Pescadero

Year's End Book Round-Up 2010

Following are some of the books I enjoyed this year, listed in no particular order, but I'll try to group them according to genre. Some are recent releases, some are old, one is quite old, none ancient. I think I'll make it a standing New Year's resolution to read at least one classic a year. I haven't read any Hawthorne yet, so I hereby commit to The Scarlet Letter. I've been meaning to read it since I saw Melville's dedication in Moby Dick. Last year's resolution was to read more women writers, and it was an inspired decision. I discovered Vivian Gornick, Lorna Sage, and Deborah Eisenberg, and dipped into (or immersed myself completely in) Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Sharon Doubiago, Pat Barker, Hilary Mantel, Mary Gaitskill, Eleanor Wilner, Mary Karr, Patricia Hampl, and Fanny Howe. Right now I'm reading the diaries of Katharine Mansfield, the John Middleton Murry version, despite accusations that he edited all the darkness out of her. The alternative was the complete journals and notes, but it was too big and too expensive, and it includes shopping lists and 'to do' notes - no kidding. There's only so much reading time in life. One of my biggest complaints. I'm also closing out the year with Frank Bidart's Stardust and a wonderful and strange book about non-linear thinking by Stephen Harrod Buhner called The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. Its one of those books that confirm what poets know only in a different register.

First prize goes to Cormac McCarthy for Blood Meridian. I think it might be the best novel I have ever read. It might not even be a novel, though of course it resembles one. It reads like something else entirely, some sort of extended invocation to the gods of the underworld that rule our lives and have delivered us smoking from the mouth of the pit ...



POEMS AND PROSE POEMS

El Nino by Sharon Doubiago (1989)
It's my favorite Sharon Doubiago book, and a bit different from her poetry collections in that each fragment or 'story' is a simple retelling of some episode in her life. The pieces are fresh, unworked-up, direct. And in many cases, as magical and strange as anything she has written elsewhere. Some stories are just 5 or 6 lines long. My favorites are transcribed conversations or snippets of monologues overheard in bars up and down the Mendocino coast. They manage to situate some extreme sense of delicacy and wonder right square in the middle of our lived lives. The lived lives, that is, of poets, drinkers, bartenders, fishermen, drifters, hitch-hikers, fiddle-players, Vietnam vets, and the boys and men this poet has loved along the way. It's a beautiful, surprising, completely original book, romantic and gritty at the same time, and, for Northern Californians, delightfully recognizable as well.

The Caged Owl by Gregory Orr (2002)
A fantastic 227-page collection of the beautiful, incomparable Gregory Orr, whose tragic sense of loss and wild, almost hieratic ability to transfigure death and find meaning in beauty is a constant source of wonder for me. Lyric, mythic, stripped to essences, his words have an absolute quality, like things religious, or alive. 53 pages of new work plus selections from all his other books since 1973. Here's one. I can't start quoting people all over the place or I'll never get this finished before midnight, but for Gregory Orr I will make an exception. I love this poet.

Singing the Pain Back into the Wound
I crouch naked at the wound's edge
and call its name softly,
until it hovers over me and I am clothed
in its shadow. Then I throw ropes
over it, pulling it down into the wound
that its body fits perfectly
like a fish-shaped cork.
Its wings beat frantically. I lash them together,
fold them carefully into a black
bundle on its back.


Lucifer at the Starlite by Kim Addonizio (2009)
I tried to hold out until this came into paperback, but in the end I had to have it ASAP, because Kim Addonizio is that good. I love her defiant, clever, disillusioned voice, her ordinary, contemporary, sometimes tawdry subjects and the elegant aesthetic she brings to them. Her closings are small masterpieces of concision and inclusion, making each poem a perfectly finished object, a microcosm of some understated universe we might otherwise have overlooked. She is the most accessible poet I know, but there is some indefinable quality at the center of almost every poem that speaks precisely to things mysterious and profound. Another local - I think she lives in Oakland and does workshops there.

In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-90 by Frank Bidart (1990)
I was oblivious to this incredible poet's existence until November, but now he is at the center of my universe. This collection covers a lot of territory and so is an excellent introduction to his oeuvre. There is nothing else out there like this. His voice is utterly unique. Long poems, discursive, philosophic, crammed with italics and upper case letters and other signs of admonition and emphasis, freely ranging across ages and continents, with scholarly musings and newspaper headlines elbowing each other across the pages in long, impassioned arguments for or against various positions, they dissect human motivation with the precision of a surgeon while remaining completely subjective. Loathing, desire, madness, denial, its all there, in poems that work out intimate problems in Bidart's own life as well as extended meditations from the perspectives of others. The 28-page War of Vaslav Nijinsky is an event in its own right, as is the indescribably brilliant First Hour of the Night, clocking in at 36 pages, but his poems about his mother and father and his struggle to separate from them are just as startling in their originality.

The Light the Dead See by Frank Stanford (1991)
Local poet and independent publisher Brooks Roddan introduced me to Frank Stanford this year, and within minutes I was blown away by his stunning, inimitable voice. I say this about all my favorite poets, and it is always true, that their work is utterly unique. Frank Stanford's poems are small legends cast in the soft yellow light of his native Mississippi and Arkansas, peopled with snake doctors and knife throwers, bootleggers, fishermen, midgets, drunks, children and animals and enormous hogs with names like Holy Ghost. Dreamlike and weird, they have the qualities of parables set in some sort of mythic, uber-American space and time. The poem 'Hidden Water' might be perfect, if there is such a thing.

The Monster Loves his Labyrinth by Charles Simic (2008)
I have only a passing acquaintance with Simic's poetry, but I love this little book of poetic vignettes. The first section in particular is crammed with tiny, luminous moments of irony as they occur naturally in people's lives, and each fragment is complete as both a narrative, with a small twist, and as a poetic statement. The best of them point to an almost impossibly paradoxical quality that adheres to the details in life, and it is something we recognize and determine to notice more pointedly from now on. Some of the more aphoristic lines fall a bit flat - at worst, they are inflated and dull, like ideas that have come to the great man as he tied his shoes or ate his cereal, lines which impress him enough to transcribe whole when they should have been woven obliquely into something more crafted. Some, like The child-beaters took their little son to church on Sundays are wry and successful; others, like A broken refrigerator in the yard next to the plaster statues of the Virgin read like enigmatic poetic seeds, and there are some real gems, humorous and odd, like this one, In a zoo I noticed many animals who had a fleeting resemblance to me, but I think we can do without lines like Birds sing to remind us that we have a soul altogether - and there are a few of them. It's a mixed bag, but fascinating anyway.

Strike Sparks by Sharon Olds (2004)
Sharon Olds rules. You can't read a poem like 'Why My Mother Made Me' or 'I Go Back to May 1937' without knowing you are in the presence of a master. People who complain that she is too confessional or too hung up about this incident or that in her childhood need help. Strike Sparks pulls poems from all 7 of her collections and shows the remarkable integrity of her vision, unwavering in its intensity over a period of 22 years. Here is real human life, physical, painful, joyous, sexual, and above all, imaginative, as if the imagination of a person is a physical organ which pulses, flinches, bleeds, breathes, and emits electromagnetic waves in the form of words and ideas. She is the only poet I have written to in an ecstasy of gratitude and awe. I didn't send the letter, but you get the idea. If you only read one poet next year, read Sharon Olds, the poet who prayed to Satan for her voice, and got it.

OK that's it for poets.


MEMOIRS AND ESSAYS

Bad Blood by Lorna Sage
Hands down the best memoir I have read this year, maybe because Lorna Sage is English, like me? Probably because she's just brilliant. She died right after it came out in 2001, a terrible loss for readers everywhere. All her other stuff is academic. See the review listed under Lorna Sage to your right.

The End of the Novel of Love, Fierce Attachments, The Men in My Life, and Approaching Eye Level, by Vivian Gornick
I inhaled all four of these books during one sunny week-and-a-half in late October. The pleasure was so intense I just couldn't get enough. Fierce Attachments, the memoir about her difficult relationship with her mother, past and present, and the childhood she spent in the Bronx as well as her pivotal relationships with 3 men over the course of her life, is the book for which she is rightly famous. It is dazzling. Jonathon Lethem is not exaggerating when he says, in the introduction, that it has that mad, brilliant, absolute quality of all timeless classics. But her critical essays are even better, if you like that sort of thing, especially those collected in The End of the Novel of Love. She analyzes several different writers, most of them women and some of them lesser known novelists like Clover Adams, developing in beautiful, lapidary sentences her contention that romantic love has steadily been written out of the modern novel as a metaphor for success as female writers have tackled the issue of their own independence. Succinct and insightful, every essay is a jewel in its own right, but together they make up a book of considerable theoretic heft. And yet she is light, radiant in fact, readable, never ponderous or academic. Her treatment of issues of desire, suffering and disappointment is the most sensitive imaginable. The Men in My Life is a similar venture, except it explores male writers as diverse as Loren Eiseley, HG Wells, Randall Jarrell, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Allen Ginsberg, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, James Baldwin and VS Naipaul. Finally, her collection of essays about contemporary life and culture Approaching Eye Level contains probably the most searing portrayal of loneliness and disillusion I have ever read, though it is absolutely unsentimental and even quite funny in parts. Chapter 5: 'At the University: Little Murders of the Soul'. Read it, and know.

A Fan's Notes by Frederick Exley
Finally I get to use the words flawed masterpiece in a review! This book is it. Flawed, because its unexamined misogyny splattered all over the place makes it hard to read in places. But a masterpiece nevertheless, one long, sustained, glorious, irreverent, hilarious, and sublimely written rant about failure, drunkenness, and alienation in fifties and sixties' America. I rarely read a book twice, in fact I've only reread 2, not counting stuff I used to study in school. This is one. The other was The Passion of Michel Foucault by James Miller. Go figure. Actually, I reread that this year too, so I'll stick it in this list somewhere. Anyway, Fred Exley is forgiven, since he has suffered so much for his own sins, and because he's such a great, great writer, at least, in this work. One of these days I'm going to write a post about writers, artists, and their sins. If they kill their wives (Carl Andre, William Burroughs), have sex with their kids (Woody Allen), have sex with other people's kids (Roman Polanski), exploit lost souls (Andy Warhol), or rape women (Arthur Koestler), should we enjoy them anyway?

All the Strange Hours by Loren Eiseley
This is a strange little book, something I would never have ventured upon without the prodding of Vivian Gornick (see above). It was some quality of compassion in her review, and curiosity on my part, made me want to see for myself what ailed this famous anthropologist. It is a very unusual read, something like a confession of secret heretical religious conviction delivered at the eleventh hour (Eiseley died shortly after publication) which can be read as a psychological document not entirely unlike those famously popularized by Freud, though without the analysis. As Gornick points out, Eiseley is largely or wholly unconscious of his own message, which is one of crippling, agonizing disappointment. It is also a beautifully crafted work, not in its organization, which is haphazard and eccentric, but in its sometimes achingly lovely prose.

The Adderall Diaries by Stephen Elliot
If you don't already receive the daily emails of this local writer, you might like to check them out - go to http://www.therumpus.net/ and sign up for the Daily Rumpus in the top right corner. They are sloppy and personal, a writer's public private life. The Adderall Diaries is a book about compulsion, creativity, violence, and not-belonging, and it skilfully weaves together two interlocking narratives in its accounts of a Bay Area murder trial and of the author's own childhood and personal life, growing up in group homes in Chicago, moving to SF, kinky sex; the issues that pertain to both accounts combine to tell the story of this man's life. Not, as Vanity Fair would have it, the work of a genius, but brilliantly organized, compulsively readable, and sort of edgy. Lots of SF references too. Local writers get extra points in my world. It's inevitable, we love to see ourselves reflected.

The Liar's Club by Mary Karr.
The classic of the genre, really, this is the most popular memoir out there. Not surprisingly. Karr's voice is arch, witty, and tough, inflected with plenty of Texas drawl and influenced by the storytelling prowess of her father, whose 'Liar's Club' of beer guzzling men met in a neighbor's garage. It is a riot. Brilliantly written, canny, hilarious, and profound, it is both wild and masterfully controlled at the same time. This woman's childhood would have felled a lesser soul, but as a writer Karr is its fabulous incarnation.

My Father's Love by Sharon Doubiago
I posted a review of this book on its Amazon page, because I loved it, and it struck me as important in a social-political sense, being an unflinching account of child sexual abuse and the confusing, sometimes devastating reality of living with, and loving, an abusive parent. There are parts which could only have been written by the poet this writer is, beautiful, magical passages in which she fully inhabits the perspective of her child self and tells the story from there. Meticulously documented and full of photographs, it is more than one woman's story - it is a rich account of its time and place as well. Second installment forthcoming from Wild Ocean Press.

The Love of my Life by Cheryl Strayed
I came across this essay in a book about grieving called In Passing which I found in the free box outside Phoenix Books, and while most of the collection was pretty blah, this one essay stood out like a jewel. It can be found in the much more exciting Best American Essays 2003. This is hardcore grief writing - the woman practically lost her mind, did, in fact, lose her marriage, as she went on a sexual bender that lasted for years - and she writes about it all with the clarity of an angel, or a person transfigured. It is a wonderful read.

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin
Having never read any James Baldwin before this year I was unprepared for the intellectual detonation that a first encounter with this brilliant thinker can bring on. Everybody else seemed flabby and soft in comparison. How to describe his particular brand of genius? Polemical doesn't even come close. His mind is so razor-sharp, his technique so diamond-cut, and his argument so terrifyingly passionate and true. The relevance of his insights to today's social problems is astonishing as well. Astonishing, and terrible. Contemplating his sophisticated hyper-articulate argument was one of the high points of my year.


Blue Arabesque: A Search for the Sublime by Patricia Hampl.
I'm not sure I can give a faithful account of this writer since this short book is all I've read of her fairly prolific output. I've read an excerpt of her memoir A Romantic Education and it was lovely, elegant and wise, but Blue Arabesque was slightly disappointing. Perhaps because the subject, an aesthetic awakening, is so close to my heart (Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is an all-time favorite) and not written of enough. It starts out well; I especially liked her assessment of modern fractured consciousness and the loss of what was our birthright, the uninterrupted gaze ... the world ordered inwardly by seeing, the act of unbroken private attention that was an expression of integrity clasping imagination, making sense, making "vision". Though I disagree that our modernity is necessarily the villain, it is refreshing to stumble upon so sensitive an account of what seeing can actually mean, seeing in the sense of the uninterrupted gaze, that is, seeing as a way of being ...
Anyway, I wanted more of this, and less of the padding (as I saw it) that was her attempt to render episodes in the lives of Matisse and Delacroix. There were many beautifully written passages, some overwritten passages, and some rather amateurish lumps that went on too long and lost my attention. But I love what she said in an interview about nuns and the contemplative life, and I loved the excerpt of her memoir in the collection Writing Women's Lives, so I'm not giving up on this writer.

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature by Kathleen Dean Moore
I picked this up at Point Reyes Books, the best spot to find writing about nature and ecology, the imagination as a natural phenomenon, sensory intelligence, craftsmanship, etc. - ie. the dream bookshop for a certain sort of mood. The book is a series of essays about the author's immersion in the natural world, in country living, wild country, deserts and snow-packed ridges, rivers and forests ... her minute observational skills and poetic gifts are everywhere in evidence, and she develops a parallel theory about human nature and the 'solace' people can experience when they are tuned to the rhythms of their environment. Some absolutely beautiful passages and images, fine textures, details.


THEORETICAL STUFF

Gathering the Winds: Visionary Imagination and Radical Transformation of Self and Society by Eleanor Wilner (1975)
This is a knockout book, completely unique, brilliantly imagined and researched. I love it when poets go all theoretical on you and this book is one of the best - she doesn't just consider the role of imagination in human consciousness, but develops an entire ingenious argument to the effect that imaginative patterning and mythic or visionary thinking correlates directly to the state of emergency and disorder an individual or a society might suffer, acting upon events in a way that changes the course of history and human development. Three elegantly presented chapters consider the agency of vision in preliterate societies, the mythic imaginations of Blake, Beddoes, and Yeats, and finally, the most astounding chapter of all, a consideration of Marx's thought as the ecstatic 'materialization of the ideal' that promised redemption to an alienated, divided world. Wilner brings her own version of synthesis (scholarly and poetic thought) to the project, so that the book is, like its subject, a sort of vision in itself.

Re-Visioning Psychology by James Hillman (1976)
Either you love Hillman or you think he's a Jungian nut, but if you love him there is no end to the pleasures of reading and rereading him, and, fortunately, a long list of publications to work through as well. Re-Visioning Psychology is one of his first, and it lays out the essence of the argument he is to develop in various ways later on. Come to think of it, he might be a Jungian nut, but perhaps this is what I love about him. He is a fearless advocate of the soul, of the multitude of voices and visions, which he plainly calls gods and demons, active in our psyche, of relativity in the inner world (departing from the Jungian project of individuation) and of inspired commands to 'stay with the image', which is music to artists' ears. But none of this goes anywhere near to explaining how radical, how utterly paradigm-shattering his thinking really is. At bottom, he is arguing not just for the 'polyvalence of the psyche' but for its non-human essence, which hauls him into the category of a visionary, in my eyes anyway. See chapter 4 on 'Dehumanizing'. Our souls are not ours.

The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
This is one of those books I have always meant to read in the interests of research, since it is mentioned by other writers about as often as, say, The Golden Bough is mentioned, as an influence and even a source of inspiration. James is a Victorian writer, so there is a lot of unnecessary connective tissue everywhere, but his insights are clean and clear. There is no Freud in it at all, nothing weird or occult, nothing theoretical really, just observation and reflection and a lot of first-person accounts, which are the life of the book. The testimonies of people converted after long struggles with their souls are riveting; they have a curiously Buddhist flavor as well, something to do with abandoning the self, the ego, etc.



NOVELS AND STORIES

Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
John Banville said Blood Meridian "reads like a conflation of the Inferno, the Iliad, and Moby Dick", and he wasn't exaggerating. It blew my mind. I had to take it in in short, ten or twenty page intervals and then put it down, in case ... I wasn't sure exactly ... in case perhaps I'd suffer some sort of adrenal shock if I kept on ... Mephistophelian ... utterly bewitching ... the beauty of its prose unearthly. And because that prose (it's really poetry) is in service of such relentless brutality the experience of reading it becomes almost a moral affair, religious, in the same way the Inquisition was religious. It's a kind of inverted oracle, an apocalyptic vision with its head on backwards, staring at our bloody roots. It's not a 'book'.

Twilight of the Superheroes by Deborah Eisenberg
Thank God for Deborah Eisenberg, whose stories I read between bursts of Blood Meridian in order to refresh my palette. She is the perfect antidote to McCarthy's unremitting darkness - wry, witty, sophisticated, elegant, urban, contemporary - Twilight of the Superheroes is her latest collection and it's brilliant. Her stories are miracles of condensation, precise yet enigmatic - she's our Chekhov.

Herman Melville's ; or The Whale , ed. Damion Searls
My version of this is actually an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction from summer 2009, and I haven't read it, but I had to own it as a sort of art object in its own right. It consists of all the bits left out of Orion Books' Moby Dick in Half the Time, published in 2007 as part of its Compact Books series. Some chapters are almost intact (ie. completely cut), some riddled with omissions, one consists of the single word - Hark! I feel delighted just contemplating it. It's fun, eccentric, conceptual, and it can carry just about any meaning you want to bring to it, depending on your feeling for the original, or for literature in general.

more later ...

Quote: Robert Frost

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."

Quote: Henri Matisse

"I am made of all that I have seen"

Quote: Karel Capek

There is "another type of wisdom that doesn't judge but looks ... seeing is great wisdom"

The wreck of the 'Point Reyes'

John Berryman

I just read an astonishing interview with the poet John Berryman in the 1972 Paris Review #53, available here. It includes some analysis of his method, particularly in relation to the writing of the definitive Homage to Mistress Bradstreet and 77 Dream Songs, and this spills over again and again into colorful, passionate accounts of his life, his loves, his breakdowns and hospitalizations, his religious conversion (to "the idea of a God of rescue"), his love of Yeats, his friendships with Delmore Schwarz and Dylan Thomas, his teaching crisis in the critical period after the Kent State riots, his opinions vis-a-vis fame or an indifferent public, poetic gifts vs. achievements, confessional poetry, suicide, ambition, group therapy, scholarship, female characters in literature etc, and a whole slew of references and anecdotes, all fascinating in their way, to or about fellow writers, his influences, mentors, colleagues and friends, from Saul Bellow, Robert Lowell, and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Eliot, Whitman, Housman, Freud, Shakespeare, Augustine and Pascal. But its not just the wealth of detail that makes the interview so remarkable, packed as it is. It's Berryman's wonderful voice. He comes across as cultivated, balanced, authentic, and passionate, a man you wish you could meet and can hardly believe is the same person as the intimidating, fire-breathing workshop demon described by Stephen Spender, nor the legendary alcoholic or even the tragic suicide he shortly proved to be. Then again, he descibes his process in somewhat terrifying terms, terms which seek to make a virtue of what must have been in fact an excruciating experience. "The artist is extremely lucky", he maintains, "who is presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business", adding, in case we weren't sure of his commitment, "I hope to be nearly crucified." That his ordeal ultimately dragged him over these imagined limits has been, I think, our great loss.

Trail to Indian Beach

Quote: Frank Bidart

"We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed."


from 'Borges and I' in Desire

NB: David Foster Wallace intended this line as a possible epigraph for his final (unfinished, forthcoming) book, The Pale King.

Squaw Valley

Excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl

Following is an excerpt from an interview with Patricia Hampl by Katherine Jamieson in last month's Writer's Chronicle, Vol. 43 #2.
There is a nugget of wisdom here for writers of creative non-fiction.

Jamieson: How do you help your students break out of a psychological self-focus in their writing?

Hampl: I encourage attention, descriptive writing. Not just looking to the past, not trying to understand it, but to attend to images almost as if they were photographs, and to write those. To discipline yourself to say what you see, rather than what you feel. Let the feeling flow through the seeing. I think it's a liberation.
One of the things that meditation tries to liberate you from is the terrible strictures of feeling, of the emotional batting about of rage and joy and anger. Mostly anger and frustration. All that thrashing around. Describing what you see liberates you from those feelings that are strictures.
They feel like your reality, but they aren't your reality. Your reality is your ability to see and say. But we think our reality is our ability to feel. Try just off-setting that a little, and saying my truth is saying what I see. It offsets the self, just a bit.

Club Foot Orchestra plays Sherlock Jr, Caligari, and Nosferatu

San Francisco's Club Foot Orchesta has been around in one form or another since founder Richard Marriot formed the house band at Club Foot, the Bayview's arthouse-music venue, back in the early 80's. An eclectic bunch of classically-trained and avant garde musicians, CFO has come to be known best for its original scores for early silent films and performances in theatres around the Bay Area, but its not often that we get the chance to hear them, and certainly not in back-to-back performances for three classic films at the Castro, so get ready for an afternoon and evening of unusual delights this coming Sunday, 11/14. Two screenings of Buster Keaton in the 1924 surreal comedy Sherlock Jr. kick off this all day marathon, followed by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the bizarre and subversive expressionist film for which Marriot wrote one of his most widely acclaimed original scores, and finally the first Dracula film ever made, FW Murneau's 1922 Nosferatu - its score incorporates Middle European waltzes, klezmer, and gypsy music with some comic/ironic touches mixed in. Visit CFO website for more details of Sunday's program, including film clips and samples from their entire repertoire.

Lake Tahoe

Quote: Czeslaw Milosz

"When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished."

Quote: Thomas Jefferson

"A society that trades liberty for order will have neither, nor will it deserve them."

McClure's Beach

Quote: Albert Einstein

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

MVFF33: 'Black Field'

This striking image by DP Marcus Waterloo from Vardis Marinakis's film Black Field is as good an introduction to the film's merits as anything I could say. Speaking in strictly visual terms, the film is a pure delight. The first third of the movie is so loaded with potent symbols that viewers might sense the coming of something miraculous - but, radiant cinematography aside, the whole does not really live up to expectations. It is still a beautiful film, with a confident, assured pace and masterful touch, but its themes are smaller than we are led to expect after witnessing the fantastic chiascuro images of the early scenes. It is a period drama set in Ottoman-ruled Greece in 1654; an escaped janissary (a Christian forced into service in the Ottoman army) washes up on the doorstep of a convent, where he is nursed (in chains) back to health and escapes with one of the nuns, who turns out to have been a boy all along. Their path takes them through some enchanted country, green and delicate, with rocks and pools glittering in patches of filtered sun or looming out of coils of mist. It all looks so much grander than the human story unfolding within it, which is essentially one of sexual awakening or gender liberation - no insignificant thing, to be sure, but not epic enough for this stage. I was wanting The Seventh Seal, or Macbeth, or something of that order. Early scenes, like that of the nun lying like a statue of carved stone in her stone-colored shroud, of an iron key in a slice of sunlight, the beautiful naked body of the man in chains attended by silent, black-clad women, the cremation and burial of the horse, the fog and flames and lightning, not to mention the liturgical atmosphere of the entire set, all combine to stir up the grandest possibilities imaginable. The film wants more gravitas to fulfill its promise, more complexity, perhaps simply more death, which would balance the life-affirming principle at work in the human theme and embody the shadows of its visual register. As it is, we are left with the curious feeling of having watched two films spliced together, and the loss of the one we want spoils the one we get.

SF Docfest: 'May I Be Frank'

There is an avalanche of festival films in the Bay Area right now, what with the Mill Valley, the Docfest, Berlin and Beyond, the Arab Film Festival and French Cinema Now presenting back to back throughout the month of October, but one film you absolutely must not miss is local documentary May I Be Frank. It's a wonderful story, funny and profound, inspiring, even miraculous. It documents the transformation of middle-aged, overweight, prediabetic, depressed, somewhat drug- and alcohol-addicted Brooklyn transplant Frank Ferrante as he submits to a 42-day diet and holistic health regimen organized by servers at San Francisco raw-food temple Cafe Gratitude. We expect to see some pounds shed, some improved body function and perhaps even a little attitude adjustment, but Frank's transformation is far more radical than that. He takes everything on, the failed relationships, the anger, the myriad complex patterns that keep him locked into a life of drug abuse, lethargy, and disintegration. The film becomes ever deeper and more astonishing as layer upon layer of Frank's entrenched habits peel away. It is the most far-reaching detoxification experiment I have ever witnessed, enlightening in so many ways - we learn about the physical dimensions of negative thinking, the spiritual dimensions of nutritional well-being - and there can be no doubt after watching this film that the path to total physical health is a spiritual one. It is also a difficult and painful experience. As Frank himself remarks in his ongoing blog, "what started out as a film about raw food evolved into a film about drug and alcohol addiction, broken families, frayed relationships, intention, commitment, healing, redemption, and the power of love." This statement really says it all, except for one thing - Frank is a very funny guy, and his humor makes this journey of high colonics, mucoid plaque and wheatgrass shots a truly delightful one. On another level it is a west versus east coast story, pitting affirmation against refusal, but it's not really a battle because we root for Frank the whole way, in all his incarnations. Let's just say, you can't fail to notice the stereotypes at work and play - they make things funnier and more exciting. People all over are going to love this movie, but west coast and especially SF residents might, like me, feel vindicated as well. For Frank Ferrante and folks like him, as well as all the rest of us, the place to be is definitely here.

Plays 10/22 and 10/25 at The Roxie.

Fort Funston

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto, Nick Zedd,1985

...

The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto

We who have violated the laws, commands and duties of the avant-garde; i.e. to bore, tranquilize and obfuscate through a fluke process dictated by practical convenience stand guilty as charged. We openly renounce and reject the entrenched academic snobbery which erected a monument to laziness known as structuralism and proceeded to lock out those filmmakers who possesed the vision to see through this charade.

We refuse to take their easy approach to cinematic creativity; an approach which ruined the underground of the sixties when the scourge of the film school took over. Legitimising every mindless manifestation of sloppy movie making undertaken by a generation of misled film students, the dreary media arts centres and geriatic cinema critics have totally ignored the exhilarating accomplishments of those in our rank - such underground invisibles as Zedd, Kern, Turner, Klemann, DeLanda, Eros and Mare, and DirectArt Ltd, a new generation of filmmakers daring to rip out of the stifling straight jackets of film theory in a direct attack on every value system known to man.

We propose that all film schools be blown up and all boring films never be made again. We propose that a sense of humour is an essential element discarded by the doddering academics and further, that any film which doesn’t shock isn’t worth looking at. All values must be challenged. Nothing is sacred. Everything must be questioned and reassessed in order to free our minds from the faith of tradition.Intellectual growth demands that risks be taken and changes occur in political, sexual and aesthetic alignments no matter who disapproves. We propose to go beyond all limits set or prescribed by taste, morality or any other traditional value system shackling the minds of men. We pass beyond and go over boundaries of millimeters, screens and projectors to a state of expanded cinema.

We violate the command and law that we bore audiences to death in rituals of circumlocution and propose to break all the taboos of our age by sinning as much as possible. There will be blood, shame, pain and ecstasy, the likes of which no one has yet imagined. None shall emerge unscathed. Since there is no afterlife, the only hell is the hell of praying, obeying laws, and debasing yourself before authority figures, the only heaven is the heaven of sin, being rebellious, having fun, fucking, learning new things and breaking as many rules as you can. This act of courage is known as transgression. We propose transformation through transgression - to convert, transfigure and transmute into a higher plane of existence in order to approach freedom in a world full of unknowing slaves.


The Cinema of Transgression Manifesto was written in 1985 by Nick Zedd, under the name Orion Jeriko, and first appeared in his fanzine, The Underground Film Bulletin.

MVFF33: 'Katalin Varga'

British sound artist and director Peter Strickland's beautiful first feature Katalin Varga is an impressionist film that resonates as much on the aural plane as on any other, so visual cues and plot development get behind what is often simply a powerful mood or feeling-tone signified by sophisticated effects in sound design and musical composition. It is a reversal in the usual order of things which haunts the mind in advance of events, and that implicates viewers in a weird way, weaving images which are spontaneously imagined together with those onscreen. In an interview with The Guardian Peter Strickland speaks frankly of his influences, and there are as many that have traveled through the ear as through the eye, including albums by The Cure and Suicide and the soundtrack (by Popol Vu) for Herzog's Nosferatu as well as films like Night of the Hunter and Paradjanov's Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors.

He speaks at some length as well of how the film came to be made. After suddenly inheriting 25,000 pounds from an uncle, and wondering briefly whether he should use the money to buy a flat, he set out instead for the Carpathian Mountains in Romania to make his first feature film with a crew of 11; the entire script is in Magyar translation, which Strickland doesn't speak but the actors do, so there was a lot of room for improvisation; without real access to the language, his ear was as tuned to the ambient sounds of "goat bells, crickets, and wind" as to human voices. The result is a film that situates human speech and action inside a broader natural context, so that the environment, which is after all the classic vampiric locale, begins to assume agency of its own. Landscape in this film is an obscure and fatalistic protaganist, deeply supernatural.

