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