le maître

===

"The Volume"

“You go into rooms with lenses on every surface of every wall. They give you a heavy spandex suit covered in dots that are read by some sort of beam that shines across the room you are in. This room is not called the set, but ‘the volume'.”

— from Dickens's Victorian London Goes Digital by Dave Kehr, The New York Times, October 30, 2009.

===

Questions Posed

maurice pialat cannes 87

Right after Maurice Pialat won the Palme d'or at Cannes in 1987 for the totemic Sous le soleil de Satan and gave that beautiful, legendary acceptance speech — "Si vous ne m'aimez pas, je peux vous dire que je ne vous aime pas non plus." ("If you don't like me, I can tell you I don't like you either."), a TV interviewer asked him one of the most intelligent questions ever posed to a film artist, occasioned by the catcalls and hisses directed Pialat's way when he took the stage to accept the award. —




"Did you react to these people's stupidity the same way Bernanos did when he was talking to idiots?"




Footage of the question posed and the response offered up will be included in the forthcoming MoC Series edition of Sous le soleil de Satan to be released early next year.

===

Pedro Costa Interview in LITTLE WHITE LIES

"At the time the experience of listening to something by Wire and PiL was amazing. It was like seeing a Godard film. It was another world where you would get out of the movie theatre. It was a time when the person next door would probably do something amazing, but it wasn’t a commercial competition. There was also a political revolution in Portugal at the same time, where the fascist dictatorship ended and the streets were full of anarchists, communists, and socialists, so from the ages of 13 to 22 I had everything, the music, the cinema, the politics, all at the same time. What this made me see was that John Ford was a hundred thousand times more progressive and communist than so-called left wing documentaries saying things like “film is a gun”, and “change the world”. It was Ozu, Mizoguchi and Ford that were saying that really, you just had to be patient to see it."

===

"The idea [for Ne change rien] then came for me to be there while [Jeanne Balibar] was rehearsing. When I filmed her in concert I didn’t want to do a film like [Martin Scorsese's Rolling Stones recent 'concert documentary'] Shine a Light with the camera turning upside down, and I wasn’t interested in doing a ‘making of’ that you have on DVDs with guys in the studio telling jokes and drinking beer."

===

"The Warhol film I show [at the recent Costa retrospective + carte-blanche at the Tate Modern] is called Beauty, a film I saw recently and it’s just like In Vanda’s Room, the difference being that he made it without thinking for one second whereas I took two years of pain and blood."

===

Full interview is here.

===

Rejection

===

===

Floater (Too Much to Ask)
by Bob Dylan
from "Love and Theft" (2001)

Down over the window come the dazzling sunlit rays.
Through the back-alleys, through the blinds — another one o' them endless days.
Honeybees are buzzin' — leaves begin to stir —
I'm in love with my second cousin — I tell myself I could be happy forever with her.

I keep listenin' for footsteps, but I ain't ever hearin' any.
From the boat I fish for bullheads — I catch a lot; sometimes, too many.
A summer breeze is blowin'; a squall is settin' in.
Sometimes it's just plain stupid to get into any kind of wind.

The old men around here, sometimes they get on bad terms with the younger men.
Old, young, age don't carry weight — it doesn't matter in the end.
One of the boss's hangers-on sometimes comes to call at times you least expect.
Try to bully you, strong-arm you, inspire you with fear — it has the opposite effect.

There's a new grove of trees on the outskirts of town — the old one is long gone.
Timber two-foot-six across burns with the bark still on.
They say times are hard; if you don't believe it you can follow your nose.
It doesn't bother me, times are hard everywhere — we'll just have to see how it goes.

My old man, he's like some feudal lord — got more lives than a cat.
I've never seen him quarrel with my mother even once; things come alive, or they fall flat.
You can smell the pine wood burnin'; you can hear the schoolbell ring.
Gotta up near the teacher if you can if you wanna learn anything.

Romeo he said to Juliet: "You got a poor complexion — it doesn't give your appearance a very youthful touch."
Juliet she said back to Romeo: "Why don't you just shove off if it bothers you so much?"
They all got outta here any way they could; cold rain can give you the shivers.
They went down the Ohio, the Cumberland, the Tennessee — all the rest of them rebel rivers.

