Addicted

I could blog about the opera I saw yesterday evening at Bastille, Lady Macbeth de Mzensk, and how Shostakovich composed in 1934 a musical work about a russian desperate housewife decades before American tv writers thought that housewives might be desperate; how Stalin hated the work and thought it was both impenetrable and pornographic (the association of those words sounds weird, doesn't it?) while some American critics talked at the time of "pornophony". I could write about how good the soprano and the chef d'orchestre were yesterday; that the tenor flashed his bare buttocks; that the mise en scène was interesting...and that the line "make the icons fall down kissing me" was spot-on and kind of cool, but hard to reuse in a non-Ortodox context.

I could blog about it, sure, but frankly, all I want to say at the moment is that I need the next episode of Battlestar Galactica and I want it NOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ETA: Composer Bear McCreary(I wonder if Bear is his real frist name) has updated his blog about his work for the last episode, "The Oath".

PS: In case you don't know, the picture above was the promo poster for season 4, Last Supper-style. Battlestar Galactica is television at its best. A must see!

La république de la vertu

A dear friend of mine often says that he's an atheist because he can't believe, implying that he wishes he could. I'm not appalled by supernatural, I could even say that I have a soft spot for mythologies and fantastic elements in literature. I am an atheist because I don't need any god.

Also, I don't think that human beings made up religions and gods for they feared death or wanted an explanation of the mysteries of the universe.

I think they created them so they'd have something sacred and untouchable, and thus, according to some bizarre cosmic balance, they could do anything, touch anything else, destroy anything including their kind.

In a way, venerating gods allows vices and the worst behaviours, not because gods in question permit so– sometimes they do but most of the time they are supposed to forbid crimes and sins–no it's because it reinsures men about their finiteness. It gives mankind bounds. The most destructive and violent people are often the most devout, whatever their religion is. We can indulge in harm and wicked ways provided we still have something that is beyond us, above us, unattainable. The sacred.

Such gods used to be ancient principles, immortal entities, revered spirit of the dead, then came the time of the omnipotent demiurge who moved in mysterious ways, and ruled over three religions. Calvin even put it farther, out of reach, with the theory of predestination. That god still works nowadays under various masks (sorry Nietzsche), but other religions appeared in modern times. Some, like Nazism, have failed; others expanded undercover.
Lately the gods of free market messed up– those are really flawed like Greek gods used to be and just as unchanging and unrivalled. People are greedy, selfish and self-destructive, but the gods, as imperfect as they are, keep on ruling the world and they can't die, can they?

I've come to the conclusion that, basically, religion and morality are mutually exclusive. So my atheism has nothing to do with materialism, and everything to do with ethics, and probably with a little bit of ego.

Voix de femmes

Le Théâtre de l'Ile St Louis is a lovely tiny venue (about 30 seats)you may not see at all if you walk on the Quai d'Anjou by the river for it's located inside of an old builiding, in the depth of an alley.

A musical was showed in there yesterday, Hildegarde de Bingen ou le divin féminin. I knew that, as musicals go, this was not the Broadway-type or the dreadful Canadian style (I have nothing against Canadians but I can't bear the Luc Plamandon's musicals...and most musicals actually). On the small stage there were only a woman and a man, and many weird instruments. The woman, Catherine Braslavski, performed as Hildegard of Bingen; she was singing while sometimes playing drums and dulcimer. At first I wasn't impressed, but her voice slowly raised, filled the room and took me. I forgot all the religious stuff and enjoyed the musical journey.

Joseph Rowe, like many American artists, does everything. He's a musician, a composer, a writer, a translator and an actor. He played various instruments(Oud, Tibetan bowls, darbuka, mbira, tampura) and, between the songs, read or recited texts– extract from Hildegard's books, a letter she received from another abbess, letters she sent to advise and admonish either Frederik Barbarossa or the Pope.

There are extracts from the show on youtube. It is the same show as the one I saw yesterday evening, except that Joseph Rowe spoke in French yesterday. I wish I knew how to get the video embedded here.

