tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-68591883283084489552024-03-10T21:22:47.408-06:00aesthetic pointIn which NC Weil reviews books and films, and considers this amazing world.NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.comBlogger220125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-48754075762626449582024-02-13T15:06:00.000-07:002024-02-13T15:06:47.239-07:00The Zone of Interest, a film by Jonathan GlazerThe first thing that stood out to me about this movie is the Nazi officers’ haircuts. They are so very ugly, I have to wonder whether that was historically accurate, or a deliberate choice to make the Germans loathsome. I know tastes change, but even Moe, of The Three Stooges, has a better hairdo. Floppy on top, head close-shaved from above the ears down, and with a weird little wanna-be-ducktail point in the back, they’re too broadly hideous to be ignored.
Not as hideous as the contrast between the little Eden of the Hoss family, and the back wall of their lovely garden, the razor-wire-topped boundary of Auschwitz death camp. <div><br /></div><div>This film is hard to write about – what can one say? The Obersturmfuhrer, Rudolph Hoss, played by Christian Friedel, occupies a lovely home (though his wife Hedwig, Sandra Huller, complains it’s not as big as it looks). This idyll is starkly opposed to the adjacent chimneys, barracks, the smoke the servants sometimes close the windows to keep out, the ashes that mulch the soil, the flames, the trains arriving at all hours. </div><div><br /></div><div>Hoss hosts the efficiency expert who proposes a design for the crematorium that will make possible continuous operation of the ovens – bodies (except they don’t call them bodies – “units”) go in, the 1000 plus degree heat does its work, then the load is moved to the next room where it cools, and the ashes are soon at 40 degrees, ready to be shoveled out. All that ingeniousness, turned to such a purpose. </div><div><br /></div><div>Occasionally the camp next door intrudes – Hoss goes fishing, and two of his children play in the river. He hooks a human jawbone, and suddenly barks at the kids to get out of the water. He hustles them home where they’re subjected to a sanitation treatment – a scrubbing with bleach perhaps, which has them screaming in pain – to expunge the contamination from those people, whose remains have the temerity to end up in the river where he loves to fish. </div><div><br /></div><div>Glazer makes clear that it’s possible to ignore something so horrific, so close by – just don’t think about what’s going on, or whether it’s right, or what it means to be on this side of such a wall not that side. It is a willed blindness humans suffer from, and perpetuate suffering through. The veil between what’s behind that wall, and places where we torment each other now, is almost nonexistent.</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-91519727291952160722024-01-15T22:23:00.003-07:002024-01-15T22:25:30.887-07:00Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.My disintegrating paperback copy of this deceptively small novel was printed in 1970, though the copyright is 1963. It is Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s fifth published work. And it’s dynamite. Or, should I say, <i>ice-nine</i>, the substance that destroys life on earth. I like to give copies to friends and family as high school graduation gifts, because the book contains so many fundamental truths about life, all in one place. <div><br /></div><div>Vonnegut creates a scientist and his family, a destructive form of water, and a nihilist religion. In his deadpan way he describes the Hoenikker family – Dr. Felix, the father, genius with no moral compass whatever; his daughter Angela, a tall gawky woman with a gift for playing clarinet; his son Franklin who shuns nearly everyone, spending his time building a model railroad world; and young son Newt, a midget born at their mother’s death, cared for by Angela. Dr. Felix invents a substance the US Marines can use so they don’t have to slog through mud in their forays into battle. But that’s not all the substance does. </div><div><br /></div><div>Vonnegut introduces such ideas as one’s <i>karass</i>, the people with whom one is connected; <i>granfalloons</i>, people who imagine they are connected; <i>wampeter</i>, the purpose for which a <i>karass</i> exists; <i>boko-maru</i>, the ecstatic kneading of one another's feet;<i> </i>and <i>foma</i> – lies. He invents other terms too, but these are the most important. They’re delineated in the religion Bokononism, which is outlawed on the island where it is practiced. No one may be a Bokononist – lest they suffer a hideous death – and yet, they are all Bokononists. </div><div><br /></div><div>I’ve told too much – if you’ve never read this, you ought to find a copy – preferably a crumbling artifact on a used book store shelf – and collect some fundamental truths you might have overlooked thus far.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-35342558465919327302023-12-31T23:13:00.000-07:002023-12-31T23:13:47.285-07:00Maestro, a film by Bradley CooperThis 2023 Oscar contender deals well for a while with the curse of biopics: life tends not to fit the narrative arc of a satisfying story. Leonard Bernstein was a colossus in music as in spirit, and as channeled by Bradley Cooper, he fills the screen. The first half is brilliant – one imaginative sequence, an exuberant dance by a trio of sailors, Leonard, and Felicia Montealegre, in a number from “On the Town” perfectly illustrates the attractions Bernstein has to his wife-to-be and to young men. They all dance together and apart, in this scene and in the rest of the movie. <div><br /></div><div>Bernstein is a man who leans into his appetites, at one point lamenting that his love of people prevents him from the level of composing he would otherwise achieve. The effervescent banter between Felicia (Carey Mulligan) and Bernstein (Bradley Cooper) is marvelous – we feel we are in a time when parties were populated by sophisticates who traded witticisms and opinions with confidence and a light touch.
But the second half drags – not just the cigs (I hoped the credits would include Cigarette Wrangler, an essential crewmember for this pic – I looked in vain for a scene in which they weren’t smoking). We already know Bernstein swings both ways, and that despite being a loving husband and father, he is also unbridled in his appetite for men. But the music – the compositions, the conducting – the reason anyone would make or watch this movie – plays second fiddle (sorry!) to his fast living – booze, coke, young guys. </div><div><br /></div><div>And it’s here that Cooper and his co-writer Josh Singer fall into the biography trap: they feel compelled to tell more than we need to know (“Because it happened!”) to appreciate Bernstein’s prodigious talents.
