GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ON ART

Sitting here with a blank screen looking at the stack of six wood blocks with a new arrangement of rocks balanced on top, enjoying the beauty of the finished wood. Thought popped up in mind that I put a lot of effort into those blocks of wood for nothing. The other side of my mind protested. Nothing? For not selling and getting my money back? Lord Have Mercy! It's one of those times I have to amend a thought, educate self about it. I did not give the blocks of wood three hours of sanding to sell them. I chose to do it because I wanted to see them smooth and polished, not to put a title and price tag on them. These are the two minds that kick-box in my head where making art objects is concerned. One mind is my self looking at it from aesthetic satisfaction the goal. The other mind is an authority figure from outside self saying: You're not doing it right. You need to make some money. I've given Mr Authority my ear because that's just how it is outside myself. I can't live entirely inside self. Don't even want to. Looking at the blocks of wood, mind got with self and said I'm tired of listening to Mr Authority, who is my own invention, anyway. He's a part of me. Alas, not that easy to turn off. I am so at odds with selling. This is what agents are good for. Also, I had something of an agent once who was selling things then told me to start painting pictures of "nigger kids playing around a schoolhouse, cause that's what people want." That was the end of our arrangement for me. I didn't even want to be associated with that kind of mind. It was the mind of authority from outside self about as extreme as it could be. It's right up there with the time I was asked to change a color in a painting to another color that will go with a couch and she'll buy it. The color stayed the same, she didn't buy it. I didn't want her having it after that experience.

 

Mind has struggled with self over the issue of art and money for so long I'm weary of it. Tolstoy dropped his copyright of his writings, gave them to the Russian people, could not take their money any more. His Mr Authority was his wife who unleashed hell on him for giving up his copyright. It was what the family lived on. Suddenly, they had appreciably less income. It drove Tolstoy nuts, the rage in his head between art and money. His last thing to do was to walk away from his Mr Authority. He walked to a train station and died in the station. He must have said to his self what I was saying to my self about the blocks, I'm of an age I don't have reason or justification to go on with the concern of trading art for money. I remember the old-time Regular baptist preachers, who believed their gift came from the Holy Spirit, said, "What's freely received must be freely given." They did not take money for their preaching. The meeting house was maintained by the members. Given that the Holy Spirit is within, I'm with them all the way. It was one of the first things I appreciated about them. I also appreciated that the meeting house had no steeple or cross. It was architecture so simple it looked Japanese. Wooden benches inside made by members of the church; trees cut, sawmilled, hand-sawed to needed dimensions and nailed together. A wood-burning stove in the middle of the room. I have the same feeling about the art spirit. It is a corruption of the spirit to bring money into it. Mr Authority says, you have to be practical, try to remember you live in this world and money is this world's blood flow. Been there done that. This thinking dampens my art spirit the same as a chamber of commerce meeting. Tolstoy made his decision to go with his spirit and walked away.  

 

What do I do? Make things and put them in storage? Give them away? That's a seeming solution. The hitch in this thinking is few people appreciate something they get for free. It has no value if it didn't cost something. Back to money. Back to this world. I've never found a compromise in myself. It's always been like this. I look at the artists who sell for hundreds of thousands and think, How do you paint something knowing it is going to sell for some wildly unreasonable price, you'll get maybe a quarter of it and even that amount is radically unreasonable? It is ambition that took them there. I don't have that kind of ambition. The art market world is antithetical to my interest. It snuffs out my spirit. Since I don't have storage facilities and can't give things away, maybe I'll just think about it and read Henry Miller. I love about writing in this blog that it is not about money. If money were its purpose, I could not be so free. An editor would be in the picture. Some are good, most are terrible. The worst was when the editor at the local paper declared one of my sentences too long and put a period in the middle of it. It was a perfectly clear sentence he made into two meaningless sentences. When I brought this up to him, he told me I was strange. I thought: Me strange? Take a look in a mirror if you want to see what strange looks like. I said, "Remember this: I am the strangest individual you will ever know." Then it comes to I need to be paid to put up with somebody rewriting in my name.

