Where Do We Go Now? starts slowly. I found myself wondering if this might be a film with an admirable theme but not compelling cinema. It turns out I could hardly have been more mistaken.

Where Do We Go Now? is funny, full of wonderful, crusty, earthy humor, and deeply moving. The setting is a small, remote village surrounded by the sectarian fighting that plagues the country. The men of the village, Christian and Muslim alike, are all hotheads, ready to go off at any provocation, real or imagined. The women, Christian and Muslim, have buried too many husbands and sons. They are united in their efforts to prevent the fighting from spilling over into their village. Their schemes range from the age-old tactic of withholding sex to a faked miracle, bringing in Ukrainian girls from the Pleasure Palace Nightclub to provide a distraction, and serving up hashish cookies to calm down the men. Finally, Christian women put on the chador and prostrate themselves, chanting, “Allahu Akbar,” while Muslim women worship as Christians and go out into the street flaunting dresses that reveal bare arms and legs. They tell the baffled men, “I’m one of them now.”

The sense of tragedy is not diminished by the humor with which the film abounds. The people of the village are caught up in awful circumstances not of their making. Still they have life to live, and humor is as much part of it as  the rage, grief, and loss that bring even faith into question. In a scene that calls to mind Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, a Christian woman asks the Virgin how she can allow the senseless deaths of sons of the village entrusted to her care. As with Bergman’s knight, the woman’s anguished questions receive only silence in response.

When yet another absurd death occurs, a terrible happenstance one night when two boys take a turn down the wrong street, things appear more hopeless than ever. The imam and priest, allied with the women, meet in the confessional to converse in private. The imam says, “We are in the shit. They are all out of control.” The priest replies, “Dear imam, my hands are tied. I already helped them fake a miracle. I won’t even get into hell now.” Yet the women, the imam, and the priest never just resign themselves to their fate.

I first attended the Portland International Film Festival in 1999, my first year in Portland.  Each year since I have looked forward to the festival as a high point of my winter. I have never been disappointed. This is the context in which I remark that I have gone whole festivals without seeing a film I like as much as Where Do We Go Now? and The Salt of Life.

The 35th annual Portland International Film Festival (PIFF) kicks off on Wednesday the 9th. My first thought when the festival program arrived in Saturday’s mail was to go through it and highlight the films I wanted to see. I gave that up somewhere around Lebanon—the program is arranged alphabetically by country–when I realized I was highlighting almost everything. Perhaps the better approach is to go at it day to day for whatever strikes my fancy at a particular moment.

 This year my schedule allows me to catch some of the festival press screenings at Whitsell Auditorium, a nice benefit of Silver Screen Club membership I have not previously taken advantage of. Monday I saw Gianni Di Gregorio’s gently melancholic comedy The Salt of Life (original title: Gianni e le donne). Writes Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian (Salt of Life — Review):

This thoroughly delightful Italian comedy by screenwriter-turned-auteur Gianni Di Gregorio is a kind of romantic realist-fantasia with Fellini in its DNA, and a little of Woody Allen. . . . also a very rare example of a movie whose starring role has been given to a real human being with a real human face.

That pretty much nails it. The setting is contemporary Rome. Gianni is 60ish, retired and living on his pension. His wife works, their daughter lives at home while attending the university, and the daughter’s slacker boyfriend has more or less taken up residence. The wife and daughter are absorbed in their own lives, to which Gianni sometimes seems not terribly essential as he does the shopping, walks the dog, and runs assorted errands. His days pass uneventfully.

Valerie De Franciscis reprises her role from Mid-August Lunch (2008) as Gianni’s mother, a wonderfully cranky old lady who lives in a splendid house in a fashion well beyond Gianni’s means to support. She is given to calling on him to come over and prepare lunch for herself and her cronies as they drink expensive champagne while playing poker at 11 in the morning, which he does in dutiful and exasperated good humor, same as when she phones at all hours of day or night for him to come over and adjust the television when the picture gets out of whack.