If you ever try to interfere with me or cross my path again you do so at the peril of your life.
I'm not quite as cool or forgivin' as I sound — I've seen enough heartache and strife.
My grandfather was a duck-trapper; he could do it with just dragnets and ropes.
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth — I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes.

I had 'em once though, I suppose — to go along with all the ring-dancin' Christmas carols on all the Christmas Eves.
I left all my dreams and hopes buried under tobacco leaves.
Not always easy kickin' someone out; you gotta wait awhile, it can be an unpleasant task.
Sometimes somebody wants you to give somethin' up and, tears or not, it's too much to ask.

===

Moonlight
by Bob Dylan
from "Love and Theft" (2001)

The seasons they are turnin'
And my sad heart is yearnin'
To hear again the songbird's sweet melodious tone.
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The dusky light, the day is losin' —
Orchids, poppies, black-eyed Susan —
The earth and sky that melts with flesh and bone —
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The air is thick and heavy
All along the levee
Where the geese into the countryside have flown.
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

Well I'm preachin' peace and harmony,
The blessings of tranquility,
Yet I know when the time is right to strike.
I take you 'cross the river, dear —
You've no need to linger here —
I know the kinds of things you like.

The clouds are turnin' crimson,
The leaves fall from the limbs and
The branches cast their shadows over stone.
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The boulevards of cypress trees,
The masquerades of birds and bees,
The petals pink and white the wind has blown.
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The trailing moss and mystic glow,
The purple blossoms soft as snow —
My tears keep flowin' to the sea.
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief,
It takes a thief to catch a thief.
Well whom does the bell toll for, love? — It tolls for you and me.

A pulse is runnin' through my palm —
The sharp hills are risin' from
Yellow fields with twisted oaks that groan.
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

===

Po' Boy
by Bob Dylan
from "Love and Theft" (2001)

Man comes to the door, I say, "For whom are you lookin'?"
He says, "Your wife." — I say, "She's busy in the kitchen cookin'."
Poor boy — where you been?
I already told you, won't tell you again.

I say, "How much you want for that?" — I go into the store.
Man says, "Three dollars" — "Alright," I say, "will you take four?"
Poor boy — never say die.
Things'll be alright bye and bye.

Workin' like in the mainline, workin' like a devil —
The game is the same, it's just up on another level.
Poor boy — dressed in black.
Police at your back.

Poor boy in a red-hot town,
Out beyond the twinklin' stars,
Ridin' a first-class train, makin' the round,
Tryin' to keep from fallin' between the cars...

Othello told Desdemona: "I'm cold — cover me with a blanket.
— By the way, what happened to that poison wine?" She said, "I gave it to you, you drank it."
Poor boy — layin' 'em straight,
Pickin' up the cherries fallin' off the plate.

Time and love has branded me with its claws.
Had to go to Florida, dodgin' them Georgians' laws.
Poor boy, in the hotel called the Palace of Gloom,
Called down to room service, says, "Send up the room."

My mother was a daughter of a wealthy farmer;
My father was a travelin' salesman — I never met him.
When my mother died, my uncle took me in; he ran a funeral parlor —
He did a lot of nice things for me — and I won't forget him.

All I know is that I'm thrilled by your kiss —
I don't know any more than this.
Poor boy — pickin' up sticks —
Build you a house outta mortar and bricks.

Knockin' on the door, I say, "Who's it? Where're ya from?"
Man say, "Freddy," I say, "Freddy who?", he say, "Freddy or not here I come."
Poor boy, 'neath the stars that shine,
Washin' them dishes, feedin' them swine.

===

Days Are Numbered

"I had a wonderful experience three or four weeks ago that I want to tell you about. I went to the Los Feliz Theatre to see a revival of George Cukor’s Dinner at Eight [1933]. My wife and I just wandered into the theatre by accident because we couldn’t get into various other shows around town. I said, 'I haven’t seen this film since I was 12 years old. Let’s go in and see it again.' We went in and sat there with a bunch of teenage kids and guys and girls in their twenties, who didn’t know Marie Dressler from the side of a barn, who hadn’t seen Lionel Barrymore or John Barrymore, or Billie Burke in their heydays.

