Christine's World

 

 

Watching Louie Anderson perform Christine Baskets on the FX dramedy/comedy/hell-I-don-t-know-what-to-call-it-really Baskets is not actually about watching someone perform:  it's watching someone be.  Anderson is so damn good you lose track of what he's doing, and you find yourself completely enmeshed in what Christine is doing, saying, acting like, thinking even.  It's the kind of acting that can only be seen on TV because you need several episodes of it for the whole process to sink in, and then suddenly an epiphany happens and it's there:  we're witnessing brilliance.  Let's call it "art."  Why not? 

 

The epiphany for me came in the third episode, and my adoration just grew from there:  Chrisitne curled up on a couch, covered in a shimmery quilt, talking about the beauty of the curly-fries.  Louie is in drag in the scene of course, in the whole show, playing Zach Galifianakis' somehow inert and yet completely overbearing Republican mother, Christine, who lives in a suburban dreamhouse in Bakersfield, California stocked with Costco items of every sort.  The drag is really just a way to get there:  not a lot of makeup, simple hair, blowsy, beautiful, no-nonsense, older-lady clothes that are only noticeable because they are designed not to be (except for the incredible Easter bonnet Christine wore in the Easter-themed episode, which is probably the best Baskets I've seen so far).  Christine seems to have stepped out of someone's actual life, stumbling Purple-Rose-style onto the FX platform, ready to go.  It's effortless, what Louie does, and yet his contribution has the nuanced, steely-eyed essence of someone really knowing how to make shit matter.  

 

Even though the show focuses primarily on Galifianakis' inept clown-wannabe (he went to a French clown school only to flunk out and return to Southern California to be a rodeo-clown), and that's OK, it's Christine who is the center of the show's universe.  The atmosphere and ethos of the show emanate from Louie's way of being her, a style that cancels out style but somehow manages to be better than stylish:  it's drag without camp.  Instead of parody and mockery, Louie, and the writers/creators of Baskets (Galifianakis, Louis CK, and Jonathan Krisel) seek homage in the bleakest and most banal of places.  The show gets off on absurdity, but not the kind that makes people look weak and worthless; it's absurdity that somehow saves people from themselves, even while they figure out how shitty everything is.

 

Christine is not really brave or incredibly intelligent, or really worth our time.  She just is.  And her existence is significant because it's not.  She lives in her own bubble of Ronald-Reagan wishes and Costco dreams.  She doesn't seem mean-spirited, but she is sort of gnarly and vindictive in the best of ways.  She can do a passive-aggressive one-off with the best of them, and yet you truly believe that she loves herself and the people she chooses to love.  She seems to have a heart made of two-by-fours and vinyl siding, and that's a compliment she would approve of I think.

 

I keep thinking of Raymond Carver when I think of Christine too, and Louie's way of pulling the whole thing off.  Carver wrote beautiful blunt and nuanced short stories about nobodies, most who live in California.  His stories have the same rote, sweet no-nonsense intent that Louie gives Christine.  Baskets totally benefits from that sensibility.  What could have been a Galifianakis lark about a down-and-out rodeo-clown with French inclinations opens up to become a minimalist and stark meditation on what it means to be a nobody in a world of nobodies, with Christine the empress of it all, a queen driving around in a maroon Chevy four-door sedan going to pick her elderly mother up for church, or eating a hotdog at (yup) Costco, commenting on how inexpensive it is, and you also get a drink.  Carver's stories opened up from closing down, and Louie's sense of timing and shaping of scenes, the way he uses his face not to register feeling but thought, is that same process of closure being the door to something else:  he's writing a book of short stories about Christine Baskets every time he enters a room. 

 

So here goes:  Louie Anderson is now a genius in my book, and while Baskets is funny and sweet and filled with odd and off-kilter laughs (as well blessed with another great performance by the gorgeous deadpan Martha Kelly as an insurance agent with a broken arm and a humble need to go missing), it's really not the show as much as Christine's world I'm interested in.  And I don't want a spinoff ala Laverne and Shirley or The Jefferson by any means.  I'll watch Baskets just for those few minutes when Christine appears, saunters through, says something stupidly on-target, and then goes back to hosing off her driveway.   



