About Author: Hilton Als

Posts by Hilton Als

One Poem for My Spiritual Godfather, Lester Young

– November 9, 2011

Upon approaching someone he loved, Lester Young greeted them with: “How are your feelings”?

Nat Hentoff produced the attached clip. Lester is the second soloist. He named Billie not Lady but Duchess. He called Billie’s mother, Sadie, Lady, but Billie preferred that moniker, and took it.

Billie called Lester Prez, short for President, because he was, to her, the best. And part of his greatness is his extreme humility, his body folding into itself, a leaf barely balancing his own extreme, muted feelings.

Billie was the butch to his femme. And then he’d be the butch to her femme. I know it.

Count Basie called Billie William. See what I mean? When Billie died, Basie moaned, That poor girl. See what I mean?

Some of the men in this film Billie slept with, like Ben Webster, the first soloist. It was the way she made friends. Sometimes she held on to them. And then not. And then they’d make music in a film together. The musician’s life: itinerant emotionalism.

Net Hentoff told me that when they shot this film, Billie showed up with a number of gowns. No, no, lady, he said. It’s supposed to be like a jam session. And so she put this outfit on.

He surrounded her with horns because her voice was a horn, a horn much beloved by other horn players.

Clearly, she would have been an extraordinary film star–holding back, kissing some Joe with open eyes, so “don’t care-ish,” in attitude, which is what the elders called her when she was a little girl. A Fosse creature before Fosse.

Owen Dodson told me that Billie used to call him Teach, because he was a professor.

I cannot watch this film without welling up with tears and desire. Collaboration: the ultimate dream. To be replaced by other moments. The penultimate dream.

Lester and language. When one or another of his cronies would invite him to dinner, Lester would ask: “Can madam burn?” meaning can she cook?

When Lester said he desired something, he said he had big eyes for it. “I had big eyes to be in Basie’s band.”

He loved language. You could do so many things with it. Change a mood. Like music. Bend it into something else. Because it was music.

Lester called the diminutive Pee Wee Marquette, the MC at Birdland, “Half a motherfucker.”

Lester said, once: “Due to the uncertainties [of this or that] we decided not to.”

Which is just about it, isn’t it?

Nat Hentoff told me that when they shot this film, Billie and Lester hadn’t been on speaking terms for some time. But when they made the music, they remembered.

I never said to Nat Hentoff: How could they forget?

Charlotte Rampling: The Versification of a Letter Never Sent

Hilton Als

– October 15, 2011

The great poet, a madman, produced, during the course of his long career, and violent life, a number of images–potent mirages/One I loved was about the heat in his apartment, he could grow a palm tree in it/And I wonder about the palm at the end of the mind Wallace Stevens spoke of/did it fan out, into an atmosphere of thought, eventually dried out by two much sun?/ I imagine that palm in Egypt, I don’t know why/ Probably because of Cavafy and Alexandria, the dust around his feet, a cup of mint tea, and thou/He was your type, that working stiff/Who wouldn’t take your beauty for granted/But he wouldn’t have made a fuss about it, either/Sitting there smiling, you reach for his cigarette every once in a while, your eyes narrowed against the memory of other cigarettes, your former beauty, and your great loves/Who are now pensioners who sit in a park in Paris/Wondering who this Anglais is that changes the atmosphere just by walking by/Cavafy gives it a thought/And so do I, watching you in the “The Look,” a documentary self-portrait with friends/To be released in New York in early November, naturally/The month of Scorpios/Man and ladykillers who insist on their own innocence/And while there are a number of commentators in the movie who discuss your look–those eyes–no one talks about your voice/Which should read poems aloud/Because it’s the kind of voice poets would kill for–mellifluous and disciplined all at once/And no one talks about what I feel (it’s a secret) looking at you now: that your beauty is greater now than it’s ever been/Your face lives in itself/It’s terrible history and joy/Like other boys I fell in love with you in the film, “Georgy Girl”/Your self-interest there was so outrageous/What man could resist?/Even as you screamed about your unwanted child in the maternity ward/Your hair a perfect halo of hate/I had sister like that/A poet who was fascinated by the idea let alone reality of her own power vis a vis men/Including myself/Who could not and would never get over her slim frame/And inability to forgive/Your father wasn’t a military man for nothing/Also an Olympic swimmer/And there are shots of you in the film swimming/Broad breast strokes/It’s in your blood/Along with silence/In the film you talk about how/At age 10/You were sent away/To a French school/You didn’t know the language/No one helped you understand it/And it took you nine months/Or ten months/To speak to anyone other than your sister/Who killed herself eventually/And whose self-death you kept from your mother/Until she died and you fell apart/Only to end up whole and cracked sitting in a cafe/With your colored friend, the Alexandrian poet/A queer/The only man for you/A performer/Which is to say a person who wrestles with words in front of other people/Just like and unlike poets who are ashamed to be seen/And then insist on it/O! The birds follow you/ And pull the sky along with them/As you put on your lipstick/”Just a little” you say as the other cinema object used to say/Sometimes sitting in a cafe with colored poets/Putting it on just a little/Before she stood up and changed everything with a look, too.

Queer Story

Hilton Als

– October 14, 2011

The young man sporting the checked cap, the one with the pale skin, ruddy cheeks, and dark facial hair, lives alone, in a flat that’s one step up from a council flat. There are windows in the sitting room and in the bedroom, too, but not much light gets through: it’s England, after all, and the sky is like lead. The young man is gay, and hangs out, for the most part, with people he doesn’t assume will understand them–they’re all straight–but he loves them just the same–the young, chubby Mum, his friend, the Dad, and the little baby. After he smokes a little dope with his friends, he takes a night bus to a club, one of those dinky little places where nothing exciting happens, and where, if you were to score, it wouldn’t necessarily be with Mr. Right; indeed, this club is so beat you’d probably meet Mr. Wrong, a fact you’d struggle to forget the next day, under the double weight of a hangover, and remorse. Certainly that’s all you’d expect Russell (Tom Cullen) to dig up in that atmosphere of flashing disco lights. But then, out of the man made fog, he sees Glen (Chris New) a small person with a pushy way about him. The two men–they’re in their late twenties, maybe–go to Russell’s place, and they make love, and before you know it, their defenses start to fall away–particularly Glen’s. Despite or because he’s the more-experienced -in-the-gay-world dude, Glen does everything he can to alienate Russell–standard distancing stuff, like talking about other sexual experiences, and saying shit like, “I don’t do boyfriend.” But that’s precisely what they’re doing–becoming boyfriends. And then Glen lays it on Russell: he’s leaving to study in America in two day’s time. There’s something about Russell–innocence? A powerful need to believe in love, certainly–that keeps him there with Glen, while Glen squirms and tries to avoid being a bride stripped bare by only one bachelor, even. In “Weekend,” director Andrew Haigh’s emotionally true, and unsettling, debut feature, Cullen and New play men who are shaped by an alienation that comes less from being queer than with their failure to turn away from the looking glass that reflects their own limitations. An old story. In Russell and Glen’s brave new gay world, the couple’s needs and fears and miscommunications generally have nothing to do with the status quo. (And when their story partly plays out in the straight world, it’s about violence. Standing on an outdoor train platform with Glen, Russell, gives his tormentors and thus the audience a look of defiance, and incomprehension, and powerful male eroticism: he will protect his love at any cost.) Russell doesn’t talk about his desire much. Perhaps this has something to do with being raised in a number of foster homes. Whatever the reason, he shies away from telling his co-workers, friends, and so on, who he is. Still, he’s the more authentic of the two men, the more exposed, despite Glen’s propensity to verbally challenge blokes in straight bars, let alone putting Russell on the defensive about shy nature. When Russell recalls his hard upbringing, Glen laughs, and you want to strike that little person. How many times has one sat in queer bars the world over and had one’s vulnerability laughed at because it’s at odds with some queen’s idea of self-preservation? Glen can’t stand to feel and yet Russell’s steadfastness and silences makes him feel. And it’s Cullen’s and New’s remarkable acting, and Haigh’s long takes and understated visual sense, where he films a world where splendor happens spontaneously, as it does and should, that makes “Weekend,” so satisfying to watch and reminiscent of certain gorgeous nineteen-eighties stories about England during the age of Thatcher, such as “Mona Lisa,” and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.” But those movies were made more than twenty years ago, and “Weekend” is no throwback. Instead, Haigh has learned something important from those powerful character-driven projects: how to separate sentiment from the sentimental.