 

I'm seeing Swedish actor Max von Sydow's character in Woody Allen's film, Hannah and Her Sisters, artist husband of one of Hannah's sisters, Barbara Hershey. He's a grumpy old philosopher artist who threw a fit because a new rich rock star wanted colors to go with the décor. Old man von Sydow went into a rant saying he didn't sell his paintings by the yard and refused to deal with the guy further. I had a good laugh at myself. Thank you, Woody Allen. I said that's what I've become, a grumpy old bastard. What can an artist be but eccentric? What artist would want not to be eccentric? Eccentric means being who you are in a world of people acting like they think they're supposed to act according to the unwritten code adhered to better than any written law. Fashion correctness is overseen the same as political correctness. You don't have a tattoo? How uncool is that? You don't know what a croissant is? You never heard of Harry Partch? I sometimes hope what I've learned in this lifetime will carry over into next. Then I wonder what I've learned in this lifetime worth carrying over. Maybe what I've learned only matters for this lifetime. That's good enough. At least I learned whatever it was for this one. I feel like learning about Leo Tolstoy's life and his writings has been beneficial to this lifetime. Why want it to be more than that? It's ok for it to be important in itself. It's ok for my art forms to be important in the doing and the satisfaction or dissatisfaction upon completing the project. I don't want them to be anything other than important  in the doing. Like my friend, Caterpillar, who just now walked through on her way to the water bowl. She won't always be with me. I appreciate her all the more while she is.

sparta scenes

by tj worthington

 

 

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WOODY ALLEN AND BOB DYLAN ARTISTS

jean arp

Today's movie was Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters, one I've seen five times as of today. This is over several years. It's almost thirty years old. I like to see it from time to time for a refresher to enjoy the thousands of details forgotten as it recedes into my past. This film was made in Allen's time of making his finest films. Mia Farrow was Allen's wife in that time and she played in several of his films. I never gave her much thought until she appeared in his films and I saw what a great actress she is. I chose the word great because good does not qualify with her. Other people in the movie were good actresses and actors, but Mia Farrow was great, is always great. I didn't realize how important she was to Allen until their divorce. Without her, his films have lost a major ingredient that I have to associate with her. I've not seen anything by Allen in his post-Mia era I'd want to see a second time, or even the first time. For one thing, he's been filming in London and Paris. He does not know those cultures well enough to weave his story in and out of the culture his characters are products of, and live in the way he does in New York. New York is the other subject in his New York films. He brought an architect into Hannah and Her Sisters for the chance to give us a tour of the city's varied architecture. I think New York City is the love of Woody Allen's life. He loves New York like I love the Blue Ridge. His films in his time with Mia Farrow were loaded with introspection, clever insights into American culture, New York culture, the people of New York. American culture is one of Allen's themes. His New York stories are even comments on American culture. Outside New York his characters do not flow with the culture they live in like they do in New York. New York is one of the characters in Allen's stories. I've largely given up looking for a post-Mia film by Allen that satisfies in myself the fullness he taught me to appreciate in his art form. I've decided to review his films I love instead of seeing more of the new ones that consistently disappoint. Match Point was a weak rewriting and redirecting of Crimes and Misdemeanors, one of his very finest, perhaps my favorite.

 

jean arp

 

I don't like to cast judgment on an artists work, especially an artist such as Woody Allen. It seems like writers and artists of other forms have a period when they were doing their best work. I don't expect an artist to give an even performance. Harold Pinter comes to mind as the exception to that rule of thumb. Pinter's plays were rungs on a ladder in that they were better and better, one play to the next, all the way along his career as a London playwright. Shakespeare's progression was to the better with each play unto King Lear and The Tempest. It was looking like Woody Allen was in that same line of progression. He started making movies about young people he did not understand in a city he did not understand, anyway not like he understood New York. Too many generation gaps separate him from the young of today. I think of a college professor friend who found after so many generation gaps he lost his feeling that he could relate with his students. He stayed with them for quite awhile and they gradually slipped away from him, year by year. I don't get the sense from Woody Allen's recent films that he can relate with the young anymore either. I don't mean to advise him on his life as writer, actor and director of his films. I don't mean to criticize. I don't like to speculate on that which can never be known, but it seems like Mia was a muse for him. I don't dare attempt to find out why. This man has an appointment with a psychiatrist every day. One would think it would make him either super rational or super nutty. It's made him neither. He is a writer, an actor, comedian, musician, director, making production, a successful New York artist. He's also a husband, a father, his society New York's wealthiest. I'm thinking he might be a workaholic motivated by wanting to have little time for the social part of that society or any other. He's like a Bob Dylan of film. Dylan is a songwriter, singer, musician, bandleader, director of a traveling show requiring a multitude of electricians, trucks, workers and musicians. He has a radio show on a satellite radio channel. These are two of many artists in my generation whose art success has made them into businessmen with an extensive staff.  

