Diane Arbus, Adventurer

I read the Patricia Bosworth biography of Diane Arbus, originally published in 1984, only a little over a decade after her death, but reissued and, I believe, the basis for the 2006 film Fur: an Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, which stars a horribly mis-cast Nicole Kidman (!!) and which looks awful.

The biography is not perfect — somehow I felt the truth of who Arbus was, what she felt and thought, remained to some degree elusive or hidden from Bosworth and the reader — but I found it very gripping.

I had never known that Arbus was born Diane Nemerov and was the sister of famous poet (twice poet laureate, winner of Pulitzer, National Book Award, and Bollinger prizes) Howard Nemerov!  Quite the talented-sibling duo.  Howard is quoted late in the book saying that Diane once commented to him, “You know, I’m going to be remembered for being Howard Nemerov’s sisrer;” “how ironic and untrue,” he observed to Bosworth. (Although I think Nemerov’s own fame emerged more fully after the book was first published.)  They were cosseted children of privilege, of immigrant Jewish parents, in a rarefied Upper West Side Manhattan world, their father a wealthy founder of the Russek’s department store on Fifth Avenue (Diane grew up to hate shopping for clothes); attended the elite Fieldston prep school where they were both recognized as very talented.  Yet oddly, Diane and Howard’s parents gave them very little if any money as adults, and both of them had to scrape and scheme to support themselves in their early adulthood.

I was thinking about some other famous later 20th-c American poets whose fathers were very wealthy industrialists or financiers. James Merrill, son of Charles Merrill, co-founder of Merrill-Lynch; Louise Glück, daughter of the inventor of the X-Acto knife.  I went to a private high school in Boston founded by another son of Charles Merrill, and I always found it funny to think that the Merrill money alternately funded a school and a poetry career.  Economic capital –> Aesthetic/cultural capital.

Diane married Allan Arbus as a teenager and they became a successful fashion-photography duo in the 1940s and 1950s.  People comment that the two of them were often in a corner consulting about a shot, whispering conspiratorially.  There’s an amazing reproduction of an image from a 1947 feature article in Glamour on “case histories of seven married couples who are collaborating on joint careers in the arts, the sciences, and business” that shows a prim-looking Diane in a long dark dress feeding their young daughter Doon.  They both eventually became disenchanted by the fashion world– after their divorce, Allan eventually became a successful actor, starring as Maj. Sidney Freedman on M.A.S.H. (!- this actually does not come up in the biography).

One limitation of the book is that it does not reproduce a single Arbus photograph.  I know them pretty well, but if you didn’t, you’d definitely want to read the biography with one of her collections in hand.  I am going to try to get hold of the 2003 catalogue Diane Arbus Revelations because I really only know the famous images from the 1972 Aperture monograph.

Even after reading the biography, I can’t quite decide what I think about the question of the degree to which the ways her photography sensationalizes and (cruelly?) exoticizes its subjects.  One of her mentors, Marvin Israel, says:

A photograph for Diane was an event.  It could be argued that for Diane the most valuable thing wasn’t the photograph (the result), it was the experience, the event… Once she became an adventurer — because Diana really was an adventurer — she went places no one else [no photographer] had ever gone to.  [Those] places were scary… But once [she] became an adventurer [she was] geared to adventure and she sought out adventure and her life was based on that… the photograph was like her trophy– it was what she received as an award for her adventure.

It would be difficult to defend the work on purely aesthetic grounds.  She was “adventuring,” pushing herself to enter into forbidden, strange, exotic zones– that sense of symbolic boundary-crossing was fundamental to the images. And a critique can certainly be fairly made of the ways different kinds of social marginality (e.g. ethnic, economic, disability-based) get conflated into what can seem like one big category of the non-normative. On the other hand, she was no slumming tourist, dropping in to get the photo and then going back to her upper-middle-class world.  She returned again and again, obsessively, to many of her subjects.  The famous photo of the “Jewish giant” with his parents came out of over years of visiting and photographing him: “from 1962 to 1970 she kept returning to the Carmels’ cramped apartment until she finally captured the image she wanted.”  And she became a regular at the Coney Island sideshows and Hubert’s Freak Museum, far beyond what could have been needed to get the photos, and got to know many of the performers very well (“the living skeleton, the embalmed whale, the ventriloquist with his two-headed cat”) and considered some of them friends.

