Review of Kelly Reichardt's 'Certain Women'

Kelly Reichardt filming Certain Women in Montana

On Saturday, Kelly Reichardt’s latest film, Certain Women, won the top prize at the London Film Festival awards ceremony – an accolade it entirely deserves. 

Here is my review published in Litro:

Its title is a play on words: the women in question are all searching in their own way for certainty and self-definition, while never quite managing to find it. “Certain” can mean specific, or it can mean some, but not all. These paradoxical layers of meaning reveal themselves quietly as the film unfolds. How much, the film asks, can we be sure of our lives, our loves, our jobs, our very selves. Certain Women is a film of open questions whose answers prove elusive.

Based on three short stories (“Tome”, “Native Sandstone” and “Travis, B”) by the Montana-born writer Maile Meloy, Certain Women, like Meloy’s writing, is spare and tender. Reichardt weaves scenes from the lives of four characters from these stories (changing gender in one case and throwing in a teenage daughter in another) into a loosely-knit structure. The classic beginning, middle and end would be too tight a corset for these women. Instead, Reichardt has created a film whose strands radiate outwards from a core made up of the combined desires and needs of her characters. This is not the messy, madcap Robert Altman approach of Short Cuts, and Meloy, although she shares his acuity and depth, is a different sort of writer from Raymond Carver. Place—in this case Montana with its sweeping landscapes, harsh winters and isolation—features largely in Meloy’s writing, providing Reichardt with another character to work with. The feel of Certain Women differs from Reichardt’s four previous films, Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff and Night Moves, whose characters seemed impelled by the thrust of moving West, towards the Pacific. This film, on the other hand, takes place in a landlocked space where characters’ lives are hemmed in by mountains. These stories could only happen where Meloy has made them happen: in this case Livingston, Montana and a ranch near Glendive, in eastern Montana. Meloy’s ability to get inside the lives of her women is reminiscent of Alice Munro’s fascination with the inner workings of quiet women trying to live good lives and she works it to equally devastating effects.

Laura Dern in Certain Women

Kelly Reichardt once wrote about how she preferred to work from short stories rather than novels because she likes to “expand, not condense”. Her sense of expansion is what gives her films their breadth and depth, their meditative quality and their trance-like pull, which takes us into deceptively small stories that explode upon impact. This is partly down to Reichardt’s ability to coax wonderfully underplayed performances from her actors, and in this Certain Women is no exception. The opening line of dialogue is spoken as we see a man and a woman getting dressed after what we can assume is a quick lunchtime tryst. “You better get to work,” the man says. And this is exactly what the woman does. She rushes to her office, flustered, blouse half hanging out. There is something so innocuous about this comment and yet it comes over as controlling, almost chilling.

The lives Reichardt focuses on in Certain Women are disparate but connected. Laura (Laura Dern) is the put-upon lawyer of the lunch-time tryst who is being mildly harassed by a disgruntled client, Bill Fuller (Jared Harris). Fuller is unable to accept that he is not eligible for any more settlement money from an accident he sustained at work. At the end of her tether, Laura gets a male lawyer to explain Fuller’s case to him. The penny drops as soon as Fuller hears it from a man’s mouth. “I have been telling the guy he had no case, but he had to hear it from a man,” Laura sighs. Was it just me, or was there a communal outtake of breath in the mostly female audience at this corollary to mansplaining?

Events take on an unexpected trajectory and Laura finds herself strapped into a Kevlar vest and sent headfirst into a slightly comical hostage-taking while a gang of male police officers wait for her to do their job for them. Her client and the cops can only see Laura as hostage bait, as a woman, a shoulder to cry on. Laura’s vulnerability and exasperation (perfectly conveyed by Dern) are the result of her desire to be so much more than the earpiece to her client’s problems, if only she could be seen here for what she really is: a lawyer and a woman.

Without giving anything away, this story overlaps with that of Ryan and Gina Lewis (James LeGros and Michelle Williams) and their monosyllabic teenage daughter Guthrie (Sara Rodier). Guthrie is a Reichardt addition and what better way to drive a wedge between a couple than to throw in a teenage daughter. Her name, which we can assume comes from Woody Guthrie, is the perfect shorthand for this couple and their hipster chic lives. We know the type well. Where Laura’s life is pieced together by surreal moments fuelled by a naïve sincerity, Ryan and Gina are a couple just barely hanging onto their marriage—and they know it. Prickly and sharp with each other, their discomfort with the world and themselves oozes from them. At one point, Gina sarcastically says to her daughter, “Thanks for helping out.” To which Guthrie replies, “No one asked me to.” Gina shoots back, “No one asked me to either, I just figured it out all by myself.” Another put upon woman, this time locked in a dynamic of resentment and bitterness as she volleys between being a mother and a wife. Even when Ryan tries to make it better by telling Guthrie, out of earshot of Gina, “Let’s be nice to your mom today.” Guthrie asks, “Why? Is she sick?” Kindness is something that has a value and these characters simply can’t seem to afford it.

