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Sunday, December 31
BEN KATCHOR, REAL ESTATE PHOTOGRAPHER
by
Lloydville
on Sun 31 Dec 2006 04:34 PM PST
This past November I was delighted to read a notice in the newspaper
that Ben Katchor was going to be appearing in Las Vegas as part of the
Las Vegas Valley Book Festival. Katchor is one of the great fiction
writers at work today, and he happens to work in the medium of the
comic strip, or picture stories as he likes to call what he makes.
His
signature creation is Julius Knipl, real estate photographer, who
wanders the back streets of a disappearing New York, the New York of
the small-time merchants and manufacturers and wholesalers who used to
be the life's blood of the city's economy but are now being moved out
to the fringes of things by the inexorable yuppification of the city,
or at least of Manhattan.
The
disappearance of the small-time manufacturers in Manhattan made
possible my own residency in the city, starting in 1972, when artists
and various other undesirables started renting (illegally) the lofts
vacated by the small enterprises that were becoming economically
unfeasible. Back then, we lived among the remnants and the ghosts of
these vanishing concerns, businesses that made flags and coat hangars,
fur coats and uniforms.
We
were, alas, only the pilot fish for a new influx of urban professionals
who turned the loft districts into fashionable residential areas --
eventually the yuppies would drive us out of the city as they
transformed our Bohemia into the capital of Connecticut. Fair enough.
But Katchor remembers the city we Bohemians displaced, just as someday
someone will remember the city we remade. No one will care to remember
the new city of the yuppies.
The New York I miss most these days is the New York Katchor memorializes -- but I missed it even when I was living in
New York. It exists now only in dreams and in art.
Katchor
spoke in a gallery at the Holsum Lofts, a converted bread factory
that is part of a valiant and almost certainly doomed effort to create a new Bohemia in Las Vegas.
It's located downtown, on Charleston Boulevard, near the few places in
the area which still retain the flavor of the dirty old city -- places
like Johnny Tocco's, a classic and legendary boxing gym unchanged for
decades.
Katchor
read some of his strips, with the panels projected onto a screen. It
was interesting to see how well they played with the small audience,
which was often, like myself, laughing out loud. Katchor's tone in his
strips is generally wistful and melancholy, but there's a dark humor to
them that makes his visions bearable, and a quiet anger that gives them
great energy. All this could be heard in his voice.
Katchor
was kind enough to sign one of my Knipl books with an illustration of
Mr. Knipl, and to add the date and place of the inscription. Julius
Knipl in Las Vegas -- now there's a surreal image. The yuppification of
Las Vegas proceeds apace, and it will soon have the smug bourgeois
vapidity of modern-day New York, but the process will leave
deep secrets buried here, secrets that would certainly reveal
themselves to a dogged,
mystical real estate photographer.
Here's a link to Katchor's site, where you can buy books and cards and prints, and see what he's up to:
Ben Katchor's Web Site
[Click on the image above for a bigger version]
Saturday, December 30
THE CONFORMIST
by
Lloydville
on Sat 30 Dec 2006 12:54 AM PST
Perhaps the most exciting cinematic event of 2006 was
the release on DVD earlier this month -- finally, and in a terrific
transfer -- of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.
Few films of the post-WWII era have been as
influential as this one -- few films of any era have been as ravishing,
as sensually exciting.
In the freewheeling atmosphere of the time, and with
the final collapse of the old studio system, Hollywood in the late
Sixties was in an experimental mood, though the experimentation often
involved only superficial stylistic gimmicks -- the hand-held camera,
promiscuous zooming, elliptical editing, split-screen images.
At the same time a new generation of filmmakers was
coming into prominence which had been schooled in, and deeply loved,
the classic Hollywood films -- among this generation were
Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas . . . all of them, except for
Spielberg, the products of film schools rather than of apprenticeship
in the industry.
They
were tackling new subjects and ones that were often more challenging
than the old studio system could embrace but they were
developing a style that owed much to the formal elegance of the
cinema of the studio era.
Then, in 1970, The Conformist burst onto the scene,
the work of a young Italian filmmaker who had not only mastered the
formal elegance of the old studio style but was taking it into new
realms of expressiveness and invention. Indeed, The Conformist had
something of the visual eloquence of the highest achievements of the
silent era, of Murnau's and Vidor's films, whose
extravagant poetic imagery had been lost with the coming of sound.
The effect was electric -- confirming all the creative
instincts of the American film-school avant garde. The movie was so
important to Coppola that he, along with a number of other American
directors, personally lobbied its distributor to release the film in
the United States. He used one of its actors in The Godfather, Part
II, and its visual style influenced every frame of Coppola's
masterpiece.
Bertolucci never made another film quite like it.
His visual imagination, his gift for dynamic plastic composition and
choreography within the frame stayed fresh, but was often lavished on
unworthy material and degenerated into mere mannerism.
The Conformist was of a piece because its story and
its visual style reinforced each other. Bertolucci was, in the film,
breaking dramatically from the severe aesthetic strategies and rigorous
intellectualism of his mentor Godard, indulging himself frankly in the
cinema's power for sensual seduction -- all the while telling the tale
of a promising student who betrays the political ideals of his old
professor and eventually collaborates in the professor's murder.
