Category: Magazine

The Art of Robert Mapplethorpe Comes to IU ● by Ethan Sandweiss

The statuesque nudes and the soft flower petals that line the walls of Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery of Art are unmistakable works of one of the 20th Century’s most influential photographers. Whether viewed as intentionally explicit or uniquely insightful, Robert Mapplethorpe created photographs that demand a reaction. In a joint effort with the Grunwald Gallery, the Kinsey Institute is displaying all 30 of its Mapplethorpe prints for the first time. Robert Mapplethorpe: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute’s Collection is on display through November 22nd and features some of the most provocative and recognizable work of his career.

[Image at the top of this post: Self Portrait, 1980 © The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation.

Used by permission. Courtesy of The Kinsey Institute.]

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There’s little doubt that Mapplethorpe’s gritty, explicit, and beautiful images changed the landscape of American art. Born in Queens to a working class Catholic family, Mapplethorpe was often walking the thin line between conventionality and deviance. A former choirboy, he enrolled at the Pratt Institute following his father’s wishes to become a commercial artist, but dropped out to live as a bohemian in Brooklyn. Like many artists before him, Mapplethorpe explored the world, and himself, through creation. His self-discovery as a homosexual profoundly changed his lifestyle and the nature of his work. The photographs on display at the Grunwald Gallery are some of his most provocative and distinctive.

Though he sometimes described his own photography as “pornographic,” Mapplethorpe avoided the temptation to create art just for the shock value. “I don’t like that particular word ‘shocking,’” he once said, “I’m looking for the unexpected. I’m looking for things I’ve never seen before.” Though Mapplethorpe emulated artists such as Warhol and Duchamp, he was always preoccupied with defining his own unique style. The photographer became notorious for his provocative polaroid images of New York’s S&M scene that hid curiosity about passion and the human body behind initially startling sexuality.

Robert Mapplethorpe’s career began in the 1970’s New York City. For the previous decade, art in the city had been dominated by Andy Warhol and the pop art movement; bohemian and gay subcultures which had received marginal attention before were now at the forefront of the evolution of fine art. As a college dropout, Mapplethorpe scraped by working various menial jobs and living with his close friend and lover, Patti Smith. The years before his

art began to proliferate were challenging for him on all levels; he suffered from severe health complications and struggled with his own sense of identity. Financially, Mapplethorpe was destitute, but along with Smith he continued to produce vast quantities of art. Eventually, the two moved into the Chelsea Hotel: the center of New York’s bohemian community.

In 1970, Robert Mapplethorpe bought his first Polaroid camera. Mapplethorpe, who at the time primarily created drawings and collages, began incorporating his own photographs in his work. By 1973 when his first show opened at the Light Gallery, the artist was almost exclusively working with photographs. While Mapplethorpe had begun to work commercially for print and television, his artistic career became increasingly avant garde and provocative. The controversy over his explicit, but masterfully produced, polaroid photographs not only brought attention to him but challenged the very definition of art.

Throughout the 1980’s Mapplethorpe’s work continued to evolve and his reputation continued to grow. He focused increasingly on homoerotic photography featuring statuesque men, often African American, in photographs that were at once classically formal and revolutionary. In addition to his nude photography, Mapplethorpe photographed series of flowers and celebrity portraits which became famous in their own right. Particularly controversial were his images of children, which were often infused with overtly sexual imagery.

Mapplethorpe’s self-destructive lifestyle of casual sex and drug abuse kept him simultaneously alive and on the brink of death. His close friend and writer of his biography, Jack Fritscher, wrote, “If AIDS (didn’t get) him, something else would have.” Mapplethorpe received his diagnosis in 1986 at the height of his artistic career. The AIDS epidemic had begun to devastate the gay community and Mapplethorpe was to become one if its most prominent victims. Despite his diagnosis, Mapplethorpe continued to create, and AIDS research became cause. In 1988, one year before his death, Robert Mapplethorpe started the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, dedicated to promoting photography as a fine art form and later to supporting AIDS research. In March of 1989, Mapplethorpe lost his battle against the disease and died in a Boston hospital.

Months after Mapplethorpe’s death, the photographer made his biggest impact on the world of art. His touring show Perfect Moment arrived at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. The exhibition, which featured his signature leather-clad gay men and child photography, drew outrage from conservative locals and eventually a legal suit. Dennis Barrie, director of the arts center, was arrested and put on trial for obscenity charges, facing up to a year in prison and a $10,000 fine for the museum. Barrie and the museum were eventually acquitted of all charges in a Cincinnati court. However, even though free expression had won the battle, Perfect Moment provoked a much larger conflict. The show coincided with a tumultuous time in the American art world. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had been sponsoring similarly controversial projects, including one of artist Andres Serrano that included a photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine, entitled Piss Jesus. (At the height of the controversy, IU brought Serrano to Bloomington as a guest lecturer.) Many Washington lawmakers had been looking for an opportunity to cut funding for the NEA, and Perfect Moment became their excuse. The NEA had provided $30,000 for the show, which Rep. Dick Armey, a Texas Republican and ardent anti-NEA advocate, labeled “morally reprehensible trash.” While congressional attempts to directly cut funding to the NEA were unsuccessful, a congressional committee removed $45,000 from the NEA’s budget (the combined amount spent by the NEA on both the Mapplethorpe and the Serrano show), adding also an anti-obscenity clause that denied funding for projects that featured, among other things, homoeroticism, sadomasochism, and “individuals engaged in sex acts.” Betsy Stirratt of the Grunwald Gallery recalled her own reactions at the time of the controversy. “I was a young artist at the time. I think a lot of us were impacted by the censorship.” Popular protest against the rise of government censorship increased, as did the threat. Clashes continued throughout the 1990’s in response to the legislation and brought to the table not only the question of government involvement in the arts, but the very definition of art itself.

