Joe Cillo

FURY

Anger is never without a reason,
But seldom a good one.
Benjamin Franklin

Whenever I go back to the San Francisco Bay Area, I am immersed in non-stop road rage.  Drivers swerve around you, hit the accelerator to get ahead of you, blast their horns to tell you to get out of their way and spew hate all over the highway.  I find myself getting just as angry as the other drivers as I try to weave my way through 6 lanes of traffic to get to my destination.  I come home exhausted, despising humanity and hating myself for succumbing to the hysteria that clogs our roads.

It is a glorious relief to come to peaceful Brighton where I walk everywhere, smile at everyone and love treading the streets. Humanity charms me when I am here and I find myself enjoying the kindly hustle and bustle on North Street.

I have always thought that road rage was so foreign to those who use public transportation in Britain, that they would sooner stage a massacre than be rude to another person.  Besides, it is not in the British personality to be rude or overbearing.  The people in this country are obsessed with being politically correct.

Or so I thought.

I just spent two weeks in London living in Stockwell and taking the tube to Leicester Square. That was when I was exposed to Tube Rage.  If I dared to try to tap my oyster card on the entrance gate during rush hour, I risked black and blue marks, mangled hips and fractured elbows.  When I approached the escalator, I was so terrified I shut my eyes and prayed to the almighty that my foot wasn’t crushed and I was not hurled down the moving staircase because I forgot to stand on the left.

It turns out that all this pushing, shoving, jostling and crushing is not due to rudeness at all.  It is the result of poor ventilation.  In fact the director of the British association of Anger Management warns that lack of oxygen is sure to cause uncontrolled acts of aggression.

What a relief!! I thought all those people shoving me around were ageist brutes who didn’t care that I am elderly and frail.  How wrong I was! When the British push you out of their way, it is a silent cry for air.

Which brings us right back to Brighton where fresh air is always swirling about us, filling our lungs with new oxygen from France.  I boarded a train at London Victoria and two people hit me in the shin in their rush to get to the coach first. One lady smashed her suitcase into my hip and another yanked my shoulder into a vertical position to reach the aisle seat.  The minute we all got off the train in Brighton, everyone was smiling, inhaling the lovely oxygenated air and loving one another.  A gentleman carried my case to the station, a lady held my arm lest I trip and two lovely young men with grandmother complexes bought me a coffee.

The oxygen cure would not work in America however.  It isn’t the air that infuriates them; it is the government.

 

 

Nymphomania (Volume 1)

Directed by Lars von Trier

 

 

This movie goes on my all time Ten Worst List.  It is one of the most awful movies I have ever seen.  I went with a friend and I tried to get him to leave after half an hour, but he insisted on sitting it out to the bitter end.  I think in part he was punishing me because it was my idea to go see this.

The title is an outright lie.  This is not about nymphomania.  The girl portrayed in this film is depressed, detached, and probably suicidal.  If she can be labeled as anything she is probably what they call a ‘borderline’ personality.  But she is definitely not a nymphomaniac.  Furthermore, the character of the girl is not at all convincing or realistic. She comes across as some man’s fantasy of a woman, rather than a real woman.  It is, furthermore, a hostile, derogatory fantasy.  It is a negative conceptualization of female sexuality by a man who seems to know very little about women or sex.

‘Nymphomania’ is not a formal psychiatric category.  It is not in the DSM-V.  It is an informal term that refers to an unusually strong sex drive in a woman.  I dislike this term and never use it.  It has a clinical ring to it and a derogatory cast.  More generally, the practice of categorizing people according to their sexual behavior is completely wrongheaded and leads to all sorts of misunderstanding, distortions, and bigotry.  This film is a very good illustration of that.

The friend that I attended this film with is a joyously married man of many years.  He was skeptical that such a thing as a ‘nymphomaniac’ even existed.  He thought it was something like Bigfoot, where you only see the footprints, but never encounter the beast itself.  He asked me if I have ever encountered such a woman.  I have encountered at least five women that I can think of, and have heard tell of others, who could qualify for this label.  They are a rarity in American society, and our culture does everything possible to discourage this outcome of female sexual development.  I think there would be many more such women if the culture fostered them.  I don’t call them ‘nymphomaniacs,’ I call them ‘volcanoes,’ or ‘furnaces.’  It is less abstract and more evocative of the awe and wonder that such women inspire.

