Match in a Haystack, a documentary by Joe Hill

This 2025 documentary serves as a companion-piece to Porcelain War, the 2024 documentary by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev about art in a time of war. Both examine the lives of Ukrainian artists whose work has been interrupted by the Russian invasion of 2022. Duty to one’s country and its culture would seem to dictate enlisting in the army and risking life and limb daily in acts of resistance – and yet, these films insist that this war is about defending Ukrainian culture against a foe who declares that Ukraine has always been part of Russia and therefore belongs in its sphere. 

And so, the long tradition of creating tiny porcelain animals and birds, painting them in exquisite detail, then firing them, is an act of cultural resistance. Likewise, Match in a Haystack shares the stories of a group of modern dancers, all women in their early 20s, who find purpose in creating and performing a work which, as choreographer Gala Pekha urges, means nothing without heart. She and Yuliia Lupita, the company's director, unite in their commitment to creating something that matters, that resonates in a war-torn country. 

When Director Joe Hill had spent about 6 months in-country, Vice, his sponsor, declared bankruptcy. He was fortunate to pull together alternate support to continue working, but finding himself in uncertainty set up an uncanny parallel with his subjects’ circumstances. 

One dancer makes a pilgrimage to the front lines to visit her sister involved in the fighting, and receives her blessing to continue what she’s doing. Another persuades her parents, whom she has scarcely seen since the war began, to attend the performance. Gala in particular drives the “girls” hard toward authenticity – the stakes are high, all of them have doubts but feel the significance of this work. A “match in a haystack” is what they intend to create - a spark that starts a larger fire.

For this dance to be worth the time and energy of rehearsing, costuming, finding a venue then hoping it will be intact when it’s time to perform, these young women must open their hearts to their country’s anguish, filter it through their movements, and mirror it back to the audience. And they do. If you believe cinema has value beyond escapist fare, you should see this film.

Islands, a documentary by Albert & David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin

I read an article by Michael Shulman in the New Yorker (Jan 20, 2025) about Charlotte Zwerin – now living in her former Greenwich Village apartment, he was inspired to learn more about her. She collaborated on numerous documentaries with Albert and David Maysles, though uncredited until very recently. One of those films is Islands, about the floating pink surrounds of half a dozen islands in the Bay of Biscay adjacent to Miami, Florida. 

A significant part of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work/art was their efforts – calling meetings, talking one-on-one with the holdouts – to win over locals, government entities, and myriad bureaucrats who stymie activities they don’t understand. Finally, after the necessary concession to the Miami mayor, work could begin. Choreographing hundreds of volunteers was the heart of their projects. 

Seeing rolled-up sheets of hot-pink fabric maneuvered by many willing hands, then unfurled one section at a time, is a testament to the unifying power of creativity. Everyone who participates is inspired, taken out of their day-to-day by doing something remarkable together. We see the process then the finished pieces from water level, from the air, from underwater. In the unfurling, a woman frees a young turtle trapped in a roll of fabric, and later we see a needlefish emerge onto the surface from a seam, splash around, and find its way back into the water. 

The other beauty of these projects is their brief lifespan. While art museums go to great lengths to preserve works destined to decay, Christo and Jeanne-Claude left a piece up for a few weeks, then dismantled it. Their art was about time as much as material; people remember witnessing, and it conveys something magical about the location later. 

Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed their projects themselves, as much to guarantee complete artistic freedom as to simplify the approval process. They accomplished this by creating hundreds or even thousands of images – postcards, framed drawings, maquettes, books – of each piece, and selling them. People literally bought into the ideas, supporting their creation. 

I’m delighted that Charlotte Zwerin is at last gaining the recognition she lacked in her lifetime – the New Yorker article discusses the documentary technique the Maysles and their contemporaries pioneered, eschewing lectures and talking heads for the thick of the action, shooting hundreds of hours to capture what they can, then shaping it in the editing room. Though Zwerin is not credited as Editor for Islands, the article indicates she was very involved in editing Maysles Brothers documentaries, and in that process bringing coherence to the footage: creating a film.

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?

Mary Coin, a novel by Marisa Silver

--> Mary Coin is the fictional name given the woman in the iconic Depression photograph taken by Dorothea Lange; she became the face of Okies struggling to survive as migrant workers in California. Four story-lines carry Marisa Silver's novel to convergence: a professor in the modern era considers history and how images shape our perceptions, while also trying to connect with his estranged teenage daughter; the woman of the title grows up in Oklahoma then relocates with her young family to California where as opportunities narrow they move from cabin to tent to living in a car; a grower in California blinds himself to the consequences of below-subsistence pay for the pickers; a lame woman who has made a modest living photographing society ladies in San Francisco finds herself without clients, and takes a job with the WPA, traveling to migrant encampments to document living conditions.

In the novel, these different strands establish a tempo that eases us toward its conclusions, but I find only two useful: photographer and subject. The professor asks questions that in the end seem redundant, and the story involving the grower's family is smudged with the authorial fingerprints of Plot Device. Without those sections it's a much shorter book, and perhaps that's why they are included, but as editor I would have stricken them, and sent the manuscript back to Silver to reshape. The parts that work are profound; it seems unworthy to pad them with trivia.

The questions this book raises have to do with perception, and how we can and cannot affect how others see our lives. Silver's artistry is that, without asserting an answer, she lets us see the consequences. Do photographs lie, or mislead us? We think we know something about people by seeing their picture, but aren't we projecting our own ideas? What do we - can we - really know, just from a photo? When context is subtracted from the captured instant, aren't we at the mercy of our own experience and conjectures? A few sentences about the subject give us the illusion of empathy: surely we would rather believe a photo can make us feel more human, than acknowledge how isolated we are, how vast the gulf between my life as observer, and yours in one moment observed.

This photographed instant has its own trajectory. Even as the woman's life continues, largely anonymous, the photo becomes an icon: a rallying point for reformers pleading for migrant workers, an image that epitomizes a historic moment, an artistic statement that transcends both photographer and subject. Yet for her, it's a trap: some part of her is chained to that desperation. Even as she claws her way to a better life - her own home, her children grown - a glimpse of that picture tells her the rest of her experience is illusory: one shutter-click is all the world will ever know. It's a bitter irony: as time obliterates her and the progress she has made, the photo lives on, caught forever in hopelessness.

This book is also about women, and the added burden of being female in a world that limits what they can do. But they are strong, and stubborn: the photographer sets aside her work to be with her painter husband - but the drive to express her own vision finally frees her, and when she resumes, she understands more clearly what she wants her images to show. Mary Coin survives one catastrophe after another, because she does not give up - somewhere in her future her children will thrive; her persistence is the only force that will get them there.

By making these women characters not archetypes, this novel pulls us in without insisting we take sides. We can argue logically that Mary Coin should have had a smaller family - but she loves her children - if she could go back in time and prevent any of those seven pregnancies, we know she would not. We might think that the photographer - a woman, a cripple - would excite the sympathy of the migrant workers. She feels solidarity, that she's using her skill to help them - but no: they feel hostile toward her and her camera, her car, her life that can record theirs then go away. These unexpected attitudes animate the story. We're not reading a report, or a soap opera: these are real people, and their dilemmas don't have neat solutions.

Photography is distinct from other arts in that it gives the illusion of subtracting the artist from the encounter between viewer and image. When we see a painting, we understand it as an interpretation of a person, a scene, an emotional state. The factual nature of a painting is secondary, if it exists at all.  But a photograph supposedly shows something Real. That woman was not acting at being impoverished or hungry or hopeless - whatever we see on her face was really there. But what about the photographer? She chose to frame the recorded image. She considered the light, the background, the area of focus - and out of many pictures, she was seeking one that would express directly the impact she felt. Though we do not see her, it is through her eyes, mind, experience that we see the subject.

And once the picture has been printed and published, she has no more control over it than does the woman depicted. It comes to encapsulate her work. She intended her portfolio to stir politicians to action, to rectify the circumstances she captured - but its immediacy and pathos remain potent today, long after we have forgotten the specifics of that injustice. That's what art does - it escapes the limits of its creation, reaching us years or centuries later with a still-familiar truth about the human condition.

The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt's lovely fluid prose in her 770-page Pulitzer-prize-winning novel The Goldfinch carried me through the convenient events and deus ex machina ending that would have dammed up a lesser book. I read it in a week because I had to know what happened next, whether our young narrator was learning from his mistakes or merely being more clever about concealing them. And I had to know what would happen to the exquisite small painting, The Goldfinch of the title.

Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker and his art-history-passionate mother are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York when a bomb goes off. Separated from his mother in the chaos, Theo assists a fatally-wounded man who gives him his signet ring, tells him to seek out his partner, and also urges him to take the painting The Goldfinch, otherwise likely to be damaged in the collapsing gallery. Slipping past the firemen, Theo flees the museum with the ring in his pocket and the painting in a bag. Soon he learns his mother was killed in the blast. The ring connects him to an antiques restorer on the Lower East Side, and in the company of this kindly man, the appreciation for beauty Theo's mother planted in him takes root.

His estranged father shows up, girlfriend in tow, and they bring him to her house in a nearly deserted exurb of Las Vegas, where he is left to his own devices. In the local school he meets Boris, a Ukrainian youth whose father is an engineer, in the field weeks at a time. With virtually no supervision, this pair do what you might expect from teenage boys: they drink, they use whatever drugs come their way, they steal from the local market, they fight and remain friends. Boris is fearless, whether in accepting beatings from his drunken father or in shoplifting groceries so he and Theo won't starve, and he persuades his less-worldly friend that his own father is a kinder man and better parent than he gives him credit for.

Avoiding spoilers, I'll stop there with the plot, except to say that there's a hiatus of some years in which Theo grows up and finds his niche in the world - and remains in thrall to this non-negotiable treasure, the painting.

Tartt makes some fine observations about the transitory nature of human life and the longer span of art:  
"I was different, but it wasn't. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biological static just as random as the street lamps flashing past."
"It's there in the light-rinsed atmosphere, the brush strokes he permits us to see, up close, for exactly what they are - hand worked flashes of pigment, the very passage of the bristles visible - and then, at a distance, the miracle... the slide of transubstantiation where paint is paint and yet also feather and bone."

And with a painting as inspiration, Tartt has made her own work of art.

Christo's "Over the River" Project

It's been more than a decade since Christo and Jeanne-Claude (who passed this summer) first selected a stretch of the Arkansas River Canyon in central Colorado for their project. The plan?
To suspend sections of translucent silvery fabric over portions of the river within a thirty-mile section.
The obstacles? Chiefly the Bureau of Land Management, which has demanded study after study of the installation and its impacts. It was easier to get permission to wrap the Reichstag!

As we see anytime someone wants to step beyond usual expectations, there's been a lot of uninformed opposition -

Oh, the traffic will be terrible! (maybe traffic will be slowed down, so people will take a look at something they've never seen)

Oh, it will be like putting a lid on the river! (the translucent fabric invites the eye through its shimmer, to the canyon walls, clouds and sky)

Oh, it will be ugly! (the proposed material is beautiful)

Oh, it will be destructive! (Christo has placed his art in the midst of nature for decades - his creations and the natural world enhance one another)

Oh, it's a gimmick to make him rich! (all his projects are self-supporting)

These objections all add up to: Oh, it won't be like anything we've ever seen - yikes! (true, except the fear part)

There's also been support, from artists, and from people who agree that works of art open our beings in ways we cannot calculate ahead of time. In an era when much of what we do has predictable outcomes, we need these surprises.
Christo's not proposing a re-hash of something he already did, or that anyone else ever has done.

The essence of art is that it gives us a new look at something we think we know, and by seeing it in a changed way, understanding it differently.

I hope Over the River wins approval, and if/when it does, I plan to be one of the many volunteers who put the structures in place.