Catherine Johnson-Roehr, Curator of Art, Artifacts, and Photographs at the Kinsey Institute feels passionately that the work of Robert Mapplethorpe has to be preserved and shown. “No one today should be questioning whether or not he’s a real artist,” says Johnson-Roehr, “there’s still arguments being made about what is art, but I think as a culture we’ve evolved.” Catherine Johnson-Roehr remembers that in her first days working at Kinsey, one of the most common questions she was asked was if the institute had any of Mapplethorpe’s photographs. Johnson-Roehr wrote to the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, and in 2011, it donated 30 original Mapplethorpe prints. The only stipulation made at the time of the donation was that the prints were to be one day shown in an exhibition. Coincidentally, the show will take place 25 years after the arrest of Dennis Barrie in Cincinnati, and will feature some of the same prints that were on display in Perfect Moment. The exhibition at the Grunwald Gallery, a retrospective of some of Mapplethorpe’s best work, promises to be rich with artistic and historical significance. “Not everyone will like it,” says Stirratt, “(but) it’s a very gratifying show.”

The Ryder ● November 2014

● by Colleen Wells

[ED: Jonathan Bloom, author of American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) spoke at Indiana University last month. His book, published in 2010, earned the 2011 International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Award.]

Pies, pasta and pizza are often better the second time around, but what about the rest of the leftover food in your fridge? If you don’t know what to do with last night’s corn or beans, try mixing them in with a pot of chili. Reallocate on-the-edge bread to feeding ducks, or use it to make breadcrumbs. Fading lemons, oranges, and apples can be used to create potpourri, and coffee grounds can be left in your fridge to neutralize the odor of stale food. These are the types of things we can all do to make a dent in the 160 billion pounds of food Americans waste annually, And, according to Jonathan Bloom’s book, that’s a conservative estimate.

Jonathan Bloom has been researching food waste since 2005 when he had a seminal experience as a volunteer for DC Central Kitchen. While witnessing piles of donated food, the author became overwhelmed and intrigued by the vastness of it. In the introduction to American Wasteland, he writes: “That summer day in our nation’s capital, my task was to man an industrial-sized vat of pasta. This was not a plum assignment in a building without air conditioning. Yet the job’s mindlessness granted me time to look around while I stirred the spaghetti with an oar. I noticed a variety of foods that somebody hadn’t wanted. And it was all good stuff, too.”

From there Bloom began asking questions and exploring the topic on his blog. like his book, his blog offers as many solutions to food waste as it does point out the scope and severity of the problem. There’s a forum for readers to post tips about reducing food waste. They include bringing leftovers to coworkers for lunch, feeding scraps to chickens, and getting creative with putting leftovers in omelets.

All of these, like the ideas listed above, are small suggestions we can use at home. And they are suggestions that just make sense. In a phone interview with Bloom, who lives in Durham, North Carolina, the fact that it makes sense not to waste food was discussed from many different angles.

Colleen Wells: What events and memories have informed your journey?

Jonathan Bloom: Wasting food just doesn’t make sense. When I came to realize how much food wasn’t being used, I was stunned and confounded. I had this real ah-ha moment in DC Central Kitchen in Washington where I was volunteering, where I saw all of this food that they had recovered that would have otherwise been thrown out. I saw not just the massive amounts of food but the beautiful kinds of food and the variety and the quality of food that at most places would be thrown out, but, in this instance, was being put to good use.

Having that experience really forced me to start asking some questions and start doing some digging as a journalist. The more I’d go looking for food waste, the more I found it. To this day I keep learning more and more about where food is discarded in our food system and some of the rationale behind that waste. For the most part, none of it happens for a good reason. That’s the shocking part of food waste that keeps me interested in the topic and passionate about it.

CW: That makes a lot of sense.

JB: Yeah, and just to flesh it out a tiny bit more on the background, as I said before, it’s kind of common sense. Why would anyone waste food? And that’s my perspective but the experiences I had growing up in a family where we took all of the leftovers home from a restaurant, where we saved leftovers from our meals at home, and then also where we were told to just take what we wanted to eat and to try not to take too much. All these were formative experiences…

My grandfather would finish up everyone’s plate. My grandmother–I remember watching her eat a drumstick, a chicken leg–seeing her get every morsel of meat off that bone really caused me to take a moment of pause as a kid. I guess you just don’t see that kind of reverence for food most of the time these days because we as a culture, for the most part, haven’t gone without food. But for anyone who’s lived through the depression or even the rationing of WWII, or had parents who did, you’re going to approach food differently and more likely than that, you’re going to really appreciate that food.

CW: We have a daughter who we’ve adopted from Haiti who does that with chicken legs.

JB: And why wouldn’t someone do that? We have different sensitivities, but we as a culture err on the side of being a bit on the squeamish side and we only want our packaged, boneless chicken breast. We don’t want to deal with the entire animal and we don’t want to face the actuality of what we’re doing when we eat meat, but that’s a separate topic.

CW: We are so busy as a culture and have gotten away from cooking and using wholesome ingredients.  What are your thoughts on this?

JB: That’s certainly part of the problem of poor nutrition and food waste. Not having enough time, [and] leading these incredibly busy lives. We have stepped out of the kitchen to a certain extent, or we don’t have the time to cook where we wished we did, so as a result we’ve lost some of those traditional food ways… Collectively speaking, we’ve lost some of those tricks and tips of making food last and stretching food and most importantly, knowing when food has gone bad or not knowing how long you can keep food or even how to store food so it can last longer, how to prepare food, or can food. Busyness and the loss of food knowledge go hand in hand in creating this culture that has lost its way with food, period. And you’re starting to see a reaction against that, and thankfully more and more people are starting to learn some of those traditional food ways to get better at using all of their food and getting back to eating seasonally and cooking more. It does take time to be able to pull that off… [but] where there’s a will there’s a way….

CW: There are so many ways that food is wasted from the seed to the fork. What are some of the most surprising things you discovered in your research?

JB: The most disturbing aspect of waste to me is the fresh food that never ends up leaving the farm. That happens for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s based on macroeconomics where the price of the goods doesn’t justify the investment to harvest it. Sometimes it’s due to a lack of available labor or possibly the policies on immigration leading to lack of available labor. For whatever reasons, to have this fresh, nutritious food that could be going to help feed hungry people, to have that be plowed under or just rotting at the bottom of an orchard or the bottom of the trees at an orchard, that just doesn’t make any sense. There’s food wasted at every level of the food chain, and the more I looked, well, there’s just an abundance of more foods available for recovery because of our excess.

But as we move forward, I think it’s vital to focus on the healthiest foods so that we’re not exacerbating existing problems like obesity and food-related or diet-related illnesses in trying to solve hunger. So it’s all about finding the healthiest, most nutritious foods out there for everybody, and all the loss at the farm level just seems to be a lost opportunity to help those in need.

And I don’t want to cast any blame really on farmers and growers who I think in many cases are victims of circumstances. It’s not that, it’s that we have to figure out some logistical and policy-based solutions to harness the excess food.

CW: You offer many solutions in your book.

JB: I was a little vague there in the solutions part. There’s so many gleaning organizations who are able to harness volunteer labor. There’s one avenue for change and then I think that there should be some involvement from the USDA in trying to promote food recovery at the farm level and that hasn’t happened since the late `90s. There’s a real opportunity there, especially where you have farms that are receiving federal subsidies. I think that’s an avenue to make sure that food recovery happens. If you’re gonna take some federal money then let’s contribute all that food back to society and find a way to harness that excess so that it’s profitable for the growers who I recognize have a pretty tough path these days.

CW: We have wonderful farmer’s markets and coops and small farms in Bloomington. Do you feel like that’s a huge key, here, reducing travel involved in getting food to our plates?

JB: The long distance food chain is certainly to blame for a lot of waste, so eating locally will contribute toward a more local food system. I do think it’s a process where if more and more people are voting with their food dollars for a local food economy, then that’s going to have an impact. And more importantly, perhaps, would be that when you eat locally, whether it’s going shopping at a farmer’s market, or growing your own foods, the more connected we are with our own food, the more likely we are to respect and value what we eat. That connectedness is what’s really going to make a difference with food waste.

And it really carries through with adults and kids alike, in that if you can get kids, for example, to have a school garden or even a backyard garden, they’re so much more likely to want to eat their vegetables when they’ve played a role in creating them, growing them. Kids who grow kale, eat kale for the most part and all the sudden it’s miraculous. You’ll see this transformation where broccoli goes from being something yucky to something delicious and being a part of that process can have a magical impact on how we approach food…

CW: I totally understand. It’s hard to stay connected to our food with three kids on three different soccer teams, and I’ve worked in preschools where it can be discouraging seeing what’s in the children’s lunches… how else can we teach our children about food? I didn’t grow up in an environment where we did canning, but there are things I’d like to try with my family.

JB: We didn’t do canning either. We were definitely a supermarket-based family, but we valued (the) stuff we got. I would think canning would be a nice way to do it. I just went apple picking with my kids, but I have mixed feelings about that as I’m stepping on apple after apple that’s fallen by the wayside. I think the good probably outweighs the bad because of the awareness and connectedness that you’re fostering, but that’s debatable…

I was in Colorado this summer, and there’s this really neat org called TheFallenFruit.org. They map all of the readily available fruit. There are apple trees all over the place in this town where I was staying, in Boulder. And we would be out for a walk and go by an apple tree, pick an apple or two, and that would be our morning snack, and it all just felt very organic for lack of a better word.

I think there’s something to that, just getting kids to realize that food doesn’t happen from the supermarket, and whether you’re gardening out back or in a community garden or enjoying the random apple tree run-ins, they all go toward that same end of connecting kids to their food better.

CW: That dovetails with another area of waste. It’s school lunches. I’ve seen waste in schools where I’ve worked, and it seems like it would be easy to redistribute the food.

JB: I’m with you. I’m astounded that there’s all this waste at the school cafeteria level, and for the most part, food doesn’t have to be thrown out. Leftover, packaged foods could be recovered or rescued and sent to a non-profit. There’s this huge misconception that all food in a school cafeteria setting has to be thrown out per USDA rules and that’s not the case. They’ve just added something to the Good Samaritan Act. In 2012 this congressman put an addendum on the Good Samaritan Act to make sure that people knew it applied to schools… and while there might be variations from county to county or state to state, for the most part we could have that kind of food recovery program happening at a school level.

Of course that doesn’t apply to the kid who takes a bite out of their sandwich and doesn’t want to eat any more. There’s nothing you can really do with that.

CW: I’m really interested in the composting. Can we talk about how wide-spread it’s becoming because I didn’t even know when you mentioned in your book that in Seattle and San Francisco there is mandatory composting per household and in San Francisco for businesses too. Has that taken off more since your book came out?

JB: Composting has grown steadily in the last five years and more and more cities and towns are instituting household composting, usually starting with a pilot program to test it out. So we’re at a point now where more than 200 cities and towns in America have curbside composting which is fabulous. But certainly there’s room for so much improvement there, and hopefully that will grow because there’s really no reason to be sending nutrient-dense food scraps to the landfill where they just create an environmental hazard in the form of methane emissions. So we’re taking a potential soil amendment, a potential plus, and turning it into a net negative when we throw away food, and unfortunately about 97% of the food waste created ends up in a landfill.

CW: That’s definitely another thing that families can do.

JB: Yeah, I was going to say that, and it’s not like you have to wait for your city to institute a compost program. You could do it in your back yard. If you don’t have an outdoor space, they  sell indoor composting contraptions, or you could even get worms. Have a worm bin and compost food scraps that way and in either scenario, whether it’s regular composting or worm composting, you’re going to create a really useful soil amendment that will help you or your neighbor garden.

CW: That’s awesome. Thank you for bringing up the worm bin. I hadn’t thought of that.

JB: Especially for kids too. It’s a nice way to interact with them in a natural process.

CW: Then my son can borrow a few for fishing I guess…

JB: (Laughs)

CW: How can someone like me, your average Mom who wants to make a difference but sometimes has limitations, how can I share the information about food waste?

JB: I think it all starts at home, and I want people to spread the word through actions before any kind of outreach, so trying to reduce their own waste and be as waste aware in their own personal lives, cooking at home, and out in the world of restaurants or shopping, for example.

So then I’m sure there will be these… kind of organic conversations popping up left and right, like why are you doing that? Why did you bring that metal container to this restaurant? … And why are you asking for a half loaf of bread at the grocery store with the fresh baked loaves? Then I think it’ll spread out from there. Maybe you’re then trying to work with others, work with neighbors and family members to avoid ordering too much at a restaurant or to avoid serving family and friends too much when you have them over for a meal. And I think it’ll flower from that.

CW: In your book you say, “Food waste reduction will succeed because it’ll become second nature.” You refer to recycling a few times and how that’s taken off, I was happy to hear that you believe that and that you’re seeing the change because those of us who aren’t out in the field aren’t always aware of the good things that are happening. With that in mind, what do you think are the greatest obstacles remaining?

