Inauguration of Barack Obama as U.S. President

From Online Etymology:

inauguration
1569, from Fr. inauguration "installation, consecration," from L. inaugurationem (nom. inauguratio) "consecration, installment under good omens," from inaugurare "take omens from the flight of birds, consecrate or install when such omens are favorable," from in- "on, in" + augurare "to act as an augur, predict" (see augur).

augur - c.1374 (implied in augury), from L. augur, a religious official in ancient Rome who foretold events by interpreting omens, perhaps originally meaning "an increase in crops enacted in ritual," in which case it probably is from Old L. *augos (gen. *augeris) "increase," and is related to augere "increase" (see augment). The more popular theory is that it is from L. avis "bird," since flights, singing, and feeding of birds or entrails from bird sacrifices were an important part of divination (cf. auspicious). The second element would be from garrire "to talk." The verb is 1549, from the noun.

Omens, predictions, consecration, increase, birds, flight, singing-talk-oratory, divination.

It really does feel like an inauguration day.

Girls and Monsters

I've been paging through Lynda Barry's writhing, book-length doodle-for-your noodle, What It Is.

There's no section that isn't my favorite section. One of them is about monsters.

She says that the monster that most scared and fascinated her when she was a kid was the Gorgon, who could turn anyone who looked at her to stone. She reminded Barry of her mother, and working up the courage to look at the Gorgon helped her cope.

"We never need certain monsters more than when we are children," she writes. "And a furious woman with terrifying eyes and snakes for hair was the perfect monster for me...What was yours?"

A bunch come up.


The first one I thought of was a woman in a Twilight Zone episode I saw when I was five. We had just moved from Syracuse to Baltimore, and were living in an apartment while we waited for our house to be finished. I was sleeping in a room with my three sisters. I imagine the situation was somewhat stressful, but I remember very little from that period other than being traumatized by Rod Serling.

In that episode, called "The Eye of the Beholder," a beautiful woman, on a planet where the people most prized look like wild pigs, gets plastic surgery to make her more acceptable. She spends most of the episode wrapped like a mummy, which was scary in itself. When I think about that I stop breathing. If I remember right she screams at the end when they take off the gauze, because she's still pretty. I had lots of nightmares after that. I imagined a figure standing on the wall above my bed. Plastic surgery still makes me want to scream.

Most of us are shown The Wizard of Oz when we are too young to keep our eyes open during the Wicked Witch of the West parts. You have to grow into that part of the movie.

In my baby book, it says that Hansel and Gretel was my favorite fairy tale at age two, so I guess witches were on my mind from a young age. I always thought of Dorothy as the fourth witch in Oz (there's no witch of the south, a gap she fills when she drops out of the sky). There were other good witches in movies too, like the herbalist-healer in The Three Lives of Thomasina.

Then came Cruella DeVille. When I watched 101 Dalmatians with my kids several years ago, it seemed odd that I had ever been afraid of her, but I trembled whenever she came on screen. I couldn't believe Dalmatians was a movie for kids, with a villain that frightening.

Like Lynda Barry's Gorgon, Cruella DeVille reminded me of my mom when she was angry. They both had long nails and voices husky from smoking. (My mother later quit and her five kids grew up, making her life easier and more enjoyable, but her smoking was a big issue throughout my teens; particularly her habit of lighting up after dinner while we were trying to enjoy brownies she had baked us).


As I entered my teens I watched a fair number of Godzilla movies, usually with my brother. We liked to laugh at the dubbing. I wasn't afraid of Godzilla. I thought she was female, since she had a baby that seemed to have hatched from her egg, and maybe because boys called a girl at my high school Godzilla, as an insult. They stopped calling her Godzilla after she, in a Dalai-Lamaesque maneuver, hosted a formal-dress party at her house and invited the perpetrators.

Godzilla got me imagining what fun I'd have as a skyscraper-smashing giant. Godzilla also set the stage for the unquestionably-female monster of the Alien series, which, together with the hero played by Sigourney Weaver, was a touchstone throughout my 20s.

I agree with Lynda Barry that we need monsters, to help us be brave, to give us an outlet for our own monstrous feelings, to show us what's intolerant and uncivil in our world.

I wonder if the Other Mother of CORALINE will give my daughter something to brood about.

Children need monsters; do girls need female monsters?

I think so, and female heros to tussle with them.

More Lines on CORALINE: Boys' Emotions

Last night I took my kids to see The Wizard of Oz on the big screen at Ulster Performing Arts Center. It was an experience like they'd never had at a movie. They'd seen it many times on video and DVD, of course, like any nine or 11-year-old. But here was a giant auditorium of people and images many times their height; people clapped for every actor, sang and chanted along. A father with his daughter on his lap sat in front of us; in front of them, three men leaned their heads on one another's shoulders.

Before the picture, my son and his friend (another unschooler) discussed CORALINE.

BOY 1: So how was CORALINE?

BOY 2: Sad. And scary. But mostly sad.

BOY 1: I almost never cry but sometimes I do. If I'm hurt. Or at a movie if someone is hurt.

ME: If you're injured?

BOY 2: He means if his feelings are hurt.

BOY 1: Yeah, if my feelings are hurt.

It was a privilege to listen in, and I wondered how many conversations between boys go into that territory. Maybe it happens all the time and goes largely unreported, or maybe it had to do with the kind of people these particular boys are.

I asked later what was so sad about CORALINE.

"When she goes to bed and makes dolls of her parents," my son said. "And when she puts all the dolls in the chest and locks it [in the other world.] I didn't like that at all."

Preview + Review of Long-Awaited CORALINE

CORALINE is scheduled for release to theaters on February 6, 2009.

My son Ray has been making movies since he was six: stop motion animation, live action, and lately, CGI parodies of Star Wars. He reads film production books and bios of animators like Chuck Jones, and loves ‘making-of’ bonus features and little biopics about revered figures like Ray Harryhausen. One of his ‘mentors’ is Henry Selick, who has just completed his adaptation (for 3D stop-motion animation) of Neil Gaiman’s novel, Coraline.

It was our enormous good fortune—mine, my son’s, my daughter’s, my husband’s, and his mother’s—to visit the set of Coraline a couple of years ago, and a real treat to see a preview screening of the finished work the other night in Manhattan, with Henry Selick on hand to answer audience questions.

Ray, who is 11, wasn’t sure he wanted to see what he called a ‘horror’ movie. His 9-year-old sister, who acts in most of his movies and in her own monologue-driven shorts, was firm: she wouldn’t go to the screening. The monstrous Other Mother of the previews, and the prospect of having her lunge from the screen, were horrors they could live without.

So, Ray and I headed into NYC with the plan that he would shut his eyes, pull his jacket up over his face, and hold his hands to his ears if it all got to be too much. He was willing to endure, if only for the Q&A portion of the evening.

As it turns out, he didn’t have to worry too much. He only shut his eyes once, and not for long. While the idea of Coraline is truly terrifying—a girl is left alone to rescue her supernaturally abducted parents—its creators have allowed the idea to carry most of the weight of emotion, as with the best fairy tales, and haven’t piled onto it with 3D shock effects or long, anxiety-provoking suspense sequences. The Nightmare Before Christmas, with its cast of characters in varying states of decomposition, is more horrific—at least to me, and I think my son, who got to an age where he felt too uneasy to watch it, and wouldn’t go near the undead-dominated Corpse Bride, would agree.

Henry Selick has done a beautiful job of reconceptualizing the novel for the screen and for stop motion. From the first moments, when metal hands sew up a doll-sized version of the title character and cast her into a void, this is a movie that invites contemplation of the animator and the animator’s art. Our first view of the hands of the evil Other Mother, creator and destroyer of the Other World, are bare of fleshly trappings, primordial armature. We come to find that the energy of children is what makes the Other Mother’s material other world, and it is their life force that makes it beautiful, whimsical, and inviting.

If you have watched any of the featurettes about Coraline, you have seen artist after artist toiling and tinkering away, as artists always do on these projects, though now, with the Internet, in less obscurity. They can even blog about their work for Laika Studios. It’s hard to watch that image of armature hands making the Coraline doll and not think of all the human hands that have gone into the making of this supremely hand-made movie, and seeing in these moments a tribute to them all (certainly they deserve a tribute, including those several dozen Laika workers, I was sorry to read, who were recently laid off).

