Silverlake Blvd.

November – December ’23 update

 

November 2023. Suddenly without any novel to read, I started H.D.’s “HERmione” – Wow! It’s really eye-opening. H.D.’s poetry can be so impersonal. But this positively luxuriates evoking the milieu, the concrete feelings and situations from which the poetry arouse. The tensions and pleasures of a cultured suburban Philadelphia household opened a portal to archaic Greece. Henry James and Maurice Prendergast.

Reminding me that I enjoy using those brain-muscles on a challenging text. It is certainly delightful. But it’s something I can enjoy only by the teaspoon, not big gulps.

…“You’re so intense, so oddly intense, dear. You’re like George so intense about things. We live in an odd bustle, a crowded gaping universe,” she spoke as if she had read it; little distinguished waxwork making a little speech, a little speech made up for it by someone else but taking on distinguished quality when the wax mouth pronounced the wax words written for it.”

 

11/5/23. Re-reading “Red, White & Royal Blue” again, of course, because I can’t stop. But also getting very excited about Percival Everett’s “Erasure”. It’s rich, acute, combining drollery with white-hot fury. It’s been made into a movie? How?

… “Thelonious Ellison: Author of five books. Widely unread experimental stories and novels. Considered dense and often inaccessible. Best known for his novel The Second Failure. A lonely man, seemingly having shed all his friends. Visits his mother daily though she cannot remember who he is. Cannot talk to his brother because he is a nut. Cannot speak to his sister because she is dead. Too mystified to actually be depressed. Likes to fish and work with wood. Looking for single woman interested in same. Lives in nation’s capital.”

 

11/10/23. West Adams. Marisa & Sean’s pre-wedding dinner. When the discussion turned to what people were planning to wear tomorrow, Sean’s younger brother mentioned that he was thinking of dressing as Moses. His timing and delivery were perfect – all conversation came to an abrupt halt. I asked his sister, “Is he serious?” and she replied, “I have no idea.” (He did.)

 

11/18/23. Yesterday I went to the first meeting of the SCI-Arc “Pride affinity group”. Within a half hour a student proposed as a goal having a SCI-Arc float in the next L.A. Pride Parade. Everyone shouted, “Yes!”

I was relieved to hear that students had positive experiences of the school in terms of their queer identities. They felt safe and supported. The problem was that for many their home countries were not, creating a division in their lives.

 

11/21/23. Isherwood, “Christopher and his kind”. I’ve read it several times, but now, having read “Lions & shadows”, I get what these revisions mean. He retells a story told in a previous book, but now with all the gay sex included, rather than edited out.

 On one hand, the incessant self-revising is a deliciously modernist practice. But on the other hand, it suggests that CI was essentially a memoirist not a novelist. Why didn’t he just make up characters and situations that didn’t raise questions of accuracy?

There’s all this hot air about autofiction and none of it I’ve read ever mentions CI, which seems incredible. But maybe younger writers and critics don’t know him.

 

12/8/23. Edna O’Brien, “The Country girls” Breathtaking. No wonder it was banned in Ireland.

And yet, isn’t this the kind of thing Everett’s “Erasure” teaches us to be wary of? The kick of wallowing in unseemliness, with the excuse of “realism” and “honesty” – which could just be another bag of unreal clichés?

EOB could be part of the Irish variant, inaugurated by Behan, and continued today by Martin McDonagh (and Shane MacGowen until last week)? Picking up Irish rocks to show the nastiness underneath.

But what’s impressive isn’t reportage but EOB’s art. No words wasted in sentiment or self-pity. Her girls are ignorant and foolhardy, but they’re resilient. Probably that was what infuriated people, more than images of rural wretchedness. And their observations of the men around them: “He had no insight into the small irritations that could drive people mad.”

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Seven Plums in a Chinese Bowl, 1923]

August – October ’23 update

 

8/3/23. . “2001” with live music at the Hollywood Bowl. One of my top Bowl experiences. What a treat to hear the Phil (under Caleb Young) and the Master Chorale perform György Ligeti! You don’t get that often.

At the intermission, JK and I went to the bathrooms and – for the first time ever – there was no line for the women and a long line for the men! 

 

8/8/23. Laguna Beach’s contribution to visual art is (1) the guys, and (2) surfboards. But The Pageant of the Masters was even weirder than I imagined.

 

9/10/23. I watched “Red, white and royal blue” … A M/M romance about public people trying to have a private life. An alternative reality in which a progressive woman was elected President in 2016, and COVID didn’t happen.

The idea of Uma Thurman as the POTUS was delicious, and she was game, with a twangy Texas accent and a doing-her-best stressed-out Mom/Chief executive demeanor. She might have been imitating Jerry Hall. The funniest zingers of the movie are given to the Chief of Staff (Sarah Shahi), when she discovers the guys together. (“If anyone sees you leave this hotel I will Brexit your head from your body. [Curtsies] Your royal highness.”)

Good music. It began with the joyous blast of Joan Jett’s “Bad reputation”, and featured Vagabon’s version of "If I Loved You".

 

10/1/23. Restored and remastered “Stop making sense” (1984) at Alamo Drafthouse. I haven’t listened to the Talking Heads in a long time, but will start now. A blast. There’s a lot of David Byrne – which is challenging – but ultimately he wins you over out of sheer manic energy. They all do. The non-seniors in the audience need to understand that this is not merely Jonathan Demme’s editing magic. When I saw them just before the performances filmed here, it was a non-stop dance party with no sitting down. I remember Tina being so pregnant that she played her bass on the side of her hip.

 

10/8/23. Just back from the double feature of Pedro Almadóvar shorts at the Alamo: the new “Strange way of life” plus “Human voice” from 2020. I can’t say I immediately loved “Strange” but paired with “Voice”, they resonated. They stick in the mind.

I don’t get Pedro Pascal’s appeal, but definitely do get Ethan Hawke’s. Manu Ríos – the (lip synch) singer – is so beautiful that people laughed out loud when he first appeared. Ditto Jason Fernández and José Condessa (young Jake & Silva). I suppose they’re part of the reason “Variety” calls it “a glorified fashion commercial” because it was produced by Saint Laurent with clothes by SL’s designer Anthony Vaccarello. If so, it’s very, very glorified. And it’s not as if PA has been immune to stylish clothes.

“Voice” swanks even harder than “Strange”, but its seriousness is not a question. Tilda Swinton ignites the screen with outrage, anger, hurt, despair.

It’s not an adaptation of Cocteau’s play “La Voix humaine“ from 1930. A film adaptation was made in 1948, “Una Voce Umana” with an unsurpassable performance by Anna Magnani, filmed with incisive tact by Roberto Rossellini. There was no need to do it again. This is more like an “imitation” in the sense of employing the situation and spirit of a venerable classic to address situations of the present day. An update, something Swinton and Almodóvar devised together, combining her history and his history, her punk youth and his punk youth, her daring to look back on her life and his daring to look back on his life, her daring to face her present situation and his daring to face his present situation.

The phone, the medium of communication, as a device for separation, disconnection.

Almadóvar’s theme remains the pain of hopeless love. But these shorts are in a new mode: sparer, more evocative, less explicit. Both shorts would have been prologues to one of his older epics. We would have learned all about Silva’s and Tilda’s parents, neighbors, work colleagues, their childhoods. The hell with all that.

 

10/15/23. CicLAvia. Down to 6^th Street, and over the new (to us) 6^th Street Bridge. Fumbling, inept. But I didn’t fall down, or crash into anyone else. And instead of feeling wrecked afterwards I was glowing.

I Instagrammed my first images since April 4. Why? Seemed stupid e-mailing images to people individually. Am I OK, then, with social media again?

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Eggplants and Pears, 1925]

April – July ’23 update

 

4/24/23. Chicago. I bought a marked-down Karl Lagerfeld sweater at Bloomingdale’s. While the clerk was ringing it up, he asked, “So what are you guys doing during your visit?” JK: “We’re going to Rockford.” The clerk gulped and looked down to the cash register.

 

4/27/23. Art Institute of Chicago. We had just stepped into the Impressionist galleries when I got a text to proceed immediately to the Dalí exhibit. We had 10 minutes. We ran through room after room of incredible masterpieces from Caillebotte through Cezanne, muttering, “Don’t look at anything!”

 

4/30/23. Rockford. In Frank Lloyd Wright’s Laurent house, we look out the arc of windows at a family of turkeys crossing the lawn.

 

5/14/23. Fleur Jaeggy, “Sweet days of discipline”, “Many of the girls possess diaries. With little brass studs. With keys. They think they possess their lives.”