This filmmaker confuses promiscuity with ‘nymphomania.’  Promiscuity can be motivated by many things, and the kind of promiscuity portrayed here is driven by depression, emptiness, low self esteem, anxiety, and loneliness — and possibly, at an unconscious level, rage.  ‘Nymphomania,’ as I understand it, is an unusually strong sexual appetite coupled with a ready and strong responsiveness to sexual stimulation.  It is anything but disengaged and detached, as represented here.  It is not necessarily promiscuous, in fact, such women tend to create stable relationships with one or more partners of both sexes.  Having multiple, ongoing sexual relationships is also not the same as promiscuity.   Promiscuity is shallow and anxious.  Nymphomania tends not to be.  So the filmmaker has chosen an inappropriate title for his film, because he doesn’t understand the woman he is trying to portray and clearly does not know anything about women with exceptionally strong sexual capabilities.

You can tell right away that this film was not made in America or by Americans.  A man goes out after dark to buy something at a convenience store in his neighborhood and on his way home notices a woman lying on the sidewalk bruised and bleeding.  He helps her to her feet, takes her to his apartment and proceeds to nurse her.  This is something that would never happen in an American city.  An urban American man would never pick up a bruised, bleeding, semiconscious woman off the sidewalk and take her to his apartment.  It is unthinkable.  So right away the story takes on a fantastic quality to an American audience.

It is never explained how she came to be battered and bleeding and semiconscious on the sidewalk.  She sits there through the entire movie with her face all beaten up relating the story of her life and carrying on a wide ranging philosophical discussion with this stranger she just met, when her entire life, as she retells, it is a series of encounters with an endless parade of men of the utmost superficiality and minimal emotional connection.  Why she would suddenly open up and begin to philosophically muse over her life with this stranger under these extraordinary circumstances is hard to fathom.  The movie consists of long philosophical discussions punctuated by simulated sex scenes.  The sex is not very good and neither is the philosophy.  If you want to see pornography, don’t go to this.  There is nothing erotic about this film at all.  It is actually a downer.

The film amounts to an attack on this woman’s character and behavior led by the woman herself.  I think this is the reason she is allowed to sit there on camera with her face all beaten up through the whole movie.  The filmmaker wants to make sure she is made as unattractive and unappealing as possible.  He hates this woman.  He wants to drive it home that this beaten up, uglified face is the well deserved outcome of her character and behavior.  This film is a very conservative affirmation of marriage and monogamy.

Things get increasingly ridiculous as we go along.  There is a long highly improbable scene of a ditched wife coming to Jo’s apartment with her three kids and bitterly berating Jo at length in the presence of her husband, who has just left her, for destroying her life and wrecking her marriage.  By the time she went away bawling I couldn’t blame her husband for leaving her.  There is a discussion of the differences in polyphony between Palestrina and J.S. Bach.  There is a sequence of a chorus doing a Palestrina chorale.  There is an explanation of the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to the Pythagorean theorem.  We see a jaguar with a young fawn in its mouth.  Sex scenes are accompanied by chorale preludes from Bach’s Little Organ Book.  All of this is supposed to have something to do with nymphomania.  It’s totally crazy.

If you fail to listen to me and make the mistake of going to see this, keep in mind that what you are seeing is not nymphomania.  ‘Nymphomania’ is a lurid title to draw you in, but this ambiguous term does not describe the character of the woman portrayed.  Jo is, in fact, at the other end of the spectrum.

I couldn’t see any redeeming qualities in this film.  There is nothing good I can say about it.  Stacy Martin’s nude body is good.  You can hardly go wrong with a good looking naked girl, but that is not enough to sustain a full length movie in this day and age.  It is not that hard to see a naked girl any more.  And the movie is rather long, or at least it seems to be.  Sorry, but this one is a total loss.

