Spaulding Gray gives a false ending in his book. When he turns the corner and sees the Indian Ocean, he talks about the joy, but then says it was a 9 and he needed a 10 for his perfect moment. This felt a little like cheating to me, but I’m glad that feeling that way helped me to notice it. There is a long history of the false ending in art. One thing it does (in a performance, such as Gray was doing) is wake up any audience members who might be dozing off. “Have we reached the end?” they ask and perk up to get ready to leave.

I’m not sure even Franzen could articulate this, but his opening scene to Freedom made me see one social trend that might help explain one aspect of the conservative backlash. In the late 1970s, inner cities were dangerous, and many who stayed did so because they had the working class’s equivalent of a trust fund: a house that was paid for by previous generations and on which they were only paying taxes. In the 80s, gentrifiers came in and put sweat equity into inner city neighborhoods, and the people who were already there now were sitting on houses worth more but also with a higher tax burden. Perhaps this partly explains the many working class voters electing those who cut taxes for the wealthy.

As far as narrators go, Franzen has give us some of the best and the bitchiest. The book grinds to a halt when he decides to change the form to the diary of a main character. Without Franzen’s guiding incisiveness, the tension falls out of the story.  To take himself out of the story telling is to rob it of its power.

The “plot” is really just the lives of the main characters living out, but the theme each situation they find themselves in share is how capitalism (and its relationship to politics) taints every interaction in our society. The “main” character is Patty (the diary portion is hers), whose wealthy family decides to sweep under the rug her rape as a teen at the hands of the son of a local politically powerful friend of her father’s. She goes to the University of Minnesota to get away from her family and meets her eventual husband Walter. From a poor, dysfunctional family in Hibbing, Walter wants to do good rather than do well and chooses to do so through politics.  But the environmental trust he is hired to run turns out to be a shell game to net its corporate overlords more money. She also meets Richard. An iconoclast musician disdaining mainstream culture, he is (of course) eventual made a cult hero by the mainstream, putting him in a no-win situation artistically. Patty’s son Joey develops a passion for unbridled money making early in life, much to his parents’ dismay. But he (like his father) enters into a business deal in which his partners sacrifice him for their own profits.

In the end, pursuit of these ends causes the family to break apart. When Patty’s dad dies, she has to negotiate the inheritance with her siblings. The management of wealth and passing it on to future generations is maybe the big theme here (“wealth” in many meanings; Walter’s trust is to preserve forest habitat for a rare bird).  And it affects the politics of each family and the Family of Humans. How to negotiate that and manage our impulse for greediness is the big question of our day and of this novel–a book of its day.

In cyberspace no one can hear you scream. Or whisper. Or argue for sanity.

Media Criticism 101:

Sun-Times headline: “Occupy Wall street slightly more popular than Wall Street.”

Article content: A poll showed OWS was 32% popular and Wall Street 16%.

In other words, headline: “Occupy Wall street TWICE AS popular as Wall Street.”

Media Criticism 102:

Wall Street Journal headline: “Credit Unions Poach Customers.”

“Poach”? This is the kind of arrogance of Wall Street against which OWS is demonstrating. When the banks’ own practices result in customers fleeing to credit unions, the banks blame the credit unions. They instead need to take a look in the mirror.

How to incorporate time, the fourth dimensions of art? Her famous performance on skates frozen into an ice block was a way to answer that. She had that problem because her art was not based on the Western ideal of “a person encounters a problem and they overcome it (or not).” So how do you know when it is over? When the ice melts.

The idea for a singing table came to her when frustrated with writing something on an electric typewriter. She put her head on her hand and her elbow on the table and heard the hum of the typewriter’s motor. She spoke of how the little is the big (and vice versa). A bad day writing can turn into an idea for a singing table, for example.

She recently created some sculptures for a Japanese garden as part of an Expo. The garden led from lush beauty to barren wasteland, like the cycle of life. Breaking the pattern of rhyming. Why, she wondered, in Western art is there always “rhyme,” in the sense of connecting one thing to another. In Japanese haiku, it is connecting a thing only to itself, or evoking one thing, In isolation rather than in contrast.

She designed a sculpture for the Japanese garden in which haiku went downward in a straight line of lights in Japanese characters, and when it hit the water, it circled in letters of light in English or another language. She designed a sculpture of metal strips rattling in the wind in trees. Only when seen from a child’s height on the path at the right angle did they line up to portray a Japanese mythic character. She put speakers under a bridge that “played” sounds when you ran your hand along the bridge railing.

Simple ways of creating beauty and reawakening people to the world. This is why she was awarded the Gish prize for “outstanding contributions to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.”

In Australia, she gave a performance for dogs. Because dogs listen. Better than humans. They have better hearing. (They may have better focus, but that’s another essay.)

Instead of being called a “performance artist,” she preferred the term “multimedia artist.” That way, she explained, if you write a book, you’re just changing media and people can’t complain that you are not an artist in that form.

She talked about there being no reality. “We’re not even here is my personal belief,” she said offhandedly.

She is known for her incorporation of technology into art. She was NASA’s first ever art-in-residence (and last she admitted). She said that we need artists in residence in other areas and singled out Congress. That got a big round of applause.

