Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Filter by Category : Tag : Date

Browsing Category

Movies

Mars on my Mind.

Well, well, well. Mars plans scuttled, with new attention instead directed to the moon by Musk, or so I hear. Another failed prediction, and waste of a perfectly abominable T-shirt he wore the day when leaving DOGE in the dust.

Mars-related thoughts, though, were mostly triggered by a Japanese mini series currently on Prime, Queen of Mars. It provided the appropriate level of distraction for a head-cold addled brain and a body that did not leave the house for days. I don’t know how they pull it off every single time, but Japanese Sci-Fi productions just have me cheering.

Beautiful people, serious method acting; broken families, families reunited! Good guys, bad guys, in-between guys shifting allegiances. Bad guys clearly labeled by looks – the military alone composed of star troopers, German Nazi lieutenants, an officer inexplicably looking like Ursula the sea witch in The Little Mermaid. Good guys win – yeah. Happy Ends rule! Mysterious objects appearing and disappearing, supernatural phenomena backed by some crafty AI visuals. Science rules!

The plot is perfectly commensurate with brain fog (spoiler alert!)

100 years from now, Mars has been colonized for 40 years, to extract valuable minerals. Profit rules! Now holding some 100.000 inhabitants, economically presented in the film by some 45 extras in changing costumes, the planet is governed by the Interplanetary Space Agency.

Plucky group of early settlers resists the organization’s attempts to repatriate them to Earth – Mars is their home! They also refuse requirements of machine-human interphases, not having surveillance tags implanted in hands and communication devices in foreheads. Young blind heroine gets kidnapped by profusely apologetic settlers to stop repatriation, then joins their cause.

Evil head of Space Agency, accepting bribes of mining companies and other extraction forces, has more than repatriation plans. Power rules! She wants to explode the planet to create an environment with atmosphere and water in 1000 years (Long-termism rules!), doomed remaining settlers be damned.

Feisty combo of two aging scientists and two young lovers separated by 140 million miles use mysterious objects to expose the rot at the core of the agency. Along the way we are advised we should take risks for science, not be afraid of the unknown and listen to the calls from the Universe. Curiosity rules!

The series was adapted from an original novel commissioned from sci-fi writer Satoshi Ogawa and created by Japan’s Broadcasting Corporation (NHK) in commemoration of its 100th anniversary. The narrative core, then, rests on communication, radio waves, and celebrates the underground neighborhood radio station that helps our protesting settlers topple the surveillance state. Radio rules!

They play with interesting concepts associated with communication – everyone in the movie speaks a different language, simultaneously translated by either embedded or clipped-on devices, a veritable cave of Babel, given the subterranean Martian accommodations. Subtitles rule!

Communication between Earth and Mars has a 10 minute time lag in 2125, originally. So how do you converse if it’s never “with” each other? The blind heroine has acute hearing to compensate for visual deprivation, important to the plot. And eventually we discover the value of interplanetary exploration by some means of echolocation….. A paean to auditory power.

Truth be told, these were three hours of my life well spent – there was something endearing, amusing, and at times thought provoking to this series. It makes a clear case for what is ethically and morally right – oh, do we need those reminders in our time – without being patronizing. The cinematography is beautiful in its own right. The film never yields to the temptation to speed up to move the plot along, but allows lingering. Very much recommend.

***

The broadcast I am really longing for, however, does not yet exist: a full recording of Jennifer Walshes new opera about the take-over of Mars by toxic tech bros, as experienced by an all female astronaut team on a mission to Mars. Here is the trailer. The themes cover some of the same ground as the Japanese mini series. As the composer declares: “when we talk about Mars we are talking about ourselves – about our ideas of the future, and about the operations of power in the present.” She refers back to the likes of Peter Thiel  who told the New York Times: “Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s … a political project.” Consequently the opera explores the reaction of these 4 women astronauts to “isolation, sinister ideologies, the prospect of alien life and a vibe shift toward corporate authoritarianism,” when the tech bros take over (Ref.)

Apparently the women are able to overcome a bleak future with hopeful, defiant and, importantly, collective resistance. Although it would have been easier if they had not mistakenly taken with them the wrong on-board entertainment compilation. For nine long months all they have is Shrek the Third and a few seasons of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills…

Who needs Mars when I was able to hike in New Mexico? Photographs today from Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Park. As close to Mars as I’ll ever come.

Music a nod to sensitive listening skills and subsequent translations into different auditory configurations; a wonderful new album by the Vision String Quartet, which really should be named the Listening String Quartet. In the Fields is inspired by Bela Bartok’s Fourth String Quartet, but adds experimentation on Ravel and Dvorak, among others.

1 Comments

Leave mothers alone!

Here is the good news: you can keep the popcorn in the cupboards and avoid empty calories if you don’t watch the Korean and Dutch movies I’ll introduce today. However, both cinematic explorations under review have brain power and pretty amazing visuals. If you are a fan of disaster movies, science fiction films or mysteries, as I am, you’ll be riveted.

Here is the bad news: you will need a lot of buttered popcorn to erase a bad aftertaste left by watching the movies under discussion. Both delve deeply into psychological issues using women as projection screens of stereotypical, often misogynistic concepts, centered on versions of manipulative women and bad mothers. Sufficiently warned?

Alice Neel Mother and Child (1982)

SPOILER ALERT! I will reveal plots.

I turned to The Great Flood on Netflix without any prior knowledge, simply because I saw it was a Korean film; they are known for excellent apocalyptic movies. I find disaster porn to be the perfect distraction from real life affairs since they remind me that things could be worse, and usually have a happy ending for a select few. We can dream of being the lucky ones!

The story unfolds in the predictable manner; some catastrophic weather event (asteroid melts arctic – buy that!), sets all of Seoul under water; heroine plus child live in a 30 stories apartment building, stratified along class lines, inhabitants now jamming the stairways to get to safety. A male figure appears, half threat, half protector, to guide her and child to a helicopter waiting for them on the roof. It turns out she is the remaining lead researcher in a secret UN project. They are trying to develop AI programs intent on preserving humanity’s emotional tool bag for whatever comes after humanity gets wiped out. Without her being rescued the program is doomed. Along the way she encounters massive challenges, physically and morally, revealing herself to be a tough cookie and originally not particularly attached mother.

Suddenly the film switches gears, and it turns out (for all I could decipher, since there are enough plot holes to drive a truck through,) that she volunteered to be a subject in the data extraction of human emotions for her research project. Looks like it to me, though, that the extracting powers are not interested in human emotions per se, but the shaping of emotions deemed appropriate for a good mother. She finds herself in a time loop, going through thousands of simulations of the same disaster scenario, (conveniently indicated by the changing numbers on her t-shirt for the dull viewer), finding “better” ways to handle ethical dilemmas in order to reach the goal state: a reunion with and rescue of her child lost along the way. Who turns out not to be a child at all, but a preprogrammed AI creature. With some sort of diabetes, no less, making us wonder if they had bad programmers or this was another ruse to instill extra “nursing” tendencies in a woman who had not given birth.

Kaethe Kollwitz Mütter (1911)

Across all these re-iterations of her flight we see her develop from an emotionally distant care taker to someone who is deeply attached to the child. She is ever more engaged in being there for other people in distress, even if that might harm herself or her goals. Along the way AI is shaping her, by providing adaptive memory clues and selective reinforcers, tweaking algorithms towards a preferred outcome. Just as we, the viewers, are shaped by finding our own stereotypes confirmed – isn’t it comforting to see someone evolve to be nurturing, sensitive, present, attached, servile and self-less? A “good mother”, in other words?

Helene Schjerfbek Mother and Child (1886)

As someone who currently holds two young mothers closely in my heart, mothers who could not possibly do a better job than they are doing already, I was irked that the film regurgitated every single societal demand imposed on mothers, in order to bestow the final award, success of the mission. It overshadowed the larger philosophical – and interesting – question the movie raises, how Artificial Intelligence can shape us all – and theoretically in all directions, towards becoming good, or evil, or accepting evermore incoherent entertainment….when looking at the evolution of this film. In contrast to what I watched next, though, the movie rocked!

***

The Shouwendam 12 runs on Amazon Prime. I love to watch Dutch movies for a number of reasons. They help me keep in touch with the language, provide blissfully normal looking actors (no Hollywood glam here, ever) and offer glimpses into the darker aspects of the human psyche (which I attribute to Holland’s colonial past rather than the darkness of the northern latitudes of Scandi-Noir films.)

At first glance, the series presents the familiar script of whodunits: teenagers disappear from the village 25 years ago, someone with amnesia comes back to figure out if he is one of them, a suspicion shared by some in the village, but not others. Then someone gets murdered and a hastily called detective, with the help of the young village cop, tries to find the culprit, setting her eyes on the amnesic newcomer. So far, so typical.

All of a sudden, the series picks up rocket speed with multiplying subplots involving drug dealing, gay sex, child abuse and the like. People start dropping like flies, each killed in a different fashion, with our guy having alibis for many of them, but not all. The script is clever in the sense that we really don’t learn the full extent of a very complicated narrative until the last (10th!) episode.

Paula Modersohn-Becker Stillende Mutter (1903)

Spoiler: the whole set-up revolves around women who have lost their minds, quite literally, after having or losing a child. In the mildest version, the detective is deemed incompetent because she is still shattered by losing her son to suicide. Two cases of postpartum depression then depict women with murderous impulses, trying to kill their babies or killing someone else. Finally, the main culprit is a woman completely deranged after losing her lover to suicide and their unplanned baby in a subsequent miscarriage. She goes out to revenge those losses, murdering everyone who ever harmed her lover, who was one of the missing village kids ago from all those years ago. She drags her brother – hinted to be incestuously bound to her – along in the psychotic scheme, pretending to be the “returning” amnesiac to rattle the villagers into revealing the secrets tied to the disappearances. She escapes punishment by jumping off the church tower in the end, while he shows some redeeming feature by preventing her from killing yet another innocent victim, before he is sent to prison.

It is beyond infuriating. Women are presumed to be murderous harpies under the influence of hormonal imbalance. One is shown to be suffering the hallmarks of clinical depression before she tries to drown her daughter, others are depicted just as murderously aggressive crazies. Instead of giving the viewer tools to understand postpartum depression and its harrowing burden on new mothers, it simply terrifies us with what these women are capable of with destructive intensity.

Mary Cassat Mother and Child (1880)

No mention of the gradation seen in the real world. Up to 85% of mothers experience postpartum blues, a slight impact on mood with hormonal shifts, which remits spontaneously 2 weeks or so after delivery. Then there is postpartum depression, which is clinically indistinguishable from garden-variety depression, with sadness, anxiety and hopelessness often part of the picture for a longer stretch, infinitely treatable. And then there is postpartum psychosis, appearing directly after birth for maybe 1-2 in a 1000 women (if that – the data vary widely). A rare event, and often coinciding with the emergence of dormant bipolar disease, triggered by the stress of pregnancy and birth.

