Inprint: Volver

Published in Inprint, Issue 5, October 31, 2006

Volver, Dir. Pedro Almodóvar, Starring Penélope Cruz, Carmen Maura, Rated R, Opens Nov. 3rd

Out of breath, Raimunda (Penélope Cruz) opens her front door slightly. Her friend sees blood streaked on her neck and asks if she’s hurt. She brushes it off, saying “Women’s troubles.” This is the essence of Pedro Al¬modóvar’s Volver, a film revolving around women, their lives and their relationships.

Volver, in Spanish, means “to return,” and here it means to re¬turn to Raimunda’s and her sister, Sole’s (Lola Dueñas) home village, to their family and to every¬thing else in their lives. Most importantly, this includes the return of the ghost of their mother, Irene (Carmen Maura), who died in a fire with their father.

Almodóvar is fascinated with strong women, and the actresses in this film hold their own ground. The female cast collectively won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Cruz is perfectly costumed for the role in big teased hair, stylish clothes and lovely curves, both real and false (her ass is padded). Cruz exudes maternal strength and despair at the same time while remaining calm. Almodóvar always finds grittier and fleshier roles for Cruz as opposed to her American films and Raimunda is her best to date.

Volver also marks the reunion of actress Carmen Muera and Al¬modóvar, 18 years after Women on the Verge of a Nervous Break¬down. She flawlessly slips back into Almodóvar’s world flawlessly now as an older woman. Pretending to be a Russian immigrant, her cute, wide-eyed expressions hide her guilt as she attempts to reconnect with her daughters.

Almodóvar uses close-ups to emphasize key scenes, like the pristine, white quilted paper towel dropping onto a puddle of blood, the red quickly soaking the white and the overhead shot of Raimunda cleaning a knife slowly after dinner.

The film isn’t surrealist at all, fantastically real is a more suitable description. From Irene ap¬pearing out of nowhere in the trunk of Sole’s car, to strong winds that blow mementos and flowers off of graves, every ac¬tion in the movie makes sense and is believable, though it first seems out of place.

With my fading high school knowledge of Spanish, I know some dialogue was not translated properly. Despite this minor set-back, Almodóvar’s film remains clear, tinted with his signature red, speaking to (and never for) women everywhere.

Peter Godwin: From Zimbabwe to Greenwich Village, Via the Front Lines

Photo by Monica Uszerowicz

[This is an article I wrote for Inprint back in the day.]

December, 2006

From crossing the Silverstream River in former Rhodesia, strapped to his nanny’s back, to fighting on the losing side in Zimbabwe’s civil war, Eugene Lang journalism professor Peter Godwin has come a long way to New York City.

Godwin, 48, with pale blue eyes behind rimless glasses and dark hair flecked with gray, offers his student’s guidance with his intense, worldly experiences as a freelance journalist across the globe.

Godwin got his start in journalism in a different way than most others in his field. The son of British expatriates, he was born in Rhodesia (now called Zimbabwe) and spent his first 19 years there. Thanks in part to the country’s political instability, he left to study at Cambridge University in England. He soon found himself back in Africa for his post-graduate thesis research. But before leaving Britain, he contacted several publications and asked if he could submit articles about the journey.

“I didn’t know anything about journalism particularly, but it just struck me as it might be a fun thing to do,” Godwin recalled, sitting a classroom in the 12th Street building. “My friends all mocked me because I was doing it with sort of a blotchy ballpoint pen on school notepaper.”

He mailed his handwritten articles to publications to The Sunday Times, not knowing whether they would be published. After the trip, when he reached his parents’ house in Zimbabwe, he found out that The Times actually ran his pieces as a series which then led to a freelance job as a foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times. Over the next ten years, the job took him all over Africa and Eastern Europe.

Among the many stories he broke was the Matabeleland massacres in Zimbabwe in 1983, where the government-sponsored militia tortured or killed everyone they felt were rebels while also killed many innocent white farmers.

“If we could highlight it and actually blow the whistle on this thing, then there would be a good chance we could give them some pause and that it would stop,” he said. To report the story, he visited violence-plagued rural villages that were off-limits to the press. At one point, he dressed as a priest and accompanied three nuns to witness what was happening. That’s when he discovered a mine where soldiers dropped off corpses daily. He smelled “the unmistakable stink of rotting human,” he wrote in Mukiwa—A White Boy in Africa, his award-winning memoir.

By then, Godwin was a wanted man by the government, and soldiers were on the look-out. He managed to drive away from the site. Later, he picked up an unassuming hitchhiking solider. The sergeant at the next roadblock told the soldier they were looking for a journalist dressed as a priest, and because the soldier said Godwin was his good friend, he managed to escape.

“I was younger and it was one of those things where afterwards, in the cold light of day, you kind of think ‘What was I thinking?’” he recalled. “Yeah, I got out okay and it was then a whole different species of problems. Once I had written the piece, it got very, very hot for me, and there was a serious death threat to my life and I had to get out of Zimbabwe.”

Later in his career, Godwin didn’t stick to the written word—he produced documentary films for the BBC, covering a wide-range of topics, like Pakistani politics, Filipino pirates and the Thai sex industry. He won several awards for his work.

Now, he is focused on teaching. “If you’re writing books, you become very misanthropic and completely de-socialized,” he said. “Teaching is a very good antidote to that.”

“There’s no substitute for real curiosity and I think a lot of good journalism starts from that basis,” he said, about journalistic ambitions. “And that includes approaching subjects that you don’t know anything about.”

Students in Godwin’s course, Foreign Correspondence: Windows on the World, typically research a specific area of the world, like China or Indonesia, to find the beginnings of a story. One student arrived at an opium field in Afghanistan while another went on a heavy metal festival circuit in Sweden.

After teaching at Princeton and Sarah Lawrence, Godwin found that, “Lang students, to me, seem to be more cosmopolitan. They’re slightly edgier and don’t feel like the world owes them anything. I like the fact that it’s not a campus university. The kids go out the front door here and they’re in New York City.”

Currently, Godwin is working on a screenplay of Mukiwa, to be filmed next year in South Africa. His next memoir, When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, is centered on the “disintegration of [my] family set against the collapse of the country,” of Zimbabwe.

After being exiled, Godwin was, to his great relief, allowed back in. This suited him: he can’t seem to escape the country and the continent.

“I miss Africa tremendously. It’s not just a nostalgic thing. If I’m not there after a while, I start to ache for it,” he said.

After spending one more semester at Eugene Lang, Godwin now teaches at Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs. You can read a more current interview done by my friend and former-Godwin-student John.

Briarwood, New York

85th Road in Briarwood.

[I wrote this for Inprint, Issue #15, May 1st.]

No one’s ever heard of Briarwood, my quiet, small neighborhood off of Queens Boulevard, tucked in the outskirts of Jamaica and Kew Gardens. My credit card statements are addressed to Jamaica, New York, as if Briarwood doesn’t even exist to Citibank. Though, the MTA recognizes the neighborhood enough to create a subway station there: Briarwood-Van Wyck, home to the F train.

Whenever I tell people I live in Queens, they gasp and say, “Oh my god, that’s so far away! How long does it take you to get to school?” Forty-five minutes to an hour, I answer, depending on the train. Then they gasp again, “Oh my god, that’s so long!” Compared to my hour-and-a-half trek to high school in the Bronx, going to Lang is a breeze. Even getting home during the late hours (or early morning, whichever way you choose to look at it) is easy because the F train never stops; although there might be a twenty minute wait.

I live on 85th Road, on top of a hill. One side is so steep for several blocks that it rests on Hillside Avenue. The other side slants slowly, twisting and meshing into other streets, until it comes to a stop on Queens Boulevard.

Outside my apartment, there are two other similar buildings, all part of the same apartment complex. In the center is the circular pathway where I learned to ride my bike, going round and round until dark and the pathway that became a make-shift baseball field, each entrance substituting for the bases. A stout, wide bush where I saw my first robin in spring sat in the very center of it. Children walk to the elementary school just across the street, and when they’re a bit older, they walk a bit further to the junior high school right behind that elementary school. The sky’s clearer above and I can count how many stars I see with two hands.

Despite this calm and serene atmosphere (and because of it), Briarwood is not very exciting. Besides the Little League parade every spring, not much happens in this little neighborhood. I spend most of my time in Manhattan, where it’s livelier.

Going home, though, is an indulgence I get to relive every night, because it’s a break from the constant motion of Manhattan, walking through the quiet, hilly roads of Briarwood where I used to play manhunt through the streets and buildings of the neighborhood and watched in awe as a friend threw a ball up to the roof of a six-story apartment building. Briarwood is where I grew up, and for now, it’s nice being here.


Summer Briarwood skies.

Baptism by Fire: An Interview with Justin Kirk

Justin Kirk in front of The New School.

In honor of the Weeds season 3 premiere tomorrow (I've watched the first four episodes, and let me say that they are excellent), I am posting an interview I had with Justin Kirk (playing Andy Botwin, Nancy Botwin's pothead brother-in-law) back in November 2006 for Inprint. Although the main peg of the interview was his film Flannel Pajamas, I still managed to talk to him about Weeds.

Standing in front of The New School on a Monday afternoon, Emmy-nominated actor Justin Kirk looks just like a regular student—hair arranged messily, hands in his pockets, standing slightly hunched with a stylish rip in his jeans.

Kirk is probably best known for playing AIDs-stricken Prior Walter, whose boyfriend abandons him, in the HBO miniseries Angels in America and his part as the sex-obsessed, pot-smoking brother-in-law Andy Botwin in Showtime’s TV series Weeds—who, among other things, teaches his youngest nephew how to masturbate into a banana peel. Currently, he is promoting his newest film, director Jeff Lipsky’s Flannel Pajamas, the story of the rise and fall of a relationship. In person, Kirk is similar to his acting persona—unabashedly delivering smart, sarcastically tinged laugh lines, all the while exuding charm.

We begin the interview in the Gigantic Pictures’ downtown office. I tell him I’m majoring in poetry. “Nice, so this will be a very poetic interview,” he says. “Feel free to twist my words.”

Justin Kirk grew up in Washington state and attended elementary school on an Indian reservation—“I was just a kid, so I don’t have great sociological insight,” he says. Then he moved to Minneapolis, where he enrolled in the Children’s Theater School. From the beginning, Kirk says, he felt like he wanted to be an actor. At the age of 18, he moved to Los Angeles and then ended up in New York, where he did theater. Currently splitting his time between Los Angeles and New York (he comes back at least once a year for work), Kirk says he “loves Los Angeles for all the reasons you’re not supposed to like it. I’m a kind of person that doesn’t need to be doing stuff, so I don’t mind being stuck in traffic and staring. I’m sort of a daydreamer.”

“There’s something just really sweet to me about people from everywhere who have come to this place with their big dreams, and they’re going to roll the dice and it’s going to happen,” he says about LA. “And a lot of people find it depressing, but I think it’s kinda cute.” He laughs. “The difference is that in New York, life is thrust upon you. In Los Angeles, you have to search it out. I couldn’t leave my apartment [in New York] without running into some asshole that I knew, whereas in Los Angeles, you gotta have a destination, and you have to get in your car to go there.” But, he adds, “I find myself in New York a lot. You can’t get out. In the beginning, I was really burnt out [by the city], but each time I come, I realize I do miss it a lot.”

In Flannel Pajamas, Kirk plays Stuart, a man whose profession is to entice unknowing tourists to Broadway shows by fabricating elaborate stories. He embarks on a relationship with Nicole, played by Julianne Nicholson, the eager-to-please girlfriend with a slightly neurotic family. Stuart is “a guy who seems to have a plan for his life and in the world of relationships, [when] he meets Nicole,” Kirk explains. “He thinks [she] is pretty perfect for him and fits all the things he wants, and starts hammering her into the hole of that plan that he has.” The character, he adds, is “confident and also insecure. It’s sort of what actors are. A mix of egotism and insecurity.”


