Sunday, May 31, 2015
3:18 AM |
The Dead Bird
Once upon a time there was an empty house on a hill beside an old
dalakit tree whipped by the winds, its branches gnarled and penitent under the fierce coldness of gray Zamboanguita skies, in the cold southern interiors of Negros nobody spoke about. Once upon a time there were rumors of a girl who lived there, on her own, and nobody knew where she came from, or who she was.
Those who had seen her, and there were plenty who did, swore that she was a mute vagabond, an orphaned child who found mere refuge in the old house—nothing more. Others claimed she was a ghost, a vengeful spirit, perhaps even a caretaker of
sigbins. Most would agree, however, that the girl was young and small and would have been an inconspicuous thing if she were not constantly dressed in an old white shirt more than double her size. Manang Biday, whose own humble hut was closest to the empty old house, swore she had seen the girl countless of times, and that she was always wearing the same old thing, a man’s shirt, torn at the edges, and smudged everywhere with dirt and age.
Here we come to our brief story. If Alba, Manang Biday’s granddaughter, had looked away a moment sooner while she crossed the shallow creek, she would not have seen the girl dashing out, without so much as the feeblest noise, from the shadows of the house’s dilapidated back porch and into the waning light of the late afternoon.
It was growing to be a cold night, harbinger of the monsoon season. Alba had been on her way back to their house from an errand to buy lamp oil for that evening from the sari-sari store at the next bend of the creek. She was fiddling with her sweater, feeling the cold air snake into her and pouncing upon her skin. She wanted very much to banish it. But the sweater was too tight, and she could not adjust it. In her struggle, she felt a sudden whirling from behind her, and a change in the air that indicated someone else’s presence.
When she looked back, she saw the girl.
The girl had a look on her face that drew a frightening blankness. It betrayed nothing, just an ominousness that felt invasive. Even her eyes, half-hidden by stray locks of long black hair, were wells of utter emptiness, the blackness of her irises seeping in and absorbing the coldness of the gray late afternoon skies.
The girl had stopped a few feet away from Alba, the hem of the old shirt hugging her ankles and dragging into the mud and the wet grass. There she stood, a ravaging stillness, blank eyes staring straight into Alba’s own.
Alba, momentarily frozen, finally found her voice.
She leaned forward a little bit, and cleared her throat. “Where did you come from?” she asked. “Who are you?”
The girl would not say anything, but it moved back a few steps, slowly, and then stopped. It regarded Alba’s face with what could pass for cold curiosity.
“What are you doing here?” Alba stammered.
The girl still would not say anything.
When the girl moved again, it was to raise its right hand with a suddenness that startled Alba. It was clasping something, and when the child had her hand in midair, she opened it, palm up, and there it was. It was a small bird, a
maya, and it was dead, its neck broken.
“Get away from me,” Alba said, and backed away.
She hurried down the narrow dirt road towards home, and when she turned around, the girl was still there, looking at her.
Alba stumbled to a run, but now she felt more clearly those blank eyes still staring at her, those blank eyes gazing at the nape of her neck, those eyes caressing it like one would a little feathery pet.
Labels: fiction
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Friday, May 29, 2015
4:50 PM |
A Place of Memory
I was coming home from my secret writing nook near Tugas when I found myself walking by my old neighbourhood in Tubod -- Springville, its denizens call it. And because I am currently writing a short story about it, culled from my childhood growing up there, I decided to visit it after many, many years.
There's a small road behind Kurambos that begin right off the highway, and begins as a claustrophobic passageway that stretches on and on, bordered on both sides by concrete fences that scale towards the sky. There used to be a field right beside this stretch, adjacent to a spring -- where the name "Tubod" comes from -- where the neighbourhood's women would converge daily to do their laundry and gossip. It's all concrete walls now, and the effect on the passersby is a squeezing akin to panic.
When it finally opens up after a few meters, I see the old house where we used to live. It is even smaller and more decrepit than in my memory, and I quickly wonder how we managed to live there for many years. There is a slight stench to the air, a mix of dirt and
kanin baboy. The A-framed bamboo house after it, painted a dark brown, was where a young Peace Corps volunteer once lived, her greatest drama then being spied on at night by a peeping tom who turned out to be a young man who lived right across us. This house looked the same, if looking muddied more than ever. And the yellow bungalow that occupied the very middle of this narrow stretch, which terminated in the Kingdom Hall of the Jehovah's Witnesses twenty meters away, is still bright yellow and is still a bungalow, with a towering structure in pink now behind it.
Kingdom Hall is no more, only a series of unremarkable flats crowded together, telling me that all I have left of this place is memory, and that the past is not a place to go home to, except in fiction.
Labels: fiction, life, memories, writing
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Wednesday, May 27, 2015
6:48 PM |
Fellowships, Festivals, and Friendships in Literature
This is happening tomorrow! Catch fictionist
Susan S. Lara and poet
Marjorie Evasco in a talk titled
"Fellowships, Festivals and Friendships in Literature," where they lead a conversation on building a community of writers and readers. It's at 10 AM at the University House in Silliman Campus. The event is open to the public for free!