Contagion: For Valda

Hilton Als

– October 2, 2011

I went to see “Contagion,” the new Steven Soderbergh movie tonight, and thought of you. I always think of you, always, but images bring certain feelings to mind more quickly than others. Images are notorious memory triggers. I earn some of my living watching people pretend to be something other than who they are “ordinarily,” and then I talk about the truth or the falseness of their imagination, the strange business of being called a name not one’s own. The only way one can repair oneself after this hard work–that is, telling the “truth” about certain falsehoods–is to avoid dinner parties and movies: both places where people gather to pretend. But after taking in one theatre piece for the second time this afternoon, I went to the movies; I didn’t want to hear actors shouting (Godard has said he loathes the theatre because actors seem to be screaming) and it was raining and the streets of the town looked so small and curved, like a hunchback laying on his side, I would have sought comfort in the memory of your arms, your hands, running over what you used to call my “beautiful woolen things,” and other times when we were as you called it pal-ing around, not talking, just walking, and the world came through our eyes, but I didn’t want those memories jus then, somehow. What I wanted was to go to the movies with you so we could not talk some more, and I thought you’d meet me in the little town where “Contagion,” was playing, you get the tickets, I’ll get the popcorn (your side dish of salt wrapped in a paper napkin). I thought “Contagion,” was definitely something you would want to see, medical issues in films always did it for you, you loved movies like “Safe,” and I can’t remember others, but women trying to live in a challenged atmosphere appealed to you for obvious reasons: in your world, no woman was safe. You would have loved my response to the film’s first five minutes: relief that Gwyneth Paltrow dies from a mysterious virus nearly straightaway. Soderbergh links her death to the AIDS epidemic (without naming it) because, even though she’s married to Matt Dillion, who’s excellent in the film, GP’s having an affair with a man we never see. We know that but Matt doesn’t. And then the coroners scalp her and look inside her brain and they can’t believe what they find there. At this point i would have turned to you and said: “Nothing. They found nothing in her brain,” because Paltrow is a contraption, not an actress–certainly she’s no Blythe Danner. You would have loved Kate Winslet of course, you always fell in love with optimistic women, and she’s certainly that in this film, right up until the moment she’s about to die and she hands her parka to a man shivering next to her death cot. But the woman you would have fallen in love with completely is played by Jennifer Ehle, a scientist in search of a cure who wears stockings with bad patterns who eventually shoots herself up with her own medicine, she shoots up in a bit of her thigh that’s just above her black stocking, the white flesh of heath that might become ill in a moment if her vaccine is all wrong but she’s not afraid, she’s sort of thrilled to inoculate herself with a cure that might be wrong because she has a boy-like interest in risk, throwing her chips up in the air and seeing where they might land. Clearly Ehle’s character was a girl who liked woods driving, just like you, and who adores her (dying) father, just like you. In one scene, after she shoots up, Ehle visits her father with the look of an accomplice who will survive her father’s death but not the death of their shared time. It is an extraordinary cinema moment, beyond words, and in that moment Ehle seemed to be the possessor of certain memories about you, too, my own memories, in fact, it felt as though she was manifesting you, and even though she couldn’t see me, she gave me you, which made the moment that much more precious to me: she couldn’t see me, but I saw you again in her rolled down stocking, the healthy part of her thigh, her father’s eyes, in her hope that had everything to do with the facts.

Here is Wallace Stevens listing another set of facts about you. “So and So Reclining on Her Couch.” He can’t see us, either:

Arbus Speaks

Hilton Als

– September 28, 2011

When I first heard Diane Arbus’s voice, I felt as if I’d known it all along. It’s a voice that’s as singular as her pictures, girlish and definite in tone, a voice that conveys in its lovely trills and reasonableness the artist’s infinite ability to be continually thrilled, and to revel in the various mysteries her chosen medium had to offer. It’s a taped voice, obviously. The event: a lecture at the International Center of Photography, when that venerable institution was downtown. The year: 1970. Arbus is talking to the assembled about her work, and pictures ripped from newspapers and magazines that inspire her. (“I like to put things around my bed all the time,” she says. “Pictures of mine I like and other things, and I change it every month or so. There’s some funny subliminal thing that happens. It isn’t just looking at it. It’s looking at it when you’re not looking at it. It really begins to act on you in a funny way.”) A Japanese photographer is taping the talk so he can play it back to himself later on; he doesn’t want to miss a word of what she has to say, and his English is less than perfect.