The Conformist remains alive with the allure of forbidden
pleasures, tense with the guilt of giving in to them. The film is
erotic but disturbing -- a dynamic that Bertolucci would explore
more explicitly in Last Tango In Paris, but without the organic
emotional coherence of the earlier film.
The Conformist also marked the emergence of its
cinematographer Vitorio Storaro as an artist of international
stature -- but that's a subject for a future post . . .
Friday, December 29
FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 29 Dec 2006 12:00 PM PST
[Miranda, the Tempest, by John William Waterhouse]
Of all the primal bonds, that between father and
daughter has been perhaps the least examined by psychologists and by
artists . . . with the notable exception of Shakespeare, himself the
father of two daughters, one of them the twin of his only son Hamnet who died
in childhood.
Father-daughter
relationships figure prominently in 21 of Shakespeare's surviving
plays, and they are examined from almost every angle, most of them
problematic. In the comedies the relationship is presented primarily
through the eyes of the daughters, in the later magical romances
primarily through the eyes of the fathers.
Diane
Dreher's Domination and Defiance, published in 1986, was the first
book specifically devoted to the subject of fathers and daughters in
Shakespeare, and it's a fine, illuminating study. It's central thesis
is that Shakespeare's view of father-daughter relationships was both
wise, psychologically speaking, and startlingly progressive, socially
and politically speaking. Traditional patriarchal domination of the
daughter by the father is always seen as destructive in Shakespeare's
plays, harmful to the psyches of both father and daughter, and to the
social order itself.
As
with all insights into Shakespeare's work, the book raises intriguing
but always unanswerable questions about Shakespeare's biography. What
real-life family dramas informed the clashes between fathers and
daughters in the plays of Shakespeare's early and middle periods? What
epiphanies led to the sublime, almost mystical and always deeply moving
reconciliations between fathers and daughters in the late romances?
It's
impossible to believe that there were no such connections between the
life and the work -- it's equally impossible not to be vexed that they
can never be summoned up into the light, except by way of Prospero's
enchanted, phantasmagorical visions.
Thursday, December 28
ANDREW WYETH AND THE SILENT CINEMA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 28 Dec 2006 12:28 AM PST
[Renee Adoree and John Gilbert in King Vidor's The Big Parade]
Reading an excerpt from David Michaelis's biography of N. C. Wyeth in an
old Vanity Fair I came across an interesting passage. Writing about
N. C.'s son Andrew, Michaelis says:
"Andy's conception of army life had been formed by years of soaking up The Big Parade, King Vidor's silent classic about three enlisted men
in WWI, which N. C. had taken him to see as an eight-year old boy.
'This film,' Andrew later explained, 'got into my bloodstream.'
Eventually he came to own a copy and would screen it four or five times
a year all through his adult life. Forever linked to his deepest
feelings about his father, certain frames of the film would form,
without his realizing it, the basis for some of the most important
images in his art."
As an adult Andrew Wyeth eventually wrote a fan letter to King Vidor and the two men
met towards the end of Vidor's life. Vidor made a short film
about the encounter, the last film he ever made. In the film
Wyeth remarks that when friends said they didn't understand why he kept
on watching The Big Parade after seeing it 180 times -- literally
-- he replied, "You don't understand my paintings, either."
Two things struck me about this.
Firstly, it's fascinating that a great artist like Wyeth, used to
consciously analyzing visual images, should have created works which were unconsciously
influenced by shots in a silent film. I think this speaks to the
powerful ways cinematic images, particularly from silent films, can work
on all of us unconsciously.
[A scene from Napoleon's campaign in Egypt by Jean-Leon Gerome]
Secondly, I've always been struck by the influence of 19th-Century
academic painting on movies. The former were centrally concerned with
using spatial effects for dramatic and emotional purposes (again often
experienced in subliminal ways.) Movies, because they had greater
aesthetic resources in this area -- i. e. movement in space by both
subject and camera -- almost instantly spelled the end of academic
painting as a popular visual art form, and drove modern painters into
greater and greater abstraction.
The formal connections between 19th-Century academic painting and
movies is a subject that has hardly been hinted at in cinema studies to
date.
[Book illustration by N. C. Wyeth]
N. C. Wyeth kept the "cinematic" narrative-based academic style alive in
his book illustrations (as did Norman Rockwell in his magazine
illustrations) and N. C.'s son Andrew has been almost alone in keeping
elements of this style alive within the circles of modern "high art", by
making the narrative element more ambiguous and blending the dramatic
representation of space (which is crucial to his work) with a more
pronounced abstraction of design.
In Andrew Wyeth's obsession with The Big Parade we have a concrete example of the transmission of these oddly overlooked
aesthetic connections.
[Trodden Weeds, 1951 tempera -- © Andrew Wyeth]
Wednesday, December 27
OYSTER STEW
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Dec 2006 12:04 AM PST
It's
easy to make oyster stew. Here's how you do it. Get a lot of oysters,
medium sized, the sweetest and freshest you can find (hard on the West
Coast, where they're most often big and bland). It's o. k. to get them
in jars, fresh and raw, because you want them out of the shell anyway.
Put
some whole milk in a saucepan and start to heat it and when it's just
barely tepid put the clean oysters, minus their juices, into the pan.
You don't want the milk to cover the oysters -- you need to be able to
observe them.
When
the milk starts to steam just the slightest, slightest bit, sprinkle in
celery salt, a fair amount, a dose of regular salt, ground pepper,
paprika and three drops (in the name of God no more!) of Tabasco. Don't
mix all this stuff in, just sprinkle it on top, well distributed. Then
quickly put in two chunks of unsweetened butter and just when the
butter has all melted, pour the whole thing into a big bowl and let the
pouring itself do the mixing.
Eat it with a light, dry white wine and have lots of French bread handy for sopping, which is sublime.
If the oysters are rubbery, you didn't get the seasonings and butter in fast enough.
I pass this along from Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher, slightly modified, because it's a miracle that something so wonderful
is so easy to make.
The
secret, of course, is the oysters, complicated and strange, bringing
with them such tales of currents and tides and the mysteries of the not
so deep, that they want only a simple setting to recount them in, and a
hungry heart willing to listen.
Tuesday, December 26
SILENT SEX
by
Lloydville
on Tue 26 Dec 2006 09:24 AM PST
Watching
Mary Pickford's films for the first time I was startled at how sexy she
was. Even if she's not your type, even if the curls make you cringe,
it's hard not to be vexed by her energy, her obvious intelligence, the
expressive use she makes of her whole body. I have this same feeling
about Lillian Gish. No matter how delicate and virginal a character she
plays, she always moves sublimely, communicating subtleties but also
controlled power by the very inclination of her body -- something a
great ballerina can do as well. This sort of thing gives a fellow
ideas.
In a
sense, the whole medium of silent film is permeated by this kind of
frank though innocent sexuality. For adults, communicating emotion and
character through the expressive power of the whole body is just
inevitably bound up with the idea of sex, which is one reason why
dancing has always been suspect in the Puritan mind . . . and great
silent film acting is closely related to dance. Keaton is, ostensibly,
a clown, and the characters he plays are rarely informed by any
conscious awareness of their own attractiveness -- but the raw animal
lust he seems to inspire in some female silent film fans is impressive.
This may be one of the reasons I'm disconcerted by Pickford's
portrayals of children -- Pickford's sexual persona, which she really
can't lose, seems out of place in a pre-sexual being.
It
occurs to me also that this may explain the vague "creepiness" some
people feel about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. He just moves so beautifully, so
exquisitely, that perhaps he arouses unconscious thoughts which people,
women especially, don't want to associate with that particular
physique.
A more
extreme version of this reaction, in a more buttoned-up age, might also
explain, on a subconscious level, some of the antagonism towards
Arbuckle, the immediate presumption of guilt, when he got caught in a
sex scandal. It would be impossible to imagine such a scenario in the
case of John Candy or Chris Farley, because they simply weren't capable
of the kind of carnal grace Arbuckle had at his command.
Most
modern actors have lost this means of suggesting a complex sexuality by
sheer physical carriage, which is why they're forced to expose
themselves, or say naughty things, to grab a viewer's attention in that
regard. Pickford's little jig in Tess Of the Storm Country
got the
job done for me.
Monday, December 25
CHRISTMAS TRIUMPHANT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 25 Dec 2006 10:02 AM PST
I must admit that Christmas in Las Vegas threatened to
become a bit melancholy this year, as the old frontier town passes into
history, as the great experiment of it ends -- the notion of preserving
a refuge, out in the middle of the Mojave desert, from the shabby,
bovine Puritanism of ordinary American life.
The experiment proved too successful, I guess, in the
end -- the air of freedom from Big Nanny created a vital economy and an
exciting metropolis that the shabby, bovine Puritans wanted to
move to, appropriate and transform back into the shabby, bovine places they left
back home . . . as though they could have the best of both worlds, a
vibrant fantasy city that was also tidy, safe and conformist.
American Puritans, the old diehards of the religious
right and the new social hygienists of the "progressive" left (just as
fanatical and intolerant in their own ways,) never learn.
The bourgeois dullards who want to control the behavior of smokers are
the same bourgeois dullards who enacted alcohol prohibition in the last
century, whether their smug intolerance derives from moral or
"health-oriented" motives. "The Puritan conscience," C. S. Lewis
reminds us, "works on without the
Puritan theology -- like millstones grinding nothing; like digestive
juices working on an empty stomach and producing ulcers." Which
suggests that the religious moralists are perhaps slightly more sane
than the new secular Puritans.
At any rate, in my wistful state I delayed getting a tree this
year, but on Christmas Eve, when I saw that my favorite Christmas tree
lot had already closed down, I suddenly realized how shameful it would
be not to bring an evergreen into my home. I found another lot,
deserted except for two exhausted lot attendants sitting in folding
chairs outside the mobile home they were obviously living in for the
holidays. They could hardly bring themselves to notice me when I
walked onto the lot but finally stirred and stood up, prepared to make
what would probably be the last sale of the season. I picked out a big
tree, paid almost nothing for it, retrieved my Christmas decorations
from storage and set the tree up in my apartment, ablaze with lights.
This changed everything, and shows why traditions are
neglected at the gravest peril -- they pull us out of passing
moods and remind us of an antique wisdom that transcends the
understanding of the moment.
With the lights blinking, a fire crackling, a glass of
egg nog in my hand, I communed with Christmases past and Christmases to
come. I remembered my modest but Grace-filled place in the continuity
of things.
I looked forward to Christmas in Baja -- or wherever
the dim-witted Puritan duppies drive me. It doesn't matter. There's never
any guaranteed room at the inn, even if you've got what seems to be an
ironclad reservation number. I awoke at dawn on Christmas morning and
the world was born again.
I was happy I'd been reminded to say, once again and just in time, "God bless us --
every one."
Sunday, December 24
IRON GIANT
by
Lloydville
on Sun 24 Dec 2006 06:21 AM PST
A
merchandising artifact from the film The Iron Giant, released in
1999, this wondrous toy is almost impossible to find today. I tracked one
down on eBay -- it was kind of pricey in this pristine boxed condition.
The figure of the giant is about 10" tall. If you push a button on its
chest it speaks a few phrases from the film and its eyes light up. It
would be awesome if
the giant's jaw were moveable -- otherwise it's just about perfectly
cool.
Saturday, December 23
G I. BLUES
by
Lloydville
on Sat 23 Dec 2006 08:15 AM PST
Bad
songs plus a silly plot plus Elvis equals . . . movie magic.
Before his
management got utterly cynical about the quality of his films, before
he himself gave up on Hollywood as a creative challenge, Elvis made
some enchanting movies just on the strength of his persona and
charisma. He commands the screen the way a star can, without having to
work very hard at it, and the very ease of his performances makes them
fascinating. His dancing is toned down from his work on stage but it's
still unique and riveting and the commitment of his vocal performances,
even on substandard material, is touching.
In G. I. Blues, the surrealism of the
overblown sets, the travelogue nature of the location shots (none of
which feature Elvis) and the frank artificiality of the production has
a delirious effect at times -- like Jerry Lewis and James Bond movies.
There was more wit than incompetence or naivete to this style of
filmmaking in the Sixties and it seems oddly less dated than the hipper
avant-garde approach that eventually overtook the Hollywood mainstream.
Elvis' serenade to the hand-puppet here is sublime cinema -- inspired
silliness that still manages to be charming and emotionally involving.
Just go along with it and marvel at the mysterious, ever-elusive
phenomenon of Elvis Presley.
Friday, December 22
ORLANDO GIBBONS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 22 Dec 2006 04:19 AM PST
I've been reading a lot about Shakespeare recently and somewhere in
that reading I ran across a mention of Orlando Gibbons, the other great
English composer of the Tudor era (besides William Byrd.) I decided to
check him out, particularly after leaning that he was Glenn Gould's
favorite composer.
Gibbons can be appreciated as a sort of alternative to Bach, with the
same logical clarity but more theatricality, whimsy and lyricism. You
can hear the cultural giddiness of Elizabethan England in Gibbons's
work, as you can in Shakespeare's poetry.
Gould only recorded a few pieces by Gibbons but they're fascinating
performances. Highly expressive, Romantic even, they violate
historical style but somehow evoke the essence of the music, in ways
stricter interpretations, on more appropriate instruments, sometimes
fail to do.
There are worse ways to spend an evening than listening to the music
of Orlando Gibbons. If you have a fire and a glass of good red wine
and some strong English cheese -- an old cheddar or Stilton would do
perfectly
-- so much the better.
Thursday, December 21
THE BLACK MA-1
by
Lloydville
on Thu 21 Dec 2006 05:56 AM PST
In
William Gibson's latest novel Pattern Recognition, the heroine Cayce
Pollard, a coolhunter, wears a reproduction MA-1 flight jacket, 1957
pattern, made by Buzz Rickson's, which Gibson describes as a super
authentic recreation of the original -- in a sense more authentic than
the original because of the fanatical devotion to detail by the
manufacturer. He notes that the uneven seams of the original, the
result of sewing the new fabric nylon on machines made to stitch
cotton, have been lovingly copied, even exaggerated slightly, to make
the homage that much clearer.
It turns out that Buzz Rickson's is a real company, based in Japan, and
that it really does make such reproductions, with all the obsessiveness Gibson so admires.
But
Gibson made a mistake. He described Pollard's jacket as black, whereas
Rickson's only produced the jacket in green, since that's the only way
the Air Force ever issued it. When Rickson's learned about the mistake,
it decided to issue a "Pattern Recognition" edition of the jacket in
black. Gibson's fantasy jacket has thus become real.
Two years ago I posted about the jacket on the discussion
forum at Gibson's official web site. A year after that Gibson noticed
my old post and responded to it on his blog. I just discovered his response a couple of days ago -- you
can read it here:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/2005_12_01_archive.asp
This still leaves us with a problem. Do we want to wear Cayce Pollard's black
Rickson's MA-1, which is, in fact, unutterably cool-looking, or do we
want to wear the original Rickson's reproduction, which is what inspired
Gibson, and Cayce, in the first place?
In the
end, I opted for the black model, because of its unutterable coolness
and as a tribute to Gibson's great book.
But it's a complicated question that each man or woman must decide for his or her self.
Here's a link to the American distributor of Buzz
Rickson's jackets -- all of which are quite amazing and quite expensive:
Buzz Rickson's
Wednesday, December 20
PANDORA'S BOX
by
Lloydville
on Wed 20 Dec 2006 04:09 AM PST
Pandora's Box, the film Louise Brooks is best known for, is one of
the sublime works of cinema, not least because of her performance in
it.
It is not exactly a film adaptation of the famous play by Franz
Wedekind on which it is nominally based -- it is better appreciated as
what it calls itself, a "variation on themes" from Wedekind's work.
Wedekind created in his central figure of Lulu an almost mythological
incarnation of the terror the feminine inspired in late Victorian men,
who simply didn't know how to relate to women outside the collapsing
domestic structures of modern industrialized societies. Wedekind's
Lulu was a calculating vamp, an anarchic force, unrestrained by the old
female roles, and thus could be experienced as an alien and malevolent
power.
Pabst's and Brooks's Lulu is something else again. Her destructive
power is not defined by her deviance from old female roles but by the
utter collapse of manhood around her, by the failure of men to adapt to
the new empowerment of women. The crucial event intervening between
Wedekind's play and Pabst's film was the cataclysm of WWI, which
confirmed not just the collapse but the inherent weakness, the dry rot
at the heart of the 19th-Century European patriarchy. From a post-WWI
vantage, Pabst, by instinct or calculation, realized that blaming women
was not really an answer or a solution to the failure of modern
manhood.
"Pandora's Box" shares aspects of an attitude that wouldn't find its
way into American film until after the cataclysm of WWII, specifically
in film noir, where a sense of the futility of male power slammed
head-on into the contingent terror of the female, the femme fatale.
But Pabst's film is more mature, ahead of its time even, in making
Lulu's female power innocent, neutral, a mere fact of life, which men
simply have no resources to engage on equal terms.
In Pabst's film men destroy each other and destroy themselves trying to
engage Lulu's existential sexuality. They try to commodify her, reduce
her to images, trade her for money. They fail at every turn to
diminish her. And yet they must keep on trying, since they can't have
meaningful intercourse with her as she is, and this is a constant
reminder of their own impotence. Early in the film Lulu tells her
current benefactor, "The only way to get rid of me is to kill me." Her
sexuality cannot be dismissed any more than it can be engaged -- it can
only be destroyed.
This explains the curious ending of the film, in which Lulu meets a contemporary version of Jack
the Ripper in London and is instantly drawn to him. He is in a sense the only
honest man in the whole tale -- he worships Lulu, like all the rest of
the men in her life, knows he's no match for her, knows the only way he
can deal with her is by killing her. Which he does -- but not before
paying touching tribute to her majesty, crowning her with Christmas
mistletoe, in images that glow with tenderness and sacramental mystery.
Lulu almost seems to acquiesce in her own sacrifice -- a final
extension of the detachment she displays throughout the film. It's not
her job to tell men how to be men -- she can only observe the failures
of their doomed attempts to figure it out for themselves. She observes
with interest, certainly, sometimes with awe, but never with a sense of
personal responsibility. Compromising her female essence to
accommodate the impotency of men is not a solution for her, or for her
lovers.
Brooks's incarnation of this role is brilliant in the extreme, one of
the finest pieces of acting in all of movies. Her work is neither
minimalist nor merely naturalistic -- just "being herself" . . .
whatever that might mean in the utterly artificial, high-pressure
context of a film set. Pabst was clearly drawing on aspects of
Brooks's own personality in the film, but the result is a "created"
character of great complexity, one which never resolves itself into any
conventional type or relies on any conventional response. Brooks's
performance has inwardness and mystery, as Shakespeare's characters do,
as Chaplin's and Keaton's characters do.
Pabst's and Brooks's Lulu is almost unique in modern art -- neither a
demonized icon of male fear nor an idealized icon of female ambition.
She doesn't want what men have -- she wants men to recover what they
once had. She wants partners. Finding none, abandoning hope, she
resigns herself to oblivion, but not before accepting, graciously,
Jack's grotesque and pathetic tribute to what has been lost.
Tuesday, December 19
HEY, TURISTA!
by
Lloydville
on Tue 19 Dec 2006 07:16 AM PST
In the late 60s, just before or just after I dropped out of Stanford, a
couple of friends and I decided it would be cool to drive down the
entire length of the Baja peninsula to Cabo San Lucas. Cabo San Lucas
wasn't an international tourist destination back then, it was just a
romantic name and point on the map -- getting there seemed to promise
high adventure.
We set off from the Bay Area in a banged-up but serviceable car one of
my friends owned, camped out on a beach the first night somewhere
between there and San Diego and crossed the border at Tijuana. We
didn't pause in Tijuana but headed straight for Ensenada because we'd heard
there was a good beach there.
There was -- we spent an entire day hanging out on it. The wind off
the Pacific was fierce and disguised the fierceness of the sun. We
were all horribly and painfully sunburned at the end of the excursion
and so headed into the grubby little town of Ensenada for some
anesthetic treatment -- cervezas, to be precise.
We quickly drank enough to take our minds off the sunburn -- and
apparently I drank even more than that. I'm told I had to be dragged
back to the cheap motel room we'd rented because I kept accosting anyone who
looked like an American and screaming "Hey, turista!" at them. I don't
remember this.
I do remember the motel room. We could only afford to rent one room
and it had only two single beds in it, so one of us had to sleep on the
floor. We flipped a coin and I lost. The hard linoleum of the floor
instantly sobered me up, because there was no way to lie on it without
reminding me of the sunburn -- each new position shifted the searing
pain to a new part of my body. It was a long night.
In those days the road to Cabo was not paved below Ensenada, but we
assumed it would be a decent dirt highway. It wasn't. At a gas
station we asked a friendly local if it got any better further south.
He said it didn't, but didn't get any worse, either. He did strongly
advise us not to travel at night. "Why?" we asked. "Because of the
bandits," he replied, matter-of-factly, as though "the bandits" were a
well-known hazard of travel in Baja California.
As it turned out, the road was a greater hazard. Less than halfway to
Cabo we realized that the car's shocks would never survive several
hundred more miles on such a bad surface. We were losing heart.
We decided to camp for the night on a beach and take stock of the
situation. It was a beautiful beach, and utterly, absolutely deserted --
one could look for miles it seemed in either direction and see no other
living soul. This was surreal but exciting, the stuff of romance. We
woke in our sleeping bags at dawn the next day to low
growling sounds moving closer and closer to us. They came from a large
pack of wild dogs scavenging along the beach. They may have just been
looking for food but they also had the air of creatures looking for
trouble.
We hurried into the car and started north again. Things had simply
gotten too romantic, and the idea of bandits didn't
seem so improbable anymore in the midst of such vast and awesome
desolation.
There's an o. k. paved road all the way down to Cabo now. Ordinary
Americans travel it every day unmolested by bandits. Ensenada has
become a trendy resort town, and Cabo is an outpost of high luxury.
Probably some of the wildness I remember is still there in Baja California, off
the beaten track. I'm going
back to look for it, anyway.
If our paths should happen to cross at a remote seaside cantina some night, just raise your
glass and scream, "Hey, turista!"
Monday, December 18
WATTEAU
by
Lloydville
on Mon 18 Dec 2006 05:20 AM PST
The
most erotic oil painting I ever saw -- the only one that ever made me .
. . tense (as my friend Kevin Jarre used to put it) -- was by
Jean-Antoine Watteau, the 18th-Century French painter. It was a small,
uncelebrated work in a big show of Watteau's paintings at the National
Gallery in Washington in the 80s. It showed a half-clad women sitting
on the edge of a bed, seen from behind. Its focus was on the line of
her neck and back -- the luminosity of her flesh drew one into the
space of the painting as one might be drawn towards touching the woman.
Watteau
was the poet of women's backs and necks -- of the half-clad female
form. In his portraits of women it is always the inclination of the
body which suggests a sexual, an erotic mood. What's startling about
his women is that they do not seem to be posing for men, but responding
to inner passions -- in a manner that is vexing but never teasing.
Watteau's whole world is invested with this delicate current of inward
pleasure, of the small gestures, even in social gatherings, which
resonate with sensuality, with foreshadowings of physical abandon.
There
is no repression in this -- just a kind of delicate, subtle foreplay.
It has the aura of an exquisite, complicated game. It is theater --
both preposterous and sublime. Watteau was interested in the theater,
as well as in civilized flirtation, and seemed to see a link between
them -- but there is a great sadness in his theatrical paintings. His
Italian Comedy players, his Pierrots and Harlequins, have a goofy kind
of despair -- tragic eyes. In this his vision achieves its grandeur and
gravity -- as he concedes that the sweetest things of life, than which
there is nothing sweeter than the line of a woman's throat, are mortal,
will fade, will die, as passion expends itself in satisfaction.
What
arouses one about Watteau's portraits of women is what makes one grieve
over them -- what makes one see oneself in his bewildered stage lovers
and suitors. He is a profound artist, sweet and thrilling and mournful
all at once.
Sunday, December 17
BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940
by
Lloydville
on Sun 17 Dec 2006 04:20 AM PST
This was the last big MGM musical shot in black-and-white, which gives
it a kind of autumnal aura and a kind of abstract purity. At its heart
is the sublime joy and non-neurotic sexuality of Eleanor Powell's and
Fred Astaire's dancing. This was the first and only time they danced
together in a film, and two of their tapping pas de deux rank among the
greatest passages in all of cinema.
Powell had a self-contained air -- she didn't really need a partner and
her great dances were usually solo numbers. Her genius lay in her
hard-driving and percussive but still lyrical tapping -- when she tried
more balletic stuff she wasn't at all convincing . . . her line became
diffused.
Technically, of course, Astaire could match her tap for tap. When they
mirror each other's steps, dancing together, something extraordinary
happens -- her almost virile energy reveals its essential girlness, and
his almost feminine elegance reveals its essential male authority.
They create an image of perfect equality between the sexes without
losing the idea of sex.
The film's finale culminates in a tap routine to an up-tempo, swung
version of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine". It consists of two
shots, the first lasting 2 minutes and 12 seconds, the second 31
seconds. It's as powerful an evocation of good sex as movies ever have
and ever can achieve -- Powell and Astaire respond to each other's
bodies in motion with almost supernatural sensitivity and one can watch
their mutual joy grow as they execute the complex choreography
perfectly, with only the one cut over the course of nearly three
minutes of non-stop virtuosity.
In his introduction to a clip of the dance in "That's Entertainment"
Frank Sinatra said, "You can wait around and hope but you'll never see
the likes of this again."
But you will, because it's on film, and now on DVD -- and no matter how
many times you watch it, it will always be new. It obliterates time.
Saturday, December 16
AN ELEGY FOR OYSTERS
by
Lloydville
on Sat 16 Dec 2006 02:50 AM PST
. . . by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney:
Alive and violated
They lay on their beds of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked
and scattered.