SEAWRITE awardee for the Philippines and National Commission for Culture and Arts Ani ng Dangal awardee, MARJORIE EVASCO’S books have won the National Book Awards for poetry, oral history and art. Her work is published in the Norton 2010 anthology
Language for a New Century: Poems from Asia, the Middle East and Beyond (Eds. Ravi Shankar, Tina Chang & Nathalie Handal) and in
The World Record: International Voices from Southbank Centre’s Poetry Parnassus (Eds. Neil Astley and Anna Selby). An honorary writing fellow in the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa in 2002, she also received a writing residency in 1991 from the Hawthornden Castle International Writers’ Retreat in Midlothian, Scotland, and in 1992 from the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Studies and Conference Center in Italy. She has also received major prizes from the
Philippines Free Press annual poetry awards and the Carlos Palanca Memorial awards for the essay, and was regional writing fellow for poetry of the University of the Philippines Likhaan Center for Creative Writing in 1985-86, the Gawad Alagad Balagtas for Poetry from the Unyon ng mga Manunulat ng Pilipinas in 2004, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan from the City of Manila in 2005, the Outstanding Silliman University alumna for creative writing in 2008, the Carlos P. Garcia award for literature education from the province of Bohol in 2011, and the Ulirang Mandaleño award for education from the City of Mandaluyong in 2012. In 2013 she received the Taboan Literature Festival award for her achievements as a writer, for promoting the literature of the Central Visayas region and mentoring young writers in various national and regional writers’ workshops. In October 2013 she served as visiting writer in the International Writers’ Program of the Hong Kong Baptist University, and was appointed in March 2015 as Visiting Literary Artist in the University of the Philippines Visayas, Iloilo City.
SUSAN S. LARA writes fiction and nonfiction. She has won the Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature and Focus Literary Awards for her short stories, and the National Book Award for her fiction collection
Letting Go and Other Stories. She attended the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa, and the Seminar on Contemporary British Writing at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom as a British Council grantee. She held the Irwin Lee Professorial Chair in Creative Writing at the Ateneo de Manila University in 2011. She has served as panelist in various writers workshops, including the Silliman University National Writers Workshop, of which she was director-in-residence in 2013 and 2014. Currently she is a professional editorial consultant and writing coach, and facilitates writing seminars and workshops for corporate clients.
Labels: city of literature, dumaguete writers workshop, friends, life, literature, people, philippine literature, writers
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6:17 PM |
Letters From Everywhere Else
The first product from the white heat of writing I had a few weeks ago! (Actually, it's the second of four, but who's counting? This is the first one that got published.) Here's a short story titled "Letters From Everywhere Else," seeing print in the 25 May 2015 issue of
Philippines Graphic Magazine. I intend for this to be the opening story of
Where You Are is Not Here, the first of two collections I'm currently finishing right now. Thanks to
Graphic editors Alma Anonas-Carpio and Joel Pablo Salud for making this happen. Here's an excerpt:
Where am I ?
Elan Frenkel began his first letter to him. Mateo looked at the handwriting, small and hurried and imprecise in its scrawl, which threatened to go over the edges of the blue stationery like a defiance of boundaries.
This is the simplest, most difficult question possible. Easily, I’m in Hong Kong. That’s geography. I haven’t written for a while—I felt incompetent to do so. I’m studying Judaism here, not nearly as often as I should have—but it is a must, if I want to stay here, for free, in this Jewish man’s far-flung hostel. I cannot believe any wandering Jew can get free food and shelter here, for just a bit of spirituality. I can do spirituality if I have to; a backpacker on a shoestring sometimes cannot have a choice. It was either prayers, or cleaning dishes in some Chinaman’s kitchen. And what will that get me? A fleabag tourist trap in the middle of nowhere, with rotten food. Better prayers and meditation instead of soap suds. It has been a long time since I prayed, not since I was a kid in Tel Aviv. During the Gulf War, Saddam’s bomb blew my friend’s face wide open, and for a while, I didn’t know if there really was a God. Judaism is a way of life, I suppose, and I’m so distracted by this world which perpetually feels to be on the fringe of my fingers, never actually touching, writing strokes in the air with a falling feather.
The Philippines seems like the best I’ve had so far. I should return, yet I’m still on my way to China, stalled. I could just go, by myself, across the border, but being a vagabond no longer appeals to me. I haven’t managed to settle the inner turmoil yet. Perhaps I can make you understand now that I was more than rambling when we had those nights in Dumaguete, drinking in the stars with cheap beer. Which reminds me, I left my Lonely Planet guidebook in your place; it is brown with use, but I thought you might want it. I could no longer carry it around; I began to see the world much too simply as neat categorizations of ‘places to go, places to stay.’ It was too easy; sometimes, the point of traveling is in getting lost. Maybe things are changing, possibly I can recognize that in hindsight. And I appreciate you writing, though it seems to me behind those sometimes extravagant vocabulary, something altogether simpler lies.
I’m ridiculously lonely at times, much more with this state of separation from the world. I am tempted to say that life does no good. Which is just so common: nebbish talk. I talk, eat, shit, wake up in the morning, and as part of the course, pray to God, thanking him for the miracle of my resurrection daily from the dead. Yet I feel no miracle, no God; my words disperse in a space of four walls.
Nevertheless the quest goes on, I’m planning to buy a handicam and shoot the upcoming seminary here in a couple weeks, also a salad of Israeli backpackers, orthodox and cabalistic Jews swarming the earth. It was Passover a few days ago—3,300 years since the exodus from Egypt. I have only a lifetime, and by mistake I want it now. The quest is life.
To marrows,
Elan
This came two weeks after Elan had left Dumaguete. Had left him, and Mateo had not really expected to hear from Elan all too soon after leaving, and so the letter—which looked like it had gone on a long and difficult journey, its edges tattered and crumpled—came as a complete surprise. Or at least he pretended it was: there was comfort in the denial of anticipation. Two weeks, he thought, and there was still enough of April yet to reconsider and be appropriately nostalgic of the madness of those very short three days near the end of last March.
He never wrote back. Not yet. Mateo didn’t know what to write Elan about. Certainly nothing about quests or unused guidebooks or the difficulties of being on the road to somewhere else and not here. But he kept reading it, and reading it—the letter itself folded snugly in the pages of his journal, where he kept it to remind him of certain beautiful things.
Grab your copy of the latest issue of
Philippines Graphic now!
Labels: fiction, life, magazines, philippine literature
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Monday, May 25, 2015
5:56 PM |
Launching Myrna Peña-Reyes' New Poetry Collection
Myrna Peña-Reyes' new poetry collection,
Memory’s Mercy: New and Selected Poems (University of the Philippines Press, 2015), will be formally launched on Thursday, 28 May 2015, 4 PM at the University House (formerly President’s House) in Silliman Campus.
Memory’s Mercy is the third poetry collection of Dumaguete poet Myrna Peña-Reyes whose previous collections are
The River Singing Stone (Anvil, 1994) and
Almost Home: Poems (UP Press, 2004). This third collection contains new poems written after she retired here with her husband in her hometown of Dumaguete in 2005 after living abroad for thirty-four years. It includes selections from the out-of-print
The River Singing Stone that was nominated for the National Book Award.
Born and raised in the Philippines of Ilocano stock but Visayan upbringing, Myrna Peña-Reyes was educated at Silliman University from elementary through college (BA English) and the University of Oregon (MFA in creative writing). While a resident of Eugene, Oregon where she lived with her husband, William T. Sweet, she was a winner of the Oregon Literary Fellowship grant for poetry (2002) from Literary Arts. Presently retired in her hometown of Dumaguete, she continues her volunteer affiliation with Silliman University’s literature and creative writing program.
The book launch is fittingly held during the closing week of the 54th Silliman University National Writers Workshop. Present at the first Silliman Writers Workshop in 1962, Myrna had helped its founders, Drs. Edilberto K. Tiempo and Edith L. Tiempo, run the Workshop during its early years in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
Labels: art and culture, dumaguete, dumaguete writers workshop, events, poetry, silliman, writers
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1:47 AM |
The Name's Cooper, Susan Cooper.
While it is true that American comedy of recent years has lost its cinematic funny bone (as this
video essay by Tony Zhou clearly demonstrates, which pays special attention to the cinema of Paul Feig), it is also undeniably true that sometimes funny is
just funny. There is, after all, much to love in the hilarious inanity of Feig's James Bond spoof,
Spy (2015), starring the irrepressible Melissa McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy, after breaking out (and getting Oscar-nominated) in Feig's
Bridesmaids (2011), has clearly come far and made for herself a unique attraction in film comedy: she has created a persona we have all come to appreciate and love, something only the best physical comedians -- Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Bill Murray, Jim Carrey, among others -- have managed to concoct and sell to an appreciative audience. In Ms. McCarthy's case, it is the generously endowed woman with pretensions of meekness who suddenly discovers a predilection for being bad-ass and foul-mouthed. She makes it work.
She has brought that persona to the shells of various characters in her movies -- including a tomboyish bridesmaid, an angry police officer, and a happy-go-lucky identity thief -- and sometimes they work, and sometimes they fall to the abyss of the uninspired. This time around, as a CIA desk jockey who finds herself becoming an active agent, the persona is fully engaged, making the pratfalls and banter that follow something in the new movie to love. The film works as a project of great comic timing, and while you are aware that everything you see is just comedic fantasy, you find yourself becoming fully invested in the shenanigans that unfold. Perhaps that is because everyone seems heavily invested in making this film work -- Jude Law and Jason Statham, for example, seem to be in serious modes deconstructing with glee their respective screen personas as suave playboy and dynamite action figure. This in turn makes the film a whole bunch of fun I did not really expect. Hell, it's a movie where you come to
love Rose Byrne's villain as well while you buy thoroughly her cold-bloodedness. If that doesn't say anything about this film's appeal, I don't know what will.
