Pathetic Lafayette Square photo op

Trump desecrates St. John's Church

We're reeling from a pandemic and a boiling over of racial injustice, but this malignant narcissist has to make it all about him. He tear-gassed peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square so he could stage a pathetic photo op at historic St. John's Church. What a national disgrace. Or as George Will so eloquently describes him, "this weak person’s idea of a strong person, this chest-pounding advertisement of his own gnawing insecurities, this low-rent Lear raging on his Twitter-heath has proven that the phrase malignant buffoon is not an oxymoron."

(Just to be clear: the Bible passage in the photo is my embellishment, and part of my commentary. It was hard to resist, as it was probably the most Photoshop-begging photo since the Queen wore that green dress.)

Rodney King to George Floyd - How do we turn the page?

I was only three and so don’t remember the 1965 Watts riots, but I certainly remember the 1992 Rodney King riots that erupted after an appallingly unjust verdict that flew in the face of what we had all seen on videotape. And probably a few years before that, young attorney Jonathan Rollins (Blair Underwood) on the TV show L.A. Law made mainstream America aware not only of racial profiling but the daily indignities like being questioned by police for “jogging while Black”. That was thirty years ago. I feel shame and despair for my country that so little has changed after so much time. I had hoped that with a new generation things would be better, but here we are a generation later and the same travesties are still going on. George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are only the latest fatalities. The ghosts of Freddie Gray, Philando Castile, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, and too many more in a long chain of injustices going back to Rodney King cry out for justice denied. Those in older generations will remember names that go back long before that. It seems that nothing has changed, except that now more of it is caught on film. How do we turn the page?

FILM: José

During this time of closed movie theaters, some art houses like Laemmle and festivals like Outfest are brokering deals with distibutors for streaming releases, where the films that we might have been watching on the big screen now can be streamed for a rental fee, which helps support them. Thus, through Outfest, we came across the film José. Whether you enjoyed the film Roma would be a good barometer of whether you might enjoy José. If you crave plot, character, and conflict in a film, then this is not for you. On the other hand, if you can be engaged with a slice of life in a foreign setting, then you may enjoy it. José, the title character, is a young man, the youngest of his siblings and the last one living with his mother in Guatemala City. They scrape by, she by hocking sandwiches at makeshift street stalls when she doesn’t get chased away by the police, and he by standing in the street and trying to steer traffic toward a café. José is gay, and he also sneaks off for hook-ups he finds on Grindr (or whatever the Guatemalan equivalent mobile phone app is). At one point he meets Luis, a construction worker from a smaller village, and the possibility of real romance begins to present itself, at least until Luis’s city job ends and he wants José to come back with him to his home village. While we can infer the underlying emotional conflict, little of it is articulated in the sparse dialog. But from the fly-on-the-wall glimpses of their lives, we can see how hard life is, how much his mother cares for and is dependent on him, and the constrained options open to him. Alas, like a typical young man, he expresses almost nothing of what weighs on his mind. We see the outside, a rich verismo depiction of this life, but are left to imagine the inside.

Longest April Ever

It started off innocuously enough on the first Sunday in April when George started a little dry cough. He felt fine otherwise and didn’t think it was anything, but I didn’t like the sound of it. It was dry but deep, and not quite like any cough I’d heard before. George had also been informed on Friday that he’d been exposed at work, several of his patients had turned out to test positive for COVID. On Monday morning when we awoke, George was feeling a little off. He had no fever (yet) and was just feeling kind of meh. Fortunately it was raining hard, which made it easy for him to decide to stay home. Fearing what this might turn out to be, I decided I should stay home too. Good call. As that day wore on, George’s temperature climbed 2 degrees and would remain there the next two days, despite Tylenol. He experienced some chills and aches, but fortunately maintained a normal appetite and felt well enough to get out of bed and come downstairs most of the day.

Drive-thru COVID test site

Fortunately, LA County was (and continues to be) very proactive in making testing available, and on Tuesday, we were able to get a Wednesday morning appointment for a free COVID test at a drive-thru location very near our house. At the testing site, we waited a little over a half hour in a line of cars. The test itself was quick and easy, self-administered by swabbing his cheeks and roof of mouth. But then the long wait for results, which wouldn’t come until the weekend. Before we got George’s lab test results, we got a different sort of confirmation.

To that point, I had been feeling fine, but Wednesday night, I spiked a fever 5 degrees over normal. Tylenol brought it down a little, but I remained 3-5 degrees over normal the next 36 hours, with achy joints, angry sinuses, and bouts of shivering chills. A couple of nights the fever got high enough that my body went into preservation mode, circulation restricted to head and torso while I could feel my arms and legs going numb. That was frankly a bit terrifying. I’d only felt something similar to that creeping numbness once before, and that was when I had a heart attack. But I got through those two nights, and by Friday my temp was back down closer to normal. I remember waking up Friday morning thinking “It’s light out. I’m breathing. Can I breathe deeply? Yes. Shivering or sweating? No. Still feel hands and feet? Yes,” and saying a little prayer of gratitude. Just seeing another day break and taking another breath were suddenly things we no longer took for granted.

That first week we thought about breathing a lot. We knew this thing attacked the lungs. Avoid sleeping on your back, we heard. Practice breathing deeply, a doctor on YouTube advised, with an exercise of breathing in 5 beats, holding 5 beats, and exhaling 5 beats that I took up like religious devotion. We both felt an uneasy heaviness in our chests, and on Thursday George felt a strange tightness too, almost like he’d pulled a muscle in his chest. We both were still capable of deep breath, but we stopped taking it for granted and wondered if it might suddenly stop. George also lost his sense of taste and smell, which we’d been hearing was also associated with COVID. Though we were still awaiting test results (I’d done a similar drive-thru at the Rose Bowl a couple days after my symptoms began), at this point we pretty much knew what the tests would tell us. When we each got our positive results four or five days after our tests, it only confirmed what we already knew.

