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?

________________________

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.. 

The Nick of Time - Courtroom Concert

Just when the pandemic winter was beginning to get old, we took the drive to St. Paul to attend a noon Courtroom Concert sponsored by the Schubert Club. They had corralled one of the region's outstanding interpreters of art song, mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski, to perform the world premier of four song cycles written by equally stellar local composers David Evan Thomas and Libby Larsen. As an added treat, the text of two of the four cycles drew upon poems by the late, great local poet, Louis Jenkins.

It's customary on such occasions to dwell on the international Kudos of the artists in question. For example, Clara was the first American prize winner at Thomas Quasthoff's International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany back in 2017. But these artists have been with us for a while, and the event, fuelled by host—and also distinguished composer—Abbie Betinis's irrepressible enthusiasm, had a distinctly joyous yet also a down-home feel, as if a bunch of kids, after spending hours cooped up in their rooms, had finally been given permission to go out and play.

Although I don't know any of these artists personally, I felt like I did. After all,  Libby Larsen was my T.A. for a music history class decades ago. And at one of Clara's recitals on the U campus, I said to the woman passing out brochures, who was concerned about the performer's immediate whereabouts, "You seem to know Clara quite well."

"I guess I do," she replied. "I'm her mother."

Clara added a new chapter to this sense of neighborhood familiarity, shallow though it may be, at the recital, when Abbie asked her to explain why a poem by an obscure poet, Henry Lorentzen, had been set to music.

"Libby asked me to choose a poem for her, and I picked that one. I grew up on a ranch in North Dakota, and when I was nine I saw it framed on the kitchen wall of a neighbor's house one day. I copied it down, word for word, and have kept that sheet of paper ever since...And I have it right here!" She grinned as she held up an unlined sheet of coarse paper on which you could see, even from the tenth row of chairs, several uneven lines of child-like block letters, in pencil.

May I an Artist Be?

Master of the sky and earth,

May I an artist be;

That I may catch the spell of lands,

And of the billowed sea?

Guide my erring hand at times

If it does not present, the charm

Of youth or silver hair,

As truthful as is meant.

May I preserve upon the wall

The strong, the fleet, the meek.

Or flowered landscape with

A home - it is for this I seek.

Her dream has come true. The rich, dark, and often haunting timbre of Clara's voice  was a pleasure to listen to throughout. And the fresh and bracing mood of the recital was enhanced by the natural fluidity of the art song form itself, in which the vocal line is typically relieved somewhat from the constraints of harmonic integration, often weaving and bobbing to convey the meaning of a piece of text or the patterns of human speech, while the piano accompaniment not only maintains the "field" but also adds color and programmatic detail. For example, in the first song in Libby's North Shore cycle, delicate pianistic flourishes seemed to evoke the lines

Steam rises from our bodies

and forms high, thin clouds

that go racing past the moon over the lake

            

Before Clara performed his cycle "Children of the Night," David provided some details about the life and work of Edwin Arlington Robinson, who wrote the poems involved. David also reminded us of what a niche form the art song is, and how rare and pleasing it was to have an artist of Clara's caliber actually perform it.

For me, the most shocking moment in the show was when Abby asked how many people in the audience were familiar with Louis Jenkins' work. Out of perhaps a hundred guests, no more than six or seven people raised their hands. That's a shame. Almost unbelievable. It's rare that I head north on vacation without throwing one or another of Louis's books into the book bag: The Winter Road, Sea Smoke, Just Above Water, North of the Cities, Before You Know It. Titles pulled off the shelf at random. A good place to begin exploring his work would be Where Your House is Now: New and Selected Poems, published by Nodin Press in 2019, the year he died.

Louis was a master of the prose poem, humorous and droll, fatigued and wonder-struck, likely to veer off from the subject at hand in a new direction following a logic both natural and obscure. But that dead-pan humor is lost when sung in a lovely, leaping female voice. I loved the music, but quit following the text, because I heard little of Louis's wise and weary humor in the sparkling leaps and bounds.  

Ten Matinees

 

After quite a few months of ignoring films, we got the bug recently and saw eight or nine of them. We streamed some and actually went to the theater several times. Here are brief descriptions of a few of the best.

