Thursday, December 27, 2012

rethinking that visit

Reading A Visit from the Goon Squad, which I first read on my Kindle as a sample, and loved the purse-wallet-stealing episode, and then got bored with about the third chapter... Matthew said, you know, you could bail, do you ever do that? but see the pages toward the end... so in the middle of the night, when I almost always get up to read, I started with those great graphic pages, and continued -- ah yes, the silences, the pauses in rock-pop music, and then that great end, when we get back to Sasha and the wallet, and realize, THIS is the person who went up with her, and they all go to ring her doorbell....
And of course it stops just about there, and I was overcome with the realization that it gives you the same disappointed and heart-stopping feeling as at the end of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, when the father who has adored the  woman upstairs sends the son up but not himself... I deep wanting it to end differently, but it won't. Just as Aida, next time, as I used so fervently to wish, won't end with that being sealed up-- I can't see the opera because of that, and don't we all identify with the ends?
maybe not.
But I do see about time and the Goon squad, and just having seen AMOUR, my goodness, it also about endings and time and release, and I suppose every film has its own goon squad. Django was just what you'd expect from Tarantino, but there was no way to predict AMOUR or, even, at least the first time, Aida.
Ferdinand Hodler and his self-portraits took up my morning at the Neue Galerie,  and not just the pitiless recording of his beloved lover's gradual decline from her portrait -- like a Fayum stare at you from some tomb already -- to a  seated, then horizontal position on her deathbed is equally overcoming.
Stick, perhaps, to his clouds over the Mont Blanc and the way the orange streaks from the sky invade the blue of the mountains. Of course, you could stick to the dancing and walking women of the emotions III and II as they move by fours toward each other, on blue on the left, and in rose, on the right, to signal his passion for Valentine, his lover you have seen or will see stretched out on her deathbed in the other room. Some exhibit.... and if you visit it on Facebook, you get a reduction of $5 on your price of admission.  Hodler, whom I have loved for years, I wouldn't have wanted to miss.

No comments: