Michael Ferguson

House of the Sleeping Beauties, and other stories. 

By Yasunari Kawabata (1969)  Translated by Edward Seidensticker.  Tokyo and New York:  Kodansha International.

 

Recently I bought several porcelain figurines of nude young girls.  They are made by Kaiser of Germany and are exquisite in detail and craftsmanship.  The absolute smoothness of the surface of the porcelain and their pure whiteness coupled with the finely detailed features of the nude girl create at once an idealization of the young girl’s body and a kind of perverse reduction of a girl to this idealized representation.

As I look at these lifeless figures I find that I begin to recall living, breathing girls from the past that I once held in my arms.  I recall the details of their bodies, their “imperfections” in contrast to these perfect porcelain representations, the way they kissed, especially their kisses, the fierceness of the longing and hunger in their kisses, their pants, moans, and sharp cries in my ears.  My response to these porcelain figurines is exactly analogous to the memories awakened in Eguchi by the all but lifeless bodies of the deeply sleeping girls in the House of the Sleeping Beauties.

The House of the Sleeping Beauties is no ordinary brothel.  It is very exclusive and caters only to very old men, who “are no longer men,” that is, men who have lost sexual potency, and can thus be “trusted” to spend the night beside a sleeping nude girl without performing intercourse on her.  The girls are between about sixteen and twenty.  The madam supposedly drugs them into a deep sleep from which they will not awaken while the man is present.  They are not dead, but nearly so.  Customers are free to examine and explore the bodies of the sleeping girls to their hearts’ content, but the house rules are very strict and absolutely forbid the girls being sexually violated.  Eguchi claims to be still capable of sexual performance and on a number of occasions considers defying the house rules and taking sexual liberties with the girls, but he always backs off, finding one excuse or another.

The story is psychologically complex and works on a number of different levels.  First of all, on the obvious level of presentation one might question whether the girls really are drugged into a deep sleep, or is it an elaborate performance?  Numerous passages suggest that the girls are indeed aware of the man’s explorations of their bodies and they seem to respond at times to his overtures as if they had sensible awareness.  The madam told him on one occasion that the girl that evening was “in training.”  But how much training do you need to be drugged into a stupor and lie unconscious all night in the nude?

I had the sense that there is a pervasive and profound hostility toward women expressed throughout the story, but it must be qualified by some counterweighing factors.    The negative valuation and destructive impulses toward women are strong, but they are at the same time nuanced and tempered.  This extreme ambivalence is reflected in the way the story ends, which we will examine.

Eguchi, at sixty-seven, is a man who has had a lifetime of extensive sexual experience with many women.  He is not an ascetic and continues to desire to sleep beside the nude body of a young girl, even if drugged into insensibility.  He is deeply disappointed in women (p. 17, 22), yet they continue to offer a comfort that is worth paying for, and there is also profound comfort in the memories they evoke of women long faded in the past (p.27).  He still finds their bodies beautiful and fascinating.  He remains drawn to women and strongly so, despite his disappointment in them.  He has not renounced the pleasures of sex, a la Wagner or Tolstoy, in search of an ideal of “spirituality.”  He feels impulses to both violate the girls and to kill them.  His feelings toward the girls are extremely mixed.  There are murderous impulses, suicidal impulses, alongside a deep longing for connection which he is in despair of ever attaining.  I think this is part of the reason the girls must be unconscious, but at the same time nude.  They are reduced to their physical bodies, much like my porcelain figurines, devoid of personality, devoid of response, unable to interact — although not entirely, as it turns out.  As he told the madam, “It is not a human relationship” (p. 38).  Promiscuity is another way of interacting with women on a physical level while evading a deeper attachment and engagement with the personality of the woman.  Eguchi is able to make attachments to the women, something which commercial sex and promiscuity tend to discourage.  The madam takes the initiative in making sure that he does not sleep with the same girl more than once.  She understands Eguchi’s tendency to become attached to the girls and seek and involvement beyond this superficial acquaintance with her body, and she is very much at pains to avoid that development.

There is a deeply pessimistic attitude toward women, human relations, and life itself that runs throughout the story that hearkens back to the Zen Buddhism that has afflicted Japanese society for centuries.  This pessimism is also related to the profound sense of loneliness and isolation throughout the story.

Eguchi visits the house several different times.  Each time the girl and the experience is different.  On his final visit the madam provides him with two girls.  The experience of two girls divides his attention and makes it difficult for him to sleep.  During the course of the night one of the girls dies, perhaps from an overdose of the sleeping drug, or an allergic reaction to it.  This is only a minor inconvenience and the madam encourages him to stay on, “there is the other girl.”  The cold indifference with which the girl’s death is treated evinces the hostility toward women that pervades all of these stories.  Her death is no more than a nuisance such as a spill or a broken dish.  But it is balanced by the girl who remains living with whom Eguchi spends the remainder of the night.  This conflict between the impulse to kill the girls on the one hand, or to keep them alive and enjoy sleeping with them, even if only in a condition of near total insensibility, is the theme throughout the story from the beginning, and finally at the ending it is made stark and concrete.  Throughout all of these stories the attitude toward death is callous and diffident.  It reflects a low valuation of life itself.

There is no moral or message to the story.  It is a portrait of a man who is so fragile within himself that he is unable to interact on an intimate level with a living, breathing woman.  He can only deal with women on the level of their bodies, without the driving force of lust, and only with the utmost detachment, as if he were appreciating the beauty of an insensate object, like my figurines.  This desire is itself a source of pain for him, because it emphasizes his loneliness and isolation and his inability to reach beyond it.  This is probably the reason for the murderous impulses toward the girls.  If he can kill the girl, maybe he can kill the desire within himself for her, is the logic.  But, or course, it is futile.

Incidentally, this is a mechanism in some serial killers who kill women or prostitutes.  What they are trying to do is blot out an intolerable desire within themselves, a desire that is experienced as intolerably painful because of deep disappointments and frustrations in the past.  It is an attempt to externalize an internal problem.  But projecting it onto the girl who is the object of the desire and killing her does not work, so he has to keep on killing.  Serial killers of women are fundamentally lonely people to an extreme degree, who are trapped in a horrifically painful isolation from which they cannot escape, and which tortures them with relentless, hopeless desire.  In Eguchi we see a very similar psychic mechanism, but in this case the girl is not overtly killed, she dies, more or less by accident.   Eguchi has mitigating forces in his personality that prevent him from becoming a killer, although not by much.

House of the Sleeping Beauties might well be called a novella.  It is the flagship story in this small volume of three stories by Japanese writer, Yasunari Kawabata.  The additional two stories in this volume are One Arm, and Of Birds and Beasts.

One Arm is a tragic representation of the inability to accept intimacy, the partial merging of another with one’s body and one’s self.  The writer borrows an arm from a young girl just for one night — the right arm.  “I don’t suppose you’ll try to change it for your own arm, but it will be all right.  Go ahead, do,” the girl invites him.  And indeed he does exactly that.  In the course of the night he removes his own arm and replaces it with the arm of the young girl.  “Is the blood flowing?”

“[The arm] lay over my heart, so that the two pulses sounded against each other.  Hers was at first somewhat slower than mine, then they were together.  Then I could feel only mine.  I did not know which was faster, which slower.  Perhaps this identity of pulse and heartbeat was for a brief period when I might try to exchange the arm for my own.” (p. 118)

The arm is a symbolic representation of the girl, perhaps it might be better to call it an abbreviation of the girl, which the man brings to his residence and sleeps with in his bed.  The result is a partial merging with her.  The girl [the arm] become part of himself, incorporated into his own body.  He removes his own arm and replaces it with the girl’s.  His blood flows through it.  The girl becomes part of his self.  He and the girl merge into one.  “I’ll keep away the devils,” she tells him.  “Our sleep was probably light, but I had never before known sleep so warm, so sweet.  A restless sleeper, I had never before been blessed with the sleep of a child.” (p. 123)

But he awoke screaming.  “I almost fell out of bed, and staggered three or four steps.  I had awakened to the touch of something repulsive.  It was my right arm.”  (p. 123)  In an instant he tears the girl’s arm from his shoulder and replaces it with his own.  “The act was like murder upon a sudden, diabolic impulse.”  The story ends with him weeping over the dying arm of the girl.

