Abbas Kiarostami's Five and Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times.
There isn't a single boring moment in Abbas Kiarostami's Five, but it's difficult to convince people of this when the "protagonists" of the film are, in order of appearance, a piece of driftwood, the crashing surf and a railing, sunbathing dogs silhouetted against a glaringly bright sea, a platoon of ducks walking one way and then the other, and finally, the moon reflected in a pond just before a rainstorm. (After giving her this synopsis, my friend Jane paused for a beat, then said, "You really need to start dating again.")
I write "in order of appearance" because this merely pertains to the visual elements of the film; the sounds of waves crashing and frogs croaking are as essential to the comprehension of the movie as what the audience sees. (In short, the film enacts a re-privileging of the sense of hearing, which perpetually plays second fiddle to the gaze. If people talk about sound in cinema nowadays it's always about THX vs Dolby Digital.)
Five's secondary title is "5 Long Takes Dedicated To Ozu", but I haven't seen enough Ozu to see the similarities, I'm afraid (and I'm not familiar with the whole transcendentalism thing either). And I won't attempt to philosophize over the meaning of the piece of wood being buffeted by waves and the odd dramatic tension when it disappears from the camera and returns, a few minutes later, already (tragically?) swept out to sea. Or the ducks, intent on waddling to a destination off-screen, only to return en masse to the other direction.
It's a little easier to write about particular segments and how they work. My favorite is the fifth: a barely visible reflection of the full moon on a pond, with an oppressively loud chorus of frogs (and a lone barking dog, followed later by crowing roosters) croaking on cue. The otherwise perfect circle of the moon is stretched, sliced, and chopped by the ripples on the water; it's hard not to think of the instability of light and chemicals on celluloid in this scene. Sometimes the turbulence, and clouds across the moon, render the light into a milky gray. When the rain comes down, only the intermittent lightning on raindrops is left to illuminate the scene. It's an impressive aesthetic minimalism -- cinema literally reduced to nothing but sound and flicker -- and all the more conceptually interesting in its technology because Kiarostami relies only on the vicissitudes of nature to prove his point.
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And (in keeping with the blog entry title), a few hastily-scribbled notes (to J-Lu, on e-mail) on Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw perhaps two years ago, and little of which I remember. The film could be seen as a kind of career retrospective, that is, the three segments clearly refer to Hou's own cinematic arcs, in terms of style. An exercise, perhaps, in seeing whether he could film three phases of his career in miniature: A Time to Live and a Time to Die, Flowers of Shanghai, and Millennium Mambo. (Like any good band, Hou has three distinct periods, and here he charts three moments in a century of Taiwan history.)
The first part, set in the mid-'60s, was oddly straightforward (I didn't expect anything so narratively pat, if a little less linear) but also just gorgeous, the second I'd quite frankly seen before in Flowers of Shanghai, right down to Lee Ping-Bin's cinematography (though radically changed here by the fact that intertitles are substituted for dialogue), and the third... well, Shu Qi is a babe and a half (and a quick Google Image search for "Hsu Chi" will result in all of her NSFW softcore pics prior to becoming Hou's cinematic muse), but even her presence can't carry the aimlessness of the segment. But lesser Hou is better than most anything out there; the first segment alone, featuring the most rapturously beautiful shots of beautiful people playing pool, is well worth watching.
It was Mandy Moore's first concert ever in San Francisco -- "at the Fillmore, can you believe it," she asked. I think a smaller venue would have worked better. Some people on Last.fm commented with surprise about my going to a Mandy Moore concert. But friends know I have a soft spot for pop. And yes, J-Lu dragged me there, but I do like her latest album: Wild Hope, is a remarkably strong bid for singer-songwriter status; it's a solid, if safe, collection of sober, mature folk-pop that gets better with each listen. It's a far cry, in any case, from her old teenybopper days, which is something clearly reflected in the setlist. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. My only complaint: I honestly thought she was the headliner, but I was wrong (see more below).