Particle Fever

Directed by Mark Levinson

 

 

This is a documentation of science as a media circus.  It is a public relations infomercial for CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research that operates the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.  I was disappointed in it to the point of loathing.  I was expecting something akin to the old NOVA programs on PBS, where they seriously examine the scientific issues and provide in depth biographical portraits of the scientists involved.  It wasn’t anything like that at all.  This was superficial and childish.  It was a cross between the Oscars and a cheerleading section at a basketball game.  But this is a game that no one understands or knows how to play.  So it is hard to understand why anyone is cheering or what they are cheering for. 

They showed a graphic with an H in the center of it and told us that’s the Higgs Boson; that’s what we’re looking for.  It’s the key to the universe.  It’s the long sought Holy Grail of particle physics.  Well, . . . OK.  But no attempt was made to explain what it is and why it is so important, or why you need this gargantuan apparatus to find it.  Maybe they decided that we are all just too dumb to get it, so they would try to create some phony drama that would hop us up and entertain us.  But it didn’t work on me.  I have too much curiosity — which was the main justification they gave for building this behemoth in the first place.  The film should have pandered to that curiosity that is driving the scientists.  The scientific issues should be engaging and interesting enough in their own right to hold the interest of the audience.  But the filmmakers simply didn’t believe in it.  They opted to make something like late night television.  I’m getting more annoyed the more I think about it.

A hundred years ago a lone, eccentric scientist, driven by little more than his own peculiar interests, could build an apparatus in his basement that was capable of making important discoveries.  That is no longer the case.  It costs a lot of money to build and operate a mother bear like the Large Hadron Collider, and for that they need a lot of support from political leaders and the public, since it admittedly does not produce anything of immediate economic value.  Perhaps the debacle in the United States of the Superconducting Super Collider struck fear in their hearts, when the U.S. Congress, in 1993, canceled the project to build the world’s largest and most energetic particle accelerator after it was well under way.  Perhaps the thinking is that the way to garner public support is through propaganda, public relations gimmicks, and advertising, rather than trying to educate people about the subtleties of particle physics and the deep structure of the universe.  I disagree, but I am certainly no expert on public relations.  My opinion is that this attitude is mistaken and this film is misguided in its fundamental approach to the subject.  It is an unfortunate missed opportunity both to educate the public about recent developments in particle physics and to broaden the base of public support for large scale scientific enterprises of the type done in the Large Hadron Collider.  I don’t think this film is going to be popular, and I don’t think is serves the scientists well who participated in it and who care about pushing back the frontiers of human knowledge and understanding the origins and structure of the universe.  Even if you are suckered by the light entertainment this film offers, you won’t know very much more about the Higgs boson when you leave than you did when you went in.  

Program 3 — Firebird — San Francisco Ballet Performance

February 28, 2014

 

 

Three ballets make up Program 3:  The Kingdom of the Shades, which comes from Act II of a ballet called La Bayadére, by Ludwig Minkus and Natalia Makarova; Ghosts, by Kip Winger and Christopher Wheeldon; and Firebird, by Igor Stravinsky and Yuri Possokhov.  They all have to do with male idealizations and conflicts about women.  They are psychological in that they deal with the internal, psychic representations of women in the male imagination rather than with stories, events, or women who might be real.  Firebird is by far and away the superior of the three.

The Kingdom of the Shades is a sublime display of dance technique at the highest level and great visual beauty.  According to the program notes, “The scene is the opium-induced hallucination of Solor, who grieves for his love, the murdered temple dancere (bayadére) Nikiya.”  However, you would never guess this upon watching the ballet.  There is no suggestion of opium influencing Solor (Denis Matvienko), who presents several impressive solos that show him perfectly sharp and at the top of his game.  There is also no suggestion that Nikiya (Maria Kochetkova) has been murdered, or that she is even dead.  What you get is the sense that Solor is dealing with an illusion about a woman, not any woman in particular, but an abstraction of woman, a phantasm.  Nikiya is not a woman who actually exists or ever did exist except in Solor’s imagination.  It is a naive, idealized conception of a woman by someone who doesn’t really know women very well.  The music starts out somber, nostalgic and conflicted, but morphs into a series of waltzes that grow progressively cheesier as they go along.  What saves the ballet is the technical brilliance of the dancers, which we have become spoiled into taking for granted at the San Francisco Ballet, and the visual beauty of the staging and choreography.  Once again the San Francisco Ballet has taken something that is short on substance and turned it into a pleasing visual spectacle.

