Sunday, November 28, 2010

Inside Job

This muckraking movie makes me mad with its shocking analysis.  

People are interviewed  from  Iceland, where banks once regulated and stable were deregulated and drowned in debt, nearly bringing down the government, and laying off thousands of people.  In a country of 300,000 that has a huge impact.  In the United States where deregulation began with the Reagan administration, the continued ripple effect on the global economy resulted in larger layoffs, more recessions, and continues to this day under Obama and what one interview subject called the "Wall Street government."

Money is made on debt that cannot be paid.  The higher the debt, the more leveraged the bank becomes, until eventually, so large (too large to fail), the executive who was supposed to be overseeing this, bails out and gets his package, which includes millions of dollars.  Sometimes these executives, knowing that the company is headed south, sell their shares and take them home with their severance package, and here's the funny thing, their heads held high.

When what you are selling is so complicated that it cannot be explained without a programmable calculator something is wrong.  And it is sinking the financial markets around the world.  Unbridled capitalism bankrupts us all, punishes the poor, and makes the rich make out like bandits.  This movie urges us to take the system back from the criminals.  And to change the way government works.  This movie, though most of its heavy firepower is aimed at the GOP, does not exempt Clinton, sitting very cosily with the biggest of the marauders, or Obama, who has allowed the status quo to continue.

There are some heroes in this film, who speak before and after those caught red handed.  Unlike the Federal Reserve Governor, and the Harvard University economist, and the bankers forced to testify to Congress,  there are  heroes like a consumer advocate who warned Greenspan, and then Bernanke about what was happening to no avail.  There is an executive at the International Monetary Fund whose paper was published criticizing the mathematical model that used derivatives to make money on bad mortgages; he was subsequently shunned.  George Soros says some things about the inequity of executive compensation that sound dead on. 

Eliot Spitzer sits in a large vacant room with miles of windows making us wish he had never gotten in trouble with someone not unlike the madam who was interviewed earlier about what Wall STreet traders like to do after their fifteen hour days on the floor.  Spitzer reminds us how he used to go after the people who were raiding consumers' accounts to line their own pockets.  He says he isn't in a moral position to say much about their morals now. Damn.


Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Howl


Howl with James Franco


The movie begins with a recitation of the poem as it might have been delivered in a dark subterranean coffee shop in San Francisco in 1955, shortly after it was written.  James Franco wears the thick black horn rimmed glasses, the white t shirt under the buttoned down white shirt, just the way that Ginsberg wore these things.  Franco’s voice takes on that raspy incantatory drone  that was Ginsberg’s performance persona.  The voice, and the juicy words that run on and on return us to 1955 – but do these lines speak to us now as they did in 1955?  Perhaps we do not need them now as we did then.
James Franco

The opening titles show glimpses of the animation to come.  Armies of men carry identical brief cases, wear identical hats, march across an unknown grey city.  Photographs of Ginsberg and Orlovsky, his lifelong partner, actual photographs, look a bit scruffier than the cleaned up actors who play their counterparts.  The cold war is represented by missiles pointing ominously toward us the viewers.   In this context, the beat poets were railing against conformity, against war, against restrictions of all kinds.

Franco plays Ginsberg especially well when he is full of longing.  He speaks to an unseen interviewer (the script comes almost entirely from transcripts, interviews, and the poetry itself) about his journey from a young poet wannabe in the shadow of his straight traditional poet father.  His sexuality he hid from his parents.  He was put in an insane asylum when he was 21 ostensibly because of his homosexuality, and was released when he agreed to become straight.  After two years of working in advertising and rejecting his true nature, his therapist encouraged him to do what he wanted, and the rest is history.

Allen Ginsberg
The animations in the movie are distracting.  The images of star bursts that denote orgasms, the explicit sexual couplings, detract from the power of the words.  But this is a movie. I can see why the filmmakers thought so much time with just the words-- staring at the screen, listening to Franco recite, might be boring without some action.  

 How gratifying to hear a poet's words treated with the seriousness of a love affair, or a war, or a heist, or some other common subjects of movies.  I remember when the movie came out about Sylvia Plath.  They had everything in that movie except the poetry.  This movie has the poetry front and center and I am grateful.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Poets Forum on Contemporary Poetry:Wild and Strange Language




Lyn Hejinian
Carl Phillips
Ron Padgett

Kay Ryan


The four poets sat in a row in front of microphones, Lyn Hejinian the language poet,  on the far left.  She began by saying in her high girlish voice, "Here we are in a row, I must be "A".  Kay Ryan piped up quite promptly "And I must be "Z".  Chortles all around.  We knew where the two poets stood on the meaning, or lack of meaning, in poetry, especially when it comes to language.

Hejinian read examples of what she thought of as showing wild and strange language.  (No poet would like to be accused of using tame and ordinary language, she said.)

First came Robert Grenier, from his book "Sentences", available online.

She may or may not have read this:

PAW

he barks at things gone by
two trees

stepping through the water to the rocks

five sound shut doors

LOOKING AT FIRE

ashes to ashes

looking at the fire

at has been added

Hejinian champions  the use of language in an aesthetic sense.

Padgett ruminated on his childhood a bit, thought of how language is enjoyed sometimes without meaning necessarily.  Children like to  repeat sounds over and over again until they are drained of meaning and remembered as something else, something coming in to the ear.  He also enjoyed discovering the concrete poets, the wild poets whose works contain pure sounds and playful shapes on the page.  Later, he pointed out that William Carlos Williams' poems in Spring and All were electrifying.  The red wheelbarrow poem said it so plainly.  Padgett is charming and funny, and full of plain spoken truths, with a childlike simplicity that is seductive.

