Rest in Peace

You know how celebrity deaths seem to come in threes? After the July 30 double whammy of international director greats Michelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, the other shoe dropped for me with the September death of classic Hollywood actress Jane Wyman. Here in these three artists was a mid-century cluster of craftsmanship and humanity, emotion and intellect.
I discovered Wyman when I watched her star with Rock Hudson in two of Douglas Sirk’s great films, Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows This was last year when I was on a Sirk kick after falling in love with Far From Heaven, a film inspired by All that Heaven Allows.
Far From Heaven pays homage to the meticulous mise en scene of Sirk, especially in regards to its emotive use of rich color, the precise movement of the actors and the architectural arrangement of figures and lines in the frame. Julianne Moore is gifted enough to follow Wyman’s lead without irony and fully live in the tightly mannered acting style . . . . But if I start talking about Far From Heaven, I need to compare Julianne Moore’s performance with her turn in Hayne’s Safe and then go on to Boogie Nights and Magnolia and we’ll be here all night . . .

A German expatriate, Sirk was a master of elaborate mise-en-scene in the service of “women’s pictures,” as these purple family melodramas were often called. Sirk made beautiful and swooningly emotional films, but in their day they didn’t receive the respect of more muscular 1950’s offerings – hard boiled noirs, war pictures, social issue films like On the Waterfront, Gentleman’s Agreement.

In both the Sirk films, the Wyman and Hudson characters fall in love, but are kept apart – in Heaven, by social strictures against their age differences, their social status. Wyman plays a widow with two grown children who oppose her relationship with her younger gardener. In Obsession, incredible plot devices separate the two – Hudson not only accidentally kills Wyman’s husband, but blinds her as well. It is only his rapid transformation from n’ere-do-well playboy to savior eye surgeon that can win her love.

In All That Heaven Allows, Sirk’s transformation of a studio backlot into rural New England through the seasons is a sight to see, especially in the sunlit winter scene when Wyman decides to return to her young lover’s home. She fails to hear Hudson call desperately to her from the cliff above! Hudson slips and falls from the cliff! He nearly dies but is nursed by the health by his love!

I suspect that viewers have one of two reactions to this level of melodrama – you either gasp at the audacity of this kind of thing or roll your eyes and turn the channel. I’m won over by Wyman’s eyes. Her bangs. Intense emotion kept at bay but revealed in those trembling lips.

Jane Wyman, 5 January 1917 – 10 September 2007

In another life, I showed Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries to seniors taking a World Lit course at a Chicago all-boys parochial school. The film worked beautifully for our thematic unit on “Young and Old,” which also included Edward Albee’s short play The Sandbox. Nostalgia visits the film’s elderly protagonist, played by Victor Sjostrom, but also surreal dread of death and meaninglessness.

Bergman’s unexpected mixing of the sweet and the harsh in Wild Strawberries is fascinating to me, and reminiscent of Maugham. The story unwinds as an elderly professor drives to accept a lifetime achievement award, revisiting his childhood home. Scenes of light loveliness alternate with pitch black - in one scene, the professor picks up some hitchhikers, including Bibi Andersson as a teenage blonde who laughs, chatters and delights in the high-pitched lilting clucks and lows of Swedish syllables. Then the car nearly collides with that of a desolate couple whose shockingly bitter argument seems to have landed like a rock through the window from another film entirely.

I came across Bergman’s The Virgin Spring on cable a while back. Within a few minutes, even before I discovered who was the director, it was clear a master storyteller was in charge. Purity and innocence destroyed, then brutally avenged. A story as old as time. Academy Award, best foreign film, 1961.

Ingmar Bergman, 14 July 1918 – 30 July 2007

Antonioni’s Red Desert? I remember the sound of it the most – a thick aural stew of anonymous industrial droning and pounding as lovely Monica Vitti wanders through a luridly colored wasteland of modernity . . .

And ah, Blow-Up. Such silly pop pleasures from a usually non-commercial artist. The mimes, the eerie silence in the park as David Hemmings shoots a love scene – or is it a murder?, Vanessa Redgrave laughing with no shirt on, The Yardbirds in concert. London at its frothiest.

Michelangelo Antonioni, 29 September 1912 – 30 July 2007

Guiness commercial by Jonathan Glazer

Jonathan Glazer directed Sexy Beast. Look at this color!

Guinness is good for you. Like Malcolm Lowry's drunk said in Under the Volcano, beer is full of vitamins.

Jack Black- Be Kind Rewind

Gondry owes me some laughs. Just THINKING about "Endless Sunshine" makes me cry.

Around the House and In the Garden

Around the House and In the Garden is a lovely collection of essays about “heartbreak, healing and home improvement” by Dominique Browning, a divorced mother of two sons.

Lest you fear, as I did for a couple of minutes, that the writer’s day job as the editor of House and Garden magazine would have you stumbling as you read over designer names you feel like you should have heard of, or French terms for fancy furniture you’d never want in your comfy home, don’t worry.

Yes, there is a reference to a prie dieu, (hm?) but Browning reassures in each brief essay that meaning lies in the love, the comforting habits and the beauty created within a home rather than the sticks of furniture inside its walls.

The writing comforts and sustains, even as Browning takes us on her painful journey of deciding to leave her marriage, tearing a home asunder, grieving the emptiness, and working towards healing. There is agony on the way. When her son compares her to his father’s new wife, the normally gentle and equanimous author hisses, “Don’t you ever talk to me about that woman again,” and you feel the raw wounds of parent, child, family, home.

