But it finds awfully tidy patterns in the messy lives it depicts (2 00).
In a small town on the outskirts of Todos Santos Cuchumatán, in the department of Huehuetenango, several remittance houses had American flags painted onto their outer walls or incorporated in tidy patterns along façades and cornices.
A number of plot points appear to hinge on this sort of happenstance, coincidences and accidents that shouldn't work but somehow do, largely because Somerville is so adept at keeping the action moving — and at reminding us that our lives rarely conform to neat and tidy patterns.
You often heard chattering, out-of-sync trombones over a steady rhythm framework, or tidy horn patterns over rocking, free-rhythm bass and drums.
Mr. Seligson-Ross seems comfortable moving dancers, 14 here, around the stage in tidy, flowing patterns and interactions, but only one piece, "In the Garden of Souls," suggested an individual behind the work.
Think of a valet-parked garage where each vehicle lines up perfectly with the next to form a tidy row-by-row pattern of cars.
The first verses, set to a tidy seven-beat guitar pattern, yearn for isolation: "Are you such a dreamer?
The Wolds have a beautiful tension between the tidy 18th-century field patterns and the raggedly overgrown wide verges and hedges.
But the trapezoidal purple Furla purse (a gift) and square-toed Robert Clergerie pumps (Morgan Stanley, circa 1990) joined the tidy stacks of cardigans, patterned skirts, and undersized pants for the waiting hipsters at consignment stores.
But despite the familiarity and long-standing history between both parties, the encounters almost always follow a predictable pattern, one as tidy and unmistakably Japanese as the iconic vertical street signs that peek out from Tokyo's narrow facades.
