Movies: My Winnipeg

This, my first ever Guy Maddin film, is a kind of film school noir meets family/hometown paean meets mid-century propagandistic chamber of commerce advertisement. It's also beautifully filmed and hysterically funny, so long as one isn't attached to any of the following: linear plot, developed characters, straight-forward narrative, or the truth. If one is fascinated by repetition, linguistic play, the fictionalization of fact, and the passing of time, one will be, like me, fascinated by this strange and wonderful film, which celebrates and criticizes equally Maddin's hometown of, yes, Winnipeg (which, based solely on Maddin and fellow countryman Marcel Dzama's incredibly strange talents, must be rather an amazing, inspiring place).

Art: Olafur Eliasson at MoMA/PS1

I'm glad that I saw the fun, but less spectacular, PS1 portion of this show before going to see the installations at MoMA, or else I may have been disappointed. From the PS1 installations, one might identify Eliasson as a hit-or-miss artist, someone who has the occasional great idea, but who also gets rather mired down in obsessive, uninteresting nonsense. The occasional great idea would be the "title track," Take Your Time, where, to truly appreciate this piece, one must do exactly that. Walking into the large gallery (I love the proportions of PS1's huge, high-ceilinged, airy rooms), you see people lying on the floor, looking up into an immense, slowly rotating circular mirror, which is mounted at an angle not parallel to the ground. It is difficult to describe the trippy results without leaning on psychedelic language, but the euphoria this piece induces is a kind of mind-bending, total-body displacement, a woozy, uncanny, unplugging of from spatial reality that might seem like a gimmick, if it weren't for a number of Eliasson's other similarly brilliant pieces. Rather than dwell on the assorted bits and pieces of dreck also housed at PS1 (I'm thinking of the Model Room, which is, to be honest, a collection of studies, rather than an actual work of art, and perhaps therefore undeserving of my derision), I will move directly to MoMA, where the real jewels of the exhibition are housed.

The hands-down most stunning piece at MoMA right now happens to be part of Eliasson's show, and it is called Your strange certainty still kept, consisting of a magical curtain made by flickering points of light. The mechanical description of the piece is that a ceiling-mounted bar dribbles water into a trough on the ground, and the drops of water are illuminated by strobe lights, but that doesn't quite evoke the power of the installation, which manages to simultaneously tap into the primordial and the mechanical, the innocence of a childhood magic show and the sordid fascinations of a strip club. It describes, far more than the so-called installation at PS1*, beauty.

The on-its-heels runner-up to this piece is the visceral head-trip (an oxymoron, I know) of Room for one colour, for which Eliasson installs a lengthy corridor directly off the escalator with a kind of yellow tubular light bulb. These lamps at first simply seem egregiously bright, but after a bit, you shake your head in confusion as you realize that they somehow bleach everyone of color, so that you're walking in an old photograph or movie, or amongst the ultra-punk-rock. This is another of the visually-uncanny kinds of work that is delightfully so. The emotion induced is similar to the emotion felt (if a fan could feel) by the freewheeling fan in Ventilator, which, hung on a sturdy cable, propels itself as if a small child on a swing, in random, gleeful circles, heedlessly threatening to threaten the heads and raised hands of the audience (but being too good-natured to do any actual harm). When exiting the black & white hallway into the next room, color emerges as in the film Pleasantville; people look tinted, falsely painted, in strange and muted colors, until one's eyes adjust.

The smaller pieces at MoMA, including a number of spot lights pointed at mirrors and the ground to create "No way!" moments of geometrical perfection, delight on a more puritanical level. A circular colored projector in another room brings to mind the shadowbox at the Exploratorium, for all you San Franciscans out there. A slowly-changing, ceiling-sized light box in one of the PS1 installations, which shifts from dim to need-sunglasses bright, and from golden to rosy, recalls the same museum's Meeting by James Turrell. Turrell is the artist who might first come to mind when walking into most of Eliasson's installations.

There are, it must be said, large pieces that don't quite make the jump from ephemeral to mystical, and these include the Moss wall at MoMA and the Reversed waterfall at PS1; the first is a bit too dead, the latter a bit too sloppy. But ultimately, Eliasson's work is the first ultra-contemporary, ultra-conceptual art that has moved me in a long time; I don't think I've felt this kind of ebullient thrill since illegally climbing inside the sculptures at SFMoMA's Sol LeWitt retrospective. And at the Eliasson show, I wasn't doing anything that I wasn't supposed to be doing.

*Beauty consists of a wall of water as well, only a much finer, continuous mist, against which is trained a steady light, producing a rainbow. The piece is almost as ephemeral, though nowhere near as magical, as Your strange certainty still kept.

