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.

DOCUMENTARY FILM: Blackfish & Seeing Sea World

I have taken zoos as valuable learning institutions, eagerly seeing entertainment destinations to prevent my children and grandchildren from being exposed to boredom.

And I delighted in my visits to the magnificent San Diego Zoo, butterfly farms, the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Wild Animal Park, petting zoos.  Aren't zoos, aquariums, water parks, circuses, even backyard turtles and school fair goldfish prizes, rightfully part of the discovery process? Isn't valuing earth's stupendous reality as we attain our years the most desirable outcome?

Yes but. As I painfully reset my relation to all sentient beings, replacing dominion with stewardship, I wish it were possible to leave only footprints. 

The compromises are hair-shirt uncomfortable these days, with films like "The Cove" and "Blackfish" revealing animal abuse we never even thought about as we walked through the magic kingdoms commerce created for us.

Here's the modest proposal: We look at movies instead. Film crews are licensed to shoot and audited for best practices. Audiences go to Imax-type movie theaters, called Filmzoos. They look at taxidermied specimens and plaster models in diorama settings.

I know, you can't hear me anymore. Being able to pay means you get your way. Don't say I didn't try to warn you.  Karma exists.

PS: PETA did attempt a demonstration at the Rose Parade but it was quickly dispersed and they came off mostly as nutty activists. Probably its the first stage of awareness, Marcuse might say, or the only possible last stage of one-dimensional men.



    

    

MOVIES: The Dallas Buyer's Club

Stories from the AIDS epidemic: this film tells a story based on a real individual, a tough, homophobic rodeo cowboy, Ron, who was diagnosed with AIDS.  He's horrified when he finds out, not because he's just received a death sentence, but because people will think he's a queer.  

In a flashback sequence, during a wild drug and liquor debauched orgy, he seems to recall or not a brief encounter with another man, and I imagine his deep shame as his payback is visited upon him. I could be wrong about this: my husband points out that he could have contracted AIDS from a woman or a needle. 

The background song here should be the old country ballad "…love,o careless love…look what careless love has done to me."

Ironically he cannot get AZT legally in the U.S. because the FDA has lagged in developing remedies for the disease.  Ron goes to Mexico and finds medicines there that alleviate his condition.  

Despite his poor judgment, he's not a stupid man, and he figures out how to import drugs for AIDS victims and sell them illegally, building a thriving business.  Various government law enforcement agencies pursue and thwart his efforts.  It's a damning perspective on bureaucracy and its failures, all the more sad because Ron's drug "cocktails" extend many lives, while early AZT drug trials actually kill some patients because dosages were too strong and suppressed the immune system too much. 

Rejected cruelly by his own friends, he teams up with a gay transvestite to sell, and his own homophobia is eroded away until he comes to a life-embracing spiritual wholeness.  In the most memorable scene in the film, he enters a butterfly incubation chamber and hundreds of them land all over him, and a look of wonder and gentle surprise covers his face as grace covers him over.

Matthew McConaughy, Jared Leto and Jennifer Garner all give strong, memorable performances - how good the actors are, I'm always amazed.  But they don't need to lift the material, the whole film is wholly fine.  

   

BOOKS: Donna Tartt - , A Secret HIistory,The Little Friend, The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch (2013),  A Secret History, The Little Friend

These three books are all compelling, engrossing, polished, singularly wrought novels. They are nearly genre-free, following no escapist recipe.  All feature children as protagonists. Yet the narrative is never compromised with a simple point of view. The inevitability of the story proceeds from fully drawn characters, and so the plots, complex as they are, feel Dickensian in their resolutions. 

The three novels could be classed as mysteries or thrillers, because they are truly hard to put down, the quality of suspense so imbues the writing.  In The Goldfinch, a little boy who worships his mother “saves” a famous painting after the Met is blown up by a terrorist bomb. In A Secret History, a young man goes east to college and his choice to study the classics leads to conspiracy and murder.   The Little Friend, the most upsetting of the three, is about a little by who is kidnapped from his yard during a family holiday dinner.  His young sister determines to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

Each features meticulously wrought settings, breath-taking moments of danger, sympathetic treatment of characters as their amoral, evil, cruel, insensitive personalities and choices wreak grief, derail careers, and precipitate breakdowns from which there is no return. 

Tartt’s characters’ downhill slides turn the stomach of any parent:  long  (repetitive) descriptions of alcohol and drug use, theft, lost ambitions, cruel parents and guardians, the pitiful loneliness of lovely children callously neglected. 

The novels end where they began: the look-back the grown-up child has shared with you closes the account of the childhood tragedy.  There is distance and coolness now; the past is the past, about the only comfort Tartt permits her readers. 

BOOK: The Light Between Oceans, by M.L. Stedman

This book has some of the most beautiful writing about mothering a little girl that I have ever read. I loved the magnificent distant setting, the descriptions of the island, and the symbol of the lighthouse. The seemingly factual lighthouse keeper's unusual and rigorous job was fascinating, too. 

I accept that Isabel did what she did, and Tom, too. But then I found the characters' various refusals, required promises, misplaced letters, unfair blaming, quite authorially manipulative and began to resent it. The conclusion, after long grief, stoic oaths, angry revenge behavior, is rather sudden, and Isabel's recovery from her breakdown and its consequences is left to us to imagine.  I suspect it was much worse and incomplete than the novel led us to conclude.  But then, that's the book club's discussion topic.