I've printed all four panels of "The Moth Burial" now--here's the sheet, in the morning sun. (It's finally hot & steamy here--I'm sitting outside this morning-- before it gets unbearable.) I'm waiting till the ink's 100 percent dry before I fold it up. With the high humidity, best to wait several days.
I'm pleased! There are some issues... I have a couple copies to experiment with fixing by hand. Some people's prints were perfect. One person in class said, "You were ambitious".
A four-board story was more ambitious than I'd realized. I was careless about registering the paper so all the prints lined up right, and there were things I didn't think to take care for--like, inking each board the same, so each print is consistent.
But that's okay--Penny Cooper was thrilled. I was a little surprised--I'd thought she'd be critical, but she didn't think in those terms at all. Rather, "That was good, what we did for the moth."
Technical problems don't bother me all that much either--I'd rather jump right in. "I like tostart on page 18", Auntie Vi used to say.
For the past couple days, I've been putting together a 'Books of the 21st Century' list. It's a very personal list--these are not necessarily "the best" of anything, they're books that impressed me. Some here have a note, most not. I'd like to annotate the list, but I'm giving myself a headache and I want to stop now, so I'm posting this as is.
THE RAW LIST of . . . [counts] 43 Books from This Century That Impressed Me
Any books you'd include or recommend?
1997 [obviously not 21st cent. but this book really impressed me. I don't like the author's novels though.] Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche, nonfiction, Haruki Murakami, 1997. About the 1995 Aum Shinrikyo sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway.
2000 Me Talk Pretty One Day, nonfiction (humor, memoir), David Sedaris, 2000. "I then declared my love for IBM typewriters, the French word for
"bruise," and my electric floor waxer."
Troll: A Love Story––novel, Johanna Sinisalo, 2000. Translated from the Finnish by Herbert Lomas, 2003.
2001 Life of Pi––novel, Yann Martel, 2001.
The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times--American Buddhism/self-help, Pema Chödrön, 2001.
Don’t let’s go to the dogs tonight: an African childhood, Alexandra Fuller, 2001. [Did this fall out of favor? I haven't seen it on anyone's best-of list.]
2002 War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning––history/politics, Chris Hedges
2003 Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea––graphic nonfiction, Guy Delisle, 2003.
Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why, nonfiction, Laurence Gonzales
2004 Islam Explained, Tahar Ben Jelloun, The New Press, 2004. A Muslim father answers his daughter's questions about the religion.
"Consider the Lobster"--nonfiction, David Foster Wallace, Gourmet Magazine, August 2004. PDF: https://www.columbia.edu/~col8/lobsterarticle.pdf "Is it all right to boil a sentient being alive just for our gustatory pleasure?" *The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness--memoir, Karen Armstrong, 2004.
2005 The Democratic Genre: Fan Fiction in a Literary Context, Sheenagh Pugh (for my fandom book--I enjoyed it so much)
2006 *World War Z––novel (apocalyptic), Max Brooks, 2006
Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance–history, Ian Buruma, 2006. (I remembered being impressed by Buruma when I'd read his notes for Sunday Bloody Sunday on the Criterion DVD--he's the nephew of director John Schlesinger.)
The Soul Of A New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa--cookbook, Marcus Samuelsson, 2006. Born in Ethiopia and raised in Sweden--and had a restaurant in Mpls for a while
*The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying
Epidemic – and How it Changed Science, Cities and the Modern World––nonfiction, Steven Berlin Johnson, 2006.
Leaving the Fold: A Guide for Former Fundamentalists and Others Leaving Their Religion––psychology, Marlene Winell, 2006 ed. (first pub 1993)
2008 Here Comes Everybody: the Power of Organizing without Organizations––nonfiction, Clay Shirky, 2008. "how online social tools enable
individuals to collaborate, organize, and communicate more effectively
than ever before."
The Wordy Shipmates––history, Sarah Vowell
2009 *Wolf Hall––novel, Hilary Mantel, 2009.
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead––mystery novel, Olga Tokarczuk, 2009.
Nothing to Envy: Real Lives in North Korea––history, Barbara Demick, 2009. ... life in North Korea through the eyes of six defectors.
2010 Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter--nonfiction, Tom Bissell https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2010/mar/21/tom-bissell-video-game-cocaine-addiction "Tom Bissell was a prize-winning young writer. Then he
started started playing the video game Grand Theft Auto, became cocaine addicted, sleep deprived and for 3 years barely able to write a word." . Started Early, Took My Dog–– "a Jackson Brodie crime novel", Kate Atkinson, 2010.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss––family memoir, Edmund de Waal, 2010.
2012 The Hypo: The Melancholic Young Lincoln––graphic biography, Noah Van Sciver, 2012.
Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent and Lead––psychology, self-help, Brené Brown, 2012. Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail––memoir, Cheryl Strayed, 2012.
Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, (2nd ed.) Henry Jenkins
2013 Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, Illustrated Edition––nonfiction/art by Maira Kalman, 2013.
An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth, Chris Hadfield
2014 "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?", graphic memoir by Roz Chast
2015 Superbetter: How a Game-ful Life Can Make You Stronger, Happier, Braver and More Resilient, Jane McGonigal
2016 The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed Our Minds--nonfiction (psychology, biography), Michael Lewis, 2016. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky and their research into cognitive biases
The Gardener and the Carpenter––child psychology, Alison Gopnik: “When we garden,...we do not believe we are the ones who
single-handedly create the cabbages or the roses. Rather, we toil to
create the conditions in which plants have the best chance of
flourishing.”
2017 Less––novel, Andrew Sean Greer, 2017 (Pulitzer Prize, 2018). Like a very nice culinary foam.
*All Systems Red––novel (sci-fi), first of the Murderbot Diaries, 2017–, Martha Wells.
2018 There, There––novel, Tommy Orange, 2018.
Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress--nonfiction, Stephen Pinker, 2018. White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism––nonfiction, Robin DiAngelo, 2018 OMG, what I could never agree about with Ass't Man.
2021 Project Hail Mary, novel (sci-fi), Andy Weir, 2021.
Today I am designing my next print for printmaking class--tomorrow we start carving linoleum in "jigsaw" style for printing blocks of color. (I have no idea.) Thinking about a favorite saying, Not my circus, not my monkeys--(but I always say "pony" instead of "monkeys")---I want to do a circus pony, and maybe a bear too. I went looking for circus art for inspiration--I was thinking of the bold Polish CYRK poster art I've always loved.
This Soviet one is more printerly...
A student in the printmaking class recommended German printmaker Daniel Hopfer (1471–1536)--this is his etching "Three German Soldiers". At the MMA. Does it inspire or dismay to see excellence?
____________
Speaking of excellence--I might get a TV so I can watch the Olympics. The reminder that we humans work hard to excel at unnecessary things always cheers me up.
Maybe I should get Internet at home finally--now I can afford it. I've always lived where I could use the house Internet. Living alone for these two years, I've created a hot spot with my iPhone--free, and fine for blogging and browsing on my laptop--but the speed isn't sufficient to stream media. With Internet, I could watch things like the Criterion movie channel this fall, when I go back to work.
I guess it's obvious... but it just occurred to me that the reason it's so nice to have this summer off--it has surprised me, how nice it is--is because I know I have a job to return to. Sometimes I wake up feeling anxious and then remember--it's okay--you have a job! Usually when I've had a long stretch of time off, I've been unemployed, so there was always an undercurrent of worry.
I have five more weeks free. Five! I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. Printmaking class for three more weeks (yay!)--and then on my own; working on making/eating/drawing nice food; writing up Criterion movies and my favorite books of this century so far; Wednesdays at the thrift store.
Seeing people... One friend will be in town this week--we studied Classics in college together. (She teaches high-school Latin in Virginia.) Another is leaving town––moving back home to Maine. We worked together at the art-college library 20+ years ago. I'll see her for the last time this Saturday, meeting at the art museum next to our old workplace. We don't see each other often, but it's weird she won't be here anymore. It's being nice to reconnect with a couple people--KG in printmaking class, MT who makes dolls––while other friendships have kind of pulled apart. So it goes.
Fun Locator "it's a job... for a doll!" Spike's tip: "look for the squishy stuff and the curlicues".
I was inspired by Maira Kalman's illustrations for Food Rules that I posted yesterday... and the idea that food can be playful. One of the book's rules is "Eat snack foods only if you make them yourself."
Could you even make a Hostess cupcake? (An English person said these are like "choc rolls" in the UK.) There are recipes online < that one looks delicious ––but a true one would include propylene glycol monostearate and sodium stearoyl lactylate, and where do you even buy those?
You know what words were not in the "best books of the 21st century" NY Times reviews I mentioned yesterday? (Words I'd jotted down included "devastating, urgent, human debris, silenced"--and so forth.) Was there even one word signifying fun? Laugh, guffaw, lighthearted, amusing, raucous, ribald, hilarious? Any mention of, godforbid, humor? Maybe? but none I recall that stood out from the litany of disaster.
My sister had posted her top-10 novels of the 21st century on FB--that's what gave me the idea to choose my own-- and her choices were all grim. (Two by Colson Whitehead.) I texted--would she recommended anything lighter?
"I looked at my Good Reads list" she replied, "and there isn’t a single not-heavy title there!" So this morning she posted Captain Underpants. She volunteer tutors grade-schoolers in reading, and a second-grader had turned her on to this series.
I started off my "favorites of this century" with Maira Kalman on purpose, to set the mood: she is like beaten egg-whites, air lifting even a heavy batter. Some of the books I'll list are dark--but I can't tolerate absolute despair, so not that dark.
