DB and GM at the ICA.
Usless things
Things that have evolved
Harmful things
Things you can eat.
Feelings
Invented concepts
Just words
Love/Imaginary love
Natural things that have bred unnatural things
Animal urges versus human urges
Ways we justify our animal behavior
Ways we pretend to be moral, where we are in fact corrupt
Wars
Religions
Corporate identities
Irrationality versus rationality
Fear as the base of every other emotion
Artists' brains versus scientists' brains
Curio
Monday, October 15, 2007
Friday, October 12, 2007
Dear Geoffrey -
Thanks so much for those tickets! I really, really enjoyed the lecture, and so did my mom... We had a lot to talk about afterwards. Such incredible ideas, very inspiring.
After attending the lecture, and reading your books (mindbinders both), I think I'm gonna focus on you two guys, the event, and your books, with some of Vlad Griskevicius's research brought in (who's been real helpful, and I loved his Peacock's and Picasso paper, which is how I found you). I'm trying to get in touch with David through McSweeney's to ask him a few Q's as well. I've listed some below. There are ten, but answer whichever ones you want, or the ones you actually have something to say about. (These were just things I was thinking about post-lecture and -book.) You kept anticipating things I wanted to ask, and even random connections, such as the Modern Lovers song which had been running in my head since reading Vlad's article. One of my favorite refrains ever:
Well he was only 5'3"
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not in New York
Anyway, here are the questions. Answer however you like, feeling free to be brief.
1. Hitler seems to be an interesting case. You mention his use of the Mad Dog Strategy. Is there something more here, considering he was a failed artist (failed to widely display his creativity), but eventually became sexually adored by many women? Could some (most?) of his behavior be explained by sexual selection? (I imagine this is dangerous, prickly territory, of course.)
2. Have you done any studies involving homosexual men and/or women? I wonder how the concept of creative analysis versus creative production might differ between heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
3. How do you think your brain differs from David Byrnes'? Or: according to that press release, I think you have some theories, or at least opinions, on David's music. Like what?
4. Why do you think everybody laughs at the idea of sexual displays and mating? The bowerbird is a huge comic hit, for example, because its behavior looks a lot like some human courting behavior. (This question may relate to the nature of laughter itself, however, rather than anything evolution-related.)
5. Beside the motivation many scientists have to display their familiarity with the canon of art so that people don't think they're simply "truth" obsessed, do you feel a necessity to balance out your research in evolutionary origins with art (painting, literature, music, film, which its clear you know a lot about)? (Granted, many of your theories are beautiful/artistic in themselves)
6. In The Mating Mind you write that evolution is heartlessly unromantic. As an evolutionary psychologist (ie, someone who studies evolution, and especially sexual selection), is it difficult to believe in romance...?
7. David Byrne writes this in the intro to his book:
I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with—that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational "thinking" areas of our brains are super-rationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them to both ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others. "The hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge [as an explanation of nature] is as faith-based as intelligent design," says Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory.
Do you agree with these statements, or do you take issue with any of them? Where does rationality come in for you, if it comes in at all?
8. Heartache/heartbreak: Increased cardiac activity due to the stress/anxiety of a romantic attachment coming undone? More specifi than this?
9. What about reputedly asexual artists, like Borges, or the later Henry James? (Andy Warhol's wasn't exactly asexual, but he's an interesting one - a man who clearly wanted love and fame and recognition through his art, and sort of made that his thing. (Loved the deft explanation of why Warhol would not have drawn a candy bar, by the way. That particular guy's question - a classic example of a male striving to be heard, despite not knowing what he's talking about...?)
10. To date, what do you consider the most interesting evolutionary discovery you've made?
Thanks so much for those tickets! I really, really enjoyed the lecture, and so did my mom... We had a lot to talk about afterwards. Such incredible ideas, very inspiring.
After attending the lecture, and reading your books (mindbinders both), I think I'm gonna focus on you two guys, the event, and your books, with some of Vlad Griskevicius's research brought in (who's been real helpful, and I loved his Peacock's and Picasso paper, which is how I found you). I'm trying to get in touch with David through McSweeney's to ask him a few Q's as well. I've listed some below. There are ten, but answer whichever ones you want, or the ones you actually have something to say about. (These were just things I was thinking about post-lecture and -book.) You kept anticipating things I wanted to ask, and even random connections, such as the Modern Lovers song which had been running in my head since reading Vlad's article. One of my favorite refrains ever:
Well he was only 5'3"
But girls could not resist his stare
Pablo Picasso never got called an asshole
Not in New York
Anyway, here are the questions. Answer however you like, feeling free to be brief.
1. Hitler seems to be an interesting case. You mention his use of the Mad Dog Strategy. Is there something more here, considering he was a failed artist (failed to widely display his creativity), but eventually became sexually adored by many women? Could some (most?) of his behavior be explained by sexual selection? (I imagine this is dangerous, prickly territory, of course.)
2. Have you done any studies involving homosexual men and/or women? I wonder how the concept of creative analysis versus creative production might differ between heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
3. How do you think your brain differs from David Byrnes'? Or: according to that press release, I think you have some theories, or at least opinions, on David's music. Like what?
4. Why do you think everybody laughs at the idea of sexual displays and mating? The bowerbird is a huge comic hit, for example, because its behavior looks a lot like some human courting behavior. (This question may relate to the nature of laughter itself, however, rather than anything evolution-related.)
5. Beside the motivation many scientists have to display their familiarity with the canon of art so that people don't think they're simply "truth" obsessed, do you feel a necessity to balance out your research in evolutionary origins with art (painting, literature, music, film, which its clear you know a lot about)? (Granted, many of your theories are beautiful/artistic in themselves)
6. In The Mating Mind you write that evolution is heartlessly unromantic. As an evolutionary psychologist (ie, someone who studies evolution, and especially sexual selection), is it difficult to believe in romance...?
7. David Byrne writes this in the intro to his book:
I happen to believe that a lot of scientific and rational premises are irrational to begin with—that the work of much science and academic inquiry is, deep down, merely the elaborate justification of desire, bias, whim, and glory. I sense that to some extent the rational "thinking" areas of our brains are super-rationalization engines. They provide us with means and justifications for our more animal impulses. They allow us to justify them to both ourselves and then, when that has been accomplished, to others. "The hope that a mathematically unique solution will emerge [as an explanation of nature] is as faith-based as intelligent design," says Leonard Susskind, inventor of string theory.
Do you agree with these statements, or do you take issue with any of them? Where does rationality come in for you, if it comes in at all?
8. Heartache/heartbreak: Increased cardiac activity due to the stress/anxiety of a romantic attachment coming undone? More specifi than this?
9. What about reputedly asexual artists, like Borges, or the later Henry James? (Andy Warhol's wasn't exactly asexual, but he's an interesting one - a man who clearly wanted love and fame and recognition through his art, and sort of made that his thing. (Loved the deft explanation of why Warhol would not have drawn a candy bar, by the way. That particular guy's question - a classic example of a male striving to be heard, despite not knowing what he's talking about...?)
10. To date, what do you consider the most interesting evolutionary discovery you've made?
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
With G
“Remember how we used to go to parties just so we could get there and leave. It’s like now we just go and don’t even realize we’re there. We never even really arrive anymore.”
Two dyed-red-headed girls talking to one another. Their conversation seemed extremely important from a distance.
"What’s his book about?"
“I don’t know. Raging. Fucked up shit. This girl once licked coke over his dick. She was fucked up. He was like, “Dude, that chick was OUT OF CONTROL. It was like, Come on, what are you doing? You’re totally out of control.”
Getting upset about being called teen wolf.
“People don’t realize that when they say stuff like that they in danger of getting they THROAT CUT!”
Laughing painfully:
“To answer your question J, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking, J. I’m drunk.”
Complaining about how this guy, the AP of the L, is pumped about being who he is. The whatever kind of irony that’s implied in wearing a tweed jacket and scuffed brown wingtips and a yellow tie. To encompass the entire thing: Why? Why the effort? The intent is partly to make you aware that he knows, maybe, publishing a magazine is a strangely ersatz thing to do, old-fashioned, uncool in comparison to the music and filmmaking and art-making folks that surround one in NY and are more relevant and popular. Also the frustrating Warhol idea (a working class boy) that "there's nothing more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois." Actually, there probably are more bourgeois things than that, I just don't have the time to figure out what they are.
G in the voice saying I’ve ruined him. Or that the night he before he’d had sex with H and “It was sensual. She touched my balls. Sensuously.”
Heather suddenly appears, after the guy’s throat has been cut, and says, shaking her head, “You shouldn’t of said that. He’ll cut ya throat.”
He drew a speech bubble: It’s stinky chocolate. [Laughter] It was commonly acknowledged that he was gifted.
Bloody Social: G leaps at the mention of the band.
“What’s he like? The lead singer?”
“He’s like, [pursing lips] ‘We should hang out.’”
“Oh yeah?”
“He stands there in the studio looking at the rest of the band as they play and occasionally going, ‘Yeah, nice mate.’ He's the lamest guy ever."
"Ha ha, nice!"
