The Shroud of Turin. Is Seeing Believing?

 

The Shroud of Turin
 Is seeing believing?

 

A storm had been brewing for days. You could bite the air it was so thick. Sleep was impossible. Sweat was constant. Black, muscular clouds, bruised, crazed, ready to blow, beat down on us as if we were the head of a drum. My toes were sunk in the sand on the bank of the Wanaque River.

 

It came from the west, right over the river, emerging from thick and twisting thunderheads. It wasn't more substantial than air; it was the embodiment of air; it was animate sky; more air than air, more sky than sky. White and black, gleaming as a sunstruck cloud, sharp as a slicing wind. Swinging from left to right, seeking and gobbling its dragonfly prey. And that fast it was lost to my eyes downriver.

 

That was a swallow-tailed kite!

 

This Florida bird did not belong in New Jersey! Its exotic home was a thousand miles south, casting its shadow on earthbound alligators and colorful flowers.

 

Birders keep something called a "life list." We record every bird we've ever seen. For the past fifty years, alone in my room, no witnesses, I cannot bring myself to check the box opposite the words "swallow-tailed kite." I am stopped by the barrier between perceiving and accepting.  

 

The part of my brain that instantaneously assembles disparate details into a coherent whole and reports, "This is a chair; this is a table;" told me "This is a swallow-tailed kite." But bird-watching requires firing up the part of the brain that disassembles details and analyzes each. That part of my brain that would have consciously ticked off each detail – the snow white breast, the dipped-in-ink wings, a storm that may have tossed the bird off course – that part of my brain was not in gear. I was too awed by the whole to inspect the parts.

 

And it's more than that. Now that I'm an adult and I've lived away more years than I lived there, I can recognize that my hometown was special. We never locked the door; we were surrounded by neighbors we knew and woods full of deer and berries and spooky stories. But when I was a kid, my hometown felt like prison. Even as we kids enjoyed the woods, the sleepovers, the close, warm kitchens full of kielbasa and lasagna and paella, we yearned for anywhere else where everything, we were certain, was better. Such an elegant bird simply did not belong in the turbulent sky over the humble Wanaque River.  

 

In the 1986 horror film The Fly, a mad scientist tries to explain to his girlfriend that, thanks to an experiment gone wrong, he is turning into a fly. She says, "I don't get it."

 

He replies, "You get it. You just can't handle it."

 

A swallow-tailed kite in my factory-pocked hometown? I got it. I just couldn't handle it.

 

Over seventy years earlier, a world-class French scientist occupied that same rickety bridge between perceiving and accepting. Anatomist Yves Delage wrote of his "obsession" with a "disconcerting contradiction between" a mind-blowing artifact and the "impossibility to find a natural explanation" for that artifact.

 

Moi aussi, Yves. Like you, that's how I have long felt about the Shroud of Turin.

Snow White 2025 Review

 

Snow White 2025
 
Is it Woke or Disneyfication that hobbles the movie?

 

Ever have one of those days when no matter how hard you try to be rational, pleasant, and productive, the universe seems to hate you? You walk out the door and a pigeon poops on  your head? You cross the street and a cab splashes you? You show up for work and everyone blames you for every snafu? Relax. At least you are not the 2025 film Snow White.

 

Snow White is a musical fantasy produced by Walt Disney Pictures. Marc Webb directs. Erin Cressida Wilson wrote the screenplay. Her best-known work is Secretary, an explicit exploration of a sadomasochistic relationship between a submissive secretary and her dominant boss. The songs "Heigh ho," and "Whistle While You Work," from the 1937 Snow White, but with new lyrics, re-appear. The song "Someday My Prince Will Come" is cut. Lyrics to new songs in the film are by EGOT-winners Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. Snow White is 109 minutes long. It opened in the U.S. on March 21, 2025.

 

Some scenes in Snow White put a smile on my face and made me laugh out loud. I'd rate the film three out of five stars. What handicaps Snow White is not so much Woke, as it is the Disneyfication of the source material. More on that, below, after a bit of background.

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive. Book review.

 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive
 
A book asks, can Nazis love? And why did the powerful aid their escape?

 

The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive was published by Knopf on February 2, 2021. It is 417 pages long, inclusive of endnotes and a bibliography. Black-and-white photos illustrate the text.

 

Ratline recounts the encounter between author Philippe Sands, a Jewish-British lawyer and law professor and descendant of Holocaust victims, and Horst von Wachter, the son of a Nazi war criminal. Baron Otto Gustav von Wachter (1901 – 1949) was Austrian born. He was an early and enthusiastic member of the Nazi party, joining the Nazi Sturmabteilung or Storm Troopers in 1923. He eventually rose to SS-Gruppenfuhrer, or major general rank. He served under Governor General Hans Frank, the notorious "Butcher of Poland," in Krakow and Galicia in Nazi-occupied Polish and Ukrainian territory. Wachter sent Jews, non-Jewish Poles, and other victims of Nazism to their deaths. After the war, Wachter hid out in the Austrian Alps. He eventually made his way to Italy, hoping to travel, via ratlines, that is, escape routes for Nazis, to safety in South America. Instead, he sickened and died in Italy.

 

Otto von Wachter married Charlotte Bleckmann in 1932. They had six children. Charlotte was an active diarist and letter-writer. Horst, their son, shared his extensive trove of documents with author Sands.

 

The Ratline has received rave reviews from both readers and professional reviewers. The book did not work for me, for reasons I'll outline, below, after a discussion of the book's reception and a summary of its contents. 

Presence 2024 Movie Review. A Small Film Succeeds Where Bigger Films Failed

 

Presence 2024
A small film succeeds where bigger films failed

 

"For English, press one."

 

"Please listen carefully. Our menu options have changed."

 

"Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line and your call will be answered in the order it was received."

 

"All our representatives are helping others. We will return your call at a time convenient to us, after you have fallen to the floor and are sobbing uncontrollably."

 

Some of us have lost some genetic lottery. Cancer haunts our families. We hear these phrases when, struggling to sound calm, we inquire about our loved ones, when we schedule ourselves, and when we request our prognosis.

 

Which is worse, a cancer diagnosis or navigating the health care steeple chase? A twenty-something girl treats you like a slab of meat while shoving you into a big machine. God didn't gift cancer cells with awareness. When those cells attack your body it doesn't say anything about human nature. When a fellow human is mean to you for no good reason as you shiver from cold, fear, and shame in your hospital gown, it gets to you.

 

In November, 2024, I coped with my latest perch on the limin between life and death as I usually do. I wasn't taking drugs. I was cleaning, writing, hiking, bopping to great music, soaking in hot baths, shopping for groceries, and going to the movies. These activities are my therapy, my miracle drugs, and my best friends.

 

Friends? "Cancer ghosting" is a thing. The people around you recoil from you. At first, I felt marooned. But then I realized that their ghosting me was just nature taking its course. I was updating my will, giving away belongings, and wondering whether I'd soon be reunited with departed loved ones. The folks who retreated from me were, simply, living in, and involved with, a different dispensation. They were moving through the colorful, physical, concrete world of life, with all its promises of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. My friends were doing that necessary work that we all do – investing in life while alive, and avoiding death. Cancer ghosting can leave you feeling very alone, but as Nietzsche said, when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you. At least the abyss was willing to hang out with me.

 

In January, 2025, I was going for a walk and listening to NPR over my headphones. When I tune in I usually hear a story about how blacks are suffering in white supremacist America, or how gays are suffering in homophobic America. I wait out the propaganda and listen for the quality programming that sneaks in.

 

A man was speaking. He was a white guy, older, even-tempered, quietly and intelligently witty, at home in the world and with himself.  Ghost stories, the man was saying, are "essentially hopeful … the very premise means that there's an afterlife. Something comes beyond" death, he said. I am intimidated by scary movies but this guy was giving me a new way to look at them.