As in Mid-August Lunch food is as much part of the ensemble as the actors and the city of Rome, whether it is breakfast Gianni prepares to serve his wife in bed, lunch enjoyed with white wine on a sidewalk table outside a small restaurant, or dinner with an old flame.

For all this Gianni’s life is missing something. It is not that he is caught in an existential crisis over which he anguishes or obsesses. Rather, there is a vague listlessness to it all, no bounce in his step. He knows he would like something more from life than ending up with the three old men who sit in front of the café all day talking about football. But what that might be, ah, who knows, much less how to get it?

Gianni’s friend Alfonso suggests he have an affair. After all his mother’s nurse is a knockout, and she is right there in the house. Gianni does not take Alfonso seriously, but once the idea is planted, he is bemusedly intrigued. There follows a series of modest, harmless, halfhearted flirtations that need not pan out to add a bit of flavor to Gianni’s life. Hopefulness is seasoned with the bittersweet in just right proportion, as when his hopes are raised when his mother’s nurse says she dreamed about him, only to be dashed when she adds, “you were my grandpa.” Later he wonders aloud, light-heartedly to be sure, why he never married the old flame, to which she responds, also light-heartedly but maybe not altogether so, “because you’re an idiot.”

In lesser hands The Salt of Life could just another more or less amusing tale of an aging Lothario. That it is not that at all, that it is so much more, is a tribute to Di Gregorio as writer, director, and actor. He has given Gianni—and this film—a real human face. That is no small thing.

Drive is more than a bit violent and bloody for more taste, yet compelling. Ryan Gosling’s stoic protagonist is a Hollywood stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. Refn sees the taciturn, preternaturally cool driver as a mythic, fairy-tale hero, a knight in shining armor who saves the damsel in distress. This archetypal figure is grafted onto the existentialist antihero of classic noir who lives not so much outside legal and moral conventions as oblivious to them. Not that he is nihilistic. Far from it, he is bound by a strict moral code and sense of right and wrong that lie beyond articulation.

There is a woman, Irene (Carey Mulligan, whom you may recall from Lone Scherfig’s fine 2009 film An Education). Their paths cross by chance, mutual attraction communicated by shy glances and gestures. There are complications in the form of a young son and an imprisoned husband. When the husband returns home after release from prison, he senses there is something between his wife and her friend. He is bothered by this but lets it go beause he wants to put his criminal past behind him and make a life for himself and his family. In classic noir fashion, the past’s grip is not easily shaken, leaving the two men bound together on a doomed course undertaken because it is the only way they can see to protect the woman they both love.

To say the driver has a dark side is insufficient. There is something more than dark, something deeply bad and wrong, in the excess of violence coldly exhibited, without frenzy or fury, beyond any need of the moment. Thus Refn and Gosling collaborate to make the driver repulsive as well as appealing, for he is both. Contrast him with Lisbeth Salander in Steig Larsson’s trilogy about the girl with the dragon tattoo. No less capable of extreme violence than the driver, Lisbeth does horrible things to very bad people who would inflict as bad or worse on her if they could, and in some instances have done so. Though there were moments I cringed when reading or watching those scenes, I found myself cheering, albeit with something of a guilty conscience, as Lisbeth meted out a brutal justice. I felt nothing like that when the driver stomped the man in the elevator, however clear the man’s bad intent toward the driver and Irene. Is Lisbeth more simpatico because she is a woman brutalized and abused by men from childhood? Or it more that Larsson provides a backstory to give us a sense of why Lisbeth is as she is, it humanizes  her, while Refn’s driver remains a cipher, a mystery, not a realized individual for whom we might feel sympathy if we had a sense of the source of that capacity for violence within him.