"I was in tears by the end of the evening, because, when Billie Burke finished the great scene where she’s mad at the whole world — upset because the food hasn’t been prepared right for the dinner that night, when she finishes her big tirade which ran two minutes in the middle of the film — this audience of teenagers — to a person — broke into applause for this tour-de-force. My hair stood up on the back of my head, and I thought: 'A thousand years from tonight, the work you people did and that she did and all the people in this industry do will be immortal.' You are all immortal. You have beat death at the game because that scene is going to be repeated a thousand years from tonight and ten thousand years from tonight — and there’ll be other teenagers who don’t know any of you from Adam, but they’re going to break into applause because of something excellent you did once in your life, maybe — or twice, or three times when you had the breaks, and you had a good director, and you had the decent script, and you had these actors working for you and that magical thing happened.

"So I sat there and I broke into tears. I thought: 'Everyone in that film has been dead for 20 or 30 years. Marie Dressler died in 1934 — but she is still alive!'

"This is the science-fictional business you are all tied into. You’re really tacked onto the future — like it or not — so you’re going to be changing people 100 years from tonight and 500 years from tonight and a thousand years from tomorrow noon."

—Ray Bradbury, 1967, in an address to the American Society of Cinematographers. Taken from a post by Lawrence French at The Orson Welles Web Resource, Wellesnet.




===

New MoC Releases

La Camargue [1966] and Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble [We Won't Grow Old Together, 1972], both by Maurice Pialat, and included in this one release in their original aspect ratios of 1.37:1, and 1.66:1 anamorphic + progressive. La Camargue finds Pialat exercising his essay-documentary mode, condensing to six minutes' time that region in the south of France where cowboys and toreadors walked, then and forever a vision of Pialat's, not Hemingway's. For Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, Pialat shifts into an autobiographical story (which is, in turn, the story of all sincere expression) that sometimes takes place within this same Camargue region — hence the pairing — a story that details the disintegration of a couple already paired together, but for no good reason, as it often is in life, that is, with circumstance itself barely providing justification to man or morality. Possibly Pialat's most emotionally violent work, and unquestionably a grand masterpiece on every level (formal, scenaristic, performative), the film contains for me the single most upsetting shot in the oeuvre of this master — no — god — of the cinema. His miracle is that of the artist who can shake you with threat, who is not a provocateur, no von Trier, or Noé, or any mercantile asshole who trampled the Croix, the Alice Tully, and the .tiffs of 2009. Also included on-disc: a 19-minute 2003 video interview conducted by Serge Toubiana with Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble lead actress Marlène Jobert; 5-minutes'-worth of interviews with Pialat, Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble lead actor Jean Yanne and actress Macha Méril from the 1972 Cannes festival, with two scenes deleted from the film interspersed; a 1972 interview with François Truffaut about this then-latest Pialat film, shot in two parts totaling 8 minutes in length — one, before his having seen the film, and the other, directly after his (first) screening while he remains still shaken and teary-eyed; 12 minutes of footage from a 1972 conversation between Pialat and associates about Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble at a dinner; and the original trailer for the feature, along with the trailers for the six others in The Masters of Cinema Series. A 32-page booklet accompanies the release, and includes an exemplary new essay by former editor-in-chief of the Cahiers du cinéma Emmanuel Burdeau titled "Pialat n'est pas là", and excerpts from three interviews with Pialat about the film newly translated into English.

===



Passe ton bac d'abord... [Pass Your Bac First...] by Maurice Pialat, from 1979, presented progressively in its original aspect ratio of 1.66:1 anamorphic. What to say here about this film, Pialat's Strangeways, Here We Come? Maybe let them fight their own wars. Or that it's his Sixteen Candles — an inferno of genius. Included on-disc: an 11-minute 2003 interview conducted by Serge Toubiana with Pialat collaborators Arlette Langmann and Patrick Grandperret; a 35-minute 2003 piece by Serge Toubiana and Sonia Buchman that catches up with the cast and location of the film in the contemporary era; and the original trailer for the film, along with the trailers for the six other Pialat features in The Masters of Cinema Series. The release includes a 52-page booklet that contains a new essay about the film by me titled "The War of Art"; newly translated excerpts from three 1979 interviews with Pialat; and Pialat's explosive responses (newly translated) to a 20-question survey conducted in 1981 by the Cahiers. Also: Hieronymous Bosch.

