Author: BeatrixKiddo

 

House shows are nothing new for Vail cooperative house in Kerrytown. Vail house has an ideal setup for loud shows and parties, existing dingily in its own cottage-like universe, chronically unnoticed by police or neighbors. Though the coop sits in the middle of a student-housing neighborhood close to the city center and campus, an unkempt wilderness surrounds it on all sides, allowing it to stretch peacefully almost across the city block – breaking the neat rows of gravel and garages unnoticed. An enormous, solid old oak tree sits between the house and the sidewalk, dwarfing the house with warped perspective. When I lived there for a year, I learned to love the wood paneled, windowed living room and the washed out glory of the faded, split and mended 30-year-old furniture and carpeting, the shelves filled with forgotten knick-knacks and musty books, objects that hadn’t touched hands in decades.

 

After a month, I had learned to navigate the dark hallways without pause – I could fly from my room to the basement to the kitchen in near complete darkness while my friends felt along the walls, lost within the horizontal labyrinth. The vanguard of trees, shrubs and grasses dimmed the sunlight during the day and, and at night on the second-floor porch the smoke from a half dozen spliffs floated upwards in one ghostly mass while the riffs from a mandolin, a banjo, a guitar rippled around us. Trash and recycling spilled out of their containers, the floors could turn a bare foot black in minutes, and nobody cared enough to not sit on the large tubs of flour and sugar in the kitchen while they drank whiskey and ate garlic toast on stale pretzel rolls.

 

My memories of Vail – both frustrated and fond – came rushing back to me when I returned to the house for the Frontier Ruckus living room show tour this past Friday. Frontier Ruckus, the verbose Ann Arbor based folk band, has been touring the country doing a series of intimate living room shows. After fans purchased tickets on line, the venue was revealed to them (though Vail House residents and ‘friends and family,’ myself included, were admitted for free). Openers Fred Thomas, a solo Michigan acoustic musician, and Wych Elm, Vail’s folk-band-in residence turned actual folk band, played on a ‘stage’ consisting of a carpet against the wall, with an audience of 75-100 strangers and friends sitting on chairs and couches or standing against the wall.

Then Frontier Ruckus took the stage, feeding off the already warm and intimate energy established in the audience. As the band played songs from their three albums, front man Matt Milia offering vignettes and stories to accompany his lyrically dense anthems of Midwestern angst, while David Winston Jones provided an energetic banjo and Zach Nichols rotating between trumpet, musical saw, and the Vail basement’s defiantly un-tunable grand piano. Former member Anna Burch joined with the band to provide the harmonies, a key addition to the band’s sound. I had seen Frontier Ruckus before without Anna’s accompaniment, and I noticed how much her voice added – both amplifying the acoustic sound and complicating the melodies. I found myself paying more attention to the singer throughout the show, as she performed unprotected by a musical instrument, hands occasionally clasped behind her back, completely comfortable in the space she occupied.

 

Though Vail often has live music performances, usually they take place during a party or in a party-like atmosphere – people thrash and dance, holding red cups, while the amplified musicians sweat, either hollering through or grooving to the chaos. I once spent most of the Vail House Band’s fourth of July porch show anxiously, drunkenly protecting a cello player who had set up her expensive instrument too close to the keg. This show was different, intimate, respectful. People hadn’t come to drink and party, accompanied by music, they had actually come to see music that they were interested in. I was oddly touched, realizing that of all the house shows I’ve attended at Vail – including shows that I had fun at, shows that took place when I lived at the house, shows of bands I’m more dedicated to than Frontier Ruckus–  this may have been the one that I was the most present for.

I love action movies. I can talk about Fellini and Godard, I can admire French new wave, and I certainly do love the auteur golden age of cinema – but whether steered by a gangster, superhero or cop, I’m always drawn to a good action movie vehicle. I discovered the silly, fantastic trinity of Die Hard, Speed, and The Matrix when I was making daily trips to the neighborhood blockbuster at the age of 10, and quickly fell in love with the concise sweep of the well-executed action movie. “What’s a good action movie?” I would ask my parents as I trolled the action aisle at our (dearly departed) neighborhood Blockbuster, and they suggested in turn James Bond, Indiana Jones, Miller’s Crossing, The Untouchables, The Usual Suspects, and The Bourne Identity. My sister and I would get sugary snacks and watch and rewatch the X-men series, while I would drag my friends to see the new Spiderman movie the day it was released.

And I haven’t grown out of it. The new Star Trek movie was fantastic (though the sequel was slightly disappointing), I followed the Bourne trilogy to its end, and though I’m getting fatigued of superheroes I still watched every Batman, and have kept up to date on the (increasingly tiresome, but still mostly fun) Marvel hegemon. My sister moons over the Grand Budapest Hotel release, but I’m already excited for the new Guardians of the Galaxy in August.

But in order to love action movies, I’ve had to accept that I’m never going to see myself represented in them. I don’t expect to see compelling, non-idiotic female leads – and I do expect to see women treated as rewards, as plot devices and romantic pawns, and generally created as undeveloped, flat characters. With the entire Hollywood movie industry generally characterized as men making films for men – with women only holding 18% of behind the camera roles, and many films failing to feature enough women to pass the simple Bechdel test – it might seem unsurprising that the most testosterone-fueled of the movie genres is short on female leads. It could be argued that we should focus our attention on incorporating women as complex characters in more dramas and comedies, and surrender the action movie to male domination – but I disagree. We need more female action heroes.

The action genre may be generally simple, but it’s a kind of simplicity that can be indicative of broad social and cultural norms. The form of the archetypal  ‘bad guy’ has always told us a lot about the western mindset, as he evolved from a Russian-accented evil mastermind during the Cold War to a modern ideologically motivated and often vaguely middle-eastern terrorist (or, reflecting our modern fears, even a natural disaster or post-apocalyptic baddie). And while the action movie villain reflects what we’re currently afraid of, the hero reflects what we aspire to be, and what we trust to conquer our fears. When these heroes are all men, it damages our perception of what’s possible. I certainly don’t look to action movies to tell me what I can and can’t do – if I did I’d have pretty warped perceptions of physics and gun safety – but I can’t help but look at blockbuster movies as major cultural signals, as indicators that the cultural monolith affirms or denies my ability to be a ‘hero.’ Lupita Nyong’o’s recently spoke about this kind of cultural affirmation in her moving ‘Black Women In Hollywood’ acceptance speech, explaining how the international success of dark-skinned model Alex Wek helped her to embrace her own dark complexion as beautiful. The fashion world’s embrace of Wek was an important signal to Nyong’o, a cultural affirmation of non-white beauty. In action movies, we need signals affirming non-male strength and power, not only because female leads will affirm our own strength and give us female role models, but because movies will be better for it. Even the most fantastic scenario or the most ridiculously costumed hero must in some way be analogous to the consumer’s life, and when more than half of movie-consumers are female, it pays – both artistically and literally – to make these analogies align to the lives of women.

And these roles are out there. La Femme Nikita, Luc Besson’s post Professional movie about a female spy, was the first action movie with a female lead that I remember watching. Though Nikita might be a druggy psychopath at the beginning of the movie, I loved the development of her secret agent skills, her sexual authority, and especially the idea that a woman being dragged off to die would scream her own name. Kill Bill, True Grit and Alien all come to mind as past examples, but it may be the enormous success of the Jennifer Lawrence driven Hunger Games series that ultimately marks a turning point in Hollywood’s relationship with female action leads. With The Hunger Games proving that women and men will turn out, in droves, to see a female kick ass, the movie industry would be foolish not to capitalize on this broken ground and make more non-chick-flick roles for women.

I still love a lot of movies that ignore women. It’s hard not to, since some of the best movies do. But I also recognize how I’m culturally minimized by the industry. So while the otherwise-excellent True Detective series may have been meta-criticizing its leads’ relationships with women, making some kind of easily ignored point that ignoring women leads to death and destruction, at this point I’m so exhausted with shows that use similar scenery – the fetishized, ritualized murder of women – without engaging female perspectives that I’m not really listening anymore. It’s the same fatigued, misogynistic landscape that women have been bored by for centuries. If you want to get our attention, make roles that recognize us – as paying consumers, and as capable humans.

 

The new HBO series “True Detective” structures itself around a series of well-known tropes: two macho cops find their different personalities and worldviews clashing and conflicting when they are forced to work together; a woman’s body is found in a murder scene with occult, ritualistic overtones; a detective follows his superior intellect to investigate a potential serial killer. Yet writer Nic Pizzolatto and director Cary Joji Fukunaga use these familiar plot devices as a simple basis on which to build an eerie, dark character study and southern thriller.

The series uses a surprisingly effective story-telling device, as detectives Marty (Woody Harrelson) and Rust (Matthew McConaughey) are questioned separately in the present-day about the particulars of a closed homicide investigation that took place fifteen years in the past. Aged by makeup and hair, the actors respond to their interrogators, providing narration, commentary, excuses, and the key implication that the case we are following is somehow not quite closed. As we listen to Rust and Marty’s different perceptions the investigation – and eventually watch their stories diverge from reality as they lie to the detectives – Pizzolatto establishes a theme of storytelling and subjectivity. As the detectives interrogate liars, drug dealers, and potential murderers, and as Rust establishes himself as a first-class, cold-hearted winner of criminal confessions, the subtle interplay between questioner and story-teller becomes more interesting than the allegedly murderous truth.

