Portable Bohemia Newsletter Jan 1, 2025
Greetings from the Far Left Coast! I was up celebrating with a glass of wine and a John Sandford novel when the year rolled in at Times Square in New York. A short morning run is on today’s agenda and a new year’s feast with friends Hollye, Vince, and Nigel the Airedale to ring in 2025.
Jimmy Carter stepped on a rainbow a few days ago. The sense of loss is coupled with reflection and celebration of a good person and a life well lived.
Randall Balmer called Carter “the last progressive evangelical,” in a tradition that goes back to “the Second Great Awakening at the turn of the 19th century.”
Progressive evangelicalism traces its roots to the teachings of Jesus in the New Testament and to a much earlier era in American history. Jesus enjoined his followers to be peacemakers and to care for those on the margins of society. Throughout American history, progressive evangelicals have sought to take those commands seriously. Especially in the antebellum period, evangelicals worked to promote peace and to end slavery, even though many Southern evangelicals continued to defend it. Evangelicals also advocated equality for women, including the right to vote, and supported the expansion of public education so that children on the lower rungs of the economic ladder might be able to improve their lives.
That tradition, writes Balmer, was sent “reeling” by the election of 1980, which
led to the melding of white evangelicals with the far-right reaches of the Republican Party…Over the decades the Religious Right has become the most reliable component of the Republican Party, much the way that labor unions once served as the backbone of the Democratic Party.
Jimmy Carter was not sent reeling.
Forced into political retirement, he set about making plans for his presidential library, and here, freed from political constraints, Carter would be able to act most fully on his religious principles…He conceived the Carter Center as a working institution…and it has been extraordinarily effective in the eradication of disease, the monitoring of free and fair elections, and the pursuit of peace, justice and care for those on the margins.
During my final years in Atlanta, from 1992 until I came to Portland in 1998, I lived a few blocks from Carter Center and frequently strolled around the grounds where at Jimmy Carter’s direction dogs were welcome to chase frisbees and splash in the pond back of the center. One afternoon while running along the path that ran past the center toward downtown I encountered three runners coming toward me. Two obviously fit young men flanked an older fellow in the middle. It was only after we passed each other that it dawned on me the older fellow looked a lot like Jimmy Carter. That was kind of cool.
Randall Ballmer, Jimmy Carter: The Last Progressive Evangelical, Politico, December 29, 2024
Helen Lewis has a thoughtful essay at The Atlantic that takes up the thorny issue of participation by trans athletes in women’s sports and goes on to the broader matter of how we approach trans issues generally.
In my view, the way forward lies in an empathetic compromise, one that broadly respects transgender Americans’ sense of their own identity—for example, in the use of chosen names and pronouns—while acknowledging that in some areas, biology really matters…many voters who support laws protecting trans people from housing and employment discrimination don’t see trans rights as an all-or-nothing deal; in fact, a few limited carve-outs on the basis of biological sex might increase acceptance of gender-nonconforming people overall. (What the Left Refused to Understand About Women’s Sports)
Do something department.
Jessica Craven, Chop Wood, Carry Water: newsletter “dedicated to saving democracy, addressing the climate crisis, preserving our freedoms, electing better lawmakers, and, in general, creating a better country—one simple action at a time.”
Memo from the Cinema Desk. The Girl on a Bulldozer (2022). Dir. Rye-Woong Park.
The Girl on a Bulldozer is a Korean action thriller that is considerably better than the title led me to expect. Gu Hye-Young (Kim Hye-yoon, known in her country as the Nation’s Little Sister) is a skinny, nineteen-year-old girl with a hair-trigger temper. When she pulls off the white sleeve covering the tattoos that run up and down her left arm, watch out.
Hye-Young is well known at the local police station. The film opens in a courtroom where the judge is reading her the riot act for beating up three schoolgirls who assaulted a worker at a convenience store. Taking into account the fact that although she went way too far, she did so coming to the defense of the store employee, the judge orders her to attend a vocational training class. Instead of a secretarial class deemed suitable for girls, she opts for operation of heavy equipment. Bulldozers.
Hye-Young lives with her father and her younger brother, whom she promised to look after when her mother lay dying eight years earlier, in rooms above his small restaurant. They struggle to get by, burdened by huge gambling debts racked up by Hye-Young’s father. After he is gravely injured in a suspicious car accident that leaves him lying unconscious in the hospital, Hye-Young learns that they are being evicted from the building she thought her father owned. Determined to find the truth about the accident, she confronts the building owner, Chairman Choi, a smarmy politician and wealthy owner of a construction equipment company. Bulldozers.
Hye-Young barges into Choi’s office, stalks him at campaign rallies, and is roughed up by his thuggish entourage. She sinks into despair when her father is declared brain dead. Somewhere along the line she is left battered and bruised by an avenging male friend of those schoolgirls from the opening scenes. Finally she boils over, removes the white sleeve, and terrorizes Choi with a bulldozer, for which she pays her debt to society after being shot by a cop. Somehow, two years later, a satisfying ending comes of it all in this nice little film I rather enjoyed.
Golden Years (orig. title: Die goldenen Jahre) (2022). Dir. Barbara Kulcsar.
Peter appears to be less than elated during the retirement party following his last day at the office. Alice, his wife, is enjoying the festivities and looking forward to what lies ahead far more than he is. He remains seated, smiling affably, while others take to the dance floor after he and Alice are presented with tickets for a cruise as a retirement gift from their son and daughter, who have their own issues. As the last guest leaves, Alice tells Peter his daughter drinks too much. He replies that her son, who was accompanied by his latest Tinder date, is a gigolo.
It soon becomes evident that inertia has a lot to do with Peter and Alice being still together at this stage in their marriage. She wants to meet people, make friends, have adventures. Peter frets about aging, diet, and health. He goes vegan, quits drinking alcohol, bicycles obsessively, and otherwise lounges around the house.
Then comes the cruise. Alice is not pleased by Peter’s invitation for their friend Heinz to join them after the death of his wife Magali, who collapsed while she and Alice were hiking shortly after the retirement party. With her dying words she mysteriously instructed Alice to retrieve letters from a drawer in her bedside table. To Alice’s astonishment, the letters reveal that for fifteen years Magali had been secretly carrying on an affair with someone named Claude in France.
The cruise does not go as Alice envisioned. Peter and Heinz hang out together, do guy stuff, bond. Left to her own devices, Alice stews. She ditches the guys in Marseille. They realize she is missing only after they are back on the boat bound for Barcelona. A text informs Peter she needs a time-out. She will see him back home in Switzerland.
Alice explores Marseille, buys a colorful new dress, hooks up with a retired couple who travel around Europe in a camper and enjoy wild mushrooms whose pleasures extend beyond the gustatory. After parting ways with the camper duo, she sets out to find the address on the letters to Magali and lands at a feminist commune whose members reject capitalism and patriarchy. Not only was Magali having an affair, but…quelle surprise! Back on the boat, Peter has a panic attack on the treadmill.
Golden Years struck me as a bit sappy at the beginning, sit-commish, shallow. It became something sweetly more as Peter and Alice reunited back home and grappled with the realization their relationship held together only as something other than marriage, but held together even so. Nothing profound or transcendent, but in its way heartwarming.
Perfect Days (2023). Dir. Wim Wenders. The last film I watched in 2024, it left an inexpressible impression.
Hirayama is a middle-aged man who lives alone in a small apartment. Each morning he rises, puts away his futon, and tends to his plants before donning a blue jumpsuit with the words The Tokyo Toilet in white on the back. He smiles when he opens the door and looks up at the sky, purchases a coffee from the vending machine just down from his doorway, climbs into his van, and listens to cassette tapes while driving to work: The Animals “House of the Rising Sun,” Otis Redding “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay,” Patti Smith “Redondo Beach,” Van Morrison “Brown-eyed Girl,” Lou Reed “Perfect Day.”
Hirayama’s routine does not vary. He keeps to himself, rarely speaking, as he meticulously cleans public toilets, stepping aside patiently when someone has urgent need to use a toilet while he is working there. Lunch is a sandwich in the park. He glances at a young woman eating her lunch at an adjacent bench, takes in sunlight falling through the trees, acknowledges a homeless man across the way with a nod, watches kids playing. At workday’s end he visits a bathhouse before dinner at a little shop in a mall where the cook knows him. In the evening he reads before falling asleep, books by William Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith, purchased in a little bookshop where the woman who works there knows him and comments on his purchases.
Hirayama puts up with an annoying younger coworker, Takashi, for the most part ignoring him, but never in a rude manner. Takashi’s girlfriend, Aya, ten of ten the younger man describes her, is intrigued by Hirayama’s cassettes when he gives them a ride to the shop where she works. After he shows her how to insert the cassette, Aya sings along quietly with Patti Smith on “Redondo Beach.” Later after Takashi’s date does not work out as hoped, he confides to Hirayama that his chances with Aya are two of ten.
Aya is an elusive figure who appears briefly later when she returns the Patti Smith tape she swiped at their first meeting. He again gives her a ride to work, and she weeps listening to “Redondo Beach,” then gives him a shy peck on the cheek as they part.
From his books, the caring attention to his plants, photos he takes with a small, old-fashioned film camera, interactions with others that might hardly be thought of as interactions, small acts of kindness as when he comforts a small child separated from her mother, from these things comes a sense of who he is that defies being nailed down.
One evening Hirayama returns home to find his teenage niece Niko who has run away from home waiting for him. They scarcely know one another. He takes her in anyway. The next day she accompanies him as he cleans toilets. They walk in the park, bicycle through the city, form a bond neither might have anticipated. Perhaps he is expressing his philosophy, if we want to give it so grand a name, when he advises her, “Next time is next time. Now is now.”
That brief interlude ends when Hirayama’s sister comes for Niko in a large car with a driver. There are intimations of background, family, a story that is not what might be expected of a toilet cleaner, leading me to wonder how his life came to be as it is. The brief exchange between brother and sister ends more emotionally than either might have anticipated. Nothing more is revealed. It does not have to be. That is not the story. Now is now.
Perfect Days is my favorite film of the year among quite a few that I liked a lot. I am sure to carry it with me for a while.
Guardian News & Media film editor Catherine Shoard proclaims that 2025 is “likely to go down as the year auteurs roared back” following a season of “cash-splash smashes by mainstream directors” (Auteurs assemble! Why 2025 offers a banquet of movies by cinema’s great creators). Claire Denis, Celine Song, and Chloé Zhao are filmmakers I know and care about who have new films coming up. A good note on which to ring in the new year.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt