The Furnace

Coffee’s made, the tea-water’s on
and here's a glazed pane of iridescent frost
stroked by a ghost etcher’s point
—struck through with silver and laced with light:
its gravure of fern fronds glistens
on a clear silicon plate
……………….…………
And there's a brilliant postage stamp of blue
piercing an otherwise stratocumulus dome
marking a bit of sky beyond the frost-etcher’s art:
a frame within a frame a window in a window
a thought within a name
…………………………. The furnace sparks
the burner fires before the blower starts and
warm air rushes from a grate
as if a house might warm its cupped hands
to mitigate the lethal silence of a still cold place
as we will sometimes hunch and blow to mitigate
a frigid shadow stillness:
……………………………….a blast of breath
from our own deep furnace in winter
while we wait
………………….
by Jim Culleny, 12/18/09

by Sam Kean

The interviewer asked Bill Gates flat out: “Bill, even your harshest critic would have to admit that your philanthropy work is, you know, planet-shaking, incredible, and could be, if you make it, a second act so amazing that it would dwarf what you’ve actually done at Microsoft … If you had to choose a legacy, what would it be?”

Bill demurred: “Well, the most important work I got a chance to be involved in, no matter what I do, is the personal computer.”

Wha? More important no matter what, than anything else he could ever do?

During the height of the Evil Empire Gates reportedly glanced at the newspaper one morning and became absorbed in an sadly unremarkable article about a disease ravaging the third world—malaria, or polio, or a miserable tapeworm, something along those lines. Gates famously (even a little infamously) had no idea diseases like that still existed in the 1990s, much less that they dominated health care in poor countries the way cancer and heart disease do in the first world. Call him sheltered, but the Gates Foundation was more or less founded that day over coffee. Its goal: to rid the world of such scourges. Bill Gates had a road-to-Damascus moment.

And yet—given the choice between being remembered as the man who liberated humankind from, say, malaria more or less single handedly—and being remembered as the person who foisted PowerPoint on the world—Gates is choosing PowerPoint? Really? He’s picking AutoCapitalization and a dancing paperclip?

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David Schneider

T.S. Eliot might well have smirked at the events of the Naughty Oughties. By one yardstick, they came in with a bang and ended with a whimper, trussed up and devoured by the dirty deeds, done extravagantly, of the stuffed men, the hollow men.

Back in the green days of Communism's defeat (which we, in our typical hubris, called capitalism's victory) an American president spoke of creating a “bridge to the 21st century.” Of course, this was dismissed as mere rhetoric by less (publicly) priapic politicians. Through the hindsight of the intervening years, however, it's become clear that such a bridge was indeed necessary. The left and right banks of America, blue in mood and red in face, were left hanging by chads on a Bridge to Nowhere, suspended within a fiction called The End of History.

History, that's the rub – history, and its myths. From the very first days of the Bush Administration, I sensed that the conservative American consciousness, boiled down into its thick molasses, was simply in fear of the future. We were held back, as a nation, by a persistent fear (predominently by those who witnessed the chaos of the '60s) that history Xeroxes itself; that any struggle towards positive change, any at all, was a fool's errand, doomed to devolve back to Fascism or Communism, except this time with the extra added bonus of nuclear apocalypse. And those of us who came to oppose this nation's decisions perhaps understood ourselves as being held back, from advancing a grade in a school called Democracy and the Pursuit of Happiness. Held back, by a dubiously legitimate leader who clearly attended Bible School dutifully but spoke as if he himself hadn't passed the 3rd grade.

History, as Morpheus said, is not without a sense of irony. And it doesn't like to be declared deceased.

I know we want to leave this low, dishonest decade, but I say: not yet, not quite yet. There are still a few days in which we may legitimately consider what happened to us, before the tsunami of ever-present tensions crashes down upon us anew.

From my peculiar and partial vantage point, every great American crisis of the '00s – Y2K, the Dot-Com Collapse, The Great Indecision, 9/11, Iraq, Abu Ghraib, Katrina, global warming, the Media Crisis, and the Financial Crisis – stemmed from our inability to integrate the hyperspeed advances in media technology with our aging infrastructures – physical, economic, managerial, governmental, and moral. This is the chasm that needed and still needs to be bridged – it is, I believe, the parsing of Clinton's metaphor.