The story is short on analysis and explanation, so I will try to provide some.

“Woman why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?”  These questions of Jesus to Mary Magdalene are recalled in the text “as if spoken by an by an eternal voice, in an eternal place.”  “Very often when I’m dreaming and wake up in the night I whisper [this passage] to myself.”  (p. 120)  These questions might well be posed to every woman a man ever sleeps with.  They truly are eternal in place and voice.  But the answers to them are myriad.  In One Arm no answers are attempted.  The man is entirely absorbed within himself.

Intimacy is a merging of the inner self with that of another.  It is the most profound communication between people.  In the Bible the phrase “he knew her” is used to represent having sex with a woman.  Having sex with a woman is equated with “knowing” her.  One knows a woman through sex.  I like this locution.  Sex is communication.  Sex is discovery.  Sex tells you where you are in your relationship with another person.  Sex is a merging of the body and the heart, and it extends beyond the act of sex.  Sex creates a bond, because once you “know” someone, that knowledge does not disappear with the sunrise.  It is this emotional bond, created by the intimate connection, that this protagonist revolts against.  It is experienced subjectively as a feeling of revulsion toward the woman, an intense desire to get away from her, even to destroy her, to repudiate the connection that had been made through the night of unleashed desire and longing with the merging of self and other that resulted.  Why is that?  Why did he wake up screaming after the warmest, sweetest sleep he had ever had?  The girl said she would keep away the devils, but she didn’t.  The devils were much deeper than her arm could reach.  In order to be intimate with another person, sexually and emotionally, one has to have good internal boundaries.  That means that one has to have a sense of oneself and who one is that is sturdy enough to withstand penetration by the needs and longings and inner world of another.  If one feels overwhelmed by the emotional needs of the other, if one merges with the hunger, longing, and pain that the other brings to your bed to the point where you begin to feel you are losing yourself, a kind of panic may result, experienced as an intense need to escape from the suffocating quicksand of the inner world of another.  The origins of the writer’s dilemma are not described, but we can surmise that he must have experienced some severe and confusing early rejection.

“Woman why weepest thou?  Whom seekest thou?” are probably questions he has been asking himself for many years.  Do you really want to know?  Are you really ready for the answers that might emerge?  Why does he wake up in the night with these questions in his mind?  They represent his greatest fear.  He is lonely and isolated.  He reaches out to the woman.  He wants to be close to her.  He needs the soothing and comfort of her body.  Yet the closeness overwhelms him.  The reality of merging with the woman’s heart is intolerable.  This is the tragedy of the story.  He longs to come close, and he succeeds.  But he has to turn around and destroy the connection he created.  He is not able to consolidate what he has gained through his connection to the woman.  Like Sisyphus, he has to start pushing the rock back up the mountain all over again.

Of Birds and Beasts describes a man in his late 30s — who is not named — who feels very little connection to other people.  It is the story of a man who is deeply depressed, estranged from human connection (with the exception of his maid), and on the verge of suicide.  He maintains a few small birds and dogs which provide him with his only joy.  I think it is fair to say that the only thing between this man and suicide is the fleeting vivaciousness he finds in these small animals.  The story opens with him and his maid in a taxi on his way to a recital and they become stuck in a funeral procession — essentially equating this excursion to the recital with a funeral.  Additionally, he mentions two dead birds to his maid, which have been left dead in their cage at his house for a week.  So the theme of death is at the forefront of consciousness right from the very beginning, and the indifference to death is also evident, represented by leaving the dead birds unattended in their cage for a week.  The bulk of the story is a discussion of his birds and his dogs, and especially their fates, which often come at his ineptitude in taking care of them.

He relates an anecdote about a group of children who find a baby bird that has been coldly thrown away by some neighboring bird keepers.  Our hero at first has the intent of taking in the discarded bird and raising it, but he abandons the idea when he considers that this bird was discarded as garbage by his neighbors, most likely because it would not become a singer, and he leaves the baby bird to be tortured to death by the children.  He points out how the human love of animals quickly becomes a quest for superior specimens, and the discarding of the inferiors is brutal and cruel.  He tells us he would not take in an animal that had been raised by someone else.

Smiling a sardonic smile, he excused them as symbols of the tragedy of the universe and of man, these animal lovers who tormented animals, ever striving toward a purer and purer breed.  (p. 134)

This transformation of the simple nurturing impulse into one of competitive striving for relentless improvement can be seen as a metaphor for modern middle class values of child rearing.  In many families great stress is created by the imposition of expectations for achievement on growing children.  In America today the entire educational system is obsessed with testing and retesting and measuring the progress of children — and teachers — in every imaginable way.  The whole system of education has been distorted by the testing regimen to the point where we have lost sight of what education is all about.  Education has become a competitive struggle to maximize certain numbers:  grade point averages, standardized test scores.  The problem that no one considers is: what happens to those who don’t measure up, or who are only average?  We are a society that only awards achievers.  In Garrison Keillor’s mythical Midwest town of Wobegon all the children are above average.  The anxiety of the American middle class is being average or below.  Because we all know there is no provision and no place for those who are only mediocre, like the small bird in Kawabata’s story who is brutally discarded and tortured to death because it could not sing.

The great strength of the Christian faith, which has sustained it for centuries and continues to be its wellspring of renewal, is that Jesus came to seek and to save that which is lost.  Jesus saw value in the losers, the outcasts, the rejected.  To the people nobody else wanted, he said “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”  It has inspired millions who see hope for themselves in his promise.  That unconditional acceptance is powerfully appealing.  The great flaw in industrial capitalism is that its emphasis on competition, innovation, efficiency, and improvement makes no provision for the losers.  Those who do not measure up, those who can’t cut it, those who are left behind in the mad rush of progress:  What happens to them?  They simply perish.  It is not a workable value system for human societies, because, in fact, most people are losers.  Over time, the winners become an ever smaller and smaller group accumulating more and more of the wealth and power in the society while the vast majority of people are forced ever downward in their standard of living and in their prospects.

Kawabata captures this ruthless indifference in his attitude toward the baby bird discarded by its human possessors because it could not sing.  There are other such parallels drawn between the indifference to the deaths of animals and human deaths caused by human failings.  He describes a female dog who dug a nest of straw to sleep in and placed her puppies beneath it.  “she [the mother] would lie on the straw under which they were buried.  They would die in the night of cold and suffocation.  She was like a foolish human mother who suffocated her baby at her breast.” (p. 138)

The birds and beasts in this story provide this man with a tolerable, if feeble, connection to life.  The birds and the dogs do show personality and vitality with which he can choose to interact minimally. He observes them with coldness and detachment, and often neglects them to the point of death.  Nothing in the story suggests that he “cares” for the birds or the dogs.

But for him life was filled with a young freshness for several days after a new bird came.  He felt in it the blessings of the universe.  Perhaps it was a failing on his part, but he was unable to feel anything of the sort in a human being. (p. 131)

The three stories in this book provide an excellent representation of what the psychiatric literature calls a “schizoid personality.”¹

The schizoid condition consists in the first place in an attempt to cancel external object-relations and live in a detached and withdrawn way.  . . . It pervades the whole life. (p. 19)

The attitude toward the outer world is . . . non-involvement and observation at a distance without any feeling. (p. 18)

The schizoid person’s capacity to love has been frozen by experiences of rejection and the breakdown of real life relationships.” and results in a “longstanding unsatisfied hunger for love about which, however, she could only feel hopelessness and despair. (p. 91)

This psychiatric description is rather abstract and from the outside looking in, but these three stories of Yasunari Kawabata illustrate this mode of existence very concretely from the inside out.  Through the eyes and voices of the protagonists one sees and experiences the detachment, the emotional coldness, the loneliness and isolation, the suppressed rage, and the indifference to death.  It is at once beautifully written and deeply tragic.  I’m not sure I would recommend this book to the general reader, but if you want to gain insight into this particular type of “borderline” personality, these stories bring you into the heart of how it is lived and experienced in the context of Japanese culture.

 

 

1.  Guntrip, Harry (1968)  Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self.  London:  Hogarth Press.

Lincoln

Directed by Steven Spielberg

 

 

This movie has been hyped and promoted far out of proportion to its merit.  Even Lincoln scholars have gotten on the bandwagon heaping praise on this mythologizing propaganda.  At first I was puzzled by this.  I couldn’t understand why so many scholars would throw their support behind this film in the public way that they have.  Are they just afraid to set themselves against something that is so popular and has so much money behind it?  But after thinking about it for a few days, I realized that the scholars are actually the problem.  Steven Spielberg consulted them and probably followed their advice.  He didn’t make this up out of his head, and he didn’t do all the research himself.  The community of Lincoln scholars is largely beholden to this idealized, honorific, and in many ways, false conception of Lincoln that the film presents.  This film is a correct reflection of the way Lincoln is perceived and reconstructed in mainstream American society, and this in turn derives from the scholarly community that has created and perpetuated this Myth.  This Lincoln could have come out of Leave It to Beaver.   He’s a genial, storytelling, wholesome, fatherly figure.  Everyone says Daniel Day-Lewis plays him so well.  I don’t get it.  He’s nothing like I imagine Lincoln to be.  Lincoln was depressive.  Melancholy.  He was forbidding and aloof.  He was indecisive on the one hand, and stubborn on the other.  He had human compassion and a crude sense of humor.  He was a very astute politician, he had a talent for making deals, and an appetite for power.  Psychologically, he was very complex and hard to gauge.  He did tell stories, but his stories tended to be earthy, if not vulgar.  They served the purpose of entertaining people and making himself the amused center of their attention.  At the same time, they served a defensive function in that they enabled Lincoln to conceal himself.  Lincoln the story teller remained an elusive, private, enigmatic man.  The film implies that the story telling was didactic, that he told parables like Jesus to teach people moral lessons.  He might have done that.  He won some court cases that way, but for the most part Lincoln the story teller was a man hungry for attention and approval.  He was a politician looking for support and good will.  This movie simplifies him and turns him into a warm, friendly cupcake.  It is an apology, an attempt to elevate him, beatify him.  It’s a feel good movie, to make Americans feel good about themselves, about America, about the Civil War, and about Lincoln.  It starts out with soldiers quoting the Gettysburg Address back to Lincoln, as if the common soldiers were fighting out of a sense of idealism and dedication to the cause of liberty and freedom.  Then there is a shot of Lincoln raising an American flag, and a scene with him and his wife, Mary, in private having an intimate conversation like a married couple that is getting along well and has good communication.  It’s a lot of nonsense.  The biggest lie of all is the portrayal of Lincoln’s marriage and of Mary Lincoln.  This is an attempt to rehabilitate Mary Lincoln from the corrupt, mentally ill woman she was, who was the bane of Lincoln’s life, and make her appear to be some strong, influential participant in his decision-making and private deliberation.  Sally Field is completely unconvincing as Mary Lincoln.  This is a very contrived, incredible role that has nothing to do with the real Mary Lincoln.  There was one scene that felt real and that was when Lincoln and Mary had a screaming argument over their son, Robert’s, enlistment in the Union Army.  They even have Lincoln slapping Robert in the face at one point — a very unlikely scene that illustrates how far afield they are of Lincoln’s true character.  In a couple of places the word ‘fuck’ is used as a curse word.  This is an anachronism.  ‘Fuck’ did not become widespread as a curse word in American English until the late 19th or early 20th century.  They can get away with it, of course, because not too many Americans know this and they don’t teach it in school.  The rest of the movie was manipulative, annoyingly distorted, and mendacious.  The predominant content of the movie is actually the drama surrounding the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which abolished slavery, rather than about Lincoln himself.  This is also a rather simplified, sanitized, honorific reconstruction.  I thought the acting was rather poor in general.  Everyone was overplaying and the characters and scenes seemed simplified and cartoonish.  This whole movie is just annoying from beginning to end.  And it is rather dull, I have to say.  I found myself waiting for it to end.  I couldn’t get interested in anything they were doing.  They have taken an extraordinary time and an incredibly interesting person and turned them into something mundane and ordinary.  If you haven’t seen it, don’t go.  Watch Ken Burns Civil War series instead.

If you want to learn about Abraham Lincoln for real, take a look at Edgar Lee Masters, Lincoln the Man.  It was originally published in 1931 and the U.S. Congress actually tried to ban it.  That speaks well for it right there.  Of the many biographies of Lincoln, which tend to be redundant and hagiographic, Masters is my favorite, because it falls well outside this mainstream tradition.  Most biographies of Lincoln deal overwhelmingly with the last five to ten years of his life, and they focus on his policies and actions as President rather than his personality or his character.  Masters has his flaws, like they all do, but it strikes me as more realistic and it takes more interest in Lincoln as a person.  C. A. Tripp’s The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln (2006) details Lincoln’s affinity for same-sex relationships.  My paper, “Was Abraham Lincoln Gay?” (2010) Journal of Homosexuality 57:1124-1157, draws heavily on Tripp, and examines Lincoln’s private life and the 19th century sexual culture in which he grew up and lived.  Lincoln and Booth:  More Light on the Conspiracy (2003) by Donald Winkler, is a fascinating study of the assassination of Lincoln and John Wilkes Booth’s relationship to the Confederacy’s intelligence network.  David Donald’s Lincoln is informative and probably accurate in its facts, although it tends to fall into this apologetic, mythologizing tradition, and is heavily weighted toward the last four or five years of Lincoln’s life as President.  One of the best books you can read on this subject is Lincoln in American Memory (1995) by Merrill D. Peterson.  This is an excellent study of the growth and evolution of the Lincoln Myth in American culture, which this present film perpetuates and promotes.  Peterson explains how Lincoln was transformed from this ineffective, indecisive, much hated, vilified president that he was into this godlike icon of American goodness.  It is important to understand this because it enables one to see why it is well-nigh impossible today to get a balanced, “realistic” understanding of Abraham Lincoln.  One’s position on Lincoln will be heavily influenced by one’s take on American history since Lincoln, and where one stands socially and politically in contemporary society.  There is no such thing as “objectivity” when it comes to Lincoln.  He has become almost a religious myth.  It is an annoying myth to me.  It is a false myth that embodies a saccharine view of American society and its history, that is conservative, self-congratulatory, glosses over unsavory developments, and is sometimes invoked to justify highly offensive policies, like the expansion of executive power and the abrogation of basic constitutional liberties.  This film falls squarely in that mythological tradition, and I think was subtly crafted to resonate with some of the recent overreaches of executive power in the conduct of warfare and the bypassing of due process.  I’m not going to make the case in detail, because I would have to watch the film several more times, and I am loathe to put myself through that.  But I remember having that feeling several times as I watched it that I was being bamboozled and that it was really referring to our time, rather than being an honest historical piece.

Steven Spielberg has made a film that he knew would make people feel good and that they would be willing to pay money to see, not something that would disturb them and make them question everything they had been taught about Abraham Lincoln and American history.  He has succeeded very well and will undoubtedly be well rewarded for it.  But count me as a NO!  I am not taken in by it.

Hendrix 70 Live at Woodstock

Directed by Michael Wadleigh and Bob Smeaton

 

This was a one-time showing of Jimi Hendrix’s concert at Woodstock in August of 1969 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco, December 4, 2012. We arrived a few minutes late and the film was already in progress. It was my fault. Sorry. We missed some of the introductory interviews with fellow band members and promoters that explained how Jimi Hendrix was recruited to play at Woodstock, but we didn’t miss any of the concert, which was mesmerizing. Jimi Hendrix had a powerful physical charisma that naturally drew everyone’s eyes toward him. But, of course, it was his guitar playing and his singing that kept people spellbound. I love the way he sings a song. He had a natural feel for how to use his voice to let the song speak through him. He was casual, yet precise. His sound is chaos. It is the sound of a battlefield. It is agonized. There are screeches and sirens, explosions and clamor, bombs going off. It can be relentless and tries to crush you. And yet it can subside into captivating, soul searching lyricism. His voice rides above this tumult smooth and steady. He doesn’t scream or shout. He sings even though underneath there is a seething cauldron.

Someone who knew him once told me that Jimi Hendrix cared about three things: music, drugs, and sex — not necessarily in that order. In my case, I would say it is the arts, ideas, and sex. The order depends on circumstance and inspiration. But I have a natural affinity for Jimi Hendrix. Rock and roll guys tend to be relaxed and easy going, but underneath there is a driving sexual energy that is combative, defiant, and even reckless. The music helps to channel it and give it some structure, but in Hendrix’s case the disorder and recklessness is right on the surface. The chaos is palpable to the point of being overwhelming.

The concert included many of his standard favorites like Fire, Foxy Lady, and Red House, but my personal favorite was his version of the Star Spangled Banner which then morphed into Purple Haze. His version of the Star Spangled Banner is a different view of America than they play at NFL football games. His version is harsh, abrasive, and violent. When the rockets red glare and the bombs burst in air, you can actually hear the rockets blaring and the bombs exploding. It is not a sanitized, romanticized America that makes you stand and put your hand on your heart. It is the violent, rapacious America of slavery, the extermination of the Indians, the pillaging and despoiling of the natural environment, the unnecessary wars, the millions incarcerated, the violence between the sexes, the fear of walking the streets at night, crumbling schools, declining wages, the disillusioned and angry. It is all there in Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner. I remember being taken with it the first time I heard it around age 16 or 17. I remember many people being offended by it. Hendrix’s Star Spangled Banner is America with the gloves off. He then segues into Purple Haze, which is another of my all time favorites. Missing from the show was All Along the Watchtower, which I was hoping he would do. Altogether it was a magnificent concert, and I am so glad I was able to see it. If it comes around again or they put it out on DVD, by all means try to catch it. Very unfortunate his early death.

Chasing Ice

Directed by Jeff Orlowski

 

 

This is a film about making a film, rather than the film that should have been made.  I think a good opportunity was missed.  This film should have been about the melting ice, the retreating glaciers, and the implications this has for the world.  Instead it was a self indulgent portrayal of James Balog, the photographer in charge of the mission, the suffering hero, and the trials and tribulations of making a film in the harsh conditions of the Arctic.

What is good in the film is the spectacular photography of the glaciers, ice formations, and seascapes in the frozen worlds of Iceland, Greenland, and Alaska.  The film visually documents the dramatic retreat of the glaciers, which is accelerating with the warming of the Earth.  They placed 25 cameras set to continually photograph numerous glaciers throughout the Arctic creating a time-lapse record of the ice melt and retreat of the glaciers that is undeniable.  There is powerful footage of a massive calving from the Colombia glacier in Alaska the size of Manhattan.  One cannot help but be awed by the visual beauty and obvious, alarming decline of these unbelievably massive glaciers.

The film falls short in establishing the significance of its own report.  So what if the glaciers are melting?  Let them melt.  Who cares?  The film does not deal with this.  It does not spell out the implications of all of this melting ice for climate, the oceans, and human societies.  There is brief, passing mention that 150 million people will be affected by a sea level rise of one foot, but who, or how, and over what period of time is not described.

The problem is that too much time is spent on James Balog and the gory details of how the film was made.  All of this should be relegated to minor footnotes.   Frankly, I don’t find James Balog particularly interesting, nor his wife, his kids, his knee, nor all the different problems he had getting his cameras to work under the inhospitable conditions of the glaciers.  He is much too grandiose and masochistic for my taste.  Tramping through ice water in his bare feet to get the best shot.  Gimme a break!  He thinks he is going to save the world through his self sacrifice.  But carbon dioxide is at 391 parts per million and it is still climbing.  That is about 30% more than the maximum over the last 800,000 years.  The Earth is in for some rough sailing ahead and there is nothing we can do about it.  The only question is how extreme the catastrophe will be and how quickly it will rain down upon us.  Balog claims he wants to inform people and get the message out about global warming;  he should do that and get himself out of the way.

Much of the film is preoccupied with the petty troubles of the expedition and establishing what a great photographer James Balog is and his dedication to the project and how much he is prepared to suffer and punish his body to accomplish this noble challenge.  But the issues this film should be dealing with are far bigger than James Balog, his life, or any of the difficulties in making the film.  The dirty laundry of how the film was made should be kept well in the background.  His photographic work is stunning and incomparable.  He really is the Ansel Adams of the Arctic.  If he would put his work in the forefront instead of himself, I would go see anything he does.

This film offers some magnificent views of the glaciers of Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska, and it establishes without question that what is going on is well outside the boundaries of normal fluctuation.  Maybe the filmmakers thought that simply showing the glaciers and documenting the severity of their melting would be too boring, and therefore they felt they needed this human interest aspect to draw people in and hold their interest.  Actually it is the other way around.  I found myself getting impatient watching them figure out the best way to mount a camera on the side of a mountain.  I want to see the pictures they took with that camera once they finally got it to work.  So the film is worth seeing, but it gets a little tiresome and falls far short of its potential.

 

A Late Quartet

Directed by Yaron Zilberman

 

 

This is the story of a classical string quartet in crisis due to the illness and departure of its cellist and senior member, Peter Mitchell (Christopher Walken).  It is a powerful, moving story, but I doubt that it will have a wide audience.  The audience for this film is devotees of classical music, students in music conservatories, and fusty old conservatives with very conventional ideas about music, sex, and relationships.

It is a film for mature audiences.  When I say “mature audience” I don’t mean that it has sexual content and is therefore not suitable for young people.  On the contrary, I think sexual content is especially appropriate for young people because they are most curious and preoccupied with sexual feelings and issues, and should therefore be taking every opportunity to learn about it in any way they can.  “Mature audience,” for me, means an audience that has lived long enough to grasp the complexities and layers of personal relationships that have continued over a long period of time.  “Mature” means having perspective, being able to see the context in which passions and longings are played out, understanding the limitations and trade-offs, and ambivalences that are inevitable in human relations.  Being able to see that things change and evolve, and what is true today, may not be true tomorrow, and what was true yesterday may no longer be true today however much we might wish it to be.  It means being able to face up to what we are as people defined by what we have done or not done, rather than by what we have wished or strived for.  Young people can grasp these things intellectually, but they don’t know, and can’t know, what it feels like and looks like to a much older person.  That is just the nature of being younger or older.  That is the meaning of “maturity.”   So when I say that this film is for a mature audience, this is what I am talking about.  The issues are mature and the themes are mature.  I don’t mean to say that young people should not see it.  They absolutely should, because it will help them understand older people.  But the issues of the film are not their issues, with the exception of the sexual affairs between the younger girls and the older men, which the film treats very badly, trivializing them, and dismissing them in a rather callous, nonsensical fashion.

I like the subject matter, and the film is very well made, but I have a number of problems with the script.  The female characters are not well drawn, and I think, given short shrift.  The most promising character in the whole film, Alexandra (Imogen Poots), is turned into a confused, spineless, simpering jellyfish.  Juliette, (Catherine Keener) the violist and wife of the second violinist, Robert (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and the mother of Alexandra, is not fleshed out at all.  She becomes a very conventional and inadequate housewife and mother whose only asset seems to be her role as violist in the quartet.  She fails as a wife and she fails as a mother, and is rather problematic throughout the saga.  She seems to want to keep everything the way it has been, but she is not very effective in anything she attempts and we do not see who she is in any depth.

