Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth

We went to see the new Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I movie a few weeks ago, and enjoyed it enough to finally get the old one (as old as 1998? that was a surprise -- and to see that it was made the same year as Shakespeare in Love when we looked it up to see whether it had received any Oscars) and watch it on DVD last night. Jenny stayed up late to watch the special features, and pointed out to me just as I was going to bed that the director made no bones about historical accuracy not being the point of the movie(s): he started with the icon, and made the story fit the icon. Elizabeth I as super-hero, as it were.

Our famous doctor

Jenny's ob-gyn, Laura Minikel, is in Time magazine because of the long-distance relationship she's had with her husband for years. The image of her is in consequence a specially interesting one -- her face on TV, with her husband in Denmark looking on.

White Chalk

I got P.J. Harvey's new album, White Chalk, a few weeks ago, and have been listening to it in the car when there's an opportunity (Elena is very clear about her listening preferences right now, and if it isn't Raffi or Music Together or Les Garcons Joufflus, she wants me to change the music or turn it off). I have to admit that although P.J. Harvey's more raucous music has an energy I like, and which can become mesmerizing in concert (I saw her at Slim's with Stevie some years ago, and then at the Warfield a few years later with Richard Retecki), I can't listen to that side of her oeuvre over and over the way I can her more melodic work, like the very first album, To Bring You My Love, and the one she did with John Parish and now this one.

Back to Monterey for a day

We drove down last night, stayed at the Munras Lodge which is maybe a block from the much more expensive Casa Munras (justified only by its bloodwarm pool). The night manager was a friendly Pole who allowed me to practice my two Czech phrases on him after he noted that my name meant "freedom" in Czech, and that he was from Czech's "northern neighbor." We drove by Mexcal, hoping to have dinner there again, but the banner had been removed from the building and the place looked very closed, although there were no notices posted indicating it had closed for good -- just nothing that would indicate the restaurant was still a going concern. We went to Denny's instead and had food that was probably prepared from chubs. To the Aquarium today, where it turns out the area known as the Splash Zone, most suitable for toddlers, is closed for refurbishment and won't reopen until March 17 of next year. However, we did see a lot of wonderful fish, including the young great white shark, and had some enjoyable conversations with volunteers who know the place intimately. Then we had lunch for the second time at the Bistro Moulin, which makes a very tasty French onion soup and a fine platter of mussels. Finally, before leaving we played for an hour at Dennis the Menace park, where we met other parents and kids, including a woman from Czech with her two kids.

Before the Dawn

After reading Klein's book The Dawn of Human Culture I jumped right to a more recent book on the same subject, Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn, in hopes of learning where the science has gone in the three or four years since Klein's book was published. Although there was some good information about what has been happening in the field, chiefly due to the separate lines of scientific development going on in the application of genetics to the field, the presentation was totally different, and it took me half the book before I realized that what I was reading was journalism, not science. What it comes down to in my view is that journalists are willing to cut corners on science for a good story, whereas for a truly good popular scientific writer the science always is the story. There are intermediate cases: Brian Greene would be one such in my experience. His books about physics and string theory are meant to be popular scientific arguments, but it's possible that when the subject gets too close to the cutting edge that he too is guilty of cutting some corners. I mean, the guy in my opinion was almost single-handedly responsible for string theory being seen as scientific orthodoxy by the general public.

Anyway, Wade is ever anxious to point out the ways in which concepts like "race" actually do have scientific validity. His game seems to be to go over areas that touch on a lot of political sensitivities and see whether anything explosive, and yet "proven" by some combination of genetic evidence and probabilistic reasoning (which is never made explicit enough to be understood in the book itself), can be drawn out of applying natural selection to modern human history. Whereas an author like Klein is always willing to describe the paucity of evidence involved in getting to the prevailing view of human history, Wade always leans toward a sophisticated version of "the scientists tell you so" when discussing why a particular scientist's view is or is not orthodox, confirmable, or based on evidence that is still in a state of flux. Wade's book left a bad taste in my mouth, as much as I appreciate and agree with his foremost argument, which is that the idea that natural selection stopped when human culture arose is absurd.

Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould

I finished Up in the Old Hotel, the collection of Joseph Mitchell's works, last night. The final piece in the book is "Joe Gould's Secret," which qualifies in my mind for the category of nonfiction novel and is a kind of depressing, but Borgesian, masterpiece. Joe Gould and his vast work-in-progress, the Oral History, both are and aren't (because the guy, and his secret, were real) stand-ins for the reader's and Joseph Mitchell's own highest aspirations. Mitchell doesn't simplify the moral dilemmas he finds himself in at any point, and there's a sense in which the reader becomes implicated as well, in his relationship with a mentally imbalanced, self-promoting homeless person who's capable of flashes of wit as well as delusions of grandeur. Where most of us would "do the right thing" in terms of what seems to be asked of us today and pull away (we've been taught by a kind of weakened, and evil, but comfortable, version of Alcoholics Anonymous theology that we are actually being most moral when we do nothing to support or interact with an alcoholic or person of similar disorder), Mitchell is unable to do so, and conveys a palpable sense of being besmirched by his choices with regard to Gould, no matter what they are. It's a marvelous, and still morally relevant work that Dostoevsky would be proud to have written, I think.

Mary Heilmann

Is the subject of cover stories in both Art in America and Artforum this month, and I received both magazines on the same day. Many of the same images are used in her stories in both magazines -- in fact, the cover image from Art in America is reproduced at almost the same size in Artforum. I almost never read stories straight through in these magazines, even stories about painters, so what's interesting for me at the moment is wondering whether the two stories might not even be identical -- I do remember the phrase "painter's painter," actually the phrase "painter's painter" itself already enclosed in double quotation marks, being found in both stories. But even if the two stories were the same word for word, I'd probably take them differently because of their subtly different contexts: the Art in America story being one that would present a less-known artist to the general "art public," whereas the Artforum story (which does have an additional article of objets "curated" by Heilmann to distinguish it) presents the painter as a source of both painting practice and conceptual theory. I could read the first story as an introduction to Heilmann's work, and then read the second one as an inculcation into her intentions, and disregard the fact that the words were the same in each story...

Garcons Joufflus

I've been spending most of my listening time in the car (driving to and from BART, or going to the library after work with Elena) on Stephane Calbo's Les Garcons Joufflus, subtitled "Muzak meets Pop on the Computer," an addictive and eclectic assembly of instrumental tunes that hearkens to Lush and shoe-gazing msuic of the early 90's as well as to the whole range of French, Italian and American pop of the 60's and 70's. It's an absolutely wonderful album that establishes its own unique world of emotional tonalities, all derived from but unlike the familiar ones...