Corny

Mr. Cornell

 

Joseph Cornell is one of those peripheral and yet totally important figures in contemporary art history who haunts and informs a lot of what is made and seen today.  He passed away in 1972, and yet his influence and the scope of his ghostliness illuminate a lot of what has happened artistically and aesthetically in the 20th and now 21st Centuries.  He was humble and yet ambitious, ingenuous yet sophisticated, "outsider" yet completely in sync with his contemporaries, including the Surrealists and everything after.  He lived in a small, unremarkable house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, taking care of his brother who had cerebral palsy, and working a lot of odd jobs to sustain his household that included both his brother and mother.  He basically spent his lifetime outside of those activities making intricate, oddly meaningful "things" out of materials he lifted from life:  postcards, fabric, toys, bottles, glasses, etc., all usually aligned poetically and ominously in shadow-boxes.  He also made movies, created hefty dossiers devoted to movie-stars and waitresses, wrote, and even collaborated with his brother on a series of delicate drawings/collages that merged fairy-tale wishes with a scratchy/gorgeous obsession.  In fact, most of what Cornell did seemed burnished by an overarching obsession to find meaning in what is already in front of you, as if a junk-drawer in your kitchen is a primal resource for reinvention and even transcendence, every little doodad and left-behind nothing a reason to daydream, to travel while remaining still.

 

Our next Thunder-Sky, Inc. exhibit, “Utopia Parkway Revisited: Contemporary Artists in Joseph Cornell’s Shadow" (opening February 26, 2016 with a reception 6 to 10 pm and closing April 9, 2016). features beautifully and incidentally Cornell-inspired works by Jeff Casto, Marc Lambert, Christian Schmit, Matthew Waldeck, and Matthew Waldeck Jr.  They all make art that both mimics Cornell’s approach (collage, sculpture, assemblage, and appropriation), as well as the spirit involved in his vision, creating and recreating an aesthetic universe based in nostalgia, obsession, and pop culture.  Casto's works are the closest in spirit and materials to Cornell's boxes, but he also has his own sense of deadpan whimsy and ache, as if he's taken in Cornell's need to make something out of nothing and pushed resources and dreaming to their limits.  Lambert's works featured in the show respond to Cornell's use of everyday materials (Lambert paints on ceiling tiles), and also to his starry-eyed sense of cinema and history.  Lambert meticulously recreates universes collaged from movie-scenes and folklore, juxtaposing Sasquatches with pyramids, pterodactyls with UFOs, a psychic boyhood embellished with a sense of sentimental ache and poetry.  Waldeck, Jr.'s drawings have that same sense of longing for Utopian context.  Executed in magic-marker on 8" X 11" sheets of paper, they function as a sort of illuminated manuscript informed by television, solitude, and a search for more than is there.  Waldeck, Sr. creates funky, frenetic dioramas (and other contraptions) made from machine parts and other junk.  They playfully reference space-travel, carnivals, and miniature civilizations, in a Cornellian flourish and flicker.  Schmit's one piece in the show is truly masterful, and acts as both a comment on, and a rapturous biographical portrait of, Cornell, constructed with a painstaking accuracy and ingenuity pretty much akin to everything Cornell accomplished.

 

It's going to be an incredible show.

 

A lot of times I argue on this blog that biography often handicaps the way we see and consume art, that knowing that the artist has a diagnosis or hardship or whatever shouldn't get in the way of feeling and understanding the art for what it is and can be.  You don't want to lose focus or respect by attaching charity and other kinds of condescension onto the whole shebang.  But Cornell's work and life intermingle in ways that go beyond "diagnosis" and "charity."  From limited means and a "small life," he forged an incredible body of work that somehow captures lightning in a bottle every time you witness it.  He dedicated his life to minutiae and what it means when you take the time to excavate it, to reinvent and reimagine it.  He discovered vast planets inside the smallest of boxes, and allows us today to take such endeavors completely seriously. 

 

 

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Jr.

Matthew Waldeck, Sr.

Jeff Casto

A wall of Jeff Casto works

 

A wall of Marc Lambert works

Marc Lamber

Marc Lambert

Christian Schmit

Jeff Casto

 



Shakespeare, Indiana

 

 

 

 

American Crime is in its second season, and this season has the same dour, dreamy, urgent feel as its first.  There's hardly any soundtrack music to coax scenes out of what they actually are -- just a throbbing hum from fluorescence or maybe it's just God sleeping.  And every actor is keyed up and centralized; you feel their faces somehow, feel their thoughts.  I love the whole setup of this limited series.  John Ridley is the creator, and he's fashioned a Shakespearean nightmare world out of Indianapolis, Indiana, transforming suburbs, exurbs, tenement apartments, basketball courts, pancake houses, and private and public high-school hallways into high-tragedy venues of seriousness and sorrow.  The writing has an intensity and drive to it; every hour episode moves through like a semi on the interstate.  What the characters say feels authentically boxed-in, as if culled through surveillance, and yet there's an artfulness to it all too, as if each character is a type we've never come across before on TV or in movies, and yet we've known them all our lives. 

 

Felicity Huffman's Leslie Graham, the private school's highbrow, hyper-professional headmaster, has the steely-eyed reserve of a non-profit dragon-lady, and yet the way she's performed you have access to her ability to compartmentalize for the "greater good," meaning she can take advantage of women like Lili Taylor's Anne Blaine, a working-class mom whose son attends the private school on scholarship, and who seems to have just been raped by one of the school's basketball players.  Boom.  Taylor's hurt registers like a fish-hook into a palm; you feel all she's been through without knowing a single thing about her.  It's her eyes and mouth, the way her hair hangs down her face.  She's a restaurant manager who's overworked and anxious to help her son ascend.  When she finds out about the assault she speaks with Ms. Graham, thinking that something can be done, an investigation, punishment, whatever.  Ms. Graham's instinct is to ask her to sign some papers before she leaves.

 

Regina King's Terri LaCroix, an upper-middle-class African American mother, wife and manager, whose son also goes to the school and hosted the party where the assault allegedly happened, is distinctly over and above it all, tired of having to justify herself .  King is triumphantly and constantly reminding anyone in the room that she has ascended, through body language, through a heated flicked in her eyes.  She is letting all of us know she is no longer "one of those people," and that she is tired of all of us not noticing that.  In one scene, she has to fire one of her African American underlings, a woman who asks her, "Can you do something for me?"  She hates the insinuation that the two of them are connected by race, and complains at a wine bar that night with some of her friends that she's sick of those kinds of expectations.  And then later in the same episode, when confronted with the assault controversy and worried about her son's culpability, she invites a cop friend over to her home and asks, without a note of irony or apology, "Can you do something for us?"  The cop is black. Terry LaCroix's face is always registering a blank, almost frightening unconcern, until she senses she might be seen as vulnerable or not worthy, as when she's asking for help from the cop friend.  Her other expressions range from fury and disdain to plain old everyday "I need to get this," while putting her I-phone up to her ear.  In short, she's an American classic, ignoring history while also trying to find a way to escape it, and yet in King's performance you feel a kind of thermodynamic exhaustion taking place right before your eyes.  She's tired of all she has to do to be herself, and yet she can't stop the act; she's wearing a mask that's smothering her but she can't remove it. 

 

The same can be said of Connor Jessup's Taylor, the boy who is sexually assaulted, and Joey Pollari's Eric, the boy accused of assaulting him.  They both are running from the way they have to perform themselves, seeking a way out of the codes and regulations encircling behavior, class, desire -- but they don't have anything to replace it with, to run to.  This sense of hopelessness permeates all of American Crime, and it's refreshing in a way you can't describe except that while you watch it you feel reality's pulse, tragedy's electricity.  There aren't really any happy moments in the show: dinners are always scraping plates and forks dropping to the floor, school a shadowy collection of hallways and facelessness, homes lit with living room lamps and TV light, faces lit with phone-light, everything in a sort of 21st Century gloom.  It's not show-offy though, this gloom -- it's bracing and for real, artificial enough to have a sense of style that saves the whole enterprise from being high-dungeon or campy or worked-up.  

 

American Crime creates a raw-nerve labyrinth of class and sex and gender and bias and hate and love and phoniness that encapsulates America in a way other shows can't.  You get lost in all the atmospheric complications, and yet the narrative momentum and dread pull you through.  There's no easy way to explain it, no easy way out.  This is heady stuff, extremely watchable somehow, all of it arranged into a high-stakes one-hour drama with an eye toward not letting anybody off the hook.  American Crime finds a beautiful and strange ambiguity in all that furor and blame.

 

Not to Be Believed

"A lot of movies are about life.  Mine are like a piece of cake," Alfred Hitchcock once said. 

Nancy Meyers is the 21st Century Hitchcock in many ways.  While Hitch hitched his sense of cinema/design/manipulation/aesthetic mostly on the thriller genre, cake-decorating the screen with posh, Technicolor, darkly romantic interiors (think North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, Vertigo, etc.), Meyers creates a romanticism of conspicuous consumption, making romantic comedies/dramedies that feel both fairy-tale brittle and heavy-handedly delightful.  Her slice of cake is interior-design as fever-dream; each of her greatest films are elopements from reality, and yet so overtly realized and sumptuous as to blow your stinking mind.  I'm talking here mainly about the movies she's directed and written since 2003:  Something's Gotta Give, The Holiday, It's Complicated, and this year's The Intern.  All of these films are sentimental and bland and populated by talky, over-earnest, rich ladies and gents who have successfully created their own destinies through hard work and good living.  All of which would piss any normal moviegoer off, but somehow, due to Meyer's innate, obsessive tendency to manufacture a sincere and scrupulous universe you feel sucked into all her gorgeous business; you feel the pain and triumph of made-up bicoastal white-linen American aristocracy.  You want to be a Meyers-ite from the first glimpse of sunlight through Central Park trees, so iridescent and lyrical as to make you feel nostalgic for experiences you've never experienced, or the sun-drenched ceramic-tiled roofs of Santa Monica mansions undulating into the sunset, or the crisp, bright, efficient stylishness of a Brooklyn warehouse transformed into heavenly office-space.

I could go on.

Meyers, like Hitchcock, seems to be more interested in the stuff involved in making the movie than in the overall movie itself, meaning she has an almost perverted sense of objects, décor, things.  She's a fetishist in the most regal and Architectural Digest sense of the word.  Her camera lingers across tables, pillows, couches, Egyptian-cotton bed-sheets with a voluptuous voyeuristic slowness and ardor that reminds me of Hitchcock's slow and delicious lingering on lips, eyes, and lady-gloves.  You feel a world opening up inside a mind in Meyers' movies, a wish-fulfillment that somehow allows you access into another dimension where everything is so fucking beautiful you feel both alienated and welcomed home.  But it's not your home.  It's really nobody's home.  It's just some figment, some colossal cottage-castle in the Hamptons filled up with taupe fabrics and antiques and people drinking white wine at dusk laughing about how lucky they are, even though sometimes they get kind of sad because you know everybody gets sad sometimes.

I just saw The Intern, which might be her best.  Meyers captures a phony, gorgeous, intensely not intense NYC in it, with so much aplomb you might view it as some over-the-top parody of a tourist commercial for the Big Apple.  Perfection is not the word here.  The brownstones in it have a heft and grandeur not to be believed, and the office-space overseen by Anne Hathaway's Millennial Internet entrepreneur is a vast white-bricked labyrinth of ergonomic seating and long white tables for laptops and big mugs of tea.  You want to work there, especially because everybody just seems to be meticulously performing work, not really working.  And Robert Deniro, as the titular intern, a Baby-Boomer retiree with a benevolent sense of patriarchy spilling out of his eyes, is a beautiful, static study in sweet, handsome decency:  Deniro in The Intern, in fact, might be Meyers' ultimate piece of furniture, and I totally mean that as a compliment to both.

I want to have a Nancy Meyers movie-night soon, where everybody brings a big elegant throw pillow, a home-made cobbler, and expensive bottles of white wine, and we sit in chunky knit sweaters and act like we're the most important people in the world, while watching the made-up and yet somehow actual and more important people in the world experience all their First World problems on a lush and monochromatic planet called NancyWorld. 

It's a good goal to have.  Makes life worth living.

The office space in The Intern



The English cabin in The Holiday

Meryl and Alec in the NYC hotel bar in It's Complicated

The kitchen and dining area in It's Complicated

The Hamptons house in Something's Gotta Give

Robert Deniro and Anne Hathaway in The Intern

Locking into Place

Of course it's January when David Bowie dies.  Cold silvery light, frosted-hard glass, that sense of loss locking into place:  roads, tree-branches, ditches, power-lines.  He was silvery like that somehow, frosty; you didn't know him, you just experienced his atmosphere. 

 

That's exactly how I remember him.  Just enough cold to make you shiver, just enough strangeness to make you feel scared, just enough glamor to make you understand, just enough video to freak you out.  Once somebody like him goes, you get what he means, and it's startling.  You've depended on his strangeness to get you through.  I have.  Truly.  Depended on David Bowie's oddness and fearlessness and creepiness, his shapeshiftingness, his ability to disappear and reappear.  It gave me hope.  Gives me hope still.  He pursued a swarm of off-kilter notions that turned into a kingdom.  His musical catalog is an electronic nest of hallways, every word and note merging into rooms that flow into one another and then suddenly you're outside in the cold again, freezing, wanting to freeze:  "Sons of the Silent Age," "Always Crashing in the Same Car," "Boys Keep Swinging," "D.J.," "Wild Is the Wind," "Heroes," "Ashes to Ashes," and so on.  I'm in a Berlin k-hole here, fixating on the albums Bowie made right before, during, and after he moved to Berlin and got God (Brian Eno):  Station to Station, Low, "Hereos," The Lodger, and Scary Monster (and Super Creeps).  You can't escape their importance, nor their interstellar drag, a music that defines a secret era through saturation and slurred loveliness.  It's the late 70s and very early 80s, but also it's just Bowie:  disco refashioned into robotic trance, punk recalibrated into thoughtfulness, rock's warmth and stir disconnected and rewired into beautiful crooned terror. 

Bowie was a weirdo that somehow found a way to make weirdness majestic, worth putting up with.  He did this through experimentation, but the experiments, at least those I'm referencing, always paid off, always found their way out of flaunts and fancy-flights into direct bullets to your brain and soul.  It's the kind of music so connected to life it feels foreign to it; you just want to ride inside the spaceships he's made, close your eyes, find that planet of ladies rubbing lipstick off their faces, the planet of furious D.J.s and harlequins entrancing bulldozers.

Even before Berlin, Bowie was like that.  One of the first memories I have of him is from Soul Train.  For real.  Bowie singing "Golden Years" on Soul Train.  Well, lipsyncing at least.  Out of it.  He was thin and regal and looked doped-out, emptied of all feeling, but still into it, lizard-like and connected to some kind of malevolent corporation.  The perfect thing:

All those guises, all those identities.  I was maybe 10 years old.  Loved watching Soul Train.  Bowie's presence, though, made Soul Train feel gorgeously soul-less, like purgatory, and yet you wanted to be there, wanted to figure out what the hell?  That was him:  so strange he defined "strange," and now nobody is strange.  They are just wannabes. 

God bless the Thin White Duke.  Rest in Peace.

Panic in Detroit

 

 

When I think what movie I would consider the best of 2015, I keep going back to It Follows, a low-key, low-budget horror movie written and directed by David Robert Mitchell.  Filmed in Detroit, Michigan, it casts a furious spell; you don't really need to understand what's going on because It Follows follows its own sort of poetic nature out of itself, and as it moves forward you get sucked into its rust-belt-flavored richness, its atmosphere and logic.  The plot details trumped-up supernatural goings-on that don't make too much sense, outside of the fact that a lot of teenagers have to run from zombie-like figures that are conjured when they have sex.  That conceit alone is worth the price of admission of course, like a takedown of all those 80s horror flicks that make violent death the wages of sin, but here there's something else all together happening, not exactly parody or pastiche as much as nightmare-nostalgia.  Mitchell is interested in a certain tone that John Carpenter got back in the day in Halloween, The Fog, and The Thing, a foreboding slow-burn fueled by Moog and mood to the point you start to feel the horrors ripen slowly into haikus:  the way the old sad neighborhood glows around dusk, the way car-lights glare in abandoned parking garages, the way weedy backyards seem to engulf themselves in raw luxury... 

