Perspective in a Nutshell

The year just ended was a difficult one -- death and dislocation for many in the Middle East, tensions in Asia and Latin America,  and a bitter election season in our own country.  

As the new year begins, let's try to keep in mind how many things have gone well for us.  Consider the following from the latest novel of Ian McEwan:

            Pessimism is too easy, even delicious, the badge and plume of intellectuals everywhere.  
            It absolves the thinking classes of solutions.  We excite ourselves with dark thoughts in 
            plays, poems, novels, movies.  And now in commentaries.  
                   Why trust this account when humanity has never been so rich, so healthy, so 
            long-lived?  When fewer die in wars and childbirth than ever before -- and more 
            knowledge, more truth by way of science was never so available to us all?  When 
            tender sympathies -- for children, animals, alien religions, unknown, distant foreigners -- 
            swell daily?  When hundreds of millions have been raised from wretched existence?  
                   When, in the West, even the middling poor recline in armchairs, charmed by music 
            as they steer themselves down smooth highways at four times the speed of  a galloping 
            horse?  When smallpox, polio, cholera, measles, high infant mortality, illiteracy, public
            executions and routine state torture have been banished from so many countries?  
                   Not so long ago, all these curses were everywhere.  
                   When solar panels and wind farms and nuclear energy and inventions not yet known 
            will deliver us from the sewage of carbon dioxide, and GM crops will save us from the 
            ravages of chemical farming and the poorest from starvation?  When the worldwide 
            migration to cities will return vast tracts of land to wilderness, will lower birth rates, and 
            rescue women from ignorant village patriarchs?  
                    What of the commonplace miracles that would make a manual laborer the envy of 
            Caesar Augustus: pain-free dentistry, electric light, instant contact with people we love, 
            with the best music the world has known, with the cuisine of a dozen cultures?  
                    We're bloated with privileges and delights, as well as complaints, and the rest who 
            are not will be soon.... 
                    We'll always be troubled by how things are -- that's how it stands with the difficult 
            gift of consciousness.

-----

The above comes from McEwan's latest novel, "Nutshell."  McEwan is known for improbable plots -- think of "Atonement," which became an award-winning movie, or "Amsterdam," which won the Mann Booker Prize.

"Nutshell" takes the improbable and goes several steps further.   It is a first-person story told by a yet-unborn baby, whose observations include the one above.

Yes, really.

Strange as that set-up sounds, McEwan makes it work.

The book opens when the baby is about one month from birth.  His mother has thrown her husband, his father, out of the father's rundown townhouse in an expensive London neighborhood.   Now the baby's disreputable uncle, brother of the baby's father, is plotting with the baby's mother to kill the baby's father and to live well on the proceeds from the sale of the house.

The baby, dependent on his mother and loving her for his nurture, also feels loyalty to his father and not a little anger at his uncle or the prospect of growing up with the two of them.  

The title comes from an early passage in Shakespeare's "Hamlet."  Claudius, usurper to the Danish throne once occupied by Prince Hamlet's father, sends emissaries to find out why Hamlet is so blue.  

At that point, Hamlet knows that Claudius has married Hamlet's mother, but he has not yet learned that Claudius killed King Hamlet.

"I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space," Hamlet says in the play.

You can see the parallels between play and novel -- Claudius the murderous usurper/ Claude the murder-minded dumber brother. The baby of "Nutshell" is the king of his own small space.

He also shares observations not associated with small children, let alone children not yet born, as the plot spools out to its conclusion.

"Nutshell" runs to an economical 208 pages, and McEwan knows how to tell a story. Check it out.

Strappy Shoes

Fashions of all types come and then go, and then come and go again.

Last year I commented on the popularity of updated Mary Jane shoes, flats that were once the style of choice for little girls, notable for the strap across top.

A grown woman's variation with a slightly higher heel and two straps, by Prada, was very successful in 2015.

Success attracts imitation, as we know.   

In addition, people take new ideas to extremes.  With Mary Janes, the look was distorted in two ways  First was the heel -- if a short heel was good, wouldn't a stiletto be even better?  And if two straps were nice, well, how about five or six?

That is what we have seen this year.  Examples are below.


Altuzarra

Stuart Weitzman

Vince Camuto

Topshop 

Jimmy Choo  

Gucci 

Gianvito Rossi

Ivanka Trump

Michael Kors

Francesco Russo

Why Now

Shoes of this type could have been made anytime in history, but I believe there is a particular reason they didn't appear much earlier.  

It is this: No woman in her right mind would sign up for buckling and unbuckling that many straps.  

