| Saturday, October 24, 2009 |
| Anglophilia |
We went to see two movies today, both British imports. I picked the first one, "An Education," which I was desperate to see because it is that rare thing, a decently-reviewed Peter Sarsgaard movie. Lately, he's been in more than few stinkers, like "Orphan" and "The Mysteries of Pittsburgh." Joe picked the second one, "The Damned United," a film about an English football club manager, scripted by the always-reliable Peter Morgan ("The Queen," "Frost/Nixon"). After "An Education" ended, we had 45 minutes to drive to the other end of town to catch "United." Seeing them both back to back like that made me realize that the seemingly dissimilar films did have one common theme -- arrogance. (Warning: mild spoilers ahead...)
Jenny, the young heroine of "An Education," played by the dazzling newcomer Carey Mulligan, is a 16-year-old schoolgirl who has only one thing on her mind -- getting into Oxford -- until David (Sarsgaard) comes along. A sophisticated, wealthy, much-older man, he wines and dines her, showing her a glamorous life she never knew existed. It's certainly a far cry from anything she's ever experienced in her dull, early-60s suburban life. Why should she plod away at Latin and eventually wind up like her dowdy spinster schoolteacher (played by the usually-very-undowdy Olivia Williams) when she can run off with David and enjoy a whirlwind of travel, concerts and beautiful clothes? I don't think it's giving too much away to reveal that Jenny eventually learns that David doesn't quite offer the easy path to a perfect life.
Mulligan, like her American counterpart Ellen Page, can play much younger than her actual age (she was in her early 20s when the film was shot, but is completely convincing as a 16-year-old). It seemed unrealistic to me that Jenny's parents would be so supportive of her relationship with David, but thinking about it later, I realized that a middle-class couple with few means (in one scene, Jenny's father complains about how much he'll have to spend to send her to Oxford) probably would want their daughter to "marry up," as it were. And in that day & age, once you were a married woman, what would be the point of furthering your education?
If I had a daughter around Jenny's age, I'd want her to see this film -- as dated as some aspects are, the message that in the end, a woman must be able to depend on herself and not simply rely on a man is a timeless one.
Jenny thinks she's got life figured out at age 16. Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) didn't have the excuse of youth -- he was an adult man with a family when he became manager of the Leeds United football club in 1974, the most coveted job in U.K. sport. He promptly went in and told the team members that they were doing everything wrong, despite their long record of victories under previous manager Don Revie, and from now on, it would be his way or the highway. In fact, Clough is practically a textbook example of how not to succeed in a new job. He's such a jerk that it's hard not to want him to fail, and fail he does. Most of "The Damned United" takes place in flashback, as we learn how Clough was able to attain the lofty position of Leeds manager in the first place. A big part of his prior success at Derby County was due to his assistant manager, Pete Taylor (Timothy Spall), who had an uncanny knack for being able to pick players who would help lead the team to victory. But when he gets the Leeds job, Clough is convinced he can go it alone -- that he's the genius. He is very wrong.
In the film, the Brian-Pete relationship is -- well, I don't want to use the hated word bromance, but "United" is practically a love story in which the two men are together and then split up and everything goes haywire because they are so obviously meant to be a pair. It's sad to note that while the film shows them reconciling, in real life, they were torn apart a decade later by a disagreement over a player's transfer to a different team. The men remained estranged until Taylor's death in 1990. Clough died five years ago, and his family is reportedly angry at inaccuracies in the film. (It's based on a novel, The Damned Utd. by David Peace, which is a fictionalized account of Clough's tenure at Leeds.) The "goofs" page of the movie's IMDB profile shows that the writers took plenty of liberties, and shows that a lot of football fans want to set the record straight. For instance, "the 3rd round F.A. Cup tie between Leeds and Derby on the 27th of January 1968 depicted in the movie was played in Leeds, not in Derby." Good to know!
Bottom line: if you're a Sarsgaard fan like me, run, don't walk, to see "An Education." It would also appeal to anyone in search of a coming-of-age saga or period piece -- it's certainly a nice alternative to all the horror fare currently clogging theaters. I was a little more lukewarm on "The Damned United," mostly because Clough was such an unlikable and deluded character. On the up side, it's easy to follow even if you know nothing about football, and Sheen gives yet another excellent performance.
