The Taste of Things

Too often, sharing a kitchen, cooks are reaching for the spice rack at the same time, lunging for the same utensil, colliding en route to the pantry, or banging into a suddenly opened refrigerator door. But the first time Steve and I cooked together, almost twenty-five years ago, it was different: we never got in each other’s way; we just instinctively knew how and what and when to contribute to the meal we would share.

That grace, that unity of purpose, focused on fresh, simple ingredients meticulously prepared and presented, is one of the keen pleasures of director Trần Anh Hùng’s The Taste of Things. Juliette Binoche and Benoît Magimel are passionately dedicated and creative cooks, working in tandem — also for some twenty years — in a sublimely functional 1880s French country kitchen. We audibly sighed at the profusion of enormous copper pots and pans, the succulent fresh vegetables picked in the morning for the evening meal, the complexity and intensity of the preparation (that braised rack of veal came in and out of the oven no fewer than three times by my count) — it was glorious. The loving grace of shared process.

But the film is not only about making magnificent food together. It is also about making magnificent food together in time. Dodin, the gourmand manor owner, cherishes the seasonal cycle: the first rain, the first snowflake. He talks at length about the ingredients — the fruits, vegetables, game, and birds — that come available, and then fly or wither away, yielding to the insurgent flavors and flourishings of the next, with the start of each new season: new possibilities burgeoning as the seasons continuously flow. Eugénie, his cook and his partner — a quietly independent lover who sometimes leaves her door unlocked and sometimes does not, who has turned down his repeated proposals of marriage for decades, who does not share the meals with him and his guests, but reigns over her kitchen, savoring every detail of the meals she sends upstairs — loves only the burning sizzle of summer. These are very different values, very different approaches, but they both acknowledge the temporality of what they love. What is available now will not always be, and so should be zestfully, lustily, satisfactorily made much of while it is here.

This point is subtly underscored late in the film by a funeral which exits the manor through the kitchen. Near-silent, intense, and elaborate, this somber ritual marking the passing of a life is the obverse of all the intense and elaborate creation that occurred here.

Later, the film’s final scene circles, cycles, around the kitchen: the fire glows.

The Ally

The Ally, by Itamar Moses, is playing at the Public, and Julie told us it was for me; we went today.

I have in my older age come to a rather simplistic engagement with works of art: do they move me? do they touch an emotional chord? The younger me had a greater appetite, a more dexterous facility, I seem to remember, for pure ideas. This play is pure ideas; it did not bring catharsis; it did not directly elicit any emotions. But it did set my brain to churning, and kept Steve and me, and then Julie and me, talking and thinking and making connections all over the place. And I wanted to try to set some of that down before I lost them.

The Ally is a very smart, very honest two-and-a-half-hour explanation, expiation, and exegesis on the nature of human beliefs and how they butt up against each other intra- and interpersonally. The focal point is Asaf, a writer and adjunct faculty member. He is an atheist Jew, the son of Israelis, progressive in his politics. So he thinks. And this play is all about the various alliances he is asked to make, and the compromises many of these require, and the toll they take on his relationships, reputation, and faith in himself.

The characters in The Ally are outwardly similar: university educated, liberal, sincere, passionate in their convictions — all members of somewhat overlapping minority/outsider groups. But here’s the rub: nobody’s experience is quite identical, and everybody holds a bias that favors their own people’s narrative. And being very clever, very learned, and very persuasive, each in turn holds forth, turning previously presented arguments on their head. Asaf, a modern-day Tevye (“he is right; he is also right”), listens to and is swayed — to varying degrees — by each. A mild example from an early point on his descent down the slippery slope of acting on his convictions: He has agreed to sponsor a new student association that will bring a speaker to campus whose ideas are condemned as undermining Israel; he was persuaded to this action by a Jewish undergrad who points out that a point of pride for her in being Jewish is the religion’s mandate to question: she sees this as the essence of Judaism. Asaf feebly trots out this argument in defending access to differing viewpoints to a furious conservative Jewish PhD student, who rightly points out that Talmudic questioning is for Talmudic scholars only.

The point is, everybody — whether Palestinian or Jew, black or white, student or administrator — makes very reasonable, nuanced arguments defending their point of view and asking Asaf to ally with them. And Asaf, so wishy-washy in his decision-making, but yet so invested in his beliefs, ends by disappointing pretty much all of them.

What should we believe? And how should we act on those beliefs? Time and again in the play, Asaf rigorously examines his prejudices, painstakingly justifies his reasoning, and makes agonized decisions. But then all that gray, all that rigor, all that nuance, becomes reduced to a black-and-white action, which others can then denounce as evidence of his insensitivity. Taking action — which presumably is the only way to bring about change — is thus fraught and damnable.

There is no objective reality in this play — and perhaps none in our contemporary world, where opinions, perceptions, and feelings outweigh facts. These people are more honorable and knowledgeable than the trolls on social media, but their effect is the same: to hammer home their point of view.

I had a sense of growing unease as I felt myself becoming numb to the well-reasoned, well-founded, but highly confrontational arguments the various characters were espousing. Could anything be solved here? Can anything be solved in the real world? Is listening to other points of view really useful? Does anyone really listen, or is the process of exchange merely an opportunity to shore up weaknesses in your own argument preparatory to doubling down on it?

I wondered if this impassioned level of discourse, this do-or-die, make-or-break, was confined to campuses, to the young. I contrasted the high octane of this week’s theater with Talking Band’s Existentialism from last week. A similarly smart piece, about Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, living side by side, connecting sporadically, touching briefly, affecting possibly, but mostly creating and living in their own heads, pouring out most passionately to their typewriters. And seeing their lives quite differently than we saw them, as Ellen Maddow’s character talks of their sharing everything after Paul Zimet’s has died.

Taken together, the plays do paint a picture of a wholly subjective reality, where we can only look inside ourselves for the tools to craft a cohesive narrative out of the morass of conflicting impressions projected via our limited senses and reflected and refracted across our biases, misperceptions, and misconceptions. A narrative is the best we can hope for: there is no truth. Which I find singularly depressing.

The Ally made me think: I don’t know that I feel a clarion call to action, a sense of resolve as to how to proceed in the world. But maybe Julie is right. Maybe we can try to train our minds and our senses to listen to other voices, other perspectives. That’s something hopeful.

