Meek's Cutoff

We started the new year by watching a really wonderful movie that somehow didnt' make it on my radar until I saw it on Euan Kerr's Top 10 list on Minnesota Public Radio's website. Technically, the movie came out in 2010, but I'm glad he included it.

It's a Western directed by a woman, Kelly Reichardt, which in itself is unusual. There was not a word of dialogue until minute six, and for a small budget film it has wonderful cinematography. It also has some major acting talent, namely Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Paul Dano, Shirley Henderson (I love her!) and Will Patton. It's no Days of Heaven, but it's aspiring to that same elemental, beautiful, contemplative vision of America.

The film is really a deeply affective and effective exploration of otherness. The families are lost in the Oregon wilderness with a guide, Stephen Meek, who is all bluster and bravado and has also clearly lost his way. They are all supremely vulnerable and at each other's mercy. When they encounter an Indian and forcibly make him a part of their party, thinking he can lead them to water, they are at the mercy of a being that is completely other.

There are nice touches-- Meek's face is completely obscured by facial hair, making you want to claw your way to the bottom of him-- is he for real or is he a fake? Can you trust him? The Indian, bare-chested and with an utterly blank yet open face, is other in a different way that is also, in some sense, the same. It is "the West" that is other, the landscape that is impenetrable.

Some people might find the way the film treats gender a big heavy-handed, but I liked it. When there are discussions to be had about the settlers' predicament, they are had by the men, while the sound man and we spectators watch with the women from a slight distance. This adds to the sense of being lost and dependent, without a sense that the women are oppressed. They are just in their roles, as are the men. The main couple, the Teatherows (Williams and Patton), speak intimately at night and he asks her opinion, shares information and engages her in the drama of the journey then.

The film is based on real accounts of the journey of a wagon train guided by Meek via a "short-cut" in 1845. The larger wagon train broke into two parties, and Meek accompanied the smaller, led by Teatherow. However, it was likely not this small, just three families and their wagons. Meek's wife was also in the actual party. But the small ensemble allows for the meditative feel of the film while no character gets short shrift. Also, a wide variety of responses to the situation can be given by these characters.

All in all, it was a very compelling film, and I highly recommend it. It does feel, too, like we are starting the winter film viewing off right! 

For a good overview of the historical wagon journey in 1945 across Meek's cutoff, click here.

Two Good Books about Nuns

In my search for contemporary novels about American nuns, I've found only two. Both of them are fantastic books I'd recommend to anyone. They both share a strong message about religious life, as well as some other key similarities. The two novels are Mariette in Ecstacy by Ron Hansen and Lying Awake by Mark Salzman. (Hansen also wrote Exiles, a novel based on the story of the Wreck of the Deutschland and drowning of eight nuns and the poem Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote about the incident, but it's a different, much more historical and in many ways less accomplished, book.)

Both books have a mystic at their center, and both of these women live in cloistered communities. Mariette, though published in the 1990s, is set in the first decade of the 20th century, when all Sisters who were not on active missions were cloistered. Lying Awake, published in 2000 and covering the years 1969 to 1997, deals with a Carmelite Sister living in an enclosure in Southern California.

By building in these restraints on the Sisters' lives (habited, cloistered), the authors are able to deal with the central issues of a nun's life: community living with other Sisters and the quality of the spiritual life. What is clear immediately is that mystics, who seem both closer to God and richer in spiritual experience, are disruptive to religious communities. In Mariette, set in 1904, the mystic has the experience of stigmata and her experience, though doubted as self-inflicted, is treated seriously as a phenomenon recorded throughout history. Her wounds come and go and don't act as normal wounds or cause the permanent damage one would expect. The priest and Sisters experience other inexplicable signs of S. Mariette's special status. The experiences of Sister John in Lying Awake result in visions and writings which find popularity in the world outside the cloister walls. Both Sister Mariette and Sister John gain noteriety for their spirituality outside the convent.

But by the time Sister John is having her mystic experiences, there is a diagnosis and a cure for her particular troubles. She is recommended to receive surgery for epilepsy and has to decide whether or not to have it, knowing it will mean and end to her visions and possibly a return to a spiritual dryness that plagued her earlier in life. What makes up her mind is an experience with her community. It is not good to stand out in a convent. The idea is not to be special but to seek God together in daily life and prayer and work. That is the life, and the life, both books seem to decide, doesn't work without the Sisters subverting their own desires to the life and needs of the community. It is ultimately a much more "big picture" view than most of us can take. It's a big-picture view of time (aren't all spirtiual experiences by nature fleeting, if we continue to grow?) as well as one's place in a community.

As in Mariette, Lying Awake handles this action without diminishing the veracity of Sister John's spiritual experience. In the end, a holy, older Sister, helps S. John to understand the meaning of the experience. "God showed you what heaven could be like, and you shared it with others. ... God must think you did enough with that gift. Now he wants you to do something else."

Sister John is also helped by the glimpse she gets of her surgeon's vocation and its challenges. He also faced a period of disillusionment, realizing he went into medicine "for the wrong reasons." But he remained a doctor when he realized "everybody gets into medicine for the wrong reasons. It seems to come with the territory."

Quite a bit comes with the territory of being a nun. Struggling with the large questions all the time, and with the limitations of the church. For the Sisters who entered in the 1940s and have lived this life in its changing forms until today, there are myriads of questions, challenges, and also, I believe, joys. And each one is special and "stands out," even as they do what it takes to live together.

Moneyball

I didnt' have much interest in seeing Moneyball in the theater until a friend told me about his experience seeing it in a major metropolitan area (not Oakland). At the end of the movie, the audience stood up and gave it a standing ovation.

Standing ovations are odd things in themselves. They have become expected, ubiquitous rituals at a theater, and I square it by telling myself that I'll happily stand up and clap for anyone willing to entertain me in person for two hours. In a movie, it doesn't make sense, except as the audience affirming an experience shared with the others in the theater. Moneyball, then, was about something that could make people rise to their feet and applaud rolling credits. Perhaps, I thought, it has something interesting to say about America and about this moment in our history.

It turns out, it does. The movie is wonderfully entertaining, with excellent acting performances and a cast of characters that clearly includes many real athletic scouts (their acting is not excellent, but it's always fun to see real people in a movie). But what is the story? What kind of American hero is Billy Beane?

He's a failed professional baseball player who chose the major leagues when he wasn't ready, when he should have gone to Stanford on a scholarship. He looked like a great player to the scouts, who analyze players in a certain, romantic way, and who are looking for stars. In that system, he failed miserably.

As a general manager for a team that has one of the worst budgets in the Major Leagues, the Oakland Athletics, the game as it is played also isn't working. He can't win with the best players he can buy. It doesn't work to identify young stars and develop them, because as soon as the stars help the A's get close to a championship, they're bought off by teams with bigger budgets. As he says, he doesn't want to be a farm team for the Yankees.

So he changes the questions he's asking and changes the way he plays the game. He enlists a Yale economics graduate and they assess players differently. According to the system they're using, they choose players according to their ability to get on base (as determined by their stats). Rather than saying, "We need a star first-baseman to replace Johnny Damon," they say, "We need three players, and they all need to be guys who can get on base a large percentage of the time." They find undervalued players and recruit them.

However, they also (according to the movie) train and change these players to provide strengths that others didn't see in them. They get the players not to look at their shortcomings but to see themselves realistically and play from the strengths that they have. They teach a catcher to play first base, because they need his hits. Beane wants them to stop doing the thing they were originally assessed for and supposed to be great at and concentrate on what the statistics show they actually can do.

