Vonnegut's Ballerinas

Kurt Vonnegut wrote the short story "Harrison Bergeron" in 1961, but 51 years later it still has a sting. It's a cautionary tale about trying to make everyone "equal," and the story goes:

Harrison Bergeron is a handsome 7-foot-tall teenager who in the year 2081 is in prison because he is not handicapped enough. The dystopia of the story is one in which the federal government makes everyone "equal" by "handicapping" them. The chief administrator of this program is the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers. The story is framed by Bergeron's parents, who are sitting and watching a ballet on TV in their home. Both are "handicapped" in different ways. Since Harrison's mother has average intelligence, she is not "handicapped," but Harrison's father, who is above normal, is: he has a little device in his brain that sends out electrical shocks if he thinks too much. Plus the father has a 48-pound bag of buckshot strapped to him to physically make him equal. On TV, the ballerinas are also handicapped in the same manner. They also have to wear masks, the uglier the mask, the more beautiful the ballerina. In the middle of their dance, Harrison escapes from his bondage, strips away all the impediments bestowed upon him by the Handicapper General on live TV, and proclaims himself emperor, taking one of the ballerinas as his empress. In the end, Harrison is shot by Diana Moon Glampers, right on TV, right between the eyes. And the story ends with Harrison's mom and dad seeing the execution, but then forgetting about it a few seconds later.

I haven't read Vonnegut in many years. The desire to revisit this story came to me as I was thinking about artists with disabilities, what "outsider art" means, and all the whole weird, unnecessary routes we take to describe how we value art and artists, as well as how we construct "disability."

Reading the story again I see that often good intentions, like ensuring that everyone is equal, and that "handicaps" don't "matter," can be an unproductive experiment, because in altering the playing field to make everyone the same, you also lose the main reason you are playing.

Viewing and consuming visual art, without judgment, without the construct of geniuses and amateurs, is a boring, sad endeavor: "Everything is beautiful in its own way," Ray Stevens once sang, and boy is that really not a great song. What Vonnegut's story seems to be getting at is the absurdity of even wanting to create a Utopia based on making everyone the same.

Schools and programs often try to do this when dealing with "disabilities." They try to create a fake level playing field through programs like Everybody Counts where kids are told to put on blindfolds to pretend to be blind, a pretty explicit example, but also through "political correctness" often dictating that "We are all the same." We aren't. And by pretending to be, or by trying to enforce some kind of equality based on "disabling" yourself, you lose the essence of what "disability" and "ability" mean.

In looking at art created by people with developmental disabilities, this means that there are geniuses and amateurs within that demographic (of course). In other words, not every person with a developmental disability who makes art is an "artist." Not every person with a developmental disability has a keen, instinctive visual instinct, or even an urge to create. 

Setting up "arts programs," then, for people with developmental disabilities, and setting up an art studio are two very different situations. If you don't make this initial distinction, this "discrimination," then you start "handicapping" the actual "artists" in any program by enforcing the program's vision: everyone is equal here.

Not true.

Sometimes art can be used as the great equalizer, but art never equalizes: it discriminates because it needs to. Without discrimination, pictures, sculptures, and other works of art lose their meaning, and all you end up with is a wall full of smudges, a free-for-all. Art constantly creates and re-creates its own rules, aesthetics, judgments, and definitions through constructing "inspiration" and valuing it. Once you try to eliminate those albeit made-up distinctions, art becomes anything you want it to be. At the end of the day, that is a very depressing notion to me.

Look at Vonnegut's ballerinas in "Harrison Bergeron." All of them masked and weighted down, dancing but not dancing, trying to make sure they are all doing the same thing in the same way. They don't want to end up hurting anyone's feelings.

