Losing it

« Brain Cloudy | Main | A visit to Niigata (1) »

06/30/2015

Losing it

Once in awhile, I cry at what I read, listen to, watch, but it happened twice today. The first time was listening to James Taylor’s “Angels of Fenway” (on his extraordinarily good new album Before This World). I think the tears were in part about following a team, and feeling their victories and defeats as if they were family. And in part for the grandmother in the story. This evening I was snipping edamame off their stalks in the kitchen as I listened, and the tears blurred my vision, making it difficult.

The second time was after dinner, for Hosoda Mamoru’s animated movie Wolf Children. This is a director who, years ago, was hired and fired by Ghibli. I think this is his third feature and, exciting as the previous two were, here he is firmly in Miyazaki/Totoro and masterpiece territory. The scene of the family arriving in the country is a homage to Miyazaki and Totoro. And the story, about becoming who you are, is beautifully realized. My tears were a reaction to the love and caring of all the characters.

I wonder if I’ve been softened up by what happened in the United States these last few days, gay people being granted full civil rights. As a gay person born, growing up and living in the shadow of shame, it’s quite extraordinary to feel that lifted.

--Julian

Posted at 08:29 PM in Current Affairs, Film, Music | Permalink

Comments

You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post.

Verify your Comment

Previewing your Comment

Posted by: |

This is only a preview. Your comment has not yet been posted.

Your comment could not be posted. Error type:

Your comment has been posted. Post another comment

The letters and numbers you entered did not match the image. Please try again.

As a final step before posting your comment, enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below. This prevents automated programs from posting comments.

Having trouble reading this image? View an alternate.

Books David finished in 2017

Nanao Sakaki: How to Live on the Planet Earth: Collected Poems
I reread this for a project, and was reminded what a rigorous and wonderful poet this old hippie was.
Nicci French: Dark Saturday: A Novel (A Frieda Klein Novel)
Now I'll have to wait for the forthcoming Sunday.
Nicci French: Friday on My Mind: A Frieda Klein Mystery (Frieda Klein Mysteries)
The ending to this one has a bit of a deus ex machina twist that suggests the novels—Frieda's life and relationship to the crimes she solves—are going to take a different direction. Stay tuned.
Nicci French: Thursday's Children: A Frieda Klein Mystery (Frieda Klein Mysteries)
The first case with which she was involved, way back on Monday, involved identical twins. One of them was a guy who had some problems. The other was a bad guy, a very bad guy, and he becomes a sort of stalker and nemesis of Klein's. He's a recurring character who everyone except Klein believes to be dead. That's one reason a lot of people think she's nuts. (More . . . .)
Nicci French: Waiting for Wednesday: A Frieda Klein Mystery
Among Klein's friends is a police detective. She's often working at cross-purposes with him, and gets him in all kinds of trouble, but he comes to respect her: how could he not since she's more or less always, in the end, right. (More in the next post, by which I mean the post above.)

Books Julian Read Recently

Elizabeth Strout: Anything Is Possible
Strout writes with notable veracity, revealing what we feel and think under our usual veneer of self-protection and social conformity. Together with compelling truth there is compassion, especially for difficulties like obesity, poverty and bad marriages. The vehicle here is short stories that cleverly jigsaw with characters and incidents in her previous novel “My Name Is Lucy Barton,” and with each other. Reading Strout is both a pleasure, and an encouragement to be a real person. (*****)
Edward P. Jones: The Known World
The antebellum South, with whites and even a few free blacks owning slaves. It's sublime storytelling of a superstitious time when God and the Bible guided thought and embraced the corrosive idea of humans as property, and there is mystery in both content and chapter titles. That said, it’s also a story woven in the truest of terms, featuring characters of the most treacherous and the most compassionate, but mostly going about their allotted lives with outcomes having less to do with virtue or infamy than with luck and circumstance. This microcosm painted in vivid detail shows that the aberration of slavery still infects the present, a mere few generations later. In simpler terms, through this book I lived for awhile on a slave estate in a corner of Manchester County, Virginia. (*****)
Adam Mars-Jones: Kid Gloves: A Voyage Round My Father
I don’t think I’ll be able to capture my parents amply in words, so I admire Mars-Jones chatty, rambling account of his family, his own growing up with them, and of helping his mother and father as their deaths approached. It’s sometimes insightful and rarely less than fun, the more so for anyone gay, middle-class and British, who came of age in the 1960s. (****)
John Berger: To the Wedding
This story is told in a flat, grave, fragmented style, with a complex, quasi-mystical framing device. It leads up to the wedding in the final pages, a tour-de-force that leaps off the page and might have worked better as a self-contained short story. (**)
Michael Chabon: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
A rollicking saga about cousins growing up Jewish in New York and in Prague in the 1930s, and the birth of comic books. This fiction woven with fact is funny, tragic, epic, and intimate by turn. It’s fluidly written as it sprawls all over the map, with a cast of characters you are glad to follow anywhere. Glorious. (****)
Shirley Hazzard: The Great Fire
This novel quietly paints horrors and tragedies of war, in this case, in the aftermath of World War II. It is also a love story. I was sometimes jarred by a suddenly shifting point of view, or befuddled by high-flown and, to me, opaque passages, but the story and writing carried me along. The ending, encapsulated in the final line, earns it an extra half-star. (****)
Elizabeth Strout: My Name Is Lucy Barton
Centered on a stay in a New York hospital, a woman relates incidents from her life. This novella is artfully artless, with an honesty that leads deep into human motivation and emotions, including the functions and dysfunctions of family, how we hurt ourselves and others, and the aching ecstasy that accompanies love. This is my second Elizabeth Strout, and it’s every bit as good as her "Olive Kitteridge." (*****)

