JACK BERNARD'S TRAVELS

How can you personalize and internalize an experience – especially an art experience? How can you give it legs and make it more than an entertaining night out? How can you share the experience with others in a meaningful way?

Publishing houses answered those questions years ago when they realized that personal contact between author and reader created buzz and sold books. The book tour is now a sophisticated marketing tool designed to introduce the author, create a following and provide feedback. It isn’t just a way to sell books to the devoted junkies that attend the readings. Local radio and TV interviews expand and draw the audience to the author’s work and expand his or her reach beyond the range of the NY Times Book Review. Lately publishers have seen gold in book clubs and added reading group discussion guides as addenda to the paperback versions. Museums, symphony orchestras and stage companies have jumped on the bandwagon and are personalizing the audience experience by having the curators, directors, actors, and artists meet with their audiences following a performance to discuss their work.

These Q&A sessions can be interesting. The audience members who attend them are serious, curious, and appreciate the effort. They’re hungry to discuss the performance with others and to question the writers, directors, actors, musicians, and artists involved about the intent and meaning of the art. At the end of an evening Q&A I feel more involved and more knowledgeable about what I have seen, heard, or read, and I’ve internalized the experience.

For example, on Friday night Marilynn and I attended the opening night performance of a play called The Language Archive. The play, at Seattle Public Theater’s Bathhouse, is an oddly provocative inquiry into communication and interpersonal connections. The main character in the story is a linguistics professor who speaks a dozen languages but is clueless when it comes to communication with his wife. His interest in communication is purely academic. His wife is equally clueless and displays her feelings through wordless, tearful episodes while performing simple household tasks like ironing or washing dishes. The professor’s academic interest in preserving dying languages leads him to two elderly research subjects, who speak a soon to be extinct language, but who revert to English profanity whenever they get upset and their own language doesn’t give them the power to insult, slander, and abuse.

California based playwright, Julia Cho, the daughter of Korean immigrants, already has an impressive list of playwriting credits, and if I see her name again I’ll be sure to see whatever it is she’s doing.The Language Archive may not be great theater but it is entertaining, and live theater is an intimate personal experience – this one included. After the opening night performance the director, Shana Bestock, stayed for a Q&A and the audience was able to ask questions making the evening an even more personal experience.

The Weekend section of the Seattle Times lists local stage offerings every Friday and I’ve been surprised and impressed by the quality and variety of Seattle theater productions. We’ve seen three plays at the Bathhouse in the last year and two of the three were better than two of the three plays we saw in New York On Broadway in December. The Language Archive runs through June 9th at the Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake.

In the same vein; SIFF, the Seattle International Film Festival opened over the weekend. Film festivals provide excellent opportunities to experience the same up close experience through Q&A with actors, directors and writers. I always find it hard to choose from the extensive catalog of festival films in spite of the fact that there is good online and local print coverage of the the festival. Sometimes an interesting subject or a film with a good publicity machine behind it will pop up or someone will make a personal recommendation and make it easier to choose. That happened yesterday when What Maisie Knew was presented.

Maisie is an adaptation of an 1897 novel by Henry James adapted, updated, and modernized for the screen. I might have missed it but one of the co-directors is a close friend of a friend of mine and we have been following each others progress for 30 years. David Siegel is a Berkeley grad as is co-director, Scott McGeehee. Neither one is a film school graduate but the two of them have been writing and directing as a team for years. Their credits include The Deep End with Tilda Swinton, Uncertainty with Joseph Gordon-Leavitt, and Bee Season with Richard Gere and Juliette Binoche. None of them have been blockbuster hits but they get enough good reviews to keep making the films they love. A.O. Scott in his New York Times review called What Maisie Knew “a brilliant, haunting adaptation” of the James novel.

Maisie is the story of a 6 year old child of uncommonly narcissistic parents who are coming undone as a couple. The mother is a rock musician, the father an international art dealer and businessman. Both of them love Maisie when it’s convenient or when they want to punish each other. The rest of the time Maisie is an inconvenient obligation subordinate to the narcissistic pursuit of their other interests. The two other characters who emerge as the story develops are her nanny/stepmother and bartender/stepfather who become convenient after-market caregivers that solve the parents caregiving problems after the divorce. It’s not a pretty story. I have to say it did make me look at my own selfish behaviors over the years. Still, this is Maisie’s story and not everyone in Maisie’s life turns out to be bad news. You’ll have to see the movie to find the outcome. The film opens nationwide next week. See it.

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When I started to blog about it I figured that living in Seattle required a survival mentality. I grew up here and was carrying a lot of baggage left over from when the town was in the clutches of a handful of families who fancied themselves as aristocrats and acted as if the town was their personal fiefdom. I was wrong. Things are different now. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, and dozens of biotech firms have changed the demographic and sucked some of the swell out of those heads. In the 1950’s Sir Thomas Beecham called Seattle the “cultural dustbin of the world.” In February 2013 Seattle was named the 2nd most literate city in America (close behind Washington, DC). Nice change.

My mental shift notwithstanding, the weather is a challenge and a good reason to maintain the survival mentality. When the weather drives me indoors survival depends on finding ways to fight the dragon. It means checking out the art, theater, music, and bookstore scene, and those elements have been particularly rich this past two weeks – the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD performance of Giulio Caesare, Seattle Rep’s 1970’s French farce Boeing, Boeing, an Art of Jazz event at SAM and last weekend’s release of Baz Luhrman’s film The Great Gatsby. I’ve seen them all but was particularly struck by the contrast between the jazz concert at SAM and the Jazz Age laid out in the Gatsby film.

Luhrmann’s Great Gatsby is tumultuous, raucous, glitzy, stylized, and over the top. It’s a frontal assault on the senses visually, aurally, and musically – and I didn’t even get to see the 3D version. With music as crazily different as Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and Jay Z’s $100 Bill the soundtrack helps propel the action forward. Gatsby is all about the excesses of the Jazz Age and anomalous as it seems Jay Z’s thumping hip-hop beat fits the manic action at Gatsby’s extravagant parties very well. I reread the novel just before I saw the film and was surprised at the fidelity of Luhrmann’s adaptation. Much of the dialogue is lifted directly from the novel and the use of Nick Carraway’s voiceover makes it easier to remain faithful to the text. Lately the novel has been getting hyped as the Great American Novel. I disagree, but it has endured. This is the fifth film adaptation and two years ago I saw a stage adaptation. It is right up there with To Kill a Mockingbird, The Old Man and the Sea, The Scarlet Letter, and A River Runs Through It as one of the great short novels in American fiction. I think its real strength is the way it captures the senseless hedonism of the Jazz Age and the seeds of it’s own destruction. The greed, duplicity, racism, pretense, anti-Semitism, disparities in wealth, and pursuit of pleasure are all there. The book was published in 1925 within four years the party was over, the stock market had crashed and breadlines were forming. The picture was beautifully painted but Dorian Gray’s portrait was hanging in the closet the whole time.

I’m in the camp that believes a novel has more power when left to the reader’s imagination. I think that’s especially true of The Great Gatsby. I like my own rendering of the characters but this film is well worth seeing. – much better in my estimation than the airbrushed, romanticized 1974 Robert Redford, Mia Farrow version or any of the earlier adaptations. It’s obviously the same story but DiCaprio is a more complicated Gatsby as he obsessively devotes his attention and wealth on Daisy’s capture.

In contrast to the glitz and glamor of the Gatsby film, the Dutch saxophonist, Tineke Postma, who performed at the Seattle Art Museum’s Art of Jazz concert last week was supremely understated. Her appearance, as part of the month long Earshot Jazz Festival was the essence of cool. The Seattle Art Museum is not an intimate club, and I would like to have seen her in that setting but the museum’s ground floor with its surreal installation of hanging automobiles and flashing lights played more like a sacred space than a museum foyer.

Ms Postma, backed by three local journeymen musicians, played two sets of her own compositions about evenly divided between soulful and raucous. She is a unique talent whose work shows the influence of Wayne Shorter and others. When I closed my eyes I could hear echoes of Miles and when she played the soprano sax Ornette Coleman was right there at times. Jazz, like everything else (except politics), is global and eclectic these days. Nothing Ms Postma played was hummable, but it was rhythmic and oddly beautiful. Some of it could have been right out of the Eric Satie catalog.

The Art of Jazz is a regular feature on the second Thursday of every month, but not every performance includes an artist of Ms Postma’s international stature. As a museum member the Art of Jazz serves up a little something extra and if you choose to walk the galleries on the second floor the music provides a compliment to the museum’s modern collection. Frankenthaler and Postma went very nicely together last Thursday.

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Now he lives in the islands, fishes the pilin’s
And drinks his green label each day
Writing his memoirs, losin’ his hearin’
But he don’t care what most people say

Through eighty-six years of perpetual motion
If he likes you he’ll smile and he’ll say
Jimmy, some of it’s magic, some of it’s tragic
But I had a good life all the way

The last verse of Jimmy Buffett’s He Went to Paris

I love the lyric. It captures my feeling about the “magic and tragic” that is the essence of our lives.

In January I wrote an essay called Who Will I Be in 10 Years after hearing an NPR feature with the same title. I can’t answer the question now. Maybe I won’t be able to answer it at all. I’m in what climbers call “the death zone,” the upper reaches of the mountain, above 8000 meters, where thin air, low temperatures, high winds, unpredictable weather and ice present a matrix of threats to life. It isn’t ice or thin air that creates the death zone for me; it’s stealthy predators like cancer, heart disease, Parkinson’s and stroke that challenge the longevity calculus. As well as I am at the moment, there is always the possibility that the predators will strike. They creep in to steal the future, but, like the climbers on Everest, we don’t focus on the risks. Instead, we continue toward the summit. We continue to plan, set goals, and drill on into the night.

The trigger for these reflections was a performance of Tracy Lett’s play August: Osage County, the 2008 Tony Award winner about a family dealing with the death of its patriarch and all the tangled emotional family issues it brings into focus. It’s unique as modern theater but deals with the same complicated family drama brought to life in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Mercifully, it only takes 3 hours and 40 minutes to deconstruct the Weston family in Osage County versus the almost endless undoing of the Tyrone’s in the O’Neill play.

As Tolstoy said in the famous opening line of Anna Karenina “Happy families are all alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” The Weston and Tyrone families in Osage County and Long Day’s Journey are riddled with alcoholism, drug addiction, envy, and incest – a litany of modern family problems. But these problems are symptoms of the underlying existential angst and stress created by their tangled and knotted family relationships. What is it about these plays that compels our attention aside from the brilliant portrayal of their flawed characters? I think it’s that they lead us back to our own family dynamics. My criterion for evaluating a film or theater piece is the durability of the conversation that follows. In the case of these plays, extreme as the situations are, the conversations and reflections are driven by comparisons to our own families and the discomfort we find in the common elements.

In Asia, where I have spent most of the last four years, the family is still the most important social unit. Gish Jen, the Chinese-American writer, in her book Tiger Writing: Art, Culture and the Interdependent Self asserts that Euro-American culture with its focus on individualism is categorically different from Asia’s emphasis on the collective interdependent self. The family is the context for community and growth. Elders are venerated and holidays dictate a return to the family home which is almost always geographically close. In the West, we encourage our children to be independent and to question authority – and we scatter.

Divorce, geography, and lifestyle are all challenges to family harmony and communication in the West. My immediate family (children and grandchildren) has spread itself between Seattle, Saigon, Sun Valley, Salt Lake City, Bellingham and Brisbane, Australia. None of my children live close to me and I have not shared a holiday with any of them in more than 5 years. We live separate lives with separate networks of friends.

I have always admired writers that mine their own experience but I’m also mindful of the pain they cause when their friends and family see themselves in their work. My friends, Dick and Kit, have been treated harshly in fiction written by their son, Dan, and James Salter used his neighbors, the Rosenthal’s, as models for an unflattering portrait of a disintegrating marriage in his novel Light Years. My wife is uncomfortable when I even nibble at the edges of writing something personal. I want to be honest and not hold back, but I feel protective. Still, there is an open wound and ongoing pain with two family members. That’s where the Osage County, Long Day’s Journey stuff comes in; when I look at my family I see reflections of the same discord I see in those plays.

My family doesn’t have alcohol, drug, incest or domestic abuse issues like the families in August: Osage County or Long Day’s Journey Into Night but like many families we have sticky issues that emanate from the Euro-American emphasis on self. I take responsibility for some the distance between us. I was an only child and always self-absorbed. I still am. I could do better at reaching out to my children – but so could they. I hear from my oldest on a regular basis but almost nothing from the other two. I hate the telephone and use it mostly for housekeeping tasks like making appointments or doing things I can’t do by email. I like the written word so I communicate by email, even though I know it is easily misinterpreted. I rarely see my children or grandchildren and our visits are getting rarer – once a year maybe. They began to separate, individuate and differentiate themselves as teenagers when they went away to boarding school and then to college. My then-wife and I encouraged it. They were all different then and have grown to be independent and successful in their different ways now.I’m proud of them.The two that have their own children are good parents and all three are good friends to each other and to their friends but it’s not enough to make us into the Brady Bunch or the Beaver Cleavers. Neither are we the Westons or the Tyrones.

All families are dysfunctional to some degree. I thought mine was different but now I realize this was self-serving and delusional. My daughter said it first; our choices and priorities are different. Is there anything I can do to change it? Yes, but I want it to be mutual. I want them to want it too. I don’t think of myself as needy but I guess I would like a little more Asian interdependence. At this point we all have reasonably normal, successful lives within our own spheres. Would I like to feel closer to my children? The answer is yes. Would I l ike to have healthier more frequent communication with them? Yes. Would they answer the questions the same way? I don’t know. Interesting isn’t it? I really don’t know them well, nor they me, at this stage in our lives. In the abstract we all want “better” relationships with better communication, but families are complicated and the divorce, distance, and lifestyle issues are always at play.

