Category Archives: Reviews

On Joy Mancini

Posted on by

web.jpg

The art of Joy Mancini has a true home in the gallery at Tribes. Her paintings have a visceral quality that would seem to belie the intricate narratives they present.  Using relatively simple pallets, Joy creates a visual texture that the eyes must learn to decipher, like a map. Each painting has a legend, a key that must be grasped, in order for her canvasses to reveal the territory of feeling that lurks within them. One painting, for example, seems to portray an endless space. It’s a dark and murky picture, at first sight puzzling to the viewer’s mind. Only when the shark at the bottom right corner of the canvass is grasped  for what it is—a child’s remembrance of a nightmare, drawn in a deliberately crude and careless manner—does the painting unlock itself. Suddenly, the viewer is confronted with the sea, and  the stippled hallmarks of marine life that inhabit the sea.         

The paintings currently hanging on the walls have to be viewed in sequence. With two exceptions, they form an organic whole, and exposit a single meaning—or rather, they exhibit the restless search for a meaning that transcends that limits of logical thinking. Coupled with the sculptures that were present at the opening, an entire under-water theme is in effect at Tribes. The beauty of the show lies in how the sculptures seem to extend from the paintings, making tangible and present what would otherwise only be visual and pictorial. For a space as small as Tribes, this continuity can only be praised. Unfortunately, Joy Mancini’s show will be only be on exhibit until Wednesday; but for anyone sympathetic to the Surrealist evolution from nightmare into life, it’s something worth seeing.         

web2.jpg

Overall, I think this is one of the better shows I’ve seen at Tribes—if only for the style of the paintings. Joy Mancini’s sensibility is primarily that of a symbolist: she works with private meanings that are not necessarily apparent to viewers who are not privy to the autobiographic details of her world. This doesn’t weaken the presentation of the paintings—their style—but it does make for difficulties in the realm of subject-matter. Generally, one could argue that the symbols she uses are winsome and vague (sharks are a recurring motif); but I think a stronger appraisal would take into account how her symbols are painted. Her paintings tend to have a raw and adolescent feel which is very deliberate, and to that extent there is a bona fide link between form and content. But for people who aren’t interested in adolescent feeling—specifically, the feeling of sundering—these paintings will probably lack substance.  As a whole, the strength of Mancini’s early paintings resides in their style—beyond that they take a commercial turn which feels like a form of flattery, their subject-matter becoming a little too obvious. “All good things wear a mask,” writes Neitzsche, and one could wish that Joy Mancini’s masks were a little less lovely and little more terrifying to behold.

-Jeffrey Grunthaner

 

Exterminating Angel – a look at the posthumous volume of poems Divina is Divina by Jack Wiler ( Cavankerry Press )

Posted on by

 

Exterminating Angel   

- a look at the posthumous volume of poems Divina is Divina  by Jack Wiler ( Cavankerry Press )

 

                                                                               steve dalachinsky

 

 

Even at their darkest, most disparate and desperate levels Jack Wiler’s poetry gives us, through their sheer force and honesty, a sense of hope and relief, albeit through a lens sometimes clouded by the immense pain felt through equally intense, personal experiences filtered through what can only be called true black humor in all its shadings. Life itself as Wiler might put it is a comedy of errors that oft times creates real hardships and tragedy, however through this prism of outright nitty gritty despair these poems manage to fill us up rather than drain us, give to us rather than take from us. They never make us flounder or feel confused and due to their uncanny straight-fowardness rarely need decoding. Wiler’s knack is to un-complicate the complicated making us feel uneasy yet relaxed with such forces as death, love, friendship, loyalty, and vermin. He shows us that it’s ok to experiment with one’s own life as long as one is willing to face the ultimate consequences which, in his case, was contracting AIDS and eventually dying from that ravaging disease after a long battle.

I met Jack quite awhile ago and he looked like death warmed over, something he freely admitted. He struggled for many years managed through all adversity to maintain as normal a life as possible. In his case having a straight job as an exterminator ( if one can call that normal ) even being featured in a major t.v. film about rats while all the time pouring out poems and a play about his life and the lives of those around him. Always reminding us that the world is not a safe place and that we could be exterminated at any time… “We found the body about two hundred feet up the ravine…”  “… the Angel of Death… I know he could come visit me at any moment.” Wiler tells us his life … “is priceless…” and that he’s “paid dearly for it.” And I feel by this he means all our lives.

He talks about rotten teeth and about his beloved city New York (even though he’s a Jersey boy). In the title poem Divina is Divina we hear about Divina, the transsexual whose given name is Hector, brought home one day by Jack’s long time companion Johanna, whose given name is Marko, herself a transsexual and a firm presence in this volume… Divina “fading into the world…” dying anonymously, quietly alone, isolated by his/her choices yet never giving them up.  It’s almost an incantatory when Wyler states “Hector is Divina because the flowers bloom / ….because she is /… we are / … the sun is … / Because we die…/ Because / Because” A recurring theme of this book, the choices we make and how they affect us in positive, negative and most assuredly life – altering ways.

 

In a moment of classical near comical despair Jack intones … “O woe! / O horrible patience. / Give me rest or money. Give me spring. / Let the girl at least glance / back one time on this / terrible ride.”

 

And in moments of absolute tenderness, poignancy, pathos and desolation, he states in “Love Poem at the beginning of Summer” … “ This is a love poem about empty places…/This is a love poem for you… / This is a love poem without you in it. / Like every love poem should be. / … a poem that won’t let me forget./ Everything in the world is asking about you. ”  

As seriously as he took his work, Jack made fun of himself and made light of all the heaviness that life brings down upon us and the stupidity of the risks he took that ultimately killed him something you immediately grasp as you read this last will and testament which may make you too, as Jack might put it, only want to live, live, live until you die and as he so succinctly summed it up it what might be called his poetic epitaph: “The Hardest Poem a Man Can Write” :

 

                                 “Here lies Jack

                                   Dumb as a stick

                                   and flat on his back.

                                   Couldn’t keep his dick in his pants.

                                   Now there’s worms in his mouth.

                                   Thought he’d live forever.

                                    Oops he was wrong.       

 

I’m with you all the way on that one Jack.

 

Living inside this book, hearing and watching Wiler wrestle the demons with an almost righteous indignation, is indeed almost like living in that room in Bunuel’s film, The Exterminating Angel, filled with strangers and friends all waiting for who knows what, only to finally discover they are all waiting for the same thing, good ole Mr. Death or some other angel perhaps, to scoop them up, whisk them away or perhaps play poker with. “… The purpose of angels is to help us deal with another life.” while our purpose, for the most part is, “always hungry” to wait “for the master to bring us food ” as we “Watch, listen, taste, smell, eat, breathe, sleep, rise, work.”, the angels or devils always there, always “hungry for conversation.” And these poems are always reminding us how hungry we are. How some of us think we are invincible. How much we need, want, crave, in order to survive until we succumb.

 

This singular in-your-face voice, a voice of reason ultimately too hard to reason with, will be a difficult act to follow and one that will sorely be missed.   

.   

Where is the Joy? By Patricia Spears Jones: A Review of “For Colored Girls”

Posted on by

Review of For Colored Girls directed and written by Tyler Perry based on the play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf” by Ntozake Shange.  Produced by Perry, Paul Hall and Roger M. Bobb.  Now in wide release.

Where is the Joy?

By Patricia Spears Jones

While others watched the last of the Marathon, I went to see the movie version of  For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf?”. After sitting through the two hours of Tyler Perry’s adaptation, I felt like I and the rest of the audience had been in a marathon complete with heartbreak hill and that final sprint towards the finish line.  But you know, none of us were winners.

 

First I have to give props to Perry for attempting an almost impossible artistic task: adapt an experimental theater work that featured an all female cast who spoke and danced a  choreopoem into a two hour commercially viable film complete with male actors and occasional outdoor scenery.  Ntozake Shange’s poems are like the crystals in the heavy wooden bowl of Mr. Perry’s screenplay.  Indeed, I left the film with an even greater respect for Shange’s achievement and the power of poetry.  I wish I could say the same for Tyler Perry.

