A rare medical condition originally noted in the late 19th century, but much later brought to public attention at Exeter in 2015. It occurs when the individual cannot visualize images to go with words, spoken or read. This is quite different from how most of us read, study, and process words generally.

destroy itself because of crazy politics, runaway corruption, greed, ignorance, selfishness, out of control violence, and war on rules, democracy, law and order, and one another.

Personally: one’s own body throughout life. Getting teeth, eyes, knees, hearts, livers, limbs repaired to keep things running.

Externally: leaking basements and toilets, cracked sidewalks, crumbling roads, collapsing apartment blocks and bridges, driveways waiting for mudjacking, the damaged highways and towns because of flooding, fires, earthquakes, etc. Endangered forests, polluted oceans, the smoky air we breathe. All kinds of technological failures including moon flights cancelled because of engine failure.

People, companies, countries constantly repairing, fixing one thing or other. The ensuing difficult matters of choice and daily and long-term choices borne out of complete necessity for continuance and survival.

Infrastructure. Everywhere, everything, everybody.

Even in relationships, societies, and civilizations.

Think about it: just how far this metaphor goes and applies.

How’s your infrastructure going today?

You haven’t seen everything, especially those of you familiar with Ibsen’s plays like A Doll’s House, Hedda Gabler, or An Enemy of the People. The Wild Duck (written in 1884) starts very unremarkably with Hjalmar Ekdal, a lower-class, daydreaming man, going to a dinner party and ‘catching up’ with his host’s rebellious, idealistic son Gregers Werle, who later will bring grief and tragedy to Ekdal and his family.

The Ekdal family includes Ekdal (played befuddledly by perennial favorite Denholm Elliott), his devoted, hard-working wife Gina (Rosemary Leech), their charming, losing-her-eyesight daughter Hedvig (played by young Jenny Agutter before she was cast in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout movie), and Old Ekdal, her demented grandfather (played memorably by John Robinson) who, with the daughter, keeps a menagerie of pets in the attic including the symbolic wild duck of the title. The duck later becomes significant in the layered, ironic, tragic ending.

Also going blind is Ekdal’s rich friend Werle, senior, who has strangely supported Ekdal, his father, and their family enabling them to survive their non-stop hardships. As it turns out, Gina once worked for Werle as as servant while he was bent on seducing her. There is some mystery as to how Ekdal and Gina got together and even some doubt as to Hedvig’s parents. Mysteries have been compounded over time and eventually Gregers (played convincingly by Derek Godfrey),  who has an obsessive passion for truth tries to set Ekdal straight on the past. His idealism, insistence on honesty, and well-meaning advice are the toxic motivation for Ekdal’s disillusionment with his wife and daughter and, ultimately, leads to the play’s absurd, brutal, dramatically-ironic, tragic ending.

There are many themes in the play, notably reality/truth vs. illusion, the sins of parents being visited on their children, repeated cyclical behaviors, youthful innocence vs. the limitations of adult authority, the dangers of excessive idealism and honesty, and the conflict between the individual and society. Plot-wise, character-wise, and thematically, all conflicts are finally unified by the bird of the play’s title.

Other patterns such as the fact Ekdal and Old Ekdal once contemplated suicide and that Werle, senior (also going blind) seduced his latest maid after Gina left add to the depth and circularity of the fated outcome. The sensible, prescient character of the doctor-boarder is also an effective counterpoint to Gregers’ nonsense and meddling.

The production itself kicks into high gear after the laid-back opening, aided by constant overlapping dialogue, showing how these people don’t communicate or listen to one another. The sets are the familiar BBC tv claustrophobic Victorian rooms, emphasizing dinginess and an atmosphere of entrapment without escape. Max Faber did a nice edited job on the script; normally this play is ponderously longer in running time. Director Alan Bridges has created an efficiently compelling, horrific ending of Ibsen’s most shocking of his play conclusions.

The photographer whose 1964-65 photos made Dylan very famous, iconic, and mystifying.

