I was a writer before I was a photographer. This year I've neglected my photography but have been writing more than ever before. If neglected this blog last month, it is in part due to the fact that I have been busy writing for three other venues:
With this flurry of activity, I wish I could work on my own stuff. It's not a matter of time, really - a friend once told me that if you wanted something to get done, ask a busy person. It didn't make sense to me until I became a busy person myself. But I'm struggling with my own projects, and the struggle begins with what my own project would be. How will I marry writing with photography? As I work on, or avoid working on, applications for photography competitions, I face a blank page.
The answer must be right in front of me. I'll let you know when I find it.
As an aside - or is the answer somewhere within? - last month I had the opportunity through to meet a number of musical heroes: Elvis Costello, Jack White, Herbie Hancock, the Jonas Brothers (well, somebody's heroes). I even got a glimpse of Paul McCartney being whisked away to an official dinner. I took photos of my friends with some of these luminaries, but absent Taylor Swift there was nobody I was excited enough about to want to have my picture taken with them.
But the week after the all-star soiree, I met somebody I did want my picture taken with:
Tommy Wiseau is the auteur behind the cult phenomenon The Room, and I don't use the word auteur ironically. For all the press calling this "The worst movie ever made," for the awkward dialogue and acting, the writer/director/star has some kind of amazing vision. Not everybody hears that whistle - unlike many bad movies, what makes this enjoyable has nothing to do with camp or a wink-wink knowingness. The charm of Tommy is that he doesn't know. As much as the audiences that pack houses to see him at midnight screenings aroudn the country show up to laugh at him, he stands by his vision. It may not be a coherent, comprehendable vision, but it's clearly a vision - Citizen Kane homage aside, what other movie is like this?
I have three different vinyl pressings of Love's desert-island-disc Forever Changes. I have two Dexy's Midnight Runner's lps - most don't realize there was more than one, but it predated "Come on Eileen" and is more informed by Northern Soul than the Celtic whatever of their second album. I have no fewer than four Sheena Easton albums (at least three of which were purchased in the last twelve months, none for more than a dollar), and this afternoon discovered I still had the promotional album card - a thin slab of cardboard with the cover art on one side and promotional text on the other - for her Strut album. Does anybody out there like jazz tumpeter Woody Shaw? I have several of his 1970's lps for Columbia, the entire run of which was collected on a box set by Mosaic Records, but I've never listened to them and can't remember where I bought them - maybe one or two came from a trip to Amoeba Records in Berkeley in the '90s. Man I bought a lotta records there.
In short, I hoard vinyl - I have hoarded it since the 80's, and have memories of the dollar used bins at Kemp Mill Records in Georgetown where you could have picked up a mono pressing of St. Pepper for less than $10 (sadly, I didn't). I remember when Zodiac records, a Latin music specialist on Columbia Road, mysteriously acquired an incredible record collection full of punk/new wave lps that they were selling for $1.50 a pop. I picked up early Roxy Music, Todd Rundgren, John Cale solo records; I passed up a first pressing of X-Ray Spex' Germfree Adolescents because I already had a copy. Too bad, because a few years later I saw them selling for three figures.
In the early oughts I lost a few boxes of records to mold damage owing to a flooded furnace room, but besides that I've never made a concerted effort to shave off the collection's unruly beard which is now several ear-splitting decibels beyond ZZ Top. In the ensuing years, there has been a resurgence of record stores (and I mean record stores) in this town, with three excellent sources of used vinyl within walking distance; the dollar-bins at one of those shops is the bane and boon of my existence, full of strange records of all lands with jaw-dropping covers that - well, like this:
Or this:
There are thousands of lps in my basement, and I weeded a boxful this week. Some were easy decisions: did I ever need the Blow Monkeys lp? I'd always thought their hit, "Diggin' your scene," had an unresolved chorus that should have gone on for another bar. I don't think I ever listened to Difford and Tilbrook's post-Squeeze album more than once - for that matter, I can say the same of Squeeze's last album, and do I really need any besides Argybargy? If that? They were a band I used to eat up like corn flakes but they no longer stay crispy in my milk. I never listened to my Guided by Voices double-lp bootlegs, but I'll probably give those to my brother if he wants them. And I always thought Pussy Galore was trying too hard.
Of course, I went for a walk this evening and bought a new lp, Excavated Shellac, a collection of old string-centric 78s from foreign lands compiled by the curator of the blog of the same name, and issued by Dust-to-Digital, producers of the fantastic Goodbye Babylon set of old gospel. I bought it at Melody Records, the best new record/CD store left in Washington, DC. I remember buying a picture-sleeve 45 of "(Just like) Starting Over" at Melody Records, when they were still at the corner of Connecticut and Q, the week before John Lennon was killed. Over the years their stock shifted from vinyl to CDs and now they again have a healthy selection of new vinyl. When I bought a Big Star 45 at Melody several months ago, it was the first time I'd bought a 7" single from Melody in more than a decade.
