Sherry Chandler

I guess you’ll need Liquid Virgin.

Pucker up, gals.

(Think alum.)

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I have been wanting to see Persepolis since I saw a preview at Lexington’s Kentucky Theater earlier this year. Having finally got it through Netflix, however, I left it sitting on the table for several days, because I thought watching it would take concentration and mental energy. And I was right.

I am not a great appreciator of the graphic novel. I haven’t even read Maus, though it sits on our shelves and I appreciate Spiegelman’s New Yorker covers. I tend to think of graphic novels as sort of a guy thing, though I also know that that is rapidly becoming a dated attitude.

I was very taken by the graphic look and feel of Persepolis, however. The minimalist style, a look that might be characterized as the dark side of South Park (though, okay, South Park is not without its own dark side — maybe the tragic side), the use of silhouettes in black and white, was often very affecting. This is not the computer-animated cutesiness of Disney et al. The film is also a monument to the revolutionary power of pop culture. For one thing, it is the animated film of a graphic novel (comic book) so its very genesis is pop. But, as Frank Zappa was a force in solidarity-era Poland, so our heroine is inspired and consoled by black market tapes of Iron Maiden.

Because the story is a child’s story — I was amazed near the end of the movie when our heroine is about to get married to learn that she is only 21! she had already had experience enough for several lifetimes — the form allows Marjane Satrapi to convey the simplicity of the child’s vision while maximizing the terror that is a child’s experience of war, repression, prejudice.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, Persepolis gives one an idea what it’s like for a woman living under a repressive fundamentalist regime and also an idea why leaving the country isn’t all that satisfactory a solution. Nafisi’s vision is more analytical; Satrapi’s gives us raw emotion and some delightfully iconoclastic characters (the grandmother and uncle). There are moments of truly wicked humor in the film.

Satrapi also deals with the clumsiness or just plain evil Middle East involvement of the West, from the installation of the Shah to the arms dealing in the Iran/Iraq War. Her focus is not so strictly domestic. When one of the women says of the religious revolution, “It can’t be any worse than life under the Shah,” I couldn’t help but think of how much worse life is now for women in Iraq since we deposed Saddam Hussein and facilitated a fundamentalist takeover.

I was deeply moved and I think this is a movie that all of us should see, especially now when the Bush administration keeps beating the war drums and painting Iran as the greatest evil in the axis thereof. If you see the human face of your enemy, it is not so easy to hate her.

You will find a number of perceptive reviews and a plot synopsis at Rotten Tomatoes.

Persepolis, by the way, was the Greek name for the ancient capitol of the Persian empire.

What can I say about Black Orpheus, a film that upon its release in 1959 won the Oscar, the Palm D’or, and the Golden Globe and is credited with popularizing the bossa nova in the industrialized world.

Before the world heard Astrud Gilberto’s whispy voice, before they knew of Stan Getz’ velvety sax, they saw Black Orpheus. The film (in Portuguese, Orfeu Negro) put a face on a new style of samba that was fresh, romantic and very accessible to jazz hipsters.

Not much that hasn’t been said better already. Just that the film is eye and ear candy. The shots of the cliffs surrounding Rio, the scenes from Carnival, in spite of the tragic nature of the mythic framework, it all adds up to a celebration of life and sexuality that is especially refreshing after watching the dark melodrama of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

There is little approaching evil in this movie. Mira, Orfeo’s jilted fiancee, tries to murder Eurydice for stealing her man, but her anger is bright and out there and some would say she had cause. Anyway, as Wesley Morris writes in the Boston Globe:

One problem with the romantic tragedy, historically speaking, was that you couldn’t dance to it. In 1959, that changed. Marcel Camus delighted the world with “Black Orpheus,” which relocated the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro just in time for Carnival.

…

Indeed, the Orpheus of Greek myth tamed the masses with his lyre. For Camus’s purposes, he’s Orfeo, a streetcar driver (Breno Mello) who can seduce crowds with his guitar and the gentle rhythms of bossa nova. He’s also a wicked dancer, with moves that wouldn’t be out of place in the center forward position (Mello was a soccer star in his day). Orfeo is also something of a cad. Women swoon wherever he goes. But he’s engaged to Mira (Lourdes De Oliveira), a feisty whirlwind and sexpot who always seems to forget how angry she is when the opportunity to dance presents itself.

