Some of those who cast off religion (as being insufficiently hip) but continue to experience spiritual hunger wind up plunging into such ethereal realms of soul-questing as astrology, Scientology, fortune-telling, white witchery and New Age blatherbloat. Before long they’re channeling Rock Hudson and Bella Abzug and joyously waggling their hands like Yes-God-ing gospel singers; and their throbbing souls (which they had said they didn’t “believe in” anymore) are ripe for plucking by manipulating apostles. Gore Vidal and Joyce Carol Oates wrote novels about this rhapsodic idiocy that will scare the hell out of you.
Archive for the ‘art’ Category.
Speaking of Gore Vidal, he didn’t look like a wretched old Queen until he started launching the little bee bees that are all he has remaining from his blunderbuss days as the pinup girl of Marxian polemics. Oddly enough, I met him in 1990 at a fundraiser during his surreal—it could have been directed by Fellini—Senatorial campaign in California, and he never looked me in the eye, though all I said to him was, “How are you?” On the other hand, his sulky lips and aristocratic jaw worked perpetually as though he’d got some peanut particles lodged inside the crevices of his teeth. Aha, I thought. A man who’s not comfortable with his masquerade. (When they asked me, “What about the money?”, on my way out, I replied, “I’m the wrong flavor, friend. I bleed red. I was just here to see the bon vivant and litterateur, not the hard-charging candidate.”)
I was a phenomenon of rather far-fetched notability when I was thirteen: a pubescent white boy residing in a middling suburb of a fair-to-middling city in the South in the early 1950s whose ardently embraced role model, hero and highest god was the ever-laughing black musician and performer Louis Armstrong, the self-taught (musically and every other way) son of a prostitute plying the night-side of New Orleans, the greatest musical improviser since Beethoven, the most important figure in American music in the 20th century (rivaled probably only by Stravinsky in the world), a cultural revolutionary, a marijuana devotee and laxative-consumer extraordinaire. So what did I know, right? Well I knew this: What I loved about Satchmo as a young teen, and I do mean loved, I later confirmed to be the sine qua non of the greatest art man produces—-the joyous making of something new, brilliant and affecting from the nondescript raw materials of everyday existence. Pops’ bucket didn’t have a hole in it.
The artist and the intellectual ought to fear decadence more than ignorance. Ignorance is a quality that enlightenment may ameliorate, whereas decadence is a condition curable only by despair following a catastrophe.
The concept of Man espoused by the ancient Greeks is for me the most compelling model in all of thought and art. I mean the idea that an individual is a force field of capabilities alignable by the principle of harmony.
A Lifetime’s Love and Toil Distilled: There is nothing that affects my heart as piercingly and sweetly as an old lady’s voice raised in song. And when there are several of them and the song is a hymn, I believe I’m listening to a choir of angels-in-the-making practicing for Graduation Day.
One of the ways a hack differs from an artist is by not wanting to put out anything there isn’t already an audience for.
Ambitions of the Young. I: Listening to some young people talk about their “plans”—to become rock stars, movie stars, CEOs, media magnates, big-bucks athletes, television celebrities—I am reminded of those late-night infomercials which purport to show you how to make millions and millions of dollars in a matter of hours: “First you buy downtown Cincinnati….” The target audience doesn’t know enough to grasp the flagrant absurdities of palaver like this, because they’ve never considered what their dreams entail. “I didn’t want to ‘be a writer,’” said William Faulkner. “I wanted to write.”
Pith and Wit: The only advice I have for novice writers is to practice saying the same thing in as many different ways as he or she can think of and invent. (Consult Act I of Cyrano de Bergerac, the scene concerning varieties of descriptions.) When a writer wants to say something, he wants to say it in a particular way, giving it emphasis and shading, tone and specificity. He wants his phrasing to marry energy, incisiveness and force; he wants to fuse pith and wit.
Hollywood, Cradle of the Gold-Plated Castrato: A semi-tropical desert become a verdant fantasy park despite the absence of actual weather through the beguiling sorcery of agricultural irrigation. The altar of tasteless excess on which the carcass of Integrity has long since blanched in the sun. A hyperbolic monument of strident vibrating neon to all the cheap souls exterminated by the treacheries of art commerce. Accurate to the smallest detail, faithful only to the spirit of rapine. The town where no means, “Offer me some more money,” and yes means, “But I get to fuck you first.” Where people walk backwards in order to see the knives coming. Where egos drift serenely across the empyrean like dirigibles. Where slack-jawed women enthrall themselves from the looking-glass above the bed while their hairy-backed producers seek to elude their own perfidy by stuffing their entire bodies into the crevice of the Rotting Goddess. Where chicken-liver shakes its booty at Giorgio, and Rolls takes a dump on Mercedes. Where “opportunity missed” means a body is still on its feet. Where the values in the screenplays are guessed at by the self-mutilated eunuchs who not only can’t get their values up anymore, but can’t remember how it ever felt to have values. Where minimal self-respect requires the bloody abolition of all the other sleazoids doing business in this town. And where the Nine Muses alighted from the train in 1939 to get a feel for the place, but within the hour reentered the train and departed, never to grace these inhospitable precincts again.
A natural athlete doing anything, but the simpler the better, say drinking a glass of water, is the most beautiful sight in the world.
