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.

FILM: Knives Out

Our Thanksgiving weekend movie was Knives Out. What a fun suspenseful whodunnit, contemporary but with the classic feel of an Agatha Christie mystery. It has all the elements: a big mansion with hidden elements and creaky stairs, the apparent suicide (or was it?) of an elderly multi-millionaire author (who made his fortune on – what else – murder mysteries), and a houseful of dysfunctional family members each with their own motive for wanting grandpa dead. Something is clearly afoot at Thrombey Manor, and only ace mystery solver Benoit Blanc (charmingly played by Daniel Craig sporting a genteel southern accent) can get to the bottom of it. Writer/director Rian Johnson skillfully spins out the mystery Rashomon style, as each family member is interrogated in turn, and we see each recollection of the events of the fateful night, colored by their biases and motives, then airbrushed and embellished as they tell it to the detectives. Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Chris Evans, Toni Collette, and several others provide the colorful characters on this Clue board. The deceased patriarch was portrayed by Christopher Plummer as such a chess-master that his stories must have been at least this good (and how much of this one last story did he himself orchestrate?). And then there’s Marta, the nurse-companion, an immigrant from some ambiguous Latin country with the inconvenient inability to lie without throwing up. Everyone seems to love her and consider her part of the family. At least until the knives come out. This mystery has donut holes inside donut holes, and you probably won’t figure it out before Benoit Blanc does, but looking back, you’ll see that all of the clues were there. Such good fun!

Also have to give a shout out / plug to Exceptional Minds Studio, a local non-profit professional training academy and studio for visual effects artists and animators with autism. Exceptional Minds did the closing titles for this film. They provide individuals on the autism spectrum with the technical and behavioral skills required for employment in the entertainment fields of animation and post production visual effects, with the goal of breaking the vicious stereotypes resulting in low expectations that burden those in our society with special needs. I have two cousins who have graduated from this exceptional academy, and we are regular supporters. (Thanks, no doubt, to Jamie Lee Curtis for the opportunity to work on this film. She is a notable supporter of Exceptional Minds.)

Remembering Unc

From my earliest memories and throughout my life, my Unc Hal was a presence in my life that embodied what family meant. If you asked me at any point in my life who my “close family” was, after my Mom, Dad, and brother, there was no question that it was Tante Elayne and Unc Harold, and their kids, my cousins Donna and Victor. My mother and her sister were not to be separated, so when my Mom got married and settled in Los Angeles, Tante and Unc uprooted their young family and moved from New York to be close to us. Thus, when I was growing up, they were just always part of our family life. Most days, we were over at their house or they were over at ours. I know I had other aunts and uncles and cousins in Indiana and New York and Washington, and we loved them too, but more abstractly. Tante and Unc and Donna and Victor were my familiar family, the ones I just took as a given that we saw all the time, so that when you say “uncle”, I can’t help but picture Unc Hal.

When they first moved to California, Unc drove a delivery truck for Frito Lay, and as a very little kid, I have memories of Unc’s truck parked in the driveway, and sometimes being allowed to go into the truck and pick out a bag of Fritos. (In those days, the delivery trucks were not huge, more like the size of neighborhood ice cream trucks.) Among the Dads in our family and the neighborhood, I think he was the most likely to get down in the grass and wrestle and tumble with us on the front lawn. He had a growly voice, but teddy bear growly, not scary growly. He was mostly soft spoken, although he was certainly capable of raising the volume when the discussion around the family dinner table got loud, and he and Tante had no trouble shouting to each other across supermarket aisles (“ELAYNE! DO WE NEED MORE COOKIES?”). (Unc did love his cookies, and there was always a well-stocked cookie jar at their house.) At some point in my childhood, Unc quit the FritoLay truck and started his own business washing windows for shops and restaurants, a job he would work until he retired. As a kid, I only understood that he had to get up crazy early in the morning because he had to drive to far-flung locations all over the city, and that his clients preferred their windows get washed before their open business hours. I also came to understand that some of the places he went were parts of town that the rest of us might be apprehensive to go to, but Unc was unassuming and approachable, the sort of guy who could talk to pretty much anybody. And he’d sometimes come back with funny stories. I remember one time, he asked us “Did you know that ‘bad’ can mean ‘good’?” Turns out he was washing windows at a furniture store, and while he was there, a couple of black women were there on the sidewalk looking in the windows and saying “Look at all that baaad furniture!” After they’d said this a couple of times, he got curious and asked them, “did your family have a bad experience buying furniture here?”, and they laughed and gave him a lesson in Inglewood street slang. His openness to talk to anyone extended even beyond borders and language barriers. When Tante and Unc traveled to Paris with my parents, at one point when they needed directions, Unc was the one who, despite any useful French, was willing to go up to someone and ask directions. He went to ask a nearby vendor whether they spoke English, but his attempt at “Anglais?” must have come out more like “une glace”. When he returned and the others asked what he had found out, he laughed and said “I still don’t know where we are, but I got this ice cream cone.”