OtherMotherWorld is especially fanciful and so packed with detail it's hard to imagine not seeing the movie many times to try to take it all in. Henry S. has ensured that the Other Mother’s overture to Coraline is suitably seductive. She—and we—are truly tempted to stay and sample more delights from the animators’ cabinet of wonders. The wonders really are wonderful; we laughed throughout the early other world scenes. In the post-screening Q&A, Henry S. talked a bit about his motivation for shooting in 3D. He wanted the audience to have more access to the animators' world—2D doesn't really allow it. So the other world—more colorful, more fanciful—really is the animators' world. (One could imagine a version that is flat when we're in Coraline's world and 3D only in the other world, like the sepia vs. color worlds of The Wizard of Oz.)

Henry Selick’s Other Mother is a kind of ‘50s fantasy mom—she cooks brilliantly in heels, make-up, and manicure and wears a stainless, starched apron. Other Father is affable, doting, and fun (aside from the saucy, riotous French and Saunders as the Misses Spink and Forcible, my favorite vocal performance is John Hodgman's as the Fathers Real and Other).

Coraline's real world parents, by contrast, are familiar to us as contemporary, overworked telecommuters (fortunate in that sense, they write at home on gardening) who share the work of their life equally, don’t exactly excel in the kitchen, and don’t have much time for their daughter, who learns what it means to have 'good enough' parents.

That Coraline's creativity will rival the Other Mother's is intimated by a lovely scene that is not in Neil Gaiman’s book. Having returned from an early foray into the other world, Coraline finds her apartment empty; her parents have not come home from work and grocery shopping. Newly arrived in a strange place, friendless and now abandoned by her parents, she goes to bed alone, making pillow-people versions of her mom and dad to comfort herself—the Other Mother isn't the only one who can conjure power from a doll. I think Coraline's realization that they're not coming back is the scariest moment in the story (though Gaiman's protagonist is pretty brave at this point, as I recall). Henry S. wisely lingers long enough for us to feel her loneliness and her sadness.

A resourceful adventurer who is, like too few movie protagonists—even at the dawn of the 21st century—a girl, Coraline would be perfect if not for Henry S.’s addition of a boy to come to her aid in her time of need. Or so I thought when I heard about him. But Wybie (nicknamed "Why Be Born" by Coraline—I guess Henry S. knew some of us would resist), who gives Coraline someone other than a (really cool) cat to dialog with, adds a melancholy element to the other world, where he is more expressive for his muteness.

When my son and I came back up the Hudson River the day after the screening, and made our report to his sister, she said, “I think I’ve changed my mind. I do want to see Coraline.” I look forward to seeing it again with her.

We were too shy to ask for a shot of Henry S. with Ray, but here he is after the Q&A. Be sure to view through your 3D glasses.

The Age of Innocence at 32 and 47

When The Age of Innocence came out in 1993, I was 32. I went to see it with my boyfriend. We were living together in a committed relationship, and our lives had become routinized and boring.

After the movie we strolled into the East Village and he began yammering in an easy, superficial way, much like the way May Welland tells Newland Archer all the society doings in her winter resort of St. Augustine. Like Newland Archer I tuned out my partner in order to pursue my own reverie about, actually, Newland Archer, in whom I thought I saw myself.

I had left the film sad at his fate, and his separation from his soulmate, Ellen Olenska. I was on a cliff I might soon fall off of, into marriage and a lifetime of predictability. My partner’s wisecracks about Michelle Pfeiffer’s hairdo, or whatever he was talking about, added annoyance to my despair. He wasn't moved by the story the way I had been, and I took it as one of many signs that we didn't belong together. Within a year we had broken up and gone our separate ways.

In my eleventh year as a New York resident, I moved into my own apartment in Chelsea, where I lived happily, without a roommate for the first time. I bought a VHS copy of The Age of Innocence and made a habit of watching it once a year.

I like to see it during the winter holidays, not so much because it is a winter film (like Meet Me in St. Louis, it encompasses all seasons, but like that movie it leaves you with a sense of having been snowed on), but because of a particular memory I have of its being shot in Park Slope, around the corner from where I lived with that boyfriend.

