Amour the Best Film of 2012 (But Won't Be so Honored)

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Not a Hollywood film so it won't win Best Picture, but count it among the greatest achievements in cinematic history.  

AMOUR (2012)

Directed by Michael Haneke

Les Films du Losange, PG-13, 127 minutes, in French with subtitles

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Here’s what happens in the Oscar-nominated Amour: a woman in her 80s dies. That’s it–no guns, no fast cars, and no dazzling special effects. And, yet, it’s easily the best film of 2012–though it has no chance of winning that category–and it’s not too early to apply the term “classic” and rank it among the better films of all time.  (For the record, director Michael Haneke’s 2009 film The White Ribbon also belongs in that category.)

The film is essentially a pas de deux between Georges (Jean-Louis Trintingant) and Anne (Emmanuel Riva), elderly, married, haute bourgeois soul mates that have shared decades of music, teaching, books, art collecting, and mutual aloofness. When Anne blacks out after a glorious recital by her former pupil Alexandre (Alexandre Tharaud), the couple is faced with the reality that Anne is dying. It is here that amour (love) meets its ultimate test. What would you do for the one you love most when the Grim Reaper beckons? The film raises all manner of questions we spend our lives ignoring. When do we hold on, and when do we say goodbye? What will we endure for a few more moments? How do we judge when the line is crossed between tolerance and intolerance? How much care can even the most loving caregiver provide before the giver snaps? Is that person honor-bound to respect the wishes of the dying? How much is the receiver willing to accept? When does the loss of personal dignity become so repugnant that death becomes merciful? Georges quickly learns that there are no easy answers to those questions, and that the only guidelines are internal and instinctive. When daughter Eva (Isabelle Hupert) shows up to ask “serious” questions about what to do, Georges abruptly dismisses her.” What sort of serious discussion do you wish to have?” he demands. Eva has no answer; her own life is as complicated as most are midstream–financial woes, a rocky marriage, career worries, self-absorption….  Georges’ retort sharply slices through the nostrums and makes Eva confront truth.

If you get the idea that this film is depressing, you’re right. But it’s also many other things: touching and tragic, wise and helpless, shocking and poignant, funny and gut-wrenchingly sad. Does this sound contradictory? Isn’t the life cycle equally so? We are born without awareness and in a state of total dependency, and in such a state many of us leave this mortal coil. The biggest difference is that in between we develop selfhood and definite opinions about how that self should be treated.

Many North Americans will avoid this film like the plague. Not only is its subject a downer, its pacing is glacial. Georges and Anne are essentially prisoners on death row awaiting a sickle-bearing warden. They sit in the stillness of the den, inch along the silence of the foyer, and sit almost wordlessly at the table. There is one numbingly beautiful shot of Anne on her side in bed wearing a pale blue night gown; were it not for her occasional blinking, it could be a still-life titled Odalisque at 80. Another astonishing moment occurs during Georges’ slow-motion attempt to trap and release a pigeon that has gotten into the apartment–almost certainly a metaphor for the soul’s release. These are among numerous moments in which director Haneke forces his audiences to slow down and be aware of time’s passage. Kudos go also to veteran actors Trintignant and Riva. Few actors convey ennui as convincingly as Trintignat–his performance in Trois Coleurs: Rouge ranks among the finest in cinematic history­–but for once he is upstaged. Emmanuel Riva won’t win the Oscar either, but it would be fair to say that there is more emotion, passion, and anger in her eyebrows than her Oscar contenders could muster in a dozen overwrought soliloquies. She is a veritable shape shifter whom we witness transformed from a handsome older woman into a barely breathing sack of bones. Toward the end, her performance is mime elevated to heights not seen since the passing of Marcel Marceau.

Let me reiterate: this is not an American-style movie; it’s a European film. Amour demands patience, but its rewards are–dare I say it?–eternal. It should be required viewing for every erstwhile moralist that opposes doctor-assisted suicide. It also gives a twist and substance to the New Testament passage: “Greater love hath no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”     --Rob Weir

Sons of the Never Wrong Album Offers Hope (if We See It)

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SONS OF THE NEVER WRONG

King Fisher King

Waterbug 107

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I admire Sons of the Never Wrong in much the same way that I’ve been a fan of Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion. Cynics don’t get the Midwestern ecumenical Christian wholesomeness of either Keillor or the Sons, but sometimes I’ve just had it with all the pessimism and want something that lifts the spirit. The latest from SOTNW opens as most of their recordings do–with a catchy little homespun ditty that spotlights Bruce Roper’s dry, reedy voice (which is vaguely reminiscent of Steve Goodman’s). In this case, we get the down-home virtues of “Arkansas,” and its musical pastiche of Americana, folk, and faintly Irish instrumentation. What stands out most, though, are the incredibly tight three-part harmonies between Roper, Sue Demel, and Deborah Lader. It’s an infectious song that exudes giddiness.

Don’t be fooled by the trio’s optimism–it’s not blind faith. The album’s major theme is the fragility of life and is embodied on track eleven, “Compromise,” which addresses the choices we make to uplift, or tear down; to come home, or be lonely on the road. As they remind later on, “... all our best intentions are lost in a net by the Galilee Sea.” The album’s tone is often joyful, but it’s also cautionary: if you want meaning, you have to take the time to see the small things that really matter. “Over There” could be viewed as a slice of folky Utopia with Biblical undertones, or a litany of the things that divide and conquer. It’s all a matter of the choices we make.

The Sons of Never Wrong are hard to classify musically. They are certainly on the folk end of the spectrum, but material such as “Sword and Pen” and “Face on Mars” have a theatrical feel that evokes light musical theater. They also have a penchant for writing off-kilter songs. “The Great Unknown” takes the well-worked theme of contemplating what’s on the other side of death, but how many songs tell this by populating the lyrics with Caesar, Lincoln, and John Lennon? Or how about a song about the importance of remembering that’s actually about forgetting (“Window”)? Or some white people’s soul in which a terrifying “Tornado” becomes a father’s gentle lesson about life cycles. I understand when people tell me that Sons of the Never Wrong are just too weird (or too sunny) for them, but I get them and I’m grateful for the gentle guidance they offer. Check out the new album's songs for yourself at http://www.sons.com/

 

--Rob Weir

Mindy McCready: Not a Legend, a Tragedy

As it happens, she wasn't very tough.

Legend: (n) nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times; body of stories of this kind…accepted as historical; the person at the center of such stories. Synonyms: myth, fable

I awoke on February 18 to hear the sad news that country music artist Mindy McCready had taken her own life. Then I toddled off to the gym where one of the TV screens was tuned to Fox News and saw one of its gaudy banners atop the talking heads. I never listen to Fox (or any other network news), but the headline caught my eye: “Legendary Country Singer Mindy McCready Dead at 37.” Legendary? That’s a stretch even by the sloppy (non) standards of contemporary American English. With the exception of the word "hero," it’s hard to imagine a more misused word in our language than “legend.”  (Regarding “heroes,” it would behoove most who use that term to renew their acquaintance with the word “victim.”) In what ways, exactly, was Mindy McCready legendary? Her life was an open book whose pages we endlessly viewed whether we wished to or not. It was all too verifiable and the only “tradition” associated with it is voyeurism.

I’m not here to praise or bury Mindy McCready. I’m more concerned with what Joni Mitchell  labeled the “star-maker machinery” that seeks to transform a moderately talented singer into an epic drama. In fact, I think it may be partly responsible for McCready’s suicide. It is the pop machine that inures us to damaged individuals who should be in therapy rather than on stage.