The thing is - I could have bought a whole stack of records from the dollar bins I could have bought twenty one-dollar records for what I paid for Excavated Shellac.
My apologies to those not infected by vinyl geekery. I feel I've gone on ad nauseum like a friend goes on about where he's seen what movies and how he saw that movie at the Jerry Lewis Cinema in 1971 and how an appallingly expurgated version of it ran on the CBS Late Movie in 1975. I have waxed more than was my intention, and could wax some more. I have a problem. I am a recordaholic.
I'll post updates on this continuing crisis, as developments occur.
I go to New York regularly but I seldom venture out of Manhattan and even more seldom into Queens. I may complain about increasing gentrification of the Lower East Side or the Sexandthecitification of The Bowery but I never run out of things to do there. Well for once I was at a loss for things to do, and maybe the few hours I spent in South Philly gave me a taste and yearning for a big city that was not losing its regional character. Forty-five minutes on the subway, to the eastern terminus of the 7 train, I found that character in Flushing, where the advetrtising was predominantly in Chinese even before I got out of the station.
Whenever I watch Anthony Bourdain's No Reservations, I always salivate over at least some of the regional dishes he tries, and no less so than when he devoted a program to New York. Still, as I tend to do with things I see on tv, I forgot about it. But my friend G., whom I've run into in several different neighborhoods in New York over the years, strongly recommended The Golden Mall in Flushing, not just for the food but for the sensory overload. Thanks, G.
Xi'an Famous Foods, was easy to get to but not that easy to find - I saw at least four different entrances to Golden Mall, and couldn't reproduce how I got there. There is basement entrance to 41-28 Main Street on the corner, and if you can find that, you'll find the liang pi (cold noodles, $5, pictured) and the lamb burger ($2.50, not pictured - it looks like a sloppy joe, but, laced with green chilies and cumin, it tastes much more fantastic), and have an outrageously good and spicy meal with change from a sawbuck.
About a block down and across the street from Golden Mall is the Tai Pan Bakery. Wouldn't animal cupcakes be an intriguing variation on the cupcake craze? The mobile cupcake van could tweet that they're running out of goat. This ram was made of two layers of tiny sponge cake with a creme filling. Not as sastifying to eat as it was to photograph.
See the sidebar on seltzer in part 2. This can of agua con gas is courtesy of the cafe at PS1, the Long Island City affiliate of the Museum of Modern Art, which are both currently exhibiting surveys of performance art - in general at PS1, and, specifically, Marina Abramovic's at Moma. Also recommended at Moma: the work of found poem/collagist/ Manhatan Project scientist Bern Porter, which I found more inspiring and much less crowded (I was the only one there) than the Cartier-Bresson show upstairs. Peppy, a performance artist in his own right who travels with me frequently, is courtesy of my homes. The patriotism is from one of the dollar stores (real cost $2.99) in one of the sensory-overloaded malls along Main Street in Flushing.
Finally, it took me years of visiting New York before I found a chocolate chip cookie to go back for. Within stumbling distance of Eisenberg's is this chewy, vanilla-soaked answer to your cookie questions, from The City Bakery, which is home to an annual hot chocolate festival and the sippable cuppa cocoa you see here.
Daido Moriyama, along with Nobuyoshi Araki, was part of a new wave of Japanese artists to break out of photographic traditions in the late '60s. For Moriyama, these traditions included things like focus and a level camera; his high-contrast, grainy black and white images are pure street photography, but he's just as likely to print images that are all blur and texture as he is to point his lens on disaffected youth and the banalities of everyday life. Whatever the subject, or lack thereof, his best work is full of energy, and pushes the limits of the form and what constitutes photography.
Moriyama has largely avoided the media, but that changes with the feature-length documentary Stray Dog of Tokyo (a reference to the title of one of his books), which includes extensive interviews with Moriyama as well as with the often hilarious Araki, and Japanese magazine editor and photography critic Kazuo Nishii. More intriguing for photographers, like myself, a single camcorder follows Moriyama on a photo shoot wandering around the Shinjuku ward of Tokyo, not unlike the titular stray. The camera also follows Moriyama to the darkroom, though he shares none of his developing formulas, perhaps not even to himself. Nishii recalls an exhibit which required an enlargement of one of Moriyama's prints, but after a photo lab was unable to replicate Moriyama's print, a consultation with the artist revealed that he himself couldn't remember how he printed that one.
Photographers like me will also be curious to know what equipment he uses. Araki explains that his friend almost always ends up borrowing a camera, which then becomes his. Moriyama's first was a toy camera made of Bakelite (the rugged substance that makes up any number of Brownies and other plastic cameras), and has always felt that you can make a good picture with anything. Then again, the 35mm point-and-shoot he uses on screen appears to be a Ricoh GR1s — no Leica, but not exactly a cheap camera either. But the small, wide-angle compact is perfect for his "no-finder" aesthetic; instead of looking through the viewfinder, he looks in one direction while pointing his camera in the other - from his chest, from his side, even from below his waist. In this manner, the wide-angle lens is likely to pick up whatever it was in that direction caught his eye, be it a businessman out on the town or a group of schoolgirls.
Stray Dog of Toyko also shows Moriyama shooting his very first digital still and video footage - the documentary was shot around 2000-2001, when digital was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. The results are funny, and, despite high-resolution color, recognizably Moriyama. But don't think that he's abandoned the analog. In addition to a steady stream of monographs, Moriyama has lent his brand name to a pocket-sized toy camera that uses 110mm film and is packaged with a small print of his signature stray dog.
In a perfect world, a documentary about Moriyama would be shot in grainy, hi-con 35mm film - something along the lines of Let's Get Lost, Bruce Weber's now classic documentary of the defeated and soon to be dead Chet Baker. Stray Dog was shot on video, but is edited well enough to rise well above the usual level of documentary as DVD extra. Students of photography and observers of modern Japan alike will learn a lot from 84 minutes with Daido Moriyama.
My next stop was New York, where my usual first stop after getting off the bus or train is for the double katsu at Go-go curry, the sole American outlet of a Japanese chain that honors New York Yankees star Hideki Matsui with a gorilla mascot and an excellent roux-based curry. But I was heavy laden and saved my Japanese jones for the Tan Tan Men @ Menkui Tei in the East Village. I don't know how many times I'd walked by this place before finally venturing in last year, but since I've discovered it, I haven't been to New York without stopping by. The ramen noodles and spicy ground pork are perfect for a cold winter night. The $4 Sapporo draft makes it fine for all seasons.
Depending on the browser you're using to read this, about here you'll see what layout designers call trapped white space. I learned about trapped white space, and that it was something to avoid, from, if memory serves, Mr. John Bailey, the contracted liaison between the high school yearbook staff I worked with and whoever our publisher was. I never forgot the lesson, and in fact much of what I learned about photographic composition comes from cropping photos for the yearbook, even though I wouldn't pick up a camera for some years after that. So if you happen upon a 1983 or 1984 Aetonian, and find a photo of my friend Jim waving from across the school library, his hands strategically, and unintentionally, spread from a vortex formed at the base of a crucifix (thank you, Society of Jesus, for the strong education); well I didn't mean to crop out the top part of the crucifix - it was an editorial decision made above us.
As this digression may have entirely negated the trapped white space I was afeared of, let us continue apace.
New York hotels don't often have the "continental breakfast" that many chain hotels offer guests, but The Mave (on Madison Ave) had good coffee and okay pastries available from 7-9 every morning. But getting up before 9 in the morning in New York isn't something I normally do. So to fuel up for a morning of browsing in the Antiques Garage, I wracked my brain and then Google to find the name of the sandwich shop I'd seen written up in the blog Jeremiah's Vanishing New York for their exemplary formulation of the iconic New York drink, the egg cream.
Eisenberg's is the name, and at 22nd and 5th just south of the Flatiron Building it's another of those places I've probably walked right by a few dozen times, blissfully unaware of the deliciousness within. When I found the place, I couldn't even remember resting my eyes upon it for even a glance before. I had the pastrami and eggs: juicy, spicy, tender pastrami, the best I've ever had (and that include's Katz's Deli).
That's the egg cream. I haven't had enough egg creams to maneuver the nuances of seltzer-to-syrup proportions, but I can vouch for its tastiness.
Not pictured: the cortado from Joe's the Art of Coffee on 23rd St. near 9th Ave; the best cuppa joe I've had since returning from a trip to South America last year. Which reminds me. Among the culinary discoveries I made in South America, besides the fantastic $9 steaks to be had in Buenos Aires and the revelatory bacon cheeseburger I had in, of all places, a Ruby Tuesday's at the Santiago airport, was agua con gas. In restaurants, diners are offered the choice between agua con gas or sin gas, the latter being regular tap water and the former being the carbonated water known here by the brands Perrier or San Pellegrino, and the generic seltzer.
Me gusta!
In DC it's easy to get Perrier or San Pellgrino or club soda in single-serving bottles. But seltzer is a rarer bubbly animal. Merriam-Webster defines it, with endearing circularity, as water from the German town of Selters (what genius added the "z"?!), and if I am reading the wikipedia article correctly, there appears to be no real difference between seltzer and other carbonated water. But seltzer is a lot more fun to say and write, and hear, which you can do right now from the disembodied neutral voice of Merriam-Webster online. And it is part of the regional lore of New York, so much so that the city was abuzz when the last remaining seltzer-delivery man had to take time off to recover from an injury in 2009.
Which is a long way of saying I get seltzer, be it in egg cream or in its raw form, whenever I'm in New York. Your corner bodega chooses Canada Dry, but the seltzer syndicate is in completely different territory in Penn Station, where Hudson News proudly stocks only Seagram's seltzer.
The foodstuffs pictured above and adjacent to these spring-watery passages are, first, what remained of the fish special at Cucina di Pesce. I never got what the name of the fish was, despite hearing it at least three times from my friendly waiter Sal; and the beginnings of a heavy night's sleep brought on by the same restaurant's tiramisu. I wish there were an Italian restaurant this good in DC, but I know that if there were, it would cost twice as much.
For my 1400th post on The Bloggy, Bloggy Dew, and by popular demand (two people asked!) I'll tell you about a weekend that started out as a Timothy Carey tour and ended up a foodie tour of two cities - three if you count the concubine's beef I had for lunch at Pete's Diner back home the day before I left.
I was in Philadelphia for a limited amount of time and wanted to make sure I had one known quantity of cheesesteak before heading north. I'd been to Cosmi's Deli in South Philly once before with my homes. Theirs was the highest rated sandwich in the "Ultimate Cheesesteak Taste Test," conducted by Richard Rys of Philadelphia magazine for Frommer's Philadelphia & The Amish Country, 2007 ed. To give you an idea of the reviewer's local cred, he rated the most famous cheesteak stands, tourist-magnets Pat's and Geno's, at the very bottom of his list. I walked two miles to get there, from 14th and South Street, past a Little Vietnam in South Philly (I saw a couple of bahn mi joints) to get a cheesesteak with whiz, and it was worth the walk.
[Not pictured: a crappy late-night carry-out cheeseteak with scrambled eggs. It wasn't even as good as the cheesteaks I can get at the corner Chinese carry-out back home.]
My hotel was close to the Reading Terminal Market. A sidebar in Frommer's suggested DiNic's as a decent purveyor of the Other Philly Sandwich, the roast pork (John's Roast Pork, rated high in the Frommer's cheesteak list, is reportedly The place to go) . I got one (right) with sharp provolone. It tasted healthier than a cheesesteak, but wasn't *that* much less greasy. I'll have to get broccoli rabe next time. Nice touch: The Thank You for Shopping Here bag.
I don't remember the name of the place whose siren song called me with this display of the Drunken Orange, a rich nutella/whiskey/truffle topping - which made its home on what was, alas, a medicocre shortbread base. Proper shortbread would have made it worth the heavy feeling in my tum tum.
I went up to Philly last weekend for a four-hour program of films featuring Timothy Carey, the late great character actor who hammed his way through dozens of bit-roles. I've written about him previously. Some of his movies you've seen and love - notably his significant supporting roles for Stanley Kubrick in The Killing and Paths of Glory (his famous scene in the latter involces a cockroach); some you haven't seen and wouldn't love if you had (Chesty Morgan, anyone?) A contrary fellow if there ever was one, he turned down roles in all three Godfather pictures, because, he claimed, he didn't want to be one of those actors who was in it for the money. Chesty Morgan, anyone? I tease, but in my search for the Timothy Carey mysqtique I've watched a lot of bad movies, and the only one I couldn't get through was the so-called sex comedy Chesty Morgan. Which is too bad, because the director let Carey go on at length during a dinner scene where you can clearly see his fellow actors becoming uncomfortable with Carey's riffing.
Carey was also a director, most famously of The World's Greatest Sinner, a film whose reputation was such that Elvis Presley asked to see it (Carey has an uncredited role in the Presley/Mary Tyler Moore vehicle Change of Habit, as a hulking, massive grocery store clerk.) Carey's son Romeo presented a documentary about the making of TWGS (Mike White, who administers the Timothy Carey page on Facebook, writes about the documentary, and the other films shown that evening, here.) and answered questions at the screening. One of his remarks hit on why I'm so drawn to Carey - the guy simply didn't care what people thought of him. If this can be seen in his supporting roles in other people's movies, it goes in spades for his work as a director.
TWGS was rarely seen until it ran on TCM Underground last year. Carey plays Clarence Hilliard, an insurance salesman who up and quits his job to follow his own strange path - as a God. He enters politics as God Hilliard, and also tries his hand out as a rock star. One of the talking heads in the making of documentary notes that Carey has no proficiency on the guitar before making the movie, but claims that he got by on charisma alone, and could have opened for Elvis. That may be overstating things:
The film is a mess, but has a few remarkable scenes. As hard as Carey is for other directors to rein in, he's even less inhibited here, which isn't always a good thing. His performance relies too often on shouting - from streetcorners, from stage. The most memorable scenes are softer, or at least, not as loud: a seduction scene with an elderly former insurance client; and the final revelation.
TWGS has been difficult, but not impossible to see, until recently. Much rarer is Tweet's Ladies of Pasadena, a collection of footage, shot between 1969 and 1974, that was slated for a tv pilot in the 70s. This train wreck makes TWGS look like Citizen Kane; my first reaction was that it was unwatchable, but as it went on and I laughed hard at one and then another ridiculous scene, I couldn't look away, always wondering what the hell he might do next. Carey stars as the roller-skating, bib-overall wearing Tweet Twig, caretaker of a menagerie of animals including goats, chickens, ducks, dogs and kittens (all of which belonged to the Carey family). Who talk. Yes, Timothy Carey made a talking animal picture, and naturally, the German Shepherd has a German accent.
