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Saturday, June 14th, 2008
I am being continually surprised, as I read Nixonland, at the extent of the racial violence that occurred in America in the early to mid-60's -- and secondarily surprised at myself for being surprised. I am more ignorant of my country's history than I like to think of myself as being. Take for instance the Watts riots -- I have of course heard of these before and had a notion of their importance; but somehow I had assumed they were a concrete event that took place over a week or something at a particular time and place. Come to find out instead that for a period of at least a few years, a large area of Los Angeles was borrderline anarchic and prone to break out in mass violence. Similarly I had no idea of the frequency with which white mobs assembled in Chicago, and for how long that went on. Thanks for schooling me, Mr. Perlstein.
 (And thanks, Edge of the American West bloggers, for giving me inspiration to do some history reading -- I'm finding your this day in history posts fascinating.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
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 So it was, to be clear up front, not a great movie, certainly not in a class with Herzog's great works. It had a lot of visual beauty, and occasional arresting moments of clarity; but it felt to me like Herzog stumbled aimlessly into these moments, like his heart was not in this movie. Still I would recommend the movie, just for the visuals, and the cute fluffy seals. (The portions of the soundtrack which were recordings of seal grunts were fantastically good; the music portions were hit or miss.)
posted morning of June 14th, 2008: Respond
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Friday, June 13th, 2008
Friday the 13th falls on a Friday this month! Best bet's probably to stay indoors, under the covers.
posted morning of June 13th, 2008: Respond
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Tuesday, June 10th, 2008
One of the first things I thought of in response to Dave's post about authoritarian "followers", was Michael Verhöven's 1991 movie, The Nasty Girl. Reacquainted myself with it through the providence of Wikipædia; I had forgotten it was based on a true story. The woman whose experience was the basis for the movie wrote (in 1985) a book about her town's history, Widerstand und Erfolgung Am Beispiel Passaus 1933-1939, which I am a little shocked to see has never been printed in English (that I can find).
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: 2 responses
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Remember what I said a couple of weeks ago about it not really being that hot? That is no longer operative; it's really brutal, and has been for a couple of days now. But! Supposed to break tonight! And sure enough the rain is pouring down. Hopefully the latter half of this week will be a little more acceptable.
 ...And yes, it's much more bearable now temperature-wise. Still humid though. We had a really massive storm last night that brought down trees on people's cars and houses in the area -- our immediate neighborhood seems to have been pretty well spared.
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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The high walls that enclose the cold mosque courtyard are made from massive stones that are blackened with age but undiminished; the icy funeral stone chills a person just to look at it... It is as if this courtyard -- these colossal stones, these giant walls -- existed for no other purpose than to make a person feel helpless and bereft.-- Fethiye Çetin, My Grandmother
I had been wondering, since I first read about this book, what the form of the memoir would be. It appears it will be shifting back and forth between Çetin's adult life and her childhood, and her grandmother's childhood -- this works very well, at least the amount of it I've read thus far.
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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Today I (whose reading material is almost entirely novels) bought two works of non-fiction to occupy myself with in the coming weeks. The first, which I'm reading this evening, is Fethiye Çetin's My Grandmother: A Memoir; when I finish this I will embark on Rick Perlstein's considerably more voluminous Nixonland. I was attracted to Çetin's memoir (besides by the Maureen Freely association) because I want to learn more about the genocide in Armenia. I have always had a vague notion of it as a historical event but no real sense of how it had happened or what its repercussions had been. It seems to me (though this could just be because I have been paying more attention to Turkey since I got interested in Pamuk) like it is getting more discussion in recent years than it did, say, ten years ago -- Freely's introduction* seems to bear that out. Freely gives a very concise history of the events in Armenia (which to my surprise, does not refer in this context to the small former SSR by that name, but to a large portion of the modern country of Turkey.) She also speaks briefly about how Çetin came to write this memoir, and about contemporary clashes between Turkish nationalists and people who have attempted to air the story of these events. She does not mention whether Çetin herself has been a target; I hope she has not. The only historical events I have much of a handle on that seem analogous to the genocide in Armenia, are the genocides committed against the native peoples of America. I wonder if that is a productive avenue of thinking -- maybe I will float it by the Edge of the West folks.
 *Something I am curious about -- Freely mentions the author several times in the introduction, and always by her full name, never an honorific plus last name, or last name alone. This sounds kind of awkward to my ears and I'm wondering if it's something to do with Turkish custom. Anybody know?
posted evening of June 10th, 2008: Respond
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Monday, June 9th, 2008
So I might well be heading in to the city Friday night, to see Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, at the Flim Forum. If you'd be interested to see it then, drop me a line.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Werner Herzog
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So I left work early today, to watch Sylvia auditioning for next year's Overture Strings, and to file away the folders of music I've had in the back of my car since YOEC's spring concert a few weeks ago. Arrived at South Orange Middle School, only to find the school and the rest of town dark -- a fire at a transformer station in West Orange shut down several towns around here. Well Ellen, Sylvia and I escaped the heat by driving over to Springfield, which still had power and by lucky coincidence, has the only public library around here that's open well into the evening. We chilled out, I read the first chapter of Nixonland and confirmed that I want to read the rest of it. Got back home just as the power came on. So the site was down for a while this afternoon but it looks like no data was lost. And here we are.
posted evening of June 9th, 2008: Respond
➳ More posts about Youth Orchestras of Essex County
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Saturday, June 7th, 2008
A beautiful but flawed movie, I think -- the flaw is in the plot, which is not interesting enough to keep me in my seat for 2½ hours. The beauty is (of course) to be found in the dancing, but this brings up a question for me: why is the main ballet sequence shot with special effects that could not happen on stage? Filming stage presentations seems to me like a great idea; I really like e.g. what Bergman did with it in The Magic Flute. When Craster is conducting the overture and the camera is showing the confusion backstage, that was what I thought was going to happen -- self-aware cinematography of the company's presentation of The Red Shoes. Instead I got a fantasia of what the ballet might look like in a movie, and I'm not sure what to do with it. Is this a depiction of what is going on in the dancers' heads? In the audience's head? In the director's head? It's definitely not what's going on on stage and I think that takes away from the movie.
posted evening of June 7th, 2008: Respond
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