I would have cut twenty minutes. The fizz of the first half has gone flat, the story dutifully plods on. Between concerts and bouts at the keyboard, we have a lot of slack time filled with pickup scenes and parties. <i>Cut!</i> At Felicia’s command he lies to their oldest, their daughter Jamie (Maya Hawke) about rumors of his behavior at Tanglewood. Later, it’s clear she knows what is going on. <i>Cut! </i></div><div><br /></div><div>
Much has been made of Cooper’s prosthetic nose, created by the makeup artist Kazu Hiro. I don’t know what they are complaining about – I used to watch Bernstein’s Concerts for Young People, and Cooper channeled Bernstein brilliantly – I thought I was watching the man not the actor portraying him. If you’ve seen Frank Langella as Richard Nixon, or Liev Schreiber as Henry Kissinger, or, god forbid, John Wayne as Genghis Khan (in “The Conqueror,” best watched in an altered state), you would give Cooper very high marks. </div><div><br /></div><div>For me the actor who stole the show was Carey Mulligan, who deserves an Oscar. Understated vs. Cooper’s flamboyance, she holds her own without being pitiful.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-39800078213520374382023-11-10T18:59:00.000-07:002023-11-10T18:59:04.678-07:00They Shot the Piano Player, a film by Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba<div>I love the Denver Film Festival, now in its 46th year! Depending on their reception, some of these offerings go on to wider distribution, but most you'll probably never have another chance to see on a big screen. If you love film and there's a festival in your area, you should go!</div><div><br /></div><i>They Shot the Piano Player</i>, a 2022 animated film, is the story of a Bossa Nova pianist with a tragically short career. Tenorio Jr. was a gifted young pianist who pioneered some of the great new syncopated jazz sounds in the early 1960s that captivated Brazil then the jazz world. He played with some of the greats: Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto, and many others, but only recorded one album before he simply disappeared. A New York writer working on a book in 2010 about Latin jazz listens to that album then wants to know more. <div><br /></div><div>His curiosity, and love of Tenorio Jr.’s music, take him to Rio, to Buenos Aires, to the homes and haunts of many musicians who played with him and admired him; gradually he disentangles the story of Tenorio Jr.’s disappearance in 1976 while visiting Buenos Aires. At that time, all over Central and South America, military coups, funded by the CIA as a means of “stabilizing” their political landscape, were rounding up not only dissidents and Communists, but artists, students, musicians, anyone whether overtly political or not, whom they deemed threats. </div><div><br /></div><div>So we get our history lesson, but alongside it we enjoy some great music and captivating images courtesy of the film’s animation team. This movie is well worth seeing on a large screen in a theater with a good sound system, where you can enjoy it at its best.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-55091497633052332432023-10-28T21:41:00.000-06:002023-10-28T21:41:01.355-06:00The Catherine Wheel, by Jean StaffordThis 1951 novel recalls sharply Virginia Woolf’s <i>Mrs. Dalloway</i>, which I read about a year ago. <i>The Catherine Wheel</i> spans a summer not a day, but moves back along the remembrances and regrets of its characters as fully and poignantly as Woolf’s. <div><br /></div><div>Cousin Katherine, unmarried, and fortyish though with hair turned white by a bout of typhus, summers in a grand house outside a small town near the Maine coast. Though the book is set in the late 1930s – early 1940s, Katherine’s life is anachronistic, as if by resisting modernity she can keep time itself from intruding. Instead of a car she has a carriage and team of horses and coachman, as well as a gardener, a cook, a couple of maids, and a tenant on her land. She is the <i>grande dame</i> of the region, respected and appreciated and gossiped-over by the townsfolk. </div><div><br /></div><div>Every summer Katherine hosts her twin nieces and nephew, who under her indulgent intellectual eye are free to do as they will. Andrew, now twelve, has been best friends with the tenant’s son Victor, a rough character a couple years older than himself, with whom he would otherwise never cross paths. In summers past they have been inseparable, performing mischief, fishing and clam-digging, swimming and boating, and spying on the townsfolk of the nearby village. This year, however, Victor’s older brother Charles, a sailor, is home with some nonspecific ailment; Victor appoints himself nursemaid and confidante. Andrew is inflamed with jealousy – he has lost his companion, and the hours weigh on him. He longs for Charles’s death, or recuperation and return to seafaring – either would give Victor back to him. </div><div><br /></div><div>But this is not to be – Charles’s health waxes and wanes, Victor is under his sway, and Andrew wishes ever more fervently that Charles will meet some terrible fate. Katherine has her own secret, but while she and Andrew suffer and sense each other’s misery, they cannot confide. Yet, their dual distresses unbalance the household, so that instead of Katherine’s firm grip on her emotions and Andrew’s youthful nature steadying them, they only grow worse in tandem. </div><div><br /></div><div>Woolf’s visitations into the pasts of her characters are no less perceptive and pointed than those Stafford brings to bear, and we have to ask ourselves: which turning was the one that changed our trajectory from a steady and hopeful one, to disaster? Which thwarted relationship warped our future, crippling our capacity to live our ideal lives? It is too late for remedy – one can only plan for a fitting end.</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-29012155482474987182023-09-23T22:26:00.000-06:002023-09-23T22:26:13.247-06:00Into the Wild, by Jon KrakauerThis book, published in 1995, grew out of an article Krakauer wrote for <i>Outside</i> magazine in January, 1993, five months after its subject, Christopher McCandless (who called himself Alex, and Alexander Supertramp) died of starvation in the Alaska wilderness. Krakauer, an adventurer in the same mold as McCandless, dug deeper after the article was published – who was Chris/ Alex McCandless? Why did he end up alone in an abandoned bus, missing a couple of key opportunities to trek out? Was it hubris, ignorance, or the courage of his convictions, that compelled him away from the practical resources that would have saved him? <div><br /></div><div>Krakauer asks these questions and more as he retraces McCandless’s footsteps from his college days in Atlanta, to wandering across the south, the desert, nearly drowning in the Gulf of California, living on the edge of the Mojave Desert in the sort of rag-tag community that can only exist in such marginal places. Along the way, McCandless, with his combination of intellectual curiosity, adventurous spirit, and candor, made deep impressions on those he encountered. </div><div><br /></div><div>Perhaps because he was young, idealistic, and fixated on his quest for an adventure that would challenge him to the marrow, he evoked protectiveness and generosity from those who gave him rides, offered him jobs and shelter, and tried to temper his singlemindedness. They saw in him a roving son, grandson, brother, or in