About Author: Hilton Als

You have only to open the Library of America’s sterling edition of Gertrude Stein’s “Writings, 1903-1932,” to find what you are looking for in terms of inspiration. She changed everything, and she can change your mind with a glance of her pen. To wit: Bored and disgusted with the natural hysteria that informs the American theatre or most of it? Turn to page 397 and read Stein’s version of a play: “Turkey and Bones and Eating and We Liked It,” in which a character named Felix and a letter. says: “I do not wish to reply to a telegram, not because I find it difficult to explain in it that I wished to see you. I did wish to see you.” No one has topped this in terms of emotional truth, or the American penchant to express sincerity–theatrically. As I was reading “Turkey” (has it ever been produced? I would love to record it), Miss Stein appeared on my I-Shuffle reading her portrait of the painter of Pablo Picasso. In that moment I knew Gertrude came to see me, and push me up the hill toward greater or realer self-expression, while leaning on metaphors.

Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts

Hilton Als

– July 11, 2011

The young author of “Harlem is Nowhere,” (http://sharifarhodespitts.com/harlem-is-nowhere/) in repose. In New Orleans. At home in the world, which is “nowhere,” that is, an ever present state, her home being herself, sometimes dressed in blue, her hair plaited in a way that suits rather than frames the image that is her face, with sculptural properties Brancusci could not shape ore re-shape via his imagination since his African-ness came from Europe and Sharifa’s Africanness was shaped in America, which is flat and big, or round and small, in any case Texas is her home but at present she’s in New Orleans and tomorrow it could be some place else, since her blue dress will make an appearance, always, in the space called somewhere else. She may not live with you since she lives in the world. Her blue dress, the green leaves of her salad. I can smell both (smell is the way I take people in, or expel them; I can’t love you anymore if I can’t bear the way you eat or smell) just now in New York, days after sitting with her in a cafe in New Orleans, where she told me something about herself and told me the brownie I picked up for desert would get smashed flat in her bag if she didn’t eat it right now. I know her, and don’t know her, and want more of both experiences: knowing and not knowing her. In thinking about her, I had to read about her, and there is some of her in Gaston Bachelard’s beautiful “The Poetics of Space,” when he writes: “The house furnishes us dispersed images and a body of images at the same time….Our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word. If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.” That is Sharifa’s work: looking at things intimately, humble or no. But there’s a second level of work– her body, her corner of the world, a structure–her body, her self–that young women rarely claim as freely as Sharifa has. So doing, she has created a body of images in my mind that includes her making her way through green leaves on her plate, or in her neighborhood in New Orleans, wearing her blue dress, lit up with herself.

New Orleans (for Truman)

Hilton Als

– July 11, 2011

In 1946, when he was roughly twenty-two years old, Truman Capote published an essay about his home town–New Orleans. In that beautiful piece of writing, the author observed: “New Orleans streets have long, lonesome perspectives; in empty hours their atmosphere is like Chirico, and things innocent, ordinarily…acquire qualities of violence.” So saying, Capote was, of course, describing the imagination, and how it can get to work in a place like New Orleans, which is empty and haunted and struggling and alive, all at once. He was not wrong about the “long, lonely perspectives,” that can haunt you as you move from Treme to the Quarter to Canal Street, then Uptown. The heat seals New Orleans off from the rest of the world while citizens wouldn’t have it any other way: who would want to be like the rest of the world? Palm trees and cement, wide avenues, balconies made up in the old colonial style, and then, over in Treme, row houses built on high foundations, with slats built into doors, so air circulates through shotgun houses, but actually you’re not living on air in New Orleans anyway but liquid that sits on top of air, squishing it with a laugh. And at night the insect world that feeds on liquid feeds on New Orleans; the city is alive with the sound of insects, Northern girls scream and Southern Girls giggle as the sound of their skirts swishing in the dead of night mingles with beetles singing and the sound of a cigarette being lit. What can happen to your body in that night? Near Congo Square the air is as black as your worst thoughts; a gas station is a figment of your imagination, your dreams, your nightmares. Fill ‘er up! But where’s the attendant? Where’s the rest of the world? A shirtless Creole-looking boy crosses N. Rampart Street and disappears, and then you disappear, too, down Royal into what? A street scene near the Hotel Monteleone, and on corner where there’s a drug store with the old neon sign: an impromptu street scene, a woman dancing near a trombone: New Orleans as a living cliche that lives. Sometimes, afraid of the night or what I might look like in it, let alone what might happen to me in it, or sometimes, late in the afternoon, when I can no longer swim in the swimming, steaming, air, I go to the Napoleon House, a bar and restaurant in the French Quarter, I always forget it until I see it again, over on Chartres Street (pronounced Chart-ers Street; don’t make the mistake of pronouncing anything French-like, no one will understand you). Napoleon House sags and stands erect in its middle, the walls a victim of that Louisiana air, an element that makes a play thing of paint and plaster, and finds doors obscene. In that place of wooden tables, palms, and white table clothes, air circulates with the help of fans, and the bartender conducts his own personal business as you decide whether or not your body can afford more delusions over ice, or another sandwich made of peppers. Excess is this city’s middle name. Have you ever felt like you had an excess of time? New Orleans days are stretched to their limit, and then night appears as suddenly as it was forgotten, and then it starts again: the lonely perspective, the violence, a political disaster where no one passes you without a lovely “Good morning.” Or slow and comprehending, “Good night.”