Imitation of lead singer complaining about their popularity among fat girls from the mid-West. “Mates, we seem to be despised everywhere except for bloody Kansas. We’ve got to take some kind of redemptive bloody action.”
Pictures of girls bending down on stage to plug in a guitar pedal.
Two dyed-red-headed girls talking to one another. Their conversation seemed extremely important from a distance.
"What’s his book about?"
“I don’t know. Raging. Fucked up shit. This girl once licked coke over his dick. She was fucked up. He was like, “Dude, that chick was OUT OF CONTROL. It was like, Come on, what are you doing? You’re totally out of control.”
Getting upset about being called teen wolf.
“People don’t realize that when they say stuff like that they in danger of getting they THROAT CUT!”
Laughing painfully:
“To answer your question J, yes, I’ve been drinking. I’ve been drinking, J. I’m drunk.”
Complaining about how this guy, the AP of the L, is pumped about being who he is. The whatever kind of irony that’s implied in wearing a tweed jacket and scuffed brown wingtips and a yellow tie. To encompass the entire thing: Why? Why the effort? The intent is partly to make you aware that he knows, maybe, publishing a magazine is a strangely ersatz thing to do, old-fashioned, uncool in comparison to the music and filmmaking and art-making folks that surround one in NY and are more relevant and popular. Also the frustrating Warhol idea (a working class boy) that "there's nothing more bourgeois than being afraid to look bourgeois." Actually, there probably are more bourgeois things than that, I just don't have the time to figure out what they are.
G in the voice saying I’ve ruined him. Or that the night he before he’d had sex with H and “It was sensual. She touched my balls. Sensuously.”
Heather suddenly appears, after the guy’s throat has been cut, and says, shaking her head, “You shouldn’t of said that. He’ll cut ya throat.”
He drew a speech bubble: It’s stinky chocolate. [Laughter] It was commonly acknowledged that he was gifted.
Bloody Social: G leaps at the mention of the band.
“What’s he like? The lead singer?”
“He’s like, [pursing lips] ‘We should hang out.’”
“Oh yeah?”
“He stands there in the studio looking at the rest of the band as they play and occasionally going, ‘Yeah, nice mate.’ He's the lamest guy ever."
"Ha ha, nice!"
Imitation of lead singer complaining about their popularity among fat girls from the mid-West. “Mates, we seem to be despised everywhere except for bloody Kansas. We’ve got to take some kind of redemptive bloody action.”
Pictures of girls bending down on stage to plug in a guitar pedal.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
Tired
Man, I'm tired. If you drink only one or two nights week, and then drink a fair amount, don't expect to wake up at a reasonable hour or be alert in any way until around 6 or 7 o'clock. Fun time with D and then G later on. D and I talked about why I don't have a girlfriend and he does, how I spared his girlfriend, how much he loves her, that he's in a kind of level four as oppsoed to level three type state. Never experienced before. Shit, this is stupid. Speaking of that, stoop. D said "Getting stupid on the stoop." If you want to go out tonight or do something fun you better get the fuck to work and stop fucking around on this blog. Okay?
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Williamsburg
I was in Williamsburg last night and it felt very strange to be there. A whole new crop of kids are there. Young kids. Early twenties, or younger. Eric, Graham's friend, who it turns out is 33 and a little ashamed of this, was saying "I'm afraid the kids in this hardcore band that I've been hanging out with see me as a creepy old guy.... When I was fifteen and had just discovered punk rock me and my friends thought, 'Wow, I'm gonna be into this for the rest of my life!'" He put his hand to his forhead in a mix of mock and real astonishment. "I wish I didn't mean it."
Graham and I got on the subject of The Bloody Social, who've been appearing everywhere. We were trying to figure out a way of describing their music. At first Graham said, "Sort of American rock. I don't know." And then "Mellow Bon Jovi maybe." Laughter, because it was accurate. That was almost exactly it. Graham imitated the singer, who doesn't exactly sing lyrics, just more of an "Ooooh. Oooh." While playing a G chord. Graham's friend asked what we thought their fate as a band was, and we realized the phenomenon of bands simply getting more recognition that they suck by becoming "popular." Like Blink 182, maybe - who may have had a very successful and longterm run as a local LA underground punk band, had they not decided to go for it, and make it known to the American public how badly they suck. This, we thought, was the fate of the Bloody Social - to gain some kind of confused attention, mainly through the lead singer's contract with Calvin Kline, and then to be overwhelmingly despised by New York City's rock community, used as a kind of punching bag until they disappear into different bands, jobs, or states.
"Off the top of my head, I can't think of a betterr drummer in New York City. Off the top of my head, right now in this moment."
"What about Graham? Can you think of a bigger asshole in New York than Graham right now, off the top of your head?"
[Comic pause]
"No. Of the assholes that I'm thinking of, off the top of my head, Graham is the biggest one."
Graham and I got on the subject of The Bloody Social, who've been appearing everywhere. We were trying to figure out a way of describing their music. At first Graham said, "Sort of American rock. I don't know." And then "Mellow Bon Jovi maybe." Laughter, because it was accurate. That was almost exactly it. Graham imitated the singer, who doesn't exactly sing lyrics, just more of an "Ooooh. Oooh." While playing a G chord. Graham's friend asked what we thought their fate as a band was, and we realized the phenomenon of bands simply getting more recognition that they suck by becoming "popular." Like Blink 182, maybe - who may have had a very successful and longterm run as a local LA underground punk band, had they not decided to go for it, and make it known to the American public how badly they suck. This, we thought, was the fate of the Bloody Social - to gain some kind of confused attention, mainly through the lead singer's contract with Calvin Kline, and then to be overwhelmingly despised by New York City's rock community, used as a kind of punching bag until they disappear into different bands, jobs, or states.
"Off the top of my head, I can't think of a betterr drummer in New York City. Off the top of my head, right now in this moment."
"What about Graham? Can you think of a bigger asshole in New York than Graham right now, off the top of your head?"
[Comic pause]
"No. Of the assholes that I'm thinking of, off the top of my head, Graham is the biggest one."
Monday, September 17, 2007
Bed and Board, Hero, The Goat, True North, etc
So. Watched Bed and Board, starring Antoine Duoniel (Jean-Claude L'something). Pretty damn iffy. Kael wonders if he's simply forgotten how to act, and that may be true. The man appears to me to be the prtotypical Frenchman. Significant nose, thin, fast moving (like a lot of lean Western Europeans - fueled and made cranky by excess espresso and nicotine), prone to explosive and dramatic but decidedly effeminate gestures, yellow teeth, an amazing capacity to appear stoic in the presence of a woman and in general, intelligent, distanced, "cool", a deep existential angst disguised by impassivity, and other qualities I associate with French guys, I suppose. Women are both helpless in their charge and utterly dominant. Maybe that's the thing: there is nearly always an uncanny and mysterious swinging from contentment to exasperation. (Especially in Godard's stuff - see the furious fluctuations in Contempt) In Bed and Board this occurs often--and although its uncanny it doesnt appear to have any cause. Donieul gives no indication why he would want to sleep and be with this crazy suicidal Asian other than total, and unexpressed, nihilism. He appears to love his wife immensely, finds her hot, has her wear glasses in bed for aesthetic kicks. Then he has a kid. And suddenly he's interested in the speechless Asian. Okay. Justification is only given afte the fact, as if Truffaut realizzed he'd given his hero no motive. We learn that his wife was boring, prude - that Doinel was her first lover, that he makes her laugh. (He is funny he's got amazing timing and great deadpan looks, as seen when operating the remote control battleships in the pond while smoking a cigarette and discovering the Asian girl. His childishness and immaturity is winning I guess; he's got the resilience of the guy who's so entertaining to women, and so energetic and sociable with men, that he's never really had to ponder deeply on why things aren';t ass they should be, and so he appears child-like, carefree, immensely innocent. Yeah, he's funny. But where does it get us? There's a strangler who turns out to be a TTV personality (too much TV had convinced the people of the villa that this man was a strangler, and then the TV proves this not to be the case.) There's the opera singer and his flighty, adoring, truant wife whose husband throws her fur coat and handbag down the stairwell when she takes too long to get ready for the opera, in which her threatening, dominant husband features prominently, we can assume. There's a mysterrious guy who keeps asking Doinel for money, and this was never resolved, I don't think. So what the fuck is my general reaction. WTF Truffaut? An endearing film, but not much else.
Hero was fucking crazy! I watched it in four separate installments, and each time I hit stop and did something else it was tinged with the "slow-motion delicacy of the film's phenomenal fight scenes." (critic phrase) Once I went into the kitchen and cut some garlic and put down the knife on the cutting board and it rang as if I'd just pulled it from someone chest and let it fall, dripping with sugary blood. Or I quickly flipped open my cellphone and felt it'd made a "whhhhoooo" sound. Or talking on the phone: the succinctness of my Yesses and Nos was of a kind with those precdeing a sword duel in a heavily leafed park. The images were magical! Simply magical! The falling sour-apple colored silk sheets in the emperor's palace! The leaf fight! People kept dying and then re-appearing, which confsed the shit out of me chronologically, although it's guaranteed that I was misisng something crucial to the theme/plot/essence of the film and probably Kung-Fu movies in general (if that's what Hero is). The calligraphy stufff was a tad cheesy, as was the conlusion of the film, the pre-credits informing us that Our land is what they now call China! Hurrah!
