Deep Tropical Ciné-Musique

[A month ago I wrote an engagement of Days of Ciné-Musique, text by Patrick Mullins and artwork by Christian Pellet. Now, having just finished reading Deep Tropical Ciné-Musique, the prior, leaner work in the ongoing collaboration, I find myself wishing I could post some images of Christian’s compelling paintings, which play a more central role in this book. Arrayed in a portrait gallery of alienation, Christian’s ordinary, even familiar-looking figures appear formal, placid, almost classically statuesque, yet they are flattened and oddly distorted in Christian’s renderings: lopsided, smeared, effaced, decapitated — other. Here are some text grabs from Patrick’s prose-poetry, obliquely recounting the brief collaboration of the “outrageously educated and alarmingly gaudy” Lace Racy with a young unnamed protégé, beginning at the beginning…]

* * *

A non-verbalized metaphor of a dirndl — symbolizing the silent, pervasive presence of Lausanne/Ouchy, Switzerland, throughout this novella that does not take place in Lausanne, and is not about Lausanne — is occasionally in evidence.

* * *

The space could be rented indefinitely; and there was little danger of pressure from the garishly bejewelled and darkly encrusted enclaves not more than twenty miles away, to furnish it coarsely with classical allusions. Where there were people who liked to fund the arts, as long as “the arts” were preponderantly moribund, which kept them from having to know what art was. “Funding the arts” was a contrived term that gave many moneyed persons that they knew what art is. It followed quite logically that they liked their racy separate, pretentious, ugly and even painful a good bit of the time.

* * *

One of Lace Racy’s gifts was to talk so much that he seemed he was telling everybody everything. Most of what he had to say remained unspoken.

* * *

Youth: “I am like a god.”

Lace: “You are not a god, but may be like one in that they probably bleached their hair, too.”

* * *

Boy: “If we were famous, as we are — this would be a good place to go, because nobody would recognize us.” Lace had liked this and had copied it onto a napkin at the restaurant, and found it again in early May.

* * *

Later, Lace left some fairly rough answering machine messages at the Hamburg number, which would close off any possible chink the boy might try to find in getting the Office Spot back, which he wanted to take without earning. Lace also purged the Office of every item the boy had left, even a towel and a shirt he had given Lace. All this made Lace Racy suffer pangs of guilt, till he realized that these outwardly rough words had diagrammed the underlying discord that could surface frighteningly were they to try to undertake any discourse too soon. The discord was now fully exposed. This opened the possibility that he could serve, much as a pivot chord does in musical harmony, for the purpose of modulation out of a sad mode, a really sad, obscure one like Locrian, and into a happier key — although the advent of the public nature of A Major seemed a ridiculous hope, to be sure. The worst guilt Lace experienced stemmed from the fact that he was essentially telling the boy that, for now, he had failed his Course in Thought; that he could be said to have vandalized the Club.

* * *

Did he hate himself that much for making a disastrously inaccurate calculation of logic that had hurled him into a hideously dilettantish arty empiricism that reeked of odious opaque smells, both animal and holy. Oh, yes, it was certainly possible, no matter the struggle against it: There were far too many who had walked with heads held high, profundity exuding from every vain pore who had been known to wake up and find themselves having chosen to “circle the drain,” living on the crumbs of the innocuous, the pedestrian, the unspeakably art-alien.

“How infuriatingly weak I am,” said the proud and gifted Lace Racy aloud to himself in the New York Office.

Singing Detective by Potter, 1986

O Lord God, who loves and saves and watches, and admonishes all of us miserable and unworthy sinners — O Lord God, look down on us now in Thy awful majesty. Search out our hearts; look into our heads; seize hold of our innermost thoughts. Dear Lord, you can see. You know. You are looking down now upon one boy. One particular boy. One boy in this room. You are entering the bones; You are piercing into the space between the bones. Dear God, almighty God, terrible in wroth, with the stars to guide, with the whole earth to turn, with the flowers to grow, with the rain to make fall, with the sun to make shine — with all this, all of these things, You stop, You look, You watch. Because all of these things — the weight of the mountains and the deeps of the oceans, the day and the night, the cares and the troubles of the whole slow spin of the whole big world — all, all of these things You O God, Thee O God, almighty and awful Creator, You leave for the moment to point down at the one…


Owl Service by Garner, 1968

[After I read Dominic’s observations about Alan Garner’s Red Shift I went looking for it at the library but came up empty. I did find The Owl Service though, in the children’s section. The first two paragraphs of Dominic’s post capture well the mythos, the eternal return of the repressed, that haunts this Welsh valley. Here are some excerpts, beginning as usual at the very beginning of the book.]

* * *

“How’s the bellyache then?

Gwyn stuck his head around the door. Alison sat in the iron bed with brass knobs. Porcelain columns showed the Infant Bacchus and there was a lump of slate under one leg because the floor dipped.

“A bore,” said Alison. “And I’m too hot.”

* * *

At first he thought that Huw must have finished with the coke, but when he came to the yard he saw Huw leaning on his shovel, and something about him made Gwyn stop.

Huw stood with two fingers lodged in his vest pocket, his head cocked sideways, and although his body seemed to strain he did not move. He was talking to himself, but Gwyn could not hear what he said, and he was dazzled by the glare of the sun when he tried to find what Huw was looking at. It was the whole sky.

There were no clouds, and the sky was drained white toward the sun. The air throbbed, flashed like blue lightning, sometimes dark, sometimes pale, and the pulse of the throbbing grew, and now the shades followed one another so quickly that Gwyn could see no more than a trembling which became a play of light on the sheen of a wing, but when he looked about him he felt that the trees and the rocks had never held such depth, and the line of the mountain made his heart shake.

“That’s daft,” said Gwyn.

He went up to Huw Halfbacon. Huw had not moved, and now Gwyn could hear what he was saying. It was almost a chant.

“Come, apple-sweet murmurer; come, harp of my gladness; come, summer, come.”

“Huw?”

“Come, apple-sweet murmurer; come, harp of my gladness; come, summer, come.”

“Huw?”

“Come, apple-sweet murmurer; come, harp of my gladness; come, summer, come.”

Huw looked at Gwyn, and looked through him. “She’s coming,” he said. “She won’t be long now.”

* * *

When she heard the shouting Alison rolled off her bed and went to the window. It was Roger’s voice. She opened the fanlight. Gwyn appeared below the window, wheeling a barrow toward the stables.

The sun had warmed the ledge. Alison leaned her head against the glass. Some distance away the long stone fish tank by the lawn sparkled where the inlet broke from the ferns, and she saw herself mirrored among halos that the sun made on the water. The brightness destroyed the image of the house, so that all she saw was her face.

I’m up here and I’m down there, thought Alison. Which is me? Am I the reflection in the window of me down there?

Gwyn came back from the stables. He was walking with his shoulders hunched, and he kicked at every pebble. He sat on the edge of the tank, right next to the Alison in the water; he seemed to be watching her.

Now am I here, and you there? Or are we together? If I’m the reflection here then we’ll be able to talk to each other. “Hello, Gwyn.”

Gwyn said nothing. He reached out to touch her hair, and she was at once gold and whiteness over the water, and Alison was back in the window and the metal frame was hurting her cheek. And Gwyn looked up.

Alison was in the window. She did not move. The stillness he had tried to enter was now all around him, and Gwyn sat, and watched. But the gong sounded for lunch, and Alison hurried downstairs, while Gwyn went to drain the potatoes and put them in their dish on the serving hatch.

* * *

“There, Ben. Lass. Good, Lass. There. There. There.” The dogs changed direction at a whistle. He looked for the men, but they were not on the mountain. “Bob, there, Bob, Lass, good, Lass, there.”

The dogs came on and the sheep bunched together. The dogs were in a bent line, the horns of the line pointing up the mountain. The dogs reached the sheep. “There there there there. Ben. Lass. Ben. There. Bob, Bob, Bob.” The whistles followed sharp and urgent. The dogs swept past the sheep, the horns of the line drew in, pointed to the Ravenstone.

“There, Ben. There, Ben. Good, Lass.”

He looked behind him. There were no sheep on the top.

“Bob, stay, Bob. There, Ben, there. Lass, there, Lass.”

The dogs came for the Ravenstone. Their tongues rolled with the climb, but they came, and when they were near they dropped their bellies low, and crept. They moved in short spurts, eyes fixed.

He could not watch all of them at the same time.

They moved past the Ravenstone, turned, and lay between their haunches, and then ran at him, low quick darts from all sides. When he faced a dog it stopped, and two others closed nearer, and lay still when he looked, and the first came on.

“Get out!”

He waved his arms.

“Ben. Good, Ben. There, Ben.”

A wall-eyed dog reached him first, in with a nip to the ankle and away. He ran to kick it, but other teeth pinched his calf.”

“Lass, Lass, Lass, there, Lass.”

“Call your flaming dogs off!”

But his voice went into cloud, and the wind spread it over the peat moss.

Decoding Reality on The Wire

Recently I put up a post about Vertov’s Man with the Movie Camera as seen through the interpretive lens of Jonathan Beller’s The Cinematic Mode of Production. Vertov recognized that producing a film isn’t just another kind of industrial commodity: by turning the camera on its own producers, a film can illuminate the process of industrial production itself. As Beller says, it is cinema that confers self-awareness upon a humanity embroiled in and scaled by industrialization… Cinema is the becoming-conscious of social relations — literally, the relations of production.

Captivated by the image — the sleek design, the slick packaging, the entertaining TV ad campaign, what Beller calls “the sheen of the commodity form” — the consumer loses sight of the human labor that goes into making and distributing a commodity in the marketplace. Through packaging the mode of industrial production is repressed, sealed off beneath the image of the object like an unconscious. In probing the quotidian bustle of 1930s Odessa, Vertov functions like a psychoanalyst, turning his camera on the scenes taking place behind the image, detecting traces of repressed industrial processes and focusing our attention on them, making them conscious. In contrast, most commercial cinema is a work of stagecraft, emulating and exemplifying the commercial enterprise, using theatrics and editing tricks to hide the work of production behind the spectacular image. Beller describes Vertov’s “communist decoding of reality”:

It was because the acted cinema mystified the relations of production — leaving them in the obscure world of the director’s fantasy — that Vertov detested it so profoundly. Political economy, as a set of necessarily unthought relations, is the unconscious of the objective world dominated by capital. Like the political economist, the psychoanalyst, and the author in modernist literature, the camera breaks apart the objective world and enters into it in order to bring forth the repressed or the unconscious elements and bring them to the level of consciousness… In Vertovian cinema, the objective world is revealed as frozen subjectivity; it is seen to be composed of historically sedimented, subjective practices and activated by subjective application. Thus, as Benjamin notes, “By close-ups of the things around us, by focusing on hidden details of familiar objects, by exploring commonplace milieus under the ingenious guidance of the camera, the film, on the one hand, extends our comprehension of the necessities which rule our lives; on the other hand, it manages to assure us of an immense and unexpected field of action.” With Benjamin, Vertov’s film theory utilizes scientific precision and “the dynamite of the tenth of a second” in an effort to liquidate the aura or, what in mass production will evolve intensively as the fetish character that accompanies objects in modern bourgeois society, despite Vertov’s efforts…

By unpacking the object and revealing it as an assemblage of individuated processes, the subjectivity impacted in its form comes to life. The visual analysis that is tantamount to a de-reification of the object and therefore of the objective world is the unique content of Vertov’s phrase “I see.” …What we learn from Vertov is that the image is constituted like an object — it is assembled piece by piece like a commodity moving through the intervals of production… the endeavor to de-reify the commodity necessarily reveals the general commodity-structure of the image. Vertov articulates from a Marxist standpoint an implicit relationship between images and objects under modern capital.. The image as a social relation is a direct consequence of advances in the industrial production of objects.

Modern life is mystifying and alienating; it passes before our gaze without our being able to process it consciously. The spectacle of the manufactured world functions like an external unconscious: it has a structure that we’re unable to formulate consciously, it affects us without our being aware of it. Overwhelmed by the totality of the spectacle, we lose sight of the individual objects and people, as well as their codified interrelationships. The concept of totality, says Beller, is the specter of capitalism. Vertovian cinema offers what Beller calls a strategy of re-mediation: his cinematic interventions slow the world down so we can pay attention, bringing at least part of its unformulated and mystifying flux into conscious awareness. Beller relates Vertov’s visual destruction of reification to Lukacs’s project of recognizing that the totalizing image of everyday life occludes the “simple and sober ordinariness” of “the whole of society seen as a process.” Lukacs says that only consciousness “confers reality on the day-to-day struggle by manifesting its relation to the whole. Thus it [consciousness] elevates mere existence to reality.”

Previously I put up two scenes from the television series The Wire: the first one shows two Baltimore police investigating the scene of a homicide; the second, a drug lord evaluating and adapting to local marketplace conditions. Both scenes show people undertaking a conscious detailed analysis of specific social processes that contribute to the mystifying totality of the world. While creator David Simon frequently explores the drug underworld from the producers’ perspective, the program concerned itself primarily with the police’s efforts to understand production in order to undermine it.The name of the program refers to the electronic surveillance equipment police use to piece together the drug distribution network from encoded telephone conversations between anonymous bosses and suppliers and with neighborhood distributors. Police on rooftops watch the street action through long-lens cameras, photographing dealers making phone calls in order to match voices to bodies; photographing dealers’ face-to-face interactions with customers, subordinates, suppliers, and bosses in order to piece together the mechanics of the drug operation. The camera shows us what the police see, using stop action and long-angle focus to zero in on the nodes and synapses in the world’s neural matrix that continually produce the totalizing image as an epiphenomenon. In short, The Wire exemplifies Vertov’s cinematic strategy of decoding reality.

In producing this demystifying probe of the drug trade is Simon operating within Vertov’s Marxist framework? In a way he is: although the inner city drug gangs operate in a secondary countercultural economy, they run their business just like any other capitalist endeador. Simon also shows us the connections between organized crime and legitimate society: the payoffs to stevedores who unload contraband from ships and bypass the official tracking systems in order to transfer the product to the suppliers; the schemes for laundering drug money through legitimate businesses; the investments in real estate development facilitated by “campaign contributions” to politicians. The drug trade is embedded in the larger economic system, its very illegality adding monetary value to its operations.

At the same time, the illegality of the drug trade provides an arena in which legitimate society gets to demonstrate its power. The very politicians who take the kick-backs are also mounting re-election campaigns built around getting tough on crime. Police top brass, charged with cleaning up the streets, rely on the perpetuation of criminality to justify their manpower demands and budgets and thus their power in the city. As one of the police captains observes, antidrug enforcement isn’t really a police operation, the purpose of which is to ensure the safety of ordinary citizens; rather, it’s more like a state of perpetual war being waged in part to justify the covert surveillance and overt control that the state exercises against the citizenry. (The episode in which this insight is presented was originally produced shortly after GW Bush won his second term in office.)

As we watch the police watching the criminal underworld, we also watch the police assembling their surveillance and control systems, operating them in order to obtain information and to secure arrests. But this kind of surveillance works only if it remains covert, undetected by the subjects under scrutiny, disguised behind mystifying screens and charades. At the same time the drug gangs maintain constant vigilance, trying to detect the eyes and ears hidden behind the ordinary surfaces of the world. The work of surveillance and counterintelligence unfolds like a chess game, with each player responding to his opponent’s last move while at the same time trying to anticipate the next one.

For Vertov, showing objects and states as processes creates sites of potential action. He depicts all moments of social production as both part of a conscious process and part of a process becoming conscious… Thus are previously individualized consciousnesses — the people who work on their products and who formerly disappeared into them, as well as the people who enjoy the use of aspects of the social product — seen in the theater by the audience and producers alike in their collective interdependence.

By probing the details of the quotidian social spectacle and subjecting it to conscious understanding, the producers of The Wire aren’t just demystifying the social relations of capitalist production in order to dismantle the system. They’re demonstrating that the owners of the system employ these very same tools to build and maintain the system and to hide it behind a totalizing spectacle. Those who would undermine the system succeed to the extent that they adopt the strategies and tactics employed by the owners of the system.

Being Dead by Crace, 1999

For old times’ sake, the doctors of zoology had driven out of town that Tuesday afternoon to make a final visit to the singing salt dunes of Baritone Bay. And to lay a ghost. They never made it back alive. They almost never made it back at all.
* * *
It must have seemed her leg had moved, a shrug of skin, a spasm of muscle, enough to dislodge some calf-sand and to shake the longer grass under her foot. Joseph tried to bark and squeak her name. His arm was heavy and numb, dislocated at the shoulder. The air seemed too thick to penetrate with anything as soft as flesh. Yet somehow, fortified by his self-pity, Joseph found the will and the adrenaline to reach across towards his wife. He wanted to apologize. He had to twist his wrist against the broken angle of his arm and weave his fingers through the heavy air. His hand — bruised a little when the wedding ring was stolen — dropped onto the stretched flesh of her lower leg, the tendon strings, the shallows of her ankle. Blood from his damaged knuckles ran over her skin but not enough to glue his hand in place. He spread his fingers and tried to grip a solid bone to steady himself. He had to stop his body being swept away, by wind, by time, by continental drift, by shooting stars, by shame…

It was as if they had been struck by lightning but the thunder, separated from its faster twin, had yet to come with its complaints to shake and terminate the bodies lying in the grass. Time was divided into light and sound. There was a sanctuary for Joseph and Celice between the lightning and the thunderclap. Such were their six days in the dunes, stretched out, those two unlucky lovers on the coast.

This is our only prayer: May no one come to lift his hand from her leg. Let thunder never find its voice. Hold sound and light, those battling twins, apart. There is a meadow that separates death’s chilly gate and the tumbling nothingness beyond, in which our Joseph and Celice are lying, cushioned by the sunlight and the grass, and held in place by nothing firmer than his fingertip.
* * *
By four the rain had stopped, although the sky stayed overcast and dull. Again the crabs and rodents went to work, while there was light, flippantly browsing Joseph and Celice, frisking them for moisture and for food, delving in their pits and caverns for their treats, and paying them as scant regard as cows might pay a turnip head.

So far no one had even missed Joseph and Celice. They were not expected back at work till Thursday. Their daughter, Syl, would not phone until the weekend, if she remembered. The neighbours were used to silence from the doctors’ house. So their bodies were still secret, as were their deaths. No one was sorry yet. No one had said, ‘It’s such bad luck.’ They’d perished without ceremony. There’d been no one to rub their skin with oils or bathe and dress the bodies as they stiffened. They would have benefited from the soft and herby caresses of an undertaker’s sponge, the cotton wool soaked in alcohol to close the open pores. No one had plugged their leaking rectums with a wad of lint, or taped their eyelids shut, or tugged against their lower jaws to close their mouths. No one had cleaned their teeth or combed their hair. The murderer, that good mortician, though, had carried out one duty well. He had removed their watches and their jewellery. There was a chance, depending on the wind and sand, that even their bones might not be found or ever subjected to the standard rituals and farewells, the lamentations, the funeral, the headstones and obituaries. Then they’d not be listed with the dead, reduced by memory and legacies. They’d just be ‘missing,’ unaccounted for, absent without leave. His hand could hold her leg for good.
* * *
Their wedding photograph was on the wall. Syl had looked at it a thousand times before. Her parents seemed so old in it, even though they had only been in their twenties. Her age now. They were not flattered by the wedding suits or by the hard light of the flash. She stared at it as if their faces would reveal a clue. Do faces in a photograph transform on death? Were their smiles a little more fixed and thinner now, as if their mouths had reached the point beyond which there is no going on?
* * *
There’s nothing more sincere than death. The dead mean what they say.

It’s About Product

The West Side gang faces a crisis at the beginning of Season 3 on The Wire. The Towers, their prime location for selling drugs, have just been demolished to make way for urban renewal. Their main supplier got busted, so they’ve had to share turf with the East Siders in order to get access to better drugs. Their head man is in jail, and the sales force is demoralized. Now it’s the number two, Stringer Bell, calling the shots.
.

.

.
And Stringer has been evaluating the situation…

Badlands by Malick, 1973

“We planned a huge network of tunnels under the forest floor, and our first order of business every morning was to decide on a new password for the day. Now and then we’d sneak out at night and steal a chicken or a bunch of corn or some melons from a melon patch. Mostly, though, we just lay on our backs and stared at the clouds and sometimes it was like being in a big marble hall, the way we talked in low voices and heard the tiniest sound. We had our bad moments, like any couple. Kit accused me of only being along for the ride, while at times I wished he’d fall in the river and drown, so I could watch… I grew to love the forest. The cooing of the doves and the hum of dragonflies in the air made it always seem lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone.”

“One day, while taking a look at some vistas in Dad’s stereopticon, it hit me that I was just this little girl, born in Texas, whose father was a sign painter and who had only just so many years to live. It sent a chill down my spine, and I thought: Where would I be this very moment if Kit had never met me? Or killed anybody? This very moment. If my Mom had never met my Dad? If she’d of never died? And what’s the man I’ll marry going to look like? What’s he doing right this minute? Is he thinking about me now, by some coincidence, even though he doesn’t know me? Does it show on his face? For days afterward I lived in dread. At times I wished I could fall asleep and be taken off to some magical land, but this never happened.”

“The world was like a faraway planet to which I could never return. I thought what a fine place it was, full of things for people to look into and enjoy… Through desert and mesa, across the endless miles of open range, we made our headlong way, steering by the telephone lines toward the mountains of Montana… Little by little we approached the border. Kit was glad to leave South Dakota behind and cursed its name. He said that if the Communists ever dropped the atomic bomb, he wished they’d put it right in the middle of Rapid City… He needed me now more than ever, but something had come between us. I’d stopped even paying attention to him. Instead, I sat in the car and read a map and spelled out entire sentences with my tongue on the roof of my mouth, where nobody could read them.”

“Kit knew the end was coming. He wondered if he’d hear the doctor pronounce him dead, or if he’d be able to read what the papers would say about him, the next day, from the other side. He dreaded the idea of being shot down alone, he said, without a girl to scream out his name.”

Man with the Movie Camera by Vertov

Man with the Movie Camera: A record in celluloid on 6 reels. (An excerpt from the diary of a cameraman.) This film presents an experiment in the cinematic communication of visible events. Without the aid of intertitles. (A film without intertitles.) Without the aid of a scenario. (A film without a scenario.) Without the aid of theater. (A film without sets, actors, etc.) This experimental work aims at creating a truly international absolute language of cinema based on its total separation from the language of theater and literature. [From the opening titles]

Jonathan Beller begins The Cinematic Mode of Production (2006) with an analysis of this 1929 Soviet silent film, in which filmmaker Dziga Vertov captures glimpses of daily life in all its diversity. It’s actually quite entertaining, what with the variety of cinematic techniques and tricks Vertov deploys. He’ll present in rapid sequence a variety of vehicles and machines in operation, then he’ll show the people actually running the machines, then he lets us watch the gears and pulleys and armatures in motion inside the machines. Or we’ll be watching three women riding in a car, then we see (via a second camera) the cameraman riding alongside in another car filming the women, then the lens of the camera, then the women watching the cameraman filming them. Vertov is intent on showing his audience both how stuff works and how filmmaking works. Films don’t just appear on the screen before you: someone has to operate the camera, cut and splice film, assemble the montages, run the thing through a projector. In one sequence Vertov shows a series of still shots, then a still of a piece of film that includes the prior still along with the series of images preceding and following it, then the scene containing the still in continuous cinematic action, the way we’re used to seeing it.

By breaking down the flow of life into discrete actions of people interacting with machines, Vertov shows how the mystifying intricacies of economic activity are assembled piece by piece by actual workers. By also breaking down the flow of film into discrete screen shots and their assembly executed by people working these devices, Vertov draws parallels between filmmaking and the work of industrial production. Says Beller:

for [Vertov] and for other Soviet filmmakers of his time, the consciousness characteristic of montage is the consciousness endemic to modernity’s assemblage process, from the assembly line to constructivism. Through the rationalization, routinization, and standardization of certain aspects of industrial production, montage achieves new orders of particularity and expressivity in the visual. Montage as fragmentation and montage as the connecting of fragments are at once the condition of modern life and the condition for the production of meaning in modern life. In short, all objects, from trains to concepts, are combined and combining: the rationalization of combinatory processes joins function and expression in a manner realized as cinema… Cinema is seen as an extension and indeed as a completion of the general logic of socio-industrial production. The cinematicity of production in general is realized as cinema and it is cinema that confers self-awareness upon a humanity embroiled in and scaled by industrialization.

Here’s a short clip from the movie:

The whole film can be seen in 9 YouTube segments, starting HERE. A reminder if you want to watch it without straining your eyeballs: click the little box in the lower right corner of the YouTube screen to get a full-screen image.

Kite Runner, 2007

[Screenplay by David Benioff, adapted from the novel by Khaled Hosseini. Hosseini, an Afghani by birth, left the country with his family after the king was deposed in a communist coup. I commented in the post on Disgrace that I’d put up a screen shot only if something about this rather disappointing movie stuck with me when I woke up this morning. It did — and here it is.]


Baba, a wealthy Afghani, owns a large estate in Kabul. He has one child, a son named Amir; his wife is dead. A lifelong servant and his son Hassan, members of the oppressed Hazara minority, live in an outbuilding on the property. Despite class and ethnic differences, Amir and Hassan are best friends — at the beginning of the movie anyway. The story begins in the 70s, just after the monarchy has fallen to the communists.

AMIR: The mullahs at school say that drinking is a sin. They say drinkers pay when the Reckoning comes.

BABA (swallows some whiskey): Do you want to know what your father thinks about sin?

AMIR: Yes

BABA: Then I’ll tell you. But first understand this and understand it now: You’ll never learn anything from those bearded idiots.

AMIR: You mean the mullahs?

BABA: I piss on the beards of those self-righteous monkeys. They do nothing but thumb their prayer beads and recite a book in a tongue they don’t even understand. There is only one sin. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation on theft. Do you understand that?

AMIR: No, Baba jan.

BABA: When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife’s right to her husband, his children’s right to their father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth. Do you see? The is no act more wretched than stealing. A man who takes what’s not his to take, be it a life or a loaf of naan, I spit on such a man. And if I ever cross paths with him, God help him. Do you undersatnd?

AMIR: Yes, Baba.

BABA: Good. (Drains the rest of his whiskey with a single swallow, stands, and returns to the bar.) All this talk of sinning is making me thirsty.

Once, 2007

I liked this musical when I saw it at the theater, and I liked it again when I watched it at home. The music is overraught and not something I would ordinarily listen to, but it was the kind of music the lead character would play so it’s okay. The combination of unfulfilled romance and earnestly hopeful artistic ambition seemed right. There’s probably not much more to be said about it.


Disgrace by Coetzee, 1999

[Here are some “screen shots” from this novel, beginning with the first paragraph…]

For a man of his age, fifty-two, divorced, he has, to his mind, solved the problem of sex rather well. On Thursday afternoons he drives to Green Point. Punctually at two p.m. he presses the buzzer at the entrance to Windsor Mansions, speaks his name, and enters. Waiting for him at the door of No. 113 is Soraya. He goes straight through to the bedroom, which is pleasant-smelling and softly lit, and undresses. Soraya emerges from the bathroom, drops her robe, slides into bed beside him. ‘Have you missed me?’ she asks. ‘I miss you all the time,’ he replies. He strokes her honey-brown body, unmarked by the sun; he stretches her out, kisses her breasts; they make love.

* * *

‘We want to give you an opportunity to state your position.’

‘I have stated my position. I am guilty.’

‘Guilty of what?’

‘Of all that I am charged with.’

‘You are taking us in circles, Professor Lurie.’

‘Of everything Ms Isaacs avers, and of keeping false records.’

Now Farodia Rassool intervenes. ‘You say you accept Ms Isaacs’s statement, Professor Lurie, but have you actually read it?’

‘I do not wish to read Ms Isaacs’s statement. I accept it. I know of no reason why Ms Isaacs should lie.’

‘But would it not be prudent to actually read the statement before accepting it?’

‘No. There are more important things in life than being prudent.’

Farodia Rassool sits back in her seat. ‘This is all very quixotic, Professor Lurie, but can you afford it? It seems to me we may have a duty to protect you from yourself.’ She gives Hakim a wintry smile.

‘You say you have not sought legal advice. Have you consulted anyone — a priest, for instance, or a counselor? Would you be prepared to undergo counselling?’

The question comes from the young woman from the Business School. He can feel himself bristling. ‘No, I have not sought counseling nor do I intend to seek it. I am a grown man. I am not receptive to being counselled. I am beyond the reach of counselling.’

* * *

He tries to wash off the ash under the kitchen tap, pouring glass after glass of water over his head. Water trickles down his back; he begins to shiver with cold.

It happens every day, every hour, every minute, he tells himself, in every quarter of the country. Count yourself lucky to have escaped with your life. Count yourself lucky not to be a prisoner in the car at this moment, speeding away, or at the bottom of a donga with a bullet in your head. Count Lucy lucky too. Above all Lucy.

A risk to own anything: a car, a pair of shoes, a packet of cigarettes. Not enough to go around, not enough cars, shoes, cigarettes. Too many people, to few things. What there is must go into circulation, so that everyone can have a chance to be happy for a day. That is the theory; hold to the theory and to the comforts of theory. Not human evil, just a vast circulatory system, to whose workings pity and terror are irrelevant. That is how one must see life in this country; in its schematic aspect. Otherwise one could go mad. Cars, shoes; women too. There must be some niche in the system for women and what happens to them.

* * *

Just something to dabble at, he had said to Rosalind. A lie. The opera is not a hobby, not any more. It consumes him night and day.

Yet despite occasional good moments, the truth is that Byron in Italy is going nowhere. There is no action, no development, just a long, halting cantalina hurled by Teresa into the empty air, punctuated now and then by groans and sighs from Byron offstage. The husband and the rival mistress are forgotten, might as well not exist. The lyric impulse in him might not be dead, but after decades of starvation it can crawl forth from its cave only pinched, stunted, deformed. He has not the musical resources, the resources of energy, to raise Byron in Italy off the monotonous track on which it has been running since the start. It has become the kind of work a sleepwalker might write.

He sighs. It would have been nice to be returned triumphant to society as the author of an eccentric little chamber opera. But that will not be. His hopes must be more temperate: that somewhere from amidst the welter of sound there will dart up, like a bird, a single authentic note of immortal longing. As for recognizing it, he will leave it to the scholars of the future, if there are still scholars by then. For he will not hear the note himself, when it comes, if it comes — he knows too much about art and the ways of art to expect that. Though it would have been nice for Lucy to hear proof in her lifetime, and think a little better of him.

Dirty Pretty Things, 2003

I wonder if I’m getting sick of looking at all these movies. This one seems so contrived as a story, yet the critics loved it. The screenwriter Steve Wright’s next film was Eastern Promises, which likewise explores the marginal lives of London illegal aliens, though in that later film he casts the immigrants in a decidedly less sympathetic light. I just started watching season 2 of the American TV series The Wire, which centers around the investigation of the murder of several eastern European prostitutes smuggled into the Baltimore harbor. One of the bad guys sports a star tattoo on his knee — just like the Russian mobsters in Eastern Promises. I wonder if Wright found his inspiration from The Wire: after all, Wright started in the entertainment biz as producer of the British version of the TV show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Stephen Frears directed Dirty Pretty Things. I see that one of his first films was an adaptation of the goofy Victorian novel Three Men in a Boat, which I once read to our daughter as a bedtime story. I think I’ll add it to the queue. Nope, can’t do it: it’s not in Netflix’s inventory.