Rewind: Funky Christmas, Santa Baby

It's weird how we lose so many right around Christmas. I'm so glad to have seen James Brown, the Hardest Working Man in Show Business, doing his thing, before he died in 2006, before I ever have to die. Merry Funky Christmas, indeed!










I've plugged the book on Cuba's own Alberto Korda (Alberto Díaz Gutiérrez); now I'll plug the documentary, Hector Cruz Sandoval's Kordavision (2005). This guy was way cool and, like Diane Arbus, lives on as a role model for any still-aspiring hepcat photographer . . .




















Next, I love the fact that Charo (i.e. María Rosario Pilar Martínez Molina Moquiere de les Esperades Santa Ana Romanguera y de la Najosa Rasten) and Don Rickles are still touring -- I used to smile big time watching them on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show when I was a kid staying up late on school nights (much as I still do).

I'm also sad to note the passing [in 2008] of another late night (and Batman) favorite, South Carolina-born (like James Brown) Eartha Kitt, who performed the original 1953 "Santa Baby" and more. Zowie!

Carry on, those of us happy enough to still count ourselves among the living, and RIP to those gone (but not by any means forgotten) . . . Merry Funky Christmas to all!

Fellini: Giulietta degli Spiriti

Giulietta Masina married Frederico Fellini near the end of the Second World War and remained in that interesting social compact (unconventionally) for fifty years, at which point Fellini died; Masina died five months later. Giulietta degli Spiriti/Juliet of the Spirits (1965) takes an indirect look at their relationship near its halfway point, or so it would seem. As one character states in the movie: "The interpretation is up to you. What can we say?"

Masina plays Giulietta/Juliet, a mostly self-contained middle-aged woman with a strong Catholic background; when confronted with her husband's infidelity, she falls through a metaphorical rabbit hole. This is Fellini's first color movie, and all its heightened effects work together to radiate a world of the spirits. Colors are wild and vivid; sounds echo; the camera moves and all is in motion. The sharp images, incandescent hues and frequent use of shadow create a dreamy, sometimes hallucinatory feel for Giulietta's derangement of the senses. The characters are, well,

Felliniesque . . . Diane Arbus in color. It's a luxurious and unrushed ride.

What I see immediately after viewing Juliet of the Spirits are a series of artistic "hyperlinks" to other movies: back through time to The Wizard of Oz and Fritz Lang; over the rainbow to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal; and coming our way through such visually stunning films made between 1965 and 1986 as Rosemary's Baby, Barbarella, The Exorcist, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Carrie, The Shining, Stardust Memories, and Blue Velvet; and even closer, to the great HBO series of recent years. Interesting company, indeed; with, however, almost no violence at all in Juliet of the Spirits. The music at times reminds me of Woody Allen, for sure; the Italian dialogue is beautiful to listen to, even while keeping up with the subtitles.

To me, the coolest thing in the movie is the furiously fluttering artificial fire that surrounds Juliet as she is being (pretend) burned to death in her childhood school play rendition of a Catholic martyr, a striking image that visits her from time to time.

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Fellow Travelers: The Photographers

Kellie Jones, Lorna Simpson (Phaidon Contemporary Artists, 2002).

Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (2005).

Susan Goldman Rubin, Margaret Bourke White: Her Pictures Were Her Life (1999).

Anthony Penrose, The Lives of Lee Miller (1988).

Cindy Sherman: The Early Works, 1975-1977. Catalogue Raisonné (2012). Das Frühwerk.

Five über-cool photographers. I dig them all! 

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Diane Arbus/Lisette Model

A couple of more items related to Diane Arbus and photography. Part 2 of a short 1972 documentary above (she died in 1971).

Below:  Eugenia Parry's Shooting Off My Mouth Spitting Into the Mirror: Lisette Model, A Narrative Autobiography (Steidl Photography International, 2009) about Model  (aka Elise Amelie Felicie Stern Model, 1901-1983), a key mentor to Arbus. Looks promising.  

Today's Rune: Warrior.

The 70s: Bring Out Your Dead, Part I

Some of those who died in the early 1970s but still reverberate:

Jimi Hendrix (11/27/1942-9/19/1970). We haven't see nor heard anything quite like him since, have we? Playing guitar or otherwise.

Janis Joplin (1/19/1943-10/4/1970). Ditto Hendrix for her. Of women, the only singer I can think of who seems as intense, since Joplin's death, is Amy Winehouse.



Charles "Sonny" Liston (ca.5/8/1932-12/30/1970). Fought Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali; the second bout (May 25, 1965) was especially notable for "the phantom punch." Was it a setup or did Ali deck him? Really a sad guy.

Jim Morrison (12/8/1943-7/3/1971). The Doors, man.

Louis "Satchmo" Armstrong (8/4/1901-7/6/1971). Often called the greatest jazz musician (trumpet), and synonymous with New Orleans. Widely liked and respected, yet put under FBI surveillance for supporting integration.


