About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

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The Actor’s Body

I was fixing dinner one night recently and the television was on. Even though I wasn’t watching it, I liked listening to the dialogue–I think that’s the only way I ever watch network TV; I am interested in speech, in the rhythms of speech, particularly scripted speech: writing as talking, talking as writing.  In any case, television serials are, for the most part, plot and dialogue driven, and one can often tell what’s happening by what is being said rather than what is being shown. A variation on radio stories, TV as “anti-cinema.” While washing some spinach, I could tell–I could hear–that the show’s protagonist and his wife were at a theatre–a “first night”–and, seconds later, I could tell they were watching Jean-Claude van Itallie’s “America Hurrah.” This I knew less by what the actors were saying, than how my body reacted to what they were saying. I had appeared in the “Interview,” section of the three act piece when I was a drama student at the School for the Performing Arts. And before I quite knew what was happening, I was saying the words–my part–and I wasn’t washing spinach, I was that character again, on that stage again, trying to put the writer’s ideas, and my character’s, over. Montgomery Clift, to my mind the greatest film actor this country has ever produced, once said that acting was hard because your body didn’t know you were acting. And that is, perhaps, the most precise definition I’ve ever heard of the actor’s machinery: to make a character or situation real, your body, and the emotions and thoughts it contains, has to infuse it all with their real blood, and tendons. That may explain the jitteriness one sometimes encounters with actors in what passes as real life: they are filled with words and situations their bodies can’t forget. That is, they are “themselves,” in the world, buying overpriced necessities or crap in supermarkets like the rest of us, but they’re past lives, as other people feeding on their real nerves and blood, trail after them like old tin cans. Or Marley’s chains. They take on a part, and it will not let them alone. (Nina Simone once wrote that part of her madness at a certain point was the direct result of not being able to forget song lyrics.)  That is where their training comes in; Sandy Meiser, Stanislavsky, Strasberg, not only helped the performer free themselves, but to build up their internalized shrink’s office, a place where they can gain some distance, perspective, on the fictional skin they inhabit for real. In a wonderful book called “Bergman By Bergman,” the great Swedish director talked about a particular shot featuring Liv Ullman–a close up. Bergman’s interlocutor asked if he used a special filter to capture a certain look on Ullman’s character’s face. And Bergman said, no, he told the actress to put all her character’s emotions in her lips. Ullman did. Bergman said, This was only something that a great actress could do. It couldn’t be unexplained. I had a similar feeling–about my old actor’s body, about Ullman’s lips–when I recall two film performances I have yet to recover from. The first was Rachel Weisz’s truly uncanny work in “The Deep Blue Sea.” Terence Davies directed this small, beautiful film, by wrapping it around Weisz’s character–a posh Englishwoman living in World War II London who catapults herself out of her class and into the arms of a working class man who cannot and will not meet her demands to be loved now and forever. She is in love with him because he has loved her once, can’t he love her again? Sharing a small flat situated in a sad little courtyard, the grime on the lovers windows is the grime of death: we meet Weisz’s character after a failed suicide attempt. Working backwards, Davies more or less narrates the story through Weisz’s eyes, which are often filled with desire and panic; we hear it in her voice, too. Why can’t her lover stay? Why can’t love kill you and bring you back to life? In one beautifully choreographed sequence, Weisz runs into the underground, and pauses on the platform. A train rushes by, she leans towards it. (A major influence on the piece is clearly David Lean’s “Brief Encounter.”) She has everything and nothing: her understanding of England’s class distinctions, the turn on that comes with flouting the rules, loving down, her body. But she has only grown to know her body because of her passion for a man who does not have her language or, more specifically, the language she acquired because of her background, her access to the life of the mind, a closed world where she could not call her soul her own. Last year, Glenn Close was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award for her portrayal of “Albert Nobbs.” She should have won. As with Weisz, Close has an amazing command of her face, which is the film actor’s stock in trade: they must convey thought with relatively little language. But whereas Weisz’s ripe blooming lips and Vivien Leigh-like dark lushness only adds to her character’s tragedy–she luxuriates in small rooms and in a cold grey England  that cannot contain her beauty–Close’s Nobbs is trussed, like a mental patient who has committed himself not to his madness, but to society’s: the world will not allow him to be who he is, so he will pose as the very image of rationality even as his soul grows wilder, quietly wilder. Directed by Rodrigo Garcia, one of the best young directors out there–his cinema is a cinema of women without relying on obvious “drama”; his pacing is remarkable, and Isak Dinesen like in its love of the tale unfolding in its own time–Albert Nobbs fills Close’s face with that character’s genius for survival, in addition to the ambitious performer’s.

