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| December 2009 »
On this day we sincerely give thanks for life, for being alive — an experience unlike any other. Well, we don’t know any other anyway, most of us. The floats and balloons go by a couple of blocks from my house, which sounds glamorous and exciting until you see the crowds and the frantic behavior by both parent and child out there.
My Daddy Says
My mom and dad are visiting. Mom is watching An American in Paris on TV (though she nods off regularly) and dad is devouring my New York Review of Books issues that I save for him.
I hollered out to dad, “Dubai is broke!” but dad (surprisingly) didn’t know about the existence of the tiny desert enclave that, with no real resources, has built up a massive amount of real estate and wealth. It's a self-invented mercantile hub — a nexus of shipping, trading and banking.
[Photo]
Lightning strikes the world’s tallest building in Dubai… often…
It's much like Hong Kong in a way. They went crazy with the tall buildings and the splashy lifestyle, but now the piper’s come a calling and they have built much of it on debt. Debt they can’t repay. Ooops. I recall articles a couple of years ago about Americans living the good life in Dubai, making tons of money quickly, boozing it up in luxury apartments, hanging mainly with other newly rich expats.
I imagine other cities and territories that have no real assets will find themselves in a similar spot quite soon. Detroit is already just about gone — though urban farming is rumored to be a novel use for the vacant acreage; as is Phoenix, though they do have mineral wealth in the surrounding deserts, which is why it was seized from Mexico in the first place. The suburban town my parents live in, Columbia, MD, is in a comparable situation. It is a corporate development that was traded to a Chicago company, which has built lots of new condos and office buildings in recent years, as has been done all over NYC, imagining that the real estate bubble would go on expanding ad infinitum. Meanwhile, the town has no resources and they don’t actually make anything.
It seems to me these systems are all based on faith — faith that is easy to sustain when the money is fast and flows easily, and when there is no end in sight. Faith then seems justified. Those who doubt get laughed at. It’s not a reality-based system — as the Bush administration used to say, “We make the reality.” It’s true, to an extent, that faith certainly does make reality — if enough people believe something to be true, then you can predict that things will occur as if it is… until someone or something pulls the bottom card out. The art market is, and always was, a faith-based system — and so far, many of the believers still feel secure.
My dad pointed out that the country’s banking problems are only the tip of the economic iceberg, but we know so much about them because bankers whine louder than many others, and have connections — so folks hear their whining. But, my daddy says, the unemployed are a huge and growing financial drain, as are the massive number of prisoners in the US — not Gitmo folks, but regular jails are a massive soak… as are health care costs (the US insurance and pharma companies have managed to create the most expensive health care system in the world, though it is not always the best!)… and finally, duh, Afghanistan and Iraq are bleeding trillions out of the US economy and flushing them down the drain in the sense that only a miniscule percentage of those trillions, trillions!, actually creates anything — very, very little of it creates jobs, employment or infrastructure. It’s basically money down the toilet as far as the US economy goes — and now we really can’t afford to throw that kind of money away. Granted, those trillions are supposed to be guaranteeing us some kind of global safety and security — or so we were told — but pretty much the exact opposite has happened, as the brushfires spread to neighboring hills that were previously fairly safe.
The wars (or, more correctly, invasions) in Afghanistan and Iraq are tied, intimately, to the global economy and also the daily lives of every American. A country that threw away trillions on invasions that have not accomplished their objectives (which often were not even clear in the first place) is in no position to deal with the costs of exploding unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, education and economic collapse. The public is beginning to sense this, and as their pockets become increasingly empty they, I sense, feel that maybe now that there has been sufficient “revenge” for 9/11, and maybe the venting has been accomplished — the dubious mission has been accomplished — it’s time to move on.
I was invited to be on the jury of the Estoril Film Festival, which, like many others, has a number of sections — tributes to directors (David Cronenberg, Victor Erice — Spirit of the Beehive) and actors (Juliette Binoche), a smattering of crowd pleasers (Fantastic Mr. Fox, Antichrist) and an actual film competition. The force behind the festival, Paulo Branco, a Portugal-based art film producer, had his folks select competition films from the pile that often gets overlooked at the other big name festivals, where films by big name directors are often in competition. So, we got some small to medium (Moon) films that often deserved another look or more attention than they’d gotten, though a few had indeed won prizes previously. Unlike Cannes this festival is not a marketplace, but an award or series of awards might help a small film find distribution. As it gets slightly easier to make a film — with digital projection and computer editing — marketing and distribution are no easier or cheaper than before, though innovative strategies appear, as with the super cheap to make Paranormal Activity in the US, which Paramount released city by city before it blew up. We’d usually see 2 movies a day, and after viewing the dozen selections, we 4 members of the jury haggled over a nice lunch.
Here are the winners and some others we all liked a lot. Best Film: Dogtooth, a Greek film by Yorgos Lanthimos. Wow — I loved this film, even if the video projected version wasn’t so great looking. It’s very formal and stylized, and it begins in a way that appears to be completely hilarious and absurdist (one juror said it just seemed random at that point) — but soon it turned dark and became very disturbing. I noticed online that some people absolutely hate it. There was one scene where I turned away. 
[Source]
Here’s a trailer. (Spoiler alert: some images in the trailer give away too much, in my opinion.) This from Variety: “Three indefinitely grounded siblings are stuck in an alternative universe dictated by their parents' cruel whimsies -- think an eternal ‘Big Brother’ house as designed by Lars von Trier.” We split the second prize, as we loved both films. The Girl, a Swedish film by Fredrik Edfeldt. This is a beautifully made and shot film about a young girl in a rural house who is left in the care of a young aunt while her parents go on a good works trip to Africa. Soon enough, the young aunt abandons the girl as well — and she has to fend for herself, which isn’t completely bad, as most of the adults seem like jerks. 
[Source]
And:
Eastern Plays, a Bulgarian film by Kamen Kalev about a young, artistic though aimless man who drinks a bit too much beer (the actor was also a junkie in real life). He rescues a Turkish family (and their beautiful daughter) after they are attacked on the night streets of Sofia by some fascist skinheads — one of whom is our hero’s brother. Slow moving, but wonderful. Sadly the lead actor passed away before the last few scenes in Istanbul were to be shot. The film integrates news footage of soccer hooliganism, racist attacks and Eastern European street fighting with the characters and the story in a way that feels natural. 
[Source / source]
Other films we all liked were: Le Roi de l'Evasion This hilarious French film by Alain Guiraudie is about love among French farmers and tractor salesmen. These middle aged and older guys all appear to be normal hicks, but they love to frolic together in the woods and elsewhere. It’s a farce, I guess — I laughed a lot. The lead is an overweight tractor salesman named Armand who rescues a young girl from a group of teen bullies — she, though only 16, then falls obsessively for him, and he decides to try going straight, and the two end up on the lam, with the young girl chasing big Armand in his skimpy briefs though field and forest. I could just imagine the director pitching this concept in Hollywood! 
[Source]
Les Beaux Gosses is a French film by Riad Sattouf about pimply teens and their attempts at scoring girls. Sounds like a typical American Pie scenario, but these kids are (to me) funnier and more realistic in their awkwardness and geeky looks. Much, much better and funnier than any recent Hollywood teen movie. I think this one could be the most popular of the films we saw — the audience, like me, was laughing a lot. If close-ups of awkward tongue kissing and pimples turn you off then avoid this one. 
[Source]
Lastly:
Le Famille Wolberg, a Belgian film by Axelle Ropert about a Jewish family — the husband is a mayor, the wife had an affair, and we watch the model family fall to pieces in a very subtle way. The film touches on a lot of hot topics in Belgium, so it’s not just about one family’s problems.
Slightly inland from the seaside town of Cascais, nestled on a low mountain that seems to generate its own cloud cover, is the retreat of former royals and wealthy citizens called Sintra. The mountain and its cloud cover must have made for a pleasant coolness in the hot Portuguese summers. C and I made a couple of day trips up there to visit some former palaces, residences and monasteries.
One of these is called Quinta de Regaleira, the former home of a baroness that was later bought by Carvalho Monteiro, a super wealthy Brazilian, at the turn of the century. After buying the house he then bought up the rest of the hill where the baroness’ home was situated. After a false start at commissioning a design for a place for himself, he decided to hire an opera set decorator to design both the house and its chapel, but also to effectively turn the whole mountaintop into a colossal set, with fake ponds, underwater labyrinths and a series of underground tunnels that functioned as a metaphorical voyage of initiation and self-discovery — a voyage inspired by the Knights Templar, the Freemasons and alchemists as well. Disney take note — this guy was doing freaky cosmic theme parks before anyone else.
So I asked myself, as readers of Dan Brown’s books no doubt have, who were these Knights of Templar?
