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Monday
Sep162019


"ALL ART FADES, BUT SEX FADES FASTEST" 

Monday, September 16, 2019 at 07:34PM

THE LIFE AND WRITING OF EVE BABITZ

 

“I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter.”

Critics often compare Eve Babitz to Joan Didion. But Eve Babitz is nothing like
Joan Didion. Eve Babitz loves sex.

And drugs. And rock and roll and drinking and beauty and glamour and style and
charismatic, accomplished guys and Hollywood. Babitz passionately embraces
everything Didion despises, especially joy and abundance.

For graceful sentence-making, dead-on cultural parsing, astonishing common-sense
insights and ruthless social anthropology, only Didion and Renata Adler compare
to Babitz. But Babitz, whose books from the 1970s have only recently been
brought back into print by the New York Review of Books, never garnered the
serious literary cred in which Didion and Adler rightfully bask.

Maybe because Babitz’s subject matter – mad sex, drugs, rock and roll, drinking,
beauty, glamor, style, accomplished, charismatic guys, and Hollywood – wasn’t
deemed sufficiently serious, few recognized the poetic depth of Babitz’s
insights. Maybe because she had too much fun writing and living, Babitz never
vested in the astringent, antiseptic distance from which Didion and Adler
eviscerate. Babitz wrote from the eye of the storm, a storm she most likely
created. Her knives were as sharp as Didion’s and Adler’s, but always tempered
with compassion and wit. And, often, lust.

Almost everyone who writes about Babitz – both in the 1970s when her books were
first published and recently upon their re-publication – regards her as they
would a talking dog. Surprisingly, even women writers default to the talking dog
position. They first describe Babitz – accurately – as hot, brazen, stylish,
wild, brilliant and untamable. Then they talk about her top-shelf remuda of
absurdly famous lovers. They always cite those lovers. Then and only then do
they mention Babitz’ astute perceptions, her moral and artistic courage, her
singular voice – and that with astonishment. They take the tone that this
modern-day Venetian courtesan had no right to write like a genius.

Babitz touches on this dilemma in her writing on Marilyn Monroe, with whom she
was mildly obsessed. It infuriated her that everyone regarded Arthur Miller as a
jewel in Marilyn’s crown, rather than her as a jewel in his. Babitz regarded
Marilyn as something she would never, ever be: an ingénue. Babitz could never be
an ingénue, she writes. Ingénues are doomed because they insist on being
undervalued.



The ingénue’s role is of the lamb to the slaughter, a lamb who pretends
innocence as a dreadful, instinctual, inescapable collusion with her butcher.
That collusion, Babitz thinks, is crucial to an ingénue’s charm – the ability to
act like no one is hurting you even as they sever one limb after another. Babitz
expresses awe at both how long Marilyn let her butchers chop away and how
untarnished Marilyn remained. Only a select few in Eve’s Hollywood remained
untarnished.

Babitz never regards herself as so. Her understanding of the rarity of being
uncorrupted by Hollywood, rock and roll, style, glamor, money and success led
Babitz to a profound appreciation of the corrupt. She admired and, for a while,
enjoyed the company of those who avoided the middle steps of attempting to hold
onto innocence and failing. The truly corrupt did what the ingénue could not:
They embraced and paraded their strengths, behaved as they wanted and ignored
the toll others paid for their corruption.

In the first half of Sex and Rage, which features little straightforward
depiction of either, Babitz describes falling into an international haut
demimonde that had descended, in their unending circuit around the globe, upon
LA. Night after night and week after week of morally, socially and emotionally
complex debauchery followed. Babitz finally totaled up the rent this demimonde
demanded when, on the way home as the sun rose, Babitz realized she had consumed
fourteen White Ladies – a cocktail most likely made of gin and Cointreau – in a
single evening. From that moment, Babitz began, despite the sex, fun, style and
glamour available, to extricate herself from that world. Looking back from a
survivor’s distance, she understood of the demimonde that “most of the girls
they used for local color died before they were thirty.” All those girls
attempted some version of the ingénue’s gambit.

Babitz acknowledges the ingénue’s power. The ingénue knows that when someone
falls for her innocent act – and 99.99% of them are dudes – she can get away
with murder. The ingénue also knows that those who throw themselves on the pyre
of her performance of innocence will take care of her. That’s the ingénue’s
pendulum; she swings between the sucker and the butcher. There are no other
options.

Babitz sought neither suckers nor butchers. She evokes Tina Fey’s
self-descriptions: Babitz never entered any social situation feeling or acting
like an underdog. Igor Stravinsky is her godfather, for crying out loud;
Stravinsky named her! Babitz grew up in a family of intelligent, good-willed
bohemians who only wanted her to be true to herself.

