The Met Exhibit from Pergamon: Hellenistic Ecstatically Excellent

If you have not had a chance to catch a glimpse of the treasures of the Hellenistic Age on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, you only have a week left.  This incredible collection brings together artifacts, statues, and objects from Pergamon, the most intact city from the Hellenistic Period. This period is marked roughly from the time after the death of Alexander the Great that resulted in an amalgamation of cultures and resources from the vast empire Alexander had united under the ideals of Hellas until the takeover of ancient Greece by the Roman Empire.

This period of time is remarkable in its aesthetics as it represented the human body with a dramatic tenseness and dynamism so that historians termed the style Hellenistic Baroque. Statues took on contortions of form, a fluidity of motion, and broke down the conventions of Classical forms to reveal the individual personality of the human subject they try to depict.  Hellenistic art became fascinated as much with busts of powerful political and military elite as with common subjects (for example, a boy taking a thorn out of his foot, an old woman wrapped in a shawl in a marketplace, a dwarf laughing).  Hellenism took the humanism of the Classical Period in art to a new level to reveal the individualized personality of the subject.  The arts of the Hellenistic Age are literally springing out of the hard limestone and marble, dancing, laughing, crying, dying.

Knowledge of other culture’s techniques in jewelry-making and the accumulation of the wide reserves of gold from the entire empire, including high concentrations in the Middle East, made possible intricate designs and heavy ornateness of unparalleled quality.   Don’t leave without taking in long gazes of the gilded armlets of mermaids bearing babies, headdresses dangling with tassles of gold twisted into the knot of Hercules and precious stone, hair pieces to hold a lady’s bun.

The Pergamon Exhibit also includes a reconstructed replica of the original Temple of Athena in Pergamon and an imposing Pallas Athene, the tallest statue of the entire show.  Another room recounts the finding of the shipwreck of the merchant ship off the island of Antikythera that resulted in many objects of art that give insight into the period.  This included the first attempt to create a ‘computer’ by the Greeks named the Antikythera mechanism.

The splendor of the Hellenistic Age sprawls on the 2nd floor of the Metropolitan packing the wing with objects from as far away as Turkey, Rome, Greece, and Berlin.  (To actually physically experience the splendor of the altar sanctuary of the Temple at Pergamon you must visit Berlin where it was literally lifted from its mound in its entirety in Turkey and transported to the German museum).

Here is just a sampling of the treasures you will experience up close:

Murals with Greek themes curb graffiti

In an effort that has proved effective for curbing the repeated occurrence of graffiti, Congressman Joseph Crowley’s office has teamed up with Councilman Costa Constantinides to fund mural making at certain key points in Queens.  One such location that has repeatedly been “bombed” is the train tunnel next to the Stathakion Center or AHEPA Headquarters in Astoria.  Working with the not-for-profit organization 501 See Streets, this beautification effort has put a team of street artists to create a Greek-theme inspired mural.  Director of 501 See Streets, Noah Sheroff concedes, “We have seen a reduction in tags and graffiti when we paint murals.”  Muralist Marthalicia Mataritta and her brother had primed over the graffiti-infested tunnel space when it was tagged before they could start the project.   501 See Streets is an public arts organization whose aim is to combat urban blight and instill pride in communities by partnering with community-based organizations and small-businesses and street artists to create works for public spaces.

A similar location in Woodside between 48th and 49th Streets has proven successful in keeping graffiti at bay.  The mural at the Stathakion center aims to mirror the Hellenic identity of Astoria by featuring gods and goddesses of the Olympic pantheon, ancient philosophers such as Aristotle, and classical architecture.

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MBFGW2: A Must See again and again!

The big problem with a sequel to a blockbuster is the danger that it won’t keep the standards or pack the punch of the original.  That certainly is not the case with My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2; in fact, I believe MBFGW2 is superior to the first version.  This is something quite rare in the film world.

Having just got back from Lincoln Cinemas pre-screening of the flick, I am still caught up in the rapture of the experience.  Nia Vardalos and John Corbett were on hand to usher in the preview and to remind us that it has been 14 years since the release of the first movie.  But, it was all worth the wait.