Obit: Alice Munro, 92.

The American International Series directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price (*unless otherwise indicated):

(Famous Swedish filmmaker Alf Sjoberg’s adaptation-homage of Strindberg’s famous 1888 play later, incidentally, led the way to his collaboration with a young Ingmar Bergman on another movie and influenced Bergman’s early filmmaking thematically and stylistically.)

This notorious single-act play used many stylistic devices including tracking shots of horses and carriages, dream scenes, multiple flashbacks to childhoods of two characters, dissolves, plays on light and shadows, and visual symbolism such as a birdcage, the ‘Garden of Eden’ estate, the park nude statues, and large European paintings in the house. Sjoberg’s goal was to open up the play which basically took place in one room on stage, in order to make Miss Julie more entertaining, interesting, and understandable to filmgoers of his day.

He also used some controversial content like nude boy and the same clothed boy escaping an outdoor biffy by crawling through one of the toilets, and later getting whipped (offscreen) by his father to appease his employer’s manservant who chases after him. Sex, too, is thickly suggested and referenced in this movie and the film was banned in the U.S. when it first came out.

This tragedy is centered on Miss Julie, an aristocrat’s daughter raised by weird, manipulative parents, who was raised by her mother to treat men like dirt. She becomes heavily involved with her manservant Jean who uses her for his ends, eventually leading to tragedy for both of them. She humiliates him early on, flirting shamelessly with him despite their class differences. Later, Jean degrades her and uses her to steal her father’s money so they can escape to France to open an inn.

There is a definite modern S & M undertone to this struggle between the sexes as a ‘liberated’/new woman is disgraced and exploited in a manner representing 19th century’s male treatment of women. Julie meanly whips her dog Diana, but she is also seen using her whip on men. There is one scene where Julie’s father shows off a painting of his mistress/bride-to-be to a roomful of envious men (unabashed male gazing of the woman as object).

In flashbacks, the story of Julie’s parents, their manipulative relationship, and the control games they play over Julie become almost as important as the main Julie-Jean plot, and act as psychological background as to why Julie is the defective way she is. Her mother is a manhating misandrist who warps Julie’s sense of the male sex. Her disgraced, chauvinistic father treats her better and looks out for her more. The crazy mother sleeps with the father’s friend and sets fire to the house; her husband eventually tries to commit suicide.

Certainly, ‘forbidden fruit’ Julie is mentally unstable, to say the least. She is also terribly selfish, uncentered, fickle, provocative, mean, and suicidal. Both she and Jean trade childhood memories and even strange dreams that exemplify their core views of life. In many ways, they are alike: restless, callous, rough, and soulless. The caddish Jean is terribly shallow, hedonistic, and materialistic; despite their class differences, he has no qualms about making her a stereotypical fallen woman. Julie herself becomes the bird cage symbol used in the opening credits. Though she is manipulative in the first part of the film, she becomes an exploited, used creature by the end.

I will add that many of the characters’ psychological depths are communicated non-verbally beyond words, and via an emotionally-cueing melodramatic soundtrack. Simply put, this aesthetic black and white film covers a lot of territory in 90 minutes. And Sjoberg does finally succeed in making Strindberg’s play more accessible to modern audiences via the medium of film. The movie is truly an irrational inter-generational battle of the sexes by Strindberg with Sjoberg’s social criticism baked into it all the way.

(DVD includes interesting essays and many extras. Restored and subtitled in English)

When she chose to announce that Trump’s documents trial was postponed indefinitely, she was responding to a full day of Stormy Daniels’ damning detailed testimony in the election fraud trial.  Her announcement was all about the timing and making Trump feel better on another damning legal front. She was doing this for him mainly, but also for his crazy deluded followers and to suggest to the Supreme Court that yes, he is immune from any criminal prosecution. She was trying to influence the latter case as well even though she was showing her partisan hand and admitting that she was incapable of judging any important legal case.