Though Pizzolatto excels at intertwining an intriguing plot with complex character development, the dialogue can be clunky and overwrought. Rust, an intellectual with a dark past as an undercover narcotics CI, has a particular penchant for pessimistically philosophical dronings. When Marty often gives his partner the verbal equivalent of an annoyed elbow –  Jesus, man, what’s wrong with you? – it comes as a comical moment for anyone who ever wanted to do the same to Dexter, Travis Bickle, Rorschach, or their pop culture brethren. The monologuing can get tiresome, and often it’s to McConaughey’s credit that he can pull off some of Pizzolatto’s most nonsensical lines. With a thousand-yard stare, a drag on a cigarette, and the humble obfuscation of a deep (and recently parodied) southern drawl, McConaughey can skim rhapsodies about “mainlining the truth of the universe” without batting an eye – but the other actors, specifically Michelle Monaghan as the philandering Marty’s beleaguered wife, struggle more noticeably with the unwieldy prose.

Though the writing is sometimes uneven, the direction is consistently excellent. As the detectives drive up and down the bayou, Fukunaga’s cinematography brings the scenery to life with the bleakness of direct sunshine and the suspect rottenness of fertile land, a blend reminiscent of Sally Mann’s photographs of the American south. Fukunaga may have cemented True Detective’s critical reception with two outstanding wordless sequences in Episode 4. First, Marty trails a woman as she leaves a strip club and makes her way through a dystopic rave to a drug dealer contact, the camera moving with dreamlike focus through the flailing, blindly exultant partiers. Then, in an incredibly choreographed six-minute tracking shot, we follow Rust as he flees an undercover drug heist that has spiraled out of control. In one of the best ‘chase scenes’ I’ve seen on television, the camera follows Rust’s desperate yet calculated escape, weaving feverishly in and out of tenement houses and between chaotic groups of drugged, gun-toting dealers.

After the 5th episode marked a peak in the series’ action, episode 6 followed the disintegration of the partners’ relationship in the past, as in the present the interviewers finally pose direct questions about Rust’s involvement in the supposedly closed case. The seventh episode abandons the retrospective story-telling device and places the scene firmly in the present day, setting the scene for the alcoholic, disheveled Rust and the hackneyed, divorced Marty to put aside their conflicted estrangement and reunite for the series 1 finale on Sunday night.

The series creators have confirmed that the season will be self-contained; the series will continue next season with a new cast and storyline. Although I often enjoy watching characters grow over multiple seasons of a show, with a thriller series there’s definitely something comforting in the knowledge that this mystery is the fully realized product of a complete thought process. Though Pizzolatto has promised that there won’t be any serious twists, True Detective fans are certainly hoping for a suitably twisted ending to one of the most fascinating thriller series on television.

Paolo Sorrentino’s new film, ‘La Grande Belleza (The Great Beauty),’ follows the long faced Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), an aging Italian writer and languidly energetic socialite.

Four decades ago, Jep wrote a highly acclaimed novel called ‘The Human Apparatus,’ but has not written a book since, instead working occasionally as a journalism while spending his nights submersed an elite socialite lifestyle of decadent parties, dinners, drinks and drugs. His voiceovers are self-aware, lonely. When he first arrived on Rome’s social scene, he says he wanted to be “the king of the high life,” with the power not only to attend parties but also the power to “make them a failure.” Now, four decades later, Jep owns Roman social life, but still finds himself deeply unfulfilled. He bounces back and forth between the sorrow prompted by memories of an old love that has just died, and his new, not quite fulfilling, romance with a stripper named Ramona.

We meet Gambardella in the midst of his 65^th birthday party, at a debaucherous rooftop celebration in Rome where electronic music pulses, a lecherous old man hisses at spray-tanned and spandex clad young women, an aging moviestar bursts out of a cake, and a midget woman slowly drinks herself to sleep in the corner. In a series of immersive visuals, the crowd parts for a line dance, and through a tunnel of outstretched, flexing hands and arms, we see Jep standing alone in the middle, a cigarette clenched in his teeth. Servillo emotes heavily – he dances, but with his eyes closed to an inner world that we can tell is painfully self-aware. When he opens them, his eyebrows slouch parenthetically upwards and his mouth sets into a look of almost casual dismay. Jep may drift in the present, vibrant moments of his social scene, but Servillo’s sad eyes and long, lined face emit a pathos that is almost wise, almost ancient. Jep, we come to understand, is vitally aware of his own tender insecurities, his disillusionment, and his disorientation in time and space. He bemoans his sleep schedule and lifestyle to his grounded housekeeper, but shrugs his shoulders to the external refrain from his friends and acquaintances – “Why didn’t you ever write another book?”

Although he spends his time with young actresses, aging poets, and the generally rich and famous, Jep consistently cuts down or dismisses any pretentions that the participants in his shallow lifestyle may make to youth, sincerity, or legitimacy. When one of his friends speaks with pride about her writing, political work and family, Jep criticizes her brutally, pitilessly exposing the tender insecurities at the center of her arrogance – implying that to lie to one’s self may be necessary, but to make such pretenses loudly is just embarrassing. Yet in his dismissal of his friends’ claims, Jep betrays his awareness of his own decline, and his lack of fulfillment and his fears.

Jep seems desensitized to the spaces he occupies, even as Sorrentino follows him around a city full of buildings, monuments and statues with deep artistic and religious significance. In one of the film’s most ethereal sequences, Jep speaks to a mysterious man at an outdoor, nighttime party – an old acquaintance, we assume – who produces a hefty metal box of keys that open the doors to ‘the most beautiful buildings in Rome.’ Jep and his girlfriend Ramona embark on a nighttime odyssey (detached, as far as I could tell, from spatial logic) through these buildings, and peruse famous statues, paintings and monuments by the light of their guide’s candles.

When on this midnight journey they encounter a trio of princesses playing poker around a table, it’s only characteristic of the surreal imagery that interspersed in Sorrentino’s style. Jep works for a midget woman with blue hair, a CGI giraffe makes a brief appearance, and the movie’s last act involves an aging, saintly nun with two crooked teeth. Also surreal, and sometimes even perverse, are the entertainers that Jep encounters – a knifethrower marks the outline of his shivering assistant; a young girl forced by her parents to ‘perform’ at a gathering screams as she hurls buckets of paint towards an enormous canvas; Jep meets and romances an aging stripper who still performs in her father’s strip club. Here, the comparisons to Fellini are inevitable and mostly accurate, but Sorrentino retains a unique voice and a distinct, modern vision.

Sorrentino’s use of Rome’s religious imagery is particularly immersive, and pointed. That the people, statues and buildings that surround Jep are all imbued with a deep religious significance, stands in stark contrast to his inability to find meaning in his life – he is looking for a ‘great beauty’ to appear, unable to turn around or start over for anything lesser. When he says early on that tourists are the only good people in the city, he seems to cut towards that truth – the tourists see what the native Romans are numbed to. The great beauty, Jep monologues, exists somewhere beneath and within humanity’s miserable smallness, somewhere not above or behind but within the great “embarrassment of being in the world.” Sorrentino’s extravagant, entrancing odyssey finally illustrates that what Jep has been waiting for can’t be waited for. Great beauty has been there all along.

I was lucky enough to be raised by literature loving parents – that is to say, to grow up in a house populated by numerous bookcases full of books, and to be guided towards them by mentors who wanted me to value the worlds they contained. For bedtime stories my parents would serialize books like Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, or Great Expectations, with my mom often putting on southern or British accents to voice the different characters. I loved story time, and learned quickly that books and novels with daunting titles or famous authors didn’t have to be inaccessible. After all, some of the scariest sounding great novels were actually adventure stories, or had narrators who were kids just like me!

But because I was sure I could tackle any literary challenge – and was, incidentally, a sad kid, sometimes misguidedly/desperately looking for answers – I ended up accessing certain authors before my time. For instance, I remember reading The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway at the age of twelve and wondering why Jake and Brett couldn’t just be together. If they love each other so much, I thought, then why so much angst? It wasn’t until I reread the book for a class in high school that I realized I had completely missed the implication that Jake’s war injury had left him impotent. As I grew up I struggled similarly through heavy tomes on artistic photography, Sam Shepard plays and Ken Kesey novels, only more doggedly determined to finish the works that most befuddled me. Although I had the resolve to understand the vocabulary, the metaphors and some of the references, sometimes I was simply hindered in understanding by a lack of real life experience.

I was fourteen when I began to read some of the works of E.E. Cummings, and I remember liking them in a simple, confused kind of way. His funny grammar and odd line breaks were pleasant, if perplexing, and I liked how he would sometimes arrange the words on the page in weird patterns. That was pretty much the extent of my appreciation for his work, and anyways at that age I was more interested in probing the delightfully dark, squelching lusts of Charles Bukowski than following Cumming’s grasshoppers around a page. I hadn’t revisited Cummings in ages, and had pretty much written him off (except for a brief incident at Interlochen arts camp, when an emphatically free spirited cabin mate read me a bizarre poem she had written about having some kind of graphic but metaphoric sex with the famous poet).

