Sinners

 Sinners (2025) is an extraordinarily ambitious vampire film. The movie doesn't use vampires as an allegory for anything and there's no facile message or socio-political theme.  Rather, the picture explores with mysterious depth the question of what is important in life, what are the values that make life worth living.  Darkness surrounds us.  How should we act to overcome this darkness or, at least, make meaning from it?  Ryan Coogler's film is only incidentally a horror picture.  Horror here signifies the misery of oppression and cruelty but the strength of the film is that the Sinners is too rich and subtle, too complex, to attribute to any of its elements (including the garish and gory vampire theme) any single meaning or even constellation of meanings.  We have to consider the film as a whole and accept the fact that certain aspects of the picture seem meaningful, and, even, profound, but resist any unambiguous interpretation.  As an example, the vampires, at first, seem to embody aspects of the poor White trash experience.  So are we to conclude that the downtrodden Black sharecroppers who represent the community under attack in the film are the victims of White racism, here identified with vampirism?  This interpretation can't be sustained.  In fact, the vampires seem to have their own peculiar culture with its own odd rituals and folk music -- the vampires favor Scotch-Irish folk songs and seem to indulge in weird choreography that looks like zombies imitating Irish step-dancers.  And the vampires, who originate in some kind of Choctaw Indian sorcery, make an odd appeal to the Black sharecroppers -- "join us," they proclaim, "and we will all be completely equal", in fact, a sort of desegregated "beloved community".  It's impossible to rationally interpret these features in the film -- but, nonetheless, the movie is all of a piece and has the crazy integrity of a nightmare.  

Sinners has a prelude and epilogue with its narrative divided into three principal blocks of action.  In the prelude, a preacher's son stumbles into a Sunday service at a rural Black church.  The young man is wounded, carrying the neck of a wrecked guitar, and his face has been scratched, gouged open as if by a panther's claw.  The children in the church are singing "This Little Light of Mine / I'm gonna let it shine" and the preacher pleads with his son to abandon the devil's music, the Blues, and come back to the Church.  The film, then, flashes back one day, to the preceding Saturday afternoon.  Two handsome Black hustlers have come to the small town of Clarksdale in northern Mississippi (the birthplace of a number of Blues luminaries, including Sam Cooke, Ike Turner, Muddy Waters and many others).  It's 1932 and two men, twin brothers, are Chicago gangsters and World War One veterans who have returned to their hometown to set up a business.  Smoke and Stack, as the gangsters are named, are snappy dressers, obviously armed, and they aren't cowed by the local Ku Klux Klan.  In fact, they buy an abandoned mill from the head of the local Klan, threaten the White bigots with violence if they trespass on the property (everyone in this movie including the undead are intensely territorial), and, then, recruit local sharecroppers to staff the Juke Joint that the intend to operate out of the building.  The first third of the narrative has something of the character of Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai -- the main thrust of the action is recruiting musicians, doormen, and cooks for the juke joint.  We observe Smoke and Stack interacting with various folks and persuading them to attend the opening night at the Juke joint -- it's an exercise in building a team.  Sammie, Smoke and Stack's cousin, is an accomplished Blues guitarists (he's the mutilated figure in the opening scene) and he agrees to perform at the joint.  Pearline, an attractive Octoroon (who can pass for White) joins the venture as a singer.  Cornbread, a field worker, says he will work as a bouncer and doorman.  Delta Slim, an alcoholic musician, agrees to play piano and mouth-organ in the joint.  A Chinese merchant and his wife also join the team and Annie, Smoke's estranged and embittered wife, is recruited to cook for the customers of the joint --she fries up huge batches of catfish. (Smoke and his wife had a baby daughter, but the child's death drove a wedge between them and, apparently, led to Smoke abandoning her and going to Chicago; Smoke's wife is a "conjure woman" who traffics in herbs and knows supernatural lore.)  The scenes involving Smoke and Stack gathering their forces are lovingly detailed and written in a very pungent Mississippi delta patois.  A White boy from the North (such as this writer) may need subtitles to understand some of the dialogue. (Smoke and Stack are played by the same actor Michael B. Jordan).  Coogler's direction is self-assured --like John Ford or Kurosawa, he's in no hurry to get to the bloody action and this part of the film betrays little evidence of the genre horror elements that will dominate the last third of the movie.  There are a couple short and enigmatic scenes establishing that the vampires have attacked some Irish immigrants and, apparently, converted them into monsters -- but this aspect of the film seems only incidental to the warm and compelling scenes that establish the community.  

