The Blog Is [Not] the Territory

09 July 2007

500 Clown Frankenstein

After enjoying 500 Clown Macbeth so much, we got some friends together to see 500 Clown Frankenstein, also at Steppenwolf, the other night. It was a good show, but not as tight and well-composed as Macbeth. The three clowns telling the Frankenstein story all try to avoid portraying the monster (an understandably thankless job).

Regardless of its shortcomings, the show is highly entertaining; it more deeply engages with the audience than Macbeth, with multiple chases through empty and populated rows of seats, and audience members enjoined to torment the monster as it attempts to escape its fate. As with Macbeth, the clowns succeed in conveying the major themes of Mary Shelley's novel in spite of their narrative incompetence.

One key difference from the other show is that here nobody wants to be something (the monster), while in Macbeth, everybody wants to be something (king). Perhaps it is more inherently compelling to watch characters vie with each other for something they want than watch them try to avoid something they don't want.

A Summer Affair

I have had a couple of books by Ivan Klima on my shelf for years, and finally got around to reading one. Sort of. After a while, I skimmed it. Here's a synopsis: middle-aged man, bored with family life, insecure about his professional accomplishments, encounters attractive younger woman, becomes obsessed with her, they have an affair, he destroys his family and career to be with her, and she kills herself.

See why I skimmed it? Not only have I read this story before, but I don't think I ever want to read it again...

This book goes on the giveaway pile.

06 July 2007

Cuter Still

OK, this is cuter. But you can see the puppet bike in person.

Instant Smiles on Michigan

What's cuter than a couple of furry handpuppets? How about furry handpuppets dancing? How about furry handpuppets swing-dancing? How about furry handpuppets swing-dancing to "Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens"?

If you think of something, let me know. In the meantime, check out the Puppet Bike, which generally hangs out opposite the Art Institute, or this YouTube video (there are several others), and add some smiles to your day.

Earthsong

I'm a big science fiction fan, but picky, and slow to find new authors. Once I find one I like, I hunt down everything I can find. That's why I was stunned, last time I was in the wonderful Women and Children First bookstore, to find this book.

Suzette Haden Elgin is a linguist as well as a novelist, and her books Native Tongue and The Judas Rose reflect that study. In these books Elgin describes a future world where women are oppressed to the extent that they are only valued for the children they can bear and for their surprising linguistic talents--needed to communicate with the technology-rich aliens who have come to trade with the people of Earth. These two books chart the women's realization that creating their own language would essentially create a new reality; ultimately the invention of Laadan enables the women to get a degree of independence from their men.

In the third book, Earth Song, which was published in 1994, but which I only discovered last month, the planet is facing catastrophe because the aliens, who were responsible for Earth's tremendous technological advancement, have abruptly departed. They have left their gadgets behind, but nobody understands how they work, and they are bound to start falling apart. Entire economies that had been based on trade with the aliens are shattered. Nobody understands why the aliens have left.

This novel speculates on the "inevitability" of human violence in some very entertaining ways. It is perhaps not as cohesive as the first two books, but it was lovely to be back in the world of a very thoughtful and interesting writer.

05 July 2007

Becket

Talking with my friend Ellen recently, she brought up this movie, which I thought I had seen, but realized I may have been mixing up with A Man for All Seasons, which has similar themes. So I added it to my Netflix list and nudged it up the queue, and Victor and I watched it last night.

They sure don't make movies like this anymore. Based on the play by Jean Anouilh, it is a lot more verbose than anything contemporary, providing the actors with some really meaty speeches. Which both stars, Richard Burton and Peter O'Toole, are very good at performing.

The homoerotic subtext--really subplot, since there was nothing particularly hidden about it--makes parts of the movie seem a bit campy today and it's pretty long, at about two and a half hours; however, Burton's performance is a standout. Any impatience disappears when he's on screen.

Worth seeing? Yes. But I'm not sure it would be worth seeing again.

High School

I had a miserable time in high school. Not during the high school years--because I was lucky enough to have access to other social spheres where I didn't feel like quite such an outcast--but in high school itself I felt fortunate if I had a single friend at a time. I was a member of no clique; the most fun I had in high school was in class. It is certain of my teachers who I remember with the most fondness.

That tells you something.

So I've not gone to any of the high school reunions, not the 10th, 15th, 20th, or (most recently) 25th; I could never imagine what I would have to say to these people. But this year's reunion was capped by the start of a Yahoo group, which I joined out of curiosity. And soon became rather addicted. The brief bios, musings, and reminiscences of those who had been among the most popular of my year interested me because they seemed actually like pretty nice, thoughtful, intelligent adults. (Not at all as I had remembered them.) I started to wonder what defect in me had made me feel so separate from these folks in high school. I felt excluded, but maybe I had excluded myself.

