Notes on "Breach"

The movie, Breach, is based on the Robert Hanssen spy case. Robert Hanssen was a top FBI agent. In the early years of this millennium he was uncovered as a Soviet spy. The story is told from the point of view of an aspiring FBI agent who was a planted as his assistant and played a significant role in breaking the case. The film spends a good deal of time on Hanssen's attempts to convert the assistant to Opus Dei (the real Hanssen was an Opus Dei member along with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and, according to rumor, FBI head of the time, Louis Freeh.) Curiously, it only mentions the cult by name one time late in the film. The film is structured as a thriller, but the plot is so understated that it comes across as more a psychological character drama.

- J

Notes on "The Gold Coast" by Elmore Leonard

The Gold Coast by Elmore Leonard is a novel set in Florida involving the widow of a Detroit mobster. This is the second Elmore Leonard novel I have read. The other was Cuba Libre, in which an American cowboy gets swept up in the Spanish American War. Elmore Leonard is known for his dialog, and stories tend to be dialog driven. In this he was a good student of Hemingway. From a sample of two I can say that his heroes tend to be blank slates, there is a distinctly sadistic tendency in the villians, and the love interest tend to have duplicitous interests. Fun reads, though.

- J

Notes on "Pericles"

We saw the California Shakespeare Company production of Pericles. Scholars are uncertain to what extent Shakespeare contributed to the authorship of this play. The language of the play did not have the richness, density, or playfulness I would have expected, so I would side with scholars that do not believe he contributed much. The character of Gower, the narrator, had all the poetry.

In general, the production was good. The set was interesting and versatile. The actors performed with energy and enthusiasm. It was well passed. But then there were the accents. The director chose to give the population of each locale of the play a different accent. I suppose this was to help the audience keep track of where we are (we travel all over the Eastern Mediterranean), but for this to work the accents need to be consistent and instantly recognizable. In this case, they were just confusing and made the language of the play more difficult to understand. Lose the accents and one would have a fine and worthy evening out.

- J

Notes on "Mississippi Masala"

In the seventies, Idi Amin expelled from Uganda people of Indian descent. Many had been in Uganda for generations. Mississippi Masala is the story of one such expelled family who ended up in Mississippi. The daughter falls in love with a black man. It is a story about race and racism, but not the traditional story. It is about how suspicions and mistrust can grow between two oppressed minorities. It is a very interesting movie, but a little emotionally flat.

- J

Notes on "The Mountains of California"

The Mountains of California by John Muir is a natural history of, mainly, the Sierra Nevada range. It is that and much more. It covers all that is expected of a natural history: the geological history, the geographical features, the flora, the fauna, and seasonal change, much of this discovered by the author. But it is also a paean to the mountains and the freedom they afford. It is an adventure book, recounting Muir's need to get to the tops of things to have a look around: previously unclimbed peaks, trees in the middle of a windstorm, or Yosemite Falls in January. It is also a polemic for preservation. Muir devotes a chapter to the bee pastures. He never says it, but it is clear that he wants people to believe there is money to be made by leaving things as they are.

Notes on "Romance and Cigarettes"

The movie Romance and Cigarettes, directed by John Turturro, is about a working class couple in Jersey with marital problems. Done as a musical. James Gandolfini is kicked out of his home for infidelities. He begins to sing. Pretty soon he is dancing in the street with the garbage men. Depressing topic. Fun movie.

- J

Washing the Car

I washed the car this afternoon, which I rarely do. I wash the car when it needs it, when the accumulation of crud and debris threatens its aerodynamic characteristics. I sometimes joke that I wash it every year, "whether it needs it or not." This is a true description of frequency, but not motive. If it didn't need it, I wouldn't wash it.

While I was engaged in this work it occurred to me that it is quite possible that, since we are in a drought year, someone could be driving by might become indignant about my wasting of water. They might make the assumption that I do this every weekend, as some do. They might wag a finger of approbation.

The thing I was thinking about as I scraped a years worth of bugs from the front grill is that this hypothetical finger wagger is right in the general case. I would agree with him or her. One should not waste water if you live in the semi-desert that is California. You should not do so, especially in a drought year. Its socially irresponsible. Its bad for the environment. Washing cars is one of the ways people waste water. Its just that the wagger's finger might be misdirected in my case.

People make errors of particularization all the time, of course. It probably happens more these days. Our technology permits more and more context free encounters. George W. S. Trow wrote about it in the sixties in Within the Context of No Context. We curse each other on the freeway because of a too sudden stop or a missing signal. This is an example of a great sin: people don't signal as they should. We shake our fist because we have found a sinner. The sinner. But we have never met the person in this car in front of. We don't know what kind of day they are having. We don't know if failure to signal is a chronic problem or an aberration. We have a moral makeup meant to protect the cohesiveness of a tribal village. It loses its bearings in the anonymity of modern life.

- J

Notes on "The Kite Runner"

The movie, The Kite Runner, is true to the book upon which it is based. Plot details are followed in sequence, more so than in most movies. It is perhaps too true. Cinematically, it feels a little flat, at least by modern expectations. On the other hand, the story has a lot of authenticity. I think this is what attracted people to the book. It would be difficult to make the story more cinematic without losing the authenticity.