One slightly odd note: the dialogue of both films include reference to the "wandering Jew." I had always thought that was the name of a plant, but I now know that it is also a figure from folklore who was cursed to walk the Earth until Jesus' second coming. We live and learn. |
posted by 125records @ 9:11 PM  |
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| Saturday, October 17, 2009 |
| Coincidences at the book sale |
Yesterday afternoon I was emailing with my friend Neal about author Sherman Alexie, who had just done a reading in Albuquerque. I mentioned that I had been wanting to read his acclaimed novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.
A couple hours later, I went to my local Friends of the Library book sale, which is one of the largest in the Bay Area. I happened to be walking past a table when someone picked up a book and showed it to her friend. "Oh, this is a wonderful book," she said. I glanced over, and noticed that the book she was holding was none other than The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. The friend took it, glanced at it, and put it down. I reached over and snapped it up.
I walked over to a table filled with hundreds of romance novels displayed spine-up -- I don't read that genre, but the sheer volume was kind of impressive. A fellow browser mentioned that she had just donated 500 historical romances -- "those were my duplicates!" -- and said she was looking for novels by Liz Carlyle. I had never heard of that particular author, but at that very moment, my eye happened to fall on a particular book and I read the name Liz Carlyle. I handed it to her, and sure enough, it was one of the titles she was searching for. (A further perusal of the romance table shows that a good third of the books there seem to be written by Nora Roberts.)
One of the things I like to do at the sale is try to find the book that seems least likely to sell. At this sale, I think I have to declare a tie between The Complete Y2K Home Preparation Guide and 5/5/2000: Ice: The Ultimate Disaster. From a description of the latter book: "The Antarctic ice mass should be three miles thick by May 5, 2000 -- the date when all the planets will be arrayed in a straight line and some kind of cataclysmic shift of ice to the equator is possible..." Perhaps the 2012 Survival Guide will be turning up at the 2017 Friends of the Library sale. |
| posted by 125records @ 12:15 PM |
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| Thursday, October 08, 2009 |
| Secrets and lies |
Are you keeping a family secret? I learned a really good one a couple of years ago, which has the added advantage of being about relatives who are all dead, so I can pass it along without having to worry about invading anyone's privacy. My great-grandmother -- my father's maternal grandmother -- had a "hidden" sister named Emma. Emma gave birth to an illegitimate son in 1916, and both mother and child were considered mentally ill. The son, Birger, spent his life in and out of an asylum before dying in the mid-1970s; Emma was a social outcast who never left her small town, even as most of her siblings emigrated to the U.S. She died a couple of years before her son passed away.
This is how far my great-grandmother went to keep the secret: she always claimed that the church where the genealogical records were kept in her hometown of Stockaryd, Sweden, had burned to the ground, just so no one would ever go searching there for the family history. I assume she never even told my grandmother, her daughter, about Emma. My parents learned about it during an e-mail exchange with some distant relatives after my grandmother's death. Sometimes I think about her and how dreadful it must have been to be shunned by your family, your very existence erased by your own siblings.
When I heard an interview on NPR with Steve Luxenberg about his book Annie's Ghosts: A Journey Into a Family Secret, I knew I had to read the book. Luxenberg, a Washington Post editor, learned after his mother's death that the oft-recited narrative of her childhood was a complete fiction. Only child Beth had actually been Bertha, who grew up with her younger sister Annie, a mentally retarded, disabled girl who had been institutionalized at the age of 21. Annie Cohen died in the early 1970s after spending over 30 years in Eloise, a massive public hospital in Detroit. Luxenberg knew that he had to bring all of his reporter's skills to find the truth about Annie -- and why his mother had spent a lifetime keeping her a secret. One of his big questions: did his father, who died several years before his mother, ever find out that he had a sister-in-law?
The book is absolutely fascinating and I highly recommend it, so I don't want to give away too much of what Luxenberg's research reveals. He is fortunate in that some of the people who knew his mother and Annie as children were still alive, so he could track them down and interview them. But the book is about much more than one family's secret -- it's a fascinating portrait of how society's views of mental illness and physical limitations have changed over the decades. Eloise itself, once home to over 10,000 residents and 75 buildings, is now a virtual ghost town with just a handful of dilapidated buildings. Had Annie been born in the early 1970s, instead of dying then, her life would have taken a very different course.
For some reason, the saddest thing to me was that Luxenberg never found a photograph of Annie, despite combing through hundreds of albums belonging to family members, friends and former neighbors. (His mother, not surprisingly, kept no pictures from her childhood; it was as though her life began when she got married in her mid-20s. Beth/Bertha did not even appear in her high school yearbook, perhaps due to the family's poverty.) The haunting cover image is an illustration made from a stock photo. At least Annie's memory is honored by this book. |
| posted by 125records @ 12:24 PM |
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| Wednesday, October 07, 2009 |
| Anatomy of an inbox |
A few days ago, I came down with a cold -- despite my hypochondria, I'm fairly certain it wasn't the swine flu, just the kind of head cold that causes a perpetually runny nose, sore throat and mild aches & pains. Happily, unlike the previous time I had a cold (in Sweden last year), I had access to NyQuil. For those who haven't taken this miracle substance, it gets rid of all your symptoms, for a price: the fact that it completely knocks you out and makes your head feel like the contents have been scooped out with a melon baller. Now, I'd rather have my nose stop running and be able to sleep through the night, but the downside is pretty significant in that it renders me fairly non-functional and unable to do much more than look at the pictures on Go Fug Yourself, drink tea, and watch "Dancing with the Stars."
So my email has been piling up like crazy, and I'm starting to realize that I have a problem -- an email problem. My inbox, which I try to keep at a reasonably tidy 50-60 messages, currently has 229. This is the reason I can never go on vacation without bringing the laptop along; the stress of returning home to hundreds of unread messages negates whatever relaxation I might have enjoyed while on a break.
Is it even possible to tame the inbox monster? My email program displays 50 messages per screen, and here's what's up on the current one:
Seven of the emails are from clients, including a couple cc:s that don't require any immediate action on my part. Two are from my mom asking me to make updates to a web site I manage for her. I guess I could kind of count her as a client, in this specific instance.
Six more are related to the lineups page I maintain -- new listings from contacts at the shows, and, poignantly, an email from a guy in the Air Force (he has an af.mil address) asking why I haven't updated the page recently. I am letting down our men and women in uniform! Guilt!!
Five emails are news-related. I'm on various NPR, New York Times and SFGate mailing lists that send me email when news breaks. Turns out the Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognizes study of ribosomes! And Arnold Schwarzenegger is threatening to veto lots of stuff! I like to be the first to know things. I have fond memories of being online in Sweden at the exact moment the Times email landed in my inbox announcing that John McCain had chosen Sarah Palin as his running mate. Thousands of miles away, and still up on the politics at home.
There are a couple of emails where I just don't understand how they wound up in my inbox at all. "Help pick the official Gavin Newsom logo," for instance. I would never in a million years have signed up for a Newsom for Governor mailing list, and yet here he is, asking me to choose which graphic design I prefer. There's no way he's going to get the nomination unless Jerry Brown has a change of heart and drops out of the race, so why bother picking? I'm just surprised none of them are blatant rip-offs of that Obama "O" design.
Three emails come from MySpace -- I hate MySpace, but I maintain a seldom-updated page for the Loud Family, so the friend requests and comments land in my inbox.
One -- yes, just one out of 50 -- email is a personal note from a friend. Thanks, Rog.
Everything else, approximately half of the 50 emails, is from a mailing list. There's the comic of the day, puppy of the day, newsletters from CDBaby, PayPal, Amazon Associates and my web hosting provider, a couple of messages from ecto (a music-related mailing list I've been on for a good 15 years now). Chicago Public Radio wants to send me a tote bag, probably because of some "This American Life"-related donation I made long ago. Kashi wants to send me coupons. Tickets to "Finian's Rainbow" on Broadway are just $55, and "The Creature from the Black Lagoon" movie will be showing in San Francisco.
Ordinarily, I can keep up with it all since I'm online all day, every day, working efficiently, deleting and archiving. But confronting it in one big clump is daunting, and makes me want to crawl back in bed and pull the covers over my head. I may drift off into a Nyquil-dazed slumber, but the emails never stop coming. |
| posted by 125records @ 2:57 PM |
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| About Me |
Name: Sue
Home: San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States
About Me: Email me: talk at interbridge dot com
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