True Bromance

Louis CK's TV show Louie (on FX Thursday nights) is a merging of all kinds of different worlds and sensibilities, a collage hodgepodge of moments captured in a cinema-verite' style that somehow transcends both movies and sitcoms.  As I watch each new episode I get the feeling Louis is referencing literature, not pop culture, and yet there's nothing starchy or explicit in those literary references.  He isn't doing Shakespeare, God knows, or even John Cheever, but there's a feeling inside each of his little 24-minute movies on Thursday nights that has the deft charm and seriousness of a really good short story written by someone who wants to both manufacture a masterpiece and also try to reconfigure what a "masterpiece" means in this really crazy and kind of creepy Reality-TV day and age.  

The transcendence and ambitiousness seems to emanate from the man himself.  A lumpy, embarrassed, middle-aged guy with a look of hope turning into hopelessness in his eyes at all times, Louis' character on the show is an avatar for the man himself of course, but it's not a docudrama or docucomedy by any means.  The show has a sloppy sense of continuity on purpose (different actors play the same characters sometimes in the same episode), but a strict sense of aesthetic purpose.  Louis always gets that 1970s Sidney-Lumet/Francis-Ford-Coppola light just right, and the romance of that smoky melancholic attention to detail gives the show a way out of itself.

The best episode I've seen so far this season details a trip Louie takes to Miami, in order to perform stand up.  The details pile up slowly and dreamily:  an anonymous hotel room facing a crowded beach, Louie overeating on a plush hotel bed, Louie adventuring out to the beach in black clothes, leaving his wallet and clothes on a beach-chair so he can go for a swim.  And then one of the staff taking the beach chair away while Louie is swimming.  Louie panics.  The lifeguard on duty thinks he's drowning.  The lifeguard in this case is a gorgeous, dreamy-eyed Cuban.  Louie and the lifeguard become fast friends in a breezy series of encounters that reminds you of those first friendships you make on playgrounds as a kid -- an intensity that far outweighs the significance of the acquaintance.  Louie basically falls in love with this guy.  The sexual implications aren't hilarious, in the way they might be on other sitcoms.  There are no easy jokes here, just easy access to human emotions.  By the end of the show, you totally understand how a straight middle-aged guy can fall in love with a young male lifeguard, and not because the older guy is horny or closeted, but because he feels all alone.  That might be one of the best examples of "gay" ever put on TV, dislocating static binaries, and providing enough space for actual feeling.

Louie is a TV show that somehow matters.  In a world overwhelmed with media and bull-shit and pundits, Louis CK has staked a claim to simple, effective, beautifully shot authenticity. 

Oceania

Frank Ocean's Channel Orange is one of those albums that defines any space and time it's played in.  It has an atmospheric soul, and a sense of playfulness and seriousness that reminds me of Joni Mitchell's Hissing of Summer Lawns:  long, jazzy, sophisticated pop songs that linger among themselves like people inside a crowded beach-house party, sipping cocktails and relaxing and chatting, but also the whole she-bang layered with a communal understanding that all of it's a big beautiful dream. 

Music like this doesn't come along very often, and Ocean seems to know this rarity instinctively.  Each song has its own distinct sense of itself, as if every note has its own monogrammed towel, every melody its own golden bracelet.  Love songs kick into meditations, meditations turn themselves into flocks of birds.  One of the best songs on Orange is a low-down-gorgeous wake-up call called "Crack Rock."  Its energy comes from inside a glassy intelligence, like sunlight captured in a mirror.  Another great one is called "Sweet Life," a long lush ballad ensconced in a tricky, lacy rap that details the lives of a lost generation while also celebrating the sweet nothingness of it all.  "Pyramids" is a Prince- from-1999 centerpiece that has a heavy heart but a whimsical, ecstatic soul.

But it's not one song that seems to be the point:  it's an accumulation of words, music, atmospheres, tones, all of that providing a plush escape from the way soul and R&B music has been trapped inside itself for so long.

Ocean has discovered a new planet with this album.  Let's call it Oceania.  I want to live there.
 

Ain't America Beautiful?

