Moved by Pictures (oils, pastels, lithographs ...)

Some days in early spring are so bright that they demand to be explored, though they turn out to be so bitter and windy it's hard to enjoy being out in them. What better time to drive down to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which is full of air and light, but also of heat? And art?

One exhibit featured a Japanese potter, Kamoda Shōji,  who's style, to judge from the photos in the flyer we got in the mail, seemed overly polished and elaborate, and far removed from the Mingei tradition. In fact, Shoji moved through a succession of styles during his long career, and though most of them were, indeed, elaborate and polished, quite a few of them were also very nice.

I finished with the one-room display before Hilary did, and I wandered across the lobby to the gift shop, where a coffee-table book caught my eye featuring a painter I'd never heard of named Agnes Pelton. I liked what I saw inside, and showed the book to Hilary. We hadn't plan to attend the ticketed exhibit of supernatural art on the second floor, but the day was still fresh and we decided to take a look.

I have come to the conclusion that it's very difficult to paint the supernatural. Many of the works in the show related to spiritualism, a movement from the turn of the twentieth century that focused on communicating with the dead. Evidently the aesthetic products of this movement have been attracting increased attention for some time now.

Most of the works in the MIA show are by artists I've never heard of, and quite a few of them are BAD in one way or another.  

But many of them are also fun, in a corny way, and a few do seem to evoke an eerie atmosphere. Others are wonderful regardless of the category or intent.

Grant Wood's painting of a traffic accident struck me as effective.

Also Andrew Wyeth's rendering of a woman on her deathbed peering off into the beyond.

A haunted room has been recreated in the gallery, but it seems the spooks were left behind on the loading dock.

One of my favorite phrases from the Old Testament is "Ezekiel's chariot," and an entire room near the end of the show was devoted to that theme.

I really liked the assemblage of love potions and other voodoo cures, with its numerous colorful bottles and references to Cassandra Wilson and D'Angelo.

And some of the paintings were good because their spiritualist connections remained obscure. 

And after all, doesn't art, by definition, always has a spiritual dimension?

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A few days later we made the trek to St. Paul to see an exhibit of Minnesota art assembled by the Minnesota Historical Society. The attendant there told me that a travelling exhibit about Sherlock Holmes had been delayed, and they whipped up this substitute on the fly.

Nice work! They should make it permanent.

You can almost guess what kinds of things have been included, but you won't be able to assay the high level of artistry until you go there.

There are historical portraits ranging from Carl Sandberg to Barbara Flanagan and Bud Grant.

There are industrial scenes, and rural scenes that might have been painted in the forests of Barbizon.

There are plenty of whimsical "Minnesota" scenes.

And others that might seem a little grim.

This painting carried the evocative title: "and the feather drifted silently to earth, as though it meant something." 

It was a bright and joyous morning, but the wind-chill was near zero, and we felt the need to warm ourselves in the sunny confines of Brasa on Grand Avenue with some pulled pork, collard greens, and grits.

 We weren't quite done with art exploring. We took a lazy route west down Grand Avenue to the Mississippi, then north on River Road to the Weisman Art Museum on the U of M campus. A collection of works by an early twentieth century artist, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, were on exhibit, and many of them were outstanding.

I had never heard of Nordfeldt, but now that I've seen his work, I'd put it right up there were Marsden Hartley, Milton Avery, John Marin, and that crowd. And he seems to be at ease in a great variety of mediums.

This exhibition is evidently the first retrospective of Nordfeldt's work; if so, it's long overdue. He was born in the small town of Tullstorp, Sweden, and was raised in Chicago. At the age of 15, he attended the the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and was inspired by the comprehensive overview of contemporary art he met up with there. A long career in art took him to London, Paris, Munich, and Vienna, then back to Chicago, New York City; Provincetown, and Santa Fe.

The show contains oils, woodblock prints, drawings. And it's free.