Ghosts is a more interesting performance in my eyes and ears.  The music is more interesting and the choreography and staging have a greater sense of freedom and imagination.  The ballet is abstract.  The theme is Ghosts.  Well, what is that?   What you see are pairs of male-female couples, that stay pretty much in those pairs throughout the performance.  There are a couple of triangles with two men and a woman, but there is a strong sense of the male-female couple throughout this ballet.  And the couples are strongly interactive.  They look at each other and touch each other and are quite involved with one another physically and emotionally all the way through.

My understanding of a ghost is that it has to do with the past and with the imagination.  A ghost haunts one by intruding into ones consciousness unbidden and unsolicited.  An experience or person of some significance, but long past, continues to disrupt and influence ones present emotional balance and cannot be easily dismissed.  One does not get that sense from this ballet.  There is no sense of the past that I could discern.  And these ghosts were benign, whereas I think a ghost suggests something ominous.  A ghost is an unwelcome presence in my understanding.  This ballet has no such overtones.   One does not get a strong emotional fix on this ballet, but it is visually interesting and danced with a high degree of skill.

The highlight of the evening was Firebird, with music by Igor Stravinsky and choreography by Yuri Possokhov.  This ballet has an interesting concept and is beautifully staged and danced to high quality music.  The dance and the music complement one another very effectively, which is something I especially like to see in a dance performance.  This is one I would like to see again, because I don’t feel like I got it all on the first viewing.  It is a complex, ambiguous story that allows for a wide range of interpretation.  I might have to study this one some before I come to a clearer conception.

The Firebird is a mythical figure (female) who seems to fall in love with a prince.  They part on good terms for reasons that are not clear and the prince then takes up with a princess.  The relationship between the Firebird and the Princess is not clear, and I am wondering if they are the same in some sense?  A devil-like character, Kaschei, appears and brings discord to the romantic couple.  The nature of the discord is not clear, but the Firebird reappears to dispel Kaschei and restore the couple’s harmony and equilibrium.  The story ends with an apparent wedding and a happily ever after sequel.  According to the program notes it is supposed to represent the ultimate triumph of good over evil, something I am finding it increasingly hard to believe in the older I get, but the story is very positive and uplifting and danced and staged at a superb level of skill and taste.

What I can say now is that this story, like the previous two ballets, has to do with male psychology, with male conflicts and idealizations of women, and it represents them in much more depth and interest than the previous two ballets.  The Firebird seems to represent the sensual, sexualized woman of the male imagination.  It is she who rescues the beleaguered young couple beset by turmoil sown by Kaschei, the disruptive, dissatisfied, restless aspect of the young male.  It is the Princess’s ability to tap the sexual energy of the Firebird, the hidden Firebird within herself, that enables her tame Kaschei, to hold the male’s interest, and create a lasting, stable bond.  It is not exactly a triumph of good over evil, but rather a triumph of human connection through sexual bonding over disappointment and dissolution.  This is one you should go see, if you have a chance.  It is both mentally challenging and aesthetically satisfying.

Tim’s Vermeer

Directed by Teller

 

 

This is a film that is going to appeal mainly to people who have a special interest in art history or painting.  It may have some appeal to the museum-going general public, but the audience on the night I attended was sparse.  There is not a lot of action — no, that’s not right.  There is not any action, except the slow process of creating a painting stroke by stroke — sort of like watching ice melt, for those of you on the East Coast.  But that can be very interesting, and it is, but you have to be interested in painting.  If you have ever tried to paint anything with any kind of realistic likeness, you’ll understand what I mean.