Later, in the 1960s after her divorce, this “adventuring” transitioned into sexual adventures, sometimes of a pretty seamy variety:

Sex was the quickest, most primitive way to begin connecting with another human being, and the raunchier and grosser the person or environment, the more intense the experience, and this enlarged her life… She… described in a particularly detached way how one night she’d had sex in the back of a Greyhound bus (“If you sit on the inside back seat of a Greyhound bus, it means you’re sexually available.” [ed. note: good to know!)  No introductions were made, not a word was spoken, and after this swift, mute encounter in the dark, she got off on the next stop and waited on the highway for an hour or so until another bus came along which would bring her back to New York. ... It was almost as if she was determined to explore with her body and her mind every nightmare, every fantasy, she might have repressed deep into her subconscious.... Crookson listened as she told him of picking up a Puerto Rican boy on Third Avenue "because he was so beautiful."... At this point Crookson interrupted to ask her if she hadn't ever faced actual danger as a result of such recklessness.  Yes, she answered, but she'd always been "thrilled" to take risks to "test" herself- and besides, nothing bad had ever happened to her and for some strange reasons she was positive it never would.... [W]hen her camera was with her she always felt in control….. It seemed as if merging with her subjects… was a way of giving herself to them after they revealed themselves to her camera.

Many comment that Arbus carried her often-bulky cameras and other equipment in front of her like a shield– even when she photographed at orgies (these images have apparently never surfaced).  I was surprised that there is not a single reference to her ever getting mugged or having her camera stolen, given all the stories about her wandering about Central Park in the middle of the night or the like.

To me probably the most haunting images are the late ones taken at the institution for mentally-disabled patients in Vineland, New Jersey:

Arbus’s Guggenheim proposal (she won it): “While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future,  its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning.”

Music Videos @ Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati

Another visit in Cincinnati was to the Contemporary Arts Center, which for a while was the only building in the U.S. designed by Pritzker-prize-winning, Rem Koolhaus-protege, Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid.

From wiki: “A winner of many international competitions, theoretically influential and groundbreaking, a number of Hadid’s winning designs were initially never built: notably, The Peak Club in Hong Kong (1983) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994).”  It’s funny to look at a (seemingly abandoned/ not up to date — only up to 1990) accounting of her early works: over and over, “Not Realized.”  Here is a good, albeit somewhat skeptical, analysis of the Cincinnati museum.  I like the building, although it is showy and I agree with the critique that “we are often forced to acknowledge the building at times when perhaps we should be admiring the work presented inside the building instead.” Although maybe that is not such a problem really.

(I just remembered an amusing bit in Bruce Wagner’s good novel Memorial — the protagonist is a semi-successful bitter architect who is always mentally fulminating about various international art and architecture stars including, obsessively, “fucking Zaha Hadid.”)

Right now the whole experience is very 21st-century and postmodern (or late 20th-century anyway) since the building is full of a show about the history of music videos.  I actually thought it held up pretty well — although most of the videos are things you could easily pull up on Youtube, they did make sense as a curated collection, and the experience of watching them on large screens with headphones in this context was often pretty engaging.  No question of course that music videos have been a major occasion for groundbreaking aesthetic experiment over the past 30 years.  A lot of Bjork… there was one whole little room based around her amazing video for “Wanderlust” featuring these somewhat Snuffleupagus-like felt yak creatures.  Also several Kanye West videos (“Can’t Tell Me Nothing” lip-synched by Zack Galifianakis and Bonnie Prince Billy in the sidekick/Flava Flav role = great; the “Runaway” video featuring an apparent Victoria’s Secret model in painted-on feathers in the Man Who Fell to Earth angel role = crap), early David Bowie, LCD Soundsystem, several Michel Gondry videos, Missy Elliot and Hype Williams’s fantastic “The Rain,” all kinds of other stuff.

There was a huge, noisy school group there (once they left, we were almost the only ones in the whole place) and the guards kept shutting off certain screens in order to protect the sensibilities of the little brats.  There was one little room specifically dedicated to “Controversial” videos which featured little peepholes you had to peer through — quite irritating actually as, ironically, you had to kneel to see them if you were over 5′ 5″ tall.  These mostly weren’t too exciting — the one I’d never seen that made an impression was the rather creepily erotic and fascinating video for a song called “Twin Flames” by the Klaxons.

Nick Cave Soundsuits @ Cincinnati Museum of Art

We made a little Spring Break visit to Cincinnati this week, and one highlight was the show of Nick Cave “soundsuits” at the Cincinnati Museum of Art.  This is not the Australian musician Nick Cave of the Bad Seeds but the African-American, Missouri-born artist.  (At first I thought, geez, if you have the same name as an iconic/famous musician, wouldn’t you use Nicholas or something professionally? But it turns out the poor guy is only two years younger than the Australian Nick Cave.)

The soundsuits are body suits made of fur and (sometimes human) hair and decorated with buttons and various other appendages, tassels, sequins, feathers, and patterns.  They’re really beautiful, often funny & joyful, sometimes a bit scary, sometimes in the form of bears or other totemic animals.  In some ways they’re very simple — as much textile art, fashion and costuming as high-concept art; obviously influenced by drag outfits and probably New Orleans Indian Mardi Gras costumes, not to mention actual Native American or other indigenous shaman or ritual clothing.  One room was screening a video of the artist (and others?) dressed in the suits, dancing and generating the sounds and noise that they are designed to make when moving.  But in fact they worked very well as more static sculptural displays.

Part of what was neat about seeing them was the clever way they’d been integrated into the museum.  The Cincinnati Art Museum is a big, old-school, traditional 19th-century art museum with a pretty impressive collection of Old Master-type work from the last few centuries.   They scattered the soundsuits throughout the entire collection such that you follow blue arrows on the ground from room to room to come upon them integrated with the permanent collection.  They often seemed to be playing off the Japanese ceramics or 18th-century French painting or whatever it was in that room; although I never felt sure how intentionally or expressly the juxtapositions had been been planned, it often felt as if there were subtle parallels or echoes at play.

The girls really loved them too, and would gasp and exclaim when we came upon a new one.  It was definitely art an 8-year-old girl could relate to, all about the transformative power of costumes and dressing up.

Here’s a video interview of the artist with some of the suits:

Brilliance/ Craziness of the St Louis City Museum

We had a great visit with friends to St Louis this weekend.  The zoo was fantastic… the Botanical Gardens amazing: we especially enjoyed a temporary exhibit up at the moment on “Extreeme Tree-houses” — at least a dozen “tree houses” made by artists, these not up in trees but around the bases.  All enchanting/engaging in different ways.

But here I want to discuss the great, amazing and very strange City Museum.  We forgot a camera so I am going to rely on the museum’s promo photos.

It’s difficult to convey how different this place is from any other “children’s museum” I’ve seen.   It has some of the qualities of Willy Wonka’s castle or a haunted house, I thought.  I commented to Sarah at one point that it feels like something set up by psychoanalysis-influenced surrealists in Argentina in the 1930s.  Here are a few tidbits from Wikipedia:

City Museum is a museum, consisting largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, housed in the former International Shoe building.  …The museum bills itself as an “eclectic mixture of children’s playground, funhouse, surrealistic pavilion, and architectural marvel.” Visitors are encouraged to feel, touch, climb on, and play in the various exhibits…City Museum was founded by artist Bob Cassilly, who remains the museum’s artistic director, and his then-wife Gail Cassilly. The museum’s building was once a shoe factory and warehouse but was mostly vacant when the Cassillys bought it in 1993. Construction began in January 1995 and the building opened to the public on October 25, 1997. The museum has since expanded, adding new exhibits such as MonstroCity in 2002, Enchanted Caves and Shoe Shaft in 2003, and World Aquarium in 2004. A circus ring on the third floor offers daily live acts. The City Museum also houses The Shoelace Factory, whose antique braiding machines makes colorful shoelaces for sale.

A minute or so into our visit, Celie and Iris and their buddy Thea climbed up into the curling metal slinky-like tunnel you can see in the center of this photo.  They disappeared from view.  Where did they go?  We had no idea.  There is no way to find out.  They popped out somewhere.  At one point we heard their voices in the din.  For a while we thought we would have to climb in too to find them, but were worried we were too fat.  Eventually we went up some nearby ramp and eventually spotted them across several shafts and small bodies of water, stone dinosaur heads, and numerous other chutes and passages leading into the ceiling, walls, or floor.  Some tight passages and tunnels end abruptly such that you have to back your way back out.  At one point I found myself walking through an enormous 19th-century bank vault door that felt as if it might clang behind me.  There are a lot of opportunities to walk into the mouth of some creature or another.  Some very digestive shapes in the tubes and cylinders.  You kind of feel you might get dumped down into the garbage compactor of the Death Star.

The whole museum is kind of like this.  In one spot there’s a small closet-like door or rather hole in the wall.  If you go in there you enter a somewhat creepy little labyrinth with several layers of wall space, lit by a few dim Christmas bulbs.  You feel a bit like a mouse in the wall.  At other points you can look up and see people walking above, or look down and see some kid waving under your feet.

Somewhere in the central enclosed system of spaces on the first floor we encountered a heavily tattooed dude who was one of the first museum employees we’d encountered.  He pointed out to us a spiral staircase we could climb up that would eventually allow us to chute down a 10-story slide to the bottom.  When I asked him if it was scary for kids he said, “well, I put my 17 month-old in it, and he survived!”  We decided to give that one a miss.  Celie I did go down a shorter slide that created a beautiful kaleidoscopic effect as painted metal tubes spin from your hands.

It’s kind of like a Dangerous Museum for Girls and Boys.  I seriously am bewildered about the liability question.  I have to assume that they know what they’re doing, but kids must get hurt now and then (or at least scared and stuck).  Thea skinned her knee and there was a whole first-aid center at the front administering band-aids cheerfully.  But the kids were in ecstasy.  They were really exploring and it was not all administered and explained to death by adults.  There’s potential for some actually scary moments, but the overall feeling is joyfully creative and surprise-filled.  You can see all the seams of the museum, it’s kind of a giant Rube Goldberg device.

Outside we entered a teetering, winding metal structure hanging off the side of the building that led at one point to a de-purposed fighter jet.  Unnervingly, the inside was not really stripped clean but was bristling with cut off wires.  Iris sat in the cockpit and steered a bit.

Down below were some people selling beers and margaritas (!).  Sarah is convinced that anyone could apply to set up shop and sell something.

On weekend nights it is open until 1:00 a.m. and occasionally they have “sleepover nights” when you can camp out on the roof — which we did not even make it to; it apparently contains a Ferris wheel, and there is an aquarium somewhere.  There seemed to be a wedding going on, as various well-dressed older people started streaming in towards closing time.

?!!!  What a cool place, a wildly imaginative version of urban renewal via the arts.

One other tidbit from our trip — we happened basically by accident on this amazing restaurant, the Firefly Cafe, in Effingham Illinois.  Where the Eff is Effingham?  On 70 between Terre Haute and St Louis.  It’s in a giant former barn with a big organic garden attached and a lake in back filled with huge koi.  Saveur magazine or somewhere named it the #2 Most Sustainable restaurant in the U.S. a couple years ago.  We had a pretty light lunch but the food was fantastic– amazing beets and greens salads from the garden.  Want to figure out some way to arrange for dinner there.

“Are we truly the crocodiles?”: Herzog’s “Cave of Forgotten Dreams” at IU

We were very excited to catch what was apparently the first commercial/non-festival showing of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams in the U.S.  This showing was introduced by Jonathan Sehring, president of IFC Entertainment, which is distributing the film.  He buttered us up in a nice way, effusing that “This is one of the best, if not the best, theaters I’ve ever been in… It’s a spectacular venue. You guys are very, very lucky.”  Maybe he says that to all the girls, but it gave me a warm & fuzzy (/smug & self-satisfied) feeling inside.

Apparently inspired by Judith Thurman’s article in The New Yorker about the neolithic cave paintings in Chauvet Cave in southern France, Herzog managed to receive permission from the French government to be the first and perhaps only filmmaker to be allowed in to see and film the paintings.  In 1994 some hikers/explorers stumbled on this incredible find: hidden within a rockslide from thousands of years ago, they discovered hundreds of spectacular wall paintings, mostly of animals, dating from about 32,000 years ago.  Here’s Wikipedia’s summary:

Hundreds of animal paintings have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species, including some rarely or never found in other ice age paintings. Rather than depicting only the familiar animals of the hunt that predominate in Paleolithic cave art, i.e. horses, cattle, reindeer, etc., the walls of the Chauvet Cave are covered with predatory animals: lions, panthers, bears, owls, and hyenas. Also pictured are rhinos. Typical of most cave art, there are no paintings of complete human figures, although there is one possible partial “Venus” figure that may represent the legs and genitals of a woman. Also a chimerical figure may be present; it appears to have the lower body of a woman with the upper body of a bison. There are a few panels of red ochre hand prints and hand stencils made by spitting pigment over hands pressed against the cave surface. Abstract markings—lines and dots—are found throughout the cave.

Because of the bad experiences at Lascaux, where (Wiki again) “since 1998 the cave has been beset with a fungus, variously blamed on a new air conditioning system that was installed in the caves, the use of high-powered lights, and the presence of too many visitors,” Chauvet is now completely inaccessible to the public.  So if you want to see the paintings, you gotta see Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

I found the movie to be a slightly odd combination of really excellent Discovery Channel-type archaeology documentary (this describes let’s say 75%-80% of the film) and characteristically whacked-out Werner Herzog film (the remaining 20% or so).  When I first heard the phrase “Werner Herzog 3D cave painting documentary” a year ago, I guess I imagined something different, something stranger, so at one level it was a bit disappointing to find scenes like the following: Shot of four scientists sitting in a generic white office-style florescent-lit room.  Herzog’s voice-over: “The scientists were housed in a nearby sports complex.  Although they each possess particular specialties, they share their work collaboratively” (something like that).  Cut to the laptop screen of two nerdy scientists explaining a graph.

That is to say that the two aspects of the movie, the earnest Discovery Channel-style documentary and the whacked-out Herzog film, often felt to me somewhat in conflict. Some of the most Herzogian scenes involve scientists and others involved in the project whose obsessions and idiosyncracies he draws out and dwells on to amusing or defamiliarizing effect.  There’s the “Perfumer” who walks around the surfaces outside the cave, smelling the ground, trying to sniff out undiscovered chinks or crevices.  (I remained a bit confused about whether he was an actual member of the investigating team or just a local amateur.)  Or the scientist whom Herzog films dressed in his deerskin Inuit costume performing a rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” on animal bone flute.  Or the affably nerdy, bristly-moustachio’d scientist (the 3D really brings out the moustache) who demonstrates, badly, the technique of spear-hunting with a small sling.  I guess the problem for me was that these scientists, unlike many of Herzog’s previous documentary subjects (e.g. Timothy Treadwell), do not in fact seem bizarrely or inexplicably obsessed.  They are dedicated to their work, for obvious and good reason; sometimes when Herzog tries to draw out their oddities (as with the anthropologist who, it turns out, used to work as a circus performer), these eccentricities seem somewhat beside the point.  This isn’t exactly Klaus Kinski in the jungle of Peru, and none of the scientists seem all that strange.  Herzog specializes in depictions of obsessives whose objects of fascination do not make rational sense; these cave paintings cannot be explained by reason alone, but anyone’s fascination with them is perfectly easy to comprehend.  (Sarah pointed out that it was a little surprising that Herzog spent so little time discussing competing anthropological/archaeological theories about the ritual practices of these neolithic peoples, which would seem to offer ample opportunity for Herzogian musing on primitive urges and practices.)

There’s also a sort of coda featuring some albino crocodiles, supposedly the product of genetic mutation from nearby power plants, who inspire Herzog to wonder, “Are we truly the crocodiles who look back into the abyss of time?“ at the neolithic artists of the cave paintings.  (Sehring wryly noted that at a public appearance last year, Herzog blithely declared that all the stuff about the albino crocs was completely fabricated, which Sehring implied poses a marketing challenge for a documentary.)

The crocs felt like classic Herzog (not least in their uncertain positioning on the fiction/documentary border), but then so much of the rest of the film is a much more earnest and straight-forward examination of the cave paintings, in the context of which some of his vatic pronouncements can seem a bit silly or extraneous.  (Speaking of his vatic pronouncements, ever since I discovered the brilliant “Werner Herzog reads classic children’s story books” series on Youtube I sometimes find myself giggling a bit at the sound of his voice.)

No question though that I would not want to miss the loving, rapturous exploration of these amazing and very mysterious images, which Herzog convincingly describes as “proto-cinematic” in their capture of animal motion; the 3D technology does not feel like a gimmick but an opportunity for something close to an in situ experience of them.  And, despite some of my reservations, Chauvet Cave does make perfect sense as one of Herzog’s sites of wildness and mysterious otherness, a sealed-off zone of otherworldly creation that, no matter how fully we study and chart it out, we will never fully understand.

100 Acres, Goose the Market

Indianapolis has always seemed like a surprisingly unexciting city for its size (pushing a million), even if I’m glad we live an hour away from the airport and a big-city mall, Trader Joe’s, etc.  (We’re sort of sick of the Children’s Museum, but it is very good.)  But lately the city has seemed to be looking up in various ways… We had a great little jaunt on Friday to our two new favorite places in town:

(1)  Goose the Market.  This place is sooo good.  We are dangerously obsessed with their Batali sandwich (named not for Mario but his father Armandino Batali, if you please), described by Bon Appetit, which named Goose the “top sandwich shop” in the U.S. a couple years ago, as “a standout Italian sandwich with coppa, soppressata, capocollo, provolone cheese, and tomato preserves.”  It’s a butcher/deli bar plus basement wine/beer bar plus small grocery with some nice vegetables, dried grains, and so on.  Really charming.  We did somehow manage to spend $48 on two sandwiches and what I imagined as “a few other things,” but really it’s not at all over-priced.

[photo from Helloindianapolis.com]

(2) We brought our Batalis and assorted snacks to the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s “100 Acres” Art & Nature park for a picnic.  A New York Times article describes it:

Twenty bone-shaped benches by the Dutch artist and designer Joep van Lieshout sprawl across a meadow, forming a huge human skeleton; the piece, “Funky Bones,” is meant both to evoke the remains and artifacts of the American Indians who once lived in the region and to offer a place to picnic and lounge. A terraced pier overlooking the park’s 35-acre lake and resembling a topographical map was designed by the sculptor Kendall Buster of Richmond, Va., as a perch for fishing or reading, except when the lake floods every year. All eight of the artists’ installations, which dot the park’s unruly woodlands, wetlands, meadows and lake, were conceived to handle wear and tear from people as well as nature.

“We didn’t want it to be a precious thing,” said Lisa Freiman, the museum’s curator of contemporary art and director of the park. “There are no restrictions. Whether you create them or not, people will touch and climb on the sculpture anyway.”

The girls loved the place and tore from installation/sculpture to sculpture.  By chance we visited on the weekend when a very short-term project was in place, sound artist Craig Colorusso’s Sun Boxes:

Marvel at a field of 20 solar-powered speakers, each programmed with a different loop of guitar notes, for an effect of an overlapping field of sound. The sounds of Sun Boxes have been described as both soothing and energizing, as they react to the natural fluctuations of cloudiness and sun to create an ephemeral composition. All are welcome to enter the sound environment at will during the three-day installation.