McCready’s musical legacy was thin. She released five albums between 1996 and 2010, of which only the first, Ten Thousand Angels, made it as high as #4 on the country charts. It did contain a # 1 single, “Guys Do It All the Time,” but things steadily declined from there. She hadn’t been on the charts since 2002, when one of her songs was ranked #49, and it’s hard not to read things into the title of her last album: I’m Still Here (2010). In all, McCready sold about 3 million units–not shabby, but not exactly “White Christmas” territory either. It was enough, however, to keep her in the tabloid column, though her troubled personal life made much better copy than anything she could slap onto a CD.

Her biography reveals far more valleys than peaks. It began with a Pentecostal upbringing one suspects instilled in her a sense of unworthiness, and Nashville by 18, a place known for chewing up even the strongest. By her disputed telling, she began a decade-long affair with baseball’s Roger Clemens when she was 16, and began sleeping with him when she was 18. It didn’t get much better. Her résumé includes several broken engagements, drinking, and enduring domestic abuse at the hands of a man from whom she separated and then reconnected long enough to become pregnant by him. Then came a suicide attempt, drug abuse, a porn tape, a new boyfriend, a second child, more drinking, Oxycontin, a DUI conviction, a charge of identity theft, and a custody battle with her own mother over guardianship of her children. The father of the second child, record producer David Wilson, allegedly committed suicide a month ago. (This case has been reopened.) This isn’t legend; it’s a tragedy of Greek proportions.

Now that her pathetic (as in pathos) life has ended, it’s time for tears, flowers, and teddy bears. Weepy faces appear on the screen sobbing, “We love you, Mindy.” No, you didn’t, and she didn’t love you either. Mindy McCready was a walking basket-case who desperately needed help, but who cares if she’s an OMG moment on Fox News or the Yahoo! Homepage? It’s no accident that her first record was the one that made the splash. It was her turn to be the flavor of the month served up by the star-maker machinery. Then the machine turned. Here’s how it goes. You begin with fame and graduate to celebrity. Both are ephemeral. You either add more fuel to the machine, or the final cycle is notoriety. The strong go to rehab and start the cycle anew. (Don’t we just love rehab stories?) The weak end up like Mindy McCready. There’s nothing legendary about it--it's as common as dust. Joni Mitchell’s “Free Man in Paris” is worth quoting in its entirety:

"The way I see it," he said
"You just can't win it...
Everybody's in it for their own gain
You can't please 'em all
There's always somebody calling you down
I do my best
And I do good business
There's a lot of people asking for my time
They're trying to get ahead
They're trying to be a good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
There was nobody calling me up for favors
And no one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song

I deal in dreamers
And telephone screamers
Lately I wonder what I do it for
If l had my way
I'd just walk through those doors
And wander
Down the Champs Elysees
Going cafe to cabaret
Thinking how I'll feel when I find
That very good friend of mine

I was a free man in Paris
I felt unfettered and alive
Nobody was calling me up for favors
No one's future to decide
You know I'd go back there tomorrow
But for the work I've taken on
Stoking the star maker machinery
Behind the popular song."

Not Teaching Cursive Writing a Disservice to Students

I ran across a recent item that cut me to the nib (pun intended). It seems that many schools no longer teach cursive writing. Many states have dropped it from their language arts core, the logic being that our keyboard society has made cursive writing a relic of the past. Many public school students now have no writing skills beyond printing, and some schools don’t even teach lower versus upper case printing–just block letters. (Catholic schools still demand cursive and good for them.)

A lot of my college students think it’s fine to rely on printing. They also think it’s fine to steal music. They’re wrong on both accounts. If you are an elementary school teacher, instruct your classes in cursive; if you’re a parent, don’t ask, demand that it be taught. Some of the things you read online–how ironic!–offer elegiac defenses of cursive writing. (Quite a few also spout the shortsighted party line that cursive is as archaic as vacuum tubes and print publications.) I suppose one could wax rhapsodic about creativity flowing down the barrel of a pen, links to our Western heritage, and developing motor skills, but there’s no need to go down those routes. A far more pragmatic argument is that cursive writing is, simply, a skill one needs to keep up in today’s fast-paced society.