And from this chasm (with ceaseless turmoil seething) I saw two great übercrises mingling, and seeding the events of the Double Zeroes: a Crisis of Information, and a Crisis of “Reality.” Information: too much of it, in terms too jargonized, too euphemized, and too fractured. “Reality”: a state of being controlled by the new technologies of media, without sufficient intellectual tools or time for us to interrogate adequately.

Yeah, whatevs, you say. Too subtle by half, you say. It's the “postmodern condition,” get over it. Or: hubris and incompetence, failing upward rather than failing better, same as it ever was. Or: The Matrix. Live in the sewers, Neo, and jump buildings in your brain (got a better idea?) Sorry, folks, but I need to plumb a little deeper than those keyword searches.

The first true terror I felt in this decade, the first moment I perceived a great unraveling, was not on September 11, 2001. The date was May 8, 2002, when MTV broadcast the episode of “The Real World: Chicago” that was filmed on 9/11.

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I have a very geeky 9 year old daughter; there really is no doubt about that. One day last spring, a school friend had transgressed in some way in the class and her “punishment” was to stay inside at recess and clean out the pencil sharpener. My daughter offered to give up her recess and help her, not really because she is such a loyal friend, but because she was so excited at the idea of taking the pencil sharpener to pieces and then putting it together again. She woke up that morning and declared, “Today is going to be the best day ever, I get to take the pencil sharpener to bits, clean it and put it back together!” To my knowledge, she had never actually taken a pencil sharpener to pieces before and had no real knowledge of what it would take to put it back together again. But she was totally, blissfully unperturbed by the almost certain failure she would encounter before perhaps, by chance, landing upon the correct assembly…or not. I can't remember whether she ever succeeded in her task, it doesn't really matter, what matters is that she was undeterred by the prospect of possible failure. And this fearlessness in the face of likely failure is one of the reasons that I believe that my daughter will grow up to be a very innovative person.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the US and the world needs to be more innovative in this new world economy. It is equally clear that the US is in real danger of not only losing traditionally left-brained and factory line jobs to China and India, to name but a few of the growing outsourcing destinations, but is now beginning to lose its much vaulted innovative edge. As this New York Times piece lays out, the “United States ranked sixth among 40 countries and regions, based on 16 indicators of innovation and competitiveness.” And there’s no doubt in my mind that failures in our education system rank high in the US fall from innovation grace. “What skills do children need to be innovative” is an increasingly written about topic and President Obama recently launched a campaign, “Educate to Innovate” to address this very issue.

A lot of competing theories abound in the innovation field, but there is at least one very clear theme that seems to be almost an unchallenged assumption: you cannot have innovation without failure. Fail fast and fail often.

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by Michael Blim

And so the speech, the “just war” speech is given. Or rather “the cold war” speech is given.

President Obama’s Oslo Nobel acceptance speech, that is. It could have been given by John F. Kennedy. It could have been written by Kennedy’s Sorenson, Goodwin, or Schlesinger, filled as it was with allusions to freedom, liberty, tyranny, and the need to defend the vital center. It was all there: America the underwriter of world security and the keeper of world peace since World War II, the historic champion of democracy even when compared with Johnny-come-lately Europe, the everlasting voice for universal human aspirations.

Tough-minded idealism, cold war realism. The United States, the President says, goes to war to defend its interests only when its cause is just. Afghanistan is a war of self-defense, and thus is just. Other wars undertaken while we have protected the peace these last sixty year have been just too, and they include the first Iraq War and the Balkan wars against Serbia. Missing from the ledger of the just are the Korean, Vietnam, and Second Iraq Wars, though American action in the Korean War is still so unquestioned that its costs and consequences lie unexamined.

We live, the President tells us, in an imperfect world. In a breathtaking claim upon human nature and humanity’s history, he argues that we as a species knew war before we knew peace, and accepted war as another fact of life “like drought and disease.” Though our natures remain warlike, and evil and injustice a constant of the human condition, he believes that we have made halting steps toward the rule of reason as well as a greater human interest in governing our conduct, especially during the American half-century.