 Phillips  handed out a leaflet with two poems : on one side from Laura Jensen, "Heavy Snowfall in a Year Gone Past," which ends with the moon looking  down and judging,

not the maze of anger
but the fury
at the wasted years,
at the waste of the tender snow
Wasted, wasted, the birds crackle,
wasted on you.

There was also a deeply erotic beautifully structured poem by John Wieners, "Anniversary".
The diction changes mid line

Cigarette between his lips, would they were mine
by this present moon swear allegiance
if he ever look, see clouds and beaches
in the sky, by stars lend his eyes shine.

Kay Ryan had brought this poem by Robert Frost.  She asked if we received the handout.  When there was an awkward silence, she replied, "I didn't bring one."

A Dust of Snow

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

What excited Ryan was how poetry could change a person.  The person in the snow was not in a good place, and as a result of the snow falling on him, had entered a new mood.  Such simplicity, and tight little form has the power to create a feeling.

Hejinian challenged that poetry did not have to do that, that was too restrictive.

"Restrictive!" cried Ryan.

And so Poet A and Poet Z laid out their positions.  It was an argument we could have used more of.  But it was enough for me to understand the difference between Hejinian's point of view about poetry, that it should have as much breadth and range and abstraction and freedom as jazz or a Jackson Pollock painting, and Kay Ryan who wants her poems to have words with meaning.   With no meaning, you have no power, she claims, and I agree. 

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Thursday, September 30, 2010

Weather

Scary weather lately.  A tree fell on a car and killed a woman waiting patiently inside for the winds and water to pass.  Trees are now becoming something to be leery of.  Some of them have fallen on pedestrians in Central Park.    Trees used to be the thing we rested under, sought for shade, looked at in wonder when their leaves changed color.  Did New York  used to have tornadoes?





Monday, September 6, 2010

Matisse: Radical Invention, 1913–1917

Henri Matisse painting Bathers by a River, May 13, 1913. Photograph by Alvin Langdon Coburn. Courtesy of George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, Rochester                   



The first gallery of paintings showed how Matisse was taught to paint copies of the masters, but learned to develop his own interpretation of the classic compositions,  beginning with a series of paintings on the subject of Arcadia.  What a great subject for a series of poems. 

I was captivated by this drypoint of Greta Prozor. 

Drypoint, Greta Prozor, MOMA










Friday, September 3, 2010

Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit

In Women Outside: conversations about nature, art & spirit, Mary Olmsted Greene has conducted conversations with thirteen women whose lives are enriched by the spiritual qualities of nature.  It is an eclectic group of women with a great variety of things to say about how nature has formed their consciousness. 

One woman rescues wild animals.

Another raises sheep and lives completely outside of the grid.

One woman teaches dance.

Another is a shaman whose training is based on African rituals.

One is an Episcopal priest whose dog is part wolf.

There is a girl who is nine years old.

They all respond to the same batch of questions about their lives, how they were formed by the wild or wilderness, what their thoughts about evil are, and Greene intersperses her interviews with poems that complement the conversations in verse.

The book opens with Greene's own reminiscences of growing up near the ocean,  her move to New York, her youth spent bicycling the streets of Manhattan, her wild days, her glory days, spirited and free.  This opening essay is one of the best things in the book.  She discusses  "nature deficit disorder," a modern psychological problem for those of us deprived of the natural world. From New York City, Greene moved to Sullivan County in upstate New York with her young child and many of the women interviewed in the book come from that region.

Here is Eileen Pagan's response to the question, "what does wilderness mean to you?"
One of the qualities that defines wilderness for me is that sense of quietness, being with water, trees, rocks and sky, and knowing that there are living creatures of all the various sorts that are out there.  The foxes, for instance, which I rarely see. I do see the little chipmunks, snakes, and raccoons, and groundhogs, and all the millions of little creatures in the water in the summertime.  Those beautiful flying neon--what are they called? Darning needles? Down by the waterfall they are magnificent. 

Dorothy Hartz's responds to the question, "What in your life has brought you close to wilderness, or wildness?

I don't think you necessarily have to be in a natural setting to experience wilderness.  It helps a lot, and no doubt most of what we call wilderness encounters do take place in a natural setting, but...To me, wilderness is a state of harmony based on an absence of ego-consciousness.  It belongs to the organic world, to the world of instinct, whether in or out of doors.  We are in the wild whenever we are at peace with that.  We're innocent.

Mary Olmsted Greene
 The book makes me want to live in the wild before there is none left.

I found a website recently by the great environmental artist, Maya Lin.  It is called


What Is Missing?

Lin is a woman who has found a way to give tribute to the beasts and beauty of nature in her haunting audio-visual art.

Greene's book and her poems about nature give voice to what we long for that is not human, but essential to our humanness.



Saturday, August 21, 2010

The Kids Are All Right

During the summer when I live in the country with access to only a few multiplexes,  I tend to read more about film than actually see any movies.  When hype accompanies a movie during my desire for any non-Hollywood productions, I become a little too greedy for something better than average.  The Kids Are All Right sounded like it would satisfy my appetite for that.

I have a huge crush on Mark Ruffalo. He does not disappoint.  His charm comes from that gruff voice of his, and his natural, chilled out, thoughtful way of behaving.

The children in the movie are superb especially some very strong scenes with the boy named Laser played by Josh Hutcherson and Ruffalo.  The writing of these scenes is just right. Cholodenko, the director, and her screenwriter partner have created a mostly believable script.

 I found  the character played by Annette Bening  to be unlikeable from the get go.  She is either strident, drunk, or weeping.     It would be nice if we knew what the lesbian couple actually saw in each other.  They don't really work in a believable way.  They are constructs.  Julianne Moore needs to be in more Paul Thomas Anderson movies.  She has been cast badly lately and I wonder if it has to do with her age. Same goes for Bening.   

I did find myself laughing occasionally.  The movie is not hard to watch.  But it has been overpraised probably because there is so little quality to be had during the summer.

Mark Ruffalo


Sunday, August 15, 2010


Inside the Confessional


Saturday afternoons we went to Confession.
That gave us all day to play.
The dirt got to be soft with kids going back
and forth, a perfect spot for playing marbles. 
With a stick we drew a circle in the dirt
and in the middle of the circle was a hole.
We aimed at the hole to win.
We fought over cats eyes and keepsies.
Sure, there was cheating in that small place,
leaning down in the dirt. We got really
sweaty in the summer playing there.
After, our mothers turned on the sprinklers
and we rinsed off so we wouldn’t have to take a bath.

Inside the church, by the darkened booth,
 a line would form for the nice priest
who gave easy penances:  three Hail Marys,
that was it, we were off scot free,
safe from the licking flames of hell. 
Monsignor McDowell never had a line.
He said our tongues would turn to worms
 if we kept up our lying to our little brother
about where we kept our candy.    
We held our breath and lied about our sins.
Once inside, we were invisible,
hidden from the world, just us
and the plaited rush partition that let
our sins into the priest and his forgiveness
fly out to us on the other side.  
We listened for the sound of the shift
of the slot.  Then we would begin
to list our wickedness. The penance lifted
the grit and washed the tiny flecks of mud.
All clean,  we were free to go out and sin again.

Sunday, August 8, 2010

Black Swallowtail Butterfly on Queen Anne's Lace






























I was about to throw out some old flowers I had picked on the side of the road when I noticed a caterpillar on one of the old Queen Anne's lace.  It turns out that Black Swallowtail butterflies like to eat the parsley family which includes that flower.  So I am hanging on to the cluster of broken down flowers, and am going to see what develops. 

They eventually look like this.










You can see from the first picture that caterpillars are not the only insects in our house.

Thursday, August 5, 2010

Millipedes



Millipedes are common here. Some of them have wandered into our house, and had to be evicted. I find them fascinating and more appealing than centipedes.

They have reddish stripes to mark off every ten feet (as in pedes, not 12 inches).  Their shell looks hard as armor, and tough to break.
Centipede

Centipedes are hairy wider creatures that are soft in comparison.  They actually look a lot creepier, and have only around 30 or 34 feet compared to the millipede's nearly 80 by my count.  Also centipedes can bite.  Millipedes just give off an ugly smell as self defense, or they roll into a ball so that you can't pick them up or hurt them.


Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Salt/dir. Philip Noyce

Angelina Jolie works really hard in this movie.  She makes me glad that my job description does not include getting tortured in my underwear, or assassinating the president of a superpower.  For Angelina, it's all in a day's work.  So what if she is called on to invent a small howitzer out of a vacuum cleaner and some chemicals in the office?  She is very well trained.  She also manages to jump from the overpass of a highway onto semi-truck, then switch to another truck, then an oil rig, until finally she infiltrates a cab which slams into a police car, using each of these vehicles like catapults to get to her destination.  Ultimately her destination is St. Bart's Church in Manhattan where a VIP funeral is taking place.  The Russian president attends, so is available to be assassinated.

The assassination involves trap doors, spider venom, and more chases and spills and car crashes and our Angie, she walks away without so much as whiplash.  She is a human torpedo.  Wait, there is a moment when she has to dress a wound, and finds a kotex machine which she rips off the wall in order to get at one of those paper wrapped cotton products.

Also in this movie, and holding his own with such a superhero presence is Liev Schreiber.  

Jolie as Salt
Liev Schreiber

Leave it to Chance: a Tribute to Merce Cunningham

It’s not something too common, dancers over forty, over fifty even.  At the  Leave It To Chance concert at the Beaver Brook Cottage, Karen MacIntyre and Loretta Thomas began the program with a tribute to Merce Cunningham who recently died at age 90, and continued to perform past his middle years.  But these women were not performing Cunningham’s choreography. They had created six dances with the music of David Anderson to express how they felt about “the Einstein of dance.”

Karen McIntyre
Loretta Thomas


Mary Greene read words by Cunningham that described his philosophy of movement.    Thomas and McIntyre, two seasoned dancers, knew how to move to this  monologue and convey to the audience what the movements meant.    I was moved by the beauty of the balance of the two women, how carefully they intersected each others’ spaces, especially in the first dance entitled “Radical and Formal.”
     

In "Trio," a third dancer, Leah Giles, who had been trained by MacIntyre since a very young age, joined the two older women and we were able to see the contrast between the very young and the middle to older bodies. 

The small space at Beaver Brook allowed me to sit so close I felt open to a very sensory experience, not only seeing the detail of every body on stage, but also noticing textures, sounds, smells.  A large avocado plant in the background framed stage right and an altar with threeunlit candles gave an aura of a sanctuary.  Three elegant light fixtures hanging from the high ceiling  cast a curved shadow. 

