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.

Art: The Armory Show

For me, the Armory show is a necessary evil. Everyone will be talking about it, so I have no choice but to go, and to see everything, and to do so quite attentively, so that I will be able to engage in the city-wide conversation the week afterward. And yet, for me at least, the Armory Show feels like a combination of the most gruesome things: a shopping mall the day after Thanksgiving, the velvet rope in front of the nightclub of the moment, and the ramp that cattle walk before they are unknowingly slaughtered. There are crowds, it is hot, and there is a sense of blind urgency. Flashy things—neon lights, broken mirrors, drawings of genitalia (male and female)—are hung on every wall to delight or distract (depending on whether you are more in the mood for shopping, swinging, or dying an unpleasant but quick death).

This year, I'm not sure whether the show changed, or I did, for there was a want of urgency. As always, there was an overabundance of neon (as if Bruce Nauman had alighted upon a new medium, rather than just creating a one-off amusement), myriad broken looking glasses (self-loving solipsists that we are, we tend to gravitate toward art in which we can see ourselves, and if we see ourselves fractured and distorted, we feel all the more "honest" for it), and wall after wall of unaffecting photographs.

I had my usual chuckle at the well-styled gallerists munching their festival vendor panini, selling art by artists who outsource their production (Customer: "Does the artist actually know how to draw at all?" Gallerist*: "Hmm. . . I am not sure. . . But of course, it does not matter, right?")

*French accent

But, I managed to see two things of interest. One was Grayson Perry's Walthamstow Tapestry, ironically one such outsourced work. Perry designed and drew the scene, but the fabric itself was woven by a computerized loom in Belgium (another of his tapestries, Vote Alan Measles for God, was sewn by workers in a Chinese factory, via a high-end rug company in London. Given the tapestry's overtly anti-consumerist thrust, I cannot help but find this lack of consistency rather disappointing).

The other, more ideologically integrated work that I managed to latch onto was a 22 minute video by Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. Called Staging Silence, this black and white video with its magical laboratory soundtrack offers a number of blank stages into which hands insert tiny objects, one by one, creating a scaled spaces (a waiting room, an office interior, a country estate complete with working fountain, a forest, a theatre with proscenium arch), and then taking them apart. It was rather serendipitous that I decided to stick my nose around the dark corner where this film was playing, because it was easily missed, but also easily the best work of art on view.

Ultimately, though, I couldn’t shake the feeling, walking through the show, that I was unable to discern art from non-art. Having recently seen Tino Sehgal’s show at the Guggenheim, I had this insistent itch to walk up to people and say, “Excuse me, but are you a piece by Tino Sehgal?” Oddly, whether or not they were, this would be my own performance art, although I don’t consider myself an artist (being too inhibited to actually speak to anyone).

Sehgal-struckness aside, the work versus non-work question presented real challenges for me. The broken neon leaning on the floor against the wall, shattered glass all around it: a statement that Bruce Nauman is dead, or a mere accident that hasn’t been cleaned up yet? The Acura SUV on display, complete with attractive saleswoman in short, tight dress: a opportunistic attempt to entrance a captive, wealthy audience already primed to spend thousands of dollars, or brute commentary implying that art fairs these days are as blatantly middle-brow consumerist as Japanese luxury car lots? The black man with dreadlocks to his waist pushing a trashcan around on wheels: sanitation worker, or statement about the minority man’s role in the art world? I followed him around for quite some time, trying to decide, and trying to snag a photograph, but like the meaning of art these days, he was surprisingly elusive.

Books: Joseph Andrews, by Henry Fielding

I'm developing quite a taste for the proto-postmodern, when properly done (it seems I wasn't such a fan of Sterne's Tristram Shandy, but then Joseph Andrews is less than half its length). I call the picaresque Joseph Andrews proto-postmodern not because of its structure, which is rather linear, or because of its language, which is also rather straight-forward, but because of its intertextuality. A gentle farce in the style of Don Quixote (which I also found rather disappointing when I read it a few years ago), Joseph Andrews is actually more closely intertwined with Samuel Richardson's Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, an epistolary novel written only two years prior.

Pamela is the story of Pamela Andrews, a country girl who goes to work at the estate of Mr. B—, who, taken by her beauty, makes constant advances upon her. Pamela's letters home are long, breathy accounts of how she protects her chastity at all costs, though she nearly loses it again and again. Ultimately, moved by her virtue (or perhaps stymied by her intractability), Mr. B— marries the girl, and makes her a gentlewoman.

Joseph Andrews is, of course, Pamela Andrews' brother, who serves Mr. B—'s aunt as a footman. Fielding isn't so decorous as Richardson, so he unmasks the family's name: Booby. Lady Booby has just become a widow at the novel's outset, and turns her amorous eye on Andrew. But, because he is as virtuous as his sister, and in fact in love with the lovely, illiterate maid Fannie, with whom he has grown up, he politely rebuffs Lady Booby's advances (which are proffered from her bed, her collarbones bare to him). For this, while in London, the Lady ejects him from her service (after an amusing exchange with her head servant, Madam Slipslop, who happens to also have an appetite for Joseph, who is straight of back and full of lip, with curling brown ringlets and innocent, wide eyes). Joseph then takes to the road back to the country, to find Fannie and a new position.

Encountering his salty friend, the parson Mr. Adams, who had been on his way to London to sell manuscripts of his sermons, and eventually Fannie as well, the three wander through the countryside, generally penniless due to unfortunate circumstances, encountering bandits, hunters, and innkeepers both cruel and kind. The chastity of both Joseph and Fannie are constantly at risk, not at each other's hands, though they do gaze at each other quite amorously, but at the hands of a lusty countryside. Ultimately, their love prevails, though a climactic revelation of masked identities (involving gypsies exchanging infants in the cradle) for a moment fills everyone—character and reader alike—with fear that Joseph and Fannie are actually brother and sister (they are not—but instead Pamela and Fannie are sisters, and Joseph the lost-and-found son of one kind soul met earlier on the road).

Fielding has a keen sense of humor, and though he is never vitriolic, his commentary—on wealth, politics, and Christian morality, is quite cutting. All the while, his tone remains smart and jaunty, far superior to the affected moral pretense of Richardson's. This is literary riposte at its earliest and best.

Books: Eros & Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering, by Aldo Carotenuto

Carotenuto, an Italian psychoanalyst, attempts to answer such timeless human questions as Why are we lonely?; Why are we jealous?; and Why do we fall in love? in this slim volume. These questions (and their answers) are of such an intangible nature that his selections of poetry, which punctuate each chapter's beginning and end, often tell us more than his own words (indeed, Carotenuto may be a better editor of poetry than psychoanalyst). That said, even attempting to address these questions is a rather brave venture, and there are moments at which he does indeed provide insight.

Unfortunately, these are more than matched by the moments in which he seems to be drowning in suffering himself. Carotenuto (whose name, incidentally, means "tenderly held") has a surprisingly grim outlook, likely stemming from his overexposure to the faulty field of psychoanalysis, which overemphasizes the role of the intellect in the well-being of the heart. Having been in love, and being in love, I can guarantee that I've never desired the death of the love object, as he suggests the lover must, nor have I experienced any veritable sacrifice of self, which sacrifice he uses, in part, to define that nebulous state of love. Such notions must derive from Freudian absurdity, in which violence and love bear each other's seeds. But the co-dependence of these concepts diagnoses poor emotional health in the writer, rather than providing any insight to his readers.

Movies: A Single Man

Tom Ford is undoubtedly one of the best fashion designers of our time, perhaps of all times. What he did for Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche ten years ago was revelatory. Unfortunately, I cannot say the same for his directorial debut. What he has done for film is surprisingly tedious and indulgent. Or perhaps not so surprising, for what is high fashion if not indulgent, and what is a feature-length commercial for fine wool if not tedious?

For that is what this movie is: a feature-length advertisement (I could say indulgence, but I will be crude and say advertisement) for fine men's fashion, accessories, and housewares. Buried behind the fabric there is something of a story of lost love—gay love, it is key to acknowledge—but whatever might have moved us has been styled into something so trite that we feel little empathy for our stuffy, British, gay Colin Firth, aptly called George as all Englishmen not called Colin must be called.

George lives his last day in his Architectural Digest home (its minimalist, eco-extravagance explained in a throwaway line about Jim, his lost lover, having been an architect), having flashbacks of his carefree lover. As I've lamented here before (incidentally, another gay tale*), structuring a film through flashback often leads to the sensation that we are watching a series of lifestyle commercials, rather than a coherent, meaningful film. Jim, a character with little more interior than an Abercrombie & Fitch model (who, in fact, seems to be modeled on the gay fantasy of the straight Abercrombie boy). George, conversely, has stepped out of the pages of an Ishiguro novel, with his fastidious suits, crisply folded papers, and sharp linens; never as comfortable with his homosexuality as Jim was, George has long ago slept with a woman (his dear friend Charley, a besotted Julianne Moore), and cannot get over his dead partner by simply going to bed with the Spanish James Dean he meets in the liquor store parking lot.

But the film's ultimate resolution, in which it is in fact another young man's interest that rekindles George's will to live (that of one of his doe-eyed students), ensures us that his grief isn't incurable. How lucky that he was too concerned about the spotlessness of his bedclothes to actually shoot the swallowed gun-barrel at the film's extended anti-climax. But, how unlucky that, waking in the morning hungover from too much Scotch, he dies of a sudden heart attack.

Ford takes not only directorial and production credits, but also shares writing credits with David Scearce, someone else who has never written a movie. That's a lot of responsibility for a filmmaker. Greats like Woody Allen and the Coens do this regularly, but Ford is unseasoned. Indeed, his film is beautifully art-directed and shot, but that, combined with its episodic structure, and lack of any real depth, prevents it from being anything more than a living, breathing fashion editorial. Ford could easily cull 60- and 90-second sections of the film as television spots for his new men's line, and perhaps that was just his intention.

*Allow me to clarify: I do love a gay love story, from the American cowboys in Brokeback Mountain to the impossible relationship between an Israeli and a Palestinian in The Bubble. I hate going to the ballet because the celebrated couples are so tediously hetero-normative (how I long for Gay Swan Lake!). What I find so disappointing about Ford's film is that it wastes an opportunity. Its attention to surface at the expense of depth reinforces detrimental stereotypes about an entire subculture struggling for equality and acceptance. Not only is Ford a bad filmmaker, he is a bad gay.