Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Up In the Air

















This movie feels very up to date.  Perhaps it will seem dated in ten minutes.  But for now, watching people not of the company fire people in the company and then leave the cast off with a slick pamphlet to get on with their lives -- yes that is how it feels things are done now.

The whole cast is perfectly selected.  The beautiful mature woman who can match the gamesmanship of the man's need to be first in number of credit cards, she is perfect.  The young woman who threatens to replace Bingham not just with her younger less expensive self but with a whole system that does not require flying, she is perfect.  Callow, shallow, all surface.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham who fires people for a living.  And he lives for the loyalty rewards that frequent flying affords.  Are frequent flier miles really the only place where loyalty is still a value that is honored with rewards? 

Fifteen minutes into the movie, I was aware of how much I was enjoying it.  It is rare to see a movie where everything is done right, from the opening credits, to the opening scene with snappy dialogue, to the introduction of important cast members who act flawlessly and wear their clothes as if they really were their clothes.  The music, the sets, the production, I can't think of another recent American movie that clicks this way.  What a promising career Jason Reitman is having.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Cymbeline














I was lucky enough to see the  Fiasco Theatre's production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline.   Six talented actors perform the roles of 24 characters in a small  black box theater, with several boxes and one sturdy trunk as props and set pieces. Besides the voice work of reciting Shakespeare's poetry as if it were natural speech, each actor at the drop of a hat also sings either alone or together in a beautiful blend of voices.  The cast is also called on to play musical instruments, including but not limited to guitar, banjo, french horn, and lots of different kinds of drums. 


The pace is amazing.  Scenes blend into one another  quickly and organically, and people move locations the only indication that we are elsewhere the placement of the all important trunk.  At one point the actor Ben Steinfeld performing the role of Iacomo in the act of sneaking out of a lady's bedroom must crawl out the trap door of the valiant trunk and just as he was about to deliver a line, a siren from the street blared. Instead of trying to speak his lines over the trumpeting noise, he paused, and in his eyes let the audience know that he was now hearing what we were hearing as an audience, not as an actor in a play, and when the siren stopped, he picked up his lines again and resumed, but with just the tiniest acknowledgment in his eyes that we knew what he was doing.  All the time he was waiting for the noise to stop, he was acting, though, in character as the scoundrel trying to win a bet about a woman's fidelity.

It is a pleasure to watch such a capable cast perform a complicated play with the utmost clarity and simplicity and style.  This company is truly wonderful.  Every time they sang together as an ensemble I felt deeply happy.  I hope that I get to see them again soon.  It is a shame it was such a short run again-- they deserve a much bigger audience.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Poetry Reading November 15














Went to a poetry reading in honor of Home Planet News
Donald Lev residing
summoning the spirit of his late great wife
Enid Dame













there was a water main break on Carmine Street
in front of the Greenwich Village Cafe
Flashing lights and jackhammers
People read regardless
an indomitable group of poets
shouting out their words
as the street caved in
and was opened up and scooped out
Waiters brought caskets of water in clear plastic
buckets for what? toilets to be flushed?
It wasn't clear
Every time the door opened
the noise increased tenfold
On this balmy November night
we closed up the windows tight
so that the words could be heard

Saturday, November 7, 2009

La Danse

La Danse dir Frederick Wiseman, 2009



Today at the Film Forum theater  crowds of people came  to see this movie.  All three screenings were sold out.   Perhaps  it is to have the rare chance to see the documentary master Frederick Wiseman's  movie  on the big screen or perhaps it is because the footage of the ballet is so extraordinarily faithful to the intention of the company.

Wiseman's opening shots establish location in as rhythmic and rigorous a beat as the dancers at the barre. Wiseman locates us first underground, in the bowels of the Paris Opera building, then in the hallways, then up the steps, and so on until at one point we get to see a beekeeper on the roof harvesting honey.  Who knew the bees we had heard were in decline were thriving on the rooftops of Paris?

Wiseman slowly leads us into the workings of the ballet company considered one of the greatest in the world. But first we get to know the building where they work and the city where the building is.  I don’t know why he needs so many shots of the city of Paris even though I too love Paris and think it is one of the most successful examples of a metropolis that knows how to preserve its very heart, beautiful, built to human scale, architecture.