2023 Roundup

Books (me)

• Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
• Life Before Man, Margaret Atwood
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers
• Stone Mattress: Nine Tales, Margaret Atwood
• Quicker than the Eye: Stories, Ray Bradbury
• Weimar German: Promise and Tragedy, Eric D. Weitz
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
• Spies: A Novel, Michael Frayn
• The Further Misadventures of Ellery Queen, Josh Pachter and Dale C. Andrews, eds.
• The Brooklyn Follies, Paul Auster
• The Heroine with 1,001 Faces, Maria Tatar
• The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters, Laura Thompson
• Magic for Beginners, Kelly Link
• We Are Not Alone, James Hilton
• Capote’s Women, Laurence Leamer
• Britt-Marie Was Here, Fredrik Backman
• Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay
• The Secret of Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay
• Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

The only dud in the year’s batch was Capote’s Women, which I bought without a second thought, as I am fascinated by the enigmatic, glamorous beings featured, such as Babe Paley, Carol Matthau, Oona Chaplin, Pamela Harriman, Slim Keith, and Gloria Vanderbilt. The ilk of these quintessential mid-twentieth-century women may never be seen again, as their shadowy origin stories and carefully curated personas would evaporate and shrivel in the harsh, cruel glare of contemporary tell-everything-all-the-time media. I am endlessly intrigued by their collective ambiguous position along the spectrum of female protaganism: canny heroines of self-creation like Gypsy Rose Lee and Sarah Bernhardt, or languid wastrels alongside the profligate Duchess of Windsor and the venomous Alice Roosevelt Longworth? Ultimately, they toil not and neither do they spin, so wherein lies their charm? I was hoping this book would provide clues: it did not, and I hate-read my way through it, loathing everything from its cutesy chapter titles punning on the focal swan (“Slim Pickings,” “Gloria in Excelsis”); to its editor, who couldn’t even string together a cohesive parallelism in the book’s subtitle (“A True Story of Love, Betrayal, and a Swan Song for an Era”) and certainly couldn’t convince the author toward a more coherent organization of his subject (telling Capote’s biography within the confines of the various swan chapters led to many a lame or nonexistent transition and ultimately distracted and detracted from the narrative’s already weak thrust); to its lack of primary sources (!); to the book designer’s decision not to include running chapter heads; to its glib summations, archly gossipy tone, inane generalizations (“Slim had other good things happening that had to with the world around her.”)  — argh!! this book is simply terrible, and it is a sin that it’s a bestseller; it isn’t the least bit compelling or interesting or slickly well-written.

All the other choices were most fine, particularly the discovery of the Nordically optimistic works of Fredrik Backman: he has a glum outlook on humanity but a deep affection for people, especially peculiar, decidedly off or oddball, people. And his writing is funny as hell:

The older couple had been married for a long time, but the younger couple seemed to have only gotten married recently. You can always tell by the way people who love each other argue: the longer they’ve been together, the fewer words they need to start a fight.

She had surprised herself back there, had lost control, felt things. For anyone else that might have been vaguely uncomfortable, like when you discover you’re starting to share the same taste in music as your parents, or biting into something you think is chocolate but turns out to be liver pâté, but for Zara it unleashed a feeling of complete panic.

and also quietly profound:

People need bureaucracy, to give them time to think before they do something stupid.

and profoundly affecting:

He just sat quietly in the waiting room and held his dad until it was impossible to tell whose tears were running down his neck. The following morning they were angry at the sun for rising, and couldn’t forgive the world for living on without her.

Plus I love love love the design of his books (that wonderful attenuated title font, perhaps Lemon Yellow Sun? and, in Britt-Marie Was Here, the use of little doodle icons as chapter titles). Even when the plot in Britt-Marie didn’t go the way I editorially thought best, I forgave Backman, because it’s a special kind of comfort read that I find very satisfying, morally, intellectually, and humanely.

The other reads were reliably smart and engaging. I was very happy to rediscover old friends from The Robber Bride in Atwood’s Stone Mattress collection (“I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth”). I was surprised on two counts: one, the Auster book was the most upbeat, cheerful Auster I’d ever read; two, the Kelly Link stories revealed that maybe you could have too much Link at a time. And while I didn’t actively dislike it, I did grow weary of the Eggers book and found it increasingly difficult to get behind or past the narrator.

Books (Steve)

• Howard Hughes, Donald Barlett
• Black Dahlia, James Ellroy
• Anxious People, Fredrik Backman
• The Big Blowdown, George Pelecanos
• Indian Killer, Sherman Alexie
• The Daughter of Time, Josephine Tey
• Harold, Steven Wright
• Jesus’ Son, Denis Johnson
• Five Carat Soul, James McBride
• The Life and Times of Billy the Kid, Pat Garrett
• Spies: A Novel, Michael Frayn
• Ancestors and Others, Fred Chappell
• Bright and Guilty Places, Richard Rayner
• Killer of the Flower Moon, David Grann
• The Night in Question, Tobias Wolff
• Talking God, Tony Hillerman
• Fire in the Hole, Elmore Leonard
• Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay

Steve’s favorite of these was Killer of the Flower Moon, which kept him constantly questioning whether this-too-fantastic-to-be-true story was actually a novel. He also really liked Harold, which very much has the voice of Steven Wright’s standup. He was most pleased to discover both Tobias Wolff and Tony Hillerman; they really spoke to him and more books by both are in the stack for this coming year’s reading. Also in the pile for next year are more by James McBride, who is always a keen pleasure. He really enjoyed reading Pat Garrett’s account of the life and legend of Billy the Kid; so much has been written about this notorious outlaw, reading something by a contemporary — and a former friend and his executioner at that — gave a unique, perhaps truer, perspective. He also liked reading about the fascinating and nutty Howard Hughes.

Theater, Dance, and Concerts

• Yes, I Can Say That! (59E59)
• Camelot (Lincoln Center)
• Best Friends (Rattlestick Theatre)
• The Harder They Come (Public Theater)
• Hidden (The Playwrights’ Gate)
• Copland Dance Episodes (New York City Ballet)
• The Beautiful Lady (La Mama)
• Jeff Daniels
• Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana (Joyce Theater)
• Downtown Urban Arts Festival
• Players Theatre 12th Annual Short Play and Musical Festival
• Psychic Self-Defense (HERE)
• Dracula—in Denver!
• Tricykle (La Mama)
• Jump Start (La Mama)
• A Celebration of Ray Bradbury Hosted by Neil Gaiman (Symphony Space)
• Pair (No. 11 Productions, 59E59)
• Scene Partners (Vineyard Theatre)
• Adrift (Happenstance Theater, 59E59)
• Some Like It Hot (Shubert Theatre)

SO nice to get to go to the theater so much! Several of our outings were to see the girls, and these were uniformly wonderful: Yael tough and funny in Best Friends, which was performed at alternate performances in English and Hebrew; Julie as Coosje van Bruggen in Pair, which is achingly lovely, particularly the scene where Coosje and Claes (Oldenburg) mutually age each other through a bit of tender theater magic. And of course Sarah’s many Dracula productions to the point where I have teased her that her obituary will begin “Sarah Congress, writer of the beloved ten-minute play Dracula—in Denver!…,” but her work is all so fun and gossamer and it is great to see her getting the professional productions her work deserves.