 

jean arp

 

These are two busy men, both of them artists whose art forms start with writing. Allen writes a screenplay, Dylan writes a collection of songs. Allen puts the script into production through his own staff as director. Dylan gathers a band to learn the songs, practice and record the songs. Next, the tour, interviews, photographers, lawyers, fans. Driven workaholics. The kind of people who would have immense success at whatever they chose to do. They are artists who did not listen to the people around them saying you can't make any money doing art. Allen and Dylan were both so hyper talented in their early years, it seemed like the talent was so big it drove them. The talent itself  made workaholics of them to keep up. I've heard that when Woody Allen made the film of his Tuesday night clarinet band playing in Europe, he lodged himself separately from the band and didn't spend much time with them. Dylan, I've heard, stays to himself on tour, doesn't party or sit around and shoot the shit. Looks to me like they're both so busy they don't have the time or the inclination to drink too much and listen to other people complain. They're both writing while they're making production. I'm guessing what they like about their privilege of fame and money is it affords them the luxury to do nothing but work on their art making. Both Dylan and Allen need genius minds to multi-task on such a scale as they do. I've never heard or read anything about either one of them being charming socially. Quite the opposite. In the video of Obama hanging a medal around Dylan's neck, it showed Obama was impressed that this was Bob Dylan, while Dylan found it another occasion to say harrumph. I too often forget that the people like them who are rich and famous were once young artists in their beginnings and nobody ever heard of them while they were looking for the "break" that would take them where they are today.

jean arp

 

WOODY ALLEN: EXISTENTIALIST IN NEW YORK

woody allen

I'm still in the spell of this evening's ongoing film festival event, Woody Allen: A Documentary, released in 2011, directed by Robert Weide. Woody Allen is the Bob Dylan of film in my generation. Like Dylan, his beginning was extra good, he stood out. Before he started making films, he was one of America's funniest comedians in his youth. Then he made very popular silly movies full of existential humor. Then he made Annie Hall, Interiors, Manhattan, and a long list of others, many of them classic American films the day they were released. The silly went away overnight. As he explained in Manhattan, he was tired of writing silly television comedy when he had so much more to say. I heard a critic say of Interiors that it was deep and heavy. Yeah. Not everything in life is comedy. Tragic stories happen too. Though Interiors was a story that took the viewer through sorrow, sorrow is a legitimate human feeling. Artists go for the range of the human scope, not what appeals to corporate sponsors. It's our place to keep up with the artist as much as it is the artist's place to keep up with us. I recall something I heard or read in an interview with Bob Dylan some years ago when asked what a certain song meant. Dylan said, It's my place to write them and yours to figure them out. These are surely not the exact words, but it's the part my sorry memory retains. Woody Allen, in his mid seventies during the filming, had the same attitude. He makes the films, puts them out there, some people like them, some people don't.

