2009

Chicago

Over the weekend, I visited Chicago for the first time, to attend a friend’s wedding.  It was a good trip, but a very busy time.  While I saw a lot of the city and surrounding area, there were still some sights that I wasn’t able to see.  I’ve read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, and while I know there’s not much left in terms of the fair site, I had wanted to see more of the city that dealt with that part of its history.  I did manage to take an architecture boat tour, where I heard more about Daniel Burnham and John Root.  Also, the architecture in the city is really grand-in addition to skyscrapers, there are many great Art Deco buildings.  Our guide also mentioned that a several buildings had recently been filmed as part of Gotham City in The Dark Knight.  The trip also made me want to pick up a few books on the Chicago Fire of 1871.

Five Greek epigraphs

My husband recently finished writing a book about foreign policy.  Just as it was about to go to press, he hit a snag: he had started each chapter with an epigraph, a short quotation, from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides.  Now, you would think that anyone who wrote 2,500 years ago would be out of copyright and could be quoted freely, and you would be right, BUT…the owner of the English translation that my husband was using wanted $150 for each quotation, or 750 clams total.  My husband could translate Thucydides himself but doesn’t feel terribly confident of his own ancient Greek skills, although he knows Greek “a little.” Luckily, there is a translation that’s in the public domain, which means it can be freely copied and quoted.  It’s in the Perseus Digital Library, a web site with a wealth of primary and secondary source information on the ancient world.   So this is a grateful shoutout to the people behind Perseus: Greg Crane and Tufts University.   I’m in awe of this amazing example of scholarly publishing at its best! Are you looking for advice about using someone else’s work in your own scholarship?  Ask your subject librarian at the NU Libraries for assistance.  Maybe there’s a resource like Perseus for you, too!

L’Appartement: Wicker Park, gone French

Last week I half-heartedly – in the course of my Netflix Watch Instantly browsing – and completely by chance, started watching the french film L’Appartment. Imagine my tickled surprise when, about three minutes in, I realized that the uncanny resemblance it held to the 2004 American film Wicker Park couldn’t be an accident. Sure enough, a quick Wikipedia confirmed that Wicker Park (Josh Hartnett, Diane Kruger, Rose Byrne) was based on the 1996 film starring the Vincent Cassel (known in America for Eastern Promises and the Ocean’s X stuff) and Monica Belucci (The Passion of the Christ, Matrix: Reloaded, Shoot ‘Em Up). As a lover of Wicker Park both for its incredible soundtrack, as well as its eerie ambience, I committed to L’appartement, eager to discover if the original  would stay true to the parts of Wicker Park I knew and loved, while tightening up some of the pieces that have always left me uneasy, confused, and just downright angry. L’Appartement makes more sense, I’ll give it that. The ending is less ‘Hollywood’, and has a nice mixture of cathartic closure and bizarre twists. And while I love the precious slow-motion finale scene from 2004 of Josh Hartnett chasing through the airport for Lisa while Coldplay’s The Scientist rings in the background, I must admit that it defeated the purpose of all the unexpected empathy that the film up until then seemed to be collecting for the Lisa-rival character. The French film resolved that better. Also, Daniel, a character whose role I never fully understood in the American version, enters the film again in the French version and makes him seem less like the confusing tack-on character he was in the 2004 film. I remember watching Wicker Park in the theater in 2004. Days later, after getting over the thrill of the soundtrack (Strange and Beautiful by Aqualung, We Have a Map of the Piano by Múm, and an incredible cover of The Scientist by Danny Lohner and Johnette Napolitano) I realized that although I loved the movie, I didn’t like any of the characters that ‘won’, and that I didn’t approve of the ending in the way I approve of fairy tale endings, which was how the film tried to make its ending out to be. I had too much pity for the characters left behind, and couldn’t help feeling that the proverbial underdog of the film – and true hero – had been cheated by the plot. The French version certainly does a 180 in terms of which female character it favors, (although there’s still the poor abused cuckold minor character (Luke, or Lucien) that neither version seems too compassionate toward). In general, I feel as if the ’96 film – while much less pretty sounding or looking (those ’90s clothes, hairstyles and lighting styles are hard to overlook), is much more meaningful and has more to say. Wicker Park with Josh Hartnett is like one big American music video – pretty sounds and pretty people with the perfect prince and princess getting together in the end, while the whipping girl is left thrust to the side. I love music videos, don’t get me wrong. But I also love a good meaningful, fiery death. And while the American version has the ambience of the former, only the French version can give me the latter. Here’s a music video drawing from Wicker Park scenes for Postal Service’s cover of Phil Collins’ ‘Against All Odds’ and here’s a detailed essay comparing the two from cinemademerde.com. I should warn you: there are spoilers. Also, whoever wrote this found the 2004 soundtrack annoying, so beware; they can hardly be trusted.

From the Where Are They Now department: Lawrence Lessig

Lessig One of our most successful panels here at the NU Libraries was the Free Culture Forum in March 2006, sparked by student interest, and featuring Lawrence Lessig of Creative Commons fame. He’s now left Creative Commons to work in DC on a campaign for congressional reform (called Change Congress). The Nation recently published an article on Lessig and this act of his career. However on his web site he claims the work he was planning for “Change Congress” turned out to be beyond what a single academic could do, so he will be moving from Stanford, his previous academic base, to the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, where he will apparently be pursuing a five year initiative on understanding the role of money in corrupting the public trust. So maybe we’ll have more chances to hear him speak again, now that he’s local!

Synecdoche, New York

    Nowadays, a celebrity-turned-director is enough to make me cringe. A red flag pops up. Okay, I think, this is going to be a piece of you-know-what.      But there’s an exception to every rule.      Charlie Kaufman has become a writing tour de force in cinema for his bizarre, intricately woven stories that take everything you thought you knew about reality and linear plot lines, and smacks it upside the head. He destroys conventions, invents new ones, blatantly disregards reality, and somehow ends it all with a surprisingly poignant examination of love, humanity, and all that other junk filling the corners of this tragicomedy called life.      The first film that really shot Kaufman into the public eye – a considerably rare feat for screenwriters – was 1999’s fantastic and imaginative Being John Malkovich, directed by fellow cinematic absurdist, Spike Jonze. In 2002, the film Adaptation – also directed by Jonze – won him a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay, and in 2004 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the wildly hip and successful mis-fitted story of memory, mistakes, and love, gained him an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.       But Kaufman steps into the director’s shoes, with his film Synecdoche, New York, a film Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers called “exhilarating and exasperating in equal doses” and “something you don’t find at multiplexes overrun with Chihuahuas and violent escapism… Kaufman,” he says, “wants to prove that intellectual ambition isn’t dead at the movies. Godspeed.”       Anyone who has seen previous Kaufman films – Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Human Nature – knows the chaos of the Kaufman diegetic. Synecdoche is no different. The film chronicles the life and various incredibly unfortunate events of the wildly depressed, indisputably pathetic Caden Cotard. After his wife and daughter leave on a trip and never come back, becoming an outrageously celebrated artist in Berlin and a tattooed ten-year-old girl – respectively – Cotard’s hypochondria and maniacal obsession with a new idea for a play spins into a more and more twisted mass of bitter memories, pitiful insecurities, and burning shames.       Cotard’s play, which is a reflection of Kaufman’s penchant for sardonic metafiction, attempts to be an imitation of the ‘real’ Schenectady, New York. He aims to have an actor for every person, acting out exactly what every person in Schenectady is doing – hence the ‘synecdoche’ of the title, a literary device that is a small part representing the whole.       Synecdoche is long – that much is true. It’s long, depressing, and has no characters you’d want to be, admire, or even probably hang out with, but with Kaufman it is not about the catharsis of the happy ending, but the craft and art of his writing. His masterful use of symbolism, and manipulation of time and events creates an underlying layer of meaning and depth that makes this one of the most intense, poignant, and complex films this generation has ever seen. There are times when you squirm, when the film seems like it will never end, and when you want to close your eyes with embarrassment and disgust for the characters; just like, incidentally, reality. But within Kaufman’s tragicomedy debut film is truth at its most sour-sweet – a true representation of the disappointments of life, the patheticness of man, and the disappointment, the failures, the sorrows, that occur when it all ends – not with that proverbial bang; but with a decidedly dissatisfied whimper.