1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 69: Lust and revenge

Australian tycoon George needs a project for his spoiled, crisis-prone daughter, Georgina, to supervise. Why not commission a bronze statue? It’d be bulky, costly, valuable (at least, once the right critics have approved it), conspicuously placed in the wing that George built for the Adelaide museum, and therefore indisputably worthy of a tax write-off. As for Georgina, this is her sort of thing; she has trendy artist friends.

Lily, Georgina’s handpicked artist, wants to subvert the male gaze by sculpting a larger-than-life male nude. That’s fine with George as long as his tax write-off goes unchallenged.

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Enter a plebeian married couple, Cecilia and Karl-Heinz. She works in a New Age shop. He is unemployed. They need money. He wants to buy a cottage in a “cultured” suburb. She wants to give money to her cult. They’re at odds in the bedroom, too (he wants more sex, she doesn’t). One night, as they lie in bed, he propositions her. “Do you know what an OBE is?” she retorts. “Order of the British Empire,” he whimpers. “Out-of-body experience,” she explains.

Karl-Heinz submits his photo to the artist, who selects him as her model. The gig pays well. Now Karl-Heinz and Cecilia will have enough money for a down-payment on the cottage. Or to subsidize the cult.

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The modeling sessions would be utterly professional were Georgina not lurking in the studio. Cecilia isn’t threatened by her husband’s proximity to lesbian Lily, but she rightly mistrusts Georgina.

She confides in her guru, who has arrived from California to raise funds. The guru, realizing that a tycoon’s money is involved, sniffs a big score.

At this point, I had better stop describing the plot, except to note that (a) Georgina’s shrink prescribes her an SSRI with aphrodisiac effects, (b) other people end up taking the drug, (c) Cecilia is urged, against her conscience, to participate in the sculpting project, and (d) the artwork, for financial reasons and with the artist’s bland acquiescence, is turned into a subversion of a subversion of the male gaze.

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I haven’t seen anything much like Lust and Revenge, except one of the director’s celebrated earlier efforts, Lonely Hearts (1982), a work that is, if anything, stranger because its oddball characters enact a more conventional plot. Both movies hinge on the conflict between barely-suppressed male desire and the integrity of an odd but fiercely conventional woman. Lust and Revenge is particularly inspired in channeling Cecilia’s puritanism through kooky New Age beliefs. (Do these two elements combine in real life? I wouldn’t know.) Cecilia looks, speaks, and behaves rather like Ingrid Bergman in Cactus Flower; imagine that character in a cult.

Paul Cox, the director, is also known for a movie called Man of Flowers, summarized thus by IMDb: “An eccentric elderly man tries to enjoy the three things in life that he considers real beauty: collecting art, collecting flowers, and watching pretty women undress.” I haven’t seen Man of Flowers, but, having seen Lonely Hearts and Lust and Revenge, I’d wager that it, too, is more amusing than salacious.

Another movie of Cox’s, one I have seen, is the devastatingly serious Innocence (2000). In it, also, a woman’s integrity is challenged. That movie purports to be realistic. Lust and Revenge is deliberately cartoonish (and Lonely Hearts is somewhere in between). Tonally, Lust and Revenge is rather like Evelyn Waugh’s novel The Loved One, with its skewering of the commerce in sacred things (art, love, spirituality) and its grotesque concluding image of a human body’s (clandestine) desecration. South Australia may as well be Southern California.

Eating and reading: A report

The eating begins in earnest just before Halloween and continues through December. Meanwhile, the northern hemisphere cools. One becomes sluggish.

I gained five pounds over Thanksgiving. Seven, the last two weeks.

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Having fallen behind in my reading, I’m trying to get back on pace by reading these short books:

• Gabriel García Márquez, Chronicle of a Death Foretold (I read this in high school and again in college)
• John Hersey, Hiroshima (I read this in high school, too)
• C.S. Lewis, Prince Caspian (I don’t know how many times I’ve read this; I’d forgotten how odd it is when Aslan, Susan, and Lucy frolic with Greek mythic figures – Bacchus, Silenus, and the Maenads – while the chaps are at war)
• Joyce Carol Oates, First Love: A Gothic Tale
• Georges Simenon, The Yellow Dog (my first Maigret novel – only seventy-four to go after this one)

You’d think I’d polish ’em off in one sitting, but that’s not how I do it: I like to drag ’em out.