We are eating oysters again, and will be until April, the last month with an r in it until next September . . . but we must remember
that each of their alien, unfathomable lives is precious, not to be taken lightly.
Friday, December 15
THE TAKING OF CHRIST
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Dec 2006 01:47 PM PST
Look at this image. Just look at it.
It was painted, in 1602, by Caravaggio -- at least, that's the current
wisdom. It was long thought to be a copy of a lost Caravaggio original
made by a follower or pupil, but in the 90s an art historian made a
convincing case for the attribution to the master himself.
Formally, it's a dazzling work. The figures occupy a shallow space but
the picture still produces a strong impression of depth because of the
stereometric modelling of the light, the way the figures block and seem
to jostle each
other even in the confined space and the way the centurion's armor
jumps out at us like a physical assault. It has, finally, the
plastic quality of a relief sculpture.
Caravaggio has placed himself among the dramatis personae here, as the
bearded figure on the right holding the lantern. This reinforces a
sense of the immediacy of the dramatic situation depicted, as
though it were an incident the artist himself witnessed and recorded
faithfully out of some urgent compulsion.
I personally would trade almost all the painting done in the 20th Century for this one work. Wouldn't you?
Thursday, December 14
RADICAL AESTHETICS
by
Lloydville
on Thu 14 Dec 2006 12:25 AM PST
Jean-Luc
Godard has credited much of the impetus of the French New Wave to the
fact that the young filmmakers who created the movement had spent so
much time watching silent movies, courtesy of Henri Langlois, the great
film collector and founder of the Cinematheque Francaise.
Godard
believed that the radically alien aesthetic of silent movies allowed
these young filmmakers to see the medium with fresh eyes, freed from
the expectations of current style enforced by the habits and dictates
of the French national film industry and the Hollywood studio system.
Godard
also said that the principal idea of the New Wave was to get everybody
out of filmmaking who didn't belong in filmmaking -- to wrest control
of the medium from corporate functionaries and state bureaucrats and
return it to those who actually created movies.
Today,
when corporate control of popular movies is nearly absolute, and
forcing its range of possibility into narrower and narrower limits, a
study of silent cinema is even more likely to inspire the sort of
resistance that will be required to rescue movies from corporate
perversion and reclaim them for humane expression on behalf of the
culture at large.
D. W. Griffith once said, paraphrasing Joseph Conrad, "What I'm trying to do after all is make you see."
Look.
Wednesday, December 13
AMERICAN CLASSICS
by
Lloydville
on Wed 13 Dec 2006 02:08 AM PST
Marlon
Brando in "The Wild One", 1954, wearing a Perfecto motorcycle jacket.
The jacket, originally manufactured by Irving Schott in 1928 and named
for his favorite cigar, was the first motorcycle jacket to feature
zippers. It's still made by the Schott company, virtually unchanged
since Brando's day, and is an iconic American classic, an almost
perfect thing. If you buy one, get the original stiff-leather version
and break it in yourself. There are soft-leather versions
available, but these are for pusillanimous yuppies.
When I wear mine I always think of "Johnny" -- the
coolest actor of my lifetime.
Tuesday, December 12
ROMANCE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 12 Dec 2006 12:27 PM PST
Sorting through some old copies of The New Yorker from the 1980s I ran across this by Arlene Croce from one of
her dance reviews:
"One
hears so much about the death of romance in the relations between the
sexes that whenever an artist manages to make a truly romantic work one
has to ask where he got the material for it. Usually, the answer is
that he got it from the past -- the artist has produced a study in
nostalgia. Changing sexual attitudes are imbued with a permanent sense
of loss. How can we really have lost something, though, and kept the
appetite for it? The appetite for romance and all that goes with it --
chivalry, the graces of courtship, the charm of intimacy -- is in
itself romantic. So is the idea that we have lost romance."
I
would add that romance is in some ways about loss -- it expresses a
fondness for all those things that will not last, for the flight of
time and the transience of the flesh . . . it embodies a kind of
respect and gratitude for the sweetness of life's passing, in moments
of ecstasy and in the common rounds of everyday experience, and through
that respect and gratitude -- all we can offer in the face of mortal
circumstances -- it builds a monument of echoes, of faithfulness and
memory, that resists the ruthlessness of time.
I think of some lines from Robert Louis Stevenson's poem Romance:
"And this shall be for music, when no one else is near,
"The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear,
"That only I remember, that only you admire,
"Of the broad road that stretches, and the roadside fire."
Friday, December 8
SANTA TERROR
by
Lloydville
on Fri 08 Dec 2006 12:39 AM PST
O. k., the drama of Christmas isn't always gentle. This picture
is from a series of vintage photographs of children terrified by Santa,
mostly in his commercial incarnations in department stores, where the
true spirit of Christmas is routinely ground down into artificial snowflakes.
Here's a link to the images (via Boing Boing):
Santa Terror
Thursday, December 7
WHAT IS THIS?
by
Lloydville
on Thu 07 Dec 2006 12:14 AM PST
What
this is is an excruciating, bitter, brilliant example of pulp noir
fiction from the Fifties. Even though it's set in the Thirties it
reflects the same post-WWII disillusionment that the Beat writers mined
-- but it's much tougher and starker, much less romantic and
pretentious than any Beat fiction. It makes William S. Burroughs look
like the James Branch Cabell of despair.
