The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future, a film by Francisca Alegria

Somewhere in the South American jungle, a river deposits thousands of dead fish on its banks. And a woman in a motorcycle helmet and muddy clothes emerges, gasps on the bank, then makes her way into town. She is Magdalena. She committed suicide decades before by riding her motorcycle into this river, but here she is. The only clues to her otherworldliness are the energy she emits that interferes with electrical objects, and her muteness. 

The family she left owns a dairy near the river, run by her hapless son Bernardo under the critical eye of her former husband Enrique. When Enrique glimpses her through a shop window he collapses and is hospitalized. Their daughter Cecilia, a doctor, collects him, her trans teenage son Tomas and younger daughter, and off they go to the dairy farm. Magdalena appears to her grandchildren, who seem comfortable with her. Cecilia, who witnessed her ride off the pier, screams at her to go away. The old woman servant who looks after everyone takes note of her presence, undisturbed. 

At night, Magdalena opens the gate of the cows’ enclosure and they escape into a field. The next day they’re all sick and dying. The owners of the pulp mill on the river deny having anything to do with the fish kill or cattle deaths, or for that matter the disappearance of the bees, which occurred after fumigation. She may have been sent by the river to warn people about the toxins, and to press them to action. Her family, with its own disharmony, suffers a sickness of anger and contempt. But her grandchildren welcome her, and accept her presence without hesitation or doubt. 

Cecilia is angry at her return, perhaps because she had no way to call her mother back, to receive an explanation or apology. But Enrique is also angry, with the same intolerance that has crippled his family. He blames Bernardo for the deaths of the cows – their livelihood – and seeing the belittled man’s shoulders slump as he rides away on his motorcycle is truly wrenching. Told he is too stupid to do anything but farm, he is also castigated for not running the dairy perfectly. Enrique does none of the work but finds plenty to criticize. We understand Magdalena better. 

And yet, Bernardo is quite comfortable with Tomas, accepting his earrings, lipstick, feminine clothes. The place is strange, the energy Magdalena gives off is strange – what is she after? Is she a ghost, or…? Tomas goes to a gay bar to dance, and Magdalena joins him. She dances too, and flirts with a man. Later she and Tomas sit on a boat together. He asks about the afterlife – how was it? Wet, she conveys – as close as she comes to speaking. Images appear on his phone from her mind, leaving viewers space to decide what they mean. 

Not every story is rational. Sometimes we just ride along to see where it goes, and take in the sights and sounds of what may be unreal. Why not? A song, woven through the opening and again at the end, is sung by some fluid voice, possibly a cow’s.

An Evening with Mark Mothersbaugh - a Denver Film Festival Event

As part of the 45th Denver Film Festival’s MOFFOM (Music On Film – Film On Music), the organizers invited Devo co-founder Mark Mothersbaugh for an evening in conversation with Jonathan Palmer. Mothersbaugh’s many compositions include soundtracks for TV shows Peewee’s Playhouse and Rugrats, and movies starting with Neil Young’s Human Highway, then later the Rugrats movie, which was so successful that Mothersbaugh became sought-after in film scoring. He did TV commercials, adding subliminal messages to Hawaiian Punch ads saying “Question Authority” and “Sugar is bad for you” which the companies didn’t catch, though kids likely did. 

He met Wes Anderson, who had very specific ideas about the sound he wanted, and they worked together on many movies starting with Bottle Rocket. That movie was previewed for a test audience of spoiled Santa Monica adolescents who came for the free sodas and candy then left in droves – Mothersbaugh said the movie became notorious for having the highest walkout rate of any preview. 

He worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who turned the children’s book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs into a movie. Later, Lord and Miller made 21 Jump Street, which he also scored. When he was approached by producers of the first Lego movie, he introduced them to Lord and Miller, and used a combination of synthesizer and orchestral sounds to blend Lego brick noises with the natural world. He has worked with New Zealand director Taika Waititi on What We Do in the Shadows and Thor Ragnarok.

He was asked to score the $150 million documentary This is not a House for which he got to use many fun instruments he’d accumulated, including dozens of bird calls and one-of-a-kind instruments such as his “orchestrium” which forced air through organ pipes and doorbell chimes using a calliope organ base, to produce mechanical natural sound. 

From 40s and 50s radio composer Raymond Scott he was able to rescue an “electronium” along with dozens of acetate recordings from Scott’s many years in radio – Ella Fitzgerald, many other shows, and cartoon music, which wasn’t copyrighted until 1954. Mothersbaugh referred to Devo’s music as “Fisher-Price toy songs” – simple melodies with odd lyrics. 

As a boy he watched old movies on a small black-and-white TV, sometimes capturing soundtracks on his family’s answering machine recorder – when he played them back later, he could re-watch the movies in his head. In the monster movie Island of Lost Souls he heard the mad scientist’s half-animal/ half human creations crying out, “Are we not men?” From Inherit the Wind he absorbed the image of a chimpanzee in front of a poster declaring Devolution Man – but with his head in the way of some letters, the image said Devo Man. 

This humorous iconoclast, whose band has been rejected yet again from induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, says his final wish is to be buried in the HOF parking lot, with one leg sticking up.

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

What a beautifully-written exquisitely-felt story this is! Jack, ne’er-do-well son of Iowa preacher John Boughton, is living in St. Louis in the 1940s. He is past middle age, solitary, with some genteel aspects alongside his troubling ones: he has read widely, poets and novelists, and plays piano, is naturally courteous. Alongside these qualities he is a petty thief, inveterate liar, a drunk and a bum: a man on the run from responsibility in all its forms. He scrapes by, pawning items he has stolen, finding marginal jobs – shoe salesman, dance instructor. His brother, who has his address, sends him money sometimes. 

He meets Della Miles, a younger black woman, English teacher at the good colored high school. One night they are locked in a cemetery – she came to leave flowers, and before she realized, the gates were locked. He came there to spend the night, as he sometimes did when he was too broke to rent a shabby room. Through the long chilly night they have a conversation as they walk around stealthily, not to draw the attention of the guard. 

Their fathers are both preachers: Jack’s Presbyterian, Della’s a Methodist bishop. Despite strict segregation and the disapproval of society, this pair find in each other kindred spirits. And they fall in love. This is the love of two people who know they only trouble each other’s lives, yet cannot keep apart. The God they may or may not believe in holds them in the palm of his hand, where they share loyalty and comfort in the face of a world of opposition. 

Robinson’s profound insights and well-crafted sentences bring us into the heart of their lives and predicaments. “She had repaid his kindness with kindness. As she would not have done if she had known who he was. What he was. When defects of character are your character, you become a what. He had noticed this. No one ever says, A liar is who you are, or Who you are is a thief. He was a what, absolutely.” 

“Downstairs were a barbershop, a failed lawyer’s office, a dentist’s office, the office of an accountant. Jack knew, because he knew such things, that there was hardly anything worth stealing. The dance studio was an empty room, in which even determined malice could hardly be up to much.” 

She writes so gently about them. Though it’s clear the world is poised to slap them down, you feel how blessed they are, this unlikely love their bulwark against an unkind future. I need not say more. Any thoughtful person will deeply appreciate reading this book.

The Painter, a novel by Peter Heller

Peter Heller’s 2014 novel, The Painter, is written in economic, dynamic style, with lots of white space on the page: modern fiction’s answer to the short attention-spans of readers accustomed to fidgety electronics. Ultimately, though, a novel is a story, and whether you appreciate it has everything to do with whether it delivers on its promise. 

Jim Stegner is a painter, rebellious son of a logger and a drunk, with his own struggles with alcohol and a hot temper. Jim’s agent and gallerist in Santa Fe, doing what he can to keep Jim painting, sends him to Paonia, Colorado, to a cabin outside town after release from several years in prison for shooting but not killing a man in a bar. The narrative is first-person – we have to take Jim’s word for his actions and accept his rationale – and in large degree he seems, or tries to be, as honest as possible. The book is situated in parts of Colorado I know well; it was a pleasure to have them so beautifully evoked. Heller is a fine writer. 

Jim – I’ll call him Jim because everybody else does – loves to fly-fish. The shooting that landed him in prison was fallout from the murder of his seventeen-year-old daughter Alce and his subsequent divorce from her mother. Jim taught Alce to fly-fish, and that activity brings her back in ways that could heal his wounds. But arriving at a creek outside Paonia, he encounters an outfitter beating a horse with a club. Jim in a rage attacks the man, the sheriff is summoned, the injured horse is taken to recuperate. And Jim has made an enemy. 

The story spins into a maelstrom of violence that overwhelms its homage to art. Since we see it all through Jim’s perspective, his choices feel consistent with who he is – but the sheriff’s warning early on, to live and let live, falls on deaf ears. Jim can’t, nor can those aligned against him. Meanwhile, as stories circulate and his notoriety grows, his paintings become darker, with violence lurking in the frame; the art connoisseurs of Santa Fe can’t buy them fast enough. 

Jim’s creativity does get him out of jams – by behaving unpredictably, he survives encounters where he could easily end up dead. And his riffs on the creative process are fine: “Usually. It comes fast, it comes without thought, it comes like a horse running you over at night. But. Even if people understand this, they don’t understand that sometimes it is not like that at all. Because the process has always been: craft, years and years; then faith; then letting go.” But I confess to being disappointed that this tale about art turns noir. I didn’t need the focus on stalking, killers, and vengeance. And despite Jim’s self-image as a man with ordinary human struggles, his participation belies it. 

Likely aware of how escalating violence can hijack a narrative, Heller regards it from a philosophic perspective, letting Jim steep in what he’s done – self-defense or not, prosecuted or not, he feels the stain on his soul, as he should. Heller humanizes the villains too, enough that the reader is not pleased to think of Jim as some Dirty Harry ridding the world of scum. In a society increasingly drawn to vigilantism and guns, this book fits right in – except the art, which doesn’t. 

Late in the novel Jim reflects on a pair of paintings at the Tate Modern Museum in London, both striking him as powerfully sexy portrayals of women. The first, a detailed study of a pale nude on a divan, leaves him wondering if she’s alive or dead. The second, a Picasso rendering of his young lover: “She was not perfect, like the other, not in a classical sense, her limbs were short, she was pudgy, she might even waddle a little as she walked. But. She was devastatingly sexy. That was it, maybe. The painting was so simple. Simple joy, simple sensual heat, simple love in her presence. I felt what Picasso must have felt.” 

He concludes this riff with his own ethos, however tattered by events: “[T]his dark yearning is what happens when we idealize anything: the form of a woman, a landscape, a spiritual impulse. We move it closer to the realm of the dead, if not outright kill it. The living joyful exuberant woman becomes statue marble and dead, or pornographic and equally dead… That is when I decided that whatever I did as an artist, I would try to go toward the living and not away from it.” But does he?

My Old School, a film by Jono McLeod

This 2022 film is a pastiche of animation and live action, telling the true story of a student entering the 5th form (junior in high school is the US equivalent) in a Glasgow school, Bearsden Academy, in 1993. Brandon Lee is an odd duck – he looks odd, he doesn’t seem to fit in, and for a sixteen-year-old he knows a great deal about many things. 

Through the course of the film we see interviews with his classmates, now adults, who express their recollections and opinions of him. I won’t say much about the story, because it would be a shame to spoil your discovery. Suffice it to say that Brandon Lee is not who he seems, and as the film progresses, we find out bit by bit who he really is. It’s a fascinating piece of cinema, playing with our perceptions even as Brandon’s fellow students learn more. 

The animated retelling of his 1993 school year adds an appropriate level of unreality to the whole thing. Alan Cumming plays adult Brandon, being interviewed about his stint as a student, and some of his fellow students and school administrators are played by actors as well. Others play themselves. There are funny moments, and surprises, and realizations that reverberate. 

This is a perfect summer movie – go see it!

Get Back, Peter Jackson's documentary about the Beatles

Peter Jackson waded through 60 hours of film and another 150 of audio recorded during the Beatles' last collaboration, in January, 1969. Part 1 of his resulting documentary is 157 minutes, Part 2 is 173, and Part 3 is 138, a total of nearly 8 hours. He has given us an exploration of the creative process, as the foursome write several songs in the course of the three weeks leading up to a concert date. They’re also trying to sort out the kind of concert that will be, and by the way, release an album. 

Whether you will enjoy this depends on your interest in a group so popular that surely everything to know about them has already been revealed, and it was such a long time ago. Maybe they seem self-indulgent, and caught in the whirl of fame. It’s useful to remember that when this footage was shot, John and Ringo were twenty-eight, Paul was twenty-six, and George twenty-five, after six demanding years together in a blinding spotlight. 

