Snow Cake

2010_9_26 Autism Revisited
Week ago I wrote about the film “Temple Grandin,” the autistic woman whose ideas have had an impact on how cattlemen handle and treat cows; indeed, the media tagged her, “the woman who thinks like a cow.” That was literally true, because she based all her ideas on pure observation of the behavior of cows, how they more in a pack and where they are in terms of moods and, yes, feelings. She became something of a celebrity and appeared on programs as Larry King Live and C-Span, where she was interviewed for three hours. Her tag line was always the same: ANIMMALS ARE NOT THINGS. She wasn’t a vegetarian or anything like that; she just believed we didn’t have to be so cruel and thoughtless while dealing with them. She has three degrees, with the final one a PHD from the University of Illinois. Currently she is a professor at Colorado State. She also has become a spokesperson for autism, always on demand as a speaking. She is unmarried and 63 years old.

As it happened I had found a fictional movie made in Canada called “Snow Cake,” that dealt with the subject of Autism, so I ordered it through NETFLIX. The movie opened without a clue as to where it was headed. Alex Hughes (Allan Rickman) is on his way to seeing an old friend in Winnipeg, Canada, after getting out of prison for killing someone, accidentally it turns out, but he nonetheless had to serve six years in prison. A second tragedy in his life had to do with the death of his son, a teenage boy, who was killed in an auto accident when going to meet his father for the first time. Alex is definitely a man grim around the edges and in desperate need of rejuvenation. Then, when he stops for a bite to eat, a young woman sits down at his table, strikes up a conversation, and eventually asks him for a ride to Wawa, a small town on the way to Winnipeg where her mother lives. Her name is Vivienne Freeman (Emily Hampshire) and her personality is odd, somewhat eccentric, but she’s lively and interesting so he takes her with him. Everything is going along swimmingly until they are near Wawa when all of a sudden their car is plowed into by a truck, a 16 wheeler, killing Vivienne. Alex emerges with barely a scratch but devastated that fate has slapped him with more bad karma that he didn’t need. Feeling guilty even though he wasn’t responsible for Vivienne’s death, he decides to find her mother and explain what happen and say he was sorry. He has no idea what he was going to encounter.

Linda Freeman (Sigourney Weaver) is at first an immediate puzzle and impenetrable; he knows she is odd and full of psychological quirks and physical tics and difficult to deal with. He can’t believe how unmoved she is on hearing her daughter was dead. She reacts as if her death was the same thing as a storm passing to the east of Wawa. But having seen “Temple Grandin” I realize that many Autistic people don’t like to be touched or intimate or even socialize. Temple drives her mother nuts because she can’t allow her mother to embrace her, and at one point she admits having a relationship is out of the question for her. “It is something I’ll never know” she tells her mother. This emotional distance from normal affection and needs is at the center of Linda’s personality. (Her father tells Alex she must have been raped to get pregnant, like she did.) She misses Vivienne in her fashion, but its cool and matter of fact. However, she invites Alex to stay to help her handle the next few days—and to take the garbage out, something she insists she can’t do. Nor can he enter her kitchen, and she freaks out when he does. And when the dog vomits on the floor her response is way out of proportion—but that’s how she is and there is nothing to do but accept it—and pick up the vomit. Slowly, an off-beat friendship eventually develops between them, as he learns how to deal with autism and her peculiar ways and reactions.

When he meets the attractive divorcee next door, Maggie (Carrie-Anne Moss) the two are immediately attracted to each other and soon end up in the sack together. After six years in prison, it was both a tonic and a joyful transcendence for Alex, and they carry on a short but happy affair, and laugh at Linda’s comment that Maggie is a prostitute. When Alex does move on it is Maggie who takes over the job of taking the garbage out, something Alex no doubt arranged. He leaves renewed, with the sun in his face, and ready to live again. Linda by being herself and Maggie by reawakening his senses and affections centers did him a great service as he drives on to meet the woman who was the mother of his son. His stop in Wawa was more than he could have anticipated and he thanks the Universe for bringing him to these two ladies.

The chemistry between Weaver and Rickman was very good. It was subtle, solid, and believable. Stephen Holden of the New York Times saw the story as cloying and banal, a calculated use of a mentally challenged person as a kind of Prince Myshkin, a holy innocent who moves and improves others by her “curse of saintliness.” That is a wrongheaded reading of the story, making the movie more calculating and designedly sentimental than it is. Linda is who she is, an autistic woman, and Weaver plays her straight up, with no inner designs on anybody, because she is compulsive about her own reality which seems to keeps her quite self-centered and preoccupied. The effect she has on Alex is a by-product of who she is—period. I never saw her as saintly; as admirable, yes, mostly because she knew who and what she was and how to stay within her own limits, such as they were. Temple Grandin was the same way.

Maggie was there to awaken in him what Linda could not awaken: his sensual self and his capacity for love and affection based on touch. It was as if Linda was the sun and Maggie was the moon, and it was the combination that made him feel complete and able to face whatever might be ahead.

The film had a lovely poetic ending which also explained why the film was called “Snow Cake.” There is a scene in the film where Linda lays in the snow and eats a lot of snow which she enjoys doing. When Alex leaves he tells her he left her a gift which is in the freezer. Later, when she opens the freezer she finds a large cake made of snow with small snowballs on top. She is delighted and immediately cuts a piece and eats it, which is end of story.

Game without a Prize

2010_9_18 A Game Without a Prize
Modern Art has been an umbrella for all kinds of marginal individualists. Some are professional artists, some are artists self-taught, and some, strictly speaking, aren’t artists, more like people who were fellow-travelers with imagination. Arthur Craven comes to mind as the latter. He was a poet-boxer, a self-styled Dadaist, and a nephew of Oscar Wilde which made him feel he had the right stuff to hang out with artist and poets. Craven got hooked up with Mina Loy, a poet, who was big in Bohemian circles. In any event, most of these marginal figures were compulsive about their creativity, but they made art more for personal satisfaction than worldly rewards or even recognition. Making things provided energy for self-transformation. It was art for the artist’s sake; indeed, it was anti-public art, where communication was not an urgent issue. It was doing, the process, which drew them into art, the uplifting energy which was the goal and the benefit. Some of these people were the off-spring of Dada and Surrealism, with Marcel Duchamp the trail blazer and chief role model.

Several years ago I saw a documentary about a prototypical eccentric artist, Ray Johnson (1927-1995), an American artist who was a seminal figure in the Pop Art movement, performance art, and a pioneer in using language in his collages. Because he was so often on the cutting edge he was known as “New York’s most famous unknown artist.” His cult status in New York was probably was behind the making of the movie about Johnson. It was made by John Walter and Andrew Moore. They titled the film, “How to Draw a Bunny.” My friend Paul Fako was the first to tell about the film which I then ordered from NETFLIX. Johnson started out an abstract painter after attending the most progressive college of the early post-war era, Black Mountain College. But he didn’t stick with painting very long and eventually devoted most of his attention to collage and to becoming the underground artist extraordinaire. He scorned the gallery scene, calling his involvement with art “a game without a prize.”


There was a small scale, stay-at-home hermetic character to his collages and “mail art.” The latter was another of his innovations. He would send small colleges by mail and ask the recipient to add something to the image and send it on to someone else. He was one of the first to try an interactive art. His work was a species of introverted doodling fed by an eternal fountain of playfulness. He had a unique ability to turn everything into a pun, a joke, a performance, or an image. For example, and this was in the film: a broken bottle of instant coffee became “Coffee Break,” spontaneous throw-away joke, art that exist primarily in the mind. These kind of encounters, like the broken bottle, Marcel Duchamp tagged “ready-mades” which were “a sort of rendezvous,” something the result of “the long arm of coincidence.” Johnson’s signature image was a (sort of) bunny head, hence the title of the film. His friends enjoyed having Ray around because he was an amusing fellow and you never knew what he might say or do next. Like Duchamp he excelled at “breathing.”

Unfortunately, on June 3, 1968 Ray was mugged and attacked in lower Manhattan. It was, oddly and coincidentally, the same day that Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas and just two days before the Robert Kennedy was gunned down. Did he see this event as more evidence of synchronicity? We don’t know but we do know he moved to Glen Cove, Long Island, where he continued to work hard but at the same time he became increasingly more reclusive and cultivated his role as an outsider. He turned down several show opportunities in New York.

His death occurred on June 13, 1995. He was found face-down floating in Sag Harbor. Authorities figured he jumped off a nearby bridge. Some of his friends are convinced it was a “performance suicide.” They noticed a strange numerological coincidence. He was 67 when he died, with the two numbers adding up to 13. His hotel room’s number was 247, again the numbers adding up to 13. And of course June was the month he was assaulted, Warhol was shot, and RFK was killed. As far as I could find out he was in good health. He left no will and to everybody’s surprise his bank account had $400,000 in it, just one more mystery about Mr. Johnson. The money was distributed among 10 cousins.

Arthur Craven had a similar mysterious death or at least disappearance. He rowed off into the Gulf of Mexico by himself and was never seen again, nor was his body found. Like Elvis, maybe he is alive somewhere, dreaming of Mina Loy.

Desert of Desire

2010_9_ 17 The Desert of Desire

Alain Corneau, a well-respected French Director, died last week. The only movie of his that I have seen was “All the Mornings of the World,” which I enjoyed immensely. I decided I should get online and order one of his films from NETFLIX. I chose “Fort Saganne” with Gerard Depardieu, Catherine Deneuve and Sophie Merceau, who was very young at the time and looked pretty and breakable, like a 19th century doll. The film was released in 1984. I was surprised how good Depardieu looked. I was used to seeing him with more pounds on his frame. Here he was thin, trim and handsome, like a rugby player. He was about 35 at the time. How he looked made me remember how Brando looked before his fatty inflation. I compared Depardieu to Brando in “The Last Tango in Paris,” the last movie in which he looked like himself. Corivan had the good fortune to work with Depardieu before he grew large, when he looked like an athlete and could handle physical acting.

“Fort Saganne” starts with our hero, Charles Saganne, as a mere boy looking through a lattice date that was entrance to a French Estate in the countryside. He is clearly in a state of envy. Out of nowhere the boy told his dad that someday that house would be his. It was a young prole dreaming about what he didn’t have and probably never would. When of age he joined the French Foreign Legion where he began a career that took him to heights he never would imagine as a boy. He was sent to the Sahara in 1911 and fell in love with the desert, its bigness, its silence and its space—the majesty it had under heaven and the stars. But this movie, in a backhanded way, is a pre-WW I story, a personal tale about one man and how his life meshed with history. Naturally, a girl had to be on the horizon. It was a very young Sophie Merceau as Madeleine of Saint-llette who became his love. But her parents would not hear of it because Saganne was a nobody in 1911. Their daughter had to marry a somebody.

The first thing Charles had to deal with in the French-controlled Sahara was his commanding officer, Debreuilh (Philippe Noiret) who goads him on to several dangerous missions and a few heroic actions, one of which nets him a medal, the highest honor his country could pay to a military man. When he becomes a hero Dubreuilh sends him to Paris to convince the government to press their military advantage and destroy insurgents under the leadership of Muslim fanatic. Saganne is turned down but he soon forgets about that failure with a great success: a passionate affair with Louise Tissot (Deneuve), the journalist who had written a critical article about him. But alas, it came to an end after a disagreement and they went their separate ways. Deneuve, who was 40 at the time, was the ultimate cool blonde, the Ice Queen and the secret slut, which Bunel had shown so brilliantly in “Belle de Jour.” David Thomson got it right when he said she was “perhaps the greatest cool blonde, forever hinting at intimations of depravity.” In “Belle de Jour” she played a bored housewife who took an afternoon job as a prostitute and was quite content with her split life.

Charles eventually finds Madeleine on one of later his trips home. She declares her love for him and her parents no longer object to him as he is now a national hero. The newspaper kept writing about him as a brave soldier. He keeps saying he did no more than what any good Legionnaire would have done in the circumstance. He and Madeleine marry and move into the estate we saw at the beginning of the film, which he can now afford to buy, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to himself as a boy. He impregnates his new wife before he goes to war again, only this time it World War I, the so-called “Great War.”

I knew how “Fort Saganne” was going to end—had to end. I knew the story ended in 1914, the same year that WW I started. Ironically, he ran into Louise just as he was preparing to go to the Western Front. She was now a Red Cross nurse. They kiss and embrace and he tells her he loves his wife but he admits he loves her more. Before he climbs on the truck he pauses to look back at Nurse Louise and said to himself, “Don’t move; just stay like you are forever.” The scene reeks with sadness, beauty and destiny, with a romantic longing that is going to end badly. The next time we see him he is in the trenches about to lead a charge against the German machine guns. His men are slaughter as they make this mad dash to their deaths. He is the last man left, still the surviving hero. He pauses but then stands up, fires his pistol and gets shot in the chest. He had stood there as if he was invincible. Somehow they got him to the field hospital where a nurse manages to tell him his wife had a baby boy; he then expires. A field doctor checks his pulse to make sure he is dead and then tells the nurse, “Throw the body into the water; we don’t have any more room for bodies here.” What an inglorious end for a tragic hero!

The contrast between fighting in the Sahara and the “Fields of Flanders,” could not be more vivid. Corneau was making his point perfectly clear: the fighting in the desert fit better in the 18th or 19th century, whereas the fighting in WW I was simply wholesale slaughter. In the desert you fought one on one, bayonet against bayonet; the numbers were smaller and personal bravery meant something. And bodies were buried in the sand, not cast aside willy-nilly.

Yes, WW I was our first all-out technological war and it was led and sustained by generals of such stupidity that they kept sending men to certain death rather than trying different tactics. Saganne’s honor and bravery in the Sahara was as vast as the desert, but on the battlefield of the Western Front he was cannon fodder and food for the fishes

Two Movies on DVD.

2010-9_16 Two new movies on DVD
“Temple Grandin” was a feature film on HBO now available on DVD. Temple is an autistic woman who made her mark despite being mentally challenged and odd. She is played masterfully by Claire Danes and Julie Ormond plays her long-suffering mother. Now, before I go any farther, I should state this notion: I believe ‘stunt acting’ is easier to do than portraying a normal person. Temple was extraordinary but you’d never call her normal. It is quite different to slip into the character of a normal person; it takes nuance, subtlety, and empathy; it’s the little things that have to carry so much. You have to stay within certain parameters that will validate and express your common humanity. Portraying the Rain Man or Ratzo Rizzo or Quasimodo was by definition doing an extreme characterization. They were outside the lines that mark and contain normality.

Temple was a load for most of her teachers; they dreaded having to deal with her because she was so intense, her eyes wide open, almost bulging, and usually talking a blue streak with little regard for communication. But she lucked out in High School due to the fact her Science teacher (David Strathairn) recognized her unique gifts and made her realize their value and potential. She had a photographic memory, an unusual ability to think visually, and skills at constructing things or at least designing things for others to build. “The Squeeze Box” was her first invention. She had noticed how cows calmed down inside a contraption that gently squeezed them. She built a gadget following that same principle and used it herself in her dorm. And she was agitated quite a bit of the time. For her the Squeeze Box was a substitute for a mother’s hug, as she didn’t like anybody touching her.

Then when she was a grad student at ASU in Tempe, Arizona, she noticed the cattle liked to move in circles, and when they went through the delousing pen they would always lose three or four cows by drowning. Out of those observations came first, curving pens which the cows accepted as the natural order of things, staying calm in the process; and secondly, she introduced a step-down platform into the water rather than a sudden step off into deep water and it stop the drowning. She designed a slaughter procedure that was more respectful of the animal and kept them calm rather than traumatized. Some cowboys refused to accept these new approaches but by now her ideas have had quite an impact. Progressive ranchers have gone to her designs.

So where is Temple today? She is a professor in the Agriculture Department at Colorado State University, proving once again that one person’s handicap is another’s person’s special gift.

Rarely do I choose a movie for its title, but I must say “The City of Your Final Destination” was one time I did. Of course the fact that Anthony Hopkins and Laura Linney were in it as well, was more incentive to see the film. Also helpful was the fact it was a Merchant Ivory film. That cinched the deal.

An Academic named Omar Razaghi, in an effort to save his position in a Literature Department decides to go to Uruguay to interview the family members of a famous author whose name is Jules Gund whose biography has never been written; he had been goaded on by his girl friend Deirdre despite the fact the family had said they would not agree to authorize a biography. Gund, the scion of a rich German family that had moved to South America in the thirties hit it big with his only novel and not long afterward killed himself because he could not finish a second book. When Omar arrives in Ocho Rios, the name of the Gund estate, he is gratified to hear that Adam (Hopkins), the older brother, an aging homosexual living with a Japanese man (Hiroyuki Sanada) who refinishes furniture, a relationship of twenty five years duration, he is gratified to hear Adam is on his side, quite in favor of a biography; which he thinks it would be a good thing. Caroline (Laura Linney), the widow of Jules Gund, a blond beauty I immediately called the “Ice Queen,” feels just the reverse; she gives Omar an absolute no deal. Nothing will change her mind. Gund’s mistress, Arden Langdon (Charlotte Gainsbourg), isn’t sure how she feels about the proposed biography. She has a daughter named Portia fathered by Jules. It is noticeable to all that Arden and Omar are attracted to each other, but they are busy denying it. Pete, the Japanese lover of Adam, wants to turn Ocho Rios into a business, but Caroline won’t buy that idea either.

She is a dilettante who dabbles in copying medieval images, although there is nothing at all about her that suggests spirituality of any sort. Unbeknownst to the others she has squirreled away Jules’ unfinished manuscript. In similar fashion Adam grabbed his mother’s entire diamond jewelry collection when she died. Caroline seems utterly discontent with her situation at Ocho Rios. She seems bored, hanging on with no purpose to her life. She gives other people a bad time because she has nothing else to entertain her.