After the four hours of films were over, Romeo Carey, who expressed surprised that more people didn't walk out on Tweet's (several in the audience did) took questions from the audience. I asked if he knew about this newspaper item:
New York Times, May 8, 1957 Missing US Actor is Found
MUNICH, Germany, May 7 (Reuters)--Timothy Carey, 31-year old Hollywood actor who disappeared from his hotel here sunday night, was found gagged and handcuffed on a lonely road outside Munich this morning, the police said here today. They said the actor had hitched a ride in a car driven by two English-speaking men, who held him at gunpoin, robbed him of $40 and finally dumped him by the roadside.
Romeo Carey did know about it. After shooting for Paths of Glory had wrapped, Timothy Carey had been frustrated with the publicity around Kirk Douglas and his other co-stars. So he faked his own kidnapping. In another incident around that time, the crew had gone to a burlesque show one evening in which one performer ended her act in a buble bath on stage. Timothy Carey walked right up to the stage and got into the bubble bath with her.
Carey's son painted a picture of life with father that was funny and uncomfortable. Romeo admitted that he used to be tremendously embarassed by the Tweet's footage. Toward the end of his life Carey became obsessed with the artistic possibilities of the fart. His last, unfinished project was a play called The Insect Trainer, about a man convicted of murder by farting. Carey liked to fart in church, just before reaching out to greet his neighbor in a sign of peace.
The screenings were held at the International House of Philadelphia (amiably known as IHOP) in conjunction with the show "Dead Flowers" at Vox Populi (link NSFW), where it will run through the end of the month before moving to New York's Participant Inc. Gallery in May. The curator was inspired by the work of Timothy Carey and his refusal to compromise his artistic vision. The show assembles a group of transgressive artists who work with the body: Genesis P-Orridge, Kembra Phfaler, Cynthia Plaster Caster, among others, and a selection of ephemera from Carey's career - film stills and other promotional materials, and, pictured above, a fart chastity belt. The other artists' connections with Carey seemed tenuous to me, other than their shared fixation with their own bodies, but it was a treat to see the Carey ephemera at hand.
Welcome Prince of Petworth readers. Apart from occasional blogcritics reviews, I've been neglecting this blog in favor of my tumblr, but it behooves me to produce content of a more personal nature here, being that my work blog has lately been more fun than my so-called personal blog. But before I tell you about how I was born, and what makes me cry, and how my experiments with butterscotch pie turned out, I'd like to wish everyone in the Greater Washington Area and all across this great solar system of ours ... a Happy International Waffle Day! The picture at left is from the web presentation Washington As It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959, where you can also find a series of views of the old Waffle House on 10th Street, across from Ford's Theatre. You missed a spot!
Marina Abramovic, "Entering the other side." Courtesty of Microcinema.
This post first appeared in a slightly different form on Blogcritics.org.
Belgrade-born Marina Abramovic, the subject of a recent New Yorker profile, is the first performance artist to be honored with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. To coincide with "The Artist is Present," Microcinema has released Seven Easy Pieces, a document of Abramovic's week-long residence at the Guggenheim in 2005, in which the artist spent seven hours a day performing one of five landmark performance art pieces by other artists and two of her own.
Performance art is by nature ephemeral - documentation may exist only in photographs or perhaps no more than the memory of an audience. Abramovic seeks to remedy this institutional loss - but is anything lost in translation? Seven Easy Pieces, directed by Babette Mangolte, condenses forty-nine hours of performance into a ninety minute video. Abbreviated as it is, the time given to each work conveys a sense of the passage of time: a summary of gestures is introduced and cycled through and repeated, and the gestures are cumulative. So for Bruce Nauman's "Body pressure," as the artist presses herself repeatedly against a Plexiglas divider, you see the traces of skin grease accrue over time, obscuring the view of the artist as she steps back from the wall.
The pieces run from the sublime to the ridiculous, the funny to the self-indulgent, the simply uncomfortable to the frankly disturbing. A re-interpretation of Vito Acconci's infamous "Seedboard" is a case in point for any number of these. In 1972, Acconci spent nine days masturbating for eight hours in the crawlspace under a ramp in Sonnabend Gallery in New York, fantasizing about those walking over him and murmuring explicit thoughts through an amplifier. Ambramovic, despite a repertoire that includes generous amounts of self-flagellation and other varieties of pain, seems in this piece less self-contemptuous than Acconci. She invites her audience, sitting in an intimate circle above her, to interact and tell her their fantasies; in one shot an excited male spectator is seen lying face down, caressing the plywood and gently humping it.
In 1969, a black-leather jacketed Valie Export cut the crotch out of her trousers and trained a machine gun on a movie theater audience. [Ed. - it was a pron theater, and she addressed the men in the audience to "deal with a real woman."] "Action Pants, Genital Panic" dripped Punk Rock at the time, but lost some balls, as it were, in the institutional confines of the Guggenheim. A heckler can he heard telling Abramovic, "Put down that gun or use it!" This may be fodder for those who believe that a work of performance art belongs to its own time: an event that once subverted expectations of passivity has become, if not passive, inert.
Gina Pane's "The Conditioning" is tailor-made for the ascetic element in Ambramovic's work (for her current show, she asked the young performers participating with her to adhere to a strict program of fasting). A jump-suited Abramovic lays on a steel bed atop an array of lit candles, which she switches out as they melt down.
Joseph Beuys, "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" may be the strangest of the pieces, and this is coming from someone with a very high bar for the strange indeed. The artist's face is sloppily plastered with gold leaf, fragments of which dangle from her face and fall to the stage (she sweeps up the detritus during the piece). She's accompanied by a taxidermied hare, which she alternately cradles in her arms, walks along the stage with and holds with its floppy ears dangling from her mouth.
"Lips of Thomas" is one of Ambramovic's own pieces, from 1975. Originally performed over the course of two hours, this piece was expanded for the Guggenheim. It is uncomfortable watching at any length. The artist sits naked at a tale, eating honey from a jar and drinking wine as a metronome slowly keeps time. She gets up from the table to stand fully naked before the audience, revealing a five-pointed star drawn on her stomach. She takes a razor blade and cuts along one line of the star, then proceeds to lie on a cross made of ice (underneath a space heater aimed at her stomach), and then sits up to flagellate herself. She puts on boots and a military cap, and waves a flag, lined with the blotted stains from her razored belly, while a Russian folk song plays. Repeat, for an excruciating seven hours.
The seventh day must have come as a relief to both audience and artist. In "Entering the Other Side," Abramovic simply stands in a giant blue dress in the center of the Guggenheim rotunda.
Abramovic said, "I do not want the public to feel that they are spending time with the performances, I simply want them to forget about time." For ninety minutes of at times taxing performance - albeit not nearly as taxing as the seven-hour iterations - I was largely compelled, if not entirely convinced. Seven Easy Pieces is a frequently uneasy time, and may not win the artist any converts. Nor will it answer the questions of purists who may argue whether performance art should be recreated at all. But as a well-produced document, fans of the artist will find it essential viewing.
This post first appeared, in a slightly different form, on Blogcritics.org.
What do you get when you blend violence-as-humor, ironic use of racial and other epithets, casual misogyny, and the kind of relentless profanity that's the sure sign of a lazy writer who can't be bothered to come up with original verbal shock tactics? A Behanding in Spokane is what you get, and, in the case of this critic, eyes rolled all the way into the back of my fucking head.
Irish playwright Martin McDonagh followed his acclaimed Aran Islands Trilogy with a foray into Hollywood. He wrote the the screenplay for In Bruges, one of my favorite films of 2008. But, back on Broadway for the first time in four years, he has taken a major misstep with A Behanding in Spokane, his first work set in America. And what did the celebrated playwright pick up in the New World? A bad case of the affliction that saddles too many writers these days: actue Tarantino-itis.
Don't get me wrong - I enjoy Tarantino's writing and directing, but his example has begat so many wannabees who believe that Attitude is all you need for success.
Christopher Walken stars as the behanded Carmichael (affected much?), a man who lost his left hand forty-seven years ago to a gang of cruel hillbillies in a railroad yard. He has been seeking his missing digits ever since, and meets with a pair who claim to have in their possession that long lost hand. If you're eyes aren't rolling already I can't help you. In Bruges worked so well because despite the seeming leading with what appear to be the standard-issue assassins-on-the-run type, there's a lot of heart and emotion behind the characters' motives. It was more than just a po-mo gangster black comedy: it was a moving character study. But Walken plays Christopher Walken, and the self-consciousness of the writing is met by Walken's own self-consciousness - his delivery is forced, his timing mannered, as if instead of putting his signature voice and timing into a well-drawn character, he's competing with the writer's own notion of what a Christopher Walken character ought to be like. Sam Rockwell does somewhat better as the hotel clerk/receptionist; he seems to have walked off the set of a particularly violent episode of the Andy Griffith Show, and that's as good as angle as any to take with this material, but the material really favors for no one - least of all the would-be hand dealing couple, an African American (Toby, played by Anthony Mackie, who gets some laughs mostly at his expense) and a blonde (Marilyn, natch, played by Zoe Kazan) who are subject to nearly all of the aforementioned ironic epithets.
Admittedly I saw the play in previews, but barely a week before it opens in earnest, I can't see the producers coming in to make any major changes. And why should they - the audience I saw it with, despite skewing heavily to the Golden Girl set, laughed at all the right places. There's no accounting for taste, but if you do like A Behanding in Spokane, maybe we shouldn't get the early-bird special together.
This post first appeared, in slightly different form, on blogcritics.org
From episodes of Gimmie a Break and Perfect Strangers, to the real-life tweeting of reporter Ann Curry, the dramedy of being trapped in an elevator is a staple of entertainment in this age of Otis. Striking the hearts of both the claustrophobic and the Luddite who should have just taken the stairs, these tales of strange bedfellows are especially chilling to those caught in the middle of the snowpocalypse that has left the Mid-Atlantic states without cupcakes for days on end. So what better way to battle cabin fever than with Hallmark Channel's Valentine's Day offering, Elevator Girl? Would you want to be trapped with these people? Come closer - let's take a look.
Under the opening credits we are introduced with keen efficiency to a typical morning for each of our predestined characters: Liberty (Lacey Chalbert, the one on Party of Five who looked like Jennifer Love-Hewitt but wasn't; this is to her great credit, as the career track of her former co-star has led to one of the most misguided and disturbing examples of celebrity too-much-informationitis: Love-Hewitt's public announcement that she had a bejewelled vajayjay ) hits the snooze button and pulls the sheets back over her head, stumbles into a kitchen past a refrigerator encrusted with post-it notes and brews herself a pot of Mr. Coffee. Jonathan (Ryan Merriman, Final Destination 3) - and note that this is by contrast, walks into an immaculate kitchen with granite counters and chrome fittings to make a perfect single-serve espresso.
Jonathan was just made partner at a prestigious law firm, and is on the way to a dinner thrown in his honor. She's on the way to cater said dinner, and runs to catch the fated elevator. I've seen a lot of forced dialogue in rom-coms in my time and I know we'll never see the verbal or charismatic ilk of Bringing up Baby again, but while their banter was not especially interesting (contrary to Libby's small-talk remarks to Jonathan how "interesting" that is), they have a kind of awkward chemistry that was surprisingly believable. It is certainly more believable than the chemistry that's supposed to make us coo at such Hollywood rom-coms as PS I Love You and Crazy Heart. Trapped for just a few minutes, Jonathan and Libby share a little bit of their lives and go their own ways ... to meet again?
"Maybe you were put on that elevator with that guy on that night to learn a little something about yourself." That's Tessa, Liberty's stock funny-looking friend, and alas it is around here that the rom-com formula starts to go bad - not as bad as a box of brownie mix that expired in 2005, but no chocolate chip cookies made from scratch, either.
Still, there are slight charms and textures to come. Patty McCormack's long career began with The Bad Seed, and television credentials that go back to Route 66 with stops at Fantasy Island and The Sopranos. Here she plays the small but crucial role of Rosemary, Jonathan's secretary. Rosemary plays matchmaker and hires Libby to cook for a dinner at Jonathan's decadent condo.This leads us to the first of a recurring variation on get-downism, but instead of the magical ethnic character teaching the stuffy Protestant to get down, Libby teaches Jonathan how to cook hummus. Earthy! The kitchen plays a role in a subsequent scene of get-downism, punctiuated by a funk soundtrack that asks us to "swing it on down and shake it up sister." Is there a clause in the contract for Hallmark Channel scripts that requires this scene? It reminds me very much of a scene in Ladies of the house, previously reviewed in this space. Hmm. Elevator Girl may be formulaic rom-com with standard-issue notions of dropping the soul-sucking nine-to-five job to answer your artistic calling, but the principals do their best to make this a pleasant diversion, and it is a good message for the kids. This Hallmark Channel Original Movie premieres Saturday, February 13th (9p.m. ET/PT, 8C).
One of my favorite movies of 2009 was Henri-Georges Clouzot's Inferno (L'enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot), a documentary that assembled footage from the French director's doomed 1964 production. Marvelously edited and with a spanking new but era-appropriate soundtrack, the most spectacular sequences were simply lighting tests of Romy Schneider:
I don't know about you, but I could watch that all day. So I thought, if Romy Schneider's test shots made for a five-star movie, I could watch her in anything, right?
Swimming Pool (La piscine), part of the five-film Alain Delon Collection, answers that question: positivement non! A 1969 vehicle for Schneider and Delon, who together were the Brangelina of their time, the picture is ostensibly a thriller but is one of the most boring movies I've seen in recent memory — and this is coming from someone who thinks Last Year at Marienbad is funny. Alainomy play Jean and Marianne (aka Jearianne), a young couple vacationing near St. Tropez. If you are still awake, I'm surprised. Because despite the magnificent specimens of gender that are Alainomy, there's only so much visual and dramatic interest you can squeeze from scenes of screen gods lounging tanned and glistening at poolside. Did I mention there's spanking? Oh, it is playful, as Delon strips a low-hanging branch from a nearby tree and lovingly slaps his topless Schneider on the back; first gently, then with gusto! You would rip off his shirt too, no?
This wouldn't be French without the promise of a menage-a-trois or even a-quatre. Column B is provided, if you can call it that, by the couple's old chum Harry (Maurice Ronet) and his teenage daughter Penelope (Jane Birkin, hot off her iconic duet with Serge Gainsbourg, "Je t'aime ... moi non plus"). This May-September couple make for romantic rivals — and, in the case of Mlle Birkin, someone to count walnuts onscreen.
Not to toot my own horn as a writer, but if you've read this far, you've likely experienced amounts of heat and tension comparable to that I felt during the entire two-hour length of Swimming Pool. There's a murder, but by the time it happened I didn't care who lived or died. Swimming Pool is sad proof that the beautiful people of any era made for a lot of baaad pictures.
I meant to blog this when I got back from New York a few weeks ago. I was saddened to learn that Alphaville, the antique toy shop on West Houston just across from Film Forum, is closing up shop after 16 years. I'd always wondered how such a specialized shop could make do in such a large space. The co-owner told me that wasn't a problem, as they had an understanding landlord. The prospects of an expensive heater repair helped the owners decide to call it a day. They'll continue to operate online, but I'll miss stopping in there before a movie to browse the display cases:
And, more often than not, get my fix of Italian 3-D plastic. As you can see above, they stocked their share of kittens and puppies, and the owner kept an eye out for 3-D popes for me. But it was this horrifying subgenre that I will remember best:
I mean, how do you look that up on eBay? Alphaville was also good for the occasional lenticular teddy bear cottage:
Thanks Alphaville! And if you happen on one of these, save me two!
This piece first appeared in a slightly different form on blogcritics.org.
A year ago this week, near the end of a whirlwind holiday trip to South America, I walked into the magnificent El Ateneo bookstore in Buenos Aires. I looked through the Argentine DVDs for something to remember the country by. On a whim led by cover art that spoke some strange yet familiar sentiment to me, I picked up a movie starring Roberto Sanchez, aka Sandro. This is the trailer for that movie:
My homie and I watched it that night, and were immediately transfixed by his infectious gyrations, now rhythmic, now melodramatic. On our last night in Argentina we went back to El Ateneo for more Sandro for her and for friends back home, but nobody else really seemed to recognize his swarthy awesomeness.
English-language obituaries call him the Elvis of Argentina, though Sandro's musical hips are attached to a dramatic ham that Elvis never showed in his movies. Sandro's entertainment was no less than an alchemical explosion of equal parts Tom Jones and Richard Burton.
Sandro died on January 4th, from complications arising from a lung and heart transplant. He was 64. In an interview with Mitre Radio, excerpted in the Star Tribune, Sandro curses his fate:
I am debilitated because I cannot move. My life is my bed, my spot in the dining room where I read the newspaper, and from there I do not move, I am to blame for the condition that I am in. I deserve it; I sought it out. I picked up this damn cigarette.
May flights of angels hip-shake thee to your rest, Senor.
My Eyes On Stuff, a new tumblr page documenting exercises in modern identity. Am currently soliciting book offers, cases of Cristal, and money - 'cause it glows.
In the 80's, I asked a high school chum, who shall remain nameless but who is a FB contact (apropriately enough, I also remember lending him a philosophy textbook, which he left in his car during a pouring rain; he returned the book to me besotted with water damage, and our Philosophy teacher pointed to it's damage as an indicator of how much its owner referred to it. I never corrected his assumption) to tape Lord Love a Duck for me, off a broadcast station (WBFF 45, a Baltimore station) I couldn't get well in DC. The tape was full of dropouts and transmission problems, and though I taped over it long ago, and the movie is now available in a pristine DVD transfer, I sometimes wish I could watch it again broadcast problems and all. The tracking (and audio) problems in these clips of similar vintage are the video-age equivalent to the patina of scratches and emulsion damage seen in neglected celluloid prints of the silent era. Cf: the time I saw a faded-to-pink print of Lasse Halstrom's Abba movie. Via lapinfille.
Last night, after months of delays, and in the aftermath of a snowpocalypse of historic proportions, I tried out a continuous positive airway pressure machine, or CPAP. Some of my best friends swore their praises and curses of the machine, which either sung them into a device-assisted date with sandman, or made them to claw at their faces and sleep unadorned.
I didn't claw. As uncomfortable as this looks, I had a much better night's sleep than the last time I was so nocturnally wired. Because this time I was masked. Thanks to this Darth Vader-like apparatus I breathed in not only positive air pressure but clean and more or less allergen-free air, with the added benefit of a humidifier. The sleep center had moved to a new facility just weeks before, and the mattress - which turned out to be simply a big cushion on top of the standard hospital-issue slab - was more comfortable by far than the hospital sleep lab. I did miss the Soylent Green-flavored relaxation videos piped into the hospital sleep lab, replaced this time with the Charlie Brown Christmas special and a news report on adopted children finding their birth parents. But the bedroom was decked with artwork that reminded me of the big sleep of Edward G. Robinson.
I woke wanting more sleep, but feeling like I actually slept.
, and I don't use the word auteur ironically. For all the press calling this "The worst movie ever made," for the awkward dialogue and acting, the writer/director/star has some kind of amazing vision. Not everybody hears that whistle - unlike many bad movies, what makes this enjoyable has nothing to do with camp or a wink-wink knowingness. The charm of Tommy is that he doesn't know. As much as the audiences that pack houses to see him at midnight screenings aroudn the country show up to laugh at him, he stands by his vision. It may not be a coherent, comprehendable vision, but it's clearly a vision - Citizen Kane homage aside, what other movie is like this?
