The One With The Book And The Right To Closure

I knew what to expect when I first started reading this book, a few days ago. I knew about the ultra romantic setting, the premise was simple: a little girl meets a man who came from the future and with every conversation he tells her things about her future – or actually, about their future together. After a few chapters we are in the present – she is 20, he is 28 – and they meet for the first time, more precisely, he meets her for the first time, she first met him when she was 6.

The book doesn’t have the most spectacular development, the most disturbing fact is stated in the beginning, when we find out he time travels. The following is actually a recording of their encounters when she’s a kid, or of their present days, up to his death.

So this is a pretty romantic book, probably really catchy for teenagers (especially because of the language, the perfect love story or the taste in music of the protagonist), but I’m not saying I didn’t like it. It was a pretty easy read, so I devoured it in a few days, reading avidly until I reached the back cover.  

What really puzzled me was the idea that prevails: waiting for someone your entire life. I find it unfair and I feel it has already been suggested in a bunch of books considered classic literature. A modern writer should give into the social pressure and just admit this is never going to happen nowadays. And it almost didn’t happen in the book either. Until it did. I feel that people should be able to get closure (even if it’s a matter of right or wrong, death or relationships). I hate the hook (as Barney, the character of ‘How I Met Your Mother’ names it) and I admit I have been under its influence too and I know how it feels. This is why I find it unfair to also read about it in a book I actually liked up to the last chapter where she’s 82 and waiting for their last date.

It’s like a person that’s brain dead, you’ll always live with an IF locked deep inside your life. It’s like living your life being unhappy, but hoping that someday you will find happiness.

I know artists should reach catharsis through their art – I do exactly the same thing and I can barely call myself an artist – but if you read the acknowledgement, Niffenegger actually claims the waiting has worked for her – NOOO!, just as it worked for Penelope. 

I send this book out there with the closure issue as a warning. I recommend it to girls, mostly, because even the male characters are pretty feminine in actions. Don’t get fooled by the time travel thing, it’s still a romance and should be treated as one.

Call It Quits

ALT + F4 real life until I can get back to Bucharest. Over here, I’m protected by my room and the nice smell of fresh coffee. I’ve always seen this room as my own paradise, where I was always buried in books and movies and surrounded by pictures and music and, why not, love.

So about this, this year I’m diving deep into the Valentine’s Day cliché, because I’ve just realized I’ve never done it. It seems appropriate since I’m single and happy for the first time in my life. I’m making plans. I’m going to spend the entire day in my room, with coffee and tea, ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’ (I’m going to tell you more about this, don’t worry) and the Oscar nominated movies. Probably some Led Zeppelin and Billie Holiday to mix it up. The heart-shaped box of chocolates is never going to happen, sadly.

I never liked Valentine’s Day [before]. But somehow I’ve never been able to make myself actually believe it. Just like everyone else, I don’t think there should be a special day to share your love. But, since there is, why not do it? Maybe it’s age making me wiser and less of a h8ter, but I actually think people should find reasons to celebrate certain days. My brain just needs to acknowledge the fact that certain days are better than others, or that they are just somehow special to me.

So, I’m celebrating Valentine’s tomorrow. Even if it’s just for the sake of my brain and the fear of Alzheimer. I’ll dedicate this day to love (I’ll just turn it into a guilty hedonism) and to the people who have found love.

Prescilla Etienne and Erwann Chopin, à la votre!

Cultural Encounters. Or How to Handle Being Snowed - In Bucharest Version.

Exams. Going to school every day and spending most of it there. Feeling the high school air linger through the desks. Bad cheating. Subjects you would write papers on but you only have half the page for space. The laziness of borrowing another sheet of paper.

On the other hand, SNOW. A lot of it, all of a sudden. Practically the first snow of the winter. Closed the hidden path that takes us all home for the weekend. Frost. Blizzard. Yum. But how were three students supposed to handle this?

Thursday night. Bulandra Theatre. Crossing the street from the subway to the theatre was totally worth it. In a really cold, but wonderful hall the three of us witnessed ‘Endgame’, a play written by Samuel Beckett, in the Theatre of the Absurd style. From the characters’ dialogues, shouts, monologues to their costumes and the play’s art direction everything was more depressing than absurd, but majestic at the same time. Seeing a favorite actor of mine (Razvan Vasilescu) play on a stage instead of on a screen was a revelation. I had visions of Oblomov, Kin Dza-Dza and the Irish interiors depicted in ‘Angela’s Ashes’ throughout the entire play. I left the theatre to face the blizzard feeling resuscitated from a long sleep. My own private sleep of reason, of conscience.

Friday night. The National Theatre. It was only two of us left to face the cold and glass ice covered by misleading snow. As you know, in times of blizzard, you just take the subway. So we walked from the subway through the small park at the University’s Place, passing the crowd (a 100 people max) who was still annoyingly shouting antigovernment phrases. It wasn’t like I didn’t care about them, I just wanted to be inside and see the one play I had been waiting to see since it’s premiere in 2010 – ‘The Avalanche’, written by Tuncer Cücenoğlu and directed by Radu Afrim, a young but creative director, famous all over Europe for his controversial plays (München loves him). With surreal images, the set was a wonderful warm white, with touches of gray. The story is about a village who takes a lot of precaution measure to avoid an avalanche which would kill everyone – the ceiling is all lace, the chairs and tables are also covered in it, the doors and floor are covered in fur, women give birth taking into account the snow. Everyone whispers. The echo is dangerous and the atmosphere is almost magnetic, sick, heavy. I think I clapped for ten minutes straight. On the way home we were both just high, pumped, talking only about the play and how we would go see it again.

Saturday night. The Jewish State Theatre. Four people walk towards the theater until they can’t even feel the skin on their faces anymore. When you can’t raise your eyebrows, it’s too cold. We enter an intimate small theatre, the smell of fresh coffee imprinted the walls. They hand us headsets for translation. This was the first shock of the night. Yiddish…This building was actually the first Jewish Theatre in the world so that place has a special meaning. We walked into a small beige room, where the walls have small golden flower patterns coming down on the walls. The smell of heavy seats and silent walls – ‘It smells like communism in here’. We plug in and watch a sweetened version of ‘King Lear’ where the themes are moved into a Jewish context, and the emphasis is on the decay of the family and its small dramas. Another pleasant surprise, except for the intonation of the woman who was translating.

Exams. Snow. Theatre for three days in a row. Hot coffee. A beer. Some loud music. And we go back to studying. And getting on with our lazy lives. And promise to have pleasant surprises again soon within a theatre’s walls.

Stay open. Allow mesmerizing. 

There’s a land called ‘Passiva Aggressiva’ and Cristi Puiu is its king

First, I should unravel something about the way I watch movies – I basically enjoy every movie I watch, trying not to be too harsh, judgmental or cynical, considering the fact that I’m still somehow in the learning process of making movies. This is why my friends would often hear me say this exact sentence, over and over: ‘I’ve recently watched this … (fill in the blanks with movie title) and it was really good. Well, actually…’ and then I develop the idea.

But seriously, ‘Aurora’ has been the first movie I watched this year, a story set in gloomy, contemporary Bucharest – a slice of life, if you may call it that way – where a divorced man follows his ex-wife through town with the not-so-obvious intention of killing her. The movie is long – three hours – and as some interesting critics who haven’t even had the decency to watch an entire movie before reviewing it say – pretty boring. But instead of boring I would like to call it slow paced, aerated, leaving just enough room for the characters to develop and for the viewer to get accustomed to their lifestyle. I think it was actually polite – yes, I’ll use this word – that the director took the time he thought he needed in describing the characters (mostly the main character, played by the director himself) and the situations created by the relationships the characters are in. And even though the movie opens with a post-sex scene between Viorel (main character) and his new mistress (Gina – played by Clara Voda), I really think this way of opening a movie was necessary in order to establish the ‘slice of life’ perspective – it doesn’t really matter where you start the story, it’s their everyday life anyway, but where the story takes you. The story runs you through the relationship Viorel has with Gina, which is pretty simple and uninvolved from what concerns Viorel – she keeps telling him about her daughter learning about Little Red Riding Hood but he starts replying after she has already changed the subject. You can almost feel her care for him, when she hands him a wrapped sandwich for work. Instead of going to work, a really wide shot discovers him stop the car in front of some railways, getting out, crossing it at night just to spy on his wife going to work and taking his daughters to school at the break of dawn.

