House of Rain, by Craig Childs

House of Rain 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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Evening with Mark Mothersbaugh - a Denver Film Festival Event

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack, by Marilynne Robinson

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Painter, a novel by Peter Heller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Old School, a film by Jono McLeod

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

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

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

This is a perfect summer movie – go see it!

Get Back, Peter Jackson's documentary about the Beatles

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

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

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

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

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

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