One summer evening I came home from work to find a block of Eighth Avenue closed to auto traffic. Blowers were creating an artificial snowfall so that Ellen Olenska, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, could descend the steps of a brownstone, enter a carriage, and drive away. (I later realized this scene must have taken place after she says goodbye to Newland Archer, played by Daniel Day Lewis, for the last time, closing the door on the possibility of their ever having the affair they’ve been contemplating).

Passersby dressed in shirtsleeves or shorts and flip-flops, had gathered to watch Ms. Pfeiffer mount the carriage and depart in the blizzard, and I stood with them for a while, enchanted by the giant snow globe Martin Scorcese had created in our neighborhood. When the movie came out, this made me more excited about seeing it, this tiny role I’d already played as a spectator of its creation.

It was wrenching, this meditation on sacrifice and lost possibility. Newland and Ellen represented all the things people give up when they settle down. Newland's story was a warning about how commitment undermines creative freedom and atrophies intellect and authenticity. Marriage even seemed to ruin his appreciation for art and literature.

Even after a few more years had passed, and I was happily married to someone I regarded as a creative soulmate, and had two children, and a family life full of art projects, and experiences worth making art about, I watched The Age of Innocence with this focus on loss, summed up in the tenor of a scene at the end, an exchange between Newland and his son Ted. Ted reveals that May, on her deathbed, told him about Newland’s affair with Ellen Olenska. And that his mother had said that she would die knowing that Ted and her other children would always be safe with Newland, because “once, when she asked him to, he gave up the one thing he wanted most.” In answer, Newland looks ahead and says bitterly, “she never asked. She never asked.”

His choice of whom to marry, in a society which, he tells Ellen earlier in the film, does not arrange its marriages, had been determined by power brokers in a system of invisible signs and symbols that moved in mysterious ways, with curious and sometimes surprising endorsements.

(Julius Beaufort, for example, who winds up as Ted’s father-in-law, is able to conduct a series of scandalous affairs and even survives a Madoff-like collapse of his investment business, all because he surfs the changing times better than Newland).

This past New Year’s Eve, 15 years after my first viewing from a bachelorette’s vantage point, I decided to watch The Age of Innocence again. I had missed a few years of viewing, and I wondered if I’d see anything new in it. Right from the beginning, I noticed more details about Scorsese’s adaptation of the novel, how he used cinematic means to literary ends so brilliantly. But a new emotional response surprised me.

This time around, I was drawn to a different most-significant moment. Ted has arranged a visit to Ellen Olenska in Paris and sprung it on his dad, asking whether he might like to meet again the woman he almost “threw it all over for.” Newland, alone in the Louvre (throughout the film, the contemplation of art brings this character closest to his emotional truth), thinks to himself, “I’m only 57.” He meets Ted outside Ellen’s apartment, but can’t bring himself to visit her.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned,” is the excuse he gives his son, “that should be enough.” He then walks away, and the narrator (Joanne Woodward) tells us that the fact that his wife had appreciated his sacrifice, and pitied him, moves him inexpressibly. Yielding to May's subtly-expressed deathbed wish that he stay committed to her beyond death, he walks away.

“Just tell her I’m old-fashioned.” With this remark Newland sides with May and the old order. Her comment to Ted about the family’s safety has ensured that his commitment to her will never end; propriety has spoken through her and he will listen.

Ellen is indeed only one of a series of ghosts in his life, one of a number of people, places, actions given up in order to experience commitment. Newland’s way is a fundamentally conservative one, and though Beaufort, with his philandering, and Ellen, with her “eccentric and incoherent education” and possible divorce, represent a new, chaotic, even dangerous order, Newland’s choice, which he finally recognizes as a choice, and stands by it, is in favor of stability and tradition. Not to say that the path he picked was better than if he'd chosen Ellen, or lived like Julius, but I no longer see it as quite so miserable and suffocating. People who commit give up all kinds of transitory pleasures; people who don't commit give up the possibility of ever standing in the room where 'all the great events of their life' have taken place.

In Newland Archer, Edith Wharton wrote an expansive character that allows for identification from very different vantage points—Archer’s yearning for freedom versus the decision to forgo it. Is Newland disgusted with Julius Beaufort or envious of him? Is his marriage to May the result of societal coercion or choice? Either, or both, depending on who's watching, and when.