They came into existence after the crusades had gained a foothold in Jerusalem. The first crusade, or shall we call it invasion of the Middle East by western Europeans, was in 1099. Jerusalem was captured from the Arabs, and Europeans began to make pilgrimages to the Holy Land in significant numbers to see and feel the aura of the place where their faith originated. While Jerusalem was, for these pilgrims, a kind of protected Green Zone, the approach to it was not. The route from the port of Jaffa (alongside present-day Tel Aviv) inland to Jerusalem was dangerous, and scores of pilgrims were slaughtered by what we might now call insurgents, or freedom fighters…or defenders of their homeland? The hapless pilgrims needed to call Blackwater or some other ruthless mercenaries for hire to protect them. So, one hundred years later a French knight proposed the creation of an order that would attempt to protect these pilgrims — the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, so called because they were given a headquarters by King Baldwin II: the Al Aqsa Mosque, which, significantly, had been built over the former Temple.
What was this Temple of Solomon, I ignorantly asked myself? According to Wikipedia it was, in its first incarnation, “the first temple of the ancient religion of the biblical Israelites, originally constructed by King Solomon… It was designed to house the Ark of the Covenant” — so we’re in Raiders of the Lost Ark territory now. Other powerful relics were rumored to be buried at this site, but all we know is that the Templars got hold of bits of what were referred to as pieces of the “True Cross.”
The Temple of Solomon was destroyed and rebuilt a number of times…marking important events in Jewish history. Here is a (somewhat exaggerated?) visual depiction from a Freemasonry website — it brings to mind the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago. Freemasons sometimes claim that the architects and masons who built this massive thing were the original Freemasons — hence the association with the Knights.
Eventually the Romans took it over, and built their own temple there — and at present there is once again a mosque on the site, which includes the oft-disputed Dome of the Rock.
[Source]
Beneath a section of the Dome of the Rock there is a cave known as the Well of Souls. All sorts of wild myths abound:
“Islamic tradition holds that Muhammad ascended heavenwards from the stone above the cave, a related tradition has grown up that states that the Last Judgment will happen at the Sakhrah, and that the souls of the dead gather in the well of souls to wait for that event, and to pray… [and lastly,] according to pre-Islamic folklore, the well of souls was a place where the voices of the dead could be heard along with the sounds of the Rivers of Paradise.” [Source]
That’s a lot of mythical weight to bear!
The Knights were quickly endorsed by the Catholic Church, and wore recognizable white mantles featuring a symmetrical red cross (this cross appears regularly at Monteiro’s theme park). They became an expert fighting unit — proto-Jedi Knights, spiritual warriors and protectors. About 100 years after their founding the Pope not only recognized them but gave them special privileges — one can imagine how noble their cause would have seemed to the European imagination. They were granted tax-free status, and were allowed passage anywhere they wanted to go — borders were no longer of any import to the Knights. Being a kind of military and financial institution (see below), this papal bull was immensely helpful.
[Source]
Though as individuals they were legendarily poor and relied on donations to continue their work, their order quickly amassed massive assets and devised innovative financial techniques. For instance: a pilgrim or entourage might want to visit the Holy Land but not leave their valuables unattended back home. So, they would place them in the hands of the regional Templars in their hometown, and in turn they were issued a paper certificate, which they could redeem for money in Jerusalem. The first form of checking, and banking of a sort, was born. Already the plot thickens — you can imagine the kinds of assets the organization accumulated. The whole island of Cyprus belonged to the Templars at one point!
Their power increased and they became an established institution (partly financial) in Europe and elsewhere in the following centuries. But not everyone was happy about this. King Philip of France ended up owing them a lot of money and he wondered how he could get out of his debts. He pressured Pope Clement V to go after the Templars. At first the Pope was timid in his attack on the Jedi — but King Philip must have had some leverage, because after a bit the Pope summoned the Templars to him and arrested and tortured them all, accusing them of heresy, homosexuality and weird initiations. Some signed confessions under torture (which they later recanted) and most of the powerful Templars were burned at the stake.
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One cried out to the King and Pope as the flames consumed him that he would see them later; both of them died within the year…but not before the church and king had usurped the accumulated lands and property of the order.
By around 1300 the Templar Order was effectively gone, but as an inspiration they lived on. Reader Luís Bonifácio adds: "The Order was disbanded in all countries of Europe with the exception of Portugal, where King Deniz, when notified by the Pope to disband the Templars, proposed to confiscate all their belongings, and to form a new Knight Order called the 'Order of Christ.' The Pope accepted, and all the knights, churches, monasteries and territories of the Knights Templar were transformed into the 'Order of Christ,' which was simply the Knights Templar by another name, commanded by a member of the Royal Family. Their symbol continued to be the red cross, with a different design, which you can still see in the sails of the NRP Sagres (sister ship of the USS Eagle). A century later, the Knights of this Order, led by the Grand-Master Prince Henry the Navigator, started the Portuguese Discoveries, an expansion towards Africa, America, India, China and Japan. The Order remained in the lead of the Expansion until Portugal's annexation by Spain in 1580. After 1580, the Order was disbanded, and today remains one of the most important honorific orders of medals in Portugal. In the XVI century, the role of the Order of Christ in Portuguese history was taken by the 'Company of Jesus' (the Jesuits), until the early XX century."
Both Knights Templar and Freemasonry were essentially secret societies — though very different from one another — which led to lots of speculation and rumor. They both also had a vaguely spiritual bent — an idea that initiates might be given special knowledge that was passed down, and strange rituals that both bound the members together and were metaphors for personal discovery. [Source]
Various spinoffs of the Masons in the US in the earlier part of the last century made the initiation and other ceremonies into lovely little quasi-theatrical events. Here is a “set” and backdrop from one such ritual that was for sale via the Webb Gallery in Texas:
One could argue that here was a whole genre of theater that existed out of public view.
So, back to Monteiro’s theme park mountain. The house is pretty great — with Arabic-themed rooms, and a hunting-themed room with mosaics of beasts to be killed and a huge tusked boar bust in marble looming out from the wall — but it is the gardens that folks come to see. Visitors head up the hill, along winding paths, past follies and fountains, through a forest of exotic plants imported from Brazil until one reaches a pile of moss covered stones.
We were told that in the past a hidden staircase led to the top of the pile, but as that route led nowhere, one was sometimes led through a crevasse to a hidden stone door with no handle. And the door was way too heavy to move by hand. How to get inside? Our guide showed us a hole in a crack near the rock door, in which was concealed a lever that released a counterweight, allowing the door to swing open — like a fairytale or an episode out of Arabian Nights come to life! Through the door was what is referred to as the initiates’ well…though it was never used as a well.
In Monteiro’s conception this allowed one to metaphorically descend into the underworld — a realm of self-testing, self-discovery and rebirth. At the bottom of the stairs was the entrance to a couple of tunnels. Our guide escorted us into one of them, saying the other led to a dead end. We pulled out our little flashlights.
Monteiro had a whole maze of tunnels constructed under his mountain — some led to grottoes, with no way out, and one led to another well that had no winding staircase to bring one up and out. To really leave the tunnel complex, and symbolically escape from the underworld (the subconscious?), one had to take a tunnel with no light at the end — to head into darkness. Eventually one emerged in the back of a little (man-made) grotto, and had to exit using stepping stones — stepping in a proscribed manner, right foot first.
Fun, eh! None of it is natural, but with the algae and mossy growth it all seems quite believable.
There is a chapel with a Knights Templar cross on the floor and a Masonic eye in a triangle on the ceiling. A mosaic shows a saint on a seashore preaching to fishes — the fish are leaping out of the water with their mouths open in rapt attention. Inside the main house there is a library that must have been constructed as a kind of contemporary art installation. The walls were filled with books on all sides, and around the perimeter of the floor was a mirror that appeared to extend the bookshelves down below the floor we were standing on. The carpeted ground in the center of the room seemed to therefore “float” — it was a creepy, unnerving sensation. I believe the lowest shelf you can see is actually a reflection:
Nearby Quinta Regaleiro is the remains of a small monastery formerly belonging to the convent of the Capuchos order. Like the magic mountain, it too was somewhat peculiar. There was no sign of a large building that might harbor loads of monks — just a small, rough cobblestoned area with two crosses on top of vaguely triangular stones. C looked behind one of the crosses, and sure enough there were steps that led to a crevasse between two huge boulders. In the crevasse was a door.
The monastery itself was not huge, and was tucked into the natural boulders and vegetation — we were told that these monks sought a kind of enlightenment in harmonizing with nature. Inside, the rooms were often lined with cork bark, as those trees were growing everywhere around. The bark walls, and bark covered doors and window blinds, made the tiny rooms appear even more primitive — as if some other kind of civilization lived here. The rooms for the individual monks, their cells, were so tiny and the doors leading to them so low and small, it seemed the monks were a species of Hobbit.
C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended. We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies. I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution. I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside. Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.
[Source]
Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary. I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely. A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time. I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least. In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.
In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well. In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?
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