She stated simply what I have been struggling to express about life since 9/11. “Fear can make certain people a lot of money.” But she feels people are finally awaking from their fear and standing up to the institutions put in place by corporations and politicians to take advantage of that fear. She said she feels the world has changed more in the ten years since 9/11 than in any other ten-year span.

She lamented that we are losing the human voice, something I identified in a conversation with Jen Neal over three years ago. I naively thought of filling that void by speaking in podcasts and vlogs. But Laurie noted that that is not the human voice any more than an mp3 is music. An mp3 is the compression of sounds so as to be playable on electric media. She talked of how musicians go out of their way to record in a studio in a spatial way. For example, you might put a guitar at eleven o’clock and another at one o’clock. Compression flattens them; they might both sound like they are coming from twelve o’clock. She said she was invited by early mp3 developers to hear her music in electronic form; they eagerly asked her what she thought. She said, “It’s terrible. It’s not music and it’s not my music.”

            My wife and I went to see an exhibit of Soviet posters at Northwestern’s Block Gallery this past weekend, and I noticed the irregular lines of letters where the lithograph, stencil, or silk screen had minutely dribbled, scraped, or otherwise affected the paint line. “No computer logarithm can ever reproduce that,” I thought. And that was Laurie’s point. We need to get back to the human mark.

The girl who asked her the question that led to Laurie being silent for one minute could not help but drum her fingers in the silence. This Internet generation needs to be stimulated 24/7, can’t sit still. You will never hear your inner voice that way, nor the voice of The Other.

My wife and I ran home and watched the Robert Wilson documentary, Absolute Wilson.

A Tree is Best Measured when it is Down (CIVIL WAR$).

No, really; the final movie was My Worst Nightmare. There’s an obvious joke there. And tempting, too, because I disliked much of this movie. And yet it was not nearly as bad as consistently as some other ones we had seen before our final day (we saw this the same day as Peace Love & Misunderstanding).

The premise (like Peace Love & Misunderstanding) is that an uptight woman gets “thawed” by a wild-hearted man. This being Paris, she is an exacting art gallery owner, and he is a Belgian drunk. Mary asked why I disliked it so much, and I was hard pressed to say. The characters were beyond the level of believability, but not so far beyond that they reached the realm of the comic. Thus, I didn’t believe them before the crisis of the plot got things moving, and I didn’t believe the plot as it unfolded because I didn’t believe the characters. I could not willingly suspend disbelief. I understand that it is a French farce and a comedy of manners, but again, that does not save a film that is not artistically good enough to keep me suspending disbelief.

So: real life and noble ideas (artistic or political) are no excuse for bad art. You can make a god movie about anything, and you can make a bad one about anything. Some of these topics were important to look at. But the look (or looking) has to be interesting, too.

            Peace Love and Misunderstanding. Actually the title includes an ampersand. Peace Love & Misunderstanding. This was by far the best movie we saw. This is an interesting assessment only if you know that I have a long history of preferring foreign movies and art house films and of disliking mainstream Hollywood movies. This is a mainstream Hollywood movie. But perhaps it is a lesson in why people like Hollywood so much. The main story is about an uptight lawyer (Catherine Keener) who takes her kids to her hippie mother’s (Jane Fonda) in Woodstock because Keener is getting a divorce from her husband. There are the usual and expected and clichéd plot points of Keener resisting and then succumbing to the more laidback lifestyle of the hippie locals. Meanwhile, her son keeps filming video in hopes of becoming a famous documentary filmmaker, and the daughter falls for a young man who works at the local butcher in Woodstock. The daughter is a pacifist vegetarian initially against the young man, but she learns that he does it to keep in business farms like his dad’s, which was taken from him by corporate lawyers. In a later scene, the butcher kills a deer hit by his truck to put the deer out of its misery. The daughter had wanted to try to take the deer to a vet. The butcher says he is on the side of life, neither a protester nor a patriot, just a guy trying to get by.

            So many plot lines are hard to bring together, and the director Bruce Beresford makes a wise choice by having the climax of the movie be the documentary film that the son made out of his footage. It actually includes video we have not seen him take, and all are woven into a non-strident film about man’s incredible ability for both cruelty and love. Being Hollywood, it couldn’t leave well enough alone, and there is a tacked on ending where Keener and her kids move in with grandma. But to me the crux was the film within a film. It showed how the youngest, those watching the older generations bicker and make mistakes, find a way of making sense through the new media available to them. Again, I have to emphasize that this metaphorical overlay of the movie is my projection or is there for you to get or not get. At heart, this is a typical romantic comedy plot. There are many funny moments and many touching ones. It was nice to be put through the wringer. I felt like this was the first movie to put me through the wringer. But then I realized it was the first to put me through the wringer emotionally. The others had put me through the wringer aesthetically.

            After a quick opening scene in which we learn of the divorce, there are a couple scenes of the car with Keener and her kids on the highway, and then they pass a sign saying “Woodstock 3 miles.” I mean, it’s not rocket science, right, to get a character from one place to another without the audience losing track of where we are. The movies we had seen so far had not been able to do this basic task.