The setlist, probably not in the proper order:
In Ten, Abbas Kiarostami provides the viewer with the most spartan of setups: one car, one woman, two camera angles, ten dialogues. We -- by way of the lone camera mounted on the dashboard -- follow a beautiful divorcee driving in a car. She picks up ten passengers, one after the other, in ten different vignettes -- a prostitute, a jilted friend, her sister, a stranger on her way to a mausoleum, and her precocious, frighteningly articulate son -- and takes the audience along for a ride through the streets of Tehran.
The shallowest thing to appreciate about the film (too superficial an observation, really) is that it gives voices to people not usually heard from. It's also a valuable corrective to the recent emergence of civilizing discourse about Iran -- "They drive cars in Iran??" and the like. But there is no easy female identification to fall back on, even if their concerns sometimes seem to coincide with those of Marin County housewives.
There is much to admire about the compactness of Kiarostami's formal rigor; it's like Flowers of Shanghai in an economy car. Actually, the Hou reference isn't entirely inappropriate, because the vehicle slips easily into its role as the, um, driving metaphor for the film: women similarly imprisoned in the confines of their surroundings while the world swirls around them. At least in Ten there's a dusty windshield that lets you look outside.
But the dialogues themselves are not necessarily meaningful; they are just steeped in the ordinary, which is just fine by me. Much of the film depends on the fascination inherent (at least for me) in hearing the thrusts and parries of arguments, or in seeing how the more passive labors of driving and riding almost naturally elicits talk. Lots of talk. It is ironic, then, that perhaps the most weighted (and, at the same time, most banal) conversations were not about a sisterly solidarity, but between the mother and her pre-adolescent son, the only male physically present in the film: a seemingly endless, circumlocutory series of bickering that echoes the tangled, but not aimless, driving through the Tehran traffic.
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Not much to say about Greg Mottola's Superbad, which stars one of the funniest comic trios I've seen in a while, trying to lose their virginities before they go off to college. The casting is just perfect: Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the hapless "McLovin", Jonah Hill (who looks like a young Chris Penn), and Michael Cera (who is excellent as George-Michael Bluth in "Arrested Development"), plus more dick jokes than you can shake a stick at. It's the latest film in a series of vaguely sweet and romance-affirming but generally raunchy sex comedies to which guys can take their girl dates -- kind of like couples-porn for the multiplexes, if there were such a thing.
Because of all the vulgarities, Superbad is obviously meant as a big filmic nose-thumbing, but it pulls off something slightly more subversive: it's really a tribute to the kind of affection straight dudes have for each other. You might as well see it because your annoying coworker will be talking about "the funny thing about my back" for a while.
1. At the age of 23, anthropology major Lauren Bush had visited more countries outside the United States (at least seven in the Global South) than her Uncle George did by 2000 -- true or false? (True.)
2. Hopefully it'll still be on the front page, but here's a video of Radioactive Sago Project performing Nick Joaquin's "The Summer Solstice" live, at Libro.ph. (If not, reload. PS: "miskol" is the 2006 word of the year.)
3. Of course I'm pre-ordering this.
4.
At the end of practice, Pati ushers two medium-size stray dogs inside the fence. He tells his players to line up for conditioning, blows his whistle and watches his team thunder downfield. The dogs take off after the players, their chase instincts triggered. They catch up to the last runner, bark and snap at the player's ankles. The runner speeds up to avoid being bitten, and the dogs go after the next-slowest runner. Pati slaps his hand against his thigh and laughs.From Eli Saslow's Washington Post article on high school football in Pago Pago. (Thanks for the link, Viva!)"See that?" he says. "That's what we call a speed coach in American Samoa."
5. I love the pathos / absurdity of this piece by Jessica Zafra, like something out of a Hal Hartley movie. If he remade Bicycle Thieves or something.
6. I'm trying to get my online friend Ardee to sell me the iPod diptych for my new apartment.
7. Speaking of the new apartment, which you'll read more about later: Walk Score calculates your place's proximity to restaurants, bookstores, bars, libraries and so on. My new place is fairly walkable (68/100), even higher than my previous one by the beach (54). (It doesn't factor in certain crucial elements, though: my old Ithaca addresses kept scoring a whopping 92/100 -- and it's true that there were indeed hardware stores, parks, movie theaters, etc., within a quarter-mile radius -- but it doesn't tell you that most of these are strung along the steepest-ass hill in a city that has snow on the ground six months out of the year. The difficulty of the slope is helpfully magnified when trudging in knee-high snow; your descent is equally facilitated when the slush freezes to ice. Okay, Ithaca rant over.)
That said, I haven't even gone walking through my neighborhood -- even though Fentons is literally less than half a mile away. Most of my time has been spent getting books into shelves (and splitting them into smaller categories as opposed to just "fun" and "work") and driving back and forth from the gleaming two-story Target store in Albany. It's so big it has its own freeway!
I'm writing this in a hotel room while Izzy sleeps. It is one of many hotels over the last year in which we have made our temporary home for a few nights, all uniform in their anonymity and proximity to freeway offramps. But we make the room our own nonetheless, our domestic rituals almost unchanging as we open the door, turn on the lights, and step with half-dread and anticipation into our new home. She gets to pick which bed she wants to sleep in, but this does not matter because come dawn she joins me under my blanket.
Our toiletries are perched, on opposite sides, around the small sink; her asthma medicine in a big Ziploc bag on the nightstand next to the clock radio. Two toothbrushes and two tubes of toothpaste stuffed in a plastic cup; her night light, the same one we've used for three years now, poised by the lone wall socket. We never bother to unpack; the bags are always open, sitting on the floor by our Chuck Taylors. Mine are brown. Hers are pink.
We are used to this now, Izzy and I: a late-afternoon pickup at her school on Friday, then an early dinner at Kerbey Lane Cafe. Where's your car, Izzy asks on the way to the lot, and I pause for a moment to figure out which economy rental car it is this time. Then the sheer joy of the all-Izzy weekend: maybe the zoo, maybe peeking into the shops on South Congress, maybe the children's museum, maybe a ride on the little steam train in the park, migas for brunch and lunchtime quesadillas and a steak dinner somewhere in there, for it's Texas after all.
I'm told Austin is a great city, and it is; it's probably as close as Texas will get to San Francisco, though all I really know of it is through Izzy, and that is fine with me. I drop everything when I come here; no laptop or textbook weighs me down these three or four days. Then a lingering goodbye, which sometimes results in tears, in the gym before the singing of the national anthem on Monday morning. Then the long, lonely flight back, though I am already happily awaiting the next month so we can be father and daughter all over again.
Despite our daily phone calls, and despite these brief weekends, it is difficult. I never saw myself being a father like this -- certainly not like this. She agrees, though her assent is mostly unsaid, but sometimes blurted out, unexpectedly, in her six-year old fashion, when she asks certain questions. I know how I'm supposed to react -- the books and experts all tell me how -- but my heart breaks nonetheless when I answer, almost always in the negative. But her resilience, constantly surprising me in its depth, is such that I can learn from it too, and I have.
Car headlights sweep in an arc across the nondescript hotel curtains. This time, we are on the first floor facing the parking lot, and for this reason the curtains are completely drawn closed to give us a little privacy. We don't get to see the orange Texas sun shade slowly into black while I read her chapter books to her and sing her to sleep. Everything is illuminated by lamplight. It reminds me of my apartment.
Next week I am moving out of the fog and high rent of San Francisco, its urban romance finally receding with just the briefest stabs of regret. But no matter: I am saying farewell to the spiders and bugs and dust mites and occasional mice with whom I shared the in-law basement apartment, moving out of my windowless, mildewed, damp batcave to a second-floor, two-bedroom place in a four-unit building in Piedmont. Actually, I'm on the Oakland side of the street, but the Post Office prefers to recognize it as Piedmont. The rent is a little above my price range than I could previously comfortably allow, but it's a lot bigger, and the need for escape is too strong. It's an awfully nice neighborhood. There are windows that look out onto the quiet street. There is sunlight; I can see trees.