Criticism is bullshit unless it's helping you come to an understanding of art in general, forming a deeper appreciation for what art is, and informing your own attempts at creating art. There are people out there who write criticism because they actually hate art, hate people who make it, and hate themselves.
Um. The Goat. What can you say? I'm slightly confused by the stupid fucking explication of "what's reallly going on" that appears throughout this play. I mean, hell of an idea: a too-all-accounts-happy suburbian family, with an ominously named gay son Billy, suddenly implodes because a possible early-onset Alzheimer's patient, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect newly commisioned to design a billion dollar World City, falls helplessly in love woth a goat. I was tryign to figure out how else this family would have reacted to such a tragedy. The unreality of his wife's hysterical reaction is covered by her self-conscious quote: "This is too serious to be serious." But all that exegetic shit aside, this play pretty much sucked. It wasn't credible. The teenage kid's dialogue was fucking ridiculous, with his totally unbelievable degreeof self-awareness. He talks as if he were a forty year odl gay man who'd slipped back into his 16 year old frame to say what he should have said when he found out his dad was fucking a goat. The praise the play received makes me wonder what kind of other plays were in the running, and the kind of softening effect the exposure to theater has on literary minds. This is a piece of the theatre world, I guess. And maybe this defines theater. But so many mistakes, such unreality, such overblown emotions in the service of "drama". In the end what has the guy really said? That it's unacceptable to fuck goats? That's essentially it. And maybe that's weird? That we should be so upset about people fucking farm animals because they're helplessly drawn to them. That such a thing could utterly destroy a marriage, even if the male is still in love with the woman, as he claims. (Now we're zeroing in on it.) But the freak-out session. Hmmm. Was this okay? Maybe she would go this batty. She definitely would not make all the knowing essayistic references she makes ("Bestiality is the ONE THING we aren't prepared for..." etc. What the fuck? The audience couldn't figure this out? It's not implicit enough in the play?). But she definitely might throw the dishes and stuff. But there has to have been more time. More of an axis for this thing. More of a transition into and out of shock, rather than "You...goat fucker!" That's fucking childish. Like, Oh, ha ha, goat fucker, that's great, that'll get some seedy laughs on Broadaway." Eck. What that fuck is my opinion.
True North is still sort of blowing my mind. Funny that Harrison brings up Hemingway only to let us know that he was never really interested in him, because the mysteries of the Great North were already known to him and considered harmless. Maybe everybody read Hemingway back then, which is why Heminway might occur to a non-writer to speak about. There's this:
"...an idea in early church history that if you couldn't forgive someone you became their slave mentally.... Forgiveness wasn't excusing the offender but unburdening yourself of the tyranny of the offender by seeing him in a full human perspective."
This book is full of such soulful, innocent, fresh-air induced wisdom. I kind of love Jim Harrison. (Jim Morrison, George Harrison?) I really want to write him a note. Maybe I just should.
Another guy I love is P. So what if a million other people love him. That story about the Blakelock painting in the house of whoever... and P. approaching the old man drunk and alone at a table, having frightened everyone else out of the room. "...but that Blakelock, sir, is a real gem." "You know Blakelock!?" Etc. He really is enlightened. Being your own harshest, or just most thoroughly considered, critic so that nothing anyone else says can damage you. The slapping of asses. Einstein: it's easier to split an atom than to change your viewof the world. Levi Strauss: It's easier to get a million people to love you than it is to get one person to love you. Hm. That sounds good, but is it true. Some person might just sort of love you for the simple reason that you ignore them, or that you are who you are, whereas you usually have to take pretty significant pains to get a million people to not only be aware of you but to love you too. I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. What else has he said recently? That you cannot deny the accomplishments of Jonas Mekas, even if 40 years ago he wrote something negative about your mother's art film house. (You should order his poems)
Hero was fucking crazy! I watched it in four separate installments, and each time I hit stop and did something else it was tinged with the "slow-motion delicacy of the film's phenomenal fight scenes." (critic phrase) Once I went into the kitchen and cut some garlic and put down the knife on the cutting board and it rang as if I'd just pulled it from someone chest and let it fall, dripping with sugary blood. Or I quickly flipped open my cellphone and felt it'd made a "whhhhoooo" sound. Or talking on the phone: the succinctness of my Yesses and Nos was of a kind with those precdeing a sword duel in a heavily leafed park. The images were magical! Simply magical! The falling sour-apple colored silk sheets in the emperor's palace! The leaf fight! People kept dying and then re-appearing, which confsed the shit out of me chronologically, although it's guaranteed that I was misisng something crucial to the theme/plot/essence of the film and probably Kung-Fu movies in general (if that's what Hero is). The calligraphy stufff was a tad cheesy, as was the conlusion of the film, the pre-credits informing us that Our land is what they now call China! Hurrah!
Criticism is bullshit unless it's helping you come to an understanding of art in general, forming a deeper appreciation for what art is, and informing your own attempts at creating art. There are people out there who write criticism because they actually hate art, hate people who make it, and hate themselves.
Um. The Goat. What can you say? I'm slightly confused by the stupid fucking explication of "what's reallly going on" that appears throughout this play. I mean, hell of an idea: a too-all-accounts-happy suburbian family, with an ominously named gay son Billy, suddenly implodes because a possible early-onset Alzheimer's patient, and Pritzker Prize-winning architect newly commisioned to design a billion dollar World City, falls helplessly in love woth a goat. I was tryign to figure out how else this family would have reacted to such a tragedy. The unreality of his wife's hysterical reaction is covered by her self-conscious quote: "This is too serious to be serious." But all that exegetic shit aside, this play pretty much sucked. It wasn't credible. The teenage kid's dialogue was fucking ridiculous, with his totally unbelievable degreeof self-awareness. He talks as if he were a forty year odl gay man who'd slipped back into his 16 year old frame to say what he should have said when he found out his dad was fucking a goat. The praise the play received makes me wonder what kind of other plays were in the running, and the kind of softening effect the exposure to theater has on literary minds. This is a piece of the theatre world, I guess. And maybe this defines theater. But so many mistakes, such unreality, such overblown emotions in the service of "drama". In the end what has the guy really said? That it's unacceptable to fuck goats? That's essentially it. And maybe that's weird? That we should be so upset about people fucking farm animals because they're helplessly drawn to them. That such a thing could utterly destroy a marriage, even if the male is still in love with the woman, as he claims. (Now we're zeroing in on it.) But the freak-out session. Hmmm. Was this okay? Maybe she would go this batty. She definitely would not make all the knowing essayistic references she makes ("Bestiality is the ONE THING we aren't prepared for..." etc. What the fuck? The audience couldn't figure this out? It's not implicit enough in the play?). But she definitely might throw the dishes and stuff. But there has to have been more time. More of an axis for this thing. More of a transition into and out of shock, rather than "You...goat fucker!" That's fucking childish. Like, Oh, ha ha, goat fucker, that's great, that'll get some seedy laughs on Broadaway." Eck. What that fuck is my opinion.
True North is still sort of blowing my mind. Funny that Harrison brings up Hemingway only to let us know that he was never really interested in him, because the mysteries of the Great North were already known to him and considered harmless. Maybe everybody read Hemingway back then, which is why Heminway might occur to a non-writer to speak about. There's this:
"...an idea in early church history that if you couldn't forgive someone you became their slave mentally.... Forgiveness wasn't excusing the offender but unburdening yourself of the tyranny of the offender by seeing him in a full human perspective."
This book is full of such soulful, innocent, fresh-air induced wisdom. I kind of love Jim Harrison. (Jim Morrison, George Harrison?) I really want to write him a note. Maybe I just should.
Another guy I love is P. So what if a million other people love him. That story about the Blakelock painting in the house of whoever... and P. approaching the old man drunk and alone at a table, having frightened everyone else out of the room. "...but that Blakelock, sir, is a real gem." "You know Blakelock!?" Etc. He really is enlightened. Being your own harshest, or just most thoroughly considered, critic so that nothing anyone else says can damage you. The slapping of asses. Einstein: it's easier to split an atom than to change your viewof the world. Levi Strauss: It's easier to get a million people to love you than it is to get one person to love you. Hm. That sounds good, but is it true. Some person might just sort of love you for the simple reason that you ignore them, or that you are who you are, whereas you usually have to take pretty significant pains to get a million people to not only be aware of you but to love you too. I'm gonna call bullshit on this one. What else has he said recently? That you cannot deny the accomplishments of Jonas Mekas, even if 40 years ago he wrote something negative about your mother's art film house. (You should order his poems)
Sunday, September 9, 2007
American Playboys
So I've had another exciting weekend in the tradition of not really reading or writing. Amazing the things you learn about the world when you don't sequester yourself in your fucking room. What a waste of goddamn time. Social isolation is, along with idle hands, the Devil's plaything. Poor asocial people.
G. is one of the most popular (read: likeable) people in Williamsburg. He knows everyone. And if he doesn't know them, he might as well, because he knows their band, their art, their friend who works for art crating or works part-time at the Gagosian gallery or saw him propose to his girlfriend at Miami Basel, etc.