Michelle Williams in Certain Women

Gina’s major desire—and perhaps the one thing that gives her life meaning—is to build a house using “native stone and railroad ties”. Or as Meloy puts it, “things that fit in”. This is important, because Gina and Ryan are “out-of-staters”. Unlike the other characters in the film, they don’t belong in Montana. They visit the elderly Albert who has a pile of native sandstone on his land, which Gina has earmarked for her dream home. She tries to get a price from him, but how can Albert translate the stone into money? For him these are not just hunks of rock, they are part of the earth and bear the marks of the pioneers who carved them from the land—they are his history. “If you want to sell,” Gina tells him, “think of a price. I don’t know how much a rock costs.” And there it is: the gap between the Alberts and the Ginas of this world. You cannot put a price on land and what it means to people—especially in a place like Montana, the “Treasure State” where the ground, and what lies below it, are so indelibly tied to its inhabitants. Ryan tries to cover for his wife by explaining to the somewhat baffled Albert that “Gina just wants this new house to be authentic”. (The italics are in the original story.) At which point the audience is squirming.

The clashing of values and backgrounds also surfaces in the third narrative in which a frazzled young lawyer, Beth Travis (Kristen Stewart), has taken a teaching job nine hours from where she lives. Combining the impossibly long return drive with a full-time junior lawyer job is wearing her out. But she wants to make it work as a way of avoiding what her family sees as the pinnacle of success for a woman: selling shoes. One night a nameless ranch hand (Lily Gladstone) wanders into her adult education class. We don’t know why she’s there, but there is a sense that she is restless and seeking something by driving around in her heated truck on a cold night. She awkwardly walks in to the classroom and sits at the back taking everything in with a look of confused wonder.

Beth and the ranch hand soon make a habit of going to a diner after class, where they don’t so much as get to know each other as tentatively find things out. Over the course of their meetings, the ranch hand develops an attachment to Beth. Where there is attachment in a Reichardt film, there is the potential for abandonment and heartache. Gladstone manages to wordlessly turn her disappointment into tragedy. Like all the performances in Certain Women, Gladstone’s is pure alchemy. In Meloy’s story, the ranch hand is a guy called Chet Moran who walks with a limp from a childhood blighted by Polio. By allowing this chaste infatuation to spring up between women, we are encouraged to consider the difficulty, the lack of a straightforward vocabulary, around same sex crushes in small towns, and the universality of love that goes unreturned.

Kristen Stewart and Lily Gladstone in Certain Women

Beautifully shot on 16mm by Christopher Blauvelt, who also filmed Reichardt’s Night Moves and Meek’s Cutoff, the film’s grain and texture reflect the distance between people physically and emotionally, as if there were visual static in the air. Reichardt was thinking of shooting it digitally but when she looked at some test scenes, she realized that “the layers of snow on the ground looked like a white wall – there was just no detail”. So she turned to film. The soundscape of Certain Women,designed by Kent Sparling, veers between the manmade and the natural. The small town of Livingston, Montana, where most of the action takes place, is signposted by the incessant whistle of a train. When we leave town, the characters are roused or stunned into silence by the rush of wind and water. The man-made and the natural come together in a striking way in the third strand of the film. Every morning, there is the rumble of the stable doors as the ranch hand opens them to reveal the snowy landscape, the horses, the mountains, and the near silence stretching out into the distance. In the barn, the radio drones. The ranch hand is not quite out of contact of the world, but very nearly. It is this note that Reichardt ends on. A sort of temporal and spatial netherworld between places and states of being. The narratives are not tied up neatly; they are too real for that. Instead they jostle and shift, like melting ice moving down a river. They lift and sink in turns—each small movement affecting the whole. This is what Certain Women is like: a half frozen river summoning us to jump in and yet we know if we do we will emerge not quite the same as before.

For the original article: http://www.litro.co.uk/2016/10/london-film-festival-glorious-uncertainty-certain-women/

Photo of Philip Corner's piano in MusikTexte

I was fortunate to be at Cafe Oto on a rainy September night here in London to watch Philip Corner and Phoebe Neville perform. The Koln-based music magazine MusikTexte has published the photo below in their issue honouring the late Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. It shows the piano, which had been decorated, wrapped and rubbed with paper by Philip and Phoebe in their own 'Paper Piece' which echoed Patterson's piece of the same name. The piano became a physical reminder, a sculpture to attest to the power of art to live on in conversation and collaboration well after it has been created. I met up with Philip and Phoebe the day after their performance to interview them. They were two of the most generous and alive people I have ever met.

My Afternoon with Ondi

my afternoon with ondi

By Joanna Pocock.

Published in 3:AM Magazine, May 2016

Timoner with Anton Newcombe while shooting 'DIG!'

Ondi Timoner texts to say she and her son Juki are running late. So I stand just inside the Catalyst Café in downtown Missoula, Montana and watch the rain bash the sidewalk. She’s in town for a retrospective of her work at the Big Sky Documentary Film Festival. She’s probably best known for DIG! (2004), which follows the ups and downs of The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre, whose careers capture the tension between making music and selling out. WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (2009) gets inside the life and mind of the Internet pioneer Josh Harris, who lays forth his prediction that our need for attention will eventually trump our desire for privacy (and how right he was). Her latest film, BRAND: A Second Coming (2015) examines the conflict between fame and political revolution as embodied in the British comedian, writer, ex-junkie, and political activist Russell Brand. Timoner is the only person to have won the Sundance Festival Grand Jury Prize twice for DIG! and WE LIVE IN PUBLIC (both are also in MoMA’s permanent collection). She doesn’t make films that are obviously out to change the world, and yet they get you questioning the logic and meaning behind art, commerce, activism, fame, and our footprint on the planet. Most of Timoner’s films follow impossible visionaries, people who pursue a utopian agenda at a cost. And this cost — this tension between what we want and what we are willing to give up in order to get it — is often where she focuses her gaze.

