Thursday, February 05, 2004
Filters and Distortions
I tried to write in one of the two paper journals I was given for Christmas, but did not get beyond the date and the verb "prevail." There is an alluring pleasure in carving on a page with ink, but one stray stroke seems to deaden the aesthetic of a raw journal. Crude penman that I am, I don't get far in any handwritten affair without a deformed "d" or the crossing of a "t" that erringly decapitates an already questionable cursive "e." Sometimes I try to print when I write on paper, in all caps, like a friend from grade school did. He was an only child, while I had a younger sister who spent most minutes of any hour calculating the precise physics of aggravation appropriate to effect exasperation in me. If there is something dangerously antiseptic about typing on a keyboard into a word processor, it is a sweet danger (like speeding away from the campus on a Friday afternoon past the ever-reprehending local police, who once gave me a full ticket for almost tailgaiting, almost not stopping, and almost speeding. If only I could have almost paid it).
I imagine the vivacity in my current writing style is pretty much a result of digesting the book I have temporarily stolen from the school's ex-library, The Essays of E.B. White. He's had a near-monopoly on my away message content lately, as well. The volume comprises thirty-one select entries from the career of a first-class writer, and I am (sadly) through all of them but two. I am convinced that 'blogs are the natural outgrowth of the human drive to write personal essays (c'mon, I know we all feel it). Each paragraph is both a laugh and lesson in polish (not Polish). His pithy observations can refract into candor or revelation at any corner. These essays are like the best short stories, and to me, lately, speak to me with more substance. (Not strange is my likewise distaste for narrative films, and my affinity for documentary).
While nothing replaces the joy of White in full context, I'll transcribe a passage that I've re-read several times. It's from a piece titled ""The Ring of Time" and is included in the Florida section. It's a meditation on a circus performer, practicing.
The ten-minute ride the girl took achieved -- as far as I was concerned, who wasn't looking for it, and quite unbeknowest to her, who wasn't even striving for it -- the thing that is sought by performers everywhere, on whatever stage, whether struggling in the tidal currents of Shakespeare or bucking the difficult motion of a horse. I somehow got the idea she was just cadging a ride, improving a shining ten-minutes in the diligent way all serious artists seize free moments to hone the blade of their talent and keep themselves in trim...
The richness of the scene was in its plainness, its natural condition -- of horse, of ring, of girl, even to the girl's bare feet that gripped the bare back of her proud and ridiculous mount. The enchantment grew not out of anything that happened or was performed but out of something that seemed to go round and around and around with the girl, attending her, a steady gleam in the shape of a circle -- a ring of ambition, of happiness, of youth. (And the positive pleasures of equilibrium under difficulties). In a week or two, all would be changed, all (or almost all) lost: the girl would wear makeup, the horse would wear gold, the ring would be painted, the bark would be clean for the feet of the horse, the girl's feet would be clean for the slippers that she'd wear. All, all would be lost.
As I watched with the others, our jaws adroop, our eyes alight, I became painfully conscious of the element of time. Everything in the hideous old building seemed to take the shape of a circle, conforming to the course of the horse. The rider's gaze, as she peered straight ahead, seemed to be circular, as though bent by the force of circumstance; then time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere. The girl wasn't so young that she did not know the delicious satisfaction of having a perfectly behaved body and the fun of using it to do a trick most people can't do, but she was too young to know that time does not really move in a circle at all. I thought: "She will never be as beautiful as this again" -- a thought that made me acutely unhappy -- and in a flash my mind (which is too much of a busybody to suit me) had projected her twenty-five years ahead, and she was now in the center of the ring, on foot, wearing a conical hat and high-heeled shoes, the image of the older woman, holding the long rein, caught in the treadmill of an afternoon long in the future. "She is at the enviable moment of life [I thought] when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as the start." Everything in her movements, her expression, told you that for her the ring of time was perfectly formed, changeless, predictable, without beginning or end, like the ring in which she was traveling at this moment with the horse that wallowed under her...
Her ride ended as casually as it had begun. The older woman stopped the horse, and the girl slid to the ground. As she walked toward us to leave, there was a quick, small burst of applause. She smiled broadly, in surprise and pleasure; then her face suddenly regained its gravity and she disappeared through the door.
I tried to write in one of the two paper journals I was given for Christmas, but did not get beyond the date and the verb "prevail." There is an alluring pleasure in carving on a page with ink, but one stray stroke seems to deaden the aesthetic of a raw journal. Crude penman that I am, I don't get far in any handwritten affair without a deformed "d" or the crossing of a "t" that erringly decapitates an already questionable cursive "e." Sometimes I try to print when I write on paper, in all caps, like a friend from grade school did. He was an only child, while I had a younger sister who spent most minutes of any hour calculating the precise physics of aggravation appropriate to effect exasperation in me. If there is something dangerously antiseptic about typing on a keyboard into a word processor, it is a sweet danger (like speeding away from the campus on a Friday afternoon past the ever-reprehending local police, who once gave me a full ticket for almost tailgaiting, almost not stopping, and almost speeding. If only I could have almost paid it).
I imagine the vivacity in my current writing style is pretty much a result of digesting the book I have temporarily stolen from the school's ex-library, The Essays of E.B. White. He's had a near-monopoly on my away message content lately, as well. The volume comprises thirty-one select entries from the career of a first-class writer, and I am (sadly) through all of them but two. I am convinced that 'blogs are the natural outgrowth of the human drive to write personal essays (c'mon, I know we all feel it). Each paragraph is both a laugh and lesson in polish (not Polish). His pithy observations can refract into candor or revelation at any corner. These essays are like the best short stories, and to me, lately, speak to me with more substance. (Not strange is my likewise distaste for narrative films, and my affinity for documentary).
While nothing replaces the joy of White in full context, I'll transcribe a passage that I've re-read several times. It's from a piece titled ""The Ring of Time" and is included in the Florida section. It's a meditation on a circus performer, practicing.
The ten-minute ride the girl took achieved -- as far as I was concerned, who wasn't looking for it, and quite unbeknowest to her, who wasn't even striving for it -- the thing that is sought by performers everywhere, on whatever stage, whether struggling in the tidal currents of Shakespeare or bucking the difficult motion of a horse. I somehow got the idea she was just cadging a ride, improving a shining ten-minutes in the diligent way all serious artists seize free moments to hone the blade of their talent and keep themselves in trim...
The richness of the scene was in its plainness, its natural condition -- of horse, of ring, of girl, even to the girl's bare feet that gripped the bare back of her proud and ridiculous mount. The enchantment grew not out of anything that happened or was performed but out of something that seemed to go round and around and around with the girl, attending her, a steady gleam in the shape of a circle -- a ring of ambition, of happiness, of youth. (And the positive pleasures of equilibrium under difficulties). In a week or two, all would be changed, all (or almost all) lost: the girl would wear makeup, the horse would wear gold, the ring would be painted, the bark would be clean for the feet of the horse, the girl's feet would be clean for the slippers that she'd wear. All, all would be lost.
As I watched with the others, our jaws adroop, our eyes alight, I became painfully conscious of the element of time. Everything in the hideous old building seemed to take the shape of a circle, conforming to the course of the horse. The rider's gaze, as she peered straight ahead, seemed to be circular, as though bent by the force of circumstance; then time itself began running in circles, and so the beginning was where the end was, and the two were the same, and one thing ran into the next and time went round and around and got nowhere. The girl wasn't so young that she did not know the delicious satisfaction of having a perfectly behaved body and the fun of using it to do a trick most people can't do, but she was too young to know that time does not really move in a circle at all. I thought: "She will never be as beautiful as this again" -- a thought that made me acutely unhappy -- and in a flash my mind (which is too much of a busybody to suit me) had projected her twenty-five years ahead, and she was now in the center of the ring, on foot, wearing a conical hat and high-heeled shoes, the image of the older woman, holding the long rein, caught in the treadmill of an afternoon long in the future. "She is at the enviable moment of life [I thought] when she believes she can go once around the ring, make one complete circuit, and at the end be exactly the same age as the start." Everything in her movements, her expression, told you that for her the ring of time was perfectly formed, changeless, predictable, without beginning or end, like the ring in which she was traveling at this moment with the horse that wallowed under her...
Her ride ended as casually as it had begun. The older woman stopped the horse, and the girl slid to the ground. As she walked toward us to leave, there was a quick, small burst of applause. She smiled broadly, in surprise and pleasure; then her face suddenly regained its gravity and she disappeared through the door.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
Reconstructing Dad
Gary, Emily, and I reunited in Union Square yesterday for a typical Manhattan Saturday: walking, a movie, slavic dinner, and beer. The only thing missing was Amanda.
The film we saw was the documentary My Architect, the biopic of physically diminutive but reputationally giant Louis Kahn, directed and *starring* his "illegitimate" son, Nathanial Kahn. While not experimental in form or approach, the younger Kahn narrates and directs with the kind of earnest simplicity that disarms most viewers and makes them wish they, too, could be less acerbic about their attitudes toward filmmaking and family. The film's focus is likewise split (yielding, therefore, foci) between the godlike genius of his work and the human failing of his families— and, given Nathanial's emotional envolvment in his subject, it cheats to the human side.
The documentary is atypical in two ways: its settings and its director's relationship to the subject. As Emily noted, many traditional documentaries suffer from interviews conducted with stuffy academics sitting in front of their tidy bookshelves stuffed with books (although, as long as the dialogue is stimulating, the backdrop is usually easily disregarded anyway). In My Architect, Kahn successfully chokes up at least two of his more scholarly interviewees by conducting the interview in one of Kahn's buildings. A younger Bangladeshi architect can barely finish his obsequious praise of Kahn and his masterpiece, the Capital building of Bangladesh, because they're standing on one of its interior parapets. The man cannot stop his tears. Earlier, on location at Kahn's Salk Institute, the film swells in spirituality while accelerated photography reveals the ingenius presence of time in this masterpiece by the ocean. Kahn built in stone, iron, brick, glass, and time. Even when trying, in layman's terms, to explain the qualities of Kahn's designs that make them art, the specialists cannot help but drift into the spiritual or the irrational. The buildings are too monumental (the film suggests Kahn was heavily influened by the timelessnes of the great ancient works of the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians); his admirers run up against them with their senses and are left too devestated to comment articulately.