Licorice Pizza

 The pace is steady, the setting is interesting, the characters are unusual, and so are the social dynamics in this romance/adventure/coming-of-age story. Sean Penn, Tom Waits, and Bradley Cooper show up in bit parts, but the two leads, both of them relative unknowns, hold the screen quite well on their own. Gary is a chubby, self-confident go-getter who seems to be starting a new business every five minutes, though he's only fifteen. He takes a fancy to Alana, a testy twenty-five-year-old working on the staff of the company taking pictures for Gary's high school annual. Her life is going nowhere, which may explain why she starts spending time with Gary, though she repeatedly makes it very clear that she is NOT his girl friend. Lots of unexpected developments, odd situations, and adventures ensue. Director Paul Thomas Anderson knows how to make things look "cool," even if it's a 1970s San Fernando Valley cool. And the soundtrack has got a good vibe, too.

Parallel Mothers

In recent years I had lost track of, or maybe lost interest in Pedro Almodóvar's films, so I'm in no position to call Parallel Mothers a return to form, but it's a nice piece of work, putting his singularly bright sense of color and soap opera-ish mise-en-scène to the service of a complex narrative, superbly acted by Penelope Cruz and Aitana Sánchez-Gijón, who play unwed mothers-to-be, a generation apart in age, who meet in the maternity ward of a Madrid hospital and through a strange set of circumstances, eventually become friends. Almodóvar's youthful zaniness is entirely absent from the work, but a heightened political consciousness fills the gap, and the personal drama is riddled with subtle turns that the actors convey in numerous conversational close-ups. I especially liked the scene in which Cruz explains to the much younger Sánchez-Gijón how to make a tortilla—that is to say, the kind of potato-egg pie you see standing unrefrigerated on the counter in every working class bar in Madrid. Sánchez-Gijón comes from a well-off conservative family, and she's never seen it done.   

Being the Ricardos

Like last year's Hollywood dud Mank, this film is intricate and ambitious, but in the end, it doesn't quite satisfy. Javier Bardem doesn't look like Desi Arnez, and he doesn't seem to have Desi's good-humored and shallow flashiness. (He was better cast as the killer in No Country for Old Men.) Nicole Kidman fares better as Lucille Ball, but in the end, viewers may long for the on-stage Lucy rather than the talented and competent but somewhat humorless woman who played the part. Still, it's free on Netflix and it's a high-quality production.    

The Hand of God

Also free on Netflix, and perhaps the BEST movie I saw in recent months, this Neapolitan coming-of-age tale was directed by Paolo Sorrentino, whose film La Grande Bellezza won the Foreign Film Oscar a few years ago. I saw that film, which was set in Rome, and it struck me as dazzling in parts, but too long, and too decadent. Reviews had it that Sorrentino's subsequent effort, a sprawling work based on the life of notorious Italian prime minister Berlusconi, was worse. But The Hand of God has the dazzling, shimmering beauty of the Bay of Naples and the personal rootedness and feeling of an autobiographical tale. (Some of the best parts of La Grande Bellezza were the flashbacks to childhood.)

The story includes high-speed boat chases, practical jokes, family picnics and feuds, film sets and theater stages, mistresses and monks and soccer, filling the screen with color and life. But the thread holding it all together is the young son Fabietto, who has no idea what he's going to do with his life. His chief interests seem to be his gorgeous but mentally unstable aunt, and the fact the famous Argentine soccer star Diego Maradona has signed a contract to play for Naples.

At one point Fabietto's mother asks him what he plans to study at university. He answers, somewhat tentatively, "philosophy."

She looks down for a few seconds, then says cautiously, "What is that?"

After a pause, he replies, "I don't know."

There are quite a few odd characters in the film, and viewers may be reminded here and there of Fellini's nostalgic film Amarcord, but Sorrentino's work veers far less often into caricature and the grotesque. He emphasizes richness rather than crassness, and sustains a depth of feeling reminiscent not of Fellini but of such Italian directors as Francesco Rosi and Ettore Scola.

The Last Duel

Maybe they should have called it "The Last Gruel." Director Ridley Scott, whose well-known films run the gamut from Thelma and Louise and Bladerunner to Alien and Gladiator, here tried his hand at a medieval morality tale, but without the morality, or the moral. The tone is rough and wisps of pageantry are few and far between. The battle scenes steer clear of gratuitous gore, but this may simply be because everyone wears so much armor that the blood rarely leaks out.

We might describe the plot as a love triangle, except that there isn't much love in it. Early on in the action the paths of Jean de Carrouges and his friend Jacques Le Gris diverge as Carrouges "wins" the hand of Marguerite, the daughter of a nobleman who "backed the wrong horse" by defecting to the English side in recent conflict. Meanwhile, Le Gris makes use of his monastery education to be of service to the local nobleman who controls the fate of Carrouge's family estate. Carrouges isn't a bad man, but his strengths lie along the lines of combat and loyalty, rather than gentility and grace, and Matt Damon struggles to breathe life and interest into the character. The ladies at court, including Marguerite, find the supple tongue and dashing figure cut by Adam Driver as Le Gris more attractive. And when Ben Afleck, as the local lord, Pierre d'Alençon, transfers the Carrouge estate from the dour heir apparent, whom he dislikes, to the bon vivant Le Gris, with whom he shares some illicit tastes, the entire situation begins to go south.

Scott employs the "Rashoman" device of telling the tale three times over, each time from a new perspective, and this livens the film at several points. But there's really no one to root for here, and we may leave the theater mouthing the remark of Aristotle—or was it St. Augustine?—"There is no justice in this world."       

The Disciple

This quiet film follows the career of one Sharad Nerulka, who has devoted his life to studying classical Hindustani music under an obscure but semi-legendary vocalist while making ends meet by working for a friend who digitalizes LPs and tapes. His guru is elderly and frail, and Sharad has also taken on a few of the man's domestic responsibilities. The film develops placidly, almost blandly, with a few performances by the "master," some lessons, and conversations among friends who are following a similar path, including a young woman that Sharad has taken a liking to. (She doesn't return the interest.)

Sharad also draws inspiration from a set of tapes that he listens to while riding his motorcycle at night, on which an obscure (but evidently legendary) female vocalist from a previous era dispenses esoteric advice about dedication, selflessness, long years of sacrifice, and other quasi-Zenlike motivational notions. Sharad tries to absorb these teachings and put them to good use, but he finds it hard to shake the feeling that he's not very good, and isn't getting much better. The hollow, gloomy, countenance of first-time actor Aditya Modak in the title role tells the same story: selfless dedication isn't enough if you haven't got the talent. (Sharad's father wasn't much good at it, either.)           

Writer-director Chaitanya Tamhane, who worked with Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón on Roma, has lined up a diverse set of episodes to keep the story afloat. The film is shot in long takes with a static and often low-angle camera, in the manner of Ozu. The singing itself is a sort of melismatic improvisation, with plenty of quarter-tones involved, accompanied by some tapping on a bongo-like tabla and a sitar drone. The guru is pretty good at it. At the start of the film, I found it incomprehensible, if not exactly irritating; two hours later, I was wishing I could hear a little more.

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky

"Whimsical" is a term often used to mask mediocrity, but this film from Georgia (the country, not the state) begins with a fable-like premise and then settles down, through a long string of plausible and occasionally enchanting episodes, to examine the consequences. It's a tale of star-crossed lovers at a bar in Tbilisi, and what we witness is what happens between people when that initial period of infatuation is removed from the equation. In fact, we soon lose sight of the initial issue as a series of new challenges present themselves. To call the film "low-key" would be an understatement. But it's also unpredictable, humorous, and touching.     

Don't Look Up

Leonardo diCaprio plays an astronomer, Jennifer Lawrence plays a grad student, Meryl Streep plays the president, Cate Blanchett plays a FoxNews host, and Ariana Grande plays a pop star. A meteor is about to strike Earth. What did you expect? It's a lot of fun, though it isn't as good as The Big Short. And it won't end the climate catastrophe. Then again, neither did Al Gore.