The second part of the film details opening night at the juke joint.  Sammie plays a blues song that somehow summons the spirits of Black musicians (and other performers) from the past and future to the bar.  We see African griots and hip-hop artists and someone who looks like George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic mingling with the dancers. (Performers from Chinese classical opera also magically appear.)  The music seems to hypnotize everyone and, in this bravura sequence, the joint is blown apart, its walls burning down and its ceiling exploding upwards in glowing embers.  Suddenly, everyone is simply dancing in the ruins of the juke joint -- it's a sort of hallucination but an effective dramatization of the power of the music.  Music in this film -- and the picture can be construed as a musical -- has the same ecstatic effect that we observe in David Lynch films:  it induces weird trances in people and strange visions.  In the third part of the movie, the vampires attack the fragile, but tight community formed among the folks at the juke joint.  The film strictly observes certain rules:  the vampires can't enter a house or building unless they are invited over the threshold -- this leads to long colloquies at the doors leading into the juke joint.  The undead can be killed by driving wooden takes through their hearts.  Their bites turn victims into vampires and the monsters are afraid of garlic which scars and burns them like acid.  Sunlight, of course, turns them into (in)human torches. (The fight with the vampires summons to mind Robert Rodriquez's  truckstop and brothel from hell in his vampire picture From Dusk to Dawn, featuring Quentin Tarantino who produced the picture.). Ultimately, the embattled people in the juke joint determine that, unless they kill the vampires, the undead will invade Clarksdale and kill everyone there, transforming the whole population into a ravening mob of monsters.  So, the survivors in the mill open the doors and invite the vampires into the structure for a final apocalyptic battle -- this scene is redolent of The Seven Samurai's last battle scene in which the bandits are lured into the village in a rainstorm to be slaughtered.  There's an unnecessary and distracting coda to the big fight in the mill.  The local Ku Klux Klan appear at the mill to take it back from its Black proprietors.  Smoke, one of the few survivors of the fight with the vampires, removes a couple of big machine guns from a wooden box, ambushes the Ku Klux Klansmen and massacres them.  The film's epilogue takes place in 1992.  Buddy Guy plays the role of Sammie, now an ancient Blues-man  performing in Chicago bar called Pearlines.  The old man is visited by the undead Smoke and his moll, Pearline, also now an immortal vampire.  These scenes are extremely moving and import into the film an almost Proustian resonance.  

Coogler's is not a particularly skilled director of action sequences.  The vampire attacks are scary but prosaic.  The final slaughter of the Ku Klux Klansmen seems unmotivated -- after all, these bad guys haven't really had any role in the movie -- and the carnage is poorly choreographed and confusing.  Coogler excels with syncopated cross-cutting between various strands of simultaneous action and directing actors in group and dialogue scenes that have considerable dramatic force.  When a vampire suddenly takes flight, leaping like a Chinese acrobat high into the air, Coogler cuts to frenetic dancing in the juke joint.  The film's design is taut and convincing and the scene-setting is extremely effective.  The camerawork conveys the heat and sweaty confinement of the ramshackle juke joint.  The skies are decorated with cauliflower-shaped storm clouds and the thickets around the juke joint flare with the red eyes of hiding vampires.  The dusty delta roads and the corn fields and the little village and shacks are all lovingly portrayed in a sort of honey sepia light.  The movie is far from flawless but its bold and has the courage of its convictions.  

(I went to see Sinners in Rochester at the Chateaux Theater on the north side of town.  The picture was projected in a calamitously dim print -- the faces of the Black performers faded into darkness and you couldn't see their expression and the midday vistas of the cotton fields had a faded denim tint, dull bluish colors under a dull green sky.  I talked to a couple of the other people in the audience but they didn't seem particularly concerned.  The other people in the theater were all young and accustomed, I suppose, to watch pictures on the format of their cell-phones and so the clarity of the image didn't really matter to them.  I went into the lobby and complained to the manager.  She returned to the theater with me and agreed that the projection was far too dim.  "We have to replace a light bulb in the projector," she said.  We agreed with her not to restart the movie but just pick up with it in progress after the bulb was replaced.  After eight minutes, the movie resumed about 15% brighter than it had been earlier -- nonetheless, the movie was shown at only about 40% of the brightness that I think was intended.  This experience reminds me that most movies look better on my TV at home than in the theater where they are indifferently projected without any real concern for how the image looks on the screen.  What was done to Sinners amounted to sheer vandalism.  I conclude to my dismay that it's pointless to see movies in theaters -- first, it's fantastically expensive:  the ticket was $14.83 for one admission and the concession featured 9 dollar fountain pop and 25 dollar popcorn; second, the theater experience is unpleasant if the movie isn't projected with proper brightness or concern for the integrity of the image.  The theater industry seems to me to be completely collapsing and no one, apparently, knows how to properly show these films.  This grieves me since I used to like attending movies and have enjoyed going to the theater all my life.)

