One more recommendation

The Wolfpack (dir. Crystal Moselle, 2015) tells the story of the Angulo family: father (from Peru), mother (from Indiana), six sons, one daughter, living on public assistance, in public housing, on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The father doesn’t want his children damaged by contact with the world, so he keeps them, and his wife, inside. The daughter suffers from an unexplained malady. All the children have Sanskrit names. The sons fill their days with movies provided by their father (one son estimates 5,000 movies), watching, and watching, and then transcribing, rehearsing, and filming favorite scenes, with props and costumes made from whatever materials they can muster. On occasion the sons are able to sneak outside — one or two or more times a year, sometimes not at all. But one son defies his father’s rule and ventures openly into the city. His brothers begin to follow. Out for a walk, they run into Crystal Moselle, who befriends them and begins to learn their story.

The Wolfpack is well worth seeing. The Angulo brothers’ seriousness of purpose, their joy in their endeavors, their fidelity to the films they reënact — it’s all moving and inspiring to see. The imagination will find a way, this film tells us, even in a miserable, locked-up apartment ruled by a two-bit dictator. But the long history of family dysfunction underwriting this state of affairs is left largely unexplored. So many questions, not just unanswered but unasked. Manohla Dargis’s Times review, which points out that “no laws seem to have been broken” in raising these children, is too breezy by half. I would like to know how paterfamilias Oscar Angulo (who speaks for the camera on several occasions) reconciles his wish to protect his children with a diet of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. I would like to know whether his wife Susanne (who also speaks for the camera) ever thought of getting away. I would at least like to know how the brothers came by costumes and props and video equipment. I know the filmmaker has only ninety minutes. But still.

What most struck me in The Wolfpack: as the brothers begin to make their way into the world, their frames of reference are from film, and only film. Out on a walk: “This is like 3-D, man!” There is joy but also tragedy in that exclamation. I wish the Angulo brothers well as they continue learning their way into that world.

Here is the the film’s official site. And here is an article from People (of all places) that asks and answers a few questions that the film leaves unexplored.

Recently updated

“Pluto in His Cups” Now there’s Part 2.

A baker’s dozen, plus one

Fourteen films I recommend with great enthusiasm, more or less in the order in which we watched them:

House of Games (dir. David Mamet, 1987). A psychiatrist enters the world of con artistry. A fiendishly tricky story, with each false bottom opening onto another. Bonus points for Ricky Jay’s appearance.

*

Le Havre (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 2011). In the French port city of Le Havre, Marcel Marx (André Wilms), shoeshine man and one-time writer, befriends and hides Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), a young boy smuggled out of Gabon. He hopes to get to London. With Kaurismäki regular Kati Outinen as Marcel’s ailing wife Arletty. The sweetest Aki Kaurismäki movie we’ve seen.

*

Moro No Brasil (dir. Mika Kaurismäki, 2002). A documentary by Aki’s brother, about the music of his adopted country Brazil. No bossa nova here. The film is in the spirit of a field recording, documenting music as the everyday joy of a people. How much music may be found in a tambourine? This film has the answer.

*


[“So happy together.”]

Total Balalaika Show (dir. Aki Kaurismäki, 1994). The Leningard Cowboys, a faux-Russian Finnish rock group, perform with the Alexandrov Red Army Choir and Ballet. My favorite moments: “Let’s Work Together” and “Happy Together.” Elaine and I have now exhausted the Aki Kaurismäki reserves of Netflix and our university library. But I still cannot spell Kaurismäki without double-checking.

*

Hangmen Also Die (dir. Fritz Lang, 1943). The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Nazi-occupied Prague, and its repercussions. A good performance from Brian Donlevy. “Bert Brecht,” as he’s listed in the title sequence, is one of the film’s writers. The cinematographer is James Wong Howe.

*

The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (dir. Brian Knappenberger, 2014). The life and death of Aaron Swartz, a beautiful and generous mind who exemplified all that is bright and human in digital culture. A Boston prosecutor’s effort to make an example of Swartz (who had illegally downloaded JSTOR articles) had tragic consequences: facing the possibility of thirty years in prison and a million-dollar fine, Swartz took his life before going to trial. For contrast: the three men guilty of lying to investigators or obstructing justice in the Boston Marathon bombing recently received sentences of three years, three and a half years, and six years.

The Internet’s Own Boy is available for online viewing at archive.org.

*


[Carol Kaye.]

