Caché

Caché turns out to be even better than I expected, better than the critics must have said (I avoided reading any reviews but I promise to get around to it one of these days), better still considered in context with Michael Haneke's other films: 7th Continent, Piano Teacher, Funny Games, Code Unknown, Benny's Video, Time of the Wolf.

Caché, in which a family receives mysterious videotapes to show they are under surveillance,  legitimately could be analyzed as a movie of:

voyeurism
filmgoing
racism
political turmoil
marriage
sexism
class struggle
coming of age
reality versus dreams
a world where simulation replaces reality
mystery
suspense

I could even imagine a discussion on the purpose of literature as depicted in this film, given that the main character reviews books on a television show.

And so forth.  It features Haneke's crisp and meticulous (meticulously Austrian?) filmmaking style.  After a fashion, Haneke might be considered the 21st century answer to Alfred Hitchcock.  (The Piano Teacher would be his Marnie and Time of the Wolf his Birds.  More than one could be his Psycho.)

I particularly like the fact that one watches this movie questioning every step of the way, reformulating an opinion or theory scene by scene, reshaping the mystery as you go, like an endlessly unfolding crossword puzzle.  The more you fill in the blanks, the more there is to do, and yet there is satisfaction in having completed each step...

In one scene, the wife, distraught by the turns of events in her family, has coffee with a friend, an adult male for whom there is obviously some attraction.  They embrace in the bistro, and one immediately assumes that this event may be secretly observed, videotaped, and used against her.  That's what would happen in a typical Hollywood movie, after all.  Indeed, when her son disappears overnight and returns angry at his mother, the reasons are left unexplained.  There is never the revelation that he saw a tape of her embracing the family friend, although he taunts her with the man's name.  There is never any evidence that a tape was made at all.

Caché is one of those movies that ends and makes you shout, "No!" You're not ready, not yet.  It's too soon.  We haven't finished piecing it together.  The final shot is one of great ambiguity.  It was only much later, on second viewing, that I realized what characters were shown in the distance.  At first, it appears to be just another long shot, a random voyeuristic view outside a school. 

The ellipses may be many, but nothing is random.  Few movies are so satisfying and engrossing, especially when so much has been carefully left out of the picture.

From Russia with Love

"Ernie," I asked when I walked into the room.  "You know the Minutemen?"

"Sure," he said without taking his eyes off the television, his lanky body in a white undershirt and jeans sprawled out on the couch.  "They sang 'Punk rock changed my life.'"

I was surprised.  That was, like 1980, or even earlier, four years before he was born.  He was better informed than I thought.

"That's right."  The new documentary about the trio had arrived from Nexflix that morning and I was burning copies.  "The movie is pretty good.  I'm making you one."

I went back upstairs and logged onto the Russian music download website to see about finding some of their music as well.  Sure enough, the album was available, Double Nickles on the Dime.  I downloaded and burned it, so Ernie could take a copy with him as he drove to Colorado the next morning.

Andrew was also downstairs, equally inert. His marijuana/McDonalds t-shirt ("Millions Stoned") was confirmed by the thin joint he held openly, unlit, in his hand.  We hadn't seen him in about a year.  He'd been hitchhiking and hopping rails.  He was sleeping on a roof in California when the police busted him and bought him a bus ticket back to Champaign. 

Lee and I agreed it was probably cheaper for the State of California to deport him back to Illinois than to throw him in jail.

We were actually glad he was accompanying Ernie on the drive. He was sweet, a deliberate freeloader, a dedicated rambler at the tender age of 23. He'd get dropped off in Boulder, where the hippy Rainbow Celebration was about to get underway, before Ernie continued on alone to Telluride, where summer work had become available.  Ernie was eager to go.  He'd just quit smoking cigarettes two weeks earlier.  Maybe he could save some money this time.