Merce said, "First you have to begin with the most difficult thing, getting up."  These words were repeated several times in "In the Mean Time..."  in which the Gaia company of dancers, young and old, joined the two principals.  What a feast for the eyes, to see so many body types and faces all crowded into the large living room, dancing to David Anderson's  excellent music which aptly matched the movements.  Even though Cunningham made an eloquent case for his dances not needing music (there is so much to notice in the movement, the music is a distraction), I have to admit I much prefer it.  There is something so satisfying about watching a well trained, well rehearsed body move to the rhythm of great music.

After the intermission, the Gaia Dance Collective performed, each dance choreographed by one of their dancers.  The program closed with  a very winning  "Swing Guitars," full of  humor, whimsy and fun. 

Karen McIntyre explained somewhat wistfully that this would be the last performance of her Triad company in Sullivan County.  It is difficult for her to come to New York from Texas where she lives and teaches.  But she left us with a humorous series of monologues in the voices of the residents who first greeted her when she was just establishing her dance studio. 

Sunday, August 1, 2010

Inception

When did Leonardo DiCaprio grow a vertical line in his brow?   In Inception, he plays Cobb, an expert at prompting other people's dreams to be available to him so that he might steal what secrets lie therein.  Cobb has a lot to worry about since his wife in the dream state keeps trying to murder him or get back at him or get him back.   His new mission is to go into a man's dreams and plant an idea there, an idea that will benefit a corporate client mightily.  It will be necessary to outwit or outshoot the security police who guard the dreamer's dreams.  There is also the risk of landing in limbo if after the third level of dreaming you get stuck between levels one and two.

Besides learning how the invasion and creation and manipulation and suspension of dreams work, the viewer is treated to hair raising action scenes, one piled on top of the other.   It is hard to keep from admiring the visual mastery of the dream sequences mixed in with these action scenes.

Joseph Gordon Levitt plays the part of Arthur, one of the team of experts who help Cobb on his missions.   He is supposed to lack imagination but he walks on the ceiling with ease.  I can't wait to see Gordon Levitt's next movie, not that he outshines anyone else in a cast that includes Tom Hardy as the shape shifter, Michael Caine as a concerned father, Ellen Page as a wizardly architect and Cillian Murphy as a very well protected victim.  

Next day, remembering the scenes of the architecture breaking up and going sideways, and of the mazes the dream architect invented, and of the van falling off the bridge for what seemed like days, I hoped that my dreams would become a bit richer in visual content. But poor Leonardo.  He has lost his boyish look. The groove in his forehead is there to stay.


Friday, July 30, 2010

Lake Shore Limited by Sue Miller

I got sucked into it willingly, this familiar Sue Miller terrain with its combination of realism, manipulation, and current events.  Once I was at page 100, I thought, why am I reading this soapy stuff, and then dashed through without coming up for air until I was done.

The thing about Sue Miller is that I sort of expect the worst for her characters. She has the ability to create  a feeling of suspense, as if something important is going to happen, just give it another five pages, and then the action I was expecting fails to occur.    I feel like a ninth grader unsatisfied with her ice cream choice.  Then why do I keep going?

I keep going because I am her audience. I am a middle aged, middle class, educated woman.  That is who Sue Miller writes for.  Her characters come from that class.  They are professors, doctors, architects, realtors.  They are in helping professions.  Some of them are teachers.  I recognize these people.  They are mostly married, and have sex in graphic detail.  One of the keys to happiness is orgasm.  You can tell how happy by how many orgasms the character has.

So there is this tie to the physical life of the characters in her narratives.  Lake Shore Limited is about a playwright whose live-in lover was killed in one of the planes on September 11.  Her new play touches on an act of terrorism that may have killed the wife of the main character while he is engaged in an affair and trying to break free of his wife.  When she is missing from the train that was blown up, he is at the brink of deciding whether to stay and play the dutiful bereaved widower or leave and begin his life with his new woman.

The book centers on the play and I thought why not just include the play in its entirety in the book, but the point of the book is to have each of the four main characters grasp the meaning of the play as it relates to their lives.

The structure of the book switches from each of the four characters at regular intervals. At one point, one of the characters says about another:  "Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier."  Exactly. Sometimes the characters seem awfully slow to catch on what is obvious to the reader. 

Still,  I have been mulling over this book, thinking about the dilemma of what your duty is to the dead who are killed in acts of terrorism.  It is a strange obligation that comes with the mourning of people instantly snatched up by the media and patriotism and other things unrelated to who the person was or what your relationship was with that person.   This is at heart a very thoughtful treatment of a new kind of subject.


Thursday, July 29, 2010

Wild Turkey

Yesterday while taking a walk down the driveway, I noticed something moving in the grass to my left and bent over to see what it was.  A female turkey burst up at me.  A blur of feathers and beak and talons grew to my size,  menaced me with her loud angry voice.  Her wings and feet rattled,  meant me harm.  My heart  pounded in my chest.  I was stunned and stood still, then realized that this was not what the turkey wanted.  She wanted me to go as far from her and whatever she was guarding as quickly as possible.

I ran to the road and didn't look back.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Cheri

Colette's perfect novel adapted in this imperfect film demonstrates the difference between movies and the books they come from.  On the one hand, cigarette smoke wafting over someone's head in a long shot with the foreground a lovely border garden evokes a character and another character's feelings about that character in just a few seconds. On the other hand, Colette's tone of voice in the book is  full of archness and wisdom.  As readers we have the time to take it in, to let its seduction take hold.  The narrator's voice in the movie is a man's, and feels forced and trying to fill in the blanks and intrusive.

The moving images of the movie are beautifully apt to the Belle Epoque settings, its architecture, interiors, and gardens. The costumes are sumptuous and steal the show. The actors all do a fine job epecially the title character, Rupert Friend, as the callow youth whose beauty is his undoing. I do not agree with the casting of Michelle Pfeiffer for this part. She is so thin, and carefully preserved when what is called for is someone fleshy and just past their prime. Is it true that the camera could not record her actual face in order to give the illusion of preserved beauty in one so far past forty? She is too much a product of California, blond, lean, and hip,  to play a voluptuous Parisian courtesan. Her voice is all wrong especially in the beginning when she seems to be faking a British accent (why? because Friend is British?)

Was Helen Mirren not available? Or Charlotte Rampling?  Something about Pfeiffer's face says surfer to me.  I know that she has the chops and all that, having played loose women etc but still, that was in American pop culture type things like Scarface and Baker Boys.  This is the cream of Colette's oeuvre and she just doesn't work in the part.

Everyone else does, thank goodness.  In the end I think the movie is about the mother making one hideous decision after another, and Kathy Bates plays the mother perfectly.

Oops, said Kathy Baker by mistake.  They are so different!


Kathy Bates                           Kathy Baker

Thursday, July 22, 2010

What is it about the internet?

There have been many articles recently about the effect of constant connection to electronic devices on our brains.  Are humans becoming less human as a result? What is it that makes us human?
Do we need to stay connected to a machine to feel part of the conversation at the cost of having a conversation with a real live person we might like to sit with at leisure over coffee?

I think there is an epidemic of loneliness.  My theory:

It is an addictive habit like smoking.
It takes practice not to use it so much.

There are so many things I want to know.
The internet provides answers.
Yesterday these were the things I looked up which can give you an idea of what my life is like:

how to clean and re-season a cast iron pan (I overzealously cleaned it)
recipe for corn chowder (love to eat, love to cook with fresh summer vegetables)
national weather forecast (when will the heat move on?)
cat ear infections (poor kitty)
writers almanac (need fresh poetry, Garrison's voice)
pictures of hummingbirds (they are crazy little buggers providing endless entertainment)
cornell's website on birds (wow why so many flycatchers here?)

New York Times crosswords (another habit forming )
New York Times op eds and obituaries (okay the news comes last)
email five times (who wants to talk to me remotely, who do I owe messages to)
zen habits (where are the date stamps on these articles?)
flickr pictures of rural librarians (what would it be like to work in the country)

In the country

Waking up to the sound of birds, to the sight of a forest, to the smell of fresh air, is more than restorative, it seems necessary.  I think of what it would be like if I were in the city right now, at 7:30 AM.  The sound of the men setting up their construction, the subway under my feet,  cars, trucks, taxis, horns honking, the smell of the heat and ozone, diesel fuel particulate accumulating on my window sill.

There are trucks laboring their way up hill in the woods to build a new development somewhere.

But in the city, I guess what we don't have here in the country, is lots and lots of people with lots and lots of needs.  They need to eat so there are restaurants on every corner, a grocery store every few blocks.  They need to get dressed, and live somewhere, more shops, apartment buildings reaching the sky.  They need to get from place to place, so there are subways and buses and taxis and roads and traffic lights.  They need to use the toilet and their sinks and their bathtubs so there are sewer lines. They need to read at night so there is electricity.  They need to cool themselves so there are air conditioners and fans and the electrical grid is amazing.

Here where there are not as many people,  there are birds, lots of trees to house them and give them food. The squirrels do not beg from me as they do in Central Park.

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Funny Animation

One of the benefits of belonging to Roger Ebert's Club (a subscription you can join on his blog) is finding the extra films and clips he provides. Here is one I particularly liked, sort of seasonal to the summer.

Thursday, July 15, 2010


Accelerant

I am the solvent that feeds the flame
The foot to the floor that hurtles the car
I am the deed you want in your name
The border that sets off the civil war.

I am the heat that prickles your neck,
the pushing, the shoving, the loaded deck.
You cannot see me, I’m gas in the pipe.
Don’t fall asleep, I might kill you tonight.

Wednesday, July 14, 2010

Reading War and Peace

I reached the halfway point, the end of Volume II, where Natasha is disgraced and ill, Pierre feels a new hope after looking at the comet, Anatole is banished to Petersburg,  and Andrei takes on the qualities of his father-- bitterness, cruelty, superiority.

Up to that point, all the characters were growing in tenderness and love, except Pierre, whose faulty marriage has destroyed his chance for happiness.   Andrei, after suffering a grievous wound in battle, and disillusionment among men of power and glory, had fallen in love with Natasha who returned his love.  They were both unsuitable for each other somehow, yet each recognized the excellence in the other, and loved the person for the bigness of soul found there.  Natasha saw Andrei as an honorable, intelligent, accomplished person.  Andrei saw Natasha as pure spirit, whose voice's purity expressed joy and sorrow and emotions perfectly.  Here is a quote from the Maude translation (I am reading the Pevear/Volokhonsky, hence the Andrei/Andrew discrepancy below):
After dinner Natasha, at Prince Andrew's request, went to the clavichord and began singing. Prince Andrew stood by a window talking to the ladies and listened to her. In the midst of a phrase he ceased speaking and suddenly felt tears choking him, a thing he had thought impossible for him. He looked at Natasha as she sang, and something new and joyful stirred in his soul. He felt happy and at the same time sad. He had absolutely nothing to weep about yet he was ready to weep. What about? His former love? The little princess? His disillusionments?... His hopes for the future?... Yes and no. The chief reason was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him and that limited and material something that he, and even she, was. This contrast weighed on and yet cheered him while she sang.

What makes reading this long book such a pleasure is the sheer scale of it.  Everything is bigger than usual in a novel.  There are more major characters, and the characters have minor characters attached to them, such as servants.  Like reading Shakespeare,  you keep referring to the cast list.  The list of major characters in War and Peace takes up two pages, and is organized by family.  Only after reading all of Volume I did I get used to all of the characters' nicknames.  Then I was able to differentiate one Nikolai from another, one Vassily from another, to remember Dolokhov's significance, and to distinguish him from Denisov.

Once I was able to do that, I began to appreciate the set pieces Tolstoy lays out before you.  There is a hunt for wolves that is right out of a fairy tale, it is fantastic, dark, bloody, and shocking, with so many omens you are sure a human being will be lost any moment, but not even the old wolf who is the prey expires -- he is merely tied onto a log and carried, pathetically snarling and writhing to the exit.

The Mummer scene is another tour de force of romantic or impressionistic sensations.  The cold of an icy winter night, the speed of the horses as they race each other, the frozen masqueraded faces -- girls sporting corked on mustaches-- as they dash off to the neighbors, Nikolai getting a little lost -- the description of the stars in the snow, or the snow in the stars.  It is all so dazzling in sensations that you forget these episodes build up to the next plot point, Nikolai finally professing his love for Sonya.

There is a pattern of illusions and disillusions.
Pierre has great ambition in the beginning.  His hopes are dashed upon marriage. He is raised up again by his joining the masons and again disillusioned at the less than stellar performance of his brothers in alms giving.

Andrei has a need for glory and honor and distinction (Where is my whiff of grapeshot) on the battlefield, and does distinguish himself only to later feel it is all useless.  His wife dies, and even though he showed no love for her that I could see, he is deeply in mourning after returning from war, and embittered by political life.  Then he sees Natasha as the freshest most innocent joyous creature, and pursues her, and regains his footing and wants to go on living.  Why he takes so long returning to her after going away for his health is beyond me.  He is deeply passive in some ways.

Nikolai -- the battle scene where he is wounded.  He thinks of his life, and what is happening as sort of a dream.

The  novel is dreamy in places.  Then it snaps into focus and becomes real  again.  When Tolstoy is going into people's heads, though, there is a swirling sense of illogic and feeling that is clearly not objective, but deeply subjective, deeply from the subject's point of view.

I am savoring every morsel.



Monday, July 12, 2010

Toy Story 3



What is new about the Toy Story franchise this time is its realism when it comes to garbage disposal.  The whole gang—Potato Head-- Mr and Mrs., Cowgirl, Pig, Woody and Buzz Lightyear—at one point face a very scary death after going through what might be a documentary style, ala Mr. Rogers perhaps, look at what happens when you throw things out in your garbage. Here is how the process works, first take the garbage from the street to the truck, then from the truck to the dump, then from the dump to the sorters, from the sorters to the choppers, from the choppers to the wait, is that an inferno down there or what are all those orange flames licking at the sides of the deep hole we are about to descend?

Up until then, we had also had a dose of reality, that is, what the preschoolers at a day care center are really like when left to their own devices.  It isn’t pretty.  It makes the first Toy Story villainous doll look like a good witch.  These children tear the toys limb from limb.


Sunday, July 11, 2010

Gasland

What could be more important than water? The natural gas industry thinks that money is.  They have seduced many citizens in depressed regions of the country with seams of natural gas buried deep within its lands to sign leases that give oil companies the rights to mine the gas in their back yards.  Up here, in the Delaware River watershed, many activists are deeply opposed to it, and are rallying to pass legislature that will prevent drilling until more is known about the health, safety, and environmental impact.














Josh Fox and leaseholder of gas drilling watch 
his water catch on fire

The problem is with local governments who never saw anything wrong with money coming into the regions.  The problem is with state governments whose environmental regulatory agencies have been decimated by budget cuts.  And of course, the problem is with federal government.  The Energy Act of 2005 exempted natural gas drilling from following the laws of Clean Water, Clean Air, etc.

Josh Fox is the director of the movie.  His muckraking is pretty effective, based on the screening I attended in Honesdale last week at the Episcopal Church.  It was standing room only, with people applauding the panel discussion leaders afterward.  The links on the Gasland website are activists who are battling with gas drillers.



Please go there and offer any support you can, especially in terms of writing, phoning, and visiting your representatives in government about this important issue.

As for the filmmaking, I wish it were less  influenced by Michael Moore, in those scenes  where the hapless filmmaker tries to interview people on the opposite side of his issue who turn him away.  When he finally does land an interview with a state agency official, the results are excellent, and remind you of the opposite side's point of view.   The original impulse to fund natural gas was not bad.  It just happens to be as filthy, short term, and patently unfair to the people who live near the drilling as any other kind of fossil fuel mine or oil rig. 

The victims in the film  who say that they don't recognize their country are heart broken and heart breaking.  A cattle rancher in Wyoming turns to the camera and says directly to anyone who is listening, this is not just happening to you, it is happening to me.  You are not alone.





