About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

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The Kiss

By
Hilton Als
– August 13, 2013

Barry4For a time I always had male companionship. Growing up, I had a little brother. Then, time passed and I went out into the world of mentors, lovers, friends, and other contemporaries who made a difference. Whether that difference was good or bad is not the point. The point is that those relationships changed my internal atmosphere and sometimes the atmosphere outside it, too. Trees. Mountains. Streets. I loved seeing things through someone else’s eyes, and then seeing it through my eyes, and then seeing what happened when I put those two things together in my heart, and in my head. Other streets, more trees. Time passed again, and I had substantially less male companionship. Life’s various intensities focused its gaze elsewhere, and I began
to travel for work–to teach–sometimes living in a town for three years, or one year, all the while collecting furniture for my Platonic home. Where that home would be–I’d be the last to know. But I knew it was there, somewhere, like a Dionne Warwick reality and abstraction–“A chair is still a chair/Even when there’s no one sitting there”–and the fire was lit, and there, there was my pile of pillows and, looking up, a kiss. I did not know who planted that kiss on my Platonic brow in my Platonic home, nor what my friend’s lips looked like, but I knew he was there because I was there, plumping the pillows, lighting the fire, making the soup: home. It didn’t occur to me until recently that some of the movies I loved the most while I was on the road had to do with male comradeship, fraternity and trust. I longed for each at once, and all together, too, since each is rarer than you’ll ever know, let alone having them all together. But I don’t want you to know that. I don’t want you to know that, for some, life’s various brutalities are the only kind of kiss–and kiss off–that makes any kind of emotional sense. For me, life on the road and elsewhere was brutal without the memory of this or that kiss of trust I kept tucked, like a memory or a cause, in my heart’s desire. It’s so warm. And among the movies that further warmed that dream of love was a film I never remembered until I happened across it on television again and loved it again: Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 epic, “Barry Lyndon.” Based on the 1844 novel, “The Luck of Barry Lyndon,” by William Makepeace Thackery, it’s the story of an Irish–read “different”–adventurer who, through a series of misfortunes and strokes of incredible luck, becomes a wealthy man, and eventually loses his fortune–and his leg. The scenes of Barry (Ryan O’Neal) loving women or trying to, are relatively brief, and sometimes tender, and often cruel, but mostly at a remove from the real emotional action, which centers–typically–on male fraternity at the expense of female joy. But there are moments that are free of all that. In one very moving scene, Barry’s military mentor, Captain Grogon, played gorgeously by Godfrey Quigley, asks his young charge to kiss him goodbye (he’s fallen in the line of fire). And for what feels like an eternity Barry, as he weeps, slowly leans in to kiss his true love, who lays dying against an atmosphere of clouds, grass, and life. And it’s in that slow moment of love, of the kiss carefully and willingly asked for and given, that Barry becomes himself and stops becoming himself. His youth can’t take his passions. So, he retreats into a frozen, synthetic world of furbelows and fineries that another male mentor introduces him to, while you spend the rest of the movie knowing that, somewhere beneath his rich man’s powdered face and then sadness and disgrace, it’s Barry’s tender goodbye kiss of love in the face of death that remains, everlastingly, the only home he ever really knew, and ever really wanted.

