The Heart and the Bottle by Oliver Jeffers

It's rare that a children's book will touch me so deeply. The most of them quickly get on my nerves rather than cause tears to well up halfway through.

The empty chair is such a moving symbol of loss. Whether it means death or absence, it doesn't matter.

What matters is that the empty chair echoes throughout the little girl's life. As a result, life is emptied of all meaning. Until that meaning can be filled again. If the mourning goes on too long, one forgets how to stop.

Just as the book illustrates the effect of loss, it also suggests its solution. Another little girl, who hasn't yet felt her life empty out, can lead the way to a meaningful life.

A children's book is not just a story but also illustrations. Oliver Jeffers succeeds in representing curiosity through references to scientific illustration in addition to various artistic conventions. In the pages on the stars, he also demonstrates with out ease or any sense of pedantry the difference between educated knowledge and a child's imagination. When looking at the stars, the adult sees constellations and the child sees a bee with its butt on fire.

I first encounter the quiet rhythm of Jeffers' books in Lost and Found about friendship and haven't been disappointed yet. He makes the magical real. Just like a child.

Carissa Klopoushak and Friends.

Seeing an old friend and former classmate succeed gives me a vicarious pleasure and pride. Even though I dreamed one day I would be rock star fronting a girl band with all the associated coolness that would entail, I won't. So it's great to know a musician who did work so hard to get where she is.

Carissa Klopoushak and Friends gave a rousing performance of mostly folk music at the Toronto Summer Music Festival. I would say it was a great performance with one caveat: I'm a total dunce when it comes to music.

Yet, I would say that I can tell good music from bad based on the "cringe-anticipation factor." It's my own scale, first developed while watching figure skating with my older sister. If I begin to tense up in anticipation of cringing at some massive screw-up, then the performer isn't very good. An excellent performer puts me at ease; she convinces me that she is performing well. And I believe her.

While she was playing, Carissa (and friends) convinced me. I believed in her pleasant voice and in her dancing violin. I am not really a big listener of Ukrainian folk music and was pleasantly surprised. I thought though that the really tasteful chairs at the Heliconian Hall should have been cleared away for a dance floor. Prompted by the music, the listeners would have been kicking up their heels instead of sitting politely and quietly. But then again, I feel the best way to listen to music (and understand it) is to dance.

Her credentials back the performance. She has been hired by the Ottawa symphony orchestra (I believe, please forgive if I have gotten this wrong), recorded several albums with her band Tyt i Tam and is the head artistic director of Ritornello Music Festival. Impressive.
nelson higher educational
The only criticism I would dare throw in her direction is more contextual than musical. For the uninitiated like me, we could have used more of an introduction (and a smoother one) to the music. They did an original arrangement of what I believe was a classical work. I didn't hear the composer's name clearly and now will have to harass her for it.

Carissa also didn't play her violin alone. The friends, Alexander Sura and Jean-Christophe Lizotte, played the cimbalom and the cello. It's completely unsurprising that Sura studied the piano, since the cimbalom, in principle and in sound, seems very similar to the piano. His soloist work was entertaining to watch and provided a nice break from the tone of the other pieces. Celloist Lizotte remained in the background as a strong player but didn't showcase any solo pieces of his own.

Watching Carissa play violin last Thursday reminded me of another time I heard her play. Around 20 years ago, she played for a group of us in the school basement as a part of show and tell. When I think about that performance and about a room in her parents' basement filled with instruments, I could almost call her career path, her destiny.

When I think about my own parents' basement, it was filled with books instead of instruments. It's no surprise that I didn't become that rock star and that Carissa is still rocking that violin. 

Die Innere Sicherheit (The State I'm In, 2000)

After having finished school, I can now expand my view. As a part of the process, I've decided to move beyond Weimar cinema and New German Cinema to the Berlin School.  So, I've entered the quasi modern state of film. Finally.



The film was released in 2000, which can hardly be called recent, but compared to my focus on films from the 1910s and 20s, it was released yesterday. Christian Petzold directed the film and wrote the screenplay along with Harun Farocki, a director in his own right.

What struck me most about the film was its focus. Instead of concentrating on the terrorist parents and telling the sensational back story, the rather mundane problem of their fifteen year old daughter's, Jeanne's, first relationship is at the center of the film. The criminal activity of the parents remains at the periphery and is never fully explained, yet plays a central role in the generational conflict and the girl's rebellion. Instead of forbidding her to see him for the usual parental reasons (bad influence, too old for her), she is not allowed to see him because it might reveal their secret.

Keeping secrets through silence is one of the main threads throughout the film and shapes the aesthetics of the film as well. Jeanne initially keeps her relationship to the boy, Heinrich, from her parents and only does so after they question her. Later on, after they return to Germany, she returns to seeing him and is once more forbidden from contact. Her parents teach her how to keep a secret while under interrogation. Remaining silent, giving the interrogators no ground, makes them unbalanced, nervous, and Jeanne uses this tactic with Heinrich, when he asks her about herself. As her parents predict, she later tells him all her secrets. Heinrich pays back Jeanne by ringing the police, perhaps selfishly unable to keep Jeanne's secret - she won't leave with them, if her parents have been caught.

Visually, the film is keeping secrets through its focus on Jeanne. The nature of her parents' criminal activities are revealed through brief visual clues that in no way reveal their violence. They are shown digging up caches of money and passports under bridges and other hidden spots. The violent extortion of an old friend occurs off camera as Jeanne talks about music with the other man's teenage daughter. Similarly, Jeanne's initial scoping out of the bank and her parents' later violent robbery are mediated through what appears to be surveillance footage. Images, which are not secret - publicly accessible and visual proof of the truth of Jeanne's initial report and how that reality can change. The side exit was open for Jeanne but not when the parents rob the bank. The choice of surveillance footage also maintains the integrity of the film's aesthetic by differentiating between the private world of Jeanne's life and the public knowledge of her family.

Jeanne's private life motivates what is shown and not shown in the final sequence of the film. The drivers of the mysterious black vehicles remain hidden behind dark windows and their identity unknown. They surround the white station wagon and drive Jeanne's mother off the road as her father sleeps in the back and Jeanne rests on her mother's lap. We see the station wagon roll over again and again, landing upside down. Jeanne is thrown out some meters away. She gets up and the final shot is her looking at the wrecked vehicle. It remains unknown to us if her parents have survived, but it is critical to the film to show her fate. She survives.

The last scene is emblematic of the film's feeling of nowness. What is important for the story is also important for Jeanne, which is why her parents' criminal activities are downplayed. It may be true that Jeanne will have other relationship, but the one she's having with Heinrich is more real and present for her than any of those other hypotheticals. In this sense, the film captures a particularity of being a teenager - my life right now far outweighs any other.