Is It the Real Thing?

Dennis Potthast:  Mr. Wizard

Musicians on vacation in Key West usually visit Larry Smith, the piano player at the Pier House Wine Bar, and play a song or two, accompanied by Larry, a bass player, and a drummer.  Sometimes Larry is familiar with the musician, sometimes not.  He welcomes everyone and some are better than others.  I was sitting in the bar on Monday, January 16, 2012, when a lanky, scruffy guy was invited up to play.  Larry introduced him as "Dennis from St. Louis."  He plugged his electric guitar into an amp, but started singing a capella in a quiet mumbling distraught voice:

Ain't no sunshine when she's gone
It's not warm when she's away.
Ain't no sunshine when she's gone.  And she's always gone too long.

Anytime she goes away.

Then he started to play.  I think I stopped breathing.  By the time he got to the lines "And I know, I know, I know, I know," we all knew.  The three musicians nodded to each other and began to play along.  Dennis "Mr. Wizard" Potthast from St. Louis was the real thing.

Klyde Broox

In the late 1990s, I was sitting in The Lionshead Pub in Hamilton Ontario for a literary open mike night.  A poet took the mike and began talking about his life in Jamaica, how he had never been hungry - but wanted to understand the experience of hunger in his country, so he decided to barely eat for a week.  "Bad idea," he said.
He then performed his poem, "I Don't Wanna Be Hungry."  I had never heard of dub poetry before, but I knew immediately that Klyde Broox, who had immigrated to our corner of southern Ontario, was the real thing.  Poetry was never the same for me again.

The real thing is out there in the arts, but also in every area of life -- politics, teaching, justice, technology.  The real thing is magnetic.  You are pulled towards it.   You think that maybe it's a subjective experience, that the speaker, singer, writer is speaking to you - and then you realize that everyone is having the same reaction.

Robert Pirsig calls this experience the Metaphysics of Quality:  "the pre-intellectual cutting edge of reality" because it can be recognized before it can be conceptualized.  We know it before words try unsuccessfully to explain it - and the memory of that feeling lasts.

Do you remember the scene from The West Wing when Charley meets President Bartlett for the first time?  
Charley says to Josh, "I never felt like this before."
Josh replies, "It doesn't go away."

What's your experience of the real thing?

What Are the Preoccupations of Our Time?

In August, 1986, I read an article in Harper's called "Reflections in a Glass Eye:  A Videocassette Best-Seller List."  From the themes of the ten, top-selling videos, the author, David Black, drew conclusions about the preoccupations of the late 1980s:  the zeitgeist.  Black showed how all 10 videos, which included Jane Fonda's workout video and Rambo, shared themes which pointed to the struggles and values of the day.

One can attempt this exercise with any selection of current cultural artefacts, from top ten iTune songs to current best-selling novels.  Because of its international flavour, the just-concluded Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) might be an excellent lens through which to view our times.

TIFF screened 289 feature films from 72 countries.  I attended 13 of these.  My films were chosen somewhat randomly by friends curious about international trends and familiar with the track records of various directors.  Spoiler Alert:  The spoilers are minimal - but with the exception of Argo and Midnight's Children, it is unlikely very many of these films will come your way.

What was the weather of your film selections?
My films overall were quite stormy and dark - not a single comedy.  The funniest was Argo which involved rescuing Americans who were hiding out in the home of the Canadian ambassador during the 1979 hostage taking.  It had sharp, humorous banter, but overall very dark.

What was the "season" of your film selections?
Arab spring (After the Battle) quickly becomes Arab winter; A Few Hours of Spring:  winter; A Late Quartet:  winter.

Does anyone win?
People mostly lose or gain a bitter victory.  For example, in A Few Hours of Spring, a woman takes advantage of a company in Switzerland that offers death with dignity to terminally ill patients.  While she fights with her son throughout the entire movie, they are only able to express their love for one another after she takes the life-ending concoction.

In Out in the Dark, a gay Palestinian student and an Israeli lawyer develop a beautiful love relationship, but the student's family want him dead and the Israeli military want him to betray the militants in his family.  Lose-lose-lose

In After the Battle, angry, frustrated Egyptians want freedom from dictatorship.  In the end, it seems one set of generals are replaced by another set.

The Attack begins with an Israeli-Palestinian surgeon being acclaimed by the Israelis for his contributions.  We gradually discover that he's not really trusted by the Israelis nor by his Palestinian relatives.  Meanwhile, his wife becomes a suicide bomber.  Dark dark dark.