Hildegard of Bingen had been forgotten for centuries until she became trendy at the end of the XXth, mostly for her music. I can't say that I care about her spirituality and philosophy much–although it's interesting to see how she managed to avoid being called a heretic at the time and how a few nowadays environmentalists take over Hildegard's veriditas–yes she was a mystic who thought she had visions, but she was also a creative person and a remarkable woman. She and another abbess of the XIIth century, the famous Heloïse, led the way for women like Christine de Pizan; she had balls!

PS: the picture is a scan of her famous Scivias that I got via the Heidelberg University website to which the title is linked.

PPS: I'd like to own a dulcimer, it's so pretty!

His Vampire Art

I should have known better, exibits at Le Grand Palais always draw loads of people, besides there was a lot of hype about "Picasso et les Maîtres"that started in October and ends on the 2nd of February.

I was bound to queue up outside for a while before entering the galleries, but brave enough to try. I don't usually run to the must-see exhibits everyone talks about, and I sensed the marketing behind the venture(because almost all the most famous painters were there) but still the idea of showing Picasso's paintings along with other works from famous painters he drew inspiration from was interesting.

Despite the cold feet and the crowd, I did enjoy it...a lot. Sometimes the method was a bit too systematic and convenient and the parallels were forced on us, but most of the time it was relevant and intriguing. The genius used to be a student and fed on art that went before him. Picasso called himself a Minotaur, and admitted to the predation existing in his portraits El Greco-style, in his tributes to Poussain, Goya, Ingres, Delacroix, le Nain, or obviously in all his variations on various famous paintings.

Of course, the confrontation leads to comparisons, not necessarily to Picasso's advantage. For instance his numerous (40!)variations on Velazquez ' Meninas are interesting; Picasso parses, dissects and eventually pieces the puzzle together, but Velasquez remains the Master and it's his painting we admire. However the series of Tarots, as Mallraux called them, Picasso's paintings inspired by gentlemen from El Siglo del Oro (by Velazquez again but also Rembrandt and Shakespeare even), often musketeer-like, were fabulous. I also loved his Chat et Homard which I had never seen until yesterday.

The exhibit is worth seeing if only for the numerous masterpieces on display. It exposes Picasso's artistic cannibalism but also reveals his ideal museum, or at least part of that one that lay in his imagination, and above all, his idea of meta-painting, when the painting becomes the subject of his painting. It shows us that canvas can be models just like any living person or any still life.

PS: Le déjeuner sur l'herbe de Manet et une des variations de cette toile(la plus réussie à mon avis) par Picasso.

A Christmas Tale

As debut movies go, Frozen River isn't a bad one. Some would say that it is a thriller, others that it is a social drama, and it is not untrue on both accounts, but I prefer to say that it is a women movie – written and directed by a woman, telling the story of two women (the actresses are terrific)and, I guess, most likely to move women at the end of the day– and it is also an American movie. Not just American as being an Indie film from the U.S.A taking place in America and starring American actors, but as dealing with typically American themes.

The Frozen River of the title is the St Lawrence river between The U.S and Canada. Ray Eddy is a "mère courage", a middle-aged woman who's struggling to make a living with a part-time retail job, raising two sons (one is 15, the other is 5) in a squalid modular home while dreaming of a new doublewide...except that we find out at the beginning of the movie that her husband took off with the down payment for the new "house". One day, she comes across Lila, a Mohawk girl from the reservation that straddles the US-Canadian border. Lila lives in a caravan and gets Ray involved, against her will, in smuggling illegal immigrants. Christmas approaches, Ray can barely feed her kids (they subsist on pop-corn and drink Tang!), let alone pay the doublewide of her dreams or even a Christmas gift for her youngest son; her eldest tries to be the man of the house but worries that without money they might lose their rent-to-own television. Reluctantly first Ray teams up with Lila and the two of them begin to make runs across the frozen river carrying illegal Chinese and Pakistani immigrants, doomed to be slaves, in the trunk of Ray's Dodge Spirit.