Timoner and her son show up at the café just as a table comes free. She’s tall and attractive with a mass of blonde hair and jingling silver jewellery. Her energy is warm, expansive and nervy in that Big City way (she lives in Los Angeles). Her son says ‘hi’ from behind shoulder-length hair.

Once we’ve ordered I ask: ‘Have you ever had a subject

get away from you?’

She looks thoughtful for a moment. And then a story unfolds. Like her films, Ondi is all a
bout stories.

I was with Don Was [the musician and record producer] in Capitol Studios recording a short film about Paul Westerberg. Paul went to the bathroom and Don handed me a guitar and said, ‘This is Keith Richards’ guitar. You play don’t you? Play me something?’ 

I said, ‘Yeah, that was my original dream but I kind of gave it up for filmmaking.’ 

Don replied, ‘Well, just play me something.’ 

So I played a few chords: a D, a G, and an A. 

Paul walked in and I handed the guitar back to Don. 

I picked up my camera and Don said, ‘I’ve got something to talk to you about later.’ 

So later that day when we were finished, Don and I were standing outside the studio when he said, ‘My hero called this morning. He wants to find a girl he can play guitar with. Would you be willing to give up filmmaking for six months and go on the road?’ 

I said, ‘Well, it would depend who it was with because things are going really well for me right now.’ My brother and I had just been nominated for a Grammy for a video about the band Fastball. We were on a roll for the first time in our young lives. I was around twenty-six.

The soup arrives, and we’re back into the story. 

Don said, ‘Well, it’s Bob Dylan. And there’s something about you that reminds me of him. I figure: camera or guitar—what’s the difference? There’s something about the way you intuitively handle your instruments… .’ 

I thought that was so interesting. At first I was just so humbled and blown away. I held onto the railing outside the studio. It was one of those moments you remember. I was thinking, ‘You just compared me to Bob Dylan?’ 

She laughs, sounding incredulous at her own story, and continues. 

Don asked if he could give Dylan my number. 

I said, ‘Sure!’ 

Then a couple of days later my phone rang and this woman said, ‘Can you hold for Bob?’ and I said ‘Bob who?’ and she said, ‘Bob’, but she wouldn’t say his last name. Meanwhile I’m reaching for a tape—at the time I was filming DIG! and I was recording phone calls to use in the movie because the band members were either staying at my house or calling all the time. So I had a tape recorder hooked up to my telephone. And I was trying to get a blank tape in because I knew it was Bob Dylan and I wanted to tape the phone call. 

Dylan: ‘I hear you’re leaving for South by Southwest tomorrow.’ 

Ondi: ‘Yeah.’ 

Dylan: ‘Do you think you have time to come play guitar with me tonight?’

Ondi: ‘Well, I’m kind of dirty right now. I need to take a shower.’

Dylan: ‘Well take a shower. Take your time. I’ll wait for you.’  

Ondi: ‘Can I bring my camera? I’m a filmmaker.’ 

Dylan: ‘I know. That’s an added attraction actually, but for tonight just bring your guitar.’ 

And then he gave me directions. We had a lovely conversation. A few minutes later the phone rang again and the woman who had called before said, ‘I heard those directions Bob gave you. They were totally wrong.’ 

So I get to his place, and I’m wearing a really weird outfit with a leopard-print scarf wrapped around my head like I’m losing my hair. He started saying, ‘Let’s play Stuck Inside of Mobile or let’s do Tom Thumb’s Blues.’ He assumed I’d know all his songs from their titles.

And I said to him, ‘I’m not so great with titles. Can’t we just play the Blues?’ So I start in on a Blues scale, and he asks me why I’m holding the pick the way I am, like I’m a banjo player. And the whole thing quickly disintegrated into a guitar lesson. 

And then we get talking about D.A Pennebaker’s, Don’t Look Back, which is one of my favourite films of all time. Dylan said how amazing it was that Pennebaker was able to hold this huge heavy 16mm camera as if it were light as a feather. And I said, ‘I do Yoga to stay strong and to hold my camera steady all the time.’ And then Dylan said, ‘Oh, I love Yoga. Do you know this one position?’ And he did this pretzel position. And then we progressed into doing different positions. He was doing a Downward Dog and I noticed this curvature to his lower back. I wanted to straighten it, you know. And my hand was hovering just above his back, and then I thought, ‘But I can’t just push his back down. This is Bob Dylan!’ 

We talked about my dad and his stroke when I was nine and about Dylan’s broken neck. He said he’d send me some songs and told me to practice every day, and that he’d call me in six months.

But he didn’t send them. And he didn’t call. It broke my heart. I felt I just wasn’t prepared for my audition with the great magician. Up until then I’d had this blessed life where I was in the right place at the right time. It was kind of shocking to me to have been so unprepared. That was the thing that hurt. I sunk into a depression but I kept practicing and writing songs. 

Our food is arriving in batches. Her son tucks in with the appetite of a twelve-year old. I ask Ondi if she tried to contact Dylan again.

‘Yes, I sent him a book called The End is Near! about Outsider Art. I thought he’d like it. And I never heard from him again. He is so mysterious. I don’t know if Dylan’s seen any of my work,’ she adds. 

Her son pipes up, ‘He’s probably seen DIG!’

‘Yeah, probably. Anyway, I got on with my work. Between 1998 and 2000, I pitched a show to VH1. It was called Sound Effects and was about how songs affect the most pivotal moments in people’s lives. Music is the most powerful artform. It’s subliminal. It travels through the air like magic. My song would have been Bob Marley’s High Tide, which I listened to all the time when I was pregnant with you, Juki,’ she motions towards her son across the table. He smiles and shrugs in that way kids do when parents reveal themselves. 

‘I wanted regular people on the show, but VH1 wanted stars. We ended up with both. So I was at the Beale Street Music Festival in Memphis finding musicians for the show, and I interviewed Susan Tedeschi. I asked her what song had meaning for her. You could hear the music of the Allman Brothers wafting down the river towards us, and her boyfriend was in the band. She was upset at missing the show and said she couldn’t think of anything. ‘How about a song that you’ve performed?’ I asked. And she said, ‘OK, great. I’ve got one. Roll camera.’ And I rolled camera and she said, ‘Well, a couple of years back when I had just finished a show, someone came up to me and said that Bob Dylan had been in the back and he passed me a note from Dylan asking if I would go on tour with him. So I ended up on the road with him. On stage there were times when he would start playing a lead even though we’d decided that I would be the one to play the lead. I’d look over at him and he’d just smile back at me. It was the most incredible and challenging experience.’ 

I was standing there behind the camera thinking, ‘Wow. My camera has brought me full circle to actually meeting the person who got the gig I wasn’t prepared for. How beautiful! I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing and she’s doing what she’s supposed to be doing. What an amazing journey life is.’

This feels so right for Timoner whose films combine the serendipity of lives unfolding in front of her camera with an ability to be in the right place at the right time. It’s pure instinct. 

Maybe because we’re in a small town, she brings up Mystic Pizza and says that when she watched it, it ignited a dream of running a pizza restaurant and living a simpler life. 

‘I often wonder what it would be like to go down that other road. I think we all wonder about those things. If I didn’t make films, I’d be an interior designer or a psychologist.’ 

‘You’d be a terrible psychologist,’ her son exclaims. They have one of those intense and honest relationships where they finish each other’s sentences.

‘Why do you say that?’ Ondi asks. 

‘You’re so sporadic and you believe in do-shit-ism. You’d tell people to just go out and dothings,’ he pauses, checking that we are enjoying his teasing. ‘I mean you’re very interesting and unique but I don’t think you’d calm people down. I think you’d be a terrible cycle analist.’

‘Did he just say “cycle analist?”’ Ondi asks, turning to me, ‘You have to write that down!’ She then tells her son, ‘Just this morning some woman called me up. She’s starting out as a filmmaker and she had me on the phone for twenty-five minutes. I was giving her ideas, names and advice. I was really trying to help her.’ Her son looks unconvinced and Timoner says, ‘I feel sad you feel that way, Juki.’ 

I am reminded here of a scene in her latest film. Russell Brand gets annoyed at her for trying to analyse his motives, and she says to him from behind the camera, ‘Well, that’s sort of my job right now.’ It is her acuity and insight into Brand’s character that made it impossible for him to watch the film and be present when it opened the SXSW Film Festival. Brand had privately told her, that her film was ‘the price of authenticity. I can’t stand there on a red carpet and wave and watch this movie as if it were a piece of entertainment.’ 

Timoner turns to me and adds, ‘As a result of me making an authentic documentary, he experienced the fallout of his own inability to face who he really is.’ 

This is something that has followed her throughout her career. Both Anton Newcomb of the Brian Jonestown Massacre and Courtney Taylor-Taylor (‘he just had to add an extra Taylor,’ she says rolling her eyes) of the Dandy Warhols have struggled in their own ways with having their lives captured so accurately on film. 

I ask her about her next project, which is a biopic of Robert Mapplethorpe—another impossible visionary. 

‘It’s a scripted film. It’s non-fiction with poetic license. I optioned a version of the script in 2006. I took it to the Sundance Lab in 2010 where I had advisers like Robert Redford and Ed Harris and Michael Hoffman. They strongly proposed that I rewrite the script from page one. So I did. I rewrote it in the summer of 2010. And I’ve written it countless times since.’ 

It was her son’s idea to cast Matt Smith as Robert Mapplethorpe. ‘I didn’t really know who he was, but Juki knew him from Doctor Who, and he insisted I take the meeting. Matt was by far the best of the hundreds of actors who read for the part. And he’s perfect. Zosia Mamet, David Mamet’s daughter, will play Patti Smith. She’s also perfect.’  

