Joe Cillo

REMEMBER ME?

Look back and smile on perils past.
Walter Scott

It happens every day.  You open Facebook and find some forgotten person from long ago. My friend Barry re-discovered Gloria, his high school sweetheart there.  They both had been widowed the year before and…well, you know the rest.  They are now madly in love spending hot and heavy weekends together reminiscing about that lousy math teach who drove everyone crazy and the big mistake they made marrying someone else first.

I have not been so lucky.  The people who re-connect with me on Facebook are all part of a nightmare I prefer to erase.  They remind me that they knew me when I wore braces on my teeth and wandered through life with my head in a cloud, my feet encased in orthopedic oxfords.  I do not want to relive a time when I was ruled by parents, teachers and consensus.  Those days are past.

I can only suspect that the ones who contact me are so senile they do not remember anything more than my name. There could be no other reason.  I was not the hottest item on the block in days gone by.

Nonetheless, I fell in love with the unattainable on a regular basis and went to great lengths to let my targets know I was available.  When I look back on all of them now, I realize how desperate I was. Did I really want that short, pimply guy in my history class?  And why did my heart flutter at the sight of a boy in uniform.  Didn’t I realize that clothes cannot transform a boy into a man?

Not long ago, I got a friend request from Donny Okun who fancied me when I was nineteen and still hopeful. He was a sailor then who wore his bell-bottom trousers tight enough so I could see clearly what he had to offer. He sent me bouquets of roses every week for a month and then asked me to come with him to Canada for a night on the town.

OMG!  I was crossing the border with an honest-to-god sailor and you know what they say about sailors!!!  I threw caution to the winds and wore my most décolleté dress so he could see my equipment as clearly as I could see his.  We got in the car, I lit a cigarette and tossed the match out the window.

However, the window was closed and the flaming match ricocheted into my cleavage.  As both of us burrowed into my dress to keep me from bursting into flame, I realized all too clearly that I needed more than a pair of tight trousers to commit.

And now, this guy wants us to be friends?

I hit delete.  It was one of the wisest decisions I have ever made.

 

ART IS GOING TO THE APES

An ape cannot speak about his art
Anymore than a monkey can discuss a his digestion.
Jacques Cocteau and Lynn Ruth

In the late sixties, a gorilla won the Modern Art competition at the Detroit Museum of Art. The animals’ owner put several tubes of paint and a blank canvas in the ape’s cage.  The furry artist, whom I shall call Sybil, stomped on the tubes of paint and smeared the colors on the canvas with her paws.  After an hour, she tired of dancing and began eating the tubes of paint.  Her owner pulled the canvas out of her cage, hosed Sybil down and was amazed at the finished canvas.   It reminded him of a combination of a Jackson Pollack with a smattering of Kandinsky, a dash of Picasso and traces of Klee.  When Sybil’s masterpiece dried, he varnished it, framed it and entered it in the museum’s competition.

To his delight, the painting won first prize.  He bought a jeweled collar for Sybil, pinned a pink ribbon in her hair and brought her to the award ceremony. It was a little dicey getting her in the front door  but the owner insisted she was a service animal  He managed to keep her from molesting the guests by feeding her bananas and bit of cadmium red. When they called his name to accept the award, Sybil joined him on stage.  He told the astounded judges that it was not he who created the masterpiece they so admired.  It was his Sybil.

Years later, I took a class with the fabulously talented realistic painter Joseph Sheppard and he told me that Sybil was indeed a magnificent talent.  Indeed, he had joined her in her cage a few years after her triumph to raise money for the museum.  Together they painted a still life that hangs now in that same museum.

Evidently, gorillas not only paint, but they know what they are painting. Sister and brother gorillas Michael and Koko were taught sign language.  As a result, Koko (the artist in the family) was able to explain to her curator Dr. Penny Patterson, that she had painted a bird.

Just this past month, word is out that a zoo in North Dakota is selling the artwork of its 275 pound orangutan named Tal. His paintings are so colorful that they literally fly off the wall.  The animal’s favorite color is yellow and often he eats as much of the paint as he smears on his canvases. “Could be because it looks like a banana,” said the zoo’s curator.

There is no doubt that creativity is fundamental in the ape psyche. The animals  love using crayons, pencils and finger paint although they prefer oils they can eat. Everyone knows that children have the same propensity to eat the colors they use to paint. I believe we can learn a lot from the apes and their ability to transform their creative efforts into funds that support their favorite institutions.  I propose that we exhibit and sell all the paintings from local kindergarten classes to pay for amenities in their schools.  Think of it! We would no longer have to pay taxes to support education!  Our kindergartners would finance the system for us…and who knows?  There might be enough money left to reward the young artists with a few bananas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?