Obama’s is a profoundly Christian vision, though a less Manichean outlook than was characteristic of the hot Cold War. The persistence of evil, however, is still its center. Humanity must hope for redemption but persevere in the face of life’s inevitable iniquities. Like Browning, he argues, “that a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?”

Applying the pilgrim’s progress to war can be both deadly and deceiving. Deadly because devotion makes a casualty of proportion, and memory becomes millennial. The march of human progress makes even terrible human tragedy and mendacity small.

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by Sue Hubbard

What is the purpose and function of art? The work of Eva Hesse challenges us to ask this question. Her history has been well documented. Born in Hamburg, in 1936, to a family of observant Jews, she was, at the age of two, put on a Kindertransport arriving first in Holland, then England and, finally, in America in 1939. A sense of tenuousness and the impermanence of things colours her work. The balls of screwed paper, the bits of flimsy gauze, mesh and cloth are like whispers rather than assertions, thought processes made physical, rather than finished objects. Her life was short. At the age of 34, when living in New York, she was diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour that cut short her career as a sculptor just as it was getting underway. The body of work she left was remarkable. Poetic, anxious and intense it made manifest her inner, often turbulent emotional life. A writer of diaries, autobiography was the base note of her work.

Like the poets Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton the trauma of Hesse's early childhood strongly affected her emotional development, as did her parents' separation and divorce, and her mother's subsequent suicide in 1945. These events left her insecure and anxious, so that in 1954 she made a decision to enter therapy. Her subsequent analysis had a profound effect on her work as she began to examine herself more closely. “I think art is a total thing. A total person giving a contribution. It is an essence, a soul…. In my inner soul, art and life are inseparable.” It is, also, not implausible to consider that on some level she must also have been haunted by the ‘what might have beens’ that would surely have befallen her if she had failed to leave Hamburg in 1936 and faced the fate of many other Jews of her generation. The ghost of the holocaust, as well as her own family traumas, shadows her work.

Hesse's creative talent had been evident since childhood. At the age of 16 she graduated from the New York School of Industrial Arts, later attending the Pratt Institute of Design. But by December 1953 she had dropped out to study figure drawing at the Art Students’ League, whilst also working as a layout artist for Seventeen magazine. Then, in 1957, she graduated from Cooper Union in New York, going on to study at Yale with the assistance of a Norfolk Fellowship.

There she worked as a painter, studying colour theory under Joseph Albers. Influenced by Abstract Expressionism her work, during the five years from 1960 to 1965, was mostly small, and intensely personal. Her powerful drawings, with their circular and container like shapes, anticipated her later sculptural configurations; her interest in the metaphors of inside and outside, of what is contained and what is left open ended.

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by Colin Marshall

Are we meant to look at Northeast High School in 1968 and marvel at the similarities to our own memories, or at the differences? Surely Frederick Wiseman's documentary, unencumbered by framing or commentary, would have looked like life when first screened. Did Wiseman himself compare the experiences of these late-60s kids in front of his camera to his own, from the late 40s? Could he have avoided it? Did he feel the condition of the American high schooler had improved or worsened since then? Should we feel things have taken a turn for the better, or the worse?

Kids These Days presumably see the picture, with its improvisatory handheld camera, harsh black-and-white 16-millimeter visuals and occasionally cloudy sound, as a garbled transmission from the ancients. But the astringent aesthetics resolve into the trappings of an all too recognizable sub-society: drab utilitarian surroundings, ceaseless bureaucratic ceremony, trumped-up administrivia, arbitrary judgments from pathetic figures, the glazed eyes of one's fellows. Past the superficial, what's the big deal? It's just another couple semesters in high school.

Contemporary reactions to the film would surely surprise them. “High School shows no stretching of minds,” writes Peter Janssen in Newsweek. “It does show the overwhelming dreariness of administrators and teachers who confuse teaching with discipline. The school somehow takes warm, breathing teen-agers and tries to turn them into 40-year-old mental eunuchs.” What eighteen-year-old could guess that this gritty time capsule was once banned in the state of Philadelphia for its sheer gall in daring to reveal that — brace yourself, America — teenagers subject to public education are, on the whole, bored and unreceptive? That's not the stuff of a brazen j'accuse — it's self-evident to the point of otiosity.