Black Mirror (7): Common People

 The strength of Black Mirror's dystopian episodes are that they follow their alarming premises to their ultimate, logical conclusions.  This is evident in the gruesome first show in Series 7, "Common People" featuring Chris Dowd and Rashida Jones.  Although Black Mirror is not entirely satirical dystopia -- some of the episodes are outright horror, action, or whimsy -- the programs that people most admire (or that are most memorable) involve extrapolations as to current technology that unnervingly disclose the dark side to what consumer society assures us is progress.  "Common People" explores horrors associated with alleged medical advances that are, in fact, traps and snares for the unwary.  This is accomplished by a convincing narrative that welds together the bait and switch aspects of subscription services of various sorts and the internet industry of grotesque videos featuring people induced to inflict all sorts of suffering on themselves for pay or, worse, for a momentary "fix" of fame.  Generally speaking, there's nothing particularly innovative about the dystopian parables presented on Black Mirror.  They follow ancient tropes.  In E. W. Jacob's famous short story, The Monkey's Paw, adapting a parable dating back to Sanskrit texts, someone is granted three wishes -- of course, things work out in an unexpected way so that the third wish has to be used to undo the first two wishes.  In The Blue Angel, the pompous hero, Professor Unrat, observes with horror a cabaret act in which a sad clown is humiliated for the titillation of a cruel audience; of course, the viewer understands that by the end of the movie, the Professor himself will be cast in the role of the abused clown.  In Nightmare Alley, an arrogant young man professes disdain for a side-show geek.  Guess who will be playing the role of the geek before the end of the film (in both the 1947 version starring Tyrone Power and, also, recently Guillermo del Toro's 2021 remake) ? These are the narrative motifs that underlie "Common People".  

Chris Dowd and Rashida Jones are Mike and Amanda, a happily married young couple who are trying to have a baby.  As with all Black Mirror episodes, the time  and place of the story are left vague -- it seems to be the near future, next year or the year after that, perhaps, except that the couple drive an old car that seems a relic of the seventies and the places that they frequent, in some respects, resemble locations in David Lynch's first version of Twin Peaks -- this is particularly true of seedy hotel in the mountains to which Mike and Amanda return each year on their anniversary; it looks like the motel near the waterfall in Twin Peaks.  Amanda is a school teacher -- she is teaching her six-year old students about pollination using robot bees since, apparently, all actual pollinating insects have perished.  Amanda has some kind of stroke and falls into a coma.  She is dying.  A sinister saleswoman proposes a bargain too good to be true but necessary to save her life -- this is the motif of the improvident wish that is granted.  The compromised part of Amanda's brain can be duplicated and its circuitry stored in a computer that will, then, transmit a radio signal to replicate the functions of the damaged neurons and synapses, restoring her to life.  There is only one catch.  In order to accomplish Amanda's revival, Mike must sign a contract with a company called Rivermind, purchasing a subscription that keeps his wife alive but for a fee of $300 per month.  Although Mike is a blue collar worker -- he does welding at construction sites -- he doesn't hesitate to sign up for the subscription.  (Of course, viewers will recognize this kind of monthly fee subscription as being the business model for Netflix, HBO and so on.)  All goes well.  But there are some constraints on the service, said to be the "basic" version of the subscription -- Amanda has to remain within the county in order that the signal beamed to her brain remains sufficiently strong to keep her alive.  (It's like cell-phone service in which a user can venture into areas in which the signal is to weak to support the service.)  After a while, Amanda inexplicably begins to spout commercial messages.  During sex, she promotes a lube, for instance, or, while preparing breakfast, recites slogans for a brand of coffee.  It turns out that Rivermind has decided to broadcast commercials through its customers.  Rivermind also requires Amanda to sleep for more than 12 hours a day, slumber that is not restful because the company has rented out parts of her brain for the use of other customers.  The inconveniences can be corrected but only if Mike and Amanda buy an enhanced version of the subscription -- one that is another 800 dollars a month.  At this point, the second strand in the narrative comes into play.  An obnoxious and puerile co-worker subscribes himself to an internet site in which the users can bid to make a performer commit degrading and painful acts on himself -- it's a variant of the bum fight in which shock jocks paid hobos to fight for money or the sort of antics that formed the basis of the Jackass series of movies.  This is the geek show that Mike detests.  But, of course, now Mike has to find a way to raise lots of money quick.  (Amanda has been fired for blurting out advertisements for faith-based Christian counseling to troubled six year olds in her class).  So Mike goes on the web site, called Dum Dummies, or something on that order, abasing himself to earn additional funds.  Rivermind keeps upping the charges for the service that preserves Amanda's life.  (She's now been told that pregnancy is out of the question because having a child would change her brain chemistry and detract from the company's ability to lease parts of her nervous system when she is supposed to be sleeping.)  Rivermind offers Mike and Amanda the equivalent of a heroin fix, that is euphoria for Amanda, to counteract her increasing depression and rage.  But this service is so expensive that Mike is driven to increasingly desperate acts of self-torture and degradation to fund services that are necessary for Amanda's continued existence.  The viewer can see exactly where this calamitous series of events is leading.

