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.

FILM: All is Lost, starring Robert Redford

…and only Robert Redford. A survival genre film, it captivated me.  Will he survive?  The irony is warm yet pitiless.  What did Our Man (RR's character, no problem with concluding this the film's existential allegorical intention) do wrong?  Why doesn't his note say he loves someone?  Major Tom did.

Why doesn't he have an emergency beacon on the boat?  Why did the bros in Deliverance canoe down a river without reconnoitering it first? Why doesn't he get out the emergency radio in the lifeboat and try to use it sooner? Why doesn't he know how to make a condenser to get fresh water?  Maybe he forgot, like older people do. 

He tells us, "he tried". An epitaph that may be all we really deserve at the end of our life, truth told baldly.  

Redford is solo sailing in the Indian Ocean when his boat collides in the night with an errant cargo bin full of tennis shoes.  He is old and moves somewhat stiffly but he patches the hole and that's about the last thing that goes his way.

What's most moving to me is that he is able to plot his position on his nautical maps,using the sextant he teaches himself to use from a book, but so what?  He knows where he is, but no one else does and knowing thyself provides no assistance but the ability to choose; the hard truth asserted.

The film's question:  when would I choose to give up and die? Would I be unable to choose, tumbled by waves and fate? Drowning is a terrible death, struggling not to breathe but finally inhaling, body panic struggling with mental directions - don't breathe yet, hold it, keep pushing for the surface... 

He takes a huge risk at film's end, (no spoiler) that's breathtaking and concludes the film with ambiguity. Is he saved? Are you saved? Why or why not? 

I sailed with my husband on a Cal 20 when I was a young woman, battling nausea, wet, cold, damp, and boredom. He loved it so. I'm just home from a gentle dive trip on a fake pirate ship in placid warm Indonesian waters, none of those problems! I loved it so.

I would think that if one had never been to sea, the film offers the poetic reality  almost perfectly.  I was chilled and stunned by the visual beauty of the film.  The musical score was exquisite and haunting, like a far-away sea bird weaving through the clouds.


Is Redford doing an extended method actor's exercise as his craggy face, icy blue eyes, and aging body reveal the range of emotions Our Man experiences? Can't say.  

This spare, unusual film is compelling and fascinating, I am fortunate to see it.

   
      

FILM: "The Wind Rises", Kazuo Miyazaki's final film

To be in love with flying today must be an unusual experience.  Aviation history has mostly happened; for the last two generations its been spaceships. So the great story of the fulfillment of centuries of dreamers yearning for wings has sat on the shelf for a time. How to summon this richness back? 

My love of flying began at age 10, when a  neighbor took me on a small plane for a trip over my little hometown.  And my early love of movies from attending Saturday matinees for children offered for 10 cents. One gray December day I saw The Spirit of St. Louis.  I remember coming out of the theater to the first snowfall, the softened and whitened world transformed, that possibility fixed for me by snow and Lindberg's great accomplishment.  

I wanted out of what I had, though, that unique Midwestern combination of childhood innocence and rigid oversight.  A flight attendant's job was one of those teen adventure dreams, and a possible pathway to that great world I so wanted to know. 

I loved aviation history; TWA and Pan Am, the SST, the Boeing 747, global route maps expanding.  I read Night Flight and Sand Wind and Stars by Saint-Exupèry and wore Vol de Nuit perfume.

And I loved aviation movies: Top Gun, The English Patient come to mind. World War II movies. From childhood, The Little Prince captures life's poignancy and flight's poetry. Only Angels Have Wings from film class, the best movie about the romantic and dangerous life of early airmail pilots.     

It was easy for me to love The Wind Rises,  the story of an idealistic young aeronautical engineer, who designed the prototype for the Zero which was used to bomb Pearl Harbor. 

Jiro Horikushu and as he is drawn by Miyazaki

I'm entranced by all of Myazaki's films; they have a gentle narrative revelation and unique animated beauty that make wanna-be's of the best Disney moments - Bambi and Snow White in the woods, come to mind, and Disney's straightforward storytelling.

