SIFF 2008

The Seattle International Film Festival is the largest in North America. This year they screened over 400 films from all over the world. I’ve attended one or two films during the festival in years past, but generally, I have not participated much. It’s easier to attend a film festival in another city when I’m on vacation. I am too busy and too tired after work to be racing around Seattle in the evenings and on weekends. Also, I just don’t enjoy going to movies. Theaters are expensive, hot, oxygen-deprived, smelly, sneezy, and too loud. Nevertheless, this year I grabbed my earplugs and made an effort to see more of the festival.

My first experience did not auger well. After standing in a quarter-mile line circling the block, I found myself sitting in the balcony of the lovely old Egyptian Theater in Seattle, right under the projection booth. An hour into the film there was a loud thud from inside the booth behind me. I looked up and there was bright white light in the booth window, then the projection room and the screen went dark. Staff swarmed quickly but the booth was locked and nobody seemed to have a key. I assessed that this film was not going to resume any time soon, so I headed for the exit and walked home.

The film I saw an hour of was Mermaid, a Russian Film, starring Anastasiya Dontsova as a girl of 8 living in a shack by the sea, presumably the Black Sea, with her mother and grandmother. She tells herself that her mother was a mermaid, her father a sea captain. She awaits her father’s return, but it is clear to the audience that the father is long gone and this family is abandoned to abject poverty. The girl dreams of becoming a ballerina. We see her again (Mariya Shalayeva ) at 17 in Moscow, trying to make a living at odd jobs in the gritty city. She shows signs of clinical depression (in my humble opinion). She is still slow-moving, uncurious and glassy eyed, and continues to fantasize the ballerina life. She copes with her harsh reality without ambition or hope. She had found a job as a housecleaner when the projector fell over.

Throughout the film there are brief dreamlike episodes of fantasy, sometimes surreal, to demonstrate that her spirit is not crushed by her difficult life. Slick advertisements ironically remind her that all her dreams can be fulfilled. The second revolution in Russia paid off for the gangsters and cronies, but left no place for a young girl's dreams. I don’t know how the story turned out, but I would guess there was no revelation. Perhaps she returns to the sea (her childhood) as an underwater ballerina. The yellow subtitles were often completely lost, against a yellow sand beach, for example. But that hardly mattered since nothing was said of importance. It is a highly visual film, lovely to look at, but aggressively banal in detail. It was interesting to see modern Russia and hear the language, but without narrative drive or character development, it is a slice of life for its own sake. The director was Anna Melikyan.

The next film was screened at the comfortable, airy, SIFF Cinema hall at the Seattle center. Love and Honor is a beautiful Japanese-made film (director Yoji Yamada) set in the Samurai (“Edo”) period prior to 1868. It’s hard to tell just when, but the doctor washed his hands before and after tending a patient, and sanitation was introduced into medicine around 1847, in the West, at least. In any case, this is not your usual swashbuckling samurai movie. The protagonist, (Takuya Kimura) is a food-taster for the local lord, and he goes blind from shellfish neurotoxin and falls into despair. When he suspects his wife (Rei Dan) of infidelity, honor compels him to a swordfight to the death with the other man, even though he is blind! It is a fine, classical story, well told, in beautiful settings and with beautiful costumes. The acting and directing seemed stagey, wooden, and somewhat repetitive, but that may have been on purpose, to convey the classical nature of the story, the well-defined roles participants would have lived back then, especially in courtly life, and to give a sense of distant time and place, much as we get from watching an original Shakespeare. Yet the dialog was colloquial and the characters were humanized, not archetypal forms, and the story was personal. All that familiarity grated with the formality of the acting and directing. Despite that dissonance, it is a satisfying story, well-told, beautiful to look at, with good actors and enjoyable music. I felt that I had been delivered to another era for a couple of hours.

Man, Hungarians can make a dark movie! Opium: Diary of a Madwoman, directed by János Szász, is set in a mental institution around 1900 in Hungary. A doctor (Ulrich Thomsen, who reminded me of a young Kenneth Branaugh) joins the staff at an insane asylum for women run by Catholic nuns. The scenes there are beautifully photographed but it is a dank, dismal, horribly depressing place. This would have been a hundred years after Pinel’s reforms, so the insane were seen as ill and suffering, not possessed, but since psychoactive drugs were still a half-century in the future, there was really nothing that could be done except warehouse these unfortunates. Still, this hospital is progressive for its time, and the very latest techniques in treatment are shown, such as immersion in ice water baths, spinning in a centrifuge, electroshock, and of course, pre-frontal lobotomy. When the camera closes in on the brass rod being inserted beside a patient’s eye, I couldn’t watch, and even though my eyes were closed the “clink, clink” of the director’s hammer on the brass stylus as it penetrated the skull, made me cringe in my seat. Thomsen is assigned to a 25 year old schizophrenic woman (Kirsti Stubø) who writes typical “word salad” madness into volume upon volume of diaries as the only way she knows to deal with her demon. The doctor, we learn, is a morphine addict, and the reason he took the job was have access to his poison. Acting by the two principals, especially Stubo, is utterly gripping. They try to understand each other, and maybe they do, a little.

The best part of the script is having each character talk unwittingly and metaphorically about the other’s demon. She says, “Each day the Devil makes you an offer and each day he takes a little bit of your body until you are his whore.” The doctor nods knowingly yet unknowingly then a little later he shoots up. He writes in his diary that his habit is going out of control and he can’t stop. The woman begs the doctor to “cut out her brain” to relieve her of her torment. Even though the film is extremely bleak, the cinematography is beautiful and haunting, as is the music. The story would be greatly improved by some easy editing, especially some gratuitous nudity and at the end, where it continues unnecessarily beyond the climax. The story of the characters’ developing relationship is compelling. I walked out of this movie deeply shaken.