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The Asiatics and the Occidentals

Hilton Als

– June 27, 2011

One of the many great things about film is that, as a collage art, you can make one thing mean another, or drain value from an image or situation that once had great import. I had the pleasure of re-watching Mike Leigh’s 1999 “Topsy Turvy,” again recently, and while I love the film, I especially love the music. Leigh took, as his premise, the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1885 piece, “The Mikado; or The Town of Titipu.” In that work, the British composers explored their idea of Japan as seen through the eyes of colonialists who rule, but couldn’t be bothered to get on a tall ship. It’s the juxtaposition of the very very English text and music hall sound with cherry blossoms and fans that makes the surreality of the work so enjoyable. But Leigh pushed against those juxtapositions even further by taking, for instance, Yum Yum’s (presumably) comic speech about her beauty out of the operetta proper, thereby creating a monologue about a performer’s self-regard that is shocking and knowing. As spoken by Shirley Henderson, a treasure to keep watching, the willfully silly prose becomes mournful, an ode, thus inspiring me to imagine more juxtapositions: Bjork, for instance, singing “The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze,” in front of a large audience at Coachella, dressed in a kimono. When she was growing up, the Icelandic native was called, because of her dark hair and slanted eyes, “China Girl.”

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Versions of Masculinity

Hilton Als

– June 27, 2011

In New Orleans. Clouds like planes of solid atmosphere. The heat that sends you scurrying and then laying flat. An atmosphere of dazed reconciliation. My gay pride was spent here amidst sudden showers, and not knowing the gay scene at all. The feeling of being displaced, uncomfortable, was balanced by the joy of not knowing who one is when one travels. Before I left New York, I stopped in at a party where I was pleased–indeed, honored–to run into the brilliant stage and costume designer Machine Dazzle, whose decor strikes me as the most original I’ve seen in years. Dressed in his customary original manner–his dress looked like the lining one would find in an expensive coffin–Dazzle offset the other versions of maleness that have enriched me over the years, including another reveler whose chest hair was as much of an accessory as his angel wings and the rose tucked behind his ear. In New Orleans, the late Sylvester glowed like an angel as one of his old videos played in a dark, wooden, bar, the rain falling out a sun bright sky, and then there was this young boy today, who was working out in the hotel gym just now, frightened and then not, to look at his evolving gay image in the mirror.

Democracy

Hilton Als

– June 21, 2011

The sound crushes. The beat bounces against your heart, tightening it. Passengers are gathered together in what looks like a technological nightmare–a nuclear power plant, perhaps. The colors in this great hall are phosphorescent and bleak. But this is no power plant; it’s only a discotheque on a luxury liner; the passengers are stamping, dancing, to disco music that sounds like cannon fire, literally surrounded by the lo-fi winds of war. Bump bump bump. The camera jumps, too. It cannot look away from this nightmare of socialization, it can only cut to other moments framed by silence, or self-conscious “real” beauty: Patti Smith presumably on that ship’s deck in a skull cap, strumming her guitar; a woman who looks as if she stepped out of an Ingres; the sound of the sea again, rising and crashing against this ship of fools. These disjointed images amount to one image, or idea: about fracture, about nature seen through technology, and the smear of history and modernism that infects the lens with its own brutalities and realities and untruths. This is the first part of the latest gift from the now eighty year old filmmaker, Jean-Luc Godard. The film: “Film Socialisme,” which is as much about the shirt sightedness of language and language turning history to myth as anything else. In Richard Brody’s full and enriching column about the movie, Godard’s biographer writes:

The McGuffin of Jean-Luc Godard’s new film, “Film Socialisme” is the vast store of gold that the Spanish Republicans shipped to the Soviet Union in 1936, ostensibly for safekeeping during the civil war (of course, it never came back), and, in particular, the batch of it that disappeared en route to Odessa. Yet the gold is more than a McGuffin: it’s a frequent subject of discussion, an object that lends the entire film its thematic and symbolic value, and the source of the movie’s elaborate backstory—and it has been on Godard’s mind for almost thirty years. In a 1997 interview with Alain Bergala (the interview that opens the second volume of “Godard par Godard”—“Godard on Godard”—a crucial book which has yet to be translated), Godard said that he heard about it from Jacques Tati “five or six months” before Tati died, in 1982. At that time, Godard wanted to interview him:

I offered to buy him a coffee. He said he could pay for it himself, and he took out a coin. A gold coin from the Bank of Spain. “That’s what’s left of the Spanish treasury that Stalin took,” he told me. It had been given to him by [the movie producer] Louis Dolivet, who was an agent of the Fourth International. I knew him from having approached him: he was my first contact, before [the producer Pierre] Braunberger, at the time of Gray Films [in the mid-fifties]. He produced “Mr. Arkadin” and “Playtime.” There’s even a shot in “Mr. Arkadin” where you see Dolivet. Tati explained the connection between them. He had been an assistant to the famous Willy Mutzenberg [sic], who had seduced the entire French intelligentsia and produced films, launched magazines. He had certainly placed money in Switzerland, which Dolivet inherited after the war. With this money, he produced “Arkadin,” which is a metaphor for the story of Stalin and takes place in Spain. According to Tati’s theory, Stalin had supported the war in Spain in order to get hold of this money. Which is completely plausible, since Stalin was a former bank robber…. That’s a story that I’d really like to have shown [in “Histoire(s) du cinema”]: what is the real relationship between “Mr. Arkadin” and “Playtime”? It’s the gold of the Bank of Spain and of the Spanish Republicans, which Stalin stole. With this money, Dolivet produced two catastrophic flops, but two very beautiful films.

The “search” here of course is not so much for the missing gold–this cinema universe is no El Dorado, or narrative cousin to “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”–but the act of looking at cinema and it’s myths, its history, its inherent “socialiasme,” which includes this reality: everyone can make a movie now, or star in one. We no longer read history in books, or listen to it as Godard listened to it in that long ago interview; instead, we watch for it, or are bored by it, as it’s created or falsified through the magic of editing. What can language mean in the face of a young boy’s face–one of the film’s more interesting stars–waiting for an answer to his questions about the historical world and his place in it. He sucks his thumb, and Godard sucks our minds free of linear expectation, narrative pleasure–bourgeois impulses that speak more about our need to control information than our ability to receive and absorb knowledge as it happens. Godard’s mind is too fast for most of us, too drenched in facts and remembrance and in his love of cinema as reportage. What feeds him and makes him more agile makes most of us sleepy and exhausted because we want to wear history–to know it–whereas Godard moves through it; it is part of who he is and who we are, if only we could face it. And because we can’t, the filmmaker barrages us with it, thus creating a beautiful and satisfying cinema of cruelty. Godard shows us bloody Russia, but it is a film–Eistentein’s view of the Steppes. We see Spain, represented by a matador, and the bullring’s blood. These visual metaphors provoke real feelings in us (first about the Spain of Hemingway, then the photographer Robert Capa and his famous image of the fallen Spanish resistance fighter, and so on) especially as Godard italicizes cinema’s falseness through his exploration of color, sound, make believe and, most of all, language. His subtitles don’t “work” (for every long speech we see two or three words), images seep into titles. Language crumbles even before we’ve had a chance to understand it’s intention. We see words, but what of comprehension? For Godard, language has always been visual. But looking at pictures in our contemporary world should involve a level of distrust: there are too many movies. Cinema is as real and as false as history. We are all tourists everywhere, especially in our myth of living in a democratized world, whose anti-historicizing we fill up with the junk of noise, and the myth of togetherness, so that we don’t risk seeing or feeling much of anything at all.