 

I left thinking “where’s the joy?”.  I was at premiere of “For Colored Girls” at the Public Theater with the original cast.  I was amazed and enthralled by the actresses, their physicality, sensuality and the sheer audacity of the play.  It was very much a young woman’s work and a majority of the actresses on the stage were in their twenties.  Shange’s choreopoem represented a kind of performance work being done at the time. It also was a deliberate and important marriage of contrasting artistic sensibilities:  the Black Arts Movement and cultural feminism. She connected African centered aesthetics (colors, religious iconography, naming and historical references) from the Black Arts Movement while simultaneously focusing on women’s lives and spiritual/intellectual growth.  In some of the poems this could be very awkward, but it also said these are my issues, my ideas about our lives and they are very important.. And it was very much a work about women talking to, for and about each other.  The humor could be mordant, but also silly.  Shange was very much in touch with the sense of how women talk to each other about stuff that women always talk to each other about: how you make your day; how you make your bed; with whom are you sleeping; who you wish you were sleeping with; the clothes you want to carry your figure; how you fight for yourself; protect your children; or lose yourself to stupid shit. What is beauty and how do you use it? And then there’s racism.

 

So what I remember at the end of the evening was a joyful exhilaration and a lot of smiling.  Those women on stage played out the joys, sorrows, rage and spiritual quests forged from that inspired combination of feminism and the Black Arts Movement. Perry clearly enjoys writing for actresses especially actresses of a certain age who get to dispense his version of wise women’s sayings. And while many of the actresses in this film give strong and nuanced performances, they have a really impossible task: to marry Shange’s richly textured poetry with Perry’s often clumsy dialogue for a conventional  plot that brings disparate women together. So we go from the gynocentric circle of the staged play to the phallocentric tower of the apartment building. The stories to, by and for each woman become bits of dialogue often with male partners.

 

This shift throws off the rationale for the play—it becomes about the women and the men to the exclusion of everything else. This means that the slutty sensuality of the Lady in Orange (Tangie) played to a fine shriek by Thandie Newton is turned into a confused and sort of angry woman who sleeps around.  No Joy.  This means that the wonderful Toussaint L’Overture poem is read by Phlyicia Rashad to children while their mother is being beat up. No joy.  It means that the nice young man you’re cooking for comes to your apartment to rape you and we get to see him take off all his clothes, but not rip yours off—odd.  Indeed, with two exceptions, the men are often disrobing or naked, but not the women.  A play that so much celebrates women’s bodies becomes a film that does a great deal to hide them.

 

The plotting and plodding screenplay underlines a problem with Perry’s aesthetic.  He seems to think that his audience must be told just about everything so that THEY WILL GET THE POINT.  He brings the play into the 21st century with the introduction of the prevalence of HIV in the Black community and how partners’ lies leave Black women vulnerable. But he does not do a corresponding plot point with the issue of abortion.  Why didn’t one of the elder women do the back street abortion poem? Why couldn’t the character, Nyla nicely played by Tessa Thompson, have a safe and legal one?  Why couldn’t Macy Gray’s performance of  “I used to live the world, but now I live in Harlem” been a woman drinking on a stoop?  Oh no, she has to be that illegal abortionist.  Why does the evangelical woman have to be crazy?  Christian Black women can be stern without being a caricature that Whoopi Goldberg has to play.  And why did Hill Harper and Kerry Washington have to represent every kind of authority figure (cop and social worker) like a couple from One Life to Live or The Young and the Restless.  Oh and they have issues too-the only smart, kind positive male figure in the movie is paired with an infertile woman.

 

Indeed the soap opera aspect plays out in the design; the photography and the sound design.  The cinematography makes this movie look like it should really be a TV special.  And the editing is often jumpy and overly ambitious (the rape scene that intercuts a brutal rape with an opera performance is particularly difficult to watch).  The cinematic aspects of this film lack confidence and artistry.  Clearly Perry is on a learning curve when it comes to filmmaking, but there are so many fine directors including women directors who might have approached this material in more interesting ways—Kasi Lemmon, Julie Dash come to mind.

 

Anika Noni Rose, Kimberly Elise, Ms. Newton and Loretta Divine allow Shange’s poems to shimmer and shine in their voices.  Ms. Elise has the most difficult task of sustaining the much too long build up to the Beau Willie Brown brutal act. Am I the only one who thought when Jo, the Janet Jackson character said “where’s the page” why didn’t Crystal, Elise’s character simply go to her computer and print it out.  Perry’s story arc and concerns leaves audiences talking more about how crazy or lying or brutal the men are than how sensuous, intelligent, and resourceful the women become.

 

This seems to be a film full of confusion about Black female sexuality (like there is not a hint of lesbianism in this movie) and Black female agency. The play that interwove a circle of women whose talk amongst themselves brought the audience to deep laughter or tears (when Trazana Beverly did the Beau Willie Brown monologue the whole audience gasped, then cried) has become another film about suffering Black women.  But more than anything, the play explored the interiority of Black women, their capacity to find the divine within, which is why it ends with “I found God in myself and loved her fiercely”.  The film tried to capture the spiritual quest and the gaining of agency through the cutting up of the “I’m Sorry” texts, but mostly these seemed like set pieces for comic relief that didn’t quite work or set ups for the wise women speechifying.  This is a far cry from that deep interior scrutiny that the poems revealed.

 

I think that Perry genuinely cares about the lives of Black women.  I really do.  And he is fascinated by older Black women and the getting of wisdom, thus Phylicia Rashad as a kind of “fixer” of people’s lives in her apartment house—she becomes a one woman deux ex machina moving the plot along.  But this film fails to find a way into that circle; to allow these women to really “sing a black girl’s song”.   Even the ending, on that roof top is stiff and off kilter.  The film’s cast tries so hard to give the poems a final shine. Kimberly Elise does her best to rise of above those tears, but the clumsiness of that scene reminds me of how powerful the women were at the Public Theater.  They encircled each other with a knowledge of their own power to sing the words of a great new poet amongst us.  The women on the roof top may have found a way to stop the “I’m sorry” moments in their lives.  But Perry has not given them any joy.

“Howl” as Cinema

Posted on by

A review of the film Howl
Directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman
Running Time: 86 minutes
Review By: Jeffrey Grunthaner

franco1-2.jpg
The film version of the poem “Howl” aspires to be a kind of social commentary on the original text. Recreating key aspects of the poem through the interweaving of four distinct planes of narrative, the film portrays the life and art of Allen Ginsberg through the lens of the poet’s homosexuality, and his accompanying struggle to find an adequate voice for his feelings. As presented in the film, “Howl” is fundamentally a love poem—a work that uses the language of ordinary conversation not as an aesthetic contrivance, but as a way of communicating intimately with Jack Kerouac, who had seemingly lost interest in Ginsberg’s emotional life. A filmic commentary on an essential text, Howl’s main merit lies in forging new connections about the meaning of the poem; and in this way serves to enhance our understanding of a work long regarded as a classic.

The drama of the film moves through the space mapped out by its structure. Howl is extended into four discrete narratives, creating a structural tension that blends a reading of the poem in San Francisco, an interview conducted with Ginsberg about the poem, a recreation of the trial where the poem stood charged of obscenity, and animated interpretations of the more visionary aspects of the poem. Each narrative goes its own way independently of the others, occupying a separate time and place, and even (in the case of the visionary sequences) a separate reality. Nonetheless, a single texture is created, each narrative having the function of interpreting a single text: the poem “Howl.”

Despite stellar acting on the part of James Franco—whose performance aims for, and achieves, verisimilitude to Ginsberg’s likeness to the greatest possible extent—Howl is not free of all charges of sentimentalism. Generally, the San Francisco scene where Ginsberg rose to prominence is painted as a motley group of mid-century-styled hipsters, with prescient notions of their future greatness. This puts the cart before the horse, as immediate consciousness declares that the self is temporally uncreated, that the dice governing our wills are never loaded, and that history can turn out otherwise than we would have expected. I would have liked to see a more edgy and enigmatic quality to the San Francisco scenes where Ginsberg is reading his poem. Instead, what we get is a smoky atmosphere drawn in gray and white: the 1950’s style of which is too reminiscent, too historically distant to have any immediate effect.

Likewise, the scenes recreating the obscenity trial in which the publisher of “Howl” (Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of City Lights) is silently featured have an ultimately hokey quality about them. This is in part due to the fact that the dialogue of these scenes is a verbatim transcription of the actual words spoken during the trial, and thus partakes of the organized repression characteristic of the McCarthy Era. The narrative plane these scenes relate is generally situated in the film as an exemplar of the kind of world Ginsberg was confronting when he wrote the poem—and they do have their dramatic resonance in context. Ultimately, however, like each of the four narratives composing Howl’s filmic texture, they unwind of themselves; and the finale to the trail scenes—a large declaration of the importance of free speech in America Democracy—comes across as a relic of liberal idealism: something without any real relevance to the world we presently inhabit.

I proffer these criticisms of the film because I believe that “Howl” is a poem with the utmost contemporary relevance, and that any film intending to be an adequate portrayal of it—to “be about the poem” as Anne Waldman told me in conversation at The Living Theater—must have a correspondingly contemporary feel to it. “Howl” is a poem about the sadness specific to American life; it details the frustrated aspirations to individuality that everyone in our nation experiences, given over as it is to a fascistic will to control, and to the policing of our every desire through the panoptic eye of media surveillance. The “underground” quality of “Howl” derives from the fact that it everywhere subverts this state of affairs, proclaiming the reality of individuated desire, while bearing witness to its utter ruin. The film portrayal of “Howl,” however, does not sufficiently capture the eternality of expression conveyed by the poem—except in parts.

Some critics have expressed disappointment with the animated sequences of the film. When I saw the film at the Angelika (which had a post-showing panel discussion featuring Eileen Myles, Mark Doty, and Anne Waldman), I overheard Mark Doty make a similar comment. Contrary to these opinions, however, I believe that the animated sequences of the film are great interpretations of the visionary horror contained in the poem. The passages in “Howl” which begin “Moloch…” are especially apt for animated portrayal. What, after all, is Moloch? It is not capitalism; it is not death, disease, or poverty; still less is it the fantasia of unsatisfied longing. “Moloch,” rather, in the context of the poem, is that from which all these things issue. It is a malefic god who feeds on the hearts of the innocent, reducing them to the status of machines that wander a world bereft of any feeling. The animated sequences of the film duly help to give body to our understanding (read: “experience”) of what “Moloch” means in the poem, forging new connections about its significance, while concretizing the meaning of an idea that ultimately transcends conceptual definition.

Also, the scenes that portray an interview with Allen Ginsberg are exactingly on point. Here, the truthfulness of James Franco’s acting develops in a way which the other dramatic segments of the film leave in the status of a cliché. As the main virtue of Howl lies in how it deepens our understanding of the original poem, Franco’s incarnation of Ginsberg, fleshed out through the gradual give-and-take of a tape-recorded interview, brings us closer to the reality of the personality who wrote “Howl.” Someone who has never seen the film might think that Franco could never authentically portray Allen Ginsberg, but Franco studied his part well; and speaking as someone who never knew Ginsberg personally (he died when I was 16 or so), Franco’s Ginsberg looks and sounds like the genuine article. After the film, Eileen Myles and Anne Waldman—both of whom did know Ginsberg personally—were in agreement that Franco’s portrayal was extraordinarily true-to-life.

Thematically, the locus of the film devolves upon the homosexuality of Ginsberg, and the forms of sexuality expressed in the poem. Apart from the visionary animation of the film (but in these also, to an extent), the running thread of Howl is that Ginsberg was a gay poet who expressed his sexual desires openly and in an argot of utter frankness, using the language of those who had similar desires, and who were consequently excluded from the mainstream of American life. This being so, the film version of “Howl” is a nostalgic kind of social commentary on the state of human sexuality. Whether the film portrays homoerotic desire in a manner that is still relevant today is debatable. Few people in the medical community today consider homosexuality a “neurosis”; and those that do are set against others who don’t—which was not the case in Ginsberg’s time. Thus, homosexual love has a kind of pathetic quality in the film, bolstered by the fact that it is situated within a time when such desire was considered “wrong” (and not only by the Christian right). None of this is to say that homosexuality, as represented in the film, is without pathos.

Anne Waldman told me that Werc Werk Works, the production company behind Howl, is currently working on a film adaption of the life of Hart Crane; and it would seem that Howl is just a practice run for what should certainly develop into a greater film. Unlike the life of Allen Ginsberg, the biography of Hart Crane lacks the clichés that too often mar a genuine enjoyment of a film like Howl. Yet it preserves everything that Howl strives for: to portray in imaginative terms the genesis of an extraordinary poet, someone who revolutionized the written word through the discovery of a mythic idiom rooted in the language of ordinary speech.


Haywire by Thaddeus Rutkowski (Starcherone Books, 2010)

Posted on by

Fractal Identity, Hard-Won Peace

by Susan Scutti

“Who am I?” is the central question of Thaddeus Rutkowski’s latest novel, Haywire. This query is posed within the context of race; the narrator, J. Thaddeus, has a mother who is Chinese, a father who is Polish-American and he and his family, which includes a sister and brother, live in the Appalachian region of Pennsylvania. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, being of mixed race in such a locality is striking to say the least. Yet despite the specificity of the narrator’s issue, any reader who is of ambiguous identity in any respect—religion, gender, class—can relate to his struggles.

An exceptional craftsman, Rutkowski constructs his novel with great deliberation and austerity. Each chapter is titled and composed of separate scenes that follow one another intuitively if not always chronologically. His sentences, which most usually offer precise unemotional observation, flow effortlessly from one to the next creating a collage-like effect. His imperceptible plotting is compelling, his prose is unerring. Reading his novel, I did not skip or stumble over a sentence even once… Rutkowski is that clean, that spare.

Divided into three sections, the novel’s first third focuses on the narrator’s childhood. Thaddeus is often derided by his schoolmates who call him, variously, “toad,” “chink,” “weird,” even “faerie.” For the most part he silently endures these slings and arrows, yet at times he is obliged to react. Witnessing his younger sister fighting with a boy who told her she “looked Chinese,” the narrator hits the boy, tells another to back off, and hurries away with her. “When I got home, I poked at my nose until it started to bleed. I stood with my hand over my face until my mother told me to lie down. ‘What do you think happened to him?’ she asked my father. ‘He got sun poisoning,’ my father said. ‘Either that, or he’s a hemophiliac.’ I lay on the sofa and felt blood dripping down my throat.” In this way Rutkowski subtly acknowledges the inevitable undertow of self-loathing and self-destruction which follows a biased attack (no matter the resistance mounted). And this is Rutkowski’s great strength as a novelist; he presents his truths directly and without embellishment and so his psychological knowledge travels unswervingly to its mark: a reader’s heart.

The father, an unnerving and disturbing character, is an artist and a heavy drinker and very much a man who harbors and possibly acts on his pedophile desires. “My father made a series of paintings of my sister. I didn’t see him working on them; I saw only the finished products.… [in one] the back of her nude body was shown. Two careful brushstrokes defined her buttocks…. I didn’t know if my father had worked from memory, from photos, or from life.” Although Thaddeus does not know what the father has or has not done, he does see that the sister begins “to stay away from our house at night.” Boldly, Rutkowski never portrays the father as anything less complicated than all that he is: a faltering artist; a man at odds with himself, with his wife and with his children; a hunter; a rare intellect withering within the stark landscape of Appalachia; an alcoholic; a man inappropriately acting out with his daughter; a nascent environmentalist; and a teacher. Such commanding restraint is another of Rutkowski’s many gifts as a novelist.

The second section of Haywire focuses on the first years away from home and take place at college then grad school. Thaddeus lives off campus with a white roommate and begins to address the complexity of his own identity through self-mockery; he asks if his roommate wants to eat “flied lice” then serves it up to him. Surprisingly, the presence of Asian students on campus fails to ease the narrator’s self-consciousness. Just as he does not fit with Caucasians, he also does not fit with them; more to the point, to date an Asian girl is as interracial an event as dating a Caucasian. Nevertheless, proximity to Asian students provides meaningful context for Thaddeus. “I wanted to join an Asian fraternity…. I didn’t find anything like an Asian fraternity. I did, however, find a math club that had many Asian members. I found a chess club with a similar composition.” Yet it is only when Thaddeus makes a road trip to Mexico that his interior life seems to transform from black & white to Technicolor, even though to a reader it is unclear whether his resurgence is the result of long hours in a car with a real friend or the result of time spent in a third world country. “At times, the rancheros took breaks to drink from a large puddle beside the road… a man arrived on a motorcycle. In the realm of horses, the man on a bike was king.” Rutkowski suggests these “neighbors,” so different from those of his childhood and also different from his own internal polarities, provide Thaddeus with rich and unseen perspective on his own life.

The final section of the novel centers on the narrator’s life after his school years. During this period, Thaddeus quits smoking marijuana through a recovery program; also his escapist interests and sexuality converge into a full-blown fetish (bondage), which he also will eventually dismantle. It’s rare for an American author to portray sexuality non-puritanically; even the most overt sex scenes within American novels are usually shadowed either by an unconvincing amorality or by some form of negative reprisal (read Phillip Roth, for example). By recounting the psychological groundwork of Thaddeus in the childhood scenes, Rutkowski deftly exposes sexual self-expression as simply a fundamental aspect of character. The sister also communicates her wounded identity via sexuality; visiting her brother in his new city apartment, she does not hide her promiscuity, even sleeps with his roommate. In later years, the narrator learns she has become an abused wife and later, after leaving her husband, she devises a life of subservience to a worthless boyfriend. Different yet somehow still an echo, Thaddeus’ brother, the youngest in the family divorces his own wife then moves in with his mother and ultimately attempts to take over her house while she recovers from a stroke in the hospital. All three siblings, then, responding in individual ways to painful childhoods, remain deeply unhappy in the early years of their adulthood.

Rutkowski, though, does not end his novel there; in concise scenes, he shows his narrator meeting a woman he eventually marries; later he becomes a father of a daughter. This transcendent finale to Thaddeus’ life story shows him achieving, against all odds, the ultimate dream: a fulfilled life. And so Rutkowski ends his novel by recording Thaddeus’ actual dreamlife in a final, lyrical chapter titled, “Night Journeys” — a simple yet exquisite conclusion to a masterful character study.

 

 


Picture Me: A Model’s Diary

Posted on by

***Currently playing at the Angelika Theater in NYC and opening at the Sunset 5 in Los Angeles on Sept 24th! ****
Synopsis
Picture Me, a raw and personal video diary, charts model Sara Ziff’s rise from fresh face to one that adorns billboards and magazines around the world. Filmmaker Ole Schell and Ziff co-direct, lifting the veil on the world of high fashion modeling, from photo shoots with celebrated photographers to runway shows in New York, Milan, and Paris. This intimate account features in-depth interviews with noted photographers and designers, and showcases personal footage shot by the models themselves, giving voice to those who are often seen, but rarely heard.
With appearances by models Missy Rayder, Cameron Russell, Diana Dondoe, and Caitriona Balfe, photographers Gilles Bensimon and Sam Haskins, designers Nicole Miller, Hussein Chalayan, and others.

A documentary filmmaker follows a model for several years, chronicling her rise from a fresh face to one that adorns billboards and magazines around the world. Go behind the scenes and chronicle the glitzy world of high fashion modeling, from photo shoots with celebrated photographers to runway shows in New York, Milan, and Paris.

picture-me.jpg

Website: www.picturememovie.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/group.php?gid=68870976778&ref=ts

Purchase Tickets at :http://www.fandango.com/pictureme:amodelsdiary_136065/movieoverview?date=9%2F17%2F2010

Press: http://www.vogue.it/en/vogue-starscelebsmodels/star-news/2010/09/the-shady-side-of-a-supermodel-s-life

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010)

Posted on by

 

Dying Notes of an Ordinary Songbird?

by Susan Scutti  

The most present character of Jonathan Franzen’s novel Freedom is not so much Patty Berglund as her generation and class. Franzen frames Patty in her choices and her choices are distinctly those that were made, as he would have it, by most everybody. In his first chapter, he declares of Patty, “She was already fully the thing that was just starting to happen to the rest of the street.”  He then makes it clear that he’s speaking to a reader who understands all of this because a reader inevitably lived on that same street; his reader is you and you are middle-class gentrification, no matter who you actually are or what city or town you come from. “The collective task in Ramsey Hill was to relearn certain life skills that your own parents had fled to the suburbs specifically to unlearn, like how to interest the local cops in actually doing their job, and how to protect a bike from a highly motivated thief, and when to bother rousting a drunk from your lawn furniture, and how to encourage feral cats to shit in somebody else’s children’s sandbox, and how to determine whether a public school sucked too much to bother trying to fix it.” Eventually, he concludes, “For all queries, Patty Berglund was a resource, a sunny carrier of sociocultural pollen, an affable bee.”

And with these words we’ve backed out of the drive and begun our trip with this sunny carrier of  sociocultural pollen. Despite my suspicions that Franzen has created his Everywoman the way  Dr. Frankenstein might, stitching together disparate parts to resonate with each segment of his reading public — she’s originally from New York and now living in St. Paul, she’s half WASP,  half Jewish, her original family was upper middle class yet she married a lower middle class guy, she’s the oldest of four and formerly played sports in college, and now she’s the stay-at-home mom of a daughter who is bright and normal and a son who is exceptional — despite the fact that Franzen labors to hit every single key on his piano, I can’t help but to enjoy and appreciate Patty Berglund. Franzen, after all, is a terrific writer, nimble in his plotting, succinct yet thorough in his characterizations, relentlessly topical and usually fun. Franzen has an unerring instinct for the juice of neighborly relations; describing Patty’s rise and inevitable fall, he stops inside a jealous neighbor’s house so a reader can overhear another woman cut Patty to pieces. Best of all, he repeatedly flogs her for the root trait of her eventual demise: Patty is and always has been competitive and at times she’s inept at hiding that fact. Within the lock-step conformity of the middle class, what could possibly be more damning than this? For that jagged truth alone,  Franzen must be appreciated.

Quoting Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in his epigraph, Franzen foreshadows the adultery at the heart of his own winter’s tale, which presumably is the dying season of American empire. Walter, Patty’s husband, is the environmentally-aware guy who rides to an office job weekday mornings on a bike. Around the time his wife flips out over their son’s affair with the slightly older lower-class girl next door, Walter begins to distance himself from his family by becoming more involved in green politics. Soon he’s shuttling back and forth to Washington D.C. and eventually he accepts a position with a private trust protecting the cerulean warbler, a native American songbird which is rapidly disappearing due to removal of mature hardwood forests as well as the presence of household cats (the cerulean warbler has never evolved proper defenses to this non-native species). After Joey has moved in with his girlfriend’s family, after a distraught Patty has consummated then ended her brief affair with Walter’s former-college-roommate, the Berglund family, minus Joey, sets up house in a Georgetown mansion that doubles as headquarters for the Cerulean Mountain Trust.

With his assistant Lalitha, Walter visits his former roommate, Richard Katz, now a cultish rocker — the songs he wrote after the demise of his affair with Patty have catapulted him to fame. Unaware of his wife’s infidelity and hoping Richard will lend celebrity to his own cause, Walter explains his vision of creating a cerulean warbler preserve in West Virginia by first permitting coal extraction via mountain top removal. Walter believes that reclamation following mountain top removal (MTR) will mitigate much of the damage — what’s best about it is the preserve will be safe as no one will ever rip open the mined-out land again. Walter explains his perspective:

What’s given MTR such a bad name is that most surface-rights owners don’t insist on the right sort of reclamation. Before a coal company can exercise its mineral rights and tear down a mountain, it has to put up a bond that doesn’t get refunded until the land’s been restored. And the problem is, these owners keep settling for these barren, flat, subsidence-prone pastures, in the hope that some developer will come along and build luxury condos on them, in spite of their being in the middle of nowhere. The fact is, you can actually get a very lush and biodiverse forest if you do the reclamation right. … But the environmental mainstream doesn’t want to talk about doing things right, because doing things right would make the coal companies look less villainous and MTR more palatable politically.