Transsiberian (director Brad Anderson) has a lot of good talent: Emily Mortimer, Woody Harrelson, Ben Kingsley, and Kate Mara and Eduardo Noriega. An American couple on vacation (Harrelson and Mortimer) take the Transsiberian train from Beijing to Moscow. They are befriended by an American woman (Mara) and her companion, the unpredictable Carlos (Noriega), pseudo-mysterious drifters, possibly drug smugglers. Police detective Kingsley joins the train to add to the suspense, such as it is. But the editing and directing are so overtly manipulative that it ruins the story. We see Carlos with a crowbar in his hand sneaking up behind Harrelson at a stop in Irkutsk, then cut! In the next scene we are back on the train but Harrelson is missing! Meaningful glances are passed around. But wait, it turns out he only missed the train in Irkutsk and he is fine, rejoining the party a day later. That kind of manufactured pseudo-suspense is disrespectful of the audience, actually offensive, and a clumsy attempt to cover up a weak, predictable story.

The first 45 minutes of the movie were obviously added after the main shoot in an unsuccessful attempt to add dimension to the cardboard characters by having them reminisce unconvincingly about previous experiences. If those were important, they should have been shown, not recited. Dramatic helicopter shots of the train moving through Siberia are inserted often to counter the claustrophobia of the train set. Arbitrary blasts of orchestral music attempt to punctuate the waning story line. Lots of “local color” scenes are thrown in to spice up endless shots of people eating, drinking, smoking, and eating some more. An old guy with a gulag tattoo. Wow. Therefore what? Therefore nothing. This movie is a lost opportunity. Mortimer and Kingsley are terrific actors but they can’t save it. The movie will probably enjoy eventual success on cable television.

A film festival is not complete without a documentary feature so I chose Up the Yangtze, by Yung Chang, the Canadian director, who introduced the film in person. His humorous description of the movie (Love Boat meets Apocalypse Now) suggests a documentary better than this disappointment. He took his crew on a luxury river boat up the Yangtze to the Three Gorges dam, and along the way documented some of the millions of people and their cities, environments, and ways of life that will be submerged when the dam is completed. Flooding had already begun in 2003-2004 when he made the film. Poor farmers living on the banks of the river, living in mud-floor shacks, speak of their desperation and hopelessness. They have no plans, no prospects. They reminisce on their ancient way of life, soon to be obliterated by progress. This is important stuff, but it is also old stuff. We should note that these farmers are holdouts who declined to be relocated by the government to safe, high ground. Why? No clue is offered.

Chang has a photographic eye, and we see ooh-aah shots of neon lights reflected on water, plenty of cute kittens, puppies and roosters, charming tableaux of rustic village life. There is some beautiful, layered Chinese scenery, but not much of it. Chang likes shots that draw attention to themselves such as extreme closeups, long flat shots, blurred fast pans. Other shots are offered ostensibly as candids, but are clearly staged. More political, economic, environmental, and sociological detail is needed to justify this documentary. Pretty pictures and fancy camera work are not enough.

The onboard ship scenes are perhaps unintentionally satirical. It looks like an especially tawdry Carnival Cruise, as old people in ill-fitting clothes dance to sappy music. If Chang could have somehow juxtaposed those images more directly to mud squeezing between villagers’ toes, he might have had something. If he could have juxtaposed cruise goers gorging on buffet food against children eating insects… perhaps that would be too obvious. Yet Chang does not shy away from the obvious. City teenagers are shown dancing mindlessly, drinking vodka at a night club, declaring their desire to become rich. With signs overhead showing the future waterline at 175 meters, well above all life going on, there would seem to be ample opportunity for visual metaphor. The film is good-looking and sentimental and was well-received by the SRO audience at Pacific Place Cinema, but I think it has only the most superficial intellectual basis and will have little lasting impact.


Andrzej Wajda is an internationally known director, and Katyn is supposed to be one of his best, the first of his I’ve seen. It is a historical drama with careful, documentary detail about the Soviet Union’s slaughter of 20,000 Polish army officers at the end of World War II, and the subsequent cover-up as Stalin’s army occupied Poland, blaming the massacre on the Nazis. My understanding is that this lie was not exposed until the late 1990s when archival files were released in Russia. So this would be a very emotional topic for a Polish audience.

The film follows a group of Polish officers as they are captured by the Soviets in 1940 and shipped by train to the interior of the Soviet Union, where they were imprisoned for a number of months then systematically executed. The women and children they left behind wait for letters from them or announcements in the papers, hoping to learn of their eventual release, or at least of their survival. The audience knows, because of an English-language announcement at the beginning of the film, that they are never coming back. A sole survivor returns after the war and becomes a member of the reviled, Soviet-run, new Polish army. He argues in favor of collaboration, survival, and life, and against revealing the truth about the massacre, which can only lead to imprisonment or death. It is a compelling argument. The only counter-argument offered is “I choose the murdered, not the murderers.” Is that a good argument or is it stupid, self-destructive self-indulgence?

It is a beautifully photographed story and a fine way to learn about an important historical episode. Wajda’s reputation is well-deserved.


I hadn’t been to the Harvard Exit theater in thirty years and that delightfully funky place on Capitol Hill hasn’t changed much. There I saw a feature-length animation, a staple of any film festival. Idiots and Angels is writer-director Bill Plimpton’s surreal comedy. Plimpton introduced the film himself, explaining that no cameras were used. He scanned his 25,000 drawings into a computer database and assembled the film. Quite a technical feat!

The wordless story is of a lout who goes to a tavern each day where he drinks, smokes and fantasizes about the barman’s wife. He is a violent, self-centered lowbrow. The pencil-drawings are beautifully realized, with minimum but telling detail. Changing points of view are especially interesting and amusing. When Mr. Lout swigs his drink, we are suddenly deep in his throat, looking at the flash flood cascading toward us. Lots of fun.

Without explanation, he one morning sprouts small wings on his back. He is surprised, but sees them as aberrant growths and cuts them off. There is a Groundhog Day theme to this story, so the next day, the wings have grown back, a little larger. He tapes them down. The following day, they are even larger, and so on. He eventually discovers they are wings, and that he can fly, so he swoops around. He tries some purse-snatching from the air, but inexplicably, he is compelled to return the purse. Are the wings turning him into a “good person?”

There are many promising ways this story could have developed, but the writer had no vision of where he was going. Instead, each scene simply attempts to top the previous one in terms of self-conscious creativity for the sake of creativity. And I admit it was very creative. A loosely structured story flows for a few scenes, then is abandoned to some other theme. The ending is arbitrary because there is just no semblance of a narrative thread remaining. It was a shame he couldn’t have gotten a co-writer to lend him some direction.