My students swear to me that they can type far faster than they can “write,” by which they mean block-letter printing and that’s probably correct. They also use their electronic devices so frequently that they’ve come to expect there’s never a situation in which they won’t have one. That is, until the first time someone gives them a blue-book exam and tells them “No, you can’t type this on your laptop.” Many of my students cannot fill an eight-page bluebook in an hour, which means that their essays are superficial and they are graded accordingly. “Unfair!” they cry. I am roughly as sympathetic to that plea as math professors that tell their students they must do their own arithmetic rather than using a calculator. Are we being callous? I don’t think so.

In Logic 101 one learns that a syllogism with a flawed major premise yields illogic. In this case, the case against cursive rest on the assumption (major premise) that there are no longer situations in which one needs cursive. That’s simply false. The average accomplished typist does 60-80 words per minute (WPM). I can write faster than that even though I have a hand disability that slows me. Moreover, to hit 60 WPM, you need to know how to touch type, which is another skill that most students never acquire. I have observed students in lectures who simply can’t keep up on their keyboards. Some ask me to put my lecture notes on the Web, which I will not do. I happen to think that: (a) these things are my intellectual property, and (b) that a person with poor listening skills is ill equipped for the job market.   

One reason student are slow is physical. Just as a violin player can play faster than a cello player because they don’t have as much instrument to cover, so too can most people scribble on a piece of paper faster than they can go across a 12-18 inch keyboard (on which many students have to search for letters.)  Another reason is that we relate to screens differently. Put simply, a mind focused on a screen is less actively engaged with a detached speaker. (And this is before other temptations from the World of Wireless pops in one’s head. Try reading just one e-mail and see if you can refocus on a lecture.) Today’s students are very fast at retrieving information, but they are extremely slow when it comes to analyzing it, in part because huge chunks elude them, especially the connective tissue that relates bit of information to another. And heaven help them if their laptops run out of battery life in the middle of a class. You know what most of them do? Nothing! They simply sit there, stunned. The best students will tune in and hope to retain enough to transfer it to their computer once it’s recharged. Try that and tell me how well it works.

There are many circumstances in life where one has to jot down information in a hurry without the aid of an electronic helper–an employer calls someone into the office and gives details of an important assignment, a critic needs to take notes in a no-gadgets environment, verbal directions are given to someone who is lost, one is taking an exam that disallows computers as a potential cheating source (and this includes licensing exams for many professions as well as graduate school entrance exams), a therapist or doctor needs to focus on patients instead of a screen, a person wishes to send a note that is more personalized (sympathy cards, for example). Perhaps most important of all, if you really need to remember something, test subjects that write things cursively retain far more than those that print or type. (Typing surpasses only relying upon aural memory in psychological tests.) And, let’s face it; if you were an employer, would you hire someone who couldn’t write his or her own name?

One doesn’t have to be a Luddite or technophobe to defend cursive writing. Today’s world depends upon flexibility, suppleness, and adaptability. I won’t pretend that learning cursive writing is “fun.” I hated penmanship in grade school and my hand is indeed a poor one. I chuckle at those who defend cursive as an art form; no one will ever confuse my scrawl with art! But can we please can the if-it’s-not-fun-we-can’t-teach-it fluff of modern education? I didn’t like learning multiplication tables, conjugating verbs, or learning about syllables either, but I’m sure glad I swallowed the medicine. Do not let your kids get by without learning cursive; they will hate you now, but they’ll thank you later. 

Every Day an Intriguing Novel that Probes Identity Questions

 EVERY DAY  (20120

By David Levithan

Knopf, ISBN 978-0307931887

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Remember the movie Groundhog Day in which Bill Murray’s character got stuck in a repeating loop in which each day was a fresh February 2 no matter how the previous day ended? Author David Levithan takes this to another level. What if you had no body of your own and every day of your life you inhabited someone else’s body and memories for exactly one day?

Every Day is classified as a young adult novel, but it’s a bit like The Hobbit or The Hunger Games series in that it’s well written and can be enjoyed by readers of all ages. Its protagonist is certainly among the most elusive of recent literature in that he/she/it is, by most measures, a rather typical 16-year-old who simply doesn’t exist corporeally and has no memory of ever having done so. For sake of organizing its own conscience independently of its hosts, it calls itself A, but it doesn’t spend a lot of time working a detailed identity. A has no control over where it will awake or inhabit. A has been male and female, straight, and gay. A has awoken inside athletes’ bodies, a Beyoncé look-alike shell, those of corpulent slobs, and those of drug addicts. A has been rich and poor, of different races, and a non-English speaker.

If you were A and had never known any other existence, would it seem odd to you? Would you try to break the cycle? Probably not, unless something snapped you to another level of awareness. In A’s case, it’s an encounter with Rhiannon. In the most typical of all sixteen-year-old experiences, A has fallen in love. Rhiannon is in a bad high school romance with a jerk named Justin, whose body A used and reformed for a day. Can A express love for Rhiannon? Once A thinks about it, who would believe such a story, let alone put up with the logistical problems associated with being with someone whose physical presence changes every day? Moreover, A has learned to erase (most) of the 24-hour memories of his hosts and adheres to a strict non-interference policy. In other words, A has always been a good houseguest. But there’s something about Rhiannon that calls A back to her. Can he violate his own code? Would doing so trip unleash chaos theory’s butterfly effect?

The novel is mostly about A’s relationship with Rhiannon, though it’s also a veritable sampler of the variety of sixteen-year-old minds. What is A? An alien? A demon? A trill á la Star Trek? A higher level of consciousness? A 24-hour virus? A parasite? Or just a normal 16-year-old who simply happens to have no body? Are there others like A? You read and you decide.

I steamed through this book is just two sittings. Is it a YA book or something else? The only label I’d slap on it is “intriguing.” --Rob Weir

Walter Strauss Guitar Virtuosity

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Walter Strauss

Planet Solitaire

Self-Produced

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Walter Strauss is dedicated to stretching the guitar’s boundaries, most recently through explorations of African music. On half of Planet Solitaire’s tracks his guitar emulates the kora. “Djimbashe” is a real tour de force, with cascading showers of notes, twisted and bent strings, and accented rhythms flying out of his hands. Africa meets Europe on “Gypsydish,” with the Spanish guitar melodies linked by fleet ngoni-like runs. Later he captures the feel of the tambura on a remake of George Harrison’s “Within In You Without You.” He even serves some country blues in a jazz-laced reworking of Woody Guthrie’s “The Great Historical Bum.” Both guitar and vocals are dreamy in ways that command close listening and occasionally feel unapproachable in their virtuosity and moodiness. But the talent speaks for itself.--Rob Weir

Strauss and local artist Jonathan Stevens will appear at the Signature Sounds Parlor Room on February 21.

Do Not Try This at Home

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Memories of the Winter of 1981

Alas, not the kind of VW I drove back in 1981! 

As those of us on the East Coast dig out from under the snows deposited by Storm Nemo, I am reminded of the winter of 1981, when I did something very stupid. If it’s not the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, it’s in the top two.

I was a high school social studies teacher in northern Vermont back then, a job I really loved (except for dealing with parents). But one day made me consider a career as a banana grower in Belize. To say that big snowstorms don’t faze Vermonters is akin to saying that police officers kind of expect that some people will break the law. If you live in that part of the world and you let snow get you down, you live in a state of constant anxiety from roughly mid-October to mid-May. I lived ten miles from the Canadian border and if less than six inches of snow were expected, local radio announcers forecast “flurries.” Teachers knew it took at least ten inches on the ground with more falling before schools would be cancelled.

