Category: Film

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Editing and Martinis

I worked on the sound for my Tremor video today, and am perhaps 1/4 of the way through with the editing. It’s very challenging, sequencing these images in time, instead of on a wall. With my grids, the images relate to each other as a complete abstract visual experience that disintegrates into detail. I’m doing the opposite with the video, the narrative coming together slowly from the sequencing, and the sound manipulating how you read the images. It’s really thrilling.

Tonight it’s martinis and laptop movies in bed. Just me and Jean-Luc Godard. (In Praise of Love–a second viewing after falling asleep last time). Last night I watched an early Douglas Sirk film, Scandal in Paris, which was more Lubitsch-y that Sirk-y, Sirk not quite finding himself in the material, although the 15 seconds of over-the-top-ness were clearly his.

Okay, back to my olive.

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Guston, Turrell, Louie, Masumura, Mishima and Me

Finally made it to the Philip Guston retrospective this weekend–remarkably moving work for such a limited iconography. Get thee to the museum, and don’t forget to see James Turrell’s equally remarkable Nada, a light installation on display on the second floor. Upon entering the darkened room, and after a few disorienting minutes, soft light falling on the left and right walls becomes visible. A few more moments, and a rectangle slowly appears, straight ahead. At first it seems like the wall is painted maybe a slightly different shade of white, or a painting, but presented very cinematically. The top and bottom lines of the rectangle appear very solid, while the sides seem to blend in with the walls. As you get closer, the flat rectangle gives way to an illusion of depth, but without lines or shadows. Curious about this, I drew closer and put my hand through the rectangle, which turned out to be an opening into another space, lit slightly brighter than the other room, but with absolutely no depth or seams, just empty space. Nothingness.

Also on display is a very large exhibition of very large luscious color photos by my former teacher, Reagan Louie, of Asian prostitutes, beautifully, lovingly, and inertly photographed. I left learning nothing really about them, other than that they have very colorful rooms and seem to lounge around all day nude on beds or in baths and never seem to have sex.

I also finally got to see Masamura’s Afraid to Die starring Yukio Mishima! Mishima, sadly, was not the greatest actor, but what a hot little number. His greatest acting role was as one of a pair of lovers turned to wax in Black Lizard. You’d think that Mishima would have said something about the script, but it was fun for its lurid color and fabulous death scene. One yakuza keeps scratching his pubic area, too, very prolonged rubbings, perhaps to warn us of the crabs that come with a life of crime? I went through an intense Mishima phase in my early twenties, very affected by his Sea of Fertility tetralogy–life’s struggle revealed as an illusion. “Life’s a big joke, and there’s no punch line…” Marie Windsor cries after being shot by her husband Elisha Cook, Jr. in Kubrick’s The Killing, before keeling over. After several weeks I moved on to Mishima masturbating to Saint Sebastian, where I’ve been ever since.

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Labor Day Weekend Spew

Le Divorce with Bob visit former lover in the psych ward Chinese at House of Nanking Freaky Friday with Phil what a great guy and Victor always bubbly and bright Party Monster Bob again and Bruce Boone the translator of Pasqual Quinard with a cane now and Victor again designed new Marjorie Wood Gallery exhibition for Nick Dong re-edited his videos 36 megabytes are too many megabytes Big Chris in the studio nest cyber fun on iSpQ Paul Hot Italian furry belly in San Jose think Iberian bear is just adorable re-designed the opening animated sequence Samovar for tea and lunch with Nick and Bob yet again some work in the garden visit former lover again in the psych ward heard from my gallery in Boston no show this year much anxiety I’m going to work out now Big Chrissy but he’s got a deadline perhaps tomorrow after editing and dinner with Dean Smith otherwise Thursday not enough visits to the orgasmatron now back to my book goodnight I’d love to have a Harem for my 40th birthday could someone organize this please except for Big Chris’ not enough Big Chrissy’s sisters I’ll be 40 in 2 years did you know I did say that I was going to read my book didn’t I here I go…

I hope you all had a nice weekend. Nighty night.

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Movie Monday

I saw American Splendor last night, which I really liked. Harvey Pekar told his own story, and actors acted it out, mimicking the device of his comic books, telling his story through a representation of himself. It worked quite well, the actors were exaggerated just enough to distance themselves from the real people, and it was quite moving and very witty. On his first date with his future wife, he takes her back to his dump of a place. She shrugs and says “I’ve seen worse.” After their first kiss she runs to the bathroom to throw up, mistakes WD-40 for air freshener, and after he offers her some Chamomile tea, she emerges from the bathroon and says “Could we skip the courtship and just get married?”

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Do You Already Know What I’m Going to Post?

I finally saw The Matrix Reloaded tonight. I liked it as much as I thought I would, and I disliked it as much as I thought I would. But did I choose to dislike it, or did I like it because I chose to like it? I saw it on the IMAX screen. Laurence Fishburne’s pores were as big as my head. Carla Harryman is staying with us for the next week. (The LAB is producing one of her operas in September.) She and I agreed that we probably would have liked the movie better if Ray Harryhausen had created the special effects and the writers had ditched the silly narrative.

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LAB show coming up, Puppy- and Muscrat Love

Glen Helfand, our cute local critic is curating a 20th anniversary show for the LAB, and has invited me, and some 19 others who have had solo exhibitions there over the past 20 years to participate. I first showed there in 1992 (‘ish), a very large installation/gender spectacle/showdown called High Noon. Glen asked if I’d like to revisit the piece for the show, and I’m thinking of proposing something containing similar conflicts that I explored in High Noon, but starring the inhabitants of the new West, my furry West. The show opens in October. Mark your calendars, and stay tuned for details…

Tonight I dogsat for my neighbor Arnie. His dog’s name is Shimon, and I am in love. We ate burritos, drank a bottle of wine, and watched No Man’s Land and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning together. Arnie came home to us in a tangle of arms and paws on the living room floor. I had passed up a last-minute opportunity to have dinner with Toirac, a famous Cuban painter whom I met in Havana a few years ago and who’s in town, only because Bob has so unsettled me over the past few days that I didn’t think I could be around him without the evening quickly dissolving into Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe–well, it already had for starters. I needed a non-human companion for the evening, and Shimon didn’t mind having a soused Liz Taylor for company.

Muscrat Love, the song by Captain and Tennile, is buzzing in my head tonight. I haven’t heard it in years, and only chanced upon a brief snippet of it several months ago, so it’s a faded sort of memory of it that is serenading me, but Toni’s sincerity and lush voice, and that bizarre electronic muscrat sound toward the end have seized me in this iron vice of sugary pop innocence and nostalgia.

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The Good, the Bad, and Eli Wallach’s Cute Butt!

Victor and Chris and I saw Waiting for the Friedmans yesterday morning at the Empire, recently reborn as a pseudo art- indie- film house, and a good thing, as it’s only a hop skip and a jump away from Big Chrissy’s. The film made a point of showing how pliable and elusive truth is, even to oneself. I left wanting to believe that no crime had been committed, but feeling that the father’s clandestine desire for boys had perhaps produced an inner guilt that led to an acceptance of his fate.

Earlier, on the way to Chris’ I was unable to get out of my garage, because a dozen cop cars had surrounded my hill due to some guy a few doors up who was holding a gun to his old boyfriend’s head, threatening to kill him. How inconsiderate. I called Chris and asked him to pick me up. No one was murdered, and we made it to the show on time. Sadly, things like this happen all too frequently in my little corner of the Castro (Pacific Northwest or bust, anyone?). Since I moved to this house, in 1987, I’ve found a naked guy in my garbage can (they sent an all-female swat team to extract him from his new home), had 4 runaway trucks fly down the hill and smash into cars, 2 of which bounced into my side garden and smashed it to bits, been the victim of a stalker whose actions unwittingly led to an insurance-financed rehabilitation of the front of my house and new terrazzo stairs (!), encountered, but not joined, numerous people having sex in the side entry to my house (before I installed motion detector lights) where I have also found numerous spent condoms and needles over the years (I didn’t mind the public sex, but the needles and spoogy condoms were too inconsiderate), been burgled, robbed, and had my car and bicycle stolen. And this is a good neighborhood.

Anyway, it’s great to live so close to the Castro Theater. Last night I saw The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, for the first time on a big screen. The credits alone were like a rollercoaster ride, and then those huge faces filling the screen. It was really Eli Wallach’s film–he was great, broadly comic and only half menacing, and certainly not the “ugly” that he’s supposed to be, and the character that you spend the most time with. We were even treated to a flash of his ass as he gets out of the tub. Most spaghetti westerns seem to be sprinkled with those little titillating moments of briefly exposed dripping body parts. If I ever make a movie, I’m going to be thrown off of a horse by some guy, in the distance, run straight up to the camera so that my beautiful face fills it up, and spitting, scream “Youfilthyrat!” really fast. And do that petulant aspiration that actresses like Claudia Cardinale in One Upon a Time in the West do when the camera zooms in on their quivering lips as they’re forcibly but readily about to be kissed.