Justin Kirk as Andy Botwin in Weeds.

Kirk clears up one confusing aspect of the film: how Stuart and Nicole meet. It is, he says, not through their therapist (as most viewers are led to believe) but their dermatologist—a detail that greatly changes the audience’s perspective of the movie. “The question of why they were going to a dermatologist,” he jokes, “is equally important,” as to what hidden, psychological issues the characters might have.

He recalls his most famous role, in Angels in America, as “such an ordeal.” The play (Angels in America) was the play of my generation of New York actors,” he explains. “Actually, the first play I did on Broadway was across the street from Part Two [Perestroika] of Angels in America, and our play was not a huge hit, and they had huge lines.”

“It was a burden to say the least. The legacy the play already had when we started was immense, and then added to it was Meryl Streep and Al Pacino. There was no question that people would be watching it while we were making it, so that felt a little scary,” he says. “I’ve learned a lot from it, I will never have the same sort of fears and torture that I had making it, cause it was sort of like baptism by fire, which was a good thing.”

Kirk says he’s obsessed with with political television and blogs (especially during the months leading up to the elections) and with music. He sings a little bit of Wilco to me (“I know we don’t talk much”) and recommends The Replacements. As we leave the office and wait for the elevator, he asks me how I am getting back to school. The subway, I tell him.

“I can give you a lift,” he says. After looking for his driver and car, we are off, and that’s how Kirk winds up having his photo taken in front of The New School.

On Weeds:
"I feel really blessed to have that job. I worked with Mary Louise Parker in Angels in America, and so I heard about the show, she was doing this show called Weeds on Showtime. And then I didn’t come on until the fourth episode of the first season. They sent me some material and it was the scene where I’m pretending to be my nephew (Silos) and masturbating while I IM his deaf girlfriend. And I was like, this is going to be good.

"I just sort of connected to it right away. I went in and met them one night, pretty simple process. Most of the time, getting on a television show…I think maybe it’s different if it’s on Showtime, well It’s this horrible process where we have to go through network and studio both, Then you go into an office or a tiny little space with about 20 or 25 suits, guys that are executives who just got their jobs a few months ago or whatever, and they watch you do your thing, and then maybe the head of the network is there and when he laughs, they all laugh. I mean, it’s right out of a movie. It’s just at their whim, it’s just so ridiculous. This [Weeds audition] was a much simpler process. When I went in, I didn’t’ know if it was going to be for an episode or two episodes, and the next day they said, they signed me up for a regular, and I was very pleased about that. It was the perfect television show. All the reasons not to do television are nullified by our show. Our seasons are short, and most importantly the material’s just better than anything, you know, it’s different than most shows, the writing’s great, the people’s great. Long may we wave, I hope that."

On "Pittsburgh," Season 2 finale:
"I think she [the writer] wrote that so Showtime could never get anyone else to, so they could never fire her, cause no one else would know how to get out of it. I don’t know what they’re going to do. I have an idea about some of the stuff, though."

And here's to another amazing season.

Last Inprint Closing

I've been working on Inprint, New School University's newspaper, for a long, long time. Right now, we're in the middle of our last closing of the semester, my last closing of my undergraduate (keeping my fingers crossed for grad school/journalism school in the future) career.

I am graduating on May 18th.

But that's a different story.

As I type this, I am in the middle of working on my last article for Inprint, which I ideally should be working on now. Later on today, I will go to school, go to the computing lab, and work on my final design for this final, super-sized and in color issue.

It's kinda sad.

Peter said the other day, you know, we're going to have to edit our mail signatures. I didn't think about that before. I have to get rid of
"Managing Editor/Production Director
INPRINT
Serving Eugene Lang College and the New School community
eugenelang-inprint.blogspot.com "

What do I put there instead?

It's kinda scary.

But for now, I'll go back to my article and maybe everything'll be okay. Maybe.