Krakauer’s case, a kindred spirit, and wanted to help him on his quest, advise him, or lay bare the folly of his pursuit. </div><div><br /></div><div>McCandless left enough of a record – in journal scraps, letters and postcards to those he met, and in the margins of books – to provide insight into his convictions. Here’s a quote from a letter he sent to a grandfather living in the Mojave Desert, who had provided him shelter for some weeks: </div><div><i>“Don’t settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are</i> <i>still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame if you did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience. </i></div><div><i>“You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>If you have only the haziest memory of your own youthful follies, read this book. You may tell yourself, “I’d never do anything that dumb,” but if you’re honest, you might admit that you did your own foolish things – from curiosity, from a yen for what lies over the horizon, from an itch daily life could not scratch. We remember Chris/Alex McCandless because he was an extreme manifestation of the questing spirit that takes so many of us on our own adventures, away from our comfort zones to an edge where we can see further, and imagine more, and return (if we do) greater in spirit.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-75084011873269941322023-09-01T13:02:00.003-06:002023-11-04T22:03:45.901-06:00The Quiet American, by Graham GreenePerhaps you have heard of this excellent 1955 novel. You are likelier to have seen a film version – the one from 1958 starring Michael Redgrave and Audie Murphy, or the 2002 remake with Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser. But if you have not read the book, you may be acquainted with plot and characters without perceiving the depths, which are the source of the book’s power. <div><br /></div><div>Vietnam, 1952-55. Thomas Fowler is a cynical and weary middle-aged English journalist living in Saigon, reporting on uprisings against the French colonial grip. Into his life comes Alden Pyle, the quiet American of the title. His attitudes are bookish and moral and clear-cut. In Pyle’s world there are no shadows. But Vietnam is all gray. He falls for Phuong, the young woman who keeps company with Fowler. He wants to save her, to elevate her from her life in Saigon. Because he is young, when he offers to marry her, Phuong sees better prospects, and agrees. Fowler, who depends on her, strives to recapture the equilibrium of the indifferent – Pyle has got under his skin. Fowler would marry her himself, except that his estranged wife in London refuses to divorce him. </div><div><br /></div><div>The plot is not the point. Pyle is murdered, and Fowler has his own reasons for being involved. Besides an undercurrent of rivalry, Fowler loathes Pyle’s methods, the young American’s clear conscience while he busies himself building up the Third Force which will usher in Democracy over the heads of the Communists and dictators. A bomb going off in a crowded square at the hour when the place is most crowded with women and children is simply an error of timing – the parade in which a few colonels would be blown up, was called off. Fowler is there, seeing the young mother holding her dead baby, the trishaw driver whose legs were blown off. Pyle arrives, complaining of the blood on his shoes and shrugging off maiming and death as an ancillary cost of his great cause. </div><div><br /></div><div>Greene developed a degree of cynicism over a career spent in places where his privileges as a white Englishman set him apart – alienate him – without grounding him in faith nor honesty. He regards himself as a fraud, and thus recognizes it in those around him. Greene is thereby able to present us both Thomas Fowler, who stands in for his own views, and Alden Pyle, who despite his strait-laced awkwardness, eschewing booze and prostitutes, wields death as the tool put into his hands by those who sent him to Vietnam. He does not apologize: he believes in it, just as American officers would say a decade later, <i>“It was necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>When Fowler makes a trip north and rides along on a French bombing run, he witnesses the pilot making a “vertical raid” in which he dives the plane thousands of feet, strafing and bombing as he goes, repeats the maneuver a dozen times, then as they return to the airstrip, blows a sampan out of the water because his instructions are to shoot anything on the river. That evening at an opium house, he addresses Fowler’s appalled reaction: </div><div><br /></div><div>“<i>You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night… But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense, Fowler. You are not one of us.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Where the film versions fall short is in their inability to convey Greene’s masterful writing. Here is Fowler’s first impression of Pyle, in a café in Saigon: <i>“Perhaps only ten days ago he had been walking back across the Common in Boston, his arms full of books he had been reading in advance on the Far East and the problems of China. He didn’t even hear what I said; he was absorbed already in the dilemmas of Democracy and the responsibilities of the West; he was determined – I learnt that very soon – to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world. Well, he was in his element now with the whole universe to improve.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>Greene tells the story in reverse: almost the first thing we learn is that Pyle has been found murdered where he should not have ventured. Perhaps this is the novelist’s riposte to Pyle’s certainty – to start with his death, then explore what little of his life he spends in Vietnam, showing us what he might have learned and ultimately does not. Meanwhile, Fowler, his foil, tries to open the young idealist’s eyes. Fowler can’t hate him for taking Phuong – the Englishman already knows too much about impermanence – and can’t love him for saving his life during a Viet Minh attack in a rice paddy – he would have preferred just to die. But when Pyle accepts that the road to Democracy is necessarily paved with the innocent dead, that Fowler cannot ignore. Greene’s warning booms down the decades – have we learned anything? Can we? The Quiet American is as timely today as when it was written nearly seventy years ago.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-19442559188235128272023-07-13T22:11:00.003-06:002023-07-13T22:13:43.887-06:00Past Lives, a film by Celine SongThis 2023 Korean film concerns the long-term fascination of a pair of Koreans, initially 12-year-olds. Hae Sung has finally earned the highest grade on a test, usually Na Young’s spot. Her artist parents announce to Na Young and her sister that they are immigrating to Canada, and the girls should choose Anglicized names. She decides on Nora Moon. She grows up in Toronto, becomes a playwright, and we see her at a writing residency in New York. <b>Spoiler Alert</b> <b>– I'm going to discuss the whole film. If you don't want to know more before you see it, Stop Now!</b><div><br /></div><div>Twelve years later, Hae Sung makes contact through her father’s FaceBook page, and for a couple of years the two have frequent video calls. She asks if he plans to visit, he says maybe in a couple of years, asks her about visiting Korea; she doesn’t see that on her horizon, and breaks off contact.