Labels: comedians, film
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12:12 AM |
Think Negative Thoughts
It is hard for me to engage in an unfavourable evaluation of Brad Bird's
Tomorrowland (2015), knowing how much I love the filmography of the director. Here is a film so earnest in its message, so eager in the presentation of its set pieces, that to find ourselves walking out of the theatre thinking of it as something of a forgettable experience is to finally acknowledge that the film is ... a mess. It is, at best, a noble failure.
I wasn't put off by its exuberant didacticism. Bird's earlier films (the animated ones, especially) had didactic streaks, too:
The Iron Giant is about tolerance and being anti-military;
The Incredibles is about owning up to what makes you special; and
Ratatouille is about being truthful to one's art and vocation, no matter how the world perceives you. His latest film is actually a distillation of all these messages, which in those films made us pause in contemplation and then invariably cry. But in
Tomorrowland, they have the quality of emotional Teflon, no matter the extra measure of exuberance.
I suspect it's a matter of structure: the script by Damon Lindelof is torturous and unengaging, proving to us once more that post-
Lost, Mr. Lindelof is a hack equipped with big ideas he cannot really handle, as also seen in the equal failure of his work on Ridley Scott's
Prometheus (2012). Bird tries to handle the unwieldiness of the material with his natural feel for wonder and whimsy but the film implodes from its own sense of having absolutely no narrative direction. (Negative thinking as villain? Really? Manila Bulletin has this film's number.) The throwaway revelation in the end about the "reality" of the world we bought into in the film's trailers is also off-putting, and in deeper regard, actually strikes me as cynical -- but no spoilers here. It is still enjoyable in bits and pieces, but you're better off with a third viewing of
Mad Max: Fury Road.
Labels: film
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Sunday, May 24, 2015
9:47 PM |
The Denial of Feminism is a Hideous Thing
“My response to the ‘I am not a feminist’ Internet phenomenon… First of all, it’s clear you don’t know what feminism is. But I’m not going to explain it to you. You can Google it. To quote an old friend, ‘I’m not the feminist babysitter.’ ¶ But here is what I think you should know. ¶ You’re insulting every woman who was forcibly restrained in a jail cell with a feeding tube down her throat for your right to vote, less than 100 years ago. ¶ You’re degrading every woman who has accessed a rape crisis center, which wouldn’t exist without the feminist movement. ¶ You’re undermining every woman who fought to make marital rape a crime. (It was legal until 1993). ¶ You’re spitting on the legacy of every woman who fought for women to be allowed to own property (1848). For the abolition of slavery and the rise of the labor union. ¶ For the right to divorce. ¶ For women to be allowed to have access to birth control (Comstock laws). ¶ For middle and upper class women to be allowed to work outside the home (poor women have always worked outside the home). ¶ To make domestic violence a crime in the U.S. (It is very much legal in many parts of the world). ¶ To make workplace sexual harassment a crime. ¶ In short, you know not what you speak of. You reap the rewards of these women’s sacrifices every day of your life. When you grin with your cutesy sign about how you’re not a feminist, you ignorantly spit on the sacred struggle of the past 200 years. You bite the hand that has fed you freedom, safety, and a voice. ¶ In short, kiss my ass, you ignorant little jerks.”
~ Mark Ruffalo
Labels: activism, feminism, people, quotes
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Sunday, May 03, 2015
11:06 PM |
Life After Pacquiao's Loss
It was strange to see the national morale being punctured on the streets, on people's faces. The city looks and feels like it has been slapped, and its response is sluggishness.
Deflation. I didn't realise what hold this thing had on the national psyche. All day long, people are talking like boxing analysts, with a tone that suggests a gaping wound.
So strange.Labels: boxing, life, philippine culture, psychology, sports
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10:07 PM |
Speakeasy Cats
What can I say about Depression Era cats meowing it out to the tune of jazz, gunfire, bootlegging, and speakeasies? Tracy J. Butler's
Lackadaisy was a hoot of a read. This volume, which gathers together her initial work for an apparently very popular webcomic, is an immersive read into the sweet shenanigans of the 1920s, this time starring cats. I keep getting fascinated by this era's generosity with its capacity for being reread and reconstituted in pop culture. There's
The Great Gatsby, of course, and countless movies. But it reminds me most of all of Alan Parker's
Bugsy Malone -- essentially occupying the same thread as Butler's meowy narrative, but this time starring kids.
Lackadaisy does not exactly end with a close-knit ending: it comes with a cliffhanger, touting a continuation -- and I wish it had been a standalone volume, promising only more standalone volumes still to come. But it's intriguing enough for a graphic novel, granted a language that may be a little bit too whimsical for comfort. The characters are drawn by Ms. Butler with an eye for clarity and fervent characterisation, and it is easy to fall in love with its hapless heroes, in particular the conflicted Freckles, who has some issues Bruce Banner and Dr. Jekyll can help him with. This book has been in my reading list for almost two years now, and I'm happy I've finally reached its last page. Given that slow-burning read, I wish it had closed with a more determined decisiveness. But, oh well,
meow.