These were lovely… you could hear at least traces of the sound throughout the park, rising and falling at intervals.  It was overcast (started to rain lightly just when we were leaving) and there were a bunch of people hanging around the boxes who I assume were ready to cover them with tarps (or remove them? probably the former) if needed.

The girls had not been particularly excited about this outing, and once we were there, they kept stressing that it was “so different from what I thought.”  When I pressed them about what they thought it would be, Iris said, “like an art museum, and next to it, just some normal sculptures.”

Our plan was to go afterward to Havana Cafe which we read about in this article about Indianapolis’s ethnic food scene, but we got too tired and went home.

“Catfish” and “The Shop Around the Corner”: Opening the Envelope

We watched Catfish the other day.  It would make a good double feature with Banksy’s (fascinating) Exit Through the Gift Shop — both movies feel very of-the-moment in what they do with documentary form and what they say about 21st century mediated identity.  Catfish is hard to discuss without giving too much away.  It’s about Nev Schulman, a photographer who lives in NYC with his brother Ariel and friend Henry, and a long-distance relationship Nev develops via Facebook and email with, first, an 8 year-old girl and her mother, and then the girl’s 21 year old (or so) older sister (they all live in rural Michigan).  The young girl sees a photograph Nev had published in The New York Sun of a ballet dancer, and does a painting based on the photo which she mails to Nev.  She’s incredibly talented for such a young kid, and soon she’s sending Nev more paintings, and he’s in touch with her mother (initially as an artistic mentor for the girl), and then with her sexy older sister.  A flirtation develops, and then things start to get weird.

Apparently when it was first shown at Sundance, some accused the filmmakers (Nev and his buddies) of having faked the film — perhaps as a reaction to Exit through the Gift Shop, which is obviously faked in various ways.  I for one believe the Catfish boys, though, that it’s at least mostly legit and un-manipulated.

Coincidentally, we also watched (this one with the girls) the classic 1940 Ernst Lubitsch rom-com The Shop Around the Corner– such a great movie.  The two films really have quite a bit in common in their portrayal of love and desire as mediated fantasy, routed through communications technologies — in this case, of course, the postal system and P.O. boxes (You’ve Got Mail is to some degree a remake, but let’s forget about that).  James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan work together in the shop, drive each other crazy, and maintain a postal/epistolary romance with what turns out to be one another.  In one great scene, Stewart goes to the cafe where his mystery love is waiting for him; he can’t bear to look, so asks his friend Ferencz (this all takes place in Budapest, btw) to peek in the window.

Ferencz: She has a little of the coloring of Klara.

Kralik (James Stewart): Klara? What, Miss Novak of the shop?

Ferencz: Now, Kralik, you must admit Klara’s a very good-looking girl.

Kralik: This is a fine time to talk about Miss Novak.

Ferencz: If you don’t like Miss Novak, I can tell you, you won’t like that girl.

Kralik: Why?

Ferencz: Because it is Miss Novak.

The imaginary object of desire now transforms into his disliked co-worker, metaphor into metonymy. Confronting the actual object of his desire is a bit like opening the holiday bonus envelope:

The boss hands you the envelope. You wonder how much is in it, and you don’t want to open it. As long as the envelope’s closed, you’re a millionaire. You keep postponing that moment and…you can’t postpone it forever.

Kralik, having peeked through the glass window of the cafe, has opened the envelope, and it takes him a while to reconcile what he sees in it with what he had imagined.  For Klara, for most of the rest of the movie, the envelope remains sealed.  There’s a running trope about “counterfeiting” and authenticity: “You don’t have to tell me that it’s imitation leather. I know that.”  (No one wants to be the dupe who mistakes the fake for the real.)  Or: “Are those real diamonds?” “They’re pretty near.”  This as Kralik puts the necklace on Klara, supposedly as a trial run for his actual girlfriend.  The idea of a “real” diamond suggests an escape from fantasy and mediation: fulfilled love as a transcendence of imitation and role-playing.  But of course the movie shows that desire is all of those things.  There is no “real” or authenticity that can rise above fantasy, just a “pretty near” matching up of desire with physical/bodily reality.

Reading books or newspapers offers another version of what Klara and Kralik had found in their epistolary relationships.  It’s Bovaryism, desire as mediated escapism:

Here’s another emblematic shot: Klara and Kralik are together in her bedroom. He’s come to visit her because she missed work, not physically sick so much as heartbroken (hard to keep the physical and the imaginative/psychic distinct).  He’s there with her — notice he is almost touching her — but is she in bed with him?  Yes and no: she’s there with his letter, which she reads to him, not understanding the circularity of this performance.  There’s a weird combination of all-saturating eroticism here along with chastity, in that she (at this point) has less than no interest in the physical Kralik.