"Common People" is genuinely disquieting because it is so thoroughly nasty.  When a co-worker taunts, Mike about a sex act that he performed on himself for the delectation of his internet fans, Mike beats up the kid and pitches him to the ground where he is immediately run over by a forklift. Filmed from a low-angle (that keeps us from seeing anything too gory), we watch the kid scream in pain with the big yellow forklift seemingly cutting him in half.  It's extremely disturbing.  When poor Mike and Amanda, realizing that they can't have a baby, sell a crib that they have purchased, the buyers turn out to be pale Goth girl and an equally pale kid with many facial piercings.  Mike, a nice guy, wishes the couple good luck on their upcoming child.  The girl says that they aren't planning to have a child.  They are buying the crib so they can set it on fire for a nihilistic music video that they intend to film. (An example of the show's anachronisms -- who makes music videos any more?)  Near the end, Amanda pleads with Mike to "not do any more teeth" on Dum Dummies.  He agrees, grinning at her, and displaying, incidentally, several prominent gaps in his smile.  

Some years ago, I wearied of having expensive Cable TV services that provided me with 100 channels of garbage to watch as opposed to a merely 30.  When I tried to cancel some of the subscriptions, I was told that my services were bundled and that it was literally impossible (so the crook on the phone told me) to remove any of them without cancelling the whole service.  I said that I was willing to cancel the whole service and, then, was told that this was fine but I would have to pay a sizeable "cancellation fee" -- in effect, paying for six months of the services that I was trying to rid myself of.  After about forty minutes on the phone, I abandoned the effort to manage these subscriptions.  I probably have a couple hundred more services of this sort right now for which I am paying.  

Giants (art exhibition) at Minneapolis Institute of Art

 Giants is an exhibition of large-scale works painted (or made) by African-American, African, and African diaspora artists.  The art is part of a collection amassed by the pop singer Alicia Keyes and her husband, the hiphop DJ, Swizz Beatz.  The art is bright, figurative, and, generally, celebratory -- although there are some sour notes (pertaining to racism and mass incarceration), this is a happy show intended to be uplifting and positive.  The notion of "giants" refers to precursors who have shown us the way and from whose shoulders we see the future.  But "giants" also refers to the scale of these works, most of which are huge.  There is something refreshingly retrograde, even reactionary, about an art show that posits that the work is beneficial and inspirational.  This isn't a subtle show -- it's colorful and straightforward and so overtly explicit that it all seems just a little big superficial and, perhaps, even slightly dull.

Right off the bat, the gallery-goer is confronted with two heroically sized panels showing dirt bike riders soaring into space.  In the next room, a big triptych called "A Puzzled Revolution" comments in the famous "phantom punch" by which Muhammed Ali felled Sonny Liston in 1965.  The famous photograph of Ali triumphant with his fist raised has been used as cut out shape -- within this form, the artist has repainted various motifs from classical art:  there is an image of the Virgin Mary sheltering within the grotto-like silhouette of the victorious boxer, a bright picture of a Black man at the battle of Bunker Hill, and fragments from "Watson and the Shark", the famous American painting by John Singleton Copley.  It's baffling, but impressive on the basis of size and palette.  (The artist is Titus Kaphar working in 2021).  Also in that room are two semi-sculptural works by Nick Cave; these are lush floral arrays of delicate iridescent fibers -- one called "Tondo" is an abyss of colorful fur, an oblong six feet tall hung on the wall; the other is a figure also bristling with a mass of iridescent threads seemingly carrying a shield of the same bright fabric over upper torso and face -- the sculpture is supposed to have something to do with George Floyd's murder. (This Nick Cave is an African-American artist born in 1959 in Fulton, Missouri and not the Australian rock-and-roller.) The center piece in the show is an enormous mural by Maleka Mokgozi presented in a dark galley.  The mural is lit is such a way so that it seems to glow within as if it were translucent and pasted on a light-box.  The painting, about 12 feet tall and 140 feet long, shows interiors in Botswana with a couple frieze-frames outdoors -- some kids posing in school uniforms and people working in the bright yellow sun to plant small trees.  It's prosaic and the pictures aren't particularly compelling but the size and ambition of the thing is impressive, various figures (all of them lifesize) suspiciously peering out of the rooms and corridors in which they are posed:  we have a man in khakis sprawled on a bed, various officials, military men, an oligarch in a room full of expensive-looking art. This work was commissioned for the LA Fowler Museum and made in 2018.  Almost all of the objects on display are portraits or images of people -- for instance, three huge photographs (inkjet prints), one of a man making gang gesture with a child cowering at his hip and, then, two naked girls in Soweto, South Africa.  There are abouts 30 small painted landscapes, conventional-looking pictures showing Jamaica, but the scale of the installation (as opposed to the individual components) is also very large -- covering a high, long wall.  A lifesize stainless steel arm reaches out to restrain a stainless steel billy club, also gripped by a shiny, mirror-like fist. There's an interesting Basquiat, a meditation on Langston Hughes that is uncharacteristically sober for this artist. The last room in the show contains many photographs in 3 x 4 foot format by St. Paul native, Gordon Parks.   A portrait of Keyes and Beatz in which the handsome couple stand forth against supernal darkness makes them look like renaissance royalty, Medici collectors and patrons of the arts.

Visitors to Giants are disgorged into a gallery featuring massive totempole-like sculptures made in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea).  The large wooden figures are cryptic and menacing; a male and female couple are jointed at the genitals and look vaguely like enormous worms or caterpillars.  A so-called Malangan  (ancestor) figure stands eight foot tall with goggled eyes (a bit like a frog wearing horn-rimmed glasses or the Zapotec rain god Cocijo) and has a conical rain cap made from huge tropical leaves.  What makes these figures remarkable (and they seem somehow pendant to the over-sized pop art portraits in the Giants show) is the remarkable subtlety of the vegetable pigments with which they are painted- the delicate washes of color are transparent so that the beautifully textured wood from which these figures are hewn is clearly visible as well.  

A few galleries away there is a relatively small show featuring works by the Dakota (Sioux) artist Mary Sully.  These are remarkable works and well-worth very close study.  Sully, whose real name was Susan Deloria was born in 1896 on the Standing Rock Reservation straddling the border between North and South Dakota.  Her family was prominent then and remains prominent now -- her brother was a very influential Episcopalian pastor on the Reservation and she is lineal descendant from the English-American portrait painter Thomas Sully; his son was the notorious Alfred Sully, a ferocious Indian fighter (he put severed heads on posts to frighten the Sioux); Alfred Sully was also a gifted water-color painter and married a Yankton Sioux woman in the midst of his genocidal campaigns.  (Alfred Sully's granddaughter, Mary Sully, the artist celebrated in this show, was known as "Soldier Woman" in Lakota based on her grandfather's exploits.)  Mary Sully's nephew was Vine Deloria the father of Vine Deloria Jr. the author of Custer Died for your Sins and God is Red.  This lineage illustrates the extraordinary complexity of Indian-White relations on the frontier.  Mary Sully seems to have been self-taught and her work is highly original.  She made 200 or more pictures that she called "Personality Prints".  The images each consist of three stacked painting -- they are made with highlights of white paint, watercolors, gouache, pastel crayons, and colored pencil.  Each grouping of pictures features a vaguely figurative image at the top (about 18 inches by 18 images).  The figurative image is, then, analyzed into a schematic abstract picture, generally showing mirror symmetry that embodies pictorial motifs in the painting above.  The lowest picture in the three-tier registry translates the middle frame (which is abstract) into a Dakota Sioux pattern seemingly representing a pattern that might be woven into a quilt or blanket.  The top picture shows faces, clothing, gestures; the middle painting is an abstract and symmetrical variation on forms above it while the third picture (at the bottom) is completely abstract, a simple geometric pattern that seems to represent traditional Dakota textile craft.  The colors are subtle, extremely refined and elegant.  Deloria's subjects are the ballerina Pawlowa, Shirley Temple (reflected by a mosaic of cherubic dimpled kewpie-doll faces), the opera singer Lawrence Tibbet, Easter, Indian religion, Episcopal religion, Fred Astaire, Zeigfield (sic) of the Ziegfield follies, and, rather bizarrely, The Children of Divorce.  The trio pictures are theme and variations and have a jazzy, improvised look although on inspection the drawing is very precise -- some of the pictures look like "ledger book" art from the late 19th century.  The closest correlate to academic fine art is Marsden Hartley's "portraits" of his homosexual lover, Karl von Freyburg who was killed in World War One -- gorgeous abstractions ("Portraits of a German Officer") built from stylized horse and rider motifs, military ribbons and military regalia. Sully lived in New York during the twenties and thirties and made these pictures generally before 1940.  I have never heard of her and was immensely impressed by this small, but vibrant show.

LaFontaine's animal parables are the subject of another small exhibit.  The short parables are printed on the wall.  Painted china and ceramics illustrate the stories which involve dogs, foxes, and oysters.  Two dogs see a dead mule floating in the middle of a lake.  The dogs can't get to the mule and so they resolve to drink up all the water so that they can feast on the carcass.  They drink and drink and succeed in lowering the water table to some degree, but, then, their guts burst and they perish.  BE SMART it says on one wall, BE HUMBLE on another wall, DISTRUST THE POWERFUL is inscribed on the third wall.  Near the entrance to the galleries, ten Hokusai prints of flowers with insects are arranged along a wall facing a 4 x 3 foot canvas by Claude Monet, a scribble of colorful chrysanthemums.  The Hokusai prints were made in 1833-1834 and they show tree frogs crouching among the blossoms, a horsefly and a big bulbous-eyed dragon fly; a grasshopper sits on a stem supporting a bright flare of flower.  This is also a wonderful small show.   

Compartment No. 6

 It's 985 miles between Moscow and Murmansk.  You can drive or take the train, the so-called Artika.  The trip by train takes 30 hours.  Murmansk is directly north of Moscow.  As we learn in Compartment No. 6, the two cities occupy the same time zone.  This 2021 film is a Finnish-Russian-Estonian production, produced before the war in Ukraine rendered most of Russia's current cultural productions problematic.  Compartment no. 6 is a rather bleak, but intriguing, odd couple story involving a young Finnish woman who finds herself sharing the titular train compartment with an uncouth Russian miner, both of them bound for Murmansk -- she plans to see some pictographs chiseled into stones on an icy seaside; the young man is going to work in an enormous mine.  The journey takes place during Winter and its dark, snowy, and the cold is bone-chilling.  The picture invokes romantic comedy motifs but is more dark and, ultimately, unresolved and enigmatic.

We first meet the Finnish girl, Laura, at a party coming out of a toilet.  (This opening shot is an example of the film's reversal of ordinary romantic imagery.)  The party is loud with drunken Russians, all intellectuals it seems, performing for one another.  We discover that Laura is the girlfriend and lover of the hostess, a cold bitch named Irina.  Laura and Irina have planned to travel north to Murmansk to see the petroglyphs but, at the last minute, Irina says that she has to work, insisting the Laura go without her.  (This is clearly an extremely cruel ruse to get Laura out of the picture so that Irina can end the relationship.)  Laura naively boards the train bound to Murmansk, assigned a second-class sleeper compartment that turns out to be occupied by Lyokha.  Lyokha has a smirk on his face, seems to be half-drunk on vodka that he swills from the bottle, and acts menacing -- his head is shaven like a convict or soldier.  He assumes that Laura is a prostitute traveling to service the miners in Murmansk and rants about Russia's greatness.  But, as it turns out, he's considerably more complicated than first appearances would suggest and, after making an initial bad impression on Laura, grows more sympathetic as the film progresses.  At first, Laura refuses to share the claustrophobic compartment with him.  She tries to get reassigned but the train is full and, so, she has to spend as much time as possible sitting in the restaurant car to avoid Lyokha.  During a couple stops made by the train, Laura and Lyokha talk.  She's reckless and independent and not intimidated by Lyokha; she just finds he's a boorish annoyance.  Reluctantly, she accompanies him to visit an elderly woman during a layover in a small subarctic village.  (It's not clear how the woman is related to Lyokha.)  The two women get drunk and the babushka tells Laura to listen to the "little animal living inside of her".  In the morning, Lyokha chops firewood for the old woman and, then, they rush back to the train.  A Finnish traveler joins them and Lyokha sulks -- he thinks Laura will end up sleeping with the man and he's become possessive of her.  In fact, the Finnish guy who annoyingly strums guitar and sings wordlessly (and tunelessly) as he plays, turns out to be petty criminal -- he steals Laura's video recorder on which she is filming a record of her trip.  (The movie, based on a Finnish novel, seems to take place in the late 80's -- there are no cell-phones.)  Laura calls Irina several times only to be given the cold shoulder; Irina seems to be entertaining a male friend in her apartment.  Lyokha is upset about the interlude with the Finnish tourist and doesn't talk to Laura until they are close to Murmansk.  To celebrate the end of the long train ride, they go to the restaurant car, drink some champagne, but can't really eat -- the train's commissary is out of food. Back in the compartment, Laura kisses Lyokha but he disengages with her, apparently not willing to start a relationship that is doomed.  In Murmansk, it turns out that there is no practical way to get to the pictograph site.  The route requires both a trip by car and, then, water -- and neither are feasible in the bitterly cold and stormy weather.  In fact, it turns out that there was never really anyway to get to the pictographs during the cold season.  Laura takes a "hero-city historical tour" and, then, goes to the enormous mine where Lyokha is employed.  She leaves a note for him.  Lyokha meets her and has arranged a driver to take them to the pictographs notwithstanding the bad weather.  They travel all night and reach what seems to be the seashore in the early morning.  A gale is approaching.  They rent a small boat and travel across the water to a rocky promontory.   Laura wanders around in the frigid wind looking at the rocks while Lyokha smokes -- everyone smokes a lot in this movie.  (We never see the pictographs; they seem to be invisible to the camera.)   A blizzard blows up and Lyokha and Laura wander along the deserted seacoast, playing in smashed boats.  The driver takes Lyokha  and Laura back to the mine -- he's apparently used his weekend to take Laura to the rock carvings.  He sends her a note written in Finnish:  "I love you."  