- J

Notes on "Very Annie Mary"

The film Very Annie Mary is a wonderful movie. It heartwarming piece of surrealism starring Rachel Griffiths. It takes place in a rural valley in Wales and is about a woman's efforts to find her way out from under her father's all consuming shadow. It borrows from the surreal Australian films of Griffiths's earlier career and the English underdog from the midland's makes good. Every plot twist is contrary to the conventions of modern films, yet entirely predictable and consistent with the characters involved. Rent it.

- J

The old preacher

On my morning walk today I saw a male great blue heron in full matrimonial regalia. Great blues grow amazing long feathers down their backs during the mating season. He looked like an elderly preacher in a worn old shawl. Imagine a species for which looking like an elderly preacher is sexy.

It was a beautiful clear morning. In addition to my old preacher, I saw a night heron, many smaller egrets, some excited mergansers(not common around here), and, still, the school of salmon or steelhead.

- J

Doors

My workplace in San Mateo is near a small neighborhood of Eichler homes (the 19th Avenue Development). Eichler was a builder of ultra-modern homes in California in the 1950's. They are also known as flattops and are quite distinctive in their street appearance. In the 90's in Palo Alto Eichlers became rather fashionable and sold in the million dollar range. These are definitely not fashionable, though some have been well cared for have settled into a comfortable middle age.

I often walk in the Eichler neighborhood and began to notice something that strangely I never noticed about Eichlers before: they have no visible front doors. The entrances to the houses are almost always on the side, and frequently concealed. There will be a gate that matches the house siding.

I don't know why this is. Eichler interiors are known for their openness, but their exteriors typically reveal nothing. Was it a sign of the times? This was the era of back yard bomb shelters. Did home buyers of that era just want to barricade themselves from the dangers of the world?

Since I noticed this, I have been attentive to doors as I walk around Niles. There do seem to be periods when doors were deemphasized or concealed and periods where doors are prominent features and stand boldly in the middle of the frame. I wonder if these correspond to periods of national insecurity and of national confidence.

- J

Niles Wildflower Festival

Yesterday was the Wildflower Festival in Niles. The main fund raiser for this event is a Garden Tour of neighborhood gardens. Over the years, my wife and I have acquired a strong aversion to designer gardens in garden shows. Although these may be creative and may have interesting botanical specimens, the gardens don't feel inhabited. We tend to prefer the slightly scruffy (or very scruffy) evolving gardens of old Niles. Usually we just walk or drive on by the designer gardens. This year, though, we visited a couple of gardens that obviously had been designer gardens, but had been lived in enough years that the edge had worn off and were beginning to have a personality.

On Linda Drive we visited an entry with a lovely rose garden on the side of the house and a large vegetable garden and orchard in back. A lot of love has been poured into that space.

- J

Notes on "Sweeney Todd"

The recent movie Sweeney Todd, starring Johnny Depp, is more theatrical than cinematic. The interest is more in the grace and flair the actors demonstrate in their roles than in the characters in their world. Special effects are used a great deal to conceal this, but mainly it is talented actors hamming it up. In this it is not unlike The Pirates of the Caribbean series, in which Johnny Depp also stars.

- J

More on the Fire

There are some pretty good pictures of last night's fire at the Henkel factory here.

- J

Fire

At about six tonight my wife spotted black smoke billowing over the trees. Something was on fire. The smoke was too dark to be a brush fire. There was too much to be a house fire. From the direction location it must have been the old factory at the end of Niles Blvd most recently owned by the Swiss knife maker, home and beauty products maker, Henkel. At one time agent orange was allegedly made there. The building has been neglected recently, although the owner had spent some money to have the warehouse behind torn down. There had been a plan to turn the lot into condos but that died (we hear it is a super-fund site.)

I watched the smoke from our back door. The sirens blared and then grew quiet. The smoke turned from deep black to white. Probably steam from the water they were pouring on the flames. At our distance the billowing smoke was still formidable, but we could not hear the any of the crackling of the flame or the clamor and yelling. We could just hear the evening bird song away in the trees.

- J

Notes on "Pan's Labyrinth"

The Spanish movie Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War. It concerns a bookish and imaginative girl who's mother, a widow, has married a cruel captain in the Franco's army. He is engaged in mopping up remaining republicans in a small village. There are two stories that run in parallel: the story of the small band of rebels and their struggles with the cruel captain, and the story of the girl's inner life of fantasy. As the barbaric world comes closer to the girl, so the inner fantasies become more intense and dangerous.

For me, the "real world" story was not very real. It was as much a product of the CGI shop as the fantasy story, only with an element of sado-masochism. The "real world" story was as much a fantasy.

The movie felt to me a lot like the Matrix series. For all their mythologizing, it felt like there were no humans involved in the filmmaking.

- J

What Happened to Litter?

When I was growing up in the sixties, litter on the highways was a topic of national policy. Lady Bird Johnson campaigned against it. Signs on all roads threatened big fines for littering. Yet, shoulders were covered with trash.

Today one will occasionally encounter a "no littering" sign. Occasionally you will see trashy shoulders. But, rarely is litter a subject of public discussion let along political campaigns.

What happened? I don't think the highway maintenance sponsorship programs are responsible. Litter was largely gone before these programs began. If anything, Americans generate more trash while in their cars than in the sixties. When Lady Bird was on the case, McDonald's and KFC had yet to spread across the country. There are orders of magnitude more cars on the roads.

I wonder if air conditioning can account for the change. Americans do not drive with open windows any more, especially on highways. Tossing something carelessly out the window is no longer possible.