The supporting cast is exceptional. Bryan Cranston (Hal in the television series Malcolm in the Middle) demonstrates again what a fine actor he is in a supporting role as Shannon, a mechanic and low-level hustler who perhaps sees himself as something of a mentor to the driver. As given to jittery chatter as the driver is silent, Shannon sets the tone early as he jabbers about a getaway car he’s prepared. “You look tired, kid,” he says to the driver. “Can I get you anything? Benzedrine, Dexedrine, nicotine…oh, that’s right, you don’t smoke.” Mulligan as the femme, Oscar Isaac the husband, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks the hoodlums, are equally up to the task. Brooks in particular has been singled out, deservedly, for his performance.

In the end I do not know that I would recommend Driver, certainly not without reservation and caveat, and I feel no inclination to see it again. Yet Refn’s film is compelling enough for me to anticipate checking out at least one screening in the series Driven: The Films of Nicolas Winding Refn, on the NW Film Center calendar for March.

Interviews with Nicolas Winding Refn

• Brandon Harris, Nicolas Winding Refn, “Drive” [ ], Filmmaker, September 14, 2011
• Matt Singer, Nicolas Winding Refn on “Drive,” Ryan Gosling’s jacket, and his “Logan’s Run” remake, September 14, 2011
• Steven Zeitchik, Ryan Gosling and Nicolas Winding Refn share the ride, Los Angeles Times, September 15, 2011

Only tops of the tallest buildings across the river downtown were visible through morning fog as I ran up onto Hawthorne Bridge. The sun was out and the fog quickly burned away, the morning become bright and clear, by the time I crossed over the Steel Bridge to the west bank. Temperature 34 degrees. A woman ran barefoot at a fair clip headed south along the Eastbank Esplanade as I went north. A young fellow ran in singlet and shorts. He did wear a stocking cap and gloves, which I suppose made him only about 90 percent crazy. We start with the gauge at 50 percent, half crazy, just for being out there and calling it fun. A woman on a park bench ate noodles with her fingers. The barefoot woman and I met again on the other side of the river as we looped around. Perhaps she smiled.

The eight-mile run was the first at that distance since I rolled my ankle two months ago. The ankle and foot are all but fully recovered, about as good as they are apt to be with the mileage on them. Much the same might be said of my spirit as the year sprints to the finish, a year that brought a few new poems, not enough and not good enough, they never are, but a few. Two poetry readings in Seattle, four in Portland, with small audiences that I think enjoyed what they heard. Read some books, saw some movies. Much alone, on occasion lonely, cherished friendships old and new and renewed. Christmas was with Trani and the family in Tulsa, hanging out at the store, running with the Tulsa Runner crowd, dinner at India Palace, raking leaves before a Christmas afternoon run, Midnight in Paris on DVD at home Christmas night, Aki Kaurismaki’s Le Havre at Circle Cinema. All in all, a pretty good close to a pretty good year.

Prospects for 2012 are problematic. Life is problematic, a circumstance we are often at some pains to deny or at least avoid acknowledging. Employment is uncertain, about which I suppose I should be more concerned than I am. Retirement does not loom in any plausible scenario. Most likely I will find myself in some job or other for which I am ill-suited until I keel over from a work-related stroke or heart attack, to a considerable extent consequence of a lifetime of foolish choices, dubious moves, regrettable decisions, and values to which I have tried to hold true. It is late in the day to forsake those values now, not that I would or can.

I turn 60 in August. If all goes reasonably well Trani and I will run a fall marathon—26.2 to celebrate 60. I do not think of myself as old, yet I know that I am a ways beyond young—as ever my goofy self, curious, caring, reticent, ambitious, uncertain, anxious, fearful, flaws a-plenty and passion too oft too well hid, poet by choice and by chance, student for the duration, still so much to learn, read, say, see, do, and never time enough for it. If all goes reasonably well 2012 figures to bring running, reading, poems, film, study of French and Italian, travel, and who knows what else that for now lies unseen. If fortune smiles I will do these things more with companions and less alone than in the past, to which end I should endeavor to be more forthcoming and open myself, something that has never come naturally or easily. Between doing alone and not doing, I do alone. I remain without expectation, given to hope, susceptible to enchantment, with a taste for the marvelous. We shall see what comes of it.

