Hippie Chic at the MFA

We also went to the Boston MFA last week, first time in four years.  Not just to see the current special exhibit on Hippie Chic.  But we did see that.

As a fashion exhibit it was great.  That is, as an exhibit of clothes that even at the time would have been more expensive than I could have afforded and more fashionable than I could have pulled off (or put on), and that anyway I've only seen in photos, and that are thus are worth paying money to ogle in a museum, it was fine.  You know, if you listen to the music of the period, you've seen photos of Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Nicks, Grace Slick, Lulu all wearing stuff like this, so it's nice to see it in person, in a kind of starfucking sort of way.

I did take issue a little bit with the characterization of it all as hippie.  Predictably, given my own obsessions.  The exhibit did gesture toward the fact that this was, after all, for the most part haute couture trying to co-opt street fashion:  big business stealing kids' ideas and trying to sell them back to them.  And in the case of the hippies, who like the punks a generation later were pretty much a DYI kind of movement, into found and made objects above all, the ideological contradictions get pretty heightened.  Some of these dresses and suits were in-the-scene and of-the-scene, but some were the Man, pure and simple.  I can understand why, coming from an institutional context that's more or less dependent on charitable contributions from the Man, why that tension wasn't interrogated more.  But still. 

Yale Center for British Art

We were in New Haven for a couple of days this week, and I went to the Yale Center for British Art. 

I'm not an Anglophile.  At least, I don't consider myself one.  In fact when I was younger I had arguments with Americans who I thought were too Anglophilic - childish arguments, to be sure, but the point is that although I don't consider myself a cultural nationalist neither do I have a thing for British culture for its own sake.  That said, I do like my share of UK bands, writers, films, etc.  And over the last decade or so I've developed a real love for 18th and 19th century British painters. 

I don't think I realized quite what a love it was until I spent the afternoon at this gallery, though.  I'm not sure I can quite explain it, either.  I can explain my love for old portraiture in general - a good portrait that really captures the personality of the sitter is the best way I know to connect across the centuries, to feel common humanity from a remote age.  But why British portraits of that period, more than American?  More than French?  More than Dutch?  (Well, maybe not more than Dutch.)  I
have to think about this more.

So since I haven't thought about it enough I'll just link to a couple of masterpieces I saw and tell you why I loved them.

One is a painting that I think most viewers would agree is a masterpiece:  Reynolds's "Mrs. Abington as Miss Prue."  Reynolds makes her look utterly dreamy, yet completely conscious of her charm - you expect her to say something bawdy, or just to wink, at any moment.  She's so young, and so alive. 

The other is one that perhaps a lot of viewers would pass by:  George Beare's "Portrait of an Elderly Lady and a Girl."  Certainly it lacks the perfection of the Reynolds.  Mrs. Sgt. T once taught me that most portraitists used generic bodies and only had the subjects pose for the face, and you can really see it in the old woman's body and arms, which so utterly fail to match her face.  But that face - so unabashedly aged, so unglamorous, so real.  And the granddaughter, fresh-faced but a little awkward, a little bored.  Again:  real.

*

Is it connection that I feel?  Is it the conviction that, unlike the subjects of French or Dutch portraits, if I somehow met these people I could speak with them and understand what they said?  An illusion, of course, but a powerful one.  And yet they're British, and I'm not, right?  Does this mean that I don't feel American?  That I don't think there's a distinction between British and American culture, either in the 18th century or now?  Would I have been a Tory in '76?  Do I agree with the Booker Prize being thrown open to Americans? 

Family Plot (1976)

Have I mentioned how much I love repertory cinema?  It's one of the things we don't have in Eugene, although the Bijou is currently experimenting with the concept.  Personally I don't understand why it's not more popular.  We seem to be in a golden age of cinephilia, though not of cinema, and I feel
like in any small city there should be enough people willing to pay to see classic old films on the big screen, with good sound, in the dark.  But no, not so much.

So since we're back in Cambridge, Mass., for most of September we've been hitting the Harvard Film Archive pretty regularly (the Brattle is on our list, too, but their offerings this month are a little disappointing).  Right now they're at the tail end of a summer-long Complete Hitchcock series, and Lord wouldn't that have been fun to do.  As is we're managing to catch a few, some we've seen and some we haven't.

Like Saturday, when we went and saw Family Plot, his last film.  We'd seen Frenzy, but hadn't even heard of this one, to be honest.  Had no idea what to expect.  And when it was done we still had little idea what we'd just seen.

It's a thoroughly delightful film, just weird as all hell.  It feels curiously dislocated in time, for one thing.  The fashions, the language (surprisingly racy for Hitchcock), and the cars all feel like the mid-'70s, and so do most of the actors' deliveries and mannerisms, but the rhythms of the film, the classical shape of the plot and the blithe unnaturalism of the presentation, make it clear that the director's sensibility was shaped long before.  But this all works for the film, I think:  Bruce Dern's seedy gangliness makes him seem in step with any number of '70s stoner films, allowing the movie to feel much more off-beat than it otherwise might have.  Similarly, William Devane's Snidely Whiplash-style villain works largely because Devane plays him cool, with a dead look in his eyes, even while his lips are smirking.

It's the car chase that'll really get you.  Maybe it is, as some say, a parody of the car chases so prevalent in '70s action flicks, but it actually works.  You feel that the technology is dated, and was even for 1976, but it's so fast, so effectively edited, and puts you in the driver's seat so unhesitantly, that it still works - most of the full theater I saw it in jumped.  And yet even while Hitchcock's making you bite your nails with the car careening down the mountainside, he's inviting you to laugh, with Barbara Harris climbing all over Bruce Dern, so insistently that it goes beyond funny into surreal.  You don't know whether to laugh, until they crash, and they crawl out of the wreckage unharmed - but he squeezes out in the most ridiculously awkward fashion, seemingly just for the hell of it.  It's one weird movie, and a great way to go out.

Runaway Bride (1999)

Mrs. Sgt. T likes the romantic comedies.  So do I, but not as much as her.  She loves them enough to want to own them.  But not all of them.  And I can't figure out why she likes some but not others.  I'll think I have it figured out, and in a store sometime I'll point to one that, in my mind, is just like one

we own, and she'll say, no, you don't get it at all.  And I don't. 

So we have a lot to talk about whenever we watch one.  Like, we just watched Runaway Bride, which I'd never seen all the way through, even though I've walked through the room several times, it feels like, while she was watching it.  This time I watched it all, and when it was over I asked her why she liked it.  Like, doesn't the misogyny bother her?  I mean, the Richard Gere character starts out by saying these heinous things about women in general, and about the Julia Roberts character in particular, and sure he loses his job, but on the level of the movie where it counts he never has to pay for it.  He's never humiliated, never has to apologize or say he was wrong.  Sure he gets away with it because Richard Gere's so damned charming, but meanwhile the Julia Roberts character basically has to go through this long bout of self-searching where she realizes that, yes, she has caused all her lovers, and even friends, to suffer because of her lack of self-awareness - that basically everything the Richard Gere character said about her was true except for the malice.  He never has to humble himself to find happiness and true love, but she does.

To which Mrs. Sgt T said, you're making the mistake of assuming he has anything to do with it.  He's irrelevant.  The story isn't about him.  It's a story about her - about the female viewer, if you will - and her own self-searching;  he's basically just an externalization of her own self-critical voice.  The only journey that matters in the film is hers.  It's not that the man gets off scot-free, it's that he doesn't have any meaningful existence beyond her.

I never thought of that.

Short Term 12 (2013)

The more I think about this film the more I find not to like.  A carefully multicultural cast of

characters that nevertheless manages to make the attractive young white people into saviors.  The way the lone black male among the Troubled Kids is held up first as a potential gangsta (only to be neutralized into a poetic rapper).  The way the elderly Latino couple are held up as exemplars of abundant family love.  The way the head of the facility is shown as naive and out-of-touch, because, you know, this is America and we hate intellectuals.  The way the most vulnerable of the kids literally wraps himself in the American flag at the end of the picture...  The film's full of noxious clichés, in other words, and the more you think about the film the more obvious they become.

That said, I really enjoyed the movie in the moment.  Expertly paced, shot, and acted, with characters that, while on the screen, seem to transcend their clichés.  And politically, unlike a more notorious recent troubled-school-system film, this one doesn't propose any facetious, destructive "answers."  It's impossible to come away from the film without the impression that we're underfunding our social safety net, allowing it to depend on the heroic efforts of those who choose to work for it for far too little money (which is why the film's decision to bash the administrator is so disappointing).  But how to fix it, when the real problem runs bone-deep in our society?  It's a commentary on America (which is why the flag at the end was so annoying - if you need to be bashed over the head with that message at the end of the movie, chances are you don't care anyway).

Worth seeing.  But preaching to the choir.  Is that a contradiction in terms?

Gil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions

The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions is a 2006 CD reissue of two Gil Evans albums on one disc:  New Bottle Old Wine from 1958 and Great Jazz Standards from 1959.  The skinny is that they were his second and third records as a leader, a capacity he'd been able to assume due to the prominence he'd achieved through his collaborations with Miles Davis, beginning in earnest in 1957.

New Bottle Old Wine fairly closely follows the model of Evans's first album with Davis.  This record,

too, is essentially built around one soloist, in this case Cannonball Adderley.  It's Adderley's instrumental voice that dominates the recordings, Adderley's improvisational sensibilities that provide the heart.  It's a fine record, though, don't get me wrong;  Evans's style as an arranger is fully realized at this point, and he's doing fine things with these tunes.  They're carefully chosen to guide the listener through the history of jazz from W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton up to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and as arranged by Evans it all sounds of a piece, utterly modern, and even highbrow.  This is dry-martini music.