Timoner is happy where the project is now. ‘I’m spreading my wings. It’s exciting. But I will always continue making documentaries. I’m working on a short animated one about Yellowman right now.’ 

As I am about to ask her about this, Juki speaks up. ‘Can I tell her how you love doing normal chores?’ he asks.

Timoner laughs. ‘Sure!’

‘So, my mom works so much. She gets really enthusiastic about doing boring things. Like she’ll say, “Hey let’s take out the garbage, let’s take the leaves out of the pool. It’ll be great!” Or she’ll roll garbage cans down the hill and then want to race back up, and she’ll ask me to join her.’ Then Juki faces his mom, ‘Sometimes I look out the window at you standing on the driveway and it’s weird, you just look so happy,’ he says. 

There is talk of buying Juki some running shoes. But Ondi’s next film Join Us (2007) is playing in half an hour, so we pay up and cut through the wind across the Higgins Bridge to the Crystal Theater. Stupidly I haven’t bought a ticket and there is already a line out the door. I queue up while Ondi makes an impromptu mailing list out of a ripped Big Sky Film Festival poster. She’s upset at the thought of people wanting to see Join Us and not getting in. Dozens are turned away. ‘I can’t believe I don’t have any DVDs!’ she exclaims. ‘I always advise filmmakers to bring DVDs to screenings.’ 

Join Us differs from Timoner’s other feature docs by containing multiple points of view. It focuses on a cult leader and his wife along with four families who escape their grasp. It opens like a film noir with one family arriving at night to Wellspring, the only accredited live-in cult treatment center in the world. The camera is up close on a woman’s face. She is confused and can’t tell if escaping from the cult will send her to Hell or bring her freedom. Her confusion is woven into other narratives including that of the cult leader with his collection of expensive German cars and terrifying views on corporal punishment. The film spirals outward to ask questions about America and faith and why this country leads the world in the founding of new religious movements. What we see over the next ninety minutes is harrowing. One of the children in the film, ten-year-old Parris Rogers, is that rare child who is born wise. “Just don’t die,” she says to her mother, who expresses her severe anxiety, fear, and shame at leaving the cult.

After the film, a couple of people from the festival try to set up a Skype call with Parris. But the Skype isn’t working. Ondi gets her phone out and calls Parris. She tries Facetime, but can’t remember her Apple ID password. Her son gets on stage. He knows her password. Ondi then rigs it up so that Parris appears on her iPhone, which is turned towards a laptop camera, which is projected onto a screen. She is going to make this work, no matter what—here’s that ‘do-shit-ism’ her son mentioned. During the Q+A, intense questions are asked about Parris’s mother. She drank herself to death, Parris tells us. The room is silent. But unlike some of the other people in the film, Parris has come through the ordeal to face a hopeful future. Another story has come full circle outside the bounds of her camera.

As we file out of the auditorium, I see a dark-haired woman approach Ondi. From their exchange it’s clear this is the woman Ondi had counselled on the phone earlier that day. I make my way through the crowd towards the exit, while Ondi stays huddled with the woman with the dark hair. ‘I want to help you,’ I hear Ondi say to her as I open the doors and breathe in the rain. 

• • •

Ondi Timoner is an American film director, producer, editor and entrepreneur. Preproduction has begun on her first biopic, a film about the life and work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joanna Pocock is a Canadian writer living in London. She contributes film, literature and art reviews to various online magazines and writes fiction. This is her third piece for 3:AM.

http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/my-afternoon-with-ondi/

Montana's Ghost Towns

Some pure escapism for my Western friends... a piece in the Los Angeles Times on Montana's Ghost Towns:

Montana's ghost towns a mother lode for nuggets of Western history 

Bannack State Park Ghost Town, Dillon, Montana.  (Richard Cummins / Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image) 

Montana ghost towns 

The route:  Start at  Butte, heading southeast on Interstate 90, then head  to Virginia and Nevada cities by way of Norris on U.S. and Montana 287. At Twin Bridges, take Montana 41 to Dillon, then take  Montana 278 to Bannack and then to Wisdom, where you take Montana 43 back to Butte . 

Miles:  210, round trip 

Best times:  Mid-May to mid-September. You may want to avoid forest-fire season in August. 

Why:  The story of the West is partly the story of precious metals — gold, silver and copper – and their booms and busts, and you can follow the history of Montana   by ghost-town hopping. (Kids, by the way,  like hearing about the hardships endured by their counterparts in the 1800s. “You would  have been down a mine 150 years ago!” is a great way to get them to hurry up for school.) 

Wandering through  Bannack Ghost Town  ’s 60 structures is like being an extra in an old western. (Bannack was the state's first capital before gold was discovered; then Virginia City became the capital.)  . 

Highlights:  Tours of Butte’s historic uptown and the must-see Berkeley Pit. Panning for gold and watching for ghosts in  Virginia City . Bannack Days (the third weekend in July), which includes activities as diverse as hat making and quilting, shoot-outs and wagon rides. Intimate  Norris Hot Springs  has  live music and cold craft beer. 

Memorable stay:  A Victorian Suite in the  Nevada City Hotel and Cabins  .  In Butte, the historic  Hodgens Ryan Mansion  carries on the Victorian theme. Or you can choose Butte’s  Hotel Finlen  , where both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy stayed before they were president. 