As they practice, the rifts are evident, but so is the camaraderie, the humor that made Richard Lester’s brilliant films A Hard Day’s Night and Help! such delights. Watch these today: you will still feel the excitement of a moment when the world seemed new. By 1969 the pace has eased up, and with chances to step back and consider their prospects, they have the mental space to wonder. Yoko Ono is often blamed for the breakup of the Beatles, but her presence was only one factor in their changing chemistry – Jackson makes clear that they have all grown different directions, and this gig is their last. At the end of Part 1, George walks out. “See you around the clubs,” he says, his exit having more to do with Paul than John.

After he’s gone, the remaining three talk over what to do – should they tap Eric Clapton for the performance? The larger question is whether, without George, they can continue as the Beatles. Bands add and subtract members, but they were an entity. Many fans have a favorite Beatle they followed after the breakup. For me, none were appealing on their own: John was too ingrown, losing much of his songwriting edge; Paul was too mushy; George got narrow; Ringo couldn’t carry that weight himself. The whole was always greater than the sum of its parts. 

Their rehearsals tread the same ground over and over – add a line, lose a line, smoke so many cigarettes I choked just watching. Then Billy Preston, in London for a gig, stops by Apple Studios, and his contributions on keyboard and guitar change the dynamics, lifting them past their logjam. Enough joy sneaks back to help them answer the questions before them: how public will the performance be, can they finish enough songs to cut a record? Once they settle on playing on the roof for cameras, the path ahead is clear. 

I was entertained to hear interviews with Beatles fans down on the street listening, who didn’t know who was playing up there. I hope I haven’t given away too much – the whole film is well worth watching. If you’ve seen the movie Let It Be, you may think you know how it all went down. But the insights culled from all those hours of footage to create Get Back offer a fuller picture.

Ode to Lamar Cox

First, a note: I worked for Lamar Cox and his wife Sandra for twenty years. He died this March. I was asked by his family to speak at his June memorial service, and the poem that follows is what I shared. 

For Lamar Cox 

It’s a rare person who does it all well – 

From modest beginnings, who could foretell 

The heights you would rise to, the ways you’d excel? 

On mental agility first let us dwell: 

In the first cohort of Black enrollees 

At U Cincinnati Engineering, 50’s, 

The six of you studied, and then stayed in touch, 

For breaking that barrier enabled so much. 

You ran the high hurdles on the track team 

Though for your height and build, that looked extreme – 

It’s the spring in your stride, not the length of your limbs 

That launches you upward, those hurdles to skim. 

In corporate America you found a place 

To tap into your insight, in the rat race 

But patents and kudos could not suffice – 

Being your own man was worth sacrifice. 

But without a partner, what is a life? 

On your second go, you met your soul’s wife. 

From New York to Washington, finding your spot: 

The American Enterprises juggernaut. 

And that’s where I met you, in an interview 

For office assistant – you thought I would do 

Helping you manage your businesses there 

I worked for a couple beyond compare. 

On alarm systems and CCTV 

You applied the knowledge of your degree -

A motion sensor, in a house with a cat? 

Sure, you had a solution for that. 

Upside-down mounting would keep it from seeing 

That false-alarm magnet, jumping and fleeing. 

Your intuition alerted you 

When embezzlement came into view 

Without a fuss you put it right -

I admired that insight. 

To set up shop in Silver Spring 

You proved you could do anything: 

Cutting new doorways, finished and fine, 

Track lighting making the showroom shine – 

I watched you cut glass shelves like a pro, 

Scoring above then tapping below, 

Breaking them cleanly along that edge – 

A deft and able personage! 

Did I mention your musical gift? 

Operatic tones through the office would drift – 

And hosting friends at Christmas parties, 

With Charlotte Douglass on the keys 

Leading us all to sing a carol 

In our holiday apparel. 

Stories you shared – a bit of New York lore – 

A customer at the floral store 

Who occasioned a running gag: 

“You couldn’t put a dog in a bag!” 

 In marriage, you advised, “fight fair – 

Calling names you should foreswear. 

Never hit then when they’re low 

 That’ll be you sometime, you know. 

Once you’ve fought, then let it go – 

You don’t need bravissimo. 

A cultivated love will grow 

Stronger when kindness you bestow.” 

We miss you, Lamar, your life well made 

Inspires every accolade: 

Employer, and a mentor too – 

As family I think of you – 

No one can be in another’s skin 

But soul to soul, we’re still akin. 

Love, NC Weil

Prague Winter, by Madeleine Albright

Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s 2012 memoir of her childhood in Czechoslovakia, England, and Yugoslavia 1937-1948 covers history you may think you know, from the vantage of a small country caught in the tides of larger powers. After the Anschluss, in which Nazi Germany annexed Austria, the next to fall was Czechoslovakia. The small nation was multi-ethnic, and its German-majority region pushed to join Germany. 

Once the war began in earnest, Nazi occupiers created the Terezin camp, packing in resident Jews while creating for willing-to-believe inspectors a “model city” in which its detainees were dressed up and served abundant food – bounty that was snatched away as soon as the inspectors left. People were packed 50 to a room, disease was rampant, food and medicine in short supply, and soon transports began to death camps in Poland. 

Albright learned at the age of 57 that she had Jewish ancestry. Her non-religious parents converted to Catholicism, partly to protect her and her younger siblings, and partly so her father, Joseph Korbel, could continue his diplomatic career. She followed in his footsteps with her own ability to balance needs and forces, to find justice in difficult situations. We may cringe now at the notion of the Soviet Union as anyone’s savior, yet in WWII, small countries in eastern Europe had little choice, and made pacts with Stalin in hopes of establishing post-war autonomy. Although the Iron Curtain fell across Europe and Soviet forces supported Communist governments, leaders hoped to make the best of a situation they could not control. 

As she notes early in the book, “A scholar,” wrote my father, “inescapably reads the historical record in much the same way as he would look in a mirror – what is most clear to him is the image of his own values [and] sense of… identity.” And events bear out this assertion – again and again, people see what they want to, what fits their image of the world, blocking out uncomfortable facts that threaten that view.

This book is worth your time: because Albright is a fine writer; because she casts light from a lesser-known angle on events we consider familiar; because she understands the compromises forced on politicians, diplomats, and citizens by the sweep of history. She condemns cravenness and cruelty, but not well-meaning efforts to ameliorate harm. 

I think we read about and study WWII so much because it strikes us as a just war: unmitigated aggression coupled with genocidal plans and manifestations of pure evil, clashing with forces reluctant to take up arms, but whose courage aids their response. Righteous causes in war exist mostly in the eyes of politicians and generals – those who must do the actual fighting find less to beat their chests about. But as we watch Ukraine struggle against Russia, should we be sitting on the sidelines while their cities are bombed and people shot?

The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson

This 2020 novel by science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson starts in the present day and looks at our burgeoning climate catastrophe from many angles. And unlike the familiar doom-scrolling post-apocalyptic downers, this book threads a way forward to a living functional planet. It’s easy to feel paralyzed by the scope of the problem and the juggernaut of progress, which seems incapable of change. But just 2 years ago, the skies were clean because suddenly everyone stayed home. So before we snuggle back into our ruts and try to ignore this existential threat, let’s consider how we live, and how we could live. 

The story starts off with a heat wave in India causing 20 million deaths. This catalyzes India to lead the world in an immediate shift to clean energy, which sweeps up into its sphere soil-regenerative agriculture – and also spawns a group calling themselves Children of Kali, eco-terrorists who shoot down planes, assassinate rich people, and sabotage the beef industry by introducing mad-cow disease. 

The Conference of the Parties (COP) to the Paris Climate Agreements appoints a group, the Ministry for the Future, to find all possible ways to ameliorate climate change. The Ministry is representative of world populations, not just white men, and a spectrum of skills: diplomacy, economics, AI, infrastructure, law, agriculture, geoengineering, ecology, glaciology, insurance, security, and racial equity. Though we do meet some characters, Robinson packs a great deal of data and understanding of systems into this book. 

We see teams experimenting with ways to slow or stop sea level rise by pumping water from beneath fast-moving Antarctic glaciers, using oil-drilling machinery to do it. India buys time before another heat wave by geoengineering: seeding the upper atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to deflect sunlight. The mad-cow spread is so complete that cattle, a source of methane as well as deforestation, essentially disappear. Nations create wildlife corridors linking habitats, so that as climate destabilizes, wild animals are able to move safely to more livable areas. People join “2000 Watt clubs” aiming to reduce their energy footprint by tracking their housing, food, clothing, and transportation impacts. Sort of like getting in your 10,000 steps a day, except to benefit the world not just yourself. 