"People who say it's harder to quit heroin than cigarettes don't know what they're talking about," he had said.  He was a lot easier to talk to when he wasn't smoking.  I will miss him.  I was glad he was leaving though.  Lee had started to cry before they even started packing.  He did pack.  That was surprising, too.  Maybe he even planned a little.

Keane sounds a lot like Coldplay, I decided while delivering today.  They're good.  I guess it's obvious that the two bands should sound alike, since the lead singers of both bands used to work together in some band or another.  Ernie will have none of it.  He's very specific of what he likes, but with the new facility of the former Soviet Union website, I can sample a lot of music, more or less legally for the time being. 

I burned all the Radiohead albums and printed CD labels for them, using the album covers as art and design, so Lee can tell Amnesiac from Kid A, Hail to the Thief from OK Computer at a glance.

"Happy birthday," I said when I presented them to her in the morning.  She was getting ready to make sausages and pancakes for the boys before they left.  Their scheduled departure was 8 am, but I wasn't betting on it happening like that.  I thought the gift might cheer her up a little.  It did.

"But it's not my birthday," she said.

At 8:15, they left.  We all hugged.

"Have fun at the Rainbow thing," I told Andrew.

"Oh, I will," he said with certainty.

Lee and I walked slowly back into the house which seemed suddenly deeply empty, purposeless.

"Look," I said.  "They left behind the MapQuest plans I printed out for them.  I can't believe it."

"Maybe we should call them," Lee immediately said.

"No," I said.  "Let them be gone."

Since it was half-price day at That's Rentertainment, I made an excuse to get out of the hammock and leave when it opened at 10 am.  They had four of the obscure titles that I had in my Netflix queue, including Mike Kuchar's Sins of the Fleshapoids.  That surprised me.  Kuchar was part of the San Francisco experimental art scene years ago, a group that included Curt McDowell, the filmmaker I'd stayed with, worked with, and slept with once.  He dedicated a movie to me, but that didn't really mean much, since he cranked out his mock Hollywood sex epics with abandon for the San Francisco Art Institute.  I never saw the movie of his I had narrated, but I still have a 16mm copy of his Siamese Twin Pinheads on my shelf, with no way to project it.

Curt was one of the first to die with AIDS, well before it even had a name.  Another bullet I dodged.

In addition to the Minutemen documentary, which is aptly titled We Jam Econo, the newest Michael Haneke movie, Cache, had arrived on Tuesday from Netflix.  It's the last of the Haneke's I have collected.  Watching them all, including the interviews with Haneke on each disk, has been a feast, but there's no one I know who has also watched them or cared to, no one to share about them.

I have things ironed out with Netflix in a way I can get four movies a week, including new releases usually on the day of release, burning them and returning them promptly to keep the flow going.

Last week my agent wrote with her usual suggestions, encouraging but not announcing anything. I don't think she really tries, but even so I felt like writing again, now that Ernie has left, my computer is back from repair.  I might turn the East Bend book into fiction, into science fiction.  It might be better if I don't think in terms of commercial audience.

After the route, Miles comes out to me in the hammock, begging for money. 

"I'm your son," he says, pleading.  "You should give me money."

"You should work," I say.  "Bring me a grape soda.  With ice."

"I'm going to be a college student," he said, proud of the fact that he's going to community college at 16, as though that entitled him to plunder my wallet regularly.

We've been looking at historic black colleges.  I'm convinced that is the route he should take, probably transferring for his third year.  Even if he just humors me to get money, perhaps the idea will rub off on him.

He's driving now.  We make daily jaunts through the streets in the Prius.  I hold my breath while he maneuvers corners and parking.  He's pretty good.

Lee is waiting downstairs.  We're going to watch Failure to Launch, the movie we had used to describe Ernie, so to watch it tonight might be timely.  I've already made popcorn.  It's all I'll have for dinner.  Henry called from California.  He needs dental work, but I'm not going to think about it right now. 

