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Coming Out

– January 2, 2014

If Anything, I Am A Poet Who Loves Plastic Poetry–Film, Photography, Sculpture, Drawing–as Much as I Love Verbal Poetry. There, I’ve Said It. Reading Marianne Moore’s poem, “Poetry,” helped Get Me There. Along with Calvin Tompkins biography of Marcel Duchamp, and All the Other Riches and Sadnesses of the Year. I Feel At Present Like the Two Parts of this Gilbert and George Postcard Sculpture Which Wrecked Me as A Boy When I First Saw It and the Postcard Said Something Like We Were Sitting By the Window and It Began to Snow and We Thank You for Sharing This Moment with Us Gilbert and George and I Longed to Be Gilbert or George and Find My George or Gilbert But Now I Know They Are Both Parts of Myself and Thank You for Letting Me Live Long Enough and With Some Amusement to Get There On My Own. Part of What Has Been Difficult and New During This Limited to New York for Now Book Tour is That I Have to Say “I” A Lot and People Want to Hear Me Say “I” and Afterwards I Would Be So Exhausted Because Poetry While It Lives in The “I” Is Removed From The Audience Wanting Your Body To Say “I,” and So After a Reading Or Whatever I Would Want to Be Obliterated, Have A Person Lay on Top of Me and Press Me into the Mattress So I Would Disappear Under Their Smell But Since This Wasn’t in the Offing, I Continued to Write About A Sculptor Who Obliterates Things And Wrestles with His “I” and That was Just As Well Because Even Though It Was At Times Difficult to be an “I” on a Stage and I Wanted to Give Up I Had to Speak Because That Is What Poetry Is: I Had to Speak.

Happy Christmas, Happy New Year:

From “Ghosts in Sunlight” by Truman Capote (1967)

Hilton Als

– January 2, 2014

That phrase “reality’s reflections” is self-explanatory, but perhaps I ought to clarity my own interpretation of it. Reflected reality is the essence of reality, the truer truth. When I was a child I played a pictorial game. I would, for example, observe a landscape: trees and clouds and horses wandering in grass; then select a detail from the overall vision–say, grass being in the breeze–and frame it with my hands. Now this detail became the the essence of the landscape and caught, in prismatic miniature, the true atmosphere of a panorama too sizable to encompass otherwise….All art is composed of selected detail, either imaginary or…a distillation of reality.

Hilton Als

– November 30, 2013

It’s faith that shines through Henry Louis Gates, Jr.,’s exceptional six-part, six-hour series, “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross.” The story Gates tells in his thirteenth documentary film is an epic one, and details how enslaved black Africans became African-Americans. Between the very sensitive interviews that Gates conducts with important thinkers ranging from the feminist scholar Paula Giddings to the film historian Donald Bogle, he asks, again and again: How did black Americans survive the most bestial treatment imaginable to make art, to make families, to make an African-American President?

Gates’s quest isn’t ideological; one could call the documentary a kind of “Pilgrim’s Progress,” one in which the burdens are race and property. What becomes abundantly clear vis-à-vis Gates’s lyrical investigation is the innate genius it took for African-Americans to survive. In an early segment, our host interviews a food historian about sustenance: What did the slaves have to eat, and how did they cook it to not only feed themselves but in order to find joy in the scraps that were more or less thrown to them from their white oppressor’s welcome table? In a way, this segment is a microcosm of the program as a whole. But the tapestry-like richness of the series is interwoven with many stories, many ideas, and many realities; one cannot extract a single episode as being superior to another.

Gates uses archival footage and photographs prudently, and he doesn’t depend on images to tell his story. Rather, what we listen for is the steady calm of his questioning voice: our trusted guide illustrates how black skin became property, and how the subsequent attempt to dehumanize a people began with separating the family, and taking away their names. But what slave owners couldn’t rip off or silence was the collective African-American voice, the stories people told not only to survive but so they could be remembered. Gates’s magisterial series continues that tradition.

Jennifer Jones as “Madame Bovary” (1949)

Hilton Als

– November 7, 2013

She is the best Emma we’ve ever had–including Isabelle Huppert’s great 1991 Emma–because her director, Vincente Minnelli, not only made a story about a woman’s self-destruction, he made a film about a female actor’s narcissism. In the movie, Jones, who had won an Oscar five years before playing a saint, is ravaged by her own craven desire for her dreams to become real; in order for that to happen she must buy more than she can afford and then sell her body–her various passions–for more than her body can stand. As her husband, the sweet and somewhat dim witted Charles, Van Helflin looks, interestingly, like Jones’ first husband–the unstable actor, Robert Walker. Some of the more fascinating scenes in one of Minnelli’s best pieces occurs after Emma has her baby daughter; she can’t cope with a child’s needs, nor with her femaleness–she’s repulsed by them, just as she’s repulsed by her lies and her own body. (Jones own daughter, Mary Jennifer, committed suicide in 1976, aged 22.) But Emma can’t take her eyes off herself. Minnelli surrounds her with mirrors; when she catches sight of herself she cannot look away. Jones’ lips–she was a model for a time before she became an actress but was criticized for her “negroid” features–are a counterpoint to the deadness in her eyes; her lips sneer, smear the thoughts in her head on her face, betray her over and over through a series of hungry kisses. But nothing can fill her up; her dreams for more, a better life, a more dreamed life, have left her hollow, shrieking, all too real. Men eventually avoid her because no man in the film is equal to her fantasy about them. Emma is an object fetishist who’s hobbled by her connoisseurship; nothing measures up, certainly not real life. She should have been a writer like the writer who created her, but she could not be alone–the isolation writing requires. Her romanticism was rotten because she exploited it, and let it exploit her.

I saw this movie as a boy and it was one of the first that made me want to write for films, specifically for women in films; Minnelli’s fascination with Jones inspired me to see the camera as an instrument of interest; you could record someone and that someone told you who they were through word, gesture, silence, a mouth. Years after I saw the movie, a friend hosted a Hollywood dinner for me; they asked who I wanted to meet, and I said Jennifer Jones. (Some time before that, another friend, knowing of my great interest in her and her no doubt “negroid” features, bought a pair of her blue jeans at a charity auction.) Jones picked my friend and I up in her enormous limo; it was as if she had arranged all the lights in the world around her. I gave her Jane Bowles’ “Collected Works,” because that’s who she was playing in the Truman Capote scripted movie, “Beat the Devil,” and I told her that. We arrived at the restaurant and Jones, wearing a pants

suit, got out first; the street lights were arranged around her there, too; someone–God?–had called ahead to make the world look good around her. At dinner the conversation turned to her once best friend, Truman Capote, who not only wrote “Beat the Devil,” but Jones’ vastly underrated film, “Indiscretion of an American Wife,” produced by her then husband, David Selznick, and co-starring Montgomery Clift. It was rumored that Jones fell in love with Clift during the making of the film, and it’s all there in the movie: her inability to accept who the Montgomery Clift character is, her character’s need for convention, and Jones’ own need to be near the power of powerful husbands. Jennifer said that Capote’s fall was leaving her for Babe Paley; girl fights go on forever, but JJ had a point: his friendship with Paley removed him from the “arts.” Another actress at the table said that she remembered how, as a little girl, she was in a hotel with her father, a famous director, and there was a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door of a very elegant suite; they were in Switzerland. Her father said: Do you know who’s in that suite? Jennifer Jones. And when the real and unreal Jennifer Jones heard that at that dinner table she crinkled her nose and smiled, flattening us with her strange, strained, but real charm, just like Jennifer Jones in the movies.

Lou Reed 1942-2013

Hilton Als

– October 28, 2013

Some years ago the singer Rickie Lee Jones took me to a Lou Reed concert; she had never seen him perform. About half way through the set she said, incredulous: But he can’t sing. What was astonishing to Rickie was the lack of musicality in Reed’s voice–it’s flat almost atonal sound, not to mention his off the cuff delivery–but I think the point of his music was not so much the way HE sounded as the worlds he evoked. It’s always too late and too silly to talk about what artists should or shouldn’t have done with their careers after they’re gone, but my own memories of Reed’s music revolve around the atmospheres he created with other musicians, specifically Nico and the Velvet Underground. Reed had to deal with Nico because of Andy Warhol, who was producing his band, and of course Andy wasn’t wrong to add her to the mix: she transported Reed’s songs into little playlets about her own alienation, and everyone else’s, in a way Reed couldn’t do with his voice or persona: he was no actor and she was. What Reed did was to act on the page–in his lyrics–and it was the listener who brought the drama while Lou laid back, sometimes in his sunglasses, or turning away from Nico, who was the dark sun he could never be because he wasn’t a beautiful woman but he was a diva, and that was the complication. In any case, I think Reed cultivated the sunglasses look to hide his eyes, which always looked slightly astonished. They were the eyes of the boy he was: a nice Jewish one from Freeport who wanted to out cool all those “real” New Yorkers. Sometimes he tried too hard, but his best songs, for me at least, are when he tells a story ostensibly about someone else, those living metaphors that expressed his real or inner self and sense of outsiderness, such as his unrequited love for Shelley Albin in “Pale Blue Eyes,” or the incomparable Candy Darling in “Candy Says,” a story that moved Reed to dig deep, and find Candy’s wistfulness and trust in his own voice, which, for most of the song, never rises above a wrenching whisper.

Deborah Turbeville 1932-2013

Hilton Als

– October 28, 2013

One of the great artists who taught me to see the world differently because she saw the world differently. Everything she did was based on an internal cinema, the projectors of which turned at a very interesting Gance-like speed sometimes, or Falconetti-like speed at other times, all the while projecting her brilliant illuminations, most of which centered on the internal lives of the women she photographed in various large or cramped spaces, sometimes looking like birds waiting to be hatched or stuffed–i.e. objectified–but defying those odds through “attitude,” a steady refusal to do all the stereotypical feminine things one sees in most fashion pictures: smiling, stretching, longing to belong. Her fashion pictures were an accident, in any case, and were as much “fine,” art as anything else, and the mystery one finds in her work, her Bronte-foggy worlds where women are shut off or shut down and all the more beautiful because of that, contributed to the sui generis amateur quality in her images, her never getting a picture technically “right,” but entirely correct just the same. She de-commodified fashion by not treating the image as a commodity but something to be stapled, taped, made into something else. And she treated models with a similar freedom and recognition. Her models can be seen but not bought. To have achieved this in fashion is practically never heard of, let alone done. And fashion is a poorer place without her necessary provocations, and her love.