SHANGRI LA HERE NOW

Kandinsky

 

A dove is pecking among the pine needles on the ground outside the window. Outside another window a dove is pecking for seeds the other birds missed during the day. They make me think of childhood living near the football stadium. First thing in the morning after a game the night before, I climbed the gate and scavenged the stadium, walking its labyrinth, each section of rows back and forth all the way to the top, then back down the next section. I often went home with maybe a dollar and a half average, maybe. Even pennies found were like striking gold. A quarter was a very big deal. People carrying popcorn trays up and down the aisles. Daddy or date or whatever, pays with bills and receives change, maybe a dime fell out of his hand while he was putting the change in his pocket. Questions like this played in my mind in bed at night. How did it get there? The forever unknown unknowable. It's a different world from the 1950s I went into age 8 and came out of the 50s age 18. Public school education. It was the late 40s and early 50s that I vacuumed the stadium with coin-detector eyes. In the middle 50s came rock n roll like a rocket taking off, a little slow at first and faster, faster unto now when it is round the clock everywhere. I'm remembering a woman from Raleigh I was talking with in the coffee shop with a Polish accent, she was from Krakow, the same place Roman Polanski lost his parents, his neighbors, his life when the Jews were rounded up. He was 8. He was slick and escaped. Found his way at night to the country and was taken in by a farm couple. The woman in the coffee shop noted she had a boy who was 8 and she wondered what decisions he is making for himself that will direct his life.
 

kandinsky

 

I carried that one home, have lived with it since, every once in awhile looking at self age 8, the best I was able, which wasn't much. An inward rebel. A kid seething with rage pretending not to be. A kid looking at globes in school for the farthest point on the globe. Alas, it was water. I wanted it to be Shangri La, like the movie. Not long out of high school I found a paperback in a drugstore rack, the Third Eye, by Lobsang Rampa. It said on the cover he was from Tibet. It was my first experience with anything Tibet. All I knew was Tibet equaled Buddhist monastery. I wanted to be in one. I wanted out of this crazy damn world and also knew I was nowhere near able to sit still and stare at a wall. I took Tibet, Shangri La, for a place I wanted to escape to. Television came into the house age 8. I saw a lot of Saturday documentaries and there was Lowell Thomas showing Tibet, which popped my eyeballs out of my head. In National Geographic I looked at pictures of Tibet as my ideal place, as far away from HERE as I could get. Here, of course, was wherever I was. I probably did not know, age 8, but as soon as I heard about Tibet and learned where it was located, I saw it was in the zone of opposite as I could get staying in the northern hemisphere. It was a childhood longing for escape from home and church. I dreamed of the day I would walk away, have my own life and drive a car with a playboy bunny air freshener hanging from the mirror. Dream on, dumb kid, it's not that simple. Dumb kid found out. I'm looking at before the finding out starts, waiting for the curtains in front of the movie screen to open. I absorbed Lobsang Rampa's book like a sponge. The life of my own experience began with a stumble and fall, slip on a banana peel, stumble into the wall. The word that characterizes the years 18 to 23 is confusion, confusion in a bewilderment way, befuddled. Everything was a mystery that everybody knew the answers to but me.

 

kandinsky

 

The Fifties were the Eisenhower years, the pre-Reagan republican time of Communist witch-hunts ruining and destroying the lives of far too many for conscience to allow. G-Men. Ideologues don't go by conscience. I remember the drills in first grade of crawling under the desk at school in case a Russian atomic bomb was dropped on us. Daddy worked at GM knocking dents out of cars on the assembly line, "a ding man." I remember recession after recession through the I-Like-Ike time, daddy getting "laid off" and finding a job driving a milk truck or driving a cab. In one of those times the guy he drove milk truck for repoed daddy's dream car, a 51 Oldsmobile that had nice lines. Borrowing money from loan sharks. An electrical line broke in a windstorm and a live wire landed on his Nash Rambler parked in front of the house and burned it up. He had bad luck with classy cars. I remember telling myself in that time I would never work for a big corporation where the employees are anonymous and expendable. I made the decision in childhood, in that time, that I would not bring a kid into this world, would not be married, would live alone all my adult life by choice. A subject I'd think about in the night, longing so much, longing with all my child's might never to repeat this kind of family experience. Debt and church, union strikes and recessions. I said I will not live my life like this. I determined that I would live simply without ambition for money. During the Fifties, a boom time for media, construction, war and manufacturing, a time of progress, the fiction of Graham Greene, which I did not know about at the time, the world I lived in was devoid of anything of interest to me. At school we took a bus to the Nelson art museum in Kansas City. I was in awe with no idea why. Never saw another museum until after leaving parents. The Fifties was when propaganda was the norm, like now. Then, we made uncertain jokes about being wire-tapped hearing an odd click or something on the telephone. All my life I've known to watch everything I say and certainly never use the word communist, and now it's bomb. Propaganda reality.

 

kandinsky

 

In the last year of college was corporation day when corporate recruiters visited the campus to make job offers or whatever. I didn't even step on campus that day. It was the corporate indifference for the individual human being. The corporate world is sharp-edged as a chef's butcher knife. I like a world with soft edges. I like working for individuals or small business. It doesn't pay, but I don't want the pay. Something else I learned in childhood was it's money or time, which is my choice? I chose time. Everybody around me chose money. I can't say I did anything big deal with my time, but I can say I've enjoyed my time. I never made more money than immediately necessary to get by on, didn't want more. I could have if I'd wanted to stay in a city. I could have here in the rural world, but didn't want it. Felt like money was a form of exchange, but could not live with only money in my mind. I've been seeing the corporate takeover of our government since that time. I've seen it evolve into what it has become, a wasting of the continent's resources and a wasting of its people, especially the working class, regarded by capitalists as the enemy. It's why I live on a rural road to nowhere. In childhood my comfort was a vast acreage of woods behind the house. Another comfort was grandmother, whose culture I live in on Waterfall Road. School was a comfort too, it kept me away from home. I live in the old Air Bellows schoolhouse. Thus, I suppose, education became important as a significant comfort. I've moved into a world composed of the comforts of childhood, made those comforts into a way of life. It worked then. It works now. It is Air Bellows Mountain where I found my Shangri La.     

 

kandinsky

 

 

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ROMAN POLANSKI AND THE GHOST WRITER

     roman polanski, 2010

Three days of visiting with friends in the evenings, town trips during the day, not a great deal of sleep, created a need for a day off, a day to sleep late, take a nap, watch two movies. First movie was a kind of documentary about Roman Polanski. I was thinking it was biographical. It turned out to be about his two big horrors in life, the Manson murders of his wife and child, and the experience with American press in the time of being charged with sex with an underage girl. He learned all he needed to know about living in the USA and went to Paris to stay out of prison, where he continues to make films. It turned out to be fairly interesting as I knew nothing of his take on these two brushes with horror in Los Angeles. Perhaps what struck me most was how young he was in his early years of film making. In his years with gray hair, the strain of those times shows in his face. Both experiences left him face down in the dirt. He'll be arrested if he comes back to USA.


The documentary was called, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. It refers to being wanted in USA and desired in France. Paris is where he belongs, not LA. He's appreciated in Paris. His film The Pianist gives a peep-hole look into the place and time of his childhood in Krakow, Poland, during the German occupation. His mother died in a concentration camp. His father survived the concentration camp. His wife and baby were killed by Charles Manson and "family." This is why Manson is in prison for life and will never be let out. He is our LSD Hannibal Lechter in everyday life. Then he got with a 13 yr old girl and her mother started a big legal issue from it, against the girl's will. Polanski went through the humiliation of the trial, the threat of years behind bars, until the judge in sentencing wanted to nail Polanski to the wall to make himself look good. Both defense and prosecution lawyers agreed the best thing for Polanski to do was leave the country while he was able. It's been since that time he's made what are to my mind his best films.