But the other day someone quoted part of a line from one of my favorite e.e. Cummings poems – ‘for life’s not a paragraph, (and death I think is no parenthesis).’ I couldn’t remember the rest of the poem, so I looked it up to reread it.

I had specifically remembered liking this poem for its self-conscious syntax and punctuation, and I mostly remembered that the word paragraph ended a paragraph, and that there was a funny and clever use of an actual parenthesis in the last line.

Well, it turns out the poem isn’t about syntax at all. It’s about love.

 

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you.

 

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry

–the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids’ flutter which says

 

we are for each other: then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

 

and death I think is no parenthesis

 

There’s no parenthesis encasing the last line – “and death I think is no parenthesis.” That would be silly. Whoever would put that parenthesis there would never wholly kiss you.

The website where I found this poem had two more untitled love poems by Cummings. The last one characterized the intimacy between lovers as motion, the give and take of understanding and tenderness as movements of opening and closing. I didn’t remember this poem as potently as the other, but something in the last stanza was familiar:

(i do not know what it is about you that closes

and opens; only something in me understands

the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)

nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

I suddenly remembered reading this poem as a ninth grader, because I remembered how I unsettled I had been by that last line: nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands. The imagery that preceded this line had been the straightforward metaphor of the blooming flower, of spring and in contrast snow snow, of opening and then again closing. But the last line, this collusion of parts, had been so unsettlingly enigmatic.

Now, having been in love and having been touched in some way by the ‘most frail gesture’ of some very small hands, I understand.

Growing older has mostly been a relief for me. I’m realizing that potency of feeling may dwindle with age, but I’m mostly reassured that much of the pain and power of simple emotions can be tempered by something so natural as the complexity that comes with experience and age.

I don’t think that I wasted my time on the poems, books and movies that I didn’t understand.  After all, I understood important parts of things. Maybe I didn’t grasp the love story in Jack London’s Martin Eden, but I could understand Martin’s love of reading, and his depression. Maybe I didn’t quite get Franny’s nervous breakdown in Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, but I understood the deep love between siblings. And I’ll revisit these books, now after I’ve been in love, someday after I’ve truly lost, with different eyes and different experiences. Maybe I’ll find an entirely different story. Even if the syntax of things remains the same.

Two days ago a scandal unfolded in Japan, as popular and prolific classical music genius and deaf composer Mamoru Samuragochi was revealed to be a fraud. Samuragochi, one of the Japan’s most popular musical figures, revealed that a hired ghostwriter has been writing music for him since the early 1990s.

The pieces in question include some of the most famous compositions attributed to Samuragochi, such as ‘Symphony no 1. Hiroshima,’ and ‘Sonatina for Violin.’ The ghostwriter has also come forward, alleging that Samuragochi’s deafness is also a hoax, put on by the musician to cultivate a sympathetic public persona.

The Japanese pubic, including music companies, political figures, and news outlets, are voicing their anger and disappointment with Samuragochi himself. But what does this mean for the legacy of the compositions?

The music is the same  – but without the culturally celebratory nationalist backstory provided by Samuragochi’s person, the legacy of the ghostwritten music may very well be permanently altered. The way we value art is confused, and maybe illogically based on these kinds of backstories and histories. Banksy called attention to our disorganized value systems last October, when he asked an elderly street vendor in Central Park to sell some of his authentic spray-painted canvases. Banksy’s pieces, which often sell for millions of dollars, were skimmed over by locals and tourists who assumed they were rip-offs. Banksy pointed out that the way we value art doesn’t just depend on what we see in front of us – but does that necessarily mean that we’re snobs? We clearly value the stories about human history that surround the creation of a piece of art, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That the perceived monetary value Banksy’s paintings depended so heavily on whether people think a famous artist painted them can seem unintelligible or ignorant, but we can’t help but evaluate the human experience that we see behind the artwork maybe as much as the paint and canvas.

For instance, when I know that a piece of music was calculated by a corporation, written piecemeal by five separate songwriters, and auto-tuned into existence, I evaluate it differently than a piece of music that an artist wrote and recorded alone. The processes by which we determine the value of art has a lot to do with why we think art is valuable in the first place –and while hard to untangle, this train of thought is certainly based around the enrichment and appreciation of the human experience.

Samuragochi’s scandal has me wondering – why not let our knowledge of the social schemas and time-periods, the flaws of the director, and yes, the identity of the composer – impact our views the art they produced?