We see first the idea, then the implementation, of a carbon coin – carboni – with a long maturation value (think of a bond) payable to those who keep CO2-producing sources unused: oil, natural gas, and coal companies compensated for leaving it in the ground. Using blockchain to produce and track the carboni prevents their recipients from gaming the system, and as economies around the world shake, the carboni gains dominance. Carbon sequestration is done in many ways: pumping CO2 into old oil wells, separating it from oxygen and using the carbon as a building material, improving soil health, planting trees. This book is packed with ideas – not just good ideas, actionable ideas. 

Robinson makes a convincing case that we have the capacity to pull together as a species to protect our only home. He doesn’t scorn any technology that can help us get there. He also pokes at some of our assumptions: “Jevons Paradox [shows] that increases in efficiency in the use of a resource lead to an overall increase in the use of that resource, not a decrease” and observes “What’s good is what’s good for the biosphere. In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational.” 

By pulling back from a US-centric view, Robinson is able to show that we – and by we I mean all life on this planet – are in the same boat. I appreciate that in this novel he puts India in the lead – one-sixth of earth’s population, nominally a democracy, situated squarely in the tropics where the intensity of the sun hits hardest – and through a fictional but likely catastrophe, mobilizes to change. And if this crowded country, so often viewed by wealthy nations as some lost cause, can pivot to a green future, then the rest of us certainly can. And it’s time!

Triangulations, by Lorine Kritzer Pergament

This volume, released in March, 2022, contains the novella Triangulations and a handful of short stories by Lorine Kritzer Pergament. The novella reveals the lives of several generations of women in one family, linked through artistic ambition, love, and tragedy. Protagonist Susie wrestles with her reluctance to have children, and as we follow her journey of learning more about her grandmother, a cousin of that generation, her own mother whom she never knew, and her sisters, we come to empathize with her hesitation. 

Pergament moves through time, sometimes inhabiting characters, sometimes viewing them through Susie’s imagination, prompted by stories her older sister is able to conjure from photographs. Their grandmother Fannie survived the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 in New York’s Lower East Side, in a single day meeting the love of her life, and losing her best friend to the inferno. And fire continues to plague the family – Fannie’s daughter, Sylvie, suffered burns in a kitchen fire, with her baby – Susie – delivered a month early while she died from her injuries. Susie’s father won’t speak of Sylvie, and the young caretaker he soon marries, Clarisse, only came into the family after her death. She must turn to her older sister to learn more about their mother. 

Susie is a novelist, and her longtime boyfriend, Zach, who’d like to marry and start a family with her, is an up-and-coming painter. While she loves him, and cherishes their creative connection, having children is a fraught subject. The splintering of her own life renders her wary, and as she delves into the histories of her grandmother, and her grandfather’s cousin, Berta, she doubts a woman can both raise children and sustain a career. Even as she admires their accomplishments, she wonders how much more they could have done, without family demands impacting their ambitions. 

Reading Berta’s diary about living in France from the end of WWI, through Nazi occupation and into the decades beyond, Susie is struck by her predecessor’s adaptability, and her perspective. When she and her husband return to Paris after WWII, they find his optometry shop utterly smashed and burned. She writes: “Charles is despondent. He created that business from nothing, but is trying to be philosophical. We are all alive. What’s left are details.” Susie riffs on this: “We are all alive, the rest is details… Was having a child just a detail? Is being alive all that really matters?” While she appreciates the differences between Berta and Charles’ precarious situation and her own more secure one, she’s not prepared to write off the importance of her creative work as some mere “extra” – to thrive is steps beyond “we survived,” and represents more acutely her dilemma. 

Yet she also grasps the depth of Berta and Charles’ love, and how central that was to who they were. She finds resonance in Berta’s description of Charles as her “other half” – it’s how she feels about Zach. But, as he makes clear, that fundamental disagreement over having children will end their relationship. When we reach points in life where everything seems to be working, we want to make time stop. We know we can’t, but the desire to prevent change is our deepest self-deceit. Susie, recognizing this, has to abandon the version of life with Zach that fit so comfortably, and make a choice. Learning about the courageous women who preceded her, she’s better grounded to be fair to herself, and to Zach. 

Pergament writes with assurance about both the interior world of relationships and the larger sphere of events we cannot control, offering her readers plenty to ponder. 

