FILM: " Mr. Phillips" - a merchant marine captain is captured by Somali pirates

 What is is about Tom Hanks and that doughy pudding face sweetness 
that seems his essential character?  He's such a good guy, even when he's covertly sleazy, as in Saving Mr. Banks.  

In Mr. Phillips I see the story of American goodness, a deferential cargo ship carrying water to thirsty African nations is attacked by chaotic desperate pirates. They have ghastly skull starved deaths heads and AK-47s, dressed in rags.  

The attack on the orderly and stately Maersk line ship upsets civilized order as only African political darkness can.  Little can be done until the lethal slick Navy Seals swiftly move in and slay the pirates, in a precision shoot which spares Captain Phillips to work again in his committed quiet duty to family and humanity.

Alas.  According to the New York Post, the actual Captain Phillips was an arrogant, perhaps unprofessional captain. He was disliked by most crew, and ignored orders to keep safe distance from the Somali coast, sailing 230 miles distant instead of the 600 recommended.  He ignored emails warnings about the alarming frequency of pirate attacks in the area and did not keep the crew on high alert as the film depicts.

The real Alabama in 2009 - worn, grubby.  In the film it's stately, beautifully painted in complementary tones of turquoise and sherbet orange, orderly in all its parts.  You'd want to play with it.
As it traverses the sea, it's like a whole island of plenty being gifted to the 3rd world.

He didn't offer himself as hostage, he didn't act the part of noble leader during the attack. 

These "true life" films are just such awful mythologizing - want to believe that we would all act the heroic, wise, savvy leader, but really, I'm just disgusted with the venal, narrow, unintelligent choices, behaviors and lives of clergy, the Senate, corporate leaders, and now sea captains.

The value of history seems much in doubt. I'm so weary of comparing myself to leaders and finding that most of my friends are more ethical, moral, and intelligent than they are.  

BOOK: Brown Dog Novellas, by Jim Harrison

The reviews helped me choose to read this; that and the fact that the stories are set in the upper Michigan peninsula near Wisconsin, my beloved "home" state, and I hoped for a overweening sense of place in this book.  In this I was not disappointed.  What I hadn't expected was how funny and poignant the novellas were going to be.  They remind me very much of the foolish, short-sighted characters of Carl Hiaasen's funny Florida detective novels.

But Brown Dog, a part Indian, seems to have his emotional growth fixed at "…age 12", a desired girlfriend tells him.  There are many of these, and Harrison has no compunction about documenting the incredibly frequent tumescence BD experiences.  His worship at women's gates is impartial and non-particular, and I wavered back and forth wishing I could have met this fun lover and being offended by his hectoring offers of sex anyplace anytime.

He loves children, food, liquor, wilderness, trees, the ocean, rivers and streams, and most of all, fishing. He's a kind of Huck Finn, or Cormac McCarthy character made absurd, a burlesque mixed-breed orphan yearning for his heritage, mother and father, and his beloved rivers. 

In one novella, well meaning social workers get him a job as a dog catcher. But he is unable to euthanize any of the very badly behaved dogs he catches so he contains them,finds homes and finally throws his work cell phone in the river as he quits his job and takes off.

In another, he cares lovingly and patiently for his step-daughter, who has fetal alcohol syndrome and will never be able to live a normal life.  His wife has gone to prison because she bit off the finger of police who tried to restrain her during a drunken altercation.  

The stories are uneven and stand alone, and read all at once, become repetitive. Sly tweaks which wound deep force meditation on lost innocence, unfeeling bureaucracy, class, and poverty - what have we lost? Do we even know any more? 

But what the stories do best is call us back to a sense of  compassion and wonder. Even the last novella, improbable as it is, left me gently smiling.

SLAVERY exists today; 12 Years a Slave, The Butler

Slavery was and is the greatest atrocity of civilization. An estimated 30 million people are enslaved in the world today.