What is the dominant imagery of the films?
Walls and borders - all kinds of walls:  walls around the pyramids, separating villagers from a source of livelihood; walls around the Palestinian territories; walls of small rooms where people are crowded; walls preventing communication between mother and son, between men and women; and borders thrown up between India and Pakistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh; borders thrown up all over post-war Germany.

Walls suggest separation, and walls also imply prisons.  People in these films are trapped and, if they transcend their own prejudices, they are trapped by the prejudices of their society.  Sarah Polley's mother in Stories We Tell feels trapped in her marriage; the characters in Midnight's Children are all trapped by the circumstances of their birth. Shira in Fill the Void feels trapped into a marriage she doesn't want.  To a certain extent, all the characters of all the movies are trapped by their socio-economic status, race, and religion.  Escape is attempted, but only occasionally successful.  Hannah Arendt escapes from Nazis and goes to Eichmann's trial to try and understand the evil she faced.  Wandering through the landscape of post-war Germany, Lore, a child of Nazis, gradually escapes from the tyranny of the beliefs she inherited.  In The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Changez  escapes from the greed and materialism of the corporate world.

Does redemption seem possible?
Midnight's Children is on some level a search for home and family.  Saleem creates a surrogate family, a baby lives, and magic is alive.  (In Inch'Allah the baby dies.  InThe Attack a lot of babies die.  Note:  No matter what the genre, babies represent hope; dead babies represent hopelessness.)  Fill the Void is redeemed by the compassion of the rabbi.  He will not perform a marriage if Shira's heart is not in it.  In A Late Quartet, the power of beautiful music redeems all the characters.

Can you draw any conclusions about our times?

• These are dark times.
• Dictators fall, but there are always more dictators.
• The country you love will not necessarily protect you.
• Your birth family will not necessarily protect you, but any family based on love and compassion is your true family.
• Humans seek peace and freedom through politics, but also through love and art.

The films were

1. After the Battle (Egypt, Yousry Nasrallah)  Poor people living outside the wall around the pyramids are befriended by one of the rich activists who is protesting against Mubarak in Tahrir Square.  
2. Out in the Dark (Israeli/USA, Michael Mayer) A gay Palestinian falls in love with an Israeli.  
3. Stories We Tell (Canada, Sarah Polley)  Sarah Polley goes in search of her bio-daddy and finds her mother.
4. Inch'Allah (Canada, Anais Barbeau-Lavalette)  A French-Canadian works in the West Bank, but lives on the Israeli side.
5. The Attack (Lebanon/France/Qatar/Egypt/Belgium, Ziad Doueiri)  A successful Palestinian surgeon working in an Israeli hospital finds out that the latest suicide bomber was his wife.
6. A Few Hours of Spring (French, Stéphane Brizé)  A trucker screws up his life and ends up in jail.  The film begins with his release from jail when he moves in with his terminally ill mother who is seeking an assisted suicide.  They have some communication issues.
7. Midnight's Children (Canada/UK, Deepa Mehta)  The political events in 20th century India as experienced by the children born at midnight the day India gained independence from Britain.  Events include the separation of India and Pakistan and the war in Bangladesh.
8. Lore (Australia/UK/Germany, Cate Shortland)  After their Nazi parents are arrested, five children, led by the oldest, a 14-year-old daughter, cross the destroyed German landscape to their grandparents home.
9. Fill the Void (Israel, Rama Burshtein)  An orthodox Jewish girl is looking forward to her wedding when her older sister dies in childbirth.  Her family wants her to marry the widower.
10. A Late Quartet (USA, Yaron Zilberman)  When the cellist and leader of a famous string quartet becomes ill, each member of the quartet has to adapt.
11. Hannah Arendt (Germany, Margarethe von Trotta)  An examination of the trial of Eichmann through the eyes of Hannah Arendt.  Her conclusions challenge the philosophical community.
12. Argo (USA, Ben Affleck)  The US government chooses the least worst solution to rescuing six Americans who are hiding in the Canadian embassy after all the others in the US embassy are taken hostage.
13. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (India/Pakistan/USA, Mira Nair)  A brilliant South-Asian American rises to the top of the financial world, but the all-profit mentality of it (merging companies, slashing jobs) combined with the post-911 harassment of American Muslims, causes him to return to Pakistan.

"Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?"