It is what it is. For now, I think Jimmy Buffett says it best; “

Some of it’s magic. Some of it’s tragic. But I’ve had a good life all the way.”

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“The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party when the masks are dropped.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Robert Redford is my age, and it’s clear that until recently he had an edge in the good looks department. I’d say it’s a tossup now. He still has the great hair and the penetrating blue eyes. I have neither. In the end it’s not about the faces although they do command attention. George Orwell said, “At age 50, every man has the face he deserves.” I’m happy with mine and I feel certain that Robert Redford is happy with his. There aren’t a lot of good options when it comes to growing old, but it feels right to allow age to arrive naturally. He obviously feels the same. Neither one of us wants to go under the knife and end up looking like Kenny Rogers or Bruce Jenner. At this point in my life I feel lucky be able to look in the mirror – no matter what I look like. Every day people I know or admire show up in the obituaries along with pictures that prove the point, and it causes most of us to think more about mortality than we like to admit.

This isn’t a maudlin, cranky, feel sorry piece about getting old. Yesterday I saw Mr. Redford’s latest film, The Company You Keep, and it triggered a series of reflections on age, youthful idealism, family, choices made, consequences, and what Conrad called “the villainy of circumstance”. It’s a good film and worth seeing, but the audience demographic was surprising – they were all my age. Redford is 76 and the events depicted took place 50 years ago. I thought it would appeal to a larger audience, but maybe that says something about Mr. Redford and me too.

Recently there have been a slew of films exploring both age and mortality – The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, A Late Quartet, Amour, and the quirky Quartet with Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, and Billy Connelly. The Company You Keep is a stylish big budget movie with big name stars (Susan Sarandon, Julie Christie, Shia LeBeouf, Nick Nolte, and Sam Elliot) and a thriller plot. The other films are smaller in scale, focused on relationships, and do a somewhat better job of exploring the dynamics of growing old and coping with its issues. What I have liked about the recent ones is that the characters continue to be interesting, vibrant, alive, and having a good time. The endgame can be upbeat.

A friend recently said to me “It’s the surprise of being so old and still acting like an adolescent from time to time….” He’s right; age sneaks up on us and when we realize it we tend to act out. We go on to deny or ignore it until the grieving process, not wholly conscious, kicks in. I don’t “feel” old. I still have the same youthful enthusiasm I’ve always had for tennis, skiing, guitar playing, adventure travel, and meeting new people, but when I look in the mirror it’s written there. My children are in their 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. I have a child who is 53 years old. That can’t be… can it?

The recent bestseller by Michele VanOrt Cozzens called The Things I Wish I’d Said reminds me that there is nothing like having unfinished business with someone who is dead. I felt that way when my father passed away unexpectedly, and I suspect my children will have some of the same feelings. When we’re younger we don’t think much about it, but when we’re in the zone we think about what’s left to be done. I feel OK about it now and think I’ve done a lot of that work, but I know I’ll never get right with everyone in my life. I try to be straight and hope that they know that I love them. In the end, we all want to set things straight and to clear the air.

Am I having a problem with growing old? You bet. I don’t go to reunions because I hate being trapped in a roomful of old people, and I also have a problem with other people’s age-related expectations. Some of these feelings are normal. My own parents had expectations that differed from mine and so do my children. I love my kids and their kids, but I know that I’m not a traditional grandparent. Maybe later, but it’s safe to say that there isn’t much time left for later. At this point I’m still too restless to give up the quest for something new and interesting. I see Lucie and Benny, two of my grandchildren, once or twice a week and love it, but being a caregiver is not who I am even at this age. I haven’t stopped working and I’ve been lucky enough to find meaningful work even ten years after the normal retirement age. At 72 I was asked to take a job in Saigon and when that job ended at 75 I started looking for something new.

From what I know about Redford he has the same restlessness and curiosity. It may be the secret to maintaining a quality life. Keep busy. Stay engaged. Find new projects (or a new job). Enjoy what you have. Accept who you are. Try to live without regrets. Sooner or later the end will come – maybe sooner, maybe later. Over the years I made choices, some good and some bad. I can’t change those choices now. I have to live with them even though some of them have caused others pain. I’m sorry for the pain but after a sincere effort to make amends it is not my problem anymore. I have lost a couple of friends and a family member and that has been painful, but acceptance is the last stage of the grieving process and I think I’m there.

At the end of the masked ball, when the masks are dropped, what is revealed? Am I living well and doing good? I think so. I hope so. My biggest regret is that when I go I won’t be able to see what happens in the lives of those I love. I’m not ready to cash in yet, but I do want to go on the record as having no regrets.

“You end up as you deserve. In old age you must put up with the face, the friends, the health, and the children you have earned.”

Judith Viorst

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