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Boring Fourth of July Weekend Update

I went up to Guerneville for a few days earlier in the week, Monte Rio, actually, with Bob, but got back into town in time to see the fireworks with Big Chris from Twin Peaks last night. The Russian River’s gorgeous right now, with the fog just off the coast keeping things a little nippy. Some really good restaurants are popping up here and there. I finally got a good meal at the Village Inn, rack of lamb and crab cakes, and a spectacular river view. Next door, at the Highland Dell, a new Italian Restaurant has opened that’s supposed to be really good, and Graton, which has been nothing more than an intersection for years, has burst onto the scene with three new restaurants, one of which, the Willow Wood Market Cafe, we supped at with Stanley and thoroughly enjoyed. The humpy straight daddies outnumbered the gay ones this trip, with every other one acknowledging my visual undressing with an affectionate nod my way. Coming up through Marshall, after barbequed oysters in Tomales, over the pristine Marshall-Petaluma Road, the scent of fennel and dried grass in the hot air, I passed through Petaluma and picked up a great new shelving unit, unmarked, but very much in the style of Gilbert Rohde, probably 30’s or 40’s, with an unusual inwardly canted door in the center. I scoured the Gravenstein Highway for Jalan, but came home empty handed.

Two Reeses over the past few days; stepson Reese’s concert at the Boys’ Chorus camp in Healdsburg, and then tonight Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde 2 at the Metreon Center, which was fun. The franchise will surely have her in the White House by Legally Blonde 6, if not sooner. Reese Witherspoon has steamrolled down a career path that has produced progressively less interesting and challenging roles for her, following her brilliant performances in Freeway andElection, although I’m looking forward to her Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair. I haven’t been a-movie-ing much lately. I did see The Right Stuff with BC last night, and thought the editing was fantastic, and loved all the bureaucratic humor.
This is really a boring post, isn’t it? Fact is, I’m just bored. And I hate my new haircut.

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There’s Always Tomorrow

The PFA in Berkeley is currently running a Douglas Sirk festival. On father’s day, Emily and I saw a stellar film, There’s Always Tomorrow, which paired Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, 12 years after their fatal tryst in Double Indemnity (1944). This film was about a bored father and toy manufacturer, MacMurray, whose children and wife take him for granted, into whose life the enchanting former employee Stanwyck reappears, many years after fleeing with no notice to her boss, with whom she had fallen in love, unbeknownst to him. She’s now a successful dress designer, in town for a conference where she’s delivering a speech, and she comes back conveniently just as he’s falling apart. They spend a weekend together, quite accidentally, and quite innocently, at a sunny ranch where MacMurray is scheduled to have a business meeting, and where Stanwyck is delivering her speech, but MacMurray’s older son happens upon them and assumes his father’s having an affair. MacMurray does indeed fall in love, and later in the film, rushes over to Stanwyck’s hotel and tells her he loves her. Truly a woman’s film, but from the perspective of the husband, whose love for another woman is explained as being the fault of the ungrateful kids and the wife who’s too concerned with her duty to the rest of the family. Everything turns out fine, of course, with hubby and wife and kids reunited and secure in the comfort of the family structure, and Stanwyck on the plane to New York, tears on her cheek, leaving her true love, but with the knowledge that it was a love that could never come to be. The son also ritually passes into manhood with a more complete understanding of the complexity of love and duty. The film was filled with cliches, the entire dialogue for instance, and all the characters, but Sirk somehow convinces us of his world and draws us into it. The photography also evokes classic film noir motifs with harsh shadows in the oppressive house, followed by bright outdoor light for the liberating weekend with Stanwyck. Stanwyck is an inversion of the classic femme fatale, luring Fred MacMurray not away from his wife, but back to her. She, for instance, confronts the children strongly when they ask her to get out of town, asking them how they could blame their father for loving another woman when it’s THEIR fault!

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Evil Chris 2

I saw Cremaster 3 this afternoon, which I really liked, and Matthew Barney is just too cute, I never thought I would ever say either of those last 2 thoughts out loud, but he’s won me over. I put aside the hype, the most important artist of his generation bunk, and was just dazzled. There’s so much to think about, the images are so intriguing, and the narrative is so convoluted and imaginative. I find myself thinking about the artist’s relationship to his work and creativity, and why Richard Serra and the apprentice had to die, where gender fits into all this, why the testicle metaphor–conceptual problems, as well as the sheer spectacle of it all. I had invited Victor, my new superbear model, to see it with me tonight, and not hearing from him, decided to see an earlier show so that I could study French. Well, wouldn’t you know, I get home to 100 messages, one from him actually in the Castro Theater at the appointed time, vainly seeking his movie partner. Oopsie, so sorry, Victor.