Our family liked our routines and little traditions: Saturday night was always “restaurant night”, and we would always meet up with my aunt, uncle, and cousins at a neighborhood restaurant for a dinner out. Usually nothing fancy, except for birthday celebrations which were diligently observed. Sunday nights were “hamburger night” when I was young, and later evolved to “family dinner night” after the kids had all grown up and left home. Sunday nights alternated between my parents and Tante & Unc’s house, with whichever “children” were not out of town expected to show up. Conversations ranged from politics to family news/gossip to just the minutiae of our lives, as you do when you see someone so regularly. Unc and my Dad also shared an interest in business and investments, and would talk about that until Mom would scream “Are you two still talking about IRAs??”. (You can’t dispute that Unc must have saved and invested prudently, as he leveraged his modest window-washing business toward paying off a house in the suburbs, raising a family comfortably, and having enough retirement savings that his children never had to worry about paying for his care.) I’ve been grateful to have these family routines as steady markers throughout my life, something I could always count on even when other things changed. Except for the few years I lived on the east coast, and until he moved to Virginia just a year and a half ago, Unc has celebrated every one of my birthdays with me, and we’ve had a meal together probably three out of every four weekends my entire life. It’s only now looking back across all those years, realizing that our last birthday or family dinner together is passed, that I fully appreciate how remarkable that is.

When Tante passed three years ago, we kept up our Sunday nights, either bringing in take-out food to Unc’s or driving him over to my folks’ house. But after a while, he was becoming less capable and more depressed, so we convinced him to move to Virginia where he could be near his daughter Donna and her three grown children. Though we missed him in California, it was a great move because he got to see Donna and his grandchildren all the time, and he got to celebrate their family events together. He lived to see his granddaughter Brenna have a baby boy, and just days before he passed, he got to meet his newborn great-granddaughter. He saw his granddaughter Rachel regularly through her pregnancy, and was eager to meet the baby, excited to be a twice great-grandfather. It seemed he was hanging on just for that, before going to his rest after a good long life (just a couple months short of 90). Thanks, Unc Hal, for showing me what an uncle is, and for the gift of your faithful presence throughout my life.

STAGE: The New One

This evening we saw The New One at the Ahmanson Theatre. I hardly stopped laughing this entire show, so I need a moment to catch my breath. If you’re a fan of This American Life, you’ve probably heard Mike Birbiglia before. With his voice and his delivery, he could read a phone book and make it funny, so when he’s really got something to say, it’s hysterical. In this show, he relates his experience of reluctantly becoming a father. Those things that all new fathers probably think at one time or another but would never dare say out loud, he says out loud. And it’s so funny because it’s so true and ultimately so humane. Birbiglia is a stand-up comic by nature, and he turns the Ahmanson into a comedy club, deftly drawing in a few low-hanging audience members into his act. The stage and show are largely devoid of props and set, just a stool, except for one point where props come in to great effect. If you have kids, or if you know people who have kids, or if you’re dead set against ever being around kids, you’ll enjoy this show tremendously.