Another dozen years pass. Hae Sung is an engineer. He still longs for her, and decides to travel to New York – and admits to friends that he hopes to see Nora. </div><div><br /></div><div>They are pleased to be together, but their lives have diverged: she’s been married 7 years to an American Jew she met during her writing fellowship; he recently broke up with his long-time girlfriend because, in his own estimation, he is too ordinary, and as an only child she deserves an extraordinary spouse.
“Past lives” refers to reincarnation, and to the idea of Borges’ Garden of Forking Paths in which an infinity of options are reduced to our individual trajectories: “past” in the sense of “gone by.” </div><div><br /></div><div>Nora’s husband Arthur asks whether, if she’d become involved with a different man at the writing residency, she might now be married to someone else, and her life with Arthur would never have happened. But Nora quashes that – here they are, together, and this is the life they have chosen and created. There is no other.
She does not see some could-have-been life in her memories of Hae Sung – she is who and where she is, wholeheartedly. </div><div><br /></div><div>But when she, Arthur, and Hae Sung sit in a bar and she and Hae Sung have a conversation in Korean Arthur can barely follow, they talk about the Korean concept of In-Yon, in which affinity is a result of thousands of years of reincarnations, and cannot be denied. He speculates: perhaps in a past life she was a queen and he was a henchman, and they had an illicit affair. Or she was a songbird and he was a branch she alit on, before she flew off. But affinity or not, she stands firm in her choices: she can only be who she is now, and to sink into regret is to abandon the present in favor of some past life she cannot live. </div><div><br /></div><div>The other layer explored here is the immigrant experience – she explains to Arthur that seeing Hae Sung reminds her how Americanized her Korean American friends are, and how the culture Hae Sung is part of is one she gladly shed. Arthur knows some Korean, and Hae Sung has learned a bit of English, but their limited knowledge is one more aspect of their discomfort with each other. Both are jealous: Hae Sung of the man Nora chose to build her life with, Arthur of the man his wife can so easily communicate with, who shared first love. </div><div><br /></div><div>And yet, there is no explosion, no fight – as adults they assess their positions and accept them. It’s good to see a grown-up film!
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-58874274382064610742023-06-23T19:10:00.001-06:002023-06-23T19:11:53.113-06:00Inside Box 1663, by Eleanor JetteOn a recent trip into New Mexico’s Jemez Mountains, we visited Los Alamos, an almost nonexistent spot on the map until the Army commandeered the valley in 1943 for work on the Atomic Bomb. In <b>Inside Box 1663</b>, published in 1977 by the Los Alamos Historical Society, the story of life in the compound is vividly recalled by Eleanor Jette, wife of a scientist and mother of a nine-year-old boy. The place was ill-suited for a rapidly-expanding workforce. Begun on the site of a boys’ school, the original dormitories and Bathtub Row, housing for school personnel, quickly overflowed into surrounding fields. Living space, allotted by status in the bomb-building effort and family size, was seldom adequate. <div><br /></div><div>Water, in limited supply to begin with, was soon a dire situation – springs that fed the source creek were clogged and during the dry months, dwindled. Constant exhortations to conserve water were unequal to the severe disconnect between population and supply. Eleanor Jette, on arrival appalled by housing conditions, was not a complainer but a doer, and soon employed her wit and native intelligence to the problems, battling frequently with Army officers whose hands were tied by budget constraints. She and a few women friends quickly formed a group that helped newcomers adapt, hounded the decision-makers, and found ways to blow off steam. </div><div><br /></div><div>This human’s-eye-view of the cloistered world of Trinity, the Los Alamos section of the Manhattan Project, is a useful addition to the biographies of famous men (Robert Oppenheimer, Leslie Groves, etc.) whose experiences have gained wider recognition. Without the pressure of women like Eleanor, it’s possible Los Alamos itself may have burned to the ground, its occupants poisoned by polluted water and alternately frozen in hard winters and roasted in hot summers (while the Army directive to stoke furnaces till May 15th regardless of conditions, rendered dormitories uninhabitable). </div><div><br /></div><div>She has fun with the secrecy – they were not allowed to tell anyone where they were going nor why. Her New Mexico drivers license identifies her as Number 44, her residential address Special List B, Santa Fe. <i>“I had joined the secret society whose membership was closely guarded. Thus, I later became Number 9 for income tax purposes, and when the laundry service was resuscitated, I was Number 464. We were numbered for everything except our ration books, and the numbers were never the same. Our official address was Box 1663, Santa Fe.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>
