Dear Miss Valland,

Of flocking togetherness

Photo property of DMV

Rose, Monuments Men. Oy Vey, what a crappy movie. Hogan's Heroes meets Sister Wendy. Your look and story stolen by Hollywood stormtroopers who adulterated both with absurdities. Movies about real events are always riddled with inaccuracies but good films can be forgiven when the compression of time is artfully done. The lack of narrative logic and the indifference was an insult.  Your name was changed (to protect the innocent); and to that we say merci. And here I was hoping that this film (phlegm—my inner child is a nine year-old boy who finds hilarity in the vulgar) would spark enough interest for your memoir to be reissued and translated into English. Somewhere, some academic is researching your life and justice will be yours. 

The only way to correct the experience of a cultural dud is to cleanse the palate with something spectacular. So, I shopped. I ordered the soundtrack of La Grande Belleza, then I went to the Field Museum and hung out in the bird wing. A few weeks ago, I had a dream that I was sitting at the dining room table (my desk these days) and watching dozens of birds outside the large window. They were just hanging around, practically suspended in the air, and their colors were so vibrant. I woke up as I usually do, when in a dream I am seeing something so amazing & know it will make a beautiful photograph & that I should get my camera. I believe it is that movement of getting the camera (even just the muscular twitch from the idea of the reach) coupled with excitement of the seeing THE picture, that wakes me up. It's happening too much these days Rose, and while I'm grateful for the dreamy images, I could go for some deep sleep.  The kind of sleep of little kids who pass out in noisey places in a harried parent's arms. Like a torpid hummingbird. Bad movies are good for napping but I was too irritated at Monuments Men to fall asleep. That's all for now. I'll call you when the music arrives. We'll go for a drive and I'll play Tavener's The Lamb over and over.

Treespotting

© Ruth Lopez

Sing to me Dawn Upshaw. Do this: Take Górecki's Symphony #3 into the woods. See this polka dot and wonder if it is moss or lichen. Realize you don't know the difference. Ask bigger questions. Fumble in your sack for your notebook and pen. Drop your glove on the ground. Write your questions down unintelligibly because your hand is cold. Fumble in your pockets and bag for the missing glove. You find it on the ground behind you. It's a long winter. You will lose the glove before it is over. 

There is some Górecki in the soundtrack of the magnificent film The Great Beauty, but there is one piece of music that haunts me. It's John Tavener's The Lamb — a William Blake poem set to music. That night after the movie I stay up late researching each title off the soundtrack (except for the Góreckis ... affixed to the bark of my soul in memory of Carol Taylor...wince....) until I find it. Then I listen, and I listen, and I listen. 

 

 

Apples of my eye

On Lincoln Avenue, in search of Central Asian cuisine and a Reiki master.

The past two Sundays I've gone to the Music Box with Angel. The first movie, A Separation, by Iranian director Asghar Farhadi, was yes, as the title suggests, a story about a troubled marriage. It was also about the bathos of intractability and the collision of the fanatical and the modern in a transitional place. All 203 minutes were compelling. 

Yesterday, we saw Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan. A two and a half hour movie, also utterly absorbing, about a group of policemen and other officials who go out into the countryside with two murder suspects in search of the crime spot and the body. Here is the dictionary description of Anatolia: the Asian part of Turkey, occupying the peninsula between the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, and the Aegean: consists of a plateau, largely mountainous, with salt lakes in the interior. Historical name Asia Minor. This was Murad's territory. My dear friend in Istanbul who was killed last year in a plane crash, two months before my scheduled visit. I haven't written about him yet Rose, but I often think about him. Watching this last movie, a real guy film about bureaucrats and formality, brings him to mind.

And again, everything is connected. Angel was the only friend of recent years who had met Murad; I introduced them when a business trip took Angel to Istanbul. When I was traveling in Mexico (researching the next, always upcoming, project), I turned on my iPhone despite the prohibitive roaming charges because I was lonely and scared. First night in a hotel in the southern state of Veracruz, I was afraid to leave the salmon pink room because the lights were out in the corridor. I called a friend (Erin Hogan, whose own road trip last year produced the excellent book Spiral Jetta) and we laughed. I had a rental car and was headed into the Isthmus of Tehauntepec early the next morning and I needed to rest (I would be on the road by myself only in daylight and had lots of territory to cover). I did fall into a deep sleep after our conversation. The second time I activated my phone I was on a bus going to Mexico City. I was sitting next to a nun who was silent and stout. Somewhere along the long journey (at night and through a countryside almost as desolate as the one in the Anatolia movie) she opened a paper bag and pulled out some fried fish wrapped in newspaper, releasing a pungently oily smell that hovered in the air for the next hour. I was feeling miserable. My phone pinged. It was a text from Angel who was having lunch with Murad in Istanbul. "Murad says to come visit," he wrote. I wrote  back and said I would. Then told them I was on a bus in Mexico sitting next to a nun who was eating stinky fried fish. It turned out to be a terribly expensive text message and worth the many Abraham Lincolns.

Once Upon a Time in Anatolia also had the second best movie moment involving an apple that I can think of: The caravan has pulled off the road, the suspect isn't sure it's the right spot and the police are walking around looking. One of the officers wanders off to a tree, alit by headlights, that is laden with fruit. He  jumps up to grab one and the branch shakes sending apples to the ground. The camera follows one as it rolls down a  hill and lands in a stream. Then, it follows the apple as it floats down the stream until it comes to rest in a little bend of sticks and other apples.  I love that scene. And it brought to mind my favorite apple scene of all time; in the  Brothers Bloom, Adrian Brody is walking through a park in Prague, steals an apple off a vendor's cart, then runs down a hill through an orchard of flowering trees to Cat Steven's Miles From Nowhere. I rented the movie so I could see that scene again (but really, it's a terrific movie Rose).

So the photograph above, you wonder? It was the bust of Lincoln that drew me in Then I noticed the sign. Lincoln loved apple pie, that's all I got for you on that one Rose. It was his favorite dessert. Up the street was the Central Asian restaurant called Jibek Jolu—filled with food from the "stans" where Murad often went collecting textiles. I had mandy (dumpling filled with beef, onions, and pumpkin) and a carrot salad. Just another thing I can't tell him.