Monday, February 25, 2019

Swedish Surrealism and Beyond



The American Swedish Institute is the perfect destination for a blah Saturday morning: the size is manageable, the cafĂ© is appealing, and the exhibits are a bit out of the ordinary. The overall tone is one of relaxed Old World sophistication mixed with North Woods charm, and even the ultra-bright fabrics in the gift shop—too cute to actually consider buying—help to lift the mood on a cloudy winter day.


A selection of large landscapes by a self-taught young Swedish Photoshop expert named Erik Johannson are currently on display. The landscapes would be beautiful in themselves, but Johannson has taken them apart and put them together again digitally to create fantastic images in which, for example, a rural highway rips open like a zipper, a lake becomes a broken mirror, or a snowy field is transformed into a stitched white fabric.


The results are entirely realistic and wonderful to look at, albeit only briefly. There is no deeper significance to the images than what we see at a glance. They're a testament to human fancy and hard work. A video on the second floor illustrates the many layers Johannson is required to create to achieve the effects he's looking for. (You can watch that same six-minute video here. It's perhaps more interesting than the image itself.)


I'm a big fan of landscapes, if not exactly a connoisseur. I also spend a fair amount of time using Photoshop, though my technique remains amateurish. I was charmed by the fanciful imagery being put forth by Johannson in such a precise and unfanciful way, less surreal than super-real ... but I would also like to have seen the landscapes themselves—the grasses, the rocks, the surface of the water, the clouds—undisturbed by any bizarre manipulations. Depending on your frame of mind, a patch of moss can be more beautiful and fraught with mystery than the Sistine Chapel.


The images that pleased me most were the ones in which the "event" rather than the landscape dominates the scene, and we don't need to bemoan the vista that's been digitally transgressed. For example, in one image two sheep are being shorn, and we can see that the wool will soon take its place in the sky as clouds and thunder. 

In another image–not included in the show—a workman is unloading moons from his van while a woman in the background is attaching one of them to the horizon.


As it happened, my craving for honest landscapes was assuaged on the third floor of the mansion, where we came upon an exhibit of photos taken with a panorama camera in northern Sweden just after the nuclear disaster in Chernobyl. The prints were small, and they had faded somewhat, but there were forty or fifty of them on display, and many were lovely.

By the time we got back down to the restaurant, the only table for two available was right next to the front door. We decided to skip the Roasted Beet and Gjetost, sunflower seed, shaved apple, and radish sprouts on danish rye, and head home to a refrigerator full of leftovers ... but a much cozier table.

Friday, February 22, 2019

A Winter Day



It starts with a spin around the trails at Wirth Park at 7:30 in the morning. For the first time in quite a while, the snow was great, the temperatures were moderate ... and there was nobody there! No school teams, not even a single ski-skater. We did the "woods" trail, pausing often to admire the peachy light in the sky and the luminescent blue of the chalky and still pristine snow.  Ah, bliss!

Hilary went off to sort old photographs with her parents, and I settled down in the "office" to work on a few books. An hour here, and hour there. Then Norton called. He wasn't happy with the proofs he'd received from China. A blank journal with a photo of Paul Bunyan on it. He was eager to stop by for a consultation. Fine.

"I thought we'd gotten rid of that sign," he said as he handed me the proof.

"No," I replied, "I removed the sign on the other side. Right here. You can still see the post. But I could change the other sign, remove the date and the word Bemidji, and make it read Paul and Babe."

"And what about the back?" Norton said. "It's sort of blank."

"How about if I lighten it up and then create a noise panel so it glistens a little bit?" He liked that idea.

Twenty minutes later I'd sent off another proof to China and we were talking about the Timberwolves. Would they beat the woeful Knicks tonight? Probably not.

An hour later I was making Brazilian black bean soup from a recipe out of the Moosewood Cookbook. Outside the dining room window, goldfinches and siskins were quietly feeding together on the thistle feeder, while cardinals both male and female were fighting one another off ferociously on the sunflower feeder just above their heads.


I'd put a CD on the stereo of a strange group called the Westerlies that we heard last night at the Machine Shop. It's composed of two trumpeters and two trombonists doing everything from Beiderbecke and Ellington to Ravel and Debussy, as well as their own compositions. That arrangement of timbres calls for precision as well as dynamic control, and these young performers had it—now brash and joyous, now as rich and mellifluous as the soundtrack to an old Western. A friend had given us the tickets, so we'd bought to CD as a contribution to the cause. A day later, it made a pleasant complement to the birds and the bright sun on snow outside the window, and the aroma of cumin and garlic within.

But my biggest accomplishment of the day came early on: I succeeded in canceling my subscription to Amazon Prime. That may not sound like such a big deal, but yesterday, when I went in to terminate our free three-month trial, which was due to expire at the end of the month, I was shocked to discover that it had already been renewed—for a year!

"So that's how they sucker you in," I thought, cursing myself for my dilatory behavior.

"Why not call customer service?" Hilary said. "Maybe we can get our money back."

"Not likely," I said. There's probably some fine print somewhere that says, "Ten days prior to your expiration, your subscription will automatically blah, blah, blah."

But I found, double-checking the website, that there was a way to back out of the agreement, if you hadn't made use of the benefits. Thus with a single keystroke, I wiped an entire year of guilt and recrimination from my conscience, and a year of impulse purchases off of my shelves.

I could live again!  