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Sheryl Sutton, 1984

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“She Sat Beautifully in Chairs”: One Poem for Robert Wilson, Loree Wilson, Sheryl Sutton, and Raymond Andrews. NYC. 5.26.12

Robert Wilson: My mother was a beautiful, intelligent, cold and distant woman. She was very formal, very elegant, she sat beautifully in chairs. With my mother there was almost no personal communication. We could sit in a room together for hours and not talk. As a child I never received a goodnight kiss and I don’t remember my mother ever touching me. The first time I can recall her actually holding and kissing me is when I was eighteen years old and went away to the University of Texas. Then, for the first time, my mother showed emotion and told me that she loved me. It was the most bizarre thing. She probably felt things very deeply but was unable to express herself, and in some ways we were very alike….I didn’t have many friends. But when I was nine or ten, there was a black boy named Leroy, he was the son of a woman who worked in our house. This was a kind of friendship you had to hide in Waco, Texas. I grew up in a place that was completely segregated. There was no interaction between the blacks and the whites. My father was not a Klansman, but segregation was part of his education and environment. He was embarrassed when he saw me walking down the street with a black boy. He wouldn’t say anything but one certainly felt it. I think there was such a tight bond between Leroy and myself because we both felt segregated in some way…The problem with Raymond [Andrews] is that we knew nothing about him. We had no idea who his parents were. There was Sarah, his “sister”–she had come from New Jersey–but in the black culture you often refer to someone as a “sister,” or a “brother.” Genetically, I don’t think she was his sister. It was very curious: suddenly I had a black kid living with me. These were not times when that sort of thing was acceptable…I felt very uncomfortable about having to call my parents and say, “Hey, Dad, I’ve adopted a black kid.” Of course, they were afraid that I would bring a black boy back to Waco, to their home. It would be a great embarrassment for my father and for his friends. First I’m gay and now I’ve got a black son. It was something totally not understood, and very confusing for my father. His reaction was a big problem for me….I was fascinated by the way [Raymond’s] mind worked and the way he saw…My mother saw almost nothing; she died at the beginning of my career. She didn’t really know what I was doing, when we spoke it was more superficial, “How’s the weather? How are you?” We didn’t talk so much about the work. I guess she was supportive, she understood me best. She never said anything, but we communicated with looks, there was as a silent understanding. She died in May 1972, she had had cancer for a while and it was difficult for me, but it was not as difficult as I thought it would be. I was with her when she died. She was in a coma. Five days before she died she opened her eyes and said, “Am I dead yet?” My grandmother, who was there, said, “No, you’re not dead yet,” and I started talking to her. She told me, “You’ll be all right in this world. You’ll get along just fine because you know how to be alone and you like to be alone.” And it’s true.

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A Train Story

Email to a friend:

I’m on the train on my way back to NYC, and there are a couple of white boys in front of me, adolescents, who were giggling over something on the smaller boy’s computer when I came back to my seat after I’d gone to the bathroom. And as I took my seat (they didn’t see me for a second) I saw the screen: the smaller boy was pointing to a picture of a black woman and, next to that, an image of a baboon. After they saw me, the boy slammed his computer lid shut very quickly, but it was too late: the blood had gone to my head. I’m sitting here with another forty minutes left to the trip wondering if I should say something without being sent to jail once we get to the station, or not forget this and write it down again and again.

*     *     *

I want to thank you for your e-mail. I didn’t have a chance to write before now because I had to lug all this stuff home and I wanted a moment with my thoughts—and to replay the movie that was that particular train ride.

I sat behind those boys for a while, watching, incredibly enough, ” The Three Sisters”—the Actor’s Studio version, with Kim Stanley, and Sandy Dennis, and Geraldine Page. I learn more about writing from performers than a lot of other things, including some books. In any case, Kim, as you know, is a perennial favorite. Along with Montgomery Clift, Kim manages to find elements in text and space—to fill the poetics of space—with a subtlety that rivals and often makes trite the experience of reading established, generally self-conscious-as-verse, verse. Kim and Monty are the white space between lines of poetry.  I sort of can’t believe Kim’s IMMERSION in a role: the role is real, and she isn’t. That is the humility art demands: the evisceration of one’s body the better to show the fucked up human soul. In any case, there are those lovely speeches in the first act in the Chekhov, where the sisters say they’ll know they’ll be forgotten, replaced by other sisters in different houses, and Verishinin, the visiting army officer, says they will, in fact, be remembered—that they are traces of reality that will stay in memory, and on on and on.

I didn’t want to be torn away from this very real invention by the reality sitting in front of me, and how Irina’s talking about the warm air reminded me of the warm air beyond the train windows but, still, I had to perform in this play I didn’t want to perform in. But Vershinin’s words really worked on me: our lives mean more than we know. (I just read a fabulous quote, attributed to Jane Bowles: “Life has more imagination than we do.”) And who was I not to let my life lead me to its various starts in conclusions. I have no “power,” over how my destiny will effect or not effect someone else; all I am is an image in someone else’s mind. At least, that’s how the Chekhov, and these various performers were affecting me. As the black and white images bounced along on the bouncing train, I knew I had to do: tell those boys about themselves, as the elders used to say in Brooklyn. I couldn’t look the memory of my mother in the eye if I didn’t say something; indeed, I couldn’t look at my inner eye if I didn’t say something. And I hated what I became as I waited to say something: a person who clocked the uniform of the offenders (docksiders, cranberry-colored chinos, Lauren shirts worn down at the collar and cuff), thus sizing them up as “privileged.” I didn’t want the class twinges we all suffer from—despite the long journey from England, Americans and especially New Yorkers can read privilege in a second–but there it was. And there I was. Is the computer screen a private space? If you open your computer screen on a crowded train an invitation to look at what you’re looking at? And there I was, wondering for a minute about all that when I heard myself say, leaning over those boys seats as we all prepared to enter Penn Station, but before we got our bags: “You know, if you look at a picture of a black woman, laughing, and then point to a picture of a baboon, people might take it the wrong way. Racism hurts. It’s not an abstraction. Sexism hurts. And people use both things to belittle people. Fortunately for you, you’ll probably never experience any of these feelings.”

The boys were silent for a moment. I turned back to my bag, and started to pack up. A white woman behind me said: “Well done.”

The older boy said: “Sir, that had nothing to do with sexism or racism!” And I said: “Well, it looked that way, you guys were laughing and pointing to those images, and why did your friend shut his computer screen when he saw that I saw?”

The older boy: “Sir! That wasn’t about anything racist—or sexist!”

And the white woman behind me said: “Kid, why don’t you just apologize and shut the fuck up?!” I turned to her. Our hands touched. I said: “Did you read that mess about Obama at Barnard, and how idiots in the Limbaugh sphere are now using his support for women to slag them off?!” And she said: “I think the world is going crazy!”

A black man further down the aisle started to walk toward us; I don’t know if he heard any of the exchange, but blood hears blood—especially if there’s a chance it’ll be spilled. But I nodded that he shouldn’t come any further. For obvious reasons: if there was going to be harm, he should be spared harm.

The car got quiet. We started to collect our bags. My suitcase, though, was on the rack at the front of our car, so, I had to wait for those boys and their friends to get off the train to collect it, my legs pulsing with that strange adrenalin that the minority faces in the company of the status quo, and there was the realization, too, how, sometimes, the action can not only change the atmosphere, but allow other people to speak, too. As we walked out of the train, a white man who had been sitting across from me and the woman gave us the thumbs up gesture. Outside of the station, the air was warm, and people were going about their night time business. As in a play or story by Chekhov.

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Dig It, You Dig?

Words of advice from the brave and singular Thelonious Monk, dead thirty years this month. Words that go beyond orchestration, an architecture for life. Art: just do it, just do it, just do it. And then watch how art does you. Why treat it as separate from life? What follows is a transcription of Steve Lacy’s notes of TM speaking. Happy Monk Days to us all. And bless Steve Lacy for the card. Oh, dear Thelonious, my beard is for you. You always make me feel like a hotel room, waiting for you to come home.

 

Just because you’re not a drummer, doesn’t mean you don’t have to keep time.

Pat your foot and sing the melody in your head, when you play.

Stop playing all those weird notes (that bullshit), play the melody!

Make the drummer sound good.

Discrimination is important.

You’ve got to dig it to dig it, you dig?

ALL REET!

Always know….(MONK)

It must be always night, otherwise they wouldn’t need the lights.

Let’s lift the band stand!!

I want to avoid the hecklers.

Don’t play the piano part, I’m playing that. Don’t listen to me. I’m supposed to be accompanying you!

The inside of the tune (the bridge) is the part that makes the outside sound good.

Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by. Some music just imagined. What you don’t play can be more important that what you do.

A note can be small as a pin or as big as the world, it depends on your imagination.

Stay in shape! Sometimes a musician waits for a gig, and when it comes, he’s out of shape and can’t make it.

When you’re swinging, swing some more.

(What should we wear tonight? Sharp as possible!)

Always leave them wanting more.

Don’t sound anybody for a gig, just be on the scene. These pieces were written so as to have something to play and get cats interested enough to come to rehearsal.

You’ve got it! If you don’t want to play, tell a joke or dance, but in any case, you got it! (To a drummer who didn’t want to solo)

Whatever you think can’t be done, somebody will come along and do it. A genius is the one most like himself.

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along and spoil it.

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The Widow

Snow can be a notorious memory stimulator. Last Saturday, when we experienced what felt like winter weather for the first time in a long time, I was having dinner with a gay female friend who works mostly in Los Angeles. We were just catching up, and had yet to order, when my friend received a text from a woman friend, also gay, in Los Angeles. Whitney Houston was dead. There was nothing to say. We looked out the restaurant window, and the snow began to fall. So did the memories, not in droves, but in flakes. Whitney Houston’s alternately powerful and bland resonance for us was not inseparable from our queerness. Indeed, the gorgeous star who had been circumspect about her personal life until she married the already played out but seemingly indomitable teen performer, Bobby Brown, in 1992, was less the author of a touchingly open, gospel-trained voice trying to find meaning in frequently meaningless lyrics, than the beloved friend of a woman named Robyn Crawford, who had been Houston’s closest companion since the singer was sixteen years old. (Crawford was also Houston’s longtime executive assistant.)

In the early nineteen-eighties, one sometimes saw Crawford in those places where women of color then gathered—the Duchess on Seventh Avenue South, say, or the Cubby Hole. In those small, self-protective-by-necessity worlds, everyone knew what everyone else did, and with whom, and Crawford was often spoken of in the same breath as the lovely Houston, who had modeled for Essence, and was the daughter of Cissy Houston, herself the cousin of Dionne Warwick. That was all we knew. But as Houston’s career overwhelmed her personality—every significant pop star suffers this fate; often they don’t live long enough to reverse the order—she was still “our” Whitney down there, near Christopher Street, in the West Village: a perforce closeted superstar who had to make a living because she knew gay didn’t pay.

This was familiar to us, particularly when it came to those black female performers, ranging from Bessie Smith to Ethel Waters to Billie Holiday, who skipped over the gay parts of themselves, let alone their milieu, in order to be someone’s idea of femininity, but whose? Whitney Houston always looked like a “femme”: coiffed and sleek, a Jersey girl who could be tough, but she had an even butcher personal assistant who could deal, if it came to that. Houston grew up musically and otherwise in a black Baptist church, where sin hangs heavy in the air, and on the heart, and queerness is the last thing an intolerant population cleaving to Jesus and “correctness” wants to deal with. To be queer is to question if not sully black conservatism, with it’s rather complicated relationship to heterosexuality as the paradigm of “real” love, while homosexuality is viewed as a white-bred or “European” perversion. And black conservatism shuts its eyes to uncategorizable flowers. That Houston was able to walk in that field as long as she did is a testament to her strength in her difference.

But the pop world is just as conventional as the black universe Houston grew up in; in both, appearances are considered deep because the world responds to the shallow. As Houston’s fame increased, and she was sanctified by marriage, she drove a wedge between the world she and Crawford inhabited together, becoming a martyr to heterosexuality. (At one point it was said that Houston would appear in a remake of “A Star is Born,” co-starring Bobby Brown. How much would the film have meant if it were about a female superstar who came out about her gay past without offing herself?) Still, Crawford, and what she symbolized, would not leave Houston alone. In 2002, Diane Sawyer interviewed the singer and her then husband in their Atlanta home. Sawyer asked about Crawford, and Whitney, looking double-crossed and angry, said to the camera, and presumably Crawford: “And I love ya.” Get over it. It’s interesting that Houston thought of the camera eye—her most consistent companion for decades before her death, and now forever—was Crawford, her no doubt most steadying love, and honest influence.