JB: There’s three things. There’s awareness, apathy and attention span. The first thing is we have to get people to realize that food waste is a problem, then once you breach the topic then the danger is people don’t care about the issue and just don’t want to bother. Reducing food waste isn’t hard, but it does take a little bit of doing and people for the most part tend to steer clear of behavior change. That’s kind of scary for a lot of folks. They don’t want to listen if you’re asking more of them.

Busy lifestyles is a third barrier to action on food waste because we don’t tend to pause much on anything let alone this topic that people might not think is all that important. If we can really get people thinking about food waste, that’s the first step towards creating some kind of lasting change.

[Jonathan Bloom’s American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half of Its Food (and What We Can Do About It) is published by Da Capo Press. You can read more about him at Wasted Food and @WastedFood.] [Colleen Wells writes from Bloomington. Her book, Dinner with Doppelgangers-A True Story of Madness and Recovery is forthcoming from Wordpool Press.]

The Ryder ● October 2014

 

● by Will Healey

I had just walked off the field after a pick-up Frisbee game and, seated in my car, checked my phone for any messages.  There was a missed call and a voicemail from a friend I’d been playing phone-tag with for several days; there was a text, too, from that same friend, saying “Robin Williams died, supposedly a suicide…”

I remained in my car, in the parking lot of the elementary school where we’d played, for what must have been twenty minutes.  At first I was stunned by the sudden news that he was dead; but my shock soon turned to disbelief, and I switched to journalist mode, using the Internet on my phone to confirm that it was true.  Once corroborated by a glance at a credible news outlet, I was hit by a flood of images of many of his performances enmeshed with who I was, where I was, and who I was with when I watched them.  It was like my life, and his life as a performer, flashed before me.  Mork & Mindy, Hook, Aladdin, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Birdcage, Good Will Hunting; my family, my friends, growing up.

Good Will Hunting

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I’d always appreciated Robin Williams as an entertainer, though in recent years I truthfully found him more exhausting than anything else, mostly because the only times I saw him were in shtick-y interviews where I’d find myself pleading with the TV for him to relax, shut his brain off for a second, to stop being the entertainer…but he couldn’t.  He seemed so manic; I often wondered how he could live with his mind going a million miles a minute. I no longer went to see his films. The Night at the Museum franchise, Happy Feet, those vehicles didn’t hold the same magic for me, an adult, as they probably do for kids today.  I’d long since left Neverland.  Robin Williams had served his purpose for me, and I no longer needed him.  But when I heard that he was dead, I realized just how big a part of my life he’d been.  In an admittedly parasocial sense, I grew up with this guy.  From my car in the parking lot, I sent a group text to my family, a rare act usually reserved for sharing big things like the Red Sox winning the World Series, or videos of my little niece doing something adorable.  This felt appropriate, somehow.  We’d lost someone who gave our family much entertainment and great joy.  We’d lost one of our own.

And then my mind shifted to the manner of his death.  Suicide? I’m not saying that suicide is a fitting end for any person, but it felt especially inappropriate for him.  I had heard of Williams’ wild days with drugs and alcohol in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I knew the story about how he was one of the last people partying with John Belushi before he died, and I’d heard his bits about cocaine. I also knew that he cut all that stuff out when his first child was born in 1983.  Williams relapsed into alcohol in 2003, and struggled with it for years before checking into rehab in 2006. I remember hearing that he had checked into an alcohol treatment center earlier this year, but I didn’t think much of it. I did not see this coming.  I wonder if anyone did.

Shortly after his death, Williams’ publicist stated that he had been struggling with severe depression prior to his death.  Shortly after that, Williams’ wife stated that he had been sober before his death, but revealed that he had been diagnosed with the early stages of Parkinson’s disease.

After Williams’ death, the outpouring of grief and tributes throughout social media made it clear that the loss was felt by many.  I saw post after post of people’s favorite quotes, pictures, and clips. I thought about my favorite Williams moments, and ironically, they weren’t any of the bombastic live wire comedic performances.  They were the nuanced, dramatic moments where he laid himself bare.  His impassioned performance in Dead Poets Society. His Academy Award-winning performance in Good Will Hunting- particularly two moments- the warm glint in his eye when his character, Sean, shares with Will the information that his wife used to fart in her sleep, saying “that’s the good stuff;” and the shift in his voice in the classic park scene when he says to Will, “If I asked you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.” That one scene might have single-handedly won him the Oscar.

In the days following his death, many previously unheard stories came out about his generosity, the quiet acts of kindness that he didn’t intend for anyone to ever know about that showed the true measure of the man. The bucket list video he sent a New Zealand woman dying of cancer shortly before his death. The time he chartered a jet to North Carolina to spend the day with a young girl who would die two weeks later from brain cancer. Or the video of the time he had a tickle fight with Koko the Gorilla. Some things were higher profile, too- the many trips to Iraq and Afghanistan to entertain the troops. Helping Comic Relief raise more than 50 million dollars during its twelve-year run to fight homelessness in America. Granting countless wishes to kids with terminal illnesses through the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Supporting the St. Jude Children’s Hospital for several years.

When his close friend Christopher Reeve was convalescing after the riding accident that left him a quadriplegic, Williams snuck into the hospital dressed as a doctor to cheer him up.  According to Reeve, it was the first time he’d laughed since his accident.  Williams continued to be close with Reeve over the next several years, and even helped him pay his medical bills.  After Reeve and subsequently his wife, Dana, died, Williams helped provide support for the Reeve’s son, who was fourteen at the time.

Robin Williams almost came to the Comedy Attic try out some new material in 2010. Jared Thompson, owner of the Comedy Attic to “Unfortunately, it never happened, I don’t know exactly what he ended up doing instead, but the fact  that we were even involved in a conversation about it was just fantastic,” Thompson said.

Williams did perform at the IU Auditorium in 2009.  In an email exchange, IU Auditorium Director Doug Booher reminisced about meeting Williams, and shared this story about the night of his performance:

“There was one particular guest that night who he (Williams) was most interested in meeting.  We had learned that a young teenage boy, who was being treated for a significant medical condition at IU’s MPRI, was one of Mr. Williams’ biggest fans.  His parents wanted to surprise him with a trip to the show, but because of the costs of his ongoing treatment were only able to pay for a balcony ticket for their son, and one parent to accompany him.  When Mr. Williams learned about this, he asked that the young man and both of his parents be invited to be his guest, sit in the front row, and attend a private backstage meet and greet.  After the show, when we escorted the boy back to meet Mr. Williams, I am not sure which of them was more excited.  Mr. Williams and the young man shared stories of their lives, recounted favorite movie lines and roles, and even took turns impersonating Mr. Williams’ various performances.  Toward the end of their visit, Mr. Williams shared some very personal insight with the boy about perseverance and his optimism for the boy’s recovery.  With tears near the surface for everyone in the room, they exchanged contact information and hugs.  It was truly a genuine moment that defied all of the common beliefs about celebrities, and reinforced the incredible power of laughter and love.”

●

I read somewhere that Williams viewed performing as a means to let him get to his true passion in life- making people feel good.  It saddens me to think that someone who gave so much happiness to so many in the end had none left for himself. Perhaps the best way to honor Robin Williams would be to remember him less for the circumstances of his death and more for the joy he brought in life.

The Ryder ● October 2014

   

Welcome to England ● by Michael Roberts

The 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil has come and gone, but that doesn’t mean we have to wait four more years to see dramatic, exciting, world-class soccer.  England’s top-flight soccer league, the Barclays Premier League, has a new season underway and it is on television in the USA almost every weekend through May of 2015.  The drama unfolds over the course of a 38-match-week season in which three vital points for a win are at stake in every match; it isn’t a surprise these days for the season’s champion to be determined by a margin as small and fragile as a few points, so every single week is important to the various clubs’ ambitions.

World-class players, world-class goals, last-second heroics, last-second heartbreak, historic clubs, stadiums, and famous anthems sung by passionate supporters, high-powered local rivalries, upsets and blowout-wins, goals galore, promotion and relegation, and players from every corner of the world – these are just some of the qualities which make England’s Barclays Premier league the best ‘football’ league in the world, and so much fun to watch. As of mid-September, the BPL is heading into just match-week four, so there’s still plenty of time to catch on if you’re experiencing soccer withdrawal after this year’s wonderful World Cup. To help you get into it, here is a guide to last season’s top seven clubs, their outlooks for the current season, and how to catch them on television in the USA.

Manchester City Football Club: Last season’s champion, and certainly among the favorites to win the title again this year.  The club’s home color is sky blue and their manager/head coach is Manuel Pellegrini.  Until recently, they had mostly been known as the “pesky little brother” to Manchester’s most famous club, Manchester United, but everything changed in 2008 when the club was purchased by the wealthy Abu Dhabi United Group, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the Abu Dhabi Royal Family.  This change in ownership resulted in the immediate purchase of Brazilian forward Robinho for a British record transfer fee of £32.5 million, and unprecedented spending sprees in the subsequent transfer periods ever since.  They have now assembled a world-class team full of experienced, international superstars and consistently challenge for all available trophies.  No longer just a “pesky little brother,” Man City is now a full-fledged powerhouse – a formidable opponent for any of Europe’s top clubs.  They scored a league-leading 102 goals last season, thanks to their confident, smart, attacking style of play.  After a summer which saw them strengthen yet again in the transfer window, there’s littke doubt they will find their top form and be competing for trophies at the end of the season.

Liverpool FC: Last season’s runner-up to the league title, and an outside favorite to win it this year.  Their home color is red, and their manager is Brendan Rodgers.  Although dominant in the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, Liverpool FC hasn’t managed to win a league title since 1990.  In fact, the 2013-2014 season was the closest they have come to doing so.  While the league title has proven elusive, they have managed to win other major trophies to fill the void and have remained a competitive team yearly.  Having scored 101 goals in the league last season, they are not a team to be taken lightly.  Thanks to their stylish, quick, unselfish and passing-based style of play, many described them as also being the most enjoyable team to watch.  Uruguayan forward Luis Suárez, was perhaps the best player in the world last season.  Suárez’s Liverpool career has been riddled with controversies; however, he managed to stay out of trouble last season and produced his best football yet, scoring 31 goals.  This caught the eye of FC Barcelona, and despite Suárez biting an opponent at the 2014 FIFA World Cup while playing for Uruguay and earning a four month suspension (this being his third such infraction), they bought him from Liverpool for a whopping £75 million.  Liverpool used that money and more to uncharacteristically acquire nine players this summer to address three concerns: fixing the leaky defense, which was their major weakness, trying to fill the attacking gap left by losing a player of Suárez’s brilliance, and improving the quality of the depth of the squad.  As the new players settle, so, too, will Liverpool’s form, and we can count on a lot more wins.

Chelsea FC: Last season’s third-place finisher, but this year’s top favorite to win the title.  Their home color is blue, and their manager is José Mourinho.  The self-described “Special One,” Mourinho actually had a previous stint with the club from ’04-‘08, but after five seasons and two jobs elsewhere, the fan-favorite manager made his return to the London club last season.  Sometimes derided as a tactically negative and defensive coach, Chelsea managed a pretty healthy 71 league goals last season, though still a far cry from Man City or Liverpool’s tally.  Backed by the financial billions of Russian owner Roman Abramovich since 2003, Chelsea has annually outspent most other clubs during transfer windows.  They seized the opportunity to improve in critical areas again this summer with high-profile purchases of Spaniards Diego Costa, and Cesc Fàbregas, and others.  With three wins and 11 goals scored already, we can expect them to improve on last season’s goal tally, and just maybe earn a title in the process.

Arsenal FC: Last season’s fourth-place finisher and another team with an outside shot at the title this year.  The club’s home colors are bright red and white, and their manager is Arsène Wenger.  With 18 seasons at the Arsenal helm, the Frenchman Wenger is not only the club’s longest-serving manager, but the longest-serving manager in all of English football.  Dubbed “Le Professeur” for his studious and philosophical demeanor, he promotes an attacking mentality tactically, with the idea that football should entertain.  For many years he and Arsenal were reluctant to splash the cash in the transfer market, instead focusing on training young players and developing them into stars. That philosophy has changed somewhat in the last couple of years by necessity, with Arsenal buying a player last summer for a price in excess of £40 million, a player this summer with a cost of £30 million, and making a few other expensive acquisitions just to keep pace with the big spenders of the league. Having spent 17 weeks of last season at the top of the league table only to succumb to injuries and lose momentum, the club is looking for a big comeback.  With Chilean World Cup and ex-Barcelona star forward Alexis Sánchez joining them this summer, their ambitions are as high as anyone’s.

Everton FC: Last season’s fifth-place finisher and a team with top-four ambitions this season.  The team’s home colors are royal blue and white, and their manager is Roberto Martínez. Unable to compete financially with the other clubs in last year’s top seven, Everton exceeded expectations in Martínez’s first year as manager of the club after longstanding former manager David Moyes left the club to become the new manager of Manchester United.  Martínez installed an attractive, possession-based style of football which yielded quick and positive results with only one loss by Christmas.  Fifth place was the club’s highest finish in five years, and it inspired an uncharacteristic splash in the transfer market this summer with the club purchasing previously on-loan striker Romelu Lukaku from Chelsea for £28 million, and making a few other small-money acquisitions.  Cracking the top four this season will prove extremely difficult; nevertheless that is their objective and with Martínez’s tactical nous, they will definitely have a chance

Tottenham Hotspur FC: Last season’s sixth-place finishers and a top-four contender this season.  The club’s colors are white and navy blue and their manager is Mauricio Pochettino.  Finishing sixth last year was a major disappointment for Spurs; in the summer before the season started, they sold their best player for an unconfirmed world record transfer fee of £85 million to Spanish giant Real Madrid and went on a subsequent spending spree, buying two players for club record fees of £26 million each, plus a host of other expensive signings.  However, not all of them settled into their new lives in London quickly, which led to inconsistent performances on the pitch, and the mid-season dismissal of then-manager André Villas-Boas.  A temporary replacement manager was brought in but the turmoil continued, as the players didn’t seem to believe in or trust him, and nor did the chairman Daniel Levy.  After such a tumultuous season, Spurs named their new manager in Pochettino, and the task for this season will simply be quiet progress.  Establishing a style of play, gaining consistency and getting the star signings from the previous summer playing well would satisfy most supporters, with hopes of taking a bigger leap forward next season.

Manchester United FC: Last season’s seventh-place finishers and top-four hopefuls this season, with an outside chance at a title run.  Club colors are red, white, and black, and their manager is Louis van Gaal.  To suggest last season’s seventh-place finish was a disappointment would be an incredible understatement.  Under the tutelage of longstanding former manager Sir Alex Ferguson, between 1992 and his retirement in 2013, the “Red Devils” won 13 league titles and other trophies.  Supporters had gotten used to the club winning almost every year. The transition to Ferguson’s handpicked successor David Moyes, however, proved to be a rocky one, and perhaps it was inevitable that whoever followed Ferguson would fail due to the immense pressure to continue the tradition of success.  Not wanting to make a knee-jerk decision, the club kept Moyes on as manager until the bad results made his position untenable, and with four games remaining in the season, he was fired.  After a positive World Cup performance with the Netherlands and countless other jobs well done in his career, United made Louis van Gaal their new manager in the summer of 2014.  In a desperate move to vault them back into the elite echelon of the Premier League, Manchester United made several big-money purchases of players mostly at the midfield and forward positions, which were not necessarily their biggest problem areas.  They most needed help in various areas of defense, and the expensive defenders they did buy play the same positions as each other, and are injured or otherwise unfit to play yet, so they didn’t exactly address their most critical needs this summer.  However, they can perhaps compensate for the goals they will inevitably allow with the goals they will inevitably score; they acquired two very expensive forwards in Ángel Di María and Radamel Falcao, who are world-class talents, and who might just provide enough firepower to get them back to where they want to be.

For those who enjoyed the World Cup, there is more world-class soccer to be enjoyed.  America is very fortunate to have complete television coverage of every single game of the Barclays Premier League.  Not even the UK itself can boast that fact.  Live matches are generally shown early on Saturday and Sunday mornings and on Monday afternoons on the NBC Sports Network and are available to be live-streamed on the online platform NBC Sports Live Extra, for which there is also an app for mobile devices, for free as an added service for subscribers of participating television providers.  Now is as great a time as ever to get into it, so pick a team and tune in.

The Ryder ● October 2014

1984 at the Movies ● by Craig J. Clark

For evidence of what can happen when Hollywood Gets It Right, one need look no further than the year 1984, which yielded a batch of top-grossing films that also managed the feat of being rather good as films. (The lone exception in the top ten is probably Police Academy, which hasn’t aged well at all, but then again it wasn’t meant to.) Looking back on it from an era when sequels, franchises, and reboots routinely dominate the box office, it’s refreshing to note that only two of 1984’s top ten films were sequels –Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. Sure, it’s also the case that seven of the remaining films spawned sequels of their own before the decade was out (the lone holdout, Footloose, had to wait 27 years before it was remade), but one can hardly blame studio execs for wanting to see if lightning would strike twice with properties like Beverly Hills Cop (the #1 film of 1984 by the time the December release finished out its astonishing theatrical run the following summer), Gremlins, The Karate Kid, and Romancing the Stone.

Of course, box office tallies only tell part of the story, which is why the IU Cinema’s “Hollywood Renaissance – 1984” series includes all kinds of cultural touchstones, from effects-driven spectacles to the cultiest of cult films. Topping the list is the film that came in second to Eddie Murphy’s wisecracking Axel Foley: Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (Oct. 25), which is also pulling double duty as a CINEkids screening. A film of such enduring popularity that it received a 30th anniversary re-release Labor Day weekend, Ghostbusters continues to captivate audiences thanks to the interplay of the leads (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, and Harold Ramis, for those people who have been living in a cave since 1984) and the terrific supporting cast (Rick Moranis, Annie Potts, William Atherton, and Ernie Hudson), not to mention the quality of the script (by Aykroyd and Ramis) that elevates it above the typical Hollywood product. Even the special effects, which were groundbreaking at the time, hold up their end of the bargain. Sure, they may look quaint to an audience reared on digital effects, and the pacing of the action scenes may seem a little slow to anyone who worships at the altar of Michael Bay, but I’ll take quaint over bombastic any day.

Coming in at #12 on the chart is Milos Forman’s Amadeus (Dec. 14), which won Best Picture along with seven other Academy Awards (with three more nominations besides). Based on Peter Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning play, which Shaffer adapted for the screen (taking home an Oscar in the process), the historical comedy-drama tells of the intense rivalry that flares up between established court composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) and talented upstart Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce), whose unbridled genius outshines Salieri’s workmanlike efforts. As one might expect, the music adds a great to the film’s power, so hearing the soundtrack through the Cinema’s Dolby speakers should be quite an experience.

Returning to modern times, at #44 is Sixteen Candles (Nov. 16), which was the directorial debut of former National Lampoon writer John Hughes. Previously, Hughes had written the Lampoon movies Class Reunion and Vacation, as well as Mr. Mom, but he was ready to stake his claim to the high-school comedy with Sixteen Candles, which made stars out of Molly Ringwald and Anthony Michael Hall, both of whom stuck around for his follow-up, The Breakfast Club. In this film, Ringwald plays a girl whose sister’s impending marriage causes her family to forget all about her 16th birthday, which would be mortifying enough for more teenagers. On top of that, she’s nursing a crush on the most popular boy in school and has to deal with the crush that the geekiest of the geeks (Hall, playing a character named Geek) has on her. As embarrassing as her plight is, though, it will be interesting to see how it plays compared to the scenes involving exchange student/walking stereotype Long Duk Dong (Gedde Watanabe). That’s one aspect of the film that marks it as a product of its time.

[Image at the top of this post from “Sixteen Candles.”]

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After Ghostbusters, the other CINEkids offering in the series is #54, The NeverEnding Story (Dec. 7). Directed by Wolfgang Peterson, who was coming off his first international success, 1981’s Das Boot, and based on the beloved children’s book by Michael Ende, The NeverEnding Story is about a boy named Bastian (Barret Oliver) who gets swept up in the saga of Fantasia, a magical kingdom threatened by “The Nothing.” As he follows along with the adventures of Atreyu (Noah Hathaway), who encounters all sorts of incredible creatures, both helpful and malevolent, Bastian finds that by reading the story, he becomes a part of it. One can hope that December’s screening will allow plenty of children (of all ages) to become part of it as well.

The NeverEnding Story

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As the box-office chart gets down into the hundreds, the selections become more idiosyncratic, although no less influential. For instance, take #112, the Talking Heads’Stop Making Sense (Sep. 24 & 25), which is widely considered one of the greatest concert films ever made. Unlike some that look like they were thrown together on the fly, Stop Making Sense seems like it was meticulously worked out months in advance, but this doesn’t stop it from simultaneously feeling completely spontaneous. In fact, the joy in the performances is so apparent that everybody onstage appears to be having the time of their lives. I suspect this is probably because they were, and director Jonathan Demme and his crew were there (for a three-night stand at an intimate concert hall) to capture every note, look and gesture.

Stop Making Sense famously opens with David Byrne on a bare stage performing a solo acoustic version of “Psycho Killer” to a prerecorded drum machine track. From there, the other members of the band (Tina Weymouth, Chris Franz, Jerry Harrison) are added one at a time and the stage is pieced together in full view of the audience while they run through some of their early material. Once everything (and everyone) is in place, the nine-piece band concentrates on the polyrhythmic songs from the Speaking in Tongues and Remain in Light albums, accompanied by some incredibly striking visuals. (Every song has its own “look.”) The end result is a sight that no self-respecting music- or film-lover should miss.

Stop Making Sense

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The same goes for #117, This Is Spinal Tap (Oct. 30 & Nov. 6), one of the most quotable movies you’re ever likely to see and a clear forerunner to today’s improvisation-heavy comedies. As devised by director Rob Reiner and actors Christopher Guest, Michael McKean, and Harry Shearer – who wanted the entire cast to receive a screenplay credit, but the Writer’s Guild wouldn’t allow it – the film charts the decline of a once-popular British heavy-metal act as it tours America, playing to dwindling audiences, coping with the disinterest of their American label, and dealing with internal strife. These are merely the dramatic underpinnings that inform one of the funniest underdog stories around, though. Even the songs, which the actors composed and performed themselves, are very funny and quite catchy. This Is Spinal Tap is a film that definitely goes to 11.

Finally, scraping the bottom of the box-office barrel – thanks to a botched release by a studio that had no idea how to market it –is Repo Man (Nov. 14 & 15), which comes in at #166 (out of 168 films released that year). When one thinks of ’80s cult movies, Alex Cox’s debut is one of the first that generally springs to mind. Set in a Los Angeles overrun by punks and hooligans (and where all of the food and drink comes in generic packaging), the film follows an aimless high school dropout (Emilio Estevez) who falls in with a somewhat disreputable group of repo men after being recruited by Harry Dean Stanton, who teaches him the ins and outs of the “repo code” (among other things). Meanwhile, there’s a rogue atomic scientist (Fox Harris) driving around town in a ’64 Chevy Malibu with two dead aliens in the trunk and it seems like just about everybody is after him, especially after a $20,000 bounty is placed on the car.

Cox’s script is fairly episodic, alternating between scenes of Estevez going on repossession jobs with Stanton and Sy Richardson (a much more intimidating mentor, all things being equal), the alien conspiracy plot (which involves a secret government agency, of course), and the criminal escapades of Estevez’s punk friends (who don’t think much of his present occupation). He also finds time to hit on U.F.O. researcher Olivia Barash (who works for the United Fruitcake Outlet) and listen to the wisdom of burnt-out mechanic Tracey Walter (who always takes the bus because he believes “the more you drive, the less intelligent you are”). All the while, cinematographer Robby Müller – who shot Paris, Texas for Wim Wenders the same year – captures the city in all its neon-lit, graffitied glory. As the IU Cinema’s program proves, it takes all kinds to make a film series.

The Ryder ● October 2014

The Legacy of Gabriel Garcia Marquez ● by Will Healey

 

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez died in April at the age of 87, the literary world lost a giant.  The man best known for his 1967 masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude and the literary genre with which his name became synonymous, magic realism, left in his wake a trove of novels, short stories and essays that simultaneously communicate timeless truths of life and evoke the mysteries of the supernatural.

Garcia Marquez, from Colombia, was the most celebrated Latin American writer of his era, and one of the most revered writers of the last fifty years.  So towering were his works, that when he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, the Swedish Academy of Letters said “Each new work of his is received by expectant critics and readers as an event of world importance.” Writer William Kennedy famously called One Hundred Years of Solitude  “the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race.” Telling a friend that I was finally going to read that novel after Garcia Marquez’s passing, he said, “it’s the history of the world told through the story of one family.”