The next week we had fluctuating mild fevers and slept more than usual, but ate normally, and were up and about the house during the day. The positive test results came with some information that reassured us that 80% of people recover from COVID at home, so we took some hope in that. At the same time, I was reading every bit of info I could find about this novel virus, and was seeing too many stories of people who had only mild symptoms for the first week or more, only to experience sudden and sharp downturns. So there was the quiet terror of so much being unknown about this disease that took away the comfort of our actually relatively mild experience. As with all new pandemics, there is a desperation in the beginning to find something, anything, that works, and a lot of fleeting hopes and constantly changing information. Everybody in New York is taking this anti-malaria drug, and it seems to be working! Oh wait, no, maybe the side effects are worse and the “cure” was an anecdotal mirage. Take Advil to control your fever! Oh wait, now the French are reporting that Advil may have adverse effects with COVID, avoid the Advil, take Tylenol instead! It’s dizzying, dismaying, and desperate. It’s easy to see why people jump on rumors and hopeful but unreliable promises. We didn’t jump on anything exotic, but we did go for things like Tylenol, Mucinex, extra Vitamin C, and tonic water which were clearly safe even if questionably effective. We also heard that viral load was a concern, and that even though we were both already sick, it was possible we could make each other worse. So I decamped to the guest room and we spent our isolation in separate bedrooms and bathrooms. (Among the small terrors: we only had one working thermometer which was both essential and a path for increasing viral load being shared. We ended up keeping a small vial of alcohol next to the thermometer so it could be immersed before and after every use.)

Isolation was its own challenge. Prior to being sick, we had been staying “safer at home” like everyone else, but now we were strictly isolating. It may sound like a subtle difference, but it’s not. It’s the difference between being independent and being dependent. Previously, we’d been able to go to the store or go to restaurants to pick up food. Now we were at the mercy of others to bring us anything we needed. We’re so conditioned to be independent, to be reluctant to ask for help, even from close friends. But isolation gives you no choice, and we had to overcome that reluctance and ask for help. It turns out that during a pandemic, there are some things that even Amazon Prime can’t get for you when you need it. But good friends will go to three stores just to find the last bottles of Mucinex on the shelves, or offer to airlift us Tylenol from a secret stash in New Jersey, or send us a crate of Gatorade from Sacramento, or pick us up a farm box and bring it to our porch. We are very grateful to be blessed with such good friends who were more than happy to do all these things for us.

The third week was mostly a blur. COVID, at least as we experienced it, doesn’t give you any clean fever break moment where you know you’re better. It’s just a long slow slog. Temperatures still oscillated, though in a milder range, and we were able to do some light activity. We took a few light neighborhood walks, though we’d tire before going as far as we normally would. I did some light yoga. George did some light yardwork. I wish I could say I watched the AFI top 100 films, learned to bake bread, and learned to speak Chinese, but none of that happened. We watched very little on screens. Rather, we found a Zen-like appreciation of just watching the birds, bees, and butterflies in our backyard. A couple days I sat so still for so long on our stone bench that the birds stopped worrying about me and took baths in the fountain just a couple feet away from me.

The fourth week we were feeling 90% better, and had this been a normal flu bug, we’d have been back at work in “fake it till you make it” mode. But now we had another concern. How do we know when it’s safe to go back to work? How do we know we’re no longer contagious? We were both still coughing occasionally, and clearing our throats often. And George still had no taste or smell. The CDC guidelines were ambiguous about ending isolation. They said “three days without a fever, and other symptoms have improved.” But what does “improved” mean? Completely gone, or just getting better? Neither of our employers offered any clarity either. Come back when you feel better was basically what they said. Just for our own peace of mind, we ended up getting tested again. And once again, shout out to LA County making testing easy and available. Just wish it didn’t take 4-5 days to get results. We both came back negative, which made us feel more confident to stop isolating.

Now, after four weeks of isolation and two weeks back at work, we’ve never felt a “pop the champagne, we made it!” moment. George’s taste and smell is even now only slightly recovered. And he still feels a tightness in his chest sometimes. There’s still such a swirl of uncertainty shadowing us. Are there any hidden lasting effects? We’ve read some stories of permanent degradation of lungs. Do we have any immunity, or can we get it again? One study found 30% of people showed little to no antibodies even after recovering from COVID. And even if we have antibodies, no one knows if they are actually protective, or if so, for how long. Studies of other viruses in the coronavirus family are not promising for lasting immunity. And now we’re reading some stories of people who recovered and then relapsed. None of this is encouraging for us, especially for George, who is now handling many COVID patients each day at work. Fortunately, he suits up more heavily in more PPE than they were using before he got sick, although it’s hot and uncomfortable to work in all that gear. I can’t greet him with a hug when he walks in the door after work; he insists on changing out of his work clothes and washing up first. But despite this cloud over us, we have so much to be grateful for: for being in the 80% who just ride this out at home; for having a beautiful home and yard to isolate in; for having an abundance of people who love us and were very much there for us when we needed them; for having good jobs and good insurance and not having to worry about that while worrying about our health; for having each other; for taking another breath and living another day. None of these do we take for granted now.

BOOKS: On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“Ma,” writes Ocean Vuong to his mother, “You once told me that memory is a choice. But if you were god, you'd know it's a flood.” His memoir, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, is a delicious flood, a cascade of memories told in an impressionist style in vivid prose that approaches poetry. He is a young boy at the beginning and a young man by the end, but the path between is no straight line. It is a series of experiences, impressions, recounts of stories handed down from mother and grandmother, not chronological but emotionally true, presented in the form of letters to his mother. His words and phrases are like brushstrokes in an impressionist painting, splashes of color up close that converge on images as you step back to regard them in perspective. His grandmother fled Vietnam after the war in search of the soldier who fathered his mother; his mother fled an abusive marriage. Their experiences are absorbed into him through their tales and their scars: a revving car engine can conjure helicopters, and his father’s violence against his mother flashes in his mind in an unexpected way as he has his first sexual experiences. Immigrant life, coming of age, and coming out are all well-trod themes, but his voice is so fresh and his memoir so beautifully expressed.