The Idea of Phart: An amalgam of “phony” plus “art”, this term designates the exhibitions of the little nothing self-promoting charlatans who lack even the minimal artistry necessary to make it in the art-is-a-major-investment sweepstakes. Their “work” may also be described as “tabloid art” because the little preening suck-ass nothings vie for the public’s attention on the basis of sensationalism. Artistically, on the other hand, they operate on the basis of anti-imagination: 42-miles of fuchsia-tinted Saran Wrap unspooling across the highlands of Bulgaria; Jesus in a bottle of piss together with the Virgin Mary sculpted out of dogshit; 36 amputated titties in eleven rows of three plus another three on the ceiling; the actual corpse of an obese grandmother asphyxiated by the action of her support-hose cutting off her circulation; six little boys dressed as nuns throwing darts at The Artist Himself while the latter creates profane tattoos out of his flesh wounds; a python in a maze wriggling its way towards a day-old puppy at the terminus. Speaking qualitatively, what is the difference between this bathetic junk and a freak show at the local fairground or, for that matter, Ripley’s Believe It or Not? In our great land it’s not what you do that counts, it’s what you call what you do.
At a minimum, 90% of the people who call themselves “film critics” are nothing more than journeyman reviewers, likely to praise one movie and dispraise another for the same set of reasons; that’s if they’re not just flacks. Reviewers tell us why they like or don’t like a movie, but the title of critic should be reserved for those who explicate what they perceive as working or going wrong in a film as measured against the filmmaker’s intentions, in terms of technical methodology, narrative art, imagery and the actors’ performances (as distinct from their picturesqueness). The actual function of reviewers is to help potential audience members decide if they want to see a movie, so the personal orientation is not at all out of place. I only object to them when they overreach as far as their job descriptions are concerned. Tell it like it is, brother. If I can’t trust you to be honest about yourself, why would I listen to anything you have to say about a film?
The word “aphorism” contains a wonderful image and a potent idea. It means “a tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion,” and its derivation is from the Greek verb aphorizein, to limit or define; the verb itself consists of two components, apo (away, different) and horizon (boundary). What I love the most about foreign-language study is the way it transports you into another culture and, if you choose, another time, where “they do things differently.” I can easily imagine reclining on a cliffside above the sunstruck Aegean Sea (lapping interplay of azure and cobalt) in the third millennium B.C., drowsily observing the passage of a merchant galley close to the horizon, when a trio of sea gulls swerves into view; I follow the wheeling birds on their upward flight, and after they have gone I still watch the sky, but I haven’t forgotten the ship and the birds. I find I don’t need literally to see these anymore in order to examine them. I am thinking about them. Soon I begin to envision their essential shapes without the clutter of log-line, oars and feathers… Later I will grasp that I abstracted those shapes, drawing them in my mind as more efficient constructs than my eyes by themselves were able to discern. An interlude such as this might well have seen the birth of three thousand years of Western rationality, the primary force shaping our understanding of earth, all that’s on it, and the universe beyond. For my experience of that moment, I am indebted to the evocative and clarifying powers of language. Aphorisms were first written by Hippocrates (devisor of the Hippocratic Oath) as a method of concisely stating medical principles, his first aphorism is famous: Life is short, and art is long.
Huge personal anguish: Today (12/19/02) I’m forced to see my prose for what it is: puerile, inadequate, inept, anemic, bathetic, vapid and clumsy-booted. I have just finished reading a column—the first of his I’ve seen—by James Lileks. If I used a pen to write with, I’d break it. As it is, I can’t destroy the thinkbox, because it belongs to my daughter. I’ll have to suffer my humiliation before its mooted, mocking visage.
Narrative fantasy (think Hitchcock in this case) needs two things indispensably: brilliant artifice and an evocation of emotions conveyed in a way that grounds them in the psyche. Without the former, our emotions are insufficiently objectified; they remain amorphous and are not successfully culminated, exorcized and plainly viewed in the aftermath. Without the latter, the artifice sticks out like a brittle, skeletal, slapped-together construct reminding us of a Tinker Toy windmill, pathetic and silly and all the more so as the plot continues permutating pointlessly, irritating us more than anything else (cf. Minority Report). We never assent to such a narrative because it never jibes with our interior sense of what comprises psychic reality. In tandem, however, the universal emotions and the expressive artifice support and energize each other, making for a slam-bang ride on the toboggan run known as Galloping Dementia.
I want to write at the intersection of the sensibility and the mind.
Vladimir Nabokov had a hell of an idea. I’ll reconstruct what I believe to be his thinking: If I could just get the brain, or rather the mind, out of the way, I could light the sensibility up like a Christmas tree and take the reader’s emotions on a real sleigh ride. But the mind imposes patterns of its own stemming from its expectations and preconceptions. Those puerile patterns interfere with my patterns—and thus with my ability to strike directly at the heart. How might I divert and occupy the mind so I can work my sorcery? I know what I can do. I’ll give the mind some intellectual games to keep busy with, and I will make them so devilishly complex—what with puns, word games, brain teasers and the most obscure references imaginable—that the donkey of all organs will become oblivious of what’s going on in the rest of the person. Surely V.N. was the greatest fiction writer of the second half of the 20th century.
Today the world adores the nose-thumbing slut Madonna. It used to adore the exuberant sex-toy Marilyn Monroe along with the sultry teen sex-toy Brigitte Bardot and the stylish hot mama Rita Hayworth. Before that the world adored the sophisticated worldly woman Myrna Loy. And still earlier it adored the virginal waif Mary Pickford. Such is the “popular history” of the world since the beginning of the last century.
When the researchers advised parents to expose their children to music in order to promote an increase in their intelligence, they did not really have in mind the songs of Britney Spears and The Backstreet Boys; those will take your child’s brain from age 3 back to age 2 again as quickly as a Nicholas Cage marriage is over with. The kind of music the researchers were talking about is the music of such obscure historical wraiths as Beethoven, Bach, Mozart and Hayden, which is to say, music of some complexity. Unfortunately for the kids, nobody had ever thought to promote the parents’ intelligence.