But we really want to see the dancers learning how to dance the dances that we see when they are perfected.  Isn’t that why we came? And to see the woman spray painting the worn out toe shoes so that they look new?    And the man applying glue with the precision of an aeronautical engineer so that the sequin will stay just so.  We want to see the rows of costumes rolled in, each one tagged with the dancer’s name.  We want to see the handicraft of preparing the tutus, and the mounds of tulle before they become costumes, and the make up and the wigs.  There is so much  individual labor that goes into such the jewel- like work art of  ballet.  So many unknown people, like the woman dying the dress.  These are the behind the scenes images that stay with me.  That and the painstaking one on one tutorials that convey the steps of the choreography from a dance master to his dancer.  The individuals who make the dance possible are not just the choreographers and the dancers but the painters keeping the walls of the studios fresh.  Even though the movie is called La Danse, to me the movie is  an ode to labor.

35 Rhums



The movie unfolds with the slow pace of real life and the risk of boring its audience.  We watch real trains in real time come and go through the suburbs with nothing visually arresting to keep our attention, just the usual jumble of wires and train tracks and cereal box buildings.

The main character, a middle aged single father named Lionel (like the train set), lives with his beautiful young adult daughter who attends university in Paris.  Lionel says little, but his still face expresses his concern for his daughter's future, I think.   Their relationship is so loving and intimate that you wonder if they are sleeping together, but no, it's just the tension that builds as they determine what  they should do for each other to set each other free.

There is one scene that finally reveals how the reticent man is feeling.  Denis, the director, clearly loves the way this beautiful actor looks, getting in and out of his bathrobe.  And so do other women who cotton to him even when there is evidently nothing tying him down to any of them.    He has come to the restaurant with his daughter and a friend, and then hits on the waitress who is younger and more beautiful than his friend.

As they dance,  you see how the father has desires just like any other man, and the audience intuits that he wants the daughter to experience and enjoy them too.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Museum of the Chinese in America




The museum is as crowded as the neighborhood. Maya Lin's design lends elegance to its rooms which unfold one from the other, beginning with the early immigrant experience and its blatant racism and exclusion acts. On opposite walls you can read the achievements of individuals, like Ah Bing














who discovered how to hybridize the perfect cherry, and

Anna Mae Wong,


whose inroads into Hollywood were spoiled by her exploitation. You experience post WWII anti-Communist fifties by sitting on an old arm chair and watching a 1950s era tv show about the hounding of Chinese in Chinatowns (the authories assumed that they were Communists). Modern stars of contemporary culture include Steve Chen, the inventor of Youtube, Yo Yo Ma, and I.M. Pei.












One of my favorite discoveries was Dr. "Mom" Chung, the first Chinese American woman physician who served during the Second World War, and liked to dress as a man and dated among others Sophie Tucker.

I wish that I could process everything at once, but was overwhelmed by listening to overlapping audio and watching moving images from three different projectors. The print on the placards is tiny. I felt old and incapable of taking it in. Next time I will bring a magnifying glass.




At the end, in the Bloomberg Exhibit Hall was an ongoing loop of movies, called the Chinatown Film Project. I will have to go back and watch the ten short movies which progress in linear fashion, one at a time.

And the paintings by Yun-Fei Ji are marvelous. It is a pleasure to go into an open space and see paintings spread out at their ease.



The Scholar Flees in Horror by Yun-Fei Ji

Monday, September 28, 2009

Bright Star/directed Jane Campion



With a magnified needle piercing a piece of muslin.  we are instantly drawn into this sensuous movie.  I remember Campion's ability to startle all of my senses in The Piano, and with sudden twists of plot.  Here she is telling a story of love experienced by a great poet, John Keats.

I loved the clothes, the little girl with the cloud of red hair who played Fanny's little sister named Toots, the actor who played Browne, a perfect dog in the manger, the cat, the flowers, the butterflies, the way we get a taste of daily life in the early nineteenth century through the deliberate pacing of scenes, and finally I love the way the film sends you home to read Keats (or the letters of Fanny Brawne which prove that the film is very well sourced).

Sunday, September 27, 2009

Saw a girl that looked like her

She had long blondish hair
She was tall and thin
She carried herself in a way that said
I don't care what you think but I know that I might be worth looking at
When she bumped into someone by accident she said Oops sorry
She was wearing boots
A pair of jeans with holes in them
She was eighteen

Vermeer's The Milkmaid

We went to see the Vermeers amid crowds of others. The Milkmaid truly was the glory of the exhibit, looking as if lit from just outside the window.