Artist Danny Evans photoshops the hell out of famous celebrities, turning them into people just like us.  It's an amazing and beautiful metamorphosis, each photo poignant in a way short stories in little magazines are poignant.  It's as if Bobbie Ann Mason and Andy Warhol had a baby.  There's a meditation in here somewhere about beauty/ugliness, but what the real kick is:  each celeb's "look," even when brought back down to earth, has a strange and hypnotic power because someone took an ugly stick to them.  Call it the Charlize Theron Monster Factor.  Evans isn't just making  superstars look like "regular people" here -- he's foregrounding class, and showing how we somehow "see" people in whole new ways when the context shifts and the joke melts away.  Its a gallery of grotesques he's made, but the grotesquery is ours, and ain't America beautiful?  

These stars now have majestic lower-middle-class others enjoying themselves at gun-and-knife shows, clocking in at their dead-end jobs, standing in line at Chick-Fil-A on Hate-the-Faggots Day.  But also look at their faces:  they're the same people before, during and after.  The transformation is fleeting; they morph in and out like strobe-lights. 

My fave is Gwyneth Paltrow.  I think she would be my friend.

I'm also thinking about Antonio Adams, my favorite artist, and his new show coming up at Thunder-Sky, Inc.  Antonio is doing the same cultural and aesthetic work Evans is doing, only instead of accessing software, he uses magic marker and a more authentic and spiritualized philosophy.  In "Unrealized and Unforeseen:  New Works," opening August 24, 2012 at Thunder-Sky, Antonio is showing a portfolio of extremely beautiful and eerily provocative paintings, photos and drawings about flipping the world of celebrity on its fucked-up head, and creating a sort of William-Blake-like paradise where all the stars slip through blackholes, and all the "regular people" he knows (folks Antonio works with at Frisch's Restaurant, family and other friends) go through customs and become Super Stars. 

Evans' photos are creepy, hilarious and stone-cold great, but there's also a sort of celebrity-crush still going on.  The anonymity of the people they become is just another way to glamorize what's been taken away.  Antonio does Evans one better in my book:  he's on the other side of celebrity, telling all of us there's no need for it.

Wired

In July 1981 I was sixteen and fat and gay and poor and living in the middle of nowhere.  My only connection to a world outside of this world was the movies, and that summer I stumbled upon not just a movie but a work of art.  I know how pretentious that sounds, but that was the feeling, and it still is.  Brian DePalma's Blow Out came out that July and flopped big time, but I didn't care.  I was so mesmerized by it I went to see it by myself 14 times before it left theaters.  1981 was the summer of Raiders of the Lost Ark and Clash of the Titans, and of course I saw those and loved them deeply, but Blow Out was a deeper pleasure that made me realize that some movies can be experiences beyond what movies are supposed to be.  Blow Out captured a dour, glistening glamour and intensity that allowed me to start thinking about what "art" is. 

Like I said, back in 1981, I was a weird, sad, teenaged queer living in a broke-down house where the electricity would get shut off every other month, with a family that was slowly falling apart, but I also had this extra sensitivity, like an allergy, that made me want to dream.  Not dream about escaping or being "something" (that was way too farfetched), as much as dreaming about dreaming.  Blow Out was the first time I understood what "dreaming" really is artistically:  it's a very disciplined, glossy enterprise, with a vision that sees beyond sight merged with a crazy need to show off and also to make the world understand itself.  DePalma's movie is gorgeous to look at, glittering with cynicism and magically photographed with by Vilmos Zsigmond, and it has an arrogant, demanding spirit that creates a momentum toward wisdom by the end of the story.  It's a wisdom nobody really wants to have access to though, because Blow Out is probably one of the most tragic and depressing political thrillers ever imagined.  It ends with the death of its heroine caused by the impotence of its protagonist. 

Nancy Allen plays the heroine Sally, a part-time prostitute and full-time cosmetologist.  At first when she appears on-screen you think You have to be kidding me.  From the get-go, Allen performs Sally with a Betty Boop affectation, a Cewpie-doll high-pitched voice and Shirley-Temple hair fluffed up into sluttiness.  But as the movie goes on you realize that affectation and soul have merged inside Sally, as if she's lost herself through seduction and sadness.  Allen gives her a tragi-comic grandeur by the end of the movie, and when she does get killed by John Lithgow's fucked-up assassin on the top of a building during a night-time fireworks display, you actually feel connected to her not in a movie-way, but as a real person sacrificed without any real meaning attached to the sacrifice. 