Often, technological changes cause changes that cannot be foreseen. Sometimes they are not even seen at the time the changes are taking place, and can only be observed in hindsight.

- J

Notes on "The Cooler"

The Cooler is a movie starring William H. Macy about a man with such bad luck that he is employed in a Las Vegas casino to "cool" the luck of gamblers. He falls in love, his luck changes, and hilarity ensues. Well, hilarity and a good deal of extreme violence.

- J

The fish are still there

I check on the fish in Alameda Creek below the BART tracks now almost every day on my morning walk. I am now convinced they are salmon. They are still there. They have not been as easily seen, the light is poorer in the morning and the water is back to its usual murkiness, but now I know the form to look for and I can clearly make them out. Usually they are swimming in place facing into the current. They have distinctly V-shaped tails.

- J


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TV Friends

In a recent This American Life episode, David Rackoff told a story of a man found to have been dead a year in his lounge chair with the television still on. He said that recent studies have shown that television is capable of having the same emotional and physiological effects as friendship. But, he said, at a minimum a friend should be able to reach over and say, "How are you doing, buddy. You're not looking so good, in fact you are looking a little ..., dead!"

Its true that a lot is missing from the emotional connection that people seem to have with people on television, but it is hard to underestimate its power. Political campaigns these days are built around trivia aspects of appearance or behavior while monstrous defects go unremarked. What goes largely unnoticed is that television news, mainly under the influence of the 24 hour cable news channels, has become more informal and conversational. The way people relate to any medium is by correlation to real world social forms. The transition from Walter Cronkite to Chris Matthews is the transition from a professor in a lecture hall to a guy in a bar. A guy in a bar demonstrates his understanding of the world by inferring broad generalizations from small details that others might not notice: a missing flag in a lapel or quirky turn of phrase. In a bar, a guy who has command of facts and statistics is a know-it-all and must have hidden motivations. A guy who can spin a narrative from whether someone wears a flag in his lapel is a regular guy.

- J

Notes on "Letters from Iwo Jima"

The Clint Eastwood film, Letters from Iwo Jima, is a companion to his earlier film, Flags of our Fathers. This one is about the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective. Like many later Eastwood films, this one centers around violence, but neither romanticizes nor moralizes it. Not to say that it avoids mythologizing. Eastwood is all about the mythic. In this case, it is about the honor system of Japan and the cult of suicide. The narrative makes a distinction between the uses of the honor system to promote authoritarianism and conformity and the truely honorable death.

- J

Salmon or Steelhead?

I walked this afternoon on Alameda Creek. A strong cold wind was blowing from the Northwest, so generally up the creek. Alameda Creek, like many waterways in California, is heavily managed. There are a number of inflatable dams where the creek flows through Niles to divert water into nearby quarry ponds and to thereby recharge the water table. This time of year there is usually a lot of water backed up behind a dam where the creek flows under the BART tracks and only a trickle below the dam. Later the stream below the dam will dry up completely.

Because of, I imagine, the cold upstream wind, the creek was unusually clear this afternoon. As I was admiring this clarity, I began to notice forms moving in the stream. Large forms. Fish, in fact. Quite a number of them , in fact. I counted one congregation to be more than thirty, but most were swimming along in columns of four or five, so all in all there were probably more than a hundred. I was quite astonished. I have seen one or two large fish, floundering in the margins of the creek before, but never this many.

As far as I could tell this was the end of the line for these fish. Since they were mature fish I am assuming they were attempting to swim upstream. There was no way they could cross the dam in its inflated state. I don't know whether they were salmon or steelhead. From my experience, they resembled salmon quite a lot, but I have no point of reference for steelhead. Whatever they were, would that there were more of them.

- J

Notes on "June Bug"

The movie, June Bug, is a very American movie, but had the feel of a French film. It was quiet and static with an ambiguous ending.

This is a city mouse/country mouse story. A sophisticated art dealer from the city is trying to sign a primitivist painter from the deep south. Since this is near her new husband's family home he comes along. The art dealer bumbles along, not understanding her newly acquired family's country ways. Her husband is divided between the two worlds.

The protagonist is clearly the art dealer. Her husband is out of focus for most of the movie. But in the end, it is he that is changed by the experience.

A strange, fastinating, out-of-place, out-of-time piece of filmmaking.

- J

Notes on "Charlie Wilson's War"

The film Charlie Wilson's War is about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the role of Congressman Charlie Wilson in providing funding for the resistance. It stars Tom Hanks, Julie Roberts and Phillip Seymore Hoffman, was written by Aaron Sorkin of West Wing, and directed by Mike Nichols. These are such very competent people and we are so used to seeing their work that we are swept along. It is an entertaining couple of hours. Only afterwards did I stop and realize that there was so little there. This is a political procedural, like a TV cop show or hospital drama. Things happen that appear to have great moral weight but no one changes fundamentally.

The story is based on real world events. Just as in the real world Charlie Wilson had a reputation as a rake, became obsessed with Afghanistan, coerced a reluctant CIA to become involved in the effort to resist the Soviets. Some people have said that the defeat of the Soviet Army there brought down the Soviet Union, though it is of course a bit more complicated than that. But the movie is not very interested in the war in Afghanistan. This is depicted in a couple of montages, the movie is not very interested in the politics, not interested in the refugees. It seems mostly interested in the irony of the assertion that it was a libertine Democrat, and
not the moralistic Reagan that brought the Soviets to their knees.