Labels: books, comics, life, pop culture, reading, writers
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Friday, May 01, 2015
8:31 PM |
The Universe is Amply Supplied with Night
“There are things that upset us. That's not quite what we're talking about here, though. I'm thinking about those images or words or ideas that drop like trapdoors beneath us, throwing us out of our safe, sane world into a place much more dark and less welcoming. Our hearts skip a ratatat drumbeat in our chests, and we fight for breath. Blood retreats from our faces and our fingers, leaving us pale and gasping and shocked. ¶ And what we learn about ourselves in those moments, where the trigger has been squeezed, is this: the past is not dead. There are things that wait for us, patiently, in the dark corridors of our lives. We think we have moved on, put them out of mind, left them to desiccate and shrivel and blow away; but we are wrong. They have been waiting there in the darkness, working out, practicing their most vicious blows, their sharp hard thoughtless punches into the gut, killing time until we came back that way. ¶ The monsters in our cupboards and our minds are always there in the darkness, like mould beneath the floorboards and behind the wallpaper, and there is so much darkness, an inexhaustible supply of darkness. The universe is amply supplied with night.”
~ Neil Gaiman,
Trigger Warnings
Labels: books, life, memories, quotes, writers
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Thursday, April 30, 2015
9:02 PM |
And Here I Am...
Labels: life
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Wednesday, April 29, 2015
1:39 PM |
Headline News Blooper
I get why this happens. It has happened before. What most people don't get is that, unlike TV or radio or the Internet where breaking news can happen, newspapers are physical objects in need of systematic circulation that need
specific deadlines to run -- and if you are a national newspaper, that's a lot of circulation to consider.
If a story is imminent, newspapers make a template of what could possibly happen, run with it, and hope for the best. (Major newspapers, for example, have an active obituary staff who write every important persons' obituaries, with constant updates, long before these people are dead. So that when death does come, the writers just fill in the blanks regarding the specifics -- and
voila, instant publication only minutes after the announcement.) It is all done in the name of scoop and/or timeliness.
This is not a story of bad journalism. This is a story of how one medium of news may no longer be suitable for the times we are living in. Most of the time, editorial hunches for imminent news stories are correct -- but sometimes it does spell disaster, like the famous
"Dewey Defeats Truman" headline of
Chicago Tribune in 1948. Shouting "Stop the press!" happens only in movies. (But I do wish these newspapers have the prescience of that newspaper in the film
Chicago. In that scene near the end, the newsboys await the verdict for Roxie Hart's murder charge, with two headlines ready for the selling: "Guilty!" says one version, "Innocent!" says another. They get the proper go-signal from the courthouse -- and one version of the newspaper vanishes instantly into the truck. But this happens only in movies.
To quote the great Alain de Botton in
The News: A User's Manual: "... The stories we take in were decided not by supernatural decree after a conclave of angels but by a group of usually rather weary and pressured editors struggling to assemble a plausible list of items in harried meetings in corner offices over muffins and coffee. Their headlines don't constitute an ultimate account of reality so much as some first hunches as to what might matter by mortals prey to the same prejudices, errors and frailties as the rest of us, hunches plucked out of a pool of several billion potential events that daily befall our species."
Which makes me think: in the age of instant gratification, news do run better now in social media (
where errors are necessarily less forgivable), especially if you need your news like you need your instant coffee. Newspapers may not be dead yet (and I hope they don't die off like the dinosaurs), but as a medium of news in the age of breaking news via Twitter, it is truly showing its creaky joints.
Photo from Coconuts ManilaLabels: issues, journalism, news
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Tuesday, April 28, 2015
1:19 PM |
Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Jane Campion's Bright Star (2009)
I started this film looking for one thing, but like with many experiences in pursuit of something, I found another thing.
A film about the romance between John Keats and Fanny Brawne invites a certain reading, a writerly one. Of these films, we ask the hoary questions:
how does one live a poetic life, what exactly goes into the making of poetry, and what inspires it? But capturing the dynamism of a writerly life in film has always been an exercise fraught with near-misses, although one can argue about a strong tradition of literary biographies and fictionalised renderings of real lives in celluloid, from
Henry & June to
Agatha to
The Basketball Diaries to
Capote to
The Hours to
The Last Station, as well as well-meaning mishaps like
Becoming Jane and
Anonymous. The writer as a character in film has always been a fascinating subject. In this trope, we are presented the life of the mind via a creative person, someone also bedevilled by neuroses that feed that creativity.
Drama ensues. When the writer happens to be real, the fascination becomes even deeper.
But how does one exactly convey the life of the mind? Being a writer is primarily that -- an existence of solitary grappling with the word, locked in an imagined tango with the quest to craft the perfectly turned out phrase. Sometimes a film about a writer is successful only in conveying the more dramatic environment of
being a writer
in the world -- consider, for example, the wild jaunts of Leonardo Di Caprio's brash and young poet in
Total Eclipse, or the confining interior world of Michael Douglas' troubled novelist in
Wonder Boys -- but
not the
act of writing itself. Understandably so: there is nothing cinematic in capturing the act of scribbling or writing or typing on a keyboard. Filmmakers employ techniques, of course, to cheat some cinematic drama into the act of writing -- for example, using emotive voice overs reading well-known lines from a literary text while the camera gracefully captures a writer's penmanship -- but the visual shorthand has become a cliche, and a hollow one. Perhaps the best cinematic attempt in capturing the writer and his work-in-progress is Jeffrey Friedman and Rob Epstein's
Howl (2010), their fascinating if imperfect dramatisation of Allen Ginsburg's celebrated poem and the scandal that followed the wake of its publication. It is a miraculous film in that it managed to cinematically render authorship, craft, and literary criticism -- a worthy experiment in film narrative that did not quite become a success, but can be lauded for its bravery for trying to capture a veritable lighting in a bottle.