But regardless, what a gift Wiseman has given us. Each viewing of High School is tantamount to a trip, if a short one, in a time machine. Now often cited as an early example of cinéma vérité, the documentary drops us straight into Northeast High and ejects us 75 minutes later, having offered not a word of guidance, explanation or editorialization. We pass, ghostlike, through classroom, hallway, auditorium, office and gymnasium, rarely noticed by faculty, staff or student. (This is definitely a time before reality television.) On a hunt for the interesting, Wiseman's camera swings from one subject to the next, occasionally pausing to closely observe the fine detail of a grimace, fidget or hesitation.

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“Fish and other marine life could be left gasping for breath in
oxygen-poor oceans for thousands of years to come if global
warming continues unchecked, scientists warn in a new study.”
–National Geographic News; Jan. 28, 2009

Dead Zone

You are sequestered in water
I am confined by the air

You are scaly and finny
I am soft-skinned and fair

I am a reader of volumes
You are a swimmer in time

You read the text of the ocean
I stroke the sea of my mind

You draw your breath from a liquid
I take mine from a gas

I am as slow as a dimwit
You are exceedingly fast

I know little of coral
You know nothing of trees

You know the feel of a current
I know the touch of a breeze

You seem content to be fishy
I’m seldom content to be man

You take pleasure in isness
I take it however I can

Your limit seems bounded and narrow
I think my limit is none

I die by the bounty I squander
You die by the damage I’ve done

By Jim Culleny, December 7, 2009

Elatia Harris

Thanks to Brian D'Amato not only for the interview but for original visual images not available elsewhere. Above, Koh's Game, copyright Brian D'Amato

In the early '90s, the artist and writer Brian D'Amato published Beauty, an international bestseller about cosmetic surgery and young love gone wrong, badly wrong. Back then, it was all slightly futuristic, right down to its not very cuddly protagonist, a metrosexual monster whose fate I shall not uncork here. Reading it was about as much fun as you could have within a 25-mile radius of New Haven; you kept running into Derrida, but it was trashy enough to make you nice and guilty too. I fondly recall its Mayan sub-theme, and was delighted to find, a decade and a half later, that Brian D'Amato had gone Mayan in the biggest possible way, with In the Courts of the Sun, volume I of a trilogy, The Sacrifice Game, set both in the very near future and in 664 CE, the high point of Mayan civilization.

It's the read you would expect from the writer of Beauty — smart, funny, always surprising, and very sure-handedly grounded in technology and philosophy of science. You can read this as literature, but you can also get the sci-fi fix you need. You could even read it to find out how an orphaned Maya refugee interfaces with some beamish and satanic Mormons. There are lots of reasons to get involved, and, whichever you choose, you'll be glad you did. Soon, The Sacrifice Game will be available not only as a trilogy but as a game — one more form of time travel for those with a thirst for it.

Recently, I caught up with Brian D'Amato, who writes from Lake Michigan these days.

author photo Timothy Greenfield-Sanders

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Part One

Justin E. H. Smith

I.

I used to get very upset at the suggestion that there might be such a thing as 'non-Western philosophy'. Some years ago a German anthropologist friend told me she had heard, out on Broughton Island in Arctic Canada, Inuit elders using their free time, in the dim light of slowly burning seal blubber, to engage in leisurely dialogue about the nature of space and time. That's different, I insisted, because they were only addressing the issue (I supposed) within the comfortable mythological confines of their culture, rather than asking what space and time look like when you strip away your culture's contingent myths, which are, as Spinoza would say, satisfying only to the imagination, and then see what is left over. I had an even stronger complaint about what had come to be called 'African philosophy', 'Native American philosophy', and so on. These, I thought, were more the product of an unfortunate misunderstanding brought about by the politics of identity, which supposed that every identity group –and often what counts as an identity group, I noted, is only slapped together in hasty response to the classificatory schemes of the West: as if there could have been anything like a unified tradition across the African or North American continent prior to the period of colonial expansion– must come up with its own version of whatever it is that the West is thought to do well. I felt horribly discouraged when, on more than one occasion, while working the 'philosophy table' at my university's open house, I would meet adult Cree and Mohawks thinking of returning to school who, as they explained, might want to study 'your' (i.e., my) philosophy someday, but didn't feel any particular urgency to do so, since “we've got philosophers of our own.”

