I’m Sorry to Be the One to Tell You This, But

February 21st, 2012

Humpday is a good movie.

It’s not just a well crafted cringe comedy, though it is that. It’s also a sincere and emotionally astute movie about a Male Friendship With Issues. AND it has a lot to say about identity and personality and how relationships have the power to send both of those things reeling.

I was surprised by how moved I was. Also, John and I had this fun conversation post-viewing:

M: Wow. That was very real. That was actually kind of hyper-real.

J: Yeah, but not as much as that other guy’s movies.

M: Oh, Andrew Bujalski, founder of mumblecore?

J: Yeah, him.

[Hysterical laughter.]

We love Andrew Bujalski, and here’s why. Back when I was reviewing films, I was given Bujalski’s first film for a cap. And at first I was befuddled and couldn’t make sense of it. But about midway through, comprehension clicked into place, and I started laughing with glee. It was one of those forehead-clapping moments of getting it, and therefore richly rewarding. So when Bujalski’s second film came out, I told John we had to see it.

So, happily the Shattuck was showing it (thank you, Landmark Berkeley), but there were only about 10 people in the theater. And we were watching and watching, and everything was really silent and slow. The energy felt pretty dead in the theater (and indeed, the energy was pretty purposefully dead on-screen). But then, like 45 minutes in, John started to crack up. He turned to me with a look, and I knew he was having the exact same experience I had with the first film, and then BOTH of us were cracking up, and NOBODY ELSE WAS. And we couldn’t stop. And it was supremely awesome.

That’s good times, people.

Posted in Highly Recommended, Movies | No Comments »

The Problem of Sympathy

February 17th, 2012

Did anyone else read Jonathan Franzen’s latest piece in The New Yorker, about the purported problem of sympathy in Edith Wharton?

I confess to not having made it through the entire thing, largely out of pique rage. Franzen lost me the moment he asserted that, and I quote, “[Wharton] wasn’t pretty.” Really? I mean . . . all he had to do was say that she wasn’t considered pretty, acknowledging in a single word the caprice of the concept of beauty and its inextricability from time/place/culture/viewer, and I’d have been fine. Instead, we get his Voice of Masculine Authority condemning her appearance as though it were universally accepted fact.

It makes me want to punch him. Which, if you know anything about my lengthy one-sided relationship with Franzen, you know is how I feel about him approximately half the time.

Anyway, that was my first snag. He goes on to discuss the aforementioned “problem of sympathy” in Wharton, which I’ve never felt. As in, how is Lily Bart not sympathetic, whether she’s considered beautiful or not (and she is)? Bart has depressingly few options in life and only one tool to use—the beauty—which as she ages is losing its caché. She’s trying as hard as she can to get what she needs and, ultimately, failing. It never even occurred to me not to feel for her.

(I can’t speak for The Age of Innocence or Ethan Frome, having read them at too tender an age to remember much.)

At any rate, here’s what’s fascinating to me about Franzen’s having chosen this topic: His writing is often accused of the same problem. When Freedom came out, you heard people everywhere complaining about its characters, and how they supposedly weren’t important (as if “importance”—what is that code for, even?—had ever been connected to sympathy), and how nobody wanted to hear middle-class white people whine about their “issues.”

Which boiled my blood. Because a) Every single human being has a story and is therefore interesting, full stop, and b) In the second chapter of the book [SPOILER ALERT] Patty is raped, and much of the book is about her inability to deal with that rape. And from her parents’ chillingly blasé and self-protective response to that rape, we know that she hasn’t been given much fortification in life; put another way, as a child she didn’t receive real love or support, so as an adult she doesn’t know how to accept them. It’s surprising, actually, that she copes as well as she does.

The thing is, I find Franzen’s characters, in Freedom and in The Corrections, immensely sympathetic. I find his narrative voice unbelievably generous; his love for his characters seems to spill over the page. I would say, in fact, that I find those two novels more loving and compassionate than almost anything else I have read. And folks, I have read a lot.

That’s why it’s so bizarre (and a source of amusement to my friend Ted—hello, Ted!) that I tend to find Franzen himself insufferable. In this I am far from alone, I know. He seems unable to give an interview without coming off as a self-satisfied prig, and lately he’s been saying nutty things about how the Internet is destroying the world. (Even his claim that nobody with an Internet connection writes good fiction is just so patently false.)