Not only does MBFGW2 adhere to the original characters with original cast that we can recognize and continue to love , Gus and Maria Portokalos, Theia Vaso, Toula and Ian, but it goes beyond the first in the depth of its themes, the complexity of conflict, and the roundedness of its characters.  While the first version made us laugh because it played with common Greek stereotypes, and don’t’ get me wrong the second one does the same, wrenching out peals of deep laughter from its audience, the second goes beyond just telling a funny story to grapple with the conflicts of identity that shape Greek American existence.

We see in the second version Toula and Ian fast forward 18 years later with their daughter a senior in high school about to enter college.  More than one conflict appears in this version, as opposed to the central one in the first mainly focusing on Toula’s coming out as a marriageable daughter and her conflict in marrying a ‘xeno’.  Paris, their daughter, for one feels the love/hate dynamic of growing up bicultural.  She is not a member of the Greek Club but instead chooses to wear heavy blue eyeliner and dark hoodies to fit in as a typical teen growing up in a Chicago suburb.  She loves her big Greek family, but she wants to stay true to her budding individuality.  The big decision is where she will choose to go to college: stay local at one of the universities in Chicago or venture far far away from her overly dramatic family.  Toula monologues the conflict precisely when she says, “Greek families stick together so closely sometimes some of us get stuck.”  Her big issue is to get unstuck.  Paris, a second version of Toula, living with her extended clan has to hear the same spiel from Pappou, “You look old. You have to get married and have Greek babies.”  Pappou is resolved from the first scene to get Paris a Greek boyfriend.

There are issues with Toula and Ian’s marriage as well.  “There is no romance after marriage,” Ian says more than once.  Toula is too busy being a supermom, taking care of the restaurant (the travel agency closed, a casualty of the economic downturn), tending to the ailments of her elderly father, and the one who fixes everything that she has neglected her role as a wife.  They are suffering through the boredom of middleagehood and their love life is paying the price.  The conflict for them is to rekindle the spark in their marriage.  To this end, the ever-wise Thea Voula comes to their aid. “Go on a date with your husband,” she advises Toula. Remember you were a girlfriend before you were a mother. In her cut-to-the-chase, no-nonsense tone, she tells her to “shave everything.” Connected to this conflict is Toula’s need to take a step back and allow her daughter to grow. She has to face the painful process of separating from a beloved only daughter, something that is difficult for any mother to do but excruciating for a Greek because of the family’s tightness.

Perhaps the most surprising conflict is between Gus and Maria, the yiayia and papou’s relationship.  It turns out while Gus was conducting genealogy research in his efforts to prove that he is a direct descendent of Alexander the Great he uncovers his marriage certificate from Greece. But there is a problem. It was never signed by the priest (he had not technically been ordained as there was no money back then).  That means the couple was technically never married.  So what starts off as an oversight blows up into a major test of their 50-year-long marriage.  Maria refuses to marry him without his giving her a proper proposal.  The possibility that they are not married, spins her into a deeper consideration of do they really want to? She starts to deeply revisit her reasons for marrying him in the first place and uses this as an opportunity to review her life and the choices she has made.  He had not proposed to her in a romantic way but as an ultimatum, “I am leaving for American in a few months, if you can survive with me, come along.”  His refusal to propose escalates into her going on strike: she refuses to do his laundry or the cooking, or to sleep in the same bed with him (as they are technically not married). There is even contention in the family business; he is technically the owner, which makes her his employee.  “In that case, you owe me 50 years of back payments for working overtime,” she reminds him.

For a while it seems that the foundation of the clan, the yiayia and pappou, do not want to marry; what they took for granted is no longer a given.  Only a mishap while Gus was having a bath causing him to go to the hospital turns the story around.  On a gurney about to be wheeled into the ambulance, Gus makes a plea for Maria to accompany him because he can’t live without her. That was a good enough proposal which ushers in the second half of the film (much like the first film): arranging for the big wedding for yiayia and pappou.

MBFGW2 works the second time around because there is so much stuff to make you laugh again and again: the formula that worked well for the first movie continues into the second and then some. The exaggeration in the first movie is even more exaggerated in the second.

Here’s some of the stock ingredients that made for laughs:

Pappou’s panacea of Windex (the first scene of the movie is his unfreezing the driver’s door by spraying Windex on it) helps him unhinge an ailing hip joint (he even sprays it into his pants).

Thea Vaso’s litany of physical ailments. “ There is a mole on my tummy shaped like Mykonos” “When I got married, I would only ovulate from my right ovary. The left ovary nothing but the right would spit out 2 eggs at a time– ping ping!)

Yiayia, Gus’ mother, still dressed in black; hiding under conference table at the college fair  with Tupperware of spanakopita; or dressed up in a wedding gown acting as a dummie in a department store window.

The standard Greek word plays “Give me a word, any word and I will show you that the root is Greek.” They accomplished this throughout the movie  with such words as hockey, chimichanga.

Sex references: Pappou tells Ian that he only begot one daughter and not five sons like Nick, Toula’s brother, because he was a vegetarian with slow sperm. Voula harkens back to her wedding night telling the girls under the hair dryers getting ready for the wedding how her mother had advised her to faint if she felt too nervous.  She tells about dressing up as a wizard for Taki because he carried a magic wand. The part where Pappou snags Ian and Toula in the act in their car after a romantic date: “You don’t have a home to do that?” he asks in his thick Greek accent.

And there are new conflicts in this version.  For the wedding, Gus’ brother, Panos, is flown from Greece.  The rivalry between the one brother who left the home country to make a fortune and be successful in another vs. the one who stayed behind in the homeland without the opportunity clothes the larger tension between who is an authentic Greek: the one who forsakes his motherland by leaving or the one who stays faithful to her by staying put?

What made MBFGW2 so compelling was the richness in the way the age-old themes and conflicts were revisited in the second version.  It especially focused on the push-pull of bicultural identity as reflected in the changing values of the Diaspora.  Traditional marriage has always been at the center of life. But when women like Toula and her daughter grow up in America, the traditions that are taken for granted suddenly start to be questioned.  Toula apologizes for her father’s remarks to her daughter that she need to start thinking about marrying at 17; that she does not have to worry about how she looks.  In the climax of the movie, just when Maria comes down the aisle in her wedding dress ready to marry Gus again, she sees him laughing and carrying on with his brother and Takis, (they had gotten wasted on Ouzo shots in the police car on the way to the church).  She walks away from the altar and retreats to the tiny office of the priest behind the ambo.  From there she openly expresses her doubts at marrying a “crazy old” man.  She delivers a feminist manifesto to the entire congregation as the loudspeaker is on. “Who says a woman is supposed to be married?”she asks. Maybe I could have t r aveled or  saved people from  diseases instead.  I wanted an adventure not to be stuck taking care of a grouchy old man and giving him his castor oil everyday . . . “

It’s much more complicated to be a Greek in America. Thea Voula knows that Angelo’s “partner” is not just a business partner. She condones him and accepts him as part of the family, an anathema to a traditional Greek family.

In the conflict between the traditional Greek values of staying true to the clan vs staying true to you, the film makes an untraditional yield.  It is ironically the crazy yiayia that whispers to her great-granddaughter that she should not make a decision to please her parents and her extended family by staying close to home, but take the decision to go away to NYU for college.  It is a scene that legitimizes rugged individualism, a value adopted as part of the new culture, by espousing it from a symbolic representative of the Old Country.  It’s OK to follow your heart and be true to yourself; this is how you will grow. Your needs take precedence over blind obedience to your family.

Yes, your big loud Greek family can pool their resources together to give yiayia and pappou an affordable wedding, but they don’t give you space to breathe in.  They also interfere with a nuclear family’s ability to cohere.  Ian gives up on waiting for Toula to meet him for a date.  The needs of her original family, the duty owed to her mother and father trump those of her husband’s and her own marriage.  Ian points out that she uses the excuse of taking care of her family to avoid being alone with him.  Is this really a healthy way to be? the movie questions.

Cultural dissonance and the resentment at being seen as culturally different raises its angry head in this version.  While in the original film we see Toula being ridiculed by her two lunchmates for eating moose kaka, 20 years later, Toula overhears the same two, now her neighbors, making comments such as “That’s such a  weird family.” But this time she sets them straight, “What is wrong with you?” she asks them.”You are standing on my driveway in front of my house while my father is getting wheeled away in an ambulance.”  She stands up for the “other” and the way non-Americans are stereotyped and criticized just for being different.  What’s wrong with you America, she seems to say, “You are made up of immigrants. You are a nation of diversity. Don’t criticize what you don’t understand.”  At the end of the film, these same neighbors with an axe to grind come to the house to complain of the noise from the wedding party.  Toula invites them to come to the backyard party and then they comply.  They were only being resentful because they weren’t allowed to take part in the fun of being an “other” like the fun-loving Greeks.

MBFGW2 brings the conflicts and themes across the three generations of the Portokalos clan into a well-orchestrated resolution. Maria comes to terms with the life choices she has made.  Her brave adventure was to make a family. She was brave to leave home and travel to a new world without a map.  She realizes that although she could kill him, she does love Gus. “He is a good but crazy man.  It’s been a good life.” Gus realizes that although it seemed like he was taking her for granted, it was because she had become a part of him. He could not live without her.   Ian and Toula reaffirm their wedding vows in the shadow of her parent’s wedding.  In a sense they start all over again.  They reinstill the magic in their marriage by coming to terms with the fact that their job as parent is done.  “We are newlyweds now,” they say, redirecting their focus on their own marriage.

Unbeknownst to her Paris asks out a young man to the prom who turns out to be Greek.  She is secretly overjoyed because in her heart even though she wants to separate and individuate she still wants to hold on to her Greek roots.  Having a Greek-American boyfriend with the romantic possibility that he just might wind up to be your husband is all that she needs as a 2^nd generation Hellene to keep her culture alive.

Just like a Shakespearean comedy, the film ends in a wedding in a traditional church.  Marriage is a sacred institution. It is what makes a family happen.  It is through an act of union that three generations are tied together.

The moral of it: Keep the Greek but adapt to the American. Much like Paris’ prom date says about the Greek Club in school, “We eat food and make fun of our parents.” This is just what the film does: forces us to feel the bittersweet love/hate push/pull of our bicultural identity by making fun of it.

Without a doubt, MBFGW2 is so much richer and more complex in its storytelling.  A total must see, again and again.

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NYC Greek Film Festival 2015: Crisis and Myth

Take the opening one: It starts  with a middle-aged matriarch new office director who was shaking and shaping up the public  bureaucracy.  She is bringing in new levels of service and accountability.  No going home early. No long smoke breaks.  There will be inspectors that pass through.  Employees will be ranked according to productivity.

Kiria Maria, the elderly woman on staff, is taken aback by the new directives slumps in a chair and overwhelmed by the prospect of losing her job has a heart attack and dies. The other employees would have called a doctor but the geeky official with glasses reminds them of law 775/34 that passed legislature in 1987 that only the manager can call a doctor.  She is un-slouched and touched up by wearing dark glasses at her post.  They decide to wait after the day’s work to deal with the situation.  Under this watch the state inspectors speaking in German come. The end of the short has the office manager awarding “Best Employee of the Month” to Kiria Maria.  In an obvious sarcastic Kafkasque but also comical tone, the poor woman who has died of exhaustion and worry sits on a chair decorated with balloons and a birthday hat.

Symposium features a couple talking about love at a bus stop while downing beers concealed in handkerchiefs in NYC .  It is a spin on the old story of the Symposium by Plato where different philosophers ponder on the nature of love.  The young man define love as a shared traumatic experience. The young woman, more a philosopher, defines it as, “When you are ready to give up a piece of yourself.”  She is breaking up with her lover whom she met in India at the Peter Pan statue in Central Park. “You shouldn’t give up so fast if falling in love was so awesome,” the man tells her.  And the short end with the bus whisking her away.

Act ii features the girl with her lover exchanging love letters about to break up. While in a lover’s spat, a mugger masked takes her away. He turns out to be the bus symposium conversant who stages this drama so that it will reunite the lovers.  He gets beat up by Ellie’s paramour in a show of bravado.  He was overcome and confesses his love for her. A Leonard Cohen song lingers in the background with a still shots of their love letter in two pikes by the Peter pan statue.

Narcissa is a post-modern retelling of the Narcissus myth (the theme of last week’s Onassis Festival). Narcissus is reincarnated in a self-obsessed supermodel who is constantly taking selfies of herself on a couch.  A laconic make up artist appears with ominous music in background. He is silent except for the repetition of the ends of her sentences.  The model is displeased with makeup job. She obnoxiously metes out makeup commands.  “Dumb, I need lipliner,” she chides. “Do you know who I am? I’ve been featured in Vogue Paris 12 times I know what I need.  Listen to me just do what I want.”   The myth becomes ominous when she appears on set with a large bloody slash on her right hand.  She goes back into the dressing room to meet with what symbolically becomes a fragmented mirror that will no doubt slash her even more.  So cool!

The fourth short focuses on a closeup moving portrait of mother and child.  The short is evocatively ominous because of the lack of dialogue and music.    After bathing her daughter giving her watered down milk to drink, the mother embarks on a long journey to somewhere, not really clear.  But the audience can sense the mother is on a mission to deliver the girl somewhere.  There is an intense scene when the mother pitifully and painfully gives into the little girl’s request for ice cream at the “periptero” or kiosk.  It costs 1.75 euro and through the subtle non-verbal cues of the mother, we know it is painfully too much for her.   The careful attention the camera pays to the minute routine actions creates anticipation of tragedy.  And it does.  Under the alibi of going to the bathroom, the mother walks out of the building and resumes her  job at an ice cream parlor. The short ends with her in a reverie over the broom as she cleans up at her pittance post at the ice cream shop.

A more light-hearted segment opens with a protagonist looking for five ways to die. He is surfing the web looking for  funeral coffins.  He gets fitted for a dark funeral suit.   He walks into a pharmacy and asks for two bottles of a knock out medicine. He lacks the prescription so he goes to an overpass.  As he is about to jump, he is stopped by two children as onlookers. Next he connects a pipe to transfer the carbon monoxide from his exhaust into the front of his car. He gags and that ends that attempt. He returns home to his wife, already suspecting there is something wrong, intrigued by the new black suit, “It’s so formal she says.  I bought it on a whim he says I promise it will come in handy one of these days.  He drops the hair dryer into the bath causing a general short in the house. So the film progresses in this way until the very end.  The camera was all a deception because the one who winds of dying is his cheating, no-good wife.  He had been planning her death all along, not his.

My favorite short film, however, was titled “Oriste” or “Behold” in English.  It features a vegetable peddler who drives a van with a loudspeaker broadcasting “Tomates,” “Bamgies,” “Kolokithia” (this is a very common way to sell in Greece).  His name is Diogenes the Cynic and is transformed into the modern-day philosopher cum roving vegetable vendor who belts out maxims during his rounds of the depressed small town in the Greek backwater.   Two women are speaking about the pros and cons of living in the village as opposed to the city measure their respective lives. One is the optimist counting her blessings and the other Maria pessimistically recounts her ills . “What the fuck is it all about? It’s the same day as yesterday,” the voice of the cynic rebounds through their conversation.   “Insist on your free will with tomato sauce.” In this smartly delightful sketch, the ending scene pictures Diogenes the Cynic riding his vegetable truck over a hill and disappearing on the other side.

The ever-immortal Olympia Dukakis packs a powerful performance as Marie, an elderly Greek American woman who shares an intimate friendship with Irene.  While one is widowed and the other married to an ailing husband, their sense of loneliness is beat back in their shared Orthodox faith (the majority of the film is set in St. Demetrios Cathedral in Astoria) but mostly in their friendship.  The film is an ode to friendship in the light of impending old age, illness and death.  Very moving, Irene and Marie, even for a youthful audience.

Lastly, Tihos or Wall acts as visual allegory of crisis and makes an obvious artistic statement about the recent capital controls on the Greek economy.  A line of people cue to withdraw funds from Lifebank.  The street cleaner offers cynical, often non-sensical comments and acts like a single-woman chorus, “I have eaten the mathematics but the equation has escaped me. A list explaining nothing. Expertise is the enemy of the imagination.”

When the ATM runs out of funds, the line of customers waiting to make a withdrawal becomes distraught.
“Is this all my money,” a man shouts.  No way. Until further notice no cash withdrawals allowed.  The crowd plasters itself across the doors of  “Lifebank” desperately waiting to get in.

Flash to the inside of the bank.  It is a casino with high-stakes players crowding around a roulette and poker table. The hard breathing of those waiting outside the glass doors is heard.  Two women try to devise a contraption to break down the doors of the bank but a recorded woman’s  voice comes over the speakers overlooking the bank square  advising customers to keep an orderly cue.  “A catastrophe is meat you eat to know,” the street cleaner muses.  Of course there are no reserves to withdraw. They are getting used as chips in the giant crap shoot in a private casino.

One thing for sure, the Greek Film Festival is not in the throes of crisis.

For more info and schedule times go to www.greekfilmfestival.com.

A Gem near the Acropolis: The Ilias LaLaounis Museum…

The Lalaounis Jewelry Museum located a short walk up from the New Acropolis Museum is literally a gem.  The blinding bling bling of its eclectic collections can turn even the least material girl into a lavish diva clawing for the littlest nugget of gold. That’s because the pieces on display are works of art.
The collections are arranged either chronologically or around themes of inspiration.  There’s The Golden Dawn of Art that features pieces from the Paleolithic to Neolithic and include jewelry unearthed from mythical Ilion or Troy. Then there is a permanent collection dedicated to the history of ancient Greek jewelry and includes designs from the Minoan, Mycenean, Classical and Hellenistic, and, my favorite, the Byzantine, eras.  This summer the rotating or visiting display bedazzled with the symbols and craftsmanship of Persepolis and Persia.  Lushious pomegranates heavy with rubies as seeds dangled next to lapis lazuli amulets.  This is part of a rotating exhibition that tantalizes the eyes and the imagination exposing the mesmerized viewers with fantasies of themselves regaled from Tudor Queen, to consort to Suleiman the Magnificent, to Mesopotamian princess even turquoise Cherokee squaw.
Then there are several science and nature inspired collections.  Coiled gold and crystal structures reminiscent of the DNA strands, the building blocks of life.  Or strange crystalline moon rocks that glitter with other worldly purple and pink.  The museum houses a real jewelry making workshop that demonstrates the techniques that metamorph the clunky dark stone into the brilliant faceted objects d’ art you see behind the glass cases.  Yes, there is hardly a woman who can resist the love of gold spun into exquisite sinuous curves around her own curves.  Even if you are not a fan of jewelry, the Ilias Lalaounis Jewelry Museum deserves a peak. I guarantee it will leave you in ecstatic sighs of ooh and aahs fantasizing about how that medallion would look around your neck. Someday, someday.  For now, you can dream for a mere 5 Euros.

Open  Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday from 9 am to 3 pm. Sundays from 11 am to 4 pm.

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Alkistis Protopsaltis and Eleftheria Arvanitaki in NYC

I’m excited! Alkistis Protopsaltis and Eleftheria Arvanitaki are going to be at Town Hall in our own NYC next month. I had a chance to experience this graceful mesmerizing duo last summer when they gave a concert in the open air ancient theater in my native Ios.  This dynamic duo is like Ying and Yang to the eyes and ears.  A mellifluous combo that tap into a wide repertoire in the Greek song book–from rebektka to laika to their own compositions as well as covers by such greats as Mikis Theodorakis and Dimitra Galani.   They imbue the stage with an aura of classical beauty and elegance. For women in middle age they are sophisticated and so so chic.  Protopsaltis could have sprung to life from a an ancient Greek statue as an ancient Karyatid, Tall slender with graying short hair.  Yeah I want to look just like her when i grow up. Alkistis and Eleftheria, even their uniquely Grecian names anciently exotic bring an aura to the stage.  Her counterbalance Arvanitaki is the Greek Stevie Nicks with her long flowing saffron chiffon gracing her sinuous movements.  Their voices and their movements meld into a meandering river of sound and sight that takes the audience into the center cosmos of the song.

I’m not that into Greek music but this duo has the eclectic sophistication both as performers and singers to satisfy the taste of even those who poo poo on Greek croners

Mark your calendars: .    Saturday. Sep 26, 2015 8:00 PM – Town Hall-NY, New York, NY.
For tickets log onto Ticketmaster or  songkick.