wildly talented people create art out of next to nothing—how I pine for the show during these long months of hiatus); how to parse a Dolce & Gabbana ad; and only-in-New-York stories.
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: Inspires prolonged laughter. Subtitled, "I keep track of Condoleezza's hairdo so you don't have to," this blog includes terrific politically themed photos and favorite features such as "Sparkle Pony Interactive," which lets you vote on the following question: "Which would you enjoy more? An elegant sit-down dinner with Condoleezza Rice; bloodthirsty ticks applied directly to your eyeballs; scabies; awakening to find Charles Krauthammers' mutilated corpse in your bed; flying in a helicopter with Tony Snow; or spontaneous finger loss?"
• Jesus of the Week. 'Nuff said.
Or something like that.
So while I change from this little sequinned, split-level, scanty-but-sensational evening gown into my whirly-girly perfect party dress for another champagne-soaked night on the town with my coterie of adoring admirers, let me just take a quick minute to share these scintillating sites with you for your perusing pleasure.
• The Fagat Guide: Wickedly witty site, home of insights from darling gay guys, including dish on Bravo's brilliant fashion reality show, Project Runway (the only, only, only reality show I will watch, not only for the drama but especially for the chance to watch wildly talented people create art out of next to nothing—how I pine for the show during these long months of hiatus); how to parse a Dolce & Gabbana ad; and only-in-New-York stories.
• Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: Inspires prolonged laughter. Subtitled, "I keep track of Condoleezza's hairdo so you don't have to," this blog includes terrific politically themed photos and favorite features such as "Sparkle Pony Interactive," which lets you vote on the following question: "Which would you enjoy more? An elegant sit-down dinner with Condoleezza Rice; bloodthirsty ticks applied directly to your eyeballs; scabies; awakening to find Charles Krauthammers' mutilated corpse in your bed; flying in a helicopter with Tony Snow; or spontaneous finger loss?"
• Jesus of the Week. 'Nuff said.
Monday, June 05, 2006
With the Lights Out, It's Less Dangerous
With the lights out, it's less dangerous
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido
Yay!
When Nirvana released the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, it helped make them into rock gods. Ironic, isn’t it, since the song was Kurt Cobain’s dig at mainstream culture. According to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, “Kurt really despised the mainstream. That's what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was all about: the mass mentality of conformity.” But the song, which Rolling Stone magazine ranked ninth in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, was too catchy, sexy, moody, hard to understand, hard-edged, frayed and nearly perfect to escape the clutches of the mainstream. Its hard-to-decipher lyrics were skewered by Weird Al Yankovic in his parody, “Smells Like Nirvana,” which featured lines like:
What is this song all about?
Can't figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go?
I wish you'd tell me, I don't know
In a 1994 MTV interview, Kurt Cobain said of the parody, “Oh, I laughed my butt off. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. He has some good people working for him. . . . They really know how to reproduce things to the T. He had the exact same setup. It's the same video with him in it. It's great.”
For an entertaining roundup of horrible cover versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," you must check out April Winchell's awesome multimedia site full of free audio clips that will keep you listening and chuckling in amused horror for hours, long after you've exhausted the "Teen Spirit" covers in polka, disco, Paul Anka and Gregorian chant versions. Winchell (daughter of the late ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who was also the voice of Tigger for Disney for many years) has a radio show in Los Angeles and has put together a very funny Web site complete with the best collection of odd aural pleasures I've found online: corporate training tapes, celebrities like Leonard Nimoy and Farrah Fawcett singing (they really shouldn't), Abba covers in Hindi, masturbation tips from a NYC phone hotline, Johnny Cash singing "I Walk the Line" in German, Dolly Parton singing "Stairway to Heaven," a whole section devoted to terrifying Christian recordings—you name it.
The original "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a perfect blending of droning, captivating, chant-like repetition; buzzing power chords; barely understandable but still compelling lyrics and ragged-voiced angst. It encapsulates suffering, cynicism, dry humor and teen alienation. It felt fresh 15 years ago, and it still sounds fresh and raw today, despite being named the Most Played Video on MTV Europe in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records. Even though it’s one second over five minutes long, it doesn’t feel drawn out; its pacing, its bridges, even its repetition make it somehow stronger rather than monotonous. The layering of instruments makes for a great, pulsing wash of sound, but within the layers are subtleties, long-held and echoing guitar notes, a threatening bass line, and Cobain’s growling voice matching the bending notes and jagged timbre of the instruments around him, so his voice becomes an instrument to match them. The melding of his own voice and the growling guitar when he says “Yay!” is spookily satisfying, and gave me the same little shiver after the hundredth listen that it gave me the first time.
While the music on Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” from which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes, is classified as grunge, it’s really just a polished, pure and more accessible form of punk, slowed down enough to be grabbed and ridden on, but it channels the anarchic spirit of British punks like the Sex Pistols, whose seminal album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” probably inspired Cobain to name the Nirvana album “Nevermind” in their honor. (Some say it’s also a tribute to the Replacements song “Nevermind.”) Unlike American punk bands like the wonderful Ramones, whose screamingly fast-paced songs about sniffing glue and teenage lobotomy patients, punk rockers and beating on brats with baseball bats were essentially all in good, mindless fun, the Sex Pistols really were about anarchy, giving the finger to the establishment, protesting the moral bankruptcy of middle- and upper-class British twits, the monarchy and the conservative political leaders of the 1970s and 1980s. They were the real deal, and Cobain admired that twisted, angry, anarchic vibe. That vibe was bent, reformed and polished into some of Nirvana’s best work, and their songs were musically inventive and attractively melodic enough to grab people who would never give straight punk a second thought while being honest enough to appeal to pure punks as well. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was essentially a crossover hit, and its success rather embarrassed Cobain, since it made him and Nirvana superstars beyond imagining and, it seems, beyond Cobain’s ability to handle the attention, the adulation, and being co-opted by the mainstream until he became a media darling largely against his will. His drug problems and ultimate suicide of course only fueled his legend and turned him into a mythic figure of alienated youth and artistic purity tarnished by too much interaction with the filthy mainstream, the same mainstream which his widow Courtney Love alternately woos and trashes.
So where does the title come from? Kurt Cobain dated Tobi Vail of the group Bikini Kill, she used Teen Spirit, a deodorant marketed to teen girls. Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna painted “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his wall to imply that he was marked with his girlfriend’s scent, but Cobain didn’t realize the reference and thought he was being complimented on his spirit of youthful rebellion. Again, how ironic: his anti-mainstream screed also served as inadvertent advertising for a Colgate-Palmolive product aimed at the teen masses.
Here we are now, entertain us
I feel stupid and contagious
Here we are now, entertain us
A mulatto
An albino
A mosquito
My libido
Yay!
When Nirvana released the song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” in 1991, it helped make them into rock gods. Ironic, isn’t it, since the song was Kurt Cobain’s dig at mainstream culture. According to Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic, “Kurt really despised the mainstream. That's what ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was all about: the mass mentality of conformity.” But the song, which Rolling Stone magazine ranked ninth in its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, was too catchy, sexy, moody, hard to understand, hard-edged, frayed and nearly perfect to escape the clutches of the mainstream. Its hard-to-decipher lyrics were skewered by Weird Al Yankovic in his parody, “Smells Like Nirvana,” which featured lines like:
What is this song all about?
Can't figure any lyrics out
How do the words to it go?
I wish you'd tell me, I don't know
In a 1994 MTV interview, Kurt Cobain said of the parody, “Oh, I laughed my butt off. I thought it was one of the funniest things I ever saw. He has some good people working for him. . . . They really know how to reproduce things to the T. He had the exact same setup. It's the same video with him in it. It's great.”
For an entertaining roundup of horrible cover versions of "Smells Like Teen Spirit," you must check out April Winchell's awesome multimedia site full of free audio clips that will keep you listening and chuckling in amused horror for hours, long after you've exhausted the "Teen Spirit" covers in polka, disco, Paul Anka and Gregorian chant versions. Winchell (daughter of the late ventriloquist Paul Winchell, who was also the voice of Tigger for Disney for many years) has a radio show in Los Angeles and has put together a very funny Web site complete with the best collection of odd aural pleasures I've found online: corporate training tapes, celebrities like Leonard Nimoy and Farrah Fawcett singing (they really shouldn't), Abba covers in Hindi, masturbation tips from a NYC phone hotline, Johnny Cash singing "I Walk the Line" in German, Dolly Parton singing "Stairway to Heaven," a whole section devoted to terrifying Christian recordings—you name it.
The original "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is a perfect blending of droning, captivating, chant-like repetition; buzzing power chords; barely understandable but still compelling lyrics and ragged-voiced angst. It encapsulates suffering, cynicism, dry humor and teen alienation. It felt fresh 15 years ago, and it still sounds fresh and raw today, despite being named the Most Played Video on MTV Europe in the 2000 Guinness Book of World Records. Even though it’s one second over five minutes long, it doesn’t feel drawn out; its pacing, its bridges, even its repetition make it somehow stronger rather than monotonous. The layering of instruments makes for a great, pulsing wash of sound, but within the layers are subtleties, long-held and echoing guitar notes, a threatening bass line, and Cobain’s growling voice matching the bending notes and jagged timbre of the instruments around him, so his voice becomes an instrument to match them. The melding of his own voice and the growling guitar when he says “Yay!” is spookily satisfying, and gave me the same little shiver after the hundredth listen that it gave me the first time.
While the music on Nirvana’s second album, “Nevermind,” from which “Smells Like Teen Spirit” comes, is classified as grunge, it’s really just a polished, pure and more accessible form of punk, slowed down enough to be grabbed and ridden on, but it channels the anarchic spirit of British punks like the Sex Pistols, whose seminal album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols” probably inspired Cobain to name the Nirvana album “Nevermind” in their honor. (Some say it’s also a tribute to the Replacements song “Nevermind.”) Unlike American punk bands like the wonderful Ramones, whose screamingly fast-paced songs about sniffing glue and teenage lobotomy patients, punk rockers and beating on brats with baseball bats were essentially all in good, mindless fun, the Sex Pistols really were about anarchy, giving the finger to the establishment, protesting the moral bankruptcy of middle- and upper-class British twits, the monarchy and the conservative political leaders of the 1970s and 1980s. They were the real deal, and Cobain admired that twisted, angry, anarchic vibe. That vibe was bent, reformed and polished into some of Nirvana’s best work, and their songs were musically inventive and attractively melodic enough to grab people who would never give straight punk a second thought while being honest enough to appeal to pure punks as well. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was essentially a crossover hit, and its success rather embarrassed Cobain, since it made him and Nirvana superstars beyond imagining and, it seems, beyond Cobain’s ability to handle the attention, the adulation, and being co-opted by the mainstream until he became a media darling largely against his will. His drug problems and ultimate suicide of course only fueled his legend and turned him into a mythic figure of alienated youth and artistic purity tarnished by too much interaction with the filthy mainstream, the same mainstream which his widow Courtney Love alternately woos and trashes.
So where does the title come from? Kurt Cobain dated Tobi Vail of the group Bikini Kill, she used Teen Spirit, a deodorant marketed to teen girls. Bikini Kill member Kathleen Hanna painted “Kurt Smells Like Teen Spirit” on his wall to imply that he was marked with his girlfriend’s scent, but Cobain didn’t realize the reference and thought he was being complimented on his spirit of youthful rebellion. Again, how ironic: his anti-mainstream screed also served as inadvertent advertising for a Colgate-Palmolive product aimed at the teen masses.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Emotionally Scarring Toys
In December 2005 researchers at England’s University of Bath released the results of a study that found that children, especially girls, see torturing and mutilating their Barbies as a common and enjoyable form of play. An article in the London Times stated that “mutilation ranged from cutting off hair to decapitating and putting the dolls in microwaves.” Children ages seven to eleven were said to “see Barbie torture as a legitimate play activity, and see the torture as a 'cool' activity,” according to the article. The children were aware that they were being exploited by “over-marketing and over-charging” and that rejecting the doll was a “rite of passage” engaged in by children who felt they’d outgrown their Barbies. “Barbies are not special,” said the researchers. “They are disposable, and are thrown away and rejected.”
I considered my own and my daughter’s history with Barbies, and I had to take issue with some of the article’s findings. Cutting Barbie’s hair isn’t really an act of mutilation in the way that putting her in the microwave is; children know that cutting their own hair gets them in trouble, but cutting Barbie’s hair gives them the satisfaction of distorting her appearance and messing with the standard and approved way of viewing her, yes, but it also lets them know what it feels like to cut hair. The Barbies I grew up around often had missing toes; this is not because we wanted to bind their feet golden lotus–style and further fetishize their sexual-fantasy-based bodies but because chewing the rubbery plastic felt good and eventually gnawing away at them resulted in their coming off completely in the mouth in a pleasant if slightly disturbing fashion. Pulling Barbie heads off was common when I was a child, not because we were acting out scenes from Robespierre's Reign of Terror but because we wanted to trade them around among dolls with different features and outfits. We also pierced our dolls’ ears (leaving them looking grey and infected) and bent their knees back and forth so much for the sheer pleasure of hearing the click click click of their joints that their skin tore.
But do people take pleasure in creating their own torture tableaux featuring Barbie, Ken and all their plastic molded-bodied friends? Of course. Their constantly perky expressions and injection-molded perfection do invite children to challenge their prefab poise. They look so inviting in the box, but take them out of the vivid fuchsia packaging and their clothes are hard to put on, and their hair gets bunched up and never lies flat again and gets permanently dull and stringy when Barbie is invited to play in the bathtub. Ken’s spray-painted hair wears off and he ends up with flesh coloring showing through in patches that have nothing to do with standard male-pattern baldness. Barbie is not only free of genitalia, but sometimes has molded skin-colored patterns simulating underwear built right into what would be her buttocks if she had any gluteal muscles to cover her sorry, skinny ass.
Barbie’s original design was based on that of the Bild Lilli, a 1950s German sex doll aimed at men. Don’t believe me? Check out this side-by-side comparison. When Barbie debuted in 1959, many parents found her obviously sexualized nature disturbing. But, of course, this aspect of her is partly what has always made her so alluring to children. She’s the premiere socially sanctioned sexualized plaything that allows young children to engage in pre-sexual roleplay and pretend to embody the roles they think are expected of them as they mature. Children live out stereotypes with Barbies and also challenge them and laugh at them.
The by-now widespread delight that children take in trashing their Barbies when they feel they’ve outgrown them might be a reaction to the stereotypes, expectations and mass-merchandizing overconsumption extravaganza that Barbie represents, at least in part. But often Barbie’s mutilation is an unintentional byproduct of trying to personalize her and make her more interesting and individual. When this attempt results in a Barbie who is almost always less appealing as a result, both her loss of allure and her inability to grow into something uniquely appealing make her a sorry remnant of a time of earlier naivete and a reminder of failed attempts at creating more individualized beauty. Rather than feel bad every time we see what our attempts at beautification have done, it’s easier to dissociate her from her former status as beauty icon if we take her destruction even further. If she’s ugly and all the gloss and perfection that we once admired in her is gone, why not turn her into a doggy chew toy or see what happens if we take nail polish remover to the paint on her face? If we turn her into a science experiment, we feel less disappointed in her lost glory.
In 1992, Barbie’s reputation for mindlessness was bolstered by the release of Teen Talk Barbie. This talking Barbie spewed forth phrases like “Math is hard!” and “Will we ever have enough clothes?” A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization soon became famous for engaging in acts of Barbie sabotage, exchanging Barbie’s talking guts for the voice hardware found in Mattel’s Talking G.I. Joe dolls. The BLO repackaged three hundred dolls and slid them back onto store shelves. When unsuspecting little girls tried their new Barbies at home, the fashion dolls grunted out “Vengeance is mine!” and "Dead men tell no tales," while little boys' new G.I. Joes cooed “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”
Of course, some toys are less than glorious to begin with, and only become more disturbing or ridiculous with time. Others begin attractively and grow frightening with disuse or misuse. Such are the toys found on one of my favorite Web sites, DisturbingAuctions.com. The site’s home page states that Disturbing Auctions “is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on Internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.”
DisturbingAuctions.com features home furnishings including the velvet painting of Jesus blessing an 18-wheeler, accessories such as the purse made of a bull’s scrotum, clothing, such as used gym shorts and a matching used jock strap, and haute cuisine, including 200 freeze-dried pork chops. But nothing can compare to discovering the hideous figurines, including the “Check Out My Ass Clown” (make sure to look at the optional magnified view for ultimate flamboyant clown perusing pleasure), the items classified as Terrifying Dolls, or, my favorites, the Emotionally Scarring Toys.
The Terrifying Dolls category features the pained, shriveled and body-part-challenged Puppet Assortment, the pinheaded Li’l Head Doll, and Baby Tears-Your-Flesh, a.k.a. Little Dolly No-Head. Big Hands Baby and the Saddam Hussein puppet also get honorable mention.
Clowns have a special place on Disturbing Auctions; there is a clown brooch, a clown ashtray and a vicious Cranky Clown Lava Lamp, among other items. Dead stuffed frogs also have their places, as does the stuffed and mounted genuine Deer Butt. The Clark Gable candle puts one in mind of a wax-covered severed head, and why the seller of the Inflatable Ladies' Legs had to mention that they fit in the mouth when not inflated is anyone’s guess.
Still, the Emotionally Scarring Toys is the biggest, juiciest treasure trove of outrageous kitsch. From the Dean Martin Hand Puppet to our beloved Big-Ass Donkey, from Darth Small to the marvelously named Pooduck, it’s hard to find an entry that isn’t deeply, horribly, hideously wrong down to its very core.
While most of the site has stayed static for years, there is a related site, DisturbingAuctions.com/daily, where visitors can post their own horrific online auction discoveries and attach their own witty (or, more frequently, just vulgar) commentaries. There are occasional gems to be found here, but the older, original DisturbingAuctions.com site has the most consistently hideous and perfectly captioned offerings. All hail the Pooduck!
I considered my own and my daughter’s history with Barbies, and I had to take issue with some of the article’s findings. Cutting Barbie’s hair isn’t really an act of mutilation in the way that putting her in the microwave is; children know that cutting their own hair gets them in trouble, but cutting Barbie’s hair gives them the satisfaction of distorting her appearance and messing with the standard and approved way of viewing her, yes, but it also lets them know what it feels like to cut hair. The Barbies I grew up around often had missing toes; this is not because we wanted to bind their feet golden lotus–style and further fetishize their sexual-fantasy-based bodies but because chewing the rubbery plastic felt good and eventually gnawing away at them resulted in their coming off completely in the mouth in a pleasant if slightly disturbing fashion. Pulling Barbie heads off was common when I was a child, not because we were acting out scenes from Robespierre's Reign of Terror but because we wanted to trade them around among dolls with different features and outfits. We also pierced our dolls’ ears (leaving them looking grey and infected) and bent their knees back and forth so much for the sheer pleasure of hearing the click click click of their joints that their skin tore.
But do people take pleasure in creating their own torture tableaux featuring Barbie, Ken and all their plastic molded-bodied friends? Of course. Their constantly perky expressions and injection-molded perfection do invite children to challenge their prefab poise. They look so inviting in the box, but take them out of the vivid fuchsia packaging and their clothes are hard to put on, and their hair gets bunched up and never lies flat again and gets permanently dull and stringy when Barbie is invited to play in the bathtub. Ken’s spray-painted hair wears off and he ends up with flesh coloring showing through in patches that have nothing to do with standard male-pattern baldness. Barbie is not only free of genitalia, but sometimes has molded skin-colored patterns simulating underwear built right into what would be her buttocks if she had any gluteal muscles to cover her sorry, skinny ass.
Barbie’s original design was based on that of the Bild Lilli, a 1950s German sex doll aimed at men. Don’t believe me? Check out this side-by-side comparison. When Barbie debuted in 1959, many parents found her obviously sexualized nature disturbing. But, of course, this aspect of her is partly what has always made her so alluring to children. She’s the premiere socially sanctioned sexualized plaything that allows young children to engage in pre-sexual roleplay and pretend to embody the roles they think are expected of them as they mature. Children live out stereotypes with Barbies and also challenge them and laugh at them.
The by-now widespread delight that children take in trashing their Barbies when they feel they’ve outgrown them might be a reaction to the stereotypes, expectations and mass-merchandizing overconsumption extravaganza that Barbie represents, at least in part. But often Barbie’s mutilation is an unintentional byproduct of trying to personalize her and make her more interesting and individual. When this attempt results in a Barbie who is almost always less appealing as a result, both her loss of allure and her inability to grow into something uniquely appealing make her a sorry remnant of a time of earlier naivete and a reminder of failed attempts at creating more individualized beauty. Rather than feel bad every time we see what our attempts at beautification have done, it’s easier to dissociate her from her former status as beauty icon if we take her destruction even further. If she’s ugly and all the gloss and perfection that we once admired in her is gone, why not turn her into a doggy chew toy or see what happens if we take nail polish remover to the paint on her face? If we turn her into a science experiment, we feel less disappointed in her lost glory.
In 1992, Barbie’s reputation for mindlessness was bolstered by the release of Teen Talk Barbie. This talking Barbie spewed forth phrases like “Math is hard!” and “Will we ever have enough clothes?” A group calling itself the Barbie Liberation Organization soon became famous for engaging in acts of Barbie sabotage, exchanging Barbie’s talking guts for the voice hardware found in Mattel’s Talking G.I. Joe dolls. The BLO repackaged three hundred dolls and slid them back onto store shelves. When unsuspecting little girls tried their new Barbies at home, the fashion dolls grunted out “Vengeance is mine!” and "Dead men tell no tales," while little boys' new G.I. Joes cooed “Let’s plan our dream wedding!”
Of course, some toys are less than glorious to begin with, and only become more disturbing or ridiculous with time. Others begin attractively and grow frightening with disuse or misuse. Such are the toys found on one of my favorite Web sites, DisturbingAuctions.com. The site’s home page states that Disturbing Auctions “is dedicated to the research and study of the most bizarre items found for sale on Internet auction sites. Not the obviously fake auctions, like the infamous human kidney, but truly tacky stuff that people really, honestly, believed that someone would (and in some cases did) buy.”
DisturbingAuctions.com features home furnishings including the velvet painting of Jesus blessing an 18-wheeler, accessories such as the purse made of a bull’s scrotum, clothing, such as used gym shorts and a matching used jock strap, and haute cuisine, including 200 freeze-dried pork chops. But nothing can compare to discovering the hideous figurines, including the “Check Out My Ass Clown” (make sure to look at the optional magnified view for ultimate flamboyant clown perusing pleasure), the items classified as Terrifying Dolls, or, my favorites, the Emotionally Scarring Toys.
The Terrifying Dolls category features the pained, shriveled and body-part-challenged Puppet Assortment, the pinheaded Li’l Head Doll, and Baby Tears-Your-Flesh, a.k.a. Little Dolly No-Head. Big Hands Baby and the Saddam Hussein puppet also get honorable mention.
Clowns have a special place on Disturbing Auctions; there is a clown brooch, a clown ashtray and a vicious Cranky Clown Lava Lamp, among other items. Dead stuffed frogs also have their places, as does the stuffed and mounted genuine Deer Butt. The Clark Gable candle puts one in mind of a wax-covered severed head, and why the seller of the Inflatable Ladies' Legs had to mention that they fit in the mouth when not inflated is anyone’s guess.
Still, the Emotionally Scarring Toys is the biggest, juiciest treasure trove of outrageous kitsch. From the Dean Martin Hand Puppet to our beloved Big-Ass Donkey, from Darth Small to the marvelously named Pooduck, it’s hard to find an entry that isn’t deeply, horribly, hideously wrong down to its very core.
