Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool: A Sunday afternoon in Lincoln Park

After 18 years of living in Chicago, I'd still never explored the Alfred Caldwell Lily Pool.  I decided to do something about it, spending a sweltering Sunday afternoon wandering around the pool and its Lincoln Park environs.

I found the entranceway to the lily pool on Fullerton.  It has a bit of a "secret doorway" feel.  I happened to know that the lily pool is one of Roger Ebert's favorite places to walk in Chicago and that it's precisely that "tucked away," "secret pocket" quality that he likes.  Since Ebert was the writer who first showed me the door opening onto a wonderland of film--of Bergman, Fellini, Antonioni, etc.--it's fitting that his writing led me to this secret garden as well. 

 

I stowed the iPod and strolled in.  I heard the trickle of a gentle waterfall.  Then my eye took in the beauty of the lily pool and I felt the city slip away as I began to stroll. 

 

Wind rustled softly in the trees.  Birds chirped.  I found an outcrop of rock in the shade and sat gazing over the pool and the surrounding woodland plants dotted with yellow and purple wildflowers.  The soft hum of traffic seemed quite far away.

I liked the Prairie-style observation area. Even the rock outcroppings seemed influenced by the horizontal Prairie aesthetic.

I caught a few pictures of the wildlife.

After leaving the lily pool I crossed Fullerton and walked all the way around North Pond, stopping for a look at the facade of the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum. 

I came upon a mother duck and her ducklings (or, as my sister and I used to call them for some reason when we were kids, "half-baby childs").   

At the top of the park I snapped what is meant to be a picture of  the Elks National Veterans Memorial.  And if this sunbathing beauty got into the shot, well, that's life.  Too much trouble to PaintShop her out.  Ahem.

As long as I've lived in this town I'm still discovering things that cause me to look upon the familiar in a new way.  Who needs to go to Giverny?  Monet could have found all the beauty he needed on the north side of the great city of Chicago.

  

 

"Enter the Void" and "Showgirls" double feature: the abyss and the puddle

[Caveat: the following piece contains spoilers about both movies discussed.]

By some aligning of the stars, “Showgirls” and “Enter the Void” dropped into my mailbox in the same week (I certainly hadn't planned it that way).  Even though the former is an exploitative piece of high camp from 1995 by those shameless commercial hacks, Paul Verhoeven and Joe Esterhaz ("Basic Instinct"), and the other a psychedelic mindblower from 2009 by the Argentine provocateur Gasper Noe ("Irreversible"), the two pictures actually made for an interesting double feature, variations on the theme of "Sex Money Power", as a gaudy sign in "Void" blares.  (Chuck in "drugs" and you've covered it.)

Both films take us into a world of neon, of night, coke, pole-dancing, colorful marquees promising adult fun within.  And they take us behind the scenes to show how all this hedonism is manufactured in their respective worlds: Las Vegas ("Showgirls") and Tokyo ("Void"). 

 

Pretty heady stuff for a sheltered kid from Southeast Ohio. 

I hadn't seen it before, but you probably know that "Showgirls" is about a tough girl, Nomi (Elizabeth Berkely), who comes out to Vegas to follow her "gotta dance!" dream.  She takes to the pole to make ends meet, though her dream is to be a showgirl.  One day she catches a rehearsal of a  hotel show and gets her first glimpse of the star (played by Gina Gershon as a sexy, sneering cokehead).  Immediately Nomi envisions herself taking the older woman's place.  (The movie echoes a classic Hollywood structure: young woman on the make, older star maneuvering to cover her ass.)

Elizabeth Berkley is striking, statuesque; Verhoeven shoots her with that corrupt, alluring sheen for which he's so well known.   Every shot she's in she gives you some kind of visceral jolt.  She moves a bit like a mannequin come to life, like an alien approximating human behavior.   "Strong" isn't the word: she's fierce.  (I reckon Lady Gaga's seen this picture more than once.)  She radiates power, holding her own in a world of dangers (men, drugs).   

 

"Showgirls" is a joke, of course: a ludicrous pulp melodrama.  None of its people act in any recognizably human way.  Although remarkably witless and incompent, as a joke--a fantasy--it's funny enough.  However, then it veers into exploitation movie territory.   The scene where a star of the Vegas stage and his bodyguards rape Nomi's friend, and the ridiculous revenge-fantasy scene where Nomi goes to his hotel and kicks his ass?   These are played for entertainment, and are thus so corrupt that you really have to laugh. (In that I suppose in a weird way the movie is an honest mirror held up to a facet of American culture).   

Is the movie in on the joke?  (Certainly the actors are.)  I have a sinking suspicion that Verhoeven and Esterhaz actually think they've made something that takes a hard look into the abyss, but actually it's got the depth of a puddle. 

"Enter the Void" is something else.  Now I love provocateurs, but before this film I wouldn't have classed Noe with the finest of them--there's a twisted humanism in the best of them, like Von Trier and Haneke, as well as a kind of intellectual distance (and wit) that I wasn't getting from Noe. The best of them are never exploitive, exactly, the way I thought Noe's "I Stand Alone" was.  "Irreversible" was an improvement: honestly disturbing and full of interesting ideas. 

"Void", however, is an extraordinary film, a sensory experience that showed me things I've never seen in a movie before.  It aims for that sort of spiritual, transcendent experience that, if you're like me, you're always looking for; I suppose on one level I'm always turning to movies looking for just such an experience.    

At least in its opening sequences, it's the rare film shot in the first-person, that perceives its world as we do ours: our own individual consciousness carried around on our shoulders.  It's about a young American kid, a bit of a seeker, who  relocated to Tokyo and was finally able to  afford to bring  his sister over (Paz de la Huerta: yowsa!!).  They've had a "blood brother/sister" closeness ever since their parents were killed in a car accident (unforgettably, viscerally rendered).  To make money she takes to the pole, while he  peddles drugs.  He's as much an enthusiast as a seller, really.  (There's a beautiful sequence at the beginning visualizing a trip.)

One night the police raid a club while he's carrying; he rushes to the stall to flush the drugs.  In a frantic bid to dispel the cops, he stupidly yells out that he has a gun.  A point on his chest  erupts once and he realizes he's been shot through the stall door.  Sinking, he feels his life ebb out of him on the floor of the squalid stall. 

His soul, his consciousness then leaves his body and begins to flit about Tokyo, stuck in this world until it can find its way to a higher plane of existence.  Finally the camera is as free as I've always dreamed it could be.  Hovering, flying, floating, giving us a window  on to visions flitting across his mind's eye, dreams, flashing memories of his life.  (The point of view now is from just behind his silhouetted head).

The film contains some astonishingly beautiful visuals.  The brother and sister enter a shop that she remarks "looks like heaven":  

At one point the kid examines a glowing model of Tokyo made by an artist friend: 

 

The sequences that take off into the inner and outer universes pick up the baton thrown down by the likes of "2001"  and "Dreamscape" and take us if anything even further:

  

And it's not all sensory overload: there are long stretches when it's very,  very quiet.  Noe's had the courage to make the film  just as overlong as he wants it to be, to convey the tediousness, the frustration of this soul flitting around our world looking for a way out.

Sometimes the kid's soul seems to be able to enter the body of a man while he's in the act of sex; we then get a very intimate view of the  woman's head and shoulders.   The movie finds something sacred, some ancient ritual, some human connection even admist the impersonal sex in the Love Hotel.  As he floats he sees a glowing emanating at all points where bodies connect.  

I've certainly never seen a shot of sexual intercourse taken from inside the vagina before.  Having shown us the end of life,  Noe now shows us the origin of it: wriggling sperm attempting to penetrate a human egg.  “Enter the Void” is as much about life as it is about death.  There's a recurrent image of a baby nursing at its mother’s breast.  It dares to peer into the void,  the abyss, and find something beautiful there, something more than pain. 

Both "Showgirls" and "Void" depiect a demimonde comprised of men who are only interested in other human beings to the extent they can make money off of them.  (As a hysterical Paz cries out over and over in "Void" after her brother is killed, even as she takes comfort in the arms of one of these men, “Evil people, you're all evil people!”).  Both movies purport to be about human souls trying to navigate an inhuman world, but only "Void" is truly about a soul trying to find a home.  Fake right down to its Hollywood ending, "Showgirls"  contains not an ounce of soul (which is not to say it's not a laugh).

Only "Void" detaches "sex" from the "money" and "power" equation and connects it to the life force of the universe.

 

Glen Hansard at Millenium Park

It was good seeing Glen Hansard at Millenium Park last night.  I don't know how else to put it: having gone to see "Once", the movie he made with Marketa Irglova,  more than once back in 2007, I feel like I know the guy.  At the time I wrote of the movie: "There’s an urgency in the performances, as if through the force of their singing they might exorcize the pain...At times the raw emotion of the music they make together threatens to shake the film off its sprockets."

Well,  the enthusiastic Irishman was alone under the Gehry bandshell last night (he and Irglova having since broken up), singing his heart out, armed with just an acoustic ax (and, on one song, a ukelele), bringing that soulful, intense roar.  Can anyone but an Irishman make f-bombs sound so casually good-natured?       

He did mainly new songs, but near the end of the set he did something I won't forget.  Thanking Van the Man for the song and adding that it's one he used to do on the streets of Dublin, he went into an extraordinarily ferocious "Astral Weeks" that was one of the most remarkable versions I've ever heard, absolutely thrashing on the "to be born again" refrain, finally kicking a pedal to unleash a storm of thrash-metal feedback.  By the end he was cracking himself up at how over-the-top it was.  

"If I ventured in the slipstream/between the viaducts of your dream..."

Before going into "Falling Slowly" he commented that it's hard for him to do this one "without my friend".  He needn't have worried.  From throughout the seats and out over the park came wafting the sweet sound of hundreds of people softly singing Marketa's part.  It's still magical, that song.

On the way out of course I couldn't resist snapping another shot of the Historic Michigan Boulevard District.

R.I.P. Peter Falk

A clip about the pleasures of being alive, from "Wings of Desire," one of my favorite movies.  Here Falk's addressing Bruno Ganz's character, an angel.

Funny, I never knew Falk as Columbo: I was too young to see it when it went out and I've actually never seen a single episode.  I knew him from the honesty of his work in Cassavetes' pictures--those unflinching, withering examinations of American manhood in the 60s and 70s--and from "Wings," in which he plays himself. 

In "Wings" he's in West Germany to shoot a picture; his Americanness in the context of this very European film always amused me.  They must have had "Columbo" over there because Germans seem to know him and regard him fondly.  He probably represented a certain idea of America to them, as well.  That's the kind of representation abroad we can, and should, be proud of. 

Movies About Movies class, Part I: "Mulholland Drive", the road into the dark heart of Hollywood

On June 22, 2011, Matty "Ballgame" Robinson and Adam Kempenaar, co-hosts of the essential "Filmspotting" podcast/radio show, convened the third session of the summer class they're teaching, "Hollywood Reflected: Movies About Movies".  We watched "Mulholland Drive," on many days my favorite film.  I certainly never get tired of watching it.    

 

The whole class is about movies that are meta--that is, that are about movies on some level--but rarely has a mirror quite like "Mulholland Drive" been held up to the dream factory.  It's a fun house mirror, or maybe a deep dark truthful one, to paraphrase my man Elvis Costello.  

[Warning: spoilers coming!]

As many times as I've seen it, watching it in class was a new experience because I had the themes and images from our first two classes richocheting around in my head (not unlike the way all those Hollywood dreams and detritus filter through aspiring starlet Naomi Watts' consciousness in the first two-thirds of "Mulholland Drive", in those last guilty fever-dream moments before she shoots herself).

In our first  two sessions we'd examined The Star.  Matty and Adam discussed "cautionary tales," movies meant to warn girls how strong the chances were against them if they followed their dreams to Hollywood.  To illustrate they showed excerpts from a Mack Sennett silent with Mabel Normand, "The Extra Girl", including a scene where Normand's character does a comic screen test.  Adam explained that there's a whole tradition of such scenes, and illustrated with a screen-test scene from "The Star" from 1952 with Bette Davis.  

Then we watched the 1937 version of "A Star is Born" (with Janet Gaynor, making the transition from silents like "Sunrise" (sigh)). 

In the second class, expanding on the theme "I'm going out there and BE somebody," they showed "Singin' in the Rain", another picture I can always watch with pleasure.

All of this made for an expertly selected set-up for "Mulholland Drive".  Every facet of what Adam and Matty had been talking about is there in Lynch's picture: success, illusion, identity shifts, the movie business, the way Hollywood chews up and spits out starlets...The Dream.  And it's genius, the way it limns all of that through symbols, colors, codes, feelings, and an endlessly layered storehouse of movie references.  

In a fun move, Adam framed the post-film discussion using the deliberately abstruse "10 Clues" that Lynch issued in the wake of the movie's release.  Did talent alone help Camilla [become a movie star]?  Where is Aunt Ruth?  (Well, dead--or, in Hollywood parlance, "acting in Canada".)  

On the one hand they'd placed the movie within a tradition:  I think of Naomi Watts' audition scene, which must stand as the absolute pinnacle of screen-test-type scenes.  Or of Jean Hagen fleeing the microphone in "Singin'" and the song carrying on without her, just as the soaring, heartbreaking Spanish version of Roy Orbison's "Crying" fills the Silencio club even after the singer collapses.  It's all an illusion.

But they'd also shown us how it takes that tradition to places it never dared go before.  The movie emerges as the ultimate movie about Hollywood, the ultimate cautionary tale, but the warning it sounds aims right at us, the dream-consumers.  Hollywood is bogus.   "Hey pretty girl, time to wake up."

And then there's also this.

Funny, as deep into as we got in the ensuing lively discussion, I still feel like we barely scratched the surface.