“Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal” plus 1 more |
| Confessions of a Radical Mind - Wall Street Journal Posted: 26 Sep 2010 05:07 PM PDT By NICOLAS RAPOLDOn Saturday afternoon at the Museum of Art and Design in Midtown, Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky explained how he found his calling. "I discovered art because my father hate my mother," he said. "He was eating fried eggs, and my mother said, 'I cannot be with this disgusting person.' My father threw the fried eggs, and my mother did like that [he ducks his head] and it hit the painting [on the wall]. There I learned first surrealism." True? False? For the rapt, overflowing audience at the museum, it could be hard to tell the difference in the story of a life as unlikely and impressive as one of Mr. Jodorowsky's hallucinogenic movies. As part of the museum's retrospective of the cult filmmaker's cinematic work, "Blood into Gold: The Cinematic Alchemy of Alejandro Jodorowsky," the director gave a 90-minute "master class," and the engaging event revealed a life story that, as one viewer put it later, was Zelig-like in its breadth. "I was a dancer. From dance I went to pantomime. I came to Europe, and I directed the mise en scene for Maurice Chevalier," Mr. Jodorowsky, an animated raconteur with a ready grin, said. He then paused to demonstrate the "trapped-in-a-box" mime routine (aka "The Cage") he later choreographed for Marcel Marceau. Afterward came theater in Mexico, where he directed 100 shows ranging from Ionesco to Strindberg and co-founded the "Theater of Panic" movement. He destroyed a piano with a hammer on Mexican television, and wrote several books. His cinematic head-trips include 1970's "El Topo"—perhaps the most renowned of the mind-altering era's cult films. Born in Chile, Mr. Jodorowsky stood out early, the son of a Communist Russian-Jewish father who had little sympathy for his son's "marecon" poetry. But his decades of iconoclastic output have won him fans internationally, and at the master class, the warm, disarming artist looked and acted far younger than his 81 years. His fans matched his vigor, and included artists and performers. One of them, Deborah Harry, introduced Friday's screening of Mr. Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" and hosted a party in his honor. Saturday's session offered nuggets for Jodo-heads, tips for aspiring filmmakers, and bits of mysticism. A brief clip from "Santa Sangre," his surreal 1980 circus-family horror oddity, starring his son Axel, led to a very special on-set memory. "You can imitate to cry, or cry real. What do you prefer?" Mr. Jodorowsky recalled asking his son. "He say, 'I prefer to cry really.'" So the director obliged by pinching the boy's legs just out of the range of the camera, triggering the desired whimpering. Mr. Jodorowsky also gave a sense of the filmmaking philosophy that led to the bright, spectacular compositions of "El Topo" and "Holy Mountain," with their mythological starkness of Westerns and the uncensored, indelible bizarreness of a symbol-laden dream—whether a perfectly circular pool of water tinged red with blood or a Russian-roulette ritual run by a priest. "When I see a camera who move a lot, it's the camera who move! Why? I eliminate the extraordinary camera movement. I look for the accident," Mr. Jodorowsky said, wiggling and swooping to mimic American action cameras. Close-ups, he said, are also a no-no: "The truth of you is in your body. I want to shoot bodies. I don't want to shoot heads." Mr. Jodorowsky's comments on purity and beauty struck a special chord with the audience, which seemed to include more than one artistic pilgrim. At the screening of "El Topo" that opened the series, two separate questioners thanked Mr. Jodorowsky for his inspiration, and each presented him with gifts. (One was booze and, from what I understood, the other a homemade comic book; "Jodo" has a long-running weekly newspaper comic and massive comic-book collection.) It's all in a day's guidance for Mr. Jodorowsky—who also gives advice in the form of "psychomagic," a therapeutic practice that involves prescribing liberating fictions to act out. "If you want to make poems, don't try to live off from your poems. Work! Drive a bicycle. Be taxi driver," he said. "Blood Into Gold" runs through Oct. 8 and marks the latest entry in the Museum's movie program, which is curated by its manager of public programs, Jake Yuzna. There are no current plans to tour the series, but Mr. Jodorowsky will appear again next week for another screening. "The essence of theater is ephemeral," he said as he described the provocative acts that helped make his name. The flip side to this sentiment is to seize the moment—which the cult figure did, in spades, at the Museum's lively afternoon. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Armchair travelers will relish 'India' : New in Paperback - Cleveland Plain Dealer Posted: 26 Sep 2010 11:31 AM PDT Published: Thursday, September 23, 2010, 3:16 PM Updated: Sunday, September 26, 2010, 2:54 PMBy Vikas TurakhiaThe 13 stories in India: A Traveler's Literary Companion attempt the impossible: to capture the essence of a subcontinent that feels like 20 countries teeming within the borders of one. Readers will see familiar names with contributions from Salman Rushdie ("The Prophet's Hair") and Vikram Chandra (an excerpt from "Sacred Games"), but the collection's value lies in the stories from writers unknown in the United States. Phanishwarnath Renu's humorous "Panchlight" follows a group of Bihari villagers who have purchased a lantern but don't know how to light it. A story by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay, whose novels form the basis of Satyajit Ray's "Apu" film trilogy, showcases the ingenuity of a Calcutta man trying to win back a lost job. Nazir Mansuri's "The Whale" moves the drama of "Moby-Dick" to the coast of Gujarat, with an Indian Ahab who maintains his senses while confronting an obsession. Anjum Hasan's "Eye in the Sky" perfectly tracks the shifting mood of a woman who decides to take an overnight train to Goa without her husband. Travelers shouldn't forgo their Lonely Planet guides, but editor Chandrahas Choudhury's selections give readers visiting "India" a taste well worth sampling. For reviews of nine more noteworthy paperbacks: Stitches David Small (W.W. Norton, 329 pp.) $15.95 Small, an award-winning illustrator of children's books, aims for an older audience with his moving memoir about a childhood marked by an operation to remove his thyroid that unintentionally severs a vocal cord. The botched surgery renders Small mute during his adolescence, and he suffers from devastating loneliness. His mother's mental illness and his father's emotional distance make his situation even worse. Praising Small's memoir, Plain Dealer reviewer Karen Sandstrom said, "Much depends on the art, and this is where 'Stitches' really earns the reader's affections." Sandstrom went on to explain, "Small's fluid line drawings are tailor-made to convey movement and emotion. This energy speaks eloquently about Small's experiences and troubles. The most heart-stopping example takes place when Small, as an angry teenager, visits a therapist who becomes the first adult to give voice to the boy's feelings. "What follows are not words, but nearly 10 wonderful pages of drawings depicting scenes of rain. Fantastic. And the book is chock-full of equally creative visual scenes all the way through." Still, Sandstrom found aspects of this book problematic: "There's a natural flow to the events Small has chosen to depict and real intrigue in the details of his troubled upbringing. But for me, one factor diminishes the story's power: Small's mother is drawn here -- literally -- as an unmitigated rhymes-with-witch who does things like reminding her sick son that doctors cost money. (Ironic detail: Small's father was a radiologist.)" Sandstrom acknowledged that Small offers a short coda at the end of "Stitches" in which he says that he would have offered more context if he were telling his mother's story, but for Sandstrom, "that caveat only goes so far." As she went on to say, "It's certainly fair for Small to depict only his perceptions of childhood, but the strongest memoirs are shaped by adult reflection." Even with the book's flaws, however, Sandstrom felt " Stitches" deserves an audience: "If the words here feel sometimes incomplete, even truncated, the lavishly thoughtful artwork earns "Stitches" a place alongside other mature graphic books of the day." A Happy Marriage Rafael Yglesias (Scribner, 382 pp.) $16 Yglesias based his first novel in over a decade on his 27-year marriage. His wife, Margaret, died in 2004 of cancer. "A Happy Marriage" follows the trajectory of the 30-year relationship between Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, creating characters who resemble the author and his wife in their ages and occupations. In a note to readers, Yglesias explains, "I chose to write ['A Happy Marriage'] as a novel, and not as a memoir, because I wanted to preserve the frankness of my private thoughts and feelings while telling the story. I believe what William Dean Howells once put this way, 'No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it.' "I doubt any human being is capable of writing with absolute honesty about himself -- we are all too skilled at self-deception -- but the sad combination of losing my wife and needing to go on with my work led me to hope that by writing 'A Happy Marriage' I could provide readers with an unusually intimate portrait of marriage from a man's point of view." Plain Dealer reviewer Nancy Connors observed, "I can't think of many examinations of long-term