Sandra Hüller is a pretty great foreign actress, and has some wonderful performances in a few noteworthy films, two of which show up on the academy award foreign film list: Anatomy of a Fall, and the Zone of Interest. She has a wide range, being tough, emotional, even whimsical. In Anatomy, she plays a mother and a wife defending her honor and innocence, and in Zone, Sandra plays the spouse of a conflicted but certainly guilty Nazi war criminal, as she spends days at home, watching her children, chatting with friends, gardening and blithely ignoring the concentration camp only feet from her front door.
Little known fact: Sandra is also a licensed fork lift operator, which was important for her work in In the Aisles, which was a heartwarming yet sad film about the people who everyday stock and people a typical grocer in some unnamed German town.
I have this recipient who calls me everyday, or at least most days of the week. Sometimes they cuss at me, other times they tell me about their various errands and plans for the day: going to this or that store. Often, they get mad at me for not calling them on a given day (even though I normally talk to most of my recipients only a few times a year).
Once, of hundreds of calls and (longish) conversations, and I remember this very clearly, this person thanked me: thanked me for returning their calls, talking with them, and supporting them in their wellness.
But, what I think was special about this call is that being appreciative can be difficult, and sometimes, it doesn’t come naturally: it can be hard to be vulnerable and to acknowledge what another means to someone, even if they mean a lot.
And, in a related way, I definitely learn many good lessons from my work, and I have tried to be more intentionally thankful myself, which has taken a lot of work.
One of my bucket list visit locales is Bavaria (even though I struggle with my commitment to work and things are expensive right now). Not only do they have offer some of the oldest, finest breweries, those views are just breathtaking, and castles! Not to mention, Oktoberfest!
If you could travel anywhere right now, where would it be?
The unknown can be scary. It is scary as much for what it is as for what it could be. When we fear something happening, sometimes it is the fear itself that overcomes us, even as the actual event might end up paleing in comparison. I can think of so many situations I thought would be terrible but ended up being not so bad, and I got through (although some situations do just suck, too, and we have to just grin and bear them).
Sometimes you gotta just try and get through, no matter what, and things get better, and try not to let an active imagination or hard feelings paralyze your action (that’s my struggle, at least).
Sometimes just doing something that makes good sense is the right answer, even if it isn’t perfect. Instead of thinking through every possible eventuality and missing the window of opportunity, when action makes most sense, one sometimes must just act.
But also, it’s about being able to weather the unknown and its inherent discomfort: the discomfort of the unknown. Moving forward is so often the answer, and just hanging on through the toughness (or long enough until you get comfortable with the uncomfortable).
As I was driving home from a social work home visit, I noticed a man walking his bike, with a buggy attached to the back, someone possibly experiencing homelessness. A dog was happily walking alongside him. Proudly emblazoned on the front of his bike, on the outside of the handlebars was the sign “I NEED A BEER” in red, scrawled-out capital letters. There was no mention of solicitation. Just a statement about his current feeling about being in the world and needing a kind of respite from it: needing a beer. What a feeling we can all relate to, a universal statement on the nature of being in the world, dealing with its inevitable, daily, stressors, and needing a break. At the end of a long day or at the end of a long week: I NEED A BEER. My rendering of this image below.
By my nature, I am a planner. I like budgets and lists and setting goals. I have Google Keep notes on top of Google Keep notes.
(Not my actually Google Keep).
But if there’s something I’ve learned in life, one lesson (cheesy as it sounds), it’s about trying to find peace and meaning in a situation even when it doesn’t go according to plan. And…adjusting, pivoting given the new circumstances (much easier said than done). Trying to stay solid and balanced even when something goes off plan (and maybe even planning for when it goes off plan). That equanimity, while elusive, is golden.
As well, I think being able to improvise, to navigate the un-planned, is a skill itself it takes time to develop. And it’s hard and uncomfortable sometimes. But it can get bettter.
A morbid, poignant film that depicts the domestic life of the family of Rudolf Hoss, an SS commandant of Auschwitz, and the bizarre and tragic juxtaposition of their relative comfort and bliss with the monstrous terror being visited on so many just on the other side of the wall. A competitor for best foreign film at the Academy Awards, and a winner of the Grand Prix award at the Cannes Film festival.
In music, I enjoy unpredictability as much as predictability. I think this is what draws me to the Avant Garde. The predictable can get boring. But a piece of music that has changing tempo, varied instrumentation, dissonant sounds, off-beat rhythms: it defies the expectations one has for music, which is welcome in a world full of predictability.
This is what draws me to AC or The Residents, This Heat, John Cage or others. It’s not always easy to listen to, but it makes us think about the defining features of music, what makes music music, just as modern artists might fixate on color or shape almost to the exclusion of other qualities in a painting or even the appearance of a painting as something that displays a realistic picture of reality.
Modern Art effectively said “no we do not need to just depict reality in a specific way.” It is an intentional decision made to force us to think about some aspect or quality of art: the form, the type of material used or the lines, as they relate to some kind of meaning associated with the artwork. One example being a work of Kandinsky, which lines and colors which suggest forms that are familiar to us like a sun or a person or a dog but it’s not entirely clear what is actually occurring in the piece, and to some extent is just a constellation of colored shapes and lines carefully articulated with one another to suggest an image that our mind attempts to put together into something meaningful (whether it is there or not).
Or perhaps a sculptural/installation piece, a jet, like Anselm Kiefer’s, a German artist, that symbolically grapples with pretty amorphous things like notions of German identity following WWII, mechanical and technological dominance and guilt.
I was just looking at this work of art earlier online entitled Gift For Apollo by the well-known Robert Rauschenberg, which pushes the boundaries somewhat in regard to what we might call a painting in a different way, with objects attached and installed, as if both painting and sculpture.
When we hear a thing that sounds dissonant or different, it makes us think in a way an easy-listening song or a more song-like-song does not about the boundaries of music. It brings the inconspicuous nature of a song that resembles a song to the realm of the conspicuous so as to make us conscious of the elements of a song and the boundaries of the definition of the notion “song” in an interesting and experimental way: that is, if a song has an unusual or unorthodox tempo, sound, beat, melody, composition or sounds dissonant, is it still a song? At what point is it just sounds gathered together our mind is forming into a thing we call a song? I guess that’s what I find interesting about it: the experimentation, and the questions it raises about a field of human activity (although it’s also fun just to listen to songs and enjoy them too and not think about any of this).
But also, for the artist, I think there’s a lot of play involved: trying things, seeing what works and doesn’t, what they like, in the process of creation and don’t. And then developing from it. Changing over time. In this sense, music is both for-the-audience as well as for-the-creator.
Bearer of Pity 