Soon my old apartment will no longer remember I was there: the DVDs I piled up high on a ledge have been packed into boxes; the sleigh bed -- practically the only piece of furniture I got after the divorce -- will be disassembled and rebuilt into a new room; the smells of the curries and stews I attempted in my slow cooker have already vanished into the ether long ago. For someone nicknamed Sunny, this apartment was a cruel joke. One window faces two walls, with only a sliver of sky to be seen if one bent one's neck; the other is underneath a deck, conveniently positioned to catch the few minutes of sunshine in the early morning when the sun was angled just right, if the fog of the Outer Sunset allowed.
I realize I never once bothered to put anything up on the walls in all my three years here, because it was never really home. The apartment would magically transform into one only on the nights when Izzy would stay over and sleep on the inflatable bed on the floor next to mine, the suffocating drabness returning once more in the morning after I took her back to school. Except for the occasional visitor, even my friends were hardly welcome, mostly out of embarrassment on my part. There wouldn't have been any place to sit anyway. It's just as well that houses have no memories, for I associate nothing but a vague, dusty misery here.
Izzy's leg jerks out of the blanket sometimes while she's sleeping. I do not think this is out of an anxious restlessness. I think she is excited because it's her big birthday bash tomorrow, complete with ballet teacher and princess pinata. She will be handing out princess wands and hats and blowing out six candles on a Charlotte's Web cake. Eight girls -- no boys invited! -- all in pink tutus and giggles, will be arriving the next day, ballet slippers in hand. I like to think she is practicing her pas de chats in her sleep.
It will be almost a year since my baby moved 1700 miles away. But now I'm throwing out old things, selling books to make more room. I'm allowing myself to think about buying furniture again. I will know now when the sun rises and sets. When I pick her up in late December and bring her back to the East Bay for a quick Christmas visit she'll be moving into a home. I think I'm getting a tree this year. We can't wait.
My last three years have been marked by various transitions -- some huge, with no small amount of trauma. One is easily Googleable, and I have no doubt that I'll be posting more about it in the months to come; the others can be read between the lines. Actually "transition" is a euphemistic way of putting it; it's been, for the most part, sheer hell.
So there's really no explanation for why I've been unreasonably happy the last month or so -- okay, certain burdens like my manuscript have been lifted, but the fear of unemployment and rejection still looms large -- but there you go. My brother teases me about living the life of a teenager with all my carrying on -- absolutely not true, but if it resembles a pre-midlife crisis (or the lingering aftereffects of being rudely kicked out of the 18-to-34 demographic), let it be known that it comes at a great, great price. And if there's something in all of this that resembles callow, adolescent bravado in my manner (especially if you've been out with me lately), you're probably interpreting it correctly as well.
I have recently started a glorified data-entry job at a financial institution which shall remain nameless for now, if only to allow me to post snarky blog entries in the future. It's my first non-academic job -- let's just say my parents made sure that summer jobs were unnecessary -- and I should be feeling apprehensive, out of my depth. Instead I am enjoying -- again, unreasonably so -- its repetition, the fascinating cubicle dramas, the fruitless debates over grammar, the regularity of lunch hours. And now I know the answers to the most amazing questions, like, Can condo homeowners associations prevent you from sunbathing naked? (The answer: depends. If someone has to clamber up a tree to actually see your ass, the answer is no. But if your balcony opens up to the parking lot, that's a different story.)
There is something liberating about this nine-to-five job -- I get home and I'm not worrying about work; I don't have to grade papers or quizzes; I can read anthropology books simply for enjoyment, and not because I have to write about them, or I have to meet a deadline. And shit, I can read fiction again! The job allows me to savor the texts, to allow not just for the pleasure of acquiring nebulous theoretical knowledge but also the delight of ethnographic detail. It is an odd feeling, working at a job for which my years of higher education did not prepare me, but there is nevertheless something comforting about this ability to bounce back from the brink of unemployment. (Note: maintaining this blog actually had something to do with the new job, believe it or not. I'm amazed that it's actually good for something.)
I have also had the opportunity to be on the other side of the classroom for the first time in something like 12 years, yet another disorienting but enjoyable experience. Last month I took a couple of classes in marketing basics and brand strategies. (This was not because I was planning to earn a Certificate in Marketing, but looking for a chance to parlay my ethnographic skills into something more corporate.) So there I was, actually collaborating with classmates -- even the term "classmates" seems so unfamiliar to me -- on homework (homework!) and quick-and-dirty presentations.
(One of the projects was on the demographically-possible but somehow culturally wrong Starbucks boba tea, which my classmate Naoko and I thought could survive a pilot release in selected branches but would fail miserably everywhere else. Another group presentation was on a so-wrongheaded-it-just-might-work vitamin-infused vodka. Our group called it Vitamin V. Our classmates were skeptical, but I think the antioxidants won them over.) But there was also something reassuring about the passivity of sitting behind the desk, taking notes, wincing whenever the teacher would assign homework (homework!). And no, all this is not unrelated to the adolescence mentioned earlier.
Sometime last week I finished a summer class at City College, and did something I'd never done before: I wrote them an email message telling them how much I enjoyed the class. This was absolutely true: it was a class I'd taught many times before, but I would literally walk into the classroom at the beginning of the class with a big grin on my face, looking forward to the next three hours. Sometimes I'd buy them Krispy Kremes (okay, I'm cheap), again something I'd never done for students before (yes, I already said I was cheap), which I can only attribute to a kind of fondness.
And once again, there was no logical reason, really, for such odd affection towards the class: part of it may have been the relative brevity of the session; the class only ran for a month, but we also met daily for a rather concentrated time period. One other reason, I think, had to do with how handily the students pulled off the required project -- only in a matter of three weeks, certainly the shortest deadline I've ever given -- and how a couple of the group papers were some of the best, most thoroughly researched and ethnographically detailed projects I'd seen in eight years.
And, of course, there were the students: a scrappy bunch of incredibly motivated, perspicacious, adventurous, intensely interested and interesting kids who could have lain on the beach all summer, but didn't. (Okay, they probably did some of that too.) But teaching this class was an utter delight. I see it as a kind of validation, too; that teaching will always be in my blood somehow, and that pedagogical satisfaction is indeed its own reward -- meager, perhaps, in remunerations in the usual sense of the word, but immeasurable in its little everyday gifts.
1. And so it ends: the concert I've been waiting to attend for so long. Eloise and Son and Weiss and I were standing there maybe 10 people from the stage. And alas, it was rather anticlimactic...
2. I never thought I'd write this, but the setlist was rather short on hits.
3. I mean, it was great to hear "Winterlong" dusted off and all, but when you unveil self-indulgent 15-minute long instrumentals (though the last one before the encore just rocked) about two and a half hours into the concert -- with the blood sunk way down into my ankles -- would it really have killed Billy to throw in "I Am One" or "Cherub Rock" or "Mayonaise" into the whole three-hour set?
4. "Zero" was great though. And so was "With Every Light" early in the set. And "Muzzle" in the first encore.
5. The highlight of the show for me, I think, was the slow-burning "Starla".
6. But jeez -- not even "Bullet with Butterfly Wings"?
7. Was that Ummagumma playing while the Black Angels were clearing their stuff?
8. And that light show was pretty amazing.
9. Plus the longest will-call line I've ever seen at the Fillmore -- all the way down the city block and down past the KFC on Geary and Steiner.
10. And yeah, the new folks were great and all, and Billy and Jimmy were fantastic, but... I think I want my D'Arcy and James back.