marriages in modern novels, and that alone makes Rafael Yglesias' surprising and deeply affecting new work stand out. What's more, it's clearly autobiographical, yet deals evenhandedly with deeply painful subjects, which makes it a very brave book indeed." The San Francisco Chronicle also complimented Yglesias' novel and said that the "sprawling yet intimate account of his 27-year marriage will break readers' hearts while at the same time renewing their faith in the value of the enduring institution of matrimony." The paper's reviewer noted that "the nonlinear story structure creates a fine balance between the excitement of a youthful romance and the heartbreaking loss of a longtime love." She went on to say, "Although the ending is no surprise, the emotional suspense of the novel keeps the reader turning pages long after giving up hope that a miracle will save Margaret's life and Enrique's marriage. "The medical details are a fascinating but stark reminder that there is nothing glamorous about death, that a strong-willed and healthy woman can be reduced to a spectral presence dependent upon one tube that feeds a milky substance through a port in her chest while another ejects green-black bile from her stomach in order to keep her alive." The Education of a British-Protected Child Chinua Achebe (Anchor, 176 pp.) $14.95 Achebe's first book since he was paralyzed from the waist down in a 1990 car accident collects 16 essays by the Nigerian author, most exploring topics and presenting arguments his readers already know. For readers only familiar with the writer's landmark novel, "Things Fall Apart," this collection offers an entry point into Achebe's ideas about the longstanding effects of colonialism, the insidious ways of institutional racism and the importance of having a sense and value for one's own culture. Achebe also offers a glimpse of his personal history in essays about his childhood and father. Some of these essays betray their lecture/speech-roots in their academic heavy-handedness, drowning Achebe's natural voice. But pieces such as "Africa's Tarnished Name" demonstrate an intelligence and conviction commensurate with the writer's august reputation. In that essay, Achebe illustrates that though "race is no longer a visible presence in the boardroom," it may still "lie, unseen, in our subconscious," so that "when we are comfortable and inattentive, we run the risk of committing grave injustices absent-mindedly." The Providence Journal found the collection "provocative and perceptive" and said, "The lucid ferocity of Achebe's style underscores his humane point of view." The New York Times offered a mixed reaction, explaining that "Achebe has lived in the United States for the past 20 years, and almost half of these essays are transcriptions of lectures he has given at universities and conferences in America, Europe and Africa from the late 1980s onward. In addition, then, to a certain dated quality, the book has something of a recycled feel. This is not helped by the fact that several of Achebe's more affecting anecdotes are repeated from one essay to another." Still, the paper's reviewer said the collection "does, however, succeed in presenting an eclectic and thorough view of Achebe in his longtime roles as writer, father and teacher. With the same generosity and humility that have always distinguished his work, Achebe once again shares his thoughtful perspective on a world about which, despite his privileged placement in the 'luxurious' space of the middle, he remains more than a little wary." A Village Life Louise Gluck (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 72 pp.) $13 Gluck, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection "The Wild Iris," offers her 11th collection of poetry. The 40 poems, narrated in a variety of voices, are set in a seemingly Mediterranean nameless farming village that houses danger and offers safety. Gluck writes, "Wherever you live,/ you can see the fields, the river, realities/ on which you cannot impose yourself." While these images seem to offer tranquillity, "the mist/ dissipates to reveal/ the immense mountain" and a sky "punctuated with small pines/ like spears." "No one really understands / the savagery of this place," Gluck explains, "the way it kills people for no reason,/ just to keep in practice." Plain Dealer reviewer Craig Morgan Teicher noted that Gluck's poems "have always combined a choked intensity with a stony gaze that reports back in the plainest, starkest, often the severest terms." In this collection, Teicher explained, "The fictions here are really a pretext for Gluck to stage poems that explore, for the first time, material that is neither explicitly her own biography nor that of her mythical stand-ins. Always at the mercy of the Greek gods that inspired her earlier poems, Gluck now is playing God herself." While Gluck at times "speaks from on high, a watchful deity, sad for her creations," and elsewhere "she inhabits her villagers' minds and voices," Teicher said that "really, the voice is always the same: It is Gluck, whose verbal knife is always sharpened by what suffering promises to give and take away." Teicher went on to observe that "for the first time in her poems, Gluck lets her lines -- which were always clipped and breathless -- go long, lets her sentences fill with air. In so doing, she proves that her unflinching intensity is like a gas expanding to fill its suddenly larger container. This book is not quite as thrilling as 'Averno' (2006), which recast the Persephone myth as a narrative on love and aging, but Gluck is claiming some new territory." The Kids Are All Right Liz, Diana, Amanda and Dan Welch (Three Rivers, 352 pp.) $15 This memoir (not connected to the recent Annette Bening/Julianne Moore movie of the same title) was written by four siblings who were orphaned after their father was killed in a car accident and their mother lost a three-year battle with uterine cancer. The siblings were farmed out to various foster homes, and while each Welch experienced varying degrees of unpleasantness, as the title makes clear, things turned out OK. The story of the Welch family should appeal to the fans of Jeannette Walls' memoir, "The Glass Castle," although the writing here isn't as sharp, and the story feels disjointed as the siblings take turns narrating different chapters, sometimes revisiting events from two or more perspectives. But the memoir's structure, as the authors explain, helps in understanding the way that "memory is a tricky thing." Where such a disclaimer can sometimes gloss an author's exaggeration, here it offers an explanation for messy truths, as the Welch siblings disagree. They illustrate the ways in which the truth can be subjective -- told from the perspectives of a 16- or 20-year old girl or that of 14-year-old boy. Vanity Fair said "The Kids Are All Right" is "by turns heartbreaking and hilarious." Kirkus Reviews said that the book's four authors have composed "a love-filled but often fraught dialogue, and the reader is a privileged silent witness to their testimony." The result is "a brutally honest book that captures the journey of four people too young to face the challenges they nevertheless had to face." The Patterns of Paper Monsters Emma Rathbone (Back Bay, 206 pp.) $13.99 Rathbone's young-adult novel offers the story of 17-year-old Jacob Higgins, a rebel spending time in a juvenile detention center for an inept robbery attempt. Jacob, with his cunning, could be a youthful version of Ken Kesey's anti-hero, Randall P. McMurphy, though the teen's circumstances and intentions make it easier to be sympathetic toward this particular delinquent. The New Yorker praised Rathbone for writing Jacob "some great bits of irreverent commentary," and said, "The best thing about Jacob is that he is remarkably self-aware: Even as he's feeling sorry for himself or slyly manipulating some well-meaning adult tasked with helping him, he is frank about what he is up to." The reviewer went on to compliment the way adolescent romance in the novel is "is believably stilted and messy; it moves in fits and starts, with Jacob's motives alternating between a deep need for companionship and the simple desire for sex. It's an appealingly understated teenage love story, and Jacob's offbeat descriptions are charming." The magazine's critic, who confessed to having "little patience for all that sullen self-pity, pent-up anger, and nascent sexual pining" that form the core of many young-adult novels, admitted that Rathbone's novel "presents an interesting challenge to grown-up, strait-laced readers who tend to avoid books about troubled youths. " Where other teenage narrators have made the reviewer wonder "Why work so hard to shut others out? Why not make oneself useful for a change?" she said, "Jacob is just the kind of junior criminal -- smart, devilishly perceptive, secretly sentimental -- with whom I really can identify. I started this book at lunch one day, and found that Jacob had won me over before I'd finished my sandwich." Homer & Langley E.L. Doctorow (Random House, 224 pp.) $15 Doctorow's latest historical novel takes its title characters and inspiration from the Collyer brothers, hoarders who were found dead in 1947 underneath 103 tons of trash in their New York mansion. Doctorow alters the brothers' real history by adding more than three decades to their lives and changing some of the biographical facts. Narrated by Homer, who is blind, Doctorow's novel moves through the 20th century and its varied political movements. As the two bothers age, we see Langley mentally deteriorate as the traumas tied to his experiences in World War I gradually turn into an overwhelming paranoia. Plain Dealer Book Editor Karen R. Long