meryl streep and woody allen in manhattan

The only parts about the documentary that failed to get my full appreciation were the critics. This one, FX Feeney I think was his name, I took for so limited he fell into the Pauline Kael slot for me, the Hollywood critic of late 60s, early 70s. I found I disagreed with her taste a hundred percent of the time. I don't deny Feeney some fair insights, but he didn't hold my interest much. He was too affiliated with Hollywood, Academy Awards, red carpet glitz for my taste. In my personal film watching, Hollywood only figures as films to avoid. Hollywood is corporate glorified television. I like independents. Woody Allen is the ultimate independent. It was told that he goes to the producers, tells them he has a movie to make, and it's on. He doesn't even have to give a brief of the plot unless he wants to conversationally. In a way he is the Shakespeare of America in our time. Allen writes his films, acts in them and directs them. His films are as particularly American as Shakespeare's plays are English. Shakespeare made silly comedies in his beginning years, grew weary of them and wrote serious dramas in the history plays and tragedies. Allen's history plays were stories of the contemporary upper middle class of Manhattan. In my own personal taste, Crimes and Misdemeanors is my favorite Allen film. I see it his Hamlet. In Shakespeare's time the belief was that we pay for our sins. In Allen's time, not necessarily.

woody allen

Somebody insightfully called Woody Allen the Albert Camus of comedy. When you see it, it's almost too obvious to mention, but I doubt I'd ever come up with that insight on my own. Absurd is Allen's view of the world. A line from one of the films, maybe Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow says in a kind of Shakespearean monologue, an aside to the audience, "If Jesus came back and saw what was being done in his name, he would never stop throwing up." Max von Sydow in Allen's film was a nod to Bergman. The Allen period that satisfies me the most is the time of making each film an American version of a given great director's film. My other favorite Allen film is the one critics slam and call his worst, Stardust Memories. He played with Fellini's 8 1/2, the story of a director having a difficult time with women, the result of his own infidelities, driven to introspection and self-doubt of himself as an artist. One of the many aspects of Stardust Memories that took hold of me was the way he brought forward the feminine beauty of the women in the film. Early in the film, neither one is what I'd call stunning. Nice looking women. As the film goes along, they become more and more beautiful. By the end, Charlotte Rampling became the Venus of now before my eyes. She became a vision of beauty, and by then we knew her humanity too.

charlotte rampling in stardust memories

 

 

Woody Allen appreciates the feminine like few film directors I can think of. He likes a woman's mind, how women think, how women feel, and especially explores what really is the feminine. Allen finds the truly feminine that has nothing to do with makeup and fashions. He finds and brings forward the grace in his actresses. He appreciates the feminine especially sexually, which he does not deny, but uses in the telling of his stories. The women in his films are not just roles, but complete human beings, even the incomplete ones. In a way like feminist writer Germaine Greer, Allen is always looking for the authentic feminine in a woman, and he finds it, brings it forward in full appreciation. This aspect of Allen's films was not touched in the documentary of his life in film making. Allen's appreciation of the feminine stands out for me in Allen's art form along with his humor and insight. Actually, I found it odd that the people who put the documentary together failed to bring up Allen's appreciation of and respect for the feminine as expressed in his films. Allen's women have a feminine grace seen in few films that are not French. He also looks at the nature of the people in this world with a cold and sympathetic eye. From his start in show business he was carried along by his amazing talent. He said in an interview for the film, "After all these lucky breaks, why do I feel like I got screwed somehow?" Hearing him say that, I thought it as good an illustration of Allen's world view and comedy in a one-liner as could be found. He is the master of the one-liner.

 

  

woody allen with hair

 

 

 

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WHITE SMOKE OVER THE VATICAN

 

 

 

 

I don't know what it is about the papacy that holds my interest, albeit a disinterested interest. I have dim affection for the Roman Catholic religion as far as I know. The Church appears to me to do the reverse of the spiritual intent behind the symbolism. Gold representing whatever, white representing whatever, red representing whatever, lace representing whatever. Outfits from Roman times that are made of incredibly expensive cloth with personal tailors. Recalling a Lou Reed song that had the line, Pontif, pretty Pontif, spoken in Reed's sassy suburban teenage sneer tone of voice. I think it was somewhere on his New York album. When I hear it, I feel a twinge of empathy for il papa without knowing why. I tend to see the Roman Catholic Church the original bureaucracy, the original hierarchy, the original monopoly, the original dictatorship, the original international corporation, straight-jacket bound in a couple thousand years of tradition plus all the way back to goddess, tax-free wealth beyond the Cayman Islands, outrageously expensive (sacred) objects of gold. I left out the original conqueror of the New World sponsoring the slaughter of New World residents as too heathen to exist. For the gold. For the gold only. The Inca and Aztec civilizations were plundered to extinction for their gold taken back to the Crown and the Church. The North American people were slaughtered by Protestants to get them out of the way. Then it might be said, the Catholic approach was to kill them and take their gold, while the Protestant approach was to kill them for the thrill in the killing.  

 

In a paragraph, that's a summary of how I see organized religion. The more organized, the worse. The most organized, the worst. I have the Protestant perspective from the start of seeing the pope as just a man. As just a man, I can appreciate il papa. That's it. That's where I appreciate the pontif. When I saw pictures of old Pope John bent over, unable to hold his head up, looking like a case of dementia, I felt empathy for him. He's just a man, but he's pope for life. If it takes all he can do to raise his hand and give the papal wave, he's pope for life. As long as he's living, he's pope. When old Benedict went in, looking way too much like the actor who played the Emperor in the Star Wars series, I felt sorry for him right off. He looked small and frail. Saying so soon he was unable to keep up with the papacy's regimen, the doctor having told him not to travel anymore, I could see he was in the early phases of frailty. He recognized it and saw that the Church needed a fresh mind to walk it through this next span of papal time, not somebody fading into frailty and dementia. It looks like the Church is going to be walking on hot coals for some time to come.

 

 Lawsuits over child abuse from everywhere in the world have the potential to put the Church's outlandish wealth in jeopardy, perhaps into sales at international auction houses of wardrobes of popes past and infinite amounts of gold. When Wall Street starts sniffing at the leavings, look out. This period of time could put the Holy Roman Church out of existence, turn the Vatican into a museum of itself maintained by Friends of the Vatican. It could take a long time to liquidate the assets. I want to see the Vatican art collection I've heard is kept away from public view for various reasons for multiple centuries. It's said to have dollar value through the roof. When the buzzards are picking at the carcass, the dollar values told on evening news, in news magazines, money magazines, tv talk shows, will shock the world, make the Church look as materialist as the Americans. And this is where I have the problem with the Church. All their symbolism is about a Romanesque display of wealth and an Egyptian belief in the physical body. Big gold rings for the faithful to kiss on the bishop's hand. Phew. Give me a break. This is the few controlling the many.

 

 

 

 

I see the display of wealth and imagine a million times beyond what I can imagine, and there we have more symbolism. Wealth as infinite as the universe, therefore sacred. Give it unto Jesus. Jesus doesn't want that detritus. That's the stuff of the human mind, the stuff he took a human shape to help us get control of in ourselves, individually, to see that aint it. Then I see swarms of cardinals dressed in red billowing gowns like from Gone With The Wind, buzzing around il papa in multiple thousands of dollars worth of outfits apiece. And this is about Jesus? Jesus attired himself in his culture's equivalent of bluejeans and a tshirt. He didn't need scepters nor necklaces nor silk underwear nor million dollar mafia rings nor thousand dollar shoes. I can't help but doubt a "faith" that believes a man who gets up like Elizabeth Taylor in all her jewelry out of all her safe-deposit boxes represents the Jesus I read about in the Gospels, the Jesus the Holy Roman Church stands for. I don't get it, never got it, and probably never will get it. I don't see anything to get except the Church as another institution of the few controlling the many. It was a smooth transition from the Caesar to the Pope. In the name of Jesus, send us your money. Jesus said render unto Caesar in reference to taxes. Now he would say render unto the Pope. I'd venture that if Jesus were on foot somewhere on earth now, he would not be interested in seeing the Pope and the Pope would not be interested in seeing him unless he had a substantial amount of money to be giving over.