Walter outlines his understanding of this confluence of finance, government, corporate interests, private investment and environmental cause then explains that this is merely a preliminary before he tackles the real problem: low-density development, fragmentation, and over-population. Reading the ins and outs of what is, for the well-intentioned Walter, an acceptable solution, glimpsing the compromise and deal-making and taint behind simple preservation of land for an endangered species is enough to smog a reader’s mind for days. Unfortunately, it stinks of the truth and this is Franzen’s horrifying point; this is where it’s at in America now, bloated bureaucracy and innumerable interest groups mean absolutely nothing is simple (or sacred). To create his preserve, Walter ends up making a deal so that displaced homeowners will be given jobs at a factory run by LBI, the oilfield services giant and government contractor that manufactures body armor and also happens to employ Walter’s son, Joey. Father and son, then, are caught in the same web… what will they do? 

Despite the urgency of this environmental plot-line, the lifeblood of Franzen’s novel is Patty’s marriage to Walter. Gracefully, compellingly, Franzen offers a reader his understanding of the crucial psychological underpinnings of their marriage, the emotional counterpoint that creates both consonance and discord: Patty’s high school rape, and Walter’s drunk father’s cruelty. Raped by Ethan Post, the son of wealthy friends of her parents, Patty feels abandoned by her parents. A pragmatic lawyer, her father outlines what he believes will be her humiliation, not her rapist’s: “Patty, the people at the party were all friends of his. They’re going to say they saw you get drunk and be aggressive with him. They’ll say you were behind a shed that wasn’t more than thirty feet from the pool, and they didn’t hear anything untoward.” Disappointed, hurt, Patty notes, “You’re not on my side, are you.” After rape and lack of justice, Patty becomes “a real player, not just talent” on the basketball court, a girl who is “no longer on speaking terms with physical pain.”

Her husband’s childhood has been sculpted by a drunk father who favors his first-born son while doing his ample best to beat down his book-loving son, Walter; one of the father’s favored tactics is to demand Walter perform the most humiliating chores at the family-run motel. In order to support his family in his father’s demise, Walter gives up his dream of becoming a filmmaker so that he can work extra jobs while attending law school. When Walter, a natural caretaker, meets the needy Patty, he falls in love yet his knowledge of her rape makes him too sensitive, too careful, too respectful in bed and ultimately not as exciting as the more self-aware Katz. Thus Franzen animates these psychological portraits of Patty and Walter who blindly enter the inevitable crisis of mid-life in which Walter will choose between Patty and his assistant, Lalitha, an Indian-American raised in Missouri by engineer parents.

First seen through Katz’s eyes, who describes her merely as an “Indian chick,” Lalitha is the notable exception in more ways than one within this comedy of errors (or Mistakes, as Patty would have it) among the middle class. I can’t argue with Franzen’s understanding of the separate fate of the one character of color as compared to the other characters. This is his vision after all, and it may very well be the true state of America in the earliest years of the Twenty-First Century. So, too, he may be correct in his understanding of greed as the natural yet unsavory offspring of a union of upper middle class and lower middle class (as embodied by Joey Berglund and Connie Monaghan). I’m not sure his perceptions are unfounded, so much as I fear them; Franzen unfortunately has done his job too well, seduced and implicated his readers too fully, so that seeing the truth played out in fictional form hits too close to home.  

Finally, mention must be given to the title of this novel. Although at first “Freedom” seems both too serious and too sprawling a word for what transpires on these pages, Franzen’s ironic meaning becomes clear by novel’s end. Hemmed in by government, big business, neighbors and the limitations of our own characters, our American freedom is as endangered as that of the cerulean warbler.

 

Off-Off-Broadway in Mumbai

Posted on by

by Howard Pflanzer

How can you produce a brand new controversial American play in Mumbai?  I thought India would be an excellent place to produce and direct my new play, The Terrorist, a timely commentary on the US government policy of detention of South Asians and Muslims and the initiation of the war in Iraq.   The political climate in India was in some ways similar to the US, where the government had passed and implemented, The Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which was modeled on the USA Patriot Act passed after 9/11.  In India as well as the US many “terrorists” were imprisoned without proper charges, access to legal counsel or a fair trial.  When the Congress party returned to power in India several years ago the act was rescinded.                                                                         

            The play is about Frank, who claims to be in security, his girlfriend, Claire, her boss, Roger, and a government agent, Paula, who is trying to find a terrorist conspiracy at all costs. The play explores each character’s particular view of terrorism.  Frank is a self-proclaimed fighter against terrorism, Claire is Frank’s supporter, Roger believes wholeheartedly in the US government’s fight against terrorism and Paula sees a terrorist conspiracy everywhere. Frank, Claire and Roger are ordinary Americans victimized by the US government.  In the end, the persecuted turn on their persecutor, Paula, in a bold reversal of roles.  Some people in the audience felt my ending did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough, while many others applauded the ending as a powerful protest against US government policies.

The Terrorist was presented at the Little Theatre of the National Center for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai for two performances, May 8th and 10th, 2003.  The play with a cast of four Indian actors, had a live tabla (an Indian percussion instrument) composed and performed by a young American musician, Daniel L. Scholnick.

The Terrorist was started at the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois in August 2002.   I read an excerpt to a group of the other artistic residents and several people said “it would stir things up.”  I knew I was on the right track and completed the play in the fall of 2002 before I left for India.    Some revisions and additions were made during the rehearsals for the premiere production in Mumbai.

My liaison at the NCPA, Arundhathi Subramaniam, poet and administrator, whose husband is active in the Mumbai English theatre, read the play with excitement and approved it for production.  She arranged for me to have the Little Theatre for two performances and rehearsal space as needed and available and introduced me to the key staff people.

In my first few weeks in Mumbai, I went to see every new play in English that I could, to meet the writers, directors and actors.   Indian plays written in English are being presented with greater frequency by a growing number of Indian theatre artists.   Writers are finding their voices, writing in English that is neither British nor American, but Mumbai-English, inflected by the rhythms and words of the Hindi and Marathi languages.  And many actors are performing plays in English.

I cast Radhika da Cunha, appearing in a play, Class of ’84, as the government agent, Paula.  I auditioned a number of actors for the part of Frank, finally selecting Darshan Jariwala, who not only performs Indian plays in English, but in Hindi and Marathi.  After I chose him for the part, he was worried about his accent and I told him, “it would be an asset for the part.”   Avantika Akerkar, who was appearing in the Indian premiere of the Vagina Monologues, was cast as Claire.   As Claire’s boss, Roger, I cast Denzil Smith, a Mumbai actor with a wonderful voice who plays contemporary and classical parts.

I developed a production concept for the play that included a live tabla player on stage.  The stage at the Little Theatre was much deeper than it was wide.  I divided the stage into five playing areas: Frank’s workshop, where he is creating his “security” device, Claire and Roger’s office, a street area, a park area and a café.  Other transitional places were spun off from these locations.  The four actors remained seated at the back of the stage in a darkened area when not in a scene, along with the tabla player who performed live throughout the play.  The actors were able to move smoothly from one scene to the other underscored by the tabla.  All the playing areas had shadowy illumination which highlighted the ambiguity of the situations in the play.  The final scene of the play, where the characters are interrogated, was lit by a powerful flashlight, which was aimed at each actor’s face as he or she was questioned.

The fifth actor in the play was a musical instrument, the tabla.  It became a live musical presence.  I had listened to Indian vocal and instrumental music in a number of  Mumbai’s venues before I began rehearsing The Terrorist..   Every type of musical performance I heard used the tabla.  I thought, why not create a contemporary tabla score to emphasize theatrical elements in the scenes and link the scenes in the play.  I would use a traditional Indian instrument in a non-traditional way.  It would be a wonderful way to propel the action.   The composer, Daniel L. Scholnick, was excited by the concept and developed the score while watching the rehearsals.  After the performances, audience members commented how effective the music was in moving the plot along.

During the first few rehearsals, the actors thought the characters were simple because my dialogue is so spare, but as we worked they became challenged by the characters’ interactions.  As we explored their roles and improvised some scenes, the actors began to dig into their parts and complex characters began to emerge who defined their conflicting attitudes towards terrorism.  One of the actresses, Radhika da Cunha, had never done animal exercises in her acting classes, and we worked on her developing dog-like characteristics (listening for and smelling out terrorists) which she seamlessly incorporated into her performance as a government agent.  In the scene, which I dubbed “the discovery of the weapons of mass destruction” scene, Roger, played by Denzil Smith, did a brilliant improvisation underscored by tabla sounds, in which everyday tools: a screwdriver, a pair of scissors and a plastic hair band became extraordinary objects of terrorist menace.

My stage manager, Vijayalaxmi Londhe, went with me to the Chor Bazaar (Thieves Bazaar) in Mumbai to purchase props.  She bargained in Hindi and we bought everything from a powerful flashlight to an electrical switch that was the “security” device Frank was working on.  Going to the Chor Bazaar with its crowded streets and hundreds of shops of Muslim vendors was a theatrical experience in itself.  And I thought about the hundreds of Muslim detainees in the US imprisoned after 9/11.

To publicize the play, I obtained a list of the half dozen writers/editors who covered cultural activities in the Indian English language press and phoned each one personally.  Unlike in New York or other major American cities, it was not necessary to write a press release, but in each case when I spoke to a journalist, I pitched the basic idea of the play and the unusual circumstances of its production.  The Asian Age did a feature with a photo, “The Terrorist Strikes in May”, with a face-to-face interview about me as a playwright/director working in Mumbai, which appeared two weeks before the opening of the play.  The other press pieces were published around the time of the performance.  Midday ran an article, entitled, “Staging a Terrorist” about the subject of the play with a photo of two of the actors.  Afternoon did a feature, “The Terrorist Hits the Marquee” with a photo of me and the cast posed in the rehearsal space.  Briefer articles appeared in The Times of India and The Indian Express, which had profiled me earlier in the year.

To create further interest in the play, three scenes were performed by the actors on the tiny stage of the Tea Centre as part of the COHO Arts Festival in Mumbai to an audience of eighty people who crowded into the space the Saturday before the premiere.   The scenes were well received and this helped to produce a buzz about the play.

On a shoestring budget with great help from Indian theatre people, who worked in the English Indian theatre, the play was rehearsed for five weeks.  I focused on getting the Indian actors to perform as an ensemble and give an American feel to their performances.  Their training in Indian traditional theatre performance techniques helped them to create the stylized feel for the play that I was seeking.  It was a challenge for me to work with the actors to incorporate their techniques into my production but in the end it was greatly enhanced.

A few weeks before the production opened I was told by the director of the American Center, a career diplomat, that they would give me money to produce any other play during this time of the Iraq invasion.  I refused.  I was then asked not to mention the American Center or the Fulbright program as assisting this production in the program and publicity.  The play was officially produced by an Indian foundation under the auspices of the National Center for the Performing Arts where I was a visiting artist.

The Terrorist was performed twice to packed houses.  All the officials from the American consulate turned out including the director of the American Center.   And the Indian Fulbright newsletter did a brief article with a photo about how I had directed a production of The Terrorist with some of Mumbai’s leading actors about “the psychological effects of terrorism” which the play was clearly not about. After each performance there were questions and a discussion of the politics of the play.  Most of the Indian audience members shared my concern about American policies in Iraq and towards the detainees.  I did another short performance piece, Surveillance, which was thematically related to the play.  The Terrorist was documented through photos and a video. After the performances were over, I found out there had never been a premiere of a new American play in Mumbai before.  It seems I had made theatre history way Off-Off Broadway.

Howard Pflanzer was a Fulbright Scholar in India during the spring of 2003.   The Terrorist was given its   American Premiere at the Laurie Beechman Theatre of the West Bank      Café NYC by the Unofficial New York Yale Cabaret (UNYYC) in June 2006.

Ernest Hemingway (A Review of Tao Lin’s Richard Yates)

Posted on by

Since I have like three venues to publish it in, and I told Tao I needed a galley, I feel obliged to write a review of Tao Lin’s novel, Richard Yates. I don’t think I will ever read anything by Richard Yates. Reading Tao Lin has a way of erasing any literary knowledge one had. I eagerly anticipated this release after reading Eeeee Eee Eeee and Shoplifting from American Apparel. He sold shares in this novel to publish it and not have to work at a vegan restaurant while he was writing it.

Richard Yates

I feel not conscious enough of how I’m mimicking Tao Lin’s Style. Tao Lin’s Style is infectious and hypnotic. Writing about Tao Lin in Tao Lin’s style, as The Observer, or rather Christian Lorentzen, did, is hard to resist. I think the Observer was lazy. I approve of that laziness. Of course, as with Hemingway, another “bad” writer whose parody comes easy, and whom Tao Lin namechecks as much as Yates, and includes in the index, the style slips in anyway. While reading Tao Lin I find myself becoming much drier and flatter. I lose my obligation to feel strongly about anything, especially about how I feel about anything.

Tao Lin is indeed kind of a hipster writer. He’s easy to hate. I think when people say something is “polarizing” that thing often itself has an intense focus on neutrality. Some of the key phrases to use in a Tao Lin parody are “neutral facial expression” and “I feel neutral” and “said in Gmail Chat”. If you use these phrases you will be immediately parodying Tao Lin, and you don’t need anything else. Everything he writes is autobiography, or so it seems. Everything is exactly as it seems. It’s just one damn thing after another but there are some interesting elisions and refillings of previous story that are perhaps occuring more in Richard Yates.

There are more changes in Richard Yates from his previous style. Someone must have commented on the names of his characters, like how obvious it is that the main character is always Tao Lin but named like Sam or something. So he named the Tao Lin character Haley Joel Osment and the teenage Jersey girl he met on the internet Dakota Fanning. The ages are about right but the great thing about it is you still can’t actually picture the actors as the characters. I now see “Haley Joel Osment” and that represents a Taiwanese-American hipster writer to me. I wonder whether any kind of defamation charges could be brought but it’s too obviously a stunt. I am willing to honestly believe Haley Joel Osment crossed state borders to statutory rape Dakota Fanning, who is variously self-destructive. I do because those are the characters. There’s really a lot of name-dropping in this, which brings up that issue of how much writers have to be literary historians, or just more culturally aware, or whatever.

I’m afraid that it’s almost a homage to the novel’s namesake that Richard Yates has a pretty clear structure and plot, and particularly that it’s about someone simultaneously epitomizing and feeling alienated from contemporary American society. The story is most of the arc of a codependent relationship. In case you don’t know what that is, it’s when someone stays romantically involved because they feel the other person needs them and the other person (who often has some compulsion or addiction the first person enables) does more of that to get more from the first person. Neither person involved is very good and both are very depressed. What I like about depression in Tao Lin is that it’s not necessarily pathological. Halfway through the book I totally thought he’d impregnated her.

At first it seems like he just emotional abuses her and then it turns out Dakota Fanning’s been secretly binging and purging. I don’t think the “spoiler” concept is relevant here. “Haley Joel Osment” comes across as a total dick even though he does sort of know what to do. I like that Tao Lin does that with not-himself. I like the realism about this couple creating their own little world. I want to use the terms “party girl” and “cheese beast” and have someone understand them. I think Tao Lin is a party girl. I am a party girl. It’s easy to say the attitude is immature and neurotic, and I want to shrug that off as harmless and ubiquitous but the impact on “Dakota Fanning” makes it actually more morally conscious than a parody of Tao Lin. But “Shoplifting” already kind of had that underlying moral message. I think a lot of the couple’s professions of need actually sound kind of weird to me because I feel like every time I’ve said anything like that it was very very self-aware.

I don’t know. A lot of what they, and Tao Lin, do say is self-aware, but so dry that there’s no difference. I always feel like the manuscript was written with a lot less capitalization and punctuation, so it’s gone through that transformation already. Tao Lin definitely is being about neutrality in representation as a direction with an impossible goal. That’s too figurative for a Tao Lin parody. I don’t want to tell you what to do with these books but I do think Tao Lin is important to be able to parody.

I wanted to include some quotes from the book but it lost all the highlights I put in before about 2/3 of the way through and I didn’t want to be biased.

Anyway, I guess I like him because he’s familiar. He steals from places near the place where I work, but doesn’t mention stealing from us, which I appreciate. We have a similar social anxiety and detachment, and have our most emotionally intense experiences through internet chatting. He makes me think “I could do that” but this review was my chance to and I don’t think I could, or want to, and neither could that Observer guy.

Just Kids, a Memoir by Patti Smith: “Because of Robert”

Posted on by

Reviewed by K.A. Sitafalwalla

kim.JPG

Partially a proclamation to the 1970’s, the artists and the derelicts, the rich and poor, the talented and talent-less, “Just Kids” stands as an ode to friendship and love; everything in between. Patti Smith’s memoir is poetic and true with an honesty and straightforwardness that is disguised in her poetry and music. Smith is a sage, a modern day Siddhartha reliving and recounting her experiences with the wisdom only experience and reflection can procure.
Opening the first pages of the stoic purple hardcover book one notices the choice of font, the simplicity of the layout and timelessness of the physicality of a book. The story told is the same: stoic, knowing, and open for a reader to take what he or she needs. The reader finds in the pages a retelling of Patti’s youth, her innocence, drive, ambition and devotion. Although the book is splashed with images of lanky Patti in her 20’s, her voice has slithers of grey and insight. It is as if she had been courting the tale her entire life, rolling it over and over, negotiating, chastising, disbelieving, and when the first words spiraled off her Remington typewriter she finally understood how and why those years of glamorous poverty and community of strangers gave way for the artist within.

We are introduced to young Patti in her home in Chicago and the foundation from which her artistic inclination, intellectual curiosity, and austere simplicity, are rooted. Her father admired the works of Salvador Dali while her mother taught her to kneel down by her bed and pray. Little did Patti, the rebellious punk rocker, know the significance these notions would carry. Years later in the Chelsea Hotel, in the blur of the faceless famous, Dali acknowledged her presence: “You are like a gothic crow.” From Chicago she and her family move to New Jersey; she becomes alienated from the life she was familiar with but this move initiated her bond with literature. Her character deepens, as do her relationships with her siblings; relationships that will keep her grounded and free.

Patti’s steadfast devotion is part of her nature. She never veers too far from poetry, music, or the people whom she loves. Her commitment, inspiration and fortitude are unyielding. Just Kids tells the life and love past of Robert Mapplethorpe. He was a multi faceted artist who showed Patti the life of a true artist. He remains the artist of her life as he continues to be her muse. The memoir fulfills a promise to Mapplethorpe: “Before Robert died, I promised him that I would one day write our story.” The love they shared was unique in that they were kindred spirits, devoted and married to each other by forces beyond explanation. There is a mystical aura to their friendship filled with coincidences and knowing; a kind of trust that comes from beyond the world of matter driven by fate. With their separate artistic visions they complimented each other, challenged each other and depended on each other. They found balance in chaos, a routine of Nescafe, “bad” doughnut shops, and a muse in one another. As a couple they waxed and waned but their foundation for an everlasting friendship had been sealed.

Historical moments – markers in time –ground the story. We hear the artists’ reply to the Son of Sam horrors, the Kent State Massacre, the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. Smith observes the change in the air, the attitude shift from the peace peddling hippies to the transcendentalist beatnik poets to the defiant, questioning artists who will become the forbearers of Punk and the underground downtown art movement of the early 70’s. The disorder of the changing face of America stood as comrade, instigator, and bystander to Patti and Robert’s own relationship. The reader witnesses their many phases, their hunger and need for each other and mutual understanding of an unyielding bond.

Just Kids is a salute to an uncompromising artistic ethic she and Mapplethorpe pursued. It is a celebration of youth and the peculiar satisfaction of freedom regardless of how many burnt cups of coffee, day old rolls, or second-hand stores one must endure. For it was not a matter of subjectification, it was a matter of being free in New York City, free to board in the Chelsea Hotel, free to sleep in Tompkins Square Park, free to express the vision of the artists’ truth.
Patti Smith’s mythic storytelling might come as a revelation, her references to God and the power of prayer, her religious upbringing, and the faith that embossed her life gave her certain buoyancy –trust in herself and trust in progress: the journey of her life. Her rowdy stage performances of the 70’s and critique of socio-political happenings hardly fit with the geeky bookstore clerk of her youth. Smith shares her excitement in feeling the changed energy in the air when Bob Dylan attended his first Patti Smith performance. She calls it an “initiation,” as if she needed that nod from another poet whom she respected to confirm, validate, and encourage her own artistic quest.

Smith offers an intimate account of a bourgeoning art scene in downtown New York. She is straightforward, honest, and romantic. Her commitment to art is both a dedication and allegiance to the many that inspired her: Rimbaud, Genet, Dubuffet, Piaf; and the many that challenged, protected and collaborated with her: Dylan, Ginsberg, Shepherd, Hamill. But among them all it was Robert Mapplethorpe that taught her to see and practice through the lens of an artist.

I Need That Record Store: Retail as Club Membership

Posted on by

by Kurt Gottschalk

I first heard about it when I was about 12 — a store where Kiss albums could be procured for about a dollar less than at the mall; a store that, strangely, wasn’t in the mall. It wasn’t far, but it did mean asking my mother to make another trip.

Things seemed different at this new store. It wasn’t as crowded, but people were talking to each other and the guy behind the counter even asked me about what I liked. Before long a relationship had been established — between myself and Danny and John, two of the clerks — but also between myself and the store. I went in every weekend with my $5.86 (almost 25% of the paycheck from my after-school job) and bought what they told me to buy. I might object that things seemed too weird (David Bowie, Devo), but I’d always oblige and ultimately never felt misguided. (On some weeks I’d save a few dollars by perusing the cut-out bin, unknowingly buying into a mob ring by doing so. I didn’t know about that underworld relationship until years later, after reading William Knoedelseder’s highly recommended Stiffed: A True Story of MCA, the Music Business, and the Mafia.)

The difference between the store at the mall and the store down by, well, another shopping plaza became central to my adolescent identity. Danny and John not only crafted my musical development, taking me by the hand and guiding me through art rock and into punk and new wave, but they became the figureheads for what would become my circle of friends in high school. In a small, conservative city in central Illinois, even listening to Elvis Costello or The Clash put one on the outs. Weirdos certainly weren’t heteros (somehow “Devo” even became slang for “gay”). I met other young music obsessives Danny and John had been grooming, and we came to be friends. We taped each other’s records and tried to form bands. The store at the mall no doubt did more business than the one in the plaza. They had all the Top 40 albums on the wall and the latest hits on the sound system. But they weren’t there to have conversations or to tailor recommendations. And they certainly weren’t there to recognize the kids with the burning curiosity and help them along their ways. They were there to move product.

That store at the mall might be something like what Internet record shopping is today. Certainly there are those who would argue that any number of online-community models replicate the brick-and-mortar experience (and in truth my interest here is more in exercising a bit of nostalgia than in proving them wrong). The two worlds are certainly parallel. People who started purchasing recorded music only after the Santana / Matchbox 20 merger have their own ways of learning and acquiring. And they have their ways of begging, borrowing and stealing, if on a larger scale, just as we had ours. (A Buddy Holly cassette held in one hand at JC Penney, a George Jones in the other while the coat is put on, the tapes left midway in the sleeves because I just had to know what they sounded like). But for those who came of age fondling vinyl, the record store was a shrine, a temple for the merchandising of art that cannot be replaced by virtual experience.

I went on to work both sides of the divide, or all three if you count a life spent haunting stores. As a co-founder of the online store Squidco and, currently, a member of the collective operating the ESP Records storefront in Brooklyn, I’ve worked the culture of both Internet and physical stores. Online stores may be more convenient, and are sometimes cheaper, but nothing matches the clubhouse of the actual shop.

That club feeling is a big part of what Gary Calamar and Phil Gallo’s Record Store Days: From Vinyl to Digital (Sterling Publishing) is about. The book is a well deserved glorification of the independently-owned shop, full of photos and stories about record store proprietors. It makes for a bit of a sad celebration: In large part is comes off like being at a wake where no one talks about the cause of death. Avoiding the sad state of record sales until 175 pages in makes the book seem a bit hollow, although the story of the dying industry in the face of Internet file-sharing is discussed and written about so much that it might be just as well. When Calamar and Gallo finally do get to the state of the industry, they handle it succinctly. It’s not an economics textbook, and they do a reasonable job of covering the issue and getting out again. And while the business end of the record business isn’t really the thrust of the book, the authors also include a good and concise discussion of the controversies around Soundscan, the point-of-sale data collection system that replaced the copies-shipped method of charting record sales in the 1990s, causing a major shift in the Billboard charts.

The rest of the colorful volume is full of love letters and mash notes, all torn from the diary of defining cool by commercial means and related by merchants and musicians. Susanna Hoffs remembers naming her band The Bangles so she could be among her favorites in the “B” section. (It’s my favorite section as well, although Hoffs may not have been shopping for Derek Bailey and Anthony Braxton). Robyn Hitchcock reveals the “fetish element” of collecting punk singles for the picture sleeves. And my fellow WFMU DJ Michael Shelley recalls mirroring my JC Penney act, going to the New Rochelle Mall to pocket Nick Lowe and XTC 7”s. (New York clearly had cooler malls than Illinois).

For the most part, the book reads like a bunch of guys hanging out at a record store swapping stories, which in a sense underscores what the local store is all about. A more incisive look at the ins and outs of making and selling records, can be found in the documentary I Need That Record! The Death (or Possible Survival) of the Independent Record Store. Brendan Toller’s film, available on DVD from MVD Visual, is a good history entertainingly told. In 77 minutes, Toller covers the disappearance of local stores and ties that to a corporatization that reaches back to the radio payola scandal of the early 1960s and up to the current day, where Wal-Mart represents 20% of all national record sales.

As succinctly put by Legs McNeil, former editor of both Punk and Spin magazines, “When you’ve got accountants running the record labels, you’re not going to have very good music.” Or, as Glenn Branca says in a boisterous interview, “Criminals, thieves and bastards are attracted to making money.”

As with Record Store Days, I Need That Record does a good job taking a national focus, representing New England to California and the oases in between. Toller is a dynamic storyteller, using cartoon graphics, film and animation clips, and old TV spots (including some vintage MTV) to frame a complicated story where the villains aren’t always apparent and the crimes not completely clear. The case Toller makes against corporate control of distribution of what is, after all, supposed to be art is ultimately quite scathing.

The future of the music industry remains, of course, a gapingly open question. But at least for the generations who didn’t grow up buying and listening to music on a computer, the record-store clubhouse hasn’t been replaced yet. As Rand Foster, proprietor of Long Beach, CA, store Fingerprints, tells Calamar and Gallo, “The important part of retail is the culture you’re selling. It’s the museum element that stimulates people.”

Greater New York Is Fucking

Posted on by

review by Janet Bruesselbach

Apparently every five years PS1, MoMA’s converted-school extension in Long Island City, has a huge group show featuring local artists. While this may be only the second Greater New York, they seem pretty intent on the historicity of the thing. One of the biggest contradictions of having a “local artists” show in this city is that most of the artists will be either immigrants or part-time residents. Perhaps the joke is that the entire world is really Greater New York.

PS1 is disorienting. It’s nice to have another context besides Art to see art in, but the elementary school vibes throw things weirdly and I always feel like I’m missing something. But hey, it’s one of those “pay what you want” places, so the only thing you have to lose is your time and maybe a buck.

Okay, so the worst thing is that there’s too much video in this show. Video is by nature a selfish medium, not only because it demands time but because it requires technological support. I thought I would feel more envy of the artists included and wonder why I wasn’t included, or wonder why I wasn’t curating. I felt a twinge when I saw that one of the videos included someone I knew in college, but I didn’t feel any of that envy at the show, because I wouldn’t want to be the person who had made or chosen these things. I hate cool people.

This is the retrospective room.

It became one of those “find a redeeming thing” games. Individually most of the pieces had something going for them, or, at least, those that weren’t goofy videos. If there isn’t something funny about art, if there isn’t a joke to “get” or “buy” about it, I tend to skim over it, maybe just because I’m biased against romanticism and transcendence.

Then again, maybe this show could use some transcendence. Artists are perverts. The walls were full of glory holes. At all levels, for all sizes and shapes of perverts! And yet, two rooms had “adult content” warnings, for when things were more than bluntly suggestive. The whole thing is a dirty joke and the biggest influence on my entire generation has been internet porn. But maybe that’s just me? And why don’t I like the filth more? I usually do.

DETEXT was an installation that shaped the show. I only later found out that DETEXT had removed the “con” from what it was doing, intentionally, and that all the phrases in giant letters in hallways were excerpted from spam messages. The museum has 4 levels (0, 1, 2, 3) and it seemed like the level of innuendo in the phrases corresponded with the levels.

Here are some things I liked:

Tommy Hartung is good conceptually but I get the feeling he outsources the craft. Some drawings a friend did for him weren’t very crafty, either.

Michele Abeles’s photography

Ishmael Randall Weeks had a very scientific feel.

Nearby on the second floor, and whose label I couldn’t find (making them all the more confusing) were a couple of museum-style stands with bits of archaeological-looking artifacts in them, but all pretty obviously made out of contemporary cheap materials. The artifacts were mostly fimo clay.
Everything by the Atlas of Radical Cartography in a third floor hallway also had a research feel that fit very well in the school building. I particularly remember copies of maps with “latino” and “america” labeling two general (and reversed) areas of the Americas which had been given to people crossing the Mexico-U.S. border and undergone evident wear. There were “maps” there with significant research behind them that remind me of how awesome Jen Dalton is.

Ashley Hunt: “The rich can be rich because they got tired of being poor.” That reminds me. If you haven’t been listening to David Byrne’s Here Lies Love you should.

This is going to look really dated in 5 years, Debo Eilers. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Brody Condon’s video of a smurf tribe finally makes that wooden sculpture outside the Hamburger Banhof make sense.

An artist with the hip-as-dick name Liz Magic Laser displayed her purse taken apart by a surgery and dissection robot, the “Da Vinci System”.

Hank Willis Thomas’s isolation of depictions of blacks in mainstream magazine ads filled a room and held our attention for way longer than anything else. If nothing else it showed that progress is never continuous and always double-edged at least.

David Brooks is a rainforest conservationist.

Some of the only painting featured included Dave Miko and Leidy Churchman, whose “Three Beards” reassures me that there is nothing more macho than two cocks in your ass.

The Bruce High Quality Foundation can always be relied upon to be sickeningly hip, filling one room with artists’ genitals and another with a pedestal exchange program, “Perpetual Monument to Students of Art”, in which clean sculpture pedestals are substituted for used ones from local schools throughout the show. It sort of looks like the holocaust memorial in Berlin. Anyone who’s done gallery installation will like stuff like that. All the jack-off-in-a-box glory hole installation elements, not so much.

Aki Sakamoto’s “skewed lies / Central Governor” had a great steampunk, participatory mood and kept the basement feeling like a paranoid secret center of operations we children had illicitly discovered. Also there was goldleaf.

And uniforms:

My date said “I feel like my time has been raped”.