The Skin I Live In is intellectually horrific, psychologically suspenseful, and a zany tale of vengeance and madness, in other words, vintage Almodóvar. Held captive on the palatial estate of an unhinged but gifted plastic surgeon (Antonio Banderas) is a beautiful woman (Elena Anaya) on whom he experiments to develop a synthetic skin for burn victims. The woman’s identity and how these circumstances came about are a mystery until a man in a tiger costume comes to the door and rings the bell. The tiger is Zeca the criminal, whose appearance precipitates flashbacks to a tragic sequence of events that began six years earlier.

English plastic surgeon Nigel Mercer says, “I take my hat off to Pedro Almodóvar: this film about a deranged plastic surgeon is absolutely brilliant. My wife was so disturbed after watching it that she started asking me some concerned questions about what my job actually involves.” (Laura Barnett, Another View on The Skin I Live In, The Guardian, 13 September 2011)

For Almodóvar no subject is taboo, no scenario too far-fetched. Themes of identity, sexual and otherwise, are familiar ground for Almodóvar; here they form a unifying thread. The film starts a little slowly, then unwinds quite nicely. The storyline is outrageous, and Almodóvar makes it work, with a denouement where the inevitability of a tragic justice is followed by a touching and unanticipated reunion.

I have picked up Ulysses on a number of occasions, several anyway, over the years without ever making much headway, invariably finding myself soon lost, appreciative of this soaring passage or that bon mot, but too often unsure who said what, or where, or what exactly is happening here, there, or when, in what must be the longest day in the history of the world. The impulse to take another crack at Joyce’s grand work was just that, impulse, whim, and perhaps symptomatic of a trend to aimlessness and lack of focus that marks the past few years, a kind of entropy of intellect and spirit.

The curiosity that served me in good stead from my first discovery of books and reading is still with me. The discipline to follow through is what has eroded. Thus my reading bounces from a bit of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics to fascinating chapters about Proudhon the anarchist and John Stuart Mill in Alexander Herzen’s great memoir My Past and Thoughts to yet another perfunctory stab at Hegel for maybe no better reason than because he’s there and I’ve made little more headway with him than with Joyce, all of this highfalutin fare punctuated by a slew of contemporary novels, among them The Italian Shoes by Henning Mankell, The Club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte, The Tragedy of Arthur and Prague by Arthur Phillips. Sylvia loaned the Mankell. The redoubtable Neil Anderson’s recommendation of The Tragedy of Arthur led to Phillips. I happened on The Club Dumas while searching for vacation reading, having previously enjoyed several other Pérez-Reverte novels. This is typical of how one comes on books: recommendations, reviews, one book leads to another, all well and good, except another among my illusions is that I might yet make something of my life, late in the day as it is for that, and that calls for a bit more discipline, a bit less of being easily diverted from serious projects by books and escapades even when they offer their own rewards.

That Ulysses has its rewards is evident from the beginning in Joyce’s wonderful capacity to describe the most ordinary things and everyday events with grace, elegance, and assurance, even at his most wildly, wordmadly inventive, in language that is never, ever pedestrian, however commonplace that which is being described. The novel’s opening—”Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather, on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air”—may not be up there with “Call me Ishmael”; “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”; or “I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got there. Perhaps an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never go there alone”; but there is something of it caught in my mind on first reading and remains.

Harold Bloom avers that “Ulysses is a pleasure, difficult but available, for the common reader of intelligence and goodwill.” I buy that it is available for the reader of intelligence and goodwill but balk at the unalloyed claim to pleasure. There are moments of pleasure, to be sure, passing at times almost to sublimity, when after a long slog one comes to a passage that is just special, as when old Leo Bloom waxes rhapsodic on the topic of Gerty McDowell’s undergarments espied from a distance as she, provocatively posed, leans back for a better view of fireworks, full aware of the view on offer, her face “suffused with a divine, an entrancing blush from straining back and he could see her other things too, nainsook knickers, the fabric that caresses the skin, better than those other pettiwidth, the green, four and eleven, on account of being white and she let him and she saw that he saw and then it went so high it went out of sight a moment and she was trembling in every limb from being bent so far back that he had a full view high up above her knee where no-one ever not even on the swing or wading and she wasn’t ashamed and he wasn’t either to look in that immodest way like that because he couldn’t resist the sight of the wondrous revealment half offered like those skirtdancers behaving so immodest before gentlemen looking and he kept on looking, looking. . . .” Such wonders are worth hacking through the wordy undergrowth for, half lost half the time, more than half, fighting the impulse to skim whole pages for a passage that might tender intimations of some sublime, even settle for lower pleasures but pleasures still, born of Joyce’s genius to let fly great tsunamis of words that in lesser hands would soon degenerate into sophomoric excess, show-offy twaddle to no good end.

The experience of reading Ulysses is akin to that of reading poems such as Keats’ “The Fall of Hyperion” or Wordsworth’s “The Prelude,” where the challenge is to focus through lengthy stretches that may not enchant in and of themselves but are nonetheless integral to the whole, for a good poem’s meaning comes to more than just those special passages that lift us up out of ourselves and linger in our minds even when we do not formally commit them to memory. At present, barely halfway through Ulysses, I face the prospect of giving myself an incomplete if I do not go at it like a fury for the next few weeks. Yet there is the daunting but undeniable conviction that I would do well to go back to page one and begin anew with stately, plump Buck Milligan making the scene, yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, sustained gently behind him by the morning air, and take it up again with all the patience I can muster, enriched by the experience of what was absorbed on the first go around, having learned for instance that for me Joyce is best read aloud, at least moving my lips as I read, and in this sense too Ulysses is akin to those poems that mean most to me. This is where I stand with it for the nonce, with more, much more, to come.

I do not come to Woody Allen with an open mind. He is among those who most inform my work as poet, through the evolution of a sensibility, as a source of myth, with a feeling of spiritual kinship, however much or little merited. I would not be who I am or write as I do apart from my encounter with a company that includes Keats, Dickinson, Rimbaud, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, Gregory Corso, among the poets, and among others Bergman, Fellini, Dostoevsky, Camus, Nietzsche, Chagall, Bob Dylan, and Woody Allen. As my old philosophy professor Dr. Matsen used to say, we follow in the footsteps of giants.

Woody is among our foremost filmmakers. We might quibble over whether he has made a singularly great film that stands with, say, The Seventh Seal or Amarcord. Woody himself says he is still trying to make the great film that has thus far, in his own estimation, eluded him. We may accept that assessment without backing off one whit from our awe before the remarkable and rare achievement marked by his incredible body of work, a film a year for forty years, among them–off the top of my head–Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters, Match Point, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Midnight in Paris. Upon going to a list of his films, I hastily add Love and Death, Interiors, Husbands and Wives, and Crimes and Misdemeanors as special ones that deserve to be singled out. I imagine others would subtract from my list and add to it to make up their own. Even the lesser films, the ones that are more purely comedic or just do not quite measure up, have their moments of humor and poignancy.

What do you suppose it says about Woody Allen’s public persona that it comes more naturally to refer to him by first name than by last? Perhaps in part this is because for so much of his career Woody played the male lead in his films, so that rightly or wrongly we tend to identify the protagonist with Woody the person. In the later films I find myself seeing Larry David, Josh Brolin, Owen Wilson, as the “Woody Allen character,” sometimes thinking, probably unfairly, Woody would have delivered this line differrently, that line better. Woody’s protagonists tend to be anxious, overly reflective, cognizant of mortality and life’s fleeting nature, sometimes morbidly so, calling to mind stereotypical intellectual figures while never being reduced to stereotype. The capacity to direct witty barbs at themselves and their foibles as well as at others enables them to retain a certain affability, to be likeable even at their whiniest.

