Reviews

[tarigwaemir]

Haste Street, on the Feast of Blessed Charles the Good

The theme for this weekend: trying to find places I've never been to before in San Francisco without being armed with a Google Map printout. ^_^ On Friday, jaebi_lit and I intended to go see a free screening of Persona, an Ingmar Bergman film, but unfortunately we couldn't find the theater. Alas for the lack of clearly numbered buildings on Embarcardero! But we did enjoy wandering around lost for the better part of an hour before we gave up and went to jaebi_lit's apartment to watch an indie film instead.

The film's main character is Alby, who is stagnating in nostalgia for his childhood, which he remembers as being the best time of his life. His wife throws him out of the house and tells him to come back only when he can prove to her that he can act like a fully grown adult male. He goes back home and gets back in touch with his best friend, Elias, whom he persuades to take him along on a trip to Diggityland, an amusement park they used to frequent as kids.

As you might expect, Alby is forced over and over again to confront the fact that his childhood was not the perfect time it seemed to be and that he really, well, needs to move on and grow up, instead of continually whining about how hard it is to be an adult. Still, the film remains rather gently sympathetic to him: Alby often acts like a jerk, but we also see him being patient with his mother (who has some sort of memory loss/disorder) and making friends with a mentally disabled child (one of Elias' students). There were some genuinely funny moments--e.g. Alby and Elias stopping by a retirement village called "Fountain of Youth"--and some genuinely bizarre ones--e.g. a scene where Alby watches women dressed up as mermaids swimming in a tank. I suppose the main problem with the film was that there was no turning point or climax in the story; the film just ends with Alby boarding the bus for Diggityland.

Borrowed The Nine Tailors and History Boys from jaebi_lit as I left: of course, I can tell who the awesomepants people are because they have awesome bookshelves. ^_^

Yesterday, I went to see a performance of Samuel Beckett's Endgame with Steve. Since neither of us brought directions to the theater, we ended up going to the Apple Store to look up the address of the theater as well as making phone calls to friends with access to the Internet. But we did end up getting there with plenty of time to spare, and now I can say that I've been in a part of San Francisco that isn't the downtown area or the neighborhoods next to UCSF.

The blurb on the website:

Even sharper and more satirical than Waiting for Godot, Endgame takes place in a little room at the end of civilization. Based on the last moves of a chess game, the play follows the attacks and parries of its four remaining inhabitants as they cut each other with wickedly funny and withering insults. Two of these inhabitants are in garbage cans. Yes, this is the play that inspired Oscar the Grouch.

(You know, Sesame Street must be a lot more subversive than I remembered if one of its characters comes from a Beckett play...)

The only Beckett play I've read is Waiting for Godot, which I've never seen performed. Still, I expected a very minimalist set--I mean, whenever I think of "experimental" theater, I think of actors standing on an empty stage without any context--but actually the set looked fairly realistic. A broken-down room with a rotting ceiling and blurry, stained windows, plus the two garbage cans, of course. I was impressed by the lighting as well: you could note the progression of the day--the cloudy moments as well as the sunny ones--through the quality of light that appeared to be coming in through the windows.

The Immortal Game (that book about the history of chess) has the following to say about Endgame:

Nearly two decades after his series of chess games with Duchamp, Beckett published his second play, Endgame, which was inspired in part by Duchamp's endgame chess book. Aside from its title, Beckett's play does not explicitly refer to chess, but alludes strongly to the feeling of pointlessness often experienced by a chess player in the final moves. The protagonists are a master and his servant who seem existentially bound to one another, to the lifeless life they live together in their cramped seaside home. Hamm, the master, Beckett later explained is "a King in a chess-game lost from the start. From the start he knows he is making loud senseless moves." The hopelessness of the play marked other gloomy Beckett works, including Waiting for Godot. Beckett's entire literary career, in fact, is nicely summed up by his proposed ideal chess game--the chess pieces may move around for a while in futility, but in the end are back in their starting positions.

Well, reading this paragraph probably affected my perception of the play, but it really does feel like that: like the chess king, Hamm is blind and immobilized in his wheelchair and cannot move unless he's pushed around the room by his servant, Clov. Clov has some sort of defect in his leg that prevents him from ever sitting down (paralleling, I suppose, the limits on the movement of chess pieces), and they all seem to be dreading/anticipating the end that is to come. The play ends with one last soliloquy from Hamm, after he calls out for Clov and receives no response (Clov stands there in the doorway, his suitcase in hand, paralyzed): this sense of the inevitable converging upon you, but bringing no relief or even resignation when it arrives, and the knowledge that you are completely alone in that final moment (regardless of whether you actually are physically alone or not) is sickening.

It's interesting that chess is touted (according to the author of The Immortal Game, in any case) as a game that represents free will and the triumph of human reason over chance and chaos, but if you think about it, both the opening and the endgame have restricted possibilities (there is a clear finite number of possible first moves, and after enough pieces have been captured on both sides, a decreasing number of possible moves towards the end of the game). Of course, it's fate imposed not by an arbitrary force but by the rules of a closed system.

Endgame has its darkly comic moments as well, and I want to read the actual play now in order to figure out how much of the comedy comes from the words alone and how much comes from the director's interpretation of timing and phrasing. I remember Waiting for Godot having very few stage directions, so it'll be interesting to see how much of the movement on stage is scripted. (Clov moves around a lot, despite his leg: he's always stomping around, running errands for Hamm.)

Possibly not the best play to see before walking back home in the dark at 11 PM, but you know, it's awfully nice to be able to go see plays (for $20, no less!) instead of simply reading reviews about them and even nicer to have people to go see them with. ^_^

In other news, I have no idea if ridder is meant to be eaten with potatoes or not, but it tastes very delicious when half-melted on a steaming baked potato with butter. Next cheese of the week: goat cheddar. I intended to get parmesan but got distracted. Maybe I should go look for a cheese blog to figure out how you're supposed to eat these cheeses; I just eat them with crackers or flatbread.

Yours &c.

Comments

[jaebi-lit.livejournal.com]

because they have awesome bookshelves.

I hadn't thought about that bit of it, but of course you're right. I'd been thinking that a home crammed with books was enough to indicate awesomepants, but if I went over to someone's place and it was crammed with Ann Coulter books or similar, that would definitely not qualify them as awesomepants.

I liked Full Grown Men, but am still bemused by it. I don't think I liked Alby all that much.