Memorable meal:  The Fiesta Mexicana food truck in Dillon where Austin, Texas-style food meets small-town Montana. The buttermilk pie at the  Crossing Bar & Grill  at Fetty's in Wisdom is well worth a stop. 

Tourist trap:  Elkhorn Hot Spring. Don't bother. 

Plan to spend:  12 hours for Virginia and Nevada cities and Bannack. But if you want to soak in a hot spring, explore the thrift stores of Butte and catch a show in Virginia City, then two days is best. 

— Joanna  Pocock 

http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-roadtrips-montana-s-ghost-towns-a-mother-lode-for-1466537641-htmlstory.html

Montana's Ghost Towns

Some pure escapism for my Western friends... a piece in the Los Angeles Times on Montana's Ghost Towns:

Montana's ghost towns a mother lode for nuggets of Western history 

Bannack State Park Ghost Town, Dillon, Montana.  (Richard Cummins / Getty Images/Lonely Planet Image) 

Montana ghost towns 

The route:  Start at  Butte, heading southeast on Interstate 90, then head  to Virginia and Nevada cities by way of Norris on U.S. and Montana 287. At Twin Bridges, take Montana 41 to Dillon, then take  Montana 278 to Bannack and then to Wisdom, where you take Montana 43 back to Butte . 

Miles:  210, round trip 

Best times:  Mid-May to mid-September. You may want to avoid forest-fire season in August. 

Why:  The story of the West is partly the story of precious metals — gold, silver and copper – and their booms and busts, and you can follow the history of Montana   by ghost-town hopping. (Kids, by the way,  like hearing about the hardships endured by their counterparts in the 1800s. “You would  have been down a mine 150 years ago!” is a great way to get them to hurry up for school.) 

Wandering through  Bannack Ghost Town  ’s 60 structures is like being an extra in an old western. (Bannack was the state's first capital before gold was discovered; then Virginia City became the capital.)  . 

Highlights:  Tours of Butte’s historic uptown and the must-see Berkeley Pit. Panning for gold and watching for ghosts in  Virginia City . Bannack Days (the third weekend in July), which includes activities as diverse as hat making and quilting, shoot-outs and wagon rides. Intimate  Norris Hot Springs  has  live music and cold craft beer. 

Memorable stay:  A Victorian Suite in the  Nevada City Hotel and Cabins  .  In Butte, the historic  Hodgens Ryan Mansion  carries on the Victorian theme. Or you can choose Butte’s  Hotel Finlen  , where both Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy stayed before they were president. 

Memorable meal:  The Fiesta Mexicana food truck in Dillon where Austin, Texas-style food meets small-town Montana. The buttermilk pie at the  Crossing Bar & Grill  at Fetty's in Wisdom is well worth a stop. 

Tourist trap:  Elkhorn Hot Spring. Don't bother. 

Plan to spend:  12 hours for Virginia and Nevada cities and Bannack. But if you want to soak in a hot spring, explore the thrift stores of Butte and catch a show in Virginia City, then two days is best. 

— Joanna  Pocock 

http://www.latimes.com/travel/la-tr-roadtrips-montana-s-ghost-towns-a-mother-lode-for-1466537641-htmlstory.html

In Defense of the Introvert

This was published March 29, 2016 in JSTOR Daily

We’ve all met them. They’re about two or three feet tall and clinging onto the legs of an adult, usually those of their mother or father. I’m talking here about shy children. Despite their existence in our midst, we have come to treat them as suspicious, unknowable, and secretive. They’re the ones secretly sticking pins into dolls, voodoo-style.

As the mother of a shy child, I felt unnerved by the reactions of adults around me to my daughter’s quietness. She was happier hiding inside my coat than belting out show tunes or piping up at dinner parties about the wonderfulness of the food. When she was almost three years old, I took her to a child psychologist to discuss her shyness. So many adults in my orbit had told me they felt she was “too shy for her age” or that she wasn’t “outgoing enough.” They worried on my behalf that she was “too clingy” and wasn’t giving them enough eye contact. There were grumblings about Asperger’s or autism.

After several visits with the child psychologist, I discovered that my daughter’s introversion caused her no distress, but it drove the adults around her crazy. By shining a light on the adults in her orbit, I was able to see their—and my—limitations, and was finally able to put the issue into perspective.

I began to observe some of the adults that my daughter came into contact with. The ones who expected her to speak like an adult were bound to be disappointed. When she was three, I remember someone asking her benignly how she was. She remained silent and stony faced. She had no idea how she was. She just was in that way children just are.

And this is where I want to make a larger point, one that has been made in books like Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking: Children should be allowed to be introverted. Being quiet is not an illness needing a cure. Pushing a child to conform to the stereotype of the precocious youngster who talks like an adult—a norm seen in many TV shows and children’s films—is not a healthy societal norm.

Society’s desire to foster an extrovert nature in children comes with serious consequences: In the United States, shyness in children is now being seen as a disorder. And the minute a psychological state is defined as a disease, it opens the door for drug companies to find pharmaceutical treatments. The American bible of psychiatric disorders, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), which is regularly updated and used by mental health professionals across the country, now lists “severe, prolonged crying or tantrums,” “shrinking away from other people,” and “extreme clinging and not being able to speak in social situations” as symptoms of Social Anxiety Disorder, which can be treated with drugs.