Politeness; The most acceptable hypocrisy.
Ambrose Bierce

British men are the politest animals in the universe.  The first thing they ask you is “Are you all right?” and, if you are an innocent, you believe they really want to know. They seem so caring, so mild, so…so sweet.  But underneath that proper façade, lurks suppressed anger, aggression and hatred boiling about, absolutely aching to let off steam.  Just ask any woman over 14.  She knows.  She has seen it.  She has defended herself against it. And she has won.

Obviously, male testosterone and animal aggression are at an all time high universally in this century.  In Spain, chastity belts are a way of life. In Greece,…well…we all know what those men do to a woman. In Britain, however all that hormonal activity  is repressed and re-channeled.

That is why the crime rate for men in Britain has plummeted.  The male Brit is simply too proper for confrontation. In the UK, the very idea of murder is terribly upsetting. It is so messy.  The thought of assaulting someone on the street is repugnant to a real gentleman (and we all KNOW how correct an Englishman must appear).  It might stain your shirt or even worse…leave a bruise.

Every woman in a heterosexual partnership can testify to the passive–aggressive garbage they must ignore every day (for they too are very PC.)  For example, it is a well-known fact that a man will always call you darling before he hits you.  Always.  It is the way it is done.

The truth is that any fellow who is British in bed, will always apologize and we women know why. We watch pornography, too.   In fact, although the maternal instinct is very strong, most women would prefer that their partner was not present at the conception of their children.  They always hope for a French intervention…or even an Italian one.  Those men don’t bother with protocol.  They just get in there and get the job done.

No full-blooded Englishman ever actually leaves his wife. That explains those tortuous 40-year alliances that drag on and on plodding through rearing the children, indulging the grand kids and going on cruises to ease the boredom of it all.   A real Englishman stays with his spouse and ignores for her for so long, that she is forced to leave to preserve her sanity.  Clever fellows!  That is how THEY become the injured one.

Besides, as every male knows, it is foolhardy to walk out of a partnership until he has found himself a proper house cleaner and a hot young thing for recreation.

The fact is that English MEN have a sense of entitlement that women must accept.  They get it from their mothers.  They know how to push the right buttons to make women and children indulge them and juries excuse their behavior.

The buttons they push these days are on their smart phones and their I-pads.  Men in this country are addicted to online bullying and misanthropic tweeting. It doesn’t leave a scar.  It is not unusual for a hard working woman, to slave away for 8 hours at the office, gallop to Lidl (she knows where to find the bargains) on the way home, Hoover the house as she charges through it to the kitchen to make a healthy stir fry for the children while her partner is belching quietly and watching television in the parlor, scratching his private parts.  As she tosses the pasta into the drainer and chops the garlic, she will inevitably hear a beep from her phone, glance at it and see a picture of a hot pair of baubles with a cryptic note:  “Why aren’t yours like this?”

Women are not bothered by all this foolishness.  After all, we can multi-task.  Don’t think you guys are the only ones with secrets.  Women always have the final say when it comes to any connection with a man.  We know how to say no.

 

 

Scheherazade

By Haruki Murakami

The New Yorker, October 13, 2014, pp. 100-109.

Translated from the Japanese by Ted Goossen.

In Haruki Murakami’s revisitation of this ancient classic, a woman the narrator calls ‘Scheherazade’ tells stories to her lover, Habara, “because she wants to.”  She seems to need to talk.  Nothing is at stake, certainly not her life.  Habara was enthralled by the stories because he was “able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment.”  They “eased [him] of worries and unpleasant memories,” and he needed this more than anything else.

The lovers don’t call each other by their names.  He doesn’t know hers, and she doesn’t use his.  “She barely spoke during their lovemaking, performing each act as if completing an assignment.”  She would leave at 4:30 to prepare dinner for her family, and Habara would be left to dine alone.  He watched DVDs and read long books.

There wasn’t much else to do.  He had no one to talk to.  No one to phone.  With no computer, he had no way of accessing the internet.  No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television.  (There was a good reason for that.)  It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside.  Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone.

It is a little hard to figure out what this relationship is all about — that is, why it even exists.

Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier.  He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.”  Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house.

  Apparently, having sex with him was part of her assignment as well.

no vow, no implicit understanding — held them together.  Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim.

So there seems to be some large, mysterious institutional force governing their lives and defining their roles and their functioning within this rather choreographed relationship.  It sounds like he might be under some sort of house arrest, or perhaps he has some disability or injury that he is recovering from.  It is never clear why these two people meet frequently and what motivates them, or why Habara has such a sense of confinement.  It is also unclear why they could not continue to meet even if this nameless, faceless force decided to terminate their “liaison.”

I think this ambiguity, this absence of internal motivations, is important.  Perhaps it is a comment on Japanese society.  I haven’t lived in Japan, so I cannot speak authoritatively on this, but from casual observation, it seems that many Japanese people live very structured lives that are defined by external forces, social expectations, that are a pervasive, overarching presence in their lives.  Thus, much of what they do and how they live is done in order to fulfill these imagined requirements and obligations, rather than from a deeply personal sense of purpose.  People don’t know why they are doing what they are doing, but they know they are supposed to do it — so they do.  What is the “reality that surrounds” Habara that he is so eager to forget, and thus so readily loses himself in Scheherazade’s narratives?  Japanese society.

I once met a young Japanese woman who had freshly arrived in the United States.  I asked her, “Why did you come to America?”  She replied simply, “Freedom.”  I was a little taken aback by that blunt response and all that must have been behind it, but I think it is not an uncommon sentiment among young Japanese women.  Japanese society can be burdensome and confining for young people and this relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, defined and controlled by a powerful unseen force, evokes that sense of invisible boundaries and sweeping tides.

There is nothing resembling spontaneity in this whole story, with the possible exception of their conversations.  The conversations after sex seem to be the only place in their lives where they can interact of their own volition  and participate in life as themselves.

Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. . . Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike either. . . to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life?  He couldn’t tell.

After this ambiguous set up of the relationship between Habara and Scheherazade, the story shifts focus and is taken over by a reminiscence Scheherazade relates from her adolescence that dominates the remainder.  Habara and Scheherazade, the couple, retreat and Scheherazade herself steps forward to claim center stage, specifically, a relationship — or, rather, an obsession — she had in her teens, which impelled her to break into houses — not to steal things, but to satisfy a psychological compulsion.  So it becomes a story within a story, or rather, a substory taking over what had been the main thread.

Scheherazade was obsessed with a boy in her high school class.  She broke into his house (rather easily through the front door with a key hidden under the doormat), and proceeded to go through his things, lie in his bed, smell his clothes, take a couple of innocuous souvenirs, and — very importantly, leave some small mementos of herself behind in inconspicuous places.  She is a rather aggressive girl, but in a very indirect way.  She never approaches the boy himself.  She tries to get close to him through the things he uses and lives with: by occupying the space he occupies, but when he is not there.

she began thinking about what to leave behind.  Her panties seemed like the best choice.  They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning.  She could hide them at the very back of his closet.  Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange?  But when she took them off, the crotch was damp.  I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought.  It would hardly do to leave something tainted by lust in his room.  She would only be degrading herself.  She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave.

Murakami does not write very well about sex.  He does not seem to understand it.  What I mean is he is detached from visceral passion.  Lust.  He doesn’t want to let himself or any of his characters feel it.  Neither Habara nor Scheherazade feel lust or strong passion in their relationship, and the above passage repudiates lust as a motivating force in Scheherazade’s behavior as a young girl toward the boy in her dreams.  It sanitizes her obsession with the boy.  It desexualizes her smelling his shirt and taking it home, lying in his bed, looking at his hidden pornography.  It makes the girl seem unreal and discredits her obsession with the boy.  If she had stuffed her wet panties under the boy’s pillow and approached him with a dripping cunt that was eager to fuck, it would have given her character more credibility.  She would have to do it in a Japanese way, of course.  Murakami could figure that out.  But Murakami cannot write the story that way.  He wouldn’t know what to do with a girl like that.  Believe me, there are plenty of Japanese girls who are not afraid of lust.

Scheherazade actually has more interaction with the boy’s mother than she does with the boy.  In fact, it seems likely that the boy never became aware of Scheherazade’s interest in him, although it is very clear that his mother did — and she put the kibosh on it.

When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool.  It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach.

The subsiding of Scheherazade’s interest in the boy is as amorphous and inexplicable as her obsession.  But it was the mother’s actions that locked the door and made the house inaccessible to her.  The boy himself was still readily available.  Scheherazade mentions watching him in classes at school and watching him on the soccer field.  She could have approached him in any number of ways.  It leads me to think that this obsession was more about the mother than it was about the boy.  Nothing she did had any impact on the boy, or even reached his awareness.  But the mother knew everything, or at least would soon discover everything, and Scheherazade knew this.  Still she pressed forward in defiant provocation.  It was an attempt at asserting independence — from the mother — through sex.  But it was quashed.  And it appears she never recovered.

Habara and Scheherazade have one more lovemaking session, at Scheherazade’s suggestion, and then she dresses and leaves.  It is not clear why Habara is left ruminating about the possibility — or rather, the certainty — of losing Scheherazade, and the greater specter of losing connection to all women.  Being “deprived of his freedom entirely” was the way he put it.  The invisible puppetmaster that pulls the strings on all of their lives and limits them to a very narrow range of possibilities, seems destined to pull the plug on his tenuous connection to humanity and leave him completely desolate.  This is his greatest worry.  There is nothing in the story to substantiate this fear, any more than there is anything in the story that explains why this affair is even taking place.

In the world Murakami creates these invisible forces that shape and define and limit our lives are both capricious and malevolent.  We can’t see them or influence them, yet we are always under their shadow.  Scheherazade gave a hint to the nature of that unseen, but all powerful governing force: the all knowing and all intrusive Mother, who locks doors and hides keys and crushes all free spirited love and passion.

One can look at this story in two ways as a commentary on the outward forces in Japanese society that define and structure and limit the lives of people, but it also represents a depiction of internal, unconscious forces within the self that restrict and crush the individual spirit.

The original story of Scheherazade was, perhaps, the earliest literary representation of a serial killer.  It remains paradigmatic.  An all powerful king who had felt betrayed and abandoned by one lover takes his revenge on all women thereafter.  Every day he marries a virgin and has sex with her.  The next day he beheads her and marries another.  This continues indefinitely, and endless stream of murdered, slaughtered virgins.  It is a tale of unbounded cruelty and hostility toward women from an original injury by one.  The king is so insecure and so lacking in his own sense of loveability that he feels he must kill each new woman or she will surely betray and abandon him.  This original insecurity and sense of being unloveable did not start with the lover who betrayed him, but rather, started with his mother who was never able to make him feel loved and secure in her love.  His rage was so extreme that he had to kill every woman he came in contact with.  It was the only way he could relate to women.  The betrayal of the first woman who touched off the spree was only the spark that lit a tinderbox that had been waiting for many years.  The injury that she inflamed had been inflicted many years prior, and indeed, goes back to the cradle.  Killing women was palliative, but not curative.  It assuaged his rage temporarily, like a valve letting off steam, but it did not begin to heal the original injury of neglect and abandonment that continued to fester and give rise to new waves of rage that demanded appeasement.  This is why serial killers need to keep on killing.  The mere venting of rage is not a cure.  Sex alone is also not a cure.  Scheherazade had the right idea.

Habara feels that abandonment by Scheherazade is inevitable.  It is only a matter of time.  This expectation was present before he ever met her.  It had nothing to do with anything she did or said.  His fear of being deprived of his freedom entirely is not a fear of external forces — there are no external forces — but rather of internal anxieties and insecurities that might cripple and disable his ability to connect on any level with women.  Scheherazade’s stories eased him of “worries and unpleasant memories” — most likely in relation to women.  He very likely had many of them starting way back with a mother who could not love or make him feel loved, and perhaps abandoned him.  Lust and passion are way too dangerous for a man this fragile.  Deep attachment is the utmost danger, because from an early age he learned that strong attachment leads to devastating disappointment — over and over again.  This is what the story is about.

The original story of Scheherazade ends optimistically, even triumphantly.  Murakami’s contemporary reworking is less optimistic, but has some promising trends.  The original story is a story of healing, through, perhaps, sated rage, coupled with satisfying sex, coupled with a continuing narrative whereby the wounded ruler becomes invested in the future.  Being able to see a way forward that is not an abyss of abandonment and devastation is a very important aspect of the healing process.  That is what Scheherazade’s narratives were able to do for the murderous king.  He was eventually able to fall in love with Scheherazade and make her his Queen.  A decisively optimistic outcome.

In Murakami’s story there is less healing and less optimism.   Murakami’s story ends with gloom and foreboding.  What is positive in Murakami’s tale is that Scheherazade and Habara were able to connect with one another in genuine communication from the heart through the stories she told after sex.  Sex was not the primary avenue of communication for this couple.  Their sex was obligatory and somewhat perfunctory.  The real action between them occurred afterward, when she told him stories of her past.  He took a genuine interest in her life and she found a receptive audience for things she needed to reveal.  This very positive connection aroused Habara’s anxieties of abandonment.  There has not been enough time to effect a healing of his underlying vulnerabilities and injuries, but if they continue, perhaps for A Thousand and One Afternoons, they might achieve a similar outcome to the original tale.

 

Hide and Seek

Directed by Joanna Coates

 

 

 

This film is a cross between summer camp, group therapy, and pornography.   Written by Daniel Metz and Joanna Coates, who are married to each other, perhaps it is a response to marriage.  This fantasy of four young people isolated in a pastoral setting, all having sex together and playing children’s dress up games to act out the conflicts in their lives is partly idealistic and mostly escapist.  The characters, except for Charlotte (Hannah Arterton), have no past and no connection to the outside world.  Nobody works; they are presumably a group of independently wealthy young actors.  It is not clear how they came together for this adventure in sex and self exploration, but it is clear that they do not know each other at the beginning, and are very uptight and uneasy with one another.  They like to create structure for their interactions.  They schedule who sleeps with who, they create performances for each other, they dress up in costumes and play role games like kids.  But they have sex like people in their 20s.  The sex is pretty good in this film.  There is one scene where one of the males is laying sideways across a bed with full erection masturbating.  Charlotte comes into the room and unexpectedly finds him in thrall, then quietly stands and watches.  It’s hot.