If movies want to raise larger questions – is AI a dangerous tool or possibly preserving the essence of humanity; are given life events a path to madness under certain circumstance – please find something that does not involve motherhood. Mother bashing has such a long and treacherous history, we should really move beyond that. True not just for movies, but also for books – just look at all the new memoirs about and by mothers, or the endless novels about bad mothers…

Max Ernst- Die Jungdrau züchtigt das Christuskind (1926)

True, too, for operas: just think Madame Butterfly willing to give up her child, or Azucena in Verdi’s Il Trovatore with her fragile mental equilibrium, not knowing which baby went into the pyre and which she kept and raised as her own. Or Bellini’s Norma, who spares her child, but that was that for sane actions. The Queen of the Night is an ambivalent mother in Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Cherubini’s Medea is the worst of them all, killing both of her children in an act of revenge.

Enough mother bashing! Could you please leave them alone?

Here is a naughty child instead, for today’s music, in the end (at ca. 39 minutes into the video) crying for Maman, no less. L’enfant et les sortilèges is a beautiful opera by Maurice Ravel.

Mother and Child, 1902 by Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso Mother and Child (1902)

1 Comments

Your very own Town Crier.

Walk with me. That way we can talk and I don’t have to yell “Oyez, oyez, oyez!” like the town criers of yore, to get your attention for today’s public announcements. Oyez means “hear me,” (still used in French, originally Anglo-Norman.) I have always wondered if the German expression Oh Je – oh no! – is a derivative, since the news were mostly bad and the expression is one of concern, regret, or surprise….but I digress.

Let’s walk the just re-opened Oak Island Loop, at its most glorious colors this time of year, on a sunny and warm day, too warm for April, really. Trudge across the large meadows and turn a corner into the oak woods – unclear who was more startled, the calves hanging out in the shade or this hiker. But guess who ran!

Vultures hovering close, ever hopeful. Not this day, my friends, not yet!

Golden sheen wherever you look. The unfurling oak leaves green-gold, the poplar leaves not yet covered with dust reflecting sunlight like golden dots, the buttercups not far behind.

Colors in general more on the pastel side, soft pink hawthorne, nettles, the blues of the camassia everywhere, and white, tinged occasionally with pink in the fruit blossoms and emerging white hawthorne.

I had been thinking about colors, having wasted 90 minutes of my precious life time on an inane movie with nothing to show for but admiration for the colorist who designed costumes and backgrounds to sheer perfection. The Room Next Door was on my list for the mere fact that I am a sucker for Tilda Swinton and director Pedro Almodóvar‘s work. I don’t know what they were thinking here. Stilted dialogue, a plot too hard to believe, a display of photogenic suicide with nary a bit of pain in sight.

Narcissistic woman who has managed to drive everyone from her life, is now facing cancer death in loneliness. Neither estranged daughter nor distant friends answer her request not to die alone when taking her own life. Forgotten friend from long ago, who makes a living writing about her fear of death, inexplicably yields to the request for companionship even though both know it endangers her for criminal aiding and abetting. Rent a mansion in upstate NY (costing enough to cover the price of a first class flight to Switzerland, where assisted suicide for any reason is legal, is my bet.) Patient takes her own life, friend barely escapes legal trouble, daughter (also played by Swinton in a ridiculous wig) reappears to find no real answers.

In any case, the ethics of suicide are never discussed, the pragmatics not based in reality, and the question of succumbing to requests that are entirely selfish, not once tackled. Political questions are reduced to the plight of personal trainers not allowed to touch clients any longer, or whiney ex-lovers hinting at their disgust for climate change. Almodóvar, what has got into you? In any case, not recommended, but for the colors which rule in setting up space and personalities.

***

Back to the public proclamations of your personal town crier. On Wednesday, the members of Portland City Council Community and Public Safety committees voted on passing a resolution about the fate of Portland Street Response‘s future to the full City Council. Part of Portland’s Public Safety area, the program is a successful tool in assisting people experiencing mental health and behavioral health crises, rather than calling the police on the frequently unhoused people in distress. The new resolution seeks to strengthen this program, among other things, by fully realizing Portland Street Response as a 24-7 co-equal branch of the first responder system. Here is the resolution in full.

Water is ominously low already. St. Helens in the background.

Two of the committee’s members, Loretta Smith (District 1) and Eric Zimmerman (my istrict 4) voted against bringing the resolution to the full council – really trying to throw a wrench into the gears of progress in dealing with our homelessness crisis. They ignore the positive example of many other cities (Seattle, Albuquerque, and Durham, NC, among them) that have shown that independence – not reporting to either police or fire department, in other words being co-equal – has improved service capabilities. Luckily, Steve Novick cast the decisive vote to bring the resolution forwards.

Mt. St. Helens, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood in full view.

The meeting for the full council is in early May. If you cannot attend – a lot of presence always helps – I encourage everyone here in Portland to consider writing to their respective council members what you think should be voted for (or against.) Seven ayes will be needed to pass the resolution. (I have already written to Mitch Green, who is the District 4 member to vote next. And to Zimmerman to protest.) Here is the link where you can choose to write to your counselor. There is a spot where you can pick the name of your representative to be alerted.

Back to private proclamations: the woods were full of birdsong, the warblers picking up the golden dot theme,

For obvious reasons called butter butt…

the mourning doves, the red-winged blackbirds, the robins, song sparrows and swallows joining the chorus. Baldies shrieking, Heuer happy.

Instead of music today we’ll have the splendid sound scape of a day’s recording – dawn to dusk – of nature sounds on the Knepp Estates, one of Englands pioneers in rewilding. The album was released 4 days ago and is revelatory. From the producers:

The recordings were made by Alice Eldridge of the University of Sussex, who explained the idea behind the wilding.radio project that inspired this release:
“I have come to believe that nature sounds are not only ‘calming’, but offer a powerful, visceral means to remind us that we are a part of the wider tapestry of life. This simple listening experience has been received with extraordinary enthusiasm and gratitude. Britain is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world. This reduction in biodiversity has serious consequences for the future of life on this planet. It also radically depletes our sensory connection to wider nature. And if we don’t feel our connection to the rest of life on this planet, we are less likely to care for and take positive environmental action in the future.”

2 Comments

Moloch

Some persistent bug had me under the weather last week. Consequently I watched even more movies than usual, with shows divided between those I stream while knitting and those I devour intently. Given the quality of what’s currently out there, the “knitting” category covered about 90% of my movie diet, with the remaining 10% providing a sigh of relief.

I photographed at the waterfront in San Francisco in September 2020, around noon. The smoke from the fires blocked out the sun. These colors are not manipulated.

In the latter category, one series stood out in particular. It’s a French/Belgian production from 2020, now playing on the Sundance Channel, called Moloch. Not for the faint of heart – the series contains not just very violent images, it also creates pervasive fear in any viewer sensitive to horror and asks disturbing psychological questions that we have to answer ourselves. It offers magic realism as a plot device, but it is also as smart a documentation as they come of what ails our societies, and delivers superb psychodrama. Next to the terrific acting, the cinematography is brilliant, mirroring the suffering of its protagonists in the desolate land- and cityscapes that are as beautiful as paintings. If you plan on viewing it and don’t want spoilers, stop reading here!

The plot revolves around people spontaneously combusting into columns of fire in a Northern French coastal town. An unlikely duo of a young journalist and an older psychiatrist team up to solve the mystery, both burdened with tragedies of their own. A number of the psychiatrist’s patients are peripherally involved, as potential victims or perpetrators of the deeds, no one knows. As the story unfolds, the crimes are attributed by the increasingly riled population to Moloch, the ancient God of Fire to whom children were regularly sacrificed. (Evidence concerning Moloch worship in ancient Israel, by the way, is found in the legal, as well as in the historical and prophetic literature of the Bible, in the Pentateuch, Deuteronomy, the Books of Kings and Numbers. The Moloch cult was an established institution with a fixed location (the Topheth), at Carthage, a colony founded by Phoenicians on the coast of Northeast Tunisia. Archaeological discoveries at Carthage attest some 20,000 burials of infant bones along with animal bones in what are evidently was institutional sacrifice. )(Ref.)

The film’s victims of these seeming self-immolations are all revealed to have been violent, cruel and abusive in their own right, and the steady background noise of radio and news reports points to larger syndicates as well, recklessly polluting the sea with toxic run-offs, setting a general tone of late-stage capitalism dysphoria.

Some part of the population, however, thrives on the sense that justice is done in an unjust world, a world that sees repeat areas of violation: child abuse, sexting among teenagers bent on shaming young girls, crimes related to drug dealing, bankers driving people into ruin, and so on. The treatment of immigration – refugees as witnesses or potential perpetrators – slowly emerges, with a compassionate lens on the fate of African migrants whose suffering makes them buy into religious frenzy of an avenging God.

The core issue, though, turns out to be anger, depicted in various degrees and various manifestations, ultimately so intense in those who have no means to escape it, that it becomes fiery enough to immolate hated targets. And what, at first, was meant to be a crusade for a better world, with victims given a chance to change their behavior lest being punished, becomes in the end a reckless tour of revenge, blind with fury. The allegory of a society devouring its young who then strike back by sacrificing representatives of said system, ultimately ends in self-sacrifice of the perpetrator. And the viewer’s own moral compass is by then upside down, feeling only compassion for a life un-lived, turned to evil. All this is narrated in long, calm, pensive scenes, only occasionally disrupted by action shots.

Who needs such bleakness, you ask? My answer: any work of art that teaches us something about our state of affairs might help us, in turn, to promote some change, if only we are courageous enough to look. Regarding the particular theme of Moloch, the best artists of their times picked it up – just re-watch Metropolis from 1927 or re-read Allen Ginsberg. (More below.)

I think the question why so many young men (and increasingly some young women) are turning to dreams or actualization of violence, to revenge fantasies concerning a world that is seen as depriving them, trapping and suffocating them, needs to be investigated. How can we convey that it is not feminism, or DEI, or some other convenient subgroup thwarting them, dangled as culprits before their eyes by some politicians eager for foot soldiers? Flooding them with ideology that keeps them in suspension, unable to think of and realize a productive future for themselves?

What can be done to unravel myth from reality about the causes of inequality, injustice and purposeless lives for entire generations experiencing a steady drop in life quality and life expectancy, leading to ubiquitous anger? If a film makes you think about those issues along parallel lines, brings them up with metaphors that grab you emotionally as well as philosophically, more power to it, even if it uses the tropes of thriller-cum-horror movie as a vehicle.

Here is poetry published in 1956 (!) alerting us to the point: an excerpt of Allen Ginsberg‘s Howl.

II.

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?

Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!

Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!

Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!

Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!

Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!

Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!

Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!

Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street! 

(The entire written poem can be found here. A reading by Ginsberg himself here.)

Here is new music for an old (1927) silent movie: the Moloch Scene in Metropolis, rescored by Matt Mason.

0 Comments

Cheesy Movies and other Diversions

Hot. Again. I spend the mornings watching the birds upstairs, on the balcony and in surrounding trees. Nuthatches, a young finch, flocks of fluff ball bushtits and the familiar band tailed pigeons all make a daily appearance, happy for the water dish.

Later I’ll move to the cooler (daylight) basement to hang out on the couch and unapologetically watch movies, junk and otherwise. The perks of retirement.

I blame my fried brain for all the recent fare I liked for little reason, but the truth is I would have liked it anyhow. I’m a sucker for delicious trash, as you all know.

What fits that description to a tee is Netflix’s new show A Perfect Couple, a star studded mystery that reviewers called “profoundly unserious in all the best ways.” The Who dunnit element of an Agatha Christie-like country-estate dinner- party murder (can you tell my brain is hot with all these haphazardly placed dashes?) soon recedes in the background when the spotlight falls on what rich people all do to keep up appearances.

An icy matriarch, Nicole Kidman is half of that perfect couple, botoxed into porcelain doll – existence, with a cemented cascade of hair to match, emphasized by delft and wedgewood blue outfits. Her husband is a drug addled lecher, whose pregnant mistress is the murder victim. Multiple children, partners, (Dakota Fanning shines)and house guest complete the assembly of outrageously overdrawn character, romping through the beauty of Nantucket Island. One wonders during this search for the culprit, how many real sins we are exposed to, besides murder, given that there are so many of them spoofed. The sin of binging, in my case.

Also over the top, but growing on you after a few episodes, is the British black comedy Kaos, a retelling of Greek Myths supplanted into modern times. It is equal parts trying hard and exceedingly clever, star studded as well, with Jeff Goldblum as Zeus, Nabhaan Rizwan as a ravishing Dionysius and Billie Piper as a perfectly cast Cassandra. Someone, I swear, tried to reference as many famous film makers as possible in the visuals, from Antonio, to Bergman, to Eisenstein. I had a blast.

If you like historical dramas with a twist, I was quite taken by The Serpent Queen, featured on Amazon. It is a retelling of Catherine de Medici’s role in France’s politics, her steady rise to power from Italian orphan to queen consort to regent in lieu of her under-age son. The acting shines for both the young Catherine (Liv Hill) and the old one (Samantha Morton), with a super strong cast surrounding them.

Visually it is a feast. Narratively, it tends to cast one of the most scheming women in history into a role that demands empathy for her plight, and understanding for her cruel moves. It does so with dishonesty via omission – the rise to her ultimate power, we are told, rests on her desire to protect a France free of religious compulsion, inclusive to both Catholics and Protestants (in contrast to her daughter in law, Bloody Mary, known for her persecution of Protestants.)

The series, however, conveniently ends with the coronation of Catherine’s second son (and her regency,) before she herself becomes the killers of the Huguenots, one of the most heinous religious persecutions in history. Oh well, artistic license, I gather, extending to the decision to underscore the period costume drama with utterly modern music. Somehow it all worked.

And there is always Season 2, relying on our forgetfulness of Season 1, I suppose.

On my way down to the basement now…

Listening to a melody from Orpheus & Euridice.

0 Comments

Monsters among us.

The election results for the European Parliament are in. While not surprising, they are horrifying regarding the advancing power of the extremist right, with France’s Macron, facing terrific losses, even calling for new elections in the middle of preparation for the Olympics.

How shall we escape a monstrous present? If you are like me, by watching monster movies, of course, where all the horror is safely contained in a make-believe world. All the better if they amuse you – and today, for all the reviews I’ve read with people claiming they shed tears over the moving melodrama in question, I have to admit, mine were tears of laughter.

I am talking about the newest Netflix addition, fresh from a short, extremely successful run in real cinemas, praised to the heavens by most who know their cinematic stuff and adorned with an academy award for special effects: Godzilla Minus One.

The public loves it. The critics loved it. (Reviews from the US and abroad here, here and here.) It was shot on a minuscule budget as these kaiju – strange creatures – movies go, and it has two parallel storylines allowing you to focus either on a human interest drama, or the frisson of seeing a mega-monster trample Japanese cities, throw large ships and train cars miles through the air, and dooming all the extras.

So what’s wrong with me that I felt it provided a huge amount of comic relief? Particularly since the underlying message is really an anti-war stance and a reminder of what hell nuclear bombs created (viz. monsters) and what trauma a government forced upon a population asked to sacrifice for war without sufficient militaristic, technological or other support?

The movie’s title already introduces the idea of devastation. Set in 1946, the war has brought Japan to ground zero. A potentially successful attack by Godzilla, a sea creature that grew, radioactive flame throwers included, from the exposure to nuclear bombs and later nuclear testing at surrounding atolls, would move the needle even further into the dark ages – from zero to minus one. Would I have known that if I hadn’t scoured the internet for explanations? Of course not. Maybe not the best start.

Here’s the (abbreviated) plot line (spoiler alert!): Kamikaze pilot Koichi Shikishima chickens out during the war and lands his plane with a pretext on a small island outpost with Japanese mechanics. Godzilla appears and our “hero” freezes again, not shooting the monster who then kills the crew but one. Returning to Tokyo after the war, Koichi as well as everyone else counts their losses, but with a large heart takes in a plucky young woman, Noriko, and an orphaned baby, Akiko, supporting them with dangerous work as a mine sweeper. On the job, he bonds with a band of diverse characters, the typical roster for action movies (think Ocean 11) with geeks and planners and musclemen well represented.

His shame and guilt prevents him from reentering life, attaching to the love interest, or becoming passionate about just about anything. When Godzilla reappears, now even more humongous than before, and destroys a city where love interest works, seemingly killing her in his spree as well, our hero decides to join the desperate attempts of civilians – with the government once again leaving them to their own – to tame and maim the monster, back to his old tricks as a kamikaze pilot. Except this time a mate provides his plane with an ejection seat, something the Japanese government had not afforded to war pilots before.

Curiously many ships get destroyed in the battle with Godzilla except for the ones manned by our merry band of misfits. After much fiddling and nail biting, the monster is slain, although some of the last underwater shots show parts of him regenerating already. Hero and love interest are re-united and he feels he has done sufficient restitution to his honor that he can “live” again.

The core story is indeed: war is bad, human bonds are good, trauma can last forever unless there is an occasion to redeem yourself. Survivor guilt dominates the post-traumatic stress experience. But it also hints at taking honor seriously, and being a bad person if you don’t sacrifice everything for the nation, or your fellow countrymen.