One interesting aspect of the whole project is the author’s unconscious illustration of Freud’s theory of infant and child development, from oral, to anal, to oedipal stages. The imagery and symbolism are very much open to psychoanalytic interpretation, which no doubt would be quite embarrassing to the author if he were aware of it. It’s probably just as well that I was not able to stay for the Q&A session after the film, because there would be nothing gained by bringing that up. I enjoyed the creativity, but without a narrative thread, it was just amusing, not important.


A collection of shorts is mandatory viewing, and I chose a well-curated batch called The Art of Memory. The first two these nine films were wonderful; one other was memorable; most of the rest only interesting, but all worth seeing, if only to wonder at the diversity of the human imagination.

“Run,” was probably set in a remote coastal town in Australia, judging from the accents. A working class father encourages (commands) his two children to run each day for exercise and health. The preadolescent girl is chubby and struggles to keep up with her younger brother. She also rehearses “Fur Elise” for an upcoming piano recital, but surreptitiously practices a brooding variation she has composed. The children are brown, possibly aboriginal, and on the daily run, white boys delivering milk taunt the girl and throw milk at her. The milk could represent the absent mother, whose picture is displayed on top of the piano, and whose absence might be the source of the girl’s emotional turmoil. She finally expresses herself at the recital when, unable to remember the Beethoven, she plays her own composition to an astonished and mystified audience. It’s a film dense with symbols, emotion, complex family structure, class and race themes, and psychological development, all in less than 10 minutes: a real masterpiece.

Last Day of December was a Romanian production, if I remember rightly. The language sounded more Russian than Romanian to me, but what do I know. A boy of 14 meets his father in deep snow in a birch forest. We gather that the man is on the run. A well-dressed 40-year old watches from the road above. Four pursuers arrive, we assume police, and chase the man through the knee-deep snow, down into a ravine, in kinetic sequence of exhausting energy and dazzling beauty. The pursuers go in the wrong direction, but the young boy finds the man. After a long moment, he yells to the pursuers, who capture the man, beat him, and take him away. Then we discover that this has all been a flashback of the well-dressed man who was not watching, but remembering the action. He goes to his now-dying father’s house, but in a poignant scene, is turned away. Nothing is forgiven. Another masterpiece.

Two of the remaining shorts were animation, one a claymation, proving it still can be done, but not justifying why it should be. One notable short, “PB&J: A Love Story” was a stop-action animation romance between a jar of peanut butter and a jar of jam. They consummate their love in a gooey sandwich. The whole story was no more than 3 minutes long and delighted the audience. The only other short that stayed with me was “Felix,” a German tale about a 14 year old boy who learns sign language so he can have a relationship with a deaf girl he met on the internet. Their budding friendship goes awry when she discovers that he is not really deaf. It is very well acted by the children, but the film only states the theme without exploring it. Could such a relationship work? Maybe for childhood friendship, but not with adults. Now that I think of it, most of these shorts focused on children. That simplifies the ideas and the emotions, but is that really the only way to successfully tell a very short story? Anyway, three hits out of nine is a good ratio so I’d say this package of shorts was a success. [I misidentified “Felix” as a different short in my online review at SIFF.net but it is not possible to edit those posts.]

Young People Fucking: What an inspired title this is for a contemporary comedy of manners centered around sexual relationships! Five relationships are explored: friends, roommates, a married couple, a couple on the first date, a divorced couple. All relationships are hetero, although other tendencies and urges are hilariously suggested. The story rotates through the list of couples to comment on introduction, foreplay, sex, orgasm, and afterglow, to create a set of 5 x 5 = 25 scenes of 5 to 10 minutes each. The camera work and directing are respectful and there is little nudity, because this is really not about fucking, but rather on how twenty- and thirty-somethings understand and deal with sexuality. The writing is brilliant, in a sitcom sort of way, and there are many laugh out loud moments. Afterward however, I realized that I had been manipulated. Virtually nothing about the human condition was revealed or even seriously explored. It was a series of gags, some sophisticated, most sophomoric. There were moments of honesty, as when each of the exes considers returning to the closed door after the tryst, but then each, separately, sadly, wordlessly, turns away from their side of the door. That was wonderful, but most of the scenes were easy gag setups from the beginning, from the “old pal” girlfriend who just wants to be “serviced” to the bored wife who convinces her bored husband to submit to a purple strap-on. The casting was just perfect and the acting truly outstanding, and those considerable virtues made the cliché humor acceptable. The way the audience squirmed, laughed, and groaned, I’d say the subject matter was “very hot” and that sketch comedy was the only way audience anxiety could have been dealt with. I think this Canadian production will enjoy wide release (possibly with an edited title) and will perform an important and much-needed socialization function.

One Hundred Nails
This stunningly beautiful Italian film makes you feel the warm sun on your back and smell the spring grass. A professor of religion becomes fed up with academic theology and disappears from the university for a life of natural simplicity beside the river Po, but not before he takes 100 medieval theology books from the library shelves and nails each to the wooden plank floor with a large (crucifix-sized) iron spike. Out in the country, the peasants embrace him and help him rebuild a derelict stone house to live in, while he tells them bible stories. They take to calling him Jesus Christ. Local authorities levy a huge fine on the town for some infraction and the professor gives the mayor his credit card to pay it, but the police trace the card and arrest him for the library vandalism. In his absence the villagers decorate the town in anticipation of his Second Coming. It’s a long, quiet, and slow film and even the subdued religious allegories are only decoration. Nothing much happens and there is no lesson to be learned. The languid pace communicates the fantasy of spiritual peace one hopes to find in an idyllic village and simple way of life. But if you had the gumption to have acquired a BMW, a university professorship, and an open-ended credit card, I’m pretty sure the ignorant, backbiting civilization of small town life would drive you mad quite shortly. The romantic bucolic fantasy endures best as an imaginary utopia. Even knowing that, this sensuous movie lured me there.