Omar has an accident which brings his girl friend to Ocho Rios. He has an allergic reaction to some bee stings and fell off a ladder which put him in the hospital for several days. It is her arrival that pushes the moment to its crisis. Omar realizes he hates the pushy Deirdre and loves Arden, who is not as attractive, ambitious, or bright. But it doesn’t matter. She fits better than Deirdre did. Adam comes up with an alluring idea: he will offer Caroline the jewels or the money Pete can get for them, which should be considerable. There is short dialogue between Caroline and Adam. She asks him whether he’d prefer to stay at Ocho Rios or live in London or New York. His answer is classic for an outsider content with what he has: “Because you have to care about—or at least pretend to care about everything: politics, fashion, culture. It’s just too exhausting.” She in contrast would give anything to go to an opera. When Adam hears that he is certain they have a deal and they do. Her last act before leaving is burning her dead husband’s manuscript.

The story ends several years later at an opera in Europe with Deirdre running into Caroline. Deirdre is with a new man and so is Caroline. They chat for a few minutes. Caroline tells Deirdre that Arden has had another child; that means Omar is the father and is living in Ocho Rios, taking her place at the Gund table. He gave up not only on the book about Jules, but his whole academic career. He had found out that love was more important than a teaching career. Adam and Pete did go into business and were doing well. As for Deirdre she did not bat an eye hearing about Arden and Omar. She was teaching at Columbia and was dressed to the nines. She was much more interested in becoming friends with Caroline back in New York where they both lived.

One characteristic of the film, despite conflict situations, difficult choices to be made, and passions aroused, was its cool tone, its level-headedness, and even philosophical temper. No one got too excited and in the end everything got sorted out to the betterment of all concerned. I rather like that quality in the film—no muss, no fuss, things will work out for the best and everyone will go on with lives.

Redon and Symbolism

2010_9_ 11 Redon and Symbolism
On Oct. 12, 1972 I wrote in my journal about the drawing I now regard as my signature image. I refer to “God’s Athlete in the Abyss,” which appears in PRIMUS ROTA. At the time I was sitting back and enjoying my handiwork after a few previous attempts of the idea. I had found an image of a guy hanging in that position in one of my wife’s Dance magazines; interestingly, from a dance called “Pain.” The final effort was good, in focus, and clean, simple, complete and immaculate. It expressed what I meant it to: In a single image it revealed the essence of my INFERNO experience. Now when I contemplate the image the INFERNO experience flares before my mind’s eye, bringing it all back home to me again. It allows me to relive my visionary death and rebirth.

At the time the image reminded me of a Tarot card; it still does. It has a vertical format, a similar proportion, and a single figure like so many of the traditional cards. The darkness included in the image brings in an occult element, and a feeling of dread evoked by the serpent, the fact the figure has no head, and the raging waters below. The figure struggles to hold his legs up, to keep them dry and out of the water. (I believe it was Heraclitus who said, “The dry soul is the wisest.”) The image also has an atmosphere of mystery about it. Enigma rules.

Actually I was trying to encapsulate the Kundalini experience which was what the INFERNO was all about. It was inadvertent, accidental, if you will, but it happened to me nonetheless. But I didn’t want it to be schematic, and I think I succeeded. Experiencing Kundalini is not what you would call a rational experience. It is calling forth out of the depths of the subtle body within all of us what the yogis of India call Shakti or divine creative energy, a force that can awaken at any time or one can learn to coax out into the open by spiritual discipline and practice. It happened to me the first time after a particularly trying year in Las Vegas. I experienced what others have termed a “Dark Night of the Soul,” and my hanging man is meant to suggest the fright that was part of the trip. In a sense I did not have adequate preparation for what was happening to me, no guide, no guru to tell me not to worry. According to the Kabbalah the Abyss can be found on the Tree of Life, in the upper branches; it is where Divine contact is possible. Only ‘‘God’s Athlete” can psychologically survive the Abyss and turn it to the SELF’s benefit.

I deliberately made my athlete less muscle-bound and a softer looking male because that was more fitting for my physique; and then I added bloodied bandages on his legs and arms to connote wounds and struggle, which are also the attributes of a warrior. The head of a lone fish was visible out of the ‘chaos of waters’ down below. The fish can dive into the unconscious; it can also be understood as the nascent Self. I also put the fish in close proximity to a whirlwind on the border of the image and as well close to what I then called “the black ball,” my premier symbol through hundreds of drawings over 30 years.