More than putting together a budget team, Billy Beane puts together a team whose parts work together to produce wins. Lots and lots of wins. According to the film, it's this change in thinking that leads the Red Sox to finally win a World Series in 2004.

It's an odd thing, really. In one way, it's a cold, heartless system, based on mathematics and statistics. On the other hand, the current system of player analysis seems just as cold and heartless. It is more romantic, building young men up with lavish praise of their talent and skills, and it provides the stories we hear in baseball commentary and tell each other over baseball cards and fantasy baseball leagues. But when they don't live up to the hype or promise, they're discarded and, the movie suggests, real damage is also done to their psyches.

The movie is not romantic, especially for a baseball movie. It embraces its inner geek, and although Brad Pitt is beautiful, charismatic and chews tobacco, there is surprisingly little baseball action in the movie. The games are mostly played out in documentary-like fashion. They are collections of hits, runs and scores, not feats of superhuman ability or "heart."

So what would make an audience get to their feet? Maybe it is Billy Beane's desire to do things totally differently when facing a situation he can't win, the big money market of professional baseball. Maybe there is a recognition that we, America, are not the high-budget team of all-stars we once were.

Our budget is low and we're not living up to our potential as stars. We need to change the game. We need to be realistic about what we can do as individuals. We also need to nurture new skills, the things we can do, and play our parts so we can get the most runs. Not every time, but enough times to be in the winning column. The truth is, this movie is not about the big winner. It is a movie trying to convince Billy Beane that falling short of the big win doesn't make his whole season and its successes meaningless. What he does counts. What he does turns baseball on its head and yet serves up a game that is wonderful for the fans to watch and satisfying for the team to play.

In the end it's surprising that the movie is offering people hope on a grand scale. It might be a good sign.

The Killing

I wrote this post on June 21 and for some reason never posted it. Just found it in "drafts" so here it is, late-- but I stand by it!

My creative writing students know that I have a few rules about storytelling: no sexual violence against women (trust me, you can't do it well and so just don't do it); no Scooby Do endings and no Wizard of Oz endings. I don't want anyone waking up at the end and discovering it was all a dream, and the monster had better not be Farmer McGregor in a mask. In other words, I expect you to stick by the rules of your genre, no matter what it is, and don't cheat the reader.

So you can imagine how I feel about the season finale of The Killing. Not since Twin Peaks have I so resented watching a show week after week. Yes, it's stylish. Yes, the acting is compelling. But I want some relief-- and that means releasing the main character from her obsession and telling me who the killer is. It's only fair. I've been watching television for over 40 years, and I've come to expect resolution from my series. Especially a series that purports to be a whodunnit. What's the point of having a "suspect tracker" on the Web site, a clue finder, etc?

The thing is, I'm not sure even of what I saw-- is it a Scooby Do ending? Holder's role has been to frame and bring down Darren Richmond? Then why did he participate so heavily in the false track the show was on for six or seven episodes, incriminating the teacher Bennet Ahmed? Why did he seem to be so half-cocked in his anger and reactions to everyone, including Mr. Larsen? Oh, that Farmer McGregor.

The Jayhawks and Me

Reunited Jayhawks Marc Perlman, Karen Grotberg, Mark Olson, Gary Louris and Tim O'Reagan

Last night a friend and I went to hear Gary Louris "and friends" play in St. Cloud at the Paramount Theater. It turned out to be a Jayhawks minus Mark Olson show. The friends were Karen Grotberg, Tim O'Reagen, Marc Perlman, all members of the Jayhawks since the late 1980s,and Jim Boquist, who played with Louris in the band Golden Smog and also plays with Son Volt. I'm thinking since the Jayhawks with Mark Olson are putting out a new album in the fall, they didn't want to bill under that name and give people the expectation that they'd be playing early music by that band. However, they did focus on the three albums made by the Jayhawks after Olson left, Sound of Lies, Smile and Rainy Day Music. Perlman, O'Reagan and Louris were at the heart of these three albums, and Grotberg played on many tracks even after she left the band in 1999.

Before the show, I had a drink at the White Horse Bar with my friend Nancy, who loves music and plays music in a folk band (there seems to be nothing she can't play, but flute and mandolin are her strengths), and who has six children ages 5-16. Although the night was billed as an "accoustic set," I told her to expect lots of amplification and maybe even a few electric instruments. Indeed, Louris played an accoustic guitar and Grotberg a grand piano, but the lead guitarist and bass were electric. I then began telling her how the Jayhawks fit into music history and my own.

You see, it all began with Gram Parsons. He brought country to the Rolling Stones and the Byrds. Then he died and they set his body on fire in Joshua Tree, California. He was discovered by some guys, The Jayhawks, who began this sort of movement in the 1980s in the Midwest called Americana, Alt Country or No Depression. The Jayhawks went as far as they could nationally, but by the time they hit it big, they were in massive debt to the record companies for the promotion and touring costs necessary to get them where they got, and thoroughly disillusioned with it all.

And Mark Olson met Victoria Williams, a hippie Christian singer/songwriter from Joshua Tree, California, who was hitting her own stride but keeping it small because she had been diagnosed with MS. Mark left the band and made music with her in Joshua Tree under the name "The Original Harmony Ridge Creekdippers," eventually whittled down to "The Creekdippers."

My heart is with Mark Olson and the Creekdippers. When I got together with my first husband, George, I was a big Victoria Williams fan, and he introduced me to The Jayhawks. It seemed a culmination of our own relationship when the two of them got together. We went to small, late-night shows in Chicago to see them and played their music all the time. George bought a boxed set of The Byrds and started "encoding it in [his] DNA," to get deeper into the heart of this kind of music. He bought the Anthology of American Folk Music assembled by Harry Smith, an eclectic set of 78 tunes also at the heart of this music. We went to hear Lucinda Williams live, and worshipped Gillian Welch's first record, Revival. I was partial to Freakwater and the female vocalists, and of course we filled in our collection with Uncle Tupelo records. They had already broken up, so we went to an early show by Son Volt (really too darn loud) and listened to Wilco. We went to see the Bottle Rockets. One Tuesday eventing we even got to see Bob Dylan in a small venue.

Listening to and talking about this music was a large part of my life then. And at the heart of it really was The Jayhawks. I didn't much like the three albums after Olson left, preferring the truer folk and missing the complexity and harmonies of their earlier work. Louris had a love of 70s rock and roll and a little too much earnestness in his long line of songs about love gone sour. It didn't surprise me last night when he said "Trouble" was one of his favorite songs.

Still, I knew all the words to all those songs. I no longer own the CDs-- I lost them in the divorce. These older, still talented, comfortable musicians making solid music (the tickets were an astonishing $8) moved me. It's been a few weeks of nostalgia, beginning with my 25th college reunion, and this concert was heartwrenching in the places it took me. It was an effect only music can have. That, and the sight of four people on the stage (plus Jim Boquist!), all in their 50s I'm thinking, who have lived in and out of loves, had children, made music with many different people of many different varieties, and come back together now and then.

The last time I saw George was at a Gillian Welch show in Los Angeles. It was a small venue. I was there with friends, and he was there with the woman he left me for-- a woman who, with her husband, had accompanied us to a Wilco show and a Bottle Rockets show. (There's another story of seeing the Creekdippers at The Brown Derby in LA that is too long to tell but really emphasizes how this betrayal go mixed up in the music.) Out of the corner of my eye I could see his new girlfriend working it, facing away from the stage, her arms around his neck as she sang they lyrics to him along with Welch. I didn't feel anything except how pathetic and sad it all was. Shortly after I left California for Minnesota, I learned that Mark Olson and Victoria Williams had broken up, too, and he was wandering around Europe. Eventually he made his way back to Minnesota, too, and now there will be a new album from those early Jayhawks. I'm looking forward mostly to the harmonies.

Last night there were moments of heartache. But also, as there had been all day, as I worked in my lovely garden, bringing in 1000 more pounds of dirt and compost for the final beds (in the end I have the equivalent of 15 raised beds), there was a sense that I have arrived at the place I started out for a long time ago. It is a place of simple living and gardens, of good food and love-- and music. And this music, which I so love, like so much of what I love, is here, still going on.

For an earlier post on Louris and Olson, click here.

Minnesota Television

I am a fan of public television, which varies in different regions of the country. Since I'm in a "cultural critic" frame of mind, I thought I'd share what I love and dislike about Minnesota public television.

First, I love that we get three different stations. And the programming is not the same on all three. I can watch "Frontline" at 8 p.m. instead of 9 on Tuesdays, and so be free to watch "The Good Wife" at 9 p.m. Channel 17 always has cooking shows on for an hour or two in the evening, which I like watching better than any sitcom. There are old Julia Child programs, which are always fun, and another good cook with good guests, Ming.

Then there is my favorite, a show I don't think you'll see anywhere but Minnesota, "New Scandanavian Cooking with Andreas Viestad." Andreas is from Norway, and the show also features chefs from Sweden, Denmark and Finland (though I've only seen the Swedish chef, Tina Nordstrom, and Andreas. The hallmark of the show is the chefs setting up an outdoor cooking station and making dishes on the spot. There's lots of herring, salmon and lingonberries. Salt and sour cream and dill are frequent flavorings. These two are delightful, and the food they cook is simple, fresh and beautiful. I particularly enjoy their accents and the way they tie their shows to tourism information about different regions, festivals and holidays in their countries.

Also on Minnesota Public Television are some first rate survival and wilderness shows. There are documentaries about people who homesteaded in the Boundary Waters or Alaska. There are also documentaries about great blizzards or the architecture of old homestead farmhouses. Some date back to the 1980s, and they seem to show periodically. I never get tired of watching them.

On the other end, is the unwatchable "The Red Green Show." I have not been able to watch enough of it to tell you much about it. It insults my intelligence and is not funny. It is 100% charicature of the Great North-- possibly Canada, or possibly Minnesota. Whenever I see it, I think of the constant showings of "The Benny Hill Show" on Chicago public television. Or that British comedy about the department store that played constantly in the San Francisco area, along with "Tales of the City."

If you move to a new place, watch public television. You'll learn a lot, maybe even how to cook a lingonberry tart.

Three African Films

In the past week we have watched three amazing films set in Africa. Two were French and one was South African. All three focused on white characters, and so they were all about colonization to some extent.

The first, and by far the best, was Of Gods and Men, about a group of eight Trappist monks living on a mountain in Algeria who decide to stay in their monastery despite the utter certainty that they will be killed by rebels. Or, by the government-- in the end it doesn't matter, because the film is not at all about the political situation in Algeria. It is about what martyrdom means and what it means for these men to follow their vocation. Theirs is a Benedictine vocation, which puts great store in commitment to a place and a community.

This is the best film I've ever seen about monastic spirituality. It may very well be the best film I've seen about Christianity. During this time of Lent, as Christians consider the meaning of the crucifixion, it is the most meaningful expression of what it means to follow the way of the cross. One thing you will not say after seeing this film is, 'Why didn't they just leave when they could?' Without preaching or blaming or any kind of self-aggrandizing behavior, in full consciousness of the consequences of their choice, they live out their vocations. And I do believe anyone watching will understand them and neither pity nor particularly admire them afterward. They did what they were called to do. The honesty of the portrait is what cuts to the bone, and what is also transcendent.

The second film was Claire Denis's White Material. Set in a French colonial country in Western Africa, probably Cameroon, where her first film, the wonderful 1988 Chocolat was set, the film explores the post-colonial situation of white settlers being removed from their farms. Again, the film feels very real, very honest, and not as political as it obviously has to be. The rebel children soldiers moving into the area frighten the workers-- frighten everyone, in fact, but the fierce French woman who runs the coffee plantation and her son, a man-child who is unfortunate to be born white in Africa after colonialism has run its course. As one character says, "He is African, but he does not look like Africa."

The government soldiers are equally brutal and frightening. It is not, in the end, the "sides" that matter. In this case, the French should have obviously gotten out of the country when they could, but like the monks in Algiers, where, after a lifetime in Africa, would they go? The film is beautiful and compelling, with surprisingly little dialogue throughout, and paints a complex and again, non-judgmental drama of people and a land.

The third film, Stander, is South African. Set in the 1980s and based on a true story, it tells of a white police captain who, fed up with the actions of the riot police and the corruption within the force, starts robbing banks. Again, the politics is confused. The man at the center of it all, Andre Stander, is 100% white masculinity. He likes to be naked, has a gorgeous wife he knows how to seduce, and is loved by men and women alike. He's a good shot, can handle himself on a rugby field, and is utterly reckless. Lucky for him, the state of affairs in the police force is such that they just can't catch him.

He is a lost man, really. His is a moral conundrum. He wants to pay for having shot an unarmed man while on riot patrol. But the government doesn't even recognize this crime. In the end, it's hard to know what to make of him or his actions. Unlike the other characters, he has the least purpose, and that has great consequences for South Africa.

Two of these three are now available on Netflix. Stander was released in 2003, and White Material in 2009. And if watching White Material makes you want another Isabelle Huppert fix (and let's face it, why wouldn't you want to see more of her?), follow it up with the movie Home, a black French comedy about the effects of a road expansion.

eXistenZ vs Inception and Avatar

After watching Inception, I had this urge to revisit David Cronenberg's 1999 film eXistenZ. I only remembered that I had really liked it, especially Jennifer Jason Leigh, and that it was about gamers trapped in a highly articulated game world.

If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend that you do. It is much closer to Brazil for creation of its own world. As far as cinematography and a critique of the morality of living in a virtual world, it is much better than either Inception or Avatar. And it does it on a significantly lower budget (not just because it was filmed in Canada!).

The plot is this: a group of people are invited to play the latest game by designer Allegra Geller. They play by downloading the game through her perverse, fleshy game module, which they connect to via a bioport they've had injected in their spinal columns. When the test is disrupted by a would-be assassin, Allegra and marketing trainee Ted Pikal go on the run. They then port themselves in and play her game to see if the world or game has been damaged.

The world of the film and of the game is beautifully realized. It is itself both limited as one would expect a video game architecture to be and also full of fleshy perversions, like the umbillical-style cord that plugs into the bioport, which the characters keep licking before they insert them. If you're squeamish about penetration, you're gonna squirm watching this film.

The plot in the game also works pretty much like a game plot would-- they have to say certain lines to trigger a response from key characters and advance through the game, and they're "rewarded" when they complete a task. In the end there is kind of a winner.

I'm not sure why this movie wasn't better received when it came out. I do remember watching it in a Joliet, Illinois, movie theater with a smile on my face the entire time, completely entertained. I certainly did not have that experience in either Inception or Avatar.