- J

One Art

I heard Elizabeth Bishop's poem One Art on Fresh Air today. I really liked it. Light and breezy with a punch to the gut (at least for me) at the end. Would that I had it in my back pocket in recent months as my mother was dying from Alzheimer's.

- J

One Art

by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Turtle Blues

Lately, if I get a window seat on an airplane I look for humans when the plane is taking off or landing. I see plenty of cars scutting along. I rarely, if ever, see actual humans, even when the planes are low enough to the ground to make them out. We have become a country of turtles or hermit crabs. We spend most of our time under a shell of some kind.

-- J

A little perspective

Balloon Juice:

If you have a memo from Jeremiah Wright to John Yoo showing how we should become a rogue nation, let me know. If you have pictures of Jeremiah Wright voting against the GI Bill, send it to me. If you have evidence of Jeremiah Wright training junior soldiers on the finer aspects of stacking and torturing naked Iraqi captives, pass them on.

"Until then, I just can’t seem to get all worked up about the crazy scary black preacher that Obama has to 'throw under the bus.'"

The media needs to be talking about the important things, not former preachers and lapel pins.

Notes on "Gulliver's Travels"

Gulliver's Travels: should be required reading for software people. Big Endians, Little Endians, lots of natural law philosophy, and Yahoos! I had forgotten about the chapters on Laputans and Balnibarbians which together catalog everything that can go bad in a software project.

- J

Notes on "Figaro"

The Berkeley Rep. is presenting Figaro, on an adaptation from Theatre de la Jeune Lune of the Beaumarchais play, The Marriage of Figaro, and the Mozart opera reimagined by wrapping it a flashback seen from the perspective of the French Revolution. The play was apparently controversial in its time and some have said it was a precursor to the Revolution. It is an interesting concept and nicely executed. It was rather more opera than drama, though. I imagine if I were more familiar with the original opera I would have been better entertained.

- J

Notes on "Atonement"

The 2007 movie Atonement felt emotionally false to me. Very nice cinematography and competent acting, but to what end?

- J

Notes on "Fellini's 8 1/2"

I remember being enthralled seeing 8½ in the seventies. Seeing it recently, I felt less involved. Some individual scenes are quite memorable: a coming of age memory on the beach where the village outcast dances for the young Fellini and his school mates, a scene taking the water at a health spa, and a scene on an aborted movie set. Unusually for an Italian movie, there is no whorehouse, but there is a fantasy harem sequence. It amounts to about the same thing I suppose.

- J

Notes on "La Vie en Rose"

La Vie en Rose is a biopic about Édith Piaff. It is told as a sequence of montages unrelated in time. Unlike many films that use this technique, there is no wrapping narrative that explains the jumps. This is not a sequence of interconnected memories. Rather, it appears, the filmmaker made a standard biopic in standard narrative order: star as a child has traumatic experience, star gets foot in the door by chance, star struggles to adjust to changing tastes, star has problems with drug abuse, star abandons those who love star, star collapses on stage, star has comeback concert, star dies. I think they realized that they had done this, so decided to randomize the chronology to so that it would not be so apparent.

- J

Notes on "Savages"

I heard from several source that The Savages was a movie about disfunctional siblings caring for an emotionally distant parent with dementia, but funny! I can confirm all but the last clause. It was a well acted movie and emotionally honest, but it was not funny, at least not for me.

- J

Notes on "The Rainbow" by D. H. Lawrence

I have been listening to The Rainbow, by D. H. Lawrence, but I am giving up on it about half way through. I have become impatient with Lawrence's narrative style. Many novels are written from an omniscient perspective. Lawrence writes from a perspective of universal sympathy. He understands, and describes in detail, the inner emotional turmoil of his characters. Pages and pages pass without dialog, direct interaction among characters, or event. The microscopic examination of psyche feels unauthentic to me. It made me feel more remote from the characters, like they are chess pieces being moved on a chess board. Such intimate sympathy does not make me feel more involved in the internal lives as Lawrence may have intended. It makes me feel they are slaves to the author's will and whim.

That being said, The Rainbow has not been without rewards. The prose, particularly when describing the external world, can border on the poetic. The book recounts three generations of the Brangwin family, owners of a small farm near Nottingham. Here is a passage near the start describing the life of on the Brangwin Farm:

But heaven and earth was teeming around them, and how should this cease? They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed to begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the daytime, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds' nests no longer worth hiding. Their life and interrelations were such; feeling the pulse and body of the soil, that opened to their furrow for the grain, and became smooth and supple after their ploughing, and clung to their feet with a weight that pulled like desire, lying hard and unresponsive when the crops were to be shorn away. The young corn waved and was silken, and the lustre slid along the limbs of the men who saw it. They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees, they harnessed their horses at the wagon, and, with hand on the bridle-rings, drew the heaving of the horses after their will.

Hearing this, I thought I was in for a story bound to the English countryside, with rich and detailed descriptions of farm life, but the author seems to lose interest. We hear comparatively little of the work the do, or the practicalities of life.

The Librivox book is beautifully read by a single reader, Debra Lynn, who has a slightly incongruous, but level and pleasant midwestern accent. She kept me listening long after I would have otherwise stopped.

