Half the things

"Half the things I say are there cannot be found." — The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber

[half-the-things]

Get Out

A movie about if some of the weirder stereotypes were true. A bizarre mix of trite Hollywood tropes that tell us what we’re supposed to know, and surprises that feel logical in retrospect but completely unexpected as they fall.

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Georgia O’Keeffe: Living Modern Brooklyn Museum

This is more than a pairing of O’Keeffe’s work and clothing. It’s a retrospective of the artist as an icon — of fashion, lifestyle, and feminism — rather than just an artist. And it makes me desperately want to visit New Mexico again.

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Dreamlands: Immersive Cinema and Art, 1905-2016 Whitney Museum of Art

A whirlwind tour of cinema as art in the past century or so; a series of spaces to get lost in.

Highlights: 

Anthony McCall, Line Describing a Cone: a 3D structure made of smoke and light Bruce Connor, CROSSROADS: declassified military footage of an atomic bomb test Hito Steyerl: Wacky dancing in a grid with video game overtones A triptich I can’t find; maybe Oscar Fischinger Matthias Polena, Immitation of Life: A Disney-like donkey singing a song on a boat Edwin S. Porter, Coney Island

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20th Century Women

When a single not-so-young mother worries she shouldn’t be her teenage son’s only influences, she enlists the help of the people closest at hand: her boarders and her son’s best friend. One teaches him to be a feminist while the other strings along his hopes of becoming more than friends. 

Is the experiment successful? From the point of view of the plots, yes and no. But this movie reminds us that we are shaped by the people in our lives, and experiences and relationships tend to make us more complex rather than simply better or worse.

The movie is set in the late 70s, adding an extra dimension of memory and prescience. We know that the young characters will be beset by computers and internet and smartphones a few decades into their adult lives; this is never mentioned in the film itself, but the choice of temporal setting seems intentional; it’s before; it’s a freer time. The ending flash-forward to how things turn out for each character lands us approximately in the present, not the future, barely the past.

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The Magic Flute The Metropolitan Opera

Beautiful costumes, amazings sets, magical animals. Billed as abridged and kid-friendly... but absolutely not childish. The queen stole the show.

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The Bone Clocks David Mitchell

Not a perfect novel, but I tore through it anyway. As someone who loved Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler (and while we’re at it, Cloud Atlas), I am impressed by an author who can pull you in, and throw you out and pull you back in again, and again, and again.

The Bone Clocks features six different narrators whose lives overlap, though unlike in Cloud Atlas the story unfolds chronologically. Every time the narrator switched, I’d find myself first skimming for the connection to the story we left off... and then inevitably I’d be drawn into the new one, and disappointed when it ended. I thought I hated Crispin Hershey, but then his death left me a little stunned and wanting more. He’s also an interesting narrator because he’s a novelist, and makes wisecracks about novelists whose protagonists are novelists, even though he is one.

I agree with Pico Iyer’s New York Times review:

For my money, Mitchell is far better at suggesting mystery than at pulling off creatures of the “Shaded Way.” Action is not his forte; he’s a wizard, rather, at dialogue and “air shimmering with bells and cold as mountain streams,” the dizzying lights of Shanghai, the sun-baked wastes of Iraq and the Marine talk that crackles across them. His take on everyday life is so alive and so much his own that it seems a waste when he starts inventing realities, as so many other writers do.

But I still admire Mitchell’s ability to dance across the line between fantasy and reality, to lure you alternately with believable relationships and unbelievable adventure. The last chapter about a dystopian not-too-far-off future, is where the two may mix best. And while it could almost exist as a standalone short story, its ties to the rest of the book make it more powerful and heartbreaking that it would be on its own. To quote Iyer one more time:

Not every part across these 624 pages is fresh. But with Mitchell it’s the whole, the way he stitches the pieces together to make something greater than their sum, that makes the work unique.

[half-the-things]

Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson

"Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” “The opposite of poverty is not wealth; the opposite of poverty is justice.”

In a smart structure for non-fiction book, Stevenson alternates between a long-form story of his work for one man on death row, Walter McMillian, and vignette-like chapters that examine additional themes in his work and incorporate other case studies.

For me, one of the most powerful was the chapter about mental illness, and about the Conferedate flag sporting prison guard who hears Stevenson make his case in court and rethinks his attitudes toward prisoners, prison, and Stevenson himself (and buys his ward a milkshake).

The New York Times has a better review than I can write.

[half-the-things]

Staph Retreat Radiolab

A biologist and historian team up to re-create an ancient recipe for antibiotics — and it works. It’s an inter-disciplinary success story, and a reminder that both biology and history operate in cycles.

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Pipilotti Rist, Pixel Forest The New Museum

A retrospective of the work of Swiss video and multimedia artist Pipilotti Rist. Her work focuses on the organic: bodies, nature, cells, membranes, water, vistas. It is weird and hypnotic. The first floor houses a series of “single-channel” videos in viewing boxes that only one visitor at a time can watch. You wait your turn impatiently, then get inside and can’t seems to leave.