It should also be pointed out that Orfeo can play the sun out of bed with his guitar, or so the local children believe. Thus is set up his role as a force of rebirth, as part of the cyclical nature of life and death.

Death lurks around the edges, pursuing Eurydice, but Death is a natural fact not an evil force and this one moves so beautifully that he’s a joy to watch. Spider Man should have such moves.

Lawrence Russell, writing at Culture Court, says that Black Orpheus achieves what Orson Welles rather infamously tried when he went to Rio in 1942 and spent gobs of money trying to document Carnival on film.

It was around 1930 before the Brazilian authorities allowed samba music to be part of the Rio Carnival. Long outlawed as a dangerous expression of black slave culture, it eventually gained legitimacy as a community recreation in the form of Samba Schools, who competed for prizes at festivals.

Our Orfeo is “king” of one of these samba schools, the Babilonia School, and the whole film takes place in the context of preparation for the competition. Continuing with Russell:

The samba gained attention in the U.S., Europe and elsewhere with the highly popular 1934 Hollywood film Flying Down To Rio and later at the 1939 World Fair in New York, where the Brazilian Pavilion featured a samba orchestra and dancers. This in turn created a fad for the exciting 2/4 dance music on Broadway and inspired Orson Welles to visit Rio in 1942 and attempt a movie set in the Carnival. This movie was never completed, in part because Welles ran afoul the local authorities when he went into the surrounding hill communities in order to film a voodoo ceremony as part of the origin of the samba.

Without doubt, Black Orpheus achieves anything Welles was trying for and probably goes well beyond it. For a start, [the French director] Marcel Camus had a script to work from whereas Welles was trying to wing it on the spot. Also, by the late fifties the advances in camera and film technology allowed Camus a far easier mobility. The comparison is merely for historical purposes, however, as Welles was attempting a documentary (with certain fictional aspects) whereas Black Orpheus is pure drama.

So, in the end, the lovers die.

Eurydice is taken by Death. The underworld that Orfeo visits to reclaim her is the voodoo ceremony that Welles wasn’t allowed to film. Again, Lawrence Russell:

Here, under the direction of the witchdoctor (who is smoking a cigar), the samba is in its most elementary form, a raw cacophony of primitive drumming, clapping, chanting… and the droning cries of the dancers who stagger on the edge of the astral plane, seeking possession and reincarnation.

…

The orgiastic aspects of voodoo — sex and the torture of animals — are what relegate “the old religion” to the shadows of the occult. Yet as a source of the samba and the hypnogogic function of dance, the ancient rituals embrace both pagan and Christian cosmogonies and anticipate certain procedures in psychotherapy.

An old woman in the ceremony channels Eurydice but Orfeo fails at or rejects this method of reviving his love. He looks behind him and sees, not his beautiful Eurydice, but a plain old woman in a voodoo trance. He flees this underworld in grief.

The original Orpheus was ripped to death by Maenads for forsaking the love of women after Eurydice’s death. Our Orfeo, returning home carrying the dead Eurydice in his arms, is driven backwards over a cliff by a sort of mob of excited women led by the angry Mira. Life is always lived on the edge if you are poor in Rio. As Lawrence Russell says:

Beautifully photographed and edited, with a lot of the action on the cliffs, Rio is always an ethereal tableaux in the background, its beauty tempered by our visual anxiety of the precipice, the lurking vertigo, as if these frolicking sambistas are always just two or three wrong steps from disaster… like our involuntary falls into the chasms within our dreams.

So Orpheus and Eurydice die and our final view of them is lying in a beautiful sprawl in one another’s arms at the base of the cliff.

But it’s all no matter. There will always be another Orpheus and so another Eurydice. Some one must make the sun come up with their love song, a bossa nova played on the guitar. Here is the final scene of the film:

of the Great Flydini!

Hattip to Charlie Hughes.

It’s Saturday night. I have a glass of merlot. Time to unwind!

nothing is sacred

or

women do everything and men steal it

Here from the NYTimes:

Generations of recovering alcoholics, soldiers, weary parents, exploited workers and just about anybody feeling beaten down by life have found solace in a short prayer that begins, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.”