- J

Notes on "Tragedy: a Tragedy"

In Tragedy: a Tragedy by Will Eno, a new play at the Berkeley Rep, something cataclysmic has happened and we are in the last night. Or maybe not. But, the news team of a local station is on the case. There is an avuncular anchor, a man on the street reporter, a human interest reporter, a political reporter, and a "witness". The content free commentary of these reporters who really do not know anything is pitch perfect and very funny. As the play proceeds, we watch the reporters collapse under the strain of trying to report on a world they believe has turned upside down. Very 9-11.

-- J

Notes on "The Souls of Black Folk" by W. E. B. Du Bois

I thought I was an educated man and understood at least the basic history of race in America, but The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903, was a revelation. There were many points while reading this book where I wondered, "could I have been sleeping in class that day?" The Civil War, of course, was about freeing the slaves. I know about the Civil War. I, after all, watched the Ken Burns miniseries. I should think I would know more about what happened regarding the slaves. I should think I would know that freeing of slaves occurred in the midst of the battlefield, because of course the battlefields were among farms and plantations. I should think that I would know that some Union Generals responded to black men escaping to Union lines by ordering the ir return to their "rightful" owners or by effectively enslaving them themselves. I must have been asleep in school when these facts were discussed.

Du Bois said at the beginning of the last century, "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line." He meant by this more than the white/black issues in the United States, but all the encounters and conflicts among the races throughout the world. This proved prescient, of course. These conflicts continue, in the twenty first century to occupy us. The Souls of Black Folk, except for its title, reads as a very modern book.

- J

Notes on "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind"

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is a film based on the Chuck Barris autobiography of the same name. Chuck Barris was a creator of trashy game shows for television -- The Dating Game, The Newlywed Show, The Gong Show. In his autobiography he claims to have led a double life as a CIA assassin. The movie plays it straight, except that the actor playing Barris plays his role rather broadly. The movie was a project of George Clooney, who directs and acts. It was a well paced movie, never boring, but unsatisfying. The movie seemed to be making some important point about Hollywood, but I didn't get it. Maybe it would make sense to people in the business.

- J

Farley's Blend

Farley's Blend. You can still get it at Peet's, even though it is not on the board. They have to blend it on the spot. Most Peet's blends, it seems to me, are either all Arabica(Asia or Africa) or all Robusto(Americas). This one blends both.

- J

Rubber Rooms

I heard a This American Life story last night about Rubber Rooms. It can be heard here. These are temporary "Reassignment Centers" for teachers in the New York City public school system. Teachers may be pulled from the classrooms for any of a variety of reasons and assigned to a Rubber Room, where the have to show up each workday and sit for seven hours to get paid. Some people are assigned this purgatory for years. It is a bizarre and arbitrary system. In these circumstances, apparently, people quickly begin to behave like people in prison. They played a snippet of what it sounded like on a typical day. It sounded just like a High School classroom when the teacher is out.

- J

Crossed Paths

I have been listening to the Librivox edition of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois. In the final chapter he introduced a brief autobiographical moment with "My grandfather's grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds...." I thought, "I wonder..."

We have traced one branch of my wife, K's, family back to Hugo Freer, one of the twelve patentees of New Paltz, New York, in the late seventeenth century. They were French Huguenots fleeing religious persecution. They obtained their patent from the Dutch colonists. When we visited the Huguenot Street Historic Site in New Paltz we were shocked to learn that the original families kept slaves, whom they obtained in trade with the Dutch. Du Bois is obviously a French name. I wondered if K's ancestor and Du Bois's ancestor crossed paths.

There is this: Per Wikipedia, "W.E.B. Du Bois is said to be grandson of a loyalist descendant of Louis Du Bois' brother who left for the West Indies." Louis Du Bois is another New Paltz patentee. Louis Du Bois, himself owned six slaves, according to records. So, maybe. K's ancestor and Du Bois's ancestor may well have crossed paths.

Strange to think that people fleeing oppression would turn to oppressing others. Strange to think this occurred in the "enlightened" north. New York did not completely ban slavery until the 1820's.

- J

A New Tack

I have not been happy with the direction of this blog lately. It has become limited to mini-reviews. I meant the blog to be an exploration, and it has ceased to be that. So, I am going to try making an entry each day on something from that day.

To that end, we enjoyed a nice dinner at a new Italian restaurant in Fremont -- not a chain! -- named Federico's. On Mowry Blvd. It was pleasantly buzzing, and apparently successful. I hope it continues to enjoy success and to inspire other independent restaurants.

- J

Notes on "Once"

Once is an Irish film in which a street singer and a struggling immigrant woman from the Czech Republic meet and rescue one another through music. The film is mostly told through the music, although it is not a musical in the normal sense. The immigrant woman is strong in a way that immigrants are often forced to be, and this one fact causes the film to have a rhythm and trajectory that is counter to that of most films.

- J

Notes on "There Will Be Blood"

There Will Be Blood is a 2007 Paul Thomas Anderson film about the early days of the oil business in California. It is loosely based on an Upton Sinclair novel, Oil. It felt like an Upton Sinclair novel. It has a plot arc of the naturalistic fiction of Frank Norris and Emile Zola or of the Italian films of the '50s. That is to say, the plot arc steadily in relentlessly downhill.