===



La Tête contre les murs [Head Against the Wall / Head Against the Walls] by Georges Franju, from 1959, presented progressively in its original aspect ratio of 1.37:1. The debut feature by Franju provides a glimpse into a c. '59 lunatic asylum presided over by Pierre Brasseur and Paul Meurisse. It approaches and at the same time eludes the classification of that other film of the mad that approaches then eludes — that is, approximates: the one signed both Melville and Cocteau — a mystery icing a mystery. (A mystery, then, requesting that another mystery grant it escape to a completed project. God bless the best of intentions.) No figure in Georges Franju's — that is, Jean-Pierre Mocky's — film is allowed to take events to their conclusions except for Charles Aznavour, who of course ends his own life with a hanging. The rest is a vacuum, with both protest and progress testing the limits of static walls before echoing back onto themselves in singularity's instant. Alas — a picture as intriguingly inert as life. "There are no more films about the insane." — Jean-Pierre Mocky (whose giant oeuvre has yet to really be discovered in English-speaking territories) speaking in 2008. On-disc supplements include this very video interview in which Mocky delivers the straight-scoop, for 10 minutes; and a 5-minute 2008 interview with Charles Aznavour in which Mocky pitches questions and comments from off-frame. A 48-page booklet includes a chapter about the film from Raymond Durgnat's 1968 volume Franju; a translation of Jean-Luc Godard's 1958 essay about the film; and newly translated interview excerpts with Franju.

Supplement this release with Criterion's double-feature package of Franju's Le Sang des bêtes [The Blood of the Beasts, 1948] and Les Yeux sans visage [Eyes Without a Face, 1959], and MoC's double-feature package of Franju's Judex [1963] and Nuits rouges [Red Nights, 1974].

===



Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F. W. Murnau, from 1927, presented progressively in its original aspect ratio of 1.20:1, with its original English-language intertitles and Movietone soundtrack — available variously (with identical supplements) in a double-disc standard-definition DVD package, and a single-disc high-definition Blu-ray package. Murnau's great masterpiece is a predominantly moral vision of the world distilled like the remedy for an era (1927, 2009) overcome by the images of profligacy, selfishness, and degeneracy espoused by a Tucker Max or a Kirk Cameron. On-disc: an audio commentary by cinematographer John Bailey; outtake footage from the film, with John Bailey audio commentary; Janet Bergstrom's documentary 4 Devils: Traces of a Lost Film, newly updated; the original theatrical trailer; and a truncated only-extant European version of the film at a cropped 1.37:1 aspect ratio with Czech intertitles (and optional English-language subtitles). The booklet: a 16-page piece for the SD DVD, and 20-page affair for the Blu-ray, both containing the same detailed notes on the restoration and the differences between the two versions of the film.

===

A PDF version of the new Masters of Cinema Series catalogue can be downloaded by clicking here.

===

The Last Time She Was Pretty

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

[portions of the above episodes may have been subject to minor revisions since the initial time of posting]

(4)

I would rouse her only when the time had come for the High Ceremonial Viewing of Home Movies Shot on Super-8 in the '70s and Early-'80s (decades my new squeeze had probably barely heard of; it'd be a wonder, even in the imagining, to discover her phone didn't sport an iCarly skin), all transferred to horribly, blockily compressed video by my other grandmother's long-time gentleman-friend who once claimed to "know his way around an Avid." I had understood this utterance as some aphasic misfire brought about by an anxiety towards aphids infesting the couple's jointly-tended community-garden plot, and at the time I'd responded by letting him know, in what was only intended as the most joshing of tones, that he couldn't find his way around a hole in the sod and that his own asshole counted as such and that's why he smelled as much of shit as sweat and medicine. Thus I'd acquired a second strike against my record in the mind of that grandmother who represented, for reasons which will soon become exceedingly clear, my ever-the-least-favorite-of-the-extant-two. As for the first unpardonable offense, which dated back to the Late-'80s and with regard to which it's always been just kind of like "get over it," I had rung up on the woman's phone bill 400 minutes' worth of calls to 900-numbers devoted variously to smut-talk, tales told 'blood-curdlingly' by Robert Englund in the voice of Freddy Krueger, and life advice listlessly parceled out by Dionne Warwick's network of close personal psychic friends.