Now the Serenity Prayer is about to endure a controversy over its authorship that is likely to be anything but serene.

For more than 70 years, the composer of the prayer was thought to be the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, one of modern Christianity’s towering figures. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, said he was quite sure he had written it, and his wife, Ursula, also a prominent theologian, dated its composition to the early 1940s.

His daughter Elisabeth Sifton, a book editor and publisher, wrote a book about the prayer in 2003 in which she described her father first using it in 1943 in an “ordinary Sunday service” at a church in the bucolic Massachusetts town of Heath, where the Niebuhr family spent summers.

Now, a law librarian at Yale, using new databases of archival documents, has found newspaper clippings and a book from as far back as 1936 that quote close versions of the prayer. The quotations are from civic leaders all over the United States — a Y.W.C.A. leader in Syracuse, a public school counselor in Oklahoma City — and are always, interestingly, by women.

Not, mind you, that I’m accusing Reinhold Niebuhr of stealing. It’s all a little more complicated than that. Most things are.

Read the article.

Possum, who is stubborn (maybe because she only has about two brain cells) was sleeping in the corner of the cabinet top. This position is defensible, you see, from all the big males in the house, but we humans didn’t find it acceptable so we bribed her with a bed and now, for the moment, she sleeps on the dryer. Slight improvement but she doesn’t look any happier.

Another cat poem from Baudelaire:

Le Chat

I

Dans ma cervelle se promène,
Ainsi qu’en son appartement,
Un beau chat, fort, doux et charmant.
Quand il miaule, on l’entend à peine,

Tant son timbre est tendre et discret;
Mais que sa voix s’apaise ou gronde,
Elle est toujours riche et profonde.
C’est là son charme et son secret.

Cette voix, qui perle et qui filtre
Dans mon fonds le plus ténébreux,
Me remplit comme un vers nombreux
Et me réjouit comme un philtre.

Elle endort les plus cruels maux
Et contient toutes les extases;
Pour dire les plus longues phrases,
Elle n’a pas besoin de mots.

Non, il n’est pas d’archet qui morde
Sur mon coeur, parfait instrument,
Et fasse plus royalement
Chanter sa plus vibrante corde,

Que ta voix, chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange,
En qui tout est, comme en un ange,
Aussi subtil qu’harmonieux!

II

De sa fourrure blonde et brune
Sort un parfum si doux, qu’un soir
J’en fus embaumé, pour l’avoir
Caressée une fois, rien qu’une.

C’est l’esprit familier du lieu;
Il juge, il préside, il inspire
Toutes choses dans son empire;
peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?

Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j’aime
Tirés comme par un aimant,
Se retournent docilement
Et que je regarde en moi-même,

Je vois avec étonnement
Le feu de ses prunelles pâles,
Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales
Qui me contemplent fixement.

— Charles Baudelaire

A translation:

The Cat

I

A fine strong gentle cat is prowling
As in his bedroom, in my brain;
So soft his voice, so smooth its strain,
That you can scarcely hear him miowling.

But should he venture to complain
Or scold, the voice is rich and deep:
And thus he manages to keep
The charm of his untroubled reign.

This voice, which seems to pearl and filter
Through my soul’s inmost shady nook,
Fills me with poems, like a book,
And fortifies me, like a philtre.

His voice can cure the direst pain
And it contains the rarest raptures.
The deepest meanings, which it captures,
It needs no language to explain.

There is no bow that can so sweep
That perfect instrument, my heart:
Or make more sumptuous music start
From its most vibrant cord and deep,

Than can the voice of this strange elf,
This cat, bewitching and seraphic,
Subtly harmonious in his traffic
With all things else, and with himself.

II

So sweet a perfume seems to swim
Out of his fur both brown and bright,
I nearly was embalmed one night
From (only once) caressing him.

Familiar Lar of where I stay,
He rules, presides, inspires and teaches
All things to which his empire reaches.
Perhaps he is a god, or fay.

When to a cherished cat my gaze
Is magnet-drawn and then returns
Back to itself, it there discerns,
With strange excitement and amaze,

Deep down in my own self, the rays
Of living opals, torch-like gleams
And pallid fire of eyes, it seems,
That fixedly return my gaze.

— translated by Roy Campbell in Flowers of Evil A Selection, ed Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955)

The Lar that Campbell refers to here is the singular of Lares, the domestic gods of the ancient Romans. There was a lar familiarie, which was the familiar of the house. Possum, lately, has been entirely too familiar with some places for my comfort. Peanut, on the other hand, has staked out the top of my desk and will not be moved. We tried a bed for him, thinking we could entice him away, but he sleeps beside it.

Hard to get much done around here.

For other translations, see Fleur du Mal

Speaking of the braiding of cultural threads, I’ll give you this version of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” in a tip of the hat to Lance’s open thread discussion of Bonnie and Clyde, which will take place tomorrow night, either at the New Critics site or over at Lance’s place.

I’m sure he’d be pleased to have you join the discussion. For me, I fear, the most memorable thing about Bonnie and Clyde was the Bluegrass soundtrack.

Meanwhile, you might enjoy Lance’s post on Bonnie and Clyde in Nixonland.

I love it when the threads of my cultural interest braid into a single wonderful item, like this version of June Carter Cash’s “Ring of Fire” with Earl Scruggs and Billy Bob Thornton. The Sling Blade edit’s sort of fun, too. The song is from Earl Scruggs and Friends.

Update: I was reminded of this cut when I ran across my Oxford American Southern Music Sampler #5 (2001), which may be the best one they ever did. In addition to this cut, it also has Bob Dylan and Ralph Stanley singing “The Lonesome River,” Kevin Gordon doing “Down to the Well” with Lucinda Williams, Ann Peebles doing a pre-Tina version of “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” (here, too) and Jim White doing a really spooky thing called “The Wound that Never Heals.”

Roger Ebert says Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is about “the nature of sex,” which leads me to wonder a little bit about his home life, because the film I saw was more about the erotic nature of violence.

Certainly, the sex scenes dominate the film. So much so that The New Yorker’s Anthony Lane tells you that the sex starts at 95 minutes into this 2 hour 40 minute film, so that you won’t have to waste time watching the rest of it. Or, if you’re mostly interested in the costume drama, so you can leave before the sex starts. Either way, he sees the sex as the (ahem) climax of the film. He summarizes the plot thus:

The costume belongs to Wong Chia Chi (Tang Wei), one of a group of student actors who meet in Hong Kong in 1938 and, with the coming of war, hatch a subversive mission against the Japanese occupying powers. Wong is deputed to seduce Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), a senior Chinese official collaborating with the Japanese, the plan being that she will lure him to his death. Wong is a fervid moviegoer (she goes to see “Intermezzo” and “Penny Serenade”), and that seems odd, since anyone schooled in Hollywood melodrama knows that female spies always fall in love with their male targets. And so it proves, the difference in “Lust, Caution” being that Wong and Yee, far from tumbling into a genteel swoon, embark upon a series of difficult grapplings, all harsh breaths and awkwardly locked limbs. Afterward, they lie not in sprawling abandon but in a needy, fetal curl.

“Harsh,” yes, “needy,” maybe, but I wouldn’t call it “love.” Yee begins his love-making with rape, complete with a belt beating, and continues to abuse Wong at every meeting, f*cking her til she bleeds while she has fantasies that the resistance group will burst in and scatter his blood and brains all over her. We know this latter because she tells us so. Yee is a brute who tortures captured resistance fighters and tells Wong that while doing so he pictures the prisoners on top of her.

Intermezzo, this is not. In fact, I think these Hollywood melodramas may be included for contrast. Or to indicate the distance Wong travels from Hong Kong, where she thinks she is playing a game of seduction, to Shanghai, where the full perverted nature of what she is doing is brought home to her. (Hard to write this without making bad puns.)

Everything about sex in this movie is skewed and twisted. To begin with, Wong’s father has escaped to the United States, taking his son with him but leaving Wong behind with promises to send for her later. The promise is never fulfilled.

