HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS: I haven't got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's lush biopic about Cuban gay/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy's life, you know what to expect, really.

I will say that the one major objection I had at the start of the movie--why are they talking in heavily-accented English, rather than either Spanish or accentless English?--ultimately struck me as a really interesting choice. It started to make sense for me during the class in Russian, and then there was the scene with Arenas and the exiles speaking in French: Using heavy accents is a way to express the position of an island caught between America and the Soviet Union, with no sense that her own language is adequate to the political world of her times. The accents also, of course, make Cuba's global marginalization mirror the internal exile of the homosexual. If you don't speak Spanish you will miss some of the movie--although an English-speaker can probably guess the meaning of the mural of Castro, with the slogan, LA HISTORIA ME ABSOLVERA--but mostly I think the decision to make the movie in an inherently marginal and alienating accent was the right one.

The final moment of violence, well... if it really happened then so be it and I'm sorry. If it didn't, putting it in your movie seems to me like a gross concession to the American revulsion from suffering. I would say more but don't want to make it too obvious what happens; suffice it to say that I think the treatment of suffering-in-Cuba and suffering-in-America would have been much deeper and more complex had this thing not happened.

COLD FEVER: I would just like to warn you that Saturday Night Fever is one of the most depressing movies I've seen in a while.

No, really: At first you think you're just watching the story of a working-class shlub who has a bickering family and doesn't treat his girl very well. Kitchen-sink, sure, but not kitchen-Titanic.

What's interesting is that things start to barrel downhill right after Tony Manero's brother quits the priesthood. The family is devastated; everyone around ex-Father Manero still treats him like "the priest/he's the doctor/he can handle the shocks"; the disco becomes his confessional, and therefore his purgatory. After that it's just kind of a domino rally of abortion, race war, suicide, and other forms of despair.

Who won the sexual revolution?

The Castroist emissary at the moment was called Sánchez Parodi, today Castro's Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs. He might have been Parodi but he was not the target of my parodies. Parody is an act of love and those men are hideous.
--Mea Cuba

Now even the Soviet Union has attained a Utopian destiny: she is, like every Utopia, to be found nowhere.
--Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Mea Cuba (1968)

THE TORTURE GARDEN: The other place I went in LA was the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach. We went to the main galleries, where the most memorable things for me were the Warhol-riffing Cuban soup cans sardonically lauding "America's Favorite Revolution," and a... lenticular?... picture in which the shining girders and industrial debris shimmered and shifted, if you tilted your head, to reveal a small overlooked human being at the far corner of the frame.

But the current exhibit is what I really want to tell you all about. It's billed as landscape paintings by David Siqueiros, who apparently is better known (though not to me) as a muralist. But these aren't landscapes in any traditional sense. They were mostly painted from photographs or from the inside of the man's own head, rather than from nature; many were painted while he was in prison. Some are surreal, science-fiction scenes of bulbous future cities. Some are (often unsatisfying) allegories of various aspects of Mexican history and revolutionary politics.

But some are just horror. Black, churning waves; twisting shapes which could be trees or monsters or both; thick, lurid reds; martyred men and menacing ravines. The whole world has turned against itself in his art. It's frightening and it's impossible to look away from.

If you're in the area you really should check this out.

"I tell you what," said Miss Haldin, after a moment of reflection. "I believe that you hate revolution; you fancy it's not quite honest. You belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us--so much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea of revolutionary action for those you think well of as if it were something--how shall I say it--not quite decent."

I bowed my head.

"You are right," I said. "I think quite highly of you."

"Don't suppose I do not know it," she began hurriedly. "Your friendship has been very valuable."

"I have done little else but look on."

She was a little flushed under the eyes.

"There is a way of looking on which is valuable. I have felt less lonely because of it. It's difficult to explain."

"Really? Well, I too have felt less lonely. That's easy to explain, though. But it won't go on much longer. The last thing I want to tell you is this: in a real revolution--not a simple dynastic change or a mere reform of institutions--in a real revolution the best characters do not come to the front. A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, humane, and devoted natures; the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a movement--but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, of disenchantment--often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured--that is the definition of revolutionary success. There have been in every revolution hearts broken by such successes. But enough of that. My meaning is that I don't want you to be a victim."

"If I could believe all you have said I still wouldn't think of myself," protested Miss Haldin.
--Under Western Eyes