Books: The Cement Garden, by Ian McEwan

This is the first Ian McEwan I've read, and I read it not because his "Now a Major Motion Picture!" Atonement was waitlisted at the library (which I imagine it is), but because I am a massive fan of Todd McEwen, who is in no way related to Ian McEwan, except in people's confused minds (mine included, at first). I needed to be able to differentiate between the two, and while I was accustomed to saying that Todd McX was the superior man, I had to acknowledge that until I read something from this other famed McHominym, I was talking out of my ass. And The Cement Garden, while nothing like McEwen's gut-busting intellectual romps, quite delighted me anyway.

The writing is limpid and nostalgic and sensual rather than frenetic and intellectual and multivalent. In describing the plot to a friend, I was interrupted by his brilliant synopsis: "So, it's a cross between Lolita and Lord of the Flies?" Indeed. Focalized through an adolescent male narrator with social troubles enough between acne, masturbation, and the the haughty thumb of his teenage sister, the story slips from inviting to disturbing to (delightfully) horrifying. The reader, however, swept along in the natural stream of narration, finds nothing unnatural in the behavior of these four siblings, whose actions make perfect sense, given their options upon the domino death of their parents. (After their father dies, the four children, ranging from six to sixteen, two girls and two boys, learn to take well enough care of themselves when their mother falls ill and takes permanently to her bed. When she dies, rather than tell anyone and risk being split into different adoptive homes, they drag her body into the basement and bury it in a chest of wet cement, hoping to lock away the secret forever).

Despite the filth that accumulates in the kitchen (no parents, no chores) and the general aimlessness of the siblings (it's summer vacation, and no one plans on going back to school in the fall), things go fairly well. The youngest boy, who has trouble with bullies and seems somehow malsocialized, requests to become a girl, and his sisters, sewing some old dresses to his size, appease him, wig and all. The oldest sister, playing at being grown up, finds herself a boyfriend—at first a mystery provider of expensive new boots and clothing, but soon a regular visitor to the house who wants to be let in on its secret. A sweet, sick smell emanates from the basement; the gasses of the decomposing body under pressure have cracked the cement, and, told that the encased corpse is that of a dead dog, the boyfriend willingly (and knowingly) patches the crack. His frustration at not being trusted with the secret's truth begins to mount as intensely as the smell, and he bursts into the house one evening only to see his rage became truly explosive: our narrator and his older sister, whom he has so loved and hated and desired, lie together on their mother's bed, taking each other's virginity, while the youngest, playing at being a baby, lies aside them, watching. Sick, twisted, lovely, and punctuated by the sound of sirens (while his girlfriend copulates with her brother, the boyfriend's jealousy manifests itself in a call to the police), the novel ends there.

Movies: Juno

Notes on Preggy Chic and the pro-life media machine:

1. It's been near impossible these past few years to walk past a newsstand without seeing a magazine headline dishing on so-and-so's new "bump;" words can be noxious enough, but a picture's worth a thousand. This month, I'm haunted by this:


Sure, there was this before it:


and this long before that:


but I would argue that frequency and intensity are increasing. There is now such a thing as the "Celebrity Bump Watch," and googling those terms will lead you to loads of slideshows thanks to the patrolers at People, CBS, Us Weekly, The Sun, iVillage, and—roll this one in your mouth for awhile—babyrazzi.com. It's clear that, as stated on iVillage, "The hottest trend this. . . season has been the baby bump."

2. Knocked Up is thinly veiled propaganda, and much more horrifying than it is funny. What's even more horrifying is that audiences did indeed laugh.

3. Critics are saying that Juno is either more realistic or more fair or more feminist-approved. Though it's clearly a better movie, it's still propaganda. If you were an intelligent sixteen year old girl with a future, would the concept of tiny fingernails inspire even a slight hesitation on your way to abortion? Didn't think so.

4. The Center for Disease Control (yes, I did say disease control, does that strike you as odd?) has reported that based on data gathered through 2006, the teen birth rate has risen for the first time in 14 years. Additionally, the non-marital birth rate has reached an all-time high, up 16% from 2002. Finally, and most importantly, the total fertility rate reached the highest it's been since 1971.

I'm actually using the term "propaganda" somewhat playfully; while I don't consider this. . . trend. . . (pun, for once, intended) quite a laughing matter, I'm no conspiracy theorist. I am not proposing that there are or were any top-secret meetings at which George W sat at the head of a board table, flanked by the minister of the female interior, a demographer, Judd Apatow, reps from the major Hollywood studios, and a sales exec from Bugaboo (purveyors of fine baby carriages ($759.99 for the "frog" model), whose website rivals that of BMW, purveyors of fine automobiles), to decide that abstinence-only sex education, when combined with a pro-repro media barrage, was the only way to reinvigorate the country's waning reproduction rate, thereby ensuring the production of future waves of consumers. I'm certain that the films are far more symptomatic of said "trend" than instigatory, although they are guaranteed to be entrenchatory. But here is a question for you: why aren't any of these besmitten, besotted, beset females on the pill? And even if they weren't, what stopped them from inhaling the now-available-directly-from-your-pharmacist Plan B ("morning after") tablets? Narrative devices, of course; no pregnancy means, in the case of Knocked Up, no love story, and in Juno, no single-mom adoption story (oops, spoiler; sorry. . . well, not really).

So what's my problem? The entrenchatory powers of film, of course. It's bad enough for the individual who spends his or her life wondering why love isn't what it ought to be (i.e., the way we see it portrayed again and again on screen); having false expectations for oneself generally leads only to disappointment, self-loathing, depression, and anxiety, and the pharmaceutical industry has got us covered on that front. I'm far more concerned about all the impressionable young women across the country, coveting Hollywood's bumps. It's one thing to covet JLo's six-carat, pink diamond ring; you're probably not going to ever get one, but you can buy an imitation on the internet for $24.99 without much affecting anyone. A bump, on the other hand, is totally procurable, and to get it only requires engaging in a fun and healthy activity you'd probably be engaging in anyway. The only difference is the consequence's duration. When the pink diamond becomes déclassé, you can toss it in the closet or trash or street and forget it ever happened. Doing this with a child is less highly recommended, and has been proven to lead to imprisonment for the parent, followed by imprisonment of the child, once it grows up into a young thug, as unwanted children tend to do (don't believe me? See Freakonomics.

So, is Juno a cute, generally well-written movie featuring the next best thing in female talent (under the name Ellen Page; I give her two years or less to blow up into the thing, just hopefully not naked, preggers, and on the cover of some pseudo-fashion rag)? Sure. But should she have stayed put once she got to that abortion clinic? Hell yeah.

Books: Miss Lonelyhearts/Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West

Not knowing anything about West, and retrospectively appreciative of the biographical synopses we were assigned as high school and then undergraduate students (oh, Norton anthologies, let me thumb your fragile pages) I poked about his wikipedia entry after reading this brilliant, heartrending twofer—a veritable exposition on the concept of "poignancy"—in one 24-hour period (really, it's far too good to put down). I found out that he was Jewish, Lithuanian, and a inhabitant of New York's Upper West Side; he and I are a match on all three accounts (though he grew up in New York and moved to California, whereas I did quite the opposite), but I've never trusted superficialities like that to bind readers to writers.

The magic is, as usual, in his delivery (despair's deadpan: think Godot); the best prose beats the pants off poetry with the poet's own tools—rhythm, diction, imagery—and West has it all up his sleeve. Miss Lonelyhearts is an alcoholic young man shuddering under the weight of the world's sorrows, which pour into his heart through his mind from the stacks of mail he reads at work, paragons of poor grammar and poor spirit. West provides us with a sampling of these missives, and we empathize. Miss Lonelyhearts has pryed a collapsing Christ off his crucifix and nailed the sculpted body directly onto his bedroom wall, but it hasn't helped. Eventually, he meets a married woman whose copious flesh feels all-encompassing. He has sex. He dies with an errant gunshot. The story is over. It's the best story you've read in a long time. Day of the Locust isn't as good (and there's no locust, just a lizard that an isolated man watches day after day, until a beautiful young starlet moves herself into his house, and her cowboy admirer, her Mexican lover, and their cock-fighting chickens into his garage), but it still is good—higher in drama if lower in pathos. Life, it seems, is a beautiful, miserable thing.

Dance: Juilliard's Composers and Choeographers Plus

You probably don't know about this ill-publicized free event; I wouldn't have known about it either, if Juilliard hadn't sent me a letter about tickets to another event, and mentioned this one. Apparently, at the end of term, the dance division, which offers a choreography/composition course pairing third year dance students with master's and doctoral musicians, puts on a show at the not-to-be-sneezed-at Peter Jay Sharpe Theater, where the students showcase their work: created by students, and performed by students (read: live music, not just live dancing). This is such an awesome thing. As a whole, the work is far more creative, innovative, interesting, and new than what you'll see at, say, Juilliard's December Dance Creations (review to soon follow), or at a lot of professional dance venues. But, the execution is a lot more precise and professional than what you'll see from younger, edgier choreographers, who probably have trouble finding and funding their dancers. And, since the showcase included six short pieces before the intermission, and eight shorter pieces afterward (the second half of the show comes strictly from choreography classes, with recorded music instead of live, new compositions), there is enough variety that, should you not like one piece, you won't be bogged in it for long.

