Vampyr

Vampyr (Criterion DVD, 2008)
Directed by Carl Th. Dreyer
Denmark, 1932
In German with English subtitles

Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 Vampyr, his first sound film, is as much an art statement as it is a vampire movie. Loosely based on a pair of 19th-century short stories by Sheridan Le Fanu, this recently restored print pairs a surrealistic narrative structure with Dreyer's usual compositional brilliance to create a true shadow world in tune with its subject. While the odd, intentionally disjointed plot has to do with the fate of a character named Allan Gray, an occult student/enthusiast who wanders into a strange inn on the outskirts of Paris late one night and immediately begins to suffer the effects of a series of supernatural encounters, one of the ways in which it breaks new ground is that the audience is never sure whether Gray is delusional, dreaming, or perhaps already dead (shots like the one below, where the character appears to see himself in a coffin, are of little help). Real life aristocrat Nicolas de Gunzburg gives a woozy, somnambulistic performance as Gray that's just perfect for the part, and Dreyer and his crew accentuate the oneiric elements in the script with a succession of images--ghost couples dancing to a band of ghost musicians, a gravedigger "undigging" a grave, a female vampire victim's carnivorous smile--noteworthy for their austere beauty. Maybe not the fastest-paced film ever--but the Man Ray-like visuals more than make up for it, trust me. (http://www.criterion.com/)

Note: I haven't seen all the extras on this two-disc set yet, but what I have seen has been impressive. Highlights so far include Jorgen Roos' Carl Th. Dreyer, a 1966 documentary on the director, and Casper Tybjerg's "visual essay" on the artists and artwork that influenced Dreyer's style on this film.

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway

Booked to Die: A Mystery Introducing Cliff Janeway (Charles Scribner's Sons hardcover, 1992)
by John Dunning
USA, 1992

For all this book's rather serious shortcomings (faux tough guy patter that almost always rings false, an uninteresting protagonist, side stories involving a thug and a love interest that lack all credibility whatsoever), I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I actually enjoyed much of this thriller's plot. While some of that likely only had to do with the particular subculture explored in the novel, the world of book dealers and book scouts in Denver's used/rare book trade, I feel I must grudgingly give Mr. Dunning some pre-Da Vinci Code-style credit for pumping out a mystery that was almost as entertaining as it was preposterous! Rating: Eat a big bag of these and then tell me how you feel! (http://www.simonandschuster.net/)

John Dunning and his poseur hat

Sin Nombre

Sin Nombre
Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga
USA and Mexico, 2009
In Spanish with English subtitles

I saw the U.S./Mexico coproduction Sin Nombre yesterday and thought it was a decent movie despite a couple of major flaws that continue to grate on me today. I should start by noting that first-time feature film director Fukunaga is to be commended for taking on the themes of Central American immigration to the United States and gang violence of the Mara Salvatrucha variety, two sometimes interrelated topics that have yet to receive much play from other U.S. filmmakers. In traveling scenes like the one pictured below, the director and his team even manage to highlight the desperation along the route to the so-called promised land in a manner reminiscent of both The Grapes of Wrath and Heart of Darkness. Unfortunately, other aspects of the film--like the way it turns into a typical thriller more and more as the main characters head north--are way less impressive on the storytelling end of things. While photogenic leads Paulina Gaitan (Sayra) and Edgar Flores (Willy/El Casper) do nice jobs as a Honduran teenager trying to make her way to family in New Jersey and a Mexican ex-gang member trying to flee from his old way of life, the way the sheltered teenager and the killer with a heart of gold so quickly develop a bond is unconvincing in the extreme: Hollywood, baby, Hollywood. Rating: 3/5 stars.

Three of the "nameless"

See "official" trailer w/cheesy voiceover here.

The Land of Little Rain

The Land of Little Rain (The Modern Library Classics paperback, 2003)
by Mary Austin
USA, 1903

"For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. It comes upon one with new force in the pauses of the night that the Chaldeans were a desert-bred people. It is hard to escape the sense of mastery as the stars move in the wide clear heavens to risings and settings unobscured. They look large and near and palpitant; as if they moved on some stately service not needful to declare. Wheeling to their stations in the sky, they make the poor world-fret of no account. Of no account you who lie out there watching, nor the lean coyote that stands off in the scrub from you and howls and howls." --The Land of Little Rain, p. 10

Although The Land of Little Rain is very slow moving in parts, I liked this slender 109-page nature-writing classic quite a bit more than I would've expected from just a quick glance at that horrid New Age cover on my library copy above. Austin's prose is suitably spare and unadorned throughout this series of 14 non-fiction vignettes on life in the harsh southern California desert, but she has a great eye for detail and an unconventional point of view that provide for constant surprises when leafing through her work (to provide just one example, Austin is as likely to decry an act of violence with an unexpectedly secular aside--"Since it appears that we make our own heaven here, no doubt we shall have a hand in the heaven of hereafter" [40]--as she is to attribute John Muir's profound love of the natural world to his status as "a devout man" in another passage [95]). Geographically focused on the areas near the Mojave Desert and the Owens Valley in California where the author lived at the dawn of the 20th century, the Land of Little Rain's thematic concerns embrace the flora and fauna of the region, the itinerant gold prospectors still looking for their lucky strike, and--perhaps most interesting of all over a century later--Austin's interactions with the Paiute and Shoshone Indians and the Mexican settlers of her adopted home. Discovering that the midwest transplant and single mom Austin was so appreciative of these different cultures in an age notorious for intolerance of all kinds makes me want to learn more about this gifted writer sooner rather than later. Rating: 4 out of 5 stars. (http://www.modernlibrary.com/)

Mary Austin

The Modern Library edition of The Land of Little Rain includes a fine biographical sketch by Robert Hass, but other versions of the text are available online for free due to its status as a public domain work. For a good recent blog entry about Austin and her life, check out Prof. Peter Richardson's self-titled blog on Californian culture here.

Buenos Aires Trip Report #2

Palermo, Buenos Aires

(Click here for the earlier part of this trip report)

Tu, March 17: My wife and in-laws had some shopping to do in the barrio Once section of Buenos Aires, but they kindly dropped me off at Plaza Serrano in Palermo so I could do some wandering around on my own in one of my favorite parts of the city (I was sad to miss Once since I only know it from Daniel Burman's 2004 film El abrazo partido [Lost Embrace], which takes place there, but these are the kind of decisions one must make on a short trip). Although Palermo's one of the bigger neighborhoods in town, the area I was strolling in is usually referred to as Palermo Soho or Palermo Viejo. I'm not sure where the exact boundaries are, but this part of the neighborhood reminds me a little of Greenwich Village in New York with fewer in-your-face hipsters and a more musical accent. The tree-lined streets above are typical of the barrio's tranquility during the day, but at night the place becomes a madhouse with pub crawlers, tourists, and some of the most photogenic people in town taking in the bar and café culture. A couple of years ago, the big joke was that some of Palermo was being even further subdivided into yet another new district, Palermo Iraq, on account of all the American tourists who had invaded it! I enjoyed walking down the fiction-friendly J.L. Borges street toward leafy Plaza Italia, getting lost on some other street on my way back (without a map of any sort, I didn't realize that Plaza Serrano's official name is Plazoleta Julio Cortázar), and having a beer and a coffee outdoors at Malasartes near the appointed rendezvous time with the rest of my family: a wonderful corner to people-watch from as this particular stretch of real estate has more beautiful women passing by per square foot than anywhere I've been outside of Barcelona and Paris. Not that I noticed, being married and all! I'd dipped into a couple of bookstores and record stores before that without buying anything--the calm before the storm--and somewhere along the way I stopped at an ice cream shop because I just had to have a cono at this one particular place because of its advertising: they had a cardboard cutout of Gardel wrapped around a street sign with a doctored image of the tango titan holding an helado in his hand. How cool is that? Back at home in Burzaco later that evening, A cooked up a delicious dinner of rabas (calamare) and breaded filets of merluza and pejerrey (two types of fish) that we'd bought from the pescador (fisherman, or in this case, the traveling fishmonger) when he was making his morning rounds in the neighborhood with his carrito full of fish on ice. My in-laws also receive frequent visits from the sifonero (a guy who delivers carbonated water bottles that come with their own siphon--the water amazingly never goes flat) and a biweekly visit from la pollera (a woman who delivers free-range chickens door to door). Is it just me or doesn't this seem like a way more "civilized" form of life than having to shop at Whole Foods or your local chain supermarket of choice?

The Holy Grail of Recent Argentinean Fiction

Wed, March 18: My wife hates the hustle and bustle of big cities everywhere--too much sensory overload--so we agreed that I'd go into Buenos Aires on my own today because I love sensory overload! Adroguébus operates a combi (shuttle van) that leaves from the train station in Adrogué and drops you off in the middle of downtown Buenos Aires near the Obelisco on 9 de Julio for a mere 7 pesos ($2 U.S.), so I hopped on and headed off for another day of exploring. "Exploring" in this case meant walking up and down the microcentro looking for books and absorbing life away from home, so I started off on calle Corrientes and started walking away from 9 de Julio to the west. What a day! Something like 13 million people, about a third of Argentina's population, live in its capital city, so walking down these main downtown arteries gives you a real feel for the more monumental side of things here. While Corrientes is far from my favorite street, there are masses of people everywhere and a librería (bookstore) seemingly every two or three stores. Sort of like a Times Square with books! I walked down Corrientes and some of the surrounding streets most of the day, stopping at calle Callao on my first run and ending up near Plaza San Martín in the Retiro district on the other side of 9 de Julio on my way back. Crazy walking which led me to a totally accidental discovery of one of Borges' houses! The part of Corrientes near where I started includes some of the theater district, but my happiest moment in the day was finding Distal Libros (http://www.distalnet.com/) at Florida 528: a decent but fairly nondescript smaller bookstore that had a copy of Rodrigo Fresán's Mantra for sale. I had this book checked out of my local university library for months without being able to find another copy for sale, and my attempts to order it online led me to discover that it's selling for upwards of $50 in the U.S. because it's out of print or just impossible to find here for some reason. I only paid 36 pesos (about $10 U.S.) for Mantra at Distal, and I was so excited to find a copy of this paperback grail at last that I briefly debated buying a second one to give away as a gift. I eventually decided against this, leaving the remaining copy at Distal for the next tourist from a faraway land to fortuitously encounter some day, and bought a copy of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada's 1942 Radiografía de la pampa (oft cited as one of the defining works in 20th century Argentinean letters) for 49 pesos instead. A bookstore or two later, and I had a copy of Juan José Saer's La pesquisa under my arm from the Ateneo bookstore (think of a good version of a B&N or Border's in the U.S. stocked with all those Spanish titles you could only dream about) at Florida 627. I could have gotten this book from the library, but the 37 peso price was just too good to pass up for this literary souvenir (Saer was one of my favorite fiction discoveries last year thanks to a marvelous professor I know, so here's a review of another work of his I read for the 2008 Orbis Terrarum Challenge). On my way back to Adrogué on the combi, I basked in the glow of my incredible book-buying good fortune and then laughed when I saw a parrilla called "ESTOY LOCO" along the route. Hey, I'm crazy, too! Anyway, here's a short article on Fresán, an argentino now living in Spain, and his Mantra, a kaleidoscopic feat of writing set in and inspired by Mexico City, that may help you understand why finding this one title in itself would have made for a totally satisfying book-buying trip for me. Which means that the other dozen or so to come were just icing on the Mantra cake!

A remera (t-shirt) touting Argentina's favorite sandwich: chorizo + pan

Th, March 19: I don't remember what C and my in-laws had going on during the day, but I took advantage of some free time to head into the city solo again. Today's destination: San Telmo, one of the oldest neighborhoods in town and one often hailed as the most "authentic" by people wowed by its history and beautiful, rapidly deteriorating architecture. I hadn't bought a map for this trip yet, so I wandered around Av. Carlos Calvo dodging loose tiles and trying to remember where Plaza Dorrego was located. I gave up temporarily a little more than a block away, dipping into the pastelería (pastry shop) Il Forno on Bolívar 933 to sample a couple of empanadas de carne and pour down an agua con gas: my typical traveling food in Bs.As. whenever I'm hungry or just need to regroup. The empanadas were OK but nothing special, but I ended up hitting the jackpot when I ordered an individual torta de ricotta (ricotta pie) and a café con leche from the spectacular looking pastry counter. I guess now's as good a time as any to mention that Paris is the only other city I've visited yet that can rival Buenos Aires for the quantity and quality of its breads and sweets. After leaving Il Forno, I wandered around the rest of San Telmo for a while enjoying its ramshackle ambience and paying a token visit to Plaza Dorrego--the lovely little plaza whose fame has only increased since one of the Bush daughters had her purse stolen here under the watchful eyes of various Secret Service agents a couple of years back! While heading down calle Defensa in the general direction of the microcentro, I stumbled upon the famous parilla Desnivel at Defensa 855 and decided to sit down for a "snack" in the interests of "research" for this informe. Although I wasn't all that hungry so soon after my last meal, I decided to order a serving of mollejas (sweetbreads) a la carte anyway since they're relatively hard to find in the states--probably because they gross almost everybody else out! I also asked for a glass of the house vino tinto with my appetizer, and the combination of masterfully-grilled mollejas, jarrito (little jar) of wine, and non-U.S. bread was so entirely satisfying that I decided to do some more research. I ordered a serving of chorizo next, which was also insanely good and a steal at a mere 5 pesos (~$1.50 U.S.). Feeling more than a little gluttonous but incredibly satisfied that Desnivel had lived up to the hype, I stopped at a locutorio to check my e-mail and waste precious time on a blog post ("Now Blogging From Buenos Aires") that I later deleted. Before the ride home on the combi, I made a quick detour to Corrientes again to pick up a couple of books at Librería Hernandez (Av. Corrientes 1311). For those keeping score, one book was for a friend and the other one was for me: Santiago Rosa's Abril rojo, a Peruvian thriller that won the Premio Alfaguera de Novela for 2006. I didn't eat again until way later that night, but my mother-in-law prepared two different kinds of milanesa for us, one meatless (eggplant) and one not (the "usual"). An excellent day for parilla and comida casera (home cooking) fare--if you ever get to eat in Buenos Aires, you'll soon understand why those I Love Choripan t-shirts are so popular! Coming soon: Mar del Plata and more.

Las batallas en el desierto

Las batallas en el desierto (Era libro de bolsillo, 2007)
por José Emilio Pacheco
México, 1981

"Miré la avenida Álvaro Obregón y me dije: Voy a guardar intacto el recuerdo de este instante porque todo lo que existe ahora mismo nunca volverá a ser igual. Un día lo veré como la más remota prehistoria. Voy a conservarlo entero porque hoy me enamoré de Mariana. ¿Qué va a pasar? No pasará nada. Es imposible que algo suceda. ¿Qué haré? ¿Cambiarme de escuela para no ver a Jim y por tanto no ver a Mariana? ¿Buscar a una niña de mi edad? Pero a mi edad nadie puede buscar a ninguna niña. Lo único que puede es enamorarse en secreto, en silencio, como yo de Mariana. Enamorarse sabiendo que todo está perdido y no hay ninguna esperanza". --Las batallas en el desierto, p. 31

Hermosísima novela corta sobre el primer enamoramiento del narrador, Carlitos, y la fragilidad de la memoria. Relacionando los recuerdos de su juventud como un "niño de la colonia Roma" en México, D.F. (14) con todas las transformaciones del país en aquel entonces en los años 40 y 50, el adulto Carlos regresa al "paraíso perdido" del pasado en la época cuando México ya era en la antesala de modernización. La prosa de Pacheco es engañosamente sencilla, pero él tiene un estilo impecable y la conciencia de un poeta en cuanto a lo que significa estar enfermo de amor. El resultado es una especie de bildungsroman a la mexicana que critica varios aspectos de la sociedad mexicana con un tono agridulce y elegíaco. Una obra sumamente conmovedora.
*
Battles in the Desert (Era paperback, 2007)
by José Emilio Pacheco
Mexico, 1981

"I looked at the avenida Álvaro Obregón and told myself: I'm going to maintain the memory of this moment intact because everything that's existed until now will never be the same. One day I'll see it as the most remote prehistory. I'm going to preserve the instant in its entirety because I fell in love with Mariana today. What's going to happen? Nothing will happen. It's impossible that anything will come of this. What will I do? Change schools so I don't see Jim and therefore don't see Mariana? Look for a girl my own age? But at my age, nobody can look for any girl. The only thing that you can do is to fall in love in secret, in silence, as I have with Mariana. To fall in love knowing that everything's lost and that there's no hope whatsoever." --Battles in the Desert, p. 31

Beautiful, beautiful novella about narrator Carlitos' first time falling in love and the fragility of memory. Relating his childhood memories as "a kid in the barrio Roma section of Mexico City" (14) to all the transformations that were going on in the country at that time in the 1940s and '50s, the adult Carlos returns to the "paradise lost" of the past when Mexico was still on the brink of modernization. Pacheco's prose is deceptively simple, but he has an impeccable style and a poet's feel for what it means to be lovesick. The result is a kind of bittersweet Mexican bildungsroman that criticizes various aspects of Mexican society with an elegiac tone. A very moving work.

José Emilio Pacheco

Próxima parada en el subte de Orbis Terrarum:

Gran Bretaña (Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), Líbano (Hanan Al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra), o ??? (???).

Note: I chose this 68-page novella to represent Mexican literature for both the Exploration: Latin American Reading Challenge and the Orbis Terrarum 2009 bilingual mini-challenge. New Directions put out an English translation of the work in 1987, but I'm not sure whether it's still in print or not. The rough translations above are mine--sorry for any harm done to the original text's meaning or phrasing.

Julio Sosa vs. Sandro

Julio Sosa and Sandro will have cameos in my Buenos Aires trip report when I get back to writing up the rest of it, but I thought I'd share two YouTube video clips of them with you in the meantime. The Uruguayan Sosa is a tango legend whom I like quite a bit (his nickname, "el Varón del Tango" ["the Great Man of Tango"], pretty much says it all), and his version of Enrique Santos Discépolo's classic "Cambalache" is a good example of his hard-nosed, almost pugilistic style. I had never even heard of Sandro until late last week, but the so-called "Elvis Presley of Argentina" was apparently a huge hit with the ladies for years and years. The "Tom Jones of Argentina" may be more like it--not exactly my cup of tea, but the first 30 seconds of "Rosa Rosa" had me rolling on the floor with laughter after checking out those Austin Powers-esque dance moves of his. Outstanding! Which of the two singers do you prefer?

Julio Sosa, "Cambalache"

Sandro, "Rosa Rosa"