While most of the site has stayed static for years, there is a related site, DisturbingAuctions.com/daily, where visitors can post their own horrific online auction discoveries and attach their own witty (or, more frequently, just vulgar) commentaries. There are occasional gems to be found here, but the older, original DisturbingAuctions.com site has the most consistently hideous and perfectly captioned offerings. All hail the Pooduck!
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Painful Blessings
For the past three years I've been building a lush woodland garden around my home. I live directly next to a greenbelt and a creek runs alongside my house from some rooms I can hear the creek as it rushes by in the rainy months, and in spring and summer months the sounds of nickel-sized frogs lull me to sleep. In these months when the weather is warm enough to leave the windows open, I hear the coyotes' nighttime choruses of yips even more distinctly, though their calls to each other echo along the creek even in the cooler months, and I hear them even when all the windows in my home shut out the storms and the cold.
In these spring months, my daughter and I delight not only in all the budding, bursting, blooming plant growth in our garden, but in the frequent presence of gorgeous little animals. We love to watch the birds, an occasional vole or chipmunk, many entertaining squirrels, and, when we're very lucky, rabbits.
Others in our neighborhood complain about the rabbit population and how rabbits devour tender garden shoots. They resent the rabbits and even laugh when their dogs chase bunnies through the streets. Now, I've planted many times more plants in my garden than anyone else in my neighborhood has, even those who have larger lots, and I've lost several hundred dollars worth of shrubs, perennials, ground covers and many bulbs to rabbits in the past three years. So what? Yes, I'd like to see more of those bulbs, and I wish they hadn't done such damage to several of my favorite new flowering shrubs. But they're rabbits. That's their job. And they're gorgeous. The shapes of their bodies, their limbs, their delightful white tails that bob along and disappear when they're surprised between a fuchsia and some hostas, the exquisite texture and shading of their fur, their long and tender ears, their perfect faces: to us, they're some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet. When they come to feast on our clover or hide in our perennials, we feel honored by their presence. If we drive up and see them on our little lawn out front when we get home, we quietly go out to watch them and talk to them in soothing tones. If we see one out back while we're eating breakfast, we feel we've started the day with a blessing. For us, they're not only symbols of spring but of nature in general; of regeneration, yes, but also of vulnerability and of fleeting beauty, and since they rarely stay long, we treasure each visit and call up or down the stairs to each other to remind ourselves that we're witnessing something special, and how lucky we are to share in it.
A couple of weeks ago I decided I really had to do something about the groundcover that was overtaking the berm under my cherry tree near the front porch. The sweet woodruff that I'd planted there so nonchalantly last year had taken over rapidly and hidden all the other tender little things I wanted to focus on, so, reluctantly, I admitted that I needed to pull it up in great bunches. I pulled back a big armful and set it down behind me, and as I turned back to the berm I noticed a hole about two inches across. I moved closer and peeked inside, and I could see movement and three small heads. There was a trio of some sort of animal with heads perhaps one by two inches in size, and as I looked carefully I saw that they were newborns and their eyes were still closed. As they sniffed around after I'd disturbed their quiet I realized that I had found a little nest of tiny bunnies. We'd seen a pair of rabbits on that very berm a day before, and now we realized why. In my determination to try to push nature around, I'd unearthed a little treasure hole. I felt awful; I took my clusters of freshly-pulled sweet woodruff and piled them before the hole again to keep it from being too open and obvious a target for neighborhood cats, dogs, coyotes or other predators. I was glad I'd been wearing rubber gloves so that I hadn't spread too much of my human scent around their home. I ran to get my daughter so that she could peek at them, too, and we cooed and sighed and made happy girly noises in our delight at finding a whole small furry family living in our garden right outside our front door.
Since then we've noticed adult rabbits in our garden every few days, mostly the rabbit we believe is the bunnies' mom, filling up on good green things so she can offer warm milk to her babies. We've tried not to disturb the little family, but we've been excited and pleased at the prospect of meeting the little ones when they decided to go abroad into the garden at large.
This afternoon I was working in Seattle on a freelance editing job. I was just finishing up a week's project and the five hours of sleep I had last night had worn off some time before. I was grinding through the last of my work when I got a call from my daughter telling me that one of the babies was sitting on our porch at that moment, and that it had let her get within two feet of it. It was gorgeous and still, and looked at her patiently with big, dark eyes. She was mesmerized, and so was it. She noticed that flies were hovering around it, though, and it wasn't flicking them away or running from her. We thought nothing of that, though; it was a young thing, so perhaps it didn't know enough to fear us yet.
An hour later we were looking gently around the garden to see if we could find the magic bunny. Horribly, we did; it was lying dead on the berm, about five feet from the hole in which it was born. It didn't look like it had been attacked by one of the dogs careless neighbors let run loose around our home. It was a hot day, and we haven't seen any of its family for a few days, and I fear it may have been abandoned when the others left the little hole, and that it might have starved and suffered from dehydration.
Its little body was among the loveliest I've ever seen: dark, lovely eyes still open to the world, the large white tail, perfectly formed little feet, dear long ears, inviting toast-colored fur. I asked Lily whether she wanted to be with me when I buried it, and she said she wanted to stay with me through everything. So we wrapped our bunny in the funnies; we figured it wouldn't have wanted to be in a hard, dark box, and that a little paper shroud would disintegrate faster than fabric and would let it become part of the ferns in the back corner of our garden more quickly. We couldn't bear to lay it alone in the soil, so we buried it with clover and our favorite variegated pineapple mint, and laid it in a quiet corner with rich soil. We laid a perfect purple clematis blossom and a fragrant sprig of dwarf lilac above its little body, and thanked it for spending its last hours in our company.
A couple of years ago an exquisitely colored love bird, clearly formerly someone's pet, flew onto our driveway while I was gardening and looked up into my face. It was tired and didn't want to be held, but it wouldn't go further than one of my rhododendron branches, so I knew it was weak. I took it in and let it rest in a ventilated box and asked around the neighborhood, but nobody knew it. We put up "FOUND BIRD" signs and took it to the vet to make sure it was okay, but within two days it became listless and had trouble eating. We put its cage in a warm spot and placed a heating pad against the corner and a blanket around the base of the cage, since the vet said the bird, who appeared so healthy, actually showed significant liver damage from being fed too many fatty seeds. It was a very sick little thing and needed warmth and love.
That night, it died in the warm little corner we made for it. We mourned the beautiful bird we had known for so little time, but we also felt blessed that it had chosen to live its final days with us. The same was true with the tiny bunny; for whatever reason, it got as close to us as it could. Yes, it may have simply been seeking a shady spot on a hot day, a cool porch to rest on as its body slowly depleted itself of nutrients. But still, we felt that this small rabbit, like the lovebird, had given us a gift by allowing us to get so close to it and to show it kindnesses just before and after death. We felt humbled in the presence of such beauty and such an early end to its life, and grateful to have seen something so ephemeral and precious up close, right in our own garden.
I spent an hour in the garden after I buried the rabbit. I watered and admired all the new growth, and wondered at how much had happened there in just the last five days since I last took a considered look around at it all. And I wondered at how fast that little rabbit had grown, and at how much hidden life there is all around me in my garden, and how many dramas and stories and secrets there are going on in the houses of the neighbors around me. I realized how odd it is that we can feel alone in such a densely populated world with so many animals right below our feet, and so many tender people right on the other sides of those thin walls we walk and drive by every day.
It was painful for my daughter to have the remarkably lovely experience with the perfect bunny less than two hours before she discovered its lifeless body four feet away. There was a cruelty to the situation, to the rough juxtaposition of great fortune and loss. But we were better for having had it, even with the pain. We again felt the blessing and honor of being chosen by a tender creature in its final hours, and were reminded how fragile the trust it put in us was, and how much responsibility we have to honor and appreciate it.
In these spring months, my daughter and I delight not only in all the budding, bursting, blooming plant growth in our garden, but in the frequent presence of gorgeous little animals. We love to watch the birds, an occasional vole or chipmunk, many entertaining squirrels, and, when we're very lucky, rabbits.
Others in our neighborhood complain about the rabbit population and how rabbits devour tender garden shoots. They resent the rabbits and even laugh when their dogs chase bunnies through the streets. Now, I've planted many times more plants in my garden than anyone else in my neighborhood has, even those who have larger lots, and I've lost several hundred dollars worth of shrubs, perennials, ground covers and many bulbs to rabbits in the past three years. So what? Yes, I'd like to see more of those bulbs, and I wish they hadn't done such damage to several of my favorite new flowering shrubs. But they're rabbits. That's their job. And they're gorgeous. The shapes of their bodies, their limbs, their delightful white tails that bob along and disappear when they're surprised between a fuchsia and some hostas, the exquisite texture and shading of their fur, their long and tender ears, their perfect faces: to us, they're some of the most beautiful creatures on the planet. When they come to feast on our clover or hide in our perennials, we feel honored by their presence. If we drive up and see them on our little lawn out front when we get home, we quietly go out to watch them and talk to them in soothing tones. If we see one out back while we're eating breakfast, we feel we've started the day with a blessing. For us, they're not only symbols of spring but of nature in general; of regeneration, yes, but also of vulnerability and of fleeting beauty, and since they rarely stay long, we treasure each visit and call up or down the stairs to each other to remind ourselves that we're witnessing something special, and how lucky we are to share in it.
A couple of weeks ago I decided I really had to do something about the groundcover that was overtaking the berm under my cherry tree near the front porch. The sweet woodruff that I'd planted there so nonchalantly last year had taken over rapidly and hidden all the other tender little things I wanted to focus on, so, reluctantly, I admitted that I needed to pull it up in great bunches. I pulled back a big armful and set it down behind me, and as I turned back to the berm I noticed a hole about two inches across. I moved closer and peeked inside, and I could see movement and three small heads. There was a trio of some sort of animal with heads perhaps one by two inches in size, and as I looked carefully I saw that they were newborns and their eyes were still closed. As they sniffed around after I'd disturbed their quiet I realized that I had found a little nest of tiny bunnies. We'd seen a pair of rabbits on that very berm a day before, and now we realized why. In my determination to try to push nature around, I'd unearthed a little treasure hole. I felt awful; I took my clusters of freshly-pulled sweet woodruff and piled them before the hole again to keep it from being too open and obvious a target for neighborhood cats, dogs, coyotes or other predators. I was glad I'd been wearing rubber gloves so that I hadn't spread too much of my human scent around their home. I ran to get my daughter so that she could peek at them, too, and we cooed and sighed and made happy girly noises in our delight at finding a whole small furry family living in our garden right outside our front door.
Since then we've noticed adult rabbits in our garden every few days, mostly the rabbit we believe is the bunnies' mom, filling up on good green things so she can offer warm milk to her babies. We've tried not to disturb the little family, but we've been excited and pleased at the prospect of meeting the little ones when they decided to go abroad into the garden at large.
This afternoon I was working in Seattle on a freelance editing job. I was just finishing up a week's project and the five hours of sleep I had last night had worn off some time before. I was grinding through the last of my work when I got a call from my daughter telling me that one of the babies was sitting on our porch at that moment, and that it had let her get within two feet of it. It was gorgeous and still, and looked at her patiently with big, dark eyes. She was mesmerized, and so was it. She noticed that flies were hovering around it, though, and it wasn't flicking them away or running from her. We thought nothing of that, though; it was a young thing, so perhaps it didn't know enough to fear us yet.
An hour later we were looking gently around the garden to see if we could find the magic bunny. Horribly, we did; it was lying dead on the berm, about five feet from the hole in which it was born. It didn't look like it had been attacked by one of the dogs careless neighbors let run loose around our home. It was a hot day, and we haven't seen any of its family for a few days, and I fear it may have been abandoned when the others left the little hole, and that it might have starved and suffered from dehydration.
Its little body was among the loveliest I've ever seen: dark, lovely eyes still open to the world, the large white tail, perfectly formed little feet, dear long ears, inviting toast-colored fur. I asked Lily whether she wanted to be with me when I buried it, and she said she wanted to stay with me through everything. So we wrapped our bunny in the funnies; we figured it wouldn't have wanted to be in a hard, dark box, and that a little paper shroud would disintegrate faster than fabric and would let it become part of the ferns in the back corner of our garden more quickly. We couldn't bear to lay it alone in the soil, so we buried it with clover and our favorite variegated pineapple mint, and laid it in a quiet corner with rich soil. We laid a perfect purple clematis blossom and a fragrant sprig of dwarf lilac above its little body, and thanked it for spending its last hours in our company.
A couple of years ago an exquisitely colored love bird, clearly formerly someone's pet, flew onto our driveway while I was gardening and looked up into my face. It was tired and didn't want to be held, but it wouldn't go further than one of my rhododendron branches, so I knew it was weak. I took it in and let it rest in a ventilated box and asked around the neighborhood, but nobody knew it. We put up "FOUND BIRD" signs and took it to the vet to make sure it was okay, but within two days it became listless and had trouble eating. We put its cage in a warm spot and placed a heating pad against the corner and a blanket around the base of the cage, since the vet said the bird, who appeared so healthy, actually showed significant liver damage from being fed too many fatty seeds. It was a very sick little thing and needed warmth and love.
That night, it died in the warm little corner we made for it. We mourned the beautiful bird we had known for so little time, but we also felt blessed that it had chosen to live its final days with us. The same was true with the tiny bunny; for whatever reason, it got as close to us as it could. Yes, it may have simply been seeking a shady spot on a hot day, a cool porch to rest on as its body slowly depleted itself of nutrients. But still, we felt that this small rabbit, like the lovebird, had given us a gift by allowing us to get so close to it and to show it kindnesses just before and after death. We felt humbled in the presence of such beauty and such an early end to its life, and grateful to have seen something so ephemeral and precious up close, right in our own garden.
I spent an hour in the garden after I buried the rabbit. I watered and admired all the new growth, and wondered at how much had happened there in just the last five days since I last took a considered look around at it all. And I wondered at how fast that little rabbit had grown, and at how much hidden life there is all around me in my garden, and how many dramas and stories and secrets there are going on in the houses of the neighbors around me. I realized how odd it is that we can feel alone in such a densely populated world with so many animals right below our feet, and so many tender people right on the other sides of those thin walls we walk and drive by every day.
It was painful for my daughter to have the remarkably lovely experience with the perfect bunny less than two hours before she discovered its lifeless body four feet away. There was a cruelty to the situation, to the rough juxtaposition of great fortune and loss. But we were better for having had it, even with the pain. We again felt the blessing and honor of being chosen by a tender creature in its final hours, and were reminded how fragile the trust it put in us was, and how much responsibility we have to honor and appreciate it.
Monday, May 15, 2006
Fosse Fan
I took my daughter to see the Stephen Schwartz musical "Pippin" yesterday at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre for Mother's Day, and it was terrific. I'd seen it in San Francisco nearly 30 years ago when it toured the country, and I grew up knowing all the songs from it. I thought this production was more fun and fresh feeling than the version I saw all those years ago, which surprised me, because the actors in most of the other shows I've seen at the 5th Avenue seemed to have phoned in their performances. "Pippin" by contrast was filled with passionate performers who looked like they wanted to be there and had the moves, the pipes and the desire to perform that can make live theater so exciting. The sets were clever and attractive, the choreography was pleasing if not as crisp as Bob Fosse's original moves, and the male leads were sexy as all get-out and wore fetchingly form-fitting clothes, and sometimes not many of them, so I'm willing to admit that I might have been blinded by beauty over quality to some extent, but I really did feel the whole production was strong and very entertaining.
I grew up knowing all the songs and sang several of them at pops concerts in the seventies, so I'm nostalgic about the show, which also clouds my eyes a bit, I guess. But I've been a fan of composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz since I saw his hit "Godspell" when I was a child. Lily and I really enjoyed another musical by him, "Wicked," when we saw it on Broadway last year. I thought "Wicked" would be a dumbed down crowd-pleasing show with more flash than cleverness, but the story and lyrics were actually wittily written and the music was a pleasure to listen to. The variations on the "Wizard of Oz" theme actually showed depth of thought and meaning. What a lovely surprise.
We went on to read the book on which it was based, which is much darker than the musical version, and became huge fans of Gregory Maguire's writing. We've now read four of his novels, all of which are based on fairy tales we've all grown up knowing by heart but which turn the stories on their heads, give the background and readjust our perceptions of the main characters and their motivations. Rather than slipping into lighthearted fantasy, each one unearths the darker side of fairy stories, human nature and history. Maguire himself lived a sort of dark fairytale childhood; his mother died in childbirth and his father couldn't look after him on his own, so young Gregory was sent to an orphanage for his first five or six years before his father remarried and took him back. He says the sad part ended there, because his stepmother was actually not wicked but a kind and loving soul who raised him well. But throughout his life he's had a special affection and aptitude for seeing into such fantasies and pulling out something rich and dark.
His stories would be nothing without good plots, of course, but what keeps us (and writers like John Updike who also enjoy his work) coming back for more of his stories is his fluid writing, his lyrical style, his fresh and mesmerizing way of leading us into his characters' heads. All of his characters are flawed, some make grave mistakes, most are outcasts of some sort or other. Quite naturally, they make much more fascinating reading than the polished golden heroes of Disneyfied fairy stories we usually find nowadays.
So there I was yesterday enjoying "Pippin" again after all this time and sharing it with my almost-teen daughter, who loves musicals. I'd remembered that this was a slinkier, steamier musical than most; Bob Fosse directed the original, after all, and most of his work drips with decadent sexual overtones. However, I'd read a review that described this production as a bit tired and mired in the seventies, and missing the late great Fosse's oomph this time around. So while I expected some bumping, grinding, sexy costumes and sinuous suggestiveness, I can't say I expected the orgy scene in full fetish gear. It wasn't the most wholesome extravaganza, but Lily's nearly 13 and it gave us fodder for a little amusing chat afterwards. She's a bright, down-to-earth girl and the show was very stylized, so while there was no mistaking the fact that there were sexual overtones dolloped all over the show, it wasn't "Desperate Housewives."
As I thought about the show and of Fosse's other works, I considered the thread of raunchy, threatening sexuality that runs through his major later musicals and through his excellent, disturbing non-musical film "Star 80." In "Cabaret," "Chicago" and "Pippin" the songs and dancing are truly integral to the story: all action doesn't stop when a song starts, and, especially in the Kander and Ebb musicals "Cabaret" and "Chicago," the songs add a lot of richness to the understanding of the characters, the historical setting, the mood. The stories could stand without the songs (and indeed, "Cabaret" is based on Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin"), but the songs in those shows really move the action along and tells us something deeper than most musicals do. They're darker and dirtier than "Pippin" is, and while I like "Pippin," I think "Cabaret" is one of the masterworks of the musical theater, and perfectly suited to the troubled, brilliant Fosse.
But again, I consider how drawn he was to stories of disturbing, bent or bruised sexuality. In "Cabaret" Sally Bowles wants to act wild and with abandon, and brags of her "divine decadence," but it's really bluff, and she puts herself into emotional jeopardy by flirting with love but retreating into sex when true feelings become too scary. In "Pippin," the lead character, a hapless son of Charlemagne, throws himself onto all of life's grandest stages in an attempt to be grander than he is, but he finds himself feeling empty, lonely, broken as a result. "Chicago" stars two ruthless women who kill their men in jealous rages and use their sociopathic sexuality to draw fame and fortune around them as they step on everyone below. In each story, good men get used and broken, burnt like moths attracted to the deadly flame of femmes fatale. Fosse's fantastical autobiographical film, "All that Jazz," which I've found a surprising number of people list as among their favorite movies of all time, shows him (in the guise of Roy Scheider, in what I think is his strongest film performance) as painfully aware of his tendency to hold women at bay while loving them fiercely, if at a distance, and of his countervailing tendencies to try to draw too much of life in at once while driving away the parts of it he most loves. Rather like the main characters in the stories he was drawn to choreograph and direct.
I grew up knowing all the songs and sang several of them at pops concerts in the seventies, so I'm nostalgic about the show, which also clouds my eyes a bit, I guess. But I've been a fan of composer and lyricist Stephen Schwartz since I saw his hit "Godspell" when I was a child. Lily and I really enjoyed another musical by him, "Wicked," when we saw it on Broadway last year. I thought "Wicked" would be a dumbed down crowd-pleasing show with more flash than cleverness, but the story and lyrics were actually wittily written and the music was a pleasure to listen to. The variations on the "Wizard of Oz" theme actually showed depth of thought and meaning. What a lovely surprise.
We went on to read the book on which it was based, which is much darker than the musical version, and became huge fans of Gregory Maguire's writing. We've now read four of his novels, all of which are based on fairy tales we've all grown up knowing by heart but which turn the stories on their heads, give the background and readjust our perceptions of the main characters and their motivations. Rather than slipping into lighthearted fantasy, each one unearths the darker side of fairy stories, human nature and history. Maguire himself lived a sort of dark fairytale childhood; his mother died in childbirth and his father couldn't look after him on his own, so young Gregory was sent to an orphanage for his first five or six years before his father remarried and took him back. He says the sad part ended there, because his stepmother was actually not wicked but a kind and loving soul who raised him well. But throughout his life he's had a special affection and aptitude for seeing into such fantasies and pulling out something rich and dark.
His stories would be nothing without good plots, of course, but what keeps us (and writers like John Updike who also enjoy his work) coming back for more of his stories is his fluid writing, his lyrical style, his fresh and mesmerizing way of leading us into his characters' heads. All of his characters are flawed, some make grave mistakes, most are outcasts of some sort or other. Quite naturally, they make much more fascinating reading than the polished golden heroes of Disneyfied fairy stories we usually find nowadays.
So there I was yesterday enjoying "Pippin" again after all this time and sharing it with my almost-teen daughter, who loves musicals. I'd remembered that this was a slinkier, steamier musical than most; Bob Fosse directed the original, after all, and most of his work drips with decadent sexual overtones. However, I'd read a review that described this production as a bit tired and mired in the seventies, and missing the late great Fosse's oomph this time around. So while I expected some bumping, grinding, sexy costumes and sinuous suggestiveness, I can't say I expected the orgy scene in full fetish gear. It wasn't the most wholesome extravaganza, but Lily's nearly 13 and it gave us fodder for a little amusing chat afterwards. She's a bright, down-to-earth girl and the show was very stylized, so while there was no mistaking the fact that there were sexual overtones dolloped all over the show, it wasn't "Desperate Housewives."
As I thought about the show and of Fosse's other works, I considered the thread of raunchy, threatening sexuality that runs through his major later musicals and through his excellent, disturbing non-musical film "Star 80." In "Cabaret," "Chicago" and "Pippin" the songs and dancing are truly integral to the story: all action doesn't stop when a song starts, and, especially in the Kander and Ebb musicals "Cabaret" and "Chicago," the songs add a lot of richness to the understanding of the characters, the historical setting, the mood. The stories could stand without the songs (and indeed, "Cabaret" is based on Christopher Isherwood's "Goodbye to Berlin"), but the songs in those shows really move the action along and tells us something deeper than most musicals do. They're darker and dirtier than "Pippin" is, and while I like "Pippin," I think "Cabaret" is one of the masterworks of the musical theater, and perfectly suited to the troubled, brilliant Fosse.
But again, I consider how drawn he was to stories of disturbing, bent or bruised sexuality. In "Cabaret" Sally Bowles wants to act wild and with abandon, and brags of her "divine decadence," but it's really bluff, and she puts herself into emotional jeopardy by flirting with love but retreating into sex when true feelings become too scary. In "Pippin," the lead character, a hapless son of Charlemagne, throws himself onto all of life's grandest stages in an attempt to be grander than he is, but he finds himself feeling empty, lonely, broken as a result. "Chicago" stars two ruthless women who kill their men in jealous rages and use their sociopathic sexuality to draw fame and fortune around them as they step on everyone below. In each story, good men get used and broken, burnt like moths attracted to the deadly flame of femmes fatale. Fosse's fantastical autobiographical film, "All that Jazz," which I've found a surprising number of people list as among their favorite movies of all time, shows him (in the guise of Roy Scheider, in what I think is his strongest film performance) as painfully aware of his tendency to hold women at bay while loving them fiercely, if at a distance, and of his countervailing tendencies to try to draw too much of life in at once while driving away the parts of it he most loves. Rather like the main characters in the stories he was drawn to choreograph and direct.
Wednesday, May 10, 2006
Intensity
My first clear memory is of a trip I took with my mother and grandmother to the San Diego Zoo when I was about three years old. I remember a pole with three flat, circular wire baskets placed concentrically on it, and each basket was filled with fluffy yellow chicks that visitors were invited to approach and stroke. I remember being thrilled and running to them in my delirious haste to touch their tiny, soft bodies. But as I stuck my hand in the basket, they all rushed away from me and hurled themselves out of the basket. I remember feeling shock that I should come so close to something so wonderful and then scare it away. I knew that I wanted only to stroke them, but by my bold actions I frightened them. My intensity and desire to enjoy them chased them from me and left me with empty hands. I remember crying desperately about the lost opportunity. Thus, my earliest memory is about losing something not despite but because of the magnitude of my appreciation for it.
Many of my other early memories also have to do with feeling punished for being open about my feelings. I was not a drama queen; I had no tantrums, I didn't stalk anyone. In fact, I kept to myself most of the time, but when I did express myself, I meant what I said. And what I said was deeper and often truer than what others spoke of, much older and more thoughtful than my years, and such directness makes some people uncomfortable. Especially kind directness. Be sarcastic and folks may think you're bold and funny; be tender and honest and many people don't know what to do around such pure feeling. I've never liked to play games and pretend that I don't feel something when I do. Punished or not, I've always felt that, much as I wanted others' approval, I'm the one who has to live with myself, and if I'm not honest, I don't want to be around myself.
Sometime after the San Diego Zoo chick fiasco when I was perhaps four or five, my mother came home from work one day with a tiny chick in a shoe box. I don't know whether I was to have kept it or whether she borrowed it for the night from the Future Farmers of America advisor at the high school where she taught, but I knew it was mine for the night at least. At first I was delighted; here was my chance to appreciate and nurture an exquisite, vulnerable creature. But it was soon clear that the chick was in great distress. It peeped constantly and wanted nothing to do with me. When I went to bed, it was still peeping sadly. When I awoke, it was dead. I felt such guilt, even though I hadn't brought the chick home or failed to do what I was told to; I was a tiny girl, but I felt responsible for its suffering and death all the same, because it had been mine in some sense. I felt somehow that I should have known what to do to care for the little helpless bird, that somehow I should have known better, been cleverer, stayed up all night with it, something. It didn't occur to me that my mother had acted inappropriately in bringing home a tiny creature that needed special care, food, warmth and companionship and helped me to provide none of that. The feeling that my awareness and empathy required action stuck with me. Yet sometimes showing too much personal concern toward another's emotional situation can also be overwhelming to someone who doesn't have the energy to respond. I've had to learn to offer my feelings and insights, and step back so others have room to breathe.
There's always been a connection for me between feeling that my intensity has the ability to alienate others and also that my intensity gives me the responsibility to know more, do more, share more. I have often felt that because I have a capacity to show care and awareness of others' feelings, I should. And sometimes I'm conflicted because I feel that expressing myself might push others away, but that not speaking what I feel would be to be dishonest to myself or another. If I do what I most want and say what I feel deeply, I may make others avoid me or fear that I won't know when to stop. But I do know. And if I don't let them know what's in my heart, I've lost the chance to show them how much value I see in them and how much I want their happiness. Intensity and a willingness to speak openly and passionately has so much more emotional resonance to me, and the honesty of it makes me feel more real myself. But sometimes people just want to relax into shared good feeling. They have more unwanted intensity of other sorts than they can handle and just want some ease for a change. I can see it, I can understand it, I know that's a valid and even valuable point of view. But for me, that's a tricky one.
Many of my other early memories also have to do with feeling punished for being open about my feelings. I was not a drama queen; I had no tantrums, I didn't stalk anyone. In fact, I kept to myself most of the time, but when I did express myself, I meant what I said. And what I said was deeper and often truer than what others spoke of, much older and more thoughtful than my years, and such directness makes some people uncomfortable. Especially kind directness. Be sarcastic and folks may think you're bold and funny; be tender and honest and many people don't know what to do around such pure feeling. I've never liked to play games and pretend that I don't feel something when I do. Punished or not, I've always felt that, much as I wanted others' approval, I'm the one who has to live with myself, and if I'm not honest, I don't want to be around myself.
Sometime after the San Diego Zoo chick fiasco when I was perhaps four or five, my mother came home from work one day with a tiny chick in a shoe box. I don't know whether I was to have kept it or whether she borrowed it for the night from the Future Farmers of America advisor at the high school where she taught, but I knew it was mine for the night at least. At first I was delighted; here was my chance to appreciate and nurture an exquisite, vulnerable creature. But it was soon clear that the chick was in great distress. It peeped constantly and wanted nothing to do with me. When I went to bed, it was still peeping sadly. When I awoke, it was dead. I felt such guilt, even though I hadn't brought the chick home or failed to do what I was told to; I was a tiny girl, but I felt responsible for its suffering and death all the same, because it had been mine in some sense. I felt somehow that I should have known what to do to care for the little helpless bird, that somehow I should have known better, been cleverer, stayed up all night with it, something. It didn't occur to me that my mother had acted inappropriately in bringing home a tiny creature that needed special care, food, warmth and companionship and helped me to provide none of that. The feeling that my awareness and empathy required action stuck with me. Yet sometimes showing too much personal concern toward another's emotional situation can also be overwhelming to someone who doesn't have the energy to respond. I've had to learn to offer my feelings and insights, and step back so others have room to breathe.
There's always been a connection for me between feeling that my intensity has the ability to alienate others and also that my intensity gives me the responsibility to know more, do more, share more. I have often felt that because I have a capacity to show care and awareness of others' feelings, I should. And sometimes I'm conflicted because I feel that expressing myself might push others away, but that not speaking what I feel would be to be dishonest to myself or another. If I do what I most want and say what I feel deeply, I may make others avoid me or fear that I won't know when to stop. But I do know. And if I don't let them know what's in my heart, I've lost the chance to show them how much value I see in them and how much I want their happiness. Intensity and a willingness to speak openly and passionately has so much more emotional resonance to me, and the honesty of it makes me feel more real myself. But sometimes people just want to relax into shared good feeling. They have more unwanted intensity of other sorts than they can handle and just want some ease for a change. I can see it, I can understand it, I know that's a valid and even valuable point of view. But for me, that's a tricky one.
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
Fluffy Mackerel Pudding
In the early 1970s, Weight Watchers and other companies created packs of recipe cards that they gave away with hideous giant plastic recipe boxes in order to try to hook gullible Americans (and perhaps Canadians, though I hope they had the good sense not to follow their U.S. cousins) into subscribing to a series of monthly recipe packs which arrived with billing statements and hefty postage fees. The special introductory offers provided a free recipe box and the first set of recipe cards in the hopes that the person ordering them (a.k.a. the sucker) would then get (and pay for) a new set of recipe cards every month. After a year or so, the sucker would have a whole collection of supposedly mouth-watering original recipes that would allow a hungry family to eat hearty, wholesome meals that would satisfy all their nutritional needs and cravings for just pennies a serving. Once the vast majority of Americans realized they could get a free plastic recipe card box and 24 or so cards featuring scary color photographs of unappetizing food and then cancel their "memberships" in the recipe clubs, they were all stuck with giant awkwardly sized recipe boxes into which nobody could fit any of the recipes they might actually want to keep. I know this because I ordered my own giant plastic free recipe box when I was about 11, and I kept it for years figuring I would someday figure out how to store actual recipes in it, to no avail.
A few years ago, I somehow stumbled onto a brilliant Web site with fabulously unappetitizing (and splendidly captioned) examples of Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974, and every few months I go back to the site to laugh until I snort and my sides ache. Whenever I do, I always start my pilgrimage to Tacky Town with my personal favorite recipe: "Fluffy Mackerel Pudding," the highlight of the "Convenience Fish" section. The name speaks volumes. But I'm always delighted when I make my way through the pack and get to other mouth-watering delights such as "Hot Wrap Ups," which include the delicious hot lettuce, pickle, chive, caper and celery combo, as well as "Rosy Perfection Salad," an exciting little number featuring shredded red cabbage in molded purple gelatin. Who could say no to a brandy snifter full of "Jellied Tomato Refresher," or a man-pleasin' pan full of "Mackerelly"? The "Fish 'Tacos'" which are completely free of tortillas look especially authentic and enticing, with their shredded green cabbage, tomato chunks and some sort of chopped fish on a bed of . . . toast. And in the "Budget Best Bets" category, don't forget "Frankfurter Spectacular," a sexy little dish of hot dog halves wrapped around a pineapple core and garnished with carrot, potato and pineapple chunks. Between meals, why not fix yourself a plate of "Polynesian Snack," featuring the excitement you can only find in a dish composed of canned bean sprouts, buttermilk, pimiento and fruit pieces. That's snackin' satisfaction! For a peek at "Snappy Mackerel Casserole" or the famous tortilla-free "Marcy's 'Enchilada,'" you must check out the Candyboots Web site. The wicked captions make enjoying these recipe cards a pants-wettingly entertaining experience.
A few years ago, I somehow stumbled onto a brilliant Web site with fabulously unappetitizing (and splendidly captioned) examples of Weight Watchers recipe cards from 1974, and every few months I go back to the site to laugh until I snort and my sides ache. Whenever I do, I always start my pilgrimage to Tacky Town with my personal favorite recipe: "Fluffy Mackerel Pudding," the highlight of the "Convenience Fish" section. The name speaks volumes. But I'm always delighted when I make my way through the pack and get to other mouth-watering delights such as "Hot Wrap Ups," which include the delicious hot lettuce, pickle, chive, caper and celery combo, as well as "Rosy Perfection Salad," an exciting little number featuring shredded red cabbage in molded purple gelatin. Who could say no to a brandy snifter full of "Jellied Tomato Refresher," or a man-pleasin' pan full of "Mackerelly"? The "Fish 'Tacos'" which are completely free of tortillas look especially authentic and enticing, with their shredded green cabbage, tomato chunks and some sort of chopped fish on a bed of . . . toast. And in the "Budget Best Bets" category, don't forget "Frankfurter Spectacular," a sexy little dish of hot dog halves wrapped around a pineapple core and garnished with carrot, potato and pineapple chunks. Between meals, why not fix yourself a plate of "Polynesian Snack," featuring the excitement you can only find in a dish composed of canned bean sprouts, buttermilk, pimiento and fruit pieces. That's snackin' satisfaction! For a peek at "Snappy Mackerel Casserole" or the famous tortilla-free "Marcy's 'Enchilada,'" you must check out the Candyboots Web site. The wicked captions make enjoying these recipe cards a pants-wettingly entertaining experience.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
The World's Fastest Indian
I saw a lovely little film a couple of weeks back that I keep thinking of and wanting to write about: "The World's Fastest Indian." The film stars Anthony Hopkins as New Zealander Burt Munro, who, in his sixties, became the world's land speed record holder on his 1920 Indian motorcycle. This movie is so full of small pleasures, quiet humor, perfect period details and lovely actions and reactions by Hopkins that I enjoyed myself completely while I let the story wash over me.