Also, this role is part of my favorite arc in Jude Law's career. It's interesting to note that he's was in three of these dystopian virtual/real films at the turn of the century. The first, and by far the best, was Gattaca (1997), about a dystopian world created by genetic engineering. The second was this film in 1999, and then he had a key role as the plastic toy-boy Gigolo Joe in Steven Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001). He is fantastic in this role, the perfect reluctant game-player who nonetheless wants to win.

Television without the Networks

It is probably not a good thing that we can now access so much television programming online. Before Steve and I got married, he spent a few Christmas vacations with his daughters plowing through an entire season of 24 in a few days, three to four episodes a night. I don't like 24, and haven't watched it after the first season (it was the body count and extreme violence against women that got to me more than anything else). However, this winter, with the kitchen renovation dragging on and the deep freeze uninterrupted, and the movie queue getting thin, we did give ourselves over to the first two seasons of Damages. We watched them two to three episodes at a time, one night even watching four.

The show pulls you in with its structure, especially in the first season. Why is Ellen leaving the apartment covered in blood only two months after she is hired by Patty Hewes? Well, the story inches forward and inches back each episode, filling in the crime and catching up to who done it. It is well-written enough that I really didn't know which of the bad guys done it until the last episode. And it was well-written enough that I didn't feel cheated when I learned who in fact done it.

The acting is also great. I'm sure Glenn Close is very good in it, although I think watching the episodes back to back like this makes her performance seem more uneven. There are some problems with her characterization. It's not possible to believe that she would have gotten away with all she gets away with for as long as she seems to have been a powerful lawyer. Her seeming altruism is so at odds with even her personality that it's just confusing. She is more like Gordon Gecko than Jack McCoy. And does she or doesn't she do anything illegal in the course of getting justice for the little guy? I have to say, I really don't know. Though I completely don't buy her as calling out a hit on someone. And I completely don't believe the fact that her baby died back when she was young had anything to do with, well, anything. I get her as a flat character, and these attempts to give her some depth are not even interesting to me. I don't have to like her.

By far the best character in the first season, and to some extent in the second, is Ted Danson's Arthur Frobisher. He is as believably conflicted, if not complex, as Patty is not. Danson is able to completely pull off the pathetic and clueless nature of this character, and it's not at all a stretch to believe he'd call in a hit.

Which is to say, I really loved this show, even as I felt like it was sucking the life out of me. Watching 28 episodes in a short period of time is not actually healthy, I don't think. It is the nature of serialized television to manipulate and lead you on, to play with your head. But only a little bit at a time. Once a week. Watching it like this can be kind of hellish. You feel a little like a junkie. And when it's dark and cold outside and you have no kitchen, well, it can feel like the winter is never going to end-- or at least, not without something really, really bad happening.

Dream of Life

I highly recommend that anyone who reads and likes Patti Smith's book Just Kids also rent the (auto-)documentary Dream of Life. Thanks to Giana for sending the recommendation my way!

This movie, a collaboration with filmmaker Steven Siebring, took ten years to make, and is in some ways about Patti Smith's reflections on the loss of friends, family and lovers: most poignantly her husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, who died in 1995, but also Mapplethorpe and her brother Todd, other musician collaborators, poets from her beloved Rimbaud to Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg, and finally, her parents, to whom the film is dedicated.

It's worth seeing even if you haven't read the book, if for nothing else than the amount of footage available, and for the music. If you've read the book, you'll appreciate even more how young she was when she lived at the Chelsea Hotel-- there is some amazing footage of her back then, and I must admit, even with the photos scattered throughout the book, it was very difficult to imagine Patti Smith quite so young. But it is also evident in the film that she is truly an artist of her time and weaves the Beat legacy, the Dylan folk legacy, the Vietnam War protest legacy and the punk rock world in which she lived and found her voice. Is it rock and roll? Is it folk? Is it punk? Is it poetry? Her performances have all these things, and her person has all these things.

She is also a Detroit mom who clearly adored motherhood and marriage and her house. Over the ten years of filming, we see her two children grow into young adults, and footage of her thirteen-year-old son in a hotel room is precious, as is the later footage of him playing guitar like his dad. He seems to be well-adjusted and as unassuming as she is.

Patti is a fan of childhood, and her visit to her parents' house in South Jersey is entertaining, real and precious. What would it be like to have Patti Smith for a daughter? Well, it would be wonderful, because she's a loving person who appreciates them. I have to admit that it also hadn't quite registered what it meant that she was from South Jersey, where almost all my relatives are from, until I heard her say the word "water" ("wudder") on screen. Her accent remains, not to be confused with a Long Island, Brooklyn or Bronx accent, and it comes out most purely in interactions with her parents. South Jersey is a fascinating place, where one can be more rooted (or stuck) than is imaginable in the 21st century when one is only two hours from New York City.

Patti Smith has no contempt, except for George Bush. Which seems well-placed enough to me! So although onstage anger contorts her face, and her words seem as charged with rage as with any other emotion, off-stage she has a smile as wide as the sea.

And in the scene with Flea on a California beach literally exchanging stories of pissing into bottles to see who is more extreme, Patti wins. Especially because what she did, she did with female anatomy. She is one impressive woman. Godmother of punk indeed.

For readers of the book, you'll get a glimpse of many fine objects, including the tambourine Mapplethorpe made for her 21st birthday, and the Depression-era guitar Sam Shepard gave her (played here by the man himself). Just as in the book, there is a visual landscape she inhabits, and it is not a natural landscape but a room full of important art objects made and invested with all sorts of meaning, concrete and pulsing with the life of those who made and gave them. There is no question she carries her whole life with her and translates it in the lyrics of her art, embodies it and gives it life with her voice. Her whole life seems as real and accessible to her as the ashes of Mapplethorpe she pours into her hand, the tape that carries the voice of her husband singing a song about a cancer-ridden Jackie O walking through Central Park that she wrote and cannot sing again because he so owned it.

Patti Smith / Just Kids

Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids is not an advice book, and should not be read as one. If you want to know her program for becoming a famous rock star in the 1970s, here it is:  move to New York City, even if you don't have any money and have to live on the streets for awhile (a good place to meet artists); attach yourself to a truly talented, driven artist; get a job that puts you in contact with people that might help you become an artist of some-- any -- type and allows you enough time to work on art of all kinds; move into the Chelsea Hotel, and work those contacts for all you're worth.

Really, it seems attaching herself to Robert Mapplethorpe and moving into the Chelsea Hotel pretty much paved the way for her success. In her memoir, and to her credit, she doesn't claim any great talent or really very much direction at all. If it weren't for meeting Mapplethorpe, getting hired by a bookseller, and hooking up with Sam Shepard, it's hard to tell what she might have done. At the Chelsea, she met rock stars, including Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix. Also Gregory Corso and some others who helped get her up on her first stage, St. Mark's Church, for an accompanied, high-octane poetry reading.

She was surprisingly, almost shockingly, nearly drug free. (The drugs make a very late appearance, which might say more about the '70s and rock and roll than anything else.) Her rough living was founded on poverty: homelessness and hunger. No health insurance. She comes across as eager and kind and enthusiastic, engaged and caring. Surely she was a little more raw and tough than the voice of this memoir would have one believe-- you almost have to remind yourself by looking at the pictures or focusing on the imagery in the artwork-- to remember what their "scene" was like. What it was they were creating was more punk than folk, even if she claims to have modeled herself on Bob Dylan.

Mapplethorpe, too, comes across as sweet. What I loved most in the book were the times Robert would be listening to her tell a story, or come in and find her doing something, and say, "Patti, no!" The first instance is when she's telling him the story of stealing from the jewelry box of a sick friend. Every time she got to the theft in the oft-repeated story, he's say, "Patti, no!" as if to get her to move away from the jewelry box. This playful outrage is repeated, and wonderful, especially near the end when he comes into her apartment and finds her awkwardly trying to roll a joint. "Patti, no, you're smoking pot!" It's what I will remember most from the book (and no doubt imitate in interactions with my friends).

Patti Smith was a poet, a singer, a painter/assemblage artist, a playwright (with Shepard), who got some very lucky breaks. She comes across as serious about life, but not serious about art, except for her desire to be an artist, in the way many people her age in the time the book takes place (18-24) are. If she were older, you could call her a dilettante. But she was actually just someone awake to her time, engaged with the people who came into her life, who found her way onto a much larger stage through the power of her personality and stick-to-it-ness.

Bad World, Good Wife

We don't watch much television, by which I mean following shows week to week. The one show we do watch regularly is The Good Wife on CBS on Tuesday nights. The acting is good and the stories are interesting and the point of view, figuring out what the show is up to, has also kept our attention.

I'm actually starting to think it's the most cynical show on television. Let me explain.

From the beginning, the law firm that Alicia Florek (Julianna Margulies) works for has been in financial trouble. The main goal of the two partners, Will Gardner (the wonderful Josh Charles who did so well in the Aaron Sorkin debut series Sports Night) and Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski, who seems to always be holding a martini even when she's not), has been to increase billings and make decisions that will keep the firm financially strong.

This is interesting in and of itself: the very likeable partners make no bones about the fact that their first priority is making money. Not in the "we support X number of employees and their families and they're all counting on us" way, but in the "I went into law to make money and now let's see how we can make the most we can, because that's the measure of success" kind of way.

Because their primary driver is money and keeping wealthy clients, the firm's principals' morality is in many ways slippery. The enemy on the show is clear: that privileged mercenary Cory (Matt Czuchy) who doesn't realize that he's no match to Alicia as a lawyer-- and can't compete with her anyway because she has a powerful husband and thus potential to bring in more money! Cory and the corrupt state's attorney who took Alicia's husband's job when he himself (the incomparable Chris Noth as Peter Florek) was disgraced, come across as sleazy and mean-spirited. But are they any moreso than the lawyers we like?

After the last episode, when Will Gardner and company tricked their young client and lied to him to try to get him to take a lesser sentence (thus leaving his pregnant girlfriend with the longer sentence), Alicia is uncomfortable with the tactics/strategy. However, her objections seem lame, because they're based on her belief in true love, not wanting to lie to the young man to turn him against his girlfriend. But she seems to accept the tactics ultimately, even participate, as she accepts her brother cheating on his lover (what is one to do?) and, though surprised, even accepts Diane's paranoia and move to siphon off clients/lawyers from the firm. Surprise is the closest thing to moral outrage on the show, at least when it comes to the principal characters (the "opposition" is always outraging us with their wiley ways and unsavory associations).

The title refers to Alicia Florek as "the good wife"  for standing by her husband after his public and humiliating (for her) affair, and throughout accusations of corruption. We're never sure if this is being questioned or not-- is it a virtue? Is it what she, as an individual, should do? As the second season progresses, one must ask-- does she have to leave all moral judgment at the door to stand by her man and her firm? On what basis is she "good"? Is loyalty the highest value, and is it required in a job as well as a marriage? By "keeping her marriage together" do we mean maintaining the lifestyle to which she and her family have become accustomed by working in a corrupt profession? Is she simply becoming acclimated to the world "as it really is" so that she'll realize it doesn't matter if her husband cheated on her or not? What is this show up to? It's definitely enough to keep us tuning in.

There have been law shows before that looked at the crass business side of law. L.A. Law was a good example. The divorce lawyer, the affairs, the ambulance-chasing and high profile, celebrity cases. It was over the top, but we didn't exactly like Arnie (Corbin Berenson) or some of the other characters. Even when we did like them, it wasn't because we saw ourselves in them.

The Good Wife is a very different show. These people are believable, everyday Chicagoans-- Middle America folks who have gotten where they are (we believe) in part because of their goodness and also because they're smart and likeable (like us). But maybe not. Maybe, we see, as they unapologetically proceed through their cases and their lives, it's because they are good at their jobs, which are not really admirable, and because they have single-mindedly pursued power and money.

I'm still thinking this through, but am interested in what others think. I'm not going to stop watching the show, but I am beginning to wonder just how good the good wife is...

Films of 2010

I've been cruising the Web this morning looking for Top 10 movie lists to fill out my Netflix selection. It's sometimes hard to navigate the recommendations. I'm not sure why, but it seems like movie reviewers have become more and more subject to their particular, individualized taste. Maybe there are just too many films, or not enough trustworthy national reviewers-- if you have recommendations of Top 10 lists worth paying attention to, please post. Mostly, I don't want to watch dark underground slasher/horror films or Sundance-type indies that go nowhere. One reviewer's list was loaded with "relaitonships on the verge of collapse" films, and another was too gory for consideration. Still, I gleaned a few I'm looking forward to that I would not have otherwise heard about.

After seeing The Fighter before our Christmas trip to Chicago, we have been having a little Christian Bale film festival. Steve hadn't seen The Machinist or American Psycho, which, taken together, do show an interesting range by Bale, and if nothing else, his attention to his own physique! I'm going to add Laurel Canyon to our viewing, and we're thinking of rewatching Empire of the Sun as well. I have another on "video on demand" from Netflix, All the Little Animals, which is also supposed to be a stellar performance.

One of the films that stood out on lists, and that was among the best we saw this year, was actually three: the Red Riding series. I first saw it listed as part of the Palm Springs Film Festival when we were there last January (what a great way to start the year that was!). Reminded of it later in the year, I added it to my Netflix queue. If you like the murder mystery series done by the BBC over the last three decades, you are in for a treat with this series. A tale of police corruption and serial killings in gritty Northern England, the 1970s period is captured stunningly well and the films have excellent performances and a rich feel. The first one stars Andrew Garfield, who costarred in The Social Network and is a young actor to watch.

Although the reviewers are saying that 2010 was a good year for the studios, I have to disagree. I don't remember a year where I had so few films to put in my queue, or so many weeks when we would have liked to go see a film and couldn't find a single thing we'd go to the theater to watch. It is possible that more and more often, the good films come out in Jan-March of the following year, to focus the Oscar buzz, but I can't say I've even heard about more than a handful of films I'd go out of my way to see. When I'm anxiously awaiting Toy Story 3 to come out on DVD so I know we'll have something worth watching, the studios aren't doing a good job.

It's hard if not impossible for me to imagine life on the farm without Netflix, especially Netflix Watch Instantly. I remember when I moved from Chicago to Joliet with my first husband, how nervous we were about the loss of movie options. There was an amazing video store in Joliet, with no organization-- as films came in they just gave them a number and added them to the collection, which would have been chronological except they were also acquiring older films as they went along. That place kept us busy and provided lots of entertainment. Now, though, every year is a good year with access to the Netflix catalog. It's just a matter of finding the recommendations.