FILM: Emma

When we first meet the “handsome, clever, and rich” Miss Emma Woodhouse, she is inspecting flowers in a greenhouse, discriminatingly pointing out the perfect blooms to be cut for a bouquet. “No, not that one,” she tells a trailing servant with the shears, “the one beside it.” Emma is an exquisite flower herself, perfectly composed, her hair perfectly curled, and perfectly confident that she can match people as easily as she selects flowers. Alas, the fact that everyone in this corner of Georgian English countryside looks up to her causes her to overestimate her own talents, causing some consternation and complication along the way to marrying everyone off Jane Austen style in this delightful comedy of manners. Emma is brought to life by Anya Taylor-Joy, giving her the confidence and cleverness of Lady Mary Crawley but tempered with the humanity of Lady Sybil (as well as her well-meaning meddlesomeness). I have to confess never having read the Austen novel, nor seen any other adaptation (not even Clueless), so I came to this fresh and didn’t really know how the romantic convolutions would end up. In the end, I didn’t do a much better job than Emma of sizing up the characters, though in fairness, I think the screenplay by Eleanor Catton and director Autumn de Wilde does a clever job of making us see the world as Emma does. The characters are all charming including Johnny Flynn as the dashing Mr. Knightley, Bill Nighy as Emma’s kind but perpetually chilly father, and the suddenly ubiquitous Josh O’Connor as the vicar. The countryside is sunny and beautiful. The music is a very effective mix of classical (Mozart, Haydn) with traditional English folk music. And who knew a minuet could be so steamy? It’s a very enjoyable romp.

Sichuan Impression, Grom, and Rodin

For my off-Friday adventure today, I wanted to check out a Rodin exhibit at the Pepperdine University Weisman Art Museum. But first, I thought I should go to a Chinese restaurant, since I’d heard people were avoiding them out of fear of the coronavirus. Indeed, I went to the usually bustling Sichuan Impression in West LA and found it was nearly empty at noon. I was happy to support them, ordering a heaping plate of “hong-xing” diced rabbit with peanuts, scallions, and sesame, all doused in chili oil, along with an appetizer of “impressive dumplings”. From there, I headed to PCH and up the coast to Malibu, where I stopped at Grom for gelato – espresso and mint chocolate chip. It was a beautiful day, a bit cloudy over the ocean, but when I turned onto Malibu Canyon Road, the light on the hillside, with its outcrops of sandstone and stands of eucalyptus, was just stunning. The exhibit – Rodin and Women: Muses, Sirens, and Lovers – was fascinating. With the emphasis on Rodin’s women, there were no Burghers, no Shades, no Balzac, and no Thinker. But there were some much loved familiar figures, including Eve, the Paolo and Francesca variations, and The Kiss. But there were also works I had never seen before. The Benedictions, a pair of winged spirits descending from Heaven, was meant to be a topper for a World’s Fair Monument to Labor that was never built. A Fallen Caryatid labors under the weight she bears. Several busts of women who were his models and muses exemplify that expressive motion that Rodin uniquely captured – these bronze faces look like they are about to turn, about to speak. I learned that Rodin eschewed professional models who struck formal poses; he preferred untrained models, and he directed them not to hold still but to continually move around so he could study their motion. It’s no wonder that so many of his sculptures capture figures in mid-movement so naturally that our minds can’t help but “see” the movement.

FILM: Portrait of a Lady on Fire

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a lustrously gorgeous period tale of passion between a painter and her elusive subject, the daughter of a countess on a remote island in Brittany. Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) refuses to sit for a portrait, hoping to forestall the inevitable arranged marriage it will lead to. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter summoned to pretend to be a walking companion for Héloïse, so she can study her and paint her furtively. The dialog is incisive but spare, and much is communicated with looks instead of words, which seems appropriate since one of the themes is how to capture someone in paint. While 8k film is not paint, it’s close, and director Céline Sciamma and cinematographer Claire Mathon use it exquisitely to capture the extraordinary actresses in an atmospheric and almost painterly way. It seems that what parts of the film were not filmed by candlelight were filmed at that golden hour before sunset when sunlight creates a magical glow on skin. The broody skies and dramatic island cliffs above tempestuous seas adeptly underscore the suspicion that turns to passion between these women who themselves could have stepped out of a Vermeer or Rembrandt painting. The myth of Orpheus and Eurydice is an intriguing motif through the film – why did he look back? Did he make a poetic choice of memory over life? Did she ask him to turn around? And underlying that is the whole question of choice. The aristocratic daughter resents the lack of choice she has about the course of her life, while the painter seems in some ways to have more freedom, and even the servant girl has some choice about an unwanted pregnancy. (If Vermeer had ever painted a “maker of angels”, it would have looked like the stunning scene in this film.) But the most remarkable through line is the gaze between painter and model, between lover and lover. The gaze is so distinctively female in this work of art written and directed by a woman, and realized by a predominantly female cast and crew. When Héloïse asks Marianne to paint her a self-portrait to remember her by, the scene is itself an unforgettable portrait.