H. was there last night, and she's going through something called The H. Revolution, which is her new personal event. She broke up with her boyfriend, one of her best friends died (God knows how, I assume drugs or a fixed gear bike accident), she's been in contact with people at Cooper Union, where she didn't get in. She's more full of life than anyone I know. Which means, maybe, that she's a bit self-involved, completely self-interested, self-obsessed, and self-important. And lke most people concerned so hugely with themselves, she has crazy parents and is struggling not be them. Like Jim Harrison in True North, the key is simply to, if you have a crazy family, figure out why they're crazy and try not to act like that. So the self prokect is fully underway in H's case, and therefore the H Revolution. She was wearign a dress from someone named Marilyn, and a girl had asked her earlier in the night, "Is that a Marilyn?" and she said, "Yeah, it's a Marilyn." "It was the most pretentious conversation I've ever had."
Talked with Mark for a while, who has a bit of a wall eye which gives you the sense that he's not very interested in what you're saying. (Secret thought: "He's not even looking at me while I'm telling him this story. He's looking at the chick behind me" etc.) We discussed how bikes can change a person's life. It changed his, it changed mine. Getting doored was a big topic. I made up a story about a guy I know getting "doored" and falling in front of a bus which ran over his band, killing him. Later we were inside looking at a model Lambourgine made out of cut plastic panelling. We both wished the doors were open, displaying the way they open up instead of out. This got us thinking about how friendly a Lambourgine is to the bike messengers and amateur road bikers in Manhattan. No one gets doored by Lambourgines. Ditto Delorians. This led to a story. At the funeral for the "friend" of mine, the black sheep of the family delivers a eulogy. It begins conventionally, "My brother was my best friend," etc. But then he suddenly launches into an alternate reality tangent, in which the door was not an out-opener but rather a Lambourgine door, which opens up, saving his brother's life. He suddenly turns and hits play on a giant projector: "Now, had it been a lambourgine instead of a Bick or whatever it was that took my brother's life..." And on the screen you see the brother riding a bike at top speed down Broadway and then narrowly avoiding the Lanbourgine door. Slow mo shot: the brother looking into the car, and the Lambourgine owner smiling at him, giving him the thumbs up. The bus whizzes by, and the bus driver too gives him the thumbs up, smiling. He turns left at the intersection, and fades into the setting sun at the end 34th Street, going god knows where. Alive! The brother looks back at the awestruck funeral attendees, and then returns to the screen, where the film continues through his brother's successful and happy next few months, before he is finally doored by a car not a Delorian or Lambourgine, and dies in a more violent way, more slowly and cruelly, getting churned up in the gears of a street sweeper but dying in the hospital. With that the brother's euology ends.
Then we met G's buddy, foget his name, who G called a real American playboy. He was funny. They talked about this new film, King of Kong, a documentary about the guy who has the highest score on Donkey Kong. He's from a small town in New Hampshire which happens to host the world's largest classic arcade game tournament each year. People from all over the world come. "They're like rock stars! In that arena, that is. The Kong guy is literally one of the most contemptible people I've ever met in my life. Just a genuinely despiccable human being." He loves his job with AC. He said that when he works with Graham, they each decided "You know what, let's love it. Let's just love life. It's all good! I love it!" He gets huge tips each time out, because he appraoches the customers in a "Listen, I'm right here, right now, here to do anythign I can to make you're day the best day you may have ever had. What...do you need ME...to do for you?"
B and A were at the Lodge earlier. And B's girlfriend, who kept saying, "Guys, listen guys. Let me telll you something. Girls? We just want you to fuck us. That's it. That and to be like a man. I want my men to be a men. A menly men. We want you to buy us thing. And to pay for the check. And to treat us like a woman.... You know, feminism was not such a big deal in France, because it is understood that we, women, are superior to you. There was not all the complication of equal respect and things like this. Because our men, they already respect us, because we have power in society? You know what this means? We are real women, French girls. And we treat our mens very well." Etc. She was drunk and B. said severally times, "Tout calm, tout calm." She was the only girl at the table and loving it, approaching tables full of Americans, excited to enter into a basic dialogue about food and cheese plates. One of us commented on the fact that she'd paid for the cheese plate, not Ben. "Yes," she said. "But this is an unusual circumstance. I am your guest you could say, and I feel it my responsibility to treat you well, especially since I am only girl at the table."
It's true that the smartest people I know are the most adrift, work the "worst" jobs, typically droppped out of college, use drugs and drink a lot, and tend to make music, or to have some involvement in music. They're more independent in other words. Not following mom and dad's lead, like the couple Gavin and I moved on Friday, Pez and (something Persian), who bought their lives at Ikea, who don't seem to have any idea they're alive.
Saw Fog of War and Hannah Takes the Stairs. Both pretty good. Why doesn't she take the elevator though? She doesn't want help? She can do it herself? She needs the exercise? She's claustrophobic?
G. is one of the most popular (read: likeable) people in Williamsburg. He knows everyone. And if he doesn't know them, he might as well, because he knows their band, their art, their friend who works for art crating or works part-time at the Gagosian gallery or saw him propose to his girlfriend at Miami Basel, etc.
H. was there last night, and she's going through something called The H. Revolution, which is her new personal event. She broke up with her boyfriend, one of her best friends died (God knows how, I assume drugs or a fixed gear bike accident), she's been in contact with people at Cooper Union, where she didn't get in. She's more full of life than anyone I know. Which means, maybe, that she's a bit self-involved, completely self-interested, self-obsessed, and self-important. And lke most people concerned so hugely with themselves, she has crazy parents and is struggling not be them. Like Jim Harrison in True North, the key is simply to, if you have a crazy family, figure out why they're crazy and try not to act like that. So the self prokect is fully underway in H's case, and therefore the H Revolution. She was wearign a dress from someone named Marilyn, and a girl had asked her earlier in the night, "Is that a Marilyn?" and she said, "Yeah, it's a Marilyn." "It was the most pretentious conversation I've ever had."
Talked with Mark for a while, who has a bit of a wall eye which gives you the sense that he's not very interested in what you're saying. (Secret thought: "He's not even looking at me while I'm telling him this story. He's looking at the chick behind me" etc.) We discussed how bikes can change a person's life. It changed his, it changed mine. Getting doored was a big topic. I made up a story about a guy I know getting "doored" and falling in front of a bus which ran over his band, killing him. Later we were inside looking at a model Lambourgine made out of cut plastic panelling. We both wished the doors were open, displaying the way they open up instead of out. This got us thinking about how friendly a Lambourgine is to the bike messengers and amateur road bikers in Manhattan. No one gets doored by Lambourgines. Ditto Delorians. This led to a story. At the funeral for the "friend" of mine, the black sheep of the family delivers a eulogy. It begins conventionally, "My brother was my best friend," etc. But then he suddenly launches into an alternate reality tangent, in which the door was not an out-opener but rather a Lambourgine door, which opens up, saving his brother's life. He suddenly turns and hits play on a giant projector: "Now, had it been a lambourgine instead of a Bick or whatever it was that took my brother's life..." And on the screen you see the brother riding a bike at top speed down Broadway and then narrowly avoiding the Lanbourgine door. Slow mo shot: the brother looking into the car, and the Lambourgine owner smiling at him, giving him the thumbs up. The bus whizzes by, and the bus driver too gives him the thumbs up, smiling. He turns left at the intersection, and fades into the setting sun at the end 34th Street, going god knows where. Alive! The brother looks back at the awestruck funeral attendees, and then returns to the screen, where the film continues through his brother's successful and happy next few months, before he is finally doored by a car not a Delorian or Lambourgine, and dies in a more violent way, more slowly and cruelly, getting churned up in the gears of a street sweeper but dying in the hospital. With that the brother's euology ends.
Then we met G's buddy, foget his name, who G called a real American playboy. He was funny. They talked about this new film, King of Kong, a documentary about the guy who has the highest score on Donkey Kong. He's from a small town in New Hampshire which happens to host the world's largest classic arcade game tournament each year. People from all over the world come. "They're like rock stars! In that arena, that is. The Kong guy is literally one of the most contemptible people I've ever met in my life. Just a genuinely despiccable human being." He loves his job with AC. He said that when he works with Graham, they each decided "You know what, let's love it. Let's just love life. It's all good! I love it!" He gets huge tips each time out, because he appraoches the customers in a "Listen, I'm right here, right now, here to do anythign I can to make you're day the best day you may have ever had. What...do you need ME...to do for you?"
B and A were at the Lodge earlier. And B's girlfriend, who kept saying, "Guys, listen guys. Let me telll you something. Girls? We just want you to fuck us. That's it. That and to be like a man. I want my men to be a men. A menly men. We want you to buy us thing. And to pay for the check. And to treat us like a woman.... You know, feminism was not such a big deal in France, because it is understood that we, women, are superior to you. There was not all the complication of equal respect and things like this. Because our men, they already respect us, because we have power in society? You know what this means? We are real women, French girls. And we treat our mens very well." Etc. She was drunk and B. said severally times, "Tout calm, tout calm." She was the only girl at the table and loving it, approaching tables full of Americans, excited to enter into a basic dialogue about food and cheese plates. One of us commented on the fact that she'd paid for the cheese plate, not Ben. "Yes," she said. "But this is an unusual circumstance. I am your guest you could say, and I feel it my responsibility to treat you well, especially since I am only girl at the table."
It's true that the smartest people I know are the most adrift, work the "worst" jobs, typically droppped out of college, use drugs and drink a lot, and tend to make music, or to have some involvement in music. They're more independent in other words. Not following mom and dad's lead, like the couple Gavin and I moved on Friday, Pez and (something Persian), who bought their lives at Ikea, who don't seem to have any idea they're alive.
Saw Fog of War and Hannah Takes the Stairs. Both pretty good. Why doesn't she take the elevator though? She doesn't want help? She can do it herself? She needs the exercise? She's claustrophobic?
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Jim James!
Son of a bitch, Jim James's voice makes me want to conquer the world and then hand it back to whoever it was I conquered it from with a kiss on both cheeks. No, not exactly. Maybe sail a cruise ship by myself as fast as possible, hanging from the front like Kate Winslett?
Goddamn, I know it's not a good idea to look too closely at either extreme sadness or extreme hapiness, but I've been feeling pretty good lately. It's because I'm learning how to work well, maybe, and I've been hanging out with peoples. It's like I'm rediscovering the world or something. I was really in a fucking shell there for a while. But fuck it. I learned things. I feel like I'm in love but I don't love anyone at the moment. That Italy trip changed some shit i think. Loneliness in Italy. A kind of primitive boredom. What kind of boredom did Adam feel, not having known excitement, the roar of the crowd?
The other day I'm walking back from work listening to "FM" by The Junior Boys, which Jon and I agreed reminded us of all the good things in the world, and I almost started crying, suddenly, right there in the street! I had this image of myself laughing wildly on a boat in the Mediterranean, against a hard blue sky, the wind in the face, spinning the steering wheel of the yacht with one hand, and I sort of sobbed a couple times, it was so beautiful. Weird huh?
Goddamn, I know it's not a good idea to look too closely at either extreme sadness or extreme hapiness, but I've been feeling pretty good lately. It's because I'm learning how to work well, maybe, and I've been hanging out with peoples. It's like I'm rediscovering the world or something. I was really in a fucking shell there for a while. But fuck it. I learned things. I feel like I'm in love but I don't love anyone at the moment. That Italy trip changed some shit i think. Loneliness in Italy. A kind of primitive boredom. What kind of boredom did Adam feel, not having known excitement, the roar of the crowd?
The other day I'm walking back from work listening to "FM" by The Junior Boys, which Jon and I agreed reminded us of all the good things in the world, and I almost started crying, suddenly, right there in the street! I had this image of myself laughing wildly on a boat in the Mediterranean, against a hard blue sky, the wind in the face, spinning the steering wheel of the yacht with one hand, and I sort of sobbed a couple times, it was so beautiful. Weird huh?
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
A Weekend, Andy Warhol, Once
So I finished the Bunuel piece which should be running in this month's Brooklyn Rail, thank God. I didn't know if I was ever going to finish that thing. Must've gone through twenty drafts. I'm definitely learning how to write about film. Meaning I'm unlearning how to make extraneous connections that have little to do with the film(s) at hand. God knows why I was bringing all of those contemporary films to bear on Bunuel's surrealist techniques. Maybe because it made sense to do - to show people how the man has managed to leave an undeniable influence on today's avant garde filmmakers?! The key is to not sound like such an asshole while doing it. Or to lecture people on Surrealism when what you know of the movement you learned a week ago? Etc.
Crazy weekend, it seems, outside of the film intake. A filmic weekend maybe? Feel like I'm changing as a person, rather than changing the way I think about abstract concepts and the imaginative act. Much happier to be hanging out with people so often. They really are something, humans. If you've spent your youth surrounded by them, instead of squirreled away somewhere with a book, it's gonna be tough to deny yourself of them when you get older. You'll be unhappy for a while, unless you're so fascinated by boredom and the absence of social contact that, like Robert Irwin, it makes you excited and helps you grow. I find myself automatically attributing a number of mental disorders to him, which happen to prove beneficial to his art in the way they focus his work ethic. Aspergers. OCD. Etc. But how boring and untrue. Maybe like Tom Cruise says there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance. He's done the research, he should know. He knows about the origins of things like Ritalin and Adderral, and Matt Lower doesn't, which seems to me irresponsible on Matt's part. He is, after all, a major influence on the American public, and to not be as informed as the celebrity guest on matters of psychiatry - and then to defend Brook Shields' endorsement of antidepressants! - strikes me as terribly glib.
On friday I finished the Andy Warhol: American Master PBS DVD, a whopping 3 hours, which turned out to be only 2, not including the extras. Incredible film! Warhol! What a guy! The film taught me a number of things. I knew about Andy's childhood in a kind of Polish ghetto transplanted to the outskirts of Pittsburgh. And the middle (lower?) class inferiority when it came to working in New York. The striving for fame. What I think the film does so successfully is to make his story so continuous. There were no gaps where you think, "Yeah, but wait, what just happened there? What were the motivations behind that move there, where his mother moves in and winds up spending the next twenty years with him in his apartment?" It's all sort of explained, but not overexplained. And the "voice" of the documentary -if you could call it a voice - is very sympathetic with Andy. Everyone calls him a genius at some point. (Martina Navratalova: "Genius is 90% sweat.") And they may be right? It just seems he was incredibly disciplined in following and extending the diaalogue with commercial and fine art. Women and sex were definitely not interfering with his process, as they may have in a more libidinal artist. His sexual orientation and distaste for the messiness of actual physcial contact may have been one of the major influences on his style. The plasticity of the prints. Pollock and de Kooning's pieces look like sex, and by comparison Warhol's like sanitary masturbation, with gloves and disinfectant at the ready. How much did Warhol masturbate I wonder? Either a lot or not at all. How can you jerk off at 40 with your mom making a borsht in the next room? Seems psychically difficult.
Phong had a lot to say about the film. He and Nora saw it. I was thinking they'd read enough books about Warhol for the film to be a tedious rehash of the known material, but no. They were sort of blown away by it too. Nora wrote about it in the Rail in 2006. The 36 different varieties of soup was saying, according to one of the interviewees, that everybody eats Campbells soup, but some people like the bean, some the tomato. Similarly with the different variation of Marilyn, or Elizabeth Taylor. Each print differs slightly from the one beside it. Whether this was intentional at first or not didn't really matter since Warhol was able to justify the importance of their dissimilarity after the fact. He seemed to have such amazing intuition. The stuff about his life being a novel was shocking as well. Augie March might be the great American novel in novel form, but is there a greater American novel than the life of Andy Warhol? Could anyone have written such an imaginaive account of desperation, failure, success, the exhalting and destructive power of fame - which he managed to achieve by commenting on it and deconstructing it in his artwork. The interview he gives at the end, however, was bullshit. The arts journalist, a foe but still, is asking a few questions and all Warhol can do is touch his lip in an incredibly annoying and stupid and childish way and say, "Um... maybe you could just ask me the questions and then tell me the answers and I can repeat them." I guess that's funny? Not really though, since the guy has no charisma. Bob Dylan could very successfully make fun of an interviewer's questions, even when they were insightful. But Warhol seems like the lead vocalist of a shitty 70's band who's watched Don't Look Back too many times and thinks he too is entitled to act like Dylan, without possessing anything like the guy's talent for mockery. Or he could be trying to imitate Lou Reed. Who knows. He comes off like a serious creep. Maybe partly because you know he has answers to these questions, whereas Dylan and Lou, it seemed, didn't have answers to the questions they were asked. The questions were too far afield, or were totally irrelevant, or stupid. (Do you use drugs? What's your sexual orientation? What's your take on transvestitism?) Either way, the doc gave me a new appreciation for Warhol's work. How beautiful it all was, his gradual perfection of certain techniques, his mining of American culture like the very coal and steel miners of Pittsburgh's outlying coal and stee mining industries...
Last night, after hanging out with Dave and everybody at Danny's and talking briefly about the band (D. "Why should we put out a record? Nobody listens to records. We have enough songs to put out a two song EP every month for a year, by which time we should have enough songs to put out another two song EP each month for another year."), I excused myself, complained that Tommy didn't want to talk about the play, and went to see "Once," the Irish film about two singer-songwriters. I admit, the first scene had me expecting greater things: the main character Glen Hansard is busking and keeping his eye on a heroin addict - an acquaintance of his apparently - who pretends he's just tying his shoes before he steals Glen's guitar case with change and bills in it. Glen chases him down the street, catches up with him, gets the case back, and then gives the guy some of the change he made. One of the best openings to a movie I may have ever seen. It was undeniably real, funny, sad, and seemed to reveal in 4 minutes all we need to know about the guy and his existence in Ireland. The rest of the movie is pretty good too though. The way he meets the Czech girl, who will eventually play piano and sing back-up and write a few lyrics for Glen's cd, was touching without being too cute, cheesy, or inevitable. I had a problem with the vaccuum cleaner she brings for him to fix and then pulls behind her like a dog on a leash as they go on their first "date," and I was wondering why. Anything that strikes me as an overt symbol of "creativity" or "quirkiness" - some staged decision that wants you to feel a certain way about something, especially "how sweet!" - always sets off alarm bells signaling a resemblance to Garden State or You and Me and Everyone We Know, perhaps the two worst films of the last decade, simply for what they're trying to do and the horrible, appeal they make for our sympathy. There are certainly "worse" movies, but the dishonesty of those two make them the world champions. They are two awful examples of raw ambition trying to mask itself as creativity, quirkiness, creativity. Lately it's been occurring to me that "creativity" seems to mean a kind of off-beat quirkiness, a kind of eccentricity or hysteria, rather than a talent for creation. What's "creative" for example in the work of Robert Irwin, considered in the light of contemporary creativity? He drew lines on canvas for two years. Some guys make white paintings for a decade. They aren't dreaming up "rogue adenoids" or alternate universes. They're playing with the nature of perception, drawing and redrawing a single object until it confesses something about itself. According to the nature of modern creativity, this stuff doesn't apply. Where's the weirdness? The quirk? The irony? What would people make of a brain like Tolstoy's or Whitman 'sif he appeared now? James Wood may have a point about his hysterical realism, especially when you extend the principle to film and painting.