The Wrecking Crew (dir. Denny Tedesco, 2008). Finally on DVD after a long fight to clear the music permissions. This documentary is a labor of love by the son of the guitarist Tommy Tedesco. The Wrecking Crew, a loose congregation of Los Angeles studio musicians, played on countless American pop and rock recordings in the 1960s and ’70s, from the Beach Boys to the Monkees to the Tijuana Brass to Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound productions. The focus is on Hal Blaine, Plas Johnson, Carol Kaye, and Tedesco, with briefer appearances by other musicians, and a great many perspectives on the anonymity of studio work. Many, many DVD extras, including a sampling of musician jokes. This film would make an excellent at-home double-bill with Standing in the Shadows of Motown (dir. Paul Justman, 2002) or 20 Feet from Stardom (dir. Morgan Neville, 2013).

A Hal Blaine joke: What do you call a musician in a three-piece suit? The defendant.

*

Searching for Sugarman (dir. Malik Bendjelloul, 2012). A singer-songwriter from Detroit records two albums that go nowhere — except in South Africa, where unbeknownst to him, he becomes a major figure in music. (Estimated South African sales: half a million copies.) The film documents the search for Rodriguez, Sixto Rodriguez, and his later-in-life return to performing. (He’s now opening for Brian Wilson.) You don’t have to take to the music (which sounds to me like a cross between Bob Dylan and Neil Diamond) to find the story wonderful.

*


[Francine Bergé, holding on, for now.]

Judex (dir. Georges Franju, 1963). Homage to a 1916 silent serial (alas, not included in the two-disc Criterion release). A character helpfully explains the title: “It's a Latin word meaning ‘judge’ or ‘upholder of the law.’” A gleefully bizarre story of revenge and love, with silent-film and Hitchcock touches.

*

Magnificent Obsession (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1954). Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson in what might be called a philosophical melodrama, one that treats the question of How to Live. The chemistry between the two is unmistakable. The Criterion release includes the 1935 original with Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor (dir. John M. Stahl). Elaine preferred the original for its greater plausibility. I preferred the remake for its greater implausibility.

*


[Cary reads the Bible.]

All That Heaven Allows (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1955). Wyman and Hudson again. Cary Scott is a well-off widow; Ron Kirby, a gardener and tree-nursery owner, and mentor to aspiring non-conformists. Will Cary accede to social pressure and walk away from this younger man, or will she gain the courage to march to the beat of a different drummer? My favorite scene: the lobster dinner, a gathering of the local eccentrics, including Manuel the lobster man, Grandpa Adams, beekeeper and artist (“Strictly primitive!”), and Miss Pidway, “head of the Audubon Society, and an outstanding bird-watcher.” Next-favorite scene: the gift of a television. This film gives melodrama a good name.

*

The Rape of Europa (dir. Richard Berge, Bonni Cohen, and Nicole Newnham, 2006). A documentary about the Nazis’ systematic effort to steal or destroy art, and the Allied effort to recover what was taken. Includes interviews with real Monument Men. Many of us will know the gist of the story from a single painting and legal battles over its ownership. But the extent of Nazi theft and destruction may come as a shock. There are strange overtones of ISIS here, now destroying and selling the treasures of Middle-Eastern antiquity. But the Nazis wanted art for themselves. I learned about this film (and Aki Kaurismäki generally) from Fresca.

*

The Band Wagon (dir. Vincente Minnelli, 1953). I asked my dad this past Saturday, “Dad, do you know The Band Wagon?” “Do I know The Band Wagon !” said he. Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, and Jack Buchanan put on a show. Songs by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. As one of those songs says, that’s entertainment. The injection of high culture in the form of Oedipus and Faust (via Buchanan’s character) makes for a special kind of hilarity. Trying to imagine a plot that could account for the songs of the final show makes for another kind of hilarity.

Reader, what have you found that’s worth watching?

Live-blogging the weather

4:06 p.m. Achoo . Achoo . Achoo . Achoo . Achoo .

[Heavy rain, and now, a high mold-count.]

Some more words to live by

I’ve added a sentence from Simone Weil to the sidebar’s little gathering of Words to Live By. The sentence appears in a letter from Weil to the poet Joë Bousquet, April 13, 1942: “L’attention est la forme la plus rare et la plus pure de la générosité.” In translation: “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” The sentence is widely available online in English, but with no indication of a source. An couple of hours in the library looking through a dozen or so Weil books was no help, and I began to wonder if Weil had indeed written these words. I finally found the source by translating the sentence into French and searching for that online. A snippet view in Google Books gave me the answer.


[Joseph Marie Perrin, Mon dialogue avec Simone Weil (1984). I found the 1942 date elsewhere.]

Weil’s sentence seems especially suited to early-twenty-first-century life. To pay attention, when so many things compete to distract us, is to make a gift of oneself. I present the sentence as standing on its own, detached from any larger relation to Weil’s thinking about prayer and the Godhead (in which the idea of attention played an important part).

For many years I had Weil’s sentence (in translation) on a little slip of paper taped to my office door. (It was one of many things taped to the door.) The sentence was once the subject of an amusing conversation with a student, who told me that The Site That Shall Not Be Named had a complaint about me that went something like this: “He makes you come to his office and he goes over your essay with you line by line.” The nerve! My student said that reading that complaint made him decide to take a course with me. Ha.

“Pluto in His Cups”

From George Bodmer’s Oscar’s Day: “Pluto in His Cups.”

Note to Pluto: You are big . It’s the idea of what counts as a planet that got small.

I am a total third-grader when it comes to Pluto. The brave planet has been the subject of several OCA posts.

*

July 14: “Pluto in His Cups, Part 2”

“Happy days!”

From Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (1923):



Other Cather posts
Cather’s letters : Cather, snoot : James Schuyler on Cather : Proust and Cather

[If you think about how RSS readers turn paragraphs into nearly screen-wide ribbons, you’ll understand why I’ve posted these paragraphs as an image file.]

A concluding truck for belated pubs

So H. L. Mencken thinks English teachers are dumb? Take this, H. L. Mencken:

Transumption is the trope of a trope, or technically the metonymy of a metonymy. That is, it tends to be a figure that substitutes an aspect of a previous figure for that figure. Imagistically, transumption from Milton through the Romantics to the present tends to manifest itself in terms of earliness substituting for lateness, and more often than not to be the figure that concludes poems. Translated into psychoanalytic terms, transumption is either the psychic defense of introjection (identification) or of projection (refusal of identity), just as metaphor translates into the defense of sublimation, or hyperbole into that of repression. The advantage of transumption as a concluding trope for belated poems is that it achieves a kind of fresh priority or earliness, but always at the expense of the present or living moment.

I first came across this passage (from an essay on the poet Geoffrey Hill) as an undergraduate in 1977. It has stuck in my mind ever since as an example of what might be called unfriendly opacity. (On at least one occasion it was a great hit read aloud in tipsy company.) I like legitimate difficulty in poetry and prose. This passage though seems meant to produce an academic version of shock and awe. A master is speaking. And he need not offer a single example.

There are parts of academic life I will never miss.

[My Mac’s Dictation did a fine job with this passage: “a concluding truck for belated pubs.” Regarding difficulty: say, John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.”]

Atticus Finch’s permanent record

“An explosive plot twist that no one saw coming”: that’s how a New York Times article describes Atticus Finch’s changed character in Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman. (Briefly: he’s an out-and-out racist.) Certainly those responsible for the publication of this work have long known that its older Atticus Finch is not the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. That the news has come out just days before the novel’s publication date (July 14) seems to me the result of careful, cynical calculation: the timing is right to produce maximum buzz with minimal damage to sales (the early orders are in).

Bewilderment about how the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird could espouse the beliefs he holds in Go Set a Watchman bespeaks a failure to distinguish between fictional characters and human beings. “Atticus Finch” isn’t a human being, a moral agent, who devolved over time — which in itself would require time travel, as Go Set a Watchman is the earlier work. “Atticus Finch” is the name of a character in two works of fiction. That the two works are wildly discrepant in their presentation of this character is a matter of a writer’s changing conception. “It’s sad to think that Atticus’s character is going to be tarnished,” says a teacher, as if the ugliness of Go Set a Watchman is going on Atticus Finch’s permanent record. (There is no human being for whom to make a permanent record.) Go Set a Watchman will require us to distinguish between what “our own desires” have made of Atticus Finch and “the literary truth,” says an academic, as if the Atticus Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird was really the old racist all along. Confusion upon confusion.

For me, the most exciting news about Go Set a Watchman is that the book is arriving in mid-July, which leaves open (at least in my mind) the possibility that a J. D. Salinger book will be arrive later this year. I don’t think it’s too cynical to imagine that publishers get together on the timing of these things.

[The tea cakes and lemonade affair is going to be pretty awkward, I suspect.]

A Mark Trail retort

[Mark Trail, July 11, 2015.]

Mark needs a boat. His editor Bill Ellis points out that the last one the magazine paid for got blown to bits. Mark’s reply offers a joyous philosophy of life: “Ha! . . . That wasn’t exactly my fault!” I’m not sure about the ellipsis though. How long to pause? Must practice.

Related reading
All OCA Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)