The story though, is adult and rich with its ambiguity.  The great dream of flight, once achieved, leads to undreamed-of destruction, the Japanese defeated in a war conceived in madness. 

Miyazaki shows us this in fluidly edited sequences contrasting scenes of grandly soaring fighter squadrons followed by Horikoshi, the airplane designer, walking through a field of broken airplane parts, grass softening and overtaking like snow.

Miyazaki's hand-drawn animation uses thin black outlines to depict his characters and most of the objects of the material world, and activates them against expansive lush natural settings, drawn by Kazuo Oga.

Upwelling clouds reminiscent of N.C. Wyeth, trains puffing through landscapes yet unmarred by modern industry, all drawn with defined edges but no black outlines, making a profound visual statement about the relation of the art object and its existence in an unbounded earthly setting.

Nahoko's sanitarium 

An earthquake, Japan's 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, is a fine visual sequence, foreshadowing  terrible future events. 

In another sequence Hiro meets Nahoko again at a vacation hotel. Another guest, described as Sherlock Holmes,a large-nosed, avuncular matchmaker, plays the piano while the group sings in German together and toasts the betrothal.  

One inference is that fellowship and good will live in every language and culture, a hard lesson to be wrought from war's savagery.  Nonetheless, the lesson is particularly bitter delivered by a Jewish-appearing character singing a German drinking song.

A stylized device from western cinema is used when characters need to distance themselves emotionally: they sit and smoke. It's odd and dated, unromantic now when it used to signify such sophistication, patience, connection, individuation.

The film's love story is tear-jerker poignant: the lovers will be parted by Nahoko's early death from tuberculosis, an illness which appears in Myazaki's My Neighbor Totoro as well. TB is the classic romantic illness, offing many a filmic and operatic heroine, as well as Miyazaki's own mother. But Hiro and Nahoko make choices and live with the consequences, knowing that both the wind and the tide rise, and "...we must attempt to live."

It's a warmer judgment on a life look-back meditation than Chairman Mao's last song from Nixon in China, "...how much of what we did was good?...outside this room the chill of grace lies heavy on the morning grass."

What a fine opera this film would make. A few years younger than he, I will live with Miyazaki's farewell perspective as I spend these last years well.

BOOKS: The Bleeding Edge, by Thomas Pynchon

Requirements for understanding this novel:  1) be a cybercrime techie 2) live in Manhattan 3) be skilled in Noel Coward-like repartee 4) I keep up with pop culture and cool bands  5) for some obscure ironic reason, be completely oblivious to 9-11

Otherwise, you can laugh at some of the funny little “bits” provided in between the  sequences of descent into the virtual underworld, entered by backdoors, secret passwords, hacking, and stolen software.  There are also interludes with gangsters, children strung together with a narrative about a sexy housewife detective pursuing a money-laundering criminal. 

I read it because it was Pynchon and I leave it to cooler heads than mine to decide if this novel has any merit.  Me, I am dazed and confused, but now I know it.  I think I’ll just go fishing.

TRAVEL: Raja, The Last Day, then home (Oct 31 & Nov 1)

KRI ISLAND

photo from resort ad

Kri Island is comparatively close to Sarong, and here we saw other divers - the only place in Raja we did.  
Cape Kri had a current intersection in relatively deep water, and there we saw schools of barracuda, black-tip reef sharks, and other larger fish.  A wide open area,filled with fish traffic, and very impressive.  

Then we swam to the upper end of Kri and snorkeled the length of the island, then another snorkel around the back side. Again, the most plentiful fish ever.  They also were slower - not as skittish.  Ron said they weren't afraid of divers because it's a marine sanctuary and they haven't been hunted.  They know.  

In the morning we set off to the site of a future "home stay" - small eco-resorts built by village groups and advertised on-line.  This tiny island had nests of the peculiar Megapode.  The bird is like a chicken, with large feet. It builds a tall, rounded

mound in which it lays its egg.  The organic material within decays and the warmth hatches the egg.  The baby claws its way out, ready to go - born very developed and mature. Wallace writes about seeing it, fascinated with its ingenuity. The nest was right in the center of the compound, probably never to be used again. 

Ron had some ideas about returning to the location to preserve the nesting area and make it a feature of the eco-resort.  

While we were on the island, it rained, and we were offered shelter in one of the lodges being built.  It was warm and beautiful, with mats and quilts for sleeping, made of rattan and woven leaves.

One of the women noticed us picking up shells and brought us some lovely ones to add to our collection. That's MaryAnn with me and the cute little shy children. Then back into the water.

This video is a titan triggerfish fanning her newly laid eggs to oxygenate them.

unicorn triggerfish - about 18"

What a beautiful fish this is - with its deep blue-violet background and the saffron tail and collar, it's stunning.

trunkfish - spotted?

Meyer's Butterfly fish - a wonderfully distinctive fish

saddled butterflyfish

Regal Angelfish - rather large, like a dinner plate

Moorish Idol - this symbol of the reef, not seen by me elsewhere, ubiquitous here in Raja Ampat

masked angelfish

foxface rabbitfish

very large  titan triggerfish

 

parrotfish - the most extra-ordinary manganese blue of my dreams

trumpetfish

RL* Grouper - now this is beautiful - I wish fish colorings were fabrics I could wear

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RL* Spadefish - we saw many of these platter-like fish in schools - they are somewhat curious, following us about

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RL* scrawled filefish or map filefish boxfishs?  Love this design

RL* school of  chevron barracuda?

This charming watermelon was carved with the World Wildlife Fun logo and its  panda bear icon for our farewell dinner party.

our wonderful multi-talented crew - took such good care of us.

Each time we came in from the boat, they would line up and give us a way-to-go handslap, in the style of athletes returning to the dugout after hitting a home run. Very charming.  

John Lewis, ChristineMcKay , Judy Weis, MaryAnn Lewis, Jo deWeese, Christine Ruttle, me, Mark Ruttle, Gus Lewis, Pete Weis, Marilyn Downing, Ron Leidich, Dalton Amboy 

Indo-Pacific Bottlenose Dolphins RL*

The tropical sunset retains its singular purity, remains a great reward to day's end, journey's end.

TRAVEL: Raja: Turtles, Fine Coral, Baby Sweetlips (Day 9 & 10)

MANSUAR & KRI ISLANDS

 We are returning to Sarong as the journey ends. The weather improves, and reef life becomes even more magnificently abundant and colorful, with easy snorkeling conditions.

How magnificent the sea fans are - how deeply I perceive now how all culture mimics nature: bold ceramic sculptures, Vegas fan dancers, slow-motion film revealing lyric movement in a wind-blown paper bag.  

 How the colors look like historic palettes for artificial, chemical, and modern color theory - acid pinks and greens, dark blues

How the folds are intricate and stymie the  eye that dares follow their secret patterns

The short clip below is of the wriggling baby sweet-lips, warding off predators with a comical "dance".  Ron sent me into gales of laughter imitating this; his sense of humor made for lots of laughs - made me wish I'd gone to high school with him.  I could just imagine him entertaining the class with outbursts of glee and annoying the teacher but delighting his classmates.

Another camouflage - I have photoshopped this so we can see it.  The texture of the fish's skin is so webbed, dusty, and sandy that it's almost impossible to see it hiding.  I found one myself, but the diver guides also pointed out a couple I missed, to my foolishly intense chagrin.

 This is a fabulous fish - a Picasso clownfish.  I only saw a few, but I sinned in envying the vision of his creator, giving him that vibrant, daring skin to wear daily.

Parrotfish - saw so many of these in Tahiti, not so many here.  They are mostly responsible for the lovely white fine sand on the beaches, as they nibble, digest, and excrete the coral.

Trevally - no testament could ever live to tell the blue excitement of a school of these passing in the sunlight.

We saw several turtles.  Below, my photo, followed by RL*'s professionally-lit camera shot.

RL*

nudibranch? RL*

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RL* - grouper

This is a grouper - a favorite class of fish, because they are secretive and clever,concealing themselves amidst coral branches, and one gets quick glimpses of their beautiful colorations as they emerge to feed, then move back, all with great dignity of movement.

RL* - grouper?

RL* titan triggerfish 

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