Just like old times, we went to see a show on Martin’s recommendation, and Some Like It Hot was a delight. Frothy and fun; we were glad to make it our holiday treat.

All the puppets we went specially to see this year at La Mama were something of a washout: too much foregrounding of the puppeteers and not enough immersion in illusion. This criticism applied to HERE’s Psychic Self-Defense as well; it was good, but not great, and it did not take me places outside myself. But then, unlooked for, we happened on Happenstance’s Adrift at 59E59; they, like Julie’s No.11, are a resident company, and share the same upbeat, creative, moral vibe. A most delightful and smart production, based on the works of Hieronymus Bosch — but so funny and so multifaceted with music and mime and silliness and prestidigitation and, yes, puppets. Also at 59E59, it was great fun to laugh with Judy Gold; at the Vineyard, it was a privilege to laugh with and be moved by Diane Wiest.

The two dance outings were outstanding. I have written elsewhere about the flamenco; the ballet was wonderful. Bright and beautiful and glorious. I have no words, but I did have tears.

Jeff Daniels at Beacon was our only concert (Steve says we’re getting old, and the people we like don’t get around much), and he was just as ornery and funny and smart and passionate as we had remembered from all those years ago at the Barns at Wolf Trap. Some of the same stories, too, but so funny they are worth the retelling. I particularly liked the stories he told and the songs he sang around Lanford Wilson: it’s a great thing to have known when you were very young that something or someone very special was happening for you. Wilson asking Daniels to set a poem of his to music must have been momentous at the time; the result is just as rueful and smart as a Wilson play.

Should also mention a very satisfying trip to the Whitney to see a wonderful Edward Hopper exhibit. Always so nice to spend time communing with Hopper.

Movies

Our Letterboxd diary has 219 movies; these are the ones we saw in theaters:

• Tar
• The Lost King
• You Hurt My Feelings
• 2023 Oscar Nominated Shorts
• Asteroid City
• Barbie
• Oppenheimer
• Passages
• The Others
• Killers of the Flower Moon
• Anatomy of a Fall
• The Holdovers
• It’s A Wonderful Life
• Poor Things

So many great movies this year, with such female prominence — in the best possible way. Women freed not only of non-Bechdel considerations of male object status, but given the opportunity to be just as shitty and complex and maddening and messy as a multifaceted male protagonist.

Steve’s favorite in-theater movies, in order: Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Poor Things. Mine: Poor Things, Anatomy of a Fall, Tar. We both disliked (me, intensely) The Holdovers, which we found inauthentic and uncompelling.

We saw many new-release movies at home, largely because they disappear so quickly from theaters these days; these included May December, which was staggering; Theater Camp, which was endearing and so funny; Women Talking, which was a huge disappointment: I love Sarah Polley’s work, but this seemed so intent on ticking every “woke” checkbox that I could not discern its soul; and Three Thousand Years of Longing, which was rather amazing, a fairy tale.

We found — on Hulu, Max, Netflix, Amazon, Kanapy, or Mubi — an amazing variety of fantastic movies, old and new. Here are the ones that blew us away, took us outside ourselves, and left us hungry for more by a given actor or director:

• The Train (1964, directed by John Frankenheimer and owned by Burt Lancaster; a staggeringly great antiwar war film, explaining the difference between art and life)
• Hester Street (1975, directed by Joan Micklin Silver and with an astonishing performance by Carol Kane of a rapidly assimilating Russian Jew in the Lower East Side)
• Pig (2021, featuring a breathtakingly restrained Nicolas Cage performance)
• Petite Maman (2021, an achingly lovely dreamlike tale about mothers and daughters and childhood)
• In the Aisles (2018, a German revelation about life in a Costco-like warehouse store featuring not only Franz Rogowski, our new favorite young actor; but also Sandra Hüller, a fascinating actress peer to Juliette Binoche and Tilda Swinton; and also Peter Kurth, the mesmerizing Bruno in Babylon Berlin)
• Headhunters (2011, a delicious Danish noir thriller filled with myriad unexpected twists and turns)
• Shit Year (2010, a stark, shocking, hilarious ride grounded by a fantastic Ellen Barkin)
• The Vast of Night (2019, poetic, delicate, nostalgic, and real)
• What Happened Was… (1994, directed by and starring Tom Noonan; everything terrible and potentially wonderful about trying to connect)
• Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975; see earlier description)
• People on Sunday (1930; a Weimar Republic idyll/semi-documentary created by, among others, Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder)
• This Boy’s Life (1993; a true story which turned us on to Tobias Wolff and reaffirmed our admiration for Ellen Barkin; also staring De Niro and DiCaprio)
• Alice in the City (1974, directed by Wim Wenders, which brought me to tears not because of dialogue or situation, but just pure feeling: the loneliness, the isolation, with whatever connections the protagonists made diminished by the uncaring passing scenery)
• After Life (1998, directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose premise of if you could take one memory with you into the next life, what would it be? is undercut by the clumsiness with which that memory is to be fixed, all adding up to the Our Town injunction of pay attention, life only goes by once)
• Decision to Leave (2022; a haunting noir directed by Park Chan-wook)

Mubi’s organization encourages deep dives and wild deviations; through it, we found a lot of exciting movies and artists we would not otherwise have encountered, notably Peter Tscherkassky, whose incredible under-three-minute short L’arrivée can be seen — no, experienced — on Vimeo. Other intriguing hits we chanced on were the feminist marvel from Steven Soderbergh Haywire, the sweet and sad Undine, Wander Darkly, ivans xtc. with its bravura performance from Danny Huston, Wim Wenders The Million Dollar Hotel, Henry Fool, The Human Factor, Michael Almereyda’s crazy Twister with the as-usual-unforgettable Harry Dean Stanton, Peter Weir’s eerie The Last Wave, and The Girl Chewing Gum.

During the year, we filled in some missing classics or standards one or both of us had not previously seen; these included Midnight Run, Heat, The Trip to Greece, Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Lanthimos’s Dogtooth, My Brilliant Career, Serpico, The Ruling Class, Christopher Strong, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, Mister Roberts, and Berlin: Symphony of a Great City.

We also unearthed some surprising gems from old Hollywood. Lubitsch’s Design for Living might still be ahead of its time, so daring is its matter-of-fact central thrupple of Gary Cooper (!), Miriam Hopkins, and Fredric March; 1955’s The Glass Slipper is a refreshingly tart and crisp Cinderella with little magic aside from its casting coups of Leslie Caron and Estelle Winwood; Douglas Sirk’s Lured is a potboiler noir with a sexy and sassy and fearless Lucille Ball as a girl detective alongside the impeccably suave George Sanders, and a quite quite mad Boris Karloff; the surprise to Anatole Litvak’s Cold War The Journey was that it was essentially a remake of The King and I — who else but Yul Brynner could be so menacing, so cold, so merciless and still sing Russian folk songs?