Although sex plays a major role in the story line, the film upholds very conventional middle class attitudes toward sex and relationships, which have nothing to offer but disappointment, defeat, and failure, and you’re supposed to just live with that.  Robert, the second violinist, whose dissatisfaction with his role in the quartet and his marriage is one of the dynamic forces in the film, ends up being defeated in all his attempts to shake things up and alter his position vis-a-vis the others in the group.  He starts an affair with a young flamenco dancer (Liraz Charhi) that gets nipped in the bud by his wife after their first night together, and the very appealing girl is rudely dismissed.  He should have fought harder for her, but he was a total wimp and caved in to his wife with hardly a protest.  The incident did prompt them to hash out some of the issues in their marriage, which are of long standing, as such things usually are, but they don’t really get anywhere.  Juliette takes the typical attitude of the American middle class woman and is prepared to trash the whole marriage because her husband fucked a young dancer one time.  It’s so idiotic.  I’ve seen people blow up twenty year marriages, sell houses, move long distances, fight bitterly over kids and money, all on account of a little bit of outside fucking.  Americans are crazy.  So while the film panders to conventional attitudes, it fails to offer anything constructive or insightful.  It doesn’t raise any questions.  It just proffers pat answers that it takes for granted.

Similarly with the affair between Daniel (Mark Ivanir), the first violinist, and Alexandra, the daughter of Robert and Juliette.  Daniel and Alexandra have probably known each other since she was born.  The first question you have to ask yourself is why this affair even happened?  As the film presents it — which I don’t quite believe — Robert recommends Alexandra to Daniel for violin lessons.  Daniel treats her like a child and belittles her.  He tells her she is not ready to tackle Beethoven’s Opus 131.  I suspect that is something music students often hear from their teachers, that certain pieces are beyond their understanding and they should wait until they are older or more mature before they tackle them.  What a lot of quatch!  So what if you make mistakes?  So what if you don’t understand it fully?  Go ahead and plunge into it, if you feel a strong urge beckoning you!  Defy them!  I mean it!  Of course you’ll play it better when you’re fifty.  You better hope you will.  But you have to start where you are, when you feel the desire and enthusiasm to tackle the challenging new project.  If you wait for a bunch of old people to bless you and tell you you’re ready, you’ll never do anything.  She should have ripped the music book in half and stormed out.  Instead she seduces him.  She is the aggressor and the initiator of the affair.  She seemed to be seeking his approval, and she wasn’t getting it through her violin playing, so she had another way of getting it that she knew would work for sure.  OK, so once you get him, what do you do with him?  Here the film reaches its low point of nonsense.  The affair is quickly discovered by the others in the group, in particular, by her parents, and they go into apoplexy.  Why?  Why is it so objectionable to them?  The film treats their disapproval as something self evident and unproblematic.  But the affair is quite natural and almost predictable.  Robert, in the most dramatic moment of the film –, and very much out of character for a string quartet — punches Daniel in the face and knocks him off his chair during rehearsal — a punch that will probably be applauded by every second violinist around the world.  But it is total nonsense.   Robert becomes a ridiculous figure, flailing about violently, out of control, completely helpless and totally ineffective.   Alexandra stands up very admirably to her mother, but then turns around and inexplicably dismisses Daniel and ends the affair that she just started, although Daniel is firm in his resolve to continue with it in the face of all the opposition — the only one in the film with any real character.  But this makes Alexandra look like a weak, confused, immature idiot.  This is why I think this film treats the women with pronounced hostility.  All of the sexual affairs — which are initiated by the young women — are quickly and definitively crushed, but for no good reason.  The film is simply hostile to sexual relationships that don’t fit into the mold of conventional middle class marriage.  This gives the film an atmosphere of mundane conservatism.  It is very ordinary.  Nothing like Beethoven.

I should probably say something about the Beethoven Quartet Opus 131 in C# minor that plays a thematic role in the film.   The choice of this particular quartet as a centerweight to this film is very appropriate because of the broad emotional range found throughout the quartet from anguish, contention, and turmoil, to relaxed, airy, lighthearted fun, as well as some enigmatic aspects that are difficult to penetrate.  This quartet is rather unusual.  It is in seven movements instead of the usual four, and Beethoven wanted them played without the usual pauses between the movements.  So it makes for a rather long, continuous piece that is demanding for both performers and audience.  Beethoven expected people to have long attention spans.  He should have lived in America for a while.  The piece is somber and anguished.  The first movement is painful.  It is a fugue that stabs at your heart.  The second and fifth movements are much more upbeat, especially the fifth movement, which is essentially a scherzo.   It is somewhat repetitious, but vigorous and lively.  The second movement is bright and almost lilting.  The third and sixth movements are very short and seem to serve as introductions to the longer, more substantial movements that follow.  The sixth movement is a somber, mournful dirge that segues into the vigorous final movement.  The fourth movement is quite long, nearly fifteen minutes.  I found it difficult to relate to.  I couldn’t seem to get a fix on it, emotionally.  There seems to be a longing that is not well defined.  The anguish is there, but it is subdued, almost below the surface, threatening to break through in points but never quite taking over.  Some of the good cheer fleetingly appears and then vanishes just as suddenly.  I don’t get it, and I think it is the heart of the quartet.  It seems to be the center of gravity of the whole piece.  The last movement is rough, contentious, and full of struggle and drama.  This quartet is a mature piece that challenges both the listener and the performer.  It is very fitting to the issues besetting this group of people.

The film has a lot to say about music and performance that will be of keen interest to musicians.  I found it to be very touching and moving.  It could have been a great movie if it had not taken such a conventional, mediocre attitude toward the story line.  At the end of the film the cellist is replaced by a new member, who has worked with the group before, and is judged to be a good fit that will maintain the established character of the group.  So everything stays the way it was.  The quartet continues on playing the same music with the same character and style.  The sexual affairs with the young girls are ended.  The marriage seems to be limping along as it had before.  Everything ends up pretty close to the way it was at the beginning.  Only the cellist is replaced.  And that is supposed to be a happy, harmonious ending.  What a crock!  It makes a mockery of the whole film.  What was all the contention and struggle about if we end up with essentially the same quartet, playing in the same style, in the same personal relationships?  Does the mere presence of a stable cellist subdue all the conflict and dissatisfaction that was afflicting this group from long before this movie started?  This film should be titled “The Triumph of Conservatism and Conventionality in Classical Music and in Life.”

This quartet should have broken up like the Beatles.  I thought about that as I was watching it.  The married couple should have separated or divorced.  The daughter should have moved in with the first violinist.  The second violinist should have left, founded his own quartet and been very successful, and the flamenco dancer should have gotten pregnant with the second violinist’s child.  Now that would have been a good movie.