The movie is spectacularly dreary.  The trains seem noisome, crowded with the third class customers bedding down in horrible-looking corridors.  Old women stand on the platforms selling pickles in big jars.  The towns are all shabby, dark, grey, with rows of lights barely illuminating the perpetual twilight.  The seacoast is nondescript with big, icy waves, frozen puddles, and patches of flat black rock apparently decorated with pecked pictographic engravings.  As the movie progresses, no one can bathe and the Finnish girl becomes increasingly disheveled, her hair stringy and greasy.  However, both characters are appealingly vulnerable, open to new experiences, and kind.  It's implied, I think, that there's no hope for the relationship -- Laura may be a lesbian and she and the young man have nothing in common.  But they form a brief, fleeting bond and this is sufficient to retain the audience's sympathy and interest.  The film won many prizes and was directed by Juho Kuosmanen -- it's shot in monochrome documentary style and conveys very vividly the arduous nature of the train trip.  (The Murmansk pictographs are actually on an island in a large Arctic lake, Lake Kanozero; they are estimated to be 5000 years old and are notable for being "cartoons", that is, mini-narratives pecked into the stone.  They were only recently discovered -- in 1997. The movie shows the pictographs located, apparently, in a bay on the White Sea.)  

Rachel Barton Pine performing with 'Austin Symphony

 A concert can transport you to some other world, a different consciousness or new, disorienting perspective. I don't go to many concerts or live music events now.  So, when I do venture out, things seem strange to me; I slip into a reverie and hallucinate.  

The Austin Symphony Orchestra performed at the Knowlton Auditorium at the Public High School on March 30, 2025. A soloist, Rachel Barton Pine, was featured in the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto in D (Opus 35).  The second part of the concert was comprised of a performance of three relatively short pieces by Ravel.  I'll dispose of my criticism at the outset -- the orchestra botched the Ravel pieces, played them with a disconcerting stutter, herky-jerky as opposed to the limpid legato required by this music.  The strings sounded out of tune and the brass fumbled their notes, spattering them all over the stage.  I thought that the rest of concert was effective and well-played -- indeed, on the Tchaikovsky piece, the orchestra seemed to be punching considerably above their weight.  Impressionism in music is tricky.  Apparent formlessness can degenerate into actual chaos and I think this happened with respect to the Ravel numbers.

The day before the concert, it was warm and humid.  The temperature in mid-afternoon was 79 degrees, unseasonably warm in this climate for the end of March.  But, then, wind and rain intervened and, on the day of the performance, it was bitterly cold with icy water drizzling out of dark, congested skies.  As I walked from the side of the gymnasium parking lot, along the long dour facade of the High School, I realized that I was not dressed for the weather and my forehead was damp as if ice were freezing above my eyebrows and the cold made me shiver and ached in my joints.  The hike to the concert hall on the sidewalk outside the concert hall knocked me into another realm.  

Rachel Barton Pine has red hair and extremely pale skin.  She may be in her mid-forties although she looks younger, like a child prodigy of some sort.  She entered the concert stage on a scooter, driving up to a low platform on which a chair had been set for her.  Something was wrong with the lower half of her body and she had difficulty transferring from the little, black three-wheeled scooter onto the platform.  A young man followed her obediently to her position on the stage and, then, reached forward to hand her violin to her.  The violin was as red as her hair.  (In January 1995, when she was twenty, the violinist was riding a METRA train into Chicago where she was teaching music lessons.  As she exited the train, the strap on her violin case, or, perhaps, some other bag, was caught in the closing door.  The train started away from the platform dragging her along the tracks.  After being pulled over one-hundred feet by the accelerating train, the violinist yanked herself loose but slid under the wheels.  The metal wheel sliced off one of her legs and mangled the other lower extremity and she almost bled to death on the tracks.  In the ensuing lawsuit, METRA rather heartlessly defended by claiming that the musician was responsible for her own injuries because she was carrying an old and famous violin and wasn't willing to relinquish her grip on it.  The defense didn't work -- doors on the car closed without warning and there was no alert to the driver -- and one presumes that she was paid millions of dollars by METRA.  Her injuries were horrible, requiring over 50 surgeries but she persisted in performing on what remained of her legs while standing until 2018, when a joint infection caused her permanent damage requiring that she now remain seated while playing.)  According to the brochure, Pine plays an "ex-Bazzini, ex-Soldat" Joseph Guarnerius del Gesu violin, an instrument made in Cremona, Italy in 1742.  I'm not sure if this was the violin involved in the METRA accident.  The concert program notes that she has the violin "on lifetime loan from an anonymous patron", a detail that haunts my imagination -- I think there is a novel implicit in this arrangement, or a film or play of some sort.  

Barton Pine introduced the Tchaikovsky concerto with verve and enthusiasm.  She spoke of Tchaikovsky's suffering, how he was implored to marry one of his students, something that he obligingly did, although, of course, he was shy, closeted homosexual.  She described how he overcame his depression arising from this disastrous marriage, fled Russia with his boyfriend, and, later, regained his spirits to write the rollicking Finale:  Allegro Vivacissimo, a melody that she described as a drinking song, "vodka music".  She observed that she couldn't relate to his depression since she is a "straight woman" -- but, of course, given the horrific accident and ghastly treatment following that calamity, I suspect that she is more than qualified when it comes to grief and sorrow.  She played with flair, executing spectacular cadenzas and, then, flinging her right arm with the fiddle's bow up in the air in a triumphant gesture.  As an encore, she performed a very slithery, eerie blues piece by the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge Taylor.  I was impressed by her curriculum vitae, she regularly performs avant-garde music, commissions works by contemporary composers, admires Death Metal and, in fact, plays that kind of music in a bar band called "Earthen Grave."  There is nothing not to admire about this woman -- her courage and industry seem to be exemplary.

Just before the intermission, the director, Maestro Stephen Ramsey showed a twenty-foot tall slide photograph of Diego Velasquez' Las Meninas (1656) and asked the audience if they could identify the King and Queen shown in the large, and intricate, painting.  (The King and Queen of Spain, Philip IV and Mariana of Austria are visible as shadowy figures in a small mirror in the background of the picture.)  The work is visionary, sometimes called "the theology of painting" (Luca Giordano) with Velazquez looking out at the viewer from a position on the left, half-concealed by the big canvas that presumably will become las Meninas ("the ladies in waiting").  The Infante, Margaret Theresa, probably about six when her portrait was painted also stares out of the image, tiny in a white bell-shaped dress, and every inch a future queen.  A female dwarf with a prognathous jaw glares at us as well and there is another little person, a young man, at her side prodding a big mastiff. The dog is dignified but sleepy; it seems to be dreaming.  Of course, I have known this image all my life and admired it and, so, it was wonderful to see the picture projected above the orchestra all luminous with brass instruments shining in the stage light and the rich, deep hues of the strings, the shapely cellos and the fiddles and covenant ark of the harp.  The concert began to seem like a waking dream.  I have no idea why Maestro Ramsey had the picture projected above the orchestra -- it was a gratuitous gift, I suppose.  Ramsey said something about Ravel and his Pavane for a dead Princess but I never figured out the connection with the Velazquez painting --perhaps, Ramsey was implying that the little girl with her regal bearing was a "dead princess" somehow -- in fact Infante Margarita Theresa died at 21 after seven years of marriage to a Habsberg King and six pregnancies (with four live births); maybe, the painting had something to do with the mutilated princess playing the violin for us.  I don't know.  It was the sort of association that seems obvious in a dream but can't be deciphered when you are awake.

Pavane for a Dead Princess composed in 1899 for solo piano was orchestrated by Ravel in 1910 as a concert version of the piece.  The name of the work in French is Pavane pour une Infante Defunte.  I suppose the word "Infante" triggered the association with the Velazquez painting.  Ravel remarked that the pavane, which is a species of courtly dance music, was paradoxically a sort of elegy for a dead renaissance princess as well.  This is also incomprehensible to me, dream logic of some sort.  

After the concert, the air filled with snow, blown almost horizontally by the cold wind and wet grass turned white in the storm.