Films Julian Watched Recently

Dunkirk
My moviegoing companion bailed on this one, saying she didn’t like war movies. I think Dunkirk sidesteps that description. It’s very well-made, and the soundtrack is particularly astonishing; I was privileged to see this in IMAX, with images and sound at their most extreme. There is some understated heroism, and a lot of equally understandable doing what one can for one’s own survival. The enemy is not named or shown beyond the planes that strafe the beach and boats, which is a step forward in war movies. It’s also a history lesson that honors the victors, and the enemy as always is given nothing, so there are more steps forward to be made. It’s a horror story you hope is going to end as soon as possible. I could almost watch this as an anti-war movie: both sides fighting for their lives, and life is terribly cheap. (Theater; IMAX) (****)
Manchester by the Sea
Acting comes first in this portrait of a volatile New England man and his extended family. Like "Moonlight," it’s unconventionally made. The eccentric soundtrack music sometimes screams, “This is art.” But it more than gets the job done: It’s real, powerful, sometimes funny, and it may move you. (DVD) (****)
Lion
I enjoy a good cry almost as much as a good laugh, and this tale of families, and a horrendous social problem, builds into a powerful tearjerker. The telling is surreal yet straightforward; empathy-inducing yet unsentimental. It’s an introduction to both India and Tasmania, and is beautifully acted. There’s a lot to like here. (DVD) (****)
Moonlight
If compared to other movies in a vacuum, I’d rate Moonlight no better or worse than average, but thanks to the Academy awarding it Best Picture, it showed up at the local multiplex. It was exciting and moving to see a movie set in a to-me unfamiliar racial/cultural world. In 2017, through its existence and its celebrity, Moonlight adds to the momentum of embracing diversity, i.e., the marginal and despised, into a world of equal human beings. The story is extremely sad. It might also be, below its particular surface, the most improbably old-fashioned of love stories. (Theater) (*****)
海街diary (Our Little Sister)
Like Kore’eda’s masterpiece "Aruite mo Aruite mo" (Still Walking), this movie is rooted in a particular place and time of year, and the rituals that go with that. In this case, it’s the Shonan area centered on Kamakura and, although the movie follows a year of seasons, it’s the spring with its cherry blossoms, new beginnings and endings, that has center stage. The story and setting are a mixture of the idealized and down to earth. With so many characters interacting to push the plot forward, this very Japanese family drama may sometimes approach soap opera, but it is engaging, emotional, and never less than charming. (DVD) (*****)

Things NC Consumed Recently

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby
More than forty years on since my last reading, this classic novel is remarkable not so much for its romantic longings as for its emphasis on American violence, its depiction of a country in which California hardly matters and its meeting of the Mid West and East Coast. Plus its succinct nine chapters, its elegant prose and its almost noirish tone: Tom breaking Myrtle's nose would seem to foreshadow Lee Marvin throwing hot coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in The Big Heat - and the use of flashbacks helps too. I'd like to thank the publicity for the recent film version and my current cold for sending me back to the novel (and my young self).
Isabelle Eberhardt
In 1904, Isabelle Eberhardt drowned in the desert, leaving behind, among other things, various writings in French (a novel, travel notes, a journal, short stories), Islam, Lake Geneva, a husband, debauchery in kif, sex and alcohol, and a small collection of male clothing, which she wore habitually, along with her man's name. The lazy say she was an early hippie, because of her nomadic, hedonistic life, and being the first one to die at 27. Lindqvist has her in a line from Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celine and Genet. Her story can only get stranger and more fascinating. "In The Shadow of Islam", "The Passionate Nomad", "The Oblivion Seekers" and Annette Kobak's biography are one way in. You'll find there an apt fatal romanticism for vast desert spaces and a depiction of Islam to ponder. Among other things.
Listen to Britain - Humphrey Jennings
Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is in part an attempt to define the nation on the eve of its being invaded. But that invasion never came. A little prematurely, Humphrey Jennings's film records what left later, with something messier, less defined usurping through the back door. Terence Davies is surely right to say Listen to Britain is one of the greatest things these islands have produced.
Patience (After Sebald)
Grant Gee's documentary uses a palette of pale black and white, maps and talking heads to comment on W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, an account of his walk through Suffolk. Unlike the book, where a variety of genres (and photographs) coheres to make a recognisable whole, the film suffers slightly from a lack of direction. It is too specific to serve as an introduction and lacks an overriding arc that might describe a thesis. However, with its archival footage, interviews with the author and shots of the route taken, it is essential viewing for those already in thrall to all things Sebaldian - even if the ending, alas, veers close to Conan Doyle and fairies-in-the-garden territory.