In Catfish this all plays out through Facebook rather than mail, but with a comparable mix of misdirection, role-playing, and a sense that desire becomes revealed as a fantasy world of projection and invention.  There are matching shots: in Catfish, of the Facebook page as a new message pops up; in Lubitch’s film, of the actual P.O. box through which once or twice we actually glimpse Klara as she peers, looking for a new letter.  As befits a contemporary version of Lubitsch’s scenario, though, in Catfish the inventions manifest themselves less in words than in visual images (paintings, photographs, and especially Facebook images) and sounds (there are some interesting counterfeit singer-songwriter performances).

Some reviewers have found some condescension in the way the geography of Catfish plays out: the savvy but trusting professional-class boys from NYC head to the heart of rural, working-class Midwestern darkness where they find lies, invention, and a shamefully uncontrolled fantasy.  Nev moves, in a sense, from the media and the internet as we might like them to be today — facilitators of talents and emotional connections that can move swiftly across time and space, enabling new networks and expressions — to the media as they may in fact be: murky pools of potential deceit, role-playing, and solipsism.  (Although in the end, especially if you watch the DVD extra interview, the movie feels surprisingly sweet, I though.)

Catfish is all about what happens when Nev opens the envelope.

Kenneth Anger at the IU Cinema

I’ve been looking forward to Kenneth Anger‘s visit to the IU Cinema for quite a while.  The 300 tickets for the evening showing of some of his films sold out at least a month ago, so I was not the only one.  My understanding of Anger was actually pretty received and second-hand.  I own his scurrilous early-Hollywood tell-all history Hollywood Babylon (first published in France in 1959; the version I have is the 1970s one that sold 2 million copies, I believe) but had never seen full versions of any of his films.

The evening showing included two of his most famous, 1947′s Fireworks and 1964′s Scorpio Rising, along with a few very recent short films.

Fireworks is quite amazing.   It’s actually difficult to imagine it being made at that date.  It’s a 15-minute fantasia in which a good-looking young man played by the 19 or 20 year old Anger dallies with and is beaten up by some buff, muscle-flexing sailors.  Blood spurts out of Anger’s nose and milk pours on his head; it culminates with the fiery explosion of a Roman Candle sticking out of a sailor’s crotch.  Anger says he was influenced by early-cinema pioneers like the Lumiere brothers and Melies; it’s easy to see the influence Fireworks must have had on David Lynch and queer cinema of the 1980s and 1990s by Gus Van Sant and others.

Scorpio Rising seems similarly way ahead of its time.  Anger himself has aptly described it as “a death mirror held up to American culture… Thanatos in chrome, black leather, and bursting jeans.”  Biker dudes caressing their motorcycles, reading comic strips, petting a Siamese kitty, buckling their leather jackets and slipping into leather boots.  Death’s heads, Nazi insignia, and grim reapers.  Pop songs of the moment:  “Blue Velvet” by Bobby Vinton, “Torture” by Kris Jensen and “I Will Follow Him” by Little Peggy March.  And “Wipeout” for the inevitable fiery crash.  David Lynch must have been inspired by Anger’s use of “Blue Velvet.” I believe Anger invented the jarring juxtaposition of cheerful, peppy pop songs with scenes of violence that directors like Martin Scorsese (who’s said he’s a fan of Anger’s) made so much a part of their method; there’s no question that Scorsese’s use of pop songs in Mean Streets had to be directly influenced by this movie.

We went (with our visiting friend Jane) to see Anger’s afternoon talk as well as the evening show, which also featured a Q&A.  Not sure we really had to go to both.  Anger was for the most part very unreflective about his work, sometimes almost hilariously so.  One example: someone asked a question about the origins of Fireworks.  Anger told a story about the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots in L.A. when sailors beat up zoot-suit-wearing Latinos, explaining that it was the inspiration for the movie.  OK, fair enough, but someone followed up to ask, “could you say a little more about how those events turned into this film?”  Anger basically had nothing more to say other than that it was based on a dream he had in which he the one beaten up by the sailors, and that he considers it to be an anti-war film.  In the two hours or so of on-stage discussion I saw, he had almost nothing to say about the homoeroticism of his films (though to be fair, he was asked very little about this directly) nor about their formal innovation and experimentation.  From his conversation, you might never guess that his movies were anything but fairly straight-forward narratives.  He seemed mostly interested in technical issues about the camera and film stock, and about his continual difficulties in finding funding.  (He’s never made a feature film, despite various efforts.)  Another example, when someone asked him about his ground-breaking use of sound and music in Scorpio Rising, his answer was something like, “well, those were the songs that were popular on the radio that summer.”

One funny thing happened.  In the Q&A he mentioned that he had been going to show three recent films, but that the IU Cinema director Jon Vickers (who was standing right there) had told him one of them was too racy for the “mixed audience.”  Anger implied that the film had one “explicit” scene as seen through a peephole, but that it was fairly tame.  Someone pressed him about this — the audience was not happy –and finally Vickers took the mike and explained that since the audience had not been warned about very explicit content, he had not wanted to spring this one on us.  He suggested that after the Q&A, there would be a brief break allowing anyone who wanted to leave to do so, and then the movie would be shown.

It was 9 p.m. and I was starving and sort of wanted to go eat dinner, but of course we could not be the prudes to get up and leave at that point!

The movie turned out to be, basically, a little piece of arty porn featuring closeups of some kind of wealthy industrialist receiving fallatio from his bodyguard while another titillated guard watches on a surveillance camera.  This to the soundtrack of the Police’s “I’ll Be Watching You.”  Pretty lame, actually — and definitely pornographic, so I felt kind of sympathetic to Vickers’ actions (after all, this is a public institution in Southern Indiana and you don’t necessarily want to get the attention of Republicans in state government), even though he came off initially as the bluestocking censor.

Despite Angers’ generally low-affect tone, his affection for the Kinsey Institute came through clearly.  He told a neat story about how he met Alfred Kinsey in the late 1940s, who turned up at an early showing of Fireworks and asked Anger if he could purchase it for the Kinsey collection.  Anger said, sure, you can have the reel we just watched, so they made the transaction on the spot, and Anger later (in the early 50s) visited Bloomington and did interviews with Kinsey.

Montreal: Bagels, Otto Dix

So, I am not going to write about my entire trip to Montreal now, just two details.

• Montreal Bagels.  I learned about the Montreal Bagel phenomenon a month or two ago when I read a review of a new “Montreal-style” bagel place in NYC.  Hmm, cannot seem to find that review now but here is a 2009 article about Montreal vs NYC bagels.  We were at a gathering in the Mile End neighborhood and our host Jesse said we could get some at midnight nearby.  I think he recommended Fairmount but we accidentally ended up at St. Viateur instead (I believe they’re within a block or so of one another).  We got a dozen, all four of us had one fresh from the brick oven, and then John and I had the rest for snacking in our hotel room.  I have to say, in some ways it feels that the Montreal bagel is simply a bad, imitation bagel: not boiled but baked, and a bit sweet, it has some qualities in common with a generic mass-produced bagel from Einstein Brothers or the like.  And yet, I did really like the St. Viateur bagel.  It’s thinner, sesame (for some reason sesame is the standard; St. Viateur said they order some absurdly large amount of sesame seeds per day, I forget the amount), and straight from the oven it was really delicious; not very sweet but with a hint of pastry taste.
• Otto Dix show at the museum.  This blew me away, especially the Der Kreig [War] series of prints he made in response to his experience in the trenches in WWI, modeled after Goya’s “Disasters of War” series.  These are devastating and just amazing.  A body in pieces found in the ground; soldiers in various scenes with prostitutes; wounded soldiers with faces distorted and ravaged; soldiers advancing in gas masks looking like frightening ghosts; a soldier in the trenches eating a meal, oblivious to the skeleton next to him.

The show has the complete set (I think?) on display and it was amazing to walk through the entire sequence.  The sections of his work on prostitutes and “sex murders” were also gripping and quite disturbing.  Especially creepy was one painting of Dix himself walking in a predatory manner after a prostitute.

After 1933 he moved to a house on a lake and of necessity began focusing on landscapes and other less confrontational or challenging kinds of work.  I found those paintings sad, because not very interesting to me; they felt entirely compromised, although maybe there are other ways to think about them.

Valentines

Today’s project was making valentines for school (classmates and teachers).  I gave them a big pep talk about how much better homemade ones are — they seemed to buy it.

Target was predictably disappointing.  There’s a whole section of the store now dedicated to Valentine’s Day stuff, but no colored construction paper to be found anywhere.  It’s as if they’re actively hostile to the idea of someone making their own.  We bought some overpriced glitter and went to Dollar Tree, which had good paper for $1 a package, also various stickers and other decorations.  (There are girl stickers — hearts, unicorns — and boy stickers, cars and trucks; I made only the most half-hearted, because so obviously doomed, effort to question this opposition.)

They spent much of the afternoon creating these.

Pretty great, I think.  We also spent some of this weekend painting their bedroom pink, so all in all the household has become significantly more girly.  Out tonight someone observed that I had a single shiny glitter on my left cheek.

Oh, by the way, as we were walking into Target Iris told me that from a nature documentary they watched with mommy they learned about how you shouldn’t leave lights on when you don’t need them: “because if you leave a light on for too long, it makes it easier for the polar bears to catch the penguins.”