Diane Arbus (3/14/1923-7/26/1971). Photography. Can you dig?

Nikita Khrushchev (4/15/1894-9/11/1971). Cold Warrior, Soviet side.

Duane Allman (11/20/1946-10/29/1971). Another fantastic guitarist; and Southern rock hero. Killed at 24 in a motorcycle wreck.



Roberto Clemente (8/18/1934-12/31/1972). One of the coolest baseball players I've ever seen. Still remember watching Pittsburgh Pirates games with my parents as a kid -- wow. Clemente was batting .414 in the 1971 World Series, which Pittsburgh won. Jesus, I can still remember the excitement, whenever Manny Sanguillen or Willie Stargell or Roberto Clemente was up at bat. Clemente, originally from Puerto Rico, died in a plane crash carrying earthquake relief to Nicaragua.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (8/27/1908-1/22/1973). 36th President of the United States. He presided over a lot of good things during rough times. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act, the Great Society -- Medicare, Medicaid, education assistance (including the launch or expansion of hundreds of junior or community colleges), PBS, and more. But race riots and Vietnam took him down, ushering in Nixonian America.

Salvador Allende (6/26/1908-9/11/1973). Democratically elected socialist president of Chile, brought down with the collusion of Nixonian America in the coup d'état of 1973. He committed suicide rather than surrender to the incoming junta of General Augusto Pinochet.

Pablo Neruda/Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto (7/12/1904-9/23/1973). Chilean poet, died soon after the death of Salvador Allende, whom he supported. Having won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971, he responded during a Pinochet-ordered military raid on his home with the last up yours of a poet: "Look around -- there's only one thing of danger for you here -- poetry."

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Sequels and Prequels

Diane Arbus: Identical Twins (1967).


Marcy Dermansky, Twins: A Novel (William Morrow, 2005). Competing twins in school -- tattoos, experimentation, and infighting between identical twins Chloe and Sue.


Both covers are creepy -- this second version evokes Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides (1999 film based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides, set in Grosse Pointe and Detroit in the mid-1970s). And let's not forget the Stanley Kubrick version of The Shining (1980) below, which hearkens back to Diane Arbus's photo above.

[Note: removing the inbed, as it seems to be causing a crash].

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Funky Cold Medina

Today, on Diane Arbus' birthday (1923-1971), I had a perfect snapshot for our times -- only without a camera. In Detroit, it felt almost springy today, and I saw a couple walking side by side, oh wasn't it romantic and sweet, until I got closer and saw the truth: each one separately jawing on a cellphone to completely different people, their heads tilted violently away from each other. What a moment!

Ideally, a photographer of people would be invisible. Arbus achieved what she wanted by befriending the people she wanted to photograph and then -- POW -- got them with their guard down. Or she tormented them into some soul-baring gesture. Evil, fearless, mad, brilliant. She paid in blood, though, for what she got from the sum of her encounters.


As Arbus approached her relatively early end, German director Werner Herzog (b. 1942) was gearing up. Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen / Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970-1971) seems to pick up right where Arbus left off. Herzog seems as evil, fearless, mad, and brilliant as her but he prefers pictures in motion, i.e. movies with memorable (often eerie or creepy) soundtracks.

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Happy Birthday, Diane Arbus!

The Sylvia Plath Effect

I have nothing against Sylvia Plath, but I'd much rather see an interesting biopic about Anne Sexton or Assia Wevill than yet another take on The Bell Jar. I suppose there's room for everything -- but who then will have the courage to take on Anne Sexton? Even a documentary would be worthwhile. It's how I feel about Shakespeare -- how many godforsaken new versions do we need of that dude's works? No joke, though -- a new movie version of The Bell Jar is in the works.

Plath, Wevill and Sexton all took their own lives, or "checked out early" as Alan Arkin might say a la Little Miss Sunshine. Wevill replicated Plath and both did it in response to Ted Hughes, whose birthday is today. As for me, I'm staying out of it in the department of blame games. It's just that as with Shakespeare's Ophelia, I've read or heard enough versions of Plath; show me something new about Assia Wevill, about Anne Sexton; do a new version of Anne Kaufman's Diary of a Mad Housewife or at least re-release the old version in digital format; or someone try a straight-up take on Diane Arbus without it being too weird for words -- something with a new slant on things with people that resemble the real deal.

Korean actress-singer-etc. Uhm Jung-hwa.

Today's Rune: Inititiation.

Birthdays: Davy Crockett, Samuel Goldwyn (b. Schmuel Gelbfisz), Marcus Garvey, Mae West, Maureen O'Hara (Fitzsimons), Ted Hughes, V. S. Naipaul, Robert De Niro, Belinda Carlisle, David Koresh (b. Vernon Wayne Howell), Jonathan Franzen, Sean Penn, Uhm Jung-hwa.

The Nico Insurgency

Why do perceptions of all kinds of art and artists change over time? Sometimes it's hard to notice a trend or separate out a particular artist in the roiling present because of the din and distractions of the competition. But bestsellers now may be all but forgotten in twenty years, while those obscured in their time sometimes emerge into the light of a new now.

Christa Päffgen / Nico (10/16/1938-7/18/1988) is back, though she's been dead almost twenty years. A nice trick, that. She was a person who didn't let physical beauty deny her a life of her own, but did benefit from it early on. From a springboard of modeling and use as an album cover treat in the early 1960s, she learned to act, then acted in movies, began her own recording career, served as chanteuse on The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967), went solo with a number of admiring collaborators, acted some more, made more records and did more tours, eventually kicked a long heroin addiction that eroded her good looks, and then died after falling of a bike at age 49. But her work is back.


An expanded CD edition of Nico's The Frozen Borderline (1968-1970) has just been released. More will be revealed. Hopefully Susanne Ofteringer's 1995 documentary Nico Icon will also be re-issued on DVD. As of now, used copies are going for more than $60 USD.


Back cover: looks like a still from the British series Absolutely Fabulous. Here's a link to Nico singing "Femme Fatale" with Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S52aR94DYVs

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Birthdays: Sylvia Beach, Albert Einstein, Diane Arbus, Michael Caine, Quincy Jones.

Viva Nico!

Three for Conversation?

Looks like I can't comment on several other blogs until transferred to the "upgraded" blogspot (a porject for the weekend), so will respond here to Simon's December 13th post on Dispatches from Suburbia for now.

"If you could invite any three people to dinner (dead or alive, famous, fictional, etc.), who would they be, why and what would the topic of conversation be?"

For the dinner party, I'd have over (with universal translator) Lao Tzu, Jesus, and Voltaire. Interesting mix. We'd talk about favorite foods, thoughts on the role of sex in life, and fashion sense. I'd ask what they look for in a person, and by the way, where did we come from, where are we now, and where are we going?

For the after dinner party, same cycle of conversation (but no translator necessary) with Anne Sexton, Diane Arbus and Debbie Harry and yes, they could stay the night if they had too much to drink. Another interesting mix, a better looking one, no doubt, and probably just as intriguing.

Today's Rune: The Blank Rune.

Retro Chic and Super-Freaky

I'm glad a clarifying (and cya) subtitle has been added to the new Diane Arbus film. Already out in Italy and due at some theaters in the US and UK on November 10, 2006, Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus stars Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr.

Arbus was a model of both chic and super-freaky, and the movie looks to reflect this. Her photographs are extraordinary in unmasking and remasking her subjects, usually people up close and personal. "The more you see, the less you know."

I'm loving all the retro movies lately, ones like Capote, Infamous, Fur, the upcoming Factory Girl (Sienna Miller, I've heard, turns in a fine performance as a jangled Edie Sedgwick), Walk the Line, Casino Royale, Running With Scissors, Mrs. Harris, Marie Antoinette, and so on.

I enjoy seeing bits of retro fashion making their way into the latest styles, especially when done with intelligence and flair. Because the more that's new, the more that's steeped in tradition.

Today's Rune: Partnership.

Bon voyage!

Factotum and Its Discontents

Factotum still comes to mind even days after first seeing it. Films about artists, when they're good, are worthy of extra support. I also liked Capote (2005) and recently saw an older guy reading the screenplay in a hotel lobby, which is heartening. Running With Scissors, Factory Girl, and Fur (the Diane Arbus biopic) are all in the hopper, and let's not forget Ed Harris in Pollock (2000). I love these kinds of movies.

The three stars of Factotum are wonderful actors. Matt Dillon (b. 2/18/1964) emerged from the troubled youth milieu -- movies like The Outsiders (1983) and Rumble Fish (1983) -- to inhabit the land of troubled young adults, and then went on to a variety of new roles. I especially like his performances in Drug Store Cowboy (1989) along with William S. Burroughs and others; To Die For (1995), with Nicole Kidman; and Beautiful Girls (1996) alongside Uma Thurman and Mira Sorvino. And yes, he's great in Crash (2004), too.

Marisa Tomei (b. 12/4/1964), as Laura, has an episodic role in Factotum, and she does it well as a smart, dazed woman trying to make her way in the world; her bottom line: survival, enjoy life while you can. She's acted in many films by now, but my sentimental favorite is My Cousin Vinny (1992).

Lili Taylor (b. 2/20/1967) is another standout with a wide range of strong (and usually edgy) parts to her credit. Some of my favorite Lili Taylor performances are in Mystic Pizza (1988); Short Cuts (1993); I Shot Andy Warhol (1996); as Lisa in HBO's Six Feet Under (far funnier dead than alive); The Notorious Bettie Page, and now, Factotum. As for her acting choices, she once reportedly said, "As a woman, a lot of stories haven't been told and we've got a lot of catching up to do." Indeed.


Today's Rune: Fertility.

Beijus!

Diary of a Mad Housewife

Sue Kaufman (8/7/1926-6/25/1977) saw seven of her books published before she committed suicide by plunging from a building in New York City at the age of fifty. Creepily, her last novel was titled Falling Bodies. Though I am fond of The Headshrinker's Test (1969), she'll probably be best remembered for Diary of a Mad Housewife (1967) which was also made into a movie starring Carrie Snodgrass in 1970. In it, a novel whose title was inspired by Nikolai Gogol's macabre and sad nineteenth century Russian tale, the protagonist, Bettina "Tina" Balser, is an educated and artsy smart woman who's nicely trapped in the Manhattan material world. Married to the well-named Jonathan Balser, a fussy, pretentious nimrod lawyer who is also anxious and unsatisfied, with two children attending local prep schools, she has a hard time getting through life. In fact, she is very unhappy with her station, and few in her circle sympathize, seeing only the material comforts. Frustrated, she begins asserting herself, trying to create an identity independent of her family by beginning a secret diary that provides the vehicle for the novel.

Diary of a Mad Housewife is funny, intelligent, sarcastic, and gleefully depressing. There are scary moments, too, such as when Tina finds herself facing a sinister male presence in Central Park; incidents such as this take her closer to the edge. As in the Rolling Stones' classic satirical songs "Mother's Little Helper" and "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown," Tina resorts to pills, and therapy, and (not in the Stones' version) an affair with knavish playwright George Prager while trying to find her way. The novel works in an obvious feminist way, but it also works as broader social satire. Furthermore, it works effectively as an allegory for anyone caught in a similar situation: the typical work place, domestic situation, or even prison, where expectations are high and one's ability to break out and become autonomous, independent, and fully realized is seemingly non-existent. In that, Diary of a Mad Housewife is also a thoughtful existential exercise for all. In any situation, who wants to be controlled, bullied, or hamstrung?

Sue Kaufman has been praised by feminists, but why hasn't this novel in particular made it more into the mainstream? Why, until recently, were all of Kaufman's books out of print? Why hasn't the movie been released on DVD? If, like The Stepford Wives (1975) it is emblematic of its time, why hasn't it been remade? Here, I can only speculate and give what few facts I've been able to find.

Kaufman earned an undergraduate degree from Vassar in 1947, then worked as an editorial assistant for Mademoiselle's fiction editor for a couple years before devoting more time to her own writing. She married not a lawyer, like Tina, but a doctor, Jeremiah A. Barondess, in 1953 when she was about twenty-seven. Together they had one child, James, ca. 1957. Kaufman saw her first book, The Happy Summer Days, published in 1959 under the name Sue Kaufman, a name which she retained for all her publications. This is important, because it evidently allowed her to keep some distance from her married status. Even in the late 1960s, publishers seemed a bit confused, saying in the "About the Author" blurb for one version of Diary that she was "married to a doctor and they have . . . an eccentric dachsund, Poppy" on one hand, and that the novel was "Miss Kaufman's third. . ." We can see the need for Ms. here, at any rate, or nothing at all.

Given the detailed description in her fiction of the kind of lifestyle Kaufman actually lived, one wonders whether, after her suicide, Dr. Barondess has not either destroyed or withheld manuscripts, drafts, and correspondence, perhaps not liking the idea of additional public scrutiny. One may hope that some day her papers will be left to some special collection -- perhaps they have been, and are merely sealed until 2025 or so. One can hope.

In any case, Jeremiah A. Barondess is alive and living in New York City. I came across a March 19, 2001 article in The New York Observer that calls him "the patrician elder statesman of the New York medical community." Barondess is currently the President of the New York Academy of Medicine. He has connections with numerous institutions ranging from the University of Michigan to Cornell University, and has dozens of publications listed on the Academy's website. The list, however, only goes back to 1994. Given that Sue Kaufman leapt to her death in 1977, it's interesting to note some of the titles of his work: "Urban Health: A Look Out Our Windows" (2004); "Adolescent Suicide: Vigilance and Action to Reduce the Toll" (2004); "Danse Macabre: Poverty, Social Status and Health" (2002); and "Care of the Medical Ethos: Reflections on Social Darwinism, Racial Hygiene, and the Holocaust" (1998). Cheery stuff, to be sure. If you'd like to see his long Jonathan-like list of accomplishments, and actually see what the husband of Sue Kaufman looks like nearly thirty years after her death, go to www.nyam.org

As with most things, more will be revealed (although the FBI came up empty again in their recent search for Jimmy Hoffa). Meanwhile, I'd love to stir up interest for the release of Diary of a Mad Housewife in digital form, and hope that all of her books will be digitized and posted on the internet. Plus, how about a biography? Or a group study including Anne Sexton and Diane Arbus, among other artists of obvious comparison?

To my knowledge, there is at least one award given out in her honor, the $2500 Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction, by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, for short story collections and novels. (I actually met the first recipient, Kaye Gibbons, an Algonquin Books author who won in 1995. More on Ms. Gibbons and Algonquin in a later post.)

A Salute to Sue Kaufman! Adieu.

"Mein Fuhrer, I Can Walk!"

Last year, I was lucky enough to see Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) at a rare theatrical showing on a very large screen in Austin, Texas. Certain scenes -- like close-ups of Sterling Hayden as Brigadier General Jack D. Ripper chomping a cigar while babbling insanely about his "bodily essence," and the War Room shots -- carried major freight that's only hinted at on a small screen. Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, on the other hand, works equally well in any venue.

Dr. Strangelove is compellingly odd. Film critic Robert Kolker puts it well in a Diane Arbus/Patricia Bosworth sort of formulation: "The serious is made light of and the ridiculous is made serious."* The currency of this film is astonishing, going well beyond its historical grounding in the Cold War.

At times, William S. Burroughs seemed to see the modern geo-political world in a similar fashion. In "Soul Killer," he ironically observes that the power to use what we now call Weapons of Mass Destruction are, in the USA, ". . . vested in farsighted and responsible men in the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon." Many of whom, as Kubrick also posits, are either deranged or hypnotized by their own farcical rhetoric, or both, and quite willing to abuse their power for irrational ends. All we need do is look around for confirmation of this long-held artistic take on things.

As for Stanley Kubrick (7/26/1928-3/7/1999; born in the Bronx, died in England), I've been grappling with his work ever since I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) as a child, along with the rest of my family. I both love and hate him at times, or rather his vision and its rendered details. I admire most of his movies, or at least much of them, and am happy to dismiss Eyes Wide Shut for its senility and silliness. One cannot dismiss powerful Kubrick film like Paths of Glory (1957) and A Clockwork Orange (1971), however. I am also partial to Barry Lyndon (1975), truth be told; I'm not sure what I'd think of Full Metal Jacket (1987) these days, but the last time I watched it, I couldn't shake the misogynistic scenes, especially the one revolving around the capture and subsequent execution of the Vietnamese sniper. Kubrick is, overall, more misogynistic than misanthropic, yet for some reason I find Full Metal Jacket more disturbing than A Clockwork Orange -- maybe because it's set in historical events rather than dystopian fantasy. Still, Full Metal Jacket is unique in that it depicts the urban side of the Vietnam War during the Battle of Hue. Recently, I also re-caught some of The Shining (1980) and found much of it hilarious; I suppose it depends on context and other factors on how the viewer is going to respond. (I laughed at Eyes Wide Shut along with a like-minded friend, even as others took it as a scary movie, so who knows?)

Any way you cut it, Kubrick is fascinating. His films are all literary adaptions, yet he began as a photographer and knew Arbus (hence the Twins shots in The Shining). His films present a compelling combination of words/dialogue and powerful, obsessively shot and composed images.

*Robert Kolker, A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman. Third Ed. (Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 122.

Ciao!

The Star Attraction

At first look, the setup for the 1966 film This Property is Condemned seems like a heroic fantasy. Stranger comes to town, assesses the situation, liberates wounded damsel in distress and turns the rest of the town upside down. But this is no Clint Eastwood Western, no James Bond tale. This is an adaption from Tennessee Williams. Hence, the story is more complicated and involves larger socio-economic forces, ties of blood, primal human nature. In this as in Diane Arbus vistas, the freakish is ordinary and the ordinary seems freakish.

Overall, this is an interesting B movie. The talent pool would suggest the possibility of something beautiful and sad like The Last Picture Show (1971), but it doesn't quite add up that way. Still, it's got a lot to make it worth seeing -- starting with Natalie Wood in the juicy role of Alva Starr. Then there's Kate Reid as Hazel, her manipulative mother. Reid looks at times like Shelley Winters in Alfie -- maybe it's the mid-1960s fashions and similar hairdos -- even though This Property is set during the Great Depression -- and she acts like her, too. Alva's little tomboyish sister Willie is played by Mary Badham of To Kill a Mockingbird fame. Then there are the male stars.

Robert Redford gives a solid performance as Owen Legate, the stranger who arrives in town to deliver layoff notices to the railroad workers who comprise most of its laborers; he also becomes Alva's key romantic interest, eliciting all sorts of conflict. Legate discovers a rather twisted if understandable setup. Hazel, who runs a hotel/boarding house, essentially pimps Alva out to the highest bidder to keep things going; her husband has abandoned the family and left them to their own devices. Legate is the primary change agent in the story.

The secondary male characters also give solid performances. It's entertaining to see the nervous Robert Blake as Sidney and Charles Bronson as a brutish J.J., both of them railroad workers with a torch for Alva. J.J. is sleeping with Hazel so he can get close to her daughter. These guys are pure Tennessee Williams. Bronson was already a rising tough guy star, and Blake would break out with his charismatic In Cold Blood performance the following year. John Harding plays Mr. Johnson, a "lonely" older married man who wants to make Alva his kept mistress in Memphis. Dabney Coleman has a minor role as a salesman.

Then there's the director, Sydney Pollack. This was an early effort, and though I'm not a big fan of his movie directing, he is terrific as an actor in Husbands and Wives (1992). The primary screenwriting credit goes to Francis Ford Coppola, also an early effort for him -- before he began producing movies of his own.

The most compelling aspect of the story is the weird Starr family dynamic. Hazel constantly intrudes upon Alva's privacy and tends to trample social boundaries. She has good lines like "I can only be nice to one person at a time;" and, of Alva and Legate, "My, what a handsome couple." But Alva has some good (if cheesy) lines, too. At one point, when she confronts her mother in front of some of her male admirers, Hazel notes that she's "loaded," and Alva fires back: "Yeah, like a pistol." Legate also gets to banter, mostly with little sister Willie, to whom he says, "I suspect your sister is a mighty potent force." And he is right.

Also: Natalie Wood had a lifelong fear and dread of water, and in the course of the film, has to shout "Let's go skinny-dipping!" You can see the fear in her face in a scene that must have influenced Cybill Shepherd's similar pool scene in The Last Picture Show. Of course, the tragic and beautiful Natalie died by drowning in 1981.

Thanks to my big sister Vickie for recommending this movie some time ago. Glad to have finally found it in DVD format.

Today's the traditional date for the founding of Rome by Romulus. And as for England's dreamin', God Save the Queen and her fascist regime. It's her 80th birthday and poor Charles is still waiting in the wings for his turn. And lest we forget, happy birthday Iggy Pop!

Ciao for now. Off to do some nighclubbing. . . . .

Cleaning up in Hitler's bathtub: a snapshot of Lee Miller

Here's another strong candidate for biopic movie treatment, and one could start anywhere. What a life! Lee Miller (April 23, 1907-July 27, 1977) managed to work among crazed and feverish artists in the 1920s and 1930s and as a war correspondent during the Second World War -- and still outlived such later-starting luminaries as Anne Sexton and Diane Arbus. Though her life was every bit as brilliant, unconventional, and dangerous as theirs, she must have had a stronger survival instinct -- or better luck.

In her twenties, she set off for Europe, modeled for Vogue, and plugged into the Surrealist movement, electrifying many of its key artists with her intelligence and striking good looks. She took up with Man Ray for about three years before going independent.

I recall thinking how cool Miller was in a documentary film of the period -- despite Man Ray's maniacal attempts to control her. There's something to the feminist charge that Man Ray seemed to enjoy creating violent images of women; indeed, women sometimes appear in his pictures as lacking certain body parts. Creepy, if aesthetically striking -- not unlike David Lynch's later recurrent visions. But let's make it clear: despite Man Ray's attempts to subdue her, Lee Miller was an exceptionally good photographer on her own, and will certainly be raised in stature over time.

Two recent books explore her life and work, and I recommend them both:

Richard Calvocoressi, Lee Miller: Portraits from a Life (New York:
Thames & Hudson, Inc., 2002)

Carolyn Burke, Lee Miller: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Miller split from Man Ray in 1932 and escaped to Manhattan; she married Aziz Eloui Bey, a wealthy Egyptian, in 1934 and left him in 1939. As the war loomed, she moved to London and lived in an open relationship with English art historian and poet-painter Roland Penrose, who agreed to let David Scherman, another boyfriend, live with them, too. Technically, she remained married to Bey until 1947.

Under contract with Vogue, Miller photographed life in England during the Blitz; then became war correspondent for Life and was on hand for the liberation of Paris and subsequent liberation of Nazi concentration camps. Scherman was with her when she took a bath in one of Hitler's bathtubs in Munich on April 30, 1945 -- the very day of Hitler's suicide in Berlin. A picture Scherman snapped of her in the tub adorns the back cover of Carolyn Burke's biography.

After the war, soon after legally divorcing her first husband, Miller married Roland Penrose and had a son with him in her early forties. She continued her influential career in photography through the 1960s.

Miller's photographs -- the ones I've seen -- concentrate on people and their faces. Shots of Nazis who've committed suicide near the end of the war are horrifyingly effective. Her self-portraits are lovely, and her portraits of artists as varied as Picasso, Bob Hope, and Dylan Thomas (leaning back on a chair, cigarette in hand) are excellent. Her wartime series include many incisive shots of "common people" in various contexts.

Remember Lee Miller! And adieu for now. . . . .

Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun

Today I found a 1962 yearbook that had a photograph of Jean Harris when she was a teacher in the Detroit area. In the picture -- a group portrait -- she's sitting by a window about ten feet from where I was holding the book. How creepy is that?

HBO is still showing Mrs. Harris and it's well worth seeing. Annette Bening is perfect in the role, and the rest of the cast is quite good, too.

Meanwhile in Iraq, Operation Swarmer is underway. More human squander. And who makes up these horrid names?

Globally, the omens are bad and coming fast; they go way beyond mere politics. We seem no better prepared for global warming and its fallout than we were for the tsunami or Katrina, which were probably in themselves signs of things to come. FEMA has managed to house thousands of people in mobile homes -- horribly vulnerable to the fast-approaching new hurricane season (which is predicted to be very active and dangerous). The bird flu is on the way to North America and could begin mutating as early as this fall. Are we prepared for a worldwide pandemic on the scale of the 1918 influenza? Not by a long shot. Are we prepared for melting ice floes and massive coastal flooding in the near future? Are we prepared for anything, really?

Jim Morrison may have had it right decades ago. "I don't know what's going to happen, man, but I want to get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames." (American Prayer, 1978. Amen).

With spring break looming, I showed Pompeii: The Last Day (2003) in class today. It's good. The students were riveted. The reenactments are quite believable and seem remarkably appropriate to today's world. Last time I really visualized that disaster was in Amsterdam, watching Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii. And speaking of disasters, what do you suppose the omens meant on my wedding day -- April 26, 1986? The day of Chernobyl, the day we flew to Europe for a "honeymoon"? Interestingly, San Antonio Bill posits that this fearsome nuclear disaster was a significant factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union (and come to think about it, it may have been a significant factor in the collapse of my marriage, but that's another story). I think that Bill is entirely correct in his other points, too (Afghanistan, sectarian uprisings, etc.) But collectively, what have we learned by all this?

Despite all, good personal news today: an acceptance by Pearl: A Literary Magazine for next year's poetry issue (37) by way of a very sweet letter from editor Marilyn Johnson. Here's their website: www.pearlmag.com

More good news: I applied for a grant to go back to the Hotel Chelsea and today got word that I got it for this summer. I'm very excited and appreciative -- and, of course, thinking about many of the people I've been writing about having stayed or worked there. What a great place. There's an image of Diane Arbus terrorizing Germaine Greer, snapping a fearsome photo that Greer hated. There's Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison; there's Valerie Solanas lurking in the lobby on the day she shot Andy Warhol; there's Edie Sedgwick; Jack Kerouac; and hundreds of others. Quite a vibe to work in. Global warming notwithstanding, I can't wait!

Finally, William S. Burroughs, another denizen of the Chelsea, heaps on the scorn with "A Thanksgiving Prayer." Though wicked, this short text applies now more than ever. Here's a link: www.inter-zone.org/thanks.html

Adieu for now . . . . .

Many Things to Many People

Diane Arbus' birthday (1923-1971). When I think of her, I think of her persona first and then her photographs of people. What a wonder -- she had the courage of any combat photographer, and the wreckless spirit of an independent warrior. Beautiful and scary. When I see twins, her images come to mind. From Arbus' perspective, identical twins are unsettling, and they appear everywhere. They pop up in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). They appear in Double Mint gum ads, or with secret language and sometimes ferocious competitiveness. Marcy Dermansky's Twins: A Novel (2005) gets at these qualities. My friend Peaches has a twin brother, and when they get together they act as strange as can be. They love and fight one another. It's perplexing.

In Patricia Bosworth's excellent biography of Arbus (2005; first edition published in 1984) she quotes her as thinking of herself in terms of triplets. "Triplets remind me of myself when I was an adolescent . . . Lined up in three images: daughter, sister, bad girl, with secret lusting fantasies, each with a tiny difference." (p. 217) Arbus would have her chosen twins pose for a portrait and then take snapshots of them. In Bosworth's words, "the combination of styles seems to pinpoint the eerie visual quality twins project -- that of being both symmetrical and ambivalent. . . twins represented a paradox she longed to continue exploring and she did . . . each picture seemed to ask what is it like to live in a body that is virtually indistinguishable from your twin's? Diane suspected that the ultimate challenge was to try creating a separate identity." (p. 240)

The twins from Roselle, New Jersey represented "the crux of her vision -- the freakishness in normalcy, the normalcy in freakishness." (pp.248-249) Arbus: "Everyone suffers from the limitation of being only one person."

People who knew her well seemed to act as if Arbus was their very own twin, whether she was married or hooked up or not. One of them observed: "Come to to think of it, everyone who ever cared about Diane became very possessive of her." Another admitted: "I wanted to see her on any terms."

"Arbus was fragile as a person but strong as an artist and [Lisette] Model respected that because she, too, was a combination of delicacy and power. Model understood that many of Diane's photos had to be taken in order to relieve her mind of the faces and night worlds that were haunting it. Through some mysterious, unconscious force Diane was starting to create in her pictures a kind of art that would be both a release and a vindication of her life." (pp. 231-232)

Jim Hughes, editor of Camera Arts, in 1965: "Diane Arbus' pictures evoked powerful emotions . . . I can't think of a bigger compliment." (p. 235)

Bosworth's composite portrait is fascinating. And Diane Arbus Revelations (2003) is a superb book that deserves its own entry sometime in future.

Marvin Israel: "Diane was many things to many people." (p.205)

She had the "Helen of Troy effect," a psychic burden but also a powerful asset in gaining her access to a wide array of subjects. Like Anne Sexton, Janis Joplin, Sue Kaufman and others of that raucous era, Arbus was an extraordinary artist who burned strong for as long as she could bear. Happy birthday, Diane!

Giulietta degli Spiriti (1965)

Before I get into this film, I'm so looking forward to tomorrow night's The Sopranos and Big Love! I'll have something to say about both on Monday, I'm guessing. Stay tuned. . . . .

Giulietta Masina married Frederico Fellini near the end of the Second World War and remained in that interesting social compact (unconventionally) for fifty years, at which point Fellini died; Masina died five months later. Juliet of the Spirits takes an indirect look at their relationship near its halfway point, or so it would seem. As one character states in the movie: "The interpretation is up to you. What can we say?"

Masina plays Giulietta/Juliet, a mostly self-contained middle-aged woman with a strong Catholic background; when confronted with her husband's infidelity, she falls through a metaphorical rabbit hole. This is Fellini's first color movie, and all its heightened effects work together to radiate a world of the spirits. Colors are wild and vivid; sounds echo; the camera moves and all is in motion. The sharp images, incandescent hues and frequent use of shadow create a dreamy, sometimes hallucinatory feel for Giulietta's derangement of the senses. The characters are, well, Felliniesque . . . Diane Arbus in color. It's a luxurious unrushed ride that has really only been replicated by HBO, at least in a long while.

What I see immediately after viewing Juliet of the Spirits are a series of artistic "hyperlinks" to other movies: back through time to The Wizard of Oz and Fritz Lang; over the rainbow to Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal; and coming our way through such visually stunning films made between 1965 and 1986 as Rosemary's Baby, Barbarella, The Exorcist, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, Carrie, The Shining, Stardust Memories, and Blue Velvet; and even closer, to the great HBO series of recent years. Interesting company, indeed; with, however, almost no violence at all in Juliet of the Spirits. The music at times reminds me of Woody Allen, for sure; the Italian dialogue is beautiful to listen to, even while keeping up with the subtitles.

To me, the coolest thing in the movie is the furiously fluttering artificial fire that surrounds Juliet as she is being (pretend) burned to death in her childhood school play rendition of a Catholic martyr, a striking image that visits her from time to time. I want me some of that fake fire for my apartment!

Ciao for now, darlings. . . . .

Movies in the Making?

First, with a series of decent "period" films in production or already circulating, I hope that even more will be made over the next few years. I'd love to see a first rate movie about Anne Sexton. Such a lovely and compelling (and dark and disturbing) poet should translate well on the big screen. Or hell, even on the little screen -- maybe HBO will run with the idea. They could do her justice, certainly. There's surprisingly little footage of her available right now, despite the existence of two versions of a documentary about her made in the early 1970s. It's an aesthetic crime waiting to be redressed. Is that too much to ask? She deserves at least as much consideration as Sylvia Plath, for God's sake.

The good news is the Diane Arbus movie Fur that's now in post-production, starring Nicole Kidman and Robert Downey, Jr.
Check out NK's website for more details, and for some of Arbus' eerie photography: http://nicolekidmanunited.com/NicoleKidmanFilmography/Fur/

More mysterious is the Janis Joplin project. At one time there were three of them! The only version that seems to have a real chance of completion is the one taken up by Penelope Spheeris with the working title "The Gospel According to Janis."

Eventually, I hope there's an "on demand" service that lets people order from a massive global movie library -- forget the mail order services and let us click a button and see whatever we want for $1.00! The database should have digitized copies of every movie ever made. Why the hell not?

Meanwhile, I'm glad that Gold Diggers of 1933 is finally being released on DVD (as I mentioned yesterday). Now, can someome please release more of the massive backlog? How about starting with Wise Blood and the Guyana Tragedy: the Story of Jim Jones? Both were filmed in 1979 and released in 1980 and all that's been available of them are occasional VHS versions. Brad Douriff (now in HBO's Deadwood as the Doc) and Ned Beatty are in both of them and they have the same creepy wacky feel. Given that Powers Boothe is also in Deadwood (as Tolliver), bring him back on DVD as Jim Jones before I get "a touch of the jungle fever" . . . . .