 

The pictures I've seen of the new Pope Francis tell me Woody Allen could play him in a movie. Wouldn't that be a riot, Woody Allen playing Pope. Being a director and experienced at New York dinner parties, Allen has the experience necessary to assume a papal role. I've heard a brief BBC radio profile of the new Pope and he seems like an interesting man. Again, I see him as a man who drew the losing straw and became Pope. He is evidently known for living with a monk's simplicity, called austerity by reporters, and won't be needing thousand dollar shoes. He is known for taking public transportation when bishops are privileged with big car and driver. He evidently was not one to take advantage of privilege, rather has no need for it. That's his style. Pope Benedict's style was scholar monk. Pope Francis looks like a social monk who gets out among the people as one of them. The reporters speak in awe of how he walks anywhere in the city, Buenos Aires, alone, without body guards. He didn't just walk around and people look at him with suspicion and say, What you doin in this neighborhood? Everybody he saw knew him. They talked with him. They respected him. And he respected them. They knew him as the one who was not afraid of them. They're not going to hurt him. He knows it and they know it, but seen from the outside it's like he's taking his life in his hands. Considering that from my point of view he's just a man, I see him needing waders, big yellow New England waders, maybe the whole outfit. He will be a good example to the world of a man who really means it when it gets reported how simply he lives in his papal privilege. One thing I believe I can say without fear of contradiction is the only thing this pope needs is prayed for. He's going to need the prayers of the world to hold him up through what looks to be a rocky road ahead like something you'd see in a disaster movie.

 



 

 

 

 

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WHATEVER WORKS THE MOVIE

woody allen in a corner

I like it when I click on "new post" and don't see a pop-up in the bottom right corner that says "send feedback." When that is on, it's crazy-making trying to write. Last night's problem frustrated me so much I quit writing after a paragraph, deleted it and went to bed. It's kind of like videos on youtube at a time of day a lot of people are engaged at youtube---the video stops and the horizontal thermometer at the bottom has to do its thing first, then the movie can go again, then it stops and the thermometer has to catch up again. It's the same kind of thing with the writing. I write about a line, then it stops and I have to wait half a minute or so, then write another line and it stops, I wait, it starts again, I go, it stops, I wait. I send feedback almost every day. They don't explain what they're doing. I'm imagining the website needs more space and they're making more space possible. I don't know. I hope they're working toward making it better, not worse. So far, it's only been worse, and it's been a few months. Sometimes, like now, it is working right. When they drop back to the previous format everything works smoothly. When they're working on what is evidently a new one, it messes up. I trust they're making it worse to make it better, tearing down the old to put up the new. Stay in one place in this world and you start slipping backwards into time past. Oops.


Have just now finished Woody Allen's 2011 film, WHATEVER WORKS. I'm glad to see Allen has returned to New York from London. He understands NY people. He does not understand the Brits with the same degree of subtlety. In America, he portrays what he understands. This film threw me back into earlier Allen films, Bananas, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, Husbands and Wives, not by particular references, but by association, by seeing Woody Allen's art eye and ear evolving to this one film that could be used as Allen's farewell message to his modest fan club. If he never makes another film, this one could be used to for the summation of everything he has ever had to say as an artist, and an allegory of his interior life. He's packed it all into this film like packing a billion snowflakes into a snowball. I'm glad he's gone to using an actor besides himself in his advanced years when his nose is uglier than ever. He's the perfect one to be the lead role in roles he writes for himself. In this one, Larry David played Allen's role. Early in the film he didn't look like Allen, but as it went along he looked more and more like Allen until by the final scene closeups on his face looked like Woody Allen without the awkward nose.


He worked the two women in the story as he most often does the leading women. In the beginning they're plain and nice looking. They change through the unveiling of the story and by the end come to be seen such gorgeous women they make Marilyn a cliche, which she has always been. He took two women from southern Mississippi, daughter and mother, and dropped them into Manhattan unannounced and unprepared, separately. "The chance factor in life is mind boggling," quoth he in the beginnings of his discoveries regarding the irrational in relation to the rational. Too much rational is confining like too much irrational. Together they make a balance, each one half a circle. This seemed to me the theme of the film, incompletion coming to some sort of temporary completion. It's like all the abstract background is true, but only in relation to the foreground which acts in specifics on the principles of the background, the super-ego and ego working together. Allen does think in psychological terms, so it's natural he would dramatize the relationship of the super-ego and the ego. All the foreground characters were adjusting their own relationships with themselves, like the frustrated Louisiana preacher who fell in love with a man in NY when he went there looking for his estranged wife, who happened to be living with two men, wallowing in irreverence.