Washington Post, OCt. 17, 2013

Here are some statistics:  60,000 in the U.S., 14,000,000 in India, 1 in 25 in Mauritania, 2.1% of children in Haiti. 

I was aware of this but remain abjectly astonished at the stunning reality of this today.  Surely makes the victory of Moses over the Egyptians relevant today.

I really couldn't talk about these films without going to this reality.

"The Butler" tells the story of a young field hand taken to be a food server.  His willingness and skill at anticipating what the white folks he serves require makes for a successful career as a butler in the White House.  

I really liked this film, though it felt like familiar material: submissive servant and rebellious son, the magnitude of the civil rights movement, the inside view of presidents. 

I wish that scriptwriters wouldn't suggest that all underlings are consulted and expected to speak for their "race/gender/class" in these films.  Surely these officials aren't that gauche.

The actors playing significant historical figures resemble them faintly, making for disappointment in scenes when the butler witnesses discussions with historical implications.

Still, a pair of bookend films that I'm glad I saw.

If I knew how brutal and  violent this film is I probably wouldn't have gone to see it. The book would have been preferable.

The film, like so many today, is based on an autobiography written by a free black man living in the North who was kidnapped and sold into slavery.  He endured 12 years of demeaning, dehumanizing life before his "papers" were finally obtained and he was freed by the sheriff.

Michael Fassbender plays the ghastly cruel sadistic slaveholder who whips and degrades his slaves. His performance is brave indeed, and I wonder how he was able to sustain himself as he portrayed this evil cruel man. 

Shown in highly naturalistic unrelenting loops, The scene in which Patsy is whipped is just horrible. I kept thinking to myself why it was that this torture scene was more repellent to me that images of Holocaust survivors, massacres, Italian neo-realism rapes and torture scenes…all of them. I loathe them all while respecting the artistic purpose which makes such films. 

We're never forgetting history, are we? Art does not let us, even if denial tries. 

BOOKS: Shetland Trilogies, by Ann Cleeves

 Four suspenseful reads with a fine sense of place - the remote Shetland Islands, north of Scotland. First thing I had to get the atlas to imagine the comings and goings between islands.  Cleeves' murderers are driven by deep emotional conflicts, trapped by  past events.  It's not impossible to discern the culprit in these novels, but one can be wrong. The detective is an interestingly made character, born on Shetland, yet apart from them. 

Mystery readers shouldn't skip reading these.  

DOCUMENTARY FILM: The Cove

I had to work up the courage to view this film after it was highly recommended to me by a snorkeling friend.  When we were in Indonesia, we saw reefs that had been dynamited to stun fish as a hunting technique. The reefs are left in utter ruin and take years to return to the nurturing role we all need.

In this documentary, a Japanese fishing village on the sea takes advantage of a small cove which serves as a wet corral.  The dolphins are herded into the cove by the use of unpleasant sounds.  Long poles inserted into the water are banged on and the dolphins, highly sensitive to noise, swim the only direction left to them, the narrow cove. A market is made in the shallow water to sell them to dolphin-swim enclosures and sea life parks all over the world.

Those that aren't selected are then knifed and the waves run red with their blood, and another market is made as the fish are laid out for selection by fish wholesalers.

Why not use single long-line techniques and limit the amount of fish taken?  Amazingly, the townsfolk assert that their hunt is approved by the government as a control measure to prevent dolphin over-population. That's got to be preposterous.

Luc Bresson and his film team managed to enter the cove area during the yearly "harvest" and film this grotesque cultural hunt.

It reminds me of the brutal retrieval of bird eggs on outer islands in Scotland.  Protein is vital. I am sad about that.  I don't' know if I can eat dolphin ever again. I wish I could be a vegetarian. When I try to, after about a week I get very hungry for a beef burger; my body struggles hard because it wants what it wants, I guess.

ART: Jean Lowe, Karen Carson at Bergamot Station Galleries

Karen Carson - I saw her fire paintings on silk a few years ago and marveled at her paint handling virtuosity. They are beautiful indeed.Any mis-brushstroke couldn't be changed on the permeable silk. In the rafters stuffed black crows and ravens roosted; black angels calling down the chaos of fire death upon the evil human race.

I loved the borders, a fearless "decorative" choice which suggested ethnic textiles and boundaries impossible in a fire's wild traverse. 

Her new work is witty, positive, muscular and very pop-gestural.
I find a child's delight and fascination in shiny powerful trucks and trains that we only experience in miniature.
  
Huge and expensive heavy equipment farm machines roll into the foreground prepared for modern agricultural tasks involving thousands of acres of genetically modified corn sprayed with liberal amounts of Round-Up. Noting this: the farm subsidy program remains the bloated corrupting reality distorting U.S. economic responsiveness. I love this sour counterpoint to those gay wheeled monsters, thinking that this kind of piquant needling is the only perspective to hold in our absurd world.

JEAN LOWE at Rosamond Felson Gallery

So you want a bitter laugh?  Still need more sardonic irony?  Bill Maher,Stephen Colbert, et.al leave you hungry?  Here - theses are superb lampoons of American self-help mania.  I sent the pictures to my sister-in-law without telling her they weren't real books and she was very disappointed because she wanted to read them all!

 


I've seen Jean Lowe's work in the past also.  Her "French castle" installation was the final and total criticism to be made of high decorative cultural production.   

 I can do a Marxist, class-war, existential interpretation for myself that's totally satisfying to me, even though I'm not sure this identifies or skewers current bizarro trends.

I'm struggling over the issue of the humorous graphic message. Upon first viewing the laugh-content is used up and then disposed of, humans' love of the novel being what is is. I just don't want to spend time making paintings that will get "trashed" so quickly.  Though this reality makes the point of this work even more powerful.   

ART: Lynn Aldrich, Williamson Gallery, Art Center College of Design

What a witty, easy and thoughtful artist and exhibit.  So hard to place joy and fun in art; Alexander Calder, William Wegman do it so well, but mostly it's as if it makes the art less gravid, and this interpreted as less important and valuable.  That's what the market will do when status and commodification distort value - and when don't they?  

Worm Hole, 2003 - a series of cardboard tubes covered with yellow pages  like commercial  messages lined with faux neon fur - don't know whether to crawl in it or try to communicate through it.

How I love this collection of humble gutters, looking like a herd of elephants or the pipes of an organ, such grace in that little curve that directs the water on to ground.  I wish to push them and hear the clangor.

A bird cage stuffed with bird wings and feathers, quite grotesque.  Reminds me always of early Annette Messager and her poignant sweaters knitted for dead birds.

Of course vinyl hose should wind this way - like old pottery coils, snakes, planet rotation.

Of course, this is good too, the wave rising, snakes and undersea creatures extended lean into space. 

This waterfall is actually wax paper, and it is utterly beautiful, transformed into the most exquisite paper imaginable in the light and flow.

How could this be anything but named "Water Table"?  Rippling plastic remind us how fragile we are, beneath the humble clay and mud, the gray stretch of concrete.

All those Mike Kelley stuffed animal piles, slutty swanky goth fake animal clothing, discarded bad sofas on curbs, zebra skin rugs, alligator shoes and bags -the contradiction in the stuffing, purpose and use.  Why neon pink fur?  Are we so needy of novel stimulation as that? Yeah. Poor us.

Above my grandson tries to pick out the pattern purloined from some poor animal  which animal would hate its change the most? Which was the most heretical?  Which use repurposed most shamefully?  Were any attractive?

What grace  looks like:
sunbeams stream down to earth. Iconic. It's actually sewing thread artfully lit.

The drapery of a bridal veil and train, precious textiles, precious water, the beautiful wax paper flows down the side of the wall, the humble daily material transformed into wonder.

FILM: Saving Mr. Banks

Emma Thompson, an actress I have always admired, plays P.L. Travers, the author of the beloved children's story, Mary Poppins. Based on actual events, the film, made by Disney Productions about the making of a Disney movie, tells the story in flashbacks of a traumatized woman and how she made of her childhood's tragedy a fairy tale to comfort and sustain herself.

As a child, her alcoholic father (handsome Colin Farrell)lavishes her specially with his playfulness and attention, emotionally seducing her as he continues to fail his wife and family. The reality of his betrayal and death cripples every dimension of her personality and experience.

Walt Disney, played by Tom Hanks, has made it a mission to secure her novel for the screen, and Mrs.Travers, uptight, fearful, English spinster short of money, goes to Hollywood to collaborate on the screenplay. 

She is finally beguiled once again, after working with Disney and his talented lyricist and composer, and permits the movie to be made.  We see her on opening night at the premiere, as she experiences a redemptive closure on her past.

It's the realization that those wonderful songs from Mary Poppins that we all love still: " …the medicine goes down, the medicine goes down…", "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious"…"let's go fly a kite" - what it they'd never been written and brought to the screen, a loss we'd never even know we'd suffered.

Hanks makes a fine Disney, a seductive salesman, smooth, insistent, persuasive.  His pitch to her makes a powerful case for the necessity of vicarious fantasy, because without it, life would be unutterably painful and tragic. 

It's astonishing to me how Disney owns the childhood imaginations of several generations of American children, including myself. Then Disney himself is another story, and I think Tom Hanks is superb at creating the character.

The Disney-paradigm, however, is for me a limiting narrow world stylistically.  Visually, as beautiful as the films are, there is a dreadful similarity in them that trouble me. The flatness, the outlines, the relentless manipulative narratives, homogenize the multiple narrative sources, making of them gelid hybrids of their actual narrative strengths. I wouldn't be without them but I'm glad I'm free of them, though it's taken me a long time to move out.

Critics found the film sappy and sentimental, and so it was, but the parallel experience of Travers,once again being charmed by a special man, whose power to dominate narrative was enormous, to me was actually quite creepy at times.  No wonder she was so troubled by giving over her own narrative to be "re-purposed", even though it was done very well.
  
The screenplay really doesn't follow the actual events: Disney already owned the rights to Mary Poppins when she went to Hollywood to collaborate, and he never played a major role in convincing her to sell them.

She cried at the opening, not because of a cathartic experience, but because she disliked it, especially the animated penguin sequence.  She wanted it removed from the finished film and Walt refused: "that ship has sailed",he told her at the party after the premiere.

Evidently the actual P.L.n Travers was even more unpleasant and cantankerous than portrayed in the film, with quite a dark side. She wasn't an "old maid", but was bi-sexual. 

Slated to adopt Irish twins, she took only one, refusing to take his brother - how callous.  Did she go to the Magdalen Sisters to adopt? Overlapping stories here.  Her son Camillus, never knew he was adopted until as a young adult he met his twin in a bar and found out the truth.  Now there's the movie I'd like to see,a kind of reverse Philomena. 

A very Hollywood movie, all in all. 

Winter Birds

Downy Woodpecker - thank goodness for my neighbor Donna's mature liquidambar tree.  The migrating birds do find it easily, it's so tall and filled with yummy snack food.  

Best is, one hears a bird first. Then, only then, is it found if its travel plans call for  a pause long enough to get binoculars onto it.

Cedar Waxwing - I saw these in the tree a few years ago, a flock of perhaps 50 or so.  Again this year, two sightings; the high keening sound eerie and strange, as if some electronics equipment had gone awry.  What a handsome bird, with it's crest and eyestripe. Sometimes the pale yellow abdomen is slightly inflated looking, and the sunlight shines off it.   

A few weeks ago I heard a great-horned owl for several evenings, a sound so familiar from childhood, then not heard for so many many years, yet still it was as always was, as is.