 

The man continued in a voice, that, unlike so much I hear on NPR, was not shrill, or griping, or demanding, or haranguing. In this same tone of voice, this man might be ordering a car part or telling a child a bedtime story. This mature man knew that sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose, and he recognized that it all comes out in the wash.

 

"In my own life," he said, "during periods that I would describe as traumatic, I felt more open to people around me, and maybe had a little easier time perceiving their own difficulties or their own pain. I wondered, if a person goes through trauma, does that open you up to sense other things that you couldn't sense before?" He mentioned a girl named Chloe. Chloe, he said, is "an open wound. She's been through this horrific experience, and so she is open to the universe." It is kind, this man was saying, to make eye contact with someone in pain and to say, "I'm sorry that you suffer."

 

This man didn't have an ax to grind. He was speaking in the most universal terms about trauma and death. He wasn't talking about how hard it is to be black and to have a ghost in your house, or to be trans and to go through trauma, or to be gay and to get a scary diagnosis. He was talking about universal stuff: life, death, the space between. His speech was not excluding, dividing, singling out for blame, or for settling scores. His speech was inviting and truly inclusive. Such speech is rare on NPR. He sounded the way you'd imagine a small town doctor in a Norman Rockwell painting would sound. His words were the most soothing words I had heard in my latest dance with death.

 

That man is screenwriter David Koepp. Let's see if you've heard of the films for which he wrote the script: Jurassic Park, Mission Impossible, Spider Man, War of the Worlds, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Carlito's Way, Stir of Echoes, Ghost Town, Panic Room, and other films. His output has earned billions of dollars worldwide. Koepp has written the script for the 2024 film Presence, a ghost story. Well, I'll be darned. I had sought comfort from friends, who "ghosted" me, and from a Catholic priest, who did not have time for me. Once again, Hollywood was coming to the rescue.

The Brutalist 2024 Movie Review: Bloated, Overrated Agitprop

 

The Brutalist is a Must-See Masterpiece

 

Or is it self-indulgent, exploitative, Hollywood agitprop?

 

I have never witnessed the avalanche of acclaim for a new release such as I've seen for the 2024 film The Brutalist. The Brutalist is the biopic of a fictional character. Adrien Brody plays Laszlo Toth, a Hungarian Holocaust survivor who is commissioned to build a Doylestown, Pennsylvania community center in the Brutalist architectural style. A man of intense artistic dedication and integrity, he overcomes roadblocks, and realizes his dream.

 

Why is a movie about a Hungarian immigrant in Doylestown, PA advancing like a tornado through a wheat field, toppling critics into adoring prostration? Filmmaker Brady Corbet doesn't understand. "If something is really radical, people initially don't like it … people are connecting with The Brutalist … I'm completely confused."

 

Below, a review of reaction to the film, a summary of the film, and then my own take on The Brutalist.

Queer 2024 Daniel Craig Movie Review

 

Queer 2024 Starring Daniel "Bond, James Bond" Craig
Beat ideas literally killed people

The 2024 film Queer is inspired by a novella by Beat Movement co-founder William S. Burroughs. Burroughs wrote Queer in 1952, but it was not published till 1985. Queer is directed by award-winning, 53-year-old Italian director Luca Guadagnino. Guadagnino has won praise for his films Call Me By Your Name, Bones and All, and Challengers. Between 2006 and 2021, star Daniel Craig played James Bond. After retiring as Bond, Craig took on the role of detective Benoit Blanc in the "Knives Out" franchise. Co-star Drew Starkey is a newcomer. He has made an impression playing a troubled teen on the Netflix drama Outer Banks.

