Gogol Bordello, Congress Theatre, Chicago, May 31, 2009

Gogol Bordello, Congress Theatre, Chicago, Sunday, May 31, 2009

Before the doors opened to the Congress Theatre, there was already a long line that stretched for a few blocks, but the line moved quite quickly as soon as the doors did open. Eventually, this enormous, former movie palace-theatre built in the 1920s, was virtually full by the time the main act started. The crowd was predominantly in their late teens and twenties, with a fair number of middle-aged and older audience members, most of whom appeared as if they were like several of the Gogol Bordello band members, immigrants from Eastern Europe.

Man Man, the opening band, played for an hour. Their music is intense and raucous, with many a primal scream and growl; it is a passionate, original, percussion-heavy with xylophone, rock-jazz style. The lead singer, a sturdy looking wild man, with long, touseled hair and a full beard, energetically thrashed around, inspired and responding to the spirit of the music of his band. Like Gogol Bordello, Man Man entertains with its performers and moves the audience to become one with and lose themselves in their music. However, aside from the audience towards the very front of the stage, the rest of the crowd did not seem to engage in a noticeably passionate way with Man Man's unique music.


Gogol Bordello's performance began with a large stage curtain with the image of slingshot shooting a star from their 2007 recording Gypsy Punk being lowered. Shortly afterwards, in the role of dj, lead singer-guitarist, Eugene Hutz, appeared with a woman dancer in a military jumpsuit. Several tracks of Muslim inspired dance music were played with accompanying dancing. With the anti-Arab, Muslim, Middle Eastern rhetoric and attitude still strong in America, this struck me as Hutz's appeal for cultural inclusion and diversity.

The rest of the group then came on stage and Hutz energetically led his band to work the crowd into a frenzy. I've never seen a performer like Hutz seemingly glide around the stage as he played his guitar. Hutz's own love and passion for music irradiates his entire performance and stage presence, which is infectious. Later in the performance, he ceded center stage to band member, Pedro Erazo, who worked the crowd. Of course, after the group took a breather, there were requisite and lengthy encores, starting with Hutz alone playing acoustic guitar. One new song was introduced which Hutz explained was about a parking lot being paved that was displacing gypsies in Turkey.

A few days after the performance, I can stay that I'm still energized and inspired it. Personally, it was quite an incredible experience for me to see such a big crowd of American youth enjoying the sort of Eastern European folk melodies that I grew up listening to. I never imagined seeing this sort of music reworked and presented to a wider audience; it took someone like Hutz to come along and do it.

A final note, the staff at the Congress seemed a lot friendlier, smiling and saying enjoy the show, than during a previous concert that I attended a few years ago when they seemed brusque and surly.

Corneille's Illusion, Promethean Theatre Ensemble

Pierre Corneille's comic play "Illusion" (L'Illusion Comique, 1636), adapted by Tony Kushner, staged at the City Lit Theatre by the Promethean Theatre Ensemble, at 1020 W. Bryn Mawr, Chicago.

Watching this play, similarities came to mind in terms of its witty, playful, elaborate use of language, which is a characteristic feature of Baroque literature. Presumably, this language in its translated form has been somewhat modernized in the adaptation by Tony Kushner. Aside from using such language, the play's theme is universal--distance and estrangement of parent from a child. In this case, a son has run off from a father, who over time grows concerned about his missing son's fate, so he consults a magician to try to discover the whereabouts of his son with whom he has lost contact.

The set of the play is kept spare and simple in this production, limited to three large, triangular blocks, which are moved about a bit in each act and illuminated with different lighting.

One theme in the play is the father's revaluation of his son whom he regarded as a flighty, wild rebel; this attitude is what causes the son to run away from home. The larger issue here is how a parent reacts to a child whose temperament provokes disapproval. In the context of the time, there was certainly much less understanding for a son to oppose a father, for in France, a father could legally have even an adult child imprisoned for disobeying his orders. In effect, the self-righteous parent could always feel in the right, and the father in the play struggles with his sense of moral entitlement.

The magician obliges the father's desire to show him what his son has been doing in life, showing him three phases of his life, notably different phases of love. First, he shows his son in the initial throes of boundless enthusiasm of love, but for an aristocratic woman, which causes a conflict, since the son is a commoner--his father is a lawyer. The son tries to solicit the help of a woman servant and literally brushes off a rival. Seemingly, despite the barrier of social class that separates the wild son from the aristocratic woman he loves, all seems to be turning out for the best, but this seeming success proves to be only that.

In the second act, the pursuit of love has led the son to compromise his principles and himself become a lackey, a yes-man to a self-absorbed lord with a swollen ego. This lord speaks in what sounded like to me with an Andrei Codrescu, a one time NPR writer and wry commentato and immigrant from Romania.) The wild son compromises his ideals in the name of love, to be closer to his beloved.

In the third act, the son is shown as having fallen out of love, unable to live up to any of his fervently made principles of sacrificing all in the name of love.

The audience, along with the father, is the observer of the staged scenes; the play, is thus a play within a play. The play is fairly light, entertaining fare, except towards its end, when a tragic conclusion seems to end it. Is love itself an illusion the magician asks at the end of the play, or is it the only reality of life?

This production was quite well acted by the actors playing the son and servant woman, and it had some timely sound effects and music. The third act, however, was somewhat difficult to follow, in part, perhaps it is because it may have been shortened to make the play fit into a less than 2-hour running time.

If there was any other problem, it was seeing some empty seats, which is not that unusual in a production of a foreign language theatre classic that people may be wary of seeing. Though it cannot boast a Broadway theatre scene like New York's, Chicago has its niche virtue in theatre--the city offers a plethora of small and amateur theatre companies that are willing to risk staging theatre classics.

Reading Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes, Violence

For many years, I took a break from reading theory, mainly literary theory. What bothered me about theory as it applied to literature and culture was that it lost (or never cared to find) a focus on the intrinsic merits, principally, aesthetic, as well as explore intertextual and literary biographical aspects of literary texts. Instead, the text all too often became a means to end, a stepping stone to demonstrate the workings of power (Foucault), logocentrism (Derrida), capitalism (Jameson). I felt I was in the presence of secular priest-academics, hell-bent on finding social truths, trampling rough-shod otherwise on literary history and value and aesthetics. But they weren't out in the field fighting and struggling and taking risks for social justice.

If I want to be informed about politics, why not just read a newspaper or the work of political scientist or journalist or sociologist? Why a literary theorist? Reading theory was heady, inspiring for me at times, but something that indulged in for too long, too much of it began to seem arid and empty to me. Thus, I would liken reading too much theory to taking cocaine: it was a drug that took you into an abstract world divorced from the material, everyday world by virtue of the scintillating play of ideas, deft application of theory, apt choice of words, virtuouso handling of syntax, head-spinning organization of ideas. And it all seemed so meaningful, but at the same time it was so, so far divorced from reality.

The paradigmatic figure in the world of Anglo-literary theory had become the prolific, neo-Marxist Frederic Jameson with whom I became most familiar. He is most notable for his paragraph long sentences and amazing facility at handling ideas and concepts like silly-putty, maneuvering them with formidable erudition and dexterity, much like Sartre. Exploitation, alienation, destruction wrought by capitalism--these are some of Jameson's underlying targets. At times, I was engaged to be sure by what I read,. But where did reading Jameson get me?! If political injustice is something I want to read about, I'd rather read the account of a historian, a political activist, or about an educator, who is on the front lines fighting for social justice. Rather than read a recondite literary theorist, I'd settle for reading a muckracking writer or journalist.

I was wary of reading Zizek who was a self-proclaimed follower of Jacques Lacan, a follower of Freud. Lacan takes Freudian ideas and puts them into neat semiotic formulas. He writes in an opaque, gnomic, elliptical style in which the meaning isn't readily evident. And he shares Freud's heavy handed moralism and sexism, and is all to ready find perversion and deviance in any sexual expression that doesn't conform to some middle class norm from the Victorian era. But Zizek uses Lacan in quite interesting ways that to me actually seem to make sense.

Zizek is a theorist like Jameson, but with a few twists, like, a morbid, zany sense of humor, a gadfly's proclivity for provocative overstatement and trenchant wit, a liking for and frequent allusion to popular film and fiction, and on occasion, he speaks bluntly, forcibly, and quite effectively, eschewing qualifications and provisos. All these qualities have made him a popular academic, and if you watch him on youtube, you can see just how engaging and entertaining he is compared to most other academics.

My main difficulty with In Defense of Lost Causes were the sections and chapters that Zizek devoted to trying to salvage some meaning and value from mostly recent social revolutions (the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese). I found myself grimacing at times as he wrote about Stalin's violent experiments in collective farming and industrialization, and the purges of the party leadership itself. Just how much instructive material can be gleaned from these disasters for the sake of future revolutions? Just how much a failure, just what cost of human lives is needed to realize that it need not be repeated yet again? Even if I was given pause to reconsider just how, according to Zizek, the road to utopia or rather hell is paved with good intentions, from which we can indeed learn when the attempt or rather revolutionary fervor explodes, unexpectedly, again on the world stage, the tone in which he does so, treating human casulties as just seeming numbers cannot but seem callous. Perhaps this is calculated provocation: we are too accustomed to dismiss out of hand the brutal, inhumane excesses of communism. While we do indeed tend to overlook the excesses of capitalism, as Zizek correctly, avers, as a matter of course, regarding them as the objective, inevitable consequence of history, that is no reason to adopt such an attitude to the excesses of communism.

The cover of Zizek's book features a rendering, a color drawing of a guillotine blade, but one that has been conceptually pulled out of its context from the larger wooden structure of which it is a part, as well as the scene in which it was deployed--a bloody spectacle of public execution. So, too, isn't Zizek's writing in his book about revolutionary violence largely taking place in a scene apart and distant from its agents and victims? Or is the focus not so much on the human agents involved--after all they are ultimately instruments of historical forces they embody and deploy, but which they cannot quite control according to their plans--but rather on the mechanisms, the inner laws that seem to determine the course that violent change and upheaval tends to take? That does seem like a worthwhile topic to investigate, not adopt a dismissive formula, as Zizek observes, of the revolution turns against itself, consumes itself. What else may we learn from the socio-psychological factors that determine this self-destructive turn. That seems a worthwhile investigation, but the tone in which Zizek conducts it, tossing in a devil-may-care humor seems to me, on more than a few occasions, excessive and inappropriate. For my sensibility there is too much mordant, black humor in the aftermath of social revolutions gone wrong with millions of casualties.

One wonders just how many readers take Zizek for his word, and even if they do, what access do they have to power? This talk of revolutionary embrace and reconsideration seems to me quixotic and misplaced. In the absence of relevance and reverberation in the larger world, in the relatively quiet halls of academia and bookstores, what other way is there to create a stir, then to provoke your audience, to make outrageous claims? Terry Eagleton in his review of Zizek's Drense in the Times Literary Supplement (TLS) aptly likened Zizek's book as more interesting for its naves, than its halls.

When ZIzek is not making politically provocative overstatements, I read him with interest, for, informed as he is by philosophy, theory, psychology, linguistics, he has original, compelling things to say about political developments. Moreover, he applies abstruse theory to phenomenon unfolding today in a persuasive, readily understood manner.

to be continued

Yella (2007) by director Christian Petzold

The German director, Christian Petzold's film "Yella" (2007) is a psychological drama about the plight of a woman from East Germany trying to escape her world of limited opportunity to West Germany. In the process, she loses her sense of humanity, as she becomes drawn into the world of flimsy and shady businesses and businessmen. The rapidly changing landscape of East Germany is ripe for speculation and schemes to make a quick Euro.

Yella, or rather her husband, was apparently tempted to try his hand in the computer business and lost badly, not only money and in his plan to make money by reselling computer equipment, but also his wife. The film opens with Yella walking away from him, trying to ignore his pleas for her to return to him. To what degree Yella was involved in his schemes, we never learn. But it seems he is the more to blame for this scheme, if we are to judge by his short temper, overbearing manner, and refusal to start his life anew without his wife. Even worse, upset that Yella has actually found work in West Germany and will be soon be leaving, this husband plans to do away with them both. He cannot bear the thought that his wife will pursue her own life without him.

So, the husband, unexpectedly, shows up, before the cab does to take Yella to the train station to West Germany. Predictably, he refuses to drive to the station. At this point it's best not to divulge just how the narrative plays out, but only say that for a time Yella does seem to escape, though her husband continues to pursue and stalk her.

Yella's job offer turns out to be at a company which has just been dissolved, or bankrupted, or suddenly taken over by another company. Her boss seems to take it all as business as usual, but she is crestfallen. Yet not for long, for she meets a shady businessman, who she unexpectedly helps to realize his business scheme to outfox another business. They continue their relation, he, intent on pursuit of the big Euro, amassing money for a scheme to acquire a business, and, Yella, whose motivations are simpler--to help her poor father and to strike back at the businesses who she have ruined her former husband.

There is a sombre atmosphere to the film, a minimal focus on characters, in particular, Yella, often isolated, alone. The world is simply one of roads, cars, clean and modern and sterile office and hotel interiors. It seems that other people, the world itself is left out of the film, that is, it is not a matter of concern to the main characters of the film who are preoccupied with their schemes to make money.

This is quite a subtle, powerfully moving film, quite critical of the reconstruction of East Germany by West. The film reminded me of Slawomir Fabicki's "The Retrieval" in which a young man in Poland, who is dismayed with his work prospects, whether its shoveling manure at the family farm or working at a cement factory where he witnesses a coworker fall down a shaft to his death. This young man gets drawn into the criminal underworld, working as an enforcer for a loan shark.

Tonight I watched the compelling personal story of James Carroll that is very much a public and historical narrative that centers on Carroll's preoccupation with the nature of good and evil, in particular, how one institution, the Catholic Church, which he served for a brief time as an ordained Catholic priest (1969-1974) had and has become associated with violence, power, and persecuting Jews. The film is based on a long book that Carroll published in 2001, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews.

To make the film more current, Carroll adds two strands to his history: first, the campaign of the Christian evangelical church to recruit members at the U.S. Air Force school and base, in Colorado Springs; second, the link between political and religious, President Bush's characterization of the war on terror as a crusade. This latter point in the film is not developed, since there is simply not enough time for it, and it moves past the framework of the film (as well as the original theme of Carroll's, the relation of Christians and Jews). Carroll sees proselytizing of evangelicals in the U.S. Air Force Academy and Bush's use of biblical allusions to describe the war on terror as signs and symptoms of the fact that the bloody past of Christianity, it's use as a state religion to be used to fight wars and to persecute non-Christians, Jews and Muslims, remains unknown to most Christians. Though some efforts have been made by the pope and Catholic Church to acknowledge evils committed by the church in the name of good, they have not been quite inadequate.

The starting point for Carroll's film is the symbol of the cross. As a boy, Carroll liked the cross, but then, as an adult, he began to see the shadow its cast. The good he associated with the Catholic Church also came to be associated with evil. Where did the symbol come from? It came from Constantine, a Roman general, in the 3rd century; he claimed to have had a vision of a cross during battle, and he believed it was sign that helped him win the battle. Later, the cross was adopted as a symbol in battle. When Constantine became a Roman emperor he made the cross a key Christian symbol. Thus, a symbol of grisly Roman style execution was chosen as a symbol of a religion that became a state religion, and one used as battle standard. The cross, Christian faith, would be enforced on pagans and non-Christians by the sword. The cross was quite different from other Christian symbols at the time--the fish, the lamb.

Carroll asks, what sort of man was Constantine? We learn Constantine was a ruthless and violent man, who even went so far as to have his son and one of his wives murdered. One account from Constantine's time, ironically observes that Constantine was a man with so many sins that only the Christian religion was willing to accept him. Thus, when one asks whether Constantine accepted Christianity out of personal conviction, or as a means to an end, to consolidate state power and use religion, the symbol of the cross, as a means to inspire soldiers in battle, the answer seems clear.