STAGE: What the Constitution Means to Me

Our Constitution, written over 200 years ago, is the most long-lived written constitution in history, and remains perhaps one of the few things nearly all Americans can agree on revering, even as we disagree sometimes vehemently on the specifics of its interpretation. That reverence and that tension are at the heart of the show What the Constitution Means to Me, an autobiographical memoir by Heidi Schreck, who recreates her experience as 15-year old girl delivering competitive speeches on the Constitution at VFW halls for scholarship prizes, then breaks into her present-day 45-year old self to make some more mature reflections on our founding document. Schreck performed her own play for a highly-regarded run in New York, while actress Maria Dizzia has very capably stepped into the role of “Heidi Schreck” for the touring production that we saw at the Mark Taper. In the first part, 15-year old Heidi breathlessly and enthusiastically expounds on her favorite amendments, the Ninth and the Fourteenth (admittedly some of my favorites too), and makes a personal connection (as was required by the contest rules) to her great-grandmother, a German immigrant mail-order bride. There is little to none of a “fourth wall” in this play. Heidi begins by addressing the audience, Shakespeare prologue style, asking us to engage in the re-enactment by pretending to be elderly men in a late 1980s VFW hall. While being “15-year old Heidi”, she occasionally pops out of character for a bit of commentary. This happens more and more, until at some point she drops the 15-year old altogether, and just talks to us directly as herself with 30 years more life experience. (There is some amusing playfulness with theatrical conventions around these transitions, like pointing out that she forgot to include a door in her recreation of the VFW stage, and poking fun at a secondary character who is stranded on the doorless stage when she decides, seemingly impromptu, to drop the fourth wall.) Here is where it gets more interesting as idealization of the Constitution gives way to a more mature realization of its imperfections and limitations as she confronts her own reproductive decisions, as she learns some shocking history of abuse endured by her mother, aunt, and grandmother, and as she rethinks what may really have befallen her immigrant great-grandmother who died at 36 of “melancholia”. The mature Heidi comes to question how well a 232-year old document can give women and other unprotected groups their due when the document doesn’t even mention them, and didn’t even originally envision them as included as citizens nor even as “the people”. At this point, the only logical next step is to stage a debate on the proposition to keep the Constitution or to abolish it and start over. A precocious actual 14-year old girl then comes on stage to engage in a lively debate with Heidi for the final part of the show, but not before putting the audience into the right frame of mind by dividing us with a thought-provoking show of hands. The debate is rapid-fire and compelling, and the winner, as judged by a random audience member, could be different on any given night. It certainly leaves you with something to think about. My favorite quote: "Justice Scalia said that he couldn't tell you what the Ninth Amendment meant if his life depended on it. And I guess it didn't." (The line is an early comic toss-off but with more profound meaning in the larger context of the play.)

Oh, and I forgot to mention the bonus: everyone in the audience was given a pocket Constitution to keep!

FILM: The Two Popes

I’m arguably a bit of a Catholophile, following with more-than-due interest for an atheist in what Popes have to say about things, perhaps because of how historically consequential the Catholic church has been, and how much weight it puts on reason in moral argument. Thus I watched with great interest the film The Two Popes (for which actors Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce were both justifiably nominated for Oscars), an imaginative portrayal of conversations that could have happened between Pope Benedict XVI and then-Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio (now Pope Francis). The Catholic Church, like most denominations today, is torn between traditionalists who fear change and modernists who would embrace it, and accordingly most followers of the Popes are generally either Benedict fans or Francis fans. It is not hard to guess where the filmmakers’ sympathies lie. Nonetheless, what I found most remarkable about the film is how it humanized both men. Benedict was portrayed complexly, as “God’s Rottweiler” (an earned reputation) and a gruff loner, but also as a man of real faith and concern for the future of his church, and with a capacity for humility and humanity in his own way. I liked that that came through even in small details, like Benedict’s instinct to kneel for confession, or his concern for long-waiting tourists when his presence in the Sistine Chapel threatens to delay its scheduled opening time. Bergoglio’s admirable humility was shown generously, but then he was knocked off his pedestal with an unflinching reckoning with his complicity in Argentina’s Dirty War and its desaparecidos. It is fitting and moving that a central theme in this film is confession and forgiveness, between these two, but also in one of the most moving Eucharists you may ever see. When you cut through all the theology and the debates, forgiveness is the crux of it, as it should be. Confession, better mutual understanding, forgiveness, and ultimately the forging of an unlikely but genuine friendship. I thank the film for offering me a more charitable view of Benedict, for whom I’ll confess to having a hardness in my heart. Like the late Justice Scalia, Benedict is a master of impressive scholarly arguments, but with just a few flaws and blind spots that turn out to make all the difference. How many times I dissected his edicts, finding myself in agreement with 95% of his logic, but coming to the opposite conclusion. Hopkins’ performance as Benedict was extraordinary, capturing him in nuance and complexity, and Pryce was excellent in embodying the humble but self-assured cardinal. The film was beautifully made, exploiting the grandeur of the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo, as well as many authentic locations in Argentina. The Sistine Chapel (or at least an exquisite facsimile created in Cinecitta Studios in Rome) is featured prominently and to great effect, both in long shots and cuts to close-up details. The gravity of its ancient majesty serves as foil for Bergoglio’s very different style. In an early scene, when Benedict (then Cardinal Ratzinger) and Bergoglio are both in the washroom about to go into conclave, Ratzinger asks in Latin, “what is that hymn you’re whistling?”, and Bergoglio replies, also in Latin, “Regina Chorus… per Abba” (Dancing Queen). This introduces the other major theme that runs through the film, modernity vs tradition, and on this score the film is faithful to both though partial to one. Whether these events really happened is pure speculation and imagination, though the writers maintained a fidelity to the characters, and much of their substantive dialog with each other about the place for change in the church is drawn from actual speeches and quotes, elegantly encapsulated. “If God doesn’t stay in one place, if He is moving, how can we find him?” Benedict asks. The search for God, how to know when you hear His voice, how to recognize His signs, is another running theme, beautifully discussed by both. In the end, it is gently suggested that the voice of God might just be found in a smart watch that prompts old men, for the sake of their heart health, “Beep-beep, don’t stop now! Keep moving! Keep moving!”