 

6/6/23. I have been binge-reading gay male romance novels since the middle of May. I started the year intending to “do” the Romantics, but other than the Bs (Blake, Burns, Byron, & the Brontës) they are unbearable. Not wanting to waste another minute with Shelley’s toxic fumes, I cast around for something else to read in that tradition and  realized there was a living tradition of Romanticism that I had no direct experience of – Romance fiction. And, while I’m at it, why not explore gay romantic fiction?

After almost 50 years of unwavering devotion to capital-L Literature, I’m discovering a genre of pop fiction that appeals to me. And within that genre, I am – no surprise - attracted to stories in the “Pride and Prejudice” side of the spectrum rather than “Wuthering Heights” end: comedies not tragedies. Rom Com screwball comedies with happy endings. E.g. Lauren Blakely, “A guy walks into my bar”, Sarina Bowen, “The Best men” and Casey McQuiston, “Red, white, and royal blue”

… What does it mean that most of the books in this genre seem to be written by women?

 

7/16/23. Wes Anderson’s latest, “Asteroid City” I can’t wait to see it again. Jason Schwartzman giving Edward Norton a spoonful of ice cream was the most erotic thing I’ve seen in a Hollywood movie in eons.

 

7/23/23. I read Andrew Holleran's "Kingdom of sand" and then everything else he's written. I didn't know “In September, the light changes” (2000) and wish I had.

All the stories are lightly fictionalized memoirs or personal essays. He doesn’t even bother to invent new details, but reprises the characters, situations, jokes already familiar from his novels. He’s deeply uninterested in making anything up. Often there’s only a hint of a story, and the only momentum is the acuity of his perception. A dangerous method, but he can pull it off. It can be searing, acute, breathtaking, hilarious.

AH has been conscientiously trying to get y life in the U.S. since Stonewall down on paper for 45 years. Is it too much, or not enough? Proust, for one, was primarily concerned with time, memory, love and art; it was only by the by that he produced the essential study of the Belle Epoch hurling into the Great War. All of Holleran’s books have the same tone. His bleakness is so absolute it risks become a lapse of taste. He’s incapable of presenting bliss - or even equanimity - without slathering momento mori all over it.

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Eggplant, 1923]

November ’22 – March ’23 update

 

11/3/22. My 200 words for “The Architect’s Newspaper” …

“The Mike Davis I have been remembering is the fan of Lady from Shanghai and Starship Trooper. The collector of valueless currency issued by defunct revolutionary regimes. The acute – if hard of hearing – listener (“Are you talking about pornography or geology?”)

The lifeguard whose book projects needing my urgent assistance were really about the urgent assistance I needed to survive the AIDS catastrophe of the ‘90s. They were also a pretext for unforgettable lunches and dinners. E.g. the meal with Mike and Alessandra where his conversation consisted entirely of news stories about human parasites.

At the height of his celebrity over City of Quartz Mike decided what I needed was a boyfriend and he would fix me up. I got taken to a lot of parties where I met a lot of interesting and totally inappropriate people (straight, leaving town). I reminded him of it this summer and we laughed. Laughing about that era is an accomplishment.

When I complimented him on how he and Jon Wiener crammed Set the Night on Fire with A+ anecdotes (the connection between Barefoot in the Park with Wattstax), he responded, “You should see all the stuff we had to leave out.” Indeed.”

 

12/10/22. San Francisco. Dude in the bathroom at the St. Francis: “My Christmas gift this year from my parents is they’re paying my SantaCon tab.”

 

12/16/22. Out of desperation I turned to Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Circus”. Boring it is not. Sentences that make your eyes pop out of your head. The hyperventilating high faggotry aestheticism is like manna from heaven. I’m getting a bit sea-sick, but it’s worth it. An evening that justifies the hangover.

 

12/28/22. Chips Channon’s diaries are instructive. When I got to the 1930s (his married life, his start as an MP, etc.) I was tempted to stop reading. I missed the outrageous escapades of his circle’s 1910s and 1920s (“Dined with comtesse d’Hautpoul … it seems she takes drugs. I must find out what kind.”)

But, I persevered and eventually realized that this transition was the big story. This is what Anthony Powell was writing about. And Waugh. This diary is changing my appreciation for them. They were not as inventive as I thought. They weren’t making anything up. All their mad characters and stories were waiting for them like absurdly bizarre shells on the beach.