Woody gleefully harpoons the pretensions of intellectuals without coming across as in any way anti-intellectual himself, as in the scene from Annie Hall where the man standing behind Alvy and Annie in line to see The Sorrow and the Pity drives Alvy to distraction as he pontificates ad nauseam about the shortcomings of Fellini and Beckett before going on and on and on about Marshall McLuhan, moving Alvy to speculate what he wouldn’t give for a large sock with horse manure in it, then producing McLuhan himself to refute the windbag. It is not just that this fellow prattles on as he does that grates on Alvy; it’s that he gets Fellini, Beckett, and McLuhan all wrong. It is worth noting in the context that The Sorrow and the Pity, a four-hour documentary about Vichy France collaboration with Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944, is not exactly middlebrow fare; thus Alvy’s determination to see this film, which if memory serves he had already viewed on a number of occasions, might itself indicate a bit of pretension.

Woody has been graced with the good fortune to be able to devote his life to his work, and he has made the most of it. At age fifteen he began selling jokes to New York columnists such as Earl Wilson. He moved on to write for talk shows before his agents, Charles Joffe and Jack Rollin, convinced him to do stand-up and tell his own jokes, for which he had no inclination at the beginning, and his performances were uneven at best. (Among his role models as a stand-up comic was the wonderful Mort Sahl, known for his political and topical humor. I recall Sahl’s dry one-liner satirizing conventional, 1950s, early 1960s, notions about women: “A woman’s place is in the stove.”).

Woody’s success as a comic led to his being approached to write a script for What’s New, Pussycat? for which he would have a moderate role as a character in the film. The experience with What’s New, Pussycat? was not altogether a good one. He felt that if he had called the shots, the film would have been funnier but probably made less money. From this he concluded that he would work on a film only if he had complete control. He went on to write, direct, and star in Take the Money and Run, and the rest, as they say, is history. Through it all he remains indifferent to commercial success except insofar as that each film be sufficiently successful to enable him to find someone willing to invest in the next project. The day Woody completes a film, he puts it behind him and sets to work on the new one. As I write this, with Woody a week away from his 76th birthday, the 2012 film, Nero Fiddled, with a cast that includes Ellen Page, Penélope Cruz, Alec Baldwin, Roberto Benigni, Judy Davis, and Woody himself, is in post-production. I look forward to it.

At the outset Occupy’s renunciation of leadership and disdain for concrete proposals, detail, a program, accompanied by far-fetched comparisons to the Arab Spring, gave me pause about what should have been the heartening prospect of widespread rejection of laissez-faire fundamentalism and dismissal of the empty myth that political wisdom and responsibility is ipso facto to be found in the center. Paeans were sung to a naïve anarchism endorsed by earnest individuals convinced they were part of something unique in the history of humankind. Even those who should know better seemed willfully oblivious to the courtship of incoherence and nihilism inherent in generalized protest against whatever comes to mind, shades of young Marlon Brando in The Wild One, who when asked what he was rebelling against, replied, whadda you got? Energy, enthusiasm, and idealism take us only so far. Granted, I ought not be too critical. I have been there, convinced of the rightness of my cause and purity of my heart, not a doubt in my military mind, when “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”

Occupy’s enthusiasts credit the movement with educating the public and raising awareness about an economic system gone wrong. I believe this misses the mark by just a bit. It is not so much a matter of raising public awareness as of raising the awareness of the political and media classes that people understand perfectly well that the economic system has gone way off track and more than a few among them are outraged about it. That much Occupy has contributed, and it is no small matter. The size and staying power of Occupy demonstrations across the country have gotten the attention of entrenched power. Now where do we go from here? Will Occupy’s chosen tactics, to which the movement thus far stubbornly clings, help or hinder us in getting there? Even Portland’s Willamette Week, hardly a mouthpiece of the establishment, offered more than muted criticism of Occupy with two articles appearing in this week’s edition.

Occupy Portland had countless moments of beauty, absurdity and anger. In the end, it was downright ugly.