(In later years — if I might slightly digress — I would find myself providing both the lurid details and forensic evidence of a then-recent break-up to a then-local psychic who resided in famed, fabled Fremont and had learnt the craft of the art from her aunt — although, she'd been quick to emphasize, sensitivity coursed through the bloodline. She went on to present me with three unequivocally off-base insights about what in my personality had been feeding back into the disaster of my lovelife.

"I get the sense that you're, y'know, not-too-majorly, but still, just a little bit, envious."

"Because my eyes are green? She was envious — of everything I didn't possess!"

"But the vibe I'm gettin' says that that might justa been you lackin' confidence."

"Sweetheart, I was once the Christ in a church-play. At the high-school talent show I sang 'Bodies'."

"Okay well I kinda feel you as impatient."

"Good grief. What is this racket — where therapists go when their license is revoked?"

It was like talking to a girl at the Friday's bar on a Thursday happy-hour. As it turned out, we ended up in Ballard at Hattie's Hat, and then back at my place on the couch. In a way, psychics can provide a sort of therapy; they're just way more broken than their clients. Long story short (cigarette burns and cutting), I gave her darkly romano-semitic looks the seven-months' chance they augured and then, well before any Thanksgiving could arrive, threw her out with the cell bill. By Chanukah she'd moved to Renton, where she was later charged with wire fraud.)

A sensitivity of my own originated around, well, a sense of my own origins, and this only augmented the antagonism that I directed towards Paul (my grandmother's boyfriend), towards my grandmother (after-school guardian/warden; symbolical proxy for Paul), and towards my so-called father (Christian-name Samuel with a nickname of "The Mule") whom my mother had finally divorced at age 50, then remarried without ceremony at 51. Two years after she bore my brother Wallace, I had been delivered unto the family unit by way of New York State's adoption protocols, having been delivered in turn via plastic basket to a wad-free spot on the sidewalk circuiting the municipal hospital, an act which today would be considered in perfect accordance with the popularly termed "Baby Moses Law" but which in a more distant past would have all but resigned me to the custody of the Foundling's Asylum. The way I saw it, and the way my mother's definite roman-à-clef Dearest Desired (pub. 1982) told it, she'd had her fallopian tubes surgically cauterized right after the delivery of Wallace in order not to bear anything else created from my father's sperm. (Her book records the husband responding to news of her intentions and the selected method of sterilization by pronouncing: "Cauterize? Makes sense enough I suppose. Is the same way you fix goats' musk glands.") Still, she wanted to chance another child in the household, and so I became, essentially, whatever I am today. Of course it was obvious enough to me even by age five that my father's brain was rusted equipment, that his soul had been siphoned away in countless seasons marked not only by the "god-given" droughts but by his own intractable indolence — and all this I could have derived, had other evidence ever been lacking, purely from the reception of that stupefied praise he would bestow upon both my unexceptional achievements (general excellence in finger-painting, handwriting, and rhymes) and my totally precocious accomplishments (fabrication of a workflow-framework for highway-clean-up, later implemented by the county prison; memorization of Baudelaire's "Sed Non Satiata"). In an instance belonging to either category, I'd hear the same phrase always: "Well done, mah little man." —