When I shared this thought with Victor, he issued a swift corrective: high school students are stupid. Don't be so hard on yourself.

And then I ventured to the Photos section of the Yahoo group where someone had posted photos from back then and the sight of a few of those young faces gave me a nearly physical reaction. And I thought how lurking on the Yahoo group, I was an outsider all over again. I had nothing to reminisce about with these people. Their memories were very different from mine. The bittersweetness of nostalgia had become much more bitter than sweet.

So I unsubscribed. The class of '82 can manage without me.

03 July 2007

Throw Like a Girl

I am not sure I have ever done this before: read a review in the New York Times Book Review and then ordered the book. Certainly I've bought books I've heard good things about, but usually there's more of a delay between the hearing about and the buying.

I find the stories in this book not just good, but inspiring. And soon will be off to find every other book that Jean Thompson ever wrote...

29 June 2007

Published!

A picture from our fall 2006 stay in London (hover your mouse over the Regents' Park thumbnail).

Don't remember whether Victor or I took this picture; the camera changed hands rapidly that day.

The Aviator

Well, I enjoyed learning about Howard Hughes, about whom I knew almost nothing, but I found this a very strange movie--all shiny surfaces and not terribly pleasant to watch. A lapse for Scorcese, I think. More like a DePalma movie in its fascination with surfaces.

And I didn't know what to think of Cate Blanchett's impersonation of Katherine Hepburn. I can't remember when I've seen anything so odd. And why doesn't anybody in this movie visibly age (the story covers about 20 years)?

28 June 2007

Sunshine

Istvan Szabo is one of my favorite directors. His most famous movie is probably Mephisto, which won the best foreign film Oscar in 1982. Last night I saw Sunshine, which I have seen before, but so long ago that I no longer remembered the details (a great time to watch a good movie again). After some Internet searching I find that this epic story of four generations of the Sonnenschein family used elements from the lives of several prominent Hungarian Jews, including George Soros and a post-WW1 fencing champion named Attila Petschauer, who died in a Ukrainian labor camp during WW2.

Ralph Fiennes plays three of the major characters: a young lawyer who becomes a prominent judge under the Austro-Hungarian empire (he changes his name from Sonnenschein to the more Hungarian-sounding Sors to advance in his career), his son the fencing champion (he converts to Catholicism in order to be able to compete with the best fencers), and the fencing champion's son (the film's narrator), who survives seeing his father tortured and killed in a concentration camp. Fiennes does a phenomenal job. Certainly you can't forget that the same guy is playing three characters, but he makes those characters distinct enough that you don't feel like it's a gimmick--rather, you feel there's a strong family resemblance.

Great performances also from Jennifer Ehle, who plays the narrator's grandmother, Valerie, as a younger woman, and Rosemary Harris (Ehle's mother in real life) who plays Valerie as an older woman--a character who seems to have survived all the great events of history unscathed.

At three hours, it's a long movie, but it covers about a hundred years. Regardless of length, it's one of those movies that completely absorbs you, that you live in for days afterward. All movies should be like this.

27 June 2007

Gibberish 101

In class yesterday we learned about gibberish. You would think there is not much to learn about gibberish--just open your vocal chords and flap your lips--but in fact it is not so simple. Compelling gibberish must be backed by emotion, and ideally you have meaningful phrases in mind as you utter meaningless ones. You might want your gibberish to sound like a particular foreign language; certainly you want to appear in all other respects to be saying meaningful things.

There is something liberating about spouting gibberish but like all things in improv, what seems like complete freedom works better when you throw some structure around it (e.g., specific emotion and mental translation). Otherwise after a while you feel lost: emoting hard, but not getting anywhere.

Today, though, out shopping, I found myself singing (softly) in gibberish, and there was nothing lost about it. Just delightful. I suppose it's like scat singing: the music is itself the structure.

26 June 2007

The Accidental

This novel by Ali Smith was an interesting read about what happens to a family when a stranger walks in the door and weaves herself into their lives. At first different family members assume Amber, or Alhambra, is connected to someone else in the family, but by the time they figure out their assumption is incorrect, she's embedded.

I enjoyed the characterizations of the two adolescent children, but was not entirely persuaded by the characterizations of the adults. Some of the incidents seemed like the author was trying too hard to make a nice metaphor real. Still, it was a good read.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

Victor was tired of all the super-serious stuff we've been getting on Netflix lately, so I shuffled our list a bit and brought Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow to the top.

It turned out to be quite a disappointment. The brouhaha about the tremendous CGI achievements in this movie would be more persuasive if the script was less pedestrian. As it is, the actors may as well have been computer generated also.

Looking cool is not enough.

20 June 2007

Strange Thing

So I was walking down Clark Street, on the way to my Second City class, when a big wind starts, and I catch with the corner of my eye something dark moving from up-left to down-right. Is it a bird? A big-old bug? I look down to my right, which happens to be an apartment house driveway, and see a single black leather glove.

I look up to my left, where there are some spindly trees. And I wonder. Was this glove stuck in a tree half the winter, and then the big wind finally blows it out just now? How would a glove have gotten up in the tree (definitely too spindly to be climbable)?

A mystery.

Of course, I could be completely mistaken: it was a bird or a bug (or a leaf?) that headed off faster than I could catch, but by coincidence, someone dropped a glove as they were getting out of a cab in that driveway, and so the glove happened to be there when I looked in that direction.

Only, who wears leather gloves on a 80 F June day?

Still: a mystery.

19 June 2007

Nature in the City

Saturday evening, after Victor had been working all day, we went out for a stroll along the lakefront path so I could show Victor the bird sanctuary I found, just south of the golf course. It's all fenced in, but around the back (on the lake side), there's an elevated platform to make it easy to look inside.

We did not see any rare birds--it made us happy to catch sight of a goldfinch--but we were excited to spot a raccoon (Victor saw two of them). First we've seen in Chicago. Looking out at the lake, we saw a tern dive down and catch a fish. Pretty cool!

But a real highlight of the walk was seeing the purple martin houses, with plenty of purple martin traffic.

After sitting by the lake for a while, the skies darkened and we were caught in a fierce thunderstorm. Arrived home thirty minutes later, soaked. And blissed out.

18 June 2007

Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer

While Nick Broomfield's documentary can be upsetting, it is not as profoundly disturbing as the (fictionalized) Monster. The documentary is more concerned with the facts of what happened; not so much the deeper causes. The fiction film fleshes out a moving conjecture that connects Aileen's childhood experience of abuse and abandonment with the violence characterizing her adult life. Whether or not there is sufficient factual basis for this conjecture, it is emotionally persuasive.

Still, the documentary is worth seeing, though it offers a predictably depressing view of our justice system as it pertains to capital punishment. One of the most compelling moments is the news, after Broomfield has just interviewed a clearly bonkers Aileen (she's convinced that "sound pressure" is being applied in her cell to affect her mind, and that the cops had identified her after the first murder, but wanted her to kill more men so they could make money from selling her story) that a psychological screening the day before has declared Aileen competent enough to be executed. Broomfield wonders aloud what possibly could be considered incompetence, if Aileen is competent.

The Lives of Others

Shortly before the Academy Awards, we saw this German movie, which subsequently won the Oscar for best foreign film.

Deservedly. Can I say deservedly even though I didn't see the other candidates? Perhaps they were also deserving. Still, I think: yes.

This is an extraordinary movie that captures a time and place in which you had to take care with every word and act because someone might be watching.

In fact, someone was always watching.

The movie equally focuses on the watcher and the watched, rendering the watch-er human to us, while the watch-ee becomes human to the watcher. We see the sad results of failures of nerve, but also the possibility of transcending an immoral society via small moral acts. It's a virtue of this movie that it makes you hopeful about human nature without also worrying you about its naivety. On the contrary, The Lives of Others often feels almost grim and does not shrink from bad news.

The surprise is that bad news isn't all there is.

Bury the Chains

A couple months ago I read Bury the Chains, as I anticipated earlier this year, after seeing Amazing Grace, which centered around William Wilbeforce.

This was a really good nonfiction account of the abolition of the British slave trade, and traces the beginnings of all sorts of tools and techniques used by grassroots social change movements that we take for granted today: petitions, direct mail, newsletters, lectures and demonstrations, boycotts. The book makes you feel the courage and vision of the key players in this achievement and gives hope that such things remain possible.

House of Sand and Fog, the Movie

This is a movie I wish I could say better things about. I mean, I can say pretty good things about it: great acting, terrific cultural contrasts depicted, good dialogue. Sad, but good: the buildup of a difficult-to-resolve conflict between basically decent people working toward mutually exclusive goals.

But the end just ruined it for me. A teenage boy's idea of tragedy, fed by Macbeth, or Hamlet: ratchet up the conflict (bound up in "fatal flaws"), compound by malevolent happenstance, and then have everyone die.

Ugh.