Silverlake Blvd.

Relevance (Ex. 3. The Normal Heart on HBO)

 

 

HBO’s version of Larry Kramer’s Normal Heart begins with Ned arriving by ferry at Fire Island, depicted as a lovely arcadia of happy, beautiful, available men. Within a half-hour, the scene switches to another journey: Ned’s host Albert arriving by airplane at Phoenix. After raving with dementia during the flight and puking in his seat, we see his dead body being carried off the plane. The Phoenix medical authorities refuse to deal a victim of AIDS, so his lover and mother have to arrange a back-door cremation. Heaven and hell: welcome to the 1980s.

 

Heart is a depiction of those first years of bewilderment and horror. From everywhere suddenly came stories of deaths, and stories of sick people and their friends and families encountering brutality. The stories were so grotesque they didn’t seem possible in 20^th century America.

 

And so the horror was followed by exasperation and outrage at the fact that the wider (straight) world, the authorities, responded with excuses and indifference. Many of us discovered that we were no longer living in the 20^th century but in the Middle Ages, and not in America but in some broken-down Third World outpost that didn’t even have the gumption to acknowledge it had a problem.

 

It was a discovery of how politically disenfranchised the community was. Visibility had not translated into political clout. We had isolated ourselves, pretended we were autonomous. As a result, no one with any power gave a shit; nobody needed to. Kramer takes special pains to finger the closeted gay men in positions of authority (journalists, civil servants, politicians) who went out of their way to obstruct action to protect their careers.

 

In a way, it’s an extension of Kramer’s critique of gay culture in Faggots (as far as I remember it): a culture that was out and proud but so self-absorbed it was incapable of caring or communicating.

 

The emergence of a gay community support network in response to the crisis changed that forever. But Normal Heart isn’t satisfied with that. Kramer in 1985 already found the focus on palliative services misguided. The trajectory of the drama is such that it could have been titled, Why ACT-UP Happened.

 

All of which makes clear that The Normal Heart is not merely a personal view, but a self-portrait. This is not an ego trip, but where the art comes in--the art that makes the history bearable. If Kramer is unsparing of gay men more concerned about being sex-positive than dealing with the situation, and expresses contempt for activists who employ moderate means to achieve moderate goals, he doesn’t spare himself. The Ned Weeks character radiates a love of confrontation so passionate that you wonder what the fight is really about. This sense of perpetual emergency eventually became itself a problem for AIDS activism, but circa 1987 it was just what the doctor ordered.

 

If Kramer doesn’t spare himself, being played by Mark Ruffalo is quite a consolation. Julia Roberts seems determined to make up for all those years playing glamorous gals and remind us what a compelling performer she is. Her office assistant was played by B.D. Wong, who coincidentally also appeared HBO’s 1993 AIDS docu-drama And the Band Played On.

 

Of course it was a period drama. HBO did it well, without overdoing the period looks. Some sublime Roxy Music and Tom Tom Club on the soundtrack was sufficient to place me, at least, in 1981.

 

But on the other hand, it also seemed to be an up-to-date reminder of how AIDS remains a stigma more than a disease. And how, after decades of activism and breakthroughs and treatments, the silence (which still equals death) still obscures it from view. 

Relevance (Ex. 2. Anthony Trollope’s Three Clerks)

 

At first Three Clerks (1857) seemed like a curio—a  schematic romantic comedy about three government employees and three unmarried sisters—with faint, quaint high-British-Empire period charm.

 

That, however, is a deception. The romance quickly transforms into a scathing farce about the entanglement of Wall Street and Washington, and the rhetoric of meritocracy versus the realities of oligarchy. It’s what Tom Wolfe tried to do in Bonfire of the Vanities, and what John Lanchester partially succeeded in doing with Capital. Within the realm of Trollope it’s could be considered a first draft of The Way We Live Now.

 

Among its achievements is dramatizing the transformation of the Civil Service from a wonkish gentlemen’s club into a mechanized Imperial bureaucracy. Trollope sees that it’s inevitable, but doesn’t like it, and gives Mrs. Woodward the best assessment:

 

I suppose we shall all be very clever before long, … but really I don't know that we shall be any the better for it.