This is a geek film. Most films about the oil business would show a derrick and gray men working around it, but here we see the evolution of the technology from a man with a pick and shovel at the bottom of a hole to men with buckets slopping oil out, to primitive pumps. We see primitive braces and pulleys turning into 80 foot derricks. We see barrels rolled onto trains evolve into pipelines. It is fascinating to witness. Often, the details of the mechanics are exposed as a setup to some dramatic catastrophe. One becomes conscious that, if the camera spends time showing the course of a belt, then soon that belt will break and someone will be harmed. We do not see the mechanics simply for the interest of the mechanics, but that's okay.

A theme this movie has in common with Paul Thomas Anderson's earlier Boogie Nights is family, specifically rejection of family. Both, Daniel Plainview, the protagonist of this film, and the subject of Boogie Nights have turned away from family, and spend much of their respective films trying to reconstruct a version of it. In Boogie Nights, the family is the porn movie production company. Both lose their bearings when their pseudo-families fall apart.

- J

Notes on "Boogie Nights"

Boogie Nights is a 1999 film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Nashville in the San Fernando Valley.

- J

Notes on "The Tale of Sweeney Todd"

The Tale of Sweeney Todd is a 1998 version of the London horror tale, not the Stephen Sondheim/Tim Burton/Johnny Depp musical currently contending for an Oscar. It turns out that the Fleet Street barber's story has been rendered to film quite often, going back to 1926. The version we saw was a made for TV movie, but it the title character was played by Ben Kingsley and the remaining cast was quite respectable. In this version the homicidal haircare specialist has a blood lust that grew from war experiences in Africa. There is, of course a vendor of meat pies. An American agent inquiring after jewels in the care of one of Sweeney's victims accidentally uncovers the whole nasty enterprise. London is portrayed as a grim, dark, damp, muddy place filled with nasty brutish crude louts with bad teeth and frayed whigs. All except the principals, who have good teeth and their own hair. Having gone to the expense of hiring first rate actors, decorating and peopling a dispiriting early nineteenth century world, that the movie would hinge on a melodramatic plot device out of Sergeant Preston and the Mounted Police or a Bond movie. What was the point of getting everybody mucked up for a deus ex machina?

- J

Notes on "Knocked Up"

Knocked Up is a romantic comedy that starts out with an accidental pregnancy between a successful entertainment reporter and a slacker. It is weighted down so much by the ballast needed to make the premise somewhat credible that it plods along. By contrast, 40 Year Old Virgin, also written and produced by Judd Apatow and featuring a number of the same team, made its premise believable in the first minutes that Steve Carell was on the screen and the movie floated on air.

- J

Notes on "Wishful Drinking"

Wishful Drinking, at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, is a one woman performance written and performed by Carrie Fisher. Fisher, of course, was Princess Leia in Star Wars, was the child of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and was briefly married to Paul Simon. She has a clever, biting humor that she directs principally at the other celebraties in her life. The performance had the feel of a tell-all celebrity memoir dramatized. This was a narrative that started from the assumption that celebrities are the American royal class, and their doings have inherent interest. The events described might have weight and meaning for a dedicated fan of her or her parents, but meant not a thing to me.

- J

Notes on "Ratatouille"

The animated comedy "Ratatouille" concerns a rat who cooks in a fancy French restaurant. It felt like a plot designed to get to certain set pieces, like a bus that has to make certain stops.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

Notes on "Casanova"

"Casanova" was a light romantic comedy based loosely on the life of Giacomo Casanova, and starring Heath Ledger. It is set in Venice and looks like it may have been partly filmed there, but it is a prettied up Venice. It follows what has become a pretty standard formula since the Hepburn/Tracy movies about the amusing things that happen when a man confident in himself encounters a strong modern woman.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

Notes on "Natural History of the Chicken"

The documentary "The Natural History of the Chicken" is apparently what PBS has been reduced to. It is a humorless reenactment a la Cops of several news-of-the-weird stories that involve chickens.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

"Self Employed" by Harvey Shapiro

I really like this poem by Harvey Shapiro. Its images are sure and painted with economy. You can read it, or listen to it here.

- J

Notes on "Taking Over"

The one man show, Taking Over, at the Berkeley Rep was written and performed by Danny Hoch is about the gentrification of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn from the perspective of the gentrifiers and of the gentrified. There are young neighborhood men, a black woman, and naive and cynical interlopers. It is an interesting subject entertainingly and movingly presented. The humor is sharp and cutting, and the audience laughed heartily even when we were the target.

There is an odd thing that happens when a neighborhood moves up economically. Residents become nostalgic for the poorer times. Some of Hoch's characters reminisce fondly about the crack dominated days of the eighties.

It got me thinking that K and I have been on both sides, in our time in Niles. We moved into our narrow little working class street. Our neighbors were retired steel workers, bikers, bar patrons, drug dealers, Viet Nam vets, and fishermen. The old time residents were suspicious and we knew it. We were "resident tourists", as a Hoch character calls the new Williamsburg buyers. We were attracted by the "character" of the place. The long time residents were the character.

A few years later a new wave of young professionals and tech workers moved into our part of Niles. They had money. They were different and strange. We felt they did not understand us. We missed the old days with the drug busts at 2:00AM across the street.

Californians are a people built to surf in other people's culture. We eat their food. We acquire and mispronounce their patois. We adopt their architecture. We think we understand. We think we see ourselves in them, while we are pushing them to the margins. That's because, following in the footsteps of Richard Henry Dana, we are a vigorous and energetic people. It is interesting to see how we are seen.