Many
of Goodis's pulp novels have been made into movies -- Truffaut's "Shoot
the Piano Player" was adapted from Goodis's "Down There" -- but not
this one. It's just too grim, I guess, and its eroticism too perverse.
But its jagged broken-glass style and unflinching gaze are also
exhilarating.
[The cover above is from the original edition, but it's still in print between less lurid wraps.]
Wednesday, December 6
EGG NOG
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Dec 2006 02:53 AM PST
Is there a more congenial day in the whole year than the Friday after
Thanksgiving, when it becomes proper to begin celebrating Christmas?
There should still be lots of turkey left for sandwiches and soup, it
is permitted to play Christmas music incessantly, and the season of egg
nog begins.
A jigger of good Brandy in a glass of store-bought nog will do the
trick -- and does for me every night of the Christmas holidays. Sipped
on a cold night by the fire, egg nog revives the calm and coziness of
childhood Christmases as the gentle suspense of the season built to the dramatic
revelations of Christmas morning.
Later in life one comes to appreciate that Christmas is a celebration
of childhood on every level, as much of the world pauses to honor
the birth of a child, a miracle revealed if only momentarily as a
mystical event, beyond comprehension . . . the very definition of joy.
Cheers!
Tuesday, December 5
LOUISE BROOKS
by
Lloydville
on Tue 05 Dec 2006 01:33 PM PST
2006 marks the 100th anniversary of Louise Brooks's birth. It's been
celebrated by the release of a cool new picture book about the star,
"Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever", by Peter Cowie, and a special DVD
edition of her most famous film, "Pandora's Box", put out by Criterion,
with lots of extras.
Brooks was, like Garbo, a creature who had her being on film -- her way
of moving through cinematic space could transcend the films that tried
to contain her, transcend the normal conventions of "screen acting".
Early in her career she played second lead in a mediocre comedy called
"The Show Off". She doesn't seem to be part of the film at all -- she
looks like someone who has wandered onto the set while the cameras were
rolling and decided to stay and observe the curious behavior of the
people around her. She appears to have found this behavior only
vaguely amusing, and in this delivers a wise critique of the film from
within the film itself. The effect is bizarre.
G. W. Pabst used her uncanny mixture of detachment and sensuality to
brilliant effect in "Pandora's Box" -- he was one of the few directors
who seems to have realized that a film had to defer to her phenomenal
screen persona or risk evaporating around her. It's a film you should
watch at least once this year.
Happy birthday, Lulu.
Monday, December 4
MODERN TIMES
by
Lloydville
on Mon 04 Dec 2006 03:59 PM PST
Bob
Dylan's new album "Modern Times" sounds as though it was made by people
playing musical instruments, by a man singing with his voice, all in
some sort of space that might actually be encountered in the real
world. This is very unusual in modern popular music, and you might call
it revolutionary, even though it harks back to the sound of recorded
blues, rhythm & blues and rock & roll well into the 70s. (A
sign that the album's title might be ironic is that its cover sports a
black-and-white photograph from the Forties.)
Beginning
in the 70s, popular music began to take on what Theodor Adorno would
have called a "phantasmagorical" quality -- a process which he
explained in terms of the modern commodity culture, which tends to
produce objects which do not easily reveal how exactly they were made.
The commodity seller benefits from this because it obscures the fact
that he himself has not made the object he's selling but appropriated
the labor of others to make it (perhaps unfairly.)
Adorno
saw the same process at work in the music of Wagner, where a great wash
of sound enchants us away from an appreciation of the fact that the
music is produced by individual musicians playing individual
instruments. (Stravinsky, who hated Wagner's music, once wrote
passionately against the practice of listening to live music with one's
eyes closed -- he felt that one should never forget the physical
process of making music.)
R
& b and rock sounded revolutionary in the Fifties quite apart from
their raucous beats and suggestive lyrics -- they sounded revolutionary
because they sounded as though they were made by individual musicians,
not by workers in corporatized music factories. But with the rise of
disco and synthesizers and multi-track recording in the 70s, all fine
things in themselves, the recording industry had tools for resubmerging
individual performance into a corporatized "sound". It commodified rock
and roll -- made it phantasmagorical, in Adorno's sense.
For
some reason hard to fathom, "Modern Times" debuted at #1 on Billboard's
charts and has been one of Dylan's most successful albums ever. Perhaps
it's attributable to the nostalgia of baby-boomers, hearing music that
takes them back to the golden age -- perhaps it's attributable to
younger listeners having their ears and minds opened up by something
that sounds different, new.
Most likely it's a combination of the two -- part of the old rascal Dylan's strange alchemy whereby old forms and old
language are somehow deconstructed and recombined to reflect the peculiar aura of the present moment.
Sunday, December 3
TOURNAMENTS
by
Lloydville
on Sun 03 Dec 2006 02:01 PM PST
My friend Jae has been in town recently, visiting from Brooklyn, and
we've been on a mini poker marathon. Neither of us had been doing too
well until we discovered a cool little no-limit Hold-'em tournament at
the Fiesta in North Las Vegas, held nightly at midnight. The card room
at the Fiesta is one of the last places in Vegas which allows smoking
around the clock, which means that it attracts a better sort of player,
cheerful, tolerant, democratic in a style |