The drawback, of course, when showing fourteen pieces in one evening, is that the audience won't remember them all. I took some notes, but I will only touch on the ones that made the strongest impressions. Nada, from choreographer Yara Travieso, threatened to frustrate me via whimsy (it did make the audience laugh, and I positively loathe dance that makes the audience laugh) and a gimmick: half of the dancers were dressed in scuba suits, including flippers, masks, and snorkels. The other half of the dancers wore business suits (a trend I've noticed of late, which I don't love) with fire-engine red socks. All of this was a set-up for something dreadful, but the choreography turned out to be actually quite good, and the piece would have been equally as interesting if the dancers had all been wearing unitards. Me m ry, choreographed by Charlotte Byrdwell, was a beautiful and poignant dance, for its cloying title. Four spotlights marked "beds" on the floor, each in which a couple, dressed in white gowns and drawers, writhed and curled and twisted and embraced on the ground, occasionally switching to another bed, so that at one moment there may be three to one bed and one person left alone. The music, from Edward Aaron Goldman, was a bit on the cloying side as well (three sopranos screeching to an accompanying pianist), but suited the piece fairly, I suppose. Clearing, choreographed by Evan Teitelbaum and composed by Cristina Spinei, was clearly the crown jewel of the evening, with an all-percussion accompaniment to a group of primitivist dancers wearing perfect costumes and dancing their guts out. Juilliard could use a little more of this.

Books: Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger

Franny, the youngest of a mess of now-grown, pseudo-mal-socialized precocious siblings, suffers a kind of existential breakdown over lunch with her boyfriend before the big Yale game. Over two martinis, countless cigarettes, and an untouched chicken sandwich, she trash-talks her professors and classmates, loathes herself for doing it, becomes frustrated with her boyfriend’s inanity, cries in the bathroom, and faints. Ladies, we have all had these moments.

Zooey, the second youngest of the same mess of now-grown, pseudo-mal-socialized precocious siblings, lies in the bath, smoking countless cigarettes and reading the manuscript of a play. After some time, his mother barges in on him and makes a variety of demands; he blithely insults her and insists that she leave him alone; she does not. Mother insists that Zooey speak with Franny. Zooey insists on continuing his toilet indefinitely.

Along the way, we come to the understanding that Franny has been zealously reading a book found in her older (and now deceased) brother’s room, the story of a Russian pilgrim with a withered arm who found his vocation through constant repetition of “the Jesus prayer,” the phrase “Jesus Christ, have mercy on me,” until said prayer becomes engrained in his being. We also come to understand that Franny and Zooey, being the youngest of a mess of precocious siblings, were raised by way of a sort of educational experiment administered by their oldest brothers, in which religious education preceded cultural. We also come to understand that Franny and Zooey and all of their older precocious siblings were featured on a radio program entitled “It’s a Wise Child,” in which they would be asked questions, and given an opportunity to spout their wisdom.

Zooey does try to talk with Franny, who’s lying on the living room couch under an afghan while painters work on other rooms in the tired but grand Upper West Side apartment. The room contains multiple pianos. The siblings get into a spat and Zooey leaves her, goes into his older brothers’ (untouched) room, and calls her on the phone, pretending to be their brother; after a while she identifies him as himself. Ironically, it’s then that they are finally able to connect, as they begin reminiscing about their older brother’s demands about “It’s a Wise Child.” He would insist that Zooey shine his shoes (although it was a radio show, and no one would see), and he would insist that Franny try to be funny. He told them to do it “for the fat lady.” Each had their own vision of the fat lady, but in each vision, that fat lady had cancer. Zooey then remarks to Franny, doesn’t she know, by now, who the fat lady is? The fat lady is Jesus Christ.

This gentle slap in the face, I suppose, is Zooey’s way of telling Franny that she has no business lying on the couch in existential crisis, loathing everyone for being dreadful, when each and every one of those dreadful people is, er, her brother or sister in Christ (oh, it sounds so cheesy; Salinger is intelligent enough to leave it at the connection between the fat lady and Christ, and end the book there, and that’s what makes him different than the writer of the Pilgrim book). Anyway, it’s quite the read, and was insidious enough to throw me into a sort of Franny spell for a whole weekend (although one would hope, if it really did its job, it would snap one out of a Franny spell as well. . .) Having attended Catholic high school, I’m rather surprised that for our Salinger dose, we read Catcher in the Rye instead of Franny and Zooey, which seems much more relevant. As a side note, fans of Wes Andersen who have long heard that he stole everything he does from Salinger anyway may be dismayed to see that the brilliant Gwyneth Paltrow in the bathtub scene from The Royal Tennenbaums was lifted from Zooey’s time in the tub.

Movies: No Country For Old Men

No Country For Old Men is no movie for young girls, one of which I continue to consider myself. I've not yet read the book, and so cannot judge the film by its compliance, instead, only by the dread tedium with which it filled me as I sat in the near-empty movie-palace late late on a weeknight, expecting to be blown away, and instead wishing I could blow all the wooden characters away (they are thick enough that it would take a gunshot rather than a breath, but thick is not deep, contrary to popular misconceptions).

I would like to argue that the film is simply objectively dreadful, but I've found that a number of my male friends (and even one of my lady friends) thought it was the best movie of the year (and it wasn't just a really bad year), so I will have to accept that there is something about this movie, which is chock-full of random, non-campy violence, cold, stiff characters with no penetrable motivation, and big, empty landscapes to please my philosophically- and artistically-inclined friends. I don't know what it is, because I found the film to be irrational and aesthetically uninteresting, but these are people whose opinions I tend to value.

The plot is as as follows: somewhere in rural-ish Texas, a guy out hunting comes upon a scene: two bullet-riddled trucks, a number of dead Mexicans, a dead dog, and a truckload of narcotics. He collects all the weapons and keeps them, and trudges off to find another dead body resting in the shade of the plain's only tree, and there finds a case of money (which turns out to be $2 million). This scene is well-crafted, and the artistic mind will appreciate the way his scavenging mirrors the scavenging of the hyena that had, minutes earlier, eaten up the deer the hunter had shot and wounded. From that point on, though, I had a similar response to Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) that I had to Bigger Thompson in Native Son: he makes wrong decision after wrong decision, for the sole purpose of furthering the plot. A writer who treats his characters like pawns in the game of pushing his agenda—whether it be philosophical or political—is a hack, and having read Blood Meridian, I'm hesitant to label McCarthy by that epithet, and more inclined to pin the blame on the Coens.

But back to the plot. Llewelyn decides to go back to the "scene of the crime" (mistake number one, which no man of his mettle would, in real life, do) in the middle of the night with a can of kerosene. Before he can torch the tableaux, another truck pulls up to his, slashes his tires, and starts to shoot and chase him. Llewelyn runs. He outruns the truck. This, dear readers, is ludicrous; men simply cannot outrun trucks. The truck drivers send a nasty, muscled dog after him when Llewelyn tries to escape by jumping into a river. This, dear readers, is again unlikley; a man probably cannot outrun and swim a dog of such breed. When the dog does catch up, Llewelyn shoots it dead. This moment is nicely done, although it requires a grand suspension of disbelief to get to that point.

Llewelyn knows that shit is going down, so he sends his hemmy-hawy wife to her mother's house and prepares for combat by abandoning his trailer and moving into a motel. Meanwhile, Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), looking for the money, begins to hunt him, first going to his trailer, then his motel. Also on the trail is the sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones, who else?!) who is as disinterested and detached from his case as I am about this film; he goes through the motions up to a point, and then throws in the proverbial towel and wonders why he ever bothered in the first place. Before that, though, Llewelyn and Anton circle each other, predator and poisonous prey. In and out of a variety of motels and stolen vehicles, they shoot at each other and service their own wounds in the same "manly" way Mark Wahlberg's character does in Shooter (for some reason, we are supposed to take the hulking, animal-like Bardem much more seriously). Once it's too late, Llewelyn realizes that Anton has been tracking him thanks to a blinking device lodged in the suitcase of bills; rather than ditching the tracker, jumping out the window, and getting the hell out of the motel room (movie-goers, suspend your disbelief), he waits behind the door for Anton, prepared to shoot upon the beast's entrance. He eventually does leap out the window, jumping into a stolen car, but sustains wounds thanks to his delay.

Eventually, Llewelyn wises up (after a drunken, bloodied night in Mexico followed up by a conversation with bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) (who, not surprisingly, will also end up dead at Anton's gunpoint)) and instructs his wife to load herself and her mother into a cab to a motel in the nearest city with an international airport. While they're on their way, though, Llewelyn arrives at the motel and joins a woman lounging poolside for a beer in her room. Needless to say, when wifey arrives, close on the heels of the sheriff, it's already a crime scene; Llewelyn is shot dead (we don't see the shot or body, as if anything could be to graphic after all the killing we've witnessed along the way) and Anton is long gone with his money. Afterward, there is no need for the audience to wonder what the poor young widow will do; Anton arrives in her house and engages her in a succinct cat-and-mouse conversation before, presumably, shooting her dead. Again, one wonders why the Coens chose to add the seed of non-ambiguous ambiguity by protecting the audience from witnessing the actual shooting.

Once Llewelyn is dead, of course, the audience loses whatever vestigial interest in the film it might have had, even though the Coens go on to show the sheriff have two impenetrable "deep" conversations, one with a wheelchair-bound ex-colleague, who serves four-day-old coffee, and one with his wife over breakfast, while he tries to decide how to spend his day now that he's retired, and recounts the bad dream he had the night before. And, with this unpleasant mouth of spit-up to be swallowed, the film ends.

Reviews have had their socks knocked left and right over Bardem's "chilling" performance as either an amoral or weirdly ethical killer, but I found Anton's character to be the biggest intellectual turn-off of the whole hollow mess. The king of empty, he's so methodical that he performs most of his executions with an air gun, a kind of heavy gas-tank that he carries around that has a tube attached to the top; he uses it to blow locks out of doors and to blow holes in people's foreheads with equal perfunction. He toys with a few of his victims, threatening to use a coin toss to determine their fate (a gas-station owner doesn't understand what's happening, but Llewelyn's widow does), and this is being considered by some as ascribing to his character a philosophical bent. To me, though, Anton functions completely outside of philosophy, and in fact outside of humanity (I have wondered, after watching this film, whether there are people like him, and I have decided there are not—not that there are not serial killers, mob-men, and murderers of every kind, that kill for work or play. But Anton doesn't kill for work or for play or for revenge or for attention (those seem to be the the newest killers lighting up the front page); he's just a killing machine. He kills because that's what he does. He came into the world the age that he is, shooting; he had no childhood, no family, no lover. His character is a character that kills, and his violence is clean and dispassionate, often an afterthought (at one moment, while driving, he pauses to shoot dead a bird standing on a bridge's safety rail). This is lazy characterization, and as I said at the outset, I don't know whether to blame McCarthy or the Coens. But someone should be shot.

Books: The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow

Unlike Bellow's other novels I've read (Mr. Sammler's Planet; Herzog), this book took me more than a month to get through, for reasons other than its relative length. Rather than tackling a late-middle-aged protagonist, barging in on his life as a third person omniscient narrator, Bellow here takes on the meandering voice of memoir, writing in first person, and beginning at childhood.

Augie grows up in relative poverty with an older brother (a go-getter), a younger brother (a retard), a meek single mother, and a domineering older female boarder they call grandma. The era is that of the depression, and since money is tight, Augie and his older brother are constantly working odd jobs while going to school, and collecting charity as well. As he gets older, Augie continually finds himself in the service of other people—first employers, then lovers—who, taking advantage of his relative aimlessness, try to make him into what they want him to be; he works for an old wealthy cripple, Einhorn, an aged childless couple, the Renlings (who want to adopt him), and tries to work for his brother, who has married into business and big money. None of these yokes fit for long, and Augie throws them all off, eventually running to Mexico for a proto-beat adventure with Thea, a beautiful devil-may-care debutante-type, who wants to make documentary films about an eagle they purchase and train to catch giant lizards. This doesn't work either, though; the eagle, not raised in the wild, refuses to fight the lizards, fleeing in fear as soon as they bite him, and Augie, seeing his own failure to be what Thea wants mirrored in the eagle's failure, lets his (emotional) wounds fester after he takes a fall from his horse. While Thea continues with her western fantasy, absent for days at a time hunting snakes in the mountains, Augie hangs around town and collects stacks of foreign currency playing poker. Eventually, he decides to go back to his hometown of Chicago, after giving most of his money to a beautiful girl named Stella to help her escape her crazed husband and thereby formally ending his broken relationship with Thea. During this time, he has had an opportunity to travel in the revenue of Trotsky, who is hiding in Mexico from people who want to kill him; he has mixed feelings about the opportunity and is ultimately relieved when it is withdrawn. Augie returns to Chicago and knocks about for awhile, then moves to New York, reconnects with Stella, and decides to join the Army (WWII is exploding all over the news). Because of deficiencies in his fitness, even after an operation, Augie is still ineligible for the Army, so he joins the Merchant Marines and, a few days after his wedding, ships out. Not long into the journey, the ship is attacked, and Augie finds himself alone in a lifeboat with Bateshaw, a mono-maniac who doesn't want to be rescued, and instead wants to find solace on an island where he can conduct his scientific experiments in bioengineering with Augie as his assistant. By a combination of wits and brawn, he manages to tie up Bateshaw (after Bateshaw has tied him up), light a flare, and get them both rescued. Eventually, Augie gets back to New York and Stella, who now has a promising career as an actress. They move to Paris, where the novel at long last finally ends. Somewhere along the way, Augie also works as a union organizer and has an affair with a Greek hotel maid, and is also a college student who steals books for a living and who helps his female flatmate through a botched abortion (the child isn't his), but, considering all that happened, you will hopefully forgive me for not being certain where those parts quite fit, as well as any other parts that I might have left out.

My honest impression, at the risk of sounding philistine, is that Bellow might have left out quite a bit of this. The childhood memories, valid as they are, drag without a stronger plot arc, and the reader has no impetus to turn the page until past the half-way point in the novel, when Augie goes to Mexico with Thea. This section in and of itself would have made a good short novel, not that enough good short novels haven't been written about Americans going to Mexico in the first half of last century. The end, what with New York and the Marines and shipwreck and Paris, rings false and tacked-on after the lengthy Mexico portion, as if Bellow were scraping together scraps of other books he had read.

All of that aside, the girl sitting next to me is on the phone, and she just said the following: "I hope you do win the lottery, but in the mean time, you need to get a coat." It's good advice, even if completely unrelated to this book I would have preferred not to have read. I do want to add that Augie March is a distinctly likable character, one in fact with whom I empathize a great deal, being relatively aimless myself (we two being the kinds of aimless people who are a bit interested in everything, rather than interested in nothing); that said, I wonder why I haven't had any Adventures yet, though I have certainly had employers who tried to mold me as more than mere assistant (from that yoke I have finally broken, finding freedom within the confines of the corporate structure). Additionally, I can't help but read Augie as a writer, a writer-in-the-making, who doesn't write anything, or that is, hasn't written anything yet (and again, thereby, I connect with him); his passivity is that of an observer's (he does quite a bit of reading throughout the novel)—he is spongy, allowing himself to be swept into other people's currents in order to collect the flotsam that will eventually comprise his story—and if he lived in isolation, his story would be a mere page long, since all of his storytelling consists of other people's stories. It's something of a warning signal to me, so whether I wish I hadn't spent an entire month reading this book or not, it isn't bad medicine.

Movies: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

You've never before seen a film like this, that draws you into its horror by its beauty, its frustration through its wonder, and its hackneyed inspirational message by its aesthetic freshness. The plot itself (a true story, by the way) is a recipe for cloying disaster: wealthy playboy (and semi-estranged father of three small children) Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor of Elle magazine, wakes up one day in a hospital bed, horrified to realize that no one can hear him speaking, and that his body will not move. He has suffered a stroke and a resulting full-body paralysis called "locked-in" syndrome; his mind works perfectly, but because of his immobility, it is near-impossible for him to communicate. The only thing that Bauby can move is a single eyeball and lid. The hospital provides a speech therapist who devises an inelegant but functional way for Bauby to spell out his thoughts to her by blinking his eye when she hits upon the correct letter, an effortful, painstaking way to construct words, instilling them, thereby, with much more value. His first sentence is a request for death, but he soon dredges up a will to live, and has his editor send a correspondent to the hospital every day, who, after learning the system of dictation, takes down his memoir. The book, upon which the film is based, was published, and a few days after, Bauby died. I plan to eventually read it.

As I said, this plot has all of the pretenses of an "inspirational" (i.e. "gag me with a spoon") tale (think The Peaceful Warrior, which, luckily, I did not see), just in time for the holidays. It also has all the makings of one of those movies designed particularly to make you cry (think The Pursuit of Happyness, which I fortunately did not see either; partially). And while I did shed the errant tear, more often, my jaw was stretched to its very maximum in horror and frustration and fear and anxiety—the precise emotions, I imagine, that rushed through Bauby when he discovered (as we simultaneously discover) that no one could hear him speaking (and then shouting, as they sew shut his incapacitated eye against his uninterpretable will). Bauby's emotions hit the audience so immediately because director Julian Schnabel chose to place the cyclopic camera in Bauby's one working eye (both eyes, at the very beginning, when we see our own view of the doctor being stitched away from us, a black needle and thread winding expertly through the center of the screen.) From that point on, we see four different kinds of shots: more hyper-lit, hyper-color, often blurry, blinking views of the world through Bauby's singular working eye; crisp, full-cover scenes from Bauby's memory, in which we see the the man in his prime; fantasy sequences in which Bauby pictures himself suspended in murky waters wearing antique deep sea diving gear and as a buzzing insect flying amidst giant grasses and bobbing flower heads, as a championship skier, a surfer, and as Marlon Brando; and finally scenes in which we see Bauby as his visiting friends and family see him (and how he sees himself for the first time in a mirror): frozen, bloated, his lower lip pulled to the side in a hopelessly ugly gesture, spotted with drool.