Time is also how the Nathanial Kahn (at times purposefully, and others inadvertantly) makes such a unique presence of himself as the interviewer. With all the archival footage of the iconic Louis Kahn spliced into the interviews and footage of Nathanial Kahn on his odyssey, their facial resemblance is irrefutable. Nathanial's very existence, in the flesh, moves another of his interviewees to tears. As Kahn questions his mother on camera, asking some rather sharp but honest questions, one cannot but feel the tension and reality. This is real reality, even for a documentary. And the questions, about family and committment, are sharp because of L. Kahn's shady personal life. He managed to father a child with three different women, and be at least part of their lives, secretly, until his death in 1974. Nathanial was concieved when his father was just over 60, and was the legend's only son. One scene unites the three siblings for a conversation about the funeral, at which the two unmarried mothers were almost banished from the service by Kahn's wife. Witnessing Nathanial searching the figures and spaces of his father's past, in order to color this gap in his childhood, elevates the interviewer to subject, while at the same time maintaining his status as director. His roles in producing the film become inextricable from each other: photographer and on-screen presence, director and lost son.
In the closing moments of the film, Nathanial confesses to some sense of closure after completing the project, which was mostly filmed four years ago and had been in post-production ever since. Like any great attempt at biography, most enigmas are unsolved, even if their outlines have been traced. Like trying to define Charles Foster Kane after the closing shots of Citizen Kane, we find the film has only given us tools with which to ponder the mystery of Louis Kahn. He's still a mystery, and that is how it should be.
Gary, Emily, and I reunited in Union Square yesterday for a typical Manhattan Saturday: walking, a movie, slavic dinner, and beer. The only thing missing was Amanda.
The film we saw was the documentary My Architect, the biopic of physically diminutive but reputationally giant Louis Kahn, directed and *starring* his "illegitimate" son, Nathanial Kahn. While not experimental in form or approach, the younger Kahn narrates and directs with the kind of earnest simplicity that disarms most viewers and makes them wish they, too, could be less acerbic about their attitudes toward filmmaking and family. The film's focus is likewise split (yielding, therefore, foci) between the godlike genius of his work and the human failing of his families— and, given Nathanial's emotional envolvment in his subject, it cheats to the human side.
The documentary is atypical in two ways: its settings and its director's relationship to the subject. As Emily noted, many traditional documentaries suffer from interviews conducted with stuffy academics sitting in front of their tidy bookshelves stuffed with books (although, as long as the dialogue is stimulating, the backdrop is usually easily disregarded anyway). In My Architect, Kahn successfully chokes up at least two of his more scholarly interviewees by conducting the interview in one of Kahn's buildings. A younger Bangladeshi architect can barely finish his obsequious praise of Kahn and his masterpiece, the Capital building of Bangladesh, because they're standing on one of its interior parapets. The man cannot stop his tears. Earlier, on location at Kahn's Salk Institute, the film swells in spirituality while accelerated photography reveals the ingenius presence of time in this masterpiece by the ocean. Kahn built in stone, iron, brick, glass, and time. Even when trying, in layman's terms, to explain the qualities of Kahn's designs that make them art, the specialists cannot help but drift into the spiritual or the irrational. The buildings are too monumental (the film suggests Kahn was heavily influened by the timelessnes of the great ancient works of the Romans, Greeks, and Egyptians); his admirers run up against them with their senses and are left too devestated to comment articulately.
Time is also how the Nathanial Kahn (at times purposefully, and others inadvertantly) makes such a unique presence of himself as the interviewer. With all the archival footage of the iconic Louis Kahn spliced into the interviews and footage of Nathanial Kahn on his odyssey, their facial resemblance is irrefutable. Nathanial's very existence, in the flesh, moves another of his interviewees to tears. As Kahn questions his mother on camera, asking some rather sharp but honest questions, one cannot but feel the tension and reality. This is real reality, even for a documentary. And the questions, about family and committment, are sharp because of L. Kahn's shady personal life. He managed to father a child with three different women, and be at least part of their lives, secretly, until his death in 1974. Nathanial was concieved when his father was just over 60, and was the legend's only son. One scene unites the three siblings for a conversation about the funeral, at which the two unmarried mothers were almost banished from the service by Kahn's wife. Witnessing Nathanial searching the figures and spaces of his father's past, in order to color this gap in his childhood, elevates the interviewer to subject, while at the same time maintaining his status as director. His roles in producing the film become inextricable from each other: photographer and on-screen presence, director and lost son.
In the closing moments of the film, Nathanial confesses to some sense of closure after completing the project, which was mostly filmed four years ago and had been in post-production ever since. Like any great attempt at biography, most enigmas are unsolved, even if their outlines have been traced. Like trying to define Charles Foster Kane after the closing shots of Citizen Kane, we find the film has only given us tools with which to ponder the mystery of Louis Kahn. He's still a mystery, and that is how it should be.