John Travolta is Jack, a sound technician for cheap slasher pictures.  He's out recording some stock sound footage one night when he ear-witnesses a blow out, and inside the car is Sally and a governor slated to be the next POTUS.  Jack saves Sally, but the governor dies, and due to his techy knowledge of sound he pieces together the real story:  the blow out was caused by a gun-shot.  All the cops and politicians and administrators tell Jack to forget the conspiracy, but he just can't.  The whole situation allows Jack to come to an understanding about the world and himself:  he's tired of being fucked with, so he finally takes a stand.  That stand means "wiring" Sally when she's about to be interviewed by reporter who says he believes the conspiracy story.  Jack feels the need to record Sally and the reporter, just in case the reporter turns on them.  It turns out, though, the reporter is actually Lithgow's government-hired, mercenary psycho.    

And there you go:  Sally is murdered while Jack listens through an ear-plug, racing toward her at the top of the building, plowing through a parade celebrating Liberty.  There's an ecstatic moment when Sally reaches out from the building.   Her death-screams eventually make it into one of Jack's slasher picks.

That beauty is a direct result of DePalma's technique.  Everything about Blow Out has the shiny fervid glow of intention, as if each scene has been storyboarded obsessively and then reenacted exactly the way it was envisioned.  The actors move through scenes with a fluidity caused by DePalma's camera's surrpetious slides.  Split-screens and dual focus shots abound.  The cinematopgrahy feels both mechanized and completely organic.  Pino Donaggio's lush, tragic, hyperbolic score allows the whole movie to become orchestrated to the point of no return; the music, mimicking the movie's spirit, is both tragically over-the-top, and a parody of tragedy. 

"Good scream" are the final words in the movie -- spoken by Travolta's Jack during the sound edits for the slasher movie. He is completely broken and dumbfounded and beyond sadness, in a world where suicide seems kind of pointless. Travolta plays the sound-nerd with such finesse he finds glory in the geekiness, and a tortured soul inside a character most actors would play for laughs. In fact the movie's hothouse atmosphere and perverse/reverse sense of patriotism has a parodic edge to it. It's intentional, I think, because DePalma's screenplay is about how patriotism and politics are simply a ruse, a cover for the actual way things work. People get hired to kill people. People get killed. Nobody gives a shit. Move on. That parody is a part of the movie's desire to aestheticize corruption and hopelessness. Nobody cares. Look how beautiful that is.

"Hopelessness" is at the core of Blow Out's style and substance.  "Bad luck" becomes the atmosphere, the air people are breathing.  When I was 16, that sensibility somehow made the world make sense to me in a way a book or a speech never could.  It still does now that I'm 47.  I guess that's what I mean when I say Blow Out is a work of art.  DePalma creates an aesthetic universe that both mocks and truthfully represents this fucked-up world we've made.

  

Sorkinisms

The Newsroom sucks.  I wish it didn't.  Aaron Sorkin is an arrogant genius, creating an alternate universe in the movies and TV shows he writes in which plucky, talkative, overworked, arrogant geniuses talk a lot to each other about how superior they are and the world would be if everyone listened to them and didn't act like idiots.  That blowhard arrogance, when Sorkin is great, becomes a sort of savvy, campy manifesto for workaholic professionals and political geeks.  In The Social Network and The American President, Sorkin's masterpieces, there are moments of pure bliss and the constant talking takes on the high-style rants and rhythms of old-school Hollywood:  "repartee" is the word.  At the center of both movies is a sense of outrage cushioned in the idea that everything will work out once people come to their senses and just do what Aaron Sorkin says. 

In both those movies, though, a slight but kind of creepy sexism runs through the dialog and situations.  Even though the ladies are competent (Annette Benning in The American President is a high-IQ lobbyist, and Mara Rooney in The Social Network is a high-IQ Harvard coed), they are at the service of the main characters:  a genius president and a genius entrepeneur respectively.  That sexism pales in comparison to the outright and weird-assed misogyny in The Newsroom.  Ostensibly about an anchorman who goes a tad bit crazy and starts telling "the truth," instead of what people want to hear, Newsroom is really a bad show because it feels underwritten and overwritten at the same time, and the very premise -- that once upon a time the media really did a good job and helped this country become a great nation! -- is kind of nostalgic and whiny and oversimplified to the point that everything about the show feels forced, even the set design.  Jeff Daniels plays the anchor-guy and every time he's on screen (which is a majority of the time) you just want to turn the channel.  He's grumpy and conceited and I bet his breath smells bad.  And he bloviates to the point no one really in their right mind should really give a shit what he says.  In short he's Keith Olberman. 

It's the misogyny, though, that really makes Newsroom horrible.  Almost all of the villains in the piece are "gossips." The very idea of "gossip" is feminized in the show's cosmology, and every character who is seen as worthless is morethanlikely either a right-winged moron, or a female "gossip," including all those immoral housewives on Bravo, and most of the ladies sitting in fancy, shiny Washington DC restaurants with pomegranite martinis and really long fingernails.  Sorkin is creating a completely black and white universe in this show -- the "us" are all the smart, smart-alecky, earnest guys in the newsroom, and the "them" are those bitches who gossip outside of it (Queen Bitch is played by Jane Fonda, God Love her, as the conservative owner of the network).  These gossipers pollute the media with their singsong doggerel.  Real newspeople are truth-tellers and well, guys.  Guys who are so pissed they stay late, drink hard, don't make good boyfriends, and risk getting fired because the truth-telling is so goddamn important it just might kill them.  

But these heroics are vacuous of course.  And the "us versus them" is just plain sad.  

The only bright spot:  Emily Mortimer as Daniels' executive producer.  Even with a role that makes her swing back and forth from competent, dirty-talking, one-of-the-boys producer to spurned and bumbling ex-lover, Mortimer brings a gravity and a patience to her role that makes her moments on screen close to authentic, even though she's having to speak a lot of Sorkinisms.  

I wish they'd give her a spin-off.  And yup -- please ask someone else to write it.

   

Girls, Girls, Girls

When I first read about Girls, Lena Dunham's TV show about her and her friends' semi-Bohemian exploits in a less than romantic NYC, the show sounded like a gritty, mean-spirited version of Sex in the City (something nobody wants to see I don't think).  So I forgot about it.  I finally got around to watching the whole thing in its entirety on HBO on Demand this week, and surprisingly it's a revelation -- like someone took a Mary Gaitskill book of short stories, got rid of all the fusty/creepy self-hatred but kept the smart, off-kilter situations, and created a new way to represent young women without all the prissy finery and pretentious apologetics. 

Dunham is overweight, neurotic, narcissistic, and full of desire, and her sexual exploits with her Asperger-y boyfriend are just so odd and joyful that you feel like these two people are completely original, not types typed up for a TV show, but creatures from some other world gracing ours so we can see how silly and wonderful people truly are.  The boyfriend is played by Adam Sackler and is a pale body-builder with a melted Norman-Rockwell-paperboy face with a Russian shade of sadism shining out of his eyes.  Their relationship truly is the sun the show orbits.

The other girls are not as odd sadly enough, but still have a charm and charge all their own.  Obviously Sex in the City is a touchstone here, but it's also the mother all of them are making fun of.  And the piss-poor economy also haunts the show, as Dunham's Hanna goes from crappy job to crappy job after being cut off by her professor parents.  All the episodes have a home-made quality to them, but also are crafted like little movies.  Tiny Furniture, Dunham's 2010 movie debut, was a bit twee, enjoyable but a little too enjoyable somehow -- as if Dunham was trying way too hard to be the next Woody Allen.  In Girls she's just being herself thank God:  unpleasantly plump, nervous, and unafraid of letting us in on all of it.