The visual experience itself makes this film worth watching, but the sharp, witty, and never-patronizing (to Bauby or to the audience) dialogue deepens the audience's connection with Bauby. His ability to maintain wit within the confines of his frustration lure us into connection with his psyche; those stilted cues that put us in a critical, outsider position, so often found in more trite films on the topic of healing, are not to be found, and so all barriers to our unmediated experience are removed. Schnabel has thus outstripped both himself and his peers with this film, which is on my required viewing list for anyone who has any interest in any kind of art at all.

Art: The New New Museum

The new New Museum opened last weekend with 30 consecutive hours open free to the public (supposedly thanks to Target, which has been hip-ifiying itself by sponsoring all kinds of contemporary art nonsense (e.g. MoMA Free Friday Nights), who took over the New Museum's top floor and filled it with shittily inoffensive techno-cheer and assorted red and white candies). Obliged to go (disclosure: I have a friend who works at the New Museum, and additionally applied for an editing position there, for which I was clearly not hired and, furthermore, not even called for an interview, which turns out to be just as well given what is here forthcoming), a friend (a different friend than the friend who works there, but who is also friends with the friend who works there) and I got tickets for half-past midnight, and decided we would meet there (she had the tickets). I didn't know the address, and when text messaging Google was given the address of the old New Museum. At somewhat of a loss, I decided to wander around a bit (I knew the general location, or so I thought) until I found it; afterall, I was early, and there were flocks of people pouring in and out of all the Lower East Side bars.

My friend finally called and said that she was on her way, and gave me the address; I had been a whole neighborhood off (it's in SoHo, not the LES), and had to walk (did I mention it was below freezing that night?) ever farther back than where I had come from. When I finally got indoors, all of my skin was burning and tingling from the temperature change. Now I know how a snow cone feels when its subjected to the inside of your hot, wet mouth. That was probably the most edifying experience of the evening. To be fair, the new building is gorgeous, particularly from the outside; it looks like a stack of effervescent white boxes, each precariously settled onto a larger one beneath it. Inside, the effect is less dramatic; the galleries number only one per floor: white cubes broken by the off-center stairwell and elevator bank. It looks like this:

This leaves ample room for sculptural/installation art in a main gallery space, and some narrow corridors where other, quieter pieces can be snuck in. The ceilings are exceptionally high and airy, and lined with strips of skylights (which, I've heard, produce a beautiful colored affect during the daytime). An over-touted narrow stairwell links the third and fourth floors; I haven't anything against it, but it isn't what they say it is. The floors, poured concrete, don't touch the walls; there is an half-inch gap between the two, a tender minimalist touch that makes the space much more interesting than the art it houses, at least right now.

And so, onto the art. The current show is called Unmonumental, and oh, boy, is it. I suppose the curators were quite clever in mounting a show that aims to be forgettable, because then, when the show is panned, they can defend themselves by reminding their critics that they've achieved exactly their intention. I won't go so far as to say that it was all "trash" (which I've seen it called on various other blogs), but I will say that the general youth of the artists is apparent, as well as a curatorial distrust of what might traditionally be considered "aesthetically pleasing" (although, considering the altered aesthetic preferences brought about by the last 100 years of art, many connossieurs might find this work quite aesthetically pleasing). As I rack my brain trying to remember a piece that I like, I recall there was something of a riff off of Duchamp's Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even), from Nate Lowman but, like many (but not all!) post-modernist riffs, it's empty of the original's aura. Tucked into one of those quiet little corners I mentioned is a low wooden tabletop (more a cipher for a tabletop; even if you sat on the floor a la Japan, it would still be too low) from Carol Bove, decorated (forgive me, I could say "marked," but I think "decorated" is more precise) by bits of driftwood, a slightly weathered black and white photograph in the style of Man Ray, another other little odds and ends (the only thing missing an Imogen Cunningham coffee table book), which, in the absence of any instructive wall text, I couldn't help but read as a parody of a Pacific Northwestern intellectual elitist's home (a professor and his wife (an "artist" or a "poetess") in their fifties, childless). The best-looking piece by far is a kind of dangling sculpture: a hanging cluster of netted buoys in weathered reds and oranges and yellows and greens, recalling (this time, far surpassing) Eva Hesse's untitled testicular hanging nets (grouped in threes and fives instead of twos, but fooling no one nevertheless). Unfortunately, I have no picture of the buoys for you, and I don't have the artist's name either. I will therefore have to go back, armed with a (probably illegal) camera.

Movies: I'm Not There

Todd Haynes' (brilliant, stunning, gorgeous, fantastic) new Dylan anti-biopic isn't perfect, but it's damn well near, and surprising and different and new enough to make up for what it lacks otherwise.

By casting six actors to play Dylan at different historical moments, Haynes (likely unintentionally) establishes a test to separate the brilliant actors from the competent from the complete hacks (to break it down for you right off: Cate Blanchett and Ben Whishaw are phenomenons unto themselves; Christian Bale and Marcus Carl Franklin are capable and enjoyable, if missing that je ne sais quois of the aforementioned, and Heath Ledger and Richard Gere are vortexes of anti-charisma that threaten the entire film's stability; if the film were a souffle, they would be edge that might just cave in). To be fair, Ledger and Gere's Dylans are the Dylans we all might like least (except for Bale's Christian Dylan, whom we probably all hate the most (but Bale is redeemed by also playing the folksy Times They Are A-Changing Dylan, whom we probably all love the best))—the bad father/bad husband/bad movie-making Dylan, and the inscrutable, rambling, half-dead Dylan we see on stage today, his tempo hopped up, his hope gone, touring and touring and touring until he collapses dead on stage one day (I've been predicting it since the first time I saw him live; remember, you heard it here first). All that aside, final note to the casting directors: Ledger and Gere are both too fat to play Dylan, and far too goyische, adding insult to injury. They're in way over their heads!

Haynes makes up for these two's weakness by art directing the hell out of their sections (not that Blanchett's segments aren't art directed to the pearly whites (because they are, and brilliantly so), or Franklin's either (ditto). The director recreates five distinct historical moments (five instead of six because Wishaw's section—an interview only—features very little other than the actor himself, tightly framed, against a blank white wall): a hyper-colored late-50s South with creamed-spinach carpets and yam-colored walls;a xerox-copied late-60s with pills, cigarettes, and giant tarantulas; a home of an aging hippy (did I mention that Julianne Moore plays an amazing reminiscing Joan Baez, and perfects the Behind the Music interview persona to the very smallest of interactions with her cat?); the seaside empty family resort of the mid-70s, where Sara (played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsbourg, who, in her naive hipsterish ways, probably walked onto set in her street clothes, more appropriate than any costume that could have been found) raises Dylan's first two daughters while he philanders on a film set far away; and the surreal, costumed, face-painted Western town of Riddle, through which Gere rides around on a horse while an Ophelia-esque corpse is displayed on stage while a sorrowful rag-tag Civil War band plays a dirge (this, I imagine, is the closest we'll ever get to Bobby's interior world, where Desolation Row meets Talkin' World War III Blues meets Not Dark Yet.)

The film is non-linear, non-rational, and non-realistic, and if that troubles you, you're probably not a big Dylan fan. I can imagine a non-initiate (in my reality, there can be no dissenters, only the not-as-yet-enlightened) watching this film with a mixture of trepidation, confusion, and frustration; he or she wouldn't get the hilarity of references to the great 1967 documentary Don't Look Back, for example, or appreciate the way snippets of lyrics are woven into the characters' dialogue. Never having seen many of the older movies, like the 1973 Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, I'm sure I missed some myself. The music, of course, is almost all Dylan (with the inclusion of The Monkees' I'm Not Your Stepping Stone, my absolute favorite song when I was five years old, no kidding), and so certain to please any fan (and although, as usual, my absolute favorite Dylan song of all time—Buckets of Rain—was not included, plenty of non-hits were indeed used, like my second favorite Dylan song of all time, Ballad of a Thin Man.)*

In the case that you are one of these non-initiates, I recommend that you listen to Dylan for a few years before attempting to enjoy this film. I was probably around 18 when I started to get into Dylan heavy, so it will take you awhile; don't worry, though, it will all be worth it. Dylan-haters, I refuse to believe you exist, but I paradoxically know you're out there. You, too, might find enjoyment in this film (believe it or not), because Blanchett and Wishaw, brilliant as they are, play Dylan with that perfect edge that he has always had: cold, sarcastic, distant, unappeasing. The entire film has a back-handed, razor-sharp current slicing underneath it, dramatizing the ever-present criticism and distrust of the Dylan persona: the slip-shod put-on-ness, the ugly detachment, the uncontrollable ego. As a lover, I love even these aspects of (yes I'll say it) the greatest song-writer of all time (who, don't get me wrong, has written some real shite in his day (see Empire Burlesque)). I've long had crushes on both Cate Blanchett, and more recently, Ben Wishaw (since first seeing him in Perfume), but they've managed to supersede previous incarnations of themselves this time around. That Wishaw, he is one to watch.

*Caveat emptor! The commercial soundtrack is comprised of all indie-star covers, for whose quality I can not yet vouch.