acknowledged that Doctorow's latest novel "does not match the artistic level of 'Ragtime' or 'The March,' " especially in the way "secondary characters feel less like people and more like placeholders for the cavalcade of time: a Japanese couple forced to an internment camp, a mobster who supplies the brothers with hookers, hippies who come out of Central Park and crash at the crumbling Collyer pad." Still, Long admired Doctorow's "melancholy, absorbing" novel and said "the smell and feel of bygone eras come to us so easily through" the work of this "gifted writer." Long noted that, "unlike the gawkers of the day, he visits no sensationalism on their sorry heads. Instead, he writes with a magisterial, distilled sympathy," and in the story of the Collyers, Doctorow creates a "commentary on our national penchant for piling up junk." The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy Translated by Cathy Porter (Harper Perennial, 656 pp.) $16.99 Porter's abridgment of Sofia Tolstoy's diaries begins with entries from 1862 (the year she married Leo Tolstoy), and includes entries until her death in 1919. Through their 48-year marriage, Sofia bore Leo 13 children, ran their extensive estate and helped with his writing, copying out "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina" multiple times. In her introduction to Tolstoy's diaries, Doris Lessing writes that the book "is witness not only to her thoughts, but also to public events and to Leo Tolstoy's work -- in the period covered by the collection, he wrote 'War and Peace,' 'Anna Karenina' and many other books. At the same time, we see the hard work of Sofia: She is an involved mother, though there are nursemaids and all kinds of help. She copies, and copies, and copies again, her husband's work." "The diary entries in these pages," Lessing goes on to say, "bear witness to a remarkable life: the life of an exceptional woman, married to one of the most exceptional men of the time, with all her passions and difficulties laid bare. This is a book which is interesting for what it says about the predicament of women in the past, and how that compares to their present circumstances." The Guardian said, "The hundreds of pages offered by Porter in this selection are testament to a great spirit, a woman who lived in terrifying proximity to one of the greatest writers of all time, and who understood exactly the high price she would have to pay for this privilege." The paper's reviewer went on to say that these diaries clearly demonstrate that "Sofia was herself a gifted writer. Without apparent effort, she draws countless portraits of her contemporaries, and it's fascinating to get her view of Tolstoy's encounters with such figures as Turgenev or Chekhov. His large world passes before us in scene after scene. And there is often a great deal of tension, as Tolstoy seemed always at odds with someone or something, including church and state." Lost in the Meritocracy Walter Kirn (Anchor, 212 pp.) $14.95 Kirn, an Akron native, subtitles his memoir "The Undereducation of an Overachiever." He writes about how he strategically worked his way through high school and eventually Princeton University, all without, as he claims, learning all that much. Kirn writes, "Percentile is destiny in America," and his abilities to ace multiple-choice tests such as the SAT and understand the psychology of classrooms allows him to manipulate his teachers and excel. But in reflecting on his schooling, Kirn writes that he ended up at an Ivy League institution "all thanks to an education and test that measured and rewarded . . . what, exactly? Nothing important, I've discovered. Nothing sustaining. Just 'aptitude.' " In The Plain Dealer, Tricia Springstubb said, "Very few people could get away with complaining about attending Princeton University, but Walter Kirn does." Springstubb observed, "While Kirn mocks both his entitled classmates and abstruse professors, he's an equal-opportunity satirist. What saves the book any time he gets too whiny is the scalpel he takes to his own psyche." The Boston Globe found that "there are times when Kirn makes a meal, even a shtick, of self-excoriation even as he excoriates Princeton's snobberies and pretensions. The paper's reviewer felt that "there is aggrandizing in the abasing," but he also saw a "number of shining insights. The last pages have [Kirn] abandoning his careerist robotry and beginning to read real books -- 'Huckleberry Finn,' 'Great Expectations' -- for the first time. It's rather an instant conversion, but what an excellent way to express it: 'I wanted to lose myself. I wanted to read. Instead of filling in the blanks I wanted to be a blank and be filled in.' " Vikas Turakhia is a critic and teacher at Orange High School in Ohio. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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