Finally, we saw numerous first-run documentaries; these are the highlights.

• Albert Brooks: Defending My Life
• Being Mary Tyler Moore
• Sr.
• My Old School
• Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time
• The Meaning of Hitler
• The Booksellers
• Too Funny to Fail: The Life & Death of the Dana Carvey Show
• Dad’s Stick
• The Day After Trinity

TV

The best of our TV viewing from 2023:

• New Tricks
• Case Histories
• Kleo
• The Diplomat
• Good Omens
• The Bear

Another highlight besides these was The Kingdom. I think we first subscribed to Mubi to watch Lars von Trier’s original ’90s seasons and the 2022 final season, which was indeed a weird and wacky Danish counterpart to Twin Peaks — more absurdist and less otherworldly, but decidedly funnier than we would have expected from the confrontational von Trier, particularly in his Hitchcockesque post-show wrap-ups.

Another auteur’s TV venture fell quite flat with us. Wes Anderson’s Roald Dahl’s shorts on Netflix (“The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher,” and “Poison”) left us cold — which well might have been the intent, so distanced and distancing were they, with actors (all male) talking to the camera and narrating the action and sometimes using make-pretend theater props and sometimes being quite literal and always flat and two dimensional. We love Anderson’s long-form movies (particularly The French Dispatch), but are less enamored of his animation; as here, the humanity is harder to find.

Field Trips

• Tied for first place: Four September days (albeit HOT ones) in Cape Ann — a triumphant, relaxing, and most lovely post-COVID return to a place that had made Steve and me so happy four years ago — with all three girls this time. We had very few scheduled items: a whale-sighting cruise (which yielded, surprisingly, no whales! but did elicit (1) a free pass for a future cruise and (2) renewed gratitude for the wondrous experience we had had in 2019), and a nighttime spiritualism tour of Hammond Castle. Mostly what we felt was less a desire to broaden horizons than to narrow them, to stay extremely close to our Rockport/Gloucester base. Many many happy hours shopping, eating, walking, being.

• Tied for first place: Hudson Valley — Kingston, Rhinebeck, Woodstock, Hyde Park, Saugerties. We took Sarah for three days upstate in April, retracing our steps at Hyde Park, but then taking delicious, unscheduled time in several other little towns, each featuring a fantastic bookstore, lots and lots of charming shops, and beautiful scenery. We had a beautiful picnic in Saugerties, and a lovely half-day in Woodstock, which was fun, hip, friendly, and interesting. Can’t wait to go back.
• Also-rans, also delightful: Richmond in May, November, and December to see Danny, Emily, Ollie, and the vivacious Alice. The last trip, completed last week, not so much fun, given horrendous, unspeakable traffic. Also a quick day jaunt to Newtown, PA, which sounded more exciting than it was, but still good to go. And long ambling strolls to and from the 35th Street pier and 59th Street theater, and some nice cross-Village walks.

We should also note a few quite lovely field trips by others to us: we had a wonderful time seeing Tracey and Guy last month and in the spring; Jeannie and Bob and Jenny in August; and Kim in September.

Food and Restaurants

• Paradigm-shifting highlight: the new Ninja 7-in-1 grill, which includes a smoker and an air fryer; new culinary worlds were opened
• Exciting new effort: our herb garden on the deck (which let us make pesto, which we don’t even like)
• Best of the best new creations: smoked salmon, candied pecans, focaccia, manque roux (lovely spicy corn), pan-roasted potatoes (steamed and then roasted: soft on the inside and super crispy on the outside), spiced apple rings (now that these are no longer commercially produced)
• Feasts: Both annual feasts — Thanksgiving and Seven Fishes — were peak, especially because everyone could come this year (no COVID)
• New finds: Dolce Fantasia in Asbury; Knickerbocker Grill in the city; Uncle Giuseppe’s Marketplace, almost camp in its excess
• Old returns: Monte’s Trattoria in the Village, still old-school yummy although bittersweet without Giovanni
• Loss: A Little Bit of Cuba in Freehold

Picnic at Hanging Rock

Every now and again, without warning, a movie or a book or an album will catch hold of me like a fever dream, haunting my waking and sleeping hours, niggling and gnawing at the edges of my consciousness. While it lasts, if it’s music, I play it over and over while it earworms into my brain; if it’s a book or movie, I explore it online and inline. Until, as suddenly as it has come, the fever lifts, the obsession ends, and the object of my fascination assumes normal proportions but retains ever after a hint of its magnetic, magic allure.

So it was for me a couple of months ago with Picnic at Hanging Rock — first the 1975 movie directed by Peter Weir, and then the 1967 book written by Joan Lindsay. And while I admit that I may perhaps have been particularly spellbound, these two works have an innately compulsive nature, as the trailer for the film demonstrates:

The soft focus of the camera lens and the panpipe music — so accurately described as “delicate, ethereal and intensely ominous” by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia — impose a dreamlike state. And the simple, ghost story plot of mysterious disappearance in the wake of a schoolgirls’ picnic on Valentine’s Day 1900 at the foot of a jutting, ancient volcanic structure is irresistible.

Neither the movie nor the book linger long at the picnic; rather, the tale is the aftermath, the puzzled and sometimes puzzling efforts on the parts of the various characters to come to grips with the occurrence and with the longer-term impacts, what Lindsay calls the ripples, of the disappearances. They struggle, largely unsuccessfully, to fit this inconceivable episode into the fabric of their lives, because it is so outside the ken of these modern people, who live against but not in this awesome land. The symbolic sexuality of the disappearance — all that virginal white and Victorian orderliness piqued, perturbed, pierced, and penetrated by the ancient, looming pagan mount and the primitive insects and reptiles that populate it — is literally unthinkable, but has a snakelike, hypnotic fascination.

And the added fascination for the viewer/reader is that the story feels true.

Lindsay addresses that question at the very start of the book, neatly, serenely, and confoundingly blurring the line between truth and fiction with this note before the title page:

Whether Picnic at Hanging Rock is fact or fiction, my readers must decide for themselves. As the fateful picnic took place in the year nineteen hundred, and all the characters who appear in this book are long since dead, it hardly seems important.

Joan Lindsay wrote this book at age seventy-one in four weeks. Weir’s movie is extremely faithful to the book, fixing indelible images to Lindsay’s clear, ever so slightly arch, distanced, and often off-putting prose.