Shakespeare-wise, I rolled my dice, counted down my table of contents, and landed upon The Winter’s Tale to read next. Doubly appropriate because (a) ’tis (almost) the season and (b) I need something somber after The Merry Wives of Windsor and Much Ado about Nothing.

This is the third straight play in which the fear of being cuckolded fuels the plot. I am beginning to understand, dimly but surely, that this was a big concern in Shakespeare’s time (and in Molière’s, not long after).

Incidentally, here is Sam Bankman-Fried’s notorious criticism of Shakespeare (with special mention of Much Ado). It’s forgivable. He wrote this when he was twenty years old; I believe he was a college sophomore.

And here, the polemical philosopher Michael Huemer takes Bankman-Fried’s side. I do like Huemer, but this isn’t his best moment. He puts too much stock in what he thought of the plays when he read them in high school. (Fashioning my objection after Bankman-Fried: What do the priors tell us about one’s highschool or college self arriving at one’s most judicious possible evaluation of Shakespeare?)

Stay gold, Michael Huemer, stay gold.

What we listen to at night

Karin & I diligently read the Bible aloud to our sons – or we’d done so until the last few weeks. 1 Chronicles is defeating us. All those genealogies.

We’ve resorted to playing a recording of 1 Chronicles.

I trust spiritual nourishment will come in time, after a little supplemental reading.

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These days, Daniel goes to sleep listening to classical music on Andrews University’s radio station, WAUS-FM.

Spotify chooses classical music better than I do. But an experienced radio DJ does better than Spotify. Longer pieces; obscurer pieces; better pieces.

Besides, Spotify sucks me into an eddy of Handel and Vaughan Williams and other British (or British-serving) composers. Not that I don’t enjoy that stuff; but Spotify’s algorithm has decided that that’s all I enjoy, which isn’t the case.

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Karin & I have been viewing the police procedural Dahaad, which is set in Rajasthan. I already knew a little about caste in India, and I’ve seen instances of racism and classism in Ecuador and the United States. But it’s been shocking to observe Indian caste dynamics play out on TV, in genre fiction.

Ecuador 1, Chile 0; Brazil 0, Argentina 1; Peru 1, Venezuela 1

The highlight videos might make you think we’re kinda good. That impression would be false. We’re very good at defending; apart from that, we’re putrid.

The coach has to go. Has to, has to.

Even so, I’m happy that we won and climbed to fifth place. (We were joint-fourth, briefly, but Venezuela reclaimed a point in Lima and moved ahead of us again.)

Brazil lost at home, to Argentina, and sunk to sixth. At least we aren’t Brazil. …

Ten months (ten!) until the next qualifiers. In that time, we could get a lot better. Or worse. Every team’s form could change.

November’s poem

Having reissued Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, the Library of America has been emailing me various writers’ declarations about Vonnegut.

This is by a Millennial writer, Ron Currie, Jr.:

People who knock Vonnegut often claim that his writing is adored by young adults, but that those same fans eventually grow out of him. The implication is that his work, if truly admired only by kids, is not to be taken seriously. But this misses the point. The point is that in his writing Kurt maintained, with great effort, the idealism most of us slough off. We call this self-degradation wisdom, or experience. And as is so often the case when we perceive a shortcoming in someone else, further reflection reveals that the deficiency is our own.

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A few years ago, some highschoolers wrote to Vonnegut. He replied. They framed his letter and posted it online, and it made the rounds. (Enlarge the image by opening it in a new tab and then clicking on it.)

Did the letter inspire inner creativity? It certainly inspired the highschoolers to turn it into a display piece.

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I am reminded of nothing so much as this passage by Tom Wolfe.

What about the idea of a permanent work of art at all, or even a visible one? Wasn’t that the most basic of all assumptions of the Old Order – that art was eternal and was composed of objects that could be passed from generation to generation, like Columbus’s bones? Out of that objection came Conceptual Art.

