Akerman love

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.

Radio career fail

'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?

If this were a Facebook status update, it would say "Andrea is rhubarb tart and Hello Saferide"

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!

Full circle

I know that I was a bit remiss about posting during the final weeks of my time in England. In part, that's because I went to Berlin (which is my new favorite city), and in part that's because I was so occupied with the idea of having to leave, and not wanting to, that I didn't have much to say. But now that I'm in Richmond, and I've just come back from a British-style pub with Beatles albums, illustrations of men in full tartan dress, and football scarves on the walls -- a pub where you can go to watch football matches, no less -- I feel as if I should write a final installment about the UK. I was there for long enough for it to start to feel like home, long enough that when Kristian picked me up from the airport and we were driving down 90/94, I found that the highway signs looked strange and the cars seemed big and the facades of houses and buildings just seemed different. There's something to be said for this, for the experience of perceiving the place where you've been for quite a long time as if you have just arrived: it's defamiliarization, I suppose. I was at this party in London, in fact, where I was having a conversation about Shklovsky with a composer who turned out to know much more about him than I did, and we were agreeing that it's valuable to see things that are familiar as if they are strange. And now that I'm in a gigantic hotel in the middle of a city I don't know, I could be anywhere, really. The self-sufficient convention center is a world unto itself. In a way it feels like a buffered transition back to life in Chicago. But then again, it's just another place. A place where everyone is giving papers about the eighteenth century, mind you, but just a place. And so in the past week I've walked up Parliament Hill, come back to Chicago, left again; in the process, I've seen the dials of spring turned up and down and up again. If I kept it up it might begin to feel like time travel, but for now it just seems like I've got an established relationship with my suitcases. And after I've soaked up all the eighteenth-century talks I can, I'll saddle up and head back to the midwest for a spring of teaching Milton and getting work done. I look forward to cooking for all of you within range soon!

Old school

There is, on the way to Norfolk, a town called Little Snoring, and next to it, a town called Great Snoring. In fact, there is one intersection where the signs point to both: head left, you're on to Great Snoring; head right, Little Snoring. Perhaps snoring meant something different in Anglo-Saxon -- like great warrior of the night -- but these days, the jokes about sawing wood must get old quickly. Along the coast in Norfolk, there's a whole scattering of towns, separated by only a mile or so, and there are old pubs and inns in almost all of them, plus the odd windmill, smokehouse, and so on. There's a farm shop that sells only real ale, a man who smokes all his own fish, and a small shop where the labels on the strawberry jam are hand-printed and the flour for sale is ground at the local mill. There are also larger towns with three ice cream stands per block and an arcade on either side of the street -- more familiar beach-side fare, at least for American eyes -- but the rest of the villages, which are still largely original in the sense that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century buildings are still standing and only slightly modified, are unfussy and quiet. If you go to the village where Nelson was born (Nelson didn't always stand on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, it turns out), and go to the pub called the Lord Nelson, and ask the proprietor how old the place is, he'll tell you 1637. Almost older than the Mayflower, but not quite. The doorways are so short that you have to be careful of your head as you pass through. Not every town along the Norfolk coast boasts a naval hero, but even so, there are stone beaches and windy quays and all manner of good, unpretentious food. If you ever find yourself in Norfolk, you must, must go to Morston Hall, where you will be fed an alchemical set menu made by Galton Blackiston. All of the food comes from the area (maybe even the hedges outside!), and I can't remember a better meal. Plus some of the last steam trains run through that part of the countryside, and if you're lucky, you'll see one puffing along a bridge near the sea. The spectacle attracts hobbyists with impressive cameras who follow the trains as they pass: these are the trainspotters. I'm probably the last one to learn the origin of the term, but there you go.

Fancy people

Spotted, outside the Coliseum after the British premiere of Dr. Atomic: the stunningly androgynous Tilda Swinton, standing nearly six feet tall, in a short blonde haircut, buzzed at a sharp angle in the back and gelled into submission in the front. Wearing a well-tailored tuxedo suit with satin lapels and a plunging neckline, and very tall, fishnet-style shoe boots. She disappeared swiftly down a nearby alley, and we were left temporarily speechless.

The opera itself was good too, of course -- the production was entirely different than the one at the Lyric, less stark but also less full of awkward dance numbers. They solved the problem of getting a gigantic number of people on stage at the same time by building this massive framework of little rooms stacked on top of one another, basically a grid. Before the opera began, there was a huge periodic table of the elements projected on the scrim in front of the stage, with the radioactive elements missing. In the opening scene, this morphed into the grid full of singing scientists. At first the faces of the actual scientists were projected onto fabric in front of the grid, and then individual curtains opened to reveal the singers. Later, they all arrayed themselves in different postures, pressing their legs and arms against the walls so as to suspend themselves in different poses, and the collective effect -- you saw ten or fifteen different bodies across the whole grid -- was to give a sense of split-second frames of motion, like the pages of a flip book, or a Muybridge shot. In this production, when Oppenheimer, at the close of the first act, sings Donne's "Batter my heart, three-person'd God" -- the test site is called Trinity -- he faces away from the bomb and only turns to it at the end. "Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend / But is captived, and proves weak or untrue," he recites, suddenly frightened at the power he is in possession of, needing, or seeming to need, to believe that there is something outside of himself that will check his actions.

The close of Dr. Atomic, which represents the explosion of the bomb followed by Japanese voices, is apocalyptic, but in the most aestheticized way. You're expecting the explosion throughout the entire opera, and though the extremely loud thrumming is terrifying, it's hardly surprising. As the volume builds, you watch the entire cast put on protective glasses and kneel down to watch the bomb, but they're facing you, and a bright light flashes that casts them into silhouette and illuminates the mountains behind them. The staging acknowledges the spectacle: they're watching you, you're watching them. Then voices, then the curtain.

On Surprise

This Saturday, I was wandering around London with my dear friend Meredith, who I've known since college. It was a stunning day, warm and sunny and preternaturally spring-like, and everybody was out, on foot, on bicycle; with children, with friends; wandering, talking, eating. We walked from Camden to Westminster Abbey via St. Pancras churchyard, where Mary Wollstonecraft is buried. I met someone here in Cambridge, an English student, who visited Wollstonecraft's grave on her first date with her boyfriend. He brought her flowers to put in front of the tomb. As she said, it's the kind of gesture that really tells you something about someone; it's definitive. I have to say, I'm not sure I'd be all that keen on graveyard dates, but maybe seeing Marx and his gigantic beard would be an exception.

We walked on to the Abbey, passing Big Ben on the way and unwittingly getting in more tourist photographs than we knew. Everyone was out and everyone was photographing each other in front of everything. Apparently there's a phone booth, one of the iconic red ones, in view of Big Ben, and tourists are constantly going into it and posing as if they're on the phone. This from a friend of Meredith's who works in an office with a view of the phone booth. There's something overwhelming about the constant stream of people taking snapshot after snapshot: seeing Big Ben of course brings Woolf to mind, because of the bit in Mrs. Dalloway where the clock striking sends discs through the air that reach the ears of Londoners all around the city; they synchronize all of the distinct consciousnesses for a moment. The idea of being brought into agreement by hearing the same thing requires as its counterpoint the bustle and dissonance of the city: everything going on constantly around you is held in suspension for an instant only, and then rushes back in.

After we heard evensong (so much gold leaf in that church!) we headed through St. James Park on the way to the National Gallery, where we had about half an hour before the guards professionally shooed us out. In one of the rooms at the National Gallery, there's an anamorphic box called a peep show: there are small eyepieces at either end, and if you look through them, you see the interior of a Dutch house with a woman (I think) reading. The side of the box is open, and if you look from that perspective, everything appears massively distorted: the chair in the corner is stretched to gigantic proportions, and the woman resembles a damaged doll. There's another anamorphic painting in the National Gallery, though I didn't see it this time -- it's a painting of ambassadors by Holbein, and there's a skull at the bottom which only comes into relief from a particular point of view.

Then to Monmouth Coffee -- where you can have something called a 'flat white,' basically a latte with less milk, which is among the best things ever -- and through Regents Park on the way to dinner in Primrose Hill. A long walk, but a nice one: walking is the best way to see cities, I think, because you happen on things you don't expect. For example, when Meredith and I were making our way through Primrose Hill, and were walking up to the hill which bears that name, we noticed a light in the sky above us that looked a bit like a floating candle. We thought it must have been some kind of homemade luminary that someone had set off from a balcony. But then Meredith spotted a whole group of people at the top of the hill lighting these miniature hot air balloons, so we walked up to get a closer look. The balloons were about three feet tall and two feet wide; after you lit one you had to hold it to let it fill with air, and then you released it into the sky. They flew fast and looked spectacular against the skyline, these flying torches making their way into the darkness. The people setting them off were drinking champagne straight from the bottle and were on their way to a fancy dress party, costumed as their favorite artists.

I was stunned to have stumbled on this, and said to Meredith as we walked on to dinner that this was one of my favorite things about cities, how they surprise you. I corrected myself to say that of course the surprise cuts in both directions; it's both good and bad -- we laughed as we remembered the guy in Italy who flashed us (from which I learned: always beware of Italians in sweatpants)! And it's not just cities that are surprising: there's a tree in the middle of the desert in Nevada, literally the only thing for miles and miles, and when you drive past it you're going so fast that you hardly notice and you have to turn back to see, but it's got hundreds of pairs of shoes hanging from it, because everyone goes there to throw their shoes over the branches. But how amazing, right? To see lit hot air balloons in the middle of London, a shoe tree in Nevada, a miniature replica of Stonehenge cut from the ice on a lake in Wisconsin -- such a good kind of surprise.

Here I fear that I'm starting to sound like Alain de Botton, and in an attempt to sound less like him, I shall close by reporting that on Sunday we saw Vicky Christina Barcelona, in which Penelope Cruz plays the best jealous lover ever (that woman knows how to do crazy). The film contains an amazing exchange between Scarlett Johanssen (the sexually liberated, experimental blonde who only knows what she doesn't want, not what she does) and her foil (the engaged brunette who is secretly ambivalent about her fiance). The fiance is saying something uptight about the love triangle ScarJo's gotten herself into, and the brunette fires back, "Not another turgid argument about the categorical imperative!" Snap!