The 39 days of occupation in Lownsdale and Chapman squares began as an idealistic statement of protesters seeking economic equality and social justice.

Within days the camp became a tent city for the homeless and mentally ill, dominated at times by trouble-seekers and drug dealers. The protest camp turned two city parks into a putrid smear of mud.

But Occupy Portland also accomplished a great deal. In a way that labor unions, academics and writers could not, the organizers raised this city’s awareness of an economic system gone devastatingly wrong. (Corey Pein and Nigel Jaquiss, Chaos to Checkmate, Willamette Week, 11/16/2011)

The Occupy movement set out to bring attention to poverty, homelessness, big banks, Wall Street and other social ills that pitted the rich against the rest of us.

It began Oct. 6 when an estimated 10,000 people marched through the city, and a small group took up residence in Chapman and Lownsdale squares. In its final hours, 38 days later, Occupy Portland saw about 4,000 people stage a rally in the early morning of Nov. 13 to prevent police from clearing away the hundreds of tents in the camp.

In between, however, the Occupy Portland leadership became mired in process and debate while the camp became a haven for the homeless, drug addicts and violent street kids. The leaders never found their public voice, nor a direction in which to take their cause. (Hannah Hoffman and Aaron Mesh, The Fall of the 420 Hotel, Willamette Week, 11/16/2011)

One strain of Occupy Portland’s thinking was voiced during a discussion between Mayor Sam Adams and Occupy members on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Think Out Loud:

Occupy’s Ilona Trogub suggested there was value in the encampment’s disruption of downtown business as usual.

“You have to understand what we’re doing is an extremely heavy process. It’s going to take some stepping aside from people who don’t have the energy to be in the movement but who need to be supporting it. People need to be uncomfortable with what’s going on outside their houses first, and we are bringing attention to that,” Trogub said. (April Baer, Occupy Portland and Mayor Adams Have Words, Oregon Public Broadcasting News, 11/15/2011)

The sentiment expressed by Trogub is in accord with the tenor of too many Occupy actions, which whether by design or through want of design suggest the delusion that the movement’s aims will somehow be advanced by making life more difficult for ordinary people going about their daily affairs.

Meantime, the left sees the Occupy phenomenon through rose-tinted glasses, the mass movement always just around the corner once the people come to their senses and see where their interests lie. By way of example, Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation, enthusiastically proclaims progressives on the move (Progressives on the march to take over Congress, Washington Post, 11/14/2011):

Wisconsin lit the spark, as workers, students, teachers and farmers occupied the state’s capitol in February and launched recall elections that sobered conservative Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his legislative allies. Occupy Wall Street turned that spark into a conflagration that swept the nation. Last week, in Ohio and Maine and even Mississippi, voters overwhelmingly rejected efforts to trample worker rights, constrict the right to vote and roll back women’s rights.

. . .

Republicans mistook Tea Party passion for majority opinion. Led by Wisconsin’s Walker and Republican “young guns” in the House, they drove an extreme agenda, championing cuts in taxes for corporations and the wealthy while savaging investment in public education and public health, assaulting worker and women’s rights, and, since they knew this wasn’t a popular agenda, systematically working to make it harder for students, minorities, the poor, and blue-collar workers to vote.

Voters recoiled — opening space for Progressive Majority [whose mission is "to elect progressive champions"] and its partners’ unprecedented effort for the 2012 elections. This isn’t just a partisan revival. Corporate interests and lobbies rent Democrats as well as Republicans.

Time will tell if vanden Heuvel is right, as I would like her to be, or if this is just another swing of an ever more wildly swinging pendulum. The people tend to be a fickle lot.

The movement’s demands are so general and far-reaching that they leave unclear exactly what the authorities could do that would lead Occupy to consider its mission sufficiently accomplished to stand down. The situation is comirplicated by a certain social dynamic that seems to be at work here. People have invested considerable commitment, time, effort, sweat, and in some instances blood to a cause from which they derive a perhaps profound sense of community and power in a world where community is hard come by and powerlessness a condition of existence. It is no wonder when they fiercely resist eviction from the encampments. The occupation of public spaces and sporadic disruption of daily life become ends in themselves for want of a better idea.