FOOD: Guerrilla Tacos

In the dynamic culinary explosion that is LA, some of the best food is served not on white table cloths but in places where you order at the register, take a number, and seat yourself. That’s how it is at Guerrilla Tacos in the DTLA Arts District. Chef Wes Avila’s food truck had been rated one of LA’s top restaurants, but he’s now parked the truck and set up a brick-and-mortar where you can enjoy his dazzlingly creative tacos along with micheladas or cocktails if you like. The pork terrine taco takes inspiration from Vietnamese banh mi sandwiches: pork paired with julienned carrots and jicama, cilantro and mint, fresno pepper, enriched with a schmear of chicken liver mousse. Just take away the French sandwich roll and serve it on top of a blue corn tortilla (fresh from nearby Kernel of Truth Organics tortilleria in Boyle Heights). Served with the tortilla folded over the meat, with the schmear on the outside and the veggies and herbs piled on top, that’s when I realized why I was given a fork and knife. My other two tacos came open-faced, also on those blue corn tortillas. The saag curry eggplant taco features fried eggplant chunks bathed in two sauces, a rich curry and a piquant mint chutney. The fire is strong, but balanced with sweet raisins and marcona almond bits. The famous sweet potato taco (others vary seasonally but this one has been a persistent signature) covers slices of roast sweet potato with an almond chile sauce, dollops of soft fresh feta, fresh scallions, and crumbles of fried corn. It’s all a creative feast of hot, sweet, fresh, rich, soft, crunch that makes this taco stand worthy of Michelin notice (now that those Michelin folks have crawled out from under their white table cloth and learned how to appreciate LA).

FILM: Harriet

I knew little about Harriet Tubman beyond the barest synopsis of her as a leading figure in the Underground Railroad, and was thrilled to expand my understanding of this inspirational woman’s story as told in the new biopic Harriet. (As is inevitable for any biopic, some characters and details have been invented for dramatic necessity, but the film is fairly historically grounded in the broader story.) I was on the edge of my seat through most of this film as this diminutive but determined woman not only made her own solo run to freedom (when nobody thought she could do it on her own), but then made repeated daring returns back into slave territory to help others escape. It’s one thing to read in school about the Underground Railroad, the network of just-minded people who offered temporary hiding places and onward guidance. It’s quite another to have it brought to life on the screen, with all the powers of film-making harnessed to make you experience the feeling of running through the woods at night with hounds in hot pursuit. A textbook just doesn’t quicken the pulse like a film can. But much more than just a sequence of harrowing escapes is the monument of this woman’s faith and determination. I learned that, like Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman experienced visions. Explained at least in part as seizure-like episodes resulting from a head trauma when she was young, she understood them as God showing her things, sometimes premonitions of immediate danger, sometimes prophesies of things to come later. In any case, they affirmed her faith that God was leading her, and gave her a fierce courage to do what she needed to do. This, together with her resolve to live free or die, leads her to the central purpose in her life, that she should return and help others rather than cling to safety in the North. When other leaders of the Underground try to dissuade her, telling her that an illiterate black woman would not be able to succeed, she thunders back like an Old Testament prophet, “Nobody thought I could escape on my own, but the Lord was with me. And here I am. So don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” The performance of this character by Cynthia Erivo is transcendent, inspiring awe that makes the film. She is steely fierce, but also has some very human moments. While Harriet Tubman is not an unsung hero, this film, surprisingly the first feature film to be made of her, shows me that she hasn’t been sung enough. Can’t wait for her to be on the $20 bill.