Her short stories reveal the tensions and pitfalls in relationships. In “What Goes Up” we see a young mother at the end of her tether. In “Smell the Roses on Your Own Time” we watch a marriage unravel. “A Unique Package” surprises the best friend and confidante of a woman who has just died. And “Lost” visits the world of dementia from the inside. Pergament invests her women with humor, curiosity, and iconoclasm in contrast to the often straitlaced world they inhabit. People around them may find their behavior surprising or inappropriate, but this writer is in their corner showing why they live as they do, challenging her readers about our tendency to judge those who step outside the lines.

To order a copy of this book, visit https://publerati.com/triangulations-by-lorine-kritzer-pergament/

The Power of the Dog, a novel by Thomas Savage

This 1967 novel, recently made into a film, is truly Western, and if you don’t know what that means, this is a good place to start. Writers such as Wallace Stegner, Ernest Hemingway, Annie Proulx, Willa Cather, and John Steinbeck are quintessentially Western – and so is Thomas Savage. He draws heavily on personal experience, growing up in Idaho and Montana on ranches, observing the predominance of landscape and weather to the experiences of people living there. 

For The Power of the Dog, he creates a family, the Burbanks, wealthy cattle ranchers in Montana. The elder Burbank, whom they call The Old Gent, has retired with his wife, the Old Lady, to a hotel in Salt Lake City to escape the harsh winters and isolation of the ranch. In 1925, brothers Phil, now forty, and George, thirty-eight, are marking their twenty-fifth year of running the operation, dividing duties and still sharing their childhood bedroom. 

But they are as different as two men can be: Phil is smart, shrewd, observant, skilled – and mean. All his powers he turns to crafting the perfect cutting remark, whether to a ranch-hand late for breakfast or to any non-white person daring to elevate themselves to equal status: Jews, Indians, Mexicans, he despises them. George, on the other hand, is a little dense, a plodder, but sociable and reflexively kind, giving others the benefit of the doubt. 

Phil manages the ranch hands, the cattle, the haying operation. While he likes to spend evenings in the bunkhouse, he sets himself above the cowboys, and they know it. Otherwise, he is isolated, answering to no one, going off alone, keeping his thoughts to himself. When George marries, Phil considers the woman unsuitable, and torments her with the intention of driving her off. She is a widow with a bright effeminate teenage son, another target for Phil’s scorn and derision. 

I won’t say more about the story, just observe how insightfully written it is: "[George] knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.” and “Doors, doors, doors, doors; five outside doors in the house, and [Rose] knew the sound of the opening and closing of each one.” 

Phil is not without humor – he muses on parties the Old Folks hosted, always awkward affairs with guests terrified lest they blunder socially, the conversation dominated by some subject happened upon then worried to death till it was time to leave: “Phil referred to that as the Cabbage Dinner, and it was one of the last parties that the old Burbanks ever attempted. But there had been others – the Mud-Hole Dinner and the Grizzly Bear Dinner.” 

I haven’t seen Jane Campion’s movie, but I highly recommend the novel.

Drive My Car - a film review

You could call this film “Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima” in echo of Louis Malle’s “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” as another way of exploring Chekhov’s play about futility and despair. Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn’t get his actor/director to Hiroshima until well into his story, but arguably he could have started with a recently-widowed man taking a job with a community theater – a two-month respite from a soured life in Tokyo. 

Hamaguchi starts, however, with the marriage of Yusuke Kafuku (Kaf-ku?) and Oto – she is a successful writer for television who gets ideas during sex, narrating them to Kafuku who later recites the stories back to her so she can write them down. One day he comes home from a cancelled flight to find her having sex with Koji Takatsuke, the popular young star of her series. He says nothing, and they are unaware of his intrusion. He quietly leaves, bottling up whatever this discovery stirs in him. 

Adding to the weight of this secret is Takatsuke’s appearance in Hiroshima to audition for a part in “Uncle Vanya.” Everyone at the theater assumes Kafuku will play Vanya, which suits his age and temperament, but instead he casts Takatsuke in the role. A surprise of another sort awaits Kafuku – due to a previous car accident in which a guest actor injured someone, Kafuku cannot drive his beloved red Saab. A driver is appointed – if he won’t accept Misaka his contract is null. So she becomes his driver. 

At first he is uneasy – he’s used to rehearsing lines while driving – but she assures him she doesn’t mind, he should do whatever he is accustomed to. And he does. Her silence and expressionless mien make it easy for him to work on the play from the back seat, without noticing her – she is unattractive, dressed in jeans, work shirt, and a shabby sport coat. But gradually he becomes curious about her; she takes him to the refuse center where she used to drive a truck, and bit by bit her story comes out. 