Saturday, June 26, 2010

War and Peace

Since we are living in a time of many wars, with polarized feelings right here within the United States, it seems like a good time to reread War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy.  What strikes me at the beginning is how much wheeling and dealing goes on at the soirees.  A benevolent uncle jockeys for position by granting a favor to an old luckless impoverished woman who is quite the wheeler dealer herself.

I am also struck at the words "joy" and "merry" in relation to the men's view of battle.  They so look forward to the adventure of war that they approach it like children playing  game. 

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Women Lawyers

I have been thinking of women lawyers, and the image of women lawyers portrayed by the media and  movies.

Sunday the New York Times featured a story about Gloria Allred, a lawyer who advocates for women  victimized by criminals, discrimination, and less, including Tiger Woods' publicity team after it became known that she was one of the women he had had sex with.  Throughout the article, mention is made of what Allred is wearing, how well put together she is, how tall she is, how old she is,  elements of a professional's life that probably would not be mentioned if the subject were a man. 

On television that day was Legally Blonde, a movie that made it safe for smart girls to be froufrou in movies (let's face it, Hepburn dressed for success, not to charm in her smart girl roles, ditto Rosalind Russell et al-- can you imagine any of those black and white film strong women heroines from the 40s in pink?) or was it the movie that made it safe for froufrou women to be smart. I always watch the movie when it is on tv just to see the face off of Elle in her curvy dress with the white frill and high heels and perfect accessories, waiting for the elevator with her counterpart played by Selma Blair in a turtleneck sweater, conservative suit, pearls, and black pumps.  It is easy to see who will win the man, the case, and the career in this bit of costuming.

In 1992, Marisa Tomei wore skintight, outrageously flamboyant dresses in My Cousin Vinny when she demonstrated, in a courtroom, in front of her doofus lawyer boyfriend, her superior knowledge of cars and the skid marks they make, which helped to  save two young men unjustly accused of murder.

The Times article condescended toward Allred, a highly successful lawyer,  because she excelled at publicity, and tended not to turn down any highly celebrated client.  But  how clearly she states her case:
“The concept of fairness is always culturally defined,” she said. “Even here, where we think we are such an advanced nation, people advise women to grin and bear harassment in the workplace. I say, ‘Do complain.’ It’s only going to get worse. We have rights so that we don’t have to go like beggars with cups in our hands asking for mercy. We have to be heard in the court of public opinion as well as in the actual courts. Silence is the enemy.”















                            Gloria Allred in her office




Reese Witherspoon as Elle Woods



















Marisa Tomei as Mona Lisa Vito in
My Cousin Vinny

Tuesday, June 15, 2010


The house sparrows have no houses.
They settle in the cross beams of steel
posts suspended from street lamps.
You might hear a cheep and looking up
see feathers sprouting
from the cold metal hollows.  The proud
mothers sing their hearts out. 
Success!  Success!  Success!












Dean Street at Carlton Avenue
Prospect Heights
Brooklyn, New York
Photo by Tracy Collins 

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work









 
photo by Genaro Molina / Los Angeles Times
 In the documentary of her last year leading up to her victory on Celebrity Apprentice, which signalled a bit of a resurgence in her career as a comedian, Joan Rivers shows her floor to ceiling card catalog of jokes.  As a librarian, I loved the fact that the jokes were in alphabetical order.  Cooking jokes were just before Tony Danza jokes.  Does she write all her own material?  She seems to in this film.  Some of the jokes are very very funny.  The movie does not lionize her in all her difficulties, but it does document how terribly hard she works.  And how personally she takes slights.  And how sad she is  when her long time manager and she break off their business relationship.

Friday, June 11, 2010

Happy Birthday, Ruth Stone







Ruth Stone

At Poets House on Tuesday night family and friends of Ruth Stone gathered to celebrate her 95th birthday.  It was a beautiful day for any kind of celebration,  full of fresh air, sun, and skidding clouds over the Hudson.  Inside, it was standing room only for visitors who crammed into the small auditorium.  We were greeted by the expert program coordinator Stephen Motika.   Twelve people saluted the poet described by Sharon Olds as the "mother of humor and mourning."  

Chard de Niord began the evening with a telephone call to Stone in Vermont the way David Letterman on live TV used to phone his mom  for the whole studio and TV audience, with enhanced sound so that we could hear each other across the miles.    Stone's voice rang out loud and clear how "she loved us all very much!" and then she read her poem, "The Orchard."

Sidney Wolinsky, a filmmaker who made Stone's acquaintance in the 1970s, showed a few minutes of his documentary "Excuses."  Even though Stone was not present at Poets House, we all did get to see her at home slicing up carrots and mushrooms for a casserole while she talked about her work and her life.

Her oldest daughter, Marcia Croll,  read love letters between Ruth Stone and her husband Walter. The letters were erotic, charged with love and longing.  Walter's suicide in 1959 made Stone an expert in grieving, loss, and the surreal turns that life takes.  Now, more than fifty years later, she survives, continuing to write and read aloud with her clear firm voice.

Dorianne Laux delivered by heart  brilliantly the poem, "Curtains."

CURTAINS
Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.
What does it mean if I say this years later?
Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams NO PETS! NO PETS!
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.
I want to dig you up and say, look,
it's like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.
See what you miss by being dead?










 Dorianne Laux




Sandra Gilbert read the poem, "The Song of the Absinthe Granny."