Great Jazz Standards opens things up a bit.  Solo duties are spread around among a number of players, notably Steve Lacy, Johnny Coles, and Budd Johnson, on a number of instruments, and Gil's own piano plays a small but key role on a few tracks.  And, it could  

just be me, but the result (and this is strange to say, when Cannonball leaves such a mark on the first record) on the second result is more emotional, more moving.  My favorite track so far is the second record's opener, the Bix Beiderbecke number "Davenport Blues."

Shadows of Treme, sure.  And at this point any trumpeter waking up in Gil Evans's bed is going to be suspected of Miles Davis, but Coles makes his own case pretty quick, achieving a singing, broad, magnanimous tone that Miles just didn't use.  But it's Gil we're here to hear, right?  And he delivers, with a setting that alternates between moaning very reminiscent of '20s hot jazz sonorities and the muted-horn, odd-woodwind murmuring you expect from him.  And it all adds up to a deeply moving, authentically felt blues.  This is the olive in your martini.

The Aubrey/Maturin series

I read the whole Aubrey/Maturin series, basically straight through in a few weeks' time, something like ten years ago.  (Yes, it was the movie that made me aware of them.)  It was one of the most engrossing and enjoyable reading experiences I've had, one of those experiences of utter literary transport that I live for.  But it took, as I say, weeks out of my life:  the books are impossible to put down once you start one, and each one ends, not on a cliffhanger, but on the barest of resolutions of only the most superficial of the plotlines, so that you have to get twenty or thirty pages into the next volume before you feel able to even pause for a while.  So I haven't reread them since.  But now I'm halfway through the series again.

And I'm reading them far too obsessively to blog them individually, or even collectively in a coherent fashion.  Let me make just two observations.

First, the obvious one (given what I've just written).  The twenty completed volumes are, taken together, a masterpiece of popular fiction.  And I use that latter term guardedly:  they're popular fiction in that they inhabit a recognizable genre, and consciously, intentionally offer many of the traditional pleasures of popular fiction, compulsive readability not least among them.  But they're deep beyond any of the censure that may still (but probably doesn't anymore) attach to the term "popular fiction."  The prose is not just beautiful but challenging;  the characterizations are as subtle and complete as anything I've encountered in literature;  and the themes are as thoughtful and thought-provoking as you could ask for.

To wit (and this is my second observation):  I think the books' big theme is Tories vs. Whigs.  Not in the narrow sense of the two parties that dominated British parliamentary politics at the time of the Napoleonic Wars:  certainly those parties are mentioned by name, and some of the issues over which they argued are brought in.  But this is done with O'Brian's characteristic subtlety, so that for a reader like me who's not an expert in the period it's easy to miss them - an occasional mention of rotten boroughs suggests a great deal, but doesn't spell much out.

Because what O'Brian's more interested in is Toryism and Whiggishness as temperaments, as fundamental approaches to life.  Conservative vs. liberal, to use today's terms.  Broadly speaking he gives us Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy as an example of the Tory approach - Aubrey embodies the Navy's adherence to tradition, to tried-and-true ways, and its abhorrence of innovation (the word itself is used as a term of opprobrium on several occasions in the books).  Stephen Maturin counterbalances him as an example of Whig values, I suppose - being Irish-Catalan, he's never described in terms of English politics, but he embraces innovation, scientific theory, progress on all fronts.

What lends these broad tensions resonance is the series' Napoleonic Wars setting.  Maturin and many other characters who find themselves now fighting Napoleon privately find the values asserted by the French Revolution appealing:  Maturin was a revolutionary in his younger days, and opposes Napoleon not because he's French, and not because he threatens England, but because he betrayed the Revolution's ideals.  The books therefore become an ongoing, unresolvable, but strenuously argued debate over questions of authority and how it should be constituted and exercised.

What makes the books so satisfying, however, is O'Brian's penchant for complicating every character he sketches.  We become accustomed to the idea of Aubrey as the conservative naval officer who learned to sail by instinct and is content to do things the way they've always been done because they've always been done that way - because tradition is its own authority - but then in middle age he suddenly develops a passion for mathematics, for understanding the theoretical basis for his sailing instincts, and in fact we realize that he spends just as much time bucking tradition as buckling under to it.  He thinks of himself as a Tory but in many ways he's a Whig.  Meanwhile Maturin is a vocal opponent of Naval conservatism, ridiculing all its old ways with a variable degree of affection, but in his own profession as physician he's an unquestioning adherent of bloodletting as a virtual panacea;  on a less comic note, we're often reminded that, despite his revolutionary youth, he has an aristocratic background and is no more a friend to democracy (another word always used derogatorily in the books) than is Aubrey. 

What O'Brian is giving us in these books, then, is characters caught between fundamental human impulses toward stasis on the one hand and change on the other, at a moment when each impulse has been given clear historical manifestation, when the positions have become polarized to the point of bloodshed, but characters who themselves refuse to become polarized, because they themselves are not comfortable at either pole.  They are, actually, perfectly Cold War books, and I think I love them for a lot of the same reasons that I love Le Carré's George Smiley books.