Again we see the power of Chekhov to move people. Takatsuke flounders as Vanya, and we learn he is in Hiroshima to wait out a scandal. Paparazzi snap pictures of him any time he’s in public, and he chases and assaults them. Takatsuke describes himself as empty, and Kafuku concurs – he chose not to play Vanya because to act well, he must open himself to the depths of the character, and he is unwilling to accept that vulnerability. But Takatsuke carries himself aloof from Vanya’s interior, which makes his acting suffer.

This film explores the hierarchy of theater, in which the director stays apart. The actors have a group bitch session after a reading all found unsatisfactory, but Kafuku has already left. The actors stay in Hiroshima, while his hotel is an hour’s drive away. The producers are there to smooth things over and enforce their set of rules. 

The Korean woman with the role of Sonya is mute, and plays her part using meticulously expressive sign language, which her husband translates to the cast and director. The actor playing Vanya’s young wife speaks English and Mandarin, Takatsuke speaks only Japanese. Chekhov would approve of this multi-lingual cast who cannot comprehend each other’s words. Humans failing to understand each other is the essence of his work. 

My only quibble is that the viewer has to know "Uncle Vanya" for the film to have full impact. In “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” we see the progress of the play – the cast is rehearsing, with takeout coffee cups and street clothes, but the lines are Chekhov’s, and finally it dawns on us that we're watching the play – we don’t need sets, costumes, props. In “Drive My Car” the focus is on the lives of director, actors, and driver – the moving moments of the play are adrift from its full story.

The Secret Knowledge of Water, by Craig Childs

The Secret Knowledge of Water is Craig Childs’ love letter to the desert, to its hidden pools, nocturnal streams, and floods. In a land of scarcity, water seems more abundant, more alive, more alluring, than in wet places. Childs journeys out into desert areas armed with detailed maps, but he is seeking to be surprised, to discover pools described by John Wesley Powell in 1870, to sojourn in the lands of the Tohono O'Odham, native people who live in and with the desert. 

The book is divided into three sections, each with its own aspect of water. We begin with Ephemeral Water, in which he seeks the water hiding out in water pockets, rock crevices, and underground until heat and parch evaporate its remnants. The next section is Water That Moves, which relates the stories of streams, creeks, narrow canyons where water can hide from the relentless sun. And finally, perhaps most beloved to him, is Fierce Water, about floods. 

The tagline of the book is “There are two easy ways to die in the desert: thirst and drowning.” He doesn’t seem much at risk of dying of thirst, despite wandering for weeks in places with no likely water sources. Even when he finds some tiny water pocket with a brackish gallon in it, he leaves it untouched though he is thirsty – it’s a religious kind of response. But floods fascinate him, and by the end of the book we concur in his assessment that floods are as much part of the desert as aridity. 

He writes, “[Water] is not a true element; its atomic structure can be easily broken into Hs and Os, a fact that startled many at the time of its discovery. It behaves so curiously, however, able to move unlike anything else we know of, that it is still unscientifically considered to be an element.” He describes the fish that survive inhospitable conditions, and notes the interference of humans – “There have been cases of native desert fishes being actively poisoned out of waterways to make way for non-native sport fish.” He commiserates with a biologist who has spent decades in a losing battle to preserve these unique species. 

From a café in Kanab, Utah, he watches a thunderstorm, its flash flood arriving to the nods of locals and consternation of tourists. “The water in the street suddenly turned from clear to deep red, the red of the Vermilion Cliffs that surround Kanab, flowing instantly with the viscosity of milk and not water. Objects began to show. Rocks. Uprooted plants... The narrow downstream box of Kanab Canyon was going to be a violent place in about two hours. Anyone hiking down there, or lounging on a boulder in blatant sunlight, was probably expecting the next noteworthy event to be nightfall.” 

Childs writes beautifully about everything he sees – the shapes water has left on rocks; the birds, fish, trees, insects; the sight of a far-off thunderstorm; the ragged forms of desert mountains – and about his own yen to experience water directly. Often he strips naked to explore some narrow side canyon or bask beside a huge pool in the middle of rocks, that shouldn’t even be there. As the American Southwest descends into long-term drought, it’s worth your while to learn more about water. This book is a great place to start.