Oscar Countdown Films

The Lost Daughter is full of mystery, pathos, and intrigue, but it's first and foremost a character study. The central character, Leda, has arrived in Greece, alone, for a working vacation. She's a professor of Italian literature, or something similar, and she's brought notebooks and reading material to occupy her on the beach. She doesn't quite fit the mold of "Mediterranean vacationer" but the old man who shows her to her apartment (Ed Harris) and the younger man who tends the beach chairs and concession stand have no trouble accommodating her.

Little by little her character emerges.  She's chatting with her daughter on the phone until her daughter abruptly hangs up.  When a family of rowdy Americans arrive at the beach by boat and ask her to move down a few yards, she politely but firmly refuses. (The beach attendant later advises her, as agreeably as he can, "Don't do that again. They're bad people." )   

Watching the intruding family's children play as she writes in her journal, Leda is reminded of her own years as a young mother in flashbacks that are full of tension, noise, and confusion, as she and her husband struggle to keep their family life intact while also keeping their fledgling academic careers afloat. Subsequent flashbacks take us to a scholarly conference where the young Lena shines, basking for perhaps the first time in the praise of her idols.

 Back on the beach, one of the toddlers wanders off. The family is horrified.  Lena happens to locate the child, for which the parents are grateful.  She also finds the little girl's doll, and decides to keep it for herself.

Olivia Coleman holds the screen in the role of the enigmatic Leda, who seems a little out-of-place on the beach. Civil, but hardly ingratiating. People can't figure her out, and a mood of subtle malevolence begins to develop. Or are we merely imagining it?

 The film is based on a 2008 novel by Elena Ferrante, and first-time director Maggie Gyllenhaal  deserves great credit for successfully adapting it for the screen. There is nothing conventional about the plot, and perhaps nothing appealing, either, but the film nevertheless succeeds in opening to view those realms of the psyche that have been irrevocably wounded by actions that were both necessary and wrong.

The Worst Person in the World focuses on four years in the life of Julie, a bright twenty-something who's unsure of her career path and also has difficulty maintaining her relationships with men—stable though they may seem from day to day. This might sound like one of those "coming-of-age" dramas in which the protagonist "finds" herself after a good deal of Sturm and Drang, but Julie seems to be riding an endless wave of effervescent charm throughout the film that renders introspection all but unnecessary. In any case, Julie doesn't seem to have any female friends with which to hash out her life-choices. Her adventures are varied and fun to witness, but the success of the film depends on sustaining her allure for viewers in the same way that she sustains the trust of her mother and the interest of her successive boyfriends.   

In the title role, Renate Reinsve, succeeds in that regard--they even gave her the "best actress" award at Cannes. She comes across as genuinely ebullient rather than merely narcissistic and exploitative. Has she figured anything out by the end of the film? I'd rather not say. Do we like her more or less? Once again, it's a matter for discussion. But the film itself is fun to watch, and unusual, and annoying, and problematic. And did I mention fun?

(The film might also serve well as an advertisement for the glamour of the Swedish welfare state. Julie earns a living working as a bookstore clerk, and one of her major boyfriends is a barista at a coffee shop, yet they seem to have a nice pad and no financial problems to speak of.)

Drive My Car

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi's previous films include Intimacies, which is four hours long, and Happy Hour, which passes the five hour mark. With Drive My Car, he wraps up his story in a tidy three hours, maintaining a sure, steady pace and a solid story-line that touches on grief, infidelity, crime, guilt, story-telling, art, and work...but has almost nothing to do with cars.

The film is based on three unrelated short stories by Haruki Murakami, well-known for his elusive and enigmatic narratives. If you happened to Google the film, you'd read the following brief description:

"An aging, widowed actor seeks a chauffeur. The actor turns to his go-to mechanic, who ends up recommending a 20-year-old girl. Despite their initial misgivings, a very special relationship develops between the two."

Every bit of information here is wrong. In the film, the actor has a chauffeur imposed upon him as part of a contractual obligation, following more than an hour of development during which his wife is very much present. There are no auto mechanics in the film. The young female driver is 23 years old. And the relationship that develops between them is only one part—albeit an important one—of a much wider range of relationships between our protagonist, Kafuku, his family, and the various people he gets to know in the course of rehearsing a stage production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.

There comes a point in most "long" films where the plot takes a new turn and you find yourself saying, "Boy, this is getting LONG." Drive My Car remains fascinating throughout. It starts out conversationally, almost in neutral, and every new character or twist is welcome, as is also the spectacular Japanese countryside through which Kafuku is sometimes driven to and from rehearsals. Kafuku himself is a tightly wound spring of melancholy emotion, and that feeling quietly sustains the unhurried pace of the film. The rehearsals of Uncle Vanya add yet another layer of potential meaning...One of these days it might be fun to watch Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street again. 

Brighton 4 follows a few weeks in the life of Kakhi, a famous wrestler in his home country of Georgia, now retired, who comes to the Brighton neighborhood of Brooklyn to find out how his son Soso is doing. He discovers that Soso isn't studying medicine, but working for a moving company, and he owes $15,000 in gambling debts to a local Russian gambling ring. He was planning to use that money to "buy" a marriage, and a green card, from a Russian woman named Lena. Kakhi moves into the boarding house with his son and gets a job caring for an elderly couple in a effort to raise money.

It's a harsh life, but made more agreeable by eating, drinking, and the spontaneous deep-throated singing of the men at the hostel.  In an amusing subplot, father and son, making use of Kakhi's still considerable wrestling skills, come to the rescue of two cleaning ladies who are being exploited by a Kazakh employer. Levan Tediashvili , a Georgian Olympic champion in real life, pretty much carries the film playing Kakhi, with his resigned, gentle force and humane disposition. The plot holds a few surprises, but the film succeeds  largely on the strength of the exotic ethnic milieu it depicts and the pathos of the individual lives it lovingly details.

I was interested to learn, reading about the film later, that the role of Soso's green-card fiancée Lena was played by Nadezhda Mikhalkova, the daughter of the great Russian director Nikolai Mikhailkov. His film Burnt by the Sun won the foreign film Oscar in 1995, though his earlier films Dark Eyes, The Slave of Love, Oblomov, and Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano, are all better.  

Mysteries (I Misteri) an Italian documentary that had its world premier in Minneapolis recently, has been described as "visually stunning, powerful and breathtaking." It's not. Rather, it introduces viewers to four minor Sicilian village festivals reminiscent of church events many of us may have been involved in as children, where costume-making, pageantry, and general horseplay abound. But these events are on a much larger scale, and in an Old World environment much more exotic and attractive than what you're likely to find in the Lutheran towns and suburbs of the American Midwest. That's what makes it fun. There is nothing powerful or breathtaking about boys trying to jump over a bonfire or walking out to the end of a wooden pole above the sea to grab a white rag. The energy and excitement comes from the fact that everyone in town seems to be involved in one way or another. The film lacks subtitles, so we have no idea what anyone is saying, and that, too, adds to the giddy atmosphere.

  

Most of The Great Silence takes place within the library of a mansion overlooking the Gulf of Naples, where author Valerio Princip writes his books. He has refused, with aristocratic distain, to sell the rights to various film and TV interests, and now finds himself strapped for cash, to the point where his wife, Rose, becomes determined to sell the distinguished edifice and move to somewhere less drafty and more affordable. In the course of this stagy production (which was originally a play) Valerio gets lectured not only by his wife, but also, in turn, by his two grown children, both of whom unload a litany of complaints about his lifelong pride, remoteness, and dedication to his work. Yet they don't seem to hear a word he says in defense of himself. The only person who really listens to and understands him is the family's long-time maid. In the course of the drama she helps him to see his life in an entirely new perspective.

Watching The Great Silence is a lot like watching a play. Little has been done to make it cinematic—we hardly see the exterior of the mansion, much less the Bay of Naples—and even the "library" is less than impressive, but the well-timed entrances and exits, odd-ball minor characters, and long-winded soliloquies have their own charm.

The Drama of the Gifted Squirrel

It was one of those mornings—sunny, open, medium warm—that can only be described as joyous. Sure, I had things to do, like arranging a few more pages of a book due out this summer devoted to St. Paul Saints baseball memorabilia. 

There were dishes in the rack to be put away, laundry to be done—I was feeling the need of a  clean pair of jeans—and yet, before all else, I felt it imperative to take a look at the daily Wordle.

I may be among the last people in the world to catch wind of this brief and easy word game that can be accessed by anyone with a New York Times digital subscription. The idea is simplicity itself: figure out a five-letter word by placing letters more or less arbitrarily into a matrix. Once you've placed your letters in the top line, you hit "enter," and any letters in the right place turn green, while a letter included in the word, but in a different position, will turn gold. You've got six tries, descending line by line, to get the word right.

It becomes progressively easier, of course, as some letters are eliminated and others find their correct position.  But there will always be an element of luck involved, too.

The inescapable role played by luck struck me with force a week or two ago, when, after entering two combinations of five letters, I had correctly determined that the last four in the mystery word were A, T, C, and H—a lucky feat in itself. The word that came to mind at that point was "watch," and I was about to enter the missing W, when another word occurred to me: latch. Pausing to reconsider my entry, I added match, catch, hatch, and patch to the pool of likely alternatives. Clearly it would be a matter of luck whether I got the correct answer on my third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try, or not at all.

I hear tell that some Wordle enthusiasts use the same word to open each day's contest. I have found that one of the pleasures of the game is choosing a different opening word every day, depending upon the mood of the morning, or sheer whimsy. The initial word ought to consist of common letters, of course, and it probably ought to include two vowels.  But you can see that to start the day with STEAM or STEAL would strike a very different note from starting it with CEDAR or CHAOS.  And how about ROAST?

Aside from the challenge of the game itself, a second pleasure is watching the letters flip from white to green or gold (or gray, if the chosen letter isn't in the mystery word) after you hit "enter." They don't instantaneously change, but roll from one  color to the other, like the tiles in Wheel of Fortune

Once the Wordle challenge had been met, and I'd set various household machines in motion, I knew it was time to get out into the day. The task I hit upon was to drive out to the Wild Bird Store in Minnetonka to buy the metal base required to move our bird-feeder farther away from the house, in hope that it would then be beyond the leaping distance of the very athletic gray squirrel who regularly hurls himself off the roof of our dining room, landing with a thud on top of our bird-feeder.

But the minute I opened the door, I saw that a box had been delivered, and I knew what was inside it: two books by the German novelist Peter Handke that I'd agreed to review for a literary magazine. The box itself was quite nice, unlike those shapeless gray plastic packages so many shippers use, and the books inside were even nicer, and it struck me immediately that a new day had dawned in the world of book jacket design. Probably quite some time ago.

I had been thinking about book covers, because I'd just finished reading That Awful Mess on Via Merulana by the Italian novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, first published in 1957. Gadda is considered the Italian Joyce, though he's much more fun to read. I caught wind of him decades ago while reading Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium,  where Calvino refers to Gadda's style as "macaronic." Now, decades later, having read Gadda's masterpiece, I can see why. I have a copy of the first American edition—sans dust jacket—and I used to say to myself, every time I noticed it on the shelf, "I'll never read that." Now I have. No sooner had I done so than I went down into the basement to hunt up my copy of Gadda's other distinguished novel, Acquainted with Grief. (Not that I'm going to read it any time soon. But who knows?)

Why I hung on to that book for so many years I have no idea. But there is was, dust jacket at all. The American edition came out in 1969, and it reminded me immediately of other books from that era, including Andrea Caffi's A Critique of Violence and Susan Sontag's Against Interpretation, perhaps the ugliest book ever designed. Serifs were very big in those days. Just compare these two covers, one from 1970, the other from 2022.