Prodigal Summer (Review) and Butter

I've been reading Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer, and although I'm not disappointed in it, I am surprised by how didactic it is. I had high hopes of a book that would be full of details of rural life in Virginia, especially after reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In the opening chapters, we're introduced to a woman who is struggling to shape herself to the "family farm" she's married into. Lusa's husband Cole is out on his Kabota, and she is smarting over an argument from breakfast. This tugged at my heart, as Steve also drives a Kabota and, although we don't argue over breakfast, he usually bears the brunt of my ongoing adjustments to life in this house and on this piece of land.

I was looking forward to where that storyline would go, but it didn't go far-- Lusa becomes a widow by chapter two. And she begins to raise goats.

I was also looking forward to the goat-raising stories. After AVM, I realize I'm looking most of all for stories of simple things people do-- reassurances that none of it is very difficult. It all just takes time. My head is full of goats and chickens and cows. I just need some more instruction-- a picture I can begin to incorporate to see how this thing goes.

Unfortunately, Prodigal Summer kind of devolves into a series of lectures on pesticides, herbicides and coyote poaching, as well as a more poetic treatise on fertility. It's a fine, accomplished book, but it has a little too much of an agenda to be truly successful.

Meanwhile, much more to my liking was a set of videos I found through the cheesemaking.com e-newsletter. Each month, cheese guru Ricki Carroll shares a blog or some other information on people out there making cheese. This woman in Texas has made a number of really charming YouTube videos about life with her cow. It makes me happy to see them, and I've decided now to start laying in equipment, and looking for a raw milk source nearby. I'm going to begin with a piece of equipment I've always wanted: a KitchenAid mixer, a splurge with the advance from the Saint John's Bible book. Next stop: wood butter molds.

Enjoy this video on making butter from the woman in Texas!

Terry Gilliam via Tim Burton part 2: Terry Gilliam

After watching Alice in Wonderland, when Steve and I were processing the visual genius of it, and wondering where that came from besides Tim Burton's head, I kept bringing up Terry Gilliam. In the "live action as spectacle" world, I have trouble thinking of another director who has built the world(s) that exists in his imagination/head as completely as Terry Gilliam. Brazil introduced us to a world that Terry Gilliam invented but in realistic, not animated, terms. The sheer scope and magnitude of the world in Brazil is best expressed this way: "Generally called 'sci-fi noir," [Gilliam's film world] is "a view of what the 1980s might have looked at viewed from the perspective of a 1940s filmmaker.'" This quote, by James Berardinelli from a review on reviews.net, is one of the great quotes in the Wikipedia entry on the film, which is well worth reading.

The thing is, I could talk about scenes in the film, actors in the film (DeNiro as the freelance heating and air conditioning repairman), images in the film, etc., but I could not relate from memory anything significant or coherent about the film's plot. I could not tell him what it was about, beyond the fact that it was about a sort of Kafka-esque bureaucrat living in a bleak future of cubicles and small hive-like apartments with a Big Brother type government and business world. What happens to him, what the conflict is, and how it is or is not resolved, was completely beyond me. And I have to say, after watching it again two weeks ago, I cannot give much more coherent an account of the plot. I mean, I could, but it would not make much sense or be very interesting to read.

The problem is, it is way too complicated. What is going on in Terry Gilliam's mind is really just way too complicated. The story is so complicated that the film struggled for a title, and finally settled on just naming it after the recurring theme song in the movie. The word or place or song "Brazil" has nothing to do with what the film is about.

Before Brazil, actually, we watched Gilliam's most recent film, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. It's also Heath Ledger's last film, and in fact he died during shooting. This fact becomes really interesting after you watch the third film in our festival, Lost in LaMancha, about Gilliam's failed attempt to make a film version of Don Quixote. Among other disasters on the film are the loss of its star, the rather elderly and frail Jean Rochefort, to a complex back fracture that made it impossible for him to ride a horse.

In the case of Imaginarium, the show had to go on, and go on it did, with actors Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law playing different aspects/faces of Ledger's character in the elaborate fantasy scenes that comprise the final act of the film. Let's just say, it didn't really harm the character or plot much, which is saying a lot about the importance of character and plot in a Terry Gilliam film. Imaginarium's plot seems hung on even slimmer and yet at the same time more convoluted stuff than Brazil, which makes it sort of tiring to watch. But the spectacle inside the actual imaginarium, and especially Johnny Depp's ability to be in alternate universes (which he does so brilliantly in Tim Burton's worlds) makes it hard to take your eyes off the screen.

Gilliam's brilliance, appetite for extravagance and desire to push to extremes of filmmaking to realize his vision are shown in the documentary, Lost in LaMancha. He shows himself to be a gifted visual artist, as he continuously doodles scenes from the film he can literally "play out" in his head. He is able to communicate this vision to a group of talented costumers, light and art designers, and actors (sometimes-- I think this might be the weakest link, as the actors, without solid motivation through a workable and meaningful plot, seem at a bit of a loss or play-acting rather than inhabiting the world of Imaginarium). His glee at walking in his realized vision and seeing it on screen is thrilling to see.

And, like many artists, his theme and what interests him are more or less the same, played out again and again. He is interested in exactly what his films do: the world inside someone's head. In Brazil, a happy ending is exposed to be only a dream in the main character's head. In The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen, the wild exaggerations of a grand liar are played out on screen, In Imaginarium, a man builds a portal to engage people with their own fantasies in the imagination of Dr. Parnassus as part of a strange bet with the devil that he can get more people to choose creativity/imagination than sin/escape. It is no wonder at all that the story of Don Quixote, the frail knight living driven mad by reading too many romantic adventure novels who lives in the false world of the novels instead of seeing the world as it really is, appeals to Gilliam. It is perhaps the first, best account of what fascinates him: a world, romantic and larger that life, which he desperately wants to make real.

I see his film, The Man Who Killed Don Quixote, is in pre-production for 2011. Ewan McGregor and Robert Duvall are attached to the project, which is somewhat promising. And for those of us who love and shake our heads at all this "tilting at windmills," it will no doubt be a spectacle worth watching.

Terry Gilliam via Tim Burton, part 1: Tim Burton

The headline should be the other way around, if one were to be chronological in one's analysis. Terry Gilliam and Brazil, which changed the way I and a lot of other people saw the possibilities of movies, was made in 1985, and Tim Burton didn't really wow us until three years later, with Beetlejuice in 1988, followed by Edward Scissorhands in 1990. (Many were wowed by Gilliam even earlier, with Time Bandits in 1981, but I was a junior in high school then and doubt this film came to my local cineplex. Though I was introduced to dystopian films and their power, at about the same time, by Blade Runner, which is a whole different essay.)

We had a little Terry Gilliam film festival at our house this summer after watching Burton's Alice in Wonderland. My primary reaction to that film is this: How on earth did anyone think that what James Cameron created in Avatar was better or in any way more interesting-- even, if not especially, visually interesting-- given what Burton provided us with in Alice. Now personally, I don't think the special effects in Avatar even hold up next to the basic work of any recent Disney or Pixar film, but in the Disney production that is Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, visual spectacle at the service of storytelling and character-building reaches its highest level. James Cameron may have spent way more money doing his film, employed many more people and invented a camera, but when you see what Tim Burton has been able to do in Alice, you have to ask yourself-- so what? Why invent a new camera? Can't you do something just as good, if not better, with current technology? And isn't that way more impressive? At the end of the day, a film is judged on how it looks and feels, and how it makes us look (at the world) and feel, and Burton has created a world and characters that made me crave more and feel deeply satisfied.