FILM: Parasite

The Korean film Parasite won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, and has been raved about by critics. It was definitely not what we expected, though I’m not sure what I did expect. It’s hard to even categorize. While it has a few moments of suspense and even horror, it’s not a horror suspense film. In fact most of it deals fairly lightly and deftly with some heavy social commentary about the widening chasm between rich and poor, and its thoroughly unexpected ending is a strangely beautiful alloy of hope (wistful? misplaced? persistent?) and irony. The most comparable films I can think of are last year’s Shoplifters (a beautiful Japanese film also about a sympathetic family near the bottom rung of society doing what they can to scrape by) and Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma. One could say that Parasite is like Roma, but with more plot and less brooding. (HG Wells’ The Time Machine also comes to mind, not for the science fiction but for the social critique.) In the opening scene, we meet the Kim family in their basement apartment with a transom window looking onto a gritty street, and the young adult son and daughter trying to maneuver their phones to just the right corner of the ceiling where they can get a bit of free wifi. Soon after, we meet the Park family, living in luxury behind a gate, in a house designed by a renowned architect with a light and spacious yard. When the Kims insinuate themselves into the lives of the Park family in various positions of service, it sets off a chain of very unexpected events that serve to illuminate the contrast in their social positions. These contrasts are beautifully underscored with cinematic artistry: the spaciousness and lightness of the Parks’ house emphasized with long / wide angles and tracking shots, while tight strained angles show the cramped and dingy nature of the Kims’ basement. Director Bong Joon-Ho created a very visual verticality to the social dynamic, most fulsomely brought out when some of the Kims make a dash in the rain from the Park house to their own home, and it’s all down, down, down. As their near their home, we get a high downward shot on their street, half obscured by a rat’s nest of exposed utility wires (probably half bootlegged), and the muddy rainwater gushing down the street toward their apartment, below grade at the bottom of the slope. The claustrophobia of their apartment is ratcheted way up when it is literally filling up with sewage overflow, and they struggle to grab a few key possessions before bailing out to a shelter. Meanwhile this same rainstorm that is catastrophic to the poorer part of town below is for the Parks just an inconvenience that has spoiled plans for a birthday camping trip. The Parks live their lives on a cloud of effortlessness. As mother Kim observes, their lives are full of creases and wrinkles, but when you have money like the Parks do, money is like an iron that smooths out all the creases. Mr. Park walks through his house and up his stairs, and the lights turn on as he approaches and off as he goes past. He doesn’t understand how this happens, and he doesn’t even really think about it. The Parks give no thought to a lot of things that have to happen to make their lives just work so smoothly. The structures that the great architect has designed into the foundation of their house are long forgotten and taken for granted. But like an iceberg, it’s the submerged part that you can’t see that proves the most dangerous. I came away from this film haunted by the allegory and the poetic imagery of social divides; George just said he’s going to have nightmares. While this isn’t exactly Roma, I think Roma is a good yardstick. If you’re the sort who loved Roma, then I think you’d appreciate this.

Evergreen Cemetery in East LA

The cemetery that I visited for Dia de los Muertos was an especially interesting cemetery. Evergreen Cemetery was established in 1877 and is one of LA’s oldest. Many LA scions and pioneers have prominent stones here, names you would recognize from streets and towns like Van Nuys, Lankershim, Bixby, and Hollenbeck. Joseph W. Robinson (department store founder) is here, as is George Ralphs (grocery store founder). But this cemetery represents LA in all its facets. It is notable for never having banned African-Americans from being buried here, unlike many other cemeteries of its time. I visited the grave of Biddy Mason, a remarkable woman I’ve written about before who began life as a slave and ended it as a wealthy philanthropist who co-founded the First AME Church in LA. And I visited James Banning, an aviation pioneer who was the first black pilot to fly coast-to-coast. Many Japanese are interred here, including the Garden of the Pines, a section for the Issei (first-generation immigrants), and an impressive monument to the Japanese heroes of the 442nd Regiment in World War II. Many Armenians are here, and from the dates on their stones, I could see that many were from their first generation of immigrants fleeing the WWI-era genocide in their homeland. Many generations of Mexican-American families are here. The only marginalized group were the Chinese-Americans, who were forced to use a corner of the “potter’s field”, a large area on the east end of the cemetery where indigent people were buried in mostly unmarked graves. They were allowed to build a small shrine in their corner of the potter’s field, which from 1888 is the oldest surviving structure of Chinese settlement in LA. In 2005, when the Metro Gold Line extension was being put through along 1st Street, the excavations uncovered skeletal remains of 174 people who forensic analysis determined were all Chinese. The remains were interred near the shrine, and a memorial was erected, with 174 stones containing messages in Chinese, English, and Spanish of remembrance and blessing. This whole sprawling cemetery is such a great capsule of our city’s demographic history. (See full album of photos.)