The Song of Absinthe Granny 

Among some hills there dwelt in parody
A young woman; me.
I was that gone with child
That before I knew it I had three
And they hung whining and twisting.
Why I wasn’t more than thirty-nine
And sparse as a runt fruit tree.
Three pips that plagued the life out of me.
Ah me. It wore me down,
The grubs, the grubbing.
We were two inches thick in dust
For lack of scrubbing.
Diapers and panty-shirts and yolk of eggs.
One day in the mirror I saw my stringy legs
And I looked around
And saw string on the floor,
And string on the chair
And heads like wasps’ nests
Full of stringy hair.
“Well,” I said, “if you have string, knit.
Knit something, don’t just sit.”
We had the orchard drops,
But they didn’t keep.
The milk came in bottles.
It came until the bottles were that deep
We fell over the bottles.
The milk dried on the floor.
“Drink it all up,” cried their papa,
And they all began to roar, “More!”
Well, time went on,
Not a bone that wasn’t frayed.
Every chit was knicked and bit,
And nothing was paid.
We had the dog spayed.
“It looks like a lifetime,”
Their papa said.
“It’s a good life, it’s a good wife,
It’s a good bed.”
So I got the rifle out
To shoot him through the head.
But he went on smiling and sitting
And I looked around for a piece of string
To do some knitting.
Then I picked at the tiling
And the house fell down.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said.
“I’m going to town.
Get them up out of there,
Put them to bed.”
“I’m afraid to look,” I whimpered,
“They might be dead.”
“We’re under here, mama, under the shed.”
Well, the winters wore on.
We had cats that hung around.
When I fed them they scratched.
How the little nippers loved them.
Cats and brats.
I couldn’t see for my head was thatched
But they kept coming in when the door unlatched.
“I’ll shave my head,” I promised,
“I’ll clip my mop.
This caterwauling has got to stop.”
Well, all that’s finished,
It’s all been done.
Those were high kick summers,
It was bald galled fun.
Now the daft time’s over
And the string is spun.
I’m all alone
To cull and be furry.
Not an extra page in the spanking story.
The wet britches dried
And the teeth came in.
The last one cried
And no new began.
Those were long hot summers,
Now the sun won’t tarry.
My birds have flocked,
And I’m old and wary.
I’m old and worn and a cunning sipper,
And I’ll outlive every little nipper.
And with what’s left I’m chary,
And with what’s left I’m chary.









Sandra Gilbert


To get more of a sense of how her mind works, read this  interview with Ruth Stone.  In reading several interviews over the past few days,  I find it amusing to see how  she learns about the interviewers, how she disarms them with her curiosity about everyone she speaks to.




Thursday, June 3, 2010

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

Beauty and transience are linked in Japan. Think of cherry blossoms, and how they are celebrated in ritual gatherings, adored for their short lives as much as for their visual splendor. In Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a first film by Jessica Orent, the Japanese people show their love of insects through collecting. In the US if you go into a pet store, you see the cuddly puppies and cute kittens. In Japan, children yearn for the stag horn beetle in the square plastic box. Women go to pet supply stores in search of the best bedding for their insects, and the best insect snacks. At night, the hunters of the beetles are out with flashlights and special nets to capture the beetles who climb trees. Anyone in the beetle business seems to know just how to kick the base of the tree to dislodge the unsuspecting bugs. Overhead images of people swarming at intersection in the rain, their heads under colorful umbrellas, link our species to the insects. Constant voiceover relates how poetry, art, nature, and philosophy relate to the Japanese love of insects. Most of it is in Japanese, requiring the viewer to read the subtitles which takes our eyes off the images. This is a minor flaw, but it leaves the audience somewhat exhausted after watching.

Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo Trailer from Myriapod Productions on Vimeo.


Saturday, May 15, 2010

Please Give

Nicole Holofcener makes movies about people I recognize.   It is a relief to sit in the theater and not have to watch young men shooting each other, or middle aged men pairing off with very young women, or young men in buddy movies where the arc of the story begins with pure foolishness and ends with a little less foolishness. I know that I will see the Iron Man movie (I love Robert Downey Jr) and will be tempted by Robin Hood (Russell Crowe is no slouch) but still, superheroes and medieval legends are not the concern of my everyday life.

So when middle aged women with inner lives are portrayed on the screen I snap it up.  Why should  Meryl Streep have a lock on this?

This is Holofcener's specialty, and Please Give is her latest and most wonderful. I read  that Catherine Keener is her muse.

Long live Catherine Keener.













The movie begins with a series of mammograms shown while the Roches sing "No Shoes" in the background.  It was inevitable that mammograms would feature in a film at some point.    Accompanying the images with such a finger snapping tune leavens the tone and introduces a breast technician as a leading character. The movie shows how we feel about cast off furniture and clothes of the dead, and our ambivalence at living in the richest city in the world while surrounded by the homeless.

Any mother who has ever lived with a daughter whose whole feeling of self worth centers on having the right pair of jeans will also recognize herself in this movie. 




Sunday, May 9, 2010

Good Morning


Good Morning

In the sink the cat’s dish gets a swish.
The dregs need rinsing
from yesterday’s coffee.
The kettle needs filling.
The pilot light clicks then whooshes
 into flame, and turns the copper bottom red.

In the tub, three minutes for the sponge bath end
just in time for the kettle’s whistle.

Damp feet step gingerly beneath a bath towel.

The filter sits in the cone,
the cone on top of the carafe,
 the coffee, one half cup, in the cone.
Steamy the water that falls on the coffee,
then the scent of beans

The cat begins to eat

 The day can now begin