 

And she concludes with a remark that is as close to blasphemy as any statement could be circa 2014: 

 

How infinitely greater are truth and honesty than any talent, however brilliant!

  

For AT it’s a question of what kind of men and women you want to cultivate. The old system produced extravagantly unproductive time-servers (the Infernal Navigation crew, the Weights and Measures veterans), but also drudges (Mr. Nevermind) who were nevertheless diligent, honest and, in their way, gentlemen. But the new natural selection bureaucratic regime favors and promotes unprincipled self-promoters like Alaric, for whom meritocracy becomes a screen for insider trading and public-/private-sector conflicts of interest.

 

And so we end with a demoralization of politics and politicians which sounds very modern:

 

Every great man, who gains a great end by dishonest means, does more to deteriorate his country and lower the standard of his countrymen than legions of vulgar thieves, or nameless unaspiring rogues.

 

[Image: Gillian Wearing, Signs that say what you want to say (1993)]

Relevance (Ex. 1. Orhan Pamuk’s Snow)

 

What makes a book relevant? The wrong answer is, “It’s concerned with my life, my relationships, my home, my stuff.” The more stories touch on my world, the less likely they are to be emotionally touching. Rather than getting involved in the characters and the action, I tend to get distracted by nit-picking, as nuances of language, behavior, dress ring false. But when I’m reading about a completely alien world, none of this intrudes. More than anything else it is my ignorance of Belle Epoque Paris, Cold War Berlin, 19^th century Baden-Baden, and 12^th century Japan that enables me to enjoy Proust, Le Carré, Turgenev and Sei Shonogan. That is, to enjoy the drama, and the artistry of the composition.

 

Which makes possible something like genuine relevance: discovering in that representation of an utterly alien world some shattering analogy. This happened just now with Orhan Pamuk’s Snow. At first I thought I was enjoying a well-written tour of provincial Turkish scenes, with poetic accounts of the battles between their secularists and fundamentalists, liberals and conservatives, idealists and opportunists. It was all about headscarves and Islam and very exotic and fascinating. But by the end I realized it had also been about Hobby Lobby, and all the political battles going on now, here and everywhere. But unlike the news, Pamuk also makes room for significance:

 

A long procession of images paraded before his eyes as he awaited his next poem—a waking dream of ugly unadorned concrete buildings, parking lots buried in snow, teahouses and barbershops and grocery stores all hidden behind their icy windows, courtyards in which dogs had been barking in unison since the days of the Russians, stores selling spare parts for tractors alongside horse-drawn carriage supplies and cheese. He was seized by the certainty that everything he saw—the banners for the Motherland Party, the little window hidden behind those tightly drawn curtains, the slip of paper someone had taped to the icy window of the Knowledge Pharmacy months earlier to announced that the shot for Japanese influenza had finally arrived, the yellow antisuicide poster—every last one of these little details would stay with him for the rest of his life.

 

[Image: Samuel Palmer, Shepherd and his flock under the moon and stars (circa 1827)]

Pat Rocco’s (80th) Birthday Party @ Outfest

 

Pat Rocco still walks the earth and he’s still out of control. Yesterday afternoon he thanked us all for our interest, thanked the UCLA Archive and Outfest for their work in preserving his movies, announced a new DVD compilation available for purchase, noted that the afternoon’s selections were NOT his choices, described how he was the first to transform a Pride Parade into a festival, urged us to see the complete version of The End because they were only screening a fragment (he's right), told how the filming of Disneyland Discovery got him banned from The Happiest Place On Earth for life, and concluded with a rendition of “You’d be so nice to come home to.”

 

PR is a force to be reckoned with, obviously. But when you sit down and analyze and estimate his scope and force, what result do you get?

 

The historical significance is undisputed. June 1968, at the Park Cinema near MacArthur Park, PR started publicly exhibiting movies that hitherto were disseminated to individuals through the mail. As Thomas Waugh observed, “at the time, Rocco’s short and sentimental danglie programs were so sensational that the premieres were covered by Variety ….”

 

Moreover, circa 1970 Rocco organized a SPREE, a Godardian Groupe Dziga Vertov-type gay film-making cooperative/production company. They didn’t bring down Hollywood, but they made interesting movies (the UCLA Archive has The Prisoner, from 1970, which is astonishing).

 

But what’s the aesthetic significance? Do his movies have any value now?

 

Yes, most definitely. I think they stand on their own merits—though I recognize that not everybody would agree. They stand outside of contemporary tastes and sensibilities. Completely lacking any kind of artiness or intellectualizing, they are goofy, sentimental, and—frankly—they don’t even qualify as porn anymore (no erections, no intercourse).

 

His work is from the early “Gay Is Good” era, presenting positive images at a time when simply depicting romantic affection between men without horror, outrage, mockery or patronizing sympathy was an incendiary act of revolution.

 

Beyond that, there is absolutely nothing edgy about PR’s sensibility. Today’s sophisticated tastes probably find PR too soft, too light, and—in a word—faggy, preferring darker, transgressive work like Rocco’s contemporary Fred Halstead. Halstead's elegiac L.A. Plays Itself seems more cinematic than goofball stunts like How to shoot a nude on the freeway (1969).

 

Even when Rocco handles hot subject matter like sex change (Changes) or an early demonstration against discrimination (Sign of Protest, 1970), or family resistance to coming out (Silent No More, 1977), he minimizes conflict, and emphasizes strength, solidarity, and love triumphing over all.  

 

Characteristically, Rocco’s romantic tragedy The End (1969) stresses romance over tragedy. The clip of UCLA's new restoration they screened looked glorious: an especially trippy presentation of boys (at The Patch) dancing to a psychedelic rock band (it was prior to the invention of disco! Imagine!)

 

 

Well, I consider Rocco's optimism not an embarrassment but a rebuke to our own stupidity, complacency and naughtiness. It’s something we should reclaim.

 

I can’t imagine a more delicious utopian gesture than Boy on the Run (1968). It has the breakneck pace of a classic silent comedy short (which it is):

1. Young man escapes from prison.
2. Young man pauses to catch his breath in the woods.
3. Young man undresses.
4. Young man discovers underneath some foliage … a pogo-stick.
5. Young man bounces happily up and down.
6. Young man dresses ... and returns to prison.

 

This might have been presented in a spirit that was merely pervy and creepy, but instead it’s an expression of a very ardent and hopeful revolutionary spirit. The territory has been claimed, and on Rocco’s pogo-stick we are invited to share in the victory dance.

 

 

 

 

Big props to Outfest, the UCLA Archive, Todd Wiener, Alice Royer, and everybody who worked on this!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Prokofiev & Shostakovich @ Hollywood Bowl

 

 

I confess that I still think of Prokofiev and Shostakovich as The Other Russians, i.e. other than Stravinsky. Yuja Wang, however, performed each composer’s first piano concerto Thursday night, so masterfully and persuasively that I will have to reconsider their status.

 

Prokofiev’s 1^st is an extraordinary explosion from 1911, which probably nobody but Wang can play. Shostakovich’s first concerto, following more than twenty years later, is less flashy but more compelling, with its touching dialog between piano and trumpet. The jazzy get-down episodes are no less fun, but emerge with less ostentation. Similarly, first symphonies by each composer that began and ended the evening, demonstrated Prokofiev’s theatrical fun (irresistible) and Shostakovich’s drifts into darkness. 

 

Looking forward, it’s easy to imagine a future in which 20^th century music will mean—in the concert hall if not in the music history seminar—these two composers. Reactionary Soviet cultural policy (articulated by Andrei Zhdanov) was the bane of all Soviet artists. Prokofiev, his wife, and Shostakovich were martyrs to it. But the result is a body of well-crafted, entertaining music. Adorno dismissed Shostakovich as the Stalinist equivalent of Tin Pan Alley. Perhaps this is just, and perhaps it is not a lethal insult. 

Linda Hart @ AIA/LA

 

Hart’s prints are first and foremost graphic design. The forms are painstakingly refined distillations. The colors are flat and bright but not loud; her palette doesn’t shout, but radiates subtle warmth. The play of forms and colors within and between each work enlivened the AIA/LA rooms with showers of confetti.

 

And yet these are not pure abstractions. For the purpose of graphic delight they mischievously appropriate the—literally—foundational convention of architectural representation. For anyone so inclined, LH offers an opportunity to return to the architectural history classroom, and engage in slide identification: "What building is this the plan of?" But this, I think, is optional and not essential. The source material is merely the starting point. She simplifies, suppresses, emphasizes, and transforms the spatial into the graphic.

 

Buildings appear in visual art as frames, scenery, markers of location, or evocations of mood. LH is closer to painters like Monet, Robert Delaunay and Ellsworth Kelly, who used buildings as a pretext for creating new colors and shapes. Unlike them, she doesn’t start from appearances, but the conventional language of architectural representation. It’s the tension between the ironic representation and the sensual abstraction that gives her work its distinctive, teasing zing.

 

[Image: Sendai Mediatheque (Linda Hart, 2014)]

New Order @ The Greek Theater

 

 

 

Sunday was a perfect evening for the Greek: warm--not hot--with the super-moon illuminating the clouds.

 

I disclaim any attempt to compare this performance with the last New Order concert I attended, at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium in 1985. I remember that I was there, and had fun. And I recall it was not especially well-attended, possibly because tickets were an exorbitant $13.50.

 

But after watching the group on stage for a bit, I think I remember being impressed 29 years ago by a similar nonchalant stage attitude. They decline to conform to the traditional rock musician roles, and neither pander nor patronize. There was no pretense of intimacy. Now as then the polite impersonality was a breath of fresh air.

 

This reticence took the form of delicate self-mockery at the start. They began the show with a redoubtable performance of their most recent (13-year-old) monster dance hit, “Crystal,” while screening behind them Johan Renck’s video of young generic “rockers” lip-synching the lyrics.

 

They went on to demonstrate the triumph of Age over Youth with honorable performances of “Your Silent Face,” and “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and concluded with a crescendo of “True Faith” (with bits of Philippe Decouflé’s zany, wonderfully unfashionable original video), and “The Perfect Kiss” (perhaps their most characteristic work). Then the inevitable “Blue Monday” made the hills of Griffith Park tremble, but the final Temptation” actually generated an even greater, more rapturous response. Perhaps this is their real anthem? The final encore of “Love Will Tear Us Apart” resounded grandly. Skeptics should be reminded that the lyrics specify that it will tear us apart “again.”

 

So yes, it was terrific. However even the most enthusiastic fan would have to admit that Bernard Sumner’s voice wasn’t always up to the challenge. But his instrument has always been frail, and I respect his refusal to learn how to sing. Besides, their music doesn’t call for vocal gymnastics: it’s about quiet, deadpan recitation in contrast with bombastic synthesizer drones.

 

And one other thing. The impersonal approach I mentioned was qualified by repeated and extensive mentions of and representations of Ian Curtis. I suppose it’s commercially impossible for New Order not to include gestures of respect towards his cult, but this moony mythologizing has been going on since he killed himself, and I am weary of it. I doubt I’m not alone on this. I can’t stop fantasizing about the scorn Curtis would have rained down on it all. A much more appropriate tribute was their cover of “Isolation,” transforming Curtis’s cry of the damned into a snappy, Flock of Seagulls dance tune. It was wicked fun.

 

The visuals were beyond praise. The light show and videos had more substance than most of the movies and television I’ve seen in the last few years. (If anyone knows any details about who was responsible, please let me know!)

 

Intricately choreographed javelins of light danced about and sometimes threated the audience. There was even an actual, physical mirrored ball, used to sublime effect. The lights were coordinated with a backstage digital screen that presented videos. These were so varied, so different from each other, that I got the impression that each was the work of a different artist.

 

Some were animations: cool permutations of logos and abstract forms with vaguely ominous corporate or biotech resonances.

 

So many of the videos were so Los Angeles-specific (“Elegia” was accompanied by grainy footage of the Sunset Pacific motel, a few blocks down the street) that I wonder if they didn’t commission site-specific clips for each venue. There were also recycled bits of music videos, and some heart-stopping images from Amos Poe’s Empire II.

 

We joked that we would be the youngest people in the audience. But actually we were the oldest in our section. “It’s as much their music as our music,” we realized. Which is a phenomena begging for an explanation. Maybe, it turns out that the musical generation gap of the last half of the 20^th century was an anomaly that has come to an end. Before very recently, thirty years constituted an unbridgeable barrier in pop music taste.