Wong is sucked into the assassination plot because of her infatuation with the student leader, a beautiful boy named Kuang Yu Min (Lee-Hom Wang). Kuang Yu Min is most passionate about the resistance. He has lost a brother in the fighting and, as the only surviving son, he is not allowed to join the army. So he has something to prove. Though he more or less seduces Wong into the plot, he only approaches her sexually after she confesses to him and a resistance leader the perverse nature of her liaison with Yee (see above). Right after that confession, he follows her down the stairs, grabs her, kisses her. “Why didn’t you do that three years ago?” she asks. An essential question.

Three years ago, Wong had been a virgin who had to be initiated into sexual practices so that she could seduce Yee. It is not Kuang Yu Min who does this deed, but another member of the acting troupe, the only boy with experience — and that with whores. Wong’s sexual initiation is clinical, though we suspect she does it for love.

Admittedly, Wong does seem to have a certain talent for sex but what does her in, contrary to what Rex Reed seems to think, is not the rough play but a few moments of tenderness. It is this sentimental caving in that puts the film back in melodrama mode and that made me just furious that I’d sat through the whole, long, painful thing — especially because this tenderness includes the gift a a diamond the size of a quail’s egg. The film had left it’s melodramatic model way behind to make a cold hard point about the nature of sexuality in times of war and occupation, and it was infuriating to have it come crashing back to (stereo)type in the end.

Says Rex Reed:

It’s not a fresh story, and after all the nudity and brutal sex, there isn’t much of it left to tell. It’s positively amazing how boring so much sex can be when it subs for character development and compelling narrative. Despite Ang Lee’s beautiful images and masterful glimpses into the decadence and glamour of a lost Shanghai, and the limitless physical boundaries the two stars explore and then shatter, Lust, Caution is 157 minutes of tedium. The sex is painful and graphic without revelation (you never actually see anything), and neither of the two stars look like they’re having much fun. The outcome is predictable.

I think he misses the point about the sex; I don’t think the characters are supposed to be having fun. I think each may be punishing the other for what they themselves have done.

There is a passage in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden (Viking, 1952) where Adam Trask has been picked up for vagrancy in Florida and sentenced to six months on a road gang. This would have been in the late 19^th century.

Adam thought how a man doing an ugly or a brutal thing has hurt himself and must punish someone for the hurt. To be guarded at work by men with shotguns, to be shackled by the ankle at night to a chain, were simple matters of precaution, but the savage whippings for the least stir of will, for the smallest shred of dignity or resistance, these seemed to indicate that guards were afraid of prisoners, and Adam knew from his years in the army that a man afraid is a dnagerous animal.

In Lust, Caution, Mr. Yee says more than once, with some contempt, that everybody is afraid. When Wong says, “What about you?” he doesn’t answer.

Stephanie Zacharek, writing at Salon, points out that Lust, Caution is based on an elegant short story by Eileen Chang.

The Eileen Chang short story that’s the basis for Ang Lee’s “Lust, Caution” is as economical as a tightly wound ball of silk thread: Chang packs a lot of emotional yardage into a very small space as she examines, without ever conveniently demystifying, the complex relationship between a young spy in Japanese-occupied Shanghai and the dangerous government flunky she has been assigned to seduce.

There’s no doubt Lee admires Chang’s story; he quite possibly even loves it. But instead of doing the filmmakers’ job of taking the source material and modestly adding a bit here and subtracting there, of focusing on certain pertinent details and reluctantly leaving others behind, Lee and screenwriters Wang Hui Ling and James Schamus have instead stretched Chang’s admirably delicate story into a thin, underfed epic.

When the plot fails and the students are picked up by the secret police, Mr. Yee does not allow Wong to be tortured. She saved his life. He will not, or cannot, save hers.
__________
Update: My husband thinks it is the show of tenderness that makes Wong warn Yee. It could be argued that Yee has been softening toward her and goodness knows nobody else had wanted to do anything but use her beauty and intelligence. It might also be argued that Wong is just not capable of doing murder. But I am nevertheless offended that her moment of weakness comes in conjunction with the gift of a huge rare diamond. It’s all like some stupid deBeer’s commercial: “A diamond is forever.” It was a gaudy ugly ring.

because I outsmarted myself.

Care to try?

How smart are you?

Let me also recommend that you check out my Twitter anthology of favorites.

Ah yes, and Black Bert for a catblog: