In My Life (Early February 2012)

No burnt Velveeta this time. I've been fairly busy, but a lot of it has to do with things that I can't talk about because it could blow my cover. But that still leaves enough for a decent post.

On Wednesday I went to the Cabot Street Cinema to see "The Mill and the Cross," a movie (or should I call it "a film"?) about a painting titled "The Way to Calvary" by 16th Century Flemish painter Pieter Breugel the Elder. The painting shows a moment in Jesus' way to Calvary, the moment when Simon of Cyrene is forced to help Jesus carry the cross. Breugel has set the event in a landscape populated by numerous 16th century people going about their business — a landscape dominated by a fantastically placed windmill on the top of a rock spire. The movie goes Breugel one better and brings us into the daily lives of the miller and his family, the artist and his family, the artist's patron, and many of the others depicted in the painting. It imagines the effect wrought on all of these by the policies of Spain toward Flanders, which was then under Spanish rule. Strikingly, in all of this, it indicates that for most of the people on the scene, Jesus is not a focal figure: even those who are looking at what is happening with him are paying more attention to Simon. Hmm. Is that how it was at Jesus' time, in the 16th Century, and today? Does Breugel show us the truth about people? Anyway, it was an interesting film, and it fits well under their motto: "Films Worth Seeing More Than Once." If they bring it back, I'll try to see it again, because I think there is more to appreciate than I was able to get in one viewing.

Then on Friday I trekked into Boston for the play "God of Carnage" at the Huntington Theatre [sic] Company. It's by a French playwright, Yasmina Reza, and it's billed as a comedy, even though she says she regard her plays as comic tragedies. It's about two sets of parents who meet to discuss an incident in which the 11 year old son of one couple broke two teeth of the other couple's 11 year old son in a fight. It starts out civilized but deteriorates badly, with "alliances" among the participants forming and dissolving. I laughed! I didn't cry! The play's run has ended, but a movie has been made, titled simply "Carnage." It has different actors, and I gather it differs in some details, but if you're interested, you can catch it in a theater near you.

This afternoon, I had thought I would attend a performance of "Brighton Beach Memoirs", but I got distracted by the Boston Symphony rebroadcast, and it slipped my mind. Oh well.

In the week to come, I have three musical events in Boston: the opera "The Lighthouse" on Wednesday, the Boston Symphony concert on Thursday, and a Harvard Musical Association social evening, including a chamber music concert, on Friday. The opera is based on an event in 1900 when a supply ship came to a lighthouse on an island off the coast of Scotland and found that the three keepers had vanished. The BSO is giving a Beethoven piano concerto and a Rachmaninoff symphony. The HMA evening will have the Leipzig String Quartet performing music related to Thomas Mann's novel Dr. Faustus. I'll probably have dinner at Scollay Square that evening. Time permitting, I may also go to one of the Wednesday daytime screenings of "Melancholia" at Cabot Street.

Sometime this week I should stop by the garage and have them put some brake fluid in my car. The "brake" light in my instrument panel lights up occasionally, and the mechanic said it's probably from low fluid when I met him by chance at the sandwich shop. Also, I may need new wiper (or wipre, in the British Commonwealth) blades.