As always, in matters of surpassing human interest, those who knew nothing whatever either at first or even second hand were the most emphatic in expressing their opinions; which are well known to have a way of turning into established facts overnight.

The original manuscript had an eighteenth chapter that explains what happened on the rock; her publishers told her not to include it. Having read the chapter, which is available in a much-padded little volume called The Secret of Hanging Rock, they were completely correct in this judgment. In fact, The Secret of Hanging Rock is the perfect antidote to the Picnic‘s fever. The six-page chapter is in tone with the rest of the book, but the editors were right: it is not needed. But what is also not needed is the turgid academic prose endlessly analyzing, classifying, and delineating. No, no: I guess this is some people’s way out of the rock’s grip — explication, interpretation, and elucidation. And that is useful for some art for some times. But not for this; this needs to stay sweaty and weird and inexplicable and temptingly near true.

Ray Bradbury’s Belated Centennial Celebration

He always seemed the nicest, most accessible, of the old school bunch of sci fi/fantasy writers. The most good-natured and optimistic, even when writing in the shadow of Cold War nuclear fears; he found poetry everywhere he went, and his imagination took him everywhere in this world, galaxy, universe. Never cold, never austere; achingly, heartbreakingly empathic and warm and sad — and spooky.

We were privileged, pleased, thrilled, and delighted to revisit the master in a long-postponed centennial celebration on November 1 at Symphony Space, where host Neil Gaiman (Neil Gaiman!) and three other starry and starstruck (Bradbury struck) performers read a selection of Bradbury stories — one unfamiliar to me, two old acquaintances, and one a cherished friend. Gaiman also read a charming excerpt from a letter Bradbury had written to his publisher, firmly cementing my image of him as a modest human, gamely trying to balance the demands of lively household and insistent craft.

My first Bradbury was “The Screaming Woman.” I have it here in a 1958 anthology, The Graveyard Reader, one of my father’s many horror paperbacks. And its elements — an unbelieved ten-year-old girl, a horrific incident in sunny suburbia, the inexorable ticking of time — are classic Bradbury, reappearing in hundreds of his stories in different guises and with varying emphases. He never forgot the dichotomies of what it felt like to be a kid — their cruelty, their helplessness, their ability to wend through blissful day-long, summer-long adventures, their inability to fix or affect or understand.

Bradbury’s gift was to locate the human, the humane, the decent in any situation. Who else could have written “The Fog Horn,” one of the stories we heard performed, a tale of an ancient dinosaur lost in the deeps of time calling out in lonely anguish to the only thing that sounds as forlorn and isolated as itself: a lighthouse fog horn. Or “The Last Night of the World,” thematically similar to “Embroidery,” another of the night’s readings, where a couple know somehow that this is the last night, and they wash the dishes and go up to bed.  Or “Death and the Maiden” where Old Mam finally gives in to Death when he gives her a bottle with the first night and the first day she turned eighteen. How does Ray Bradbury have access to so many fears, hopes, despairs, loves, joys, and sorrows? That’s the magic of him. Unlike his sci fi contemporaries, he wasn’t fixed on the unknown, but the known — in all its glorious unknowability.

I was so pleased that Gaiman read one of my (and his) favorites, the one that hooked him forever, and that for me is forever hooked to my father, who read it and recommended it to me — or maybe even read it to me. “Homecoming” is a beautiful, creepy story of a family of ancients: werewolves, vampires, other…things. Beings who can fly through the air, through time, through minds. And then there’s Timothy, the youngest, the oddball, the one with no gifts, no magic — and who is cruelly mocked and played (oh, cruel Cecy! I only forgive you your capriciousness here because of your delightfulness in “The April Witch”) because of this. But big-winged Uncle Einar (who appears in his own eponymous story elsewhere) consoles him:

Each to his own, each in his own way. How much better things are for you. How rich. The world’s dead for us. We’ve seen so much of it, believe me. Life’s best to those who live the least of it.

And his mother’s loving words to Timothy at the story’s end, and the devastating truth that underpins them, dissolve me every time I revisit.

Bradbury, who writes so liltingly, so beguilingly, so evocatively of the simple joys of living — riding a bike fast down a hill, looking up at clouds, hearing the rain — writes always with a tacit recognition of mortality — the end, the cessation, the nothingness, which makes the being in the now imperative.

Before ending, I must mention other favorite stories, long fixed in my memory, all shining with Bradburyian insights and poetry: “I Sing the Body Electric!,” “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” “The Sound of Thunder,” “The Playground,” “All Summer in a Day.” So many more. So many worlds. And one profound truth throughout: Be.

Flamenco

I parse. It’s what I do professionally, as an editor, and how I approach my design work. I analyze and try to find the meaning, the intent. I do that in my free time too, with the plays and artworks I see, the movies and the more high-minded television I watch. When I’m too lazy or inexpert to figure it out myself, I google and surf for clues and perspectives, and read articles and books for context and fuller elucidation. I need to “get it”; I derive more pleasure when I understand.

Except for flamenco. Here I am blissfully uninformed and ignorant, and fanatically determined to remain that way.

The only thing I know about flamenco — the thing that drew me to it initially, in fact — is the portmanteau young adult biography To Dance, To Dream‘s profile of La Argentina (1890–1936), also known as the Flamenco Pavlova and Queen of the Castanets, who legitimized the art of the gypsies, died young, and according to the bio, staked everything at age thirty-nine by hiring out Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in an all-out effort to turn public opinion around on her art — a gamble that apparently worked, and one that I cannot find so dramatically described anywhere else. 

We see flamenco by noted performers at least once a year — most recently, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana at the Joyce this past Sunday; last year, Soledad Barrio and Noche Flamenca (her company is pictured above) — before that, we saw it as often as we could at a tapas restaurant in Old Town Alexandria with a makeshift wooden stage. And no matter where I see it, or how often, that combination of unearthly wailing in a language I do not speak, randomly proffered “¡Olé!”s, hand clapping in a rhythm I cannot discern, percussive staccato heels, stamping and slapping in seeming improvised passionate unleashing of emotions I can only thrill to, all buttressed by unutterably clean and elegant guitar never fails to stir me.

It is a glimpse into another world, a place that exists by campfire. A respite from a world of words and rationalizations, where soul-wrenching emotions spill out of the body and can only be released in sharp, intense sound and movement. Listen to the sound the singer makes from .07 to 0.12:

Watch the dancer’s speed and fury:

Lose, loose, yourself in that guitar:

Or journey to where it began, Andalucía:

I have no idea what the songs are about. They don’t sound like love songs; some may be protests against a too cruel world; they sound like baying, howling. Anguished, gutteral noises. And I have no idea what the movements signify. I appreciate the clean precision of the hands and fingers twining up and curving around as elegantly as Fosse, as delicate as ballet. And then I keen to the thigh and chest slapping, interspersed with that relentless tap-tap-tap of heels against hard surface: as if there wasn’t noise enough that could be generated by the body to express whatever emotion lies inside.