He then goes to work, where it is implied (this is what I understood, at least) that he’s clearing out his desk and office because he had been fired. I’ve always loved Cristi Puiu’s subtlety, but this time I only got this from a singular line of an employee of the plant. This employee then slips him a few self made bullets.

I know I’ve said this before, but it feels like religion, sympathy, decency and relationships are all dying and the scene is the Romanian New Wave Cinema. They’re not dead yet – the way they are presented in Sergei Loznitsa’s ‘My Joy’ (2010 – ‘Schastye moe’), but they are really dying in front of the viewer and the only breaths of fresh air are, in this case, the innocent kid we see in the movie (Viorel’s daughter, not Gina’s spoiled brat) or the collateral victim (Viorel’s ex-wife’s layer’s date). It just feels like the situations in the movie, as well as the characters’ behavior are decaying in front of us.

Almost the entire movie is shot with wide or normal lenses, the camera doesn’t really get involved, keeping a distance between the viewer and the character. The viewer is a simple observer and he can make his own opinions about the situations depicted in the movie. I personally enjoy watching a movie that puts this sort of distance between me and the characters, I believe there’s no better way of shooting a story like this one. There’s a specific connection the actor/director sets at some point in the movie with the spectator and this consists of a medium shot taken from the backseat of the car Viorel is driving, when he stares through the rear view mirror straight at the camera, piercing through the barrier or the lens. It is right there when we discover the eyes considering killing a person. The movie is almost a study, a documented murder.

An hour into the movie, I can finally say I figured out the complete set of relationships and main behavior features of the characters. Viorel is distant, intellectual, listens to good music in the apartment that once belonged to him and his wife – apartment that is now being renewed (a vision?) – is highly specific about his stuff (he tells his wife’s father to only take certain things back to her) and wear his hood inside out for the entire three hours which makes an OCD viewer want to reach for the screen and put it back in (this is where I had my issues and felt mind raped).

I like the way Puiu chose the show the murder of his mother – in – law, through a handheld long shot that follows the woman going up the stairs in her home, and then following Viorel and letting the viewer literally staring at the ceiling and just letting the sound give us the idea of what’s going on upstairs – talk about Puiu’s subtlety again! And even though he only manages to shoot his wife’s lawyer (which launches the question: ‘did this guy fuck his wife too while dealing with their divorce papers?’) and his in – laws, he goes to the police station to confess in the coldest way. The director chooses to depict the Romanian authorities the same way a lot of other Romanian movies do – these policemen are talking about the murders when he walks in, and even though he sais he’s the one responsible for them they don’t even mind his existence in the room, they just make him write his statement. This would seem absurd for a non-Romanian citizen, but if you’ve lived here all your life, you’ll know this is just the way they handle ‘cases’ (see also ‘Police, Adjective’ – Corneliu Porumboiu, 2009).

Just one more thing: Puiu migrates at least a character from an older movie ‘The Death of Mr. Lazarescu’ (2005 – Un Certain Regard Award at the Cannes Film Festival), Mrs. Mioara Avram (interpreted by Luminita Gheorghiu) to underline the humanity of these characters and the idea that they could exist in every other movie or in everyday life.

In other words, I liked not everything being explained because it involves the viewer more, I liked the slow paced sequences and the fact that it launches questions not everyone of us would answer the same way. 

When I Look

Nobody knows what I’ve been,

                          where I’ve been,

                          who I’ve been.