For Carroll, the cross, which is brought to others by sword, military force and violence--this is the starting point for Christian crusades against the infidel, its anti-Semitism and its use as a battle standard against pagans and Muslims. Since Constantine made Christianity a state religion in the twilight years of the Roman Empire--it frayed apart and collapsed in the next hundred years--there was no much time to put this militant religion into practice. However, eventually, when the medieval states that espoused Christianity became stronger in the 10th century, the crusades were launched--the imposition of the cross with the sword on non-Christians. The first to suffer were the Jews who lived along the Rhine River; they were attacked and killed by crusaders on their way to "liberate" Jerusalem and attack Muslims. Carroll goes to visit the archives, which hold books from the time, which have accounts of these atrocities. He visits Trier, for instance, and the archivist there finds a book with a description of a murder. Carroll also goes to visit the grave sites that still remain of victims.

Carroll asks, why didn't he learn about this dark past of the Catholic Church? He had even been a resident of Germany as a boy, since his father was an air force general stationed in Germany during the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, as Carroll observes in retrospect, he lived in an artificial world of moral purity and goodness. His father served the forces of good--first, the FBI, then the armed services of U.S. His parents were devout Catholics. Carroll himself harbored two dreams: either become an air force pilot or a priest, and he chose the latter. In his studies in the seminary and then in his years working as an ordained priest who was committed to the peace movement to end U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, Carroll began to investigate how state power and Catholicism were involved and implicated in evil. This investigation led him to quit the priesthood and to become a writer and journalist. In time, the result of Carroll's personal odyssey led to the publication of long, 751-page book published in 2001, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews; the movie based on the book, was released this year.

The Strangerer by Mickey Maher, Theatre Oobleck

Now playing at the Chopin Theatre (1543 W. Division, Chicago), and in its third run, is Mickey Maher's play "The Strangerer," an absurd, satiric, dark comedy featuring George Bush, John Kerry, and Jim Lehrer, a news anchor man, who serves as the moderator. The play is based on the debate between Bush and Kerry in 2004, but only in a very loose manner, that is, it is replete with euphemisms for brutality and violence, circumlocution, posing, empty rhetoric, and pursuit of tangents, so much so that nothing really does get said about the Iraq invasion. The actors playing Bush, Kerry, and Lehrer act like bufoons, and I was reminded of Eugene Ionescu's absurdist rewriting of Shakespeare, MacBeth, called MacBett, which I saw when it was staged a few years ago at the Chopin Theatre. In Ionescu's play leaders are presented as possessing all too human failings.

I will not comment on the play itself, but rather make some remarks about the issues raised in the play. For viewers who haven't seen the play, I would give too much away about it, if I discussed it, so I will refrain from doing so.

The playwright, Mickey Maher, who plays Kerry, gives his play an absurd turn by likening Bush to the antihero of Albert Camus's novella, The Stranger, Meursault, who commits a murder on a whim in a nihilistic fashion. Of course, neither Bush nor Kerry nor Lehrer ever get their hands "dirty" and "bloody" as such. The president ordered others, the U.S. armed forces to invade Iraq. In the name of security, in the name of democracy, in the name of stability--you name it--but there were various ideological justifications and explanations for the unilateral invasion of Iraq by Bush, which was supported by U.S. House and Senate. The mainstream media and press, including Lehrer's news hour, can be regarded as complicit in their support of the U.S. militarism, since they would often give the government, especially its representatives and spokes persons a free pass, a forum to drone on and on in their official rhetoric that would justify their militarism as anything--an effort to develop and support democracy, offering political stability, and so on--but what it it really and primarily was--an exercise in unilateral imposition of American economic and military power abroad.

Of course, Bush is quite different than Camus' Mearsault, who is a nihilist, who murders for no reason and who is detached from any feeling of connection to fellow human beings. Likely, Bush and others, in their own minds believe, deeply and passionately, that their militaristic policies are indeed justified, just as leaders of powerful countries have often believed they had some sort of religious and political right to impose control, occupation, democracy beyond the borders of their nation. Thus, the parallel suggested between Mearsault's nihilistic murder and the state sponsored militarist policies of President Bush is an absurd one. A more apt comparison between the two is based on their lack of coherence, which Maher's Bush in the play readily admits to, though quickly adds that that fact is not important. One memorable such and recorded incoherent response of Bush in the second debate with Kerry is still available on video online. When asked by an audience member that opinion abroad has become critical of Bush's invasion and how he responds to it, Bush rambles about the need to take decisive action that may be unpopular. The camera that pans the audience on occasion records looks of incomprehension and amusement and impatience at Bush's response. In Maher's play most of Bush's responses are like this.

But Maher does not write a play with an eye for satirizing the delusions of American imperial power politics that justifies its policies. His real target is the verbal game of double-speak, obfuscation, and misinformation, which is practiced by Bush himself, at times, ineptly. Bush makes many malapropisms in the play. Maher's other targets are the lackluster opposition epitomized by Kerry who cannot or for the sake of not appearing unpatriotic cannot bring himself to call the president and his administration to task for their militaristic policies that are packaged in lies and half-truths. And the mainstream American media which plays along with the government, rather than questioning it, is also a target for Maher's satire.

Maher presents Bush absurdly as someone who wants to call attention to death and murder. Of course, it's well known that the Bush administration has undertaken extraordinary measures to avoid calling attention to the deaths its Iraq invasion has caused. For instance, photographs of coffins of dead U. S. armed service men and women are not permitted to be made. Thus, in Maher's absurd debate Bush wants to stage a death during the debate itself! I will not elaborate on this development, since it would reveal an element of surprise and suspense from the play to those who have not seen it.

The debate constantly veers away from the questions posed by the moderator. The main diversion of debate becomes an argument on the nature of theatre, the theatre of politics and the theatre of death. How does one present political policy, and how does one present the death that it can cause? Bush and Kerry argue about a play they had gone to see together the night before the debate, and this serves as a meta-commentary on how their own politics, the posing, the rhetoric, the appeals to voters, is itself a staged performance. In the case of pursuing an invasion of another country, the question becomes for the administration how to stage the event, package and present it to the public. Kerry, in turn, plays along with the administration; he does not so much as protest or oppose it, as simply offer suggestions on how to modify it. In effect, this is a toothless opposition, one which in making itself "moderate," palatable to the entire game of staging politics, is not a viable alternative.

Another issue the play raises is that the lack of substantive debate and discussion in the 2004 presidential debates suggests that much of the American public is either tuned out or already has its mind made up. At one point, Maher's Bush observes that no one is really listening to him, for his supporters already agree with him, and his detractors only focus on his malapropisms. Kerry in contrast at one juncture asserts that the best theatre is the theatre that will put its audience to sleep, which is a commentary on his own inability to differentiate himself and his policies from those of Bush.

Short Films by Asliuk, Strembitsky, Loznitsa, Pakalnina, Buraja

Falling Out of Time
Gene Siskel Film Center
Curators, Oona Mosna and Jeremy Rigsby
Thursday, April 3, 2008

"Once the home of state-sponsored social realism, the former Soviet Europe has given rise to a new breed of documentary featuring the observational ambiguities and formal rigor more familiar to experimental cinema."

The Mine, Victor Asliuk, Belarus (2004) 16 min

Wayfarers, Igor Strembitsky, Ukraine (2005), 10 min

Halt, Sergei Loznitsa, Russia (2000), 25 min

Papa Gena, Laila Pakalnina, Latvia (2001) 10 min

Mother, Oksana Buraja, Lithuania (2001) 10 min

Five short experimental, documentary films from the former Soviet Union were shown. None of the films had narration or extended dialogue; some had background music. Before the films were shown, the curators gave some background information about them. Though the union came to an end in 1991, seventeen years ago, directors from nations that were a part of it, were strongly influenced in the 1990s by the film schools and documentary film studios that had been formed in the 1920s in the Soviet Union. Each province or oblast in the former Russian Soviet Union had a film school and studio, as well as the centers of Russia, Leningrad and Moscow. Each of the Soviet republics also had its film schools and centers in their capitol cities.

"The Mine" was shot in color and follows a crew of miners to their work site. There is no narrative commentary, no dialogue and some background movie only towards the very end of the film. The sound of the film is strictly on the machinery. The camera shows the workers trudging down a tunnel to the elevator, which then follows them as the elevator takes them further underground. A sensation of claustrophobia, feeling confined, is likely to develop in the viewer as the camera pans the faces of the miners in the elevator. The elevator reaches its destination and the workers leave one confined space to enter yet into another such space--the system of tunnels. The camera follows a few of the individual miners as they split up in order to attend to their particular tasks.

There is an implicit commentary being made by the director: the life of a miner is grim and grimy and harsh. We get closeups of miners attentive at some task; they are stoic, reserved, suggesting not the laborer as hero--as the 1920s propaganda films suggested--but rather a detached and dutiful attention to the task at hand. A triumphant sounding classical music score begins at the end of the film as workers depart from the mine; this is clearly an ironic comment, a suggestion that departure from confined and dusty underworld is the one source of solace for the miners from their difficult work.

The "Wayfarers" also offers us a grim view of life, in this instance, life at a home for mentally ill men, but there are occasional cuts in this narrative focus to shots of women sitting alone, a child, and a woman with a child. All these shots are presumably references to the social world outside the nursing home, a world that its inhabitants have left behind (in childhood) or dream about (meeting a woman to share life with). The film opens with the nursing home's director making his morning rounds with a forced cheerfulness and sarcastic comment (Here is our hero) to a former veteran confined to his bed. In one scene an elderly man reads aloud a nostalgic love poem near a tv that is playing, but is not tuned to any station, but simply showing static. There is no need for commentary or narration for this poignant scene, which shows us an older man's loneliness and estrangement from the world. In another similar scene, as the men mingle and sit outside the building, one man is prompted to sing, and he obliges. In several shots, individuals are seated and face the camera, but none of them talk nor seem to be quite sure how to respond to being put on the spot or interviewed. The film ends with a woman singing a lullaby in the background. Again, an ironic comment on the subject of the film--the tragic separation and isolation of mentally ill men confined to a nursing home.

Halt by Sergei Loznitsa is a black and white series of images that focuses on people sleeping at train station, which is full of them. The camera lingers on one or two or several people. Usually the edges of the screen are slightly out of focus, and often the angle of the camera is from the floor. The distance of the camera from the sleepers is uniform throughout: they fill the screen. Each sleeper or sleepers seem to get a minute or two of time on which the camera lingers on them, and usually there is some subtle and slight movement to observe

Each individual has fallen asleep in a different position--seated, slumped, stretched out, curled up, and so on. The only sounds we hear are the people breathing, stirring slightly, the occasional train whistle and the train rumbling nearby. The absence of action, the repetition of poses with slight variations leaves the viewer free to begin to form his or her own reflections; in effect, I see this as an open ended occasion for the viewer to reflect on whatever topic is on his or her mind. In this regard, a parallel experience would be looking at and reflecting on an abstract painting. In this film the burden of finding and making sense of the film is placed almost completely on the viewer.

Papa Gena by Laila Pakalnina is a black and white, gritty film that contrasts mundane life in a flat, urban, industrial landscape with Figaro singing Mozart's opera The Magic Flute. There is a strong contrast between the lively music that people are listening to on headphones and the gray setting they inhabit. The music, Mozart, often brings the dead scene to life, and on occasion puts a smile on the listeners face, usually on older listeners. The children and young adults don't seem to take as much pleasure and joy in the music as the adults. The film is made up of a series of scenes in which the listeners to the music are standing still and waiting, it seems, for the music to begin. At that point they listen to it for a time, and then walk away off camera which doesn't follow them. From one perspective, listening to the music is an indicator of the interviewees mood--are they amenable, open to the joy of the music, or are they indifferent to it? Will it make a change in their mood? If not, why?

The last film shown "Mother" by Oksana Buraja is shot in color and ironically, we never do get to see the mother of the boy in the film. As the film opens, we see a boy staring at a tv, and then a room full of smoke and people sitting around a table drinking. Presumably, the boy's mother is at the head of the table. All we see is her her back facing the film as she sits at the table full of bottles and glasses offering guests more to drink. A nonstop party seems to be in session, and the only people not partaking are the boy, who is about age six, and his friend who appears later in the film. Most of the film follows the boy around; the adults don't seem to pay much attention to him, except when he plays with the stove and is asked to get some water for a drunk man (his father?). The man talks about the struggle for good and evil in the soul; clearly, he has lost his battle, and is in the grip of alcoholism.

The residents of this apartment speak in Russian, and they are part of the Russian minority in Lithuania; such a Russian minority remains in all the new nations that formed after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This particular group illustrates not only the prevalence of alcoholism among Russians, whether it is in former Soviet republics that have been independent nations, or in Russia itself, but a widespread health and social problem throughout Eastern Europe and in particular the former Soviet Union.

From the naive perspective of the child, his life is boring, and he lacks structure and direction which his parents and family are supposed to be providing him. From the viewers perspective, we can only cringe and wonder what will be the long term consequences of this parental neglect on his development.

Perspeolis: a free spirit finding herself

Persepolis is a a moving coming of age story of Marjane Satrapi who grew up during the Iranian Revolution and the takeover of the country by its religious right during the 1980s. Her personal story is political: just as her nation undergoes turmoil and upheaval politically, she too leads a turbulent life trying to find herself. For a time her parents send her abroad for a few years to Vienna because they fear her outspokenness and independence at school would inevitably get both her and them in trouble with the authorities. The theme of the narrative is Satrapi's own search for stability and meaning in a life, whether under repressive religious rule in Iran that forbids free thought and expression, or living in Western Europe, which allows for such thought and expression, but such freedom is over-indulged by young outsiders that Satrapi meets.

From the first scene of the film, Satrapi as a child at a family party, one sees that she is someone who is eager to explore and test boundaries. Imitating her hero Bruce Lee, she practices martial arts moves, more zealously than called for. Perhaps, her rebellious streak is one inherited or similar to her uncle, a man who became a Marxist revolutionary, studied in the Soviet Union, and was eventually jailed in Iran after his return. He becomes one of Satrapi's heroes. The other more moderating source of guidance for Satrapi is her grandmother, who is less confrontational than her uncle--she doesn't politicize her rebellion--perhaps sensing the futility of that course of action, but is quite outspoken and independent minded.

Initially, Satrapi is an adolescent who takes a liking to the West, but in time she experiences culture shock and isolation, so she returns home at the age of 18. She tries to find her place in post-revolutionary Iran, going to far as to marry an Iranian man at the age of twenty-one, but again has difficulties--with him, the school--so she eventually leaves after several years.

Visually, the mostly black and white animated film was a pleasure to watch. The animated nature of the film serves as an effective vehicle to convey the plight of Satrapi and the Iranian people. The background is sketched in generally with spare and simple urban or nature scenery. Tehran at times appears as a dismal ghost town, its streets empty and dark, suggesting the set of German expressionist film.

This is not only a story of Satrapi, but also of her family, and other middle class families like hers in Iran, who never do fit in the theocratic government of Iran in the 1980s, nor the 1990s. There is a constant reference to events in Iranian history, and brief suggestive scenes of these historical developments, like the 8-year long war with Iran. The educated and middle class residents of Tehran hold illicit parties with alcohol, music, and dancing; after all, there is no great harm in having a bit of fun, is there?! These people enjoy Western popular culture, which is available in the underground market on the street. Satrapi's use of an increasingly popular Western art form, the graphic novel, adapted into a film, allows to both enjoy and understand her story.

The Rape of Europa, a documentary film 2007

Tonight I saw the film The Rape of Europa, a documentary about the the plunder, theft, and destruction of valuable art during and after WW II. The film begins with Hitler's own relation to art. He was a watercolor painter, who applied to art school at 18 in Vienna, but was rejected, a rejection that in retrospect gave him opportunity to become more involved in politics than art. Another young man, Oskar Kokoshko, who had applied at the same time as Hitler was accepted to the school; he later quipped, he would have made quite a different leader had he been rejected and Hitler accepted to the school.

Though Hitler set aside his artistic ambitions, as he acquired political power in the 1930s, he made his own conservative artistic sensibility a matter of state and public policy. He took much more and close personal interest in art and culture than other state leaders. His conservative taste that recoiled at the avant garde changes and developments in painting and art made condemnation, censorship and destruction of such art, which was labeled as degenerate, a matter of state and public policy. Such art was removed from museums, sold off, or destroyed.

But much of pre-twentieth century art was appreciated by Hitler, who became a collector of masterpieces from the past, whether by purchase or simply theft. In fact, even in the late 1930s, he had already set his eyes on acquiring more past masterpieces from countries that he would eventually invade. Other Nazi leaders, notably, Goering also collected art.

As a matter of policy, art in nations that German invaded and occupied was to be plundered and become a part of Nazi collections or stored for eventual housing in a museum that Hitler planned to build in Linz, Austria, his home town. The focus of the film is on Poland, France, individual collections and galleries of Jews throughout Europe, and Soviet Russia. The film has a chronological narrative thread. The art theft and appropriation commences in Austria in 1938 when it becomes united to Germany. Collections and galleries of prominent Jews in Vienna are identified and their art along with their property is simply taken away from them. Recently, and after legal wrangling, some paintings of Gustav Klimt are returned to the daughter of their owner.

The next country on Hitler's list is Poland, which Germany invades in September 1939. Here a policy of destroying Polish art and culture, most visibly, buildings is pursued. Destruction and desecration of art in Poland and Soviet Russia was a matter of policy: art deemed Polish in Poland was destroyed; what's more its culture itself was to be destroyed as well. Unless art was made by a German artist, as the case of many works in Cracow, which was to be appropriated and taken to Germany, it was not deemed valuable. In Russia, though the German army was held off at the outskirts of Leningrad, the nearby summer palaces, which had become state museums under Soviet rule, were plundered and then ruined when the Germany army retreated. The film goes back and forth between past and present, adding interviews with Polish and Russian curators.

The film then moves to France and then to Italy where some American artists and curators join the army to help in the effort to save art from the destruction of retreating German armies. There are even more stories to this film--the immediate post-war years, following the efforts of a conscientious German Christian who returns Jewish religious items to their family if he can find them; the remaining impasse of Russians holding onto to German art, which they stole from Germany; the continuing efforts, now more than sixty years after the war to restore artwork in Italy.

If there is any fault to this film, it's that there is so much territory covered in it, and so many fascinating stories to tell. Still, it's worthwhile to just see the entire story compressed into one narrative, and to see the images collected together in a film. Some of my visceral reactions to the film were to wince and flinch at the wanton greed and brutality of Hitler, the Nazis, the German army as they steal and destroy art and culture. Ironically, the ugliest and most inhumane and brutal actions are undertaken in the name of claiming art that is regarded as beautiful and the epitome of Western civilization. At times, I felt uneasy as world of wealth and art as a precious commodity comes up--what's the auction price for what's deemed a masterpiece? The film does show the war from quite a unique perspective of the art, and a few themes emerge, which pose interesting questions--to what extent is defending art as valuable as defending human life? To what degree do people identify with the art?

The website for the film has more information and links. http://www.therapeofeuropa.com/

A solar system similar to ours discovered

Below, I've posted a recent article based on the news that what seems to be possibly a solar system similar to ours has been found far, far away from ours. So far away is this planet, 41 light years, that even if it were to harbor life, and even if this life form were intelligent enough to have developed science and technology, it's unlikely they would be able to create the technology to bridge the vast distance that separates them from us. Nonetheless, it's electrifying, at least to me, to read that there is a possibility that life of some sort exists elsewhere. The thought that our universe itself is so large, yet, aside from our planet, is otherwise devoid of life on other planets is dismaying--it can't be such a cold, uninviting, dead place, can it?! We can't be entirely alone, can we?!

The new discovery suggests that maybe, no, that perhaps we're not alone. Still, even if life were to possibly exist on this planet or others, one realizes the incidence of life seems quite rare, infinitesimally so. First, there are a few stars that serve as good candidates to serve as suns, which will develop a gravitational forcefield that causes a solar system of orbiting planets to form around itself. Second, one of these planets needs to orbit within a certain distance from this sun so that the temperature allows water to form. Third, the composition of this rocky planet needs to have a certain density with a hot core and a planetary surface above which which an atmosphere can form. Finally, at this point, life can possibly begin to take shape. But meeting all these conditions is a tall order, and one that is not frequently met.

Well, just how the high the incidence is uncertain, for if there are billions and billions of stars, there are seemingly innumerable chances for life to form. Still, at this point, it seems that our universe is indeed largely, dead or to use the more neutral term--inorganic--and virtually everywhere inhospitable to the development of organic life.


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THE NEW YORK TIMES November 6, 2007

A Planetary System That Looks Familiar

By DENNIS OVERBYE

They say there is no place like home, but it is beginning to look as if there is a place sort of like home 41 light-years from here in the constellation Cancer.

Astronomers reported Tuesday that there were at least five planets circling a star there known as 55 Cancri, where only four had been known before, making it the most extensive planetary system yet found outside our own. It is also the one that most resembles our solar system, with a giant planet orbiting far out from the star and four smaller ones circling closer in.

The new addition to the system circles 55 Cancri at roughly the distance of Venus in our own solar system, in the so-called habitable zone where it is warm enough for liquid water. But, with 45 times the mass of Earth, the planet is more apt to resemble Neptune or Saturn than Earth, and thus would be a deadly environment for any kind of life that we know.

“It’s a system that appears to be packed with planets,” Prof. Debra Fischer of San Francisco State University said of 55 Cancri. She is the leader of the team that reported its results in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and in a telephone news conference on Tuesday from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

The scientists said the discovery augured well for the chance that with time and more data, astronomers would find places out there that look like home. They also said it marked the beginning of a transition between studying planets and studying planetary systems.

Another team member, Geoff Marcy, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said the discovery had him “jumping out of my socks.” He said, “We now know our Sun and its family of planets is not unusual.”

Jonathan I. Lunine, a professor at the University of Arizona who was not part of the work, said that astronomers were on the verge of beginning to answer a question posed by Albertus Magnus, the medieval German philosopher and priest who wondered whether there was but one world or many worlds. We now know, Dr. Lunine said, “how lonely the universe is, how far we live from distant stars.”

In the last decade, about 250 planets have been discovered around other stars — the vast majority of them by the so-called wobble technique of monitoring a star’s light for signs of the slight to-and-fro motion induced by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets.

As technology and techniques have improved, the planet hunters have been able to move down the scale from Jupiter-size planets to ones only a few times as massive as Earth. But detecting rocky planets like Earth is probably beyond the current technology and must await future space-based missions, the astronomers admit.

One of the first of these “exoplanets” discovered, in 1996, was at 55 Cancri. Dr. Fischer and her colleagues have been observing that star for 18 years, adding more planets to the list of its retinue as they have made their presence known.The outermost and heaviest planet in the system, which is four times as massive as Jupiter, circles at a distance of 500 million miles, slightly farther than Jupiter in our own system, and takes 14 years to complete an orbit.

The star’s three innermost planets all circle more tightly than Mercury at distances from 22 million to 3.5 million miles. The closest of three is also the smallest, only 18 as massive as Earth and surely permanently scorched.

The new planet, which Dr. Fischer called “one of the more annoying planets” because it resisted being folded into their mathematical models for such a long time, basks in the lukewarm light of its star from a distance of around 70 million miles, taking 260 days to complete one orbit. Although too massive for life itself, Dr. Marcy said, the planet could harbor rocky moons, just as Saturn and Neptune in our own solar system do, and these would be warmed to the same lukewarm temperatures as Earth.

The moons would have to be as massive as Mars, however, in order to keep their water from escaping into empty space. Dr. Marcy said, “All bets are off on what evolutionary biology would be like on one of these moons.”The astronomers said they were also intrigued by the large gap — a band about 450 million miles across — between the new planet and the outermost one, in which they have detected nothing. There is a similar, but smaller, gap in our own solar system between Jupiter and Mars, caused by the disruptive effects of Jovian gravity on planetary formation. Dr. Lunine suggested that the more massive Cancri planet could have had a similar and deeper disruptive effect.

But the possibility remains that rocky planets could be lurking beneath detectability in that gap. Dr. Lunine said, “This gives us a name and an address to point out space telescopes at in the future.”

Polish Ukrainian Film Festival Aug 24-26, 2007 Chopin Theatre

The Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division, Chicago, has been hosting Post Revolution Blues: the Polish-Ukrainian Film Festival, the last two evenings. The film on the first evening was "Acts of Imagination" made by a Canadian director, Carolyn Combs, and script writer, Michael Springate, neither of whom are of Slavic descent. The film focuses on the difficulties faced by two young immigrants from Ukraine, a brother, who is eager to assimilate and his sister who is haunted by the tragic past of her parents and grandparents, victims of a famine. While the brother has taken a natural step toward assimilation, meeting a Korean woman he falls in love with and plans to marry her, his sister meets a man from Pakistan, but she doesn't feel ready to become intimate with him. But both seem to live very isolated lives, separated from any immigrant community and the larger community as well.

To me the film felt claustrophobic in its relentless focus on the inner conflicts faced by its subjects, and it reminded me of a stage play in its reliance on dialog. Some of the exchanges would certainly be much more forceful and moving in a live performance by actors on stage.

The cinematic element offers some rays of light in its engaging and long lasting closeups and occasional shots of the dark, looming horizons. The lighting in most of the film is dark and scant on color, perhaps capturing Vancouver during a rainy season, but also the meager and straightened circumstances of its characters. There is a strong sense limited mobility and entrapment in the film that reflects the situation and psyche of its vulnerable immigrant subjects, who are . For example, the film begins with a close up of the sister peeling and cutting an orange. It's she who is concentrating on this simple act, as if using it to anchor herself in a world in which she feels adrift and uncertain of herself and troubled by the past. But in the film there are also elusive symbols of transcendence, like an icon, which may serve as a source of rent payment for the brother and sister who have fallen behind in its payment.

This was for me a difficult film to watch. I appreciated the carefully done closeups, the scenic shots, the dialogs, but I felt as if I was locked up in a small place with these characters for too long in their very circumscribed world. After the film an informative post-film discussion took place with the director and screenwriter. We learned from the screenwriter, for example, that mixed ethnic marriages between immigrants are very common.

The second evening there were three films, a long documentary and two short films. The first film was again a film made about Ukraine by a non-Ukrainian, a Spaniard, the director Carlos Rodriguez. "The Unnamed Zone" is a film made about the daily lives of the people living just outside the contaminated zone of Chernobyl. Though they live in a purportedly safe zone, the children from the area are reported to have more illnesses and sickness, and one who is filmed takes medication for headaches. We meet three families and the children talk most of the time, but their parents are also given some opportunity to speak. The film avoids presenting scientific and medical data about the nuclear disaster, and its consequences; instead, the focus is on the daily lives of the people who live in the shadow of this still contaminated and dangerous area. It was a well made and engaging documentary.

In the discussion after the film, we learned that the director took an interest in the film, because every summer children from around the Chernobyl area are sent away for weeks or months to European countries in order to live in an area far from the scene of the disaster. The director curious about the appearance of Ukrainian children in Spain took an interest in them that led to making the film.

The next film was a documentary made about a homeless girl about age 12 named Liza. We follow her around the city and in the reform school where she lives. She smokes and smarts off and swears and violates personal boundaries of others with impunity. She has soaked up much too cynicism at too young an age. The film speaks for itself about the effects that homelessness has on damaging the spirit of a child. In this documentary, as in the first one, statistics and an overview of the problem of homeless children was not given. In the discussion after the film we learned that it is serious problem in Ukraine. Often the children run away from an abusive home, or from homes where grandparent(s) become the guardians, since the parents are compelled to leave the country in search of work abroad for months to years.

The last film in the evening was a short film, A Man Thing, also devoted to a children, in this instance child abuse. The director, Slawomir Fabicki, was at the festival and at the discussions. I found this film to be the most moving and riveting of any I had seen up to that point. It was shot in black and white, and its focus was on a boy at soccer practice at school. The coach tries to toughen up his team of boys by talking tough to them, but this really proves to be not the abuse the boy is suffering from. Instead, it's at home he suffers from his father's physical beatings for misbehaving at school. I won't say more about the plot of the film, for it may take away some of its beauty and charm.

In the discussion afterwards, the director, Fabicki, stated that in his film he focuses on a social issue, like the problem of child abuse, and his purpose in film is to provoke emotions by leading the audience to identify and sympathize with its characters.

The final evening featured two more films. First, a short documentary, again about the problem of homeless children in Ukraine, "There was a woman who lived in shoe," but this time about a family in Western Ukraine who have adopted five young children, though they have two sons, who are young adults in their late teens and attending college. I found this film quite moving. The woman in the film shows an incredible reservoir of love and compassion that she feels compelled to share for her adopted children.

The evening ended with a feature length film, "The Retrieval" by Fabicki. It is a tale of on level of a Polish economy in upheaval and for many young people one that leaves them with few hopes for the future. One such young man weary of work at a cement factory where his friend dies and work at a hog farm of his family, drifts into the criminal underworld, working there as an enforcer, who collects money on loans and threatens and beats those who can't or don't pay up. On another level this is a film that details the process of desensitization to brutality and violence, that is, overcoming a natural human unease about evil. That process is especially well documented in the film. Watching this film, I felt as if it echoed the festival's first film: again, the viewer is led to follow and witness the difficult plight of isolated and young individuals.

This film was even more difficult than the festival's first film: we, who know better, are compelled to follow the descent of a good young man into darkness. There are recurrent scenes of brutality and violence in the film, and ironically, what one would hope would possibly lead this young man away from this path--a woman he loves, a Ukrainian woman--ironically only provokes him to choose this path. For he believes that he will impress his woman by making money.

I can't but help feeling the viewer felt emotionally crushed and beaten up, much as the protagonist of the film is at its end. While the film is technically brilliant, its emotionally grim and tragic in tone. I can't help but feel that the director perhaps wanted to impress on the viewer what a dead-end the new economic situation has become for some young people in Poland.

For a link to a film site created by Yuri Shevchuk, one of the moderators in the film festival discussion and founder of the Ukrainian film club at Columbia University see http://www.columbia.edu/cu/ufc/

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More information about the films, which I've cut and pasted here:

Post Revolution Blues: Polish Ukrainian Film Festival

Friday, August 24th 7p Reception 8p "Acts of Imagination" by Carolyn Combs and Michael Springate, 2006 The story revolves around Jaroslaw (Billy Marchenski) and Katya (Stephanie Hayes), Ukrainian immigrants to Vancouver, who each find their place within Canadian society and struggle to make ends meet and honor their Ukrainian heritage. The film touches on the problem of immigration, historical memory and reconciliation with history which resonates with the public on both sides of the Atlantic. English and Ukrainian. 930p Discussion - "Global Identity" with Zbigniew Banas, Film Critic; Carolyn Combs, Canadian Director; Slawomir Fabicki, Oscar ® Nominated Director; Alton Miller, Columbia College Chicago and Yuri Shevchuk, Columbia University. Saturday, August 25th 730p "The Unnamed Zone" by Carlos Rodriguez, 2006 Follows the stories of three young Ukrainians directly affected by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the worse nuclear disaster in history. They live perilously close to the exclusion zone around the destroyed station and recount their fears, dreams, fantasies and hopes for the future. There is a palpable sense of despair in this cinematographic trip to the heart of one of the world's most contaminated places still inhabited by close to five million people, who have basically been forgotten. Ukrainian with subtitles. 9p "Liza" by Taras Tomenko, 2006 The award winning filmmaker Tomenko follows a homeless teenage girl to understand the personal and societal reasons for the rise in numbers of Ukraine's unwanted children. Ukrainian, Russian, and Surzhyk (hybrid of Russian and Ukrainian) with subtitles. 930p "A Man Thing" by Slawomir Fabicki, 2001 Three days in the life of a thirteen-year-old boy trying desperately to keep secret the fact that his father beats him. Lonely and with no support from his mother or from school, the boy finds his only friend in an old stray dog from the kennels. Polish with subtitles. 10p Discussion - "Social Activism through Filmmaking" with Zbigniew Banas, Film Critic; Carolyn Combs, Canadian Director; Adam Ensalaco, Greenpeace; Slawomir Fabicki, Oscar ® Nominated Director; Yuri Shevchuk, Columbia University; and Stephen Steim, Human Rights Watch. 1030p Reception Sunday, August 26th 4p "Retrieval" by Slawomir Fabicki, 2005 Follows the fortunes of a nineteen-year-old trying to make his way in society. Living in an industrial city that has seen better days Wojtek faces a dismal future. However, he has fallen in love with Katja, a slightly older Ukrainian woman who lives with her young child. But how can he earn enough money to support Katja and her child, and get an apartment large enough for the three of them? Polish with subtitles. 6p "There Was A Woman Who Lived In A Shoe" by Olena Fetysova , 2005 Documentaries about homeless children on the streets of Ukrainian cities are a common sight in countries in transition. This film is about a couple who offer their own solution to this problem. They take in homeless children into their own family and create a home for them, a private crisis center for orphans. Original Ukrainian with subtitles. 630p Discussion - "Family Redefined" with Zbigniew Banas, Film Critic; Slawomir Fabicki, Oscar ® Nominated Director and Yuri Shevchuk, Columbia University 7p Reception

Hell on Wheels: Women's Roller Derby film documentary

Another night at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, and tonight I watched a documentary, Hell on Wheels, directed by Bon Ray, about the recent rebirth of women's roller derby, which took place in Austin, Texas, 2001. My expectation was to see a film about the character and motivation of the individual women, but instead what the film documented over the course of several years was the initial organization of the league, its split, and emergence of one league from this split. The issue that provides suspense in the film is whether this league will put the focus more on the model of the skaters enjoying the camaraderie and skating and less on running a business with a management staff in order to make profit.

There are several types of scenes that recur throughout the film. Group discussions, which often become arguments are common up until the very end of the film. The main issue of controversy is how to run the organization, how to spend the money, and who leads it and how much power are they given. There are interviews, usually quite brief, with individual skaters. There are scenes from training, from practice, from the games, as well as the injuries that seem quite common, and a few quite serious that result.

While the focus of this film is understandable--to present the nitty-gritty, often contentious discussion and argument that is involved in setting up the league and determining its structure and goals--it inherently does not seem to make for good film scenes: anyone who has ever sat in on an organizational meeting knows that they can be protracted, contentious, and a hassle that you are happy when concluded. Thus, I found myself fearing in the film, oh, no, not another discussion and argument. Furthermore, without any narrator who intruded to clue the viewer in and provide more information about the context, I often felt lost. The director clearly wanted to leave this narrator out in the name of making the film more realistic--you saw things as the participants saw them--but this I believe this made it more difficult for the viewer to get involved in the film, in terms of better understanding what was going on.

Another disagreement I have with the film is its focus on the logistics of forming and operating an organization. With this focus we see many taped scenes of arguments and bickering about just what to do and how to handle the logistics of running what proves to be a costly enterprise--renting a hall, attracting paying spectators, finding training space, buying skates, dealing with frequent and costly injuries, some quite serious. I suppose someone interested in the business aspect of this enterprise would be curious about this aspect of women's roller derby, but I was not particularly so.

True, this gives you the nitty gritty and unpleasant, yet necessary perspective on what is quite a difficult start up venture. This is truly a realist and documentary film! But in my view it just doesn't make particularly dramatic film. Personally, I would be curious to learn more about the personalities of the participants--what draws them to roller derby and why they enjoy it. For instance, a woman in the film observes that the skaters were loners who didn't fit in, but this observation isn't developed. Or the entire question of using sex to sell the sport, that is, wearing sexy outfits to draw an audience. We get a few brief explanations that the skaters are okay with that, but I sense there is more to it than simply a pat answer. Or probably there are a variety of answers to this questions, it depends on which skater you would ask.

This film constitutes quite an ambitious ground level view of the formation of a women's roller derby league. The director and his friends and associates spent several years on this project and their purpose was to document the messy process that led to the league's formation. In this they do succeed. But if you are interested in learning more about the personality of the skaters, more about their issues of gender, if they have any, then this film may not satisfy you.

Anna Biller's "Viva" (2006): Camp sex film with a critical twist

Tonight at the Chicago Underground Film Festival, I saw Anna Biller's "Viva" is an independent film, which is a labor of love, a visually striking film with wonderfully evocative, period sets and costumes in some of the tackiest and brightest colors that 1972 had to offer. Reading about Biller's background as a student in art explains why this film is so beautifully made. A number of films seem to have come out in recent years that revisit the 1950s through 1970s with an informed perspective that did or was not allowed expression at the time, like, interracial sex and homosexuality in a film like "Far From Heaven."

The hero of the film, Barbie, played by the film's director, takes the name of Viva, which in Italian means a desire to live. Trapped in an empty, predictable existence with a husband who is more wed to his work than her, with a friend, she sets off in pursuit of personal and sexual fulfillment. But she only encounters men who want casual sex first, then may consider Viva as a person. In other words, these men don't share her desire to link sexual to emotional fulfillment. Thus, it seems, from Viva's perspective the sexual revolution empowers men more than women, because most men, it seems, don't take into account women's needs.

One paradox that Viva faces is that she can begin to enjoy her sexy body and her stylish, provocative, sexy clothes, but at the same time this source of strength and new found self-affirmation works against her, attracting men to her who desire her body, but not necessarily her as a person. Thus, there is an irony in taking the name Viva: it symbolizes the promise of life, finding personal fulfillment, yet at the same time these goals prove elusive, if not unattainable.

From the film itself it's hard to determine just what is Anna Biller's position regarding the swinging seventies. While she clearly enjoys conveying the look and color of the decor and outfits--she wears the outfits herself and designed and made the sets--yet she is also clearly critical of the way people, mostly men, behave. This is just an undercurrent in the film, a ripple, for the film is primarily meant to be light, entertaining fun, which indeed it is. Still, the undercurrent of criticism for me provoked a conflicted response to the film. I felt uneasy with the glimmer of the critical eye on the sexual revolution from the perspective of the woman who is more its victim than beneficiary, while at the same time I was admiring the visually stunning recreation of the past and entertained by the film's humor.

This mix of disparate elements that I found jarring in the film "Viva" brings to my mind a book written about Picasso by Elizabeth Cowling, Picasso: Style and Meaning. Cowling considers how Picasso appropriates and often parodies other artists and art forms, often mixing the styles and time periods in a jarring, unexpected manner. Of course, this complicates our response to such paintings--what are we to make of them?! When dealing with say just one nude, however, our response is not that problematic; we can appreciate the manner in which Picasso takes primitive African sculpture and renders it in a cubist style. But consider a more complex subject in a painting, Picasso's now famous painting, "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" which shows five women rendered in a loose, cubist manner and which incorporates an element of social criticism of prostitution. The basis of this painting was a photograph of prostitutes that was meant to entice and titillate, but in Picasso these figures become aggressive and disarming, confront the viewer with their large eyes and frightening masks in place of faces. Visually, this painting is a stunning, dynamic study of interrelated figures. But how does it affect the viewer, what sort of response does it provoke? One may be attracted to its composition, but repulsed by its aggressive and blank faces that stare at you. And the viewer can walk away with this mixed response. What in the world am I looking at or who is looking at me in this painting, and why?! If curious, the viewer can read about the painting and learn exactly what is its subject matter.

For me visual art that provokes a jarring response is okay, because I can walk away from the work of art, and return to it, but I find that when this occurs in a film it feels unresolved in a disconcerting way that makes it difficult for me to experience for an hour or two. I don't want to make too much out of this particular reaction I had to Anna Biller's film "Viva"--the combination of a fun, comic film provokes laughter, but at the same time, scenes in which Viva the hero is imposed upon and taken advantage of by men provokes thoughts and the realization that the sexual revolution served as just another means to exploit women. In other words, there are two referents--one, to fun, campy film, the other to a troubling reality avoided in such films.

The film "Viva" resembles a sexploitation film with its lack of character development through extended dialog and conversation; instead, there is more focus on humorous exchanges and deadpan and campy humor. It differs in a very effective and subtle manner from these films when the manner and tone in which the actors speak is transparently outrageous. Viva's husband, for example, is the epitome of the clean cut, handsome, self-righteous, hard-working, and worst of all self-absorbed successful breadwinner and husband. Any time he speaks, he provokes amusement and laughter. When he asserts that Viva is a ball and chain who can't let him go because he wants to go away from an extended business trip that will include skiing, but not Viva, we can only smile in amusement at his self-absorption and self-righteousness.

Perhaps, I want to take Viva as a character too seriously, more seriously than the other characters. She differs in this regard from them: instead of going along with the flow, she hesitates and protests, but she never articulates just how. I imagine doing that would really introduce a new and perhaps undesired tone into the otherwise fun film. In the film all the men that Viva meets impose themselves on her, aside from one woman she meets, so inevitably she must feel dismayed--all her hopes for liberation sexually have been dashed. But how deeply we never do learn, since Viva remains pretty much a closed book, her face, the cover suggesting that she is troubled and disconcerted by her foray into the sexual liberation.

Thus, for me, the film works against itself or at cross purpose: while it wonderfully evokes a sexploitation film, it at the same same time introduces something quite alien to the genre--a critical point of view about the sexual exploitation from the woman's victimized perspective. For me, it seems, the film's last scene, Viva performing with her friend a song and dance on stage, is quite hard to believe, because it implies that somehow despite all her disappointing experiences in seeking love, everything is just fine for Viva who has learned that the sexual revolution is not for her.

Still, the film, for anyone interested in the period is worthwhile watching, especially for its visual reproduction and evocation of the time period, as well as humorous evocation of the past. There is musical accompaniment that sounds like popular music from the time, and there are several well done, amusing singing interludes in the film. Viva's visit to the nudist camp, her song and dance performance at a mansion orgy, her visit to the hair dresser--these are a few of the memorable and entertaining scenes I liked. I am impressed also that Anna Biller ventures into making a film in a genre that had been the domain of male directors and male viewers, and gives it her own critical perspective as a woman. At the same time, she enjoys making the film, having an opportunity to wear a variety of outfits. For a first film this is an impressive accomplishment, perhaps with a few flaws, but I am eager to see future films directed by Anna Biller or films in which she is involved.

For an interview with Anna Billers:
http://www.pollystaffle.com/questionsandanswers/annabiller.shtml

Worldview, public radio international news from Chicago: No, to More Permanent US Bases in Iraq and ex-leaders face extradition -- Noriega, Fujmori

Periodically, I check the archive of the Chicago Public Radio program, Worldview, devoted to international news. Usually, the program involves interviews with scholar, activists, writers who answer questions and discuss issues with the host Jerome McGann. http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_WV.aspx?episode=12407

A program dated August 1, 2007 offers three interviews. First, there is an interview with Barbara Lee, the only member of congress to not vote in favor of granting President Bush carte blanche to conduct war, granting him power of war. Listening to her, I thought, why this reminds me of the situation in Russia: virtually no elected politician there dares to speak out against the war in terror, which is more a scorched earth terror campaign in the Caucaus region against Chechens. Here too, in United States, few prominent politicians make a point of daring to dissent from policy and legislation in fear of being regarded as unpatriotic. However, in United States, there is clearly more opposition and criticism of America imposing its will abroad than in Russia, but this point of view lacks political representation to express its views.

The red X's on the map below indicate military bases that US troops have established in Iraq. Congresswoman Boxer introduced a resolution to ban the permanent establishment of these bases in Iraq. The resolution passed!

Next there is an informative and entertaining interview of a journalist and writer, R.M. Koster, who wrote a book about Manuel Noriega, and comments on his characters, past, involvement with US, and impending release in September from a Florida prison after a 17-year long stay there. Allegedly, for good behavior, Noriega, now 72, is being released early from his 30 year sentence; here, "good" means he didn't bite the hand that fed him, US intelligence. He is facing possible extradition to either Panama or France to face more charges.

Finally, the program ends with an interview with the director Ellen Perry, who made a documentary film about Fujimori, the former president of Peru, who squashed Shining Path extremists in Peru in the 1990s, yet abused his powers in censoring the press and ordering the police and military to cut too many corners, as well as heads, as the cartoon shows, in pursuit of national security. He was forced to flee the country as a result and has found refuge in Japan. Fujimori has been running for political office in Japan, and is also under threat of extradition from Chile to Peru. Hard to believe Fujimori is still so active, and not allowing exile to slow him down.

Paint or Write and Summer Break

Like probably most people who live in Chicago, which has a short summer, I try enjoy the outdoors more and change my schedule and engage in other activities, aside from my usual routine throughout the rest of the year. So, I've taken a break from writing and posting on this blog.

I was attending two 5-week long classes in figure painting, which just finished last Saturday, August 11, and I was working on paintings at home independently as well. Some of my recent work is posted on this blog page. Today, I was accepted into the continuing education program at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago for a certificate in painting. The summer courses I took were taken by me to become familiar with the program and see if I like it.

The certification program involves a student taking at least 10 noncredit courses in painting. This program is designed as an evening and weekend program for adults who already have a degree and are working, and who would like to learn about the art of painting without entering a degree or credit program. I may find myself hard pressed to write here on a regular basis, so I need to change the format of this blog. It will become more a blog listing material online that I find noteworthy with some of my brief commentary.

COMMENT ON THE PHOTOS ABOVE: The building in the right photo is the Art Institute which faces west on Michigan Avenue. The school itself, or more properly speaking one of the several buildings owned and used by the school, is a separate 3-story high modernist building, built in 1977, connected to the back or east side of the Art Institute. It is on Columbus Drive and faces Grant Park and the lake just east of it.

Bernard Shaw Major Barbara Rogue Theatre

Last night I saw a very good production of Shaw's comic play of ideas, Major Barbara at the Rogue Theatre in Andersonville. There were signs up in the window, available for rent, because after this production, the theatre is moving out of its current space.

I believe the play is inherently flawed and problematic because Shaw's main characters, Major Barbara, an officer in the Salvation Amry, and her father, Andrew Undershaft, the owner of a large arms plant, are more mouthpieces for arguments concerning the virtues of idealism and pacifism as opposed to pragmatism and militarism, than individuals about whom we learn more about during the course of the play. Instead, we are treated to mini-lectures, arguments, and witty exchanges about pacifism, philanthropy, militarism, pragmatism, capitalism.

And with heavy handed irony, one senses Shaw himself in the background taking delight in pointing how pacifism and militarism are interrelated. For instance, Undershaft contributes money to his daughter's Salvation Army branch, which is on the verge of closing for lack of funds. Convincingly, and without moral qualms, Undershaft argues that though his business of selling arms sows destruction, it also provides steady work for his employees, much more, that is, material well-being, than the Salvation Army, which offers mainly idealistic hope. This sort of argument has an echo in post-WW II United States, because this is just the sort of argument that politicians advance in the name of providing jobs for the constituents in the arms industry of which US constitutes half of the world's production.

To be sure, Undershaft is a study in single-minded ideological bad faith: he claims to serve his nation and provide work for people, but at the same time his products, arms, kill people and destroy civilization or impose colonial occupation. He admits to the destructive consequences of his business, but because he is just playing a part in the game of capitalism and playing according to its rules, he feels no guilt. Of course, any reality outside the logic and rules of capitalism to Undershaft is idealism and to be disdainfully dismissed as idealistic humbug. This includes politics itself, which ultimately serves the arms industry of Undershaft--its needs and profits, not vice-versa.

The cynical character of Undershaft is played with a requisite amount of overweening self-assurance and unctuousness, without overdoing it. There are six more important speaking roles:Undershaft's wife, his son, one daughter in the Salvation Army, another daughter, and both his daughter's fiances. And there are three more important speaking roles, minor characters who make an appearance at the Salvation Army. All these roles are also well-performed, and it's quite an accomplishment for a small theatre company to stage such a demanding play. Most companies settle for plays that don't require so many demanding speaking roles, so it was a pleasure to see this ensemble perform.

Film Review: Transamerica (2005)

Finally, on dvd I got around to watching "Transamerica" which was first screened December 23, 2005. The dvd version includes brief conversations between the director Duncan Tucker and his lead actors, Felicity Hoffman, who plays the transgender woman, Bree, and her son, Toby, played by Kevin Zegers. There is also an optional commentary on the film by the director. I was pleasantly surprised by the film's blend of humor with melodrama, well done scenes of various locales on the road trip that Bree undertakes from East to West Coast with her son. The film begins with Bree eagerly looking forward to move ahead with a new life after surgery, but an unexpected individual from her past--her distant son's reappearance with whom she has had little contact--threatens to delay her long awaited goal. If Bree believes her own life has been derailed, so too, she realizes has that of her son. He is a runaway who lives on the streets of New York City, and who is certain only about two goals--to find his long lost father and to start his acting career.

But a conflict arises because Bree is reluctant to disclose her true identity to her Toby as his father. Exactly, why we don't know--partly, it's a sense of shame that holds her back, and partly it's a fear of taking responsibility for a young man who seeks guidance, yet rejects authority. On the way back to California at a stop at a transgender friend's house in Texas, however, we learn that Toby accepts her friend, but here Bree misses her chance. And so the film tantalizes us--when will Bree talk to her son? how will he react? Doubtlessly, some measure of secrecy is an unfortunate consequence of living with a such a stigmatized transgender identity, but at the same time in some instances, it is harmful to keep a secret.

To what extent is Bree controlled by her own fear we don't get a clear answer; if asked, she herself probably would not have an answer. This becomes the tragic fate of someone who becomes imprisoned by what is an understandable and justified fear. At times the line is very fine and difficult to discern, so often you find transgender individuals erring on the side of caution or boldness.

Bree and Toby are a study in contrasts. Bree is formal to a fault, reserved and guarded, while Toby is brash, spontaneous and outgoing--too much so. The film is as much about Bree as it is about Toby's own growth. Bree needs to confront her deepest fears from her past as a man, that is her son, who she was estranged from; Toby, to stop acting out in anger against the world and himself after having been abused.

The film's flaws were minor. Some scenes were needlessly overdramatized, like Toby's confrontation with his stepfather, and some of the dialog trite, like Toby's crude trashing of the Lord of the Rings.

Ex-Fashion Model out of control, Janice Dickinson

Having an interest in woman's fashion, last night I watched the first six installments on dvd of the realty show, Janice Dickinson, a former model, who decides to begin her own fashion agency in LA. She presents herself as a tough-talking, hard-driving, when necessary, ruthless business woman, who has a soft spot for models that remind her of herself. That is to say models who may look a bit different and not find ready acceptance and promotion. I imagine Ms. Dickinson believes she presents herself as a resourceful, confident and tenacious business woman, worthy of admiration and emulation. Doubtless, we will grant her some of these admirable qualities, but at the same time her manner is so blunt, abrasive, and overbearing that she seems a stock character from stage or film, who serves as source of our laugher, amusement and contempt. Thus her arrogant character, virtually oblivious to criticism and change, serves as one of the chief attractions of this realty show.

During the course of the show, Ms. Dickinson, who herself wears a variety of impressive outfits, ends up making the very indiscretions she counsels her models to avoid, like arriving late to an appointment and behaving oneself at a show. She also can't resist dropping all pretenses of professional conduct, when in one incident, she insists one of her male models to whom she's attracted remove his underwear, so she can check out just how much he packs.

The culmination of Ms. Dickinson's business is almost undermined by her own wild antics. Invited to serve as a queen at the White Party in Palm Springs, wearing a one of a kind designer dress, she meets the designer at the party. Here it should be added that this designer is supposed to be supplying her dresses for her opening day at her fashion agency. Unable to resist temptation, Ms. Dickinson leaps into the white fountain, insisting that she be photographed while doing so, and ruins her dress out on loan. The designer decides to take revenge, so refuses to supply dresses for the opening day of Ms Dickinson's agency. Only the entreaties of her more sensible partner to the offended designer to go ahead and supply the dresses, saves the day for her.

Overall, I enjoyed this show, which offers insight into the world of fashion, a look at fashions, and a larger than life character, Ms. Dickinson, who plays the role quite well of someone quite oblivious to her own shortcomings and flaws, which makes for great theatre.

Film Note: Kalatazov, The Cranes are Flying (1957)

I watched the Russian award winning film "The Cranes Are Flying" (Letiat' Zhuravli, 1957). It was quite an impressive piece of cinematography, featuring beautifully composed shots throughout the film, brilliant acting, moving scenes. The only fault this film, if it can be called that, is the obligatory positive treatment of Russian patriotism during WWII without any hint of the arrogance and incompetence of Stalin and his regime, which allowed the Soviet Union to be caught off guard and to suffer massive casualties, ie, to throw poorly armed or not at all armed troops into combat. Another minor flaw of this film I felt were the occasional and overly done dramatic confrontations scenes. But overall, given the political restrictions under which this was made, it is moving film.

The film focuses on Veronica's plight during the war when her virtual fiance to be, Boris, goes off to fight the war, and she waits for his return. Veronica is the epitome of virtue and dedication, but her ideals are smashed by the war and then by Mark, who manages to have his against Veronica's wishes to marry her. Much of the film depends on key symbols, like a small squirrel that Boris leaves Veronica before he marches off to the front; the migrating cranes seen at key junctures of the film. This film reminded me of Tarkovsky's Ivan's Childhood, which was made few later in that it adopts a different perspective on the war--through the eyes of child, while in Cranes, it's through the eyes of a woman left behind.

Henry Roth, Truth and Stigma, How Silence Stifles Growth

Browsing articles posted in Arts & Letters Daily, an online list compiled by The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I provide as a link on this blog, I came across one that caught my eye and caused my pulse to quicken as I was reading it. In an essay, "Memory Unbound" in The Threepenny Review, Morris Dickstein discusses the enigmatic Henry Roth (1906-1995), an American writer, whose first novel, Call it Sleep, published in 1934, and republished with acclaim in the 1960s, but for some reason the career of Roth as a writer faltered, and he never lived up to the promise shown in his first novel. What happened to Roth? What prevented him from continuing to write and publish works like his promising first novel again?

In a word, stigma, the shame of adolescent sexual gone awry, incest. Dickstein explains:

In Shifting Landscape, a collection of essays, stories, and interviews that came out the same year, Roth contemplated the mystery of his aborted career but left out the root cause that most obsessed him. This changed in 1995, when his younger sister, missing from both Call It Sleep and the first volume of Mercy of a Rude Stream, suddenly appeared in his work. He wrote about years of incest with her and a cousin, beginning when both were in their early teens. Though his sister was still living and in her late eighties, he rejected her heartfelt plea that he not shame them by raking up horrors from the distant past. Roth continued to resist any single explanation for his catastrophic writer's block, but it became evident that it was the incest, and the self-loathing that accompanied it, that threw the biggest roadblock across his path. As an autobiographical writer whose work depended on emotional honesty for its devastating power, he found he could not go on in fiction past the ghetto childhood brilliantly evoked in Call It Sleep. In Mercy he at last confronted the dark transgressions he could not face in the years following his first novel.

In his essay Dickstein goes on to make an appeal, arguing that there are strengths in Roth's late and multi-volume autobiographical work of strictly factual reminiscence from the 1990s. According to Dickstein, Roth in a Proustian-inspired manner comes to terms with his long suppressed dark past that clearly haunted him and stifled his writing career; paradoxically Roth does so by using modernist and postmodernist literary devices in a work that is ostensibly factual.

For anyone who has had the misfortune of bearing a stigma from childhood into adulthood, this is a bracing and moving story. Personally, I have a strong connection to this story, because I have struggled with the stigma and shame of my transgender identity in adolescence and young adulthood. But living in a much more tolerant time, the 1990s, I have found validation and solace in being able to write personal essays about my experiences, and my self-imposed prison sentence of guilt-induced silence was thankfully not as long as Roth's near life-sentence.

Stigma is the nemesis of personal growth. If ever there was something we could call a curse in our enlightened age when we regard a curse as a vestige of a supernatural world we no longer believe in, it is the silence of an adult about his or her own stigma. An adult who remains silent about their own stigmatized sexual activity (abuse, incest) or sexual identity (trans or homo or bisexuality) in adolescence is compelled to put a hold on his or her personal life and happiness.

http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/dickstein_su07.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Roth

The World Naked Bike Ride in Chicago June 2007

In the name of protesting oil dependency, a carnivalesque protest of riding nude in the manner of critical mass rides (when hundreds of cyclists ride one day a month on city streets, taking over lanes and blocking traffic for a time) takes place annually, and this year I joined the Chicago ride. Since I am on the online listservice of Chicago's Critical Mass, I found instructions notifying anyone interested to first arrive at a Chicago park from where they would be directed to a nearby private home of one of the participant-organizers. This is done to avoid creating a distraction in a public area as riders prepare for the ride in the hours leading up to it. By prepare, I mean some put on amusing and outlandish costumes, while others have body paint applied.

The mood already seemed festive with music blaring from a garage set aside to be used as a body painting area, and many cyclists already milling about nude and or with body paint. I went ahead and joined the line to have my body painted, and it turned out to be a bike then fire around it. The ride seemed very well organized with someone in the park, at the entrance, and other individuals talking on cell phones who were going to lead and direct the ride. Finally, the ride set out shortly after nightfall around 9PM. For a time the ride didn't attract too much attention since it was in the industrial Near West side of Chicago where there aren't too many people walking around in the streets, nor many retail stores and restaurants.

Eventually, the ride did come across the first commercial retail street, which usually provoked honks, shouts, cheers, comments, and on occasion you could see people rushing from stores and restaurants to catch a view of the spectacle. People also rushed to take pictures, now quite easy since many cell phones include cameras. In the more crowded streets, the ride assumed a parade-like atmosphere as people lined the streets to look. I should add that not everyone was quite naked, that is, many people wore what look like underwear or bathing suits or various types of costumes. Also, some of the ride organizers were dressed and riding around on bikes or roller blades.

The ride itself was accompanied by speakers in a trailer playing music for most of its entire length. At some moments the music, the festive atmosphere, the notion of violating the rules of social decorum and behavior--all these gave me a sublime sense of pleasure and happiness. I have read Mikhail Bakhtin's book, Rabelais and His World, on the importance of carnival in ritually violating social rules and decorum in order to affirm one's sense of self and connection to others which is restricted and controlled by rigid social hierarchies and status. After a time I did indeed feel this that I could take part in an event and join other people, setting aside the usual barriers that would prevent us from making contact and assembling in an activity.

Personally, I've also had a liking ever since I can recall I was told to wear clothes. Seeing pictures of primitive people from around the world who wore virtually next to nothing always made me think--now why should you wear clothes if it's hot out.

Film Notes: The Lives of Others

Tonight I saw "The Lives of Others" a German film (original release date March 2006) that shows how the secret police, the Stasi, of the former East German Democratic Republic spied on its citizens, compromising, if not ruining their sense of purpose and moral integrity, especially if they were writers and artists. The basic rule to follow is either play along with the secret police, or if not, then face the prospect to not play at all--face silence, neglect, imprisonment, relegation to the margins of the society, and for some artistic death is tantamount to spiritual death, and they commit suicide.

This film won 7 Deutscher Filmpreis awards and the American Academy Award for best foreign film. This is quite a dark film, relieved with some humorous scenes on occasion, but dark in showing how everyone becomes morally compromised in the net of a society founded on mistrust. A lighter look at the East German past is available in the film, Good Bye Lenin (2003).

There are two heroes to the film, not heroes in a monumental, but on a mundane level, who both act when their sense of conscience prompts them to act in a humane way. First, there is the playwright and writer Georg Dreyman, a darling of the state, who writes plays made to order for the socialist government, and in the opening scenes of the film, we see scenes of what looks like a play that focuses on the heroism of a woman laborer in the factory. But a Stasi officer in the audience, Gerd Wiesler, senses something is amiss in the play, even though it seems on the surface to adhere to all the conventions expected of it. And actually it turns out that Wiesler indeed has an acute sense for ferreting out subversion however subtle its hints: he senses it's not the play itself that is the problem, but what it reveals about the director--that he would dare allow a friend, a director who had been punished, jailed for subversion, direct it. This is evidence enough that Dreyman is himself drifting in the direction of subversion.

Ironically, Dreyman regards this act as a simply a gesture of kindness to a friend in need, and not as a political act in any sense. But Gerd's hunch that something is amiss with the reliable writer of state is shared by the chief of the intelligence, who is also in the audience, and Dreyman's apartment is promptly wiretapped. All his conversations are recorded by Wiesler and his associate in the attic above it. Ironically, however, Gerd finds nothing suspicious to report: Dreyman remains a loyal servant for the state; at a party with friends, he dismisses an accusation by his director friend that someone at the party is a secret police informer.

What pushes Dreyman over the edge to question his allegiance to the state and dissent against it is the mistreatment of his friends at the hands of the secret police. His girlfriend, Christa Marie Sieland happens to catch the eye of the chief of the secret police, and the chief cannot resist the temptation to force himself on her sexually, a fact which shakes up Dreyman when he learns about it. This abuse of power, and then the suicide of his former mentor and director who has been silenced by the state pushes him over the edge. He decides to write an article about suicide in East Germany and how the government doesn't publish any statistics on it.

Gerd, who has been listening in on Dreyman, also begins to doubt the state and its ideals he has served selflessly and loyally. The fact that the chief of the secret police has sexually forced himself on Dreyman's girlfriend causes him to question his own institution, the more so because he must leave out his chief's vile practice out of the official transcripts of what Dreyman and all his friends and associates said or did. Gerd realizes that the secret police is corrupt and morally bankrupt. To provide some context, we are told it's 1984, and in only another five years the Berlin Wall will fall, and in the intervening years the hold of the corrupt regimes in Eastern Bloc states like East Germany will begins to unravel.

To say more about the film's plot would give it away. The theme of the film is how loyal servants of the corrupt regimes in the police and arts begin to sense the moral bankruptcy of their government and state are moved to act against it. The quality of the film itself is made with intentionally grainy film in many shots, as if it were made using the available film technology of the 1980s. (If you don't know what year a film is made, you can usually discern if it was made some time in the mid-90s or later by the higher quality of its resolution and color range, thanks to digital production.) Also, the film is generally sombre in its use of color: often the action takes place in night, or in dimly lit rooms, interrogation rooms and eavesdropping rooms. Gerd's apartment room looks like an ascetic cell of a monk with its bare furnishings and absence of any art on the walls. There is not much sunlight in this world, and the weather outside is overcast and a perpetually barren and cold late fall or early spring.

The chief actors--Dreyman, Gerd, Sieland--are first rate. I can't recall the last film that moved me so much but in such a subtle manner with its powerful message. Personally, the film reverberated very strongly, prompting me to ask myself whether I haven't allowed myself to stray too far from engaging in more work that I find meaningful to me. It also made me think about the fact that other former Communist satellite states and Soviet republics have not reckoned with the past as in East Germany; that is, as the epilogue scenes in The Lives of Others shows, the secret service files were not opened to citizens and historians and researchers.

Brecht's The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui

At the suggestion of a friend, I went with him to see Bertold Brecht's play written in 1941, "The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui," which is about a Chicago mobster's rise to power, and which is also an allegory of Hitler's or any dictator's ruthless rise to power. It was performed with a spare set with few props or stage furniture at the Steep Theatre on a second preview evening; and it's ensemble work with fourteen actors and four or five prominent roles. http://www.steeptheatre.com/current.html

This theatre company features ensemble productions; the other and last play I saw here was Arthur Miller's "Incident at Vichy". The actor who played the chief criminal, Arturo Ui, was convincingly and energetically played with animation and sulkiness. The air of someone who observes no rules and limits was conveyed well, though at times I felt as if slouching and sulkiness was overdone; I imagine a mobster, a strong man would keep up appearances of strength and a stoic front, at least in front of his subordinates. Another actor whose performance and roles were powerful was man who played the publisher and the actor, who teaches Ui how to walk, sit, talk in order to impress people.

A few scenes, especially in the second part of the play after intermission were especially powerful and moving. For instance, the court scene in which justice is bent to favor the criminals; the scene in which the newspaper publisher is pressured to remain silent, and then confronts his wife.

I must admit that not being familiar with the details of Hitler's own rise to power made me miss allusions and parallels that Brecht worked into his allegory. In the play, Brecht has a narrator comment on the turning points in Hitler's rise to power after some scenes; in the play itself, we hear an announcer speak over the intercom. Having been regularly reading about the machinations of the current government in Russia, like poisoning a critic in London with radioactive polonium, hacking into and shutting down the internet of Estonian government institutions, I found the play chilling with examples of the close connection between criminality and government that is becoming more apparent in Russia.