BELOW: I love bink's drawing, from this morning: "All the Things"––the Fun Locator, a paint box, strawberries (from the farmers market), geranium, girlettes--and that's me in the center.
Marz (below, left) joined us in the side-yard too. I got out my calendar and determined that her college classes start four weeks from tomorrow! (I go back to work in five weeks.)
It's not always easy between us in a small apartment, but I'm going to miss her as a roommate. And miss her being in town. Not that she'll be all that far away--I could take a bus day-trip to Duluth (150 miles each way), but that's a lot farther than across the room.
I'm excited for her, for sure though. A new endeavor, entirely with the intention of learning new things. Fun! I'm envious--which spurs me to look for more art classes this fall. _________________
Yesterday in part-2 of the glass wire-wrapping class I learned--or confirmed--that I do not care to work with glass. My sun catchers turned out nicely, but I don't even want them. I tied up a green baboon toy from the 1970s instead.
I was bad at it--it's futzy--but I'm glad I learned some tricks. I'd never realized that you can braid wire, wrap it, construct shapes with it, and so forth. That might come in handy for toy projects. I never did find the broken window glass I'd saved from the thrift store, but if it turns up, now I could make earrings. And I might wear the baboon as a necklace.
Have you seen lists of Best Books of the 21st Century (so far) going around? I noticed them first on Facebook, then saw the NYTimes is one of many who put together a list--their "100 Best Books".
Some of my favorite books aren't on any of the lists I've seen. (Most especially the book I always rave about--All Systems Red, the 1st and best of the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. I bet it turns up on "Best Sci-Fi", but I haven't look at such a list.)
And then, half the write-ups are awful--swollen with adjectives and hyperbole--they don't make me want to read the book.
I jotted down some words from the reviews--as a reminder to myself NEVER TO SAY:
"unpack / locate/ navigate / bear witness/ silenced... human animals/ human debris/ late capitalism/ rampant neo-imperialist capitalism... necessary/ urgent/ delicious/ beloved/ heartbreaking/ Tolstoyan/ rare / fragile/ visceral/ fresh/ labyrinthine/ destabilizing/ insanely good/ silently exploding/ quietly devastating" The one I hate the most is "necessary" applied to a book. Water and air are necessary.
Now, fueled partly by annoyance and partly by love, I have to write up some of my favorites and see if I write anything better, something I'd like if I were me (but hadn't written it).
I started on Facebook with an easy one: Michael Pollan’s Food Rules: An Eater's Manual, Illustrated Edition (2013) with art by Maira Kalman. Easy because she's one of my favorite artists and her pictures speak for themselves.
I did see Food Rules on a list, but only the one, and it was the first ed., 2009, which has no pictures. Michael Pollan said that all rules you need to know he put on the cover of the first edition. You might remember? "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."
I liked that, but it's the illustrations that make this edition a "Best of" for me because of the sensory joy they bring. It's like you can EAT the book now, with your eyes.
Pollan added more rules to this edition, some of them suggested by readers. They aren't rules in the army sense, though. They aren't beat-yourself-up weight-loss rules. They are suggestions of ways we could to pay more, better, loving attention to food and to the people we share it with (including the people who grow and make it). Like, "put flowers on the table".
He asked Maira Kalman if she wanted to illustrate it. She says on her website page for the book that she said yes, but told him that "Cheez Doodles had a beloved place in our family history".
This was not an impediment. Kalman writes, "He did not hold that against me. This is a great country. VAST. Complicated. With plenty of room for extremes.":
_________
Play with Your Food
I'm never good at making myself do things that are good for me if the things are unpleasant. Who is? (Maybe you?) I've been writing about trying/wanting to eat better and cook more, and this book helps because it's about adding pleasantness. This illustration, below, encourages me because it makes cooking look like the circus. "We will always make time for the things that MATTER. Cooking matters."
It gives me a fun idea too: DRAW MY FOOD. The nutrition app I am free-trialing is all about words and numbers: track this, count that. It is unpleasant to me, so I don't do it.
No one suggests playing with your food. "Try dancing with your food." What if I sketched some of the things I eat? That would help me enjoy food more. (Eating too much isn't really enjoyable.)
Hm. For the next print-class project, we are introducing color. Maybe I would like to carve some beautiful or fun foods... Like Cheez Doodles! ______________________ Thinking about what a good mini-review of books would be... It might/should say... 1. What the book is (what's it about?) 2. Why it's special--lots of people write about food--why is this book different? (No froth, please.) 3. Why you care--and why we might
I'm making mine a list of my favorite books, not "the best". I'm not judging them for literary merit, but by how much I liked them. ______________
Shorter is better on Facebook though, so I kept it simple. Also, I only have a few (51) "friends" there, but some are coworkers and remote relatives, and I don't like to expose myself there like I do here.
Secrets & Lies, UK 1996, dir. Mike Leigh. I watched the DVD from the Criterion Collection, which includes interviews with director Leigh and actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste (Hortense).
NOTE: There's a spoiler about the emotional tone at the end of the movie. It's the very last sentence--after the video--I left space so you can easily skip it.
BELOW: Hortense, left, is a newly orphaned adoptee, about 26 years old, searching for her birth mother. Lesley Manville, right, is astonishing as a social worker whose professional kindness is sincere, yet chilling. You sense she's gone through this with adoptees a million times, and half-a-million times seen it go wrong.
This doesn't go wrong, but there is a surprise.
Hortense: "There's a mistake, it says she's white." Social Worker: "Well, your mother could be white, couldn't she?"
Just this month, my state changed the law allowing access to birth records: "As of July 1, 2024, Minnesota law changed to allow access to original birth records by adoptees." To request this, you fill outa PDF and submit it online.
In the movie, Hortense mails her request to discover her birth mother ––she drops it in a red
pillar post box––and she goes in person to the public-records office to consult
massive volumes of birth and death dates. The technology from 1995/96 is outdated, but this movie about a Black woman discovering that her biological mother is white has turned out to be prescient because of a hard-to-predict twist in the years since: the rise of home DNA test kits.
With these kits, lots of
people who were only looking for info about where in the world they're from have been finding out that their relatives aren't who they'd thought they were.
Are they still who they thought they were, themselves? BBC article: These people took DNA tests. The results changed their lives, 2023. ______________
How does new knowledge of your ancestry change how you see yourself?
An acquaintance of mine, Lars, now in his sixties, grew up in a Lutheran family of Scandinavian ancestry. He never knew who his grandfather was. His grandmother had been a teenage mother, and her parents had raised her baby as their own. Lars's dad grew up thinking his mother was his sister, until someone spilled the beans.
Everyone thought the grandmother was hiding something. Getting hold of her high-school diary after her death, however, Lars thinks it's more likely that she didn't know who the father was. She'd coded it, but it's clear that she'd slept around with different boys in high school.
A couple years ago, Lars got an email from a stranger: "We're cousins". The stranger was following up their own DNA testing. It turned out, Lars's grandfather was one of his grandmother's high school classmates--a Jewish classmate. Lars immediately started investigating that history and claiming Jewish identity.
However, it's only a piece of information that changed---Lars is no more Jewish socially or religiously than he was for sixty+ years. Of course, there is no genetic marker for "Jewish". Or for race, either, because "race is real, but it's not genetic." And, "Geographicancestry is not the same thing as race." --sapiens.org/biology/is-race-real Unlike Lars, Hortense does enter into a different social reality as she begins a relationship with her new family members--"Welcome to the family", they say to her-- yet we get no inkling
of what Hortense thinks or feels about her biological family being white.
This
seems unlikely, not because Hortense is shown to be political or
personally unsure of herself--in fact, she is pretty solid--but because
she lives (we live) in a society dominated by race. Example:
the actor who played Hortense, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, found she
wasn't getting any roles afterward, despite the success of the movie and
being nominated herself for an Academy Award.
Mike Leigh works
closely with his actors for months before writing the final script and
together they create a complete backstory for their person. But there's
this peculiar gap in Hortense's.
_________________________
Hortense comes from the middle class and is a successful optometrist. Her birth mother, Cynthia, is not only a different race, she's a different class. She scrapes by working in a box-making factory and living where she grew up--in a crumbling, squashed East End terraced house, with an outdoor toilet.
[Mike Leigh said in the Criterion interview that they filmed in a real East End house, which had just been sold to a gentrifier. The rooms were so small, he said, it was hard to fit the camera in.]
Secrets & Lies is an excellent movie--Mike Leigh's best, many say. Marz is a big believer in the crowd-smarts of Rotten Tomatoes, and this movie gets 96% thumbs-up. I liked it a lot, and I recommend it, 4.5 out of 5 stars.
I took a half-star off because it's almost unbearable to watch Cynthia weeping hysterically, as she often does, and pleading for pity in a high-pitched whine. It's not that she's not believable. Unfortunately, she
totally is. Cynthia is the human equivalent of her dead father's upstairs
bedroom, cluttered with the detritus of a small life, so water-damaged in the ceiling, it's soggy.
Please stop crying.
If I were the director I'd have gone a little
lighter because Cynthia's pain was so obnoxious, I lost sympathy for her. Maybe Leigh wanted to get that across--that pain can make us into sniveling spongy slobs, and that other people's pain may revolt us... Still, I'd give us a break.
Secrets & Lies is more hopeful than most of Leigh's movies though (maybe that's why it's a favorite). They are sometimes unremittingly bleak stories about ordinary people struggling with bad luck and social ills. It's a relief that Hortense is a nice and giving person, but that's at least partly because she had a happy childhood. No special credit to her.
The character who brings the humanity into the bleakness, despite a wretched family, is Cynthia's brother Maurice (Timothy Spall). He is recognizable--the person in the dysfunctional family who tries to take care of everyone, and fails, because it is impossible.
Maurice runs his own successful photography studio; successful, because he SEES people. My favorite scene--a gem in the middle of the film--is a wonderful sequence showing people having their photos taken by him.
What's your name? (What's your name?) Who's your daddy? (Who's your daddy?) . . . Has he taken (has he taken) Any time (any time) (To show) to show you what you need to live?
––"Time of the Season", The Zombies, 1968
___________________
Maurice is lovely--one character says, "I wish I had a father like you"–– and it's an enormous relief that his goodness is rewarded in the end, at least for a moment. Sometimes things aren't so bad. At least for a moment.
"The Book Department's all here," said Dawn, a woman my age who started volunteering in BOOK's after I quit five months ago. ("I could see they needed help"). She, Amina, and I all happened to be in the break room at the same time. It's good there's a couple of us volunteers.
Dawn impressed me yesterday, when she set up a little display. Hope never dies!
The books sold within minutes (sad to say): someone came along and snatched them right up.
Dawn and Amina--both book people--keep the books in decent order. I help some, but I've been working more on toys, which no one loves like I do. (The good puzzle volunteer still comes too.) I still get annoyed at oversights in BOOK's, but it's purely fun to do toys. I. Teeth & Politics
I asked all my coworkers yesterday what they thought about Kamala Harris replacing Biden. I dropped by Emmler's after work and as I was talking to her about the responses, it occurred to me there's a direct relation between people who haven't been able to afford a dentist in years and people who don't care about politics. (Which is many of my coworkers--"I don't care". Those with good teeth were excited about Kamala.)
[Oh! Also... E. gave me a panini/George-Forman grill! to
use as a printing press. She said she never uses hers. Does anyone? The
store is always getting donations of grills, often like-new.]
Emmler laughed and agreed with the teeth & president connection: "If your teeth always cause you pain no matter who the president is, you don't care." She's another person who lives with intermittent, intense dental pain. "I don't care about politics", she said, "but I'll vote because of my grandmother. She was in the League of Women voters, and I can't let her down." E's grandmother is nintey-two.
Until working at the thrift store, I'd never lived around
the level of poverty that means you suffer with bad or,
eventually, no teeth. Our state does provide health insurance for people with a low-income, but it's not like you just show up and get free care. Even to apply, you have to be able to read, have access to and feel comfortable on a computer, and have the mental focus to navigate government bureaucracy. Some of my thrift coworkers don't have one (or any) of those things.
E.’s mother has come to town to help her navigate the system. "There's a difference between it being available and you being able to get it," the mother said.
II. Banana Bread w/ Almond Flour
I'm trying (trying) to be a better advocate for myself. Really, I've skated by on good luck so far... Must try harder now. For health, I'm trying to cook more, which I do not love. But I'm making an effort. Hope never dies! This morning I madebanana breadwith no added sugar. It's super easy. It's good, and it's sweet but not cake, so I'm not tempted to eat the whole pan at once. (I would.)
Recipe 3 ripe bananas--smash up with... 2 eggs, and 1 teaspoon vanilla.
Mix 2 cups almond flour with 2 teaspoons baking powder, and 1/2 (half) teaspoon salt.
Optional: I added half a tsp cardamom, and a handful of walnuts.
Mix all together, and bake at 325 for 50 minutes. A cake or bundt pan works better than a loaf pan, so the center isn't gooey.
III. Peggy Ashcroft
Marz watched The 39 Steps with me last night. I was going to write a review, but I fell asleep halfway through. Marz hadn't seen any early Hitchcock, and she was impressed.
I was surprised how little I remembered. I'll watch the second half tonight.
I'll just mention that Peggy Ashcroft (1907–1991) is in it. I'd seen her the other night too, in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), playing Glenda Jackson's mother. [center photo, below]
I first saw her when I was young--she was in The Jewel in the Crown (1984), about the end of the British raj in India. [third photo, below]
Ashcroft'd have been about 28 in The 39 Steps (1935), playing the beaten-down wife of a crofter who bravely helps Richard Hanney (Robert Donat), below.
Above: Peggy Ashcroft (as Barbara Batchelor) and Geraldine James (Sarah) in The Jewel in the Crown. (I wonder how this has dated.)
My first printing! In last night's relief printmaking class at Highpoint Studio. The teacher gave us an excellently thorough demo (unlike the glass teacher), and it took a while to get set up.
I only had time to print the first two (of four) panels of "The Moth Burial"--ten prints. The booklet will be folded up, accordion style. Don't know what I'm going to do with them . . . * * *Anyone want one? Lmk--in the comments, or email me (frescadp at gmail).
I'd like to keep making story-strips like this--I've got that movie-making, storytelling, bookish impulse. I'm the only one who divided their woodblock into different picture-areas--plus used the back.
(As I mentioned, Grateful J literally sawed the block half because I'd
carved the pages in reverse. That turned out better anyway, allowing me
to space out the panels.)
I hope there's a class there this fall so I can keep
using the equipment, plus keep learning in person--seeing other
beginners' work, you can see what works and what doesn't.
And it's fun to be around other makers--I loved seeing everyone's prints. Everyone else carved one picture on their woodblock. One woman carved a head of cabbage with a slice cut off, revealing the inner folds and curls... Super intricate! What else...? A diving loon (a wonderful graphic choice--loons have black and white markings anyway); a nighttime camping scene on the shore of a lake; broken windows in a ghost town; a horned woman with a bird (my friend KG); the St. John's bridge in Portland, OR; a dragon; a cat's face; and a fairy tale monster--this by retired professor Jack Zipes, who is famous in that field (Brothers Grimm & Sicilian tales). Printing on a professional press (there's a big roller
drum to my left in the above photo) is a doddle--so much easier than rubbing the back of
your paper with a wooden spoon. Some minor glitches arose––e.g., I
applied ink unevenly on the two blocks––but as you can see, the prints
are dark and crisp.
I might build a simple home press--like a flower press--I see them online. Hm, I also see all sorts of DIY hacks--adapt a panini maker! (we get them at the store); use a cold press laminator... Must explore more options.
Today is my thrift-store volunteer day, so off I go to that. Have a lovely one, everyone!
ABOVE: John Schlesinger directs Glenda Jackson (Alex Greville) and Murray Head (Bob Elkin) in Sunday Bloody Sunday, 1971, UK. I'm surprised I'd never seen this before. I watched it last night on a DVD from the Criterion Collection.
This is a descriptive review, way more than four sentences, but with no actual spoilers. _________________
Sunday Bloody Sunday:"Is something better than nothing?"
Strip away Sunday Bloody Sunday's place in the history of film and sexuality–– –– director John Schlesinger's triumph with Midnight Cowboy (1969) had earned him, a gay man, the freedom to film a man being sexual in a natural, everyday way with both of his male and female lovers (kissing them, holding them naked in bed); ––just four years after the UK decriminalized sex between men; the camera operator couldn't stand to look and turned away from the two men kissing*-- set aside this important social history and there remains a story that asks a question for the ages: Should I stay or should I go?
Two Londoners are knowingly both sleeping with a younger man, Bob (Murray Head). More, they are both in love with him, a charming, affectionate, talented artist who expects he's on the cusp of a career breakthrough.
"We're free to do what we want", Bob says to his woman lover. "A lot of people do things they don't want to do," she replies. Not Bob. Not because he has a superior personality, liberated from bourgeois silliness, though it's implied he might think so, but because he doesn't have to. He controls a limited commodity––access to his own young and sexy self. Bob's aboveboard, free-spirited approach to what we'd now call polyamory is an emotional pyramid
scheme--it pays off most for the person at the apex––him––and everyone lower down
gets less. Maybe they're fine with it, maybe they're not. He's never intentionally unkind, he simply considers other people not his problem.
Below: Bob (left) and Daniel hold each other. Bob is loving but refuses commitment and walks away from conflict.
The middle-aged man can accept the limitations of loving Bob with some equanimity. He, Dr. Daniel Hirsh (Peter Finch),
is shown to have a full life as a medical doctor, with friends and an
extended family. He attends and is deeply moved by his nephew's
bar mitzvah, and he celebrates afterward in a large, warm gathering.
The woman, Alex (Glenda Jackson), suffers more from the limitations of
her lover––and her life. We hear
repeatedly that England is in an economic crisis, and in Alex's work at a job-placement service she's unable to help an older man who's been laid off. When she visits her upper
class parents, they sit far apart at a long, polished table, and her mother (Peggy Ashcroft) suggests, kindly, that Alex should invite her divorced husband over.
The only friends we meet of Alex's are a family ofleftists, for whom she house sits. Their moral compass, like Bob's, bobs on good luck. SBS is not a judgmental film--usually. It presents the characters fondly, even Bob. But these are exposed as hypocrites. The camera focuses on a famine-relief poster that hangs above their fridge (below), for instance, and inside the well-stocked fridge we see the "two pounds of raw meat" the wife has instructed Alex to feed their dog.
The set design and set dressing is fantastic, a real pleasure (production designer Lucian Arrighi talks about the pleasure of doing them, on the Criterion DVD). (Clothes too.) I wanted close-ups of all the fabrics (the paisley draped over the couch, above), wallpaper, crockery, books, and art all over...
The telephone is a key link, and we see the internal workings of London's telephone system.
Alex and Daniel share not only a lover but a telephone answering service, with
messages taken by a woman at a switchboard (silent film star Bessie Love**), whom they converse
with. "How's the traffic?")
BELOW: Dr Hirsh in cool grays--his desk with telephone and Japanese netsuke:
Exterior London scenes feature too--you can see screenshots with locations identified at Reelstreets. And food. On the lonely weekend, Daniel eats candied fruit from a Harrods box; Alex makes fudge and eats it while she cries. My favorite--in her slovenly studio apartment (gorgeous! more books!
carpets!), Alex spoons instant coffee into a blue-and-white china cup, fills it with hot water from the kitchen tap, and drinks some in a rush. Do we ever see Bob eat or drink? Oh, yes--he drinks a glass of milk. But not alone.
Gay love onscreen isn't generally considered scandalous anymore; with the Internet and remote work, Sundays aren't the "bloody" wasteland of the week anymore; but people (we) are still vulnerable to loneliness and still asking, How little can I live with? How much can I take?
Is something better than nothing? ________________________
* Story of the cameraman from a good article on the Criterion channel: "Sunday Bloody Sunday: Something Better" (2012), by Ian Buruma (JS's nephew, as it happens).
**Some other small parts include a patient played by June Brown--famous as Dot Cotton in Eastenders; Vivian Pickles (the mother in Harold & Maude), as the leftist friend with the dog; and Daniel Day Lewis in his first screen appearance (of a few seconds) as a boy who scratches a car with a broken bottle, below.
I guess I'd give Sunday Bloody Sunday 4 out of 5 stars. It's very well done--the acting, the visuals--it's a pleasure to watch, maybe that's my favorite thing (the interiors, but also exteriors of London). The screenplay by Penelope Gilliatt is good--but... it's all a little cold, a little remote. I suppose it's supposed to be, but that left me not caring much about anyone.
And it's hard when the object of desire gives you an unpleasant feeling. I believe Alex and Daniel were really into Bob--sex with him looked like it'd be great--but we the viewers aren't getting it, so it's an intellectual assent on our part, which isn't going to be as strong as if we fell in love (with any of the characters, actually).
But definitely I recommend the film--for the history of England, sexuality in film, and the things--like the curtains. I want those curtains!
"It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America."
Last night I donated to Kamala Harris's campaign, inspired by reading that "progressive donation platform ActBlue raised $27.5 million from from small-dollar donors in the five hours after Biden endorsed Harris."[via cnbc]. I wanted to be part of that wave. (By this morning, it'd risen to nearly $50 million. A lot of big-buck donors immediately stepped up to support her too.)
I'd woken up thinking of Béyonce's latest album cover, for her album Cowboy Carter. (She’s also a Texan.)
Some critics said it was wrong-headed, that Black people shouldn't be patriotic to this racist country, but I'm like, if you've built much of the country and continuously pushed it to live up to its (our) ideals--struggled to extend its liberties--why not fly your flag? That's worth being proud of. Women, double that.
Claim your country. All people are created equal. Doesn't matter who wrote that sentence, it's a great ideal, worth working for.
My favorite: "The thing about democracy, beloveds, is that it is not neat, orderly, or quiet. It requires a certain relish for confusion." --Molly Ivins. _____________________
II. Hone Your Summer
On a separate note, I go back to work in 5 weeks or so... What do I want to do? I'm loving being off work much more than I expected!
Signing up for classes has turned out to be a smart move--both to push me to work on projects and to connect socially. Last week I even felt overwhelmed from socializing every day, and sometimes with people I don't know well, or at all (the new neighbors, the glass class). That's energizing and draining. (Different brain batteries.) I'm glad of it--keeps me alert.
Maybe it was President Biden and the light that his stepping out of the race shines on aging... He's nineteen years older than me. What do I want to do with the time I have left? (Nineteen years? who knows.) What have I left to do?
I'm not interested in bucket lists of fun. "I haven't been to Bali." I don't need more entertainment. It's more about... Hm... Honing the self. To hone: to sharpen or smooth, to make more intense or effective
I'm not in love with my job, but it sure is a whetstone! The grit of the public schools... Gotta make sure I use it to intensify my self, not grind me down. Must think more on how to approach school work as a tool.
A customer at the thrift store, when I told him I work with autistic students, said, "There's a special place in heaven for people like you." (I don't know why people say teachers don't get respect--people tell me things like this frequently. Maybe more because I'm in special ed?)
I said, "Well, that may be true––but not because of the kids, who are a delight––for dealing with the school system!"
But honing is not only about getting better with people (though that's maybe the hardest challenge). It's about sharpening, clarifying the mind, paying close attention...
What is undone? Well, there are important movies that I haven't viewed, or that I would like to revisit. And then write a mini-review, the writing of which makes you PAY ATTENTION (like Orange Crate Art's "Twelve Movies" series of well-crafted, 4-sentence movie reviews). Ingestion is not digestion.
Could I, say, watch all the Criterion Collection "of the greatest films from around the world"? There are now 1,696 films. If I watched one a day, that'd only take about five years. That's unlikely (one a day!), but possible.