I have feathers hanging off of my ears, blonde locks of hair but no fairy tales. I love children’s books and fairy tales. I’ve made a habit of picking them up in libraries.

Soundtracks are the type of music that would put me in a happy mood and for some reason, make me think of Christmas. I walk through my home town and make people say August when what they actually mean is January. Thank you.

I had my curtains pulled to the right (left?) for the most part of the day and a mess in my room. But when I walked to the window to close them I saw three little boys watching me. I was reading in my bed covered in multiple layers (onion?) the entire time. Wave, smile and close.

Green tea makes me hungry and Earl Grey reminds me of 34A, September 2010. Soon 2012. When and where does time fly (to)?

I’m a dreamer

       a traveler

       a searcher

       a questioner

       an artist

       a balance seeker

       a help

       an onion

       a vertigo.

I miss people I’ve barely met. Or never met. I love music when shouted into empty spaces. Such as Kings of Leon’s  ‘Closer’. I dream of you every night. I make promises and keep them. New Year’s resolution – to watch all of Akira Kurosawa’s movies (as a director).

I see. Immensely.  

The Fall Within

I fell through the rabbit hole one winter afternoon and ended up in an autumn landscape I knew.
It's been inside me for many years now.

At the end of the forest, there's an answer.

We Had Our Month - It's Over

My bad day began at 11:00 AM this morning when I finished the book after a long month of reading only a few pages at a time, hoping for a never ending version of it. Neither the sun shining at my window, nor the warm coffee on my bed stand could turn this morning back into a usual December morning.

It’s been a long time since a book drew and captured me like this one did. Fairy tales weren’t my thing as a kid, but as I grew up, I started re- reading childhood books, such as Poil de Carotte and falling in love with them for real, this time. The association between Poil de Carotte and Still Life With Woodpecker isn’t involuntary – both of them are full of adventures, almost falling out of the their covers, they both mess with your imagination and perception up to the point where you start acting the same way the characters would, or find yourself in a real situation and ask yourself the inappropriate question that will tell you the degree of addiction you’re facing: ‘What would Poil de Carotte/ Bernard Mickey Wrangle (Baby) do?’

The narrator is omniscient, and has only a few 1^st person ‘interventions’ throughout the whole book. These are either distinct chapters, epilogues or prologues, whenever he switches from one moon phase to the other (the moon phases are larger units and include a few chapters each). The narrator launches a basic question in the beginning – What makes love stay? – and a few others that derive from this one and get answered on the way – What’s the importance of the moon?, What’s the significance of the Camel pack design? He tries to answer the first question structuring the story as a post-modern fairy tale, where the princess is a vegetarian ex- cheerleader and her future - to – be – prince is… a lot of guys. But mostly, Bernard, a redhead (such as the princess herself) outlaw (not criminal!) who has a passion for explosives. We then have a mixture of random fairy tale – like characters, such as the princess’ servant – the actual throne heir and a cocaine addict -, her parents – a father with a noisy mechanical heart valve and a foreign mother, with a strong accent and a little dog -, the vengeful sheikh who painted the pyramid black and an unopened pack of Camel cigarettes.

These handful of characters have to make peace with themselves and their captivating personalities and solve their problems at the same time. Tom Robbins has written the funniest comparisons I’ve ever come across in literature (e.g. ‘The first time that she spread her legs for him it had been like opening her jaws for the dentist.’) or just funny, interesting, morally correct or slightly philosophical sentences, such as ‘It's never too late to have a happy childhood.’

If I were to think of these characters as real life human beings, I would say they are full of flaws, egocentric and immature bastards. As characters from a book they become fascinating and close to role models. After she heard about me reading the book, the girl who recommended it to me asked me whether I was already in love with Bernard (of course I am, damn it).

It feels I went on an entire trip with these special, but dysfunctional people and I have to let them go now. And we all know I’m terrible with that.

A fairy tale ended with a crooked, but happy ending. We were together for a month. I can’t make myself set it on the book shelf, next to the other victims.