Dia de los Muertos, East LA

I spent much of today in a cemetery in Boyle Heights (an East LA neighborhood with a traditionally Mexican-American population) seeing how people there were marking Dia de los Muertos. While it was a large cemetery, the bright orange marigolds specific to the Mexican tradition, used in abundance, made it easy to spot the graves that had been decorated for the occasion. The bright orange flowers, both whole and strewn petals, were arranged to illuminate a path for the souls to make their way back to earth for one night. It is presumed that the souls would be thirsty from their journey, so bottles of water, or perhaps the deceased’s favorite beverage (beer, tequila) would be left on the grave. Candy was common as well, and at one grave, I even saw fries and chicken strips awaiting one returning soul. I saw a number of people in the graveyard visiting loved ones and decorating their graves. The mood is somehow both reflective and festive. I saw whole families with children, some setting up umbrellas and making a picnic of it, some blaring Nortense music from their car. There was an elderly couple visiting some graves, the man in a wheelchair and his wife reading inscriptions to him. (I helped them back to their car when I saw she was having trouble maneuvering his wheelchair through the uneven grass.) As I always do in graveyards, I get lost in reading the inscriptions on the stones, finding little pieces of stories. In this cemetery, many had died way too young, and some had married and parented quite young too. Others lived good long lives and were mourned by generations. I like the attitude of this holiday. It reminds us all that we are a thread in a larger tapestry, a thread with a beginning and an end, but which finds a larger meaning woven together with the threads that came before us, and that have touched us, and that we will touch.

In my Dia de los Muertos tour, I also made a couple of other stops. Self Help Graphics & Art is a community art center in Boyle Heights, and in October, it’s an ofrenda factory. You can find it easily by the murals covering the building on East 1st St. While most of their handiwork is now on display in Grand Park, there were a few community-themed ofrendas still here. One was an altar to those who had died suffering the stigma of mental illness. Another was an altar to children who had died trying to cross the border, with a “sea” of messages of encouragement written by local school children on construction paper fish. Yet another was a tribute to passed heroes, where people left photos and notes to those who had inspired them, some famous figures and some very personal. My other stop was La Monarca Bakery, a Boyle Heights tradition, where I sampled pan de muertos, a mildly sweet bun with hints of orange zest, with crossed bones on top. They had piled boxes of these, which many people will bring to the graveyard tonight and tomorrow, or just to other Dia de los Muertos celebrations. And they also had an ofrenda, remembering those passed in the La Monarca family. (And of course this altar had pan de muerto on it!)

(See full album of pictures from my Dia de los Muertos tour.)

BOOKS: Giovanni's Room

“People can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.”

In a train of thought that started with Zak Ové’s sculpture installation at LACMA, I recently got to thinking about James Baldwin, and how I’d never read him, and I really should. He’d been coming up over the past year, as we visited where he lived in St Paul de Vence, and I later saw the film adapted from his book If Beale Street Could Talk. Like his Civil Rights Era contemporary Bayard Rustin, Baldwin bore two crosses, being black and gay. Being such an outsider can certainly heighten one’s sense of social observation and personal introspection. Matching such a vantage point with his facility with language was bound to result in some great literature, and thus I picked up his novel Giovanni’s Room, arguably 35 years later than I ought to have.

“For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well—by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”

Even though the world has changed immensely since Baldwin wrote this in 1956, and even since 1982 when I started coming out, so much in this landmark novel reaches incisively across all those decades. While it is very much embedded in a specific, vividly described time and place – 1950s Paris and its under-the-radar gay scene – its emotional insight still resonates today. The protagonist is an American ex-pat on the verge of being engaged to a woman, when he meets and falls in love with a man, and ultimately has to make a choice with devastating consequences. Yet that synopsis, while accurate, is about as true as saying that Les Misérables is a jail-break story. With Baldwin, that plot is just the frame in which he paints a dead-on psychological portrait of subconsciously intentional self-unawareness and avoidance. He describes with such beautiful language that if you’re the sort to turn down the corner of a page when a passage really grabs you, you’ll have folded more than half the pages by the end. (I’ve pulled out just a couple of my favorite quotes here.) Giovanni, who knows exactly who he is and what he wants, is such a foil for David, even as his older acquaintance Jacques, whom David half-despises, tries to show him his possible future. In the final morning, David is left trying to study his reflection in the window as the daybreak makes his reflection fade, a haunting image that will stay with me a long time.