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By Aditya Dev Sood

The sun has been hanging low for a while now, so different from the high summer. I find myself imagining the extreme angle of its likely incidence, the cause of its fleeting presence nowadays. The garden gets next to no sun, and cold is setting into the house for the short but sharp winter that Delhi experiences. The cool dry air and gentle sun make this the season for mela-s, festivals of culture and commerce that are scripted into the cultural geography of all north India, but brought to exalted expression in the social calendar of New Delhi.

We began by buying soap made at an ashram in Gangotri, the Himalayan mouth of the river Ganga at the Dastkar handicraft mela. We traipsed through the sarees displayed at the Chinmaya Mission mela, and enjoyed the root-beer at the American Women's Association mela, and bratwurst with beer at the German Mela. This morning we're back from the Delhi Commonwealth Wives Association mela, where we bought woolen slippers and hats at a stall run by the wives of diplomats from Kyrgyztan.

Diverting as these outings are, they're just sideshows to the real mela event of the season, the India International Trade Fair. The IITF, as it is universally referred to, is promoted by a government body and held in a specially-constructed fair grounds called Pragati Maidan, literally 'Progress Pavillion.' The first IITF was held in 1980, at the very zenith of India's era of socialism. In keeping with the state symbolism of those times, the event would be inaugurated on the 14th of November ever year, the birth anniversary of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Over the years, Pragati Maidan's 150 acre site accumulated new halls, auditoria and spectacle sites in keeping with the annual needs of the IITF. Some of the major states of India, were allotted sites where they have built semi-permanent pavilions that strain to capture the cultural and economic ethos of their region. Karnataka's pavilion is built as an over-scale replica of the medieval stone temples that dot its rural landscape. Just across, Gujarat has traded up the standard kitsch-tourism representations in favor of an unconvincing replica of modern technology park, replete with multiple satellite dishes and LED displays. This seems more and more the style these days, with Punjab also featuring full-scale models celebrating call centers.

Once you step inside, each state pavilion offers more or less the same set of propaganda pieces: infrastructural achievements, investment opportunities, and culture and tourism destinations. The differences lay in the quality and manner in which these regional stories are told. West Bengal, where nothing has changed in 30 years is still using dioramas and macquettes to illustrate state projects like wind mill farms, and paying homage to its leading intellectuals through a gallery of heroes made up of black and white photographs. On the other hand, Bihar, now under new and dynamic leadership, is showing interactive displays which promise new kinds of investment opportunities in the state. There is something winning about this kind of regional self-celebration, for it suggests that the diverse infrastructural, trade, and business activities that go on in a particular region eventually come together to create a larger whole, whose total meaning is the state itself.

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Geese

This morning when the sky’s red skin is
drawn across a beginning and the grass
is taut with frost and the clarity
of the edge of things recalls
the precision of an engraver’s point
an irregular V of geese passes left to right
like beads of an animated rosary
each a honking Hail Mary
a striving prayer
an individual articulating dot
an I-am of we-are

we are moving south
we are honking like hell
we are drifting up and down
in a wandering V together
to reach some destination
by a means coded in our cells
by a wisdom unknown
by an accident or lovely intention
on a whim or a want
on an updraft or drawn down
by a turn in the weather

we have been invited and
we are moving south implacably
as life moves

by Jim Culleny
December 4, 2009

by Norman Costa

Scientific Psychology, an Oxymoron?

In the minds of many, including scientists from the more successful sciences, the field of psychology is not a science and may never be a science. The Nobel Laureate, Richard Feynman, was kind in his criticism of psychology as a science when he said that we have the form [of science] down, but we are not producing any laws of nature. In my view, psychology as a science has made some important contributions to describing mental life and behavior in animals and humans, but, on the whole, I tend to agree with Feynman.

I care about psychology as a science, very deeply. But, why should I care? Why should anyone care? Scientific psychology must care if we are to have confidence in our discipline as a science, in ourselves as scientists, and be respected by the larger scientific community as colleagues on an equal footing. For anyone who doubts that psychological science had a serious problem of credibility, consider the following:

1. The American Psychological Association (APA) did not issue a position in support of science in the classroom in the recent Dover, OH school case. The case involved the integrity of the school district's science curriculum for teaching of the science of evolutionary biology, and against the introduction of faith-based pretenses to science.
2. The ascendancy of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) is due, not in a small way, to the failure of mainstream psychology to embrace the mantel of science.
3. The de facto secession of Division 14 from APA and the creation an independent professional association, the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).

Students today are not as [insert your own text] as when I was a student.

I began teaching psychological research methods at the undergraduate and graduate levels after two careers in research psychology – one at IBM Corporation, and another as a social science research consultant. The new mission I gave myself was the training of the next generation of research psychologists. Very quickly, I fell in love with teaching, and I fell in love with my students (not inappropriately, I might add.) For the father in me, it felt like having my children back home again.

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Due to popular demand some further tasting from the part of the collection on Ethics. I know there is a mistake in the column. IT’S A JOKE.

Part one, Short Takes, can be seen here.

——————————————————

You can recognize the people who live for others by the haunted look on the faces of the others.

—Katherine Whithorn

*

Waiter to a table of Jewish Women: Is anything all right?

*

Atheist’s notation in the Bible: If true, then important

*

To err is human, to forgive supine

—S. J. Perelman

*

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by Edward B. Rackley

Nature captivates in Thailand. Its beaches and islands are legend; its birdlife and tropical flora endlessly entertain. On this visit though, nature bored me. A relentless jetlag was partly to blame. Its disorientations so warped my perceptions and instincts that I acquiesced to its inversions, accepting the Thai night as my day. Also, I was hungry not for nature but for the artifice of human imagination: grand emanations of culture, artisanry, cosmology. Has our petty species generated anything that I’ve never seen, never imagined? In creativity is there redemption for Homo Faber? For answers to this question Thailand is a gold mine.

Heavily subject to international marketing strategies and thus cast as the ‘Land of Smiles’, Thailand wants desperately to be permeated by magic. Of all possible reasons to be ‘desperately seeking’, permeation by magic is worthy enough, and seemingly free of ulterior motive. Orientalism and its facile seductions be damned, I thought, after my first week in country. If this place holds even one treasure of the human spirit, its authenticity will be self-evident to the most gullible and the most jaded.

From where I live it’s an 18-hour flight to Thailand. I learned to stop fighting jetlag long ago; it is now my companion and confidant. Wandering Bangkok streets and alleys at 3 am, nothing remained of the diurnal parade of human pursuit to entertain me. Roaming dog packs and the occasional buzz of a moto taxi broke the surprising silence of a vast urban labyrinth. I was left with night’s shadows and breezes, long walks along empty boulevards and closed shop fronts, the constant hum of yellow street lamps and neon. Repetition sets in and one begins inspecting a city for its anomalies, its artifacts of human touch, the physical traces of the shopkeeper at home ensconced in dreams.

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By Randolyn Zinn

Rehearsal is everything and Frederick Wiseman knows it. As usual for this eminent American documentarian, his interest lies in the workaday world, but in his latest project he finds the harmony of place serving the artistic process. The opening shot fills the screen with a bird’s eye view of the rooftops of Paris as the white domed confection of Le Sacre Coeur entices the eye to the horizon line. Then the camera cuts to a closer view of the ninth arrondisement with its stately mansard roofs and street life before dropping down to gaze upon the facade of the 19th century Beaux-Arts Palais Garnier, home to the world's oldest ballet company.

YOU ARE THERE

Wiseman intercuts scenes of rehearsal with architectural snapshots of the busy hive that is the Palais Garnier – an apt metaphor because he finds an actual beekeeper harvesting honey on the roof. Multiple close-ups in underground quarters show lighting instruments rigged to pipe and thick ropes coiled in meticulous spirals on the floor. Just as meticulous is the student footwork in ballet class. Throughout, Wiseman cuts away from the dancers to admire the graceful curved balustrade of the central spiral staircase that connects cupola to basement. He stops in at the cafeteria at lunchtime, watches ballet shoes being dyed in the costume shop, and visits the empty opera house as a young man cleans its plush scarlet velvet seats. Meanwhile an underground stream (the legendary hiding place of the Phantom of the Opera) hosts not only living plants…but swimming fish. Wiseman sees everything.

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