Art: Louise Bourgeois at the Guggenheim

If I came to the Guggenheim expecting to hate this retrospective, and actually saw five or six pieces that I didn't completely loathe—that, in fact, I found partially maybe somewhat appealing (from the back), or even, *gasp,* interesting—does that make the show a success? I'm afraid I will have to say yes, since it introduced me to work with which I was unfamiliar, and which I couldn't easily dismiss.

I could, and did, easily dismiss Bourgeois' earlier work, which winds around the lower floors of the famed Guggie spiral. The small drawings and paintings recollect Miró and Klee, the totemic sculptures the African influences on Picasso and Brancusi, the general imagery the Dada and Surrealists. But all of it seems smaller, coarser, weaker. . . dare I say more womanish? Somewhere out there is a cute lesbian ready to beat me up for that (there were more than one at the opening), but I will stand by it anyway. Gender is professed to play a huge role in Bourgeois' work, so I get a free pass.

Onto gender, then. One of the few recurring images/tropes in Bourgeois' work is the nodule. Here is a good example of nodules in a piece that I found partially maybe somewhat appealing:


The appealing part, for me, comes from the juxtaposition of the raw wooden plinth with the soft sheen of the polished marble. Under well-placed lights, the crown of each nodule reflected with a kind of wet awareness (like an eyeball, or a clitoris, or a penis emerging from its foreskin. . . sorry! I warned you that we were going to talk about gender!) Aside from seemingly obvious sexual intimations, the piece (called Cumul I) offers room for more politically-inclined interpretation. One might see "groupthink" in a cluster of fretting heads, some hiding inside their ghostly garments (perhaps French Catholic nuns, perhaps Arabic women in hijab).

Even more appealing (and more surprising, since I did expect these semi-organic, disturbing growth-like sculptures, but didn't expect this) were, toward the top of the spiral, what I would call life-size Cornell boxes, intimate rooms structured with doors for walls, with frosted glass windows and keyholes for peeking inside to see rusty wire bed frames, clear glass jars, yellowed cotton undergarments waxy casts of held hands, and colored lamps. These nostalgically evoke the concept of "interior" (as in, the private space of women) in a more tender and subtle way than her other domestic work, like the caged and guillotined sculpture of her childhood home, or the installation called The Destruction of the Father, in which a room of life-size nodules gather round a pyre-like construction of skeleton-evoking bits and appear simultaneously to be approaching the memorial as dining table, all under hot red lights. I cannot find a good image of these intimate rooms, and so wish I had brought my camera.

As far as Bourgeois' ultra-famous spider is concerned, I am ambivalent. It neither disgusts me, nor frightens me, nor inspires me, nor challenges me. I might like it better if I were allowed to climb between its legs and look up at it from inside. The omnipresent arachnid is a symbol of the artist's mother, she says, who was a weaver of tapestries, and a force Bourgeois considers less than positive (as was, as evinced in her work, her father). And yet, I cannot see these spiders as evil as many viewers, no doubt, do. It is something just there. In its proportions, its machined construction, and repeated manifestations (there is one at the Tate, one on San Francisco's Embarcadero, one at the Louvre, one in Tokyo, one at the Smithsonian, one at one at the National Gallery of Canada, etc. etc. ad inf.) it threatens only on an Oldenberg scale—that is, as a joke, as "plop art," as a way to make a buck (or, in fact, a cool $3.2 million). She may be more bourgeois than most aficionados are willing to admit.

Music: The Dizzy Gillespie All-Star Big Band at the Blue Note

Though I have always been one for Jazz in general, I've never been one for Big Band in particular, and so was rather pleasantly surprised by the Dizzy Gillespie All-Star lineup at the Blue Note this week. This is mostly thanks to the wicked pealing of the trumpets and a jaw-dropping, never ending, tear-it-up sax solo from Antonio Hart. Leader Slide Hampton gave enough room to individual performers to break things up so that this wasn't any kind of Lawrence Welk soporific (except for perhaps one Monk piece toward the beginning of the set that rather dragged, like an old cat with a too-big belly). Mostly, it was shoulder shaking (me), toe-tapping (my date), and hand drumming (the other person at our table) good stuff.

I have to admit to liking the Roy Hargrove originals better than the original Dizzy composition Things to Come, which I'm certain is something of a cardinal sin; blame it on my youth. Out of sync with that youth, though, is my nostalgia for the upright bass, replaced here by an electric that continued to irk me as too processed, too amplified, and too noisy (as in lacking clarity) amongst the clean sounds of the other instruments (their own cardinal sin, if I dare say so myself). Roberta Gambarini came up to sing on a few pieces, impressing me with her nervous but capable scatting (Was it an off night? Online, I read nothing but raving about her technique, but she felt a bit uncomfortable), and, with a few ballads, providing a not quite necessary break in the hard bop of the set.

Ultimately, I could do without the lounge stuff during live performances, and keep it for quiet nights at home with my books, but there's a crowd to appease, and I suppose some audiences need a rest now and then. Not me, though, I could have listened all night.

Books: Atonement, by Ian McEwan

I read Atonement for my book club (n.b. not of my own volition); I had carefully avoided the movie and all other Ian McEwan (except the excellent Cement Garden) novels up to this point. I expected, from the film's trailer, a soporific historical melodrama, complete with floor-length ball gowns, snooping maids, a war, and an illicit affair. Indeed, McEwan gives us each of these cliches, and, while the book is more simpering than hackneyed, it's still not much worth the read.

The story goes as follows: Briony is an imaginative girl on the cusp of pubescence witnesses a few confusing events over a 24-hour period: first, she sees her older sister Cecilia fighting with the charwoman's son Robbie in the garden, later that evening, he gives her a missive to pass onto Cecilia; it's a racy love letter (and includes the D.H. Lawrence-inspired word "cunt"). Briony of course reads it before handing it over, and an hour later walks in on the two of them in the dark library (they've been copulating, but Briony naively thinks that he was attacking her). Later that night, Briony's cousin, who's visiting (and is between Briony and Cecilia in age), is raped in the woods by a shadowy figure. Briony accuses Robbie of perpetrating the crime, and, based on her evidence, he is arrested, sent to prison for years, and then sent to France to fight the Germans (we are in the midst of WWII). Cecilia has cut herself off from her family for their willingness to turn so quickly against their own, and has become a nurse. Briony, now older and with the realization of what she's done, elects to train as a nurse as well, rather than attending Cambridge and fulfilling her dream of becoming a writer. Ultimately, she apologizes to both Cecilia and Robbie, and makes what legal amends she can. The couple remains together, and Briony eventually does become a successful novelist; the book we have been reading, it turns out, is Briony's account of the story and her own atonement.

McEwan divides the book into three plus an epilogue; the first begins with the strange argument at the fountain, and ends in Robbie's arrest. The second describes Robbie's time in the war, marching across France through hunger, thirst, and the constant threat of death by Luftwaffe. I would have liked to see only these two sections, vying against each other as domestic fantasy versus worldly realism, without romantic resolution; that would have been an interesting project. Instead, the novel continues; the third book describes Briony's challenging training as a nurse, her decision to at last visit her sister, and make the necessary amends. The epilogue jumps to 1999, when Briony is an old woman diagnosed with impending dementia, celebrating her birthday will all of her extended family (Cecilia and Robbie since dead).

There is, at one moment, on page 265 of my edition, in fact, when McEwan redeems, momentarily, the tedium of languorous book one, in which each sentence describes the richness of a color, the quality of the air, the flashing of the light. We realize that Book One is young Briony's draft of a story describing what happened that day, which story she has submitted to a London literary magazine. She receives a lengthy, personalized rejection letter, which acknowledges the curious spell she casts, but criticizes her as perhaps too indebted to Virginia Woolf, too climatic, too woozy, too interested in the rocks and air rather than the propulsion of the plot. These criticisms are, to the reader, a kind of professional concurrence (Yes! It was far too ambient and flowery!), and it is somewhat redeeming that McEwan was aware of that fact (I did find it strange that his sentences were so mellifluous, given the taught, snappy quality of The Cement Garden). However, intentionally writing poorly is not as acceptable as simply writing well (unless one is writing poorly brilliantly, as Jonathan Safran-Foer does in Everything is Illuminated.

Atonement was written, and, I imagined, filmed, for a simpering crowd of effeminate, romantic readers who wet their pants over sensitive soldiers and the rustling of silk gowns. McEwan ought to have been more attentive to Lawrence and less attentive to Woolf, had he wanted to write something truly edgy and interesting. As it stands, this book is little more than daydream fodder for the sighing masses.

Points, though, for using the name Briony.

Books: Samedi the Deafness, by Jesse Ball

Not unlike Laird Hunt's The Exquisite, Samedi the Deafness is a kind of fascinating noir mystery that can't help but disappoint at the end. The story is that of one James Sim, who, in the novel's first pages, finds himself in conversation with an old man bleeding to death, the front of his body ravaged by a knife. Before expiring, the man raves incoherently, mentioning the name "Samedi," so that once James finds himself alone again, reading a newspaper, he is rather surprised to see the name Samedi there as well, as part of a suicide note found on the body of a man freshly dead on the lawn of the White House. After a strange encounter with a strange girl, another day comes, bringing another White House suicide with another Samedi note. More disconcertingly, a rubber mask of James' own face has been delivered to him, along with a note of warning. And then, James is kidnapped.

He is taken to a house that doubles as a hospice for liars; there is an extensive rule book, full of arbitrary but painfully specific instructions for all aspects of living at the house, particularly with regard to who can speak to whom and when. The girl, it turns out, has a secret room adjacent to his, from which she can monitor everything he does; she is in love with him; her name is Grieve, but also Lily Violet. There is also a maid by the name Grieve, who also seems to want to help James; there is also Grieve/Lily Violet's twin sister, who looks just like Grieve, and in fact pretends sometimes to be her. Grieve's father, who owns the house/hospital, tells James that Grieve does not have a twin sister and that she is a liar. Grieve tells James that her father is lying. An old man tells James not to trust the maid Grieve, but James doesn't know whether he can trust the old man. He is told that he is free to leave the house at any time, and he wonders whether he should go to the police with what information he has gathered, but he doesn't know what is true and what isn't, and it seems that the police are looking for him, because they think that he killed a man (when actually he only inspired that man to jump out of a window and kill himself).

The book lasts seven days, and each day another suicide occurs in front of the White House, leaving behind a note with a warning and the name Samedi. The owner of the house is behind these suicides, and behind a plot that James is desperately trying to decipher, though he has been chosen to be saved, not just because Grieve/Lily Violet loves him, but because of his trade as a mnemonist (a mystery in and of itself). It is in the final pages that we find out, along with James, that the owner of the house plans to deafen the world with a chemical cloud that will emit a poisonously high-pitched sound; he will protect himself and his co-conspirators in a sound-proof chamber in the basement. He wants James to commit all of his documents to memory, so that they can be burned, the evidence against him destroyed. And the plan goes forth, and the book ends.

This is Ball's first novel (he is, more often, a poet) and, until we find out just what the evil plan is, it's an impressive first effort, imaginative, exciting, and beautifully written in succinct, staccato, spaced-apart sentences. James has flashbacks to childhood conversations with an invisible talking owl, his mentor; they are dim, dreamy, and tender. But at the end, I was as disappointed as I was by the end of The Turn of the Screw; this?! I thought. This is the terribly evil plot? A cloud that makes a deafening noise? But in fact, there could be no inventing a plot terrible enough not to disappoint, or cloy, or cause one to giggle; the threat is too great, the tone too ominous, the writing too fine to warrant the disclosure of what the terror could be. And terror itself is not terrible because of the specificity of the act; it is the aftermath that is terrible. And so no plot, even the flying of airplanes into the World Trade Center, can sound anything but silly until it actually happens, and fear and pain and madness ensue. We haven't any of that in this book (we wouldn't, I don't think, want it), and so it seems safe, if odd, to giggle at the noise-making chemical cloud.

Movies: Encounters at the End of the World

This is, somewhat disconcertingly, only the second Herzog film I've seen, although I have heard him being interviewed on NPR, and so was prepared for the charming accent and random philosophizing he brought as narrator to Encounters at the End of the World, his new documentary that episodically visits with a number of scientists and other collected kooks living at the McMurdo research base in Antarctica.

Aside from Herzog's always-compelling random thoughts (the man defines ideal manhood, as far as I'm concerned—fearlessness, passion, and curiosity), the film offers completely unbelievable footage taken by scuba divers (we get to watch an interview with one) swimming—yes—under glaciers. This is the kind of footage that is so primal, and yet so alien, that it makes you feel very small and meaningless, which is my favorite way to feel.

Art: Subway Poster Slasher Strikes!

Art/Performance: Fluxconcert 20080613

This is a review of the second formal FLUXCONCERT . Unlike the first FLUXCONCERT, the second showcases a completely fresh composition, in 13 movements, prelude, and postlude, courtesy of rising local star Ethan Wagner. Wagner reveals a surprisingly deep understanding of the Fluxus mentality, while managing to regularly subvert the genre with actual pieces of music that sound appealing. In Movement 8 (Nonsense Sounds), for example, Wagner writes: "Compose for the following sounds: Paper clip in a styrofoam cup; straightened paper clip against an upside-down wine glass; tearing paper (one sheet only)." It is a challenge to imagine, simply by reading the instructions, the beauty of these three subtle sounds together, and it is by each performer's own skill that the patterns of noise intermingle in a pleasing, rather than cacophonous, way. That the paper used is a yellowed page of sheet music is a sly wink to Wagner's classical training, which he has not, it must be said, at all eschewed, even in this production. For example, Movement 11 (Music Lesson) demands that one "Try to teach an audience member how to play something incredibly difficult on an instrument that requires a bit of skill." Rather than opting for something populist, like Stairway to Heaven on the acoustic guitar, Wagner places a novice pianist at the keyboard and demands that she play Rachmaninoff, to rather whimsical effects. A musical teacher himself, he parodies his trade with panache.

An underlying insistence on violence pervades the show (at the end of the aforementioned Movement 8, the wine glass is crushed inside a "sturdy bag," in Movement 13, Crunching Things, a person simultaneously breaks "a sack of thirteen light bulbs, a clock, a box of Premium saltine crackers, [and a stack of] cassette tapes," using a Bible, a mallet, his bottom, and his feet, respectively), as well as a coyness about technology (in the fascinating Movement 4, Sequenced Ticking, a performer uses a microphone and a laptop to manipulate the ticking of four individual alarm clocks over a specified time period to make a kind of digital sound scape; in a number of other pieces (Prelude; Movement 10, In Memoriam Tony Clune; and Postlude) the audience is asked to participate by either actively or passively inciting their mobile phones to sing and squawk). While it is impossible not to read these two tendencies as hat-tips to the current state of affairs in the modern world, the show's best pieces maintain music's traditional role: the creation of sonic beauty. It is a piece such as Movement 3, Caricature no. 3 (Fragments on a theme.), or Movement 6, No. 6 ("Melody for trumpet and guitar.) (both original, straight-forward compositions that your grandmother would be comfortable calling "music") that actually warms and softens the audience so that it can bear the detached, wry humor of the more Fluxus-oriented movements.

A special nod goes to organizer Perry Garvin, who not only alerted me to the existence of FLUXCONCERT, but also performed, with great gusto, "a patriotic song with deep conviction" for Movement 9, Devotion. Because the composer and organizer received mixed feedback with regard to their handing out, at the show's beginning, the score (the complete instructions for each piece), I will take this moment to cast my vote as heartily in favor. The instructions are written in a beautifully succinct language, constantly on the verge of wit, but bone dry and bone bare (consistent with Fluxus instructions of yore), and serve as not only a reference, but an elucidation, of the performance. A show without the structure they provide would devolve into mere entertainment, rather than art.

Books: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel

Sometimes, my reading leads me astray. I'll read an article that name checks a book or two, and if they sound interesting, I add them to my reading list. Months later, I read them, hate them, and can't remember whom to blame. But I do know that we can all blame editor Gordon Lish for the publication fo Amy Hempel's tedious, simpering short stories, and I know that I can blame a Slate article about Lish for the dually terrible recommendations of Lish's own My Romance as well as Amy Hempel's Collected Stories.

In the (completely patronizing) introduction to this collection, which includes all four of her books published to date (the woman has been writing for 25 years and all she's eeked out is less than 400 pages of short stories, the shortest one just a paragraph?), Rick Moody writes with gratitude for Hempel's painstaking attentiveness to small things, womanly things (which are, of course, the same?!), nursing each phrase with care while her male contemporaries were, as it were, blowing their loads over hundreds of pages at a time. This put even me, the anti-feminist, on the defense immediately, but as I began to read Hempel's stories, I realized that Moody was right (to a degree); her stories are painstaking, womanly, and about small things. They are not, however, brilliant or refreshing for that. They are cloying; she gives paper cuts where she should have used the knife.

Rather than dwell on any story in particular (really, I would prefer to forget I'd read any of it, and move on to my next post as quickly as possible), I will briefly mention that Hempel clearly has a strong affinity for dogs, who appear as objects of affection and shifting symbols for loss, need, dependence, etc. in more than half of her stories. I don't like dogs. I don't mean to be dim; a good writer might, if she intended, make me love a fictional dog. I don't much care for fat people (between dog-lovers and fat people, I see the hate mail on the horizon, as certain as a tornado), but John Kennedy Toole (a good example of a great writer) made me love the ill-tempered, filthy, obese Ignatius J. Reilly in A Confederacy of Dunces. So I will not blame Hempel's tedium for her attention to small things, womanly things. I will instead remark that she's rather uncomfortably close to Lynne Tillman, and add that, as a female who occasionally tries my hand at that uncomfortable blend of fiction and memoir, I will need to take great care not to write like these ladies, and take instead, if I must have a female role model, the raging Flannery O'Connor for my flag.