Imagine you were at lively party, and your favorite song came blasting over the sound system.  Your impulse, given the heel elevations on these shoes, would be to kick them off and dance.  But it would be impossible; the song would end before you could get them unfastened.  

This would be frustrating, and who needs frustration?

I don't know when the back zipper first appeared on shoes, but I saw them for the first time about eight years ago on a BCBG pair worn by a stylish young woman.  

Since then, they have become common even on less complicated shoes with shorter heels. See the Fabrizio Viti model below, which is being offered for the coming spring season. 

It would be difficult to design this shoe any other way.  A regular buckle would interrupt the curvy straps in front, and without the raised yellow area behind the heel, a thin ankle strap would cut into the back of a woman's foot if she walked any distance at all.

This back-zip thing was a genuine innovation, a bit of new technology applied where you might not expect it.  It may not be as exciting as a new iPhone without a headphone jack, but it's not nothing.

MovieMonday: Office Christmas Party

"No film studio ever went broke overestimating the American

 public's appetite for gross-out movies."

A famous guy said the above, or something like it, a long time ago.

The original wacky-inebriates-v.-the-man movie, "Animal House," was released almost 40 years ago, and several new imitations, often raunchier but just as spirited, hit the theaters every year.  They generally earn out. 

I don't go often to movies like this one, which I always figured was because I'm not a young man and my interests were different.   

But I was wrong.  When I saw "Office Christmas Party," it was in a theater full of middle-aged couples.  The gross-out movie has gone mainstream.  As the original audience has aged, filmmakers have been supplying new movies with mature actors in immature roles.  


The Movie

This story involves an underperforming branch of a tech company whose mean CEO (all CEOs are mean in gross-out land) plans to close the branch for not meeting its 12 percent year-on-year growth target.

The only solution for this, of course, is to throw a great big, wild Christmas party.  If you've never seen this at any of the companies where you've worked, well, neither have I.

The jokes, stale but evergreen, wrote themselves.  The office copier thing.  The cocaine powder whoosh.  The shy guy's hired date who turns out to be a prostitute.  An ice sculpture with a penile appendage that dispenses egg nog.  Also, car crashes.

Every recognizable actor in the film is cast in a role he or she already has made famous.  This typecasting is efficient because it spares valuable screen time that might have been wasted on character development.

So we have Jennifer Aniston again playing a mean boss, Olivia Munn as a beautiful, brilliant techie (a feminist requirement in film these days), T.J. Miller as yet another lovable goofball and Kate McKinnon playing an uptight human resources enforcer.  

For novelty, the courtly Courtney Vance, usually cast as a serious attorney in a suit, is convinced to let his hair down and party, which isn't as funny as it sounds. 

I don't think I will be giving away much if I say that the conclusion of the film ratifies the required theme that flaunting social norms and resisting authority are mileposts on the road to wisdom.  

All I Want For Christmas Is You

This song, recorded in 1994, may be the catchiest pop/rock Christmas song of all time.  

It was released before and included in Mariah Carey's first Christmas album, "Merry Christmas," the best-selling Christmas album, worldwide, in history.  Even now, people buy several hundred thousand downloads of the song each year.


AIWFC begins with a slow, almost sad recitation of the singer's disinterest in the holiday and bursts open only at the end of the line, "All I want to for Christmas is you."  Then the musical notes tick up a few tones, the syncopation comes to life and the rest of the song is glorious energy, a particularly effective matching of lyric and score.  

  

If you wander through stores or tune your car radio to a pop station, you will hear the song many times a day all through December.  It gets more play than Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," Elvis Presley's "Blue Christmas" and certainly Wham's "Last Christmas." 


The song has been covered by other pop musicians and groups, rendered as a ballad and even re-recorded with more lush orchestral backup by Carey herself on her second Christmas album.  But the first rendition is the one with the staying power. 

I do enjoy this song.  Every time I hear it, I want to sing along and dance across the room.  Obviously I'm not the only one.


Origin

Mariah Carey wrote AIWFC during an especially productive time in her early career when she was working with Walter Affanasieff, who co-wrote the song and two others on the Christmas album, which he also produced.

Affanasieff is a Brazilian immigrant with Russian parents and a sixth sense for shaping music that appeals to people.  His many film credits include producing "My Heart Will Go On," the Titanic song that was 1998's best-selling single.   He has composed and orchestrated music for dozens of contemporary musical artists and groups. 

Affanasieff is not famous, but his fireplace mantel is crowded with Grammy statuettes and he has left his marks all over the last 40 years of the American songbook. 

On the 20th anniversary of the AIWFC release, he was interviewed about the song and the Christmas album generally.  He said that neither he nor Carey anticipated the success of the their breakout song.  Some of his comments:


         There are always three different areas that Christmas music goes into: Traditional
         Christmas songs, fun kiddie songs like "Rudolph" or "Frosty," and then you have 
         your love songs, which are like “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “I’ll be 
         Home for Christmas,” all those kinds of songs.  (For the album) we decided to
         write one of each.

         It was always the same sort of system with us. We would write the nucleus of 
         the song, the melody primary music, and then some of the words were there as 
         we finished writing it. That went very quickly .... 

         (All I Want for Christmas) was very formulaic; not a lot of chord changes. I tried 
         to ... put in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of, to make it 
         unique and special .... That part of it took maybe an hour, and then I went home. 


         Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, 'What do you think 
         about this bit?' We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely 
         coordinated and done. And then we just waited until the sessions began ... in 
         the summer of ’94 ... and started recording.  

         And that’s when we first heard her at the microphone singing, and the rest is history.

The Devil in the White City

I found this in a used bookstore last week.  It jogged a memory I had of reading positive reviews at the time of its publication in 2003.  So I finally bought and read the thing. 

It's very good.

The book tells two stories, one about the planning and staging of America's first world's fair, and the other about the contemporaneous activities of a serial killer.  Both stories are set in late 19th-century Chicago, whose population had recently grown past the million-mark, and which was attracting ambitious young people from rural backgrounds with dreams of big-city lives and careers. 

Author Erik Larson researched the heck out of this work, and it is impressive that he was able to find so many documents, meeting reports, news articles and letters more than a century later to piece together such a compelling narrative.  

The Fair 

The United States had an historical chip on its shoulder vis a vis Europe, particularly after Paris' very successful world's fair of 1889, marked by the opening of the Eiffel Tower. American leaders decided they to mount a similarly big show.  New York City's leaders wanted to host the fair, but Chicago promised a richer package and won the award.  

Getting the fair organized, planned and built was huge task with an unrealistically short  deadline.   The Chicago architectural firm of Burnham and Root was designated to oversee the task, but Root died young in 1991 and Daniel Burnham assumed the master planner job.

Burnham chose fine architectural advisors.  Frederick Law Olmstead, who designed New York's Central Park, ran himself ragged laying out landscape, water themes, trees, paths and plantings for the 800-acre site within a period of two years.  The famed architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White set the parameters for exhibition buildings' size, color (white) and style (Beaux Arts and neoclassical).  

Construction was bedeviled by harsh weather and sundry unanticipated setbacks, but the world's fair site was largely in place by the deadline.  

The problems continued when opening crowds were smaller than expected and a worldwide financial panic threatened to cut traffic even more.  The worries faded as good word-of-mouth, targeted promotions and a fine new attraction drew growing crowds.

Through it all, Burnham managed the schedule, the details, and the political matters.  Larsen's description paints him as calm, focused and extremely disciplined. The fair's success owed much to his effort and made his reputation.  At the time of his death in 1912, his architecture firm was the world's largest.


The Killer

As Burnham organized the world fair, a similarly focused man, a charming doctor and pharmacist, designed and ordered the construction of a building nearby.  

H.H. Holmes (one of many names he used) planned to offer hotel rooms to fair tourists above a ground-floor pharmacy.

The building was unusual -- weird, even sinister -- with elements that Holmes had devised and whose purposes were understood only years later.

During the course of the fair, Holmes lived in his building, apart from his wife and child.  He romanced several women who disappeared and whose relatives, living in other states, tried in vain to discover what had happened to them.  There were other deaths after the fair.  That Holmes was a serial killer is certain; the number of his victims is unknown even today. 

Chicago was attracting many new people who moved frequently, changing jobs or neighborhoods.  There were not the connections of family, church and neighborhood that had been common in the small towns and rural areas that the newcomers had left.  Police had few tools to find the missing, and Holmes was able to avoid suspicion -- let alone detection -- for years.


The Book

"The Devil in White City" tells the the crime and world's fair narratives in back-and-forth chapters.  Although the two stories do not intersect, the construction makes sense.  If the book told only the story of the fair, it would be too dry for public taste. The contemporaneous criminal story adds human drama and, with it, a broader description of life in fast-growing Chicago at the end of the 19th century.  


The Movie?

This book was very popular, and not surprisingly, its story was sold for development as a feature film.

In 2007, it was reported that director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio had joined for the project.  Plans were announced for construction of a set resembling at least part of the world's fair site.  DiCaprio was variously reported to have been cast as Burnham, the fair organizer, or Holmes, the serial killer.

Within the last two years, it was announced that the movie would be released in 2017. We'll see.


Another Good Book

In 1888, Austin, Texas, was beset by an unidentified axe murderer who killed at least five women in particularly grisly fashion.  This year the mystery got a full workup in a book,  "The Midnight Assassin," by talented Texas writer Skip Hollandsworth, who had been consumed by the story and devoted considerable effort over many years researching the crimes and their effects on the city, its police force and even the state government.  

Hollandsworth clearly wanted to name the killer -- the author's personal Moby Dick -- and the book leaves the reader with the strong conviction that the writer hasn't given up the search. 

Russian Spies

Idiosyncratist fans

The Idiosyncratist is an American blog written by someone who is not politically active and intends to stay that way.

Lately, to my surprise, the website has picked up a following in Russia.  

I learned this by happenstance.   On a free moment one day, I studied where my readership originated, by country.  And there, after the majority U.S. contingent and well ahead of the numbers from any other country, were the Russians. 

I realized that one post, Trump's Ties, had piqued curiosity in Putin-land.  My guess is that  the Russian government's web crawlers were looking for information about Donald Trump's "ties," perhaps to narcotrafficantes or international banking cartels.

In fact, the story was about neckties. I honestly doubt that Russian haberdashers flocked en masse to the internet on one particular day to research American politicians' fashion taste, which would be a mistake in any event. 

The next day, I posted a critique of  DJT's business attire, Trump's Suits, which provoked a another flurry of interest in Russia.  

To this day, the Idiosyncratist retains a small group of loyal Russian readers.  Like all others, they are welcome, but my guess is that my blog will not provide the type of information they seek.  



Notes  

At the moment, my French followers outnumber the Russian ones on some days, and the Russians outnumber the French on others.  I suspect my French readers appreciate my savoir vivre, and I am grateful for their support.

I do not research individual readers.  All are welcome, and all are accorded privacy. (That includes you, Vlad.)

MovieMonday: La La Land

Here's a movie, a real musical, that shows its heart in its first moments. 

They depict a Los Angeles trope, traffic coming to a standstill on the Ventura freeway.  But gradually and then infectiously, people get out of their cars to sing and dance to "Another Day of Sun."  As traffic resumes, the two lead characters glare briefly at each other from their cars.

The message of the scene is this:  Yes, this is a fantasy, but why not go with it?

And go with it you should. "La La Land"  is the first non-children's movie musical in many years.  (Yes, there was "Straight Outta Compton" in 2014, and there were reprises of "Mama Mia" and "Jersey Boys" from Broadway.) This is more than a story with songs.  It is an almost magical story underpinned by musical themes. 

It is a love story about Sebastian, a jazz pianist ,and Mia, an aspiring actress/playwright, each struggling to find a break.  They support each other's dreams even as tensions emerge between ambition and the relationship. There are other actors, good ones, in the story, but the focus is always on the two of them.  

If there is a third character, it is Los Angeles, shown to great effect, especially at the pastel hours around dusk.  LA is a difficult and challenging place, but anyone who has been gripped by the early pangs of love knows that the glow of those moments suffuses everything else in sight.  

Ryan Gosling learned to play the piano for the show, and a choreographer taught Emma Stone and him how to dance.  They'll never replace Fred and Ginger and their singing voices weren't dubbed, but they are better actors. The result is credible and charming.

Damien Chazelle, who wrote and directed, and Justin Hurwitz, the composer, are in their early 30s.  In college, they introduced each other to jazz and movie musicals.  According to interviews, they had wanted to make this movie for a long, long time.  Said Chazelle:
  
         It was like, years of trying to get La La Land made in Hollywood, everyone saying 
         not just "No," but, like, "Please go away. We don't want to hear about original 
         musicals." I did Whiplash out of necessity a little bit. Whiplash was a much 
         smaller movie that I was able to actually put the money together for. But the 
         whole time I was making Whiplash, I was hoping if this doesn't entirely suck, it 
         will give me some kind of calling card to make La La Land.

"Whiplash," you may recall, was a very good 2014 film about a driven young jazz drummer and his abusive teacher.  It won three Oscars -- best supporting actor, best editing and sound editing -- and seems to have given Chazelle the juice he needed to move on this project. 

In fact, the budget for "La La Land" was small, $30 million, a trifle for something made in Los Angeles.  I would have believed it if I heard that just the opening freeway scene, with music added later by a 95-piece orchestra, had cost that much.

Naturally, because it was not a Disney or superhero movie, it opened only in Los Angeles and New York.   (In a country with 50+ college film programs, you'd think film distributors would give the rest of us a little more credit, or at least relief.)  The reaction was excellent, and now the national rollout is under way.  

When "La La Land" comes to your town, go see it.  You'll enjoy the experience.