Brecht pokes fun at the mobster's rise to power through gaining influence in the grocery, in particular, cauliflower business. I could not quite follow just how one grocer was convinced and pressured to ally himself with the mob in exchange for money in the play's first part, and the allusions this may have had to Hitler's alliance with business in Weimar Germany. In any event, the play picked up momentum in the second part, and I would recommend seeing it.

Art Chicago & The Intuit Show of Folk & Outsider Art 2007

Along with Art Chicago, there was another art show, The Intuit Show of Folk & Outside Art, which occupied about a quarter of the floor below the Art Chicago show. I spent some time looking through this show before proceeding to upstairs, and would just like to mention one gallery, Ridge Gallery, from Oak Park, Illinois, in passing. The paintings of Evarist Chikawe, a folk artist, from Tanzania, caught my eye. The work reminds me of Chagall and Picasso, the latter who freely borrowed from African figurative sculpture and masks in his early paintings.

http://ridgeart.com/paintings2.html
http://www.artshost.org/rafiki/rafiki/artists/evarist.htm

Looking Beyond Borat: A society and architecture of the future, or more state propaganda in Kazakhstan?

I found Sasha Cohen's film "Borat" entertaining, but I was upset and uncomfortable with just how far and for how long the device of ignorant, crude ethnic yahoo was taken by Cohen. For this is the very image of benighted country bumpkin that comes up in and is used to justify an empire's occupation or forceful re-education of its subjects.

For example, it comes up often in the image of the crude and ignorant Ukrainian peasant that was created from an imperial Russian cultural perspective, as evident in many literary works. If the backward Ukrainian peasant, as depicted in fiction, would only learn Russian and renounce his Ukrainian, peasant culture, he would become civilized, and, of course, a proud Russian, as well. Ukrainian writers were quick to jump to the peasant's defense, in particular Ivan Nechui-Levytsky, a recorder and admirer of the peasant's fertile and creative linguistic resources.

After all, peasants possess a rich folk culture with rituals, myths, stories, an extensive knowledge of their surrounding natural world. Modern composers have turned to folk music for their melodies; scientific researchers, to peasants' knowledge of herbs to develop new medications. That said, we can note that the prototype for Cohen's ethnic yahoo is not a peasant as such, but rather a Soviet Man, that is, a descendant of an ex-peasant, one who was forcibly removed from his farm during the process of collectivization and industrialization during the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union. As part of an intensive and harmful industrialization process imposed from above by Stalin in the 1920s and 1930s, the age-old agricultural communities in Kazakhstan, Russia, Belorus, and especially in Ukraine, were destroyed, individual farms made into collectives. Up to seven or eight million peasants starved to death in an artificial famine that resulted. The descendants of these survivors became Soviet people stripped of their folk and rural culture, religion and customs; conceivably, some could even have become similar to the sort of declasse troglodyte that Cohen creates in his film. But one outcome of destroying the indigenous peasant culture was desirable to the nascent Soviet Union--to create a population that was dependent on the state for work and more likely to buy into its state propaganda.

In any event, Kazakhstan the land, and Kazakhs, the people, are by no means the backward land and people that Cohen's satire makes it out be, as demonstrated by some of its cutting edge architectural projects, like the currently under construction enormous enclosed city space, the Khan Shatyry. What is really backward about Kazakhstan is the deplorably bad situation of democratic rights to free speech and assembly--such speech is censored and banned--as well as the lack of transparency in a corrupt government--with no press and media to fear, the rulers of this Central Asian nation pocket much of its wealth with impunity for themselves. Kazakhstan has in fact had only one ruler, Nursaltan Nazarbayev, and his government, since 1991.

Thus, a really more harmful and cruel joke is being played on Kazakhs by their own president than by the comedian Cohen in his film. The sad truth is that it is likely easier to make and market a film about an imaginary ethnic yahoo than about a corrupt politician in a Central Asian nation, a megalomaniac like Nazarbayev.

While some improvement in the economy is clearly evident, as a result of oil revenues, which has provided the funds for spectacular architectural projects such as the tent city, this land has remained in many ways frozen in the Soviet past circa 1991. The snatches of official Kazakhstan state propaganda, which Cohen includes at the beginning of Borat, and which are in themselves unintentionally amusing because of the heavy handed praise of labor that contributes to state power--this propaganda may well have been updated in Kazakhstan, but it has yet to be satirized by the Kazakhs themselves.

Clearly, Nazarbayev's new and spectacular architectural projects of the future also serve as propaganda for his regime and state, more effective propaganda than that of the Soviet era. At this juncture, this architecture also can serve as a symbol of hope, a utopian dream that one future day Kazakhstan's citizens could enjoy the benefits of a democratically more open democratic and progressive society. But for now this tent city functions like a Potemkin-like distraction and stage-prop on the world stage.
http://www.registan.net/index.php/2006/12/10/the-excesses-of-kazakh-architecture/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khan_Shatyry
http://www.fosterandpartners.com/Projects/1438/Default.aspx
http://newsite.irinnews.org/country.aspx?CountryCode=KZ&RegionCode=ASI

Museum Notes: Art Institute Vollard

Before it ended, I made it to the Art Institute exhibit, Ambrose Vollard: Patron of the Avant-Garde. This art gallery owner and dealer and patron of nineteenth turn-of-the-century and early twentieth-century artists, and later a publisher of illustrated books, had an impressive collection of works by Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh, Gaugin, and others. What impressed me most were several paintings that I had not seen before, like Picasso's blue period, "The Old Guitarist", Gaugin's massive, mural sized "Where Do We Come From...", and a Van Gogh Starry Night. The book published about the exhibit by the Art Institute, a collection of essays, seems a worthwhile investment to learn more about Vollard's relations to the artists he knew.
http://www.artic.edu/aic/exhibitions/picasso/works.html

Gallery Notes: Morpho and Los Manos

Tired from a busy week and pressed for time, I didn't venture far tonight from where I live to visit a few opening night gallery night exhibits. First, I stopped at Morpho Gallery, which is a relatively isolated and small gallery, but I learned soon to be expanded with another room. There were works by several artists on display, and I've included a photo here of Steven Hazard's color etching, the moose with butterfly wings in place of antlers, as well as Dave Gista's painting, "Yellow Urban Professional, an inventive imposition of the cityscape outline onto figures dressed in suits. The staff of two was solicitous to gallery visitors, and I had a chance to ask them questions about some of the artists.

http://www.morphogallery.com/

My next gallery stop was at the Los Manos Gallery where there were four artists being shown, two of whom worked in larger scale. Striking and original were Tim Hurley's large oil paintings, and the one I included a photo of here was one in a series shown at the gallery tonight. Clearly, these iconic like paintings with brilliant colors and intricate designs have some private symbolic meaning for the artist, but the viewer can read his or her own interpretation into the painting. Fletcher Hayes paintings impressed me as well; he works on a large scale and had several large scale paintings of landscapes.

http://www.lasmanosgallery.org/artists/26/

Note on Readings & Music: The Partly Dave Show at Neofuturarium

Tonight, I went to the Partly Dave Show, which features readings and music, showcasing local talent in Chicago. I especially enjoyed Dave Awl's satire on celebrity relationships as seen from the perspective of the distant future, amused and puzzled about the bizarre lives of movie stars, Kurt Heinz's moving account of a search for love in a bar one evening, and Christopher Piatt's poetic account of his narrator's attempt to find love with someone from the neocon camp. The music of the band Even in Blackouts with acoustic guitars had thoughtful, well written lyrics. John Pierce, the lead guitar and founder of this band, was in a commercially successful punk band, Screeching Weasel. Tonight's show reminds me that there is writing and performing talent aplenty which is on par or better than what can be found in more popular and well funded and publicized work.

I should add a word that Dave Awl's hilarious and zany satire on celebrity relationships took an idea from tabloids and ran with it, that is, introducing an incredible and bizarre rumor about a celebrity. His starting point were two Star Wars erasers of aliens who were mistakenly identified in the distant future as representations of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Anniston.

A podcast of the entire evening should be up soon on Dave Awl's website, Ocelapatomus, so any reader will be able to listen to this and the other parts of the show.

http://ocelopotamus.com/ http://eveninblackouts.com/

Art Project Chicago: 300 Portraits

If anyone has interest in portrait paintings, you can take a look at a link that offers more than 300 of them rendered in distinctive styles by Chicago artists Lisa Parenteau-DePinto and Daniela Ortiz. Lisa takes some inspiration from Alice Neel, a renowned painter of portraits and figures, and her work uses a darker palette than Daniela's. Over a 15-month period, 300 individuals were asked to model for usually one or sometimes two sessions of one to several hours. About half this number may be found on the web page of the project. I was among the subjects selected to pose, since I had met Lisa in a figure drawing workshop. The project culminated with an exhibit opening with performances at a large exhibit space in Chicago named Galaxie earlier this year. http://www.galaxiechicago.com/galaxiesite/home.htm

http://www.300heads.com/heads.asp?p=all

Russia: World Chess Champion Versus KGB Judo Practicing President

I've been reading news stories about disturbing political developments that Robert Amsterdam, a lawyer who has worked for Russian clients, has been posting about Russia on his blog. Not that this is really startling news, but the recent incidents in what's turning out to be a heavy handed and rigged government election to put President Putin's successor in place, a reversion to standard Soviet practice, only reinforces the sense that the Putin government is digging the country into a deeper hole, reverting Russia into a new post-Soviet version of the repressive pre-1985 authoritarian state.

The efforts of retired world chess champion Garry Kasparov, now a Russian politician protesting the charade of an election in Russia, and trying to run for the position of president of the Russian Federation, are courageous, but ineffectual. For the Putin-led government controls all the news sources, so simply doesn't allow dissent or protest to be broadcast, nor for that matter public protests and rallies.

Though it's claimed Putin's government enjoys support of the majority of the population, one can certainly assume that it would decrease--just how much is an open question--with an open press and investigative journalism. Perhaps sensing that a mere spark of protest could eventually start a fire, as it had in Ukraine in late 2005, the Putin government has brutally put down protests, with police beating protesters and arresting them. For now Kasparov has taken to the internet to broadcast his candidacy for president, and more importantly provide much needed criticism of the current president's disregard for adhering to democratic process.

One wonders how the government will choose to handle him, because he is well-known throughout the world. Will one of Putin's henchmen venture to slip some poison in his soup, as was done to current president of Ukraine, Yushchenko, as he was running for office against a Ukrainian pro-Putin candidate? It remains to be seen just how low Putin's government will stoop.

For now thanks to genuine democrats, like Kasparov, the undemocratic transfer of the presidency in Russia will be put in a brighter spotlight, exposing the true thuggish, authoritarian face of the current Russian government, which makes itself out to be a benevolent, paternal government that must rule with force and a strong hand.

Recent attempts to silence Kasparov have shown that it's likely that the transfer of power won't be anywhere as smooth as Putin anticipated. Government justifications for cracking down on legitimate and legal protests and rallies will ring quite hollow. And, Putin won't easily perform a judo flip on a wily rival like Kasparov, at least as long as the world is watching. But it's high time for democratic nations to speak out more forcefully at the travesty of electoral politics in Russia where there are no debates even allowed. To begin with, censure Putin and insist that he and his government respect the rules of democracy. To stop overlooking the increasingly flagrant disregard for rule of law being practiced in Russia only encourages it to continue.

For a recent article by a Russian human rights activist published at Open Democracy see:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-institutions_government/russia_civil_society_4573.jsp#

http://www.robertamsterdam.com/

Art Chicago Part II

More notes about artists at Art Chicago 2007

William Conger is a Chicago painter who works with bold, strong color geometric patterns and designs with distinct lines in abstract patterns. There is a hint of a reference to the natural and man-made world in these paintings, as the titles suggest. The patterns consist of solid, firm shapes of mostly solid color and a sturdily constructed forms that seem to have mass and substance, even though they are rendered for the most part as flat on the canvas surface. Personally, I like the abstract, controlled line and form with which Conger works.
http://www.art.northwestern.edu/faculty/conger_portfolio.html

Don Colley had one painting at the Carl Hammer gallery, a gallery that had a lot of art work I liked. His painting showed a human-like creature, perhaps a gremlin, perched aboard what looked like a bomber plane. This painting evokes a sinister atmosphere with its limitation to conveying the scene in dark blue that turned into violet blue and black. The clown and satiric, cartoon-like figures that Colley paints work well in adopting a critical attitude toward weapons of war. This particular painting reminds me of the social engaged art that satirizes authority in Jose Posada's broadsides and some of the German expressionists like Otto Dix and George Grosz. http://www.artnet.com/artist/153021/don-colley.html

Nathan Slate Joseph creates fascinating works by applying pigment to steel and then riveting the individual sections to a canvas like surface. The subtle variations of one color, here it's blue, the slight hint of surface texture and varying depth created by overlapping the individual mostly rectangular blocks of steel creates quite a visually compelling surface. Also the steel glistens and catches light in different areas and from different angles, adding to making this apparently simple surface quite complex. This is a work of amazing originality and makes you realize that though it's no doubt difficult to use materials originally, it can still be done. http://www.artnet.com/artist/26481/nathan-slate-joseph.html

To be continued.

Visiting Art Chicago April 2007 (Part I):

Another large scale art show, Art Chicago, was held at the Merchandise Mart, an enormous building which is mainly used as a design trade show building. This is the second year for the show at this site, after having been held for thirteen years at Navy Pier. It seems to have been a success, judging by the crowd size, the number or red stickers marking sold artwork, and a bit more of an international presence of galleries than two years ago, which is good news, since there was talk of the decline, and perhaps even demise of this annual exhibit, since it hadn't been doing so well in its last years at the Navy Pier site.

Along with Art Chicago, there were several other large scale shows staged simultaneously, in the same building or nearby building, as well. This is a prudent business strategy, since Art Chicago itself had had difficulty attracting large crowds in recent years, so clearly the strategy is to hope for spill over crowds from the large antique show, the outsider show, on a floor below, as well as a local show, the bridge Art Fair, in an adjacent building.

http://artchicago.com/showInfo.html

I had last visited Art Chicago two years ago and felt the show was much better and the location overall much better this year, for it was more accessible, near an elevated train stop, and there is no need to walk through crass commercial tourist halls and arcades that now fill up Navy Pier in order to get to the exhibit space. A special bonus was offered to bike riders, they I learned got free entry to the exhibit! But probably, if judging by what clothes people wore, few took advantage of this offer.

The only shortcoming of the new location is the unavailability of space for oversize and enormous art works, in particular sculpture, but this probably only leaves out at most a few art works. In addition, it perhaps felt a bit more crowded than it would at Navy Pier, since there was perhaps less floor space overall, but in the future, the exhibit can always spread to another floor. As it was, there was an exhibit of outsider art on another floor, The Inuit Show of Folk and Outsider Art, along with an antique show; I saw most of the outsider show, which seemed to occupy about a quarter of a floor.

It's an exhausting task to try to take the art in, in one day; I spent about five hours looking and was a bit rushed doing so; really two full days are needed to look more thoughtfully and repeatedly at the art to let it sink in, or at least those works that appeal to you. My friend who I met at a nearby cafe, left after a few hours, and I stayed on until closing time. Most of the galleries were from Chicago and New York and the Midwest area of US, there was a considerable international dimension to the show, mostly with galleries from Canada, England, France, Germany, and Korea. Still there are only 33 foreign galleries out of more than 125, which gives us about 25% or so. Especially odd, was not seeing more galleries from this hemisphere, that is, galleries from Central and South America.

There were some familiar and famous living artists featured, like Chuck Close, Fernando Botero, and a few deceased, like Paul Delvaux. Looking through the exhibition catalog, my only quibble with it is that I'd fault some of the galleries for featuring famous artists with a reproduction of their work; of course, they want above all a sale, but why not feature an artist who needs more publicity?!

There was a considerable amount of minimalist art, conceptual art, which I generally don't like, since much of this art is antithetical to beauty. Some of it evokes a negative sense of the sublime often through a minimal use of form, color, line. Much of it eschews elaboration of the basic elements of art--color, light, line. That said, I still do like some abstract art, particularly if it does elaborate elements like color and light, and my own taste is generally for richer, bolder, strong use of color and form and materials, as in William Conger's work.