Russian writers and artists often complain that creativity has declined since the lifting of most censorship. Alexandra shows what can be done with a politically sensitive and forbidden topic, in this case the Russian war in Chechnya, right under the noses of the authorities. It is a blatant anti-war film. Or is it? A lovably irritable Russian grandmother visits her grandson at a military outpost in Chechnya. He shows her the inside of a tank and soldiers cleaning their guns. She wanders off-base into the village and befriends some local women there, revealing in mundane conversation underlying class and ethnic attitudes. Russian soldiers are universally transformed from killing machines to boys as each of them shows deference and tenderness to the old woman. Finally she goes home, The End. Who could censor such a banal slice of life? Yet just placing a kindly and feeble old grandmother inside a Russian tank says more than any jeremiad. There are a few pointed conversations, as when she asks her grandson, “Do you enjoy killing people?” He doesn’t answer. I think about several anti-war American films I have seen lately from the stridently didactic Lions for Lambs, to the morally blaming Rendition, or the more intellectually subtle Charlie Wilson’s War. Even at their most indirect, none of those films approaches the artistic audacity of simply juxtaposing a tired, frail old grandmother against roaring humvees festooned with troops. The movie seemed vastly too slow and indirect for an American audience, yet the theater was almost full on a Monday night, so who knows?

The SIFF runs for an astonishing two more weeks, until June 15th. But I am out of tickets, money and time. I feel I took a fair sample of what was offered and I was well-pleased.

Contemporary Native American Art

The Tucson Museum of Art is the last stop on the tour of a marvelous exhibit of North American native art. The exhibition is second in a three part series called “Changing Hands”, organized and circulated by the Museum of Arts and Design of New York. The 150 pieces of visual art are stunning in their diversity, creativity, and thoughtfulness. I don’t know what’s going to happen to this show after it’s over on May 11, 2008, so maybe you should just go to Tucson and see it while you can.

I had my doubts about a show called Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation- Contemporary Native North American Art from the West, Northwest and Pacific. I expected familiar images and crafts: Kachina dolls, Haida masks, beaded moccasins, carved ivory amulets, painted Kwakiutl cedar chests, and so on. What I found instead took me by surprise.

Beaded Converse tennis shoes? Uncountable tiny blue glass beads are sewn to the canvas to make the shoes blue. Like nearly every piece in this exhibit, this also presents social commentary. These are not your mother’s beaded moccasins! The struggle for Native Americans between tradition and contemporary life is starkly expressed throughout the show.
("Shoes" [The actual title of the piece is a long Indian word I did not write down correctly, so I had to give it my own name. Sorry. Teri Greeves, 1970])

Rant: Photography is not allowed in the exhibit, a stupid rule, it seems to me. I don’t see how the artists’ intellectual property or the museum’s financial investment is threatened by amateur photography. I had to cull these few pictures from the internet. Perhaps the fear is that a blogger will show pictures of the works without proper attribution to the artist, which is exactly what happens when you have to cull pictures from the internet. Rant off.

I can only describe a few of my favorites, although there were literally dozens of mind-bending works. One was a kind of postmodern totem pole. It was a cubist oil painting of totemic images. The painting was curved into a half-cylinder and displayed vertically in a vaguely totem pole shape. It thus had recognizable totemic images in characteristic Northwest Indian style, but portraying multiple perspectives at once, as cubism can do, simulating the experience one would have of actually walking around a real totem pole. What a concept. Was it a totem pole or not? Was it a memory of a totem pole? Was it a translation of a totem pole? Again, past and present are forced to coexist in tightly wound tension.
(Totemic Theory 2, Clarissa Hudson, 2001)

Nearby was a more traditional 6-foot high totem pole carved from cedar. (This show was very well curated, as the placement of these totem-like pieces indicates.) It told a story in symbols, as all totem poles do, but a modern one. A sun figure was on top, represented as a face-like circular mask. Long cedar bark “hair” suggested rainfall, with the water collected in the base, a black wooden chest with faint images of salmon as if seen through translucent water. Between the sun and the water was an Eagle (which is usually on top) and it was doubled over, reaching down to the salmon below. There were a couple of smaller face-like circular images on stems extending from the “shoulders” of the sun. Possibly they represent humanity, and if so, having them the highest images in the totem, higher even than the sun, would further this hierarchical existential portrait. The piece was called “Rainbow People” so that’s a clue (By Tim Paul, 1999).

Near the totems I sneaked a shaky photo of “Cigar Store Indian,”a wooden cigar store Indian with a small black-and-white TV in place of its face, and on the TV were old westerns from the 1950’s – Indians attacking the cavalry and being slaughtered. (Cigar Store Indian. Doug Coffin, 1998)


Etched glass is not a traditional Native artistic medium, yet glass art is pervasive in the Northwest today so it makes sense to see a traditional shamanic amulet represented in glass. The piece is about 12 inches long and 8 inches high, far too large to be an actual amulet, yet the whale-image is covered in animistic spirit-forms. On the reverse side, not shown, is a stylized human being laid out lengthwise, as if it were either an embryo or a mummy. The modern Indian is thus contained entirely within the spiritual images and meanings of the past. Is it the frozen, departed spirit of the Indian, or is it the new Indian spirit about to be reborn from the hard, cold, modern glass? (Shaman's Amulet. Preston Singletary, 2001)


I’m not sure what to make of this large piece representing racks of drying fish, all in aluminum or steel. The circular drying hoops are about 2 meters across and the thousands of tiny metal fish are suspended from the spanning metal "sticks." The drying of the catch on such racks was the “daily bread” and sustenance of traditional people. Now it is merely a geometric abstraction in steel. I’m not sure what it means. (Eric Robertson, The Hub, 2001)

This dish-shaped pattern was called “Pieces of the Puzzle”. It is an attractive piece in its own right, with small images in Northwest Indian colors and motifs from ravens, frogs, whales, and so forth. However others are pure abstractions, just lines and gestures. Yet those abstractions are more than casual “brushstrokes.” Even the simplest of them incorporates the characteristic curves and shapes that define this kind of art, perhaps suggesting how the traditional forms are so deeply embedded in the artist’s being that even a casual gesture reveals them. (Pieces of the Puzzle. Steve Smith, 2004)

There was a surprising amount of anger in this show. Surprising to me, anyway. Of course artists always try to speak from the emotional core of their being, and I would expect reverence for the past, identity confusion, and even ironic statements about modern life. I did not expect the rage, the deep bitterness, expressed in so many pieces. I’m sure that is just my white man’s naivety, but I was genuinely taken aback.

There is also a good deal of humor, but the sense of heartfelt sorrow over what has been lost is palpable. It is a very edgy show in that regard.

One poignant piece seemed un-self-conscious. It had a rather lengthy artist’s statement on the legend card in which she proudly declared that she cared not at all for tradition and was strictly a modern artist. Yet the piece itself was sort of a Chagall-like collocation of dreamy figures and patterns, with small drawings of teepees and huddled people, all on a large scraped hide. (Native Woman's Dreams. Juanita Padhopony, 1994).

Spaced Out Pictures

During a recent visit to the Kennedy Space Center, east of Orlando, Florida, I accidentally came upon an amazing art gallery. NASA has been commissioning artists to represent rocket launches and other aspects of KSC activity since 1962. Who knew?

Andy Warhol: Moonwalk

Tucked away, hidden would not be too strong, behind the popcorn-perfumed lobby of the IMAX theaters is a lovely two-story display of visual arts. I spent over an hour perusing about a hundred pieces in this secret gallery. The $30 admission fee to get into the space center is a pretty high barrier just to see some nice pictures, but if you ever do visit the space center, look for this display! It is not listed on any brochures of “attractions” so you have to know it is there.



Rollout, Columbia.
Martin Hoffman

(Note the white-painted center fuel tank. After the first couple of shuttle flights, NASA stopped painting the tank, to save weight).








Emergence

Dan Namingha

The picture does not do justice to the wonderful Navajo colors. The theme is also terrific, maybe something like "You are pretty smart to be floating in space, but the gods are all around you anyway." (They were always there, always will be there).



Great painting, large, impressive.
Sorry I did not get the details, and the online NASA images are virtually unsearchable.












This is a nice Peter Max work from 1987. There were surprisingly few abstract representations in the collection. NASA claims to have started this art program because the photographs, while extensive, were not capturing the "excitement." But ironically, many of the works they collected strive for realism, like the first example above. I tend to prefer abstraction.









Another Warhol. This one actually might be the famous "Moonwalk," not the first picture, above. Excuse my poor documentation.

There were many other amazing works of art by many artists, some famous, some not, all worth seeing.

Degas in Portland

The Portland, Oregon Art Museum has a terrific exhibition of work by Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Forain until May 11, 2008. There are 110 pieces in the show, themed around ballet dancers in Paris in the late 1800’s.

The Degas pieces are spectacular. These are from his later work, after he “specialized” in dancers. The painted and drawn ballerinas are charming, bright and colorful, “easy on the eyes.” He certainly understood the female figure of that day, which is different from today’s. Professional dancers today who looked like Degas’ healthy specimens would be considered “beefy.” If you go to see pretty ballerina pictures you won’t be disappointed.

But I think most of these paintings are not about ballerinas at all. They are about the empty space that the dancers define. The ballerinas are just a device used for the difficult job of depicting three-dimensional space, empty space, on a two dimensional surface. How can that be done? It is quite a puzzle and Degas solved it, and it is amazing to see how.

His works are arranged chronologically and one can detect a period in the early 1870’s where he seems to have discovered the secret of depicting empty space. There is one piece in particular, Musicians in the Orchestra of 1872, that announces what is to come. We look over the heads of the dark, silhouetted musicians to the dancers some 50 feet away, with nothing between the musicians and the dancers but air. How do we know there is 50 feet of empty space there? I’m not sure, but it’s there. Size constancy is one cue for depth, but that wouldn't seem to be sufficient. There is no linear perspective and in fact the dancers are in front of an ostensibly flat stage curtain. So where does the 50 feet of space come from? I don’t know. It’s a miracle of painting.

Next to that piece are some paintings from a little later, by which time he had clearly caught on to the technique of painting bold, vivid emptiness. I don’t remember which piece was next, and I don’t think it was The Ballet Rehearsal of 1873, shown here, but it was something like that, where at least one third of the canvas depicts nothing but thin air. How does he make that empty space so real, so palpable? Again I can’t say exactly how it's done, but see for yourself. And talk about bold! A picture with "nothing" filling over half the scene? How could you even think of that?

There are about a half dozen ballerina bronzes, which Degas did only in wax and somebody else cast them after he died. The point of them, I believe, is, like the paintings, to show empty space. How can you sculpt empty space? It’s amazing to see how it’s done as you walk around these small sculpltures (no more than 18" high).

Whoever curated the Degas collection surely must have understood the “empty space” theme, but oddly, there is not a hint of it on any of the printed legends accompanying the works. I never use the auditory guides in museums, as their inanity just makes me want to scream, but it is possible that the empty space theme is mentioned on those devices.

I was most impressed by Degas. But I also greatly enjoyed the few posters, paintings and drawings by Toulouse-Lautrec. I like the colors and the composition, and his technique of exaggeration, such as by putting the dancer’s leg up so high that you wonder if it is connected to her body, as in this poster, which was on display at the PAM.

I was less enamored by the Forain work. He seemed to be more of an illustrator and I read that he was at one time a political cartoonist, and his drawings and paintings have both a cartoony look and the sociopolitical “message” of an editorialist. Many scenes show a sleazy fatcat producer fawning over a young ballerina. Apparently, in the late 1800’s Paris dance scene, girls had to find a financial “sponsor” to support their dance career, and it is obvious from Forain’s drawings that the older men were interested in more than just philanthropy. The women’s plight is tragic and depressing and I have to say it was an emotional downer to look at all these scenes, however handsomely they are drawn.