I like the idea of watching the movies at random, rather than with a plan. At the library yesterday, I scanned one shelf of DVDs (alphabetized S—Z) for the Criterion label and grabbed all six that were there. What a wacky mix-up!
I've seen three (That Hamilton Woman, Secrets & Lies, and--a favorite--The 39 Steps), but not recently.
Not sure I can take A Woman Under the Influence, about a woman's mental deterioration. I love Gena Rowlands and Peter Falk though. I'll brave it, inspired by this youtube comment on the trailer: "This film was so fucking real, it was deep, loved every bit of it, fantastic piece of cinema"
I’d just blogged about Casablanca this morning. Is this a very Rick Blaine (Bogart) sacrifice of Biden?
Hm… I see Rachel Maddow has put it in those terms, saying, “What a man. What a patriot. What an act of selfless devotion to your country.” (From a guest link to the NYTimes—here on Orange Crate Art)
At any rate, I hope it will be like resistance hero Victor Laszlo says, “Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win.”
At yesterday's glass class, I assembled broken glass on clear glass squares--below (on white paper). The two layers will fuse together in the kiln.
Those white forms on the table ^ are for making glass
cabachon pendants, but I'd never wanted to make those. I'd thought I was inventing these squares (I was, for me) but one woman said, "Oh, your sun catchers look like paintings".
Most of the class was making them too instead of cabachons. Don't know what everyone else intends to wire-wrap next week. I'm bringing little toys.
The teacher, Janelle, is magnificent, like a Frank Frazetta pulp-art warrior with a braid and a broadsword. I am smitten . . . but she's a terrible teacher. Didn't explain anything, and talked in specialized technical terms. I'm glad someone else teaches the wire class.
Luckily, most of the class was experienced and knew what to do--they'd even brought their own tools––and they showed me. "If you want to cut that, score it with this tool, then break if off with these clamp grippers."
I asked Janelle if she did architectural glass work, and she said this year she'd done the stained glass vestibule of a new downtown jazz club, the Berlin Music Club. The club opens at 4 pm so I plan on going for happy hour soon. It closes at midnight. (THIS IS THE MIDWEST WE GO TO BED EARLY) (I wonder if it's for safety, too--to avoid the street violence after the rowdy bars close at 2 a.m.)
The blue glass squares are modeled after the stained glass Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church (1962) in Berlin, Germany. I've never been to Berlin, and I'd never heard of this building! "Following Allied bombing in WWII, the
original tower remained standing as a ruin and is referred to
as the “hollow tooth”:
After class, I stopped at Sisters Sludge, a coffee shop/bar near where I lived with HouseMate. During Covid, they'd set up heaters for outside sidewalk seating, and she and I used to go there frequently. It's out of the way so I rarely go there now, but it's one of my happy places.
Yesterday I sat in the a/c, drank a porter (it's on my plan), and read We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie, 2017, by Noah Isenberg,
My shock at US politics in recent years stems from my unexamined belief, growing up, that Casablanca was THE American myth: the hero who gives up love to fight against fascism. (And the heroine who gives up her passionate. She leaved the choice up to Rick, but as Capt. Louis Renault insinuates, Ilsa didn't have to get on that plane. But it's Bogart's show.)
(I bet Ilsa and Laszlo are going to be happy together after the war (if they're not killed)--they have a good partnership, like the couple at the end of Brief Encounter. While if she'd stayed with Rick, running a bar in Morocco after the war...? Maybe he'd sell up and do something else? What?
No, she'll be happier with Laszlo in the long run, and Rick will be happier with Louis. (Really, what was he going to do with Ilsa at the bar? Besides... um, that.) It's a "Ho Yay" (Homoeroticism, yay!)TV Trope.
Anyway, I was shocked (for real, not "shocked, shocked") when my fellow Americans started to celebrate fascism. Not just our usual--but now more overt--homegrown white supremacy. I mean, I get the Confederate flag. But to see white American boys marching with actual Nazi flags in Charlottesville, 2017? Hadn't they seen Casablanca?!?
Probably not, and it's not the myth they're coming from. But still, don't they have family members who remember Grandpa (great-grandpa, maybe) fought in WWII to hit them upside the head?
This book, written before Charlottesville--might be wrong. We might not "always have Casablanca" as a shared national story. I guess we already don't...
I'm confused. Does that mean we never did share Rick & Louis, Ilsa & Laszlos's story? Was it a liberal illusion?
I didn't think so, but maybe I'm wrong. From Time magazine, October 4, 2018 --(it mentions the shock of seeing swastikas at Charlotseville): "More Americans Supported Hitler Than You May Think. Here’s Why One Expert Thinks That History Isn’t Better Known"
Now I am going out for Sunday coffee with bink, so all for now. Love ya! Don't let the bastards get you down!