There is really no way to do justice to every single gallery and every artist, so I will select only a few that caught my eye. Also, I should say that my choices are guided by simply my own taste.

Let's begin with the realist figural artists, of whom only a handful were in evidence, since figural art occupies a small niche on the contemporary art scene, but several notable artists stood out, like Philip Pearlstein, who paints life size, or slightly large than life size female nudes in pairs with symbolic objects near them. A spirit of world weariness and pondering pervades the nudes of Pearlstein's paintings, bestowing a dignified tone to them. His rendering of figures reminds me a bit of figures from Max Beckmann's early work. For a few samples of Pearlstein's work see this link:

http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/finch/finch4-9-07_detail.asp?picnum=1

Charles Browning, who is represented by the Schroeder Romero gallery in Manhattan http://www.foundrysite.com/browning/ offers a parodic representation of the past, which provokes us to smile. In Browning's paintings, we are viewing the past informed with a social critique of its purported virtues. Browning's paintings mock historical paintings that monumentalize, celebrate, and thus distort the past. For example, in the painting above, Browning mocks a wealthy man, who sits beside a donkey, or is it an ass, and overindulges in food unceremoniously, while someone who looks like a servant, paints him in a dignified pose.


Vasily Shulzhenko, represented by Maya Polsky, is a Russian painter in whose works there is a Renaissance monumentality of figure and a seriousness of theme, but the subjects are placed in mundane settings, which generates an energizing frisson in our perception that has been conditioned to expect something more noble and sublime. I can't help but think that Shulzhenko is also parodying the monumentality of Socialist Realist work commissioned during Soviet rule in which he grew up and lived as a young man. http://mayapolskygallery.com/artists/shulzhenko/index.html

Caleb O'Connor, who is represented by Ann Nathan gallery doesn't offer any of the critique or parody one senses in the previous figurative artists I have mentioned, and seems a notable exception in this regard on the contemporary art scene. To the left, you can see an example of his work, which is simply an impressive realist work of art. But in other paintings, O'Connor offers realism with a twist, or else, I can't imagine him being in show of contemporary art in which just straight realism is anathema. I couldn't find two other paintings I saw of figures walking a tightrope high above a cityscape, which give a surrealist, Magritte-like dimension to his work. http://www.annnathangallery.com/pages/caleb_o'connor.htm


More artists and paintings will be continued in the next post.

Essays Noted: On Evil

The word evil has been bandied about by the current president Bush more than any other American politician. Too often and too easily. Usually, you hear the word used less frequently, and often to describe someone or an action that defies understanding or whose horrific effects are mind-boggling in scope. Reading through some essays in the online publication Demokratiya, I came across a review of a recent book devoted to the topic, and expected to find a compelling and complex consideration of the topic, but came away disappointed, for the reviewer came up with an unequivocal answer to an inherently complicated topic. You would not expect such an answer from a philosopher or writer. Think of Fyodor Dostoevsky's great detective novel Crime and Punishment.
http://www.democratiya.com/review.asp?reviews_id=80

In any event, this is a topic that I considered several times while reading and writing about it in graduate school, only to come away feeling frustrated in not feeling I got a grip on it. Only after I graduated did I come across what I considered a thoughtful, clear presentation of the concept and from what perspectives it can be addressed by Adam Morton, a philosopher, who wrote a brief, lucid book about the topic for Routledge's Thinking in Action series of books. If anyone has an interest in this topic, I would recommend reading this book.

http://www.amazon.com/Evil-Thinking-Action-Adam-Morton/dp/0415305195/ref=sr_1_1/104-7265340-8642336?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1177720268&sr=1-1

Essays Noted: revising the American literary canon

In light of a new biography of Edith Wharton, a reviewer argues that Wharton, Willa Cather, and Dawn Powell are just as deserving a place in the American literary canon as Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. I could not agree more, having read and used in class novels by Wharton (Ethan Frome) and Cather (O Pioneers!, The Prarie).

Why aren't these women ranked higher in American literature? The reviewer suggests the relatively staid and reclusive personalities of these writers vis-a-vis their male counterparts and a lack of experimentalism in their writing accounts for the critical neglect. Click the link below for the text of the article, or see the comment.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070412-094043-1459r

Film Notes: Tim Burton's "Ed Wood" (1994; dvd 2004 )

Watching the special edition version of Tim Burton’s biopic film, “Ed Wood” (1994), which came out in late 2004 on dvd was quite moving and entertaining to me. Though the director of B-movies Ed Wood has become the epitome of this film gencre, and his name synonymous with inept, bad film making, Burton's film offers a decidedly sympathetic and idealistic portrayal of this zany, cult director of B-classic films (Glen or Glenda, Plan 9 from Outer Space). Burton focuses not so much on the films themselves, but on how Wood managed to make them despite operating on a shoestring who made makeshift films on the fly and cheap. Burton in his commentary states that he regards Wood as a folk artist, that is, someone who was not educated in the medium nor that skilled in it, yet who had a distinctive and likable style, which has led to his becoming a cult hero among some film buffs today.

Despite Wood's lack of connections, despite his limitations as a film director, still amazingly he managed to find financial backers to produce his films. In one case, he even finds a group of Baptists to fund his film, as long as he agrees to star one of their members in his film, change its title, and join the church for good measure. It was Wood’s vision, his belief in himself—delusional and misguided, to be sure--his indefatigable effort in the face of rejection, criticism, and flat out failure, which allowed him to succeed—if by that we mean—make a film, no matter how shoddy and disjointed.

That quality makes Wood into a likable rogue, but he is more than that. For while he misled or simply deceived his financial backers, he also cared about other people: he gathers together a group of cast off and misfit actors and characters, who he befriends and discovers, to make his films, most notable of all, the aged and forgotten Bela Lugosi. In fact, the film’s most touching relation is Wood’s concern for the Lugosi. Martin Landau, who played the part of Lugosi, received an Oscar for best supporting actor.

To be yourself in the face of disapproval and rejection—that’s the most moving impression I took away from this film. After all, it’s a universally shared sense of sympathy we all have for the underdog and misfit. Surprising was just how Wood dealt with his crossdressing, in particular his predilection for wearing women’s angora sweaters—he made a film about it in 1953! Predictably, the film wasn’t screened, and its producer shocked and angered by just what Wood had done with his purported take on the Christine Jorgenson story of the first recorded sex change by an American from male to female, which was what the film was supposed to be about. But personally, I conjecture, Wood by making this film overcame his own nemesis, his own hidden, dark secret, his desire to crossdress, thus perhaps gained the confidence to believe in himself and not back down from any obstacles. And he didn’t. He continued making films and then writing books until he died, prematurely, from a new nemesis—alcohol, which unfortunately relegated him to the furthermost margins of B-film-making and hack writing.

Another moving aspect of Burton’s film is how Wood manages to assemble a group of misfits around himself to make his films. First, he finds Crispin, the tv medium; then, Tor, the giant wrestler, finally, Vampira, the tv movie show hostess. Just how he joins the group we don’t see, but there is also Bunny, the fey bon vivant, and, of course, Lugosi. The culmination of the group’s success occurs when they all go see the film premier of “Plan 9 From Outer Space.”

As in all of Burton’s films, the carefully created sets are a pleasure to see beginning with the opening credits of the film, which allude to images from Wood’s films.

Film Notes & Links: Why We Fight

I had hoped to watch the documentary film "Why We Fight" (2005) by Eugene Jarecki in the theater when I saw the previews for it, but now I have finally watched it on dvd. Though it presents a variety of viewpoints, ranging from the pilots who dropped the first bombs on Iraq, to neocon pundits, like Richard Pearl and Billy Krystal, who support a policy of so-called premptive strike, to Chalmers Johnson, an East Asian scholar, who is now a critic of American militarism, it's evident the director sides with those who criticize American militarism.

The tone of the film is moderate, not polemic, satiric, and confrontational, like Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911." Though less entertaining and humorous than Moore's film, Jarecki does a better job than Moore in dispassionately informing the viewer about what forces are compelling America to wage war abroad. Some of the politicians and people interviewed in the film claim war is waged for the sake of freedom, while critics argue it is either for the sake of power.

Jarecki focuses on how in America after WW II the weapons industry has itself become an invisible force that determines policy, that is, politicians don't dare question it for fear of losing voters. The film begins with old footage of President Eisenhower warning of the possibility that the arms industry will usurp political control, and includes a scene to illustrate its a fact, with one senator after another thankful that the arms industry is operating in their state. Addressing a largely empty auditorium, one senator, Byrd, observes that the issues of going to war have largely remained ignored, and it's obvious that virtually no does care to listen to him. Thus, Eisenhower, emerges as a hero of the film, or rather a politician like Eisenhower, someone who has the integrity to speak his mind, which no other American president has done, or been allowed to do so, regarding the collusion between the arms industry and American military and Congress.

And the best supporting actors or stand-ins for Jarecki's position are several commentators, who offer incisive remarks about American foreign policy--Chalmers Johnson, Gwynn Dyer, a military historian who is critical of American military, and Charles Lewis, the author of several books about American politics.

Jarecki also includes several individuals who lose their trust of the American government during the Iraq war from 2003 to 2005. One a retired policeman, who turns from a fervent supporter to doubter of the war, all the more because he lost a son in a Twin Tower, another a career soldier who balked at adding talking points in briefings about the causes of the war that were misleading, and so quit. With these individuals, Jarecki shows how supporters of American policy have come to question it, but unfortunately, the film also observes that there is little can and is being done to question and stop policies that aren't in the national interest.

Jarecki uses scenes that implicitly comment on other scenes quite effectively. For example, he interviews the air force pilots, who beam with pride about their bombing mission, though lose their smile when they explain that they just do their job which may kill innocent people, and then he offers scenes of the devastation wrought by the bombs dropped, which included innocent victims. It's especially moving to see the morgue director interviewed, and who can't hold back his own tears when talking about the people who died.

Some of the interviewees, I believe, could have been left out, like Pearl, on the right, and Gore, on the left, for both tend to make simplistic overstatements. While interesting in itself, the irony of a Vietnamese refugee who came to US, and who now works in the missile industry, could have been replaced with someone who provides us with more background information. Also, the young man who joins the military constitutes a well done portrait, but does not contribute directly to the film's underlying thesis of how the military-industrial-congressional complex is providing the means and impetus to fight.

Finally, and this may just be my personal reaction, but I think there is too much footage devoted to fighter planes in flight or on the ground. Doubtless, the director is engaging in a form of mock-critical appreciation, simulating awe, but in fact we sense that he is critical of the nefarious destructive force of these planes.

Perhaps to make his film more engaging and entertaining, with human interest stories and provocative statements, rather than a dry, but informative commentary, which some of it is indeed, Jarecki included this material. One realizes that is difficult to make a documentary that is both entertaining and informative, especially on a topic, like American foreign policy.

Moore was criticized for making Farenheit 911 too satiric and entertaining, but how else can a documentary feature film attract a large audience without making its message appealing? Jarecki was criticized for his film because it was too dry, more suited for showing as a television documentary, and too diffuse. Inevitably, Jarecki's fim was not a box office success, but perhaps, and hopefully, Jarecki's film will find a much larger audience distributed as a dvd; this format, I believe, is the most appropriate for viewing it.

A few links to the film and its director:

Photo: Why We Fight was also the title of a series of US WWII propoganda films by the director Frank Capra.

news program of PBS Now:http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/jarecki.html#
more interviews at a conference: http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=346
http://www.watsoninstitute.org/gs/Transcripts/Jarecki-Transcript1.htm
interview BBC: http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/storyville/eugene-jarecki.shtml

The Dilemma of Handling a Difficult Student

Recent newspaper articles have brought to light the bizarre and disruptive of behavior of the college student Cho Seung-Hui, who went on a shooting rampage on April 16. He had been behaving strangely in classrooms since 2005. This case brings to stark light one of the most difficult situations in teaching for the college instructor and administration--how to handle a disruptive adult student in a college classroom.

A problem can arise because such a student's behavior must directly threaten the instructor or students or clearly interfere with classroom instruction. Only on evidence of such behavior can such a student be removed from the class; therefore, any behavior that falls short of meeting those criteria will allow such a student to remain in the class. Unfortunately, that leaves room for behavior which can cause considerable discomfort for the students and the instructor, as the recent case of Seung-Hui reveals. In one creative writing class, for example, most of the students dropped out of the class because of his presence. In this case, the disruption is implicit: students felt so disturbed by another student that they voluntarily left. In another class, Seung-Hui refused to speak, participate, and wore sunglasses and a baseball cap. Though he was an inscrutable, dark, brooding presence, he was not a disruptive one.

Repeatedly, Seung-Hui's professors brought the matter of his behavior up to their department, college administration and security, but as long this student did not verbally or physically threaten anyone in the classroom, as long as he did not impede teaching or learning in the classroom, there were no grounds for his removal from the classroom. In one instance, Seung-Hui would meet separately and privately with a professor outside the classroom.

The most incriminating evidence against Seung-Hui was his creative writing, which featured brutality and violence. Students and professors who read it were mortified by it. But again, as long as this writing did not name or implicate anyone in the class or university for that matter, it did not constitute grounds for dismissal from class.

Within the parameters they were able to work under, the professors, administration, and security seemed to have done what they could. They felt frustrated because they sensed something terrible was transpiring and could not intervene, constrained from doing so because of regulations that protect freedom of expression and speech. There seems to be no easily formulated resolution to this dilemma--how to handle a student that deeply troubles other students and instructors, yet who never crosses the line in threatening them. We clearly don't want the classroom to become authoritarian, which would stifle intellectual growth and freedom, but at the same time, we can't allow a troubled and potentially dangerous individual to abuse the freedom offered in a university classroom.

In effect, ever careful and obliged by law to respect one individual's freedom, a student was allowed to harbor and develop his violent delusions, which gradually compelled him to act on them. At some point the humanity of the student Sueng-Hui had been lost, taken over, eclipsed by a violent and inhumane spirit of destruction. This tragic case calls for a reconsideration of when and how university administration and security can and should intervene.

For exceptional cases, guidelines and provisions need to be formulated so the educational experience isn't allowed to deteriorate, as it clearly did for both students and instructors at Virginia Polytechnic. When one student's quest for freedom of expression goes awry that student needs to leave the class. For students and instructors deserve to learn and be taught in a setting where they feel safe and respected.

Note on the image: this is an imaginary portrait by Man Ray of the Marquise de Sade, an eighteenth century French writer, who advocated the right to pursue pleasure with absolute freedom in his writing, which in his life often led to repeated arrest and imprisonment. This image came to mind because Richard Wolin used it for the cover his book, The Terms of Cultural Criticism.

The Rule of Eighteenth Century Rights

Reading more about the recent shooting tragedy, I realize that a ban on handguns is unlikely because most Americans, anywhere from a half to two thirds, cite the second amendment right to bear arms as something they cannot part with. It's intrinsic to their sense of self-identity as Americans.

Considering the second amendment in historical perspective, we see that it was written at a time America was a frontier state in which there was only minimal civil authority and protection in place. Thus, understandably, there was a clear justification for an individual to assert he had a right to protect himself. Clearly, however, society has changed since the late eighteenth century and the justification for the right to bear arms to defend oneself no longer makes sense. There are few if any areas of desolate wilderness and total lawlessness.

But that fact is overlooked by advocates of the right to bear arms. From their perspective, it simply doesn't matter that the environment and society has changed. Of course it has they would acknowledge, but that cannot and should not affect the inviolability of their right to bear arms. Any concession of this principle would undermine it, hence its inviolability.

In this regard, they are correct, and you cannot argue with them, or rather their essentialist argument. Furthermore, without a majority of Americans opposing their claim to a right to bear arms, their position will prevail.

Looking at this issue in a larger perspective, we can see that various areas of the world hold on tenaciously to ideas and customs which puzzle outsiders. To outsiders these ideas and customs don't make sense, but to the people who hold them, they do; moreover, they define their identity. Thus, to part with such an idea and custom that defines you is something that is difficult or that cannot be conceived. In effect, you cannot ask people to change a policy or practice or custom, which they regard as intrinsic to who they are.

