movie & book recommendation

From: Joya Beebe <joyab_at_fox.com_at_hypermail.org>
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2003 09:52:34 -0700

For you old movie/horror movie/ballet afficianados out there, check out "Dracula: Pages From A Virgin's Diary", now at the Nuart. Artsy director Guy Madden teams up with the Winnipeg Ballet to bring you a ballet version of Dracula, done in old-style black and white with tinted overlays, old-style captions, and some of the best sets I've seen - it made me think of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" meets "A Clockwork Orange". (Specifically, check out the transformation of Lucy's bedroom where she dies into the church for her funeral!) There had been a review in Thursday or Friday's LA Times, but somehow Bob and I hadn't noticed that it was a ballet. It's a good thing, because we might not have gone, but we're glad we did. A few weeks back, we'd seen "Giselle" performed on stage by the Moscow Stanislavsky Ballet, and had been pretty disappointed, because there were basically no sets (apparently, there were supposed to be some great ones, but they didn't meet the fire code), very little atmospherics (no dry ice, etc., which "Dracula" does nicely), and the music and dancing both seemed very apassionate and fluffy for such a Gothic tale. Not so with "Dracula". The music is compiled from Mahler's 1st and 2nd symphonies, and made me want to reexplore Mahler, whom I'd written off at age 20 as too bombastic (and atonal - what the heck was I thinking!). Anyhow, it moves sweepingly from full orchestral crescendo to sweet loveliness, sometimes with multi-faceted church choral music. The dancing is ballet but positively lascivious. As the review said, it centers on the idea of the women's sexuality as awakened by Dracula, representing the Other (they cast a handsome, longish-haired Asian dancer, who gets to dance a little less than the women, but when he does - WOW!), and how this threatens the men representing the Victorian mores of the time.

My book recommendation is "The Botany of Desire", which was sent to me by Bob's father, because a woman he knew had recommended it. It's non-fiction, and currently a bestseller. The basic hypothesis is that plants may be manipulating us to propagate them by fulfilling our desires, as much as we manipulate them to fit those desires. Apparently Darwin started "The Evolution of Species" (help, is that the exact title?) with a discussion of the interaction between bees and flowers - this author thinks we're not so different from the bees. The book is divided into four chapters, each talking about a specific plant and how it fills a specific desire in our lives: the apple, for sweetness, the tulip, for beauty, marijuana, for intoxication, and the potato, for control. (Yes, symbolism buffs, one might have thought to make these the apple, rose, wine grape and wheat, but the author has convincing reasons for deciding instead to use the ones he does.) Anyway, the book is well researched but also very conversational, and covers a lot of territory. It's far more a layperson's read than a scientist's - the man writing it is a dedicated amateur gardener and feature story writer - but it isn't dumb. I read it in two evenings - most of it out loud to Bob while he was trying to work, but it was entertaining enough that he didn't much mind. Full of tidbits like the true scandalous story of Johnny Appleseed (and the true importance of hard cider vs. beer in American history), the decadent tulip festivals of Sultan ___ of Ottoman Turkey which ultimately got him ousted (among other things, he had giant tortoises carrying candles on their backs to light his tulip gardens), and the politics of the potato in seventeenth-nineteenth century Europe (how Louis XVI tricked the peasants into growing it: what the English thought the potato was doing to the Irish; how bad the potato famine really was). The chapter I skipped to first out, I must admit, was the glowing paean to marijuana that reaches the metaphysical (guess which person on this list would love this the most?) while referencing among others Carl Sagan and the two foremost researchers/discoverers of cannabinoid receptors in the brain and discusses cultural reasons for the drug war - plus gives accounts of his own attempts to grow it in the past and his "research" trip to Amsterdam. (Tidbit: did you know that the main god in the Rig Veda is Soma, essentially marijuana personified?)
Received on 2003-06-30 09:52:42