Consider nineteen-year-old Babitz naked playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, in a
photograph that started as a goof and became an icon. Look at that woman, naked
with her identity shrouded by hair: She don’t lack for confidence. She knows how
to be simultaneously a person and a persona. She knows how to revel in and
withhold her sexuality. She is at ease in the most ridiculous and profound of
circumstances. All this comes through in Babitz’s prose, even when she writes
movingly of her own recurring social terror.



Babitz describes herself as surfer moving through the world with a surfer’s
balance and a surfer’s eye for which swells to catch and which to let flow
beneath her. What stirs her soul are people like her, who could only be
themselves, just bigger. She admires songwriter J. D. Souther when he tells her
he spent his first year in Los Angeles “learning how to stand.” Babitz’s famous
lovers were all men who studied themselves and the waves of their chosen oceans
with care and cunning and created the persona that would let them ride the
crests to where they wanted to go. Their skill and self-directed ruthlessness
enthralled her.

Of course, I’d like to tell you about the stars – and I mean stars – of art,
comedy, rock and roll and Hollywood that became Babitz’s handpicked boyfriends.
How she almost always chose them before they were famous and how she nurtured,
encouraged and guided them as their lives exploded. It’s some juicy gossip and
contextualizes Babitz’s 1960s/‘70s hellraising and allure as few examples could.
But if I tell you, you might think I’m suggesting that her queue of world-beater
boyfriends might be jewels in her crown and not vice versa. That those famous
names gave her credibility… If I write about whom she fucked and loved, I’d be
calling her a talking dog: a woman with famous boyfriends who happened to write.
And that ain’t right. Babitz is a writer. Her personal life is her business. A
business she wrote about in granular detail. Them boyfriends are all front and
center, if you can suss the clues.

Please, join me in discovering whether I get to the end of this piece without
listing her boyfriends and the telling, tragic, harsh, loving and riotous things
she wrote about them. The suspense is killing me.

Here’s a hint:

She writes that Val Kilmer could never portray Jim Morrison accurately because
Val Kilmer had always been a prince. Since high school, when the princely Val
Kilmer walked into a room, every woman there wanted to lick the sweat off his
neck. This was not true of Jim Morrison. Growing up, Jim Morrison was a fat,
lonely, picked-upon, bookish nerd from the sticks with delusions of grandeur.
Then, one magical day, according to Babitz, Morrison discovered speed, among
other drugs, and lost a shit-ton of weight. Overnight, he became a prince.
Overnight, women who had ignored or scorned him for the first twenty years of
his life were mega-hella hot for his bod. Overnight, women he never thought he
had a prayer of nailing begged for a moment, just a moment, of his attention.
This, as Babitz points out, might really fuck up a former fat nerd’s head. It
fucked up Morrison’s big-time. He became a screaming, pretentious asshole, as
who among us would not? Babitz maintains that no one who is born beautiful –
like Kilmer – could ever understand the identity-shredding pathos of becoming
beautiful.

“In L.A. when someone gets corrupt, it always takes place out by the pool.”

Babitz writes with delicacy, obliqueness and brutal directness about Gram
Parsons, with whom she was close. Unlike most writers, she spends little time on
his music. She focuses on his grace, incongruous charm, well-mannered remove and
refusal to be motivated to do anything. She touches with empathy but never
respect on the paradox of a genius who had too much money to care whether he
ever manifested his gifts. Unsurprisingly, when Babitz writes about Gram, she
also writes about cocaine. On the, ahem, cutting edge as always, Babitz had her
first private encounter with Gram in his suite at the then-moldering Chateau
Marmont. As she came into the suite, Gram – whom Keith Richards described as
having “better coke than the CIA”; and Keith oughtta know – was bent over the
living room table, chopping fat rails of uncut German pharmaceutical right out
of the vial(s). In 1971, snorting pure German pharmaceutical from the vial(s)
was not cutting edge – it was avant-garde.

In writing on Gram, Babitz posits her “Three Rules of Cocaine.” Her Rules are
shocking for their clarity, accuracy, immutability and immortality. Babitz’s
Rules so codify the cocaine universe that there was not then, has not been since
and is not now any need for a fourth.

Eve Babitz’s Three Rules of Cocaine

1) The first time is always the best.

2) There is no such thing as enough.

3) The process of learning the truth of Rules 1) and 2) is very, very expensive.

 

“Rosewood Casket,” probably the best-known and most-cited story in Eve’s
Hollywood, concerns Gram and Keef. Incongruously, Babitz defaulted to
pseudonyms. Since she names names almost everywhere else, her refusal to do so
here feels almost cowardly. Perhaps she feared, for good reason, Gram’s
gorgeous, ferocious, litigious 17-year-old girlfriend and later wife. Babitz
describes Gram and Keith, thinner than any vampires, hanging onto each other for
dear life at the Whiskey a Go Go, radiating such heretofore unseen death’s door
charisma and Otherness that even the most carnivorous groupies – and groupies
lined the walls and the stage at the Whiskey – hung back in dread and wonder,
not daring to approach. Even for such a connoisseur of degraded, drug-soaked
magnetism, the tightrope these two walked held no glamour for Babitz. She saw
tragedy looming. Having long since left the demimonde, Babitz became a hard-eyed
realist. When asked whether she thought Gram and Emmylou Harris had been lovers,
Babitz answers ruefully, “Gram was too high to make it with anybody.” For
Babitz, that was a fate worse than death.

Having fallen out of touch, Babitz was unaware of when exactly Gram took off to
Nellcote to hang with Keith as the Stones recorded Exile on Main Street. And she
was taken by surprise when Gram returned a shell of his former self. She
describes going into shock when she was told: Gram got fat! After seeing him,
she inflicted upon Gram the worst insult anyone suffers in these three books. He
looked, Babitz writes, like a fat southern cop. No one could look worse than
that.

This is not a superficial response. It’s a nuanced, Henry James/Oscar Wilde
response – a tragic insight, one that broke Babitz’s heart. She wrote that
anywhere other than the LA rock and roll scene or the offices of Vogue, Gram
would not be regarded as a fat guy. He’d be a normal guy. But for the god of
glamor Gram once was to show up on Olympus – the Whiskey – looking like a fat
southern cop meant the end. The end of self-awareness, of self-control, of
self-regard, of self-salvation. Babitz knew, and in saying no more than that
Gram got fat, makes clear that Gram had sunk to a depth from which he would not
and could not surface. And Gram never did.

“I don’t believe in facing pain unless it’s the kind you like.”

 

In common with Gram, Babitz sought only the coolest, most rigorous scenes that
demanded the most skillful artifice laid atop the least self-conscious
naturalism. In those scenes, you had to be yourself, only more so. There, as
Babitz depicts with compassion and schadenfreude, the self-conscious flounder.
Phonies flourish, but only on the strength of their a) drugs or b) ability to
amuse. Those scenes undid Gram, maybe because the scenes he chose revolved
around proving your mettle by creating great music. Babitz hung in those scenes
with ease, and she hung in scenes where she proved her mettle by using the right
fork or delivering the killer bon mot at 6AM after a long night of fucking,
cocaine and opium.

Babitz enjoyed blocked geniuses, like Gram. She adored and cared for doomed
beauties, who are legion in her books and as Hollywood as bougainvillea. But
genii who never get it together and gorgeous women broken by their own beauty
don’t engage Babitz’s close attention. Those people form wretched Hollywood
wallpaper; they’re part of Los Angeles and always will be. The men and women who
engage Babitz closely may have been worldwide platinum successes – before there
was such a thing as a platinum record – or they may have been glamorous,
insightful, seductive widows who sat on their silk-covered living room couches
welcoming the world with unquenchable élan.

Doomed Dean Memimger, who played a couple seasons for the New York Knicks and
spent most of the rest of his life as a crackhead, said the truest thing: “If
you don’t play ball, you can’t hang out.” If there’s a sun of a thesis around
which all of Babitz’s planets revolved, there it is. She and Dean recognize that
success demands both skill sets. That’s why Babitz respects J.D. Souther for
taking a year to learn to stand. Souther might have made it on his songs alone,
but to catch the wave he wanted he knew he had to learn how to hang. Merely
hanging won’t cut it. Hanging was like breathing for Gram, but he couldn’t get
out of his own way long enough to play.

So, you learn to play ball and to hang out and when you become champion, from
then on everything takes place only on your court. When Babitz’s not-yet-famous
boyfriends reached that pinnacle, she lost interest.

Babitz understands that social power is the one necessary superpower. Her books
explore the intricacies and subtleties of social power in numerous arenas. Those
whose only power is social, like the beautiful, compel her. Babitz writes that
she learned in the classrooms at Beverly Hills High, where at least 20 girls in
her class were world-beater beauties, that every door opened to the gorgeous.
Anywhere the beautiful wanted to hang, they were welcome. This is the true
magical power of beauty, Babitz writes: not being desired; being welcome. Babitz
was never jealous of that power because she always hung wherever she wanted.
Being free of jealousy of pretty much everyone helps fuel her insights. Babitz,
unlike most writers, never wanted to be anybody else.

Babitz is a journalist. Her books, even her putative fiction, are Babitz
reporting on her life and her in it. Though she’s an excellent reporter, facts
are not her métier; her métier is essence. With spare elegance, Babitz evoked
the valence of a stride, a glance, a pause in conversation, a jacaranda blossom,
the glint in a man’s eye, a dusty road or a glass of tequila. This gift, too,
stemmed from her surfing adolescence; she grokked the ineffable long before the
practical details registered. She prioritized the poetic and wrote as if that
priority required no explanation.

Babitz’s greatest gift is that she can tell the difference. Few people or
moments deceive her gimlet eye. Her writing reflects a central belief of her era
of growing up. That belief emerges from the pioneer existentialists and the
Beats: that there is such a thing as a Moment and that the astute, attuned
individual can Nail it. Babitz journeyed through her life seeking Moments – or
deliberately obliterating them with drink and drugs and fucking – and Nailing
them. She saw as others could not. She never defaulted to cynicism. Somehow,
throughout her journeys, her romantic soul endured.

 

Parsing the rules, games, purpose and valence of every social scene she
encounters is Babitz’s singular genius. Though her books are set in the ‘60s and
‘70s, they are not time capsules. They delve deeply into their eras, but are of
every era. Babitz’s comedies and tragedies of manners are – like Wharton’s, like
Wilde’s, like Waugh’s, like Austin’s, like Eliot’s, like Joseph Heller’s and
like Joan Didion’s – timeless.

David N. Meyer | Share Article



Sunday
Feb262017


ELLE

Sunday, February 26, 2017 at 09:22PM

He Hit Me (and it did not feel like a kiss)

Isabelle Huppert has been cast as the knowing, impervious, Paris-cool damage
object in the misogynist fantasies of creepy old pervs so many times audiences
barely react to her being abused. As Elle opened on a dark screen over Huppert’s
anguished screams I actually thought: “Oh, another Huppert rape scene...”
Nothing in it moved or touched me. Director Paul Verhoeven presented the rape as
a trope and that’s what I took it for. As the movie developed into a witty,
snarky comedy of the discreet charm of the French bourgeoisie – and the casual
genius of their scarf-tying – I almost forgot that Huppert's character
development was built on her being beaten and then fucked against her
will.Isabelle Huppert and a creepy old perv

When the rape came around a second time, it was horrifying. And served its plot
function: to further terrify and emotionally paralyze an already PTSD Huppert
who cannot connect to any emotion save irritation. So, up to that moment,
Verhoeven’s graphic depiction of the traumatic, humiliating sexual assault of a
powerful, successful woman could claim at least some moral and aesthetic
justification.

Then the rapes came like waves to the shore; cadenced, deliberate markers
attempting to show the perversity people must embrace to overcome contemporary
alienation and self-alienation. And that's the rubric under which so many
normally perceptive reviewers attempt to brand this a feminist film. But
Verhoeven ain't no feminist. Throughout his career he’s gotten off depicting
violence against women. He digs it. The rape scenes are his most heartfelt and
convincing. They're brutal, presented as primal fun for the rapist and kinda
thrilling – by the fourth time – for Huppert. Verhoeven frames the fourth rape
as a triumphal breakthrough of intimate connection.

This encounter hews to the (male) cliché of a mutually consenting and fulfilling
rape fantasy in a meta-y, self-conscious way that's supposed to be “subversive”
or about “agency” for women or some such horseshit. Instead, it’s Verhoeven
signposting he thinks rape is hot. And that women who go around asking to be
beaten up and fucked – because they, like Huppert, have power and wield it –
feel improved by rape.

In one particularly ugly but revealing scene, Huppert’s married lover shows up
at her office. The night before she told her social circle, including him, about
being attacked. He tells her to quit whining and pulls out his dick. He wants a
French, in-office handjob, apparently. By way of assent, Huppert picks up a
garbage can and puts it between them. This is Verhoeven’s idea of a joke, and
for a moment, it’s smirk-inducing. But really, who jacks off a lover into a
metal garbage can with no can-liner? What Huppert needed was a box of Kleenex.
But that wouldn't support Verhoeven’s 10th-grade sense of humor or present his
quote theme close quote.

The men in Huppert’s life view her as a means to an end – sexual, career,
nurturing – and couldn’t care less about her emotions or well-being. Contempt
and hostility fuel their desire. Vorhoeven then posits rape as a
straightforward, unhypocritical expression of male hostility. And that, he
suggests, makes Huppert grateful and aroused.

As always in Verhoeven pictures, the cast is a mix of relaxed naturalism and
bombastic self-consciousness. Charles Berling, as Huppert’s ex-husband,
personifies moral ambiguity. Her lover, Christian Berkel, looks like a horny
German cop and performs on that level of subtlety. In a throwaway role, Anne
Consigny is relaxed and charming as Huppert’s business partner. She doesn’t get
raped, the film suggests, because she seldom asserts herself.

The unrelenting ugliness is wearying. The consensual sex is hyper-meaningless;
men and women regard each other with mutual contempt and loathing; deception is
the primary relationship glue and everyone’s manners are perfect. The bottomless
mean-spiritedness – and Huppert being raped – pushed me away. I checked out for
good when Huppert uses binoculars to spy on her hot neighbor and glumly
masturbates while he arranges Nativity scene statues. In the immortal words of
the wise man from Planet Ten: “So what? Big deal!”     

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIQqBlLR4u8  

The commentary on French manners and mannerisms proves consistently hilarious
and well-observed. The depths of Huppert’s psychological damage are thoroughly
plumbed, but in aid of what? Characters turn into plot-puppets, the whole
ordeal’s repetitive, at least 20 minutes too long and far less than the sum of
its parts. With each gag ‘n sexual assault, Verhoeven’s message becomes
increasingly clear: Huppert gets raped because it brings her not only secret
pleasure, but personal insight. If that’s your idea of an artistic position,
have a ball. But don’t pretend it’s feminist.

 Coda

I sent this review to writer/editor Greg Burk (metaljazz.com) and he wrote: “I
think of Verhoeven as a comic filmmaker who enjoys twitting our voyeurism and
his own, especially since he makes millions at it. We're supposed to feel both
aroused and ashamed. Seems like he might have crossed the line, but you may be
taking it more seriously than he (having his cake and eating it) intends. The
trashcan and the Nativity wank are examples of his comic sense, as you point
out. But your charge of sexism is justified, even though he wants to blame men
(and himself).”

Greg’s comments made me realize that Elle led me to default to a moral and not a
critical response – a not very useful position for a critic. Perhaps I am taking
it too seriously. But the film asks the viewer to collude in its own amoral
worldview and I don’t wanna. Verhoeven exploits our readiness to chuckle
knowingly over genuinely toxic material. He presents his own moral bankruptcy as
merely representative of the degraded social commerce of urban sophisticates in
the 21st Century. Accepting a picture like this as witty or, much worse,
psychologically true, only accelerates that degradation.

Isabelle Huppert incarnating the director's castration anxiety

David N. Meyer | Share Article
tagged French, Isabelle Huppert, Paris, Paul Verhoeven


Friday
Nov112016


ANNA BILLER'S THE LOVE WITCH

Friday, November 11, 2016 at 08:20PM

When I say I’m in love you best believe I'm in love L U V

Samantha Robinson as Elaine (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

You wouldn’t want to mistake The Love Witch for an updating of or commentary on
Beyond The Valley of the Dolls. Beyond is a camp evisceration of every sacred
Sunset Strip-era trope – groovy language, bell-bottoms, LSD, free love and even
rock and roll – delivered in the guise of an exploitation film. Its enduring
pleasure derives from the considerable tension between director Russ Meyer’s
devotion to exploitation and his apparent lack of awareness that the screenplay
exploits his devotion in the service of self-parody.

Anna Biller’s The Love Witch shares with Beyond only naked young women,
post-Swinging London Cleopatra eye makeup, a Kodachrome candy-apple color
palette, that super-glossy, high-key early ‘70’s lighting and architectural
hair. That’s it.

The Love Witch is not an exploitation film. It’s not camp. It’s a witty,
endearing, meticulous, double-helix deconstruction and deadpan celebration of
the cinematic presentation of gender, seduction, narcissism, self-delusion,
love, “love” and naked young women. If it seems for brief moments like an
exploitation film, that’s the camouflage Biller wears while hunting bigger game.
Feeling Biller tiptoe up to the edge of camp and exploitation – a tightrope she
walks with glee – never lessens the contradictory emotions or the political,
cinematic and romantic considerations the film evokes in ways you cannot name.
Those considerations and emotions never lessen the fun.

Biller triggers your detached intellect even as you immerse in and savor, for
example, star Samantha Robinson’s red Mustang convertible, fantastically tacky
paintings or honeyed skin. Your interest in the plot matches the director’s.
When she vests, you feel the suspense. When she shifts priorities, so do you.
For much of the film, plot and ideas interweave and prove equally compelling.
After a while, the plot becomes secondary and that’s fine.

Biller’s mise en scene is incantory – it puts you in another state. Or, another
world, one entirely constructed by Biller, who made the costumes, built the
sets, composed the music and wrote the screenplay. According to an interview in
The LA Weekly, Biller took six months to hook a pentagram witchcraft rug because
she couldn’t find one she wanted. Her years-long investment in her vision pays
off in that each moment and dialogue exchange – no matter how casual the action
– seems incongruously crucial.

Anna Biller's handmade mise-en-scene (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

Samantha Robinson plays Elaine, a love-starved witch. As she desperately
contorts herself into her projection of what every man wants, Elaine’s
unaddressed rage at those contortions leads her to create love potions that kill
the men she seduces. Or worse – because Elaine accurately manifests their
fantasies – the potions reduce them to babbling emotional wrecks. And as soon as
a man falls for her or weeps or conveys need, Elaine has but a single thought:
“What a pussy!”

The hunter here is rarely captured by the game. And why should she be? The guys
revert to children any time they express their precious feelings. Biller shows
an impressive grasp of the horror of 1970s men’s hair and beards. The men are
off, somehow; they’re all hairy dipshits. Among themselves, the women discuss
emotions and desires calmly. Then the guys show up with their insistence on
being in charge and it’s clear they’re the lesser beings. Elaine’s self-esteem
issues mean she can no more “be herself” around a guy than she can stop fucking
down. Because she can’t, when her lovers kick the bucket, she seldom experiences
loss.

But when she does, Biller flips the switch. Elaine’s grieving brings forth the
primal and chthonic no witch saga can exist without. She creates a totem, a
bottle of her urine in which float her used tampons. It’s a measure of Elaine’s
tragic cluelessness about the male psyche that she cannot fathom why the (male)
cops freak at the sight of such a thing. She attributes their disgust to an
irrational fear of witchcraft.

Though she’s been compared to many exploitation goddesses, Elaine strongly
evokes Celeste Yarnall in 1971’s The Velvet Vampire, directed by Stephanie
Rothman and co-starring Michael Blodgett, the iconic Lance Rocke in Beyond.
Elaine has Celeste’s wide, staring eyes, preternatural cool and seductive
remove. Biller’s evocation of past low-rent cinema is never smirking or
condescending. Quite the contrary. It’s Biller’s sincere love of the genre that
make what could be awkward moments genuinely moving.

Elaine and one beau come upon a Renaissance fair. Everyone recognizes their
connection. The fair people lovingly clothe Elaine and her guy in gleaming white
and marry them in a mock wedding as Renaissance fair-type music plays. It should
be unspeakably cheesy. Well, it is unspeakably cheesy because Elaine’s romantic
delusions default to cheese. But Biller’s affection for her story and its
players turn the scene into an almost heartbreaking metaphor of the distance
between our dreams of romance and its reality. 

"Make our dreams real!" (Oscilloscope Laboratories)

The Love Witch opens tonight - November 11th - at, among other venues - LA's
NUART theatre, where Anna Biller will hold a Q & A at 7PM.

David N. Meyer | Share Article
tagged Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Lance Rocke, Michael Blodgett, Russ Myer,
Velvet Vampire


Friday
Sep302016


DANNY SAYS  

Friday, September 30, 2016 at 10:28AM

A Magnolia Pictures release. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures. Photo credit:
© Arturo Vega/Danny Fields Archive.

CASTLES IN THE SAND

As popular music grew from a tail of culture to the dog itself, tales of giants
emerged. The giants had atuned ears and, more significantly, money and access to
the means of production. When they liked what they heard, the world heard it.
Jim Stewart and Estelle Aston, Dave Bartholomew, Ahmet Ertegun, Jerry Wexler,
John Hammond and Berry Gordy, Jr., among others, had money and studios and
systems of distribution.

What did Danny Fields have?

Danny Fields had an unerring instinct for the real. Passion recognized passion.
Fuck accessibility. Fuck expertise. Fuck good manners. Danny sought blood and
soul. If it moved him, Danny wanted to the world to hear it, no matter what. And
Danny was never wrong. He never got rich, but he never signed Aerosmith, either.
Steven Tyler wore his ornate stage jacket to a post-gig restaurant meeting.
Danny took that as a rookie move and wanted nothing to do with Tyler or his
band. Of course, the Ramones wore their stage jackets everywhere, but their
jackets were cooler. 

Danny spent his formative years becoming an aesthete. Then he became something
more rare and valuable: the aesthete who takes action. Danny Fields did not
build empires. He built sand castles. And every one collapsed, as sand castles
do. But the reverberations of their collapsing changed, as Danny Says will tell
you, everything. Of my all-time top four favorite bands, Danny Fields helped
discover and promote two. Those two inspired at least 10,000 other bands.
Apiece.

 Danny Fields, Iggy Pop, Lisa Robinson, and David Bowie; Photo courtesy of
Magnolia Pictures. Photo credit: © Leee Black Childers/Danny Fields Archive.

Danny Fields snakes like a main cable through the 15 richest, most influential
years in white American rock. Every band that seemed too weird, driven and
intelligent to even exist – never mind make it; that time proved was decades
ahead of its time; there’s Danny, fighting to get them on the radio. And every
one of those bands today exerts the influence Danny always knew they would.

Danny Says is a rambunctious, low-budget, loving, companionable ode. Danny
Fields deserves the reverent five-star HBO treatment. But a rambling,
affectionate, awe-struck tone better suits the subject. The film consists of
Danny telling stories and musical interludes. Other people, like Iggy, tell
stories, too. Their stories are nowhere near as much fun as Danny’s. Nobody’s
stories are as much fun as Danny’s.

Danny a freshman at Penn at 15; Danny at 19 learning how cool functions from
Warhol and the Factory gang. Danny introducing Jim Morrison to Nico. Danny
signing the MC5 and Iggy and the Stooges with one phone call. Danny getting John
Cale to produce the Stooges. Danny introducing Iggy to David Bowie. Danny
declining to throw away his life to save Iggy. Danny seeing one Ramones gig and
instantly becoming their manager. Danny bringing the Ramones to England and
inspiring another 10,000 bands. Danny on Robert Mapplethorpe: “Everybody fucked
Bobby!” Danny putting heartthrob shots of the Ramones next to David Cassidy in
teen magazines.

Danny laughing and smiling, Danny rueful, Danny unpretentious and heartfelt; the
coolest guy in any room who long ago dropped any pretense of cool. You know that
stupid question: What historical figure would you most like to have dinner with?
Now you know.

Danny Fields and Nico; Photo credit: © Linda Eastman/Danny Fields
Archive.Director Brendan Toller regards Danny with amazement and delight. Danny
Says is inspiring and insanely fun. You can’t wait to hear what’s coming around
the corner – the next story, the next deranged incident, the next band that
never got over the hump and whose failure broke Danny’s heart. Again.

The limited budget sometimes intrudes. Animation takes over when there’s no
archival footage, like when Morrison met Nico and they stood silent, both
staring at the same spot on the floor for an hour. The animation is crude, but
sweet. There doesn’t seem enough money to buy performance rights; scenes and
even still photos repeat. Most regrettably, the brief film of the MC5 makes them
looks like clowns. Neither what we do see nor brief contemporary interviews give
even a hint of their earthshaking blast. Toller wastes time on wanker John
Sinclair, former MC5 manager and founder of the ridiculous White Panther Party.
To this party, Sinclair brings nothing, but he’s the only guest who does.

Danny’s former boss at Electra Records comes off self-amused, sophisticated and
living proof of how brilliant eccentrics thrive in the music biz. Nuggets
compiler, author and Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye describes discovering
himself with Danny’s help. Iggy credits Danny for something similar. Danny
discovered, against the odds, who he was supposed to be. From that he never
wavered.

The final scene is almost unbearably poignant. Early in the film, Danny
describes growing up brilliant and outcast on Long Island. He came to New York
City, he said, seeking friends. Looking back on his life, he remarks on all the
beautiful, smart, cool, insane people who became and remain his friends. “I
never thought I’d have any friends,” Danny says.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Aerah72IEI

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

 

David N. Meyer | Share Article



Tuesday
Aug232016


HELL OR HIGH WATER  

Tuesday, August 23, 2016 at 11:53AM

Debts No Honest Man Could Pay

Ben Foster and Chris Pine Photo Credit: Lorey Sebastian

Hell or High Water is a sneaky-profound, accomplished, very welcome resurrection
of a favorite exploitation genre that tragically disappeared: the mid-1970’s,
widescreen, stick-it-to-the-Man, shoot-em-up with a Message. A bleak revisionist
Western, Hell plays – as intended – like a modern country song. But not a
cornball Nashville nursery rhyme like something by Toby Keith. At its best, Hell
becomes a self-aware, hard-edged lament by Jason Isbell or Sturgill Simpson – a
bloody ballad, cadenced and elegiac.

Or, given Hell’s intertwined hope and defeat, it’s pure narcocorrido.* It has
all the elements: a good man gone bad for good reason; a bad man who does not
want and knows he does not deserve redemption;  a fatherly law enforcement
figure whose soul vengeance turns to ice and his “half-breed” partner at home in
neither the white nor his native world. Each of their tales fuel a yearning for
a lost time and place, a yearning for what coulda shoulda woulda.

The Man getting it stuck to is a Texas bank about to foreclose on the family
home of two brothers, Ben Foster and Chris Pine. They set out to rob the bank of
enough cash to pay off the mortgage. The bank wants to foreclose to exploit
soon-to-begin oil leases; the brothers have to stop the bank, ditto.

Illuminating the theme of disenfranchised working-class whites caught in the
cogs of oppressive big business, the brother’s success would bring a double
payoff: screwing the bank screwing them and cashin’ in on that oil lucre like
the invisible fat-cats who pull the strings that ruined their lives.

 Chris Pine slouches around all monosyllabic gazing sideways into the middle
distance, doing his best Chris Hemsworth impression, and it’s pretty good. Ben
Foster performs the heavy lifting and so talks non-stop. He occasionally wrecks
the taut atmospthere by speaking the film’s themes aloud. At times the two seem
like actors who just met trading lines. But at crucial plot moments, their
chemistry ignites. Fortunately, their less convincing exchanges come in the
first quarter of the film.

The yin to their yang are Texas Rangers, a revelatory Jeff Bridges, accompanied
by Gil Birmingham as his wisecracking partner. Insult-swapping cops is an ‘80’s,
not a ‘70’s trope, but exploitation demands suppression of male to male
affection no matter what the era. Like the bros, the most loving thing the cops
can say to each other is: Fuck you. The story crosscuts between the two sets of
bros with precision timing and suspense. As in any worthy ballad, rhythm is Hell
’s strong suit.

Hell is men in a man’s world. There is no romantic subplot. Women appear
briefly. They’re all so fed up with manly antics they can barely lift their
eyebrows in resignation; a Greek chorus of women who find macho posturing
tiresome and ridiculous. That's not the usual role for women in a Western, to
say the least. Malin Ireland, playing Pine’s former wife, steals every scene
with her laden silences. A lesser film would offer hints of reconciliation. But
in this hardscrabble landscape, there ain't no do-overs.

 In the most powerful sequence, the brothers race out of a robbed bank to
discover exactly what awaited the Jesse James-Cole Younger gang when they
emerged from a plundered bank in Northfield, Minnesota in 1876:** an armed
populace hype to blow their heads off. Pine and Foster met a pistol-packing
Texan in an earlier robbery and escaped as he emptied his clip – even though
they made of point of not taking his cash. Hell captures the seething,
hair-trigger resentment of disenfranchised flyovers with Conceal Carry permits.
It’s a sophisticated irony and a mid-‘70’s flashback that the trigger-happy
Texas rednecks can’t recognize the brothers as their potential allies in armed
revolt. The underemployed rednecks’ impotent rage makes them rejoice at a chance
for legal murder. Their cold-blooded, gleeful fusillade speaks volumes about the
contemporary electorate. And about how mid-‘70’s message shoot-em-ups always
showed society rejecting their heroes.

The brothers race away from the bank and Hell presents a moment you’ve never
before seen in a Western. Instead of horses, the armed posse fire up their
pickups and SUVs and give chase. As the brothers return fire, civilian
blood-lust explodes. Bridges by this time has his own reason to kill, and his
performance becomes astonishing. He’s been mailing it in for a while, but here
brings levels of Old Testament righteousness, of mixed grief and triumph, even
his long-time fans never suspected he could never pull off. Watching him Ranger
and wise-crack and be hard-bitten all over Texas of course brings to mind Tommy
Lee Jones in No Country For Old Men. Maybe that intimidating example inspired
Bridges.

No Country looms large over Hell. Margaret Bowman – the motel clerk who can’t
believe Josh Brolan wants more than one room – appears as a tough-ass waitress.
She’s funny, but insists the only choice available today is what you don’t want.
When secondary characters speak more than one sentence at a time – which is rare
– they describes the loss of a cherished status quo. Their language is rueful
and clean, Cormac McCarthy Lite. Their tiny speeches never hit a false note;
they’re singing three-sentence ballads of defeat. Okay, it’s a message Western;
somebody’s got to deliver the Message. 

Hell’s clumsy moments do not overwhelm its grace notes. There are plot-holes as
wide as the Texas sky pushed aside by scenes right out of Jean-Pierre Melville.
Foster’s best moment comes in a confrontation with a scary Native American in a
casino. Foster offends him on purpose, then tries to show their affinity. The
Native American, like a prideful gangster in a French Noir, is not appeased.
Echoing the women, he’s had a sufficiency of swaggering broke-ass cowboys.

Hell suffers when it hits you over the head with its themes. The posse scene
proves memorable because there’s no attempt at commentary. Nick Cave’s score
finds the exact tone between pastoral and dread. Unfortunately, every country
song on the soundtrack is wrong-headed, too on-the-nose and distracting. The
film tries to use the songs to underscore emotion the scenes already evoke. The
opening number – a Townes Van Zandt song that sounds nothing like Townes – and
the song over the closing credits are the most egregious offenders. Each bad
song hurls you out of the story.

At first Bridges was bemused, as was Pine, at what seemed to both a game. Come
to the end, and neither’s assuaged the anger that fuels a war between them. The
finale is bold and carefully wrought  – a truly great exploitation set-piece.
Director David Mackenzie, who showed no fear of ambiguity in his
under-seen Young Adam, revels in the unresolved ending. Unresolved because the
saga changed Bridges and Pine. Each now sees the other – failed law enforcement
vs. homegrown anarchy – as the source of his ruin. There is no simple solution
and the film doesn’t stoop to provide one.

 

Jeff Bridges Photo Credit: Lorey Sebastian

 

 

* Like this one from Breaking Bad   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUmpTKXpIdM 

** cf. The Great Smithfield, Minnesota Raid
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zw4eL-LNejs

                                    or

The Long Riders https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hs1ZR3uIHw

                                    or

Better yet, read Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes 
https://www.amazon.com/Desperadoes-Ron-Hansen/dp/0060976985/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1471906820&sr=8-1&keywords=desperadoes

 

David N. Meyer | Share Article
tagged Ben Foster, Chris Pine, Gil Birmingham, Jeff Bridges, Westerns, Young
Adam


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