And then here comes Jane Campion's
Bright Star. It is perhaps the most accessible of all of her films, after the enigmatic feminism of
The Piano, Portrait of a Lady, In the Cut, and her television show
Top of the Lake. Part of the reason for its accessibility is the consuming richness of its cinematography: almost every scene in it is an act of careful composition done in weathered beauty, but nothing too contrived to make the look lifeless. There is, in fact, an organic feel to the beauty of the film's images -- and I think it is an aesthetic choice Ms. Campion made to underline the thing she wants to explore in this story about the Romantic poet and his muse.
I was tempted to scour this movie for images that would help me mark it as a worthy exercise in showing us the cinematic possibilities in the literary life. And for sure, there are instances of that...
Like this frame of a solitary Keats writing a poem in the middle of an orchard, which for me is the perfect picture of writerly contemplation, his uncomfortable position in that chair a shorthand for the hardship of crafting...
Then there is this shot of Fanny Brawne writing a letter to the poet, the very act of writing interposed on the image to give us an idea that this is a film, after all, about writing and inspiration...
But this thought struck me suddenly: don't look at this film as a literary biography, or an examination of literary life. Look at it for the emotions it trumpets. And then I realised that the titular character may be Fanny Brawne, fashionista and muse, but it is not her that the film fusses over. She is
not its object of affection. She is not the receiver of our gaze, the object of all that longing the film revels in. The movie may be about poets and poetry and the love lives they often figure in, but it is ultimately about longing and pining. Fanny Brawne is the ultimate actor of these tendencies. The film is about her...
... looking at him, Keats, with the pure adoration of the besotted.
How the film lingers on the poet's face. Lovingly, like a caress.
This is my best shot. Here is Ben Whishaw's John Keats receiving his own loving, lingering Joseph Fiennes moment in
Shakespeare in Love -- the object of a tender female gaze.
Like Abbie Cornish's Brawne, Gwyneth Paltrow's Viola De Lesseps in John Madden's comic 1998 masterpiece about Shakespeare's loves and torments may have been offered as the muse from which our literary genius had wrought great works. But the two films subtly make the case that these men, too, are muses for the women.
These shots -- from the muses' points of view -- eagerly ask us to partake of Fanny and Viola's gazes.
Look at them, they dare us.
Swoon.
This post is part of Nathaniel Rogers' Hit Me With Your Best Shot series over at The Film Experience blog.Labels: film, love, poetry, writers
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Monday, April 27, 2015
5:20 PM |
Gracefully, Melodramatically
Now that I have seen Olivier Dahan's
Grace of Monaco (2014), I find most curious the
superstorm of criticism that greeted its opening in various cities in Europe after it made its debut at Cannes. (It never did open in the U.S.,
consigned to television fare by a distributor seeking retribution against the director.) Turgid, flat, vapid, and excruciating are some of the "nicer" epithets hurled against this heavily fictionalised biography of Grace Kelly, the supreme ice queen of classic Hollywood cinema turned real-life princess. Because, as played by Nicole Kidman, the royal portrayal is a performance that is very much a sleight-of-hand: we know that it cannot be a spot-on take --
how do you that, when Grace Kelly's very image is burned so hard on our collective pop consciousness? -- but Ms. Kidman does an impersonation that is more than fitting for the requirements of the material: beautiful princess finds herself in the maelstrom of a pseudo-thriller filled with political machinations, all touched by the elusive glamour of cinema and royalty. I liked the film. I did not love it, but it is far from the disgrace critics make it out to be. Truth to tell,
Grace of Monaco is actually a better film than
La Vie en Rose, Dahan's previous effort at exploring the exquisite travails of a female icon, in that case the trouble-addled life of French singer Edith Piaf. That other film, while strongly anchored by the sheer brilliance of Marion Cotillard, floundered around looking for a structure.
Grace of Monaco, on the other hand, is all structure, and replete with performances that don't register false notes, contrary to what the critics say. It's only problem perhaps is in trying to drum up dressed up drama and shimmering intrigue over the humdrum, something perfectly encapsulated by the whole sequence of Princess Grace arriving at Monte Carlo for the Red Cross Ball, using star power to counter international political shenanigans.
In an
essay for the British Film Institute website, Brad Stevens said as much:
In general, popular movies aimed at female audiences are evaluated more harshly than those aimed at male audiences, and when royalty is thrown into the mix, the response tends to be particularly virulent: witness the critical contempt which greeted Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana (2013) and Madonna’s W.E. (2010).