The rest of the PAM is worth a look too. Their permanent collection is strong in works of the last two centuries and in 20th century sculpture. The PAM is one of my three favorite art museums in the western U.S. (with Seattle and Tucson). Find PAM at http://www.portlandartmuseum.org/

PDX Jazz

PDX is the airport code for Portland, Oregon, which hosted its 31st Jazz Festival Feb. 15-24, 2008. I attended the opening weekend only, hating to leave all that good music behind when I returned. This was my second PDX Jazz festival, and it has been satisfying both times, even though I can only attend for one long weekend, not the whole ten day run. The festival has some great venues at the city’s performing arts center and numerous clubs around town, although I have now learned to avoid all shows that occur in hotel ballrooms. They are just not set up for it. Sure, they can cram a thousand chairs into a space, but the air quality is so bad, the oxygen content so low, the temperature so high, that one struggles to maintain consciousness. This has been a consistent experience at both the Hilton and the Marriott, so be advised: bring your own oxygen if it is in a hotel. This is not the case for the Schnitzer, Newmarket, and Winningstad concert halls, which are marvelous acoustically, aesthetically, and environmentally.

Portland is an easy and cheap Amtrak ride from Seattle, comfortable and scenic (if you appreciate shades of brown and grey). Portland is easy to get around in, with free light rail and cute, walkable city blocks. There are plenty of hotels and lots of historic architecture. The city seems to me a bit weak on restaurants. On a Friday night I could not find a restaurant or a bar downtown serving after midnight. In the midst of a Jazz festival? What sense does that make? Portland has major shopping, with all the usual suspects, Macy’s, Nordstrom, Saks, etc., and of course the world-famous Powell’s book store. When it’s not raining, Portland is a lovely city.

What’s amazing about PDX Jazz is the world class lineup, unexpected for such a modest sized festival. Kudos go to Artistic Director Bill Royston who tirelessly introduces each act, and Managing Director Rachel Trice who is never seen. Actually, most of the jazz at the festival is free. Just about every hotel and club in the city has at least one jazz performance every day. There are also numerous educational presentations.


Ornette Coleman
This master of the free jazz movement is now 79 years old but the music is as fresh as a teenager. Stooped, he shuffled onto stage in a royal blue silk suit and a black pork-pie hat, with white sneakers sporting colored LED’s in the toes. He said a few words of introduction but they were inaudible.

He was slow to get to his position but once there, his fingers were very fast. He played tenor sax in characteristic frenetic fashion. He was with an acoustic bass, an electric bass with a wa-wa pedal, and an electric guitar that could have been another bass. It was hard to hear the electric instruments because their sound was blurry. Coleman’s son played drums. Ornette and the rest of the group seem to play in different keys, which is disorienting at first but your ear adapts to it, like listening to two people talking at once. The two tracks are dissonant but complementary in some way I do not understand, so it is actually pleasant, not the noise you might expect from such an adventure. Every once in a while the parts come together on a chord or a riff, just so you know it was not a mistake.

Coleman plays a lot of notes but he only has a few things to say. He exercises his scales like Coletrane, but his main musical gestures are simple figures against the wall of sound put up by the polyphonic support group. His musical statements are small, sometimes only four notes, something simple, as if from a Coltrane ballad – lyrical, suggestive, often enclosing an octave. Then sometimes he would invert that or move it up or down a fifth, creating question-and-answer sequences that stood out sharply against the musical background. It was very conversational.

When he picked up the trumpet, he did not play a baroque solo, but only used it to splash some broad bands of color on what the acoustic bass was saying. He played the violin like a fiddle, sawing away to produce a swatch of contrasting or supporting material. He is the artist, they are the canvas. There were few solos because it is not that kind of jazz, but all the players were in close communication throughout.

As mentioned, the basses were way overmiked, not fuzzing out but muddy. It could have been an intentional technique to produce the dense background that made Ornette’s gestures stand out so well, but I don’t know. The main bassist fiddled with the amps several times, so something might have been wrong. If it was the sound they wanted, then the two electric bassists put in a lot of sweaty performance work for nothing because there was no subtlety to be heard. The second bass, which could have been a guitar, was totally drowned out except for a few moments of mandolin-like beauty.

I really like Coleman, and his 1996 “Colors” album is one of my favorites. Still, I have to say that all his music sounds the same to my untrained ear. It’s a very complex and enjoyable sound but I couldn’t begin to name any individual piece of work of his. Nevertheless it was a fine experience to see the man himself do what he does.


SF Jazz Collective
This nonprofit was co-founded in San Francisco by Joshua Redman in 2004 for the promotion of “modern” jazz, as opposed to the classical jazz of the golden age from about 1930 when sound recording became widespread to about the end of World War II when “big band,” and emerging blues-rock eclipsed the classical sound. The Collective’s mission is to focus on jazz since about 1950. Each year they pick a composer/performer to highlight, such as Ornette Coleman, John Coletrane, Herbie Hancock, Thelonius Monk. This year the celebrated master was Wayne Shorter.

An octet performs the works of the honored one, often specially arranged by a group member, and each member of the group is also a composer, so about half of their performance is original new material. The octet re-forms each year. It’s a great concept, ever-new, never stale, and it serves the mission of promoting modern jazz. This was the Collective’s first performance of 2008, and that might explain why it did not immediately catch on fire. It was good, really good, but not a performance I will remember forever.

This year’s Collective had Joe Lovano on tenor, Dave Douglas, trumpet; Stefon Harris, vibes, Miguel Zenon, Alto; Robin Eubanks, trombone, Reneee Rosnes, piano; Matt Penman, bass, and Erick Harland on drums. Shorter’s tunes I could recognize were from the 1960’s such as Infant Eyes, but freshly arranged. There were original compositions by Eubanks, Penman, and others.

To me this is classic jazz: accessible, rhythmic, harmonic, well structured. Before the 1950’s was something like historic or antique jazz, wonderful in its own right, but the kind of music you hear on scratchy old records in the Smithsonian Collection. I guess it’s a matter of what you grew up with.

This year’s SF Collective is a good act. They’re all-stars, but Stefon Harris shines the brightest. He has dominating stage presence, in part just because the vibes are large, but also because of his energetic performance, hands moving faster than the eye can follow. Just to his left was Rosnes on piano and those two instruments are made for each other: a great sound. Renee Rosnes is a standout performer but did not show much of herself. She seemed content to make Harris sound good. Robin Eubanks is a terrific performer but you have to really like ‘bone to appreciate his work. It’s a hard sound to love, in my opinion, but it blends perfectly with Douglas’ trumpet. They could have played that mellow sound all night and dropped the blat-blat stuff. I am not fond of a big brassy sound, I admit, and in fact, an octet is a little too big for me. I like trios and quartets, where I can understand what I am listening to. The Collective mixed it up all right, but some of it seemed loud for the sake of being loud. That’s my ignorant opinion and I’m sticking to it.