[§] The Conceptualists liked to propound the following question. Suppose the greatest artist in the history of the world, impoverished and unknown at the time, had been sitting at a table in the old Automat at Union Square, cadging some free water and hoping to cop a leftover crust of toasted corn muffin or a few abandoned translucent chartreuse waxed beans or some other item of that amazing range of Yellow Food the Automat went in for – and suddenly he got the inspiration for the greatest work of art in the history of the world. Possessing not even so much as a pencil or a burnt match, he dipped his forefinger into the glass of water and began recording this greatest of all inspirations, this high point in the history of man as a sentient being, on a paper napkin, with New York tap water as his paint. In a matter of seconds, of course, the water had diffused through the paper and the grand design vanished, whereupon the greatest artist in the history of the world slumped to the table and died of a broken heart, and the manager came over, and he thought that here was nothing more than a dead wino with a wet napkin. Now, the question is: Would that have been the greatest work of art in the history of the world or not? The Conceptualists would answer: Of course, it was. It’s not permanence and materials, all that Windsor & Newton paint and other crap, that are at the heart of art, but two things only: Genius and the process of creation! Later they decided that Genius might as well take a walk, too.

(The Painted Word, pp. 103–104)

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I re-read Cat’s Cradle – the first of Vonnegut’s books I’ve read twice. I liked it better the first time.

“If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”

At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass.” By which he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.

In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard

Up in Central Park,

And a lion-hunter

In the jungle dark,

And a Chinese dentist,

And a British queen –

All fit together

In the same machine.

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice;

Nice, nice, very nice –

So many different people

In the same device.

I said I liked the book better the first time, but then the first time I didn’t see much idealism in it, only a fantastical bitterness (as in Twain’s Mysterious Stranger, another book I ought to read again). The second time, more of the scenes seemed brightened with something like joy; I wonder if that’s what it was, or if the light was a mirage.

Venezuela 0, Ecuador 0; Argentina 0, Uruguay 2; Brazil 1, Colombia 2

The Venezuelans are at their all-time best. They’re on pace to qualify for their first World Cup.

Ecuador outplayed them in Maturín, in the far northeast, about as far as you can go without straying into CONCACAF land. What an uninspiring game this was. Neither team covered itself with the tiniest shred of glory.

Whenever the Ecuadorians would recover a ball in their opponents’ half, they’d send it to their back line to “recycle” possession. It seems to be what this coach wants them to do.

We’ve scored four goals in five games. We’ve scored in just two of those games.

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For the first time ever, Argentina and Brazil lost qualification games on the same day – Argentina at home, against the superb Uruguayans, and Brazil in Colombia. Luis Díaz, whose father, recently released from kidnapping, was in the stands, scored two late goals to sink the Brazilians.

The Brazilians are on a two-game losing streak – their first ever in World Cup qualification. It might become a three-game losing streak. They’ll play Argentina next. I expect the Argentinians to be in a kicking mood. They hadn’t lost since the first game of the World Cup. Before that, they hadn’t lost in dozens of matches.

Wodehouse and Lewis

I’ve never read a novel or even a story by P.G. Wodehouse, but his Wikipedia biography impressed me greatly. The sad turning-point in his life was, of course, the Second World War. Stranded in German-occupied France, he was (uncomfortably) interned in various places and eventually transported to (comfortable) accommodation in Berlin. There, in 1941, he delivered a series of humorous, very ill-considered radio broadcasts (How to Be an Internee without Previous Training). These outraged the British; after the war, he emigrated to the United States, where he lived out his days, never returning to his native land.

But first he was briefly detained by the French. Malcolm Muggeridge, then with MI6, visited him in Paris and became fond of him. Muggeridge wrote:

The broadcasts, in point of fact, are neither anti- nor pro-German, but just Wodehousian. He is a man singularly ill-fitted to live in a time of ideological conflict, having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. … I never heard him speak bitterly about anyone – not even about old friends who turned against him in distress. Such temperament does not make for good citizenship in the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Wodehouse had said in one of the broadcasts:

I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.

Around the same time, C.S. Lewis was giving the broadcasts in England that would become Mere Christianity, in which this remarkable passage appears:

I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the First World War, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.

Lewis was rather more belligerent than Wodehouse, and not only because of his stated willingness to kill. But the same spirit of chuminess was in both men.

What also struck me about Wodehouse was his work ethic. He was prolific and meticulous:

Before starting a book Wodehouse would write up to four hundred pages of notes bringing together an outline of the plot; he acknowledged that “It’s the plots that I find so hard to work out.” … He always completed the plot before working on specific character actions. For a novel the note-writing process could take up to two years, and he would usually have two or more novels in preparation simultaneously. After he had completed his notes, he would draw up a fuller scenario of about thirty thousand words, which ensured plot holes were avoided, and allowed for the dialogue to begin to develop.

Wodehouse remarked:

When in due course Charon ferries me across the Styx and everyone is telling everyone else what a rotten writer I was, I hope at least one voice will be heard piping up, “But he did take trouble.”

Racing; gift-getting

A colleague of Karin’s gave our boys a small, looped racetrack and two battery-powered racecars that look like dinosaur heads. Samuel and Daniel have been fighting over this wonderful gift most of the day. Mercifully, Daniel napped, so Samuel got a long turn by himself, and then I took Samuel to the grocery store and the library, so Daniel got a long turn by himself. Now they’re both playing with the racetrack again. I was going to write that they’ve gotten along better in the evening, but Samuel just shoved Daniel in the face.

“What a beautiful race,” Samuel keeps saying as he watches the dino-head cars tailgate each other around the track.

Each car occupies the full width of the track. So, no passing (or, as they aptly call it in Australia, overtaking).

“I feel this race is rigged,” says Karin.

But occasionally Daniel will pick up one of the cars, waltz around the room, and put the car back down in a random position on the track. So, this race is a bit like Snakes and Ladders.

I forgot to mention, last time, that I turned forty-two, and my parents had me over to eat baked chicken, which is my mother’s specialty (or has been since she found the recipe on the Internet a few months ago). I have been asking people to buy me fonts (which they won’t do) or used bookcases (which they promise to keep their eyes peeled for). My parents brought over a nice bookcase yesterday and I’ve filled it with overflow from other bookcases. I could use at least one more. My mother-in-law sent a birthday greeting by email, remarking on the fine, sunny weather; but I prefer gloom, and anyway it was the wrong day. I sent her a brief thank-you and a thumbs-up.

Potato Tots 1, Chelsea 4

Strangest game I’ve seen. Very good home team, previously unbeaten, blown out by pitiful archrival. Minute 33, home team surrenders player (straight red card). Minute 55, surrenders second player (two yellow cards). Home team better than archrival, all game long; nearly rescues draw after 90-minute mark; ultimately, loses by three goals. All game long, home team, unafraid of archrival, maintains brazenly high defensive line. Archrival unable to beat high defensive line. Archrival pitiful. Archrival’s main striker pitiful. Plays abysmally. Scores three goals. Blowers-out, trash; blown-out, bosses. Highly paradoxical. In context, utterly logical. Strangest game I’ve seen.

Body-text fonts, pt. 21: Plantin

Karin bought a babies’ bilingual board book with pictures of the characters from El Chavo del Ocho.

I read it often to Daniel, four or five times in a row. I read it in Spanish and in English and say all the characters’ names.

Tonight, poor Karin tried to read it to Daniel, and she didn’t know all the names and Daniel threw a fit.

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This early-20th-century typeface is my all-time favorite for body text. A stone-cold classic of hot metal type. Look at that glorious x-height. Excellent for printing on lousy paper (mass-market paperbacks, newspaper, etc.). Beats the pants off Times and its ilk. My favorite letter is the uppercase “R,” and the uppercase “K” has the same badass tail. Kudos to “E,” “M,” “N,” “T,” and “W” also. Weight-wise, I prefer the light/semibold pairing to the regular/bold pairing, at least in the larger sizes.

The text sample, from Jane Eyre, describes why we didn’t go trick-or-treating this Halloween.

It used to be normal for Puffin Classics to be set in Plantin, but lately they’ve been boringly set in Minion.