Queer's thin plot: an American, William Lee (Daniel Craig) is pursuing a life of casual hook-ups and drug use in Mexico in the 1950s. There, Lee encounters the much younger Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a former sailor. Craig is 56; Starkey is 31. Starkey appears to be in his early twenties in Queer. Lee lusts after Allerton, but Allerton keeps his emotional and physical distance from Lee, even while they are having sex.

Many read the film as a treatment of unrequited love. Wikipedia classifies Queer as a "period romantic drama." For director Luca Guadagnino, Queer is "about connection. When you meet someone with whom you  know you have a connection, no matter what complications arise, no matter what the cultural or emotional interruptions … the strength of it is eternal." Guadagnino says Queer is "a story of unsynchronized love." Daniel Craig insists that "Allerton is as in love with Lee as Lee is in love with Allerton … Allerton just can't show it." Queer, Craig says "deals with many universal themes about love, desire, loneliness and the need to connect."

Queer the book is based on Burroughs' own life. Eugene Allerton is based on a real former serviceman, Adelbert Lewis Marker, who was fifteen years younger than Burroughs. Professor and author Tim Gilmore writes, "Reading the novel alongside Burroughs’ letters and diaries shows that he made up almost nothing in Queer except for names." Marker died in 1998, leaving behind a wife and two sons.

Wicked 2024 Movie Review: Overrated Didn't like Wicked

 

Wicked 2024
Wicked is very popular but it hasn't enchanted everyone

 

She's twenty-four years old and she weighs a hundred pounds. She's pretty but conventionally so. Plainly human, like the rest of us, she will eventually wither and die. But right now she's twenty-four and a bare-backed gown of hip-hugging satin and ostrich feathers billows about her.

 

She resists his seduction. He sings to her – "Cheek to Cheek." They dance beside a pool of water. He is charming and she is charmed. The music, and the scene, begin as conventional patter and rise to passionate intensity. Her dance expresses that which elevates the human above the animal; her movements defy that which reduces mortals to dirt. She, freed of human limitation, wafts like the wind; she flows like water. She has joined the eternal elements; she is black and white, the elemental colors of clouds and constellations.

 

Near the conclusion, though, three times, he lifts her, spins her, and she spreads her legs. He then dips her almost to a full recline, almost to the ground, and her body goes limp. The feathers cover her face modestly like a fan – her hidden expression no doubt communicates feelings too intimate to share. The music quiets. He, a satisfied smile on his face, tenderly guides her to a stone wall, where she leans back, open-mouthed. We recognize that this old movie is telling us, in old movie language, that she has just had that precious human experience that one can have only in a human body, a climax.

 

Audiences who went to see the 1935 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film Top Hat might have, earlier that same day, been on a bread line. That year my parents were foraging for food in the forest. That feather dress transported audiences away from the Great Depression and into pure beauty.

 

Ninety years later, when I am crushed by the burdens of this world, I sometimes rewatch that dance. Its escape from, return to, and celebration of the human condition gives me what I need to go on.

 

Music analyst Robert Kapilow salutes the scene's "meticulous craft." "Cheek to Cheek" sounds familiar, simple, even corny. But it demonstrates the talent that Irving Berlin exercised in writing 1,500 songs in a sixty-year career. Berlin also wrote "God Bless America;" his "White Christmas" is said to be the best-selling single of all time. One-hundred-thirty-six years after Berlin's birth, during the month of December, one can hear "White Christmas" on any radio station or in any shopping mall.

 

"Cheek to Cheek" is "mock-mundane." Any amateur might hear the song and think, "Hey, I could have written that." Berlin's sophistication is disguised. "Every note in the vocal line" Kapilow points out, is on the beat, but with the lyrics, "When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek," "Every single note is off the beat … it's so subtle, you almost don't even notice it." Kapilow says that Berlin "brilliantly elides the" song's sudden, intense passion "in a minor key" and resolves that operatic intensity by concluding with a return to the casual flirtatiousness of the song's opening. "These are not just tunes … These songs are three-act dramas in two minutes."