The resulting tape—and the images she exhibited during the slide show—are all we have of Diane Arbus moving through time, as it were, and it’s that precious, forty-minute document that’s being screened at the School of Visual Arts theatre on October 6th. The slide show will be shown alongside the British-born photographer Neil Selkirk’s moving 2005 documentary, “Who Is Marvin Israel?,” an investigation of the life and work of one of Arbus’s close friends and intellectual companions, a pioneering art director and painter.

Arbus’s voice. Somehow one had always been prepared for the playfulness and charm and ready laugh, because it’s there in certain aspects of her work, and in the transcripts, interviews, and so on, that made up the introduction to “Diane Arbus.” In that extraordinary work, published a year or so after the photographer’s suicide, on July 26, 1971, we hear her voice on the printed page, framed by witticisms that always belied, at least for me, her reputation as the “dark lady of photography.”

In “Diane Arbus,” which remains Aperture’s best-selling photography book to date (and which is being reissued this year to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of its publication; the exceptional 1995 volume, “Diane Arbus: Untitled” is being republished as well), Arbus says, apropos of her experience of photographing a dog on Martha’s Vineyard, “I don’t particularly like dogs. Well, I love stray dogs, dogs who don’t like people. And that’s the kind of dog picture I would take if I ever took a dog picture. One thing I would never photograph is dogs lying in the mud.” In this and other similarly beautiful, goofy, and profound sentences, Arbus embraces—and imparts—the surreality of the photographic experience to her interlocutor, whether she’s behind the camera or not. What comprises a dog picture? A dog? The dirt the dog stands on? Or the photographer imagining how she’d photograph a dog if she took a picture of one?

Above all, Arbus knew what this exchange meant—that is, the dialogue between the portraitist and her subjects, their reality and her imagination. “I work from awkwardness,” she said. “By that I mean I don’t like to arrange things. If I stand in front of something, instead of arranging it, I arrange myself.” That arrangement is about humility: you don’t change the subject, the subject changes you. Arbus’s pictures are characterized by a certain reverential silence; she listens as her subjects explain something of themselves. Listening and watching the slide show, one arranges one’s body not so much to fit the sound of Arbus’s language as to open oneself up to her enthusiasm for this or that image, and for the beautiful inscrutableness that comes with making anything at all. Indeed, one reason for Arbus’s continued controversy as an artist may have something to do with what she demands of the viewer: that they change their shape—their socially acceptable self—in order to meet her totemic drag kings and queens, nudists, soothsayers, and so on. Very few people are willing to give up all that they recognize, and construct, which is to say the comfort of the status quo, which Arbus indirectly criticized in her choice of subject matter, again and again. (Arbus was notoriously uncomfortable with her own privileged upbringing and considered it somewhat crippling.)

I first heard Arbus in Neil Selkirk’s kitchen. Selkirk knew Arbus, and is the only person besides Arbus herself who has ever printed her work. He is responsible for the delicate, resonant prints we see in “Diane Arbus”; “Magazine Work,” from 1984; “Diane Arbus: Untitled”; and “Revelations,” from 2003. (The prints in the recently reissued books are image separations by Robert J. Hennessey based on Selkirk’s prints.) We sat in a darkened area; the images flashed on a small screen. Arbus begins not with her work but with the clippings that inspired her. One slide: a newspaper image of a tornado. By way of description, she tells the folk at the I.C.P., “That’s a picture of a tornado,” and pauses. I laughed, because what more could she say? What more could be said? For pure photography to exist, it must live outside or beyond language, which means reducing it to its literalness. This is a picture of a tornado. Here’s a rock. Here’s a picture of me looking at a rock and imagining what kind of photograph I could make out of it.

Arbus is similarly amusing when she talks about one of her iconic images, “Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C. 1962.” “That’s just a kid with a hand grenade,” she says on the tape, and her audience cracks up. My guess is that it’s the qualifying “just” that got Arbus’s audience; it got me. She didn’t “just” take pictures of kids with hand grenades, or girls in striped bikinis, or gay people in Washington Square Park, or a lady with a toy poodle: she inhabited what they shared with her. Working one summer in Washington Square Park, and fascinated by the social strata she found there, Arbus found herself stumped—at first. “I could become a nudist, I could become a million things,” she says not at all boastfully during this invaluable presentation. “But I could never become that, whatever all those people were.” She tried and tried. But sometimes trying doesn’t work, “and you just go to the movies.” Again the audience at the I.C.P. laughs, because art-making can, and quite often does, make you want to give up, and go to the movies.

Still, Arbus was primarily attracted to worlds she didn’t understand. She returned to Washington Square Park. The mystery of it appealed to her tenacity. “There were days I just couldn’t work there,” she says “and then there were days I could. And then, having done it a little, I could do it more.” That’s the lesson artists should run with: do it a little, do it more. Fail better and better. “I take rotten pictures,” Arbus announces in the slideshow at one point. “I think that’s another important secret. I used to think that you could just take the good ones. You could just be terribly efficient, and you just wouldn’t play unless you took the good ones. But it doesn’t really work that way. It’s just the thing of doing it so goddamn much.” Throughout her career, Arbus protected her right to retain the enthusiasm of an amateur with none of an amateur’s limitations. To fail better and more knowingly with each click of the shutter.

Diane-Arbus-Chronology.jpgWatching the slideshow, and listening to that voice, I couldn’t escape something she’d said once, and may very well want us to remember as we look at her images in the dark, or read the informative “Diane Arbus: A Chronology, 1923—1971,” a beautiful new, pictureless book of material culled from Arbus’s letters, diaries, and so on, which first appeared in “Diane Arbus: Revelations” (both book and catalogue will also be available at Arbus’s first retrospective in Paris, at the Jeu de Paume, which runs from October 8th until February 5, 2012; the show subsequently travels to Switzerland, Berlin, and Amsterdam): “I tend to think of the act of photographing, generally speaking, as an adventure. My favorite thing is to go where I’ve never been.”

Modesty: Lydia Davis and Duro Olowu

Hilton Als

– September 27, 2011

Lydia Davis writes stories whose central plot point is the very act of thinking. In a small and beautiful chapbook called “The Cows” (2001) she describes a field with cows across the street from her house near Pittsville, in upstate New York. Not a blink of the cow eye goes unnoticed by this author. Night falls on the cows, and then it’s a new day, and the cows are still there. Just recently, during a talk at Wellesley College, Lydia Davis mentioned how she feels she’s come to the end of her life as a translator; her most recent work, a new version of Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” took three years to complete. “Now it’s time to get on with me,” Davis said. But her tone wasn’t that of a boaster; in point of fact, she offered this bit of information shyly, tentatively, like a girl who was new to writing, and had discovered something as liberating and frightening as the first person narrative. She would have to learn to say “I.” Even though some of Lydia Davis’ many stories are told in the first person, as is her beautiful 1995 novel, “The End of the Story,” her writing has rarely been about her personality. Indeed, she takes Renata Adler’s here-but-not-here fictional voice even further by making the white space between her paragraphs wide and then wider. It’s the white space–the pause of reflection–where Davis’ various narrators reflect on what has become before, and what will come after, and whether their consciousness has a right to exist at all. In the end, reading Davis is not like reading at all; one watches her stories develop right before one’s very eyes, like a photographic negative finding itself made into a picture. Her work as a translator was about her intellectual interest in making language be something other than what it was–French–and turning it into something else–English–and how that transformation can and often does transform the translator, too. But one got the sense, during her talk, that Davis regarded translating as a kind of forked tongue enterprise by now, a twice-told tale that suited her humility once as she worked behind the scenes, working her way up to an “I” that fights to know itself, quietly, diligently. Humility is rare enough in literature, and rarer, still, in fashion. But modesty was at the heart of Nigerian-born designer Duro Olowu’s latest collection. He finds sustenance in heritage. His eye for prints, and the cut of fabric around the print the story has to tell on its own, makes a light that reminds one of his native land, where surface and form combine to illuminate if not help create a better being. Indeed, one is reminded, looking at Olowu’s latest, distinctive work, of the tenets of African style: one’s outside reflects the inside, while the inside emits something of one’s place in the world, the joy to be had in costuming as a higher form of communication. But Olowu has roots in London, too, and as the models shimmied not too ostentatiously in his lovely bits of there but not there fabric during his recent show, I was reminded of the prints David Hockney’s muse, textile designer Celia Birdwel, created for her late husband, Ozzie Clark, in the nineteen-seventies. Like Clark before him, Olowu is interested in style but not at the expense of personality; Olowu dresses the woman who knows how to say “I” without shrieking it.