Postcards from New Zealand: Day Five

Today, we went to see Jim to ask him whether we can park our car by the empty flat when we're in town. He must be 80 or thereabouts; his house is older—one of the oldest in Auckland—and he gave us a tour. He didn't much want us to park our car by the empty flat, but he did show us the secret room behind the kitchen, where a spice rack is actually a cleverly masked Dutch door. The room was filled with half-finished canvasses, for Jim is a painter, and his art hangs all throughout the house. He caught me gazing at a Byzantine Madonna and Child he had on the wall by the stairs, and said, "Oh, but that's not a painting, of course," perhaps flustered that I preferred it to his own Fauvist oil mashings.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Four

Today, I went to work with Aldo; he shares an office with a number of PhD students who sit in their cubicles working in silence, and there's an empty cubicle next to his where I can sit with my laptop. I was typing away when the silence was broken by canned demonic laughter—the ringing of a mobile phone. I only recognized it as such because when Aldo's mobile rings, it's with the bubbling sounds of a child's laughter. I wonder whether these laughing ringtones are particular to New Zealand; I've never heard them anywhere else.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Three

We live in a nice little shack behind the house of a friendly family. In their backyard, they have a trampoline, a treehouse, and some chickens. Today, I came out of the bathroom, and there were two chickens standing in the middle of our living room. It was easy to make them go back outside, but they had left us two nice little chicken poops on the rug. This is why I am always saying, "Chickens, go back inside your chicken fence," even though Aldo tells me the fence is to keep chicken-eating-creatures out, not chickens in. But anyway, what good is a fence that keeps chicken-eating-creatures out, if the chickens are also out? Chickens, go back inside your chicken fence.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day Two

Today, while we were driving on the highway, we saw a man on a unicycle. He, too, was driving on the highway. Also, he was text-messaging. Aldo said, "That is a brave soul." I think the Kiwis are pretty opportunistic about extreme sporting.

Postcards from New Zealand: Day One

Today, I drank a glass of champagne and then climbed a tree. This is the first time in my life I have climbed a tree. One would think that the first time a person climbs a tree, that person should not be old enough to drink champagne. But I am twenty-seven.

Books: The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan

I generally shun non-fiction, finding it tedious. It's not that I don't encounter tedium in fictitious works, which I nevertheless force myself to finish, but that non-fiction has a greater propensity to be tedious, as the writer of non-fiction generally prides him or herself on his or her knowledgerather than his or her abilities. Not so Michael Pollan. Generally, I would not presume to know on which points an author does or does not, personally, pride himself, but Pollan is a very generous—almost confessional—writer, and one who acknowledges that, at the outset of preparation for The Omnivore's Dilemma, he knew very little about the subject on which he would eventually become a novice-expert.

The book, titled after the fact that, as omnivores, we suffer from the mixed blessing of being able to choose what to eat, rather than, say, a koala, which will only ever eat eucalyptus leaves. If all the eucalyptus tress get some nasty fungus and die, so do all the koala bears; but if our wheat crop does poorly, we can eat corn, and if all of our crops do poorly, we can eat the meat of hunted animals, and if all the animals are dead, we can eat fruit that grows on trees.

Because we can choose what we eat, we get ourselves into quite a bit of trouble (diabetes, obesity, and heart disease only being the most obvious of those troubles). In an investigative exercise to better understand what we eat, Pollan decides to research the making of four different meals, following them from the growth of the grain through the mastication process. The first is a McDonald's dinner, eaten in the car; the next, an "organic" meal that comes mostly from items purchased at Whole Foods, which we learn are indeed technically organic, but not necessarily so whole. The third is a more truly "organic" meal—not de facto organic, but grown conscientiously at the radical Polyface Farms in Virginia and more spiritually "organic" than meal number two (for which the "organic" chicken is one that eats organic corn, but lives in the same size metal cage as a commercial chicken; Polyface chickens strut around in the grass, eating bugs, as chickens ought). Meal the fourth, the ultimate experiment, is one that is hunted (wild California boar) and gathered (wild morel mushrooms) by Pollan himself, with ample assistance from an Italian woodsman who knows the finer points of shooting, dressing, butchering, and curing a boar, and who makes his own wine to boot.

Ultimately, Pollan is a curious, intelligent, conscientious man who writes lucidly and spins a good yarn. And so, I would be willing to read about his forays into just about anything: map-making, symphonic minimalism, garbage collection. That said, there is an incredibly important story here, and I'm rather disturbed to see that this book, which was one of the New York Times' Best Books of 2006, didn't make more waves—that is, actually change anything. Pollan's descriptions of the factory farming of corn, soybeans, chicken, pork, and beef—the reliance on petroleum fertilizers, antibiotics and other pharmaceuticals, and the feeding of animal waste to animals, are literally disgusting. (Before the onset of mad cow disease in the U.S., beef cattle were being fed a mixture of corn and cow fat; now they're fed a mixture of corn and chicken parts. Need I remind you that cows are vegetarians, who eat grass? Without pharmaceutical aids, they cannot digest corn at all.) A friend of mine, who lent me the book, finished it and immediately became a vegetarian, but Pollan briefly discusses vegetarianism too, and acknowledges that meat-eating is not the problem. (One could eat meatless factory-farmed products only, and be just as sick as a factory-farmed omnivore.) Surprisingly, corn comes out the bogey-man, one propped up by the American government and big business lobbyists.

I'm in New Zealand right now, which is known for its quality, grass-fed meats, but there are an awful lot of McDonald's all over Auckland. I can't help but wonder whether they serve local, grass-fed beef, or whether their supply chain requires that they import sub-par corn-fed products from the states.

Movies: The Last King of Scotland

Continuing on the topic of Academy Award-winning performances during my trans-Pacific flight, Forest Whitaker provides an ideal counter-example to Sandra Bullock: here is a man who deserved his Best Actor award.

I didn't see The Last King of Scotland when it was out a few years ago, even though I'd heard it was fantastic, because it seemed rather violent, or news-y, or just not me. I wasn't quite as robust in the past (not that I really am all that robust now; I still had to cover my eyes at the end of the film), and shied away from any non-fictional displays of cruelty (ironic, isn't it, that we tend to find fictional, i.e. gratuitous, cruelty less disturbing?) But after four hours of fluff, I was ready for something serious to chew on.

Not that The Last King of Scotland is such a first-rate film; I actually think it's a rather small, thin thing, structured only as much as is necessary to give Whitaker room to play his role. Garrigan, the young Scottish doctor along with whom we become enchanted and then disturbed and then disillusioned with Amin, is actually quite a cad, who could be said to deserve the grotesque meat-hook treatment he receives at the film's climax. Amin is a madman, but there is truth in his accusations of the supposed hero's intentions: that he has come to Uganda not to give, but to take. I'm not so sorry to see him given a near-lethal dressing down.

Movies: The Blind Side

Watching the Academy Awards with friends, I was furious when Sandra Bullock won for Best Actress. I hadn't seen The Blind Side, but it didn't matter. How could the woman who had a year ago starred in the travesty called The Proposal suddenly be a serious enough actress to even be considered for an award? I so vociferously objected that I offended my friends who had seen and enjoyed the movie. And so, I was thrilled that Air New Zealand was offering me the opportunity to watch this movie while trapped in an economy seat, somewhere over the Pacific ocean, three hours into a fourteen hour flight, and judge for myself a performance that I wouldn't have been willing to watch under any other circumstance (it was on a trans-Pacific flight that I subjected myself to The Proposal as well, if that's of any significance).

Now that I've seen the film, I fully reserve my right to criticize not only Sandra Bullock (who musters a believable Southern accent, but faced no real challenge other than that in the role), but the entire project, a rags-to-riches fable that celebrates a rich white family for taking in a poor black teenager, and training him to become a pro-football star. True story; very nice.

I'll admit it's good to see Christianity presented responsibly (for our heroine mentions her prayer group, and when meeting her adopted son's crack-addicted mother, who says, "Well, ain't you a good Christian lady. . .", she responds, "Well, I try to be.") Though Christ's message demands a kind of radicalism even more extreme than our heroine's actions, given her community and her lifestyle, this is more than a tentative baby-step, and a horse pill for America's religious right to swallow. That said, for a more evolved audience*, the film is false, cloying, and has the feel of a made-for-tv movie on the Hallmark channel: good family values, tear-jerking moments, and an uplifting message (so long as you don't scrutinize it to carefully).

*Apologies for being such a self-righteous yankee, folks.

Movies: Sherlock Holmes

Truly, this is a dreadful movie, even to watch while on a 14-hour, trans-hemisphere flight. Why I chose, given the option of 78 movies on my personal screen, to watch this one is simple: the winning combination of Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law, which turned out to be surprisingly lacking in chemistry. One might blame the screenplay (preposterous, thin, and poorly scripted to boot), the direction (scene after scene so poorly lit one would be lucky to make out a face), or the attempt to mix action, mystery, period drama, literary reference, and star power all into one film, without properly giving room to any of them. Or, one can simply say, what a dreadful film; I'm glad I didn't pay $12 to see it (for I almost did), and move on with one's life, which is what I will do.

Art: William Kentridge: Five themes, at MoMA

An opening is rarely the best time to see a show; generally the crowds make the work physically inaccessible, and your sensorium is dulled by the free wine anyway. A short film retrospective, though, functions differently. The chattering revelers, who have come to see and be seen, would be forlorn in the dark rooms, filled with sound and flickering light, so they keep to the echoing loggia, crowding around the bar.

And so the benches are mostly free in room after room where all of William Kentridge's old films are playing. I've seen most of them before, and the ones I remember being my favorites (Sobriety, Obesity, and Growing Old and Felix in Exile ) still move me the most.

There are so many reasons why I love Kentridge's work, the primary perhaps being that I love it despite itself. It's not particularly seductive; I'm partial to clean lines, high production values, and pretty people. Kentridge works with charcoal drawings, occasionally adding a bit of blue to his black and white palette, and he creates moving images by photographing the literal palimpsest as he makes slight erasures and augmentations to lines, transforming each sheet hundreds of times, so that an eight minute film uses between 20-40 sheets of paper. This means that his films are swirling, murky things, where shadows trail each image and dim ghosts are left vibrating in the white spaces. Kentridge's cast of characters, too, are mottled and murky, aging, overweight, balding, naked. The blue chalk is usually used for water, cried as tears from his sorrowing characters' eyes, pouring from the faucet, filling rooms.

Why then, do these "ugly" animations move me? Certainly not because of their political intention; I generally loathe political art. Kentridge is South African, and the violent horrors of apartheid and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are omnipresent—pigs that explode, bodies that die and disappear behind blowing sheets of newspaper, long lines of refugees carrying their belongings on their backs. While I acknowledge the importance of international awareness, I generally request that my art edify, rather than notify, or, worse, horrify.

But there is something so incredibly human in Kentridge's work—he communicates our pain so tenderly, and discloses his own with such unabashed honesty. The diligent investment in his craft (he seems to be one of the few contemporary artists who actually, physically, makes his own work) is part of that honesty.

Without knowing how big the exhibition was, I over-invested my time in revisiting Kentridge's older films, leaving myself only a few minutes to watch the newer works installed in the further galleries, a number of which were installed together in one room (three pieces consisting of ten projections all together). These, which MoMA groups under the rubric of "Artist in the Studio" perhaps aren't strong enough to show on their own, but still detract from each other, and in them, Kentridge, the flesh-and-blood man, steps into the frame (he is present in the older films, but under the guise of charcoaled characters Felix Teitelbaum and Soho Eckstein). Whimsical and reminiscent of Dada films, these are more sullied by our contemporary moment, in which art is made about art and the artistic process, rather than about humans and the human condition. And so, perhaps it's for the best that I spent all of my time firmly lodged in the early 1990s, when Felix cried blue tears, filling the room with his sorrow.