This film is slow moving and cerebral.  It is a documentation, a realization, of a theory advanced by artist David Hockney and physicist Charles Falco in 2001 that Renaissance masters like Van Eyck and Vermeer and others across Europe used optical techniques incorporating lenses and mirrors to create their stunningly accurate realistic images.  They did not just eyeball their subjects to realize the kind of microscopic accuracy that characterizes the Dutch Masters style on a painted canvas.  Tim Jenison, an inventor from Texas with no particular ability in art or painting, became familiar with Hockney’s theory and hatched the crazy idea to replicate Jan Vermeer’s studio, materials, and techniques from scratch and recreate one of Vermeer’s masterpieces, The Music Lesson, himself, using the techniques suggested by Hockney and Falco.  The film documents this process with attention to all the minutiae one might find in one of Vermeer’s paintings.

I saw this when I was rather tired after a long, busy weekend, and I started feeling a sense of tedium even though the subject and the process were very interesting.  We get to see shots of mixing paint from pigments, grinding a lens, carving a table leg on a lathe, building a studio, and gradually watching the painting take shape a few strokes at a time over a period of, I think, 213 days.  The result is a flawless replica of a Vermeer masterpiece.  Jenison takes it to David Hockney, who grades it favorably, and there is a discussion of the process and the significance of Jenison’s experiment.

Jenison did not prove that Vermeer used lenses and mirrors in order to paint.  Jenison’s experiment is akin to Thor Heyerdahl’s sailing of Kon-tiki from the shores of Peru to Polynesia.  Heyerdahl’s experiment refuted skeptics who said such a voyage was not possible.  It did not prove that anyone ever did sail such a route in such a vessel, but it opened an avenue of interpretation of other evidence that might have been closed off by dismissal or the presumption of fantastical improbability.  Jenison showed that using only materials and techniques available during Vermeer’s time, he could indeed replicate Vermeer’s achievement as an untrained painter.  This does not show that Vermeer painted this way, because there is no documentation of how Vermeer worked, but coupled with the fact that there is no documentation of Vermeer ever having been trained as an artist, the absence of a drawing beneath the painting that would have served as a guide and which was customary in the work of other artists of that time, and, most tellingly, I think, that some small “mistakes” can be discerned in Vermeer’s image that reflect distortions created by the use of a lens, all give the argument weight and strengthened plausibility.

It is a very interesting film that should be noted by painters, historians, and art students.  It presents a compelling case, but not a final conclusion, and I think it indicates a fruitful direction for further historical research.

 

 

 

 

“Journey’s End” is a romantic title for the R. C. Sherriff play that just opened at The Barn Theatre in Ross.  To get a better idea of what it’s about, go up close to the stage, and examine the set. Rough beams cross the ceiling, sweaty-looking cots sit on either side, wrinkled old papers are pinned to the walls, dirt spreads over the floor, and a view through the curtained opening shows more dirt outside. “Journey’s End” is not an idyll; it’s a war story. This is a British dugout in W. W. I France,  and the trench outside leads into battle. One of the play’s first lines is, “It’s coming pretty soon now.” Flashes in the sky outside and booms from distant artillery confirm that. But when?

 

This mid-season production from Ross Valley Players departs from the rest of the season, especially from the two comedies that bracket it. “Journey’s End” shows the tedium of waiting for battle and the ways the plucky cook maintains service, no matter what food he has to work with.  Captain Stanhope, who’s been here three years and whose nerves are “battered to bits,” numbs his existence with alcohol, while a newly-arrived junior officer is excited about the prospect and thinks it’s “an amazing bit of luck” that he’s been assigned to Stanhope’s battalion.

 

This all sounds remarkably real, and it was. Sherriff served in the war and was twice wounded. It has been said that “Journey’s End” was his tribute to those who didn’t survive. It came to the stage in London in 1928, with an appropriately young Laurence Olivier in the role of Stanhope. The Ross Valley production was directed by James Dunn, who’d seen the play in London in 2005 and was determined to bring it to Ross Valley, where it is having a west coast premiere. Dunn’s respect for the material shows in every scene.

 

The British accents seem natural and the pronunciations unaffected. Stanhope is referred to as “Stanup;” the town of Ypres is called “Wipers.”

 

The set, so important to the mood of the story, was designed by Ron Krempetz and assembled by Ian Swift. The Army costumes, helmets included, were  collected by Michael Berg. Maureen Scheuenstuhl arranged the dugout’s props.

 

Stephen Dietz, who plays the self-controlled 2nd Lt. Trotter, also designed the very effective sound effects. Ellen Brooks and Ian Lamers did the lights, which become more important as the play goes on.

 

Francis Serpa has the role of idealistic young Lt. Raleigh. Tom Hudgens is Lt. Osborne, everybody’s “uncle,” and Philip Goleman is the terror-stricken Hibbard.

 

Sean Gunnell portrays Pvt. Mason, the tireless cook, with Jeff Taylor as the Company Sgt. Major. David Yen appears in the Olivier role as edgy  long-termer, Capt. Stanhope, explaining his alcohol consumption as, “I couldn’t bear to be fully conscious all the time.”

 

Two former Peninsula  lads — Ross Berger and Steve Price — are double-cast. Berger plays Lance Cpt. Broughton and a German soldier, and Price is both Capt. Hardy and the Colonel.

 

R. C. Sherriff, says James Dunn, didn’t set out to write a pacifist play, but that’s what he wrote. It’s a strong and moving piece of theatre, and it comes almost 100 years from the beginning of that war.

 

“Journey’s End” will play at The Barn Theatre in Ross Thursdays through Sunday, Feb. 16. Thursday performances are at 7:30 p.m., Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sunday matinees at 2 p.m. Ticket prices range from $13 (children and students on Thursday nights) to $22. A “Talkback” with director and actors will take place after matinee performances in February.

 

To order tickets, call the box office at 456-9555 or see the website, www.rossvalley.players.com.

 

 

 

Giselle

San Francisco Ballet Performance

January 27, 2014

 

 

This is a very strange story that ultimately doesn’t make sense.  Maybe I just don’t understand it.  A prince disguises himself as a peasant and moves to a village to court a peasant girl of irresistible charm.  It would be like Jamie Dimon disguising himself as a bus boy to court a waitress in a restaurant.  A rather odd concept, don’t you think?  Especially since the prince is already engaged to another woman — but we don’t find that out until later. 

It is a narrative, and I do like ballets that attempt to create a narrative line simply through dance without verbal support.  But the narrative here is convoluted and rather bizarre.  Without first reading the synopsis in the program, a viewer would be lost trying to figure out what is going on.

The first act, after doing a passable job of establishing the story gives way to a long cadenza-like display of dancing virtuosity.  I had trouble grasping what all this athleticism had to do with the story.  There is nothing wrong with virtuosic dance.  This is, after all, the San Francisco Ballet.  But virtuosity for its own sake, is self indulgent and risks becoming dull if it is overworked.  I think this ballet, since it had so little substance in the story line, relied a little too much on dazzle.

I don’t like scenes where one or a small group of dancers perform while a multitude of bystanders sits idle on the stage just watching.  This technique is employed to excess in this ballet.  My feeling is that if someone is on the stage they should be doing something besides being part of the scenery.  I don’t like spearholders.  If they are doing nothing, then they should be doing nothing for a good reason.  Inertness should speak.  But in this ballet it doesn’t, and you’ve got these vast stationary multitudes on stage serving as an adjunct to the audience of paid ticket holders while a few dancers hold court.

The prince’s rival is Hilarion, a “woodsman,” or hunter from the village.  He is a known quantity to Giselle and she finds him much less appealing than the disguised prince.  Hilarion exposes the prince’s disguise, reveals his true identity, and the fact that he is already engaged to Bathilde, a woman of his own class.  This puts the kibosh on Giselle, and instead of taking it in stride and chalking it up to experience (or taking up with Hilarion), she runs herself through with the prince’s sword and dies.  You can always tell a vacuous story by the need for phony melodrama to pump some life into it — in this case, killing off the heroine at the end of the first act.

The music is undistinguished and tends toward the banal and the schmaltzy. Visually, however, it is very beautiful.  The sets, costumes, configurations and choreography are interesting and make a pleasing impression.  The dancers are outstanding, as usual.  The San Francisco Ballet has done a superb job with mediocre material.  Apparently it is enough to seduce the audience.  The house was full and seemed to give a good response to this vapid nonsense.

The second act was way too long.  It could have been cut in half to a much more pleasing effect.  It takes place at midnight in a forest where Giselle’s grave is located.  Giselle returns as a ghost accompanied by a cohort of Wilis, forest spirits all decked out in pure white wedding dresses, to comport with the prince who has come to visit her grave — in the middle of the night.  The tenor of the whole second act seems to imply no hard feelings on the part of Giselle toward the prince, even though she was upset with him enough to kill herself with his sword at the end of the first act.  Now that she is dead, all is forgiven and they dance like they are freshly love struck.  It’s idiotic and extremely repetitious.  I was getting so tired of it, just waiting for it to end, and it went on and on.  The curtain call seemed overdone as well, but then, I didn’t feel much like applauding and wanted to get out of there.

The moral of the story seems to be: you should not look for love outside your own social class, and if you are a woman, you are bound to get the worst of any such liaison — a reassuring, conservative, message for all the stodgy Republicans in the San Francisco audience.

KNIT ONE, PURL TWO AND YOU’RE FREE

Properly practiced, knitting soothes the troubled spirit,
and it doesn’t hurt the untroubled spirit either.
Elizabeth Zimmerman

I was a nervous child.  I was terrified of the horrible dangers that lurked around every corner.  If I talked to strangers because they would abduct me; I must never argue with my mother or she would give me back to the Indians.  I couldn’t cross a street without risking my life; if I dared to boil water, the steam would blind me.  Touching the pan would cost a finger. Boys with nasty leers jumped out behind bushes at little girls like me, and teachers got angry for no reason at all.

Reality was too much for me to absorb.  My nerves were jangled and my nails bitten to the quick.  I jumped at an unexpected sound; I screamed when a light flashed; I hid under the couch when someone slammed the door.

My mother was a redhead with an attitude.  She was afraid of nothing. Danger actually thrilled her and she met it head on with eyes flashing and acid repartee that quelled the bravest among us.

And it was she who made me quiver and shake at the thought of facing another day with all its pitfalls.  It was she who reminded me that I might trip if I ran too fast; I might break that dish I was wiping; or jam the brush into my eye when I brushed my hair.  She couldn’t stand the fidgeting, the nail biting, and the twitches.  “This kid is driving me crazy,” she told my Aunt Hazel.  “She is a nervous wreck.”

My Aunt Hazel was a pragmatist.  When she didn’t get enough meat for dinner, she left home.  When she couldn’t earn enough money to support herself she married a bootlegger.  She was one of the first in that generation to think outside the box.  “Teach her to knit,” she told my mother.

“Are you crazy?” said my mother.  “She jiggles so much she’ll poke her eyes out with a knitting needled. “

“Well that’s one way to calm her down,” said Aunt Hazel.

So it was that my aunt took me with her to the Stitch In Time Knitting shop filled with yarn in every color and an oval table piled high with pattern books. Several ladies sat around that table drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes (this was 1943) chatting about the war effort and knitting scarves, mittens and caps for our servicemen.  Their needles clicked and they smiled and laughed as they worked.  As I watched these women moving those needles at the speed of light, I saw to my amazement that they were creating all kinds of garments: sweaters with lace sleeves, block patterns and colors, plaids and stripes and polka dots.

“I want to do that,” I told my aunt.

“I thought you would,” she said.  “What would you like to make?”

My aunt took me home that afternoon and told my mother, ”She’s knitting a scarf.  That will keep her in line.”

That was back in 1943, but my aunt’s wisdom holds truth even today.  In fact, a maximum-security prison in Brazil came to the same conclusion.  They have decided that if their inmates knit something for three days, it is worth one day off their sentence.  They know what my aunt figured out so many years ago.  Knitters don’t have time to get in trouble.  They might drop a stitch.

 

Wayne McGregor/ Random Dance

Dance Performance

Lam Research Center at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

January 19, 2014

 

 

This is an abstract study in movement and agility.  It starts out with a male/female couple in a rather contentious vignette against a beautiful vocal sound track.  The opening segment was intriguing, however, the rest of the performance seemed to be a repudiation of this promising outset.  It was as if this opening represented something from the past that had given way to something much harsher, with less human connection and less emotional content.  Perhaps it is an oblique comment on modern life.  In any case the subsequent segments were set against  clashing, percussive electronic soundtracks that incorporated sounds like the din of a factory, passing trains, jet airplanes on an airport runway, cars with stereos thumping full blast.  Intrusive, noisy, discordant sounds.  Blaring strobe lights add to this grating atmosphere of unpleasantness in an aggressive frontal assault on the audience.  The dance that was set in front of all this was active, if not frenetic.  Movements are fluid, but staccato, disjointed, contorted and sometimes grotesque.  There is interaction between the dancers, but emotional connection seems shallow.  Bodies are emphasized by the almost nude costuming, but there is little eroticism.  The eroticism is fleeting and subdued.  There is a feeling of detachment and narcissism throughout, like the activity on the streets of a large city where people are busily and anxiously active, but completely self absorbed and indifferent to others with whom they might be sharing the street and even casually interacting.  This performance seemed determined to minimize emotional interaction.  The dancers did an admirable job with a physically demanding program.  It lasted one hour without an intermission — which I appreciated.  The length was just about right, because this strident, relentless cacophony gets to be taxing.  It was not exactly to my taste, but it did have interest.

 

 

The Invisible Woman

Directed by Ralph Fiennes

 

 

 

This movie is slow moving and hard to follow.  If you don’t know much about Charles Dickens — and most Americans don’t, let’s be real — it is very hard, especially at the outset (that is, for about the first forty-five minutes) to tell what is going on, who the characters are, or what their relationships are to one another.  It takes a long time to wind up the propeller on this airplane and get it off the ground.  The plot is very simple:  an unhappily married man in midlife meets a fresh young woman and has an affair with her.  The affair goes badly, however, and they end up separating.  That is about all that happens.  So in a story like that the interest is going to be in the psychological intricacies of the characters and their relationships to one another.  But this film does not succeed in that aspect.  It is called “The Invisible Woman.”  Presumably, that refers to Nellie (Felicity Jones), but it could more aptly refer to Charles Dickens’ wife, Mary, (Susanna Hislop), who is given short shrift in the movie, and presumably also in life.  More broadly, everyone in this movie is invisible, including Charles Dickens (Ralph Fiennes).  None of the characters are well drawn.  We do see Charles Dickens’ vitality, energy, and his love of celebrity and the acclaim he received for being a famous writer.  But we see nothing of what made him tick as a writer, why he wrote the things that he wrote, what inspired him, or the dynamics of his relationships with his women.  Nellie is an aloof, self-absorbed young woman, who seems oddly conservative for a man like Charles Dickens.  They seem to break up — sort of — after a train wreck in which Nellie is injured.  She goes on and establishes a life for herself after Dickens, but none of it has any rhyme or reason.  A lot of time and attention and expense has been spent on costumes, settings, and creating the cinematic spectacle.  The result, I feel, is rather overstaged.  This striving for cinematic perfection gives the film an unreal, illusory quality.  Perhaps it mirrors the way the characters and the affair have been portrayed.  The whole thing comes off as sanitized and romanticized, which the nineteenth century definitely wasn’t, nor was anything in Charles Dickens’ books.  I don’t believe anything in this movie, and it did not make me want to read the book.  It is the kind of movie where the more I think about it, the worse it gets.   I guess that is an indication that I should stop now, but you get the idea.