My problem? The acting is so cheesy, and the hero having not even a smidgen of charisma, that you feel you are in a method acting exercise with superlative special effects thrown in. Add to that the complicated approach to honor in imperialistic systems, with revisionism just about kept at bay, and a lack of familiarity with the details of these monster film scenarios on my part, and there you have it: I just felt amused, not riveted.

The special effects, though, and the visuals in general, were truly impressive. Shot in real water, the ocean-faring scenes are striking, the creature itself half terrifying, half exhilarating. I’d recommend watching it on a large screen rather than a small laptop, as I did.

Here is the trailer.

Funny thing is, I remembered having seen another monster story that struck me for its wooden acting and sappy melodrama many years ago, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall which one it was. A dear old friend came to the rescue, pointing to the 1954 movie Creature of the Blue Lagoon that we watched in the early seventies, feeling extremely confident that our scorn was justified.

I just rewatched it and must admit that the entire narrative about evolution, ecology, the value of science and the rotten nature of economic extraction was lost on this then 20 year old. At least I didn’t remember the white bathing suit of the heroine either, which apparently was a main attractant for scores of male movie watchers at the time….

And since things like to come in threes – here is another horror movie – and, yes, not a spoof. Apparently this 2 minute music video depicts what lots of Americans genuinely believe and why DJT’s scandals don’t impact his Christian support. Fanatics having found the CHOSEN one.

And with this, it’s back to the real world.

Photographs today from war ships and other fleet items echoing the movie’s maritime scenery.

2 Comments

Protecting the Young

Let’s treat ourselves with something amusing, if slightly moralistic, at the end of this week: a short animated film about the strenuous efforts of parental love. Enjoy the clip while you can, because much darker contemplations follow in short order…

Would a parent risk their own life, like we’ve seen in that charming animation, if that pregnancy was violently imposed on them, created by rape, and secured by laws that demand forced birth? You probably have seen the same statistics as I did this week, horrifying enough that I could not just ignore them.

Since the SC Dobbs decision revoked the rights and protections offered by Roe vs Wade not so many months ago, some 64.500 pregnancies resulted from rape in the 14 states that now have complete abortion bans. (If that number is not horrifying enough, think about this one: it is estimated that 5% of all rapes result in pregnancy. That means that you have a 20 fold number of rapes that occurred in these states, within less than two years.

Friderike Heuer Jupiter’s Moons (2023) Figures by Paula Modersohn Becker (1876 – 1907)

What do we know about children born from rape? Psychologists have identified a number of factors that severely impact the development of these secondary victims of the crime. Risk factors are pregnancy and delivery, bad parent-child relationships, stigmatization and discrimination, identity issues, and, last but not least, significant numbers of infants being farmed out to foster care where they often enter a cycle of violence themselves since that system is not in good shape or under supervision.

The post-traumatic stress experienced by the mothers who were raped can influence the development in utero of these babies, as does the frequent intake of anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications to deal with the horrors of PTSD, or self-medicating with alcohol and/or drugs, substances that affect embryonic development.

For many mothers it is hard to love a child that was forced on them twice, first by the rapist and then the state depriving them of bodily choices. According to the research literature, communities treat children of rape with disdain and families, communities and the children themselves are hyper-vigilantly looking for negative traits that might have come down to them from the criminal.

Many of these children, later on trying to get a handle on their identity, want to know their fathers despite the harm those brought upon their mothers, and that leads to internal conflict and a sense of guilt, particularly if these rapes occurred during war times.

These combined factors, exacerbated by the rape victims’ shame and/or anger, predict serious mental health consequences for the majority of children born this way.

Friderike Heuer Aphrodite (2023) Portraits by Helene Schjerfbeck (1862 – 1946)

As I said, I could not avoid touching on these issues, given their political importance in a country that is trying to take rights and decisions away from women, and willfully ignores what happens to their children as well.

Let’s have music that might lift the mood a bit, again related to some sort of animation. When was the last time you listened to Peter and the Wolf ? There is a reason it has had such staying power.

Today’s photomontages are from an ongoing series that attempts to bring painters I cherish into my contemporary world. The two on offer happen to depict women protecting their children in landscapes I photographed in the US and in Europe.)

3 Comments

The full story

Today I am offering a selection of favorite photographs from New Mexico. Reading a few things related to the new film that was hyped this weekend, Oppenheimer, led me to peruse the archives.. (I did not go to Los Alamos, so no footage from there.)

I have not seen Oppenheimer despite being quite interested – I have to be patient until it streams. So, my own review has to wait, but I do suggest you check out an author who I usually completely agree with, Greg Olear from Prevail (one of my all time favorite writers.) Here is the link to his assessment of the film.

And here are some choice words by another author about the depiction of nuclear testing in NM, with a side of the story apparently not fully, if at all, covered in the movie. Here is Alisa Lynn Valdes, a journalist and film producer from Albuquerque, NM:

“This quote, from the @nytimes review of the OPPENHEIMER film: “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near- desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico” It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed.

Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government.

All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not. The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those
people.

For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family’s land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too.
She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won. The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state’s human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly.

But, no. We want more films about the “complex and troubled” “heroic” white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a “virtually unpopulated” place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as “nuanced.” Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of
Oppenheimer to be told.”

We are talking tens of thousands of people who lived within a 50 mile radius of the test site. These downwinders are still seeking justice after the federal government’s exposure of citizens to nuclear fallout 78 years ago. The Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium, founded in 2005 by a victim descendant Tina Cordova and others, is trying to expand a government program, RECA, to compensate for the damage done. (The link above brings you to an informative website).

The Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), passed in 1990, came after decades of above-ground testing in the American West and Pacific Islands, but did not acknowledge the victims from the NM site. It is also about to expire. A planned amendment that includes new populations and longer pay-out schedules is currently on shaky feet, being deemed ” too expensive.” In three decades, RECA has paid out $2.6 billion dollars to more than 40,000 people. That’s a fraction of a percent of the $634 billion the federal government plans to spend on nuclear weapons and development in the next decade, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. (Ref.)

Cordova about the Oppenheimer film: “When they came here to develop the Manhattan Project, they invaded our lands and our lives, and they treated us like collateral damage. When they came here to make the movie, they took advantage of our tax incentives. They invaded our lands and our lives, and they walked away.”

In the meantime, there is always the book on which the movie was based, which has its own fascinating story. American Prometheus was co-authored by two men, Sherwin and Bird, after the former had a serious case of writer’s block or inability to stop extensive research into the topic, the other in dire need of a job and happy to push the project to completion. It took about 25 years. Martin Sherwin died a couple of years ago. Kai Bird was interviewed at length last week here. The tome will tie me over until the movie becomes available on streaming sites!

Music had to be John Adam’s Dr. Atomic even though I don’t like it.

Alternatively let’s listen to Master’s of War by Dylan. Building shelters won’t help….


4 Comments

Seeing Red

Last night I watched a movie, Tár, Todd Field’s 2022 film starring Cate Blanchett (fabulous performance) as a famous female conductor whose life unravels, seemingly, when her past actions catch up with her. Honestly, I cannot describe what I saw with anything amounting to a rational interpretation. It is a labyrinth, proud of its plethora of cues and hints dropped all over that allow for multiple readings of what the whole thing is about.

A story about the evils of cancel culture? A story about the need for calling out perpetrators who then deserve a fitting fate, or an exploration of how rumors and innuendo destroy a life? Is it a ghost story, or a horror story or a warning tale of what happens when you pop too many pills that were not meant for you in the first place? A psychological profile about addiction to pills that might induce hallucinations, or lead to physical falls that in turn might give you concussive brain damage leading to hallucinations? Is it a tale about how lies, ambition, greed and taking no hostages along the way eventually lead to someone’s downfall, greek mythology for the modern consumer in a Me-Too era? Perhaps.

Reviews ranged from drooling (in the NYT,) to scathing (in The New Yorker,) to at least helpful (in Slate) with every single one I read, including the adoring ones from the British media, written by a man. The protagonist, Lydia Tár, originally Linda Tarnowsky, who grew up in a working-class, immigrant household that she has long obscured, is a woman of major talent and equally large appetites, for the good life and young flesh, respectively. There is clear evidence of some seductions of proteges, and more that are insinuated. Conveniently she is depicted as a lesbian, in a relationship with another woman who served her originally to get to her goal to conduct a major symphony orchestra in Berlin, and whose medications (for heart problems or anxiety, unclear) she hoards for herself. Her role as “father” in that couple’s family is enough of a male attribute to allow the viewer to buy into the me-too scenario that unfolds, as if being a cis woman would not suffice to make accusations swallowable.

We see her genuinely passionate about music, interpreting composers, getting the best performance out of her players. We also see her as being transactional in every relationship on the scene, and full of contempt, coldness or scathing for those who stand in her way or won’t do her bidding.

One of her former proteges and lovers who she actively undermined in the professional music field, commits suicide. Weird events start to intrude into Tár’s days that might or might not be auditory and visual hallucinations, or skillfully placed signs by revenging entities that slowly drive her into some form of madness.

Eventually, the chickens come home to roost; not only is she rejected by her newest paramour, but there seems to be an organized movement by many of the victims, competitors or offended people that lead to her down fall. She loses everything, her child, her marriage, her professional standing.

In the last part of the movie she is en route to the only new job she could find, in some unnamed place in Asia. She travels down a river, which might as well be the river Styx, in a tourist boat, and crouches, submerged, in a cave behind a waterfall, cut off from humanity, in what might as well be the entrance to Hades.

In the final scene we see her conducting a mediocre orchestra in front of an audience of fans dressed up and masked in the bizarre costumes of Manga conventions, with a movie about to be screened that seems to be a super-hero or science fiction tale. Whether it is all a dream or the reality remains unclear, but the unraveling is clearly linked in time to when she took a bad fall while fleeing a seeming monster, imaginary or not.

Death is Scandalous. Philosophizing at the Cemetery. (Lecture announcement.)

Is she a monster? Is she a victim? Both? Are there ghosts lurking out there bringing about revenge? Can you tell that I have been thinking out loud, trying to grasp something when I didn’t? Any suggestions are welcome, as is your opinion whether a director of Field’s caliber (and gender) should have devoted his first film in 16 years to exposing a woman in a me-too scenario, without ever committing to a clear differentiation between perpetrators and victims. I don’t know what to make of that.

What I do know is that there went a lot of care into the visuals, with admirable success in creating a gothic, grey, white and black ambience that colored everything in the upper strata of social life: from white private jets to dark-grey tailor-made suits; dark lecture halls for interviews, or restaurants that might have served the mafia dons or members of the House of Lords; cold concrete wall of Brutalist architecture in a cold marital home.

And finally white pants of those who’ll rise as avengers of the oppressed and abused, white blouses for a betrayed spouse.

Red comes in sparingly, and always associated with outrageous action. The hair of the suicidal protege, glimpsed like a ghost from behind, or with her face covered up by Tár’s body, is red.

The luxury bag of one of Tár’s admirers, coveted and snatched as a prize by Tár for a one-night-stand with the groupie, is red. The jacket of a child bullying Tár’s daughter, a child she accosts with unimaginable cruelty and threat, is red. A forgotten toy that leads to the accident at the turning point of Tár’s life, is brownish red. And the number 5, which plays a crucial part in the narrative of Tár’s ascent to stardom in her ruthless pursuit of conducting Mahler’s Fifth as her masterpiece, appears in red late in the film, leading her to be violently, physically ill.

Fiasco

Not a bad choice for a film that scatters clues in countless other ways. After all, red is the color in the visible spectrum that scatters least due to its long wave length (620-750 nm). Scattering refers to light getting deviated from its straight path upon striking an obstacle, such as dust, gas molecules or water vapor. The light is redirected in different directions (said scattering) after hitting the particles present in the medium. Red, then, makes for a good choice when you want a signal that catches attention even when visibility is compromised by obstacles, like fog or smoke (I guess literally as much as metaphorically.) In real life, of course, it serves as a warning signal: think brake lights, traffic lights, red warning flags, flags in bull fights or the ones of old that were wave at the commence of action on the battle field.

Red might also elicit emotions like anger or fear, given that it is often associated with dangerous stimuli, like fire, poisonous snakes, insects or berries, wounds and blood. “Seeing red” is a term that in fact correlates with an individual’s personal traits: people who rate high in hostility see far more red in ambiguous stimuli (colors that are faded and could be either red or blue) and also prefer the color red ( which might bias them towards the interpretation above.) They also engage in more interpersonal hostility, if they prefer the color red over blue. And of course, their anger raises the blood to their face, looking red. (Ref.)

I guess Field (who grew up in Portland, by the way,) has done his homework in the psychological literature or was just intuitively spot on, when he designed his color markers for the film. Alas, despite all visual signals, the meaning still feels scattered. Maybe I simply don’t run on the same wave length….

Music today is another composition that plays a major role in the film: Elgar’s Cello Concerto, here performed by a very young Jaqueline du Pré. It is a sad, contemplative work written directly after WW I, in 1919, echoing a world full of anguish. Elgar was ill, depressed and disillusioned. Fits entirely well with the unfolding of Tár’s drama.


3 Comments

Intermission

Don’t you believe everything you read….nothing is closed, things are just going to switch to travel mode. I will be reporting from the road, intermittently first, then hopefully on a more regular schedule again.

***

In the meantime you have several cultural riches to choose from in March:

Do NOT miss the special showing of our newest documentary at Cinema 21:

  • WHEN: March 12, 2023 at 3-5 p.m. Informational tables start at 2:30 p.m., film starts at 3 p.m.
  • WHERE: Cinema 21, 616 NW 21st Ave, Portland, OR 97209
  • TICKETS: Tickets can be purchased in advance or at the door (https://www.cinema21.com/movie/atomic-bamboozle)

I had written about the project and shown part of my set photography here along the Hanford site at the Columbia River earlier. Below is the official description from the film makers:

ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE is a feature-length documentary which exposes the claims of the nuclear energy industry to be a cure for the climate crisis.

This film grew out of the NECESSITY project @necessitythemovie as tribal communities raised concerns over false solutions to the climate crisis being presented in the form of small-modular reactors and a renaissance of nuclear power. Members of the core NECESSITY team found a need to share the story of nuclear resistance in the Northwest and chronicle the development of advertising aimed at convincing the public to trust nuclear power.

We are pleased to bring this story to the big screen with the premiere of ATOMIC BAMBOOZLE at @cinema21_portland. Join us for the premiere which will include a screening of a short film by Vanessa Renwicke, as well as a panel discussion to follow.

These are the slated speakers:

  • Jan Haaken, director, professor emeritus of psychology at Portland State University, a clinical psychologist, and documentary filmmaker
  • Lauren Goldberg, executive director for Columbia Riverkeeper with over a decade of experience advocating for Hanford Nuclear Site cleanup 
  • Lloyd Marbet, executive director Oregon Conservancy Foundation and longtime anti-nuclear activist
  • Cathy Sampson-Kruse, associate producer, enrolled member of the Waluulapum Tribe of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, retired social worker, and a champion in protecting clean water from fossil fuels and nuclear waste 
  • Greg Kafoury, attorney in private practice with Kafoury & McDoougal Attorneys, served as Co-Director of Don’t Waste Oregon
  • Moderated by Dr. Patricia Kullberg, former medical director of Multnomah County Health Department and member of Oregon Physicians for Social Responsibility

Again, tickets can be reserved here, proceeds will be shared with the Columbia Riverkeepers.

***

Also in March you can visit Bonnie Meltzer’s newest show tied to water and land, providing a retrospective of 15 years of work.

And if you happen to live in the NorthEast: God made my Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin would be my first choice of all there is to explore:

https://www.amherst.edu/museums/mead/exhibitions/2023/god-made-my-face-a-collective-portrait-of-james-baldwin.

“This group exhibition is a special iteration of God Made My Face, originally organized by Hilton Als for David Zwirner Gallery in 2019. It presents works from iconic artists such as Richard Avedon, Marlene Dumas, and Kara Walker alongside archival materials in order to explore the life, work, and legacy of James Baldwin (1924–1987). Baldwin’s ways of seeing and being evolved through his relationships and exposure to the work of visual artists, during an era when the harsh realities of racial oppression were confronted with aesthetics emphasizing self-love, pride, and validation. God Made My Face explores Baldwin through his words, relationships, and the works of other artists produced during his own lifetime and today.  

Unbeknownst to many, Baldwin served as professor and Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at UMass Amherst from 1983-86, finding a home within the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies and teaching students from across the Five Colleges. This period of Baldwin’s life highlights how far his reach extended beyond the cultural capitals of Paris and New York, where he resided for much of his life, as a writer. Baldwin’s engagements as an educator convey his legacy as a mentor to generations of intellectual and creative communities.”

In the meantime, I’ll be sending dispatches from the road, and eventually L.A. if all goes according to plan. Stay tuned!

Music appropriately Mahler’s songs of a wayfarer (one of my favorite song cycles of all time.)

1 Comments
© 2026