Lohengrin
SF Opera Performance, October 20, 2012

The concept of love put forward in Lohengrin is that of a fragile flower very dependent upon maintaining illusions. Love is equivalent to blind Faith in goodness and constancy that must be absolute and unquestioning. But the underlying anxieties of this kind of naive faith ultimately undermine it and do it in. Lohengrin echoes Christianity in its demand for simple faith and the basic concept of a man is sent from God to rescue a damsel in distress, accused of a terrible crime. He saves her, not through self sacrifice, as in the Christian model, but through militaristic combat — a Wagnerian variant on the Christian theme. Superior prowess on the battlefield saves the girl from her enemies and wins her love. The woman’s love is the hero’s reward for her rescue from desperation. But there is one condition. The woman cannot ask her rescuer who he is or where he comes from. She has to take him completely on faith and let his actions of rescue and his superior strength in battle be the sole foundation of her devotion and love. If she is to question him and demand to know more of who he is, then he will be forced to leave her and renounce her. It is love founded on the most narrow, simplistic grounds and maintained with a gun pointed at the woman’s head, so to speak. Love can only be maintained with the woman in a desperate position of neediness with the man serving as the heroic figure of strength who magnanimously saves her from perpetual impending catastrophe. Love as worship of the conquering hero. While a woman may feel grateful to be delivered from impending doom — at least for a time — she will soon feel the extreme vulnerability of this position of helpless dependence, as the opera demonstrates. She will question her own worthiness of the man’s continuing love, she will want to broaden the base of the relationship and feel more appealing to the man beyond mere helplessness and need. She will feel the fragility of the connection to him. She feels vulnerable to his tiring of her and moving on. She seeks to strengthen her position through a greater understanding of the man, who he is, and what his own needs and vulnerabilities are. The message of Lohengrin is that this is a destructive tendency, that love can only be this primitive, blind devotion stemming from a condition of imminent undoing. Love between a man and a woman essentially depends on a woman being in a perpetual state of crisis. But on the other hand, if the woman gets to know who the man is and where he comes from, then she will realize that he is not the invulnerable hero, not the idealized figure of goodness and strength that he presented himself to be, and thus her love and devotion will be annuled. The man’s insecurity and feelings of unworthiness are activated upon a deeper probing of his true self. It is a very pessimistic outlook on relations between the sexes. Love can only be born and continue within these very narrow confines of faith sustained through willful ignorance, and that fragile foundation gives rise to the anxieties and demands that sabotage and destroy it. It is an outlook on life that is essentially dark and tragic — and a little silly too.
A few quibbles with the San Francisco Opera’s performance.
This production of the opera is set in a modern context in modern costumes, although Wagner’s original conceptualization set it in 10th century Saxony. On the cover of the program is a photograph by Erich Lessing of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Budapest, Hungary, during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. The idea according to Director Daniel Slater is that a contemporary setting would make it “more exciting and relevant for the audience.” Well, most Americans living today can probably relate to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 about as well as they can relate to 10th century Saxony. Many of us would be surprised to discover that there was a revolution in Hungary in 1956. And where is Hungary, by the way?
There are some militaristic and nationalistic elements in the opera that resonated well with the National Socialists, but you have to keep in mind that Germany did not even exist as a unified nation at the time this opera was composed. Invasion from the East was a long standing European fear that would be readily grasped by any European audience. The fact that this was a pressing matter in the 10th century would not be peculiar to that time or have any compelling significance as a factor in setting the opera in that time and place. I think Wagner’s purpose in setting the opera long in the past, aside from these nationalistic overtones, was to give the opera a context where the kind of romantic idealizations in the personal sphere that the opera treats would have traction for the viewer free from the distractions of a contemporary political and social context. Moving it forward in time and bringing up contemporary political issues in my view disrupts the essential focus of this opera on the nature of human relationships. True, the opera takes place under the threat of impending war. But this was a condition of European life as far back as one cares to look. So in that sense it did not matter when the opera was set, this background factor of imminent war was going to remain a constant in whatever time period it occurred. Wagner set it long in the past precisely to expunge the contingencies of the immediate contemporary circumstances. Bringing the opera forward and setting it in our own time defeats that artistic purpose and makes the whole thing sort of confusing.
Director Slater sees Lohengrin as a problematic character who renounces his godlike status in order to experience human love with Elsa. This is based on musings external to the opera itself. Within the opera there is nothing problematic about Lohengrin. He was sent on a mission by the Grail. He fulfilled the mission, he accepted Elsa as his prize, he accepted the leadership position as a warrior, he laid out his conditions, and he stuck to them steadfastly and departed without any apparent signs of misgiving. Slater says he is seeking redemption through Elsa’s love and is willing to sacrifice his immortality to achieve it. There is nothing in the opera to substantiate this view. Within the opera, Lohengrin is a knight in shining armor coming to the rescue of a damsel in distress and then to lead an army into battle. Slater puts him instead in a leather trench coat, which tends to deemphasize his heroic qualities. But counterculture figures don’t usually lead armies. I’m not sure that it works. Lohengrin is not Hamlet.
Generally the staging is rather static and unimaginative. At times it gets dull because there is not enough activity in the staging or aesthetic interest in the lighting to sustain one’s attention. The lighting in the first act is bright and harsh. The early part of the second act feels a little cramped against the front edge of the stage. In the original conception the swan was supposed to pull a boat down the river bearing Lohengrin. Slater gives that up and opts for much less impressive imagery of a static pair of wings from which Lohengrin emerges. At the end the long lost Gottfried reappears as a small boy from the transformed swan. But it doesn’t make sense that Gottfried should reappear as a small boy. He disappeared years ago as a child. His sister Elsa has grown into a mature woman. He should be contemporary with Elsa. Furthermore, he is supposed to arrive ready to lead an army into battle, to step into the role being abdicated by Lohengrin, but he can barely lift a sword. What is Slater seeking by casting Gottfried as an 8 year old boy? Some sort of cutesy sentimentality? A child’s appearance at the end of this dark, gloomy opera trying to wave a sword is a rather ridiculous juxtaposition if you ask me, and I take it to indicate that he completely misunderstands what the opera is all about. This is not a child’s opera at all and introducing a child as a final punctuation mark on this tragedy is a colossal malapropism.
What works in this opera is the music. If it wasn’t for the music, it probably wouldn’t even be staged. The orchestra, the singers, the chorus, did a superb job and made it a musical success, even if it left much to be desired as a dramatic production. Wagner’s great creativity and strength was as a composer of music more than as a dramatist or as a prophet. It is clearly evident in this dark opera and in its problematic staging in this San Francisco Opera production.