- J

Image is scaled down version from the show's promotional image, and as such, constitutes a fair use.

Notes on "Amendla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony"

Amendla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony is a documentary about the role of music in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. I have heard Vukani Muwethu sing many of the important songs of this period. They are powerful. They are inspiring. They are truly revolutionary. The movie is a bit muddy. It is very sincere, but it should have been cut more crisply. There are some wonderful images. Nelson Mandela dancing will make you believe. The power of the music rarely came across, though.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

Notes on "The Notorious Betty Page"

The Notorious Bettie Page is a serious character study of the famous pinup star. By that, I mean it is not meant to be titillating. It is not. The modeling sessions and the resulting images come off as authentic, and completely desexualized. The Bettie Page that is described here is a woman who was abused as a child, abused by her husband, and abused by strangers. She gravitates to anyone who can offer her kindness. This eventually turns out to be a couple that publishes girlie magazines. She defended herself from the abuse she suffered by pushing it from her conciousness so thoroughly that she literally cannot understand how the consumers of these magazines see her. So, says the movie, she remains innocent. This is a movie about a protagonist who is unchanged by the events of the movie. It is a good movie, and very perceptive about American attitudes towards women and sex, but, fundamentally the story was undramatic.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

Paul Muldoon, New Yorker poetry editor

Here is an interesting interview with Paul Muldoon, the new poetry editor of the New Yorker. He writes lyrics for his rock and roll band in addition to teaching poetry at Princeton, in addition to his gig at the New Yorker. Talking about formal structure in rock lyrics as a way of talking about formal structure in poetry he says that building a building as a rectangle with four walls happens to be a very useful way to build a house. Nothing mystical. Just figure out a way to make it work. Worth a listen.

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Notes on "Paris Je t'Aime"

Paris Je t'Aime is an assemblage of twenty short (five minute) films by twenty different filmmakers, one each on the twenty arrondissements of Paris. The demands of telling a meaningful story in five minutes turn out to be good for film making. Would that there was as much content in your average full length film as there is in any of these five minute ones. As soon as it was over, I wanted to watch the whole thing again. The episodes I particularly remember were a funny vignette about mimes falling in love near the Eiffel Tower, a Coen Brother skit with Steve Buscemi experiencing more than he bargained for as a tourist in a Metro Station, a touching small story about a woman leaving her own child at a day care to be a nanny for a wealthy woman, and a bit about French adolescent falling for a Muslim girl. All wonderfully told. A heady mix.

- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

Notes on "Juno"

The new film Juno is about a high school girl who gets pregnant and decides to give it in adoption to a childless couple has the cadences and rhythms of modern adolescents, but it has the spirit of Oscar Wilde or Cole Porter. The dialog (the writer is Diablo Cody) is joyfully exuberant at the same time it is authentically ironically detached. I don't know how this is achieved. The acting is great across the board, but it may be because the whole cast was under the spell of the script.

-- J

Image is reduced resolution version from the film's promotional material, and as such, I believe, constitutes a fair use.

What is she looking at?

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

I posted earlier about this surprising bit of statuary on a wall of a building in Siena. Here is why I think she is there.

To understand this, though, I think you need to understand the Contrades of Siena. Contrada means district in Italian, but in Siena it has an especially long and deep meaning, dating from the twelfth century. They were originally organized for defensive purposes. There are currently seventeen contrades in Siena. Each has a coat of arms, a patron saint, a museum, a fountain, and a very long tradition. The contrades are the participants in the famous Palio de Siena, a twice annual horse race in the campo (civic square).

The contrada for the neighborhood, in question is Bruco or the Caterpillar. You can see that from an emblem on the same wall:
Across the street, though, is a fountain. It is a curious site, actually built under a street, within a brick arch. It has a statue of this guy brandishing a sword. So this is who the topless you lady in the frieze is looking at. I am not sure what it means. The fountain is likely the fountain of a contrada. The statue in the fountain is likely a hero of the contrada. But, I don't know whether these are the Bruco contrada or a neighboring contrada. I don't know whether the young lady in the frieze is making fun of, or honoring the hero under the road.

- J

Sensibilities

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

This frieze was on the side of our little B&B, Bed and Breakfast San Francesco in Siena, Italy. I liked it very much. It was startling at first. You have to understand that this was on a busy, but not fashionable street a bit out of the center of town. (I have a guess as to the reason for this particular location, but that is speculation for another post.) It is not a place one would look for public art. The curtains are real, but the figure is of stone.

If this were in America, of course, it would cause a scandal. The morality police would be in uproar. "This is a neighborhood! Think of the children!" We encountered a good deal of public art in Italy, and much of it in neighborhoods. We found it in big cities, towns, and little villages, in ecclesiastical settings and secular settings. Some of it would have been regarded as considerably more salacious by certain members of American society than this example. Most of it was a good deal older.


The other remarkable thing about the public art is that it was unmolested, even in forgotten or neglected areas. Its not that Italy was free of vandalism. We saw plenty of tagging and other forms of graffiti. We did not see graffiti on art. We did not see art that was obviously by vandalism. I don't know whether it is through forbearance of vandals or a quicker civic response to vandalism, but I suspect the former.

I don't think that public depiction of the body is necessarily more acceptable in Italy (although it may be, I don't know). I think depiction of anything in the context of art has a different meaning in Italy than in the US. Art in Italy, and in Europe, in general is deeply embedded in many aspects of culture; in religion, in civic life, in history and national mythology. I think subjects that would otherwise be controversial, even in Europe, get a pass when it is in the context of Art. In America we are surrounded by creative visual images, mostly "commercial art". Arguably the average American sees more of it in a day than the average European. The American street or public place is a jumble of colorful images and graphic design. But it is ephemera. It is not considered capital A Art.

In America, capital A Art is now treated with suspicion. This started in the eighties, when the conservative movement found it convenient to demonize art as a part of "liberal elitism". In the eighties art and music programs disappeared from public schools. But, even before this, public art was mainly "good for you". It separated a middle class person from a working class person. In America, sports teams are for binding a community together.

- J

Village Time

Notes from our recent Italy trip.



We stayed for a week in the village of Soriano nel Cimino not far from Viterbo in the Lazio region of Italy. This was a charming medieval town built on the side of Monte Cimino. Life in Soriano was synchronized by three interlocked time systems, that of commerce, the church, and politics. Village businesses were open from 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM, closed from 1:00 to 4:00, and then open again from 4:00 to 7:30 PM. They were closed on Thursday afternoon and on Sundays. Church bells announced services at 7:30 every morning, announced the midday, and vespers in the evening. When the Communists were in power in the town council (as they were during our visit) a whistle blew at 8:00 AM, noon(ish), and 5:00 PM, except on Sunday. The whistle was very loud, so that it could be heard in the surrounding farms and fields. The noon whistle awaited the end of the church bells before it sounded.

I grew up in a town with a noon whistle, so the sound of it brought back a wave of nostalgia. Indeed, now that I think about it, our town had constrained commercial hours (though not as constrained as Soriano) and lots of church bells.

When the town was open there was a palpable energy to the commercial district. People went from shop to shop with purpose. Cars hunted for parking spaces. You could feel the bustle. This energy, of course, is contagious, and makes one feel that these are successful businesses and puts one in a mood to buy.

I felt that if the same amount of commercial activity were spread over the normal American commercial day, the town would feel sleepy. There would be no energy. One would feel this was a dying business district.

I found I rather liked village time. We fell in sync with it rather easily. There is a very communal feeling to it. People of my village are starting work now. People are going to services now. I must remember to get my provisions because tomorrow is Sunday and nobody will be working.

The modern world has become increasingly Las-Vegas-ed. Public clocks are hard to find. Everything is open all the time. There is no distinction among the hours. People work flexible hours (which often means all hours) Even watches are becoming rarer as people use the clocks on more private devices: PDA's and cell phones.

It is good there are still places where people keep village hours.

- J

The Personality of Places

Notes from our recent Italy trip.

Do places have a nature that outlasts or influences the people who occupy them? I have had this impression in the past. I certainly felt this visiting the Uffizi Galleries in Florence recently. Uffizi, of course means "offices", reflecting their past as the center of the Medici bureaucracy. We felt that the ghost of the bureaucrats must influence the way the facility is run.



The Uffizi is a very beautiful museum. The long corridors on the second floor, filled with statuary and bathed in a soft Tuscan light, are unforgettable by themselves and the rooms off the corridor are filled with a succession of masterpieces. One could spend days and weeks there.

But, the staff of the museum has the bureaucrat's tendency to hold on to information for the sole purpose of holding it over patrons. We rented the taped tour from an officious young woman who took our passports in exchange. There was no explanation on how to start, but we assumed we would be able to figure it out from signage. We found no clear signs. We looked around us. Everyone that rented the tour was in the same quandary as us. It did not matter the nationality. The Italians were as puzzled as we were. Eventually we did figure out that the tour was keyed to room numbers and learned how to find some, but not all, room numbers. During our visit we were chewed out by museum staff for a number of offenses, all entirely unintentional. We tried to go down the up staircase, though the prohibition was not clearly stated in Italian or English. We tried this because the signage at the down staircase implied it lead directly to an exit, bypassing other exhibits. We were yelled at in the cafe for standing in the wrong place, although we could not see why.

In the end, the art was worth the bureaucracy, but it was a bit maddening.


- J

Image from Wiki Commons and is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License

When in Italy, do press the red button

Notes from our Italian vacation.

The train had stopped at our destination, Orte. We stood bewildered in front of the door looking frantically for a way to open it. People were piling up behind us. Finally, someone from behind reach around and turned a red lever and the door opened. The lever was right in front of us, but we did not see it.

A similar thing happened when we tried to leave a B&B in Siena. The B&B shared an entrance with some private residences and had a complicated system of locks on the door. We stared at it for minutes, ignoring the red button in the middle. Only when it was clear there was nothing else that could activate the mechanism did we dare press the red button.

The buttons on Italian buses to indicate your stop are red. So are the push-bars on public doors. Basically, Italians appear to mark a control red to call attention to it, not to warn people away from it. So conditioned were we to the US convention that controls marked red are for emergency use only that we struggled for some time just to be able to see them.

- J

Back from Vacation ...

This blog has been dark for the past few weeks. My wife and I were vacationing in Italy. I intended to blog from there, but, internet access was spotty and, well, we had better things to do. But we're back now, and posts will resume apace. (I probably will be writing several posts on some things we saw, heard, or tasted in Italy that interested me.) I hope the drought has not been a hardship for the readership.

- J