Ernie and Andrew are probably in Colorado already.  They could have stayed tonight with my sister in Kansas, but they left the map here by the television.  They'll probably just keep driving.  They'll be in the mountains soon, probably listening to the Minutemen.  Listening to D. Boone sing "punk rock changed my life."

"Learn to pray," I had told Ernie sometime in the past week.  "That takes forever."

EL CHINO Y EL ARROZ

Un hombre estaba poniendo flores en la tumba de su esposa, cuando vio a un
hombre chino poniendo un plato con arroz en la tumba vecina. El hombre se
dirigió al chino y le preguntó:

-"Disculpe señor, ¿de verdad cree usted que el difunto vendrá a comer el
arroz? -"Sí", responde el chino, "cuando el suyo
venga a oler sus flores..."

Moraleja: Respetar las opiniones del otro, es una de las mayores virtudes
que un ser humano puede tener. Las personas son diferentes, por lo tanto
actúan diferente y piensan diferente. No juzgues...solamente comprende..., y
si no lo PUEDES comprender...OLVÍDALO.

Recuerda las 5 simples reglas para ser feliz:

1. Libera tu corazón del odio.
2. Libera tu mente de preocupaciones.
3. Vive sencillamente.
4. Da más.
5. Espera menos.

Envejecer es obligatorio, crecer es opcional.

--
"I have no idea what I am talking about.  I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead

A folk-jazz riff on the rift

Lee and I lay on the couch last night watching Neil Young in "Heart of Gold." Her legs were on my lap, the kittens nibbled on her toes, the children were out, and although the band did sing some old songs, they were mostly from his recent album, new to me. The music bathed us in waves of joy and sadness, a glorious shock and rich vein of feeling I wasn't really prepared for. It made me feel old and timeless.

The concert connected neatly with the book I'd read that morning as I rocked outside under the trees in the hammock, Andrew Holleran's "Grief." A brief read, an elegant tone poem, certainly based on his own life, about AIDS and loss and family and friends and Mary Todd Lincoln, too. As in Heart of Gold, underlying the book is a current of connection of an artist to his parents. Maybe that was the surprising thing about both works (especially when the country is talking about defining marriage), about how powerful and indelible a stamp the idea of family really is, parents and children. Heart of Gold is dedicated to Young's "daddie" who had died just months before the performance. Young's stage patter and songs related to parents, children, old men and children, and dying...

I finally heard from my agent over the weekend, too. Writing books follows a timeline I am just learning. My last book took three years to write. I don't know why I should expect these two I've been tinkering with should take any less, with no expectation of sales (or even completion, for that matter), and with a wavering sense of audience.

Holleran said in one of many insightful comments thrown out casually that when your parents die, you lose your audience. I'd never thought of it that way. We do things for our parents, or for our children, probably forever, dead or alive.

I think I'm going to be getting somewhere with this fractal of thinking. Maybe or maybe not. We'll see.

I so frequently had told people -- editors, therapists, myself -- that I could only write if I had already sold the story. That I had pitched it to some specific publication and pre-sold it. I couldn't write unless I had that reason to do so, that direction.

But maybe it was audience that I had received, rather than the promise of money, that spurred me on. Money probably didn't have that much to do with it. The stakes were remarkably low in any case. The deadline also provided some additional push. I've often said I'd pay for a deadline. I need a deadline dominatrix. But it was also the incentive of knowing my audience, knowing who would be buying my material, and -- in turn -- knowing who I was supposed to be. My own persona came into focus when that audience was defined for me.

Did you see this letter in Sunday's paper? Nora Poland of Bellflower wrote: "Why is it that some of our military men fighting in Iraq have to stand trial for the murder of a few people in Iraq but opposing forces can slaughter, beat and behead members of our military? Is this not a war we are fighting? Someone please tell me, where is the justice here?"

Letters like this one are fascinating to me. I don't understand why the Gazette publishes them. They are illogical (at best) and make false assumptions. If a semiotician were chopping it to pieces, he could probably write a book about this letter alone. "The murder of a few people" is dismissive, missing the point that these are civilians and not soldiers, and possibly racist (the whole letter is xenophobic). The phrase "opposing forces can" is what pushes the letter over into stupidity. Who gives them permission? No, opposing forces may not kill. But they do. And this letter is not worth publishing. It reflects upon the ignorance of the populace. It furthers no new ideas.

The Crockhead and I have argued about this. He thinks people's stupidity is revealed when such letters are published. I disagree. If the News-Gazette publishes such letters in order to point out their lack of logic, then they should also publish an editor's disclaimer. They give credibility to the irrational and the unreasonable by publishing Nora's letter. Call me a fascist. It is part of my anarchy that allows me NOT to allow, that allows me to discriminate (another word for taste, isn't it?).

When the Crockhead wrote his reviews of The Sting and then A Prairie Home Companion, he made fun of people who analyze movies, who discriminate, who invent in their determinations about art. I don't know if he was joking or serious when he said all New York critics kowtow to Frank Rich. I guess it was supposed to be funny, but I think his audience believed him, just the way the Gazette readership will believe Nora's letter, nod their heads in agreement, and reconfirm their prejudices.

There are different ways to review movies. Two of them are:

a) to judge them
b) to interpret them

Maybe interpretation is false, pretentious, and unnecessary. But for me, the act of interpretation itself provides meaning. It opens a window to what one audience member, the critic, sees. It allows me, as another audience member, to participate in the work of art rather than merely consume.

If there is nothing to interpret, there's no reason to go. I try to enjoy the popcorn and the projection, but I generally prefer more protein in my intake.

Writing for blogs, I'm not sure who the audience is. Maybe I prefer to define it in my own mind. Maybe I prefer to write for an anonymous or even imaginary person spying on me. This is perverse perhaps. I forget who once said "everything is better through a keyhole." Maybe I did. Or Andy Warhol. There's something delicious to me about home movies found at a garage sale, watching an incomplete picture, being able to fill in the blanks. I like YouTube videos without context. Apart from the aspects of voyeurism and exhibitionism, with blogs there is the sense of the audience being a mystery, a fantasy. So, no, I don't want comments on my blog. I don't want to know who's watching me. I know God is watching me every minute. I got used to that years ago. It even became that I was able to sin and say "hello, God" at the same time.

Granted, I am crazy. No, not even that. I'm probably insane, which is a the upper class elite of crazy. I recognize that the creative crockpot of anarchy produces both nothing and bubbles of something now and again and there I am, stewing like the helpless victim in a cannibal's lunch.

I think stuff should be free. It's the lesson Abbie Hoffman taught me that I could never shake. I have gone to the movies for twenty, thirty years without paying for them. A sense of privilege is hard to give up. My press pass probably is what kept me in this small town, if you want to know the truth of it. I found it too hard to give up that entitlement. Because I had publications to write for, to review things, I could go to New York once or twice a year and see scores of Broadway and off-Broadway shows, I could eat at the best four-star restaurants to review -- Le Cirque, Chantarelle, Jean-Pierre's -- when otherwise I could not get past the door.

And I developed a sense that if I had to pay for these things, I did not enjoy them. If I paid for them, they became evaluated according to cost. Were they worth it? Was the Le Cirque food with Sirio Maccioni's personal attention worth the $500 price tag? (Well, in that case, maybe so. I know, I'm boasting. I apologize.)

When money was involved, I rated these extravagances, these entertainments, according to value and bargain rather than meaning and worth.

All of the above of which is the most incredible way of getting around to the way the Crockhead reviews movies and the way I review movies, the way he approaches art and the way I do.

Using a star system to review things reminds me of singing praise music at church. Why bother with four part harmony, with hymnals and the detail of written music, when you can just cut to the core, praise God, wave your hands, make your point, and be done with it before sharing time, when we can talk about our illnesses and travels?

That's a stretch, praise music and movie reviews. But it's the very kind of interpretation, parallel, comparison, that I find interesting to ponder in my Dada kind of way.

Now, I don't know who crossed the line in our differences, where real anger emerged in place of play. The Crockhead prefers star systems. In the case of a play I liked and recommended, The Pillowman, it became impossible to discuss the merits or demerits of that work because The Crockhead had given it a ZERO star rating. There was no discussion. It was judged and dead. The judgment of star ratings makes it necessary to argue, rather than discuss.

Judgment believes in the possibility of a complete communication, a finality. No home movies found at garage sales. No Stan Brakhage. Interpretation is open-ended. In his various posts, The Crockhead rated me with ZERO stars for my way of accumulating art, which he believes is illegal. But I don't pirate work and I (perhaps narrowly) fall within the guidelines of legality. When I was basking on the beaches of Yugoslavia, a honeymoon financed by sales of reviews of the Zagreb Film Festival (with absolutely no profit, an accepted hand-to-mouth, break-even experience, like my whole life has been), I was trading in my opinions and ideas for the experience.

I think the argument between Crockhead and me happened because of our proximity as much as anything. We rubbed each other's edges somehow. I parodied, not entirely fairly, some of the ways he reviews movies. The Crockhead believes that my parody was unfair because it infringed on his good name, or his audience's perception of his good name, but if he is honest, he should recognize that it might be a little more complicated than just that. Otherwise, he could have simply asked me more strongly to indicate the authorship rather than denounce me as a liar and a thief.

The Crockhead parodied film analysis and claimed that all analytical critics flock together as one. He has the right to that view. (I want to remind him that, when I stood all alone in criticizing Mark Robert's "Rantoul and Die," he provided half a dozen other critics who had lavished praise on the play and asked me, "Why is it you are different?")

Well, that is indeed the question.

What happens now? Nothing. Nothing can change. I'm still an anarchist, as likely to dismiss something one day as honor it the next. The Crockhead is still addicted to compulsive judgment that gives him comfort and a sense of security.

I don't know who wins. I don't care. We should be playing in a band, making folk music, creating something.

There's arguing and there's invention. I know which I aspire to do.

Doors

What happened during hammock time today: 8:45 am to 11:50 am:

The New Yorker insisted I devour three articles in a row.  All relevant.  To me anyway.  Review of the Timothy Leary biography (Harcourt $28).  Author Robert Greenfield. Critic Louis Menand sprinkles his review with all the cool references, unattributed, like saying Leary (and "many people in those days") "started out on Burgundy but soon hit the harder stuff" and The Doors of Perception and then remarks about Leary's scary smile "a rictus somewhere between a beatific, what-me-worry grin and a movie star's frozen stare into the flashbulbs."  It was really Alan Watts or Aldous Huxley who legitimized acid for the seekers; Leary was the P.T. Barnum.  No one wanted to be like him. Ultimately, acid died out because the social context was lost and, as the story so rightly concludes, "the LSD experience is completely suggestible.  People on the drug see and feel what they expect to see and feel...  If they expect that the secret of the universe will be revealed to them, then that's what they will find.  An illusion, no doubt, but it's as close as we're likely to get." 

Flip past "Briefly Noted" to a review of the Dada exhibit at MOMA.  Quote: "Dada was and remains a drug, of the hallucinogenic type.  What young self-styled bohemian of the past ninety years hasn't got at least briefly high on it?  I sure did, back in the sixties."  Critic: Peter Schjeldahl.

Turn page to a reassessment of Radiohead, which gets a surprising comparison to the Grateful Dead.  And Miles Davis.  And the second theme of a Schubert string quartet. 

Time to burn new copies of the entire Radiohead oeuvre while waiting for Thom Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, to come out in a couple of weeks.

All this and a $2.50 sisal hammock from Guatemala, plus generic brand diet grape soda.

--
"I have no idea what I am talking about.  I am trapped in this body and I can't get out." -- Thom Yorke, Radiohead