august philippic

Seeing the leaves against the granite, orange and green and red, gave me vertigo.  I thought of the Japanese aesthetic of death, that a way of dying can be beautiful.  I think in the U.S. the idea has an unfortunate association with kamikaze pilots.  But what would it mean to honor death, to see it as potentially ugly and potentially beautiful?  How might an aesthetics of death shape, for example, health care policy? 

I’m trying to think of my favorite film death.  I think it is the end of Le Samourai (Japan again, but filtered through France!), which I am now going to spoil by saying that it involves a sacrifice, a clean modern line, a kind of love that can’t really be love.  It’s death as a Sade tune — “We move in space with minimum waste, maximum joy.” 

Tags: visions, grooves by august
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ME: I had a hard time telling how you were different from earlier nightmares.

NIGHTMARE: I get asked that a lot. I’d say it was indeed subtle, my own artistic inspiration, borrowing a bit from German Expressionism and (because I love the textures) the Righteous Brothers. I feel that I had an artistic whole, a real organic quality that…

ME: But just to back up for a moment…

NIGHTMARE: …that recalled Fellini at his most playful and yet sad. I guess La Strada was my biggest influence. Such a brilliant film!

ME: Right, but what specifically was different?

NIGHTMARE: This was the biggest tsunami yet — a wave to convention in order to subvert it.

ME: All my nightmares have the biggest tsunami yet.

NIGHTMARE: But here, recall, that you were at top of the big cliff! And so, breaking down the forth wall, going a little meta, when you thought “those waves are just like in my nightmares,” you felt a false sense of triumph — as if you had endured it all before. As if now, finally, you could rise above and look down on your terror, as if all was well.

ME: Yes, I see.

NIGHTMARE: And then giving you this illusion of wakefulness, I of course produce an even bigger wave, one that makes the cliffs disappear, one that shook the building you were in and covered everything with water.

ME: And then I woke up. It was chilling. I’m wondering, I was speaking to somebody over the weekend who claimed she no longer had nightmares, that even in sleep she knew herself to be dreaming, and thus felt no fear.

NIGHTMARE: The detached observer. Yes, that might be your best strategy, your best hope. But you have to be very careful, because we nightmares are always laying traps, subverting your awareness, sneaking up again. We’re tricky bastards. Comfort yourself in your world all you want, but you’ll see me again, or somebody quite like me.

ME: You’re like a talk show before the writer’s strike.

NIGHTMARE: I enjoy my work. What can I say — I’m an auteur. One can’t strike from oneself.

Tags: visions by august
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I was having a conversation this morning with somebody who didn’t like Royal Tenenbaums: “It just didn’t go anywhere.” I see her point. Wes Anderson is a self-absorbed filmmaker of self-absorbed people. A lot of people have complained that he cares more about the wallpaper patterns than the acting. On the DVD of Tenenbaums, there’s an interview with Gene Hackman in which the actor describes his own discomfort with Anderson’s style — the way he had to ignore all the, the stuff to turn in his performance.

I still love the movie. I love the energy that narcissists can produce around themselves — the movies devote themselves to big personalities. They are fantasias of ego. I don’t mean Anderson’s own ego; I mean that Anderson’s lens shows us a world twisted by the personality of his characters, and in that world the most important thing about the Indian funeral, for example, is not the death, not the way the Indian characters feel, not even really the way the protagonists feel, but the way the protagonists can dress to match the color scheme. It’s borderline offensive. But it’s also entertaining, a Brooklyn-warp, a watercolor of the damaged.

It also works as light parody. In Darjeeling Limited, Bill Murray (who has no lines), runs to catch the Darjeeling Limited, and misses it. It feels like a reference to Razor’s Edge. In that movie, the protagonist has survived World War I, and the journey to India is taken very seriously as critique of the world at hand. In this movie, it’s not clear that there’s any merit to this trip beyond the emotions expressed by some odd characters. It’s funny, but the humor is subtle in all sorts of ways that Wes Anderson films mostly aren’t. There’s a central peacock feather ritual devised by some guru that is hilariously anticlimatic. There is portent and fuss and not-very-convincing reconciliation. The epiphany in this movie feels like the deep realization that we’ve been accessorizing all wrong.

To enjoy the movie, you have to love adornment and be skeptical of essences in ways that the main characters are not. You have to be able to appreciate assholes. And you have to be willing to see a story as a vehicle for serving up visions of a more beautiful universe. I’ll take that bargain any day.

Tags: visions by august
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“I wonder,” says one brother to the other two, “if the three of us could have been friends in real life.” It’s one of the few lines in Darjeeling Limited that got a laugh, but I loved the movie. It’s because I love trains, love watching the landscape, love the sense of motion. I also love Wes Anderson movies. I consider them to be a guilty pleasure, because I am aware that they are flawed. This one is orientalist in uninteresting ways, but the landscape allows Anderson a fuller palette than Brooklyn, and I love the way he can pack a frame with objects. You can smell this movie, it has perfumes and sand, tea, sex, bathrooms, train brakes, peacock feathers. Wes Anderson pays attention to detail. I wouldn’t want other directors to emulate him, but it’s an aesthetic I’m behind: poetry of objects in motion.

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From an online exhibit sponsored by Slate and Magnum. You can find it here, although you may have to rummage through the archive.

A photograph is inherently alienating. It presents an image to a person who is removed from the source of that image, and it arrests time in such a way that the picture seems to belong to history rather than present. The invention of the photograph and the works of early masters like Adams, Evans, and Steiglitz may belong to the modern, but the enterprise as a whole is postmodern — disjointed and cracked, with images that subvert their own codes. It is these qualities, in addition to reproducibility, that make photography an ideal medium for the web.

If “Tokyo, Love, Hello” were a novel, the writer would be Murakami. If it were in a museum, I would buy tickets and take friends. It feels like performance art, like avant garde filmmaking, like art. It echoes my experience of much of the world, but does so with incredible specificity of image and place. Shinjuku montage, stuffed pandas, cigars, subways. How to photograph disjuncture, ambiguity, and confusion yet still make the images precise? Try swan paddle boats, cats in boxing rings, corporate gymnastics, stairwells, monk telephones, ritual and neon.

The piece makes both Tokyo and photography an experience shared between artist and viewers. It makes misrecognition its subject, and thus acknowledges, pays tribute to, photography’s many alienations.

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I saw a movie tonight so romantic I will not tell you the title. It featured a Brancusi statue, a concert pianist, a soap opera, and a café. A thunderstorm hitting as a girl steps onto the rooftop, and the angle gets a little wider and the Eiffel Tower looms behind. Here is a woman who has slept with father and son. Here is a woman who mouths the words of French pop music as she jams to her iPod. Here is a woman who gets a job in a place that only hires men. Here are people beloved by all Paris who wish only (well, not only, and certainly not always) to be left alone.

A striptease in a concert hall. By the soloist.

And the music – music as overtly sexual as late-night cable; music that will float you out to sea like an elderly Inuit, music like lavender, like cloves, like milk and honey.

I saw a movie tonight that was a postcard to art, a comedy in the fullest sense of the word (think Balzac). It reminded me of when I used to come to New York only for movies, for popcorn and for the feel of a city and for a breath of the hope of love. Those movies, like this one, made me want to drink coffee and write, repeating endlessly until I keeled over or ossified like a Brancusi sculpture. I’m still shaken.

Tags: visions, New York, august, grooves by august
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When I lived in Seattle, I was so healthy and so grunge — bike helmet strapped to my backpack, grass stains on my shirt from ultimate frisbee, tivas. This dress was a delicate balance of life-affirming and Nirvana, one must be ready to pivot quickly, to be morose with goths or to climb Mt. Baker.

Moving to New York (with several intermediate stages) has changed me. My wife frowns on flannel. My shoes require occasional applications of polish. I am thankful for the ubiquity of cleaners. Although I do not go out of my way to be cool, I do strive to avoid embarrassment around those who do.

New York has also changed the way I move in space. Clothing is part of the issue, the Seattle puddle I might jump in; the New York puddle would stain my trousers. But more: the hard press of people drives me to open spaces: to Grant’s tomb, the Great Lawn, the Hall of Arms and Armor. I am far more conscious of my movements, of my trajectory relative to those around me, of my pace and weight and sillouette, of my clothes. And I have new models. Goodbye Eddie Vedder; hello Alain Delon. Goodbye, frisbee player and wannabe mountain climber; hello househusband and wannabe assassin.

I want to move through New York the way Alain Delon moves through Le Samourai: clean, unyielding, as silently as possible. Under Jean-Pierre Melville’s direction, Delon (assassin, master of his motion) inhabits washed out, minimalist spaces. His apartment is furnished with a bed and a parakeet that moults when the place has been cased. His hat and tie suggest a very competent tailer, and even greater competence is shown in his manufacture of an alibi for a murder he did commit. There is love, of a sort, and danger and suspense, but mostly this is a movie of movement. Melville’s camera follows Delon obsessively, and dialogue is of secondary interest.

The movie also makes me nostalgic for the days when European high-culture could see in American low-culture a Middle Earth of middlebrow inspiration. Melville has been thinking about Sam Spade, he has been watching Cary Grant. His sensibilities are not unlike those of Frank Lloyd Wright (although the aesthetic effects are quite different). The fashion in this morning is elegant sixties — the kind that James Bond proported to offer.

But when I walk through New York tonight, Lazemby will be the farthest thing from my mind. I will go with deliberate paces and clean trousers. I will be tucked in and my held will be tilted as if I were wearing a hat. My imaginary overcoat will conceal my imaginary pistol, and my apartment will be free of bugs. I will outwit the police. I will turn my plot in on itself. I will be methodical and lethal. And I will recite the koan that forms the epigram for Melville’s clasic film:

“There is no solitude greater than that of a tiger in the jungle. Unless — perhaps — it be that of a Samurai.”

Tags: visions, New York by august
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