 

2/7/23. Derek Jarman’s “Caravaggio” I haven’t seen it in years. I remembered the cute guys. They’re there, but DJ doesn’t let you relax in pleasure for long. Astringent and constantly knocking you off balance. There are a few gorgeous images, but mostly its tacky and ugly. Good god the hideous slick daubs used to stand for his paintings! The cinematography is mostly like a bad TV production. I credit Jarman with doing this deliberately. Like Pasolini, denying audiences the bawdy fun they expect. And what’s the point? A hymn to unwashed hands? It’s not Caravaggio, but any artist’s life: their loves, their hangers-on, their patrons, their critics, …. People may be false, the work may fail, but the experiences make a life.

 

March 2023. James Hannaham, “Didn’t nobody give a shit what happened to Carlotta” is the best novel I've read in a long, long time.  … “His wordplay seemed to amuse him, like he’d stirred up the bubbles in a Jacuzzi full of haughtiness.”

 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Tiger Lilies, 1920]

August-October ’22 update

 

8/20/22, Saturday. Cento. The beet spaghetti was the best tasting and most visually beautiful pasta I had had in a long time.

 

September 2022. Preston Sturges has always been a puzzle. I read that he’s the apex of screwball, but when I watch, I feel him expend enormous cleverness on shabby Abbott & Costello situations. A sensibility that seemed, at heart, pure Norman Rockwell corn.

But I’ve been watching and re-watching “Palm Beach Story”. OK, I’ve converted. There are scenes of breathtaking elegance and wit. The hilarity and insanity builds and builds to the end. But the beginning is misleading – a bore, with everyone standing around like mannequins mouthing dialogue that is not even vaguely interesting.

But I suspect this whole prologue is something the studio forced Sturges to add after his film was shot because they thought starting with Claudette Colbert sticking a pin in Joel McCrea’s ass – the real start of the move – would confuse the dopes. In general I’m getting a sense that Sturges did wonders with scenes he cared about, but scenes he didn’t, he let slide.

 

9/17/23. “Gospel at Colonus” last night. After waiting 30+ years. Meeting expectations? Yes! Not every moment was perfect, but the it was the most alive production of a tragedy in the whole Getty series. Easily the most thorough-going re-imagining of a tragedy. The over-all best cast. The performers were electrifying and on, on, on.

It presented the emotions of Sophocles’ play: the despair, the jubilation, the cruelty, the kindness. For example, Michael Adkin’s acapella solo of “Fair Colonus” from the museum balcony, presenting a version of the “nightingale” chorus. Not a word was intelligible. But it was heat-stopping, and made the point Sophocles meant to make at that point.

The one fault was that it didn’t do a good job of conveying the story. The dialogue could have been more on topic. It tacked from Baptist sermon to undigested lumps of Loeb, rather than finding a perspicacious presentation of backstory and action.

This was the Getty’s 17^th production. It’s the reason the drama has become for me the most important part of Greek and Roman antiquity. I didn’t used to feel that way. The Getty series has kept my interest focused. And kept reminding me it’s alive.

 

October 2022. Louise Brooks. “Prix de beauté” (1930) … The concluding episode where André shoots Lucienne at the premiere of her movie is tremendous. The killer’s approach is intercut with scenes of film being looped through a projector. The image of LB dying underneath herself projected on the screen is a adumbration of “Persona”. I’m astonished that it’s not on the cover of every history of the movies. Not even the terrible song can spoil it.

 

10/22/22. Lydia Millet, “A Children’s Bible: A Novel” … “He kept a private journal in which his feelings were recorded, possibly. The possibility was widely mocked.”

 

Halloween 2022. Jury duty. When I came back from lunch I noticed a crowd of armed court officers and lots of extra people milling around Dept. 16. Long delay. Juror 15 explained that Juror 14 had been waiting – as she always does – on the bench at the end of the hallway and the man sitting next to her exposed himself and started masturbating. She ran up to some officers who were outside Dept. 15. They informed her that she needed to contact LAPD, as they only dealt with issues inside the courtrooms.

By that time of course the flasher was long gone. What the fuck? If this happened in Disney Hall or Our Lady there would be an army on hand, plus an army of people falling over Juror 14 offering her assistance. But this took place at the Mosk of Injustice. Inside the courtroom, Judge X. replied to our outrage, “If you don’t want to sit in the hallway you can always go to the juror waiting room.” Fuck you. Why don’t you maintain order in the spaces you make us spend half the day? 

[Image: Charles Demuth, Church Street El, 1920]