Most of all, I think, I love that they are not doing this for me, but for each other. The campfire community of flamenco is dancers, singers, guitarists wailing and whirling for each other: buoying and bolstering in a private rhythm that I am privileged to watch.

It is a very special escape for me to a place I visit with only dim understanding but enrapt attention.

The Six: The Lives of the Mitford Sisters (Laura Thompson)

This photo is the cover of The Six. I find it mesmerizing because — it’s been Photoshopped; here is the original photo, which appears on the inside back flap of the book cover:

The disparity between the two images (i.e., the erasure of brother Tom and the relocation and resizing of Unity) seems to me inordinately significant. It is the very craft of the biographer as metaphor: the obliteration of peripheral details and the elision and weighting of discrete components to present a clear, cohesive story of a person’s life.

It’s easier by far in Photoshop, but Laura Thompson has resoundingly succeeded here. Which is not to take anything away from Mary Lovell’s thoughtful The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family which I read in 2017 and which is a frequently cited source in The Six (and which makes for a useful complementary reading). Nor indeed from any other well-written, well-researched, well-organized biography. But Thompson’s success, in my mind, is of a different order of magnitude, steeped in a masterful blend of skill, knowledge, and assertive interpretation.

To start, she is a terrific writer, with never — never — an awkward or unclear  or uninteresting sentence. For a small example, look at this lovely extended metaphor:

The “creamy English charm” that Evelyn Waugh famously described in Brideshead Revisited poured its streams through society, soothing and poisoning as it went.

Thompson’s command of the subject — and I use that word “command” most deliberately — is beyond impressive, with her research of the sisters informed and enriched by a thorough critical grounding in the fiction produced by the eldest, Nancy Mitford, whom she wrote about in 2003 (Life in a Cold Climate), and whose most famous novels are in fact a mining and modeling of her siblings and family. Throughout The Six, Thompson maps Nancy’s fiction to the story she herself is assembling. Adding further credibility to her work is the fact that she personally interviewed both Diana and Deborah.

She does not spoon feed us their story. The book has no pithy, punny, earnest, or otherwise descriptive titles for its major or minor divisions, aside from that for the brief introductory essay, “The Mitford Phenomenon.” She assumes we are familiar with the subject matter, wryly noting,

One can chant the careers of the Mitford sisters in the manner of Henry VIII’s wives, thus: Writer; Countrywoman; Fascist; Nazi; Communist; Duchess.

She thus distills the obsessive appeal of these women who “came of age in a period of profound and, perhaps more importantly, highly dramatic change” — the 1920s to 1930s, when the siblings, who had more or less run wild during their idyllic childhood of secret games and languages and little formal education, took their place in and outside society as (largely) freethinking daughters of the privileged class.

Thompson swiftly and authoritatively takes us through the intertwined narratives of the Mitford family, organizing her material in four untitled parts that cover, respectively, their childhood and young womanhood, the happy part of their adulthood, the aftermath of the decisions they made during that happy part, and life lived in the shadows and realignment that followed the death of the first sibling (Tom) through the death of the mother (Sydney). An epilogue wraps up the sisters’ respective histories. Thompson never falters, the pacing never lags, and her crisp and colorful prose smoothly accretes details of time, place, and character.

But perhaps this is the key to Thompson’s successful engagement with her topic, and with the reader’s ability to successfully engage with the book: she does not shy from offering shrewd  judgments and opinions, often piercingly conveyed through a spot-on word choice or turn of phrase:

• On Tom: “surrounded by so many girls…he could have gone down the Branwell Brontë route and decided to be overwhelmed.”
• On Sydney: “Such a capable woman; rather wasted by that marriage to the odd, handsome David.”
• On Diana, specifically her abortion after leaving Bryan Guinness to take up with the then-married Oswald Mosley: “The sordidness of the whole thing is overwhelming, so too the temptation to travel back in time and say to Diana, what in hell do you think you are doing?”
• On Unity: “By 1939, the days in Germany, which had brought her the happiness she so clumsily craved, were coming to their conclusion.”
• On Jessica: “Jessica’s extremism is more acceptable to history than that of her sisters. Such is the luck of the left.”

The result is you feel you really know and understand the girls as complicated individuals — or more precisely, feel that you’re at the same soirée as they with a particularly savvy and astute insider whispering in your ear as you watch them across the room.

She definitely has her favorites: the messy Nancy, the enigmatic Diana, the frank Deborah. She does not seem to like Jessica, and has particularly little use for Mosley, of whom she perceptively notes:

…Britain, for all its innate and healthy scepticism, has a weakness for people who spout solutions that they will never be called upon to enact: the mainstream is muddy with compromise, while those outside it can stand clean and clear, dangling the great glittering hypnotist’s tool that is “change”. This is the word that still holds its magic, and nobody promised it more than Mosley.

In well under four hundred pages including notes and index (and two slick inserts of black-and-white family photos), Thompson traces and assesses the complex on-again, off-again relationships and alliances among the sisters which, to a large degree, mirror and anticipate their stunning and frequently adjuring actions. And in her skillful opening essay, she attempts to explain both why we continue to be fascinated by the Mitfords (“one might call it a variant strain of Downton Abbey Syndrome, in which people seek comfort by retreating to an age of hierarchies, prejudices and certainties”) and how distinctively they were a product of their times:

This confidence of theirs — relaxed, diamond-hard — is fascinating[…] It is the confidence of the upper classes, embellished by femaleness: a kind of confidence that, for all their greater freedom, today’s women do not find it easy to possess[…] Should one make cupcakes or become CEO[…] should one be a domestic goddess, a yummy mummy, an alpha female, a pre-feminist, a post-feminist, a feminist, a feminist who nevertheless has a facelift… It is a shambolic state of affairs. There is only one answer to all of this, which is to be oneself, but it seems extraordinarily hard to be sure of what that is. Hence the fascination of the Mitfords, who always had the confidence of their own choices, however mad these frequently were.

As we browsed numerous indie bookstores earlier this week in the Hudson Valley, I was surprised by the number of Mitford-related books I stumbled on. Lauren Young’s 2022 Hitler’s Girl: The British Aristocracy and the Third Reich on the Eve of WWII. A 2004 biography of Diana Mosley by Anne de Courcy. Deborah Mitford’s 2010 memoirs. And a brand-new 2023 novel The Mitford Affair. When I encountered this last and its admiring cover blurbs (“Fast-paced and eye-opening.” “The most delicious story-telling.”) I scoffed, then a night’s reading from the end of The Six, “Sure, it’s easy when you don’t have to stick to facts” — a point hammered home by a review by Town & Country: “It might not be actual history, but we certainly don’t mind.”

Dear me: yes we do.

Ultimately, however well Thompson and other serious biographers bring a subject to life, their work is going to be grounded in conjecture and perception, and the best results can only be a plausible approximation of reality. We have to be able to trust that the author has made fair and accurate Photoshopping decisions. Laura Thompson has secured this trust, ironically in part through her fluency with Nancy Mitford’s fiction, and more conventionally through first-hand impressions and second-hand readings and viewings. She also gives us room to step away from her interpretations and judge them for ourselves through her copious citations and notes and by clearly signaling her opinions. The result, I think, is a rich and satisfying reading experience that attempts to take you out of your own head and into the minds and hearts of others — however distant and abstruse they might be.

Camelot

We saw Aaron Sorkin’s newly rewritten Camelot in previews Wednesday — a very lucky happenstance, as neighbors whom we did not know had tickets they could not use and gave to us at our concierge’s suggestion. And we had just put a big deadline to rest the day before and so could wholeheartedly and gratefully welcome this unexpected Lincoln Center adventure. I wish the play had had the magic of the circumstances surrounding our attendance.

If I used titles for the posts in this blog instead of just the topic of the post, I would call this one “Camelot: Odd Choices, Weird Changes, and Missed Opportunities.”

The odd choices are evident from the beginning. The only piece of scenery on the set — a series of cathedral-like arches culminating at the front in abutments which block the view of I’d say a quarter of the audience in the loge on either side — is a tree. Obviously, this is the tree in which Arthur is hiding from his court and from which he will tumble to the runaway Guinevere’s feet. In fact, the show poster above telegraphs this: there is a figure in a tree. But… no, this tree is too stark and stylized a metal contraption; no one can be perched in it. Arthur is instead spotted by Merlin climbing the theater’s wall (literally), house left: a pretend tree. Which is so strange. And predictive of a host of disconnects to come, primarily stemming from misalignment of new vision with the original material.

Sorkin’s new vision is predicated on Arthur being a real king of the Enlightenment, intent on bringing a new order of democracy for all. In his telling, Guinevere is a clever partner, quicker on the uptake than Arthur, wisecracking and sharp in the Sorkin style. Which is all fine and good, but then there’s a terrible muddle about who really is loving who “in silence,” as the song has it. (Spoiler: it’s Arthur and Guinevere.) Which convolutes a lot of the plot and demotivates a lot of songs. 

A prime example is “What Do the Simple Folk Do?” In the original (see below for a wonderful rendering by Julie Andrews and Richard Burton; the song begins at 5:40, but the preceding dialogue really points up the difference in the two versions), the song is essentially a shared grumble between two loving helpmeets, trying to lift the other’s burden a bit. It’s warm and caring and funny and a welcome relief as Arthur begins to grapple with the idea that the darkness his reign had hoped to alleviate is all too present all too closely all too pervasively.  In the new version, it was felt the song’s title would be perceived as classist by modern audiences. It is preceded by a dialogue between Arthur and Guinevere in which he calls her his business partner and she inwardly chafes at this; he then invokes his humble origins and she asks, almost sarcastically, yes, what do the simple folk do?  The attempt to de-classify it, along with Sorkin’s reconfigured love triangle,  results in the song losing any of its tension-breaking abilities, along with any charm.

A missed opportunity exists in the costumes, which are almost as spare and minimal as the sets. I’m not suggesting that the reimagined musical needed to reproduce the opulence and splendor of the original production; just that smart choices supporting the new vision be made. Everyone enters all in black and I figured that the designer was going to then signify the blossoming of Camelot by then preceding to bring life and bloom to the court. But except for Guinevere in red, and Lancelot in blue, and Arthur in mauve (I guess to show his affinity to both?) and everybody wearing kind of cheesy yellow capes for Lancelot’s knighting, color wasn’t well used. And frankly, if Arthur is in mauve to place him between the other two, then this reduces the musical to a personal problem, rather than symbolizing the Edenic expulsion of the earlier incarnation or the noble move toward progress of the current.

The insertion of the character of Morgan Le Fay — whom I understand Lerner cut out of many later productions of Camelot — is one of the weird choices. And her really long and, to my mind, pointless scene with Arthur has her recast from enchantress to self-professed scientist, a claim for which no evidence is given, other than a coldly detached demeanor. Her attitude is fatalistic: although noting that the coming new century will be one of science, she does not hold much faith in science to improve things, since anyone who chooses to do battle with human nature will lose.

This odd scene, which features the only lighting effect in the production — a shadow pattern of twining stems and branches on the floor, with branches and stems being sketched along the foremost arch, suggesting a suffocating entrapment that the scene does not embody — is intercut with both “Fie on Goodness!” (a comic number which really suffers from the interruption and from being made to serve as a major thematic statement) and with Guinevere and Lancelot’s consummation, which is less motivated by passion than inevitability and vengeance.

The intended cumulative effect of these simultaneous betrayals and cynical statements is lost since each is individually bewildering and distracting. (A small, but I think significant, nit contributing to my distraction: one of the solos in “Fie!” is sung by the actor who played Lancelot’s page in Act I, who still wears his page attire — notable because its weird headgear is an exact replica of Terry Gilliam’s in Monty Python and the Holy Grail — and is therefore not a knight with the same restless longings to return to the good old bad old days.) The perhaps most notable distraction is the realization that, if Guinevere loves Arthur and not Lancelot, then what exactly has everybody been picking up on and remarking on ad nauseam about her and Lance since he first came to court?

The script has to work so hard and devote so much time and effort to realign the trio and make Jenny and Arthur misbegotten lovers in the manner of say, Scarlett and Rhett, that the true tragedy of Camelot is completely overshadowed. This is the ultimate misalignment and the greatest missed opportunity. Although there are many fine speeches from Arthur and Guinevere and Lancelot about progress and democracy, and lots of grumbling from the knights about the same, there is no sense that Arthur has ever achieved that halcyon “brief shining moment.”

Losing the magic was important to Sorkin, as he has explained in interviews. He feels this makes Camelot more relevant by making it more real. So: no wizards or nymphs or enchantresses; a quite pointed statement early on by Arthur that the laws of men and God are quite separate things; and a lot of denigration of both Lancelot’s bringing his opponent “back to life” (in this production, it’s Arthur who is the final challenger to Lance; another odd choice) and of Arthur’s securing of Excalibur (Jenny dryly suggests that the preceding contenders had loosened it for him). These aren’t miracles, but the gullible public will insist on their being so.

And maybe it’s this intrinsic dichotomy that is tripping up Sorkin’s Camelot. Arthur knights the child (Sir Tom) at the end and commands him to tell the story of Camelot and so inspire new generations who will build on and better this vision. (And I should mention, the reason the child is “Tom” is because this is an oblique reference to the fifteenth century Sir Thomas Malory, who first committed the Arthurian legends to print.) But as Arthur has shown he recognizes, the people need excitement, glamour, intrigue, spectacle, mystery. They need a good yarn. This Camelot may crackle with Sorkin wit and his brand of cynical optimism (or optimistic cynicism?), but once you remove the tragic triangle and flood the mists of time with the bright lights of enlightenment, where is the magic that will spark audiences to want to hear this story?

2023 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

The 2023 shorts were the best I’ve seen in years, but you would not know that from the winners, so I felt I needed to weigh in and explain what the Academy overlooked.

First off, we were thrilled to get to see them in a real theater again. Second off, it was crazy hard to figure out how and where to see them so that we could do dinner afterwards; we eventually and delightedly took the day off and saw them with Sarah in Philly at the Landmark Ritz, which was wonderful on so many counts.

We saw the live action shorts first. For the last few years, this program has left me feeling drained, deadened, depressed, and utterly dejected. Guns. Drums. Toxic men. Wars. Barriers. Betrayals. Soldiers. Violence. Hatred. But not this year. This year, the films were…lighter somehow, softer, more humane, more affecting. That isn’t to say that they weren’t, several of them, quite sad. Two revolved around death, one around wartime deprivation. But a couple dipped into or ended up in cockeyed lunacy, and most ended on a hopeful note. All were about outsiders, and four were about girls or women.  Which made for a very very nice change after years of grim, grungy testosterone-fueled conflicts in these live short programs. (But trust the Academy to award the Oscar to the sole short featuring a male protagonist!).

All five shorts take their lead character on a journey to deeper understanding of themselves, their fellows, and their world. By the end of the harrowing, haunting The Red Suitcase, the heroine has lost everything that gave her identity; her first steps down this road were of her own volition: she removed her hajib. Will she continue to have agency? We care about her; she is a little girl in a frightening and unfamiliar land. When I first saw it, I worried for her; now, maybe I feel hope.

An Irish Goodbye leaves the viewer much less ambiguously hopeful. The mother is dead and the estranged stubborn brothers, one who has Downs Syndrome and the other who has left for a life in the city, have come together in meticulously carrying out a presumed bucket list in her honor. There is dark humor and whimsy, but it is a little too neat for my taste.

Far from neat and verging on downright weird is the Italian Disney film Le Pupille, which features scary strict nuns, a blowsy Italian voluptuary, girl orphans who pray for petitioners for a fee on Christmas morning while suspended in midair, and a cake made from seventy eggs at a point in World War II when I don’t think there were that many eggs in all of Italy.

A strange tale indeed! And totally inverted, with the pious denying and begrudging, the innocent decried as bad and selfish (Sarah astutely noted that the stubborn Serafina shares her ill-gotten slice with first the dogs and then the children, more like Christ than the calculating Mother Superior), and a flippant, irreverent, amoral Italian shrug of an ending with cake—albeit on the pavement—for all.

Night Ride is also a rollercoaster of tones and tempos, with its moods changing as the heroine, a little person who is early for the night train, accidentally at first, but then gradually less cautiously and more assuredly and more bravely and smartly, takes matters into her own hands. I won’t spoil it, as it’s available in full to watch.

The last of the five, Ivalu, set in Greenland, is about a little girl’s love for her missing older sister and her journey to discover what became of her. The answer to the mystery is not in any of the stark, pristine, forbidding but majestic mountains or caves or waters she encounters as she treks through the places where she and Ivalu played; the answer is at home where the dark deeds that led Ivalu to her eventual resting place occurred.

Interestingly, the Inuit tale of the sea goddess Sedna that underscores Ivalu was the subject of the best of the pieces at this year’s Puppet Slam at La MaMa, Katherine Fahey’s “crankie” retelling of this scary-sad-savage myth which, nonetheless, also ends on a note of hope: the angry Sedna and her stormy seas can be placated by combing her hair, smoothing out all the debris it has accumulated and making it, her, the sea, and the world calm again.

Now to the animations. Two are sublime, transcendent. One is wise and funny, sassy and brassy. One is quirky weird. And one is abysmal, wretchedly inauthentic, hackneyed, cloying, and pointless. That one won the award.

Since all of these are available to watch online, I will not belabor them; they all (except the repugnant The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse) should be seen and savored. Let me first dismiss the execrable entry. I understand that it is a children’s book, and I will do my damnedest to keep it out of the hands of any children I know. What struck me first on viewing The Boy… is how derivative it is. The animation style echoes E.H. Shepard’s Winnie-The-Pooh illustrations. The boy’s quest, to return home, echoes Dorothy’s. The rhythm of the noun-packed title echoes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The three magical friends (all male) mimic at least the outward composition of Dorothy’s own original confreres, but their needs are vaguer and more neurotic. And lastly, the closing tableau of the blond-haired boy and his three friends framed by a deep blue night sky shot with stars echoes Le Petit Prince. It is a charmless film made by clumsy cut-and-paste or soulless AI. In chopping up all the winner bits, it forgot to give it any heart. Instead, the long short is peppered with the most anodyne dialogue of the we-are-all-special variety: Sarah and I were dangerously close to a serious attack of the giggles and could not look at each other for much of the movie.

Washing the taste of all that treacle away was the frank, sly, funny My Year of Dicks. Sarah thinks this should be required viewing for all teenage girls, as it recounts the heroine’s quest to lose her virginity and her heart. She loses the latter at least, along with her head, in a very funny series of differently styled vignettes of romance and passion as filtered through a gawky adolescent’s imagination. It is charming.

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It is a highly meta short that reminded me of nothing so much as the odd half-world of Severance. A rather grim piece, when you think about it, saved from despair by its black humor.

Now to the pieces that soar: literally and figuratively. The Flying Sailor is nothing short of breathtaking. And, for the least grounded of the shorts, it is oddly the one based on fact. Apparently, in 1917 in Halifax Harbor, two ships bringing supplies to the war collided: one was loaded with munitions and the explosion was horrific. Thousands were killed or injured, but one sailor flew over a mile in the air and landed unharmed. This short traces his journey: it goes far far far more than a mile. Staggering and wordless and beautiful.

Ice Merchants is also wordless. A father and son live a precarious but happy life on the side of a mountain cliff. Something has gone from their lives and we know who she is and how she is missed by an exquisite use of color. Changing climate dooms their livelihood: there is no longer any ice to sell, and the foundations of their lives, already shaken, are rocked to the core. Watch.

Tár

 

Harmen Steenwyck, Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life