The normally lyrical and expressive Joe Lovano was asleep in this performance except for one lovely tune he played on alto at the very end where he really seemed like he meant it. Maybe it took him the whole set to warm up. Or maybe it was because he forgot his funny hat. I have never seen him without a hat before. Maybe that was the trouble. One other complaint was that I felt the vibes were stifled by the rest of the group. To me vibes are all about overtones and when I hear a thumping C, I want to also hear the layers around that, but I couldn’t. That might have been Harris’s style of playing or maybe it was an artistic decision that the group made about their overall sound. Still, I’m just saying the whole point of vibes is to give a resonant richness. I’m sure that is an idiosyncratic view, and anyway, I don’t mean to nitpick this performance. It was terrific straight ahead jazz by some great musicians, enjoyable start to finish.


Classical Jazz Quartet
It was a thrill to see Ron Carter in person. He is a towering musical figure, both metaphorically and literally. His bass must be tuned especially low because his open strings are so thick you can almost bite the sound. He is big, the instrument is big, the sound is big. But he also does not hesitate to climb over the neck with ease and gusto, often doing a glissando on the frets, playing the full range of what a bass can play. When you hear Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring come out of that machine you can hardly believe it.

This group specializes, of course, in jazz renditions of classical music, from Bach to Rachmaninov. I see it as a kind of running joke because after the springboard you are very, very far gone from the classic, although who knows if they maintain the formal structure of the original piece? It’s not obvious if they do. In any case, what they produce is some marvelous jazz that does have a lot of formal structure in its own right, so in that sense, they at least respect the formality of the classics.

Besides Ron Carter, we had the ubiquitous Stefon Harris on vibes, Kenny Barron on piano, and Lewis Nash on drums. One is tempted to believe at first that this is really the Stefon Harris show. The man is fantastic. In one of his introductions he mentioned that he admired Milt Jackson, the ledgendary vibraphonist of the Modern Jazz Quartet. “Do you know Milt Jackson,” he asked the crowd? Somebody in the audience yelled, “Ain’t you him?” It is a reincarnation. Harris is a spectacular player, both technically and expressively. He even does a little Jarrettesque sing-along that you can hear if you have good seats.

(Stefon Harris. NY Times Photo)

An annoyance was that Nash’s drums seemed to be way over-cymballed, if that’s a word. Five different cymbals graced his huge kit and he hammered away at them incessantly, with sticks, brushes, fingers, the ends of the brushes, sticks on the rims, and so on. Too cymbalic! It was noisy, distracting, and starting to grate on my nerves until I gave it some more thought. This was not a mistake, but a design. The key is that Ron Carter is the rhythm section. He is so good, even on comping, that you soon realize he is the engine of the group, not Nash. Carter is the rhythm and the harmony. Why have drums at all then? The role of the drummer in this group has to be that of rounded entertainer, not merely timekeeper, because they already have that. So Nash is supposed to be a featured player, an improviser, an up-front performer, not hidden in the back as the drummer is in so many groups. And given that Nash’s drum solos were among the best I have ever heard, there is no question that he is redefining the role of drums as a musical instrument. Still, the cymbal thing can drive you nuts…

The piano of the great Kenny Barron was strangely subdued. He showed one or two flashes of his brilliance but mostly confined himself to comping, which was stellar in itself. He uses very little sustain, lots of complex and rhythmic chords, but I think it is fair to ask for more because, well, he is Kenny Barron. Again there may a subtle Ron Carter effect at work. Since Carter carries most of the harmonic support, that leave less for Barron to do. They could have soloed him more, but I guess the point of the group is to be a quartet, not a pickup group. They are obviously a highly disciplined and well practiced quartet, so there you are.

One odd observation about the CJQ is that they all wore dark suits and Brooks Brothers’ ties (except Harris, who probably needs to breathe more than a tie would allow. He didn’t even have cufflinks, just open cuffs). Clearly the visual analogy is to the Modern Jazz Quartet, whose players were noted for their handsome suits, thin ties and white shirts. The homage is obvious, but at the same time a little creepy because one of the reasons for the MJQ’s dress code was to “prove” that black men were gentlemen. Still, I appreciated the allusion, and to tell the truth, I ached for them to play Djangology, but you know they wouldn’t dare.


Tim Berne
Tim Berne is a local boy who made good. While studying (or not) at Reed College in Oregon in the 1970’s, he bought an alto sax on a whim and started playing. Moving to New York, he studied with Julius Hemphill and soon started performing and recording, to great acclaim. His trio performed in the large but surprisingly intimate Winningstad theater.

Berne’s sound is hard to describe. It is polyphonic, The traditional structures of harmony, melody are lacking and rhythm is highly variable. His musical statements are actually quite limited to small thirds and fifths, punctuated by octave jumps. It would have almost an ancient sound if it were heard in isolation. But there was no isolation.

Berne played against a continuously hyperactive piano, the pianist unnamed and uncredited. Whoever he was, he must have had considerable athletic training to sustain a 90 minute agenda of presto staccato notes and trills racing furiously up and down the keyboard as if to get somewhere in a hurry but actually going nowhere. He created an amazingly thick, dense background of sound under Berne’s formalist recitations in moderate, even tempos. What made it all interesting is that the two were in different keys. There may not have even been a key signature, since they both roamed and grazed without fences. But there must have been structures invisible to me because they had charts and how could they write anything down unless there was something to write?

At first I found the sound interesting and complex but not particularly pleasant. It’s not just that there was not much familiar to grab on to, but what was presented did not recommend itself with any virtues. Then I moved into examining exactly the notes Berne was playing and they seemed arbitrary to me. The sound was not noisy, but purposeless. But then I thought well, he’s playing exactly the notes he means to play, not any others, so what is the message? And the message seemed to be, “These are the notes I’m playing. Listen to each one. If you wanted to dance, you should have gone to the Spanish Harlem Orchestra. This is the music here.” So I listened and extracted his simple formalisms disguised as polyphonic chaos.

After a while though, the sound, which is complex but varies little in macrostructure, becomes trance-like, hypnotic. One’s auditory ego is perspectivally positioned above and beyond any individual musical gestures and the piece is suddenly revealed holistically, like the smooth surface of an egg with no compositional detail. I realized I was tapping my foot in time to the music even though I could discern no particular rhythmic regularity in it. That was amazing. (The trio’s drummer was strictly a background timekeeper, also unidentified and uncredited). The group’s musical achievement was to pull me into the details of the music but then spit me out, to a place beyond the musical structures, to a transcendent extra-musical space; an intellectual space in part, but still somehow bodily tethered to the sounds. I don’t understand how it worked, but it did. Quite an experience.


Cecil Taylor
This grand master of free jazz (now 80 years old) walked smartly onto the stage (late, after a dreadful opener I won’t mention), sat down and started playing without a word of introduction. He looked good in gray dreadlocks, though only about 3 of them on each side of the head). He played several pieces of solo piano with only a few seconds’ pause between them, barely acknowledging applause. All the pieces sounded very similar to my ear, so they seemed like individual movements of a larger unified whole.

He played extremely dense chords in dissonant harmonies (whatever “dissonant” means any more), at a furious pace, lightning fingers up and down the keyboard. I could not actually see his hands from where I was but I would not be surprised if he didn’t also at times used his knuckles or put his palms down on the keyboard, so dense was the sound. He could have used his forearms for all I could tell, but I think I would have noticed that. He used the sustain pedal extensively to further blend the sound. The point is, it was dense.

The interesting thing about all this dense sound is that it was delivered in short gestures of 1 to three seconds separated by second or subsecond silences (no sustain). A longish segment would be 5 seconds max. The gestures occurred individually at different points on the keyboard within fairly tight ranges, no arpeggio forms. There was no melodic development at all, just these short bursts of multicolored density. What did it mean?

I could be way out here, but what I got from it was visual. These small, dense, multicolored objects are indeed objects, like rocks on the ground, or more like a spiky, rocky terrain. These were clearly well-defined objects, each with their own texture, density, color, and location in space. It was highly visual, and for me, it was mostly pastoral. There were several terrains, but most obviously the sharp rocks and a babbling brook. The water sounds were unmistakable and clearly distinguishable from the sharp rocks. I hope I’m not embarrassing myself, but that’s what seemed to be going on.

(Pic: www.ilachinski.com)

Besides the pastoral scenes, there was also, I think, at least one human conversation, which seemed to be an argument. I realize it is bad form to read extramusical programmatics into a piece but this performance was clearly, obviously, supposed to be a visual presentation. Taylor was a painter, like Ornette was, but Taylor did both figures and background himself. It was an artistic triumph and I’m glad I was there to see/hear it.

Indian Powwow

On New Year’s Day, 2008, I joined hundreds of Native Americans at the Rillito Race Track in Tucson, to usher in the new year with a Powwow. Several dozen tribes of “Indians” (as they call themselves) were represented, most from the southwestern U.S. but many from Mexico and some from Central and South America.

There was a fancy dance competition extending over several days. “Fancy” is when the performers are dressed in brightly colored regalia including feathers, furs, masks, shells and bells. It is pretty spectacular. Music is mostly tom-tom but sometimes flute and chanting as well.

There were also some serious “ceremonial” dances designed to help the New Year find its feet, I guess, and I was not allowed to photograph those. I’m afraid I did not understand the cultural significance of these dances but admired them nevertheless. They were just as complex as the fancy dancing but less flamboyant and conducted almost naked, which had to be chilly.

I noticed that it was usually the older men who were the expert dancers. Their skill stood out dramatically from the others. They lifted their legs high and stomped the earth like they really meant it. But there were a few young people who were also extremely talented and I was pleased to see that the culture is being effectively transmitted.

There were several tent stalls selling fantastically beautiful jewelry. The silver work is extremely fine. I had to tie my wife down with ropes. There was one Dineh (Navajo) craftsman whose work could be in a museum. I think coral and turquoise are colors that really look wonderful together. The prices were not cheap, it seemed to me: small earrings for $200 and bracelets up to $600. But according to my wife, these were very reasonable prices for fine jewelry such as this was. While I would have liked to have seen some bargains, I’m glad that the crafts people are getting paid what they are worth. They did manage to pry a few bucks out of us.

Other stalls sold Indian blankets, tom-toms, clothing, pillows, toys, knick-knacks, cosmetics and medicines. I especially appreciated the hand-held tom-toms, some of which have a deep, resonant tone with complex overtones. I should have bought one, as they good looking and under $100, but what would I do with it? I listened in on a conversation with an older Indian who was considering buying one. He inquired about the hide, whether it was deer or elk, and how it was scraped and stretched. He listened to the sound and I noticed that after striking the drum he very gently touched his fingernail to the underside of the skin to produce a variety of sounds. Who knew? He didn’t buy at that time though.

We walked around for half a day and enjoyed the sights and sounds. There were quite a few white folks there although mostly Indians. The festival actually went on for ten days with dancing, singing and crafts competition. My feeling was that I had participated in an authentic Indian celebration, not a show-biz representation of an Indian celebration, so I was glad to have experienced the real thing. At the same time, I’m sure with more organization, marketing savvy, and showmanship, this event could be a huge tourist draw for a much wider segment of society, a big money-maker. But then it wouldn’t be real.

(It's a shame I don't understand the dances, but even I could see that this fellow represented death, or ancestors, or possibly even the just-past year, now dead. Notice the skull at the center of the headdress. His white painted face suggests a ghost, and his costume, with the white fringes suggests a skelton. Notice how extremely light he is on his feet, almost floating above the ground, like a ghost. The shell-rattles around his ankles punctuated his every step. The incessant tom-toms put you into a kind of trance until you start to half-believe you are watching a ghost! It was a fantastic performance.)


Here are a few other scenes from the Festival:
This woman was weaving a pattern so fine, I couldn't even see the threads when I looked right over her shoulder!

A very nice tattoo. Looks Mayan to me.

My wife resisting the urge to purchase a leather shawl.