For a little while I thought that this movie was the American equivalent of Ken Loach's It's a Free World (one of the first films I saw last year), for it also shows precarious situations, vulnerable women, and how the poor make money on exploiting the poorer, but it's actually quite different. Ken Loach exposed a general situation, a system of exploitation, through the storyline of a woman, Angie, who was the product of such system. He did it compassionately but the movie was utterly depressing. Angie was not a bad person per se, she was just a human being who mirrored the society in which she lived, the individualistic generation she belonged to. While being a formerly-exploited exploiter, while being a bit greedy to say the truth, while being ready to do anything in regards to morality, she was also vulnerable, because there were much bigger fishes, people higher than her in the chain food, who could crush her any time; she was vulnerable also because she belonged to the weaker gender in a men's world and because she was a mother who had to care for her son first. And it's precisely her vulnerability, the fact that she could be treated badly (beaten even) and was insecure in life, that made her become a ruthless buisness woman who would give herself all the means to have her share of the loot in this Free World.

In Frozen River Courtney Hunt doesn't expose any economic system, she just shows how hard life can be for the outcast (either white or Indian) and how quickly things can go downhill. The husband who deserted his family was a gambler. He deprived wife and sons of the money they desperately needed, because of his addiction.

He was a sinner and kind of forced his wife into criminal activities, if only because he left behind him, with the keys inside, the Dodge Spirit that Lila needed and found after he took a bus to Atlantic City; the car that Ray didn't want to lose; the car that brought the two women together and led them on the river. We're told that young Lila got in trouble with the tribe's chiefs, possibly after she caused her husband's death, and that her mother-in-law stole her newborn baby, hence her living alone in a caravan. Human smuggling is the way she's found to help caring for the child she can't raise, a way to be a mother nonetheless. As she voluntarily crosses the river for the third time, during Christmas night, Ray almost commits the sin of sins. There's punishment yet redemption is possible through sacrifice, miracles happen, and there's still a place for hope beneath the ice. Humanity may overcome...Halleluja.

Frozen River is my first movie of the year. Not many films take place in the harsh, bleak climate of upstate New York, near the Canadian border. I liked the idea of dealing with that border instead of the US-Mexican one for once and I liked the title; the film doesn't only provide a refreshing glimpse into illegal immigration, it also deals with the communities issue, hostility and prejudices natives and whites have for each others. It shows that the Mohawk nation has a real sovereignty it protects fiercely. And it shows the American wilderness, those wide spaces we, Europeans, can't really grasp. Above all I liked the fact that the smuggling happens through a frozen river that turns into an ice desert wherein it's easy to get lost, a true no-man's land(both women are sans homme)– although it's part of the Mohawk Land–because deserts are often the best metaphorical places to tell a journey; I enjoyed the performances of the lead actresses and was touched by Ray and Lila's final interaction (yes I cried). Frozen River is definitely worth watching.

However, I can't help thinking that there's something much more daring and cutting, darker and much more necessary, and eventually stronger, in Ken Loach's not-feel-good movie.

No ice, thanks

Lewis Carroll made up portmanteau words like "slithy"; Boris Vian, who was a poet (and also a writer, jazz musician and songwriter), loved to make des mots-valise too. For example "Pianocktail" is a famous false synesthesia from L'Ecume des jours. Poetical licence, that allows the most fantastic literary instruments, created there a surrealistic item providing various musical nectars, liqueurs that were musically flavoured, according to the piece being played.

I am not a poet but today– is it the influence of that Siberian weather that has been freezing Western Europe for a few days or because of the news about Russia and the Gazprom issue?- I indulged in a Vian-like unintentional creativity, and talked to my students about vodkabulary instead of vocabulary (well, actually I said "vodkabulaire" in lieu of "vocabulaire").

There must be either a sleeping surrealist artist or a should have been drunkar in me.