Some have felt it too sweet and too pat a story, sort of a "chick flick for guys," as one imdb.com member put it, and one can tell from the beginning in what general direction the movie will go. The writing doesn't match the quality of the story, direction or Hopkins' acting, but the undeniable power and appeal of the underlying true story and Hopkins' dry wit and careful performance save it from being painfully sweet. The art direction was spot-on, and the visuals pulled forth so many pleasing sense memories from the back of my mind. Burt's shed (also his home) and his clothes and surroundings brought forth the memory of the pleasingly acrid, greasy tang of old motor oil in a rickety shed housing an old vehicle; the feel of the broken-in leather on an old motorcycle seat; the pleasing patina of heavy chrome-plating.
Some details didn't ring true and were indeed too pat; many of the supporting characters felt contrived and their dialog rang false, but the center of nearly every scene is Burt himself, and the determined, quiet way that Hopkins holds the story together by being completely present and aware, and looking as if each thought or action had just occurred to him at that moment, brings an element of reality to the story that held my interest and gave me continuing pleasure from start to finish. The story is also just a remarkably good one: if I didn't know it was based on a true one, I would have found it farfetched, but it's simply a genuinely inspiring true-life tale.
So much of good acting is believable reaction, seeming to be in the moment and responding viscerally and immediately, appearing to be thinking a thought at the same moment that the audience member thinks it, showing complete respect and immersion in the story's version of reality, and not showing off preparation and craft by overacting or pandering. This role is in the vein of other beautiful, contained performances by Hopkins in films like "Remains of the Day," "Howard's End" and "The Elephant Man." When he plays careful, contained men who let their emotional vulnerability slip out from behind a mask of composure and certitude in rare moments, I find him mesmerizing. When he lets himself play a psychopath, like Hannibal Lecter, or a sniveling schemer, like Richard in "The Lion in Winter," or a man who loses his grasp on his life and undermines his happiness by losing his temper in the fine but little-seen "The Good Father," he's also impressive. But I love him best when he plays the man with the stiff upper lip who crumbles just enough under pressure to show us what he's really made of, for good or ill.
Director Roger Donaldson also directed Hopkins to wonderful effect in the 1984 film "The Bounty" about the famous mutiny at sea led by Fletcher Christian against his captain, William Bligh. Mel Gibson plays Christian, and he's worth watching not only because it's one of his strongest performance but also, I will admit, because it was filmed at the apogee of his once-considerable beauty. However, the film's success really hangs on Hopkins' performance, and it is a fine one of both boldness and subtlety.
Some have felt it too sweet and too pat a story, sort of a "chick flick for guys," as one imdb.com member put it, and one can tell from the beginning in what general direction the movie will go. The writing doesn't match the quality of the story, direction or Hopkins' acting, but the undeniable power and appeal of the underlying true story and Hopkins' dry wit and careful performance save it from being painfully sweet. The art direction was spot-on, and the visuals pulled forth so many pleasing sense memories from the back of my mind. Burt's shed (also his home) and his clothes and surroundings brought forth the memory of the pleasingly acrid, greasy tang of old motor oil in a rickety shed housing an old vehicle; the feel of the broken-in leather on an old motorcycle seat; the pleasing patina of heavy chrome-plating.
Some details didn't ring true and were indeed too pat; many of the supporting characters felt contrived and their dialog rang false, but the center of nearly every scene is Burt himself, and the determined, quiet way that Hopkins holds the story together by being completely present and aware, and looking as if each thought or action had just occurred to him at that moment, brings an element of reality to the story that held my interest and gave me continuing pleasure from start to finish. The story is also just a remarkably good one: if I didn't know it was based on a true one, I would have found it farfetched, but it's simply a genuinely inspiring true-life tale.
So much of good acting is believable reaction, seeming to be in the moment and responding viscerally and immediately, appearing to be thinking a thought at the same moment that the audience member thinks it, showing complete respect and immersion in the story's version of reality, and not showing off preparation and craft by overacting or pandering. This role is in the vein of other beautiful, contained performances by Hopkins in films like "Remains of the Day," "Howard's End" and "The Elephant Man." When he plays careful, contained men who let their emotional vulnerability slip out from behind a mask of composure and certitude in rare moments, I find him mesmerizing. When he lets himself play a psychopath, like Hannibal Lecter, or a sniveling schemer, like Richard in "The Lion in Winter," or a man who loses his grasp on his life and undermines his happiness by losing his temper in the fine but little-seen "The Good Father," he's also impressive. But I love him best when he plays the man with the stiff upper lip who crumbles just enough under pressure to show us what he's really made of, for good or ill.
Director Roger Donaldson also directed Hopkins to wonderful effect in the 1984 film "The Bounty" about the famous mutiny at sea led by Fletcher Christian against his captain, William Bligh. Mel Gibson plays Christian, and he's worth watching not only because it's one of his strongest performance but also, I will admit, because it was filmed at the apogee of his once-considerable beauty. However, the film's success really hangs on Hopkins' performance, and it is a fine one of both boldness and subtlety.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Oscar Picks
Best Picture: “Brokeback Mountain”
“Brokeback Mountain” is my choice and I think it will be Oscar’s as well. I loved “Capote,” enjoyed “Crash” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” enormously, and I respect “Munich” (though I thought it more flawed than the other nominees, though well acted), but “Brokeback Mountain” was not only an excellent film story well told, it was also socially influential and groundbreaking. The provocative subject matter made many heterosexual people question their stereotypes about gay men, and it seems to have helped a number of straight folk to understand more clearly and viscerally that people don’t always choose with whom they fall in love, and what the consequences are when people are false to themselves and those around them. It was touching, wonderfully directed, beautifully acted, and thought-provoking: I think it's a shoo-in. “Capote” was a terrific movie, every bit as beautifully acted and directed, but because it was smaller in scope and in influence I don't think it has a chance. “Brokeback” also surprised many conservatives and proved to them that Middle America can watch, root for, and enjoy a movie about gay people in love, which I think is a fabulous message. I hope the film wins the Academy Award so that its fame will reverberate and its influence spread for as long as possible.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
I thought it was amazing that Philip Seymour Hoffman could inhabit the persona of Truman Capote so perfectly and yet not become a caricature or distract from the story. He made that voice and those mannerisms work, made them charming, real, and frightening by turns. I've always thought he was an exceptional actor but I think this is the film that will get him the leading roles he deserves. I believe the Academy will agree with me, but Heath Ledger is a close second; he was so moving, so believable, so far from his usual screen persona. His character was so sympathetic despite his taciturn ways; it was horrible to watch him seal his own misery with his fears. I loved the character, and thought about his performance a great deal afterwards. If he wins, I will understand the choice and can support it. I think the “Brokeback: brouhaha may give him a victory, but I think Hoffman will ultimately win out.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role:
Felicity Huffman
Felicity Huffman was funny, moving, and brave as the transgender heroine of “Transamerica.” It was a delightful performance, and Oscar does love it when attractive, appealing women (especially those over 30) allow themselves to look unattractive and vulnerable. Huffman is bright, articulate, and outspoken, and she’s been waiting for a worthy leading role for a long time. But the Academy loves Reese Witherspoon and would be delighted to celebrate her for having been the very best thing about “Walk the Line.” She was really the nurturing heart of that movie, and her character, June Carter Cash, had to show why she was Johnny Cash's obsession and his salvation. Witherspoon sparkled in the role and made it easy to see why Johnny Cash could want to build a world around her. Her portrayal of June Carter was intelligent and subtly done, and she came across as capable of much more subtlety than she is usually allowed in her usual pretty, perky comic actress roles. I think she's a strong contender, but I think Huffman’s range of emotion the “Transamerica,” the growth of her character, and the physical and vocal transformation she accomplished through sheer talent and force of will win in the end. Still, Witherspoon has a very strong chance.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role:
Jake Gyllenhaal
Jake Gyllenhaal's performance was of course a co-leading role, so much more than a supporting actor, and if he hadn't been so strong and worked so compellingly with Ledger, if they hadn't had chemistry and a carefully balanced mixture of virility and vulnerability that was believable both individually and together, the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. George Clooney was very fine in “Syriana,” and I see why he’s received some awards and acclaim for it, but Gyllenhaal was more crucial to “Brokeback” than Clooney was to “Syriana,” and he had more chance to show subtleties and varied emotions and motivations than Clooney's character had, and he met the challenge. So I have to vote for Jake, and I think Oscar will, too.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role:
Rachel Weisz
If I have my way, Rachel Weisz will get this award. She was more crucial to the film, to the motivation for Ralph Fiennes’ character, and to the forward movement of the story than the other nominated actresses were for their films. I loved Catherine Keener as Harper Lee in “Capote”; I thought she was just right for the role, but she had less to do, less range, and the actions of her character weren’t as pivotal to the emotional resonance of the film. Amy Adams was cute, but I just didn't find “Junebug” a compelling film or her character very fully realized (not her fault, just the way the character was written). Michelle Williams was very good, but more peripheral to her film than Rachel Weisz's character was to “The Constant Gardner,” which was a very fine and moving film, one of my favorites of 2005. Rachel Weisz’s character was completely necessary for the story, Fiennes’ performance, and the emotional impact of the film. Go Rachel!
Best Director: Ang Lee! Ang Lee! Ang Lee!
Ang Lee’s direction of “Brokeback Mountain” was perfect. It got the details right, including the overarching feel, the sweep of the land and the story, the tenderness and the roughness of the characterizations, the quiet spaces when nothing needed to be said, the tone and power and chemistry between the characters, the senses of failure and disappointment and betrayal felt by all the main characters at one time or another. I sensed his strong hand throughout without his ever getting in the way of the writing, the setting, or the acting. He got wonderful, realistic, compelling performances from the actors, built tension perfectly, paced it wonderfully, and let the story seem to tell itself, without hitting the audience over the head with meaning or self-importance and without telegraphing what was to come. It was intelligent, and it assumed the intelligence of the audience. He led, but never got in the way. I loved his work, and so will Oscar.
“Crash” was a hell of a good story, compelling and exciting, and it was bold, powerful and relentless throughout. I thought it was great filmmaking, but I felt it often pushed the boundaries of believability because each substory was a hyperreal, extreme distillation of a scenario punched up to a series of emotional peaks beyond daily reality. One or two in a film mixed in with more realistic stories would be more believable, but it was meant to be beyond reality to push us to a better awareness of the less sensational horrors of racism that run through our daily lives. Though I enjoyed it tremendously, a lot of people were pushed away from “Crash” because it felt so over-the-top to them, and it knocked them on the head with its messages by being so unrelenting with each story building to a fever pitch, each subplot building to a crescendo, so that, when put together, it felt like a pounding, diatribe-filled runaway train to some viewers. Compare that to the strength of “Brokeback Mountain” and its message, which is just as unmistakable and moving without hitting you on the head, even though a major character is murdered just for appearing gay. Its direction carries it along in an organic, natural, believable way. It’s kind of like comparing apples and orangutans to compare the two, since they have different reasons for being. “Crash” is all about the feeling of being in a metaphorical racial car crash where the consequences of race hatred leave people obviously broken. “Brokeback Mountain” is about the insidiousness and hidden nature of hatred and fear. I enjoyed both films very much, but I think the range of skills shown by Ang Lee is greater and deeper in “Brokeback Mountain” than that shown by Paul Haggis in “Crash.”
Original Screenplay:
“Good Night, and Good Luck” (by a nose)
This is a hard one. “Crash” was clever and fresh and important. “Good Night, and Good Luck” was carefully researched, witty, and captured all the essential points of an important historical situation and person without rendering them dry and dull. I didn’t see “Match Point” because I find Woody Allen, whom I used to love, largely stale and misogynistic nowadays, and because I found “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” to which “Match Point” has so often been compared, morally bankrupt, mean-spirited, and repugnant. “The Squid and the Whale” disappointed me greatly; there was so much mean-spiritedness, nearly all the family interactions were so disturbed, and each character was so self-absorbed and hurtful. “Syriana” was clever and impressive, but ultimately, I thought, unnecessarily convoluted. It was made difficult to follow on purpose, but I thought that difficulty undercut its power, unlike a film like “Memento,” where the confusion is integral to understanding the character, building the tension and surprise, and making the payoff work. I think it’s between “Crash” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and it’s a really close call. One is so exuberant, the other played so close to the chest, and both are insightful about issues close to our hearts, i.e., tolerance and being vigilant about seeing that civil liberties are respected. I think “Good Night” will win, but Oscar could very well go for “Crash” and I’d be happy either way.
Adapted Screenplay:
“Capote” (though it’ll be a photo finish)
“Capote” was wonderful, and the fact that it worked so well is largely because the script was exceptional, and, surprisingly, not too wordy. The writer, director, and actors weren’t afraid of silences, or of behavior telling the story instead of having to spell everything out with words. I loved it and would be thrilled if it won. But the script for “Brokeback Mountain” was also exquisitely crafted and basic to its success as a film. I’d like “Capote” to win, but I enjoyed “Brokeback” so much that I’d be satisfied if it takes the Oscar, too.
Cinematography: “The New World”
“The New World” is my choice, both because I think it deserves it and because I think it will win. Why didn’t more people see this movie? It’s remarkable. The natural world is a key player in it; Terrence Malick’s trademark seduction of and by nature is a basic and important element to the story. I loved it; it’s exquisite to look at, and told with very few words; the dreamy visuals are absolutely key, not just to the enjoyment but also to the story, which is moving. I also loved Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” which has a similarly beautiful, dreamy quality. People who found that too drawn out or too full of interior monologues will probably find the same issues with “The New World,” but I found both films powerful and moving works of art. The young woman who plays Pocahontas (who is never called by that name throughout the entire film) is Q’Orianka Kilcher, and she is a wonder; what perfect casting. (Interesting trivia tidbit: She’s the cousin of singer Jewel Kilcher, a.k.a. Jewel.)
Animated film:
“Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit”
Nick Park’s claymation short films have won several Oscars, all deserved, and I think and hope he’ll win again for this full-length Wallace and Gromit movie. I’m a huge fan of his and have been for over a decade. (Have you ever seen the short subject “Creature Comforts,” for which he won his first Oscar? It’s delightful.)
Documentary:
“The March of the Penguins”
Yes, it was cute and charming; “The March of the Penguins” was also brilliant, technically amazing and difficult filmmaking. It’s beautiful, captivating, it was difficult as hell to film, wonderfully edited, compelling, sweet without being saccharine or too anthropomorphic. No wonder it’s been the monster-hit documentary of all time. I want it to win, and I think it will.
“Brokeback Mountain” is my choice and I think it will be Oscar’s as well. I loved “Capote,” enjoyed “Crash” and “Good Night, and Good Luck” enormously, and I respect “Munich” (though I thought it more flawed than the other nominees, though well acted), but “Brokeback Mountain” was not only an excellent film story well told, it was also socially influential and groundbreaking. The provocative subject matter made many heterosexual people question their stereotypes about gay men, and it seems to have helped a number of straight folk to understand more clearly and viscerally that people don’t always choose with whom they fall in love, and what the consequences are when people are false to themselves and those around them. It was touching, wonderfully directed, beautifully acted, and thought-provoking: I think it's a shoo-in. “Capote” was a terrific movie, every bit as beautifully acted and directed, but because it was smaller in scope and in influence I don't think it has a chance. “Brokeback” also surprised many conservatives and proved to them that Middle America can watch, root for, and enjoy a movie about gay people in love, which I think is a fabulous message. I hope the film wins the Academy Award so that its fame will reverberate and its influence spread for as long as possible.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role:
Philip Seymour Hoffman
I thought it was amazing that Philip Seymour Hoffman could inhabit the persona of Truman Capote so perfectly and yet not become a caricature or distract from the story. He made that voice and those mannerisms work, made them charming, real, and frightening by turns. I've always thought he was an exceptional actor but I think this is the film that will get him the leading roles he deserves. I believe the Academy will agree with me, but Heath Ledger is a close second; he was so moving, so believable, so far from his usual screen persona. His character was so sympathetic despite his taciturn ways; it was horrible to watch him seal his own misery with his fears. I loved the character, and thought about his performance a great deal afterwards. If he wins, I will understand the choice and can support it. I think the “Brokeback: brouhaha may give him a victory, but I think Hoffman will ultimately win out.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role:
Felicity Huffman
Felicity Huffman was funny, moving, and brave as the transgender heroine of “Transamerica.” It was a delightful performance, and Oscar does love it when attractive, appealing women (especially those over 30) allow themselves to look unattractive and vulnerable. Huffman is bright, articulate, and outspoken, and she’s been waiting for a worthy leading role for a long time. But the Academy loves Reese Witherspoon and would be delighted to celebrate her for having been the very best thing about “Walk the Line.” She was really the nurturing heart of that movie, and her character, June Carter Cash, had to show why she was Johnny Cash's obsession and his salvation. Witherspoon sparkled in the role and made it easy to see why Johnny Cash could want to build a world around her. Her portrayal of June Carter was intelligent and subtly done, and she came across as capable of much more subtlety than she is usually allowed in her usual pretty, perky comic actress roles. I think she's a strong contender, but I think Huffman’s range of emotion the “Transamerica,” the growth of her character, and the physical and vocal transformation she accomplished through sheer talent and force of will win in the end. Still, Witherspoon has a very strong chance.
Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role:
Jake Gyllenhaal
Jake Gyllenhaal's performance was of course a co-leading role, so much more than a supporting actor, and if he hadn't been so strong and worked so compellingly with Ledger, if they hadn't had chemistry and a carefully balanced mixture of virility and vulnerability that was believable both individually and together, the whole thing wouldn’t have worked. George Clooney was very fine in “Syriana,” and I see why he’s received some awards and acclaim for it, but Gyllenhaal was more crucial to “Brokeback” than Clooney was to “Syriana,” and he had more chance to show subtleties and varied emotions and motivations than Clooney's character had, and he met the challenge. So I have to vote for Jake, and I think Oscar will, too.
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role:
Rachel Weisz
If I have my way, Rachel Weisz will get this award. She was more crucial to the film, to the motivation for Ralph Fiennes’ character, and to the forward movement of the story than the other nominated actresses were for their films. I loved Catherine Keener as Harper Lee in “Capote”; I thought she was just right for the role, but she had less to do, less range, and the actions of her character weren’t as pivotal to the emotional resonance of the film. Amy Adams was cute, but I just didn't find “Junebug” a compelling film or her character very fully realized (not her fault, just the way the character was written). Michelle Williams was very good, but more peripheral to her film than Rachel Weisz's character was to “The Constant Gardner,” which was a very fine and moving film, one of my favorites of 2005. Rachel Weisz’s character was completely necessary for the story, Fiennes’ performance, and the emotional impact of the film. Go Rachel!
Best Director: Ang Lee! Ang Lee! Ang Lee!
Ang Lee’s direction of “Brokeback Mountain” was perfect. It got the details right, including the overarching feel, the sweep of the land and the story, the tenderness and the roughness of the characterizations, the quiet spaces when nothing needed to be said, the tone and power and chemistry between the characters, the senses of failure and disappointment and betrayal felt by all the main characters at one time or another. I sensed his strong hand throughout without his ever getting in the way of the writing, the setting, or the acting. He got wonderful, realistic, compelling performances from the actors, built tension perfectly, paced it wonderfully, and let the story seem to tell itself, without hitting the audience over the head with meaning or self-importance and without telegraphing what was to come. It was intelligent, and it assumed the intelligence of the audience. He led, but never got in the way. I loved his work, and so will Oscar.
“Crash” was a hell of a good story, compelling and exciting, and it was bold, powerful and relentless throughout. I thought it was great filmmaking, but I felt it often pushed the boundaries of believability because each substory was a hyperreal, extreme distillation of a scenario punched up to a series of emotional peaks beyond daily reality. One or two in a film mixed in with more realistic stories would be more believable, but it was meant to be beyond reality to push us to a better awareness of the less sensational horrors of racism that run through our daily lives. Though I enjoyed it tremendously, a lot of people were pushed away from “Crash” because it felt so over-the-top to them, and it knocked them on the head with its messages by being so unrelenting with each story building to a fever pitch, each subplot building to a crescendo, so that, when put together, it felt like a pounding, diatribe-filled runaway train to some viewers. Compare that to the strength of “Brokeback Mountain” and its message, which is just as unmistakable and moving without hitting you on the head, even though a major character is murdered just for appearing gay. Its direction carries it along in an organic, natural, believable way. It’s kind of like comparing apples and orangutans to compare the two, since they have different reasons for being. “Crash” is all about the feeling of being in a metaphorical racial car crash where the consequences of race hatred leave people obviously broken. “Brokeback Mountain” is about the insidiousness and hidden nature of hatred and fear. I enjoyed both films very much, but I think the range of skills shown by Ang Lee is greater and deeper in “Brokeback Mountain” than that shown by Paul Haggis in “Crash.”
Original Screenplay:
“Good Night, and Good Luck” (by a nose)
This is a hard one. “Crash” was clever and fresh and important. “Good Night, and Good Luck” was carefully researched, witty, and captured all the essential points of an important historical situation and person without rendering them dry and dull. I didn’t see “Match Point” because I find Woody Allen, whom I used to love, largely stale and misogynistic nowadays, and because I found “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” to which “Match Point” has so often been compared, morally bankrupt, mean-spirited, and repugnant. “The Squid and the Whale” disappointed me greatly; there was so much mean-spiritedness, nearly all the family interactions were so disturbed, and each character was so self-absorbed and hurtful. “Syriana” was clever and impressive, but ultimately, I thought, unnecessarily convoluted. It was made difficult to follow on purpose, but I thought that difficulty undercut its power, unlike a film like “Memento,” where the confusion is integral to understanding the character, building the tension and surprise, and making the payoff work. I think it’s between “Crash” and “Good Night, and Good Luck,” and it’s a really close call. One is so exuberant, the other played so close to the chest, and both are insightful about issues close to our hearts, i.e., tolerance and being vigilant about seeing that civil liberties are respected. I think “Good Night” will win, but Oscar could very well go for “Crash” and I’d be happy either way.
Adapted Screenplay:
“Capote” (though it’ll be a photo finish)
“Capote” was wonderful, and the fact that it worked so well is largely because the script was exceptional, and, surprisingly, not too wordy. The writer, director, and actors weren’t afraid of silences, or of behavior telling the story instead of having to spell everything out with words. I loved it and would be thrilled if it won. But the script for “Brokeback Mountain” was also exquisitely crafted and basic to its success as a film. I’d like “Capote” to win, but I enjoyed “Brokeback” so much that I’d be satisfied if it takes the Oscar, too.
Cinematography: “The New World”
“The New World” is my choice, both because I think it deserves it and because I think it will win. Why didn’t more people see this movie? It’s remarkable. The natural world is a key player in it; Terrence Malick’s trademark seduction of and by nature is a basic and important element to the story. I loved it; it’s exquisite to look at, and told with very few words; the dreamy visuals are absolutely key, not just to the enjoyment but also to the story, which is moving. I also loved Malick’s “The Thin Red Line,” which has a similarly beautiful, dreamy quality. People who found that too drawn out or too full of interior monologues will probably find the same issues with “The New World,” but I found both films powerful and moving works of art. The young woman who plays Pocahontas (who is never called by that name throughout the entire film) is Q’Orianka Kilcher, and she is a wonder; what perfect casting. (Interesting trivia tidbit: She’s the cousin of singer Jewel Kilcher, a.k.a. Jewel.)
Animated film:
“Wallace and Gromit in the Curse of the Were-Rabbit”
Nick Park’s claymation short films have won several Oscars, all deserved, and I think and hope he’ll win again for this full-length Wallace and Gromit movie. I’m a huge fan of his and have been for over a decade. (Have you ever seen the short subject “Creature Comforts,” for which he won his first Oscar? It’s delightful.)