BOOKS: Find Me

We listened to André Aciman’s novel Find Me on a long road trip this weekend. We had both loved the film Call Me By Your Name, and I then read Aciman’s novel on which the film was based. This new novel is a sequel to the first (and there’s also buzz about a film sequel). I came to it having read some reviews, which were pointedly divergent, with some who loved it and some who found it very disappointing. In the end, I may agree with both. In this latest work, three separate sections visit Elio’s father Samuel, then Elio, then Oliver, at consequential points in their lives many years after the summer of the first novel, and, as with the first novel, there’s a coda where Elio and Oliver meet again. Time and timing is a running theme throughout, with ruminations on past roads not taken, and with romance across large age differences explored, with their inevitable “if I had met you when…”. Aciman keenly observes how certain events mark us, such that we may come back to them repeatedly, and may even observe “vigils” of certain places that we physically revisit because of their deep association with important memories. At one point, a peripheral character, a retired professor who still helps
students edit their theses, goes into a long tangent on his current project, a thesis about time. It’s an excuse to tell a series of short ironic vignettes about people who should have connected and might have connected but for the cruel tricks of time. The professor tells us that the student is really on to something, but they can’t quite figure out how to put it all together and conclude it. In retrospect, I think Aciman’s novel was even more like that thesis than he intended. There are beguiling characters here that mostly ring true, as well as lovely settings and references to classical arts and music that will delight the academically inclined. But those codas. I think with both novels, I would have loved them more perfectly if I’d have stopped short and not read the epilogs. But they just go so much against my own character, and against how I wanted his characters to be. I’m not one to dwell on roads not taken and things I can’t change, but Aciman and his characters thrive on it, it’s what animates them. I can’t deny the beautiful wistfulness of their Proustian meditations, nor can I deny that such characters can be true to life. I have known people whose early romantic experiences carved such deep grooves in them that they never recover. It’s strange that these two endings, so different from each other, both leave me with a nagging dissatisfaction. I’ve sometimes mused that perhaps an older and happier Shakespeare wrote A Winter’s Tale as a way to revisit Othello with an alternate ending. Each is satisfying and dissatisfying on different levels. Perhaps it’s the same with an older Aciman as he revisits his characters later in their lives.

FILM: 2020 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

Yesterday we enjoyed our tradition of screening the Oscar-nominated short films, both the live action and animated categories, and this year proved an enjoyable batch of nominees in both categories. On the live action front, unlike some years that have been unbearably heavy, we had a nice mix of heavy and light, thoughtful and funny. Une Soeur (A Sister) (Belgium) found us holding our collective breath as an emergency dispatch operator tries to help a woman who is being abducted. Brotherhood (Tunisia) explores the tensions in a rural family when a son who went off to fight with ISIS returns home from Syria with a pregnant and heavily-veiled bride. While the traditional family way of life is unfamiliar to most of us, the emotional dynamics of fathers, sons, mothers, and brothers are universal, as is the despair of the father when he realizes the consequences of a choice has made, in a twist worthy of O Henry. The Neighbors’ Window (USA) is funny and ultimately poignant, as a young couple in Brooklyn struggling to raise two small children find distraction in watching neighbors across the way who never bother to cover their windows. It too has its own great twists, and ultimately leaves you thinking about the “windows” of our lives that we reveal to the outside world, and how different that view can be to the life inside. (This was probably our group’s favorite.) Saria (USA) dramatizes a ripped-from-the-news story about a mass break-out from a Guatemalan orphanage and its tragic aftermath. Another dimension is added to an already serious film when closing credits inform us that all the teen actors in this film were all actual residents from a Guatemalan orphanage (though not the same one). Finally Nefta Football Club (Tunisia) follow a series of funny turns to a hilarious denouement, all beginning with a donkey sent off into the desert by itself with a load of heroin and a pair of headphones playing Tunisian music.

In the animated category, we also had a variety of funny and moving films. Hair Love (USA) was a sweet tale of a father trying to learn how to tame his daughter’s mass of nappy hair, in lovely digital animation. The project started as a wildly successful Kickstarter. Dcera (Daughter) (Czech) was an obscure story of a father and daughter struggling to find connection, with dark mottled clay figures moving through a cramped and dark world. One of us loved it, but the rest of us were just puzzled. Mémorable (France) was a poignant and beautifully animated depiction of an elderly artist and his wife, with a subjective view of the artist increasingly becoming lost to dementia. The stop-motion animation was beautiful, multi-colored, and painterly. In Sister (China) (family was a big theme this year), the son in a family of stop-action felt figures talks about growing up with his little sister, ultimately making a pointed commentary on China’s one-child policy of population control that was in effect from 1979-2015. Kitbull was a sweet story from Pixar animation about a feral kitten who befriends an abused pit bull. As usual, because the animations are shorter, we got treated to three bonus “highly regarded” films beyond the five nominees. Henrietta Bulkowski tells the story of a young woman determined to overcome her severe hunched back and fly an airplane to see the world, with her stop-motion character moving awkwardly through a dystopian steampunk world until brighter colors break through in the end. The Bird and the Whale (Ireland) had just a few brushstrokes of a storyline, but lovely and at times luminous watercolor-painted animation. Hors Piste (France) gives us a digitally illustrated adventure of two intrepid ski patrollers rescuing a stranded skier, a rescue which goes hilariously awry. Nice to wrap up the double feature laughing out loud.