In the mail came Polanski's 2011 film The Ghost Writer. I took a nap and stayed in bed several hours, 3 or 4, until I was just staying in bed because I didn't want to get up. Couldn't sleep any more. Time to watch The Ghost Writer. First thing, I noticed Ewan McGregor was the actor Woody Allen used in Match Point, his rewrite of Crimes and Misdemeanors. It was not necessarily a happy association for me, because I didn't like Match Point very much. I first saw McGregor in Trainspotting, a creepy movie. I've seen it twice and that's enough. My associations with him were not particularly favorable going into the movie. It wasn't but a few minutes before all that fell away. We were in a new world. Polanski world is leaps and bounds beyond Woody Allen world post Mia Farrow. I was looking at Ewan McGregor as an adult actor and he was up to it. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, McGregor grew up into a mature actor. Through about the first third of the film I'd lost the sense that I was watching a Polanski film. It seemed like a very nicely made film, visually something like a Kieslowski film, then it took a turn, and there was Polanski; our man realizing he was in over his head with no way out.


McGregor's character was hired to be the ghost writer for a recent Brit Prime Minister's memoir, Adam Lang, portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. He was a fictional character for Tony Blair, who played whore of Babylon to Bush's Red dragon, the sequel to Reagan and Thatcher playing the same roles. Brosnan played the role well of a big man living beyond his time of power as an isolated celebrity. The art on the walls in the minimalist house of spare architecture was contemporary, Cy Twombly the only artist I recognized. They were European artists. Twombly lived in Italy. Large abstract canvases of extraordinary colors and textures. Possibly the paintings and sculptures were loaned by a gallery in Paris. That's what it looked like. The house was a museum. At least one painting was in every scene. I spent the entire film in awe of the paintings on the walls and the architecture in the house. It's hard to believe Tony Blair lives with art like was in the film. Blair is too dull for somebody with that kind of art collection. Maybe, if his wife were an independently wealthy art dealer. Didn't matter. I loved seeing the paintings as context for the drama. One of the best was a floor to ceiling window as wide as it was tall that looked onto the landscape outside, photographic realism.


When the plot began to thicken, people and situations became more and more uncomfortable. Intuitively, we know from early on that our man isn't going to make it out of the movie alive. It was something like watching somebody taken down gradually by quicksand. He is isolated on what appears to be an island in the Cape off Massachusetts coast. A ferry runs to and from there, indicating a population that is primarily summer residences. Our friend the ghost writer, whose role is to rewrite the retired Prime Minister's memoirs. From the beginning I felt a sense that he was outside his world altogether, and completely inside their world without recourse. They were the big league of players that used guns and offed inconvenient people. He was a young guy taking a writing job, clueless. When assassins are following him and he's losing them, we get the picture he won't make it much longer. The film is labelled a thriller, and it is. We know something is lurking in the background about to catch up with our friend. He knows it is there too, but doesn't know in what form or when. When it was over, all I could say was, another great Polanski film.   


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CARNAGE THE MOVIE

     roman polanski directing carnage



Have just finished seeing Roman Polanski's 2011 film, CARNAGE, the second time. I go into a Polanski film a little apprehensive of what I'm getting myself into. He has an edge that is borderline unsettling. His films make me feel uncomfortable, yet at the same time I sit in awe of Polanski's artistry. By the end, I'm blown away by another Polanski film. This one had the Polanski edge from start to finish. I laughed all the way through it, while it was no comedy. Two middle class couples in New York City. Jodie Foster and John C Reilly were a couple, Kate Winslett and Christoph Waltz the other couple. Winslett's ll year old boy hit Jodie Foster's boy with a stick requiring dental work. Foster, a conscientious middle class white woman on edge wanting to make the world better, Africa her focus. PC to the max. Her husband, John C Reilly, is a working man, a man full of white man opinions. Winslett's husband, Christoph Waltz, is a slick-tongued lawyer. They start their visit talking about the boys fighting. Each one had a different opinion on the matter. They started with coffee and advanced to liquor. The drama followed.


If you saw Polanski's Chinatown, you remember the scene where Roman Polanski, himself, acting a brief role, stuck a switchblade up Jack Nicholson's nose and pulled it out the side. Unforgettable moment in film. The unforgettable moment in this one is Kate Winslett puking, delivering a copious hurl onto the coffee table, a direct hit on Jodie's Kokoshka coffee table book, out of print, can't be replaced. A little later we see Winslett with her head in a bucket puking some more. She was overcome by a severe case of nervous tension. Evidently, Carnage was originally written as a play. Characteristic of a play, it all happens in one space, a New York apartment. Also characteristic of a play, it was brilliantly written. It was also an acting tour de force for every one of the actors. My respect for every one of the shot way up. Kate Winslett I found on the verge of average in Titanic, but since then she has become an accomplished actress. In Carnage she's placed opposite Jodie Foster and impressed me as never before with her talent as an actress. Jodie Foster became so real in her character, as she always does--the reason she's a great actress, it felt like I was watching this event happen through a keyhole in the door.


I noticed several Pinter phrases and ways of making verbal observations. They were not like imitations of Pinter by any means. Pinter has become the language of the modern man and woman in our time. He was the Shakespeare of London in his time, the last half of the 20th Century. I'd like to see Jodie Foster in a Pinter play. She was noted for her acting in her beginning, Taxi Driver, and became an obsession of that guy Hinkley who shot Reagan. She became a big star right away. The Hinkley ordeal messed her up a bit, but she came out of it whole. I liked her in Follow The River, an average movie, but she made it better than it otherwise might have been. But I have to say I appreciated her acting talent in Carnage more than in anything I've seen her in. Maybe I fully appreciated her the first time. She portrayed a frustrated white middle class woman to what I'd call perfection. I've seen women I know express their frustration in the same body language, same attitudes, same explosive urges too inhibited to go all the way. In the beginning, everybody was happy and putting on their best. By the end, facades had fallen away and it turned out everybody was miserable.


The interior decorating in the apartment had quite a lot to say visually about what was going on. Squares and rectangles everywhere. Sharp corners pointing every which way. Everybody was showing their pointed edges to each other. Using a mirror is one of my favorite Polanski stunts. In one scene we're looking almost straight into a mirror and don't see the camera. He used a rectangular mirror quite a lot for an added depth to what we're seeing. I felt like it was a visual tour de force as well. It was a directing tour de force too. Like every Polanski film I've seen before, this one is a work of masterful artistry. The playwright's name is Yasmina Reza. Evidently the play was written for London. It was filmed in Paris, but Polanski made it New York. I didn't think I could like any film of his better than I did The Pianist, the story of the Nazi occupation of Krakow, Poland, when Polanski himself was 8, making a visual feast of a film with a powerful story.


He was 8 when his parents were taken to concentration camps. He escaped by chance and worked with the resistance. Set on his own, an orphan suddenly, he became the man he is now, one of the great film makers of the last half of the 20th Century. Sharon Tate was his wife of one and a half years when Charles Manson and some others on acid killed everybody in the house, made a spectacle for the news, one of the most heinous of crimes. Manson got the name evil from the nature of the occasion, and will probably never be let out of prison. Polanski has said he wishes he'd been there and had died that night. He said the murder changed him deeply. Before, he was optimistic, and after, lives in pessimism about the nature of humanity. Polish/American writer Jerzy Kosinski wrote an account of the Manson slayings in his novel Blind Date, as seen in the mind's eye of someone who would have been there had his luggage not been lost by the airline. He had to wait overnight before he could make his transfer to Los Angeles. Polanski has been through a lot, especially growing up in Krakow in the heat of WW2 an orphan. It gave the artist in him a depth he might not otherwise have had. Like Dane director Lars von Trier, Polanski can plumb the depths and isn't afraid to go there.


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