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?)