I can never quite put them together, these two extremes. It’s as though Franzen reserves every last morsel of his heart for his fiction and, once spent there, has nothing left to give anything else—or doesn’t want to, anyway.

WHO ARE YOU, Jonathan Franzen? And WHY MUST YOU TORTURE ME?

Posted in Books, Complaint Dept., Periodicals | 4 Comments »

My Week in Movies

February 12th, 2012

First, we saw Pina, which we had been waiting for for months. WORTH. IT. And it’s not just Bausch’s hauntingly gorgeous choreography, though it is that. It’s also Wim Wenders’ deep understanding of her work, and the way he manages to capture it on film. It’s a fantastic, weird, wondrously emotional couple of hours, studded with micro-interviews in which longtime members of Pina’s company say poignant things about her artistic process. Highly recommended.

Like some other folks I’ve checked in with, I felt that the 3D probably wasn’t necessary—and that in fact it sometimes hindered the emotional impact of the work by distorting the perspective, such that foregrounded dancers looked like CGI. But there was one moment, in which a diaphanous curtain effervesces onto the screen, that took my breath away.

Then we saw The Descendants which, in my opinion, hasn’t received enough attention. True, j’adore Alexander Payne, but there’s a reason for that: He is so, so good at making grounded, honest, emotionally real movies that are also hilarious. The humor in this film is quieter than it was in Sideways, which is as it should be, considering the topic. But it was still very funny—and very sad. (Such a magic marriage, no? Funny and sad?) I also loved the tribute the film pays to Hawaii. By the end I felt as though I’d been there.

In my off hours, I Netflixed Kramer vs. Kramer. I expected to find it dated, but . . . not really. I think more than anything I was struck by the excellence of the acting, not just Hoffman’s (though mostly his) but the kid’s—Justin Henry’s. He’s really, really good. And yet, ever since I heard Sarah Polley tell Terry Gross about her experience as a child film actor, and how she was inevitably emotionally manipulated so that the director could get the feeling he wanted, I cringe when I see children doing drama. Maybe it was okay for Henry. I guess unless there’s a memoir, we’ll never know.

All in all, a good week at the movies.

Posted in Highly Recommended, Movies | No Comments »

Rat in a Box

February 1st, 2012

Last week rat Michelle dropped a precipitous amount of weight, and I wondered whether I should take her to the vet. But she was still active, and since her starting point had been . . . adorably obese, I hoped that she’d just bounce back.  Nope. On Monday, her breathing was labored, and I made an appointment.

Turns out Michelle has a respiratory infection, quite common in rats. In fact, 10 years ago, my rat Allison died from one, but Michelle is living pretty successfully with hers. Now she needs twice-daily doses of two antibiotics, plus a supplementary diet of baby food, which is easy to swallow and therefore more likely to get down the gullet of a congested rat.

It’s not easy to dose a squirming rat with medication, particularly if you get emotionally involved with your perception of the rat’s suffering.* But John is mastering an immobilization technique, so daily we’re improving. (Thank you, man-who-can-be-replied-upon-to-help-in-any-situation.)

*There are real signs, naturally: squirming, increased heart rate, tightened muscles, widened eyes, peeing, and shitting.

Meanwhile, I have some reflections about my experiences with veterinary medicine.

First, I generally like taking my rodents in for vet care. Why? All of the benefits of the waiting room—i.e., cute animals and friendly owners—and none of the stress of having a sick dog or a cat. Rodents live for only a few years, and I’ve taken that in stride, slowly accumulating a rodent graveyard à la Natalie Portman’s character in Garden State.

Even better, vets take every animal seriously. So even if you show up with a dwarf albino hamster that is essentially an anti-social cotton ball with teeth, they’re going to talk to you about the care options as though it’s a Very Big Deal. I always loved the High Import with which my vet would discuss my hamster’s over-long teeth, which had to be clipped every few weeks to prevent her from starving. No matter how much I giggled, he never even cracked a smile.

Occasionally, I could get him to veer off-topic by asking questions about other people’s rodents. And once he told me a story about  having flung a hamster who bit him across the room (It was a reflex!) right in front of the hamster’s entire human family, including children. (”Fluffy?”)

But that vet couldn’t see me Monday afternoon, so I was stuck with another office, where I’d had a not-great experience with gerbil Moomush a couple of years ago. This time, same deal. I could tell almost immediately that the doctor was a Science Vet, as opposed to an Animal Lover Vet. Witness the opening of the appointment:

Vet: Rat in a box?

Me: Yes, sick rat in a box.

Vet: How old is she?

Me: 15 months.

Vet: How old was she when you got her?

Me: 5 weeks.

Vet: How big was she then?

Me: [Hand gesture.]

Vet: Huh. So how big would you say she was at 3 months?

Me: [Another hand gesture.]

Vet: We’ve been thinking about when to tell people to get their female rats spayed. We know that when we spay dogs in time, they don’t get breast cancer, because breast cancer is related to estrogen. So we’re trying to figure out when to spay rats. Because rats get a lot of breast cancer. And maybe at 3 months they’d be big enough for it not to be microsurgery anymore.

Me: Huh.

Vet: So next time you get a female rat, don’t bond with her before 3 months. Then if something happens while she’s under the anesthetic, it won’t be as bad.

Me: Wait. You’re saying not to love her for 7 weeks?

Vet: Oh. Well. Right. Okay, scratch that.

Yep, that’s how it went. And it wasn’t just that she opened the appointment by bringing up something entirely unrelated to what was happening in the room—though it was that, too—it’s that she was, to put it bluntly, Talking Crazy Shit.

In other words, if putting a rat under anesthetic is life-endangering enough to discourage people from becoming attached (itself an insane idea: What person in possession of an open heart can control feelings of love for an animal in her care?), then what the effing eff is the point of spaying rats to prevent breast cancer?

Let’s maybe-kill this rat so we can make sure it doesn’t die later!

JESUS. H. SCHWARTZ.

And another thing [wood-scraping noises as I adjust my soapbox for better comfort]: Never once, as we discussed Michelle’s care, did the vet mention that we are dealing with a rat, and that rats basically live for two years, and that given the givens, we might want to consider whether to treat at all.

For instance: The vet mentioned that if Michelle doesn’t do well on antibiotics, she should come in for x-rays, even though good x-rays of rodents are notoriously hard to get, since rodents do not stop moving. And if we do get a good x-ray, then maybe it shows that we need to do surgery, which is itself pretty complicated (again with the anesthetic), etc.

Sigh. It’s exhausting, really.

I appreciate that they take rodents seriously, as I said. What I also want them to do is take quality-of-life, expenses, and death seriously as well. This vet never seemed to consider that I might not want to, or be able to, pay for certain interventions; that the risk-benefit ratio of said interventions might not pencil out in their favor; or that the most humane thing to do to a rat who is suffering may just be to put her down.

Can I get a little reality here, Vet-Bot?

Some warm human interaction would have gone a long way as well.

And . . . Today’s Tirade finito completo.

Posted in Rodents, Today's Tirade | 3 Comments »

The Sense of an Ending

January 23rd, 2012

I had heard good things, so I read it.

For the most part, I liked it. It reminded me of Ian McEwan’s work in that for a while it seems as though you are reading something relatively straightforward, about what it is about, and then a sense of creepiness works its way in, and then you realize that it’s about something rather to the left of what you thought, and then everything darkens and you feel kind of horrible.

Not an altogether pleasant experience, but obviously not meant to be.

Where I snagged in Ending was in never fully buying the initial argument of its narrator. I won’t give too much away, but there’s a suicide in the novel, and the narrator presents this suicide as admirably rational—i.e., as the logical consequence of bold and right-thinking philosophy about life. And . . . not to my mind. The only rational suicide I can imagine is one taken by someone in great physical pain (or in some stage of a fatal disease) to spare further suffering.

Every other suicide I can imagine is deeply emotional, e.g., an act of great anguish, born of extreme depression; an act of shame (particularly but not necessarily in an honor culture); an act of intense fear (an inability to face something).

Anything I’m missing? I’d be curious to hear.