 

Take New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies for example. Thirty years before it came out, the pop hit was Peggy Lee’s Black Coffee. Granted, it’s possible to like both, but the two are completely different musical idioms. However, now, thirty years after New Order’s album, a hit like Justin Timberlake’s 20/20 Experience, is so similar it borders on pastiche. The gap has effectively vanished.

 

Or consider Sunday’s opening act, La Roux. Their “Bulletproof” and especially their rousing rave-up finale “Silent Partner” demonstrate that ABC’s Lexicon of Love and the Eurythmics Sweet Dreams have not been ignored by clever musicians born several years after they were released.

 

But all this may less about cultural changes and more about New Order’s music. It isn’t about disillusionment or darkness, but rather a bitter, angry kind of joy: the joy of seeing through lies but not being crushed. The joy of facing the worst down, defiantly, without whining, dancing and waving your arms in the air.

Jul 13, 2014

Mark Ford & Mary Ruefle

 

This summer I’m trying to get out of my rut of reading the same dead authors over and over. I’ve been following up on living writers I’ve read about and sounded interesting. Some aren’t, but some really are.

 

In Soft Sift, Mark Ford doesn’t insert an image of himself. And among the other abstentions, there are no narratives, arguments, or anecdotes. At first I found this impersonality annoying. The direct, intimate voice is the thing that makes poetry significant ... or is it? And then I watched people marching down the street shouting into their phones “I … MY … I … MY …”. Maybe a bit of impersonality is exactly what we all need right now. Even especially within the realm of poetry, where selfies have always been the norm. And it enables him to make antiquity completely of-the-present ...

 

The Long Man

 

of Wilmington winces with the dawn; he has just

endured yet another mythical, pointless, starry

vigil. His ankles ache, and the weather looks

irksome and moody; the early traffic whizzes by

regardless, but the news and emblems borne

by each care permeate the soil that sustains

the straggling furze, various grasses, and the odd

towering oak. Across the damp fields a distant

siren pleads for attention; he cannot

move, nor, like a martyr, disprove the lie of the land.

 

Mary Ruefle, in Trances of the Blast seems more conventional—the conventional idea of the writer as somebody who notices things—missed by most—and crafts poems to remedy our blindness. But she uses plainspokenness slyly. She’s at her best when she’s sassy and ironic. Her “Middle School” captures my story. It begins …

 

I went to Cesare Pavese Middle School.

The gymnasium was a chapel dedicated to loneliness

and no one played games.

 

And ends …

 

It was an honor to have gone,

though a tad strict in retrospect.

You have probably heard that we all became janitors,

sitting in basements next to boilers

reading cheap paperback books of Italian poetry,

and never sweep a thing.

Yet the world runs fine.

 

 

John Altoon @ LACMA

 

When I arrived in L.A. decades ago I discovered that all the local museums had on display one painting each by two artists I had never heard of, the two Johns: John McLaughlin and John Altoon. Who were these guys? They were both so good! Where could you see more?

 

Eventually, the mid-century modernism fad lifted McLaughlin back into visibility, but Altoon has remained out of sight. His work is too eccentric to fit in any of the accepted histories. Finally, LACMA has gotten around to a retrospective. It’s a serious pleasure. It makes me eager to see even more.

 

He seems to have found his distinctive vision around 1961—scribbles that are at once abstract and biomorphic and cartoonish. The off-hand elegance is like Cy Twombly, but Altoon has nothing to do with Twombly’s High Culture allusions. He’s intimate, amused, and sassy. Altoon’s Ocean Park paintings from 1962 (image above) likewise evoke a Southern California utopia that can only be described as funky. Diebenkorn’s august series with the same title can, in contrast, only be described as up-tight.

 

Having invented this rich vein, Altoon went on the next couple of years to explore something completely different: big, insolent re-drawings of advertisements and smutty cartoons, creating a mix of irony, vulgarity and elegance Richard Prince would make a career of two decades later.

 

 

And the year before he died, Lube (1968) ...

 

 

He didn’t get a chance to become a grand old veteran of the scene. There’s just a decade of work that’s puzzling, tantalizing, funny and moving.