 

The characters in It Follows exist in a suburban netherworld full of half-lit porches and stony paths, windows ripe for breaking into, above-ground swimming pools full of old possibly toxic water.  The insides of the houses have a claustrophobic stylized blush to them, like the interior-decoration and lighting involved in David Lynch's Blue Velvet.  Lampshades and walls seem to hum like insane asylum residents.  So there's that Velvety quality too, that sense of a director/writer biting into the world so we can digest it.  It Follows is an exercise in ragged spookiness and B-movie acting, but then again there's a glaze over all of it, a glamor borne out of the fact that this movie isn't meant to scare you, it's meant to put you into a Detroit trance.  You don't just watch -- you kind of climb into it, like a cave or the trunk of a great big car. 

 

Can't wait for Mitchell's next move.

      

My So-Called Apocalypse

 

 

Mr. Robot is a TV show on USA Network that has the dismal glamor and techno-tragic soundtrack of a David Fincher Daydream Nation, a country full of sleek moves and mind-fuck plot spirals, elegant camera slitherings, actors acting in sync with the paranoid, hyped-up surroundings, and an all around genuine sense of beautiful doom.  It's so stylish you forget there's substance being performed;  the story is about what would happen if the Occupy-Wall-Streeters and Anonymous-ers got their shit together and actually did something that meant something, as opposed to posing and hoping something might happen while trying to figure how not to organize while organizing.  It's all about a hacker-generated fiscal apocalypse that happens while nobody and yet everybody is watching.

 

Director/writer Sam Esmail is the brains behind the operations.  He's dreamed up a universe so skillfully realized and executed you feel right at home in each corporate boardroom and hacker bedroom and back-alley arcade.  Every shot is worth staring at, and the music, by Mac Quayle, is worth pining over,  a hyper-stylized exercise in synth-noir that gives Trent Reznor the what-for.  The music is actually kind of like a character in of itself, all voluptuously, cheesily technological and yet also lyrically nuanced enough to feel as though you're wearing the headphones of the hackers about to steal your identity.

 

But truly this is Rami Malik's show.  As Elliot, the buzzed-out half-crazy protagonist, Malik brings a gnawed-off energy and ferocity to Mr. Robot that feels authentic, uncooked, and gives the whole enterprise a vibration that doesn't stop start to finish.  Not a star but a sort of stratosphere is born.  He moves through scenes with an ache you can't specify, only feel, and his large, Marty-Feldman eyes feel both lizard-like and beautifully sentimental, both postcard-sad and hell-fire off-kilter.  You don't know whether to look away when he speaks or be drawn in or both.  It's Malik's charisma that transforms all the foreboding plot machinations into character-study material, the same way Jon Hamm's portrait of Don Draper allows you to feel/read the pretentious, arch, often leaden scenes in Mad Men as the poetic objective-correlatives of a whole era. 

 

It's another zeitgeisty show I kept thinking about, though, as we binged through Mr. Robot:  My So-Called Life, the Clare-Danes vehicle that captured the ennui and excitement of 1994 adolescence, with gorgeously written voiceovers and a grim palate of blues, purples and grays.  Malik's performance has that same sense to it of capturing a moment in time, and his voiceovers, although decidedly not about boys and dates and hair color, still have an intimacy and specificity that allow you to enter someone else's consciousness in a way you almost never get to do in TV Land.  Mr. Robot is the My So-Called Life of 2015 actually -- memorializing this fucked-up era with a knife-edged whimsy and chromium focus that make you realize how TV can sometimes be the only platform you need.