Allen went all the way back to Greek plays and to Shakespeare, using a soliloquy to fill the audience in on some background to what we're seeing, turning aside from his role in the story to talk to the audience, which only he can see. At the end, he said to the audience, "I'm the only one that can see the whole picture. That's what makes me a genius." He's the one able to see that they're all roles in a play, as in life. Allen, himself, is often called a genius. This film indicates to me that he identifies with the word, embraces it, also is aware of its limitations. He puts his character, himself, the artist within, through assaults of the irrational to find completion, balance. Allen took the deep plunge in his own life when he divorced his wife, Mia Farrow, a woman whose beauty he accented in several films, to marry their adopted daughter, who was 19 at the time. He bought the Peggy Guggenheim's estate in Venice, knowing it was associated with bad luck for its owners. He subsequently made a string of films in London, lesser versions of films he'd made before, like Crimes and Misdemeanors became Match Point. In my way of seeing, the best films he made were done while married to Mia Farrow, evidently something of a muse, which she had been to Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn before Woody Allen.


Mia Farrow struck me as something of a vulnerable, humble sparrow Woody Allen transformed into a golden finch in the course of each film. Marrying his 19 yr old adopted daughter reminded me of Jerry Lee Lewis marrying his 13 yr old cousin. From then on, Jerry Lee was just another country singer who happened to be Jerry Lee Lewis. Seems like Allen's apparent folly (no telling how many hours his psychiatrist listened to him about the move from wife to daughter) was something of a blow to his reputation. However, I suspect it did nothing to the faithful, including myself, while the ones with a superficial interest in Allen fell away. That's just as well. It's best to have a small audience that appreciates what you're doing. My friends who are also Woody Allen fans have no less affection for his film making than before. Still, I'd about stopped watching the post-divorce films, because they were so much less than Woody Allen can deliver. A self-conscious old man. Woody Allen is too cool to be self-conscious about his old age, though the hypochondriac he is can't resist the temptation. In this one, Whatever Works, he's back in New York, an old guy marrying a Creole belle not long out of high school, a fussy old intellectual of an era gone by overtaken by cliches that tell it better, by letting go of the rational long enough to receive when "fate knocks at the door" or chance makes a connection otherwise unanticipated.



Whatever Works is straight-forwardly the story of a man who was all mind, understood everything mentally, had no room for that which did not figure rationally, like God and relationships with other people. This man is confronted by a chance encounter that made him pay attention to chance and start allowing the wisdom of the irrational to complete his incompletion, to make him whole. I felt like he was saying at the end that other people had called him a genius all along because he was so brilliant of mind, but finally by the end of the story he had found his own completion in his dive into the irrational. Finally he was able to see his own completion, accepting that it's not just about mind. In Woody Allen fashion, this film got zanier with each scene, all the way to the end where it was zaniest of all. Having seen so many of his films, this one is definitely a part of the whole, and it's back in New York where he is at home. One of his great lines that appeared here, the kind he inserts one or more of in every film, "If it wasn't for sexual inadequacy the NRA would go broke." His character said in praise of Job's wife, "she chose death to obsequious acceptance." Woody Allen is still very much alive and he's back. As a film, I'd say it's nowhere near Interiors, but it fits in well as one of the lesser of the better ones. I cannot ask any artist to be running on all cylinders all the time. This one struck me as something of an absurdist play instead of a movie. It had a kind of Neil Simon quality I cannot explain.



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A SERIOUS MAN THE MOVIE

jaap mooy, animal, 1951

It's not often that a suburban comedy in film is actually funny. Silly, but seldom funny. Coen Brothers 2009 film, A Serious Man, is indeed funny. It's like a Woody Allen movie with Michael Stuhlbarg playing Woody's character. Fussing and worrying over Judaica in America. This is your average intelligent guy, a physics professor in a time when he's up for tenure. His wife announces she wants to be the wife of a retired prof from the same party set. All at once, everything whirls around his head such that he's come to a place where he doesn't believe what he believes anymore. As he thought things were, turned out not to be the way things were at all. He's a guy who lives in his mind, and the people in his house, wife and 2 kids, amount to people who want money from him and want him to fix things. In a way, they're all drains on him, but their expectations of him count, while it's absurd for him to think of having expectations of them. He's the money guy that fixes things.