Only the cumulative effect of negative consequences or the slow process of gradual education or a political upheaval will result in change. In United States, I would surmise that the former two factors will eventually change the hearts and minds of people, make them consider changing their identity and their views on the issue of restricting and then banning handguns altogether. Practically speaking, for now the most that can be expected in terms of legislation about handgun possession and ownership in United States is that the pressure to impose more restrictions will increase.

Personally, I can play only a small part in this contentious issue of handgun control in America, adding my voice to the chorus of others informing readers in a manner that isn't accusatory or condescending, but thought provoking.

Columbine Again and Worse

Reading the news on Monday, April 16 caused palpable shock and horror. A young and demented man has killed 32 people and himself at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. If this can happen there, it can happen anywhere, where you work, go to class, shop, meet, and you feel vulnerable and threatened. And you feel terrible for those who died and were injured. It feels as if the tragedy of Columbine is being played out again, but this time with even more victims.

This is the deadliest shooting incident in American history. There have been several such terrible incidents since the 1960s. Something needs to change, some policy measures taken, and legislation passed to prevent such incidents from recurring. A debate needs to begin concerning hand gun ownership and purchase. Michael Moore's documentary film "Bowling for Columbine" was a critique of an American obsession with guns and a usually unreasonable fear that fuels their desire for self-protection. Strangely, this insistence on insuring one's own self-protection overlooks the fact that the right to bear arms, handguns, also allows a a few angry individuals to wreak murderous havoc.

My position is that handguns should be banned, as they are in other advanced nations, like Japan and the United Kingdom. These nations don't suffer from the bane of handguns--an annual loss of thousands, tens of thousands of innocent victims, which America suffers. The only exceptions I would make for people who can own and possess handguns in the United States are for police and military personnel.

Is this a fair or just policy to ban handguns? No, by no means, for it punishes the vast majority of law abiding and peaceful registered gun owners who are not murderers, nor who will ever become murderers. But this policy will make our society safer, making it more difficult and less likely for handguns to be obtained by potential murderers, thus reducing innocent lives lost to handgun murderers. A handgun ban will make it less likely individuals such as the young man at Virginia Technical, will carry out their deadly plans. Imagine, it took him only 15 minutes to buy his first gun.

But given the great number of handguns already owned legally or illegally in United States, I am under no illusion that this policy will show significant and immediate results. Doubtless, for the right price, for example, an individual intent on murder, will likely and unfortunately still be able to manage to illegally purchase a handgun from an unscrupulous seller. Still, this will make acquiring a handgun much more difficult to obtain. It will take more than a simple and convenient visit to a gun shop.

Are there really any viable alternatives?! Advocates of the right to bear arms and the gun lobby are the chief opponents of a ban on handguns will argue there are. But it seems to me that no matter what efforts are taken to detect someone planning to carry out murder, there will be someone who eludes detection. And no matter how much security we provide, not every institution and building can be made into a secure place such as a court house or restricted airport area, where you are searched and need to pass through a metal detector before entering.

Unless this step of banning handguns in United States is taken, there will only be more such terrible incidents of senseless murder in the future. My hope is for far fewer, and dream, is for none to occur. Let's learn from and emulate nations like Japan and United Kingdom--and ban handguns in United States.

For a link on this issue, see "Gun politics in the United Kingdom":

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_the_United_Kingdom

And I came across a comment in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnick that puts the gun issue in comparative perspective--see the Comment for the text.

Vonnegut and Bombs Away

Kurt Vonnegut, the American novelist died recently. I only read one of his books, Slaughterhouse Five, his novel, which I liked, about the fire bombing of Dresden during World War II. This issue of bombing civilian German cities has recently been considered by historians, raising questions such as--how necessary was it? was it strategically effective? was it driven by a feeling of avenging Nazi atrocities more than by strategic objectives?

Personally, I actually met a victim of these bombings, someone who wasn't a German civilian, but a Ukrainian refugee, who at the time was a young child who was simply with his family fleeing their country in fear of a Soviet re-occupation of it. This man lived near my grandfather's house in Wisconsin, and sometimes I would see him from afar limping around in the summer. Usually, when he saw us from a distance, he would just wave in greeting and walk on. This man walked with a decided limp, with one shoulder several inches lower than the other, and a limp, not fully functioning arm. Since this man could get no immediate medical attention when he was injured, he became permanently disabled and scarred for life.

To bring this topic of bomb dropping to the present time, at times I try to avoid thinking of the bombs that this country has dropped, and the civilians it has recently killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. As if it were any solace, we are informed that with better technology, dropping bombs has become a more precise science, so less civilians are killed. But that is still no solace to the people killed and injured, to their still living families and neighbors.

It seems so senseless and brutal to maim and destroy human life, and this is what Vonnegut's great novel is about. I doubt if anyone who read Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse Five, would not pause and consider at what human cost dare he or she pursue strategic goals by bombing. I wonder if any post World War II American presidents or their Defense Secretaries have read this novel. I doubt it.

For an obituary see the comment below.

Gallery Visits

This weekend, I visited two art gallery opening night exhibits. First, on Friday night, I went to the opening night reception at the new art gallery of Greg Steffens' named Haus at 5405 N Clark Street. There was a reception for Emily Murphy, who works in clay, and I've provided a link to her work. If I had deep pockets I would certainly consider buying some of her work. This gallery-store is open every day of the week, so you can stop in and check it out. Here is a link to some of the ceramic art displayed.

http://www.hauschicago.com/gallery/ceramics/ceramics.html

On Saturday night, I went to the large Peter Jones gallery, which is located in a former warehouse near Ravenswood Avenue, just north of Irving Park Road. There was a group show there, as well as a dance performance. Though the website of the gallery includes some artwork, it doesn't have most of the work that I saw there, nor some of the work that I liked, so it's difficult to comment on art without a reproduction of it placed here.

http://www.peterjonesgallery.com/

Smoking Ban in Illinois 2008: Whose Rights Are Lost?

I was happy to read that a nonsmoking bill has been passed in the Illinois state senate, and if would pass the house and get the governor's approval, it would ban smoking indoors in all virtually all public places and businesses in Illinois on January 1, 2008.

As a concession to smokers, I should say that a universal nonsmoking ban is too draconian. Why not set aside some smoking bars and nightclubs, though doubtless the exact number and "fair" percent of them would be cause for controversy. Otherwise, it seems like the tables are turned completely against smokers, and I can understand why they would be upset.

Personally, smoking bothers me when I occasionally go out to concerts, bars, or nightclubs, because first, I am forced to wash my clothes and hair after being exposed to it; and, second, sometimes, it prevents me from going out to such places or going out altogether, for most other casual social gathering places, like cafes, close at 9 or 10 PM.

A sizable minority, up to a third of people, it seems, are unhappy with the possibility of statewide smoking ban because they feel their right to smoke is being unfairly curtailed. They admit that though their activity may be harmful to themselves and others, others can simply choose not to expose themselves to their smoke, just as they can choose to not expose themselves to any other activity they dislike.

This argument, however, operates on a mistaken assumption in defining free choice because there are so few, only a handful of nonsmoking bars, nightclubs and concert venues. Thus, there really isn’t much freedom to choose a different casual gathering place that stays open late at night.

For now even if a businesses owner of a bar, nightclub, and concert venues with a bar would like to make it a non-smoking place, he or she is compelled to allow smoking as long as their competitors do so, otherwise he or she may go out of business or lose a lot of business. Thus, one could say that even owners of night spots don't really have the freedom to make their establishment smoke free given the fiercely competitive environment!

A problem I see with the argument that you can avoid any activity you dislike is that smoking is different from say, playing music loudly or people drinking alcohol to excess, both of which occur at bars and nightclubs. However, if you dislike loud music, you can wear earplugs, and if you are uncomfortable with loud and silly drunk people, you can move away from them. But you cannot move away from the smoke inside a room.

Finally, let me conclude by considering the health issue of second hand smoke. The scientific evidence is incontrovertible that prolonged exposure is harmful to your health, causing disease and death in some cases. Thus, the health of people who work in smoky workplace is put at risk. Is this a choice too, putting your health at risk on the job? Though it can be argued, and I concede, correctly that you can choose to work elsewhere, I would respond that it may be difficult for people who work late in the evenings and usually on weekends to find comparable evening and late hours that would fit their schedule, especially since most already work at a regular job during the week. But more importantly, no one at any work place should be subjected to any well known and documented health hazard.

Note on image: This is the international symbol for a non smoking area. See the comment for the AP news release.

Comment on Readings by Shakar, Levine, Wycoff

Tonight I went to a reading at The Book Cellar, 4736-38 N. Lincoln Avenue, a relatively new bookstore, only three years old. As expected, since it's a Monday night, it's a small, independent, neighborhood bookstore, and all writers are still young and relatively unknown, though the star of Alex Shakar seems on the rise. The audience consisted of a handful of people. This was my first visit to this bookstore, and it's quite an impressive store: the elegance of the black, tall bookshelves, the coffee-wine-beer seating area.

What in the world am I doing there? Well, I work from home, and it begins to get on your nerves and makes you feel isolated and lonely, so I make a point of going out in the evenings. Also, I hadn't been to a reading for a while, and I'd stopped going to my regular Monday night figure drawing class.

Let me begin by saying that the second reader, Alex Shakar, entertained me most of all, dazzling me with his long, periodic sentences, brimming with humorous observation and word play, from his novel in progress about a feckless business man who turns to religion and out of body experiences for solace and stability in his life. I’m looking forward to reading it when it is published.

Shakar seems to be in his early or mid-thirties, looked stylishly scruffy, letting his brown beard grow out a bit, and his most striking features are his large eyes. He read with some verve and animation, more so than the other two readers, but their prose didn't lend itself to such a reading tone.

Shakar has a novel and a collection of short stories to his credit, and I ordered his novel in hardcover, The Savage Girl (2001), for 1 cent online plus the shipping fee $3.49 through Amazon. The new paperback edition was there on sale, which is a sign of success, but its print size is so small and compressed that I balked at the notion of reading it. For, in principal, unless no other edition is available, I've stopped reading small print books without much space between the lines and small margins. That's the way most books used to be published in the former Soviet Union with hardly enough room to even make a check mark, much less fit a readable phrase in the margin.

Lest my reader assume I'm a stingy and impoverished bookworm, let me add that I did by copies of the books by Stacey Levine, Frances Johnson (a novel) in a small, striking paperback copy printed by Clearcut Press and Corrina Wycoff ‘s O Street: Stories published by the college sponsored journal Other Voices.

Levine hails from Seattle, Washington; she has fair skin and short red hair. Levine read from her novel comic passages about a family that is too clutching and possessive of its newlyweds and already planning their grandchild's life. This sounds all too familiar and close to comfort for me: I lived longer with my parents than I should have, and could have stayed longer and have even been invited back so that I could save money by not paying them rent. But I'd pay heavily in frayed nerves and stunted personal development.

Corrina Wycoff lives near Seattle and studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I studied English and Slavic literature. She has a fine, sculpted cheekbones and chin, framed in wavy, short hair style. Wycoff read a passage from her stories; again the tone was comedic, though dark, about a narrator's recollections of childhood, describing tragic incidents from a child who has become inured to such incidents that surround her.

Well, my fiction reading is cut out for me. Eventually, though not in the too distant future, I would like to finish reading all three authors books and comment on them briefly.

For more about the reading see my comment.

Theatre Review: "The Swan" Trap Door Theatre

On Saturday night, I saw the play "The Swan" staged at the Trap Door Theatre. It was a modest play featuring really only leading role, Dora, who on occasion argues with her lover, Kevin, a strapping milkman, who is married, and claims with bluster he can support two women, and Bill, a man who believes he is a bird, who for much of the play cannot talk, and then talks in bursts at times or parrots others speech. The elaborate and well designed set of the play is a ramshackle house interior with a large, partly broken window, which figures importantly as a symbol in the play.

The casting is appropriate: Dora is played by a young woman who projects naivety and disorientation, always involved in relations that are spinning out of control, Kevin, by a strapping young man who is pleasant and overbearing, who often seems on the verge of losing his temper, and the swan, by a physically much smaller and shorter man, who convincingly plays the part of a man with limited faculties. Throughout the production some popular rock oldies play in the background, as well as on a few occasions we hear the sound of beating wings. If you come to the play early, you will see Dora moping around on stage, trying to sleep, obviously looking troubled. This is a standard feature pre-opening feature at the Trap Door: actors moving around on the set, usually silently.

Just who or what is Bill is--man or bird, or man-bird, or a man suffering from the delusion that he is a bird--is left indeterminate, so he is a postmodernist character, who most importantly also serves as a mirror or projection of Dora's own desires to find a man who she can love, for she can't seem to hold on to the three previous ones who she meets. What better way to meet the next one than if he comes crashing through her window. Initially, Dora is on the verge of shooting Bill, but gradually comes to see him as vulnerable, hurt, needy and even as a man (or bird-man?) willing to return her affection.

Tim Burton's film "Edward Scissorhands" (1990) immediately came to mind--a naive, otherwordly, and different and seemingly not entirely human being comes to town, and predictably ruffles feathers. (Checking a reference, I see that Egloff first produced her play in 1989, before the Burton film was released.) The other avian plays that come to my mind which use genuine birds as their symbolic centers and plot hinge points are Chekhov's, "The Seagull", and Ibsen's "Wild Ducks."

While Burton's film is a more accessible and sentimental production, Egloff's is darker, since Dora is herself is clearly a troubled young woman, who keeps making bad choices in life. The fact that she allows herself to become a mistress to the milkman, Kevin, is already a sign that though she seems a good person, she lacks the discernment to claim what she deserves--a better man and relationship. She gradually, however, begins to realize this when she begins nursing for and caring for the bird-man Bill; inevitably, she becomes attracted to the bird man, and a conflict results with Kevin milkman. I'll leave it at that.

The play has some flashes of humor, passages of eloquent, poetic language, and raw, unnerving expression of need and desire by the bird-man Bill; the last seemed too overindulged to me and made me squirm in my seat the way that babies do who won't stop crying. Also, Dora, is a difficult character to empathize with because she seems so lost and misguided, though at the end of the play there is a hint however forlorn, she attains some tragic insight. Overall, it's a well done production by talented young actors who work for free and experience in Chicago's semi-professional/amateur theatre scene.

For more text see comments; the photo is of Man Ray's oil painting, Leda and the Swan, 1941.

http://www.trapdoortheatre.com/trapdoor/page.cfm?id=1

Overspending Abroad, Paying for It at Home

Funding Militarism Abroad and a Breakdown of Domestic Infrastructure

The looming disaster facing Chicago's elevated and underground train system (CTA) was a feature today in the New York Times, a sign that the situation is dire and only to threatens to get worse in the immediate future. Specifically, tracks and stations are old and being replaced, which has been lengthening waiting times, even doubling them, and the reconstruction of several stations will only make matters worse in April.

This is simply a short, informative article, and not a longer piece which touches on deeper underlying problems, but as I read it, I was thinking about the larger context of this issue. To be sure, to some degree this is an internal problem of mismanagement, as well as lack of adequate state funding, but I wonder even if those factors were not contributing causes to the transit system's decline and shortfall in funding, would there still be a problem? Probably, I surmise, there would still be one.

The larger issue behind this issue of CTA's impending problems is a lack of federal funding for public transportation, which results from simply a lack of available federal funds for it. Where is the money going? What is a higher priority? Clearly, it's national security and defense, military spending, especially for the last few years for the Iraq war. Even without this war, military spending was high; the last few years, it went out of control.

Thus, the war, distant and abstract, to most of us, who have neither been in military service, nor are related to someone it it, has come home. America has overreached itself, and is beginning to suffer the consequences.

Listening to an interview on a public radio station today, Worldview, of Chalmer's Johnson, a retired historian of East Asia, who has just published his third book critical of American foreign policy and militarism, led me to jot down these points.

In a recent conversation with a friend, the issue came up of why isn't there more protest and dissent against the American invasion of Iraq. Well, it seems, plainly that most people are not directly affected by it, at least until now.

See the comment for the New York Times article; photo: Pieter Breugel's Tower of Babel

Chalmers Johnson, Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic (Feb 2007)

For the interview of Chalmers Johnson about his recent book, Nemesis, you can listen to NPR's Worldview
http://www.chicagopublicradio.org/Program_WV.aspx?episode=9579