Silverlake Blvd.

Thrift shop Cavafy

Early yesterday afternoon:

 

“What are you working on.”

“I’m writing on Cavafy.”

“Cavafy?”

“Yes.”

“The poet?”

“Yes.”

“Come with me! Now!”

 

And I followed him to Goodwill, where he showed me this poster he had noticed earlier last week.

Chance? “Or perhaps it was that Fate / was something of an artist …”

Brüno @ the Vista

Because of the heat, yesterday afternoon the Vista was packed. As we bought our tickets, there was a woman standing beside the line shouting, “Save your money! This movie is nothing but pornography! It shows men’s private parts! I brought my daughter and had no idea what filth it was.” She sounded earnest, but I wondered if it wasn’t a prank—the kind of prank that the whole movie allegedly is composed of.

Brüno is an event-movie, not a story-movie or an art-movie. The point of it is to tell a story or to evoke a mood, but to provide a roller-coaster to ride together with friends. It is an effective roller-coaster, and after it was over we stumbled out stunned and drained.

It is very funny—there are moments of delirium—but it is essentially a horror movie. 

I know it was a horror movie because I sat through a good deal of it with my eyes shut. The horror comes from the image of America that is presented. E.g. the episode where Brüno quizzes parents who are trying to get their infants hired as models about whether or not it would be OK to expose their kid to wasps and bees, outdated heavy machinery, dead animals, burning phosphorus, crucifixions, …. And would they mind having their children dressed in a Nazi uniform, posing with a wheelbarrow in which another child will be posing as a dead Jew? Of course none of them mind.

It is very loud and blunt but it is not crude. Mr. Cohen has a good comedian’s ear for subtly weird details. Everyone will have their own example, but I continue to be disturbed by the way Brüno, in his fake-German, repeatedly referred to his anus as “mein Auschwitz.” I leave it to somebody else to unpack the scatological blasphemy, with all the implied references to Swift, Freud, Adorno, Norman O. Brown, Leo Bersani and company.

Is the movie made entirely of documentation of pranks? I doubt it, but it doesn’t matter. Whether actors or authentic specimens, the monsters Brüno parades are all too true. 

Buika @ California Plaza

The Buika who performed Saturday night at California Plaza, was different from the Buika on Niña de fuego. Instead of an ensemble, she was accompanied by a single pianist. At first I was disappointed, but quickly realized that this cabaret format provided a better opportunity to appreciate her voice. On Niña she is silky and dramatic, but at California Plaza she led us on a journey, from high-spirited hilarity to despair, from ferocious anger to the most pathetic resignation. Her voice registered sweetness and then harshness, the most overwhelming power and then complete collapse. 

They have a good selection playing at Buikafans.

From defender of the disempowered to garbage-scarfing gangster

I grew up with Smokey the Bear and his incessant message that forest fires were the worst catastrophe you could imagine. I failed to learn so many lessons, but that one really sunk in. 

Now the National Park Service at the Yosemite Valley Visitor Center boasts about its program of controlled fires. 

And, from the minute you enter Yosemite you are warned that bears will break into your car to steal an empty Cheetos bag. 

Yosemite last weekend

A wall of Lucien Freud drawings that was in R.J. Kitaj's house in Westwood

Yes, that's a drawing of Francis Bacon doing a not very butch hands-on-hips pose. It's from a terrific catalog I found at the PCC:

Who could resist Ezra Pound lurking on the floor like that? Or this 1983 portrait of Catherine Lampert by Frank Auerbach:

St Ives by Ben Nicholson in 1931, 1940, 1946, 1949 & 1967

 

La Traviata on ice @ Dorothy Chandler

Last night the curtain went up to reveal a town house that looked more of less 19^th century, inhabited by people dressed in more or less 19^th century Parisian costume. Thank goodness L.A. Opera ditched the flapper era sets from the 2006 production. Violetta’s home is now 100% free of white limousines and snowstorms. But even so, the evening fell flat. Elizabeth Futral (Violetta), Alexey Dolgov (Alfredo) and Stephen Powell (Alfredo’s dad) were musically adept, but dramatically inert. The first half of the evening they seemed to have no idea what to do with themselves, and paced the stage--out of nerves or boredom or both. Things improved in the second half, when the characters spend their time being stunned or dying and hence stand still. Then it was possible to detect that something serious was transpiring. Didn’t anybody tell them this is a spectacle of crazy love?