Upstairs is the “Pixel Forest,” a selfie moment albeit a beautiful one that catches you off-guard as you exit the stairway. Past the forest are cushions for watching body parts and aquatic scenes swirl on projected screens. The top floor has more, similar, this time on the ceiling. Lying down makes it even easier to be swallowed. 

Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether a fluttering flesh-colored form is a few fingers or a whole person. The inside of the human body looks so much like algae and seaweed. Is she obsessed with unique details, or is she trying to tell us we’re all the same?

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Manifesto Julian Rosefeldt Park Avenue Armory

Cate Blanchett stars in a series of 12 films, the script of each combed from various manifestos. She plays a homeless man, a puppeteer, a scientist, a TV news anchor. Her transformations are impressive; the makeup, sets and costume design impeccable.

The space is cavernous, with the enormous screens like beacons. At the end of each 10-minute sequence, we shuffle to the next installment — but because the videos loop, we are more like wanderers than cattle. For the first half, I’m constantly glancing toward the other screens, wondering, “What’s that one?” By the end, I’m looking back. “Right, that one.”

The words sometimes seem incidental, but the sound is carefully planned, almost choral. And there are repeated themes in the content. Movement-starters seek freedom, creativity, and separation from existing walks of life. Many try to find the line between art and not-art. In this enormous dark space, where we witness famous Hollywood actress play everyday characters speaking words written at varying points throughout the last century, the line between art and not-art feels pleasantly blurred.

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The Party Crashers: Is the new populism about the message or the medium? Jill Lepore The New Yorker

The American party system is not only a creation of the press; it is dependent on it. It is currently fashionable, indispensable, even, to malign the press, whether liberal or conservative. “That’s the media game,” Sanders said, dismissing a question that Cooper had asked him during CNN’s town hall. “That’s what the media talks about. Who cares?” But when the press is in the throes of change, so is the party system.

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Act One: I Can Explain A teenager reports what it is like to be inside an abusive relationship with an older man.

via The American Life

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The Place at the Brooklyn Museum

This Place explores the complexity of Israel and the West Bank, as place and metaphor, through the eyes of twelve internationally acclaimed photographers.

Featuring more than 600 photographs by Frédéric Brenner, Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, and Nick Waplington, This Place offers not a single, monolithic vision, but rather an intricate and fragmented portrait, alive to all the rifts and paradoxes of this important and much contested place.

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There Are Way Too Many ‘Best Of 2014′ Lists By Hayley Munguia, FiveThirtyEight

As far as the most frequent selections are concerned, the lists of best books were the least uniform, whereas every movie critic in my sample agreed that “Boyhood” deserved to be listed among the year’s best films. TV shows had the lowest percentage of titles that appeared on only one list.

One reason the “best books” lists were the most diverse is because they were the longest. While most of the lists looking at movies and TV shows were limited to 10 or 20 titles, a lot of the books lists topped 100 titles. I asked Publishers Weekly’s deputy reviews editor, Gabe Habash, why he thought lists of the best books were so long.

“I’d imagine the reason so many best books lists are 100 or so titles is because of the sheer volume and variety of books that are published in the U.S.,” he said. “Even if, as you’ve found, there is the least overlap in year-end book lists, I would like to see even more variety. … The truth of the matter is there are so many wonderful publishers and books out there that don’t get the recognition they deserve.”

via very short list

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49 Stars, Musicians, Authors, and Other Celebrities Say Farewell to Stephen Colbert Vulture

Ken Burns: He’s a genius. So extraordinary in every way. And I think we have to appreciate it even more: He’s doing it backward. It’s like writing your name in a mirror with the opposite hand. He plays this right-wing buffoon, so everything is in the context of that, and yet he has to — at the same time — sort of challenge you, but also undercut his own arguments at every single step. It’s brilliant theatre to watch, and he does it day in and day out. 

Neil Gaiman: I remember two things about his show. One was his briefing to me before I went on, where he said, "Look, my character is an idiot. Do whatever you have to do. Just assume you have like an idiot cab driver in the front who is going to keep talking, and it’s your job to set him straight." And then I remember the moment where the conversation wandered over into Lord of the Rings, and suddenly Colbert the character left and Colbert the person broke cover. That was on air. It was just a wonderful, it was a really wonderful conversation about children’s literature and about books. 

via Slate

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Dustin Hoffman on What It’s Really Like to Be a Woman

At the heart of the film Tootsie, which premiered on December 17, 1982, was the inquiry of how one specific man’s life would be different if he — his person — had been born a woman. In this absolutely stirring short clip from an AFI interview, Dustin Hoffman explains, while fighting back tears, just how profoundly that seemingly simple question ripped open one of our culture’s greatest, most tragic wounds.

via brain pickings

[half-the-things]

Parable of the Polygons

Using only squares, triangles, and the condition that each shape wants to move if less than 1/3 of its neighbors are like it, watch how extreme segregation appears in even the most random mixing of shapes.

via kottke.org