The Great Movies: "A Woman Under the Influence"

A Woman Under the Influence
John Cassavetes, 1974

This movie is from the early 1970s, a time when it was briefly popular to make films about working class people. Since Cassavetes’ style simulates an unadorned eavesdropping on the lives of its characters (its not unlike Robert Altman’s style, in that way), there is a sense for those of us of a certain age of being plunged into the culture of childhood, complete with the mediocre food, garish décor, boxy vehicles, and children who were allowed to engage in unstructured activity. The past, as it always has been, is a foreign country.

A Woman Under the Influence is about a dysfunctional family, and not in the Wes Anderson/Dannie Darko/Garden State “dysfunction is wryly amusing!” sense either. The woman at the center of the film is profoundly disturbed, desperately scrambling for a grip on normalcy that will keep her from being institutionalized. Her husband is smart, confident, and charismatic, and so it takes longer to realize that he, too, is treading the line between sanity and its absence.

There is an uncompromising realism to this movie, so as in real life the mental illness of the characters (and their mothers, who are almost as messed up as they are) is never funny, always grim. It is given none of the ironic hipster chic of the Anderson school, nor the spooky glamour of madness that we saw in Taxi Driver. Woman Under the Influence is therefore a much more honest and authentic film – and consequently, of course, a less entertaining one.

Plot: A mentally ill couple tries to live a semblance of a normal life. They do pretty well, considering the cards they’ve been dealt. It helps that they are genuinely fond of each other.

Visuals: Stark, unlovely, and highly evocative of a time and a way of life.

Dialog: A well-written script, acted with skill and sensitivity. Good performances in the supporting roles help create an overall impression of verisimilitude. This movie is not filmed in anything like a documentary style, but it still has a documentary feel to it.

Prognosis: Recommended for people interested in the history of independent film, mental health issues, cinematic realism, and what life in the early 1970s felt like.

The Monday Quiz LXXVI

Art of the Eighteenth Century

Once more into the brutal reaches of Art History! As is the custom, you've got seven images this time -- more to work with, and more pretty pictures to look at. (Although, man, the European tradition really took a vacation during the 1700s -- ever noticed that?)

It is freely admitted that this is an almost impossibly difficult quiz.

For full marks, identify the painter (e.g. "Leonardo da Vinci"), or the title and the country ("It's the Mona Lisa, by one of those Italian guys.") Half marks for the right title without the right painter ("The Mona Lisa"). Half marks for the country and genre (It's a portrait by one of those Italian guys").

1.

2.

3.


4.

5.

6.


7.

Paint your answers in the comments.

If I Seem to Come On Too Strong I Hope That You Will Understand

Today, the Life & Times of Michael5000 turns two, and we're celebrating with the release of a new michael5000 song for your grooving pleasure! Or not, as the case may be.

So. We all have songs that we like despite ourselves. The song that we are discussing right now, for instance -- if you were to tell me that it is sleazy, sexist, and a notorious representative of the very worst species of lite 1970s pop dreck, I would not fight you on it. In fact, I would agree with you. And yet, this does not seem to blot out the affection I feel for it.

"What song?" you ask. Why, I'm talking about the 1978 hit by Dr. Hook that reached #6 on the Billboard charts. Surely you remember "Sharing the Night Together."

Here's the original:




And here's my brand new cover, fresh mixed today using state-of-the-low-budget eight-track technology! [Keep in mind that home recordings are often quieter than commercial music, so you may have to get the volume up to hear it.]

So. Yeah.

The Reading List: "Don Quixote"

Back in my teaching days, one of my students once turned an analysis of an African novel which seemed to have a singularly spare plot. I was intrigued by this novel in which so little seemed to have happened, and decided to read it myself. This turned out to be too bad for the student, for I soon realized that his entire analysis was based on the first five or six pages.

I was reminded of this incident while reading Don Quixote because everything I knew about this well-known cultural icon turns out to happen in the first 60 pages of the 939 page book. The madness from having read too many chivalric romances, the scruffy horse, the scruffy squire, the bit with the windmills -- all of this happens right off the bat. Indeed, the episode of the windmills is of no particular importance in the novel; it is just one of numerous misadventures that befall our hapless hero, and by no means one of the more remarkable ones. It makes me wonder if its cultural promenance comes from dramatic or cinematic adaptations, or from its suitability for metaphor (tilting at windmills and all that), or just from the collective memories of several generations of people who only read the first few chapters.

What we now regard as the novel Don Quixote is really two books, the original and its sequel. The two are quite different. The original is highly episodic, following the hapless night as he staggers from one adventure to the next. Quixote imposes his delusions on everything he sees. Since he generally responds by unseathing his sword and charging bravely into the teeth of danger, he is a terror to anyone he comes across minding their own business in the fields or along the roads. Since his valor generally exceeds his skill at arms, though, he takes at least as good as he gets. Throughout both books, he regularly gets the crap (and the teeth) beaten out of him. The first book is also notable for long digressions, in the form of long speeches from people that Quixote and Panza meet along the way and of whole novellas, completely unrelated to the main plot, that they discover and read in their entirety.

The sequel was written after the original became something of a Rennaissance best-seller and after the publication of an unauthorized sequel by another writer. It is as quirky and self-referential as any post-modern novel, tracing the adventures of Don Quixote in a world where everyone has read the first book and knows all about Don Quixote. Since everyone is delighted to meet the literary celebrity and wants to play along with his madness, he is further confirmed in his delusions, and the nature of reality gets ever more complex. Meanwhile, Cervantes misses no opportunity to attack the unauthorized sequel or to respond to criticisms of the first book, all within the fictional world of the novel. It is weird and fairly marvelous stuff.

Don Quixote is often held up as the first real novel. Not having much of a grounding in the other literature of the period, I can't evaluate that claim. It is, however, fairly awe-inspiring how much of what it is easy to think of as "modern sophistication" Cervantes packed into books that were published in 1605 and 1615. By imagining the effects of his knight's simple but well-intentioned morality in real-world situations, Cervantes implicitly comments on simplistic rules-based moral codes in general. He continually puts Quixote and Sancho Panza in scenarios where they have different perspectives on what is true, or encounter minor characters who have emerged from a given situation with two different stories of it. His treatment of women is almost unbelievably sympathetic for his age, and in the episode of the shepardess Marcela in Chapter XIV of Book One he all but anticipates feminist deconstruction of traditional courtship behavior.

Still, this is clearly a book from a few centuries back. The first book, in particular, is far more episodic than would be considered acceptable in a standard modern novel. It is also rather more blunt in its exposition; we are never made to infer Don Quixote's madness from his behavior, for instance, because Cervantes tells us right up front that he is mad. There's a running gag in which Sancho Panza is always piling proverbs on top of each other, which is pretty good, but unlike Cervantes a modern novelist probably wouldn't feel the need to point out the joke every few chapters. There is also a layer of cultural difference that is difficult to penetrate, although Edith Grossman's translation (more about which in a future post) does a great job of rendering the Spanish wordplay and social context as transparent as possible through judicious footnoting. Still, throughout the second book there are all manner of people who play practical jokes on Quixote, egging him on in his insanity. I read these portions completely unsure whether I was supposed to be appalled, or thinking the jokes were jolly fun, or if I was supposed to be exactly as unsure as I was. Puzzling.


Plot: A gentleman farmer, having read too many books about chivalric knights, decides that he will become one himself. In acting in the fashion of the heros of that kind of literature, he gets himself and everyone he meets into all manner of trouble.

It is a peculiarity of Don Quixote that it can be read as sheer parodic comedy, but also as the most poignant of tragedies -- that of a good man whose moral code exposes him to defeat, humilation, and obscurity. As for myself, the book is enough of a historical artifact that I neither wept for the brave knight's misfortunes nor laughed out loud at Sancho Panza's antics. But, I found that the book retains its power to move and to amuse, which is not bad at all 404 years on.

The Thursday Quiz LXXXV

The Thursday Quiz!

The Thursday Quiz is a twelve item is-it-or-isn't-it test of your knowledge, reasoning, stamina, and moxie!

Remember always the Fundamental Rules of the Thursday Quiz:

1. The Thursday Quiz is a POP quiz. No research, Googling, Wikiing, or use of reference books. Violators will never be able to look at themselves in the mirror again.

2. Don't get all stressed out about it! It's supposed to be fun!

Famous Poems III

All of the following poems selected the top hundred most-anthologized poems of all time. I've given you the poet, the title, and the first several lines of the poem. In which ones does everything line up? And, in which ones am I just messin' with you?

1. William Blake, "Piping Down the Valleys Wild," 1789.

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.


2. Emily Dickinson, "A Narrow Fellow in the Grass," 1865.

A narrow fellow in the grass
Occasionally rides;
You may have met him,--did you not,
His notice sudden is.

The grass divides as with a comb,
A spotted shaft is seen;
And then it closes at your feet
And opens further on.


3. John Donne, "Holy Sonnet XIV," 1618.

BATTER my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.


4. Robert Herrick, "Upon Julia's Clothes," 1648.

WHENAS in silks my Julia goes,
Then, then, methinks, how sweetly flows
That liquefaction of her clothes.

Next, when I cast mine eyes and see
That brave vibration each way free ;
O how that glittering taketh me!


5. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Pied Beauty," 1918.

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman's boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!


6. John Keats, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer," 1816.

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold....


7. John Keats, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," 1819.

TELL me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.


8. Richard Lovelace, "To Lucasta, Going to the Wars," 1649.

I.

O WHAT can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither’d from the lake,
And no birds sing.

II.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms!
So haggard and so woe-begone?
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.


9. Dylan Thomas, "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," 1951.

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.


10. Henry Vaughan, "The Retreat," late 1600s.

HAPPY those early days, when I
Shin'd in my Angel-infancy!
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought:
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first Love,
And looking back—at that short space—
Could see a glimpse of His bright face....


11. William Wordsworth, "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," 1888.

Ten years ago on a cold dark night,
someone was killed 'neath the town hall lights.
There were few at the scene, but they all agreed,
that the slayer who ran looked a lot like me.

She walks these hills, in a long black veil.
She visits my grave, when the night winds wail.
Nobody knows, nobody sees, nobody knows, but me


12. Thomas Wyatt, "They flee from me that sometime did me seek," 1557.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they have put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change.


Submit your answers in the comments. Rhyming couplets optional.


(The first Thursday Quiz on Famous Poems was TQXXI. Missy took the Gold.
The second was TQXLIII. gs49 took the Gold that time.)

Five Brisk Reviews

Book: Gilead, by Marianne Robinson.
Source: I picked it up because I read somewhere that it was good.
Findings: In the form of a long letter from an older father to his son, Gilead is an incredibly graceful and evocative look into (a) small town life, (b) the mid 20th Century in the United States, (c) American religious life, and (d) the human experience in general. It tells the story of a life of no more than the average level of drama and event, yet is quietly riveting. The spare, elegant writing style reminded me of Housekeeping, a book that I read for the Reading List project last year, yet I managed to be surprised anyway when I realized that two books are by the same writer. Where Housekeeping spoke in very spare language of momentous events in the narrator's biography, Gilead invests great emotional weight in the everyday. It is quite lovely.



Book: Titus Groan, by Mervyn Peake
Source: Karmasartre recommended it after I reviewed Sprawling Fantasy Epics a few months back.
Findings: The first book of the Gormanghast trilogy, Titus Groan is a coming-of-age fantasy novel as Edward Gorey might have written one. The book is populated by grotesque, parodical figures fulfilling their ceremonial roles in a vast, decadent provincial castle. Unlike the many fantasy tales where the point-of-view character is by definition good and his or her enemies evil, Titus Groan treats us to a world where no one really has much to recommend them in the way of moral fiber, and the most intelligent and dynamic member of the cast is also spectacularly self-serving. Written in the 1940s, this book can be read as a critique of both the blandness and blindness of traditional authority and of the limitations and hypocracies of anti-authoritarian movements. Or, it can just be enjoyed as a darkly funny imagined universe, beautifully realized outside of some long descriptive digressions that veer towards the purple. Either way, I'll definitely be back for the second installment.



Game: Purgatory
Source: MyDogIsChelsea told me to buy it so her friend, who designed it, could keep his patent rights or something.
Findings: An attractive, entertaining, and nicely designed trick-taking card game played by two teams of two, Purgatory is similar to Hearts in terms of its gameplay, and likely to appeal to people who like the more common game. The deck has three suits (green, purple, and blue) with numbers 1 - 13, "devil" cards that carry a penalty (a bit like hearts in Hearts), and "angel" cards that work a bit like a permanent trump suit. The most innovative twist in the game is that the three six cards are particularly significant; making a mid-value card more important than high or low cards challenges a player to come up with new trump-taking strategies. Mrs.5000 and I got our butts handed to us on our initial outting with the game, but had fun just the same.



Rock Album: The Thermals, Now We Can See
Source: I would have got to it eventually anyway, but d alerted me to its release.
Findings: The Thermals are The Rose City's other band of brainiacs, less overtly theatrical and bookish than the Decemberists and considerably rougher and more noisy. But listen through the punk-flavored guitar attack, and you'll discover songwriting that is intelligent, clever, and pointed. This new album continues their general direction towards an increasingly spare lo-fi rock minimalism, and teaches us again that just because a guitar power trio is rocking the hell out doesn't mean that they don't have anything interesting to say.



Book: Data Flow: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design
Source: I think I saw this one on bioephemera, maybe?
Findings: Graphical presentation of information is incredibly important to clear thinking. The ubiquity of Microsoft Office products, the graphical capabilities of which are bizarrely rigid and underdeveloped, has been disastrous to information visualization, so I was excited to see a text that could counterbalance the brilliant but idiosyncratic and unsystematic work of Edward Tufte in this field. Sadly, Data Flow is mostly a portfolio of truly awful graphic design that does more to obscure than convey information. With only a few exceptions -- notably, Jessica Hagy's droll hand-drawn graphical cartoons -- the work in this book abuses the capabilities of computer graphics to create images that are garish, busy, opaque, and often obnoxiously smug in their own cleverness. The ghost of the jagged, sloppy wave of early '90s graphic design infuses this work, so much so that I double-checked to make sure that this was really a new book. Depressingly, it is.

The Great Movies: "Written on the Wind"

Written on the Wind
Douglas Sirk, 1956

Written on the Wind is a melodrama about passion, alcohol, sex, scandal, and death in a wealthy Texas oil family, and it was apparently a wildly successful piece of mass-market entertainment on its original release. Snooty intellectual types -- you know what those effete eggheads are like -- criticized it as "pop trash," shallow, lurid, and overwrought. Ebert also says, though, that real sophisticates recognize this film as a work of rare genius:

To appreciate a film like 'Written on the Wind' probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman's masterpieces, because Bergman's themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message.... Films like this are both above and below middle-brow taste. If you only see the surface, it's trashy soap opera. If you can see the style, the absurdity, the exaggeration and the satirical humor, it's subversive of all the 1950s dramas that handled such material solemnly.

It's well made, for sure. But really, I thought it was pretty much shallow, lurid, and overwrought. So much for my real sophistication.

The Plot: Spoiled rich playboy type reforms his life with the help of a good woman. Then his doctor tells him he has a low sperm count and he flips out, because apparently they didn't have adoption in the 1950s or something. Then there's a lot of drinkin' and fightin' and at one point a gun goes off, and everyone looks very stern and serious and well-dressed.

The Visuals: Everything seems to be filmed on big-budget soap opera sets, which I guess is part of the exquisite irony of the whole thing. We're told that the great Spanish director Alvomodar is a huge fan of Written on the Wind. In Alvomodar's films, I more or less get the high culture/low culture riffing. Here in Written, though, it just feels like somebody spent too much money on a soap opera.

The Dialog: Fairly plausible colloquial dialog, delivered by a strong cast that includes Lauren Bacall and Rock Hudson. Dorothy Malone shines as the evil rich girl; you can tell she's bad because she sleeps around and likes that bossa nova that the kids are into these days. The best scene in the movie has her joyfully boogying down in her dressing gown while her dad, plodding upstairs to tell her to turn that damn music down, drops dead of a heart attack.

Prognosis: This is by no means a terrible movie, but at the same time I have a hard time thinking whom I would recommend it to.