Yet this contempt has little to do with strongly held republican values. Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech (2010) was treated respectfully even by detractors, despite its being the most glibly reactionary entry in the recent royal cycle; the scene in which King George VI (Colin Firth) recalls how his nanny refused to feed him suggests that, seen from the ‘correct’ perspective, the working-class female employee is actually a powerful tyrant, the privileged male aristocrat really just another starving peasant.
The reason The King’s Speech was acclaimed and Grace of Monaco jeered surely has something to do with a lingering intellectual distrust of melodrama. Although a great deal of serious theoretical work has been devoted to this genre, the rhetorical gestures associated with it still tend to disturb middlebrow reviewers (as, indeed, they should), particularly when encountered in a context that is neither sealed in a historical vacuum (classical Hollywood is an object for study, and thus can no longer trouble us), nor heavily marked by signifiers of ironic distance (see, for example, Todd Haynes’s Far from Heaven) motivated by a specious misreading of Sirkian irony, which is incorrectly seen as precluding emotional involvement.
An elegant use of sincerity and the kowtowing to melodrama, Stevens contends, constitute the very crime committed by Dahan's film. I find that critical absolute repugnant.
Who mandated the privilege enjoyed by irony and restraint? (Uhm, male critics, for the most part.) These two stylistic uses contribute to an effect critics usually call "muscular storytelling" -- indicating a bias towards manlier stories, relegating to the wayside feminine concerns and feminine expression.
This is why directors like Nora Ephron or Susan Seidelman or Jane Campion often struggle with critical acceptance for their starkly female projects, garnering praise for singular works (
Sleepless in Seattle, Desperately Seeking Susan, and
The Piano) during rare years when the critical consensus feels the necessity to do token appreciation for female work. (They don't get the same critical love afterwards, their efforts chided away for being too difficult, or too unimportant.) The only unmitigated success by a female filmmaker is one demonstrated by Kathryn Bigelow, who barrelled to Oscar recognition for a work that is undeniably masculine in
The Hurt Locker.
The sad truth is, we never really give much space or respect to what female artists have to say. They are always boxed in. Meghan Murphy in
Women and Girls Don’t Need to Be Told to Be Nicer sums up this problem this way: “The trouble is that, for women, being 'nice' often translates into putting up with things we should never put up with... We smile when we’re harassed on the street or hit on by jerks. We laugh at sexist jokes. We learn that when we have strong opinions, we’ll be called bitches and that if we get angry, we’ll be called hysterical. When we say what we want, we’re called pushy or aggressive. Part of learning 'ladylike' behavior is about learning to smile politely when someone is being crude. Femininity has long been attached to passivity and to being docile. Men fight, women giggle and fume silently.”
Princess Grace fights in Dahan's film, and speaks out wilfully, gracefully. The critical consensus has shut her up by declaring the dramatisation of that as "vapid."
Labels: feminism, film, issues, life
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Sunday, April 26, 2015
7:41 PM |
Gladys Glover and the Celebrity of Being Kim Kardashian
To understand Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, and the whole puzzling fact of becoming celebrities for having accomplished particularly
nothing, one has to go back to the 1954 Judy Holliday comedy titled
It Should Happen to You, directed with wit and panache by George Cukor. It is perhaps the first film to explore seriously the phenomenon of Becoming Famous for Being Famous.
In this forgotten Hollywood gem -- it is notable for being the first film to star Jack Lemmon -- a down-and-out former girdle model played by Ms. Holliday commiserates about not having made a name for herself in New York, despite having lived in the city for two years. She laments that all she has to show for it is $1,000 that she managed to save up. Lemmon's character, an intrepid documentary filmmaker who slowly falls for her, tells her: "Well, when there's a way, there's a will" -- and soon she gets inspired to rent out a billboard in Columbus Circle, bearing just her name,
Gladys Glover.
She rents the sign for three months, and circumstances in the film involving Peter Lawford's character and the soap company he runs soon multiplies that one billboard sign to six, spread all over Manhattan. And soon people starts asking, "Who is Gladys Glover?" A TV presenter editorialises that she is probably just the second cousin of Kilroy (
hahaha, I like that line) -- which our Ms. Glover promptly corrects of course, and soon she is making guest appearances on television and becomes a full-fledged model. And soon she really becomes famous for just being famous.
There is one scene in the movie shared by Gladys and Lemmon's Jack Sheppard that grapples the common misgivings about the phenomenon. They are having dinner, and Jack tries to show her how foolhardy she has been with her obsession for getting her name out there...
Jack: What's the point of it? Where's it getting you? No place.
Gladys: No place? I started out with no signs, so then I got one sign... so then I get six. So where do you get "no place"?
Jack: I don't know what it is, honey, but I don't seem to get through to you. Let me put it this way. What most people, real people, want is privacy. That's about the best thing anybody can have.
Gladys: Not me.
Jack: What is this craze to get well-known?
Gladys: Why craze?
Jack: Do you think everybody is so anxious to be above the crowd?
Gladys: Yes.
Jack: But what's the point of it? (
Beat.) In the first place, everybody can't be above the crowd, can they?