D'où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous.  These three questions comprise the title of Gauguin's famous painting currently hanging in the Arcadia exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.  When I was there a couple of days ago, I took the exhibit's "audio tour."  This involved wearing headphones and carrying a device as I wandered the exhibit featuring Impressionists obsessed with visions of Arcadia.  Certain pictures are labelled with a headset icon and number.  When I punched the number into my  portable device, I could listen to the voices of art historians.

The historian first described the groups of figures in Gauguin's masterpiece:  the women and baby and dog on the right,  youthful figures in the middle, a blue idol in the background, and an old woman in the left corner with a white bird.  The expert then declared that the picture does not answer the questions in the title. Huh?

Was the picture supposed to answer the questions?  Can art answer questions?  Art of all sorts tends to stimulate and inspire questions in the viewer.  As artists paint, the working out of the picture might answer their questions, just as writing blogs answers my questions (or creates more questions).  When art seems to answer questions for viewers, it is likely to be a very subjective answer.

Brief note on the audio-tour experience:

The museum was very crowded with people wearing their headsets, isolated, listening to pre-recorded comments on the works of art.  Guided tours were few and far between.  This is typical of art galleries these days, and it might seem like a good idea as a great deal of information can be communicated, and people can choose which work of art they want to hear about.

I felt isolated and cut off from other viewers, each of us in a private audio environment discouraged from interacting with one another and unable to ask questions -- the way it is on sidewalks, buses, and subways of urban environments - everyone listening to their own private playlist.

How Do You Know a Film Was Good?

Movies (and other art experiences) are often completely forgettable.  Here are two questions I ask in considering the value of a film:

1. Do I think about it at least once the next day?
2. Would I want to have dinner with any of the characters? 

If I say "yes" to both of these questions, then it was probably worth seeing.

What are your criteria?

Are We Doomed?

Angels in America, Part Two begins with the oldest living Bolshevik asking three questions:

1. Are we doomed?
2. Will the past release us?
3. Can we change?  In time?

In Angels, we see characters who loved their partners, but not enough.  There's Louis who was unable to handle his partner (Prior)'s AIDS.  He hoped he could escape his life and focus only on himself.  We see Joe who tried to abandon his wingy wife (Harper) and escape into his passionate moments with Louis.  And there's Roy Cohn who loved nobody and his loyalty was unapologetically only to himself (and note:  it is Roy who dies).  In the cosmological scenes, it seems that god did not love the angels enough and has abandoned them.  The angels are waiting for him or her to return.  The cosmological scenes seem to suggest complex societal changes as god, the angels, and humanity all drift away from each other.  (An old order is dying and a new one is struggling to be born.)

In the end, the possibility of redemption comes from the willingness of Prior and Harper to cut themselves off from Louis and Joe, cut themselves off from those who did not love them enough.  Not being loved enough is one slow, sure death.... and if god has not loved the angels enough, perhaps they too should stop waiting.

So I believe the play's answers to the questions that begin it are

1. No.
2. Only when we accept it.
3. Maybe, some of us can.  Change.  In time.

---

 Here's a downer.  A quote from the play:

Harper: In your experience of the world. How do people change?
Mormon Mother: Well it has something to do with God so it's not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in, he grabs hold of your bloody tubes and they slip to evade his grasp but he squeezes hard, he insists, he pulls and pulls till all your innards are yanked out and the pain! We can't even talk about that. And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn. It's up to you to do the stitching.
Harper: And then up you get. And walk around.
Mormon Mother: Just mangled guts pretending.
Mormon Mother: That's how people change.

What is a Transcendent Art Experience?

A friend wrote me recently saying that he did not see me as an art consumer -- the kind of person who would fly to NYC to see Kevin Spacey play Richard III on Broadway.

Actually, I'd love to fly to NYC to see Kevin Spacey play RIII - I'd even take an overnight bus from Toronto.  But indeed, I'm definitely not an art "consumer" - I'm not much of a consumer of anything.

Increasingly, the only art events I want to experience are ones that are transformative and transcendent.  Unfortunately, one usually has to show up first and fully experience an art event in order to be transformed by it.

Transcendent art experiences for me include the Met's 2006 Live in HD performance of The Magic Flute and Stratford's 2005 version ofThe Tempest with William Hutt.

How were those performances transcendent?  They took me beyond myself, outside of time.

• I felt a joy and lightness in the present.  I couldn't stop smiling.
• I felt connected to Shakespeare and Mozart and to all performers who had played in those works in the past
• I seemed momentarily to understand truths that would still be true in the future

Have you had a transcendent art experience?  What was it?  What did it transcend?