Hilda Peters plays the title character Katalin, who traverses the country with her young son in search of the men who raped her. Her performance is astonishingly protean, as she morphs from loving mother to trauma victim to seducer to avenger and back in the course of her quest. Her face alone is worth the price of admission. And the incredible face of her nemesis Antal, played by Tibor Palffy, completes the picture. They are profiles carved into opposite sides of the same magical coin. As soon as we see Antal we know - exactly what it is impossible to say - but we are charged with a sense of knowing, of significance, and his role thereafter fulfills this expectation in surprising ways. Pasolini was the great champion of 'real' faces such as these, and Strickland's casting illustrates his point to perfection. The right face carries the full weight of the story, its larger meaning as well as its specific human one.

With its haunting score (by Geoffrey Cox and Steven Stapleton), gorgeous photography (Mark Gyori), lean, intense dramatic arc, and forays into magical thinking and dark, folk-inflected myth, this film is a must-see for lovers of art, of music, and of the supernatural. Plays Smith Rafael 10/8 and 10/15. Also check out Strickland's sound world at http://www.soniccatering.com/. Here's the trailer;

MVFF33: 'Cut Poison Burn'

According to Nobel laureate and co-discoverer of DNA Dr. James Watson "the National Cancer Program is a bunch of shit", and this important film tells why. Wayne Chesler's Cut Poison Burn documents the ways in which pharmaceutical companies, and their creature, the American Cancer Society, in league with the American Medical Association and the FDA, govern the state of cancer treatment and research in this country by absolute decree, rewarding political candidates and CEOs and failing, to a staggering extent, the actual victims of this dread disease, their families, and the many brilliant independent research associates who struggle in vain to advance a real cure. Audiences will be interested to learn that a patient's life expectancy in 2010 has not, except in the case of 4 known cancers, increased at all since the 1920s when cancer research began in earnest; that patients today experience far greater suffering and diminishment in quality of life; that apparently benign fronts in the 'battle' such as Breat Cancer Awareness Month are PR fronts for purveyors of lethal drugs like Tamoxifin, known to cause uterine cancer in women; that research teams in universities across the country are routinely denied development grants for promising breakthroughs in non- or less toxic treatment options and are effectively squeezed out of the field anyway by FDA stipulations that new treatments be subjected to a staggering $1.6 billion of industry testing in order to qualify for approval. Since pharmaceutical companies (which constitute, incidentally, the largest lobbying sector in Washington bar none) are the only organizations capable of supplying such sums they have the entire industry of cancer research and treatment in a state of lockdown.

To make matters worse, parents of children with cancer are required by law to subject their kids to the entire battery of 'conventional treatment options' before they are allowed to seek alternative paths, and then only when the medical establishment has declared their child unable to withstand further treatment, a situation which usually involves the child being reduced to a virtual vegetable, bloated, hairless, riddled with secondary cancers, liver disease, and a whole host of other horrifying conditions including bone malformation and brain damage. The film follows the story of the Navarro family, who fight to the point of congressional hearings for the right to treat their 4-year old son at an alternative treatment facility in Texas. This facility, established by Polish Doctor Stanislaw Burzynski, has been treating patients with a non-toxic, non-patented amino-acid drip with enormous success, but the FDA had already barred the way to his door for the Navarros by reducing his clinic access to end-case patients only. The fate of this clinic is an interesting sub-plot in itself. In its determination to defend pharmaceutical companies' rights to dominate treatment options, the FDA waged a 13-year, $8 million legal battle to indict Burzynski on any and all charges available to the legal imagination, 75 counts in all, but were forced to merely sideline his clinic after prosecution failed on all counts to eliminate him from the game entirely. The fate of Dr. Burzynski, of other alternative-treatment practitioners, and of innovative scientists and research teams who have for decades now been thwarted and smeared as quacks by the ACS, not to mention the fate of patients like Tommy Navarro and tens of thousands like him, makes for a very sobering, sometimes infuriating, sinister and heartbreaking film, but it is an object lesson in how our country works and how, moreover, our own possible health trajectories might play out. I should add that the film is expertly produced, narrated, and formally balanced, not at all in the manner of some of Michael Moore's more strident if admirable efforts. It is an example of what great documentary filmmaking is all about. See this film. Playing 10/8 and 10/10 at the Smith Rafael Theatre in San Rafael. Jim Navarro's ongoing struggle for our right to alternative treatment options can be explored at http://www.cancerbusters.us/

MVFF33: 'The King's Speech'

As winner of the People's Choice Award at this year's Toronto Film Festival, Tom Cooper's The King's Speech is set to become a hit with mainstream audiences in the States, as previous winners Precious and Slumdog Millionaire were before it, and owing to the performance of middle-aged heartthrob Colin Firth and of supporting actor Geoffrey Rush it will more than likely be a major presence in next year's Oscars as well. Yawn! At least with its nods to Bollywood Slumdog was fairly honest about its sugar content, but The King's Speech just pulls unremittingly on audience heartstrings without any irony whatsoever, sawing away at our pathetic fascination with well-dressed, well-meaning British gentlemen who are afflicted with an endearing touch of social anxiety but whose morals and conduct are above reproach. It's a caricature of Englishness that Colin Firth has built an entire career on. Here we find him one rung further up the ladder than usual - he is King George VI no less - but the character is essentially the same as the one he always plays, with some minor variations.
Bertie, as he is known to his friends, has a fairly debilitating speech impediment which interferes with his royal duties as Duke of York but which threatens to become overwhelming when he is suddenly catapulted to the throne in the wake of his brother Edward's abdication in 1936 (to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson). Fortunately for Bertie, his enterprising wife Elizabeth (played with predictable charm by Helena Bonham Carter) has already secured the services of unorthodox Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush), and the film is a study of their developing friendship, essentially of the ways in which Lionel manages to thaw out his heavily armored aristocratic client in time for him to embrace his royal destiny and deliver the speech of his life over national radio as Britain enters the war with Germany in 1939. You know you are in for some pretty high-calorie low-nutritional fare by the time Bertie makes his first breakthrough speech in Lionel's office, and the film continues in this vein as Bertie opens and snaps shut and opens again in the course of his treatment. It is a cleverly written and staged production, with enough humor and appropriate (superficial) questioning of privilege and class division to make us feel cosily acknowledged, but the story is chockful of that cloying sentiment which is symptomatic of emotional ill-health and is the unfortunate state of quite a few British films these days, another anodyne and intellectually-retarded exercise in winning the hearts, minds, and dollars of American audiences who don't know any better and don't want to. I enjoyed it - but not with the part of my brain that thinks.

Bolinas

Quote: Bertolt Brecht

"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?"
from Beggars' Opera

Quote: William James

"The trail of the human serpent is ... over everything"
from Pragmatism, 1907

The Mission

'There is a pain so utter': a poem by Emily Dickinson

There is a pain - so utter -
It swallows substance up -
Then covers the Abyss with Trance -
So Memory can step
Around - across - upon it -
As one within a Swoon -
Goes safely - where an open eye -
Would drop Him - Bone by Bone.

Matthew Barney's Cremaster Cycle 1 - 5

Whatever you may think of Matthew Barney's curious post-industrial aesthetic, his predilection for artificiality, deformity, grandeur, and fabulous shoes, his Cremaster Cycle (of five films) is an extraordinary cinematic experiment which must be viewed on the big screen to be appreciated, certainly, but also to be seen at all, since none of the films are available on DVD. With this in mind, note dates and times of The Roxie's upcoming screenings of all five films plus Barney's latest De Lama Lamina, a mechanical-erotic-carnivalesque piece referencing the crisis of deforestation in Brazil, Afro-Brazilian deities and our own local hero Julia Butterfly Hill, and featuring the music of Arto Lindsay playing live at the Carnivale de Salvador in Bahia. I have only seen Cremaster 1 and Cremaster 5; the whole cycle is said to develop in much greater depth and symbolic complexity the themes sketched in these two films, themes which have mostly to do with differentiation of the sexes, or an imagined blissful state before differentiation takes place; the struggle to return to this state of bliss before the testes of the male are fully descended (something effected by the cremaster muscle - hence the title), which drama is enacted in a variety of rituals including sports-themed contests, operas, enactments of Celtic myth, Busby-Berkeley style musicals and beauty pageants, with Manx giants, queens, magicians, air-hostesses, Mormons, Masons, opera singers, murderers, satyrs, and water nymphs, not to mention Norman Mailer (as Harry Houdini), Richard Serra (as architect of Solomon's Temple and the Chrysler Building), and Ursula Andress (as the original 'Queen of Chain'); the delirious and bizarre array of surreally-linked objects, costumes and gestures featured therein are so out-of-this-world, so unusual and delightful to contemplate it is tempting to just fill pages with lists of them, which would be easier than writing a serious analysis and something most reviewers of Cremaster tend to do. It's inevitable - the sheer proliferation of symbolic images in these films just knocks you out - but Barney has clearly meditated at great length on the meaning of his narrative segments and their symbolic manifestations, as evidenced by his emphasis on shapes that recur throughout, on themes of ascension and descension which are continuously and variously developed, themes of biological and sexual necessity, of struggle, and circularity, and return ... what we see unfolding before us is essentially the imaginal, metaphoric dreamworld of an artist contemplating his own - and I mean this in a nice way - navel, which is to say, the real ground zero in his struggle with biological imperative as fate. Cremaster 1, shortest film in the cycle at 41 minutes, establishes the gender-differentiation theme with its evocation of pre-differentiated balance or wholeness, envisioned as a state of bliss choreographed by an indolent blonde goddess who exists simultaneously in two airships which float above the Bronco stadium in Boise, Idaho, Barney's hometown; her arrangements and rearrangements of grapes correspond to the movements of a huge synchronised chorus of girls on the blue astroturf below. It's a light, bright, musical piece with only the slightest hint of danger at the edges, easily grasped, despite its trademark peculiarities, because the central metaphor has not yet undergone the intense diversification that marks the rest of the cycle. Cremaster 5 is darker, grander, and more romantic, a fascinating contemplation of descent into duality as a form of transcendence itself, a visual and aural feast filmed in the twilit city of Budapest, in the Hungarian State Opera House, and in the Gellert Baths, starring Ursula Andress as the black-clad Queen of Chain, a sort of operatic diva whose tortured memory of her lost lover, played by Barney in various guises, re-enacts his ritual suicide and symbolic descent. Scenes of great beauty and startling originality which are frankly astonishing to behold, accompanied by a full operatic libretto (in Magyar) and score from the brilliant Jonathon Bepler, whose original music accompanies the entire series, make this one of the most unusual and memorable things I've ever seen onscreen. More than one critic has compared the cycle to Wagner's Ring, and Barney's manipulation of grand themes, magisterial landscapes of the mind and bold, heavy, myth-inflected images which develop in some sort of absolute time, aeons or possibly eternity itself, are almost Wagnerian in scope. To be able to achieve such a thing and to root it firmly in our own age, which he does primarily through his modern, weird aesthetic, is quite a feat - if I had not seen Cremaster 5, I wouldn't have believed such a thing possible without it collapsing into a bombastic mess. The ironies implied in staging full mythic themes (complete with gods and heroes) in contemporary terms are acknowledged as visual and musical refrains which gird the films against ridicule, but the irony is delicate and goes nowhere near cynicism - quite the opposite - Cremaster is unapologetically grand and passionate stuff. It really has to be seen to be believed. Series starts Friday, July 30 at the Roxie. Here's the trailer -

SFJFF 30: 'Arab Labor' and 'Sayed Kashua - Running Scared'

We are too politically correct in the US to tolerate a sitcom on primetime like Sayed Kashua's Arab Labor, but it's a pity, because laughing this hard at our thorniest, nastiest race-related problems would probably do us all a lot of good and - more's to the point - foster greater understanding across racial divides. Kashua is this year's recipient of the SFJFF's Freedom of Expression Award, and as an Arab-Israeli writer who gets non-stop flak in his country while at the same time creating one of the funniest, most controversial and yet widely loved television shows on Israeli television, a show which dives straight into the sticky heart of Arab-Israeli relations, he more than deserves it. When you watch the sitcom, which is flat-out hilarious, fearlessly probing the hypocrisies and prejudices that define Arab-Israeli relations at the mainstream level, and then see the documentary Sayed Kashua - Forever Scared by Dorit Zimbalist which follows Kashua's trials in Israeli society over a period of 7 years, it is an astonishing, devastating experience, an incredible double-bill which runs the emotional gamut from hilarity and farce through irony, absurdity, hatred, misunderstanding, recognition, enlightenment, confusion, exasperation and defiance all the way to outright fear: that Forever Scared tag is no joke. Sayed Kashua is positioned between communities that, at their (easily visible) extremes threaten him with collaboration on the one hand and transfer on the other. Reviews in Ha'aretz (for which he writes a weekly column himself) have variously decried him as "a traitor and a bad writer" "an affront to the Arab image" and "a rotting corpse"; the Arabic weekly Fasl Al Maqal has publicly demanded the termination of the series; Kashua has been forced to leave his hometown in nothern Israel after the publication of his second novel which was harshly critical of Arabs, only to move to a Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem in which he feels extremely cautious and out of place ... the reality of life for this brilliant, fearless writer, who continues to stick his neck out despite being racked by anxiety about his own and his family's tenuous position in Israeli society is beyond 'tense' in the way we understand race relations to be in this country. The guy deserves a medal. His consistently controversial books, statements, columns, speeches, etc. are the work of a man who is outraged to his core, who longs for normalcy in a society which rejects him for not taking clear sides and can only embrace him abstractly through book sales and TV ratings; it is a sort of modern tragedy, a double-bind which comes to us as a painful illustration of what life can be like for people who are prepared to break conventional molds. This is no 'pet Arab' in Israeli life; Kashua's criticism of the occupation is relentless, his use of irony as a weapon against Israeli platitudes quite startling - see the quote below - and yet he has clearly suffered at the hands of his own community as well, a suffering which seems rooted in his relationship with his father, though the documentary only hints at this dimension. His novels, the 2002 Dancing Arabs, which catapulted him to fame, and 2004's Let it Be Morning, both written in Hebrew, are probably more forthcoming than the documentary on this score. Both are available in English. The latter is not available in Arabic.

Below is a quote from the film, presumably an extract from one of his columns. The tone of arch cynicism could not be further from the delightful, outrageously funny repartee of Arab Labor, except in one crucial respect - its fearlessness. It's ironic, given the level of fear he is living with perpetually - but Kashua is a master of irony. See the SFJFF site for showtimes and more details. Sayed Kashua - Running Scared plays with one episode of last season's Arab Labor, just to get you in the picture, and Arab Labor: Season 2 gives us three episodes of the current season's shows straight from the editing room. Don't miss them - Arab-Israeli sitcoms are not exactly mainstream entertainment in these parts.