Documentary:
“The March of the Penguins”
Yes, it was cute and charming; “The March of the Penguins” was also brilliant, technically amazing and difficult filmmaking. It’s beautiful, captivating, it was difficult as hell to film, wonderfully edited, compelling, sweet without being saccharine or too anthropomorphic. No wonder it’s been the monster-hit documentary of all time. I want it to win, and I think it will.
Friday, February 03, 2006
I Carry Them in My Heart
My grandmother died in 1979, and I've missed her every day since then. She was a pure light in my life, troubled and sad and problematic, but her heart and her love were always pure, almost holy. She was unwavering in her love for me, completely unconditional and unselfish. She was never angry with me, never in a hurry, never temperamental or judgmental or unkind. Never. I can't imagine a more gentle heart than hers. She lit up when she met me at the door after school, always interested in what I had to say, and content to sit and hold my hand and talk about the olden days. She was never too tired to play a game with me or to hear me talk. I was a comfort to her, and she made me feel that I was always just right in her eyes. In my uncertain world of fair-weather friends and a distracted, frustrated mother, my grandmother's love for me was a certainty. I couldn't always be certain of her stability; she had mental and emotional problems, and constant leg pain and depression clouded her days. But even in her pain, physical or psychological, she was never unkind, always forgiving, ever loving.
When I was nine years old, my grandmother had a nervous breakdown. In trying to understand why her beloved mother had fallen apart psychologically, and in trying to figure out the basis for her own fears and troubles, my mother took a year off from teaching and earned a master's degree in counseling. Her thesis was a study of her mother's psychological life. She interviewed her father and sister and even herself, and put together what she could of the history of my grandmother's depressions, fears, and occasional breaks with reality. She taped these interviews and, after she died in 2001, I found a tape of my mother interviewing my grandfather in early 1973. I was thrilled to have it, but too afraid to listen to it. The idea of hearing my mother's inquisitive, professional tones on tape felt like too much to bear, and imagining my grandfather with his anger, vulgarity, spite, bitterness, brittleness, and self-absorption lashing out at my grandmother and swearing about how she had let him down, when in my heart I knew his seething anger and belittling of her are what broke her spirit in the first place, seemed too cruel a strike against my grandmother's memory. So I preserved it but did not listen to it.
Around the same time, I found an even more important jewel: an audiotape of me at age 12 or 13 interviewing my grandmother about her memories of her youth which I made for a school folklore assignment. Bless the teacher who made students interview someone about his or her personal history, for it inspired one of my most precious possessions. I finally had the strength to listen to my tape recently, and it was wonderful. I had set it aside for years, too, but I finally listened to it and made a copy of it in January.
My grandmother had loved telling me stories about her childhood for as far back as I could remember. I was the grandchild who loved those stories the most; I would ask over and over again to hear about the time she went berrypicking, disturbed a wasps' nest, and got stung all over her body, barely surviving. I wanted to hear about her Finnish grandfather's purchase of famous race horses, even when his family was strapped for cash and living through winter on little more than potatoes. I liked learning about the igloos neighbor boys would build during harsh Northern Michigan winters, and about how the girls would brew great pots of coffee and carry them into the igloos to enjoy with the boys when building was done. Grandma's stories about all the locals sharing a communal sauna, men and women and boys and girls all happily naked together, scraping their skins with birch bark, tossing water onto the coals to make the steam, and running out into the snow to dive through a hole cut in the ice over the river to cool down after a long steambath were so fresh, seventy years later. I loved hearing her sing Finnish folksongs and telling me about her family, and she loved nothing more than sharing her memories with me. Her treatments for her mental illness had left her with little short-term memory, but she remembered her childhood as clearly as if she were still young, and living in those times again in her memory and taking her beloved granddaughter with her gave her one of the greatest joys of her old age.
Last month I finally felt I had the strength to sit down with the old cassette and listen to my grandmother again. I feared the tape would stretch or that it would be unintelligible after all this time, that she wouldn't sound as I remembered, or that the sound of my young voice would embarrass me. I worried that hearing us together would bring forth once again the horrible sense of loss I felt when she died. But I put the tape in my old dubbing tape deck and, as I dubbed it to a fresh tape so I could have a backup in case the original failed me, I sat by the speakers and listened. The sound quality was scratchy and I had to turn the volume up to hear our voices, but I was shocked to hear how much like my current self I sounded. It was wonderful to hear my grandmother's gentle little voice, and I was delighted to hear how natural our conversation was, how enthusiastic we both were, and how clear and correct my memories of my grandmother were. We were as close and comfortable with each other as I remembered, and her stories were sweet and interesting, as I've always remembered them. And while I cried and shook my head as I heard her speak, and I did feel a flood of sadness and loss, mostly what I felt was wonderment that this terrific invention, the cassette tape, gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in my grandmother's stories and company again.
I listened to the tape of my grandfather and mother again. Not all of it; I haven't been able to listen to all of my grandmother's tape yet, either. Both take a lot of emotional energy and focus. But my grandfather's tape was also a wonderful gift. He was as harsh, self-pitying, unkind, and angry as I remembered him, and I can't imagine how my dear grandmother with her sensitive ways could stand to live with him for so long. My mother was also true to form: curious, enthusiastic, articulate, speaking directly to him but also adjusting her questions and showing more empathy toward him than I anticipated in order to try to break through his defenses enough to learn more about what made her family the way it was. I admired her courage in facing him, for he always made it clear that she was never the favorite, and that he felt everyone and everything beneath him in some way, and she felt understanding him and her mother was more important than her discomfort in dealing with him. Later in life facing that sort of anger was beyond her strength—she feared it too much to work through it, and hearing him speak with her, I understood better where that fear had come from, and how hard it must have been to have such a tender, broken mother and such a bitter, insulting father, and to try to look out for herself without dominating and squashing those around her. She adored her mother and felt the anger of her father all her life, but also saw how much more success her father's attitude had in the world than her mother's did, and I think the clash of outlooks and behaviors always caused painful internal battles in her, and kept her from engaging with others as completely and healthily as she desperately wanted to.
Instead of feeling the huge gap and sadness over the losses of my mother and grandmother anew after hearing these tapes, I felt closer to them again. I felt sorry for my mother's struggles to understand and stand up to her father, and admired her desire to understand and be loving toward her parents despite their difficulties. Best of all, the many years since my grandmother died disappeared for a little while, and the comfort of her company lingered. I suddenly felt she wasn't so far away and hadn't been gone so long. Not only did the hearing of her voice and remembering the stories make me feel this closeness, but the pleasure of knowing how well I'd preserved her memory in my heart gave me great comfort. We really do carry those we love with us in our hearts; they do live on; they aren't so far away.
When I was nine years old, my grandmother had a nervous breakdown. In trying to understand why her beloved mother had fallen apart psychologically, and in trying to figure out the basis for her own fears and troubles, my mother took a year off from teaching and earned a master's degree in counseling. Her thesis was a study of her mother's psychological life. She interviewed her father and sister and even herself, and put together what she could of the history of my grandmother's depressions, fears, and occasional breaks with reality. She taped these interviews and, after she died in 2001, I found a tape of my mother interviewing my grandfather in early 1973. I was thrilled to have it, but too afraid to listen to it. The idea of hearing my mother's inquisitive, professional tones on tape felt like too much to bear, and imagining my grandfather with his anger, vulgarity, spite, bitterness, brittleness, and self-absorption lashing out at my grandmother and swearing about how she had let him down, when in my heart I knew his seething anger and belittling of her are what broke her spirit in the first place, seemed too cruel a strike against my grandmother's memory. So I preserved it but did not listen to it.
Around the same time, I found an even more important jewel: an audiotape of me at age 12 or 13 interviewing my grandmother about her memories of her youth which I made for a school folklore assignment. Bless the teacher who made students interview someone about his or her personal history, for it inspired one of my most precious possessions. I finally had the strength to listen to my tape recently, and it was wonderful. I had set it aside for years, too, but I finally listened to it and made a copy of it in January.
My grandmother had loved telling me stories about her childhood for as far back as I could remember. I was the grandchild who loved those stories the most; I would ask over and over again to hear about the time she went berrypicking, disturbed a wasps' nest, and got stung all over her body, barely surviving. I wanted to hear about her Finnish grandfather's purchase of famous race horses, even when his family was strapped for cash and living through winter on little more than potatoes. I liked learning about the igloos neighbor boys would build during harsh Northern Michigan winters, and about how the girls would brew great pots of coffee and carry them into the igloos to enjoy with the boys when building was done. Grandma's stories about all the locals sharing a communal sauna, men and women and boys and girls all happily naked together, scraping their skins with birch bark, tossing water onto the coals to make the steam, and running out into the snow to dive through a hole cut in the ice over the river to cool down after a long steambath were so fresh, seventy years later. I loved hearing her sing Finnish folksongs and telling me about her family, and she loved nothing more than sharing her memories with me. Her treatments for her mental illness had left her with little short-term memory, but she remembered her childhood as clearly as if she were still young, and living in those times again in her memory and taking her beloved granddaughter with her gave her one of the greatest joys of her old age.
Last month I finally felt I had the strength to sit down with the old cassette and listen to my grandmother again. I feared the tape would stretch or that it would be unintelligible after all this time, that she wouldn't sound as I remembered, or that the sound of my young voice would embarrass me. I worried that hearing us together would bring forth once again the horrible sense of loss I felt when she died. But I put the tape in my old dubbing tape deck and, as I dubbed it to a fresh tape so I could have a backup in case the original failed me, I sat by the speakers and listened. The sound quality was scratchy and I had to turn the volume up to hear our voices, but I was shocked to hear how much like my current self I sounded. It was wonderful to hear my grandmother's gentle little voice, and I was delighted to hear how natural our conversation was, how enthusiastic we both were, and how clear and correct my memories of my grandmother were. We were as close and comfortable with each other as I remembered, and her stories were sweet and interesting, as I've always remembered them. And while I cried and shook my head as I heard her speak, and I did feel a flood of sadness and loss, mostly what I felt was wonderment that this terrific invention, the cassette tape, gave me the opportunity to immerse myself in my grandmother's stories and company again.
I listened to the tape of my grandfather and mother again. Not all of it; I haven't been able to listen to all of my grandmother's tape yet, either. Both take a lot of emotional energy and focus. But my grandfather's tape was also a wonderful gift. He was as harsh, self-pitying, unkind, and angry as I remembered him, and I can't imagine how my dear grandmother with her sensitive ways could stand to live with him for so long. My mother was also true to form: curious, enthusiastic, articulate, speaking directly to him but also adjusting her questions and showing more empathy toward him than I anticipated in order to try to break through his defenses enough to learn more about what made her family the way it was. I admired her courage in facing him, for he always made it clear that she was never the favorite, and that he felt everyone and everything beneath him in some way, and she felt understanding him and her mother was more important than her discomfort in dealing with him. Later in life facing that sort of anger was beyond her strength—she feared it too much to work through it, and hearing him speak with her, I understood better where that fear had come from, and how hard it must have been to have such a tender, broken mother and such a bitter, insulting father, and to try to look out for herself without dominating and squashing those around her. She adored her mother and felt the anger of her father all her life, but also saw how much more success her father's attitude had in the world than her mother's did, and I think the clash of outlooks and behaviors always caused painful internal battles in her, and kept her from engaging with others as completely and healthily as she desperately wanted to.
Instead of feeling the huge gap and sadness over the losses of my mother and grandmother anew after hearing these tapes, I felt closer to them again. I felt sorry for my mother's struggles to understand and stand up to her father, and admired her desire to understand and be loving toward her parents despite their difficulties. Best of all, the many years since my grandmother died disappeared for a little while, and the comfort of her company lingered. I suddenly felt she wasn't so far away and hadn't been gone so long. Not only did the hearing of her voice and remembering the stories make me feel this closeness, but the pleasure of knowing how well I'd preserved her memory in my heart gave me great comfort. We really do carry those we love with us in our hearts; they do live on; they aren't so far away.
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