Swimming Hole

The major improvement to our property this summer has been the addition of a proper swimming hole. On the farm we have three ponds. There's the small one behind our house that I'm using to water my garden. The water is sitll coming out cool, although the pond has swampy weeds growing right up to the surface. It's the smallest and shallowest of the ponds. The second is the large pond in the area we call the Commons, between our house and Tim and Annie's house. That's where we take out the small boat and where we ice skate in the winter. It's the loveliest of the three ponds, surrounded by prairie.

The third pond is used by Steve to water the trees in his tree nursery. It's the deepest by far, and truly more a hole than a pond. There are willows along the edge, and it feels remote. Steve leveled one approach on the north side and dumped a truckload of dark brown sand there. It's not very beachy, and because the bank drops suddenly, you kind of wade in until you're knee-deep in the sand and then push off into the water. The water is warm on top, but gets quite cold underneath, and it's clear of algae and other plant life.

I went for the first swim today, after my stint at the Joeburger stand from 9-12:30. I was a little wary at first-- it's absolutely the most "sketchy" place I've ever swam! There was a very unhappy small bird flying around making a racket the whole time, and I spotted a nest in the reeds, but it didn't look inhabited. I stayed in the middle of the pond, pushing myself down into the cold depths. As promised, it wasn't possible to touch the bottom.

In addition to the bird, I looked over once to see a large muskrat making his way toward the reeds. I said my friendliest "Hey there," and he ducked under and disappeared along the shore.

As soon as I was cooled off, I scaled the muddy bank and rode my bike back to the house for a shower. The only real worry now is chiggers. I've been told it's late enough in the season for them to be gone. I don't know what they are exactly, except that they burrow and bring up welts when they die under your skin. Sounds unpleasant!

Steve has used this swimming hole for years, jumping in wearing his landscape shorts after long, hot days of landscaping. He jumped in from the dock where his water equipment is, and I don't konw how he got himself out. The beach is for me, a luxurious improvement. I plan to make good use of it.

Small Town Crime Scene

There's nothing like a hovering helicopter to give one a sense of menace. There have been two hovering three blocks away, and doing slow circles over our house and farm, for two days now.

When I lived in Long Beach, there were constantly helicopters overhead. They meant one of three things: 1) police chase on one of the highways; 2) searching for a suspect (with a spotlight); 3) changing of the beach patrol. The third kind ran up and down Redondo Avenue all day long.

Compared to Long Beach, St. Joseph, Minnesota feels like the safest place in the world. It is hard to understand how Jacob Wetterling, at 11 years old, could be abducted and disappear without a trace in 1989. The abduction, by a "masked" man at the edge of a driveway leading to a farm, was awful in itself. Jacob was riding his bike home from the video store with his brother and best friend when the three were ordered off their bikes at gunpoint. They were told to lay in a ditch and the gunman asked each one his age. When the younger brother answered, he was told to run away. The same happened with the best friend. The two boys ran 100 yards, turned around, and Jacob and the man were gone.

The search for Jacob Wetterling and his parents' activism led to some of the earliest child protection laws. His father is still a chiropractor in town and lives in the house where they lived when Jacob was abducted. It is less than 1/2 mile away from the abduction site. He drives down that road and past the driveway every day on his way to work. The parents kept the house because they still hope someday Jacob will return, and they want to be there if he comes looking for them.

The media arrived on Wednesday when word got out that several police cars were at the Rassier farm on 91st Avenue. When I came home for dinner, I saw the two helicopters from our place on 95th Avenue. Steve came in from his tree nursery shortly thereafter, somewhat agitated, and said the helicopters had been there for an hour. All we knew was that it was related to Jacob Wetterling. Steve got out his binoculars and told us what channels the helicopters were from. The media had virtually nothing to report. The FBI and police and sheriff's department were on the scene. No one was allowed in and out. A court order prevented anyone from speaking about what was going on.

The media found their own news: the Rassiers, who are much beloved in town and in their 80s, had been in Europe at the time of the abduction, but a male relative had been home. This male relative had been questioned several times over the years. He teaches band at Rocori High School and is also much loved. The story of the two families, and the difficulty of thinking ill of the Rassiers, was becoming clear.

This morning, there was more news. Steve reported that the two freezers we need for the Joeburger stand for the 4th of July parish festival were on the farm property. The newspaper said two flatbed trucks had taken out materials and supplies for the festival-- the Rassiers, parishioners, have been storing that stuff for years. There had been a canine unit there, possibly from Louisiana.

One of the Sisters told me about 10 a.m. that the word was that a backhoe and other digging equipment had entered the farm property. At lunch, there was still the helicopters, and when I came home. Aerial photos on local news sites show a pretty extensive excavation site.

The parish festival is closing in on us. Tonight the onions are grilled for the burgers, and tomorrow all the booths get set up in preparation for the big outdoor concert on Saturday. That might account for some of the excitement, the edginess, in town, but not all of it. There's a tension, an expectancy, a sense that after all this time and many, many false leads, this time is different. "This is big," people say. "This is different." "There must be something new." We speculate, and try not to speculate. We hope they'll find something and bring closure, and then think how awful it will be if they find something. We compare what we know and understand to all the true crime stories we've heard. We talk about how this might go, how it's different; how it "makes sense." 

Looking at random news clips on web sites, I almost laughed watching the truck come out of the driveway with the barrels on it for the festival. I heard late today that another woman went in and "got her bratwursts" out for the festival. Maybe the freezers came with them. One of the parishioners on the news spoke kindly of both families and their pain, saying we're praying for both. There is the familiar treeline, the fields, the road back to those little cul-de-sacs and their clusters of houses, where another family we know live as well as the Wetterlings. We've snowshoed to their house through the corn field several times. Their kids bike over here for bonfires and other events.

So, although it is hard to imagine something like that happening here, it is also very, very easy to imagine.  

Love in the Ruins

One of my goals over the week of vacation I just had was to get through Walker Percy's Love in the Ruins. I wanted to read it mostly because he's an important Catholic American writer, whose name always comes up as one of the few Catholic writers of note: Flannery O'Connor and Graham Greene being I think the only other two biggies. J. F. Powers and Jon Hassler are two more, but they are minor and regional, of interest to me because both lived here and taught at St. John's/St. Ben's.

Like Flannery O'Connor, Percy is a Southerner, most often associated with New Orleans. Also like her, he is harsh! Love in the Ruins is a satire, published in 1971, when it caused quite a stir. To read it now, 40 years later, is difficult. I always felt I was missing major context. It doesn't help that the narrator, Dr. Tom More, an ancestor of St. Thomas More, is on staff/patient status at the local mental hospital. He is enacting his own apocalyptic scenario but without, it seems, the participation of the rest of the public. Which isn't to say he should not be paranoid, because people are actually shooting at him.

The book takes on race (in the most unsavory terms) and hippies and the bourgeoisie and psychology and New Age medicine and a lot more. Another reason I wanted to read it is because I do feel that our current political moment is the closest we've come to the political divisions of the 1960s. Things have not yet exploded, but the gulf between the two extremes is palpable and seemingly unbridgeable. The Tea Party vs. the Far Left is not very far from Percy's splintered society of fringe swamp-dwellers and country clubbers, although the two political parties: the Knotheads vs. the LEFTPAPASANE (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, the pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia), known in the book simply as the Left, are almost indistinguishable. Also, the book takes place in a future (1983, the edge of Orwell's 1984) that is five years after the Auto Age. Cars become useless when they break down and there is no one to fix them. America has the capacity to make new things but, in this dystopia, not to repair them.

I can think of other reasons why the Auto Age may come to a crashing halt. One involves millions of gallons of oil spewing into and ruining the oceans. Though it looks like we're going to handle that the way we handle everything-- find someone to pay for the damage and move on. (Don't get me started!)

In terms of Catholicism, it has split into three factions, the Roman Catholics (a remnant of a remnant) and the American Catholic Church, headquartered in Cicero, Illinois. The American Catholics believe in God and America, sing the national anthem at the elevation of the host and have instituted a new religious holiday, Property Rights Day. Priests and nuns who wanted to marry left the Roman Catholics for the Dutch Catholic Church.

The moments I liked best in the book were the ones that grappled with Catholicism. Here it is, 1971, and it must indeed have felt like the Church had split. The Second Vatican Council changed everything, and there were those who wanted to hold onto the old and those who wanted to race forward with the new. Neither is portrayed very well here, especially Father Kev Kevin, who has left the priesthood to marry Sister Magdelene and now works in the sex research lab (collecting data from the vaginal console). Between patients he sits reading Commonweal.

The best passage, however, is when he describes, in a flashback, his experience of going to Mass whlie traveling with his first wife, back in the age of long road trips. It's a bit long, but worth it:

Sunday mornings I'd leave [my wife] [in the hotel room] and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and plumbing, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape countryside to a -- town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing out here? says his dazed experession) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ--


-- Back to the motel then, exhilarated by -- what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one ey and opening her arms and smiling.


"My God, what is it you do in church?"


What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting the earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.


Isn't that a wonderful passage? The universal church, the experience of walking into a church, even in a different country, and recognizing the liturgy, being able to participate in the liturgy, whether you know the language or not. The year I spent at St. John's University, I went to evening Mass quite a bit. One evening Lech Walesa was there for Mass, up in the choir stalls, with a small entourage. He was speaking later that evening. He didn't know English well enough to fully participate, but he was attentive, prayerful, throughout the Mass. There had been a time I'd wanted to go to Poland, as an undergraduate, to try to figure out how it was that religion, namely Catholicism, played such a real role in politics and in people's daily life. It seemed to me that the Church in Ireland and in Poland still had a hold on people the way it did not in the United States. The symbols, language, music, culture, prayers, artifacts, were all part of people's real life-- how they stayed connectd to the earth. There was nothing "spiritual" about it. I wanted that. I wanted to touch the singular thread.

Vampires = Teens

In 1987, at 23, I had no trouble recognizing the genius in the film The Lost Boys. That vampires could easily go unnoticed as a group of Goth teens who partied all night on a California boardwalk and slept all day seemed so obvious, I couldn't believe no one had put it on screen before. Punk was just then morphing into Goth, bringing the world of teen rebellion and the world of vampires even closer. And bad boys are irresistible.

I'm not a reader of vampire fiction. I'm not interested in the mythology or their powers. I'm not interested in immortality and the living dead. I'm not that interested in the period pieces. But teen angst and desire that can't be fulfilled without killing the other-- that's something worth exploring. So I would have been happy to see Twilight when it first came out, but didn't have an opportunity until recently, when the DVD showed up in our house. Tonight I watched the sequel, New Moon, so now I'm all ready for when the final film of the trilogy arrives later this summer.

Twilight has it all-- the heightened scenery and filters that turn the Pacific Northwest into a medieval forest, and the school full of cliques where the good kids are likeable but dorky and the cool kids are quite obvious. It's not just because of their distinctive, individual style and the way they remain aloof from the rest of the high school scene. It's not just because they have self-confidence and are gorgeous. Well, yeah, it's pretty much just those things. Add to this enough money for a cool car or two and the modernist showcase house straight out of Dwell magazine where they live in opulence with their beautiful, immortal, cool parents, and how can a mere mortal resist?

Teenage "new girl" Bella Swan gives herself over immediately to the power of attraction between herself an Edward. The call of her blood is strong, and he resists for awhile, learns to control at least the blood-lust, but can't resist the other, stronger urge-- the one to love her and make her his soul-mate. Although of course, there's a catch-- he has no soul, despite those soulful looks, despite his capacity to pledge everlasting love of her.

Once Bella learns the truth about him, and they stop fighting the attraction, the movie becomes an exquisite exercise in chastity. They writhe with desire, and we feel with them the adolescent pain of holding back. When I was younger, I used to wonder what it was like to have a hard-on, to be actually physically engorged with sexual desire. What was going on when for hours me and my first love would "make out," but not go all the way? This film makes you feel it-- if nothing else, it is a perfect dramatization of young male desire. It looks painfully sweet and sweetly painful. And it just goes on and on without relief...

The relief comes, actually, in the form of a villainous vampire who hunts Bella. The action gives us somewhere to put our anxiety for awhile, and gives Edward something to do other than to desire and resist. He can show his love by killing the rogue vampire, the rapist, the one who does not control his desire or his blood-lust but simply pursues, male energy out of bounds.

The sequel, New Moon, takes Edward out of the picture right away, which makes sense, since that desire/resistance thing seems to have settled into teenage high school dating-- SO uninteresting and also nowhere to go. Bella has to mourn, be depressed, and find her way out of that depression by falling in love again. She falls in love with her childhood friend Jake, who has become considerably buffed up since the last film (I believe she says "You're so buff" more than twice. The only other line she repeats more often, each time she gets a birthday present, is: "Actually, it's perfect.")

She spends more time with Jake in an effort to conjure up Edward, who appears like smoke each time she is "reckless" and puts herself in danger. Jake can rebuild her a motorcycle from parts, and when riding it she hopes to get glimpses of Edward. But like so many who work long hours alone together-- Jake and Bella fall in love. Which would be "perfect, actually," except for one thing. Jake has a rare gene passed through his tribe that makes him a werewolf. Bella, it seems, can sure pick 'em. Her sweet, gentle, sensitive guy with the long hair and sense of humor turns out to embody another bad adolescent male attribute to the extreme: rage. If the vampire is a trope for male teen lust, the werewolf is a trope for teen male rage. Both are dangerous, possibly deadly, to women, as we see in the scars down the cheek of one werewolf's fiancee. How can Jake be with Bella, when despite his best efforts, one moment of rage can result in a violent act that could destroy her.

The plot of New Moon is no great shakes. It is more or less a bridge between the first film and the finale. The plot points that reunite Bella and Edward in the film were really ridiculous-- I actually wished it had been a dream when, for a moment, it seemed maybe it was. But no, she did run through the fountain in Rome and push him back into the dark. Yes, he was going to sacrifice himself just because he thought she might be dead (without even checking!) and, well, he couldn't live in a world without her in it.

The message of the teen vampire movie is not hard to read. Adolescence, especially for males, is a dangerous time, a liminal time when hormones and emotions run high, when you have to learn control and ways to channel those nearly overpowering feelings. The energy coursing through your blood, almost without you bidding it, could hurt the ones you love. The way to grow into successful manhood is to curb your appetities, think about what's good for the other more than what you want in the moment. Pledge loyalty and take your time. Let things cool to a reasonable level, holding onto those greater values, all the chivalrous ones (loyal protector, observer who sees the true beauty of the other, everlasting love).

And the message for girls is obvious, too. Enjoy the smouldering, painful desire of those days, but if at all possible-- walk away. Come back and see him when you're, you know, 25 or so, once he's passed through this transition and learned to be a man.