ART: Second Home Serpentine Pavilion at the La Brea Tar Pits

If you’ve driven down Wilshire in recent months, you may have noticed a colorful amorphous installation occupying a large lawn at the La Brea Tar Pits. It’s called the Second Home Serpentine Pavilion, and this piece of art/architecture beckons you to come inside, to follow its non-linear corridors while enjoying the colorful play of light. The structure uses the principles of a tent, with sheets of material stretched out between lightweight poles that define the form. That form is more like a hermit crab’s shell than a normal tent. The sheets are mostly translucent, some in iridescent silver, others bold primary colors. Occasionally, a “panel” is just open air cross-hatched by brightly colored streamers. The reflections, refractions, and stained glass-like illuminations compound the visual fiesta. If you ever wondered what the view of a birthday party might be like from inside one of the mylar balloons, this is it. Where did this come from? Apparently, the Serpentine Gallery in London’s Hyde Park has hosted an annual event where a creative architect is given the opportunity design and install some kind of pavilion to showcase their creativity in a summer-long installation. This was the 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, by the Madrid-based architects SelgasCano. Now it’s visiting LA through Nov 24.

STAGE: Skintight

We were very glad to have caught the last night of Joshua Harmon’s Skintight at the Geffen Playhouse. It was funny, clever, and leaves you with things to ponder that stay with you after you’ve stopped laughing. Of course it was a treat to see Idina Menzel, who has been with the show since even before the off-Broadway run. (At this point in her career, this is something she would only be doing for the love of it.) Skintight is a very modern family drama. Menzel plays Jodi, whose freshly ex-husband has just married the half-his-age aerobics instructor that he left Jodi for. The play opens with Jodi dropping in on her father, Elliot (Harry Groener), a long-widowed-and-now-gay billionaire fashion designer (a Calvin Klein or Tommy Hilfiger type), ostensibly to surprise him for his birthday, but really just looking for some support. Her studying-abroad son Ben (Eli Gelb), also gay, is coming in for the weekend as well. Elliot lives a very ordered life and doesn’t care for surprises, but Jodi’s about to get a surprise herself. Her father’s latest “partner” Trey (Will Brittain) is 20 years old, the same age as her son. That set-up is a rich vein to mine for both drama and laughs, and this play runs with both. Can one love beauty, or is that just lust? Are relationships all transactional at bottom? What do parents owe children, and what do children owe parents? These are just some of the questions that Harmon smuggles in with the comedy, along with a funny observation about the Ten Commandments, and why tens of thousands of Hungarians might have a Jewish name embossed on their skin. Skin turns out to be a running theme, appearing throughout the play figuratively, metaphorically, and literally: Skin as in the depth of beauty, skin as the beauty of youth and betrayer of age (botox notwithstanding), the skin that Trey unreservedly shows off. Skin as a symbol of kinship, the relationships you’re born with and cannot shed. It’s all there in two acts and a great ensemble performance.

ART: The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness (Zak Ové , 2016) at LACMA

British visual artist Zak Ové has created a small army of life-size black figures which have been touring around America before heading to their permanent home in a new sculpture park in Berkshire, England. Recently, the figures have invaded the Cantor Sculpture Garden at LACMA, to striking effect. The figures’ faces are African tribal masks, inscrutable and enigmatic. Their hands are raised at their sides, in a gesture of surrender, or perhaps “no offense”. Their abstract torsos have four large buttons suggesting a military jacket, but their abstract private bits are hanging out and their feet are bare. The form looks ancient but with subtle modern lines. The material is graphite, an intentional choice by the artist not to use traditional ebony, instead using a “future world black” material. And there’s something magic about the multiplicity. One of these figures would be interesting, but seeing forty of them in formation makes a substantial impression. The placement in the sculpture garden is brilliant. The figures are in an organized formation, in linear rows and columns, standing side by side, all facing the same direction, with a forward guard advancing out of the entry gate and a rear guard descending the stairs from the upper plaza. The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work. And yet this parade is not all standing cohesively together, rather they are all interleaved among the permanent residents of the garden – the Rodin sculptures and the palm trees. The comparison is really intriguing. The Rodin bronzes are also dark life-size figures, but where Ové’s figures are firmly vertical and stationary, Rodin’s figures twist and sweep with flowing movement. Where the Rodins are arranged “conversationally”, facing each other and facing the central walkway, the masked figures face forward, eyes forward, like soldiers at attention trained not to look at those who are looking at them. The occupying force mixes with the resident sculptures, close enough to each other to seem to be in dialogue, and yet they are oblivious to each other, as if they occupy different dimensions in the same space. The title of the work is “The Invisible Man and the Masque of Blackness”, referencing two cultural bookends of the black experience in the New World. (The Masque of Blackness was a 1605 Jacobean court drama done in black-face extoling he inferiority of black-skinned people. Invisible Man is a 1952 novel by Ralph Ellison illuminating the black experience in early 20th century America.) This work’s previous installations have been in open spaces on its own, but I think its intriguing insertion here into the existing sculpture garden adds another layer of meaning to this thought-provoking work.

