A Monster Always

So this is the blog post about Philip Seymour Hoffman .  I was just telling Bill this is my John Lennon moment, that desperate feeling of losing someone you never knew but somehow knew through a cultural pipedream.