But spring returns with its crocus blooms, light enters the rooms again and Browning rediscovers joy in life and its beautiful objects. She writes, ". . . Even though, after several years of being on my own, and still taking to my bed on occasion, overwhelmed, I fell alive again. Attuned to the lives around me. I see beauty, again, and I feel the spirit pulsing in the things of everyday life."

In the spirit of how beloved things of this world can work pleasure on you, here are some of my favorite things this week:

1. Far friends who keep in touch and remind me that “Everything you need has been given to you and is inside you.”

2. The plastic parakeet on a tiny perch on our kitchen counter who chirps via motion sensor each time I walk by. He keeps me company and I don’t have to feed him or clean up his poop. What better pet?

3. Mad Men, continuing to please way past its pilot (ha! Good luck with THAT, Pushing Daisies!)

And 30 Rock, funny as ever (Tina Fey calls her ex-boyfriend and a woman answers so Tina pretends to be a survey company. “How old are you? . . . How much do you weigh? . . . When was the last time you had sex? . . . Well, who are YOU!? . . . No, who do YOU think YOU is?!” Hang up. I’m snorting with laughter.)

And one-third of Tell Me You Love Me – the couple-with-kids storyline. Forget the other whiner characters; this is the plot to follow. It’s an utterly moving portrayal of two good people who are working their butts off to be good parents but have become stymied by the mysteries of each other’s desire. The kitchen table with the kids is their safe cottage; the bedroom is the dark forest where they are lost.

4. Our Toyota hybrid. Because I don’t have to feel guilty driving Mia to school in an internal combustion engine, and waiting in carpool line I get to play with the computer map in the dash, and the CD player. The energy graph that tells me my mileage by the second is my coach in amateur hyper-mileaging as I coast to stops, and confuse other drivers by keeping within the speed limit.

5. Recently spied bumper stickers:

“Isis, Isis, Rah Rah Rah!”

“Mental Illness Runs in Every Family.” I don’t know why this last one makes me smile, but it does.

6. A Mate Latte with almond. “Mate has caffeine, but it is water soluble, so it’s not as much a shock to your system as coffee,” said the Argo Tea woman. I don’t know what she meant, but mmm, it’s good.

7. My khaki-green Free People shirtwaist dress from Crossroads Trading Company. It’s my go-to dress for almost any casual outing. Recycled! Cheap! Flattering!

Shopping at this place does make me feel a bit like the crazy old college-town lady who wears too much rouge and thinks she's still one of the kids, but I get to overhear delicious bits like this in the coed fitting room.

Guy one: Did you try on these True Religions shoes? They’re too small for me.

Guy two: I think these are women’s True Religions. (Pause) I don’t care. They look good.

Art by Number

The state of the U.S. in statistics, transformed into art.

Party On

The decision to take Mia’s Saturday party away from home was a good one. The children took a walk in the woods on a beautiful cool morning, pausing to play non-competitive nature games along the way. We had sandwiches and the cake delivered to the nature center. Mr. Nicky played a great set, including a special song all about Mia’s day. The children left with pots of pansies and little mouse cookies.

Too much? Of course. But as I was driving home with the leftovers and bags of dirty plastic dishes to wash in my efforts to be a green hostess, I felt good. My freakage was kept to a minimum. It was all over in three quick hours and everyone seemed happy, even poor little Sebastian, who sobbed because he couldn’t sit next to his beloved Mia during lunch.

Feeling good is not very much what I do these days, so this ease of heart made me wonder, with what does one fill her mind when it is not topped off with worry? What replaces anxiety, regret, and guilt when we finally get rid of them – as this believer in recovery knows we can do?

Gratitude? Yes. Problem-solving? Yeah. Writing work – say, new sentence construction? Sure!

In The Snow Leopard, Peter Matthiessen describes the Buddhist belief that one’s thoughts at death will determine the state of one’s afterlife. “Therefore, every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of the precious human state—the only one in which enlightenment is possible.” (Interesting. He wrote this in October, too.)

There’s a lot to be said for the Christian idea of constant prayer, filling the mind with appreciation, kind intentions for others in need . . . It’s the requirement of praise and self-abnegation that gives me trouble.

Autumn landed with a boom for me on October 1. Overcast sky, shadows in every corner and gloom in my head.

“I’m ordering a SAD light,” I tell Randy. “You can put it next to your tinfoil hat,” he replies.

My nails are in shreds; the therapist is in Tuscany. (Does this make you laugh? It does me. It’s one of the few thoughts that broke through my funk today – that and the sight of Mia all decked out in a shiny new pink blouse for picture day.)

In last month's People magazine, Jenny McCarthy, who went to Mother McAuley High School on the Chicago southside and has always comes across as very real to me, says motherhood really kicked her ass. Her son at two was diagnosed with epilepsy, then autism and the strain tore her marriage apart.

Today everything makes me cry – the babysitter’s story of saving her best friend from an overdose, the memory of my husband describing my recycling as “militant,” Jon Brion’s soundtrack to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At least when I'm crying, I'm not screaming. My resilience is kaput. When Eleanor screams, “No! I won’t!” I answer dully, “I don’t care” or just pick her up, my lower back moaning with the strain, and haul her away.

Randy sends me an email with a picture of the Hang In There kitten on a branch. Thank God for patient and funny husbands, even though their eternal failings make the list of what makes Mommy cry.