If I had seen a child psychologist in the US, instead of the UK where I was living at the time, my daughter may have been prescribed a drug from a group of medications called Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors such as fluoxetine (Prozac). Or she may have been given one of a number of antidepressants currently used on children. Medicalizing shyness is becoming more frequent as the symptoms of a normal and healthy introversion are being interpreted as symptoms of a pathology. The drugs that are commonly prescribed to treat the symptoms of social phobia have side effects, some of which are depression, which in turn can lead to suicide. Is this where we want to be pushing our quietest children?

Despite the fact that children tend to outgrow shyness, we continue to medicate against it. Later in life, shy children gravitate toward intellectual careers, often choosing scientific fields. As the respected developmental psychologist Alice Sterling Honig wrote in the peer-reviewed journal Young Children, “Inhibited children avoided dangerous activities and social situations, conformed to parental demands, and were minimally aggressive.” What’s so terrible about that? In a 30-year study of children first seen in a psychiatric clinic for being shy, withdrawn, or hypersensitive, it was found that these children were less likely as adults to develop schizophrenic illnesscompared to children seen for other reasons.

So why are we so afraid of being confronted by children whose response to strange people or situations is one of quiet observation? It seems to me that we are pathologizing seriousness, sensitivity, and a healthy scepticism in children, when in fact we should be doing the opposite. A society that takes an almost unhealthy glee in violence, whose news channels peddle fear, and whose reality TV shows bask in humiliation (while brashly advocating fame, pleasure, and getting rich) is a society that needs the quiet people to step back, think about things, and put them into some kind of perspective.

Author and academic Christopher Lane, in his book Shyness: How Normal Behavior Became a Sickness, believes that there is a sinister link between the medicalization of shyness and the drug companies who promise pharmaceutical salvation from social anxiety, even when displayed in children. When a group of psychiatrists rewrote the DSM in the 1970s, it grew from a thin, spiral-bound handbook to a 600-page tome as the list of disorders and their treatments grew and grew. The growth of this doorstop is not only a metaphor, but also a physical reminder of the medicalization of psychiatry. Lane argues that by pathologizing certain disorders—shyness among them—Big Pharma is able to capitalize on and make money from the human condition.

Over the past eight years, during which I have watched my daughter grow, I have realized that being the gregarious and outgoing mother of a child who is so different from me is actually a gift. I have never seen her as a miniature version of myself. I have never seen her really as mine. I have always seen her as a distinct person who is on loan to me. By allowing her to flourish at her own pace, in her own way, I hope I have also encouraged her to hone the skills needed to find out who she is, to carve her place in the world.

We don’t need more medication for children; we need less homogeneity and more acceptance of differing norms. Whether they are quiet or loud, introverted or extroverted, every child deserves to occupy a space created by him or her and for him or her. They do not need drug companies to turn them into replicas of the adult population, many of whom are also medicated. Allowing children to be who they need to be is difficult and takes time. And, of course, time is money. Sticking a pill down a child’s throat is quick and easy. But who ever said the easy road was the right one, especially when it comes to raising healthy children?

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JSTOR CITATIONS

Hidden Shyness in Children: Discrepancies Between Self-Perceptions and the Perceptions of Parents and Teachers 

BY: ANDREA L. SPOONER, MARY ANN EVANS, AND RENATA SANTOS 

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, Vol. 51, No. 4 (2005), pp. 437-466 

Wayne State University Press

Perceptual Determinants of Gaze Aversion by Normal and Psychotic Children: The Role of Two Facing Eyes 

BY: RICHARD G. COSS 

Behaviour, Vol. 69, No. 3/4 (1979), pp. 228-254 

Brill

The Shy Child 

BY: ALICE STERLING HONIG 

Young Children, Vol. 42, No. 4 (1987), pp. 54-64 

National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC)

http://daily.jstor.org/in-defense-of-introverted-children/

Film Review: In Jackson Heights

March 14, 2016

Gentrification Nation: Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights

By Joanna Pocock

CINEMA   DOCUMENTARY   GENTRIFICATION   UNITED STATES

Frederick Wiseman’s In Jackson Heights gives voice to the victims of gentrification.

Frederick Wiseman’s films rely on subtlety. Long and expansive explorations, they allow the viewer time to take in the minute details that make up conversations, connections, and actions. The 86-year-old director has spent most of his career filming the inner workings of institutions, and does so with the painstaking thoroughness of an archivist or an archaeologist. The small preposition in the title of Wiseman’s forty-third film, In Jackson Heights, is crucial. Without it, the film would be about the multi-ethnic area of Queens, New York, but what Wiseman is saying here is, “Come with me as we go inside”. Faces, surfaces, stories, past tragedies, present inequalities, and future uncertainties are excavated by this poet-archaeologist and in them is revealed the beauty of our shared humanity. A broken baby Jesus in the local Articulos Católicos shop is cradled like a real baby before being whisked off to be fixed, Hindu gods radiate technicolour splendour during a Hare Krishna service, and fruits and vegetables in the local markets are as much symbols of a home left behind as they are sustenance for a new life in America. Even eyebrow threading takes on a meditative quality while women perform the quick movements like dancers. Nothing is too mundane or banal for Wiseman’s eye.