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The Mother

By
Hilton Als
– August 13, 2013

She smelled of some incredible combination of hair products, the cleanest food imaginable, wisdom, and new woolen tights. She had one gold front tooth and a tendency to laugh at the oddest
things–a banal line creatively delivered in a mediocre comedy could keep her in stitches, and be repeated for days. She had reached the incredible height of 5’4–shades of Frankie Addams–by the time she was thirteen and so forever walked as though she were a tall girl; she hunched her shoulders and so do some of her children. She liked: calpyso music, swing music, Dollar Brand. When Brand performed at this or that club, she’d get on the subway and go into “the city,” with her girlfriend and de facto sister-in-law and they would swoon over Brand’s unusual presence in their own way, which is to say they were quiet, eyes glistening like stardust in brown earth. She took two of her children with her when she went to the Lower East Side to buy said children shoes–brown Oxfords made in the nineteen-forties–they would not appreciate until they were older and someone else said they liked them. She walked to the back of those shops on the Lower East Side and talked to the shopkeeper, Mrs. Grossman, or whomever, between stacks of dusty boxes, hunting and hunting for God knows what–something called a savings. She looked at you crossly when the subject of money came up. She disapproved of children saying they were hungry, and there was “nothing” to eat: “We have milk, eggs, bread, and cheese. What do you want? Blood?” She was annoyed when you didn’t use your imagination–whether to amuse yourself, or other people. She used to say a line she loved from some movie (especially when her children were annoying her): “Why don’t you kids go out and play in the traffic?” She loved art and artists; later, some of her children fell in love with both. She made most of her own clothes–a pink wrap dress before Diane von Furstenberg started her rap about wrapping. She liked the idea of Switzerland–so clean–and the reality of Barbados: family. She was so insanely supportive of her children people are still jealous of them. She said, “Oh, for God’s sake!” when one of her children took her to see “Saturday Night Fever”; he thought it was a musical, she liked musicals. She took her two sons to see “Gone With the Wind”–twice. She never said what interested her about the movie but Hattie McDaniel didn’t bother her. She was distressed when you gave up–even momentarily–on dreaming a different future than the present tried to limit you to. She saved her children from the force and limitations of their poverty by teaching them that the imagination had nothing to do with all that; nor did love: both were limitless, or should be. She didn’t believe hope was a thing with feathers; it was real, but you had to work at it and whoever didn’t work at it wanted to live in their own smug misery. She watched one of her children climbing up the stairs to greet her, carrying a pile of books he could barely manage, and she laughed, delighted, and said: “My poor son.” She did hair, cleaned houses, worked as a teacher’s aid, made clothes, worked at other things: work was the point, taking care of your children and being connected to people you loved was the point. She never let her children forget about the discipline of her care; to this day, it would be difficult to recall any of her children showing up to anything looking “sloppy.” She went to see “Shampoo,” because it was billed as a comedy and said, “Oh, for God’s sake,” when she heard Lee Grant moan in the dark, but she laughed and laughed as Lee Grant walked through her big house looking for her maid, crying “Mona, Mona, Mona, I need you.” She never made you think she had been “like,” Lee Grant’s maid, even though she had done that job, too. She loved dancing, and dancers, and had a female friend who was a painter, whom she revered. She could make anything when it came to clothes, bags, hats, and yet did not consider that “real” art. She wanted you to go out into the world and if you couldn’t make it, she’d go out into the world for you. She looked at a photograph one of her sons showed her after he returned from Amsterdam for the first time; the photograph showed her child sitting on a bed with some new friends–Dutch friends, black and white. Her son was wearing black tights, a Jean Seberg boat neck meets James Earl Jones in his training woolies in “The Great White Hope,” jumper. She looked at the photograph and said to her child: “You belong with these people.” He blushed. She could make the world different in a minute. Couldn’t she see that, all along, he had always belonged to her, and how he lived for those moments when she’d describe their days together with a laugh, and a tenderly tended “us”?

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Black Ground Noise

By
Hilton Als
– August 13, 2013

I have a theory about artists of color and success: very few can deal with it. Then Michelle Obama came along and things have changed in terms of role models, etc., but there’s a high percentage of artists of color, still, who grapple with the idea let alone reality of “achievement,” or a certain “other side of the street,” success (a famous author had to tell me what that phrase meant, recently; look it up). It’s difficult to be a commodity–a “brand”–if a large part of your history has been about being a commodity, or treated like one. How do you escape what’s in the blood? The brilliant documentary, “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” is a metaphor for all that. Ostensibly about the world of back up singers during the hey day of Phil Spector, Bowie during his “Young Americans,” period, the Stones and “Brown Sugar,” etc., it’s really a movie about the existential need for attention, and existential dread once that attention is conferred. In the movie the artists “struggle,” but for what? Some for the fame read money that was, by rights, there’s a long time ago, but had they achieved acclaim and comfort in their heyday, would they have known what to do with it? America did not teach them that. And, in any case, what was stolen that the film’s extraordinary women could not help but give away, which was their presence, their gifts? Is that America? The home of those with no gifts and those who have a surplus of them? Speaking from the heart about the balance between the need to do, and what the colored body can take, the great singer Tata Vega says it best: Had I become famous, I probably wouldn’t be talking to you right now. And yet the film ends with the advice a sage older singer confers: “Talent is God given, but what you do with it–that’s you.” A vital lesson. Best run with it.
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In Thicke