Maybe I make too much of all this. Maybe my reluctance to endorse Occupy says as much about me, my shortcomings, hesitancies, failures, as it does about the movement. Should we hold those who put themselves on the line with fortitude and valor accountable for the misdeeds of hooligans who act in their name? Are even the best among them doing anything more than tilting at windmills? Does the pointlessness of an effort negate conduct that might otherwise be admirable?

Where does Occupy Portland, and the Occupy movement generally, go from here? I do not see what will be accomplished if it comes to nothing more than finding an alternative public space to occupy. At the outset the Occupy movement presented a forum for people to take a stand against an economic system where a very few people make out like bandits at the expense of the general welfare and common good. The numbers and staying power of the movement confounded many and helped nudge the national dialogue away from exclusive focus on reduction of government spending and general dismantling of government as the solution to all that ails us. Occupy can claim that as a positive accomplishment.

The movement remains amorphous, determinedly renouncing leadership and articulation of a political platform or program. In the early days this made sense from a tactical standpoint to draw as many people into the movement as possible, recognizing that people begin breaking into factions and dropping away altogether the instant concrete proposals are advanced. The claim to speak for the 99 percent makes for a good slogan, but no one in our deeply divided country speaks for 99 percent of us on anything. (See Beyond Red vs. Blue: The Political Typology for results of a Pew Research Center study conducted earlier this year.)

Certain members of the punditocracy have tried to diminish Occupy by conflating it with the Tea Party, in what is at best a gross oversimplification of the nature and aims of both movements. What Occupy and the Tea Party may share is a sense of powerlessness. Occupy’s acts of defiance and sense of community offer a temporary, and ultimately I think illusory, antidote to that sense of powerlessness. This may account in part for the determination to continue occupation indefinitely, occupation for the sake of occupation, grimly staying put until somebody does something, while precisely what is to be done, by whom, and how, remains up in the air, or perhaps blowing in the wind.

Two interpretations of events that unfolded in Portland over the weekend:

• Occupy Portland: Eviction of downtown parks went exceptionally well, Mayor Sam Adams says
• What you missed . . .

Mozart’s Sister is set toward the end of a long tour of Europe that began in 1763 when Wolfgang (David Moreau) was seven. Over a period of three years the children travelled thousands of miles with their parents in a horse-drawn carriage and performed for thousands of people in palaces and churches in 88 cities. Nannerl was five years older than her brother and one of his earliest role models. Here Féret takes a minor liberty by lopping two years off the difference in ages, having Nannerl nearly 15 and Mozart almost 12, while Léopold routinely shaves two years off young Wolgang’s age when introducing his son to audiences, thus making his virtuosity seem all the more remarkable.

Nannerl is not jealous of the attention given Wolfgang. Far from it, she revels in her brother’s genius. She wishes only the opportunity to nourish her own. As for Wolfgang, he appreciates his sister’s talent, and the shared joy found in music makes for a strong bond between them. Féret deftly depicts the children’s unusual lives, where all they know is music, practice, lessons, and performance, an upbringing that nurtures genius by placing it in a cocoon from which it is ill-suited to emerge into a world of more ordinary social interaction and everyday life.

The genius of writer-director René Féret’s film, presented as a “speculative” account, is that it is not content just to paint Nannerl Mozart as a victim of 18th-century attitudes toward women. A broken axle leads to a chance encounter and friendship with a daughter of Louis XV, which in turn leads to a strange friendship and near affair with Louis’s son the Dauphin, recently widowed, with some wonderfully loony court intrigue and subtly depicted depravity. In the end we can only wonder what Nannerl Mozart might composed. Her loss is our loss too.

References

Mozart’s Sister

Elizabeth Rusch, Maria Anna Mozart: The Family’s First Prodigy, Smithsonian.com, March 28, 2011