(Incidentally, you can read an in-depth essay on book cover design, and especially the recent re-branding of Jonathan Franzen's backlist titles, here.)

Out at the Wild Bird Store I selected the piece of hardware I needed, with the help of the sales clerk, who pointed out that the devise I was holding in my hand wasn't designed to support an eight-foot pole.

 I picked up a few bottles of cheap white wine around the corner at Trader Joe's, where the sales clerk, who hails from Devon, England, informed me that she was thoroughly enjoying the warm weather, but had not yet packed away her winter clothes.

"I don't want to jinx it," she said. 

I returned home and begin my spring handyman project.

Can a squirrel jump that far? I doubt it.

All went well. I got out the drill, selected some old screws from a jar, screwed down the base, and moved the pole roughly four feet farther from the house. It was so warm on the deck that I took off my hat and jacket. It was heaven.

And the smells of spring were in the air.

Note: Some readers may be racking their brains trying to figure out why the title of this entry sounds so familiar. They may have read, at some time in the past, The Drama of the Gifted Child by the German psychoanalyst Alice Miller. She doesn't have much to say about squirrels, but she does feature one of Peter Handke's early novels, A Moment of True Feeling, as a classic expression of the lasting effects of repressive early childhood education.   

A Few Good Films (and a Dog)

Belfast is a charming film about childhood, the perspectives of childhood, the importance of family ties, and the mindlessness of sectarian conflict. The director Kenneth Branagh refers to the story as semi-autobiographical, and he wrote the screenplay, so he ought to know. And the film's star, Jude Hill, is a very cute kid who has somehow succeeded in portraying a very cute kid named Buddy, who listens to his grandpa's cracker barrel wisdom in the alley and engages in mock sword fights with his friends in the street.

Branagh has peppered the narrative with mainstream cultural references that those of us who lived through those times will recognize, including quite a few Van Morrison songs and afternoon matinee films on the tellie like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence and High Noon, both of which deal with questions that Belfast also addresses, of violence and order, staying and going.

He also shot most of the film in a very sharp black and white that both he and cinematographer Haris Zambarloukous were convinced would heighten emotions and convey the vivid impressions of a young boy.

There are plenty of warm, humorous scenes in the film, and many of them take place on a single street, but beneath it all is an ever-present undercurrent of fear felt especially by the parents. Some of the local Protestants have formed gangs, and it one ten-minute scene early on, a mob goes on a rampage, breaking windows and hurling large stones in an effort to convince the few remaining Catholics in the neighborhood to leave.

Buddy's family is Protestant, but his parents want nothing to do with the strife. Buddy's got a crush on a Catholic girl in his class, and that's all right. His dad is being pressured to join one of the gangs, or contribute to it. No thanks. The local extortionist has always been a loser, a thug.  

Branagh wisely steers clear of grand political judgments and formulas; religious strife has been part of the history of Ireland for centuries and no one has figured it out yet. But he hasn't ignored the situation, either. It's part of the fabric of Belfast, and an integral part of the story of the street that Branagh, for much of his early life,  called home. 

Director Jane Campion has made two pretty good films (Angel at My Table and Bright Star) and two pretty bad ones—The Piano and her current feature, The Power of the Dog, which has quite a few problems, including bad acting, bad directing, and a bad script. This "western" shares with The Piano a very odd tone; we have no word for it in English, but it's the opposite of verisimilitude. Staginess, perhaps? The characters are one-dimensional, the dialog is stilted, and the delivery is often halting and hesitant, in the manner of a high school play where no one has properly memorized their lines and everyone is waiting for a whispered cue from behind the curtain. It just doesn't seem that any of this is really happening. I find it hard to believe that after riding herd together for a quarter of a century, a trail boss would refer to his brother repeatedly as Fatso. And a character named Bronco Henry sounds like something out of Monty Python.

The main character, Phil, is clearly upset about something, and it seems he's been that way since he teethed. Benjamin Cumberbatch has been praised for his portrayal, but anyone who's seen him in other places will know that he's merely Cumberbatching, with his intense and supercilious glassy-eyed stare and distain for his fellow man. It worked faily well for Sherlock and Alan Turing, less well for Hamlet (Branagh's version is infinitely better) and it works not at all in the Wild West. A more skilled actor (Gene Hackman? Robert deNiro? John Wayne?) would have wrapped that ferocious anxiety within a broader character that knew how to bond with his cowhands, his brother, his environment. As the minutes tick by, the question remains unanswered: Why should we care? Campion is engaged here in a sort of allegorical psycho-western, in which the atmosphere is thin and stereotypes abound.

As Hilary and I watched on the sofa in the den, I was reminded of my youth. Why? Because in those days my friends and I would often go to the Saturday matinee at the Avalon Theater in White Bear Lake to see The Guns of Navarone, Sink the Bismark, Thirteen Ghosts, or Call Me Bwana. And we would leave the darkened theater three or four times during the show to buy more popcorn, Milk Duds, or Junior Mints at the concession counter in the lobby. When we got back to our seats, we'd whisper to our friends, "What happened?" It didn't matter much.

The Power of the Dog is the kind of movie that you could leave for ten or fifteen minutes—time enough to even MAKE some popcorn—confident that you'd miss nothing of vital interest. In fact, it's the kind of film you want to leave for fifteen minutes, because it's often painfully obvious where things are headed—the piano recital scene, for example.

Of course, the psycho-western has a long, if not vaunted, history. The great Arthur Penn's directorial debut, The Left-Handed Gun (1958), with a very young Paul Newman in the title role, falls into that category, but a more full-bodied example, Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954), comes even earlier, with Sterling Hayden (usually smoking a big cigar) and saloon madam Joan Crawford exchanging Freudian quips that no one in real life would actually utter. It's described in Wikipedia, with uncharacteristic boldness, as a "gender drama with obsessive personalities flirting with dementia."

Perhaps the most successful of such psycho-westerns is Red River (1948), in which John Wayne and a very young Montgomery Clift engage in an oedipal struggle while on the first longhorn cattle drive from Texas to the new rail-line in Abeline. It's important to note here that, unlike The Power of the Dog, in Red River the story is actually robust and fairly convincing.

If you want good story-telling, rich in moral complexity, Iranian director Asghar Farhadi is your man. Though hardly a household name, he stands in illustrious company among only a handful of directors (Fellini, Bergman, Kurasawa) who have taken home the Best Foreign Film Oscar more than once. Perhaps his recent outing, A Hero, lacks the explosive energy of A Separation or The Salesman, but it shares their focus on decent people who try to extricate themselves from a jam but often succeed only in compounding their difficulties. The milieu—middle-class Iranian family life—is fascinating in itself, and the narrative development is both fascinating and excruciating, in so far as evasions and little white lies come back to haunt our "hero" as he tries to explain how he came upon a purse containing seventeen gold coins, and why he decided to return it to its owner. Reviewing a previous film, Roger Ebert once remarked, "The intriguing thing about [Farhadi's] screenplay is that it gets us deeply involved, yet never tells us who he thinks is right or wrong." In A Hero, Farhadi provides ample proof of the throw-away line that lies at the core of Jean Renoir's great film, The Rules of the Game: "Everyone has their reasons."

The documentary Summer of Soul focuses on a series of free weekend concerts held in Harlem during the summer of 1969, a few months before Woodstock took place. It consists of musical performances, of course—The Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Mann, Mavis Staples, Nina Simone, Stevie Wonder—but it also contains recent interviews with some of the headliners and some of the kids (now adults) who attended the event. First-time director Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson also weaves footage of the moon landing, the assassination of Malcolm X, and other contemporaneous events, and the result is both a joyous good time and a think piece about how our society has evolved--or not..