By
Hilton Als
– August 12, 2013

thickeI am Mrs. Robin Thicke because he can sport a pinky ring which is really hard to pull off without looking affected and trying too hard in the worst way. Because he doesn’t sound like Justin Timberlake; he sounds like himself, which is to say he sings from cigarette breath. Because he sings the kind of music his mother, also a singer, loved while he was growing up–soul music, which defines the rhythms of his white body. Because there is nothing more erotic than a man or a woman who looks one way and performs another way. Because when he puts his hand on his hip in this clip it is so attractive because it’s a gesture that means many things to me–mothers waiting on street corners for their kids to get home from school; a mother standing at the stove, stirring something in a pot; a girls showing the world who she is, defiantly–and yet it’s a man, thus triggering what I find deeply appealing: one body doing a variety of things and not being defined as one thing. Because he is not performing white soul but a humane version of the white pimp–he who understands you and wants you to save your money and go to college after you do your thing. Because his teeth are supposed to be “perfect,” but they make me laugh at the memory of Dean Martin, who never interested me. Because he has so much charm he can spread it around and make Jimmy Fallon seem charming–or at least not annoying. Because “Blurred Lines,” is such a great song and it’s silly to compare it to anything else. Because, even though I don’t like Pharrell and his Tupperware face and rhymes, Robin makes me forget him. Because he didn’t blink an eye when Chelsea Handler asked if he was “acting black” on her show, and then she went on to say some other stupid shit and he still didn’t blink an eye–behind his shades–and in short order Robin offered to whip it out as a way of shutting her up, or confirming certain suspicions. Because he can play the spoons. Because I love it when says, in “Blurred Lines”: “You the hottest bitch in this place,” and I imagine he’s talking about me and I don’t even find the epithet offensive because he doesn’t mean it to be–in Robin’s lexicon it’s a party word and it’s a party song, which you can hear when he laughs a little bit during “What rhymes with hug me?” Because when he was putting the moves on his wife, Paula Patton, he asked her to dance and she said to herself, You’re a white boy, you can’t dance, and then she danced with him anyway and he surprised her with his rhythms, his body. Because even though I don’t find anything remotely interesting about Paula Patton I’ll let her live because she’s the first Mrs.Thicke. Because “Blurred Lines,” is such a valuable contribution to joy.

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Just Us

By
Hilton Als
– August 12, 2013

letterAs she lay dying it came to her that she had to write a letter. Her friend suggested they do it together; the letter would be better that way; their collaboration would be the work of their joined spirits–a third person who would write a better letter. She looked at him, quizzically, and then submitted to the experience. The letter was better. That was his dream, always, to make this third person with someone, someone who was greater than either individual. Sometimes, looking at programs about David Bowie, say, and the years he spent touring with Iggy Pop, or living with him in Berlin, making music, he would remember that feeling–of creating the third person who wrote better than either individual. At night he would close his eyes against the break up part of that experience, the memory of it, because he wanted to see that third person, always, as whole and pure. Before the flowers of friendship faded friendship faded. And then it came back.

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Die Frauen

By
Hilton Als
– August 11, 2013

1003909_10152100789622586_1791532795_nWhenever I find myself wearying of the race-class-gender-bore-ness of it all, I turn to photographs like this as a kind of inspiration. There is something to be said about the creativity that comes with repression, not another marriage ceremony. The inhabitants of these photographs–because that’s what they do in the frame: inhabit it–remind me of what’s been sorely lacking in the public sphere for years now: wit. The reason we love Michelle Obama, say, is because she plays kitten to her husband’s basset hound earnestness. (I love them both but you know what I mean.) Wit is not entirely language based; it can manifest itself in a coyness we do not mean, like Marlene standing “shy,” as Anna works her mouth. (Of all the players seen here, Marlene has the best costuming for play.) And Leni, no stranger to control, looks out of control as she tries to coquette it up on the edge of the frame; she can’t win. In point of fact, the two people who dominate these images are Wong, and the unidentified man. Wong because she knows what the camera can handle, which is to say the smallest of gestures magnified by one’s grand interiority, and the unidentified man because of the enormous heart and pleasure he feels in Anna, Marlene’s, and Leni’s presence. I can relate. Which is why we love looking at photographs, despite their sometimes painful truth: so we can relate.

But back to the race-class-gender-bores. I was recalling, recently, how the late great Barbara Epstein called the1014177_10152100789947586_99543094_n love that dared not speak it’s name the love that won’t shut up. That cheers me. And a black male friend told me he was in bed with a white male lover the other day and the white male lover reached down and said, What I love, really, is how we’re the same size. And my black friend said: But I’m not hard.

I mean, doesn’t that say it all, and with wit, too? My friend’s story equals the scene Richard Pryor wrote for “Blazing Saddles,” where Madeline Kahn, playing a Marlene-like character, purrs in the black sheriff’s ear: Is is true what they say about you people being gifted? And then Madeline says, Oh, it’s true, it’s true! There’s a pause before the black sheriff says: That’s my arm.
(The scene as described above was cut from the film.)

All I’m saying is that there are no answers to any of this stuff, and what I look for, what I need, in addition to society’s various truths and struggles, is the glamour that can come with not putting your cards on the table all at once, and imparting a little style and wit to all the differences you can’t change–and should revel in, without the burden of explanation.

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