BOOKS: If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now

There’s a small irony in my using my daily commute time to listen to Christopher Ingraham’s If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home By Now, a charming memoir of a young family, overwhelmed by the expense and commuting toll of living in metro-DC, who gave up everything they knew and moved to a remote community in northwest Minnesota. There’s a large irony just in the story of how they got there. Ingraham is a data analyst journalist for the Washington Post, and several years back, looking for a light summer click bait story, he found a data set that had been produced by the Dept of Agriculture ranking US counties by “attractiveness”, which was quantified by weather data (mild temps, days of sunshine being good) and a survey of geographic features (more mountains, valleys, and shorelines are better). At the top was Ventura County, California. At the bottom, Red Lake County, Minnesota. Needless to say, the 4000 good people who inhabit Red Lake County were hurt to read of their home being declared the “ugliest county in the US”. Ingraham got an earful in his inbox and Twitter feed. But Minnesotans earn their reputation of being scrupulously nice, and rather than invective-filled hate mail, he got photos from beautiful back porch views ironically captioned “view from the ugliest county”, and he even got an invitation to visit. This improbable start lead to Ingraham, his wife, an executive in the Social Security Administration, and their twin toddlers moving to Red Lake Falls. This book tells the story of their decision to give it a try, and why they’re now all in. Much of the book are the engaging foibles of big city folk learning the intricacies of small town life, and the colorful characters they meet there. If you’re imagining A Year in Provence as it might have been written by Garrison Keillor, you’re not far off. There are the expected amusing stories of first time deer hunting and ice fishing, and an assessment of Minnesota cuisine. And while it’s said that eskimos have over a hundred different words for snow, now so too does Ingraham. Being a data analyst, the author peppers his book with interesting statistics to illuminate or bolster many of his observations. But he ends with the lesson that begins the story, that data can’t always tell the whole story, and he offers some thoughtful observations about the value and forms of social fabric, about small town politics and why “dispatches from the red states” are often misleading, and ultimately why his family has found unexpected reward in trading urban life for prairie life.

BOOKS: The Alchemist: A Fable About Finding Your Dreams

Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist: A Fable About Following Your Dream was a charming way to pass several hours of highway driving. It was kind of a cross between Tales of the Alhambra and Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Like Washington Irving’s Tales, it is slightly magical and set in some non-specific past that suits fables and fairy tales. And like the Tales, it begins in Andalusia and trades in fantastical Moorish characters, though this story actually crosses the Straits of Gibraltar and travels to North Africa. It resembles Jonathan Livingston Seagull in being infused with a New Age pseudo-religious philosophy that can seem captivating at first blush, enthusiastically packaged in a charming story. Just don’t think about it too hard, or the gossamer profundity dissipates, and you might start to wonder how the girl in the oasis is really any different than the merchant’s daughter in Tarifa (the Rosaline for this Andalusian shepherd’s Romeo), or whether personal legends are only for boys, or whether the mildly unwieldy phrase “personal legend” worked better in the original Portuguese. (Darn it, I let myself think about it too much.) In the end, the philosophical treasure to be gleaned from this book is no more nor less than the wisdom dispensed by the Mother Superior in the Sound of Music when she sings Climb Every Mountain. And you like that song, right? So just enjoy the tale of the enterprising Andalusian shepherd in search of travel, adventure, and treasure, and before you know it, you’ll have driven a few hundred miles.