No Country for Old Men - film review

The new collaboration between the Coen brothers and Cormac McCarthy "No Country for Old Men" is a dark and hopeless film, full of apocalyptic messages.  


This film is graphic and appealing in an eerie way.  It brings together stellar performances by Tommy Lee Jones, Javier Bardem, Josh Brolin, Kelly Macdonald, and Woody Harrelson.


The plot evolves around an uncanny incarnation of evil in a psychopathic serial killer, Anton Chigurn. 
Anton  uses unorthodox methods in killing his victims, while always escaping at the right time and surviving even the worst of injuries.  


The film starts off with a twist and keeps the viewer on the edge of his seat until the end, which I thought was a total let down.  Despite good intentions, the ending is unsuccessful in leaving any kind of moral message to take away.  


I walked out of the theater feeling very empty.  Perhaps it should be so when it comes to serial killers.  There is really nothing one can do with a man like Anton.  


This is a film I will remember, but try hard to forget.   

Life of Pi

This book by Yann Martel is one that is likely to remain in my memory for a long time. It is a very different novel, a half real half imaginary tale of coexistence between an Indian teenager and Bengal tiger, aboard a life boat drifting for nine months in the open of the Pacific. With the use of vividly striking imagery Martel examines a developing relationship between a tiger and a boy that is neither friendship, nor attachment, but a bond on many varying levels. This bond develops slowly, over many months and is shaky at best, but ends very abruptly without justification. Or does it?

With the use of philosophical allegory, the author explores the dualities between human and animal, good and evil, physical and metaphysical, conscious and subconscious, reality and imagination, instinct and will. The most refreshing part of the novel is its ending - it presents a novel choice for the reader in the form of a “second story” - an alternative explanation for the (mis)adventures that befell the characters. The reader is then left with an option of deciding which story to believe, or whether to believe at all.

scapes

St. Thomas

  
Rome                                                                         Russia


Austin

  
Hawaii

On friendship after a breakup

I read this on Oprah.com recently and decided to repost in its entirety as this article gives excellent reasons for why exes should not try being friends soon after a breakup:

(OPRAH.com) -- A young man I know, still in love with his girlfriend, tried to go along with her plea to remain friends after she told him that she wanted the freedom to see other men.

A couple of months later, she invited him to her birthday party. In the course of the evening, while searching for a bathroom, he saw her through an open bedroom door passionately kissing another man. Feeling deeply hurt and angry, he later confronted her, whereupon she retorted, "But we said we'd be friends."

The girlfriend's response seems lacking in empathy and concern -- traits we usually associate with friendship -- but one wonders whether the young man wasn't setting himself up for a fall in the first place.

"Can't we be friends?" It's an old refrain, ready-made for the one who wants out of a relationship to deliver to the one who doesn't. Frank Sinatra gave it a permanent place in popular culture with the song "Can't We Be Friends?" ("This is how the story ends / She's gonna turn me down and say / Can't we be just friends?") Sinatra, who never backed away from melancholy (at least in his music), understood a thing or two about mourning. Oprah:com: Stuck in the past? How to move on

And mourning is the theme that matters here. Trying to be friends immediately following a breakup tends to prevent the rejected partner (and maybe both partners) from mourning the death of romantic love -- from accepting its finality by suffering it all the way through.

As painful as this can be, it ultimately performs an essential function. Behind the tears, mourning has silent work to do: It binds up the torn places where love was and gives them a chance to heal.

This is crucial because falling in love carries us beyond our customary limits of self-expression into territory that puts our sense of self at risk. Two people in love place much of themselves in each other's hands for safekeeping; that kind of interdependence is why the loss of an intimate partner entails the depressing experience of being left behind with a diminished sense of your own existence.

Grieving the end of a relationship is a gradual process of extracting the "I" from a vanishing "we." It provides a way -- the only way -- to retrieve what you invested in a lover or spouse who has departed. Mourning is like casting a line into dark waters and trying to reel in those parts of yourself that you surrendered to the relationship before they, too, disappear.

Although friendship just after the split may offer temporary relief, it blocks the slow but necessary passage from loss to restoration of independence. Oprah:com: Meet women who started over and found their true calling

A number of years ago, I saw a patient who felt that her sex life was essentially over because she had suddenly been left by the man with whom she had experienced her first grand erotic passion. She did everything she could to win him back -- calling, sending gifts, even promising to change anything about herself that wasn't satisfying to him -- all to no avail.