The film is rather slow moving, but then, it is not going anywhere.  It doesn’t really develop very much, nor do any of the characters, with the exception of Charlotte.   Charlotte is the only one with an explicit connection to the outside world and her own past.  She brings an ex-boyfriend to the farm to stay for a few days, apparently without an advance notice to any of the others in the group.  Simon (Joe Banks) shows up as a surprise and takes up an uneasy residence.  He is not well received by the group and his appeal to Charlotte to return to him fails.

The scene I liked best from the film was an enactment of a funeral for Simon that the four did after his departure.  They put an effigy in a makeshift casket, solemnly carried it outside and ceremonially burned it.  This was very good because it illustrates very well what you need to do when you break up with someone.  You have to have a funeral and burn the body of the deceased ex-lover, creating visible finality.  It makes that person psychologically dead — in your mind — and allows you to move on and open yourself to new possibilities.  It is very important to be able to do that.

I saw this at the Mill Valley Film Festival and afterward they had a Q&A with Daniel Metz and Rhea Mole, who played Leah in the film.  I asked Daniel to explain the relationship between the title, Hide and Seek, and the film.  He gave a rather lame response about the allusion the game Hide and Seek makes to childhood and how it resonates with the childlike play of the group depicted in the film.  OK, but that is a very oblique connection.  The content of the film doesn’t really relate to the performance of Hide and Seek as a childhood game.  I think titles are important and this title could use a little more imagination.

This film is a little reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman in its introspection, but it is far less dreary.  Bergman’s characters are depressed and self absorbed.  These characters have a genuine emotional and psychological connection to one another, despite the fact that they use role playing games for much of their communication.   Active, satisfying sex also gives them strong emotional bonds and a pervasive  underlying spirit of good will and mutual interconnection.

There is a lot that could be criticized about this fantasy and its viability as a lifestyle.  Particularly, since this film isolates the four from most connection to the larger society.  It is those outside connections that create stresses and pressures that often derail such alternative lifestyle experiments.  This film also does not deal with who these people are in terms of their development as persons, where they came from, and why and how they gravitated toward this exotic experiment with a group of strangers.   The internal dynamics driving each of them as individuals is left unexplored, and those forces would undoubtedly impact the outcome of such an experiment.

One thing I would judge positive about the film is that its portrayal of the characters and their lifestyle is ultimately optimistic.  It does not end with failure and breakup and estrangement.  All four of them remain committed to the group of four, despite an array of assaults, both internal and external.  They feel it is a rewarding, enriching, happy experience and at the end they are staying together.  I don’t know if that counts as happily ever after, but it is an upbeat, positive judgment.  The film puts forward an interesting, unusual alternative lifestyle and presents it sympathetically.  It leaves a lot to be desired in the execution, but I am in accord with its spirit.

Bloody Daughter

A Film by Stephanie Argerich

 

 

The title of this film is misleading.  It suggests either abuse or extreme hardship or menstruation, but none of these play out in the film.  While ninety percent of the film focuses on Stephanie Argerich’s mother, the renowned pianist, Martha Argerich, the title comes from her father, Stephen Kovacevich, himself a pianist of the first order, and seems to refer to the roughness in Stephanie’s relationship with him.  He offers an explanation of the term ‘bloody daughter,’ which doesn’t quite make sense, and seems to reflect confusion and misunderstanding.  The term ‘bloody’ is a British expletive of disputed origins which is used as an intensifier, similar to the way we use ‘damn’ in the United States, or a less savory word that is much rougher and cruder.  It doesn’t really fit well with the content of this film.  I wish they had been able to dream up a different title.

But the film is outstanding.  It is a disarmingly intimate portrait of a very unusual family of remarkably talented people.   It is classified as a documentary, but it is actually a personal journal, rather than an attempt to construct an organized narrative of the facts.  There are very intimate scenes throughout this film.  Things one would not ordinarily include in a documentary.   A sequence of Martha waking up in bed in the morning and sipping her coffee at her bedside.  A tense scene between Stephanie and her father doing paperwork to obtain his official acknowledgement of Stephanie as his daughter.  Kovacevich has stalled and dragged his feet on this matter for thirty-four years.  No explanation of what that is about.  An outdoor scene of Martha and her three daughters painting their toenails and discussing their lives in a park.  Martha is on camera through most of the film.  Stephanie is intently preoccupied with her mother.  There are many close ups of her mother’s face and eyes, as if she is trying to incorporate her mother or understand her mother through the camera.

While there is a lot of conflict and tension within this family, there is also great warmth and strong personal bonds.  I wouldn’t call this a dysfunctional family at all.  The members are engaged with one another, there is good communication between them, and there seems to be a lot of basic good will among them, despite some friction and misunderstanding.   They are a family that introspects more than is common in the United States, I would judge.  They seem to make a genuine effort to understand themselves and their relationships to a degree that I find unusual as an American.  American people are not very self-knowing, and one seldom hears them discuss their family relationships with much sensitivity or insight.  This film is strikingly different in that respect.

There is great music throughout the film.  Both Martha Argerich and Stephen Kovacevich are world class pianists.  There are sequences of them performing at various stages of their lives.  It is clear that music serves as an adhesive that binds all of these people together.

The film is in French and English with subtitles available in a number of other languages as well.  There is a menu where you can select.  Argerich speaks French despite originating in Argentina.  Kovacevich is American, but has lived most of his adult life in England.  Stephanie speaks English, and French with her mother.  If you like classical music, piano, or European life and culture, this is an excellent film that is a personal, in depth study of a fascinating family of top quality musicians.

The Last of Robin Hood

Directed by Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland

 

 

 

I have no criticisms of this film.  It is excellent in every respect.   It depicts the last couple years of Errol Flynn’s life (Kevin Kline) and his relationship with Beverly Aadland (Dakota Fanning).   Beverly Aadland was fifteen at the time the relationship started, although she passed for twenty.  Flynn comes off more favorably and sympathetically than he probably was in real life, but it was a positive, convincing portrayal of his relationship to Beverly Aadland.

Flynn involved Beverly’s mother Florence (Susan Sarandon) in the relationship, having her accompany them on trips and appear with them in public places.  It provided cover for his relationship with the young girl, and Florence cooperated and even encouraged the relationship.

It is an interesting romantic story: well acted, well conceived, and well presented.  I think the significance of this film is that it strikes a blow against some of the prejudice and nonsense that seems to prevail in our culture regarding sexual relationships across wide age gaps and with partners who are quite young — “underage,” as if the government can draw a line and declare people beneath a certain age boundary unfit, or unsuited, or incapable of behaving and functioning in a constructive sexual relationship, when it is well known that people show erotic response and interest in things sexual literally from birth.

I can tell you for a fact that many young women are attracted to men considerably older than themselves and that such relationships as depicted in this film are much more common that might be realized.  The vast majority of them play out in quiet discretion, but occasionally one is exposed and made into a public sensation and sanctimonious prosecution.

I think there is a growing perception that these laws and these hysterical prosecutions are much more destructive and pathological than the relationships that are their objects.  Lives and careers are destroyed, families are broken up, communities are disrupted and riven, institutions are shaken and weakened.  All over a little bit of sex with a young person.  It’s foolishness.  Sex does not harm children.  That has never been proven by anyone.   How could it?  Children are capable of erotic arousal from a very early age.  They are curious and quite readily explore it given the opportunity.  It is quite natural.

We live in a society where it is perfectly legal to train children how to use automatic weapons, but if you show a child an erect penis, you can be put in jail and tarred with being a sex offender for the rest of your life.  There is something wrong with that, ladies and gentlemen.  I think that the perversity of this is beginning to emerge into consciousness across a wide swath of American society.

These laws creating the concepts of “statutory rape,” or “child molestation,” are a legacy of religious prejudice and are designed to prevent children from growing up with healthy, accepting attitudes toward their bodies and their desires.  In recent years we’ve seen increasing havoc created throughout society at all levels by the boundless viciousness with which these laws are enforced.  It is time to dial this all back and rethink this in a fundamental way.  Religious conservatives have succeeded in hijacking the power of the state to enforce their negative sexual agenda on the entire society.  State power has replaced ecclesiastical courts.  This is improper and unconstitutional.  In 2003, in Lawrence v. Texas, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down laws against sodomy making consensual sex between same sex partners legal in all fifty states of the United States, although such sexual acts have been condemned by religious ideologies for centuries.  It was a declaration of independence for the state against the tyranny of religious prejudice in policing sexual behavior.  This trend needs to continue and be carried forward.

This film, while not belaboring the point, serves as an illustration of the wrongheadedness of the current statutes governing sexual relations between young people and adults.  It is an indirect critique of the current sexual regime in our legal system and a blatant contradiction to widespread prejudices against relationships that cross wide gulfs in age.  An excellent job on a neglected, but much needed theme.

This is a letter I wrote recently to Dr. Patrick J. Ferrillo Jr., Dean of the University of the Pacific, Arthur A. Dugoni School of Dentistry.  It conveys my reaction to their new clinic that opened in July at 155 5th St. in San Francisco. 

 

Dear Dr. Ferrillo,

Yesterday I had the privilege of being treated as a patient at your new clinic at 155 Fifth Street in San Francisco.  I have been a patient at the University of the Pacific Dental School for over twenty years, and your students and faculty have done a marvel with my teeth for which I am very grateful.

However, my reason for writing today is that I was disturbed and troubled by my experience yesterday, so much so, that I feel compelled to write and share my thoughts and observations with you.  My student dentist, (name omitted) and his assistant, (name omitted) were excellent and showed great capability and conscientiousness.  This letter, though, has nothing to do with their performance or my treatment as a dental patient.  It has, rather, to do with the ambience and character of the new space where the clinic is now located.

My initial impression as I walked through was one of sterility and impersonality.  I don’t mean sterility in the sense of the absence of bacteria, but rather the absence of human warmth and personality.  This initial impression grew and intensified throughout the afternoon.

The layout and arrangement of the new clinic has been calculated in every consideration to minimize the interaction between the student dentist and the patient.  The patient sits in a chair that is facing into the back of the cubicle, with the student’s workstation and computer directly behind the patient.  The result is that the student is constantly talking to the back of the patient and the patient is responding away from the dentist into empty space.  The student may try to lean around the back of the chair and the patient may try to twist his body on that uncomfortable seat so they can see each other a little bit, as we did, but it is a very awkward, uncomfortable, stilted way to conduct a conversation.  And the effect is that it discourages the patient and the dentist from talking to each other anymore than is absolutely necessary, reducing personal interaction to an absolute minimum.  I believe this was a deliberate, conscious choice on the part of the interior designers.  I would not say that the layout of the space was thoughtless.  On the contrary, I think it has been carefully thought out under the guidance of the most perverse and misguided values.

One positive thing I can say about the interior design is that the cubicles are spacious.  There is plenty of room in those cubicles in contrast to the ones on Sacramento Street, which were so cramped that the students could hardly move around the dental chairs.  It is too bad that you have made such poor use of that generous spatial allotment.  The student’s computer is positioned on an unmovable pavilion at the front of the cubicle that divides and partially blocks the wide entranceway creating a closed in effect.  Perhaps it was intended as a visual obstacle to make it less easy to see in or out of the cubicle.  But its immobility means that the student has to do all of his work and analysis out of sight of the patient.  The patient never sees what the student is looking at.

At one point early on, my student presented me with a small electronic tablet on which I was to sign my name to authorize charges.  But the cord was too short.  It wouldn’t reach from the computer station to the dental chair.  I had to twist awkwardly on the chair and reach around and the student did something I could not see to get a little more length out of the cord so I could sign my name.  This is one example of the ridiculous inconvenience of having the computer and related equipment on something that cannot move, and positioned so that the patient in the chair is completely excluded from it.

When the instructor comes to discuss the case with the student, the discussion takes place behind the patient with the patient facing in the opposite direction being unable to participate or comprehend what is being discussed.  The patient is effectively excluded from the deliberations on his own case.  I think this was also a conscious, considered decision in the design.

The height of the partitions between the cubicles is about shoulder high effectively preventing anyone who is not standing up (and many that are) from seeing anything else that is going on in the clinic.  This underlines the sense of isolation that the patient feels being positioned away from the dentist and his associates who are working on him.  In the Sacramento Street clinic a person sitting upright in a chair could see all around the clinic humming with activity.  I always enjoyed this and found it stimulating and interesting to watch: the people coming and going, the diverse activities, the buzz of conversations, the attractive female dental students.  It provides stimulation and a sense of inclusion and participation in a group activity.

On your website you boast that the dental school, “is renowned for its humanistic model of education.  Accentuating the positive, respecting the individual and empowering its dedicated faculty to provide the best possible learning environment for every dental student are among the school’s primary goals.”  I had to laugh when I saw that.  This new clinic makes a mockery of those values.  This new space is one of the most inhuman, depersonalized environments I have ever seen in a medical context.

This is all justified under the guise of preserving the patient’s privacy.  What does that amount to?  Is it that you imagine that people do not wish to be seen or have it known that they are being treated in your clinic, like it’s some pornographic book store?  Or do you think people might feel self conscious or embarrassed should someone see them laid back in a dental chair with their mouth open being worked on by the student dentists?  This is a very minimal inconvenience and should not drive the design of the entire clinic.  The feeling of self consciousness or embarrassment is a signal that one is not alone.  It is impossible to feel self conscious when one is alone.  In order to eliminate the feeling of self consciousness, of being vulnerable in the gaze of another person, it is necessary to eliminate all sense of connection, to create a sense of solitude, which is exactly what you have done.  It is a great price to pay to remedy a most unobtrusive problem, if it can even be called a problem.  I would just call it a phenomenon, a condition of the experience of being in a teaching clinic.  It should be seen as benign since it underlines the sense of participating in a communal activity.  It creates a sense of inclusion and mitigates whatever indignity one might feel by virtue of the fact that we are all subject to the same conditions and we all share a common experience in this place.

The elevation of “patient privacy,” to a paramount value, I don’t see as benevolent.  I see it as another instance of the dehumanization and depersonalization that is increasingly pervading society in our architecture and our public space.  “Privacy” is interpreted to mean minimizing interpersonal contact by structuring the physical environment to make it as difficult as possible.  This new dental clinic is a paradigmatic example of that trend.

However negative these effects that I have pointed out are on the patient, the most insidious and detrimental impact of this architectural misdirection is the impact it has on the students and on their relationship with their patients, and most importantly, on their attitude toward their patients.   Throughout the afternoon I pointed out to my student dentist the things that I saw wrong with the way the clinic and the cubicle space was laid out.  His attitude was “Well, that may be, but these are the conditions that are given and we have to make the best of them.”  At the end of the day, when his assistant walked me to the escalators she asked me what I thought of the new clinic.  When I explained to her exactly what I thought about it, she probably wished she hadn’t asked.  But she could understand my point of view, but again, she is reconciled to a circumstance about which she can do nothing.

So what is going to happen is that students, and faculty alike, are simply going to  accept this as the given conditions in which they must work.  And they will make the best of it, of course.  But they will fail to perceive the impact that this is going to have on their interactions with their patients and on their relationships with their patients — if there are to be any relationships.  These conditions discourage the formation of “relationships.”  The patient becomes an impersonal “object” to be worked on.  The whole atmosphere becomes depersonalized.  The students will accept this as “normal.”  They will be conditioned to expect things to be this way.  It won’t be taught.  It won’t be pointed out.  It will just be absorbed the way one breathes poisoned air.  This is the most far reaching and malignant impact that this architectural affront will have as long as this clinic exists.  It affects the many thousands of people who will be treated in this clinic in the coming years, but it will extend beyond the clinic and affect the character and practice of dentistry in the United States more broadly by virtue of the students who will be acculturated to this impersonal style of relating to their patients.  This is a public issue that goes well beyond my personal case and even beyond the clinic.

If I were in your position I would fire the people from the university who were on the design committee for this clinic, and sue the architectural firm that realized the design and layout of this clinic for creating a brutal, oppressive atmosphere for the students and faculty to work in and for the patients to be treated.

There are three things you can do to fix that place, although it would be expensive.  But I think the expense would be worth it and would create a permanent improvement in the ambience of that clinic for every single person who comes through it or works in it.

1.  The dental chairs need to be turned 180 degrees, so they are facing out toward the entrance of the cubicle rather than toward the back wall.

2.  The computer and all of the related equipment needs to be on a mobile stand that the student can move as he needs to, instead of being in a rigid, fixed location.  It should be closer to the patient and visible to the patient.

3.  The height of the partitions between the cubicles should be about half of what they are now, giving anyone sitting up in a chair a full view of the entire clinic.  This would not enable people to see patients who are prone and being worked on.  It would simply create a panorama of visual interest and a sense of inclusion, rather than isolation.

Since this issue is of public interest rather than my personal medical case, I decided to post this letter on my blog where the world can see it https://forallevents.com/reviews/.  I think it is important for people to resist the depersonalization that is taking place more and more in our public spaces and our architecture, and the first step in resistance is to point out what is happening.  So that is why I am writing to you and that is why I am posting this in a public forum that others may perceive and be inspired to speak out and voice their opposition to the creeping dehumanization that is affecting all of us, and to prompt the University of the Pacific to live up to the humanistic values that it professes.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         Sincerely,

Michael Ferguson

Magic in the Moonlight

Directed by Woody Allen

I spent most of this movie wondering why it was made.   It is not a movie about characters and plot and story line so much as it is a movie about contentious grappling with big philosophical issues.  Does God exist?  Is there an afterlife?  Is there a “spiritual” realm apart from the world we see and experience, and do some people have special access to it?  How much faith should we put in science and rationality?  Do we need our illusions to maintain our humanity?  A rather esoteric constellation of topics for a mainstream movie.  The characters are rather simplified and cartoonish.  The plot is contrived and manipulative.  Yet the film is so well made, so well acted, and there are enough surprises that you are prevented from being bored to death with these tiresome philosophical arguments.

Woody Allen seems to like Europe, the 1920s, Dixieland jazz, and the well off and educated.  There are allusions to books and writers like Nietzsche, Shakespeare, Dickens, Freud, etc.  You have to have gone to college and studied liberal arts to watch this movie.  The characters have some intriguing qualities, but he is not interested enough in them to develop them or their relationships in any depth or complexity.   The girl, Sophie, (Emma Stone) is beautiful, but he seems hostile toward her.  She starts out attractive and appealing, but then morphs into a deceitful, conniving, low class, criminal.  He can’t seem to make up his mind whether to let a romance develop between her and Stanley (Colin Firth).  Finally, with her exposure as a fraud, the romance angle is repudiated once and for all, but then turns around yet again as the curtain is coming down in a very unconvincing reappearance for a happy ever after ending with Stanley.  It reflects the confused, indecisive character of this whole film.  There is some humor that works.  It works to some extent on the level of light entertainment, but the simplified, distorted characters lack the substance to give weight to the serious issues that the film wants to be preoccupied with.  I just didn’t get the “message” that this film was trying to get across, but it did seem to be trying to get some kind of a message out.  Some people in the theater applauded at the end, but not me.