As Robert Oppenheimer is in the headlines again in a new film, it’s worth considering the lives of those who toiled to make existence tolerable alongside the bomb-builders.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-40616821986298840872023-05-07T22:09:00.001-06:002023-05-07T22:09:42.560-06:00Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne SimardPublished in 2021, this fine book details the research of a Canadian woman whose family were foresters, and who in working with the Canadian Forest Service, conducted scientific experiments to determine why the seedlings planted in clearcuts were dying. Her studies led her to mapping the mycorrhizal (fungal) networks connecting root systems, helping her to see how the trees communicate, share nutrients, warn each other of disease – diametrically opposed to the notion of competitive growth, the zero-sum game, that the forestry old guard believed, which they have used to justify clearcutting and monocropping policies. <div><br /></div><div>Simard’s experiments and reports gained some attention, though the entrenched patriarchy gave her little credence. But she found unexpected allies, and the further she explored, the deeper her conviction grew that a forest is a network: cooperating, nurturing, protecting its members. And the Mother Trees are the great matriarchs of the forest, their mycorrhizal networks ranging furthest, their seeds scattered by birds and animals, by wind and water, nourished where they fall. </div><div><br /></div><div>In the face of climate change, with increasing stresses on plant communities, it is more important than ever to let the Mother Trees flourish, to retain old growth areas, to recognize their wisdom and awareness, their equality with humans. We assume we are superior to nature, which gives us the hubris to “manage” it – in many cases, to death – without needing to comprehend its capacities and vulnerabilities. Those days must end. Simard documents how forests heal, but that process cannot begin until we acknowledge the harm we are doing. </div><div><br /></div><div>She founded <a href="https://mothertreeproject.org/">https://mothertreeproject.org/</a> to encourage broader understanding of these remarkable trees and the communities they anchor. It’s high time we fit ourselves into the web of life, rather than viewing it as something to be conquered. With a little humility, we just might learn from beings that have been around for centuries, and in preserving them, give ourselves a better shot at survival.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-50070393325616425852023-04-24T22:27:00.001-06:002023-04-24T22:27:25.496-06:00Tribute to Edwin Forrest WardEdwin Forrest Ward – a Tribute <div>By NC Weil </div><div><br /></div><div>In every community, at its heart </div><div>Is a person who either made it start </div><div>Or took it on as their own commitment, </div><div>To grow, sustain, to care what it meant. </div><div>For writers and songsters in Denver here </div><div>The man who stood in the middle is clear – </div><div>Ed Forrest Ward set up a venue, </div><div>Inviting us all to be on the menu – </div><div>Stories, Stories spread the plate </div><div>To write, to tell, to captivate. </div><div>You and Marcia reserved the Merc </div><div>And Imagemaker got to work </div><div>To craft the invites to us all:</div><div>“Fourth Tuesday – heed the siren’s call </div><div>Of voices varied, come and share. </div><div>Creative sparks will fill the air!” </div><div><br /></div><div>So many have, for ten fine years </div><div>Embraced assembly with our peers. </div><div>Leading off with a Philly tale </div><div>Or seventies Denver: he’d unveil </div><div>A place we maybe thought we knew, </div><div>But from Ed’s unique point of view: </div><div>Gone in a Taxi to the Dark Side </div><div>Or with Lucia on a Pow-wow ride, </div><div>Or a ghost from a bygone neighborhood </div><div>The man in the attic lonely stood </div><div>And watched cops puzzling in the street – </div><div>Where can he be? He’s got them beat. </div><div><br /></div><div>All through life your stories rose </div><div>Insisting to you: Stop! Compose! </div><div>Share your thought and incidents, </div><div>Steep them in your eloquence. </div><div>An impresario is one </div><div>Who trades in the phenomenon </div><div>Of gathering, and drawing out </div><div>The storytellers round about – </div><div>The songs, the memoirs, and the fiction </div><div>Made us richer through depiction – </div><div>The deadline looms to stand on stage </div><div>Painting us all another page. </div><div>Thank you, Ed, for the groups you founded, </div><div>Those magic nights we sat astounded. </div><div>And we remember, by the way, </div><div>That aphorism you liked to say: </div><div>“A contract with the muse is a contract for life” </div><div>You kept her happy – she’s been your midwife!
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-28561479208639397312023-04-06T22:10:00.002-06:002023-04-08T21:37:01.013-06:00The Ballad of the Grand Traverse, by NC WeilThe Ballad of the Grand Traverse<div> By NC Weil </div><div><br /></div><div>I'll introduce our hardy team, </div><div>Training for this since 2018: </div><div>Page and Josh, equipment geeks, </div><div>Skiing and suffering endless weeks. </div><div><br /></div><div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEEZqPuPVUyR-0aJHyyxUki2rH7CS7qJ1I58G3UsU_eKno6hT-CaKyOKfv56DC9fDUohtjpm-f7ayspSFWSACjUDxkJd6RepfxYOw45B--RobVGhjHY3iRqLJy_VGA48Amjt9MTN0w8Dxca7vkGe4S2ng28H9y1LHhxffqDDDDTH8LPrGsQtCAzHs29Q/s1333/Page_Josh_GT_2023.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1333" data-original-width="1000" height="296" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgEEZqPuPVUyR-0aJHyyxUki2rH7CS7qJ1I58G3UsU_eKno6hT-CaKyOKfv56DC9fDUohtjpm-f7ayspSFWSACjUDxkJd6RepfxYOw45B--RobVGhjHY3iRqLJy_VGA48Amjt9MTN0w8Dxca7vkGe4S2ng28H9y1LHhxffqDDDDTH8LPrGsQtCAzHs29Q/w222-h296/Page_Josh_GT_2023.jpeg" width="222" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div>They’ve never made it all the way </div><div>Crested Butte to Aspen, night then day, </div><div>Forty miles of ice and snow, </div><div>Hoping frigid winds don't blow. </div><div>First attempt, turned back by weather, </div><div>Then Page must pause to be a father, </div><div>His son born the day of the second try, </div><div>He had to let the race go by. </div><div>In 2020 Covid hit, </div><div>Every gathering stopped by it. </div><div> </div><div>So of this Grand Traverse I’ll tell: </div><div>It didn’t start so very well: </div><div>Early on, a ski pole breaking, </div><div>Then Page’s hands commenced to shaking, </div><div>Legs soon cramping – are we finished? </div><div>Electrolytes those spasms diminished. </div><div>Now to the slog they bend their wills, </div><div>Up the dark and towering hills </div><div>While moon peers down and pairs spread out, </div><div>Spandex and plastic round about, </div><div>Five hundred headlamps up the climb </div><div>Laboring to make good time – </div><div>The Brush Creek cutoff’s coming soon – </div><div>Steady striding is your tune. </div><div>Climbing more, up to Star Pass – </div><div>Scarf those snacks, step on the gas, </div><div>Make it to Checkpoint Number Two, </div><div>Up on top with a moonlit view – </div><div>High above the Taylor River, </div><div>What a sight – it makes you shiver! </div><div>A leg-burning grind to Taylor Pass, </div><div>Knowing the Mutants are hauling ass, </div><div>Up and over 12,000 feet, </div><div>Lungs a-throbbing, thighs dead beat </div><div>And mercifully, a downhill slope </div><div>With sunrise greetings – sign of hope! </div><div>Skiing across the top of the world, </div><div>A vista of peaks in snow unfurled </div><div>Down and up to Barnard Hut, </div><div>The last check-in for your weary butt. </div><div>Well past halfway – you’re going to make it! </div><div>Not the record – you won’t break it,<br /></div><div>Except the one you’re aiming for: </div><div>Your body’s strength you must explore </div><div>Why else be in this crazy race, </div><div>Not just the distance but the pace? </div><div>Eighty teams are turning back, </div><div>Not fast enough where slopes might crack </div><div>And avalanches take them down – </div><div>Reversed, their path leads back to town. </div><div>But you are fast enough to pass </div><div>So on you go for your final gasp. </div><div>Aspen Mountain, here you come, </div><div>Having earned encomium – </div><div>Wittiest team name convergence – </div><div>You’re the Forty Year Old Virgins! </div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" dir="rtl" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtZQ93-tbK85Sh_FsKayiY46t5tPQTgvsl85ked7impZMHl62snnXesnu3g41lna-9adPNsiN4QhCCCoti60ZWXpCyUePGY_m2X233IaZdFI7fjIV_hzsBkw5DP5eoCjLmmEoxhmU5uNR2fMBIhu01_PnjWzkTWrY-MO6EIJ4oMg3jaOHeS_9CFDJGHQ/s1067/GT-Rum.jpeg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1067" data-original-width="800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjtZQ93-tbK85Sh_FsKayiY46t5tPQTgvsl85ked7impZMHl62snnXesnu3g41lna-9adPNsiN4QhCCCoti60ZWXpCyUePGY_m2X233IaZdFI7fjIV_hzsBkw5DP5eoCjLmmEoxhmU5uNR2fMBIhu01_PnjWzkTWrY-MO6EIJ4oMg3jaOHeS_9CFDJGHQ/s320/GT-Rum.jpeg" width="240" /></a></div><div><br /></div><div><div>Prize in hand, your bottle of rum,</div><div>On to a meal and beer you come.</div></div><div>But now that you’ve gone all the way, </div><div>“Experienced” is yours to say. </div><div>Way to go, you hardy mensches, </div><div>Wowing those of us warming benches. </div><div>Witnesses to long rehearsal,</div><div>We laud you for your Grand Traversal!</div><div><br /></div><div>April 2, 2023</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-33644991467142744292023-02-10T21:47:00.001-07:002023-02-10T21:47:38.060-07:00The Plague of Doves, by Louise ErdrichThis complex 2008 book has more characters than a Tolstoy novel. It is not one story but multitudes, with narrators of different generations, whose experiences intertwine and haunt and goad each other. Some are Native Americans, some are German or French immigrants, in a lonely section of North Dakota where reservation land borders failing small towns. Family trees interlock and divide and plunge skyward and earthward in a confusion the reader could either diligently list, or just flip back through to see which maimed branch this orphaned brother, this obsessed banker, belonged to. <div><br /></div><div>Or you could just read it for the stories, as rich and abundant as any Salman Rushdie could conjure – a violin that saves a hell-bent young man; a grandfather with many versions of how he lost half an ear; a baby that survives the murder of her entire family in an act that reverberates through the book; a preacher so swelled with spirit that none can withstand him – and more. Love affairs and vengeance and waywardness, the whole range of humanity with our fixed notions of the world, who cannot recognize what we’re doing even as we push it to its dreadful end, crowd its pages. </div><div><br /></div><div>Some of Erdrich’s work has plot. This one focuses on a place and its people; as with lives anywhere, plenty happens but not in furtherance of a tale so much as spinning out events and years, creating deep impressions of prairie and its inhabitants. As readers of Erdrich would expect, her characters span the spectrum of bigotry, intolerance, and delusion while tottering on the edge of absurdity, slowly releasing their secrets onto the page.</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-4650499115850854422023-01-25T22:16:00.000-07:002023-01-25T22:16:34.640-07:00House of Rain, by Craig Childs<i>House of Rain</i> is an archaeological journey through the American Southwest, starting with Chaco Canyon and ending in the northern Sierra Madre in Mexico. Childs, not himself a credentialed archaeologist, is a man driven by curiosity and imagination who, rather than bowing to the accepted narrative of ancient peoples, looks for himself at the ruins, the pottery patterns, the feathers and burials and architecture, and reaches his own conclusions.
He works with and discusses with many bona-fide archaeologists his ideas, his finds, and his questions. <div><br /></div><div>Some discount his theories, others offer bolstering evidence. By examining not only maps but the land itself, he makes connections, observing for example the ruler-straight meridians connecting Chaco Canyon with other population centers, and standing on heights where signal fire remains are visible, communicating across distances to other groups. His writing is detailed and lovely as he conveys the inhospitality of the landscape, chronicling visits in the depths of winter, the scorch of high summer, in pouring rain and parching drought. He spends a lot of time climbing in and out of precipitous canyons, and the safety-maven in me is often annoyed by his lack of top-ropes, communication devices, and other rudiments of preparedness for dangerous climbs.
But the people he is learning about surely made these same climbs and descents, sometimes supported by holds carved into rock or wood ladders, but other times likely using methods similar to his, to reach their destinations. </div><div><br /></div><div>Childs’s overarching question is about the Anasazi (a misnomer which he uses as representative of a vanished culture without applying further definition to it) – why did they “disappear”? The archaeological record suggests that they abandoned Chaco Canyon and its outposts in the twelfth century AD. Looking at the layers of use in ruins, he concludes that they were migratory people, moving in response to conditions, especially drought and the absence of game to hunt. He sees that groups left a particular site in cycles of several centuries, their descendants returning as conditions improved, then after a few generations, moving on again. </div><div><br /></div><div>It was not abandonment but a shifting – they took their culture with them into territories of greater abundance – of water, of game. In some cases they strongly influenced the groups among whom they resided – occasionally dominating, possibly enslaving, the inhabitants; in other cases they built their structures in the very midst of the locals’, as if thumbing their noses at what they considered lesser cultures. </div><div><br /></div><div>He goes out on a limb, making the case that the Anasazi culture and its successors extended from Chaco Canyon into the Sierra Madre, citing trade in tropical birds from Mesoamerica, turquoise, and pottery designs to support his thesis. Some archaeologists agree with him, but the prevailing narrative separates events and groups in Mexico from those in what later became the US, as though the boundaries we maintain now have always existed. </div><div><br /></div><div>I am struck by the respect with which he treats these sites: often he finds burial areas, pottery shards, weavings, feathers and other artifacts. He handles them with care and respect, then returns them to where he found them. This conforms to modern field practice, but it is also a choice we feel he would make anyhow: these things should remain where their makers left them.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-27708569643985994832022-11-21T20:52:00.000-07:002022-11-21T20:52:07.117-07:00The Cow Who Sang a Song into the Future, a film by Francisca AlegriaSomewhere 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-15706476859948825332022-11-11T22:21:00.003-07:002022-11-11T22:21:57.363-07:00An Evening with Mark Mothersbaugh - a Denver Film Festival EventAs 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 <i>Human Highway</i>, 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. <div><br /></div><div>He met Wes Anderson, who had very specific ideas about the sound he wanted, and they worked together on many movies starting with <i>Bottle Rocket</i>. 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>He worked with Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who turned the children’s book <i>Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs</i> into a movie. Later, Lord and Miller made <i>21 Jump Street</i>, 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 <i>What We Do in the Shadows</i> and <i>Thor Ragnarok.</i></div><div><br /></div><div>He was asked to score the $150 million documentary <i>This is not a House</i> 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <i>Island of Lost Souls</i> he heard the mad scientist’s half-animal/ half human creations crying out, “Are we not men?” From <i>Inherit the Wind </i>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-40541662288098522992022-10-20T23:12:00.000-06:002022-10-20T23:12:45.987-06:00Jack, by Marilynne RobinsonWhat 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>Robinson’s profound insights and well-crafted sentences bring us into the heart of their lives and predicaments.<i> “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.</i>” </div><div><br /></div><div><i>“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.”</i> </div><div><br /></div><div>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.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-10941104974431632282022-09-12T21:48:00.000-06:002022-09-12T21:48:11.901-06:00The Painter, a novel by Peter HellerPeter Heller’s 2014 novel, <i>The Painter</i>, 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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: “<i>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.</i>” 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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: “<i>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.</i>” </div><div><br /></div><div>He concludes this riff with his own ethos, however tattered by events: “<i>[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</i>.” But does he?
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-1838388619528761442022-08-14T16:07:00.000-06:002022-08-14T16:07:55.643-06:00My Old School, a film by Jono McLeodThis 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>This is a perfect summer movie – go see it!</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-88540540680732462842022-08-04T21:56:00.001-06:002022-08-04T21:58:29.305-06:00Get Back, Peter Jackson's documentary about the BeatlesPeter 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>As they practice, the rifts are evident, but so is the camaraderie, the humor that made Richard Lester’s brilliant films <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i> and <i>Help!</i> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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 <i>an entity</i>. 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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 <i>Let It Be</i>, you may think you know how it all went down. But the insights culled from all those hours of footage to create <i>Get Back</i> offer a fuller picture.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-79109532333159991842022-06-26T19:10:00.000-06:002022-06-26T19:10:00.217-06:00Ode to Lamar CoxFirst, 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. <div><br /></div><div>For Lamar Cox </div><div>It’s a rare person who does it all well – </div><div>From modest beginnings, who could foretell </div><div>The heights you would rise to, the ways you’d excel? </div><div>On mental agility first let us dwell: </div><div>In the first cohort of Black enrollees </div><div>At U Cincinnati Engineering, 50’s, </div><div>The six of you studied, and then stayed in touch, </div><div>For breaking that barrier enabled so much. </div><div>You ran the high hurdles on the track team </div><div>Though for your height and build, that looked extreme – </div><div>It’s the spring in your stride, not the length of your limbs </div><div>That launches you upward, those hurdles to skim. </div><div><br /></div><div>In corporate America you found a place </div><div>To tap into your insight, in the rat race </div><div>But patents and kudos could not suffice – </div><div>Being your own man was worth sacrifice. </div><div>But without a partner, what is a life? </div><div>On your second go, you met your soul’s wife. </div><div>From New York to Washington, finding your spot: </div><div>The American Enterprises juggernaut. </div><div><br /></div><div>And that’s where I met you, in an interview </div><div>For office assistant – you thought I would do </div><div>Helping you manage your businesses there </div><div>I worked for a couple beyond compare. </div><div>On alarm systems and CCTV </div><div>You applied the knowledge of your degree
- </div><div>A motion sensor, in a house with a cat? </div><div>Sure, you had a solution for that. </div><div>Upside-down mounting would keep it from seeing </div><div>That false-alarm magnet, jumping and fleeing. </div><div>Your intuition alerted you </div><div>When embezzlement came into view </div><div>Without a fuss you put it right
- </div><div>I admired that insight. </div><div><br /></div><div>To set up shop in Silver Spring </div><div>You proved you could do anything: </div><div>Cutting new doorways, finished and fine, </div><div>Track lighting making the showroom shine – </div><div>I watched you cut glass shelves like a pro, </div><div>Scoring above then tapping below, </div><div>Breaking them cleanly along that edge – </div><div>A deft and able personage! </div><div><br /></div><div>Did I mention your musical gift? </div><div>Operatic tones through the office would drift – </div><div>And hosting friends at Christmas parties, </div><div>With Charlotte Douglass on the keys </div><div>Leading us all to sing a carol </div><div>In our holiday apparel. </div><div><br /></div><div>Stories you shared – a bit of New York lore – </div><div>A customer at the floral store </div><div>Who occasioned a running gag: </div><div>“You couldn’t put a dog in a bag!” </div><div> In marriage, you advised, “fight fair – </div><div>Calling names you should foreswear. </div><div>Never hit then when they’re low </div><div> That’ll be you sometime, you know. </div><div>Once you’ve fought, then let it go – </div><div>You don’t need bravissimo. </div><div>A cultivated love will grow </div><div>Stronger when kindness you bestow.” </div><div><br /></div><div>We miss you, Lamar, your life well made </div><div>Inspires every accolade: </div><div>Employer, and a mentor too – </div><div>As family I think of you – </div><div>No one can be in another’s skin </div><div>But soul to soul, we’re still akin. </div><div>Love, NC Weil</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-82187712808615955312022-06-06T20:57:00.000-06:002022-06-06T20:57:01.418-06:00Prague Winter, by Madeleine AlbrightFormer 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>As she notes early in the book, <i>“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.”</i> 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.</div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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?
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-30590257929177565332022-04-29T15:57:00.001-06:002022-04-29T15:57:56.603-06:00The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley RobinsonThis 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>We see first the idea, then the implementation, of a carbon coin – <i>carboni</i> – 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 <i>carboni</i> prevents their recipients from gaming the system, and as economies around the world shake, the <i>carboni</i> 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, <i>actionable</i> ideas. </div><div><br /></div><div>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: <i>“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”</i> and observes <i>“<b>What’s good is what’s good for the biosphere</b>. In light of that principle, many efficiencies are quickly seen to be profoundly destructive, and many inefficiencies can now be understood as unintentionally salvational.”</i> </div><div><br /></div><div>By pulling back from a US-centric view, Robinson is able to show that we – and by <i>we</i> 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!
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-31010335358737939242022-04-19T20:10:00.002-06:002022-04-19T20:12:48.635-06:00Triangulations, by Lorine Kritzer PergamentThis volume, released in March, 2022, contains the novella <b><i>Triangulations</i></b> 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. <div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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: “<i>Charles is despondent. He created that business from nothing, but is trying to be philosophical. We are all alive. What’s left are details</i>.” Susie riffs on this: “We are all alive, the rest is <i>details</i>… 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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.
</div><div><br /></div><div>To order a copy of this book, visit <a href="https://publerati.com/triangulations-by-lorine-kritzer-pergament/">https://publerati.com/triangulations-by-lorine-kritzer-pergament/</a></div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6859188328308448955.post-82324463204541986712022-03-21T19:01:00.000-06:002022-03-21T19:01:32.980-06:00The Power of the Dog, a novel by Thomas SavageThis 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. <div><br /></div><div>For <i>The Power of the Dog</i>, 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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>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. </div><div><br /></div><div>I won’t say more about the story, just observe how insightfully written it is: <i>"[George] knew all there was to know about love, that it’s the delight of being in the presence of the loved one.”</i> and <i>“Doors, doors, doors, doors; five outside doors in the house, and [Rose] knew the sound of the opening and closing of each one.” </i></div><div><br /></div><div>
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:<i> “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> </div><div><br /></div><div>I haven’t seen Jane Campion’s movie, but I highly recommend the novel.
</div>NC Weilhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00231254589899855407noreply@blogger.com0