Abuse of Power: Not Alan Dershowitz' Finest Hour

Today the eminent Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz argued before the Senate that “abuse of power” could never be a legitimate ground for impeachment, and that the founders only intended impeachment for serious crimes or acts “akin to crimes”. I have a few questions for the professor. According to the Dershowitz theory, it would seem that none of the following would be impeachable conduct:

• a president who doesn’t perform any of his duties, but just sleeps in, plays video games, and watches TV all day long, and collects his $400K / year
• a president who shows up obviously intoxicated, stumbling and slurring his speech, at all of his meetings and public appearances
• a president who uses the White House as a set to make You Tube videos which he heavily monetizes
• a president who actively engages in real estate investments based on his inside information of where government projects will be located
• a president who directs the IRS to audit those who criticize him on Twitter and to not audit his supporters
• a president who wantonly Tweets photos of his Oval Office desk, exposing top secret documents including names of CIA agents, locations of all our missiles, and the nuclear codes
• a president who makes $$$$ doing commercial endorsements while in office (“In the White House, we only serve Pepsi”)
• a president who directs the firing of any federal employee he catches criticizing him on social media
• a president who creates heavy tariffs and grants exemptions only for businesses he deems “loyal” to him
• a president who makes it known he’ll pardon anyone who commits any federal crimes in the service of his personal interests
• a president who takes regular joyrides on aircraft carriers and F-15s, insisting on flying himself, and occasionally crashing them.

Does the professor really not think that the founders would have intended impeachment for such egregious situations? 

Let’s look at the text. The Constitution says that impeachment applies to “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors”. The record of the Constitutional Convention shows they all agreed just listing “bribery and treason” was insufficient. They considered adding “or maladministration” but revised that to “other high crimes and misdemeanors”. What does the professor suppose the founders had in mind by “misdemeanors”? Obviously we’re not talking about jaywalking here, but misdemeanor in the sense of bad behavior. True, that’s unspecific and there’s a danger there. But it’s far-fetched to assert that the same guys who spent so much time making clear that enumerations should not be misconstrued as limiting would write “and misdemeanors” and not mean anything by it. Or does the professor think “misdemeanors” is just another constitutional inkblot?

Let’s look at what the founders said. In records from the Constitutional Convention, Madison described impeachment as a mechanism to address “incapacity, negligence, or perfidy”. In Federalist No. 65, Hamilton characterizes an impeachable offense as “those offences which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.” I can’t see how these descriptions square at all with the way that Prof. Dershowitz would limit impeachment. The founders don’t even seem to be thinking about crime per se at all so much as bad behavior, the civil equivalent of the military’s “conduct unbecoming of an officer”.

Let’s look at what the founders did. Case in point: John Pickering, who has the dubious distinction of being the first person impeached and removed from office by the US Congress. While we tend to think of impeachment only for presidents, it applies to all federal officers. Pickering was a US District Court Judge appointed by George Washington. By 1800, he was starting to get a reputation for being inebriated on the bench and making rulings with questionable relationship to the law. In 1804, he was impeached on the charges of “drunkenness and unlawful rulings”. If Prof. Dershowitz is to be believed about the founders’ intention that impeachment be only for crimes, that seems difficult to reconcile with the fact that the Senate voted to remove Pickering for those charges, with the support of over 80% of the senators voting for removal. In looking at our history since the founding, there have been 20 impeachments, and “abuse of power” has been the most common charge.

With all due respect, I don’t think this was Dershowitz’s finest hour.

STAGE: The Last Ship

The musician Sting grew up in the shadows of the shipyards of Wallsend, near Newcastle in northeast England. His stage musical The Last Ship, now playing at the Ahmanson at the start of a national tour, draws on that heritage and experience in telling a multi-layered story of what happens to a small community whose livelihood and whole way of life is bound up with one industry, when that industry is in decline. There are some personal stories in here, about children who want to escape the town, and who chafe against stepping into their fathers’ boots and working in the shipyard like their fathers and grandfathers. And there is a romance suspended when one young man did escape. But the crux of this haunting work is about the shipyard workers and their families, and how they react when the last shipyard is closing down and the last nearly-completed ship is to be torn up for scrap rather than finished. There are some wonderful songs and strong performances in this evocative production, further bolstered by a marvelous set which, through clever use of lighting and projection, transforms from home to pub to shipyard to ship to a seawall where you can see and almost feel the spray of the waves crashing up on it. Though some complained that the show is long, we enjoyed it and found the music, story, and characters engaging. And though it’s set in a specific distant place and time (1980s England), I found it quite relevant and thought-provoking. On the surface, it is a simple union workers versus “the man” story with no pretense about where its sympathies lay. The good salt-of-the-earth union folks are distinct, fleshed-out characters that we get to know and like, while the owner/manager appears just enough to propel the plot, and the government is represented by “Baronet Tynedale”, a thinly veiled caricature of Margaret Thatcher. But the play is actually more thoughtful, giving some depth to the predicament. The workers understand their dilemma, acknowledging that they have only bad choices, and even understanding (while trying not to think about it) that the shipyard may actually come to an end. And while the baronet is cold and charmless, it’s hard to argue with the facts of economic reality that she delivers. There’s no buyer for the ship they’re building because it’s too expensive, and British shipbuilding is no longer competitive on the world market. It is no small irony that this last ship’s name is Utopia, as it is going nowhere. The climax of the show manages to be dramatically very satisfying, while also giving due to the unresolved socio-economic issues that linger. I was still thinking about them days later, even as some of the tunes still sang in my head.