At any rate, it was a problem for me, this position that the narrator takes. And because the payoff of the novel at least partly depends on one’s having accepted that position, I didn’t experience the shock of the ending the way it must have been intended.

One more quibble: There’s a character who is purposefully mysterious. By the end, her mystery has largely been justified, so I can’t really fault Pfeiffer for using her as a plot device. Yet she’s tedious and hard to care about, and I kept wishing the novel would focus on something, and someone else. Instead, she’s essentially the center of the book. Bummer.

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New Year, New Books

January 6th, 2012

2.5 weeks is a long time to travel, sliced thick or thin. And when you return to a house full of boxes, ennui has a way of wending itself through your veins. At the moment, I’m feeling very anti-box. At the same time, I’m entirely pro-new bed, so you can imagine where this afternoon might resolve itself.

But before any of that happens, I’d like to report on some holiday reading:

1) Sideways, by Rex Pickett. I’ve seen the movie three times—the first to review it—and after hearing Alexander Payne extoll the novel’s virtues on Fresh Air recently, I decided to read it. The result: I’m more convinced than ever that Payne is a genius.

The novel accomplishes two things. First, it creates the character of Jack, captured brilliantly by Thomas Haden Church in the movie. Second, it unearths a smart-funny line every paragraph or so. And THAT. IS. IT. The plot’s a mess, dissolving into slapstick. The writing is flabby. Miles is both unlikeable and too diffuse to truly come into focus. And the women are bizarrely naive, not to mention stereotypically hot—which, you know, snooze.

In the movie, Payne screws the plot tight, makes every character sympathetic, and infuses hilarity never achieved by the book.

2) Life on the Line, by Grant Achatz and Nick Kokonas. The writing is merely functional, but that’s beside the point: This book is about plot, and whoah, Nelly, the plot, the plot. Grant Achatz’s rise to star-chef status, coupled with his diagnosis of Stage IVb tongue cancer a few years ago, makes for fascinating reading, and it’s intensely gratifying to get a behind-the-scenes look at the origins and evolution of Alinea.

The only thing missing, and it’s clear that the writers attempted to get it onto paper, is a deeper understanding of Achatz’s creative process. It’s likely the kind of thing that Achatz hasn’t examined much; he’s not particularly introspective. I’d also have appreciated more about the technical aspects of his cooking: how he learned or came to imagine, for example, that he could bubble mozzarella?

3) Blue Nights, by Joan Didion. An excellent companion piece to The Year of Magical Thinking and equally as unexpected. As in, it’s not literally about the death of her daughter, as promised. It’s much more about who Didion is now, and what it’s like to live in her body, after both her husband and daughter died within a short time. It’s intensely brave and sharp and minimal, nearly poetry, while remaining essentially mysterious—or at least while consistently inviting mystery in. In a word: wow.

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80s Culture Roundup + Holiday Goodbye

December 12th, 2011

We bought a house. And we are renovating that house. And moving in on Thursday. And getting on a plane for New Hampshire on Sunday.

Short version: Crayfish.

Longer version: No time to blog, or to do much of anything that isn’t work- or house-related.

However, I’m finally taking a moment to say hello and goodbye.

HELLO

I’ve been reading Wendy Wasserstein. First the early plays (Uncommon Women and Others, Isn’t It Romantic?, and The Heidi Chronicles), then a later play (The Sisters Rosensweig), and now Shiska Goddess, a collection of essays.

It’s been interesting to see her work develop. Uncommon Women isn’t really a play so much as a collection of not-terribly-well-written scenes, and Isn’t It Romantic? also feels young and awkward and somewhat slight. But by the time she gets to The Heidi Chronicles, Wasserstein has learned a lot about dialogue and structure.

And yet . . . I don’t know. I don’t love her work. I suppose I have the complaint I have about most things in life, which is that it isn’t deep enough for me. The Sisters Rosensweig does dig a little, and there are real moments of pathos in that play, which thus far is my favorite. But the sitcom feeling just doesn’t leave me.

One thing I am very struck by is the gigantic chasm between Wasserstein’s generation, in which the university experience included what amounted to hostessing classes and women were still fighting for the legitimacy of having a non-mothering career, and mine, in which there was absolutely never a question.