It took extensive work (and many tears) before she was able to see that the unparalleled sexiness she attributed to him was in fact the power of her own sexual desire. At this point, his image began to lose its magnetism for her.

What her experience suggests is that if you give in to mourning, unsettling though it may be, it will eventually finish its work. Only then do you again become free to fully inhabit your present life and turn from a sorrowing fixation on the past to the exciting unknown of the future.

All human development entails suffering losses that need to be grieved. At every stage of life, we are propelled beyond familiarity and security into a new situation: A baby's first steps mean that she will soon leave behind the comforting security of being carried. A young adult going off to college feels the thrill of freedom but has to contend with homesickness. For all the important gains, there are also losses that bring up anxiety and sadness. Grief might be thought of as the growing pain of human development.

A child's love is really no different from dependence, and that equation haunts us to some degree all our lives. The residues of early dependence in all our intimacies play a large part in making the loss of love so hard to bear. Yet we all go through such loss, leaving behind a trail of casualties -- outdated selves, broken promises, lovers we realize we chose for the wrong reasons. Mourning these helps change what can seem like failures into wisdom.

In learning how to grieve our losses, it doesn't help that American culture, with its emphasis on romantic love and happy endings, isn't very hospitable to mourning. But when we enter into the deeper and more difficult stretches of loving, Hollywood can't shield us from the truth: All love stories come to an end, even those that last a lifetime. When loss hits us hard, it can be difficult to know what to do with it or even how to bear it. Many people in grief turn to antidepressants, which may reduce the pain but don't necessarily provide much by way of self-discovery.

Mourning teaches us how to accept the end of love and helps us start the process of feeling whole again. True, the self you get back is never quite the same as the self you relinquished to your relationship; although wounds can heal, they leave scar tissue. But there's more to gain than just surviving the breakup; there's also the possibility of becoming more than you were, more able to undertake the experience of love in its moments of sadness as well as joy. As with any art or skill, the only way grieving can be learned is through practice -- whether we like it or not.

By Michel Vincent Miller, Ph.D, from "O, The Oprah Magazine," July 2008

Jitterbug Perfume, on the essence of beets

I just finished reading Jitterbug Perfume, a delightful novel by Tom Robins, which deals with immortality and (you guessed it) perfume! 


In this novel, Robins intertwines four separate stories, set in the 8th century Bohemia and 1980s New Orleans, Seattle and Paris. Each story has a common theme about aging, the sense of smell, individualism, independence, love, and religion. I found the plot to be intricate, constructed masterfully with descriptive metaphors that are uniquely “Robins”.

The book also deals with other things, but one that is most worth mentioning is the beet. That’s right, a vegetable that is very uniquely bold and often under appreciated. People who are not familiar with the magic qualities of the beet most likely did not grow up eating beets in the quantities Russians do and may, therefore, lack proper understanding of the value this vegetable adds to one’s life. Robins, however, gets the beet and saturates his entire novel with the essence of beets:

"The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent, not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious."

I agree with Robins - the beet is worth contemplation. 

Understanding Poverty - a Diverse Work Exhibition

"We think sometimes that poverty is being hungry, naked and homeless.  The poverty of being unwanted, unloved and uncared for is the greatest poverty. We must start in our own homes to remedy this kind of poverty." 

--Mother Theresa

After many years of documenting life on the streets of Houston, photographer Ben Tecumseh DeSoto tells the stories of the homeless and working poor, the “broke and the broken,” with his exhibit Understanding Poverty, curated by Clint Willour, and words by Ann Walton Sieber. 

The Understanding Poverty is an ongoing collaboration of DeSoto with writer/editor Ann Walton Sieber in the role of Project Editor. Sieber’s contributions include field reporting, writing and conception of not only the exhibition text, but also the developing book and documentary film with DeSoto as first camera. DeSoto's work on poverty and homelessness dates back to 1980.  From 1981 to 2006 he was a staff photographer for the Houston Chronicle, working as "a journalist, an artist and humanist."

Two of the main subjects of this exhibition are Ben White and Judy Pruitt, whom DeSoto encountered in 1988 while on assignment for the newspaper.

White is in prison, where he feels safer that on the street because that is the only place where he can get any assistance from the government as a convicted felon. For him, it is easier to live in prison and be cared for than having to fend for himself on the streets.
 
The Houston Chronicle has published stories on both White and Pruitt, but DeSoto's ongoing relationship with each of them  gave him an opportunity to document their lives over a long period of time. 

His photographs show Ben and Judy on and off the streets, prison, court system, and halfway houses. 

Judy Pruitt started as a prostitute, working the streets 

She had more than one child and here she is pictured siting in the courthouse, waiting for a hearing during which they take away her parental rights to one of her children



Judy, also known as Snow eventually became a pastor, ministering to prison populations while struggling with liver cancer. She came up to me at the exhibition opening and shared her story of naïveté, helplessness, hope, faith, and starting anew. She was taken advantage of many times and continues to suffer and fall victim due to lack of education and lower than average intelligence. She is street smart, hard working, but too trusting for this world. Today, she is back on the street, doing any kind of work she can find. Despite her many failures, she is a fighter, who remains full of hope and will never give up on living.



“The streets of Houston have been a regular “beat” I worked with my camera,” says DeSoto, “and I want others to see what I’ve seen, and understand what I’ve come to understand, the role of the trauma in magnifying the drama of poverty.” 

With this exhibition DeSoto explains the causes of homelessness: 
"To really understand poverty, (people need) an understanding of the role of post-traumatic stress disorder — the trauma of living with an overwhelming and out-of-your-control experience," he said in an interview with the Houston Chronicle.

According to DeSoto, homelessness is "not the problem in itself but a symptom of the problem. The photographs ... I hope, bring that information together."

Meal Ticket



The Understanding Poverty project has become a joint effort between DiverseWorks, the Houston Endowment, Que Imaging, and other collaborators, including the photography subjects.  It is supported by the efforts of the Mayor’s Blue Ribbon Commission to End Chronic Homelessness, and the Coalition for the Homeless of Houston/Harris County, among others. 

(c) Pictures by Vika!

Everything is Illuminated

 "Everything is Illuminated" is a Liev Schreiber's film based on the book by Jonathan Safran Foer under the same title.  The title of the film refers to the way the past emits light onto the present.  True to the book, the film reshapes the dark history of the past with acceptance and forgiveness in the present.

Elijah Wood plays Jonathan Safran Foer, a young American writer preoccupied with his family past. Intrigued by the keepsakes left behind by his grandfather, who managed to escape the Nazis as a young man, Jonathan embarks on a trip in search of the village where his grandfather lived.

Jonathan's guide is a young man from Odessa named Alex.  He is played by Eugene Hutz, a singer and composer of the critically-acclaimed New York Gypsy Punk rock band Gogol Bordello, who left Ukraine at the age of 14.  A seven-year exit through East European refugee camps provided Hütz with experience that is well reflected in Alex’s character as a Ukranian smitten by everything American. 

Jonathan is the exact opposite of Alex – a vegetarian boy, reserved, with neatly parted hair, black suit and white button-down shirt, he looks like he came from the 1960s and could star in the Mad Men episodes.  In contrast, Ukrainian Alex is a confident break dancer, decked out in gold chains and Adidas tracksuit, who spews English in broken translations of slang and proclaims: "Many girls want to be carnal with me because I'm such a premium dancer."

Accompanied by Alex's grandfather, a grumpy old man who works as a chauffeur for Americans on tours of their ancestral villages, and a dog named Sammy Davis Jr., Jr., Jonathan and Alex engage in a search for the vanished Ukrainian town, which reveals hidden sides to every one's character. 

Narrated through reminiscent shots of Ukrainian landscapes (filmed in Czeck Republic), this journey evokes a deep emotional response to historical references of the destruction of Ukraine's Jews. The film chooses to intersperse the devastation of the Holocaust with whimsical humor of the present that is comparable to comedic outbreaks used in the Italian film “Life is Beautiful”.  Exposing, but brushing over survivor's guilt, the film does not linger on the hard topics, turning rediscovered past crimes into forgiveness, to be further forgotten with time.

Although not critically acclaimed as an creative achievement, this film is moving, humorous and thought provoking.  It made me a little nostalgic as I recalled driving around Ukraine with my parents, down a road with no name, looking for a little tiny town in the middle of nowhere, tracing family’s roots.  


It also reminded me of another road less traveled. 


From a memory came this poem:

The day is lived through
But it's not too late
Come in - I say;
And you believe me

You shed a coat
Through narrow doorway
Like naked moon
Squeezes through window

A night is quiet in the background
A lonely voyage, far away
Sings song of love you never found
I listen as you smile and sway

The road is long, it is unknown
It calls to me - I hear it weep
I wait intently and I wonder
How long until my wings are clipped?