Saturday, September 19, 2009

Julie and Julia

The movie shows how different, how much more solid, more soulful, and more generous, was Julia Child than Julie Powell.  Of course it is a tough comparison,  and I don't think Nora Ephron meant to belittle the more contemporary character (she is just one more cute slightly affectless girl like Meg Ryan played in Sleepless in Seattle and You've Got Mail) who was a blogger in search of herself instead of a woman in search of a better way of eating.  But how much more universal a goal! How much more heartening a story!  Nora Ephron, make more movies about women like these!

After the movie credits roll, what we search for is a recipe by Julia, not the blog by Julie.

Alas for Julie.  Hurrah for Julia!

Friday, September 11, 2009

ponyo


ponyo

A girl goldfish sees a human boy and is smitten. Determined to become human herself, she flees the strict rules of her father and hundreds of look alike siblings*, and finds that she has the power within herself to not only become human, but much else. The beauty of Miyazaki's animation comes from the hand made color saturated pictures, and the humorous movements of the protagonists. Ponyo once she determines she needs feet to be human, starts out with three toes like a chicken, and later gets a full set of five which liberate her to jump on couches etc.

Miyazaki's subject is saving the earth from the wickedness of humans' carelessness and waste.

*


Monday, September 7, 2009

making creme brulee

The ingredients are sugar and cream, lots of egg yolks, vanilla (and I used cinnamon). Like all custards, there is a hot water bath which challenges your ability to carry a heavy pan half filled with water, with little cups full of eggy mixture to the oven without spilling any of the water.

I got the recipe from Epicurious which does not carry the classic recipe without lemon, or coffee, or chocolate, or whatnot. This is typical of epicurious. They specialize in the rather showy trendy food fads, forcing you to strip away things in order to get a basic recipe.

Still, there is nothing more comforting than custard with a crust of caramelized sugar on top.

how to make creme brulee



photo from Flickr at
anne&ming

Saturday, September 5, 2009

September 5, 2009: Seasonal

Farmers Market, Tribeca

I love to buy fish at the greenmarket on Saturdays in Tribeca. There is always a line at Blue Moon fish because Alex Villani brings in such fresh spanish mackerel, scrod, scallops, you name it. Here you can see him talking at his stand which gives you an idea of his personality.



Alex Villani of Blue Moon

The apples are coming in after a few weeks of nectarines better than peaches. Honeycrisp is the name of an apple favored by my husband because they were discovered in his home state of Minnesota.



St. Luke's Garden was bathed in bright light today. After tanning on Elizabeth's bench, we looked at the flowers in blossom, and were struck by the bright pink flowers that look like lilacs in miniature but may be crape myrtle. It is tempting to go inside and visit the columbarium, but it is closed until services tomorrow.



photo by omoo

Friday, September 4, 2009

Why I Love Tennis

It's one on one, no teamwork required. Unlike beach volleyball or swimming
the women are able to show their curves without displaying so much flesh and you get to watch them move easily in their fitted outfits. It combines running and jumping and hitting
The Williams Sisters, one full of soul


the other fire and precision and competition


and of course there is Federer whose footwork
was compared with Fred Astaire's



It's the shock of Rafael Nadal's constantly picking at his underpants.



and Federer's mystique as the man who does not sweat, each attribute intimidating in its own way



but the love for the great competitors who can bring out the best in each other is very moving the longer the game lasts.

Roddick and Federer this year at Wimbledon.



Maria Sharapova and her sense of style and hauteur.
The way she lifts her nose as if she smells really good
when she makes a point.



(I do not like the loud noises she makes
when she hits the ball. Sounds like somebody having rough sex.)

Mostly I like the prospect of another Nadal Federer face-off, the most amazing event in sports I can remember. Like a perfect game in baseball. Rare and welcome.

Still Walking (Aruitemo Aruitemo) dir. Hirokazu Koreeda


Hirokazu Kore-Eda is a visual artist, but what stays with me are the beautiful lines he writes in his film about a wayward son who returns home to visit his aging parents one summer day with his wife and stepson. The movie is about living after the death of an important family member. The parents grow bitter, the siblings shift into their roles as not as good as might have been.