Garcia Marquez started his career as a journalist, but gravitated to fiction in his thirties.  He had many celebrated works besides One Hundred Years of Solitude – his novel about a 50-year unrequited love, Love in the Time of Cholera; the short story collection The Leaf Storm; a tale about the epic reign of a fictional Caribbean dictator, The Autumn of the Patriarch; and News of a Kidnapping, a non-fiction book about a series of kidnappings carried out by Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel.

Garcia Marquez’s works were very much influenced by the times in which he lived, and he was unapologetically political.  He counted among his friends Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, and was outspoken in his disdain for Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet.  Jonathan Kandell, in a piece for The New York Times marking the death of the great author, wrote that Garcia Marquez’s work “sprang from Latin America’s history of vicious dictators and romantic revolutionaries, of long years of hunger, illness and violence.” Kandell went on to quote Garcia Marquez’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:  “Poets and beggars,” Garcia Marquez said, “musicians and prophets, warriors and scoundrels, all creatures of that unbridled reality, we have had to ask but little of imagination.  For our crucial problem has been a lack of conventional means to render our lives believable.”

In some literary circles, however, Garcia Marquez was criticized for the fantastical elements in his writing, something Salman Rushdie (on whom Garcia Marquez’s work had a great influence), took issue with in a New York Times piece written shortly after the author’s death. Rushdie wrote that the fictional village of Macondo, the backdrop for the agonies and ecstasies of seven generations of the Buendia family in One Hundred Years of Solitude (modeled after Garcia Marquez’s north coastal Colombian birthplace, Aracataca), was similar to William Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi.  Rushdie used the comparison to argue that Garcia Marquez, like Faulkner, created real characters inhabiting a real world.

“The trouble with the term “magic realism,” is that when people say or hear it, they are really only hearing or saying half of it, “magic,” without paying attention to the other half, “realism,” Rushdie wrote.  He goes on to say that if magic realism were just “magic,” then it wouldn’t have much effect on the reader.  Because anything is possible, the stakes are lower.  But, Rushdie says, when the magic is “rooted in the real, and is brought in to supplement the real, that’s when the fun starts.

Rushdie describes a famous scene from the novel, wherein a character dies from a single gunshot and a trickle of his blood leaves his house and serpentines up and down through the streets of Macondo until it finally stops at his mother’s feet.  According to Rushdie, the passage “reads as high tragedy,” because the impossibility of the blood’s purpose-fueled behavior, juxtaposed against the plausible event of a mother learning of her son’s death, takes on a higher, even spiritual meaning.  As Rushdie puts it, “The real, by addition of the magical, actually gains in dramatic and emotional force.  It becomes more real, not less.”

In another notable scene from the novel, the death of the patriarch of the Buendia clan, Jose Arcadio Buendia, is marked by a steady rain of tiny yellow flowers, so many that the next day “the streets were carpeted with a compact cushion and they had to clear them away with shovels and rakes so that the funeral procession could pass by.”  Jose Arcadio Buendia led the expedition that founded Macondo, and was a polymath of boundless energy.  His unquenchable thirst for knowledge ultimately drives him mad, but the solemn poetry of the raining flowers suggests that the heavens were paying tribute to a man who gave everything to try to advance the lot of his people.

True to Rushdie’s sentiments that the power of Marquez’s work lay in the real, I’m struck that the passage that had the greatest effect on me in One Hundred Years of Solitude didn’t contain anything fantastic or unexplainable.  Albeit tragic, masterfully written and heart-wrenching, this passage simply depicts a man’s final moments.

“On the way to the cemetery, under the persistent drizzle, Arcadio saw that a radiant Wednesday was breaking out on the horizon.  His nostalgia disappeared with the mist and left an immense curiosity in its place.  Only when they ordered him to put his back to the wall did Arcadio see Rebeca, with wet hair and a pink flowered dress, opening wide the door.  He made an effort to get her to recognize him.  And Rebeca did take a casual look toward the wall and was paralyzed with stupor, barely able to react and wave good-bye to Arcadio.  Arcadio answered her the same way.  At that instant the smoking mouths of the rifles were aimed at him and letter by letter he heard the encyclicals that Melquiades had chanted and he heard the lost steps of Santa Sofia de la Piedad, a virgin, in the classroom, and in his nose he felt the same icy hardness that had drawn his attention in the nostrils of the corpse of Remedios.  “Oh, God damn it!” he managed to think.  “I forgot to say that if it was a girl they should name her Remedios.” Then, all accumulated in the rip of a claw, he felt again all the terror that had tormented him in his life.  The captain gave the order to fire.  Arcadio barely had time to put out his chest and raise his head, not understanding where the hot liquid that burned his thighs was pouring from.  “Bastards!” he shouted.  “Long live the Liberal Party!”

Marquez (L) And Fidel Castro

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Garcia Marquez did not invent the genre of magic realism, but he certainly popularized it.  Countless writers today employ it in their work- Rushdie, Isabel Allende, Haruki Murakami, and Toni Morrison, to name a few.  His influence carries over into other media as well.  Watching the film Pan’s Labyrinth, which juxtaposes a strange world of mythical creatures against the harsh realities of the Spanish Civil War, it’s hard to imagine Mexican director Guillermo del Toro wasn’t influenced by Garcia Marquez.  Or take the famous raining frogs sequence in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 1999 film Magnolia, which depicted the mysterious intersections of seemingly disparate lives. What makes Magnolia’s famous sequence work isn’t that the events in the film are so coincidental that, sure, frogs falling from the sky isn’t so far fetched; it’s that the characters that are all strangely connected are so real to us, and the dramas that play out in their storylines so human, that the frogs falling from the sky is an inexplicable moment of wonder that somehow rings true – Garcia Marquez’s personal recipe for successful, affecting magic realism.

Just four months on from his passing, and 47 years after the release of One Hundred Years of Solitude, it is still far too early to fully measure the scope of the author’s impact on the world. But back in April, when it became known that Garcia Marquez had finally succumbed to complications from lymphatic cancer and dementia, I wonder how many of his admirers checked outside to see that there weren’t yellow flowers raining from the sky.

 

The Ryder ● September 2014