Gladys: No. But everybody can try if they want to.
Jack: But why isn't it more important to learn how to be a part of the crowd?
Gladys: Not me.
Jack: It isn't just making a name. Don't you understand that? It's making a name that stands for something. Different names stand for different things.
Gladys: So who said not?
Jack: You want my opinion?
Gladys: No...
Jack: My opinion is this. It's better if your name stands for something on one block than if it stands for nothing all over the entire world.
Gladys: I don't follow your point.
Jack: I sure wish you could...
And for some reason -- and I can't believe I am doing this -- I agree with Gladys, and to a degree, Kim Kardashian and her ilk. Why would you want to stop anybody from achieving their dream of being famous and be a success at it, and who are we to judge the means with which they pursue it as being less valid? What does "having accomplished nothing" really mean? And really, if there is a way, shouldn't there be a will? During one of Glady's television appearances, a viewer at a bar tells another one: "All she's got is nerve, far as I can see..." The other one says: "Maybe that's all you need nowadays. Four programs in one week. She's certainly making a name for herself."
And that's that.
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Friday, April 24, 2015
10:23 PM |
Not Mine Anymore
I was reading
The Paris Review's
The Art of Fiction interview with the great fictionist and Nobel Prize laureate
Alice Munro, and this quote from her got to me and made me think, and made realise...
...everything is all right in the world.
Labels: life, literature, quotes, writers
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Wednesday, April 22, 2015
1:42 AM |
Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Colin Higgins' 9 to 5 (1980)
I didn't particularly like Colin Higgins'
9 to 5 (1980) when I first saw it on VHS two decades ago, although I pretty much got what it wanted to accomplish:
be a silly pseudo-feminist romp that's nothing more than cornball and a half, plus a catchy song. Based on an idea by co-star Jane Fonda, the film could be considered as the pathbreaking comedic turn to a string of films (
Klute, Julia, The China Syndrome, The Electric Horseman) grounded by her famous feminist persona in the 1970s, an outspoken activism which earned her, among others, the nickname Hanoi Jane. Here, Ms. Fonda finally plays it mousy --
at first. And then we get the old persona back, a pastel version of it that allows her to mock and affirm her reputation at the same time. (Then again, one could also make a case of Ms. Fonda's evolving female personality through the decades -- from the quirky doll of the 1960s to the tough woman of the 1970s to the aerobics queen of the 1980s. That's a lot of shifts in public persona.)
The film, of course, was a tremendous success when it came out, and it continues to be in circulation, attesting to its longevity in pop culture. I'm not sure if the subject matter -- three office women connive on the comeuppance of a chauvinist pig boss -- have much to do with the film having legs (
oops!), and for me, the ultimate magic that explains it is the easy chemistry of its cast, which explains its continuing significance. There's nothing much to this picture but Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton (and yes, Dabney Coleman) deliver sharp comic performances that are easy on the uptake, grounding their caricaturish characters with some fierce actorly gravity. We might as well crown the film as having given birth to a much-beloved (
by me) comedic subgenre of "women taking revenge upon the men who wronged them," into which belongs such fun highlights (most of them starring Bette Midler) as
The First Wives Club,
She-Devil, and
Outrageous Fortune. And, fine,
The Other Woman.
But it's really just a silly romp, much of it a prolonged series of revenge fantasies that have not aged well. Consider Jane Fonda's hunting fantasies...
Or Dolly Parton's reverse sexual harassment fantasies that end with some strange cowgirlish wrangling...
Or Lily Tomlin's Snow White and a cup of rat poison fantasies...
There is a dated feel to these notions that almost mars the beautiful simplicity of the movie and shunts what ounce of feminism lite it has -- but then again I'm reading this with a 2015 consciousness on gender issues that may be the wrong framework to understand the humour of a 1980 film.
So okay, then. What is my best shot? This one.
It's the fairy tale shot of all three female protagonists at the end of that prolonged revenge fantasy sequence, quickly reminding us not to take all these too seriously. It's just a band of modern princesses (decked in medieval wear) wanting their much-earned day in the sun, waving their hands from a castle they deserve to live in, away from the men who cannot even begin to give them their worth. It's a sweet shot, gauzy and in pastel. We smile, and we say, "Go, girls!" And we enjoy the film for its magnificently staged wackiness, and get a small pinkish twitch of enlightenment about gender equality.
This post is part of Nathaniel Rogers' Hit Me With Your Best Shot series over at The Film Experience blog.Labels: film
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Tuesday, April 21, 2015
12:16 AM |
"You Will Grow to Love Me Less and Less..."
Life can sometimes feel like an aspect ratio of 1:1, and then there are days when everything feels like 2.35:1 and in Technicolor. Watching Xavier Dolan's
Mommy (2014), and feeling sucker-punched.
Steve Després: We still love each other, right?
Diane Després: That's what we're best at, buddy.
Sob.Labels: film, life
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Tuesday, April 14, 2015
9:06 PM |
How to Write the Big Issue
"The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance."
~ Richard Price
Labels: quotes, writing
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