It was a Friday toward the end of a February. It had already been a “tough” winter–Vermont understatement for the kind of cold and snow that would drive lesser mortals to the loony bin. Moreover, as any teacher will tell you, Fridays are not the optimal teaching days. Lots of us did review sessions, audio-visual presentations, and free-form discussions on Fridays–anything to distract our charges from the reality that the weekend began at 2:45 pm, not 8 in the morning. There was no reason to expect that this Friday would be anything unusual–a few flakes were falling, but so what? Except that by the time the buses starting arriving at around 7:30 the flakes were getting bigger and they were coming down exceedingly fast. And they kept coming.

By 10 am more than six inches of new snow had fallen and teachers and students alike were checking out weather updates. “Yup,” one of my colleagues proclaimed, “The radio says it’s gonna be a big one. Maybe more than three feet.” A foot of that had already fallen by lunchtime. Surely schools would be closed and they’d send us all home. Except “they” didn’t! Some faculty members quickly decided it would be a good idea to sit with the kids at lunch, something we often did anyhow because–no matter what the Tea Party tells you–most teachers really like their kids. But this time it was all about crowd control. Put bluntly, the kids were bouncing off the walls and we teachers were thinking, “Uh, oh–prime food fight conditions.” I recall grabbing the arm of one of my students who was about to launch some spaghetti and saying to him, “Hey man! What are you doing? Your mom works in the cafeteria and she’ll have to clean up this mess.” A quick, “Sorry Mr. W–wasn’t thinking,” and we were cool, but it was the longest single afternoon of teaching of my career. Forget the zombie apocalypse; my students had been transformed into little anarchists, each just waiting for me to turn my back before lighting the fuse and tossing a bomb. I did everything I could to distract them–jokes, videos, impromptu discussions about how local decision-making worked…. I recall that I actually showed one class a filmstrip (remember those?) hiding in the back of my desk; it was titled “Your Friends in the Tungsten Industry.” I invited students to come up with their own snarky commentary (and pretended not to hear anything NC-17).   

The only concession made to the weather was that the administration allowed teachers to leave the same time as students instead of staying an hour later to close up shop. By then it was hard to tell how much snow had fallen, as the winds had picked up–just perfect for my three-mile commute along the open banks of the Lamoille River and up the steady hill to my road. I had a VW Rabbit back in those days, more of a snow sled than a snowplow. It weighed less than a ton even when loaded with four adults. It took nearly an hour to navigate to the foot of the hill, which I inched up knowing that if, at any point, I began to spin, I’d have to back down and start again. I made it, but the day had taken its toll and I was fried. Then came the last horror! I turned on to my dirt road and beheld a driveway buried under approximately two feet of virgin white blanket.

It seemed so rational at the time. “I’ve had it!” I thought. “There is no frigging way I’m shoveling this sucker until morning.” The Greeks had a word for such defiance of the gods: hubris. Did I heed it? That would be no! I carefully backed up my car to the end of the road, dropped the transmission into drive and gunned the engine. I made an abrupt sliding turn into the driveway, sheering a spray of snow in several directions. The next thing I knew, I was staring at the sky as if I were Neil Armstrong inside an Apollo space capsule. My maneuver served only to lift the front end up the VW straight into the air with about 4 feet of snow resting under the car. I opened the car door and tumbled down my stupidity-built cascade.

The next step was to call a colleague who knew about cars and ask him if it was okay to leave the VW aimed at the moon. After he stopped laughing, he told me that would be a very bad idea as I had probably compacted snow around the engine block. That needed to be removed he told me, or the hoses would probably freeze and break, as might the radiator or perhaps even the engine block itself. By the way, he advised, I had to be careful to shovel the car level so that it came down evenly and not with a jolt. It was vital that I level the car and take a broom handle and gently tap away as much snow as I could from vital working parts. Need I tell you that the moon was high in the sky by the time I finished? I would add that it was also the moment in which I also decided that I didn’t want to be an astronaut. But Belize sounded like a good idea.--Rob Weir