Shirin Neshat at the Broad: I Will Greet The Sun Again

Shirin Neshat was born and raised in Iran, but came to the US in 1975 for college and eventually settled in New York. When she returned to Iran in 1990 to visit her family, she was shocked by the transformation of her country under the ideological rule of the ayatollahs, the changes in appearance, dress, and behavior from what she remembered. The experienced galvanized her to respond by producing a captivating array of photography and film commenting on distinctions of male and female, who can speak and who is silenced, modernity vs tradition. Three decades of her work are on display for a few more weeks at The Broad downtown, in an exhibit called Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again. Her series “Women of Allah” from the 1990s shows images of women in traditional garments, with lines from modernist Iranian women poets and writers superimposed on their skin. (Persian calligraphy on skin is a motif that runs through much of her life work, with the words offering ironic contrasts to the images.) In one image, hands held up in prayerful supplication face the muzzle of a gun coming out from under a black chador (full body cloak/veil). In another image, a mother fully hidden in black chador holds the hand of her young son who is naked and covered in expressive henna tattoos, a stark comment on the comparative freedoms of men vs women in Iran. These type of contrasts are drawn out in short film works where she uses two opposing screens to show contrasting images. In one work, drawing on the idea that women are forbidden from singing in public in Iran, we see on the left a man on stage singing expressively to an auditorium filled with an audience of only men, while on the right we see a fully veiled woman standing in front of a microphone in a completely empty auditorium. In a series called Soliloquy, Neshat explores her own ex-patriot sense of not feeling fully here or there in Iran or America, in images of a chador-clad woman standing in front of modernist American buildings. A photographic series called the Book of Kings features three walls of portraits divided into Patriots, Villains, and the Masses. The villains are bare-chested and tattooed with images from the Book of Kings, a famous 11th century epic poem of Persian dynastic struggles. The patriots have modernist Persian poetry boldly inscribed on their faces, while the masses have much smaller inscriptions of unidentified commentary. The masses face the villains on opposite walls and can be seen their reflections. Another powerful series of portraits from 2013, entitled “Our House Is On Fire”, was inspired by the Arab Spring uprisings. These affecting portraits are mostly of Egyptians whose children had been killed in the protests. Revolutionary poetry is inscribed on these faces in calligraphy so small that you have to get very close to even see that it is there, muting the voice of the revolution against the expressive power of these faces of the bereaved. (This reminded me of a similarly inspired collection of portraits by Colin Davidson we’d seen in Dublin, of bereaved parents who’d lost children to “The Troubles”.) These are just some of the highlights of this impressive exhibition. (See full album of my photos from this exhibition.)

Trump Tirade Against the Generals - How Is This Conservative?

‘You’re a bunch of dopes and babies’: Inside Trump’s stunning tirade against generals (Washington Post)

It’s hard to say what is most horrifying about this account of an early meeting when several of Trump’s former top advisors tried to keep him from going off the rails. The headline, highlighting Trump’s utter disrespect for basically the whole leadership of our nation’s military, is sad enough, but there are several things that should be more profoundly disturbing. First, there is Trump’s utter rejection of the premise that, as General Mattis phrased it, “the post-war international rules-based order is the greatest gift of the greatest generation.” This is not news. Trump has shown open contempt for NATO, and has managed to create real doubt about America’s commitment to allies so longstandingly staunch and solid that such doubt would have been completely unimaginable prior to 2017. What is shocking is that more Americans aren’t up in arms about this. The general peace, security, and prosperity that we have enjoyed for much of our lives is directly due to post-war institutions and alliances hard won through much blood and treasure by the greatest generation. Our grandparents are surely turning in their graves to see the damage done to their “greatest gift”. How anyone can approve of this wanton and callous erosion of institutions that have served us so well for three-quarters of a century and call themselves “conservative” is boggling. Conservatives are people who value proven institutions and who are suspicious of change. Trump foreign “policy” (if his erratic and unpredictable actions can even be dignified by that term) are not “conservative” in any normal meaning of the word, they are radical.

Second, this is an alarming example of Trump’s conviction that his gut instincts are always right, even in areas like foreign policy where he has no experience or understanding, and that none of the people who do have experience and expertise are to be trusted. He has been quoted as saying “it’s very easy, actually, to work with me. You know why it’s easy? Because I make all the decisions. They don’t have to work.” That may be one way to run a family business, but it’s no way to run a public enterprise of any scale, let alone a country. The Constitution itself provides for a cabinet of secretaries, and in the 20th century we have institutionalized a National Security Council, because no president could govern effectively without taking advice and counsel from those with expertise in specific areas. And it is an established best practice that the best leaders will create an environment where subordinates feel free to voice divergent opinions and question decisions, rather than “leading” in a completely top-down autocratic style. Trump obviously missed that day of school at Wharton. Needless to say, the erosion of trust in experience and expertise can hardly be said to be a conservative value either.

The third but possibly most alarming thing from this article was the quote from Bannon, whose attitude was presumably shared by Trump. In pushing back on why Mattis and Tillerson thought our longstanding alliances were so great, Bannon says, “All you guys talk about all these great things, they’re all our partners, I want you to name me now one country and one company that’s going to have his back.” I went cold when I read that: “his back.” Not “our back”, not “America’s back”, but “his back,” as if loyalty is owed by our allies to Trump personally. This administration seems to understand no distinction between the office of President and the man who temporarily holds the office, nor between the interests of Donald Trump and the interests of the American people, as if they were one and the same. That is how dictators talk. It is completely unfitting for a President of the United States.

FILM: A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood

In the film A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, we are shown the extraordinary nature of Mister Rogers through a perfect foil: a cynical, hard-boiled reporter from Esquire who is sent to profile him and whose iconoclastic instincts lead him to look for a dark underbelly or some hint of dirt. Instead, he learns that the earnestness of Fred Rogers is actually earnest, as Rogers befriends the reporter and helps him heal some long-broken-and-buried parts of his own life. Tom Hanks is uncanny in his portrayal of the TV icon, and director Marielle Heller keeps the film honest, avoiding the clear pitfalls of such material that could have easily careened into maudlin Hallmark territory. When the reporter, Lloyd Vogel, finally completes his assignment, his wife’s reaction on reading it is, “this is great, although it’s more about you than about him.” Which is certainly true, and this film is more about Lloyd Vogel’s journey (note that Tom Hanks is nominated for best supporting actor), perhaps the best way to understand Mr. Rogers is in his interaction with and impact on others. We get little glimpses into the life of Fred Rogers – his daily routines of swimming and praying and playing the piano. His wife Joanne assures Lloyd that he is not a saint, he has a temper at times, and he works very hard to be the person that he is. But aside from that, he remains an enigma even at the end of the film, and he is rather saint-like. One rather telling moment in one of their early interviews, Vogel asks Rogers to make a distinction between Fred Rogers the real person and “Mister Rogers” the character, and Rogers is genuinely baffled by the concept – he is truly just being himself. And Rogers is one of those rare people for whom the most important person in the world at any given moment is the person right in front of them in that moment, a focus that creates a compelling rapport. He’s also thoughtfully slow and comfortable with uncomfortable silences, a trait that draws people out. But most of all, he was supremely compassionate and empathetic. He may not have been a saint, but he’s about as close as they come.

