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So as of last night I have a huge brain crush on Chantal Akerman. She's a Belgian director, and Emily and I went to see her movie Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) at Siskel. I guess it's not in wide release, but if you ever get a chance, you must see it. It's a meditation on boredom and routine with very little dialogue and even sound. The shots are long and stationary -- the camera is positioned as habitually as Jeanne herself, who goes through the patterns of her day so obsessively that you're shocked when, after watching her wash and dry and put away the silverware relentlessly slowly, she finally drops a spoon. The structure of the movie follows her through three days of her life -- she's a single mother who takes one client a day as a prostitute to support herself and her son, but the bulk of the film is concerned with her domestic routine, and sex stays off screen until the very end. So mostly you see her walking down the hallway, turning on the light in the bathroom, washing her hands, turning off the light in the bathroom, walking to the kitchen, turning on the light, putting the kettle on to boil, grinding coffee, pouring water through the filter, setting out bread and butter, going to wake her son, coming back into the kitchen, and so on. It sounds impossibly boring, and in a way it is, but it's also captivating, and it makes you as a viewer attached to her habits and the objects she uses so carefully (the thermos, the cubes of sugar). This means that when the habits start to come undone -- first she burns the potatoes, then dinner is late and everything starts to happen out of order -- you switch from this hypnotic vacancy (your state is just like hers, you realize) to mild distress, because you no longer have traction on what's going on. The transition the movie accomplishes at this point is impressive, because you move from feeling this vacancy to recognizing that you haven't had any idea all along what she's thinking; she's hardly spoken, and you've just been watching her wash dishes and fold and unfold the tablecloth for two hours now. And then the thought you have is that you don't know whether she feels nothing or whether she's entirely mad. At no point do you identify with her: you see her as a figure of domestic labor, and as a commentary on how housework can be like prostitution (or prostitution a form of housework), but you don't know what it's like for her. And the radical opacity you recognize towards the end, when she makes the first facial expressions of the film (which has been going on for three hours at this point) is all the more powerful in contrast to the peculiar thoughtlessness that the film forces you into initially. Visually it's a beautiful piece, a study in miniatures and interiors that shows you all the things Hollywood films don't, like an extended scene at the sink when her back is to you the entire time. Psychologically it's amazing: it produces a new kind of boredom, but more than that lulls you into a state where you find yourself finally surprised at how inaccessible someone else's experience is, even though you've just been (or so you think) feeling a version of it.
'Come on baby play me something, like here comes the sun' sings Metric on her new album, Fantasies. I went into Reckless last Tuesday to pick it up after I heard this track. Before I could even make it to the counter to ask the record man for the album, a woman came up to me and asked whether she could ask me a few questions. Turns out she was from NPR and doing a story about Record Store Day, so we went to the back of the store, by all the classical records, and she proceeded to ask me about whether I bought my music on vinyl (no, not really, only when I buy for Tom), whether I spend all my money on records (no, again; clearly losing coolness points here), what I'd come in for (Metric! that amazing Canadian band, I said), and what I thought about the scene in Chicago as opposed to New York (very vague answers here). The whole experience was a bit odd because I had the distinct feeling of speaking into the future even as I was looking at her and talking into the mic. This made me say embarrassingly stupid things like, "I'm not really into material objects, but I like records." I didn't even know I could utter that platitude, but apparently I can. Anyhow, I ended up on the cutting room floor, I discovered when I heard the piece on 848, but it was still fun to be interviewed, and I'm glad that NPR cares enough about local record stores to do a piece on them.
Metric's lyrics keep running through my mind -- 'Would you rather be the Beatles or the Rolling Stones?' -- in very peculiar combination with lines from the Milton sonnets I just taught. Very different sounds! So, guys: Beatles or Rolling Stones?
Ever since I saw bright pink stalks of rhubarb arrayed on a table in Borough Market, I've been wanting to make something rhubarb-y. Apparently the rhu doesn't go with strawberries in Old Blighty -- for reasons that remain unclear to me -- and so taking this to heart, I was thinking that I'd make something just with rhubarb. Unadulterated, tart, etc. When I arrived back to my apartment in Chicago about two weeks ago, I had three sorts of mail, more or less: bills, academic publishing catalogues, and cooking magazines. (What this says about me I'd rather not consider, but there you go.) In the April issue of Gourmet, there was a quick recipe for rhubarb tart. It's a bit like tarte tatin, in that you slice the rhubarb wafer thin and lay it flat, overlapping a bit, on the pastry. After you bake it you glaze it with a reduced orange glaze. The results are pretty spectacular, and they actually taste like rhubarb, which made me realize that I didn't know, until now, what rhubarb tastes like. A bit like a tart apple with an unidentifiable punch. And pink, to boot!
The other thing that I feel like evangelizing about is my new favorite album. I was listening to it all day yesterday, and my neighbors are probably ready to take their broom handles to the ceiling (in fairness, it was only my old neighbors who did that; these neighbors are perfectly nice). It's called "More modern short stories from Hello Saferide." It's not quite out here, I don't think -- I bought it at a record store in Berlin called Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free -- but it's the best thing I've heard in a long time. Have a listen!