Friday, February 15, 2019

February Light


An exhilaration comes upon you in the midst of that sparkling brilliance. You're out cleaning up the driveway in the crisp morning air, no wind, temperature near zero. It's not that you're looking at something beautiful. Rather, you're breathing something so open, bright, and full of energy that  nothing could be better. It glows in the chalky white snow, it cries out in a sky so intensely blue you can feel it in your throat.

The energy from that same February light lies behind the icicles hanging from the eaves, which weren't there a week ago. They're quaint, like a Christmas card, but without the moody darkness. And they provide you with an excuse to linger in the morning air. You grab the bamboo snow rake from the garage and get started on the heaps of pristine snow that have risen above the gutters these last few weeks.

But that's not quite enough of a good time, so you decide to cut back the highbush cranberry and the green twig dogwood before the new buds start forming. Something you forgot to do last year—until it was too late! Then it's around to the back, where the icicles outside the bedroom window are impressive indeed.

Ah, the joy of a good dump of snow down your neck as you maneuver that ten-foot snow rake from high up on the ladder while battling the branches of the pagoda dogwood that overhang the roof!

February light doesn't hold the promise of spring. It's an intrinsic good, it's free, and it's all the more pleasant and surprising for the fact that, unlike a comet or the Northern Lights, it spreads itself everywhere without undue commotion.


We drove north with some friends the other day to the rocky hills, snow-covered lakes, and black spruce forests of the border country. We skied across Everett Lake and later hiked through the woods to Kawishiwi Falls. The snow was new, the air was fresh and calm, the sun was brilliant. 

No, the sun was new, the snow was fresh and calm, the air was brilliant.  

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

Annihilation, on the Basis of Sex


It isn't feasible to see ALL the highly touted films that show up during the dark months of the year, and we inevitably make superficial judgments about what we're going to see out of necessity. For example, I decided not to see On the Basis of Sex because RBG , which I'd already seen, was widely said to be the better film. But the films are entirely different in style and focus—one's a documentary, the other's a docudrama—and it turns out they're both well worth seeing.

To some viewers, Felicity Jones may seem a little too cute to be playing Ruth Bader Ginzberg—perhaps we prefer the grizzled and feisty justice of later years. But be that as it may, the great merit of On the Basis of Sex lies in the fact that it's focused largely on Ginzberg's early career, and on a single court case. In so doing, it underscores repeatedly how strong the gender bias was against which Ginzberg was fighting at that time, and how extraordinary her efforts were to establish a legal basis for combating that social ill. It gives us an inside look into how the legal profession works, and the ACLU, and the ingrained biases of the prestigious law schools. And it also brings Ginzberg's daughter into the picture in such a way as to highlight the significance of the feminist movement as a bellwether of changing times. Would I be belittling this cinematic achievement if I described it as a cross between Rocky and Legally Blonde?


ANNIHILATION

Annihilation is a different kettle of fish, though the theme isn't all that remote: five military women facing the unknown. In the first scene, which could have been filmed in the 1950s, a strange comet-like thing crashes into a lighthouse. Now a mysterious "shimmering" is slowly advancing through the woods and fields. Most of the movie is devoted to finding out what that phenomenon is.

But there are a few plot complications. Lena (Natalie Portman) is a professor of cell biology (or something) and she's wondering where her husband (Oscar Isaac) is. They've had some domestic difficulties, true, but he's been gone on a mysterious mission for a year. When he finally turns up, he's remote, taciturn, and also ill. The ambulance ride to the hospital is diverted by military police. It turns out he's the first human ever to return from inside the Shimmering. Eventually Lena and four other women with nothing to lose try their luck at finding out the truth about what lies "inside."


The jungle inside is beautiful but disorienting. The women meet up with a variety of dangers and grotesqueries, though there are no Little Green Men lurking in the underbrush. As tensions build, dissensions grow within the group.

I'm not going to tell you how it all shakes out. But I will say Annihilation is a thought-provoking drama that, like director Alex garland's previous film, Ex Machina, explores boundaries so near at hand that it would be a mistake to dismiss it as science fiction.


FREE SOLO

There are three prominences in Free Solo, the most awesome of which is El Capitan, the 3,200-foot rock face that rises from the floor of Yosemite Valley. Also astounding, though perhaps slightly less so, is Alex Honnold, the young man who's intent on climbing the face of El Capitan, by himself, without ropes.

The most prominent of the three principals in this film—Honnold's girlfriend, Sanni McCandless—is also the least interesting. Her presence helps to push the documentary to feature length, I suppose, but that's a minor asset at best, and it's pretty clear that she's playing second fiddle to El Cap (as the climbers call it) throughout the film. It's hard to fathom why Honnold would want to get involved with a young woman who walks around saying, "Oh, what if you fall?" and engages him in long, slow conversations on the subject of "Isn't there anything beyond climbing that could make life meaningful to you?"


One film critic suggested that the film "challenges the idea" that emotional distance is required to summon the concentration required for solo climbing. I would say that it underscores the opposite point. Perhaps that reviewer didn't notice that Honnold didn't feel fully prepared to attempt the climb until McCandless went home.

For this reason, Free Solo doesn't quite reach the level of tension or the heights (no pun intended) of such classics as Touching the Void and Nordwand, but it's a fascinating story just the same, about a peculiar and uniquely gifted athlete who lives in a van and eats his vegetables straight out of the frying pan using the same spatula he cooked them with. He's found some unusual goals to pursue, and he's reached many of them.

Why climb El Capitan? "It's a crazy-seeming thing. I get that," he says at one point in the film. "I just think: Why does anybody seek out anything challenging? Humans do so many interesting and difficult things."