Girl Model
Directed by David Redmon and Ashley Sabin

This film is a public relations piece for organized criminal rackets operating internationally between Russia and the Far East. I couldn’t quite figure out why this film was made. It is a pack of lies and misrepresentations from beginning to end. The proof of this is in the film itself and I will point it out to you, although the film tries to cast itself as something benign or even benevolent. But it is such a thin veneer that it is almost laughable. This is quite obviously sordid and sinister. The more I think about it, the darker and more frightening it becomes. It’s very curious what was motivating these filmmakers?
It starts out in Siberia, of all places. Really. The opening scene reminded me of a factory farm where animals are kept in large warehouse-like facilities by the hundreds and thousands being raised in close quarters for slaughter. Except these are girls between the ages of about twelve and fifteen. Their bikini covered bodies are examined one after another in a seemingly endless assembly line, supposedly in search of some ideal of feminine beauty that will be successful as a model in Japan.
From the outset it is apparent that this is a scam. If these self appointed mavens of the fashion world actually knew as much as they claim about the tastes of Japanese publishers and fashion, then there would be successful models to interview to validate the success of their judgments. But there are none. The only adult woman interviewed in the film is Ashley Sabin, one of the filmmakers, who seems deeply ambivalent about the modeling business and who said that “no one hated the modeling business more than me.” Yet she is now a recruiter for the enterprise she once despised, and she doesn’t seem all too pleased with herself.
I spent the first part of the film wondering why this was taking place in Siberia? I’m not sure I’ve got it right, but Siberia is an out of the way place and far from media attention and public scrutiny. The population is mostly rural and economically challenged, let’s say, and probably unsophisticated in their knowledge of the outside world. It’s a good place to do something if you want to keep a low profile, and there is evidently a large pool of naive young girls who dream of escaping to a better life in a faraway place.
Tigran, the supposed owner of the modeling agency that recruits the Russian girls and transports them to Japan, is the paradigm of a smooth talking con man. He presents himself as something a few pegs below sainthood, giving these deprived girls from rural Siberia an opportunity to live an exciting life as a model in Japan and make a lot of money for their struggling families. But this avatar of his organization is belied on a number of counts, and once quite explicitly and threateningly, which I found very interesting, and a bold intimation of what he is really all about.
First of all, there are no successful models who can be held up as examples of what he has can accomplish for a girl. A successful agent should have successful clients as examples of his capabilities and judgment, and he doesn’t have any.
Second, the contract that the girls have to sign with his agency is actually quoted on screen, and promises them two jobs in Japan and $8000. But Madlen and Nadya, the two girls followed in the film, do not get jobs, and leave Japan at least $2000 in debt — to him. So they are lied to and swindled.
Third, the contract specifies that the terms of the contract can be changed from day to day at the will of the agency. This means that there is no contract, that they are basically working at his whim.
Fourth, once the girls are in Japan, he does not attend to them in any way. They are passed on to Japanese handlers who send them on an series of fruitless auditions that amount to nothing. If they do get work or their photos are used they are not paid for it, and he does not see to it that they are paid. There is not one named Japanese advertising agency, publication, retail business, or fashion house in the whole film that has used the models that this agency has represented. Not a single one.
Fifth, and most tellingly, he relates how some young girls can be”difficult” — Lord knows — and in order to subdue them, he takes them on an outing to the morgue, so they can see the dead bodies of other young girls like themselves. Purportedly, this is to discourage the girls from drug use. Tigran vouches for its powerful effectiveness. But if this is such an effective technique for keeping young girls off of drugs, maybe we should start doing it here. Why hasn’t anyone here ever thought of this after so long in the War on Drugs? Maybe we should start organizing field trips for young girls to visit morgues to see the bodies of other young girls who died from drug abuse? Perhaps this film does have one valuable insight to offer that can turn young girls’ lives around.
Actually, this is intimidation of the most heavy handed sort. This is to let the girls know that ‘you belong to us, now. We own you. And you’d better do as we tell you, or this is your destiny.’ It is a very stark choice, and he means it. He admits that he used to be in the military and that he has killed a lot of people. He wants you to know that he is capable and experienced at killing people. The military part of it is questionable, but that this man is a killer I have no doubt. This guy is intimidating and very dangerous.
The scam works like this. Girls from poor families in rural Russia are recruited by the Russian Mafia. Ashley works as a scout and a recruiter. She gives the whole process its veneer of benign legitimacy. The modeling tryouts and the search for the ideal of feminine beauty are a sham. What they are really looking for, and Tigran says this explicitly, are girls from disadvantaged backgrounds whose families have financial problems. He said they check the girls out very carefully in terms of their background and their family circumstances. They are looking for girls with the right kind of vulnerabilities. Once they find an appropriate candidate, they are lured to Japan or Taiwan or somewhere else in the Far East with the promise of a successful modeling career. But, of course, that does not happen. The girls are treated miserably. They barely have enough to eat. They have to call home to get money to live on. They get no jobs. If their photos are used, they are not paid for it. After a while they are sent home several thousand dollars in debt to the “modeling agency.”
The one instance where Nadya’s photo does appear in a magazine is one where her face is covered. Why is her face covered? With her face covered she can’t be identified. We don’t even know for sure if that is her. This “modeling agency” does not want anyone to see their models in a magazine. They don’t want anyone to know she was ever in Japan. They want her to remain invisible. What about all the tryouts and photo shoots? Some of the photos may indeed be used, but probably not in Japan, and she will never be paid for any of them. What is really going on here?
This is recruitment for prostitution. Prostitution is where the real money is, not modeling. The criminal gangs have no illusions. Very few girls can make much money modeling, but almost any girl can make substantial money as a prostitute, even a gray mouse like Nadya. That is what this is about, ladies and gentlemen. This is why the film you saw doesn’t make sense, and why it is hard for me to figure out why it was even made in the first place. The “modeling agency” is just an elaborate cover. The few thousand dollars spent on sending the girl to Japan and shaking her loose from her family is the mob’s initial investment, their startup cost. Once the girl is working as a prostitute, she will make that back and more in a very short time.
The first step is to get the girl deeply in debt. Once she is in debt beyond her ability to repay, and her family unable to bail her out, the Russian Mafia makes her an offer she can’t refuse. Remember that girl you saw in the morgue? We spent a lot of money to send you to Japan or Taiwan on those fruitless modeling tryouts, and we expect to get that money back. You’ve proven that you can’t make money as a model. But we’ve got a surefire way for you to make money, but it is not exactly modeling. It’s a little different, but another way of selling your body.
Ashley Sabin talks a little bit in the latter part of the film about prostitution and how some girls who fail as models end up going that route. She points out how some countries and cultures do not stigmatize prostitution and claims it is a perfectly legitimate way to earn a living. She professes not to know anything about that aspect of the modeling business, and claims she has nothing to do with it herself. This is very likely a lie, along with the lie we see her relating in the next few moments to Russian parents of prospective recruits that the girls from her modeling agency never return to Russia with debt, when we have just seen two girls from her agency return to Russia with thousands of dollars in debt. So her credibility is zero, and her capability and effectiveness at deception is documented right before our eyes. Some women are able to deal their way out of the prostitution aspect of the business by acting as recruiters of younger girls. That could be Ashley’s story, but she speaks very good English and appears to be an American. Perhaps those qualities were seen as more valuable assets that working as a prostitute. Ashley is a bit of a puzzle, but there is clearly much that she is not telling. It is evident that she has very mixed feelings, but apparently strong survival instincts, and she is doing what she has to do.
At the very end of the film in a textual postscript, we are told that Nadya went back to Japan the following year — a rather surprising turnaround given her disagreeable experience the first time — but maybe not, if you consider the scenario that I have painted. We are told that she failed again to achieve success as a model and racked up still more debt and was sent on to Taiwan and China and other places in the Far East. It did not tell us what she was doing or how she was living, but I think we can make a pretty good surmise that she is not making money as a model. If she was, then they would have pictures and publications and advertisements to show us as evidence of her success. But rest assured, she probably is making money, and more than she could ever make modeling, but she is not getting much of it. Ask Tigran where the money goes.
This film leaves me puzzling. Not about what is going on. That is very clear. But what were the filmmakers intentions in making this film? What were they trying to accomplish? They didn’t seem to be able to bring themselves to tell the real story, so they concocted something half-assed, that intimated very obliquely what was going on, and left a lot of loose ends dangling nonsensically, but they never really pursued the matter in any depth. And they promoted a viewpoint that they knew very well was a lie. They seem afraid to really follow this where it is leading, — understandable, actually — but if they don’t want to tell the story, why make the film at all? The people and organizations running this operation don’t usually like to be the subjects of documentary films. Why would a guy like Tigran appear in this film? Did he really think that people would buy his tale about his having such a good heart and doing this for the good of the girls, when the film plainly shows that that could not be true in any shape or form? Did they delude themselves into thinking that this would encourage young girls around the world to want to become models? I don’t get it. It must have something to do with the relationship between Ashley and Tigran. I think she is very much afraid of him. I can’t even speculate about it.

Shakespeare: The Biography.
By Peter Ackroyd. New York: Random House/Anchor Books. 2006 [2005]. 572 pp.

There is much that is not known about Shakespeare, a circumstance that always poses difficulties for a biographer, and one which often tempts the biographer to overreach the spare facts that are known with surmises and interpretations that become merged with known facts leaving a distorted, confused impression. Peter Ackroyd avoids this pitfall by masterfully recreating Shakespeare the person through the context of the time and circumstances in which he lived. The time and circumstances of Shakespeare’s life can be discerned with much more clarity and much more fullness than Shakespeare himself, but that context illuminates the person that Shakespeare must have been, and together with the writings that he left and other documents that pertain to his life, a remarkably clear and convincing portrait of Shakespeare the person emerges. What makes this reconstruction possible and so rich and informative is Ackroyd’s depth of knowledge of Elizabethan England, and particularly of the city of London. This far reaching grasp of the history and culture of the time in which Shakespeare lived, together with encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare’s writings, as well as the writings of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, gives his presentation of Shakespeare a convincing weight of authority.
Shakespeare was a country boy. Ackroyd vividly reconstructs the village life of sixteenth century Stratford and points out how Shakespeare’s plays are full of references to life upon the land that are of such richness and specificity that they evince one who could only had lived and grown up there.
“There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping; there are many references to the preparation of food, to boiling and mincing and stewing and frying; there are allusions to badly prepared cakes and unsieved flour, to a rabbit being turned upon a spit and a pasty being ‘pinched.’
An ill-weeded garden is an image of decay. He knows of grafting and pruning, of digging and dunging.
In all he alludes to 108 different plants. In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes, and apricots.
The flowers of his plays are native to the soil from which he came; the primrose and the violet, the wallflower and the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose, sprang up wild all around him. . . He uses the local names for the flowers of the meadow, such as Ophelia’s crowflowers, and Lear’s cuckoo-flowers; he uses the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness. He employs the local names of bilberry for the whortleberry and honey-stalks for stalks of clover. In that same dialect, too, a dandelion is a ‘golden lad’ before becoming a ‘chimney sweeper’ when its spore is cast upon the breeze.
No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total.” (p. 33-34)
Born in 1564, he was a first-born son to parents who had already lost two daughters. Infant mortality was high in the sixteenth century and adult male life expectancy was only forty-seven years. Shakespeare himself died on his fifty-second birthday. Death was always a looming presence in sixteenth century England. Plague struck London with regularity and often forced Shakespeare’s acting company to go on the road for the summer while the city of London endured the plague.
As an adult, Shakespeare visited Stratford once a year and in 1597 bought a sumptuous house there where he resided until his death in 1616. Shakespeare was not at all the poor, struggling artist. His father, John, was a member of the glovers’ guild. He also dealt in wool, barley, and timber. He is also known to have leant money at excessive interest rates. John Shakespeare was active in the governance of Stratford, serving in numerous official positions including mayor. He was apparently quite well respected and of some substance in the town. His son, Will, would later become quite adept and astute in money matters. Shakespeare, by the end of his life had actually become rather well to do.
The issue that overshadowed Shakespeare’s life and touched him personally at numerous points was a culture war going on in England at the time between Catholicism and Protestant reformers. It began with Henry the Eighth (1491-1547) and continued for the next couple of centuries. It encompassed more than just religion; it was also about secular power and governance. Shakespeare’s family was Catholic. Shakespeare seems to have had Catholic sympathies although he was not overtly devout or outspoken on matters of religion.  Ackroyd summarizes it thus:
“It is true that he used the language and the structure of the old faith in his drama, but that does not imply that he espoused Catholicism. His parents are likely to have been of the old faith, but he did not necessarily take it with him into his adulthood. The old religion was part of the landscape of his imagination, not of his belief.” (p. 472)
“Despite the myriad allusions to the old faith, Shakespeare in no sense declares himself. In the tragedies, for example, the religious imperatives of piety and consolation are withheld; these are worlds with no god. He never adverts to any particular religious controversy . . . The safest and most likely conclusion, however, must be that despite his manifold Catholic connections Shakespeare professed no particular faith. The church bells did not summon him to worship. They reminded him of decay and of time past. Just as he was a man without opinions, so he was a man without beliefs.” (p. 474)
“Shakespeare grew up with a profound sense of ambiguity. It is one of the informing principles both of his life and of his art. In the plays themselves the themes and situations are endlessly mirrored in the plots and sub-plots, so that the reader or spectator is presented with a series of variations on the same subject without any one of them given preeminence.” (p. 268)
“Entire plays seem to be made up of parallels and contrasts and echoes. All of his characters have mixed natures. Despite the apparently orchestrated harmony of his endings, there are in fact very few genuine resolutions of the action. The closing scenes are deliberately rendered ambiguous, with one character generally excluded from the happy picture of reconciliation. That is why some critics have agreed with Tolstoy that Shakespeare really had ‘nothing to say.'” (p. 269)
Shakespeare seems to have had a strong sexual constitution. We’ll leave aside his “orientation.”
“There are more than thirteen hundred sexual allusions in the plays, as well as the repeated use of sexual slang. There are sixty-six terms for the female vagina. . . There are a host of words for the male penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery, and fellatio. ” (p. 314)
“The poems to his ‘black mistress’ contain allusions to sexual disgust and sexual jealousy that are also to be found in his drama. There is a hint of homosexual passion in The Merchant of Venice, Twelfth Night, Othello, and elsewhere — a passion not unlike that evinced by the writer of the sonnets to his favoured boy. There are also veiled references to venereal disease in connection with the ‘Dark Lady.’ Shakespeare’s sonnets are suffused with sexual humour and sexual innuendo. The language of the poems is itself sexual, quick energetic, ambiguous, amoral. From the evidence of the drama alone it would be clear that he was preoccupied with sexuality in all of its forms.” (p. 314)
“The Elizabethan Age was one of great and open promiscuity. London women were known throughout Europe for their friendliness, and travellers professed to be astonished by the freedom and lewdness of conversation between the sexes. It was not only in the capital, however, that sexual activity was commonplace.”
“It was not always a clean or hygenic period in matters pertaining to the body, at least from a modern perspective, and the sexual act veered between mud wrestling and perfumed coupling. In order to avoid the more unpleasant sights and odours, it was customary for men and women to have sexual congress almost fully clothed.”
“In certain of the sonnets that act provokes shame and disgust. Hamlet is a misogynist. Loathing for the act of sex is apparent in Measure for Measure, and in King Lear, in Timon of Athens, and in Troilus and Cressida. ” (p. 315)
Sexual jealousy is a common theme in Shakespeare’s plays. His own sexual identity seemed to be, shall we say, flexible. Ackroyd points out that Shakespeare created more memorable female roles than any of his contemporaries. He used cross dressing more frequently than any other dramatist. He could identify with and express the hearts and minds of females as well as males with great sensitivity. In his later plays, especially, there is a preoccupation with father-daughter relationships. Ackroyd notes that many biographers of Shakespeare surmise that he suspected his wife, Anne Hathaway Shakespeare, of infidelity, but he points out that this is unprovable. But infidelity, both real and imagined, is a significant element in many of his plays as well as in the sonnets. (p. 317)
This brings up a point that I was hoping to hear more about from Ackroyd, and that is Anne Hathaway and Shakespeare’s marriage. Ackroyd has very little to say about Anne and Will’s marriage. He does research Anne’s family background and notes the relationships between some of her relatives and Shakespeare. But the marriage between Anne and Will remains shrouded in fog. This is not due to any deficiency or neglect on Ackroyd’s part. If anything were known about it, I’m sure he would be aware of it and included it. Shakespeare’s marriage is one of those dark patches that have resisted the penetration of posterity’s curiosity.
Ackroyd reveals a lot about how Shakespeare worked as a dramatist and it is very interesting. He often wrote roles with specific actors in mind. He adapted, revised, and rewrote. Numerous versions of his plays have been found apart from the Folio edition. A play could change depending on the venue and the actors available. Shakespeare always had his eye on the performance. He was not just a scriptwriter, and was perfectly willing to adapt a script to the needs of a performance. He tended to write about the aristocracy: kings, court intrigue, etc., but he was equally familiar and convincing in his portrayals of common people and lowlifes. His characters are often ambivalent and ambiguous as he was himself. Some have noticed in Shakespeare an ambivalence about the theater itself.  “One of his persistent metaphors for human futility and pretension is the theater. When he compares one of his characters to an actor, the allusion is generally negative.” (p. 313)
While much of Shakespeare’s life remains murky and beyond the reach of our prying curiosity, Ackroyd has compiled an impressive wealth of information richly set in the cultural context of Elizabethan England. I have only touched on a few of the many interesting subtopics that he covers. There is so much that is informative, engaging, interesting in this book that it is bound to please anyone drawn to Shakespeare and his writings or the history of England.