— You son-of-a-bitch! — "Mah little man." — "MAH." — The "little man" was bad enough, — but it was the "mah" that detonated me. — "MAH." — Like the way "rock" singers telegraph their "coolness" to the audience by turning every syllable consisting of the solipsistically-suited "i"-sound ("I sigh, 'Pie', / When I get wild") into the more-orgiastically-inclined "ah" ("Ah sah, 'Pah', / When ah get wahld"). — Farm-pig! — Priapist! — Archetype! — He who had of course come home serially stinking of other women's Trésor, and who had of course attempted to cash a high-four-figure check he'd swiped from the office of his sister and upon which he had forged the signature of her husband less than one month after their baby's expiring, managed to break his own mould on one sole occasion, and that was the day in the Early-'70s when his and Mom's first apartment was about to be raided by federal agents — whereupon, tipped off by a visiting (counter-)narc a full minute before the bust-in, The Mule had hurriedly drained the Vlasic jar into the sink and transferred the quart of liquid lysergic to its new home, setting the pickles off once again into fallacious suspended dance.

And so after-schools were spent mostly at my grandmother's, where I engaged in my creative pursuits away from the prattle of a deadbeat, and typically away too from the company of Wallace who, having emerged somehow morally upright from the ooze of my father's issue, required little praise and even less stimulation beyond the ready-made, and as such was content to relegate himself to the confines of his own bedroom. Setting him against the relief of myself, I took his moral calm not as the blandness I'd later perceive it to be but as a kind of 'moral rectitude,' and nothing gave me a greater thrill in that period than knowing him to be sat at his desk back home, poring over the latest installment in Time-Life's subscription series Ethics: Greece's Best Idea, while I lay comfortable on my tummy upon my grandmother's cool basement floor, replicating the cover of the Nightmare on Elm Street 2 VHS in gouache. The montage of the two scenes — the delicious profanation of it all! But one day, during just such a scene, my glee got shattered into a million mirror'y bits. Gentleman-caller Paul, a Southern English expat and, therefore, pointlessly fastidious — including, it seemed, in matters of ensuring that no gainful employment should consume his weekday afternoons — had come bounding down the steps in search of an awl, or hoe, or whatever troglodytic tool he'd deemed necessary for whatever dismal task was at hand and, spotting the clusters of refuse from the sketchbooks, with me lying prone at the center of a gouache nebula, barked: "Well, for Christ's sake, lad — you're just like a raven in a paint-can."

It's from that infuriated moment that my relationship with the extremities of my family had come to be refined, setting into motion the immeasurable procession of contrarieties and coaxing wide-open the embrace of disavowal which would forever aid me in conquering those oppressors who might impinge upon or limit the natural course of my existence. Thank God I'm adopted, I murmured there on the cellar floor and, with that — sensing suddenly the baleful implications of Paul's vituperative likening — for ever after identified as non-practicing Jewish-Hungarian.

(to be continued...)

===

The Last Time She Was Pretty

Part 1 Part 2

(3)

And yet when Thanksgiving finally arrived I could look upon her as so much more than either the real feast, or a botched contribution to the arrangement of crudités plattered in stacks about the kitchen-island. For the first time in her life, probably, she would know attention, and find herself elevated to that human realm high above her personal predicament (whether its origins were congenital or merely traumatic) — in other words would exhibit the lively and complex qualities, to jimmy the lid now from crudely molluscular metaphor, of the once-rancid oyster irradiated by gamma-bombardment — and, accordingly, she, my special gal, would enter into spectacular gestalt. Proudly would I gaze her way, and dote upon her every attempt at gestural coordination and every essay at engagement with the dynamic of my family's social fabric. She could end up surprising me pretty hardcore actually, proving formidable casuistrix (or whatevs) in conversation with that snide, fat son-of-a-bitch of a lawyer brother of mine. She might work her way in close enough to charm my ancient great-uncle who still stinks of his dead wife's dead hemophiliac cat ("Tsari'tsa"), or bring the eyes of my dull, actuarially-preoccupied cousin Reggie alive for the first time ever with a quip about Half-Ton Mom vis-à-vis my bro, — or, get this, even regale to the point of laughter my father's sister, she who lost a baby nineteen years ago to SIDS, with some yarn about gorging on seventeen-year cicadas as the cause of that (one-time) bulge in her own belly. She might invert a couple chords on the ol' upright 'forte, to the all-but-certain delight of all assembled. Or maybe defrag an old hard-drive in the den, the one with the AOL emails from my grandfather and previously considered D:\funct as he/himself...