When I first showed the image to friends and acquaintances they, rather predictably, found the image too sinister and too scary. No doubt in 1972 the influence of the malignant drawings I did in the late sixties was still in me and it would take some time to be transcended. But given what I was dealing with in creating the drawing aspects of the ‘Dark Night of the Soul’ had to be part and parcel of the final image. I wasn’t describing a picnic on the grass with the sun shining. After all, I did hang in Cosmic Night while “Serpent Power” climbed up my spinal tree to overwhelm my rational self, which was a scary experience—but only because it was the unknown. The second time it happened, in Eugene in 1969, I was ready for it and the rush, although powerful, became a very positive thing. To make a comparison: having a second baby by home birth was a lot easier for Sue and me after the first one at home. The second was a walk in the park compared to the first.

Following on the INFERNO and a few years later the invention of THE HIEROGLYPHIC THEATER, I became interested in some artists I hadn’t gotten into before, for example, Odilon Redon. He once said,” We must remember that we have other things than the eyes to satisfy, that we carry in ourselves (such_ troubles, joys, or pains which the great artist know how to address.” In his book PURPOSES OF ART the author, Albert Elsen compares Redon’s lithograph, “Light of Day,” with a conventional painting of the same subject matter, a scene of looking out the window, by a contemporary academic painter by the name of Caillbotte. It was a revealing comparison. Although similar in theme, they were worlds apart; one is the result of vision or “second sight,” the other is nothing but the facts. “Light of Day” depicted a dark interior room, a window and a tree outside the window. Simple enough. Caillbotte’s painting was a descriptive scene of a man looking out the window—period, no more, no less. What you see is all there was. Elsen wrote the following about “Light of Day.”

“As we focus on our side of the window we see this is no ordinary room, and that vague, softly luminous shapes hover in the darkness. It is as if Redon were metaphorically showing us the mysterious dark world that exists behind the human eye. What we see through the window we can describe but what lies in front has been only suggested, not defined, and this is the goal of poetic thought…Like music, they transport us into the ambiguous world of the undetermined. Redon’s modernity thus lies in his cultivation of his own experience, the creation of a private, undecipherable, but lonely world; he was an artist stimulated by the creative process whose intent was not to criticize or reform his public. His interest was to involve the spectator ‘By means of a sudden attraction, in all the allure of the uncertain.’”

Redon was both a psychic adventurer and an “introspective voyager” (Wallace Stevens), an explorer into the dark realms of the mind; he would then returned to articulated what he discovered there with wispy chimeras and vague shadows that populate the hinterlands of our deeper mind, like echoes from an unknown world. In “Light of Day” he gives us a darken room, with bubble-lie floating shapes, an ordinary window, and outside a tree. The image thus presents an interface between ordinary and non-ordinary reality, between time and eternity, between light and dark, and between Self and Archetypal Psyche. The darken room is our subjectivity, the obscurities with our interior world, the personal unconscious. The window is what Jesus called a “true door,” a threshold, a looking glass into the Other Side, where a glimpse of eternity can be had. As for the tree I see it as THE TREE OF LIFE, the “axis Mundi,” that which connects us to an Unknown God. When I meditate “Light of Day” as a species of poetic reality I see myself during THE INFERNO, looking through thick walls and seeing a inner landscape of wondrous beauty and I see myself climbing the TREE OF LIFE. These are the journeys that Art like Redon can provide.

Interestingly, Redon was drawing the “intimate echoes” of his soul when Courbet and naturalism were at their height in France and the Impressionists were about to burst on the scene in Paris. He was born the same year as Monet but he seems of another generation, not the type of artist who would join a movement, and always preferring to go his own way, dreaming his own dream. From the start he was more interested in imagination and viewed Nature, as William Blake did, as experience that had to be transformed. (Blake was more the Gnostic than Redon. He once said external reality was “dust on my heels.”) Redon felt that true artists recognized the reality that could be felt. Fantasy was the “messenger of the unconscious.” The title of his first album of Lithographs was “In a Dream.” With the emergence of Symbolism in Literature in the 1880s, his work gained more recognition and appreciation. I feel we both belong to the same Brotherhood of the Spirit and that we share, as Max Beckmann said of his patrons and admirers, the same metaphysical code.

This brings me to another term for that code. I had run across it in the mid-seventies when I stumbled on J.E. Cirlot’s DICTIONARY OF SYMBOLS, a book I have referred to often over the years. Cirlot was a Spanish poet, art critic, mythologist, musician and good Jungian. He was an avant guardist but maintained a hermetic perspective as a creative person. His DICTIONARY, which he published in 1963, was quickly translated into English but so far none of poetry has. Lots of bells rang for me when I read the entry in the DICTIONARY called “Imago Ignota,” which of course means” Unknown Images.” This is what he had to say about them.

“From about the middle of the last century, the tendency of poetry and the visual arts has been toward a mode of expression whose antecedents go back through the ages—but which received a particular impetus, around the year 1800, from the works of William Blake—and which might, with justification, be termed hermetic. This movement was characterized by the quest for the obscure as a self-sufficient goal, and representations of ‘harmonious wholes’ whose function lies in their remoteness….It is this type of unfamiliar pattern that constitutes the ‘unknown image’—a pattern of words, shapes or colors that has no correspondence with the normal, human feelings….These ’unknown images’ create their own kind of reality and expressed the spiritual need of particular individuals to live within this created reality.”

Besides Blake and Redon I think of Max Beckmann’s seven triptychs and many other works of his as examples of IMAGO IGNOTA. Peter Fischer, a German Scholar who wrote a book on Beckmann, used the word ‘Hieroglyphic,’ virtually in the same sense as Unknown Images to describe Beckmann’s work.

“His hieroglyphic compositions…represent an endeavor to reduce an intricate complex of delicate relationships to a formula whose basic content remains a mystery.”

This is a circle of initiates that I, too, belong with, what I might call those who have found the Hieroglyphic, hermetic solution to their Art.

The Killer Inside Me

2010_9_09 The Killer Inside Me
Lou Ford, the killer in THE KILLER INSIDE ME, was ironically, a deputy sheriff in his home town of Central City, Texas, a small town somewhere in western Texas. He was 29 years old, lived in the home of his dead parents, and was about to get engaged to a nice girl named Amy Stanton (Kate Hawn.) His father was a doctor with unsavory habits that no one knew about: he liked to beat his wife and she liked it too. The housekeeper used to beat on Lou, which he didn’t like. Then after his father died his mother taught him how to beat her with his belt just like his daddy had done while she lay bare-ass naked on her bed. Incest was suggested both in the book and the recent movie made from the book, but it was not explicit in either. In any case, Lou grew up liking the sadistic lust he felt with his mother. But he had learned to repress those experiences and tendencies in his nature and adapted to his tedious and humdrum existence as a deputy sheriff.

Two things sparked the violence and madness inside him; they were like traps lying in wait for him, One day the Sheriff asked Lou (Casey Affleck) to run out to the house that the prostitute was using as her home base and to tell her she had to leave town. Word had come down from Chester Conway (Ned Beatty), the rich oil man who dominated Central City that she had to go because his son was spending too much time and money with the woman. He was willing to give her some money to get established elsewhere. Lou was reluctant to do it but his boss insisted so off he went, with his Stenson on and his white shirt gleamingly clean. But when he got there the woman, Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba), put up a lively resistance to leaving. Finally, she slapped him hard twice in the face. That did it; she unleashed a fury in him that was deep and fierce; it came welling out of his depths and took him out of himself, as if he was in a trance or having an out-of-the-body experience. He pounded on the woman sitting on top of her on her bed. When he came back to himself, he started apologizing for losing his temper. Her reaction was, “Don’t be sorry, kiss me.” Fact was she enjoyed being roughed up; for her it was just a prelude to intercourse. They made furious love that day and several days in a row. Sometimes he beat her with his belt, other times he slipped it around her throat and tighten it as he pumped her. They seemed made for each other. Just like his father and mother.

So in brief, the cat was out of the bag, and it eventually turned into a raving beast. He eventually kills Joyce, or thinks he has, and shoots Chester’s son in the forehead, so the sheriff will thinks the two had an argument and both ended up dead. This begins a killing spree for Lou that doesn’t end to the very end of the book and movie, which has one hell of a finale.

The second thing that I saw as essential to the character of Lou Ford and what drove him to go on a killing spree was a discovery he made one night at home by himself. He had reason to take down his father’s old bible high on a book shelf, as if he was going to look for some passage. But he was distracted by some photographs inside the bible. They are of his mother when she was young and pretty. She was naked and tied up for his father’s pleasure. The good book was full of surprises, just like Lou’s inside world was. In one photo she was on the bed her ass up in the air waiting for penetration. Porn in the Bible; that hit home for Lou; there was his family history in a nutshell. Those images are memories that were demons in his psyche, writ large, dark, perverse and outrageous, like skeletons in his closet, forever dancing before his mind’s eye. Finding those pictures was like the “return of the repressed,” to use a Freudian term and Jim Thompson I would say was well-schooled in psychoanalysis. He had written the book at his sister’s house in Virginia. She was horrified by the book and asked where it came from. All he would tell her was “a lot of research.”