Tiananmen's 20th

 

On April 26, 1989, The People's Daily commented on the protest:

Flaunting the banner of democracy, they undermined democracy and the legal system. Their purpose was to sow dissension among the people, plunge the whole country into chaos and sabotage the political situation of stability and unity. This is a planned conspiracy and a disturbance. Its essence is to, once and for all, negate the leadership of the CPC and the socialist system. This is a serious political struggle confronting the whole party and the people of all nationalities throughout the country.

If we are tolerant of or conniving with this disturbance and let it go unchecked, a seriously chaotic state will appear. Then, the reform and opening up; the improvement of the economic environment and the rectification of the economic order, construction, and development; the control over prices; the improvement of our living standards; the drive to oppose corruption; and the development of democracy and the legal system expected by the people throughout the country, including the young students, will all become empty hopes. Even the tremendous achievements scored in the reform during the past decade may be completely lost, and the great aspiration of the revitalization of China cherished by the whole nation will be hard to realize. A China with very good prospects and a very bright future will become a chaotic and unstable China without any future.

Today The People's Daily reported:

On June 2, GM announced that it had reached a memorandum of understanding with Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery Co. Tengzhong Corp. will acquire the GM's Hummer brand and its management and operation teams.

"Things are always going wrong: new restorations of Los Angeles experimental films" @ the Billy Wilder Theater

Last night an evening of 11 short films from the Academy Film Archive, hosted by Marc Toscano. 

Gary Beydler’s 1974 Pasadena Freeway Stills was beautiful, funny and clever. It made a completely banal view of driving through the tunnels on the Pasadena Freeway to the turnoff to the 5 into a magic trick—a demonstration of the magic trick of still images moving. Like a lot of the films in the program, it was a mediation on the constituent elements of the movies, but was also—35 years later—a document of an earlier Los Angeles.

 

Likewise the other really compelling film, Beydler’s 1976 Venice Pier. At first I didn’t care for it. I thought, “Zoom shots are to independent cinema what explosions are to commercial cinema. Enough is enough.” But this zoom was composed of footage shot over a year, in the different seasons (there are such) and at different times of day. Gradually I became absorbed by the diverse moods of his unprepossessing subject. It became a demonstration of the different faces a place can present under different conditions. The sky and sea at dawn, morning, noon, afternoon, sunset, night. The crowds of strollers and people fishing during summer days, the emptiness of the place during winter mornings and evenings, and all the incremental changes in-between. I lived in Venice when it was closed. I remember watching huge waves engulf the structure while eating breakfast at the Crab Shell at the end of Washington, and wondering how long the city was going to let people use it. It was always seemed derelict, but the fishermen enjoyed it. Little did I know it had already been immortalized in film.

Pat O’Neill & Robert Abel’s 1963 By The Sea also contained images of Old Venice Beach—particularly of people messing around on the Muscle Beach exercise equipment, and the Santa Monica pier merry-go-round (before renovation). We saw things in normal grey-scale and also in super-contrast black and white. Burned into my memory is the silhouette of a girl spinning in a white void.

 

Roberta Friedman and Grahame Weinbren’s Murray and Max Talk about Money(1979) was a dialectical materialist-structuralist period piece consisting of audio of two men pontificating about money cut up into absurd snippets accompanying images of David Wilson’s rear end as he endlessly painted and re-painted a wall. It was intermittently compelling but a long 15 minutes.

 

Fred Worden and Chris Langdon’s 1973 Venusville also juxtaposed audio and image: mostly static images of palm trees and audio of two guys enthusiastically discussing what must have been some other movie, which achieved moments of hilarity.

 

But the mean-spirited humor prize of the evening went to Langdon’s 1973 Picasso, which in 3 minutes disposes of its subject with a malicious glee that a few years later would be known as punk. “This is the actual voice of Picasso” a title card said, referring to a snippet of a demented old codger’s pointless anecdote which looped and looped on the soundtrack.

 

The evening ended with a 5 minute psychedelic extravaganza from 1968 that O’Neill, Neon Park and Chick Strand made for Sears—of all incredible things—to promote the skirts, blouses and jackets of their Junior Bazaar, complete with pink giraffes, boogaloo-ing girls trailing multiple afterimages and animated hamburgers marching in formation. Art or artifact, it was a gas.