We would dine, and after my girl and I downed our portion of the bird (she would share with me a preference for dark meat, a taste indulged by no-one else in the family, thus leaving the tenderest portions for tender-hearted us-mutually-there-in-the-moment, — and, god, the endless leftovers, all ours too), we'd sequester ourselves into one-and-a-half cushions of couch in the parlor corner, far from the glow of the plasma screen set to an incorrect display-mode, and she would fall asleep at my breast, and I would never be compelled to curse again my obsequious submission to "family" on this dumb holiday — spent mate-less, I should add, every year prior — in lieu of an extended November powder to the Fontainebleau on Miami Beach, or of making some equally debauched debouchment toward Guam and environs (which is to say, pacific lack thereof). Amid the total contentment of having her propped dozing on my chest, of seeing her dribble spit down my shirt like she were reverting to her purely postulated condition of moron, I would reflect upon just how moronic-in-the-Greek-sense I-myself had been, and how judgmental and cliché had been my initial impressions of her in the bookstore, lurching about. Oh, my ring-eyed sparrow — pre-programmed with a set of fully analog movements — I was so off-the-mark! My delicate starling, collared-dove... — whatever the make, she was never in need of clinicians. To see her lips pouting there that healthy, vital red, as though bespeaking her anatomy as something calibrated for eminent utility, it would become clear to me that not only would she have never fallen asleep only to plunge, as I had previously supposed, into the irreversible process of a "pulse" blend, but that her try at meatloaf would have resulted in nothing less than a savory medium-rare finish and would have, had it been baked in time for the Thanks-semblage, been declared by all comers to the double-length hors-d'oeuvres board three hours earlier an outright gastronomical success...

(Much to the chagrin of my grandmother whose own turkey preparation would not only have been pushed, unknowing, into competition with a supplemental appetizerial meat dish, but would have ultimately had its own and much-deserved praise overshadowed by that accorded to the recipe of my guest. Around the point of pie-cutting, sensing my grandmother's upset, I would lean stealthily toward her ear, gesture of intimacy by ever-the-favorite-grandchild, and whisper into her hearing-aid, "It's okay, Grandma — almost everyone here thinks she's retarded" — no matter how plainly false, I nevertheless would still have had the conceit at the ready — and my grandmother, eager for vindication, would accept the words with a self-satisfied smile, not understanding that I'd only been adhering to my own determination to damn her for her territorial resentment and all-too-certain interior judgment of my guest as a whore and a slattern and a malcontent. — Yes, Grandma, I know what's a lie that you don't. And she knows she'll fall asleep on the couch in ten minutes with a hand under her ass, whereas you know you won't. And I prefer my bird to yours. And — oh, my sinful cardinal... your ruby hole is drooling...)

(to be continued...)

Part 4


===

AneKdote

Extrait de Chez les Weil: André et Simone de Sylvie Weil envoyé à moi de Tag Gallagher:

Une fois terminées les diverses manifestations et cérémonies, les trois lauréats du prix Kyoto furent ramenés à Tokyo pour être présentés à l'empereur. Par une superbe matinée d'automne, nous étions rassemblés dans un salon de l'hôtel, à attendre les taxis qui nous conduiraient au Palais impérial. André s'ennuyait et trouvait le silence pesant. Il était assis sur un divan à côté de Kurosawa. Il se tourna vers lui et lui demanda:

— L'empereur aime-t-il vos films?

Il y eut un court silence. Puis:

— Sa Majesté est un grand empereur.

Et le géant du cinéma japonais s'inclina légèrement, comme pour donner plus de gravité à sa réponse.

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The Last Time She Was Pretty

Part 1

(2)

She had by now disappeared somewhere within non-fiction, and making to investigate the selection piled atop a table of sale-price puzzle books I glanced matter-of-factly down the first aisle of biography. No sign. In an effort to overshoot her path, I strode toward philosophy (spiritual) (a chill danced across the scapulae), before doubling back to attempt to head her off somewhere around Churchill or Lama Dalai or Dylan or Fonda, Jane, and — then what? Size her up for a few seconds more, I supposed, gauge whether her idiocy was painfully legitimate (had she been impregnated?) (could I find her on Facebook?) or was perhaps only the skillful ruse of a professional thief, a kleptomaniac Mata Hari at work in the realm beyond social media, that is, in the old high here-in-the-flesh. I pulled my own ill-fitting jeans up by the belt-loops and, with the knuckle of my right thumb, lightly brushed the bulge at my ass-cheek in confirmation of my wallet. I was just full of glorious notions. There was surely a (newly dearest) God. What if — among us, a thief!