In Jackson Heights takes us inside the innermost sanctums of mosques, Catholic cathedrals, Holocaust survivor services, halal butchers (replete with the throat-cutting of live chickens), council offices (with saintly telephone receptionists taking angry calls), meetings of gay seniors, immigrant support groups, taxi driver training classes (where people who have never seen a map are taught to read one), transsexual support groups and a strange musical performance involving the earnest tickling of china bowls in a Laundromat – and dozens more.

Underneath what seems like a loose structuring of these disparate strands of society lies an absolute control of the material. The film is bookended by wide shots of Jackson Heights: it opens with a bright tableau of the area on a spring day and closes at night on the fourth of July with fireworks going off in the background over Manhattan. Fireworks that, like Manhattan itself, are both beyond the reach of the protagonists and yet within their view. Individual tales of immigrant struggle, pain, loss, and frustration play out within the larger context of community. The personal and the political are never far from each other, and Wiseman doesn’t lose sight of the constant threat just under the surface of these people’s lives: gentrification. Nor does he bash us over the head with his ‘message’. It’s there for those who take the time to look.

A GAP store has moved into the area offering 70% discounts. It has swallowed up eight small businesses. A local mall with fifty family-owned shops looks like it will be the next casualty of property developers. One Colombian gentleman who has had his business there for twenty-two years complains that he and others like him have “no political representation”. He goes on to list the people who should be out there fighting his case, such as state senators and representatives, but they are all in jail or involved in scandals. Another restaurant owner tells a couple of young activists that his staff is made up of older women who have been working for twenty years as waitresses, “How can I tell them they have no work when the time comes? These new corporations, all they want are bonitas,” he says. What Wiseman does with such a light and sympathetic touch is show us what is at stake when individuals lose out to corporate money and interests. The loss is so much more than financial. They are forced to give up their sense of belonging, shared histories, and hope—the very qualities that make us human. When big businesses move in, the organically forged common ground between sex workers, Bangladeshi vegetable sellers, lonely senior citizens, Latino beauticians, and the seemingly endless variety of human beings who meet in the cramped public spaces of large cities are lost forever. Every scene in the film is played out in a public or a shared space, and the importance of these environments is paramount. Towards the beginning of the film, members of a group of gay seniors are discussing whether they feel comfortable meeting in the community centre of a synagogue. Dialogue ensues about space and belonging, which are at the heart of this film. It is as much about the surface of where a journey begins as it is about the soul of where we find ourselves.

In Jackson Heights pulses with life and complexity. We hear tragic and terrible stories like the Mexican woman who stands up in front of an immigration support group to tell the tale of her daughter being lost in the desert for fifteen days as she tried to cross the border into the United States. The woman often stops and searches for the right word, allowing us to see how all our stories are constantly searching for the right words and the right ears to hear them. There is the older man who worked for a cleaning company and had recently been fired for no reason, who confesses to feeling hopeless but tells his story with such dignity that one does not want to believe in his hopelessness. There are tales of discrimination and a repeated trope of a child killed by a garbage truck, and yet for all the sadness within the individual struggles, there is comfort to be had in community—albeit a community on the verge of being eaten up by developers.

The other strand woven deftly into the fabric of film are the stories of Julio Rivera and Edgar Garzon, two gay men beaten to death by skinhead sympathizers in Jackson Heights. Rivera was killed twenty-six years ago and Garzon eleven years later. Their memories are very much alive in this film as we see the planning of the Gay Pride Parade and the meetings of gay and transgender inhabitants of the neighbourhood discussing their enduring challenges. The Jackson Heights councilman, Daniel Dromm, is a colourful presence throughout the film, walking in the Pride Parade in his suit and tie and a rainbow feather boa.

True to Wiseman’s style, there is no narration or voice-over, no talking head interviews, no questions from behind the camera, artificial lights or trickiness. Wiseman carefully constructs the feeling of time passing—there are three nights and three days over the 190 minutes—by editing his material to resemble lives unfolding. He has famously written bout his editing process: “Cutting a documentary is like putting together a ‘reality dream,’ because the events in it are all true, except really they have no meaning except insofar as you impose a form on them, and that form is imposed in large measure, of course, in the editing.” Although most people today consider Wiseman a spokesperson for the cinema vérité crowd, he didn’t like this term, preferring to call his films “reality fictions”.

In Jackson Heights is an epic poem in which the heroic deeds have been replaced by the normal lives of people who sometimes finds themselves in heroic or tragic situations. It is a reminder that to be human is not always to be greedy, ugly and shallow, which is what we are told on the continuous loop of 24-hour news, reality TV shows, and celebrity gossip. Instead Wiseman takes this opportunity to show us that despite our flaws we are capable of kindness and beauty and connection. I am grateful to Frederick Wiseman for capturing this side of us, albeit fleetingly, but captured nevertheless for all the world to see.

Appeared in Litro: http://www.litro.co.uk/2016/03/gentrification-nation-frederick-wisemans-jackson-heights/