Wife, who is nothing but demanding, demands he check into a motel, the Jolly Roger with his brother who is living at the house, "sleeping on the couch." The brother is something of an idiot savant, who can't take care of himself, working on some grand physics problem that is a notebook in length. But he can't get along in the world. Wife is tired of both of them and sends them packing. She wants to be connected with an old retired PhD who reeks of PhDness, Sy Abelman. He's an excellent cliche. Wherever our man goes to talk to someone of his situation, lawyer and rabbi, they exclaim, "Sy Abelman?" same as he did when wife told him. There comes a time Sy gets killed in a car wreck, then wife doesn't want the divorce anymore. Turns out Abelman was the cause of the upset in friend's life that was going along more or less smoothly until the beginning of the movie when nothing is as it seems. Turns out Abelman was writing anonymous letters to the tenure committee recommending our man not get his tenure. While pretending to be his friend, Abelman has set out to destroy him just to watch him squirm. Shooting Schrodinger's cat.



I don't know what kind of reviews this film got when it was new 2 years ago. It's definitely not made for boxoffice, and reviewers were as much ignored in the making as the boxoffice. Coen Brothers set out to make a good film and as far as I can tell they succeeded. Succeeded like Woody Allen. Not much audience, but enough to pay for the film expenses. Like Allen, the Coen Brothers make good films that bypass average-mind without a concession. I can't imagine reviewers or average audiences liking this film at all. It's cleverness is subtle and easily missed. It's genius is disguised. It plays with the notion that what appears to be the case in everyday life isn't necessarily the case. In class, he's talking about the formula having to do with Schroedinger's cat. Is it living or is it dead? Is it as it appears or is it not as it appears? These are the questions he's dealing with when his world goes upside down. It looks like his confusion over what's happening around him has more to do with what's happening inside him. It's like his outside world imitates his inside world.



He confessed to a student he didn't understand the issue of Schrodinger's cat. In like manner, he didn't understand what was happening in his life. His greatest issue he went from rabbi to rabbi and lawyers to querry, had to do with needing answers. Why did God (he uses a different Hebrew name) give him a questioning mind if there are no answers? Everyone is telling him there are no answers to his questions. Just leave them alone and they'll go away. That's not a satisfactory answer for him, and he goes on looking without finding. It's a Woody Allen dilemma. Allen does it in New York, this story does it in a Minneapolis suburb and the Jewish community there. This movie came into my house one day. I took for maybe a somewhat above average film that turned out to be a genius film. It doesn't have a chance to be a popular film because it's not about who's fucking whom.



The story of a man who's world goes awry for a period of time that he can't understand, the same as he doesn't understand the physics knowledge of the time, physics problems actually being the real world of his mind. His big physics question took a turn in his life and really blew his mind. I'm thinking his idiot savant brother obsessed with math and physics problems is there to represent our man's own mind that isn't very closely connected to the world he lives in; the son who wants better televsion reception, the daughter who wants money, the wife who wants another husband. Then there's the inner circle of his Jewish culture that is with him when he's out in the world of others who are not Jews, where he's a tiny minority.



The Coen Brothers most recent film, True Grit, seemed to have more going on in it than the boring suburban life in A Serious Man, exotic Western, riding horses, shooting guns, kill or be killed. A Serious Man had no guns in it, according to my memory. Yes it did. In a dream scene. That's another thing, the dreams. You'd go into a dream just like a scene in the story, then it takes a strange twist and he wakes up from a dream. The viewer is relieved it's a dream as much as the dreamer. Like a Woody Allen film, I found it never boring for even a second, though I have an idea I live in a world of people who would find it boring and not funny at all. The message in the film is that it's all in how you see it. We create it as we see it. It's not often a movie comes along that tells the story of someone creating his outer world by what's going on in his mind. I have a feeling that's how it works all the time anyway.



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