My eyes happened then to strafe a point-of-purchase display assembled in announcement of some fresh writer's "debut memoir," and I considered the inestimable significance that this métier of "thief" — as byword for "violation incarnate" — had held for no less than four centuries' worth of French artist-intellectuals. Did my girl inhabit corruption? Was her gimp left leg the mere outward manifestation of an ethical foray, of a drive to redefine "idiot-savant"? I couldn't know yet, but if she turned out not to be my XX and private Genet, she might at least echo a kind of test-tube Pirate Jenny, — and come Thanksgiving dinner, as far as I was concerned, let the grandmothers be damned.

I had barely quickened my pace when the girl emerged from military history five yards ahead and turned my way, clutching still the book that had occupied her attention from the outset of the excursion. She held it upright in the same way angels hold hymnals on the day Christmas decorations come up from the basement, and casting a quick downward glance I could at last discern its title which read, as though in prophecy of the forthcoming November disaster, Paula Deen's 101 Recipes to Die For. Head-on, I was as struck by the girl's beauty that ranged over an expression no less blank nor troubled than it had earlier appeared, as I was now arrested by the prospect of my deniably dim disciple nodding off at the blender, or variegating the crust of burnt meatloaf with something stainless-steel and sharp.

But that face! And those thumbs! invisible though they now might be, lodged — like the last primal gesture — up inside the channel of Paula Deen's spine. The black eyes canvassed her hands' vicinity for meaning. The jutting jaw softly yammered. And I imagined myself a missionary stationed on some god-forsaken isle, in search of indigenous nourishment and, stumbling upon this scene, proceeding to moderate an argument between my yearning and my conscience before pronouncing, heavy-hearted, a win for the former and concluding, "Well, there's no right way to eat a rhesus. And yet..."

(to be continued...)

Part 3


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The Last Time She Was Pretty

(1)

Found scrawled upon two New York magazine business-reply-mail inserts soliciting subscriptions from the bottom of a bag, this tale, of —

She [who] wandered in a daze among the aisles and display tables of the local Barnes & Noble. [Of] [s]he [who] wore a blue and white striped top at the bottom hem of which her belly (she was not fat but was possibly pregnant, which will reveal itself as a fact very sad very shortly) I think gamely protruded, all ovum rematerialized. [Of] [s]he [who] had the haircut and demeanor of a mental patient.

I imagined life with her, this twenty-odd-year-old thin girl, somebody's daughter or ward, who paced back and forth deep in a book she hadn't purchased, The Time Traveler's Wife or Guns, Germs, and Steel, who scuffed zombie-like and gape-mouthed between new trade-paperback arrivals at the in-store Starbucks kiosk's periphery. Because of her low-slung jeans because of her mental-patient but fashionable haircut I imagined it, that life in which she would revere the reality (?) that she was loved if not, precisely, revere the man who loved her (for in her mind-like-a-bean I probably never would progress beyond the status of cipher), that life in which she would revere the fact that she was loved at last, and for once, and so she would cling to me as a child might to a fallen baby bird, smothering the youngling and finally driving it to its death — which act would effectively represent, as far as either book-girl or hypothetical child would come to be concerned, the death of all things. She would exasperate me and drive me away, enervating me at the same time she flattered me in her obsession. No, the idea of sex with her did not enter the formulation, as it never should among gentlemen who have the best interests of those they're involved with at heart no matter the ease of actualization nor the degree of cunning in the solicitude. Yet her sloppy dress and egging white tummy, I admit, impressed this scrutiny and general revery upon me, and so lead me to the specific vision of a domestic arrangement that would, even if it never went admitted, shame my family and alienate my friends.

(to be continued...)

Part 2


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