BOOKS: The Water Dancer

Having read his brilliant Between The World And Me, I knew that Ta-Nehisi Coates was an extraordinary writer, and in The Water Dancer, he shows that he is equally adept with fiction as with essay and memoir. This tale centers on Hiram Walker, born a slave, whose mother was sold away when he was young and whose father was the master who sold her. A young Hiram dreams of earning his father’s respect and perhaps somehow supplanting his white but far less gifted half-brother, but when the Underground Railroad gets a hold of him, his life changes in ways he could not have imagined. Coates not only creates a compelling story with true-ringing characters, but the vivid description of their lives is permeated by a depth of research into antebellum Virginia society – how Virginia estates worked and how the Virginia plantation economy eroded as they overworked the soil, what people wore and what they ate, and even how they talked. The landowning whites were “the Quality” and the slaves were “the tasked”, with the “low whites” in a miserable in-between. But what really makes this book is Coates’ ability to imagine and portray the emotional truth of people in these barely imaginable situations – the mask that is trained into the Tasked to never display their true emotions to their masters, the willful blindness that the Quality must engage in order to be masters, and the emotional scars and buried feelings that allow mothers, fathers, and children to survive when families are viciously ripped apart. Amidst the horrendous cruelty and injustice, the story is lifted by a humanity that refuses to be extinguished, along with a touch of magical realism concerning the power of our deepest memories to transport us.

FILM: Bombshell

Bombshell is itself a bombshell, done in a brisk exposé style using newsy tropes like datelines, voiceovers, and occasional graphics to quicken the pulse of an already engaging multi-character story. Disenchanted Fox talk show host Gretchen Carlson drops the bomb when she sues Fox editor-in-chief Roger Ailes for sexual harassment, while Fox superstar Megyn Kelly has questions of her own as she heads up an internal investigation, and a young climber learns the price of getting ahead at the network. The film does a great job showing the great pressure on all of these women at different points in their careers to "play the game", the serious risks of calling out harassment, and why it is not a clear or easy decision to make. It also shows the pressures of a ratings-driven network, the strange symbiotic relationship that developed between Trump and Fox, and how the rise of Trump gave them a bit of whiplash with which not everyone at Fox was equally in tune. I appreciated the complexity of motivations written into the three protagonist characters, and further complexity underscored with an intriguing supporting character played by Kate McKinnon as a closeted lesbian working for Fox, a different example of the sacrifices and choices people make to get and keep a job. Strong performances all around, but especially awesome Charlize Theron as the steely Megyn Kelly and John Lithgow as the paranoid autocratic network head. I have to say that this film gave me a renewed appreciation of the importance of corporate culture, and companies like my employer who not only do all the training but are serious about wanting to provide space and means for people to speak out if they think something's wrong. Very different from Fox, at least as portrayed here, which demanded complete near cult-like loyalty to its leader. We can see in this film how that works out (just in case we weren't already noticing it in our real-life news).

FILM: Little Women

There is a particular challenge in making a new film of a story that is well-known, well-loved, and has been done before. Greta Gerwig completely rises to that challenge with her fresh take on Little Women that suits our times. At first, I was a little rattled by some of the differences from the 1994 Winona Ryder / Susan Sarandon / Christian Bale film that was my reference point, but by the end, I was completely won over. Instead of a straightforward chronological telling of the story as in the book and most other films, Gerwig chose to portray events out of time order in a way that intentionally takes the focus off of the original romantic angles. And I think in some ways, it was a nod to the fact of doing the umpteenth adaptation and self-consciously saying “look we all know the story, and – spoiler alert – I’m going to dispense early on with the fact that Jo rejects Laurie’s proposal, because that’s not my focus.” I remember in the 1994 film, I along with all the viewers was swept up in the Jo / Laurie romance, and it was such a dramatic surprise when she turns him down. Now, even 25 years later where hopefully most of us have more evolved feminist understandings, it takes Gerwig’s telling the story in a very different way to make me rethink the traditional version and realize how much that focus on romance makes even Little Women skirt close to failing the Bechdel test. Now, despite casting heartthrob Timothée Chalamet as Laurie, the film doesn’t make us fall in love with him as Jo (and we with her) did in 1994. Rather, we get to know him at his Paris worst and learn of Jo’s rejection before we come around to seeing why that may have been a hard choice. But this film isn’t about him, it’s about her, and not about whether and whom she marries, but whether she can realize her ambition to be a successful writer. The film is framed beginning and end with scenes of Jo meeting with her publisher for the first time and Jo watching her book roll off of the 19th century printing presses (a gorgeous scene). That and Gerwig’s absolutely brilliant winking touch to portray Jo’s ultimate marriage in the context of her publisher’s demand for a “storybook” ending. It’s a shame she was overlooked for an Oscar best director nomination, and I hope she wins for best adapted screenplay. This may be the first Little Women adaptation that really honors the women. In addition to engaging us with Jo as a would-be author, we’re also drawn to respect the other sisters for their choices. Amy is particularly strong in her cold-eyed (but not cold-hearted) appraisal of how marriage means different things to men than to women in her time, and in defending her choices. Saoirse Ronan as Jo and Florence Pugh as Amy are both deserving of their Oscar nominations (though the best actress competition is tough this year!). Now 1994 seems so dated, and this is my new definitive Little Women.