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)
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