"You the Israeli people are fucking us, killing us, slaughtering us, hating, abusing, conquering, and raising countless new suicide bombers. And still, I love you, I'm crazy about you, can't do without you. If only the Palestinians watched movies about the holocaust, if only they could understand what a ghetto is, what it means to be without freedom ... But the Palestinians are an obtuse people, who refuse to understand. I know them personally, and I can tell you they refuse to understand us, understand that the settlements, the occupation, and denying them their human rights are an essential part of preserving the life of the Jewish people. Stubborn people who refuse to understand that the tanks, checkpoints, mortars and soldiers are part of the most moral army in human history. Fact - there are no gas chambers. They should say thank you and shut up, thank God they weren't Nazi victims, and be thankful they didn't suffer the holocaust"

Sayed Kashua (translated from Hebrew)

SFJFF 30: 'Budrus'

The international documentary team of Julia Bacha and Ronit Avni are back (after 2006's Encounter Point) with another compassionate film about ordinary people dealing with extraordinary conditions - Budrus - a film which has already won prizes in San Francisco and Berlin, and special mentions at the Tribeca and Madrid festivals. When the Israeli state began bulldozing olive orchards on Palestinian land around the village of Budrus in the West Bank in preparation for construction of another section of the 'security fence', local residents organized in non-violent resistance against troops in an attempt to save their village, their land, and their way of life. Local organizer Ayed Morrar brought together Fatah and Hamas affiliates in a style of resistance that has proved one of the most effective in the struggle against state misuse of power everywhere, and when Budrus villagers' daily struggle attracted the attention of Israeli peacemakers as well, activists from both sides of the border joined forces to create a wall of joint resistance it is an inspiration to see. Cameras capture the entire story from inception through crisis to resolution, and this footage is edited together with interviews with Morrar and his family (his 15 year-old daughter organized the women), Hamas organizer Ahmed Awwad, Israeli activists, internationals, troops and border police, as well as clips of Israeli news shows covering the situation with talking heads and opinions reflecting the state position. But its impossible not to cheer for the ordinary people in this struggle. Compliments to the Jewish Film Festival for, once again, screening films which challenge the dominant trend in thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict, especially after last year's fracas over the Rachel Corrie film. If you want to support their doing so, and need to hear some good news from the Middle East, news about people and not ideals, positions, statements, rebuttals, etc. - or worse still, violence and casualties - go to see this wonderful film and see for yourself what people who have no political power can do when they organize. Here's the trailer:

SFJFF 30: 'You Won't Miss Me'

I haven't seen New York writer-director Ry Russo Young's award-winning short Marion and first feature Orphans, but her second feature You Won't Miss Me (showing at the Castro in next week's Jewish Film Festival) is such a jewel I can't wait to see everything else she's done. The film stars Stella Schnabel (daughter of artist Julian) as the troubled, complex, provocative Shelly Brown, adrift in contemporary New York, lurching between one-night-stands, failed indie-film and theatre auditions, seedy parties, local gigs and a disastrous weekend in Atlantic City, after a spell in the local mental health facility, where she was taken by her (terminally absent) mother after a violent outburst. It's familiar territory, but Russo Young's perspective is brilliantly original, intimate, and contemporary, with taped voiceovers looping between scenes shot variously in HD, Super 8, DV, or 16mm which correspond to Shelly's different states of mind; the style ranges from romantic, grainy, slow-motion footage which conjures an imaginal realm she struggles (and fails) to realize, to hand-held video scenes (of coke sniffing, or arguing in a hotel room, or drunken conversation with dull, disheveled boys) which look like something you might see on YouTube. Schnabel's improvisational acting techniques dovetail elegantly with this approach, as do themes of interiority, personal identity expanding and contracting according to inconsistent dreams, moods, drug-states, etc. Schnabel and Russo Young together have achieved something which is stylistically gritty and immediate and thematically quite sophisticated, something to do with fantasy and reality and their intersection, the way in which we all conspire to act, stage, or otherwise create a reality we can live with, a kind of home movie in which we are, finally, seen and heard and fully expressed. Shelly Brown's home movie is a mash-up derby of fights and dreams of normal love and tawdry collisions with reality - she is so sensitized to failure that her rage pre-empts all her opportunities - but she is consistently real and interesting, and I think this has a lot to do with the way in which she was created and imagined by women. In an exchange last year with Interview's Lena Dunham, the 27 year-old Russo Young described the genesis of the character as a collaboration between her and co-writer Schnabel; together they wrote a biography of Shelly and then proceeded to explore her character in a series of taped interviews in which Schnabel would improvise responses to questions about self-expression, love, ambition, drug-use, identity, etc. These tapes are then used as a foundation for the film itself, and are heard intermittently throughout, a plaintive, flawed, wistful, defiant monologue which echoes in a personal register the interviews between Shelly and her psychiatric advisor, scenes which open and close the film and attempt to define the character from without, or from the system or society's perspective, which we could paraphrase as not belonging. Shelly both accepts and rejects this definition, and she is severely conflicted in other ways as well, but we cleave to her perspective as real, despite its mistakes, its deflections and inflations - perhaps because of them.

It's so exciting to contemplate female characters from this angle, from within. After watching Amber Sealey's brilliant A+D earlier this year, and Andrea Arnold's stunning film Fish Tank, it feels like a new generation of female actors and directors is about to change the way we experience women on screen altogether. It's revolutionary. You Won't Miss Me plays just once in this festival: 7/24 at The Castro. See SFJFF for details. Here's the trailer;

Limantour

Quote: James Hillman

" ... ideas are inseparable from practical actions, and ... theory itself is practice; there is nothing more practical than forming ideas and becoming aware of them in their psychological effects. Every theory we hold practices upon us in one way or another, so that ideas are always in practice and do not need to be put there."

from Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975

Loch Lomond

'Weariness of Men', a poem by Frank Stanford

My grandmother said when she was young
The grass was so wild and high
You couldn't see a man on horseback.

In the fields she made out
Three barns,
Dark and blown down from the weather
Like her husbands.

She remembers them in the dark
Cursing the beasts,
And how they would leave the bed
In the morning,
The dead grass of their eyes
Stacked against her.

from 'YOU' Poems by Frank Stanford

Quote: W.H. Auden

"We are lived by Powers we pretend to understand"

Frameline 34: 'Plan B' and 'From Beginning to End'

I can't say the idea of men falling in love with one another has occupied much of my mind until now, but Plan B has changed all that forever! This playful, smart, sexy film from Argentinian director Marco Berger is like a hormone injection for languishing humans everywhere, but perhaps especially for uninitiated straight folks who might not know that young men in love are a force of nature! I am not talking about tolerance, which is boring despite its being essential to the project of civilization and modern identity blah blah blah. I'm talking about mirror-neuron activation, physical, sexual (if vicarious) delight! The plot involves two straight men who fall in love despite themselves. If you are a conscious human being you will recognize these people, you will identify with them and wish them well, and in the context of this story, that means you will hope and then actively want them to get over themselves and get it on. This is a testament to the film's sophisticated understanding of the dynamics of desire, gay, straight, or otherwise. It patiently explores the erotic charge that accumulates around obstruction, the way in which unattainability translates to sensation, and what is more unattainable for a young straight man than another young straight man? He must overcome, quite literally, himself. That takes some doing - and Plan B shows how. Actors Manuel Vignau and Lucas Ferraro are luminous, brilliant; pacing is unhurried, confident, masterly even; soundscape is by turns haunting, permissive, intriguing; cinematography seductive, gorgeous, with painterly flourishes reminiscent of Dutch masters, and sudden urban still-lives like modern photographs that connect obscurely to the action - cracks in stucco, holes in buildings, giftwrapped boxes; script as consistently real, up-to-date, and provocative as anything out there, anchored in the culture of contemporary Buenos Aires; plot funny and sweet and satisfying ... there really is nothing wrong with this picture. See it and know; you have nothing to lose but your habits and assumptions!


As fate would have it, I watched Plan B in double bill with Brazilian director Aluizo Abranches' utterly abysmal From Beginning to End, so the whole experience was one of total antithesis. From Beginning to End might actually be the worst film I've ever seen. It matches its wretchedness point for point with Plan B's delights; both films feature beautiful young men, and From Beginning to End actually takes its protaganists for a quick romp in Argentina; both plots hinge on a twist in the ordinary configuration of male desire, but where Plan B gives us something rapturously fresh, From Beginning to End serves up the most unlikely coagulated nonsense it has ever been my misfortune to see. Francisco and Thomas are not just lovers, but half-brothers whose relationship has developed since infancy; their saccharine-sweet love, like a thick layer of frosting over a cardboard cake, consists entirely in appearance; never once confronting the least opposition from reality, it is on the contrary nourished by the wealth and generosity of family and friends alike, all of whom seem to move in the viscous medium of some other idealized world parallel to ours, an atmosphere reminiscent of glossy magazines, where Calvin Klein models who double as doctors and Olympic swimmers read passages of Hilda Hilst to one another in faux defiance of a script. It is so ludicrously inert and contrived it could be a delirious farce given different treatment, but as it stands, solemn and romantic and ridiculous, it is beyond a joke.

Frameline 34: The Man Who Loved Yngve

This sweet, fresh, funny debut feature from Norwegian director Stian Kristiansen about a teenaged boy's reversal of fortune after he falls in love with another boy is a pure delight from beginning to end, the sort that is intensified, like the experience of being a teenager itself, by passionate bursts of music from bands we haven't been listening to lately but used to, a lot - the year is 1989, the Berlin wall has come down, a sense of novelty has seized the imagination of Europe's youth, and the lavish promises of pop music, promises to do with freedom, power, sex, and knowledge, begin to expand as young, alienated, pissed-off Jarle makes new friends, joins a punk band, gets a hot girlfriend, and starts to flex his identity generally. The twists and turns of his journey are accompanied by the lush sounds of Joy Division, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Cure, REM, Japan, The Stone Roses, etc. - and, as is probably appropriate to this time, this music, and this stage of human development, the effect is ironic, but not cruelly so - we still laugh with rather than at these characters, who are cheeky kids trying to be ironic themselves in ways they do not yet see are entirely conditioned by the culture anyway. That is, the film celebrates youth without taking it seriously, which is a happy way to reminisce about our own - similarities. And since the soundtrack makes reminiscing virtually compulsory, the light touch of this film is a real blessing.

Actors Rolf Kristian Larson as Jarle and Arthur Berning as his best friend Helge are so perfect their characters are unthinkable otherwise, a fact even writer Tore Renberg, whose novel of the same name is the basis of the screenplay, feels to be true now the film is completed. This 10-minute excerpt says more than I can about the film's very positive charge, about its inspired casting and bright energy. It doesn't cover the challenges that arise when Jarle falls in love with the new boy in class, the dreamy, tennis-playing, cloud-watching Yngve, nor the poignancy of the conclusion, but suffice to say the film just gets better and better. It has already won every award going in Norway since its release in 2008, and it deserves a lot more attention over here.
(NB trailer substituted for original clip because of legal shenanigans with youtube)

Frameline 34: Grown Up Movie Star

It's hard to describe the impression this brilliant film has made on me without feeling I have still somehow understated its merits. It is the debut feature of little-known (in these parts) Canadian writer and director Adriana Maggs, a low-budget production shot on remote Newfoundland, and starring (for the most part) local actors. A confident and unapologetic look at family life gone awry, it is extremely energetic, unflinching, non-judgmental, funny, and true. Its highly dramatic and somewhat breathless narrative sends us hurtling through a few weeks in the life of disgraced ex-hockey star Ray (played by Shawn Doyle) whose struggles with pot and alcohol and most importantly with his closeted homosexual life contribute to the slapdash, at worst completely neglectful nature of his parenting style after his wife has left. The eldest of his two daughters is beginning to explore her sexuality in misguided and ever more hazardous ways, flirting with her father's best friend and pushing her limits in the small community as she tries to patch together an identity from the shreds of her absent mother's dreams of stardom. The look and feel of the film is raw, messy, and unbeautiful, with its dirty, half-melted piles of snow, its convenience stores, parking lots, pick-up trucks and broken ovens - it's not a film that seeks to distinguish itself in visual/poetic terms. What makes it so extraordinary (I'll get to the stand-out performances in a minute) is the non-stop rollercoaster of its script. Actually, performance and script come together in such an incredible way it's impossible to prioritize one over the other. They are one organic phenomenon, a complete powerhouse. Characters are highly differentiated, thoroughly themselves, which makes for some interesting conflict right off the bat, and the acting is so pitch-perfect you feel like giving thanks. There is something immediate and approachable about the cast, something familiar and yet unusual - perhaps a reflection of their background in Canadian television and theatre. Tatiana Maslany, who plays the sexually precocious 13 year-old Ruby (and who won the Special Jury prize at Sundance 2010) is nothing short of a revelation. The film is unimaginable without her. But the dialogue is a force of nature, an electric current surging through every scene, binding and searing its characters into a physical, fighting knot - these are people who love and defy each other fiercely, who crash into one another head on, or fall over one another in their attempt to back off, and who never stop verbalizing the experience. Whether sarcastic or seductive, desperate, defiant, hilarious, imploring, or plagued with expletives, their exchanges come to define the very space in which they struggle and develop. It is language as a (specifically human) element, and it saturates the film, magnetizing us to it completely. It is as delirious an experience as anything out there in film or print. Add to this the fact that the humor of the situation is always front and center, even when, or especially when, things get rough (and Ruby's vulnerable sexuality doesn't fail to stir up trouble) and the film seems like something of a miracle, delightful and disturbing at once, something that gets close to a perfect essence of people.

Jane Smiley 'Private Life'

Jane Smiley won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 with her dazzling Shakespearean novel A Thousand Acres, but you would never guess she is capable of such a feat if all you knew of her work was the abominably dull Private Life, published in May. It picks up towards the end, but fully two-thirds of the novel is insufferably dreary, despite it's encompassing the Chicago World's Fair, the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, the First World War, and the stock market crash; Einstein, Japanese art, poker, and astronomy; the US Navy and the FBI; scholars in the University of Chicago and writers and editors at the San Francisco Examiner, gambling mothers, Russian anarchists, and lesbians who run around Europe with people like Henri Bergson. Perhaps if she had chosen to write from the perspective of someone for whom such matters were critical, or even significant, we might have had a more lively book, but her central character, the unfailingly decent and conventional Margaret Early is as boring and unimaginative as a person who is not actually brain-dead can be, so everything just chugs by her in a curiously meaningless way. Her unlived life might be poignant or even tragic given the right treatment, but Smiley gives us so little in the way of psychological exposition it's difficult to ascertain whether Margaret even registers her own disadvantages. The novel is mainly a story of loveless marriage, but there are several relationships besides which are described in enough detail to become tedious, since they all partake of Margaret Early's inexplicable absenteeism of the heart. Friends, cousins, neighbors all come and go without impact, without development, difficulty, commitment, or joy ... there is even a lover who falls back into the wings as quickly as he appears; their single tryst is disposed of in one short paragraph and described as "perfect", whatever that means. Margaret's one seeming bright patch is a tentatively explored aesthetic curiosity about Hokusai and other Japanese artists, but even this is undeveloped, insignificant either literally or metaphorically. The characters with whom her forays into art are associated are so poorly imagined they come across as embodiments of some Japanese design motif that Margaret, or possibly the author herself, has encountered in a magazine. Things start to get interesting in the last 70 pages or so, when Margaret acknowledges feelings of hatred for her foolish, bombastic husband, and we learn of his paranoid betrayals; the ending is surprising, moving because deeply felt (at last) and simply put, a sudden access of consciousness and memory which obliquely references her general condition - but it is too little and far too late.

If I have to imagine what Smiley is trying to achieve with this material, I would guess she is probing the restriction and inertia experienced by 'good' women whose options in 19th and early 20th Century America were so limited; also the consequences of enabling pompous and entitled men out of a misplaced sense of virtue; stylistically, she might be aiming for subtlety, minimalism, the drama of the ordinary (within extraordinary times). But she has imagined her dead-zone rather too well, so that in place of sympathy for any of these characters readers are left puzzling over why they were created at all. From a writer bold enough to update King Lear and pull it off with style, this novel about nobody and nothing in particular is a great disappointment.