As all three generations of the family gather to honor the anniversary of the eldest son's death, the story unfolds with the humor and sorrow of a Chekhov play. Everyday actions, like preparing meals, are visually wonderful. You can almost smell the corn as the tempura is scooped out of the pan and into the eager mouths. The acting is flawless, particularly by Kirin Kiri who plays the mother, a woman who has mastered the art of spite.

Kore-eda is also the director of Afterlife, a sublime treatment of life after death.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009


A bat became fastened inside the piece of siding of the house.
His little hooked talon which attached to his wing could not free itself.
He struggled and flailed and could not fly away.
He began to gnaw at the wing to detach it.
Drops of blood fell on the side of the house.
My sister bought me a table to climb so that I could reach.
With a wedged stick the siding came free and the bat
fell downstairs to our neighbor's welcome mat.
He was exhausted and bloody. He
hopped along into the net. I freed him into the wood
pile. I wonder if he will live or not.
My sister wanted to put him out of his misery
as we used to say. (Drop a rock on him.)
He was suffering and squeaking but still alive,
last seen in the wood pile.

Friday, August 21, 2009



I have no idea what this is growing on the tree, but it looks like a random pattern of lichen or some kind of fungus. Anyway want to take a stab at identifying it?

Friday, August 14, 2009

Walmart Woman

They’re having a perfect woman sale
at the Walmart. She comes in a box
with movable parts
She doesn’t say much
Just yes and you’re right
when you pull the string
She looks good with her make up in place
and doesn’t grow old
She doesn’t make mistakes
or ever lose her temper

Go ahead
Take a ride to the Walmart
They’re selling perfect women there

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Feminist Video at the Brooklyn Museum

What is it about video art? It is concept heavy to me. Yes, there is wit. But after I get the idea, I feel as if I have been lectured a bit. Am I the audience or is it clueless men?

Kate Gilmore (American, b. 1975). Still from Blood from a Stone, 2009. Mixed-media sculpture with video, color, sound, 8 min. 9 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Smith-Stewart, New York

Kate Gilmore's lifting the big blocks of white and placing them just so on the ledge has a repetition and monotony broken by the white paint that bleeds down in irregular vertical lengths.

The weed whacker wears a nice dress and shoes as she clears a patch of grass too big for that tool.



Harry Dodge (American, b. 1966) and Stanya Kahn (American, b. 1968). Still from Whacker, 2005. Video, color, sound, 7 min. 7 sec. Courtesy of the artists and Elizabeth Dee, New York

Also saw the Dinner Party, and studied some of the exhibits that accompany it. Again, it is intended to teach a lesson. I guess we need the lesson, but I prefer my art without pedantry.

The Dinner Party by Judy Chicago

Sunday, May 3, 2009

PEN World Voices Cabaret

Walter Mosley began with an excerpt from The Long Fall.

Nick Laird read from his poetry books, To a Fault and On Purpose. He was self effasive and charming. He referred to a John Berryman poem as being written 35 years earlier that was better than his poem.

Horacio Castellanos Moya read from his novel in Spanish. The excerpt said that he was not completely in his mind having hired himself out to the Catholic Church to translate a document responsible for many of the troubles he was then in. A drummer accompanied him. A translator read in English.

Steve Connell and Sekou the Misfit did a duo slam rap.

Parker Posey and other acting notables did a performance of the New York State segment from State by State edited by Sean Wilsey.

And of course, Lou Reed whose Metal Music Machine is his focus now to the point where he is almost unable to articulate anything in words, had Laurie Anderson with him. Anderson's performance of "Only an Expert" was powerful.




PEN World Voices Festival

Friday, March 20, 2009

Palace Yurt



I never realized how many applications felt could be put to until yesterday when attending the Fashioning Felt show at Cooper Hewitt. Mongolians make felt with raw wool, spread out on "mother wool pads" then moistened, rolled up, and hauled around the flat ground by camels or horses until the agitation creates a joining of the many threads to a single sheet.

Above is a picture of a "palace yurt" created with silk and felt and installed in the conservatory where sunlight filters through the diamond patterns the artist Janice Arnold made.

Another artist made her wall of felt dyed with madder and St. Johns wort -- vivid orange and red hues that attracted me like a magnet, made me want to rub up against them. She had designed these as a cure for melancholia.