Living is more important than reading or making art.
But back to Once. Glen's relationship to the Czech girl was excellent. Half an hour in he asks her to spend the night, and she looks at him and says, 'Fuck this' and leaves. Glen clenches his fists and curses himself, and the next day he apologizes by saying, "Sorry abou' that. I was just really lonely, it was a stupid thing to do. D' ya' wanna go for a coffee or tay or sump'm? Please?" Very sweet. He's like a kid. And she agrees, but not too quickly. You can't penetrate the acting; it's the way she might really behave. Perhaps, as usual, because she's not American and you can't see through the ethnic mesh. I resist calling this an urban fairy tale like everybody feels compelled to. It is part unreal musical though, as when the girl goes to get batteries in the middle of the night and spends the next four minutes of the film singing the lyrics she's written to one of Glen's songs while listening to it on headphones, in her pjs. Very dreamlike. Suddnely you re-realize you're watching a film, you're not just thinking your own thoughts or watching a music video - this is a film in the theatre. That's not explained well. But it hints at the magic of the film.
By subverting the traditional style of a film, it reminds yo that you're watching a film. That is, it makes you ask, "Is this still a film?" You then look around you and find you're in a theatre. Whereas, had the film been more traditional, more in line with the style of other films, you might never ask if what you're seeing is a film and perhaps you might not even realize that's what you're seeing, being so used to "seeing films" in a theatre.
A got a similar feeling from van Sant's Last Days, especiallly during the shots of underbrush or a tv that he holds for an inordinate amount of time. Lengthening a shot beyond the accustomed range or length of time, so that we have to re-evaluate what we're seeing, why we're still seeing it. It puts us off balance. 'Why is this shot still playing?" There's a kind of contagious hypnosis that takes place in these held shots. As if the director him or herself was transfixed by the image, and his transfixion is carried over to the audience. Herzog, too, uses this temporally extended shot to show us something new about time, some kind of intimacy inherent in the continuous frame. You forget, partly, that you're watching a film, because your eye has been turned towards something for the length of time it might regard something, an object or an action, in the world. The camera isn't hurrying to the next image, "because they have to further the narrative!" but letting these visual tangent happen, and so disregarding the narrative flow, or recreating the narrative as non-linear, as made up of blocks of extended, guided meditations on objects or happenings. "Contemplate this image with me," the director could be saying. The images Once suggests we contemplate happen to be well worth the time. (Do you see the influence of New York Times film reviews on this ending?)
Crazy weekend, it seems, outside of the film intake. A filmic weekend maybe? Feel like I'm changing as a person, rather than changing the way I think about abstract concepts and the imaginative act. Much happier to be hanging out with people so often. They really are something, humans. If you've spent your youth surrounded by them, instead of squirreled away somewhere with a book, it's gonna be tough to deny yourself of them when you get older. You'll be unhappy for a while, unless you're so fascinated by boredom and the absence of social contact that, like Robert Irwin, it makes you excited and helps you grow. I find myself automatically attributing a number of mental disorders to him, which happen to prove beneficial to his art in the way they focus his work ethic. Aspergers. OCD. Etc. But how boring and untrue. Maybe like Tom Cruise says there is no such thing as a chemical imbalance. He's done the research, he should know. He knows about the origins of things like Ritalin and Adderral, and Matt Lower doesn't, which seems to me irresponsible on Matt's part. He is, after all, a major influence on the American public, and to not be as informed as the celebrity guest on matters of psychiatry - and then to defend Brook Shields' endorsement of antidepressants! - strikes me as terribly glib.
On friday I finished the Andy Warhol: American Master PBS DVD, a whopping 3 hours, which turned out to be only 2, not including the extras. Incredible film! Warhol! What a guy! The film taught me a number of things. I knew about Andy's childhood in a kind of Polish ghetto transplanted to the outskirts of Pittsburgh. And the middle (lower?) class inferiority when it came to working in New York. The striving for fame. What I think the film does so successfully is to make his story so continuous. There were no gaps where you think, "Yeah, but wait, what just happened there? What were the motivations behind that move there, where his mother moves in and winds up spending the next twenty years with him in his apartment?" It's all sort of explained, but not overexplained. And the "voice" of the documentary -if you could call it a voice - is very sympathetic with Andy. Everyone calls him a genius at some point. (Martina Navratalova: "Genius is 90% sweat.") And they may be right? It just seems he was incredibly disciplined in following and extending the diaalogue with commercial and fine art. Women and sex were definitely not interfering with his process, as they may have in a more libidinal artist. His sexual orientation and distaste for the messiness of actual physcial contact may have been one of the major influences on his style. The plasticity of the prints. Pollock and de Kooning's pieces look like sex, and by comparison Warhol's like sanitary masturbation, with gloves and disinfectant at the ready. How much did Warhol masturbate I wonder? Either a lot or not at all. How can you jerk off at 40 with your mom making a borsht in the next room? Seems psychically difficult.
Phong had a lot to say about the film. He and Nora saw it. I was thinking they'd read enough books about Warhol for the film to be a tedious rehash of the known material, but no. They were sort of blown away by it too. Nora wrote about it in the Rail in 2006. The 36 different varieties of soup was saying, according to one of the interviewees, that everybody eats Campbells soup, but some people like the bean, some the tomato. Similarly with the different variation of Marilyn, or Elizabeth Taylor. Each print differs slightly from the one beside it. Whether this was intentional at first or not didn't really matter since Warhol was able to justify the importance of their dissimilarity after the fact. He seemed to have such amazing intuition. The stuff about his life being a novel was shocking as well. Augie March might be the great American novel in novel form, but is there a greater American novel than the life of Andy Warhol? Could anyone have written such an imaginaive account of desperation, failure, success, the exhalting and destructive power of fame - which he managed to achieve by commenting on it and deconstructing it in his artwork. The interview he gives at the end, however, was bullshit. The arts journalist, a foe but still, is asking a few questions and all Warhol can do is touch his lip in an incredibly annoying and stupid and childish way and say, "Um... maybe you could just ask me the questions and then tell me the answers and I can repeat them." I guess that's funny? Not really though, since the guy has no charisma. Bob Dylan could very successfully make fun of an interviewer's questions, even when they were insightful. But Warhol seems like the lead vocalist of a shitty 70's band who's watched Don't Look Back too many times and thinks he too is entitled to act like Dylan, without possessing anything like the guy's talent for mockery. Or he could be trying to imitate Lou Reed. Who knows. He comes off like a serious creep. Maybe partly because you know he has answers to these questions, whereas Dylan and Lou, it seemed, didn't have answers to the questions they were asked. The questions were too far afield, or were totally irrelevant, or stupid. (Do you use drugs? What's your sexual orientation? What's your take on transvestitism?) Either way, the doc gave me a new appreciation for Warhol's work. How beautiful it all was, his gradual perfection of certain techniques, his mining of American culture like the very coal and steel miners of Pittsburgh's outlying coal and stee mining industries...
Last night, after hanging out with Dave and everybody at Danny's and talking briefly about the band (D. "Why should we put out a record? Nobody listens to records. We have enough songs to put out a two song EP every month for a year, by which time we should have enough songs to put out another two song EP each month for another year."), I excused myself, complained that Tommy didn't want to talk about the play, and went to see "Once," the Irish film about two singer-songwriters. I admit, the first scene had me expecting greater things: the main character Glen Hansard is busking and keeping his eye on a heroin addict - an acquaintance of his apparently - who pretends he's just tying his shoes before he steals Glen's guitar case with change and bills in it. Glen chases him down the street, catches up with him, gets the case back, and then gives the guy some of the change he made. One of the best openings to a movie I may have ever seen. It was undeniably real, funny, sad, and seemed to reveal in 4 minutes all we need to know about the guy and his existence in Ireland. The rest of the movie is pretty good too though. The way he meets the Czech girl, who will eventually play piano and sing back-up and write a few lyrics for Glen's cd, was touching without being too cute, cheesy, or inevitable. I had a problem with the vaccuum cleaner she brings for him to fix and then pulls behind her like a dog on a leash as they go on their first "date," and I was wondering why. Anything that strikes me as an overt symbol of "creativity" or "quirkiness" - some staged decision that wants you to feel a certain way about something, especially "how sweet!" - always sets off alarm bells signaling a resemblance to Garden State or You and Me and Everyone We Know, perhaps the two worst films of the last decade, simply for what they're trying to do and the horrible, appeal they make for our sympathy. There are certainly "worse" movies, but the dishonesty of those two make them the world champions. They are two awful examples of raw ambition trying to mask itself as creativity, quirkiness, creativity. Lately it's been occurring to me that "creativity" seems to mean a kind of off-beat quirkiness, a kind of eccentricity or hysteria, rather than a talent for creation. What's "creative" for example in the work of Robert Irwin, considered in the light of contemporary creativity? He drew lines on canvas for two years. Some guys make white paintings for a decade. They aren't dreaming up "rogue adenoids" or alternate universes. They're playing with the nature of perception, drawing and redrawing a single object until it confesses something about itself. According to the nature of modern creativity, this stuff doesn't apply. Where's the weirdness? The quirk? The irony? What would people make of a brain like Tolstoy's or Whitman 'sif he appeared now? James Wood may have a point about his hysterical realism, especially when you extend the principle to film and painting.
Living is more important than reading or making art.
But back to Once. Glen's relationship to the Czech girl was excellent. Half an hour in he asks her to spend the night, and she looks at him and says, 'Fuck this' and leaves. Glen clenches his fists and curses himself, and the next day he apologizes by saying, "Sorry abou' that. I was just really lonely, it was a stupid thing to do. D' ya' wanna go for a coffee or tay or sump'm? Please?" Very sweet. He's like a kid. And she agrees, but not too quickly. You can't penetrate the acting; it's the way she might really behave. Perhaps, as usual, because she's not American and you can't see through the ethnic mesh. I resist calling this an urban fairy tale like everybody feels compelled to. It is part unreal musical though, as when the girl goes to get batteries in the middle of the night and spends the next four minutes of the film singing the lyrics she's written to one of Glen's songs while listening to it on headphones, in her pjs. Very dreamlike. Suddnely you re-realize you're watching a film, you're not just thinking your own thoughts or watching a music video - this is a film in the theatre. That's not explained well. But it hints at the magic of the film.
By subverting the traditional style of a film, it reminds yo that you're watching a film. That is, it makes you ask, "Is this still a film?" You then look around you and find you're in a theatre. Whereas, had the film been more traditional, more in line with the style of other films, you might never ask if what you're seeing is a film and perhaps you might not even realize that's what you're seeing, being so used to "seeing films" in a theatre.
A got a similar feeling from van Sant's Last Days, especiallly during the shots of underbrush or a tv that he holds for an inordinate amount of time. Lengthening a shot beyond the accustomed range or length of time, so that we have to re-evaluate what we're seeing, why we're still seeing it. It puts us off balance. 'Why is this shot still playing?" There's a kind of contagious hypnosis that takes place in these held shots. As if the director him or herself was transfixed by the image, and his transfixion is carried over to the audience. Herzog, too, uses this temporally extended shot to show us something new about time, some kind of intimacy inherent in the continuous frame. You forget, partly, that you're watching a film, because your eye has been turned towards something for the length of time it might regard something, an object or an action, in the world. The camera isn't hurrying to the next image, "because they have to further the narrative!" but letting these visual tangent happen, and so disregarding the narrative flow, or recreating the narrative as non-linear, as made up of blocks of extended, guided meditations on objects or happenings. "Contemplate this image with me," the director could be saying. The images Once suggests we contemplate happen to be well worth the time. (Do you see the influence of New York Times film reviews on this ending?)
Thursday, August 30, 2007
24 Hour Party People
So I watched this last night, in the wake of Tony Wilson's death. Jon in the Morning on KEXP Seattle has been promoting the film as, like, utterly necessary viewing for anyone interested in music, playing The Clash, The Happy Mondays, Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, A Certain Ratio, New Order, and whoever else this marketing and managerial genius Wilson backed during the late 70's, 80's and 90's. The man went to Cambridge and certainyl has a head for business. You can't tell from thsi vesion whether they guy really was such a "cunt" as everyone, including Ian Curtis, said he was.
(Side note: Jon in the morning is strating to make me a little angry. Yeah he plays good music and KEXP is listener supported etc etc. But he's constantly playing shit, too, and then gloating about it. His kid is always in the wings doing something "hilarious". And this fucking Bumbershoot concert. What the fuck is Bumbershoot and why does it have to have that name? Jon manages to say Bumbershoot at least 3 or 4 times/minute. As does the intentionally "sexy" sounding commercial girl. Bands and Seattle natives seem to like the guy because he's modest and constantly self-effacing and he plays their shit, but more often than not the guy's annoying as hell. His passion for Cloud Cult is ridiculous. That band. "Suck up, suck up and take your medicine"? How tragic and poignant and accurate for our age. And their shitty cover of Mr. Tambourine Man, which manages to give an entirely unsentimental song the most blasphemously sentimental treatment of any shitty cover I've heard. I can see the lead singer of this band right now smoking a Clove and listening to Tangled Up in Blue and trying to figure out how to fuck it up as badly as he did Mr. Tambourine Man. Cloud Cult. Like, a potentially dangerous sect of obviously harmless accumulations of moisture. They'll live on.)
Steve Coogan plays Wilson, a very dry British bloke with a tendency to quote W.B. Yeats, William Blake and Shaun Ryder, whom he thought the best poet sincce Yeats himself. I admit I didn't know who Shauan Ryder was, but the gloating over his "genius" seems a little strange. Like those who can't stop saying what a brilliant lyricist Pete Doherty is. Couldn't the prophetic anticipation of musical and cultural trends everyone attributes to Ryder simply be on account of him being at the right place at the right time, inside the Hacienda hanging out with Tony Wilson and meeting the guy who, it seems, introduced Ecstasy to planet earth? If you're at the center of things and you happen to write semi-coherently about what's happening, then you're going to seem like prophet, I guess, to those who are lined up outside the club waiting to get in and see who's playing and whether they can score this new drug their friend said they have to try.
The movie is good though. I liked the splicing of actual footage into the scenes. Iggy Pop and Johnny Rotten appear. You don't see Ian Curtis though, unless I missed it, which would have been nice. In order to convey that "Ian Curtis will soon commit suicide" the director goes a bit far. Everyone knows the guy will do it. The extended shots of him looking miserably out rainy windows as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" plays could have been cut by about 30 seconds. All that was needed was a few quick glimpses of the guy withdrawing into himself. Not the broadcasting of: "Secretly entertaining suicidal ideations whle listening to his own hit song." And the use of a cartoon rooster on the television beyond Curtis's dangling feet. Right. Cartoon juxtaposed with suicide equals pathos.
Either way, whatever, I liked it. Tony Wilson. Interesting guy. Would've been cool to be him.
(Side note: Jon in the morning is strating to make me a little angry. Yeah he plays good music and KEXP is listener supported etc etc. But he's constantly playing shit, too, and then gloating about it. His kid is always in the wings doing something "hilarious". And this fucking Bumbershoot concert. What the fuck is Bumbershoot and why does it have to have that name? Jon manages to say Bumbershoot at least 3 or 4 times/minute. As does the intentionally "sexy" sounding commercial girl. Bands and Seattle natives seem to like the guy because he's modest and constantly self-effacing and he plays their shit, but more often than not the guy's annoying as hell. His passion for Cloud Cult is ridiculous. That band. "Suck up, suck up and take your medicine"? How tragic and poignant and accurate for our age. And their shitty cover of Mr. Tambourine Man, which manages to give an entirely unsentimental song the most blasphemously sentimental treatment of any shitty cover I've heard. I can see the lead singer of this band right now smoking a Clove and listening to Tangled Up in Blue and trying to figure out how to fuck it up as badly as he did Mr. Tambourine Man. Cloud Cult. Like, a potentially dangerous sect of obviously harmless accumulations of moisture. They'll live on.)
Steve Coogan plays Wilson, a very dry British bloke with a tendency to quote W.B. Yeats, William Blake and Shaun Ryder, whom he thought the best poet sincce Yeats himself. I admit I didn't know who Shauan Ryder was, but the gloating over his "genius" seems a little strange. Like those who can't stop saying what a brilliant lyricist Pete Doherty is. Couldn't the prophetic anticipation of musical and cultural trends everyone attributes to Ryder simply be on account of him being at the right place at the right time, inside the Hacienda hanging out with Tony Wilson and meeting the guy who, it seems, introduced Ecstasy to planet earth? If you're at the center of things and you happen to write semi-coherently about what's happening, then you're going to seem like prophet, I guess, to those who are lined up outside the club waiting to get in and see who's playing and whether they can score this new drug their friend said they have to try.