HELLO AGAIN

I’ve also been watching the first season of thirtysomething, which I devoured at 15, when it first aired. I’m amused to see how relevant it both is and isn’t, and how so much of what it helped introduce to television—whitey angst, banter, the “group of friends” thing—is still there.

I’m also pretty shocked to see how every episode is about the exact same thing, which is how hard it is to work and/or parent. I don’t begrudge them their struggles, and I even share some of them. But my, how they pratter on.

I’m glad to see that by episodes 5 and 6, we’re moving away from Michael and Hope and into Melissa and Ellen, whose struggles are at least a little different. At the same time, the writing is getting stronger, not so mannered and awkward.

GOODBYE

And, this’ll be all until, I imagine, somewhere in mid-January, when we’re back and I’m unpacked enough to dedicate time to whispering into the void. Also known as blogging.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Posted in Adventures in Travel, Books, Television | No Comments »

The Wild Bride

December 4th, 2011

The Berkeley Rep’s new show—not technically a Berkeley Rep show but a Kneehigh Theater production—is some serious myth-making magnificence.

Dark, creepy, gorgeous, violent, sad, and weird, it’s a tangle of fairy tale, Robert Johnson, Eastern European folk song, and expressionist dance.

Highly recommend, but not if you’re feeling fragile. The content can be hard to take.

Posted in Highly Recommended, Theater | No Comments »

Muppet Moovie

November 28th, 2011

We saw it, natch. And it’s very sweet. But not amazing. But sweet.

The musical numbers are the best part, especially those written by Bret McKenzie:

Am I a man or a Muppet? If I’m a Muppet, I’m a very manly Muppet. And if I’m a man, I’m a Muppet of a man . . .

I think better than the movie is listening to Jason Segal and co-writer Nicholas Stoller talk about their mad Muppet love on Fresh Air. With Terry’s obvious adoration for Segal, it’s kind of a love fest all around.

Posted in Movies | No Comments »

Wendy and the Lost Boys

November 21st, 2011

I read the Wendy Wasserstein biography, and, to use a technical term, ew. Despite an intensely compelling subject, the writing—well, the writing stinks.

Author Julie Salamon has no ear for rhythm. The prose just plods, dutifully relaying plot point after plot point, with no apparent notion of craft. It’s almost like reading a list of events, with a nod here and there to the need for some kind of meaning-making.

Worse, the analysis of Wasserstein is both simplistic and judgmental*, boiling down undoubtedly very complex motivational brews to single psychobabular notions—and even using words like “dumpy” to describe Wasserstein! “Dumpy”!

*Yes, pot/kettle. Owning it.

It’s not just that Salamon doesn’t seem to like Wasserstein. It’s that she seems to relish judging her, even (maybe especially) for her weight—without any consciousness of how hard it might have been to have a larger body, particularly in the circles in which Wasserstein socialized, or that having such a body might have been something Wasserstein didn’t have the power to control.

Salamon judges Wasserstein for her secrecy, too, and for her apparent inability to be honest in the face of conflict. Yes, those are tough traits in a friend—or anyone—and Wasserstein hurt people through the years. But when I read about Wasserstein’s upbringing and early adulthood, I understand why.

In fact, the Wasserstein family saga reads to me almost as an object lesson in the perils of the achievement value. With the exception of one sibling who was developmentally disabled and another who largely opted out, the Wasserstein siblings all made it big: brother Bruce as a Wall Street titan in the 80’s and 90’s; sister Sandra as one of the first female VP’s in the Fortune 500 world; and Wendy as a Pulitzer-Prize- and Tony-award-winning writer. All of them seem to have put work before love; none of them sustained a romantic relationship; all of them died relatively young.

Those are harsh connections to draw, I know. And their collective poor health could easily have been coincidence, or genes, or miserable luck. But I wonder.

On another note, I need to read Wasserstein’s plays. I saw The Sisters Rosensweig in 1993, when it had been running on Broadway for about 6 months. I remember it as sweet and sit-commy, two criticisms Wendy apparently bridled against. Was her other work more probing? I must know.

Posted in Books, Complaint Dept. | No Comments »

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