Thompson wrote pulp fiction but sometimes he transcended the genre, which was certainly true with THE KILLER INSIDE ME. His grasp of Freudian theory was impressive, especially how childhood was the father of the man. Lou’s career as a killer gets more and more complicated; he even kills his fiancée to cover up the fact he was being blackmailed. The local D.A. figure out Lou was the killer but it was intuitive. Lou always remained cool and in control and defiant. But finally the noose began to close and he prepared a finale scenario he bets his adversaries won’t expect. He filled the house with flammable fluid and with material that will explode and waits for the termination point to arrive. So when the D.A., Chester Conway, 3 deputies and a surprise guest show up and come in the house, he is ready to go out in a blaze of glory, taking his adversaries with him.

Casey Affleck is the right guy to play Lou Ford. He can play the cold fish well and has that faraway look in his eyes. The two women are playing against type, as they are in mostly fluff movies. Both do a credible job in this chilling movie..

Orson Welles and Me

2010_9_07 Me and Orson Welles
Sue and I love sleepers, which are strictly my department, that is, to find them. I have a talent to sniff them out. I go by three things: who are the actors in any particular movie; who was the director; and subject matter.
Three days ago I picked up 5 movies at Blockbusters, on their 5 day plan. Last night we watched “Orson Welles and Me,” so the subject matter was the strong suit of that choice. I am an Orson Welles fan from way back; plus he was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, which is eight miles south of Racine, my home town. I have read three biographies about him (Brady, Callow, Thomson) and I have four other books about his life and work. With a couple of pictures of him as Charles Foster Kane, they constitute a little shrine to his memory and genius.
“Orson Welles and Me” was an indie film directed by Richard Linklater whose film record is impressive and solid. He made “Dazed and Confused,” “Slackers,” “Waking Life,” and “Before Sunset.” This particular movie is about one of Welles’ early successes on the stage, “Julius Caesar,” which was performed in New York by the newly formed Mercury Theater. 75% of the movie was taken up with rehearsal time and in-group bickering among Orson and the cast, and John Houseman, who ran the business side of things. There was meticulous attention to the styles of the thirties and how everything looked. Orson adapted the play to a 90 minute performance with no intermission. His politics were liberal so he decided to do the play in modern dress with political implications. He got a deal on a batch of black uniforms with boots, perfect attire for fascist police. His wardrobe people added shiny silver buttons. The man who played Caesar was stocky and bald; the allusion to Mussolini was unmistakable. He had studied Edward Gordon Craig’s innovations on set design. The play took place on tiers of platforms and with the back wall being the brick of the building, enhanced only by lighting. He wanted a look that was neutral and non-representational. No thrones, no fancy togas, no allusions to ancient Rome. The narrative was contemporary more than historical or both at once. The lighting was minimal and dramatic; clouds of smoke wafted up from the platforms Opening night was November 11, 1937. Welles told one cast member this play would either make him or break him.
It was a huge success; both the audience and the critics loved it. The play went on the road to six more cities after they closed in New York. It closed for good on November 11, 1938.The only actors the movie-goer might recognize were Claire Danes and Ben Chaplin. The actor who played Welles, Christian McKay, who I had never heard of, was excellent in the part; he was a Brit born in 1973 who bore a remarkable physical resemblance to the man from Kenosha, including the deep, booming voice. When I checked on him online I discovered he had done a touring one man show as Orson Welles, so he was not only a natural to play him he was experienced at doing so. His imitation of Welles was right on, showing him as brilliant, formidable, intuitive, visionary, but also full of himself, dominating, sometimes incredibly insensitive and screwing every woman within range. He also wanted credit for everything and was always right, if not exactly without fault. And he wasn’t below stealing an idea or two. But clearly, it was the force of his magnetic personality that kept the cast together and heading toward a common goal and success.
On the other hand, his egocentric approach to projects and lack of patience with the money people crippled many of his aims and goals, and many things never came to fruition or if they did, they did so by half-measure. He made a lot of mediocre movies as an actor trying to support his personal vision as a filmmaker, but he needed more than he could make. Still, he had quite an impact on theater and “Citizen Kane” was many people’s choice as the greatest film of the 20th century. In addition, his “Othello” and “Macbeth” are solid efforts and will be around for a long time. They are the best of the black and white versions of the plays.