The movie is good though. I liked the splicing of actual footage into the scenes. Iggy Pop and Johnny Rotten appear. You don't see Ian Curtis though, unless I missed it, which would have been nice. In order to convey that "Ian Curtis will soon commit suicide" the director goes a bit far. Everyone knows the guy will do it. The extended shots of him looking miserably out rainy windows as "Love Will Tear Us Apart" plays could have been cut by about 30 seconds. All that was needed was a few quick glimpses of the guy withdrawing into himself. Not the broadcasting of: "Secretly entertaining suicidal ideations whle listening to his own hit song." And the use of a cartoon rooster on the television beyond Curtis's dangling feet. Right. Cartoon juxtaposed with suicide equals pathos.
Either way, whatever, I liked it. Tony Wilson. Interesting guy. Would've been cool to be him.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Hiroshima Mon Amour
So I watched Hiroshima Mon Amour last night.
Here are some quotes:
"Looking closely at something has to be learned." Yes.
"You were bored in a way that makes a man want to know a woman." OK.
"What do you call having 'dubious morals?'"
"Being dubious about other people's morals." Right.
Overall not the most exciting film, although it would have been better to see it in the theater of course. It's one of Scorcese's favorite films; it changed the way he viewed filmmaking. The images are pretty incredible. The documentary footage in the beginning especially, which seems to alternate between staged re-enactments and actual footage from the days following the bombing. Burnt men staring into space with there mouths open, the hair singed from their heads. [Female lead] travels to Hiroshima partly to film a movie, in which she plays a nurse, but partly because she's fascinated by the place, with its history of tragedy. The change in her attitude is drastic, and very realistic. The first 15 minutes show her to be a well-spoken, giddy lover, clawing her Japanese man's soft back, and smiling hugely like someone who's never been damaged by love. But gradually she becomes more and more aware of her past, starts to remember it for him, referring to both her ex-lover, who died of sniper fire as she was en route to meet him for a private rendezvous, and her current fling. Her love is one continuous personage over time. Simply "You." And she relates the original "You", who died in her arms, with the here-and-now "You." A bad idea. She's living in the past. So little happens in the now, in the film's present. The film is dominated by flashbacks.
At the start, the two are talking in bed.She relating what she saw years after the bomb was dropped, form re-enacted footage, from the museums which preserved the hair that fell like wigs from women's heads, pieces of flesh, photos of deformed hands and feet, lip-less faces, women missing eyes. She tells him all that she saw, and he says something like, "You did not see Hiroshima." He having experienced it. Although he does none of the telling. (This is imperfectly remembered, but interesting for it.) He, having experienced the bombing, does not contribute any details. He lets the woman - who has a husband and a few kids - give her imperfect interpretation of the events, recalling things she never saw. And then she goes on to tell her own story, of how she went mad over the loss of her love. A pretty chilling series of scenes of her confined to a basement, chewing on the salty cellar walls, escaping in the middle of the night to gnaw on tree bark, wandering around in a daze. All pretty haunting. Supposed to be one of the first films of the New Wave movement. Alain Resnais. What else has he done?
Here are some quotes:
"Looking closely at something has to be learned." Yes.
"You were bored in a way that makes a man want to know a woman." OK.
"What do you call having 'dubious morals?'"
"Being dubious about other people's morals." Right.
Overall not the most exciting film, although it would have been better to see it in the theater of course. It's one of Scorcese's favorite films; it changed the way he viewed filmmaking. The images are pretty incredible. The documentary footage in the beginning especially, which seems to alternate between staged re-enactments and actual footage from the days following the bombing. Burnt men staring into space with there mouths open, the hair singed from their heads. [Female lead] travels to Hiroshima partly to film a movie, in which she plays a nurse, but partly because she's fascinated by the place, with its history of tragedy. The change in her attitude is drastic, and very realistic. The first 15 minutes show her to be a well-spoken, giddy lover, clawing her Japanese man's soft back, and smiling hugely like someone who's never been damaged by love. But gradually she becomes more and more aware of her past, starts to remember it for him, referring to both her ex-lover, who died of sniper fire as she was en route to meet him for a private rendezvous, and her current fling. Her love is one continuous personage over time. Simply "You." And she relates the original "You", who died in her arms, with the here-and-now "You." A bad idea. She's living in the past. So little happens in the now, in the film's present. The film is dominated by flashbacks.
At the start, the two are talking in bed.She relating what she saw years after the bomb was dropped, form re-enacted footage, from the museums which preserved the hair that fell like wigs from women's heads, pieces of flesh, photos of deformed hands and feet, lip-less faces, women missing eyes. She tells him all that she saw, and he says something like, "You did not see Hiroshima." He having experienced it. Although he does none of the telling. (This is imperfectly remembered, but interesting for it.) He, having experienced the bombing, does not contribute any details. He lets the woman - who has a husband and a few kids - give her imperfect interpretation of the events, recalling things she never saw. And then she goes on to tell her own story, of how she went mad over the loss of her love. A pretty chilling series of scenes of her confined to a basement, chewing on the salty cellar walls, escaping in the middle of the night to gnaw on tree bark, wandering around in a daze. All pretty haunting. Supposed to be one of the first films of the New Wave movement. Alain Resnais. What else has he done?
Friday, August 24, 2007
Billy Wilder
First entry for "Teeth on Film", maybe a stupid title for a blog. But who cares.
My writings on film now include four pieces:
1. The documentary films of Werner Herzog
2. Woman is the Future of Man, by Hong Sangsoo
3. The films of Luis Bunuel (a man whose films I had never seen until approx one week before the assignment was due)
4. Ace in the Hole, by Billy Wilder.
I freely admit my ignorance when it comes to film. I've read too many books in the past to have time for films. Plus it makes me feel a bit lazy, watching movies. I always feel as if I should be engaging more with the screen, helping it along, but it does everything for you. The film will play itself out regardless of whether you're watching or not. But it's fun. Watching the way the plots move, the way the director's transition from one shot to the next. Films are getting more and more interesting too, it seems. I'd rather watch a new film than an old film, that is. As long as the new one is decent. I can't say as much for books, novels. The technology - and the same goes for music - is just so much more enticing nowadays. Anyway.
Recently watched:
Sunset Boulevard
The Apartment
The Seven Year Itch
Ace in the Hole
And then read some of Cameron Crowe's book of interviews with Wilder himself. Crowe offered the mentor role in Jerry McGuire to Wilder, who vociferously turned him down. Sad. Would have been fun to see him act.
I've been having trouble writing about Bunuel. I'm taking the piece too seriously. Whereas my 500 word reviews are almost sassy, the Bunuel thing comes off as if I really want you to know how much I just learned about Surrealist film and Bunuel's influence on such contemporary Surrealist filmmakers as Michel Gondry and Matthew Barney. Pompous you could say. But when the piece comes out it comes out, and changing the entire scope is nearly impossible without writing the whole thing again from a completely different angle.
I'm going to start reading more Pauline Kael, who "reigned" over the NYC film reviewing circuit for like two decades. She said of "Maidstone," one of Mailer's strange movies in 1968, that it's "the worst movie I've ever stayed to see all the way through." Ouch. I wonder what she was like in person, what she looked like, why she chose film reviewing instead of, say, short story writing or the personal essay form. What makes a person a film reviewer for life? A fondness for dark theatres?
Anyway. So ends the first film entry. Hope to watch "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Ratatouille" pretty soon.
My writings on film now include four pieces:
1. The documentary films of Werner Herzog
2. Woman is the Future of Man, by Hong Sangsoo
3. The films of Luis Bunuel (a man whose films I had never seen until approx one week before the assignment was due)
4. Ace in the Hole, by Billy Wilder.
I freely admit my ignorance when it comes to film. I've read too many books in the past to have time for films. Plus it makes me feel a bit lazy, watching movies. I always feel as if I should be engaging more with the screen, helping it along, but it does everything for you. The film will play itself out regardless of whether you're watching or not. But it's fun. Watching the way the plots move, the way the director's transition from one shot to the next. Films are getting more and more interesting too, it seems. I'd rather watch a new film than an old film, that is. As long as the new one is decent. I can't say as much for books, novels. The technology - and the same goes for music - is just so much more enticing nowadays. Anyway.
Recently watched:
Sunset Boulevard
The Apartment
The Seven Year Itch
Ace in the Hole
And then read some of Cameron Crowe's book of interviews with Wilder himself. Crowe offered the mentor role in Jerry McGuire to Wilder, who vociferously turned him down. Sad. Would have been fun to see him act.
I've been having trouble writing about Bunuel. I'm taking the piece too seriously. Whereas my 500 word reviews are almost sassy, the Bunuel thing comes off as if I really want you to know how much I just learned about Surrealist film and Bunuel's influence on such contemporary Surrealist filmmakers as Michel Gondry and Matthew Barney. Pompous you could say. But when the piece comes out it comes out, and changing the entire scope is nearly impossible without writing the whole thing again from a completely different angle.
I'm going to start reading more Pauline Kael, who "reigned" over the NYC film reviewing circuit for like two decades. She said of "Maidstone," one of Mailer's strange movies in 1968, that it's "the worst movie I've ever stayed to see all the way through." Ouch. I wonder what she was like in person, what she looked like, why she chose film reviewing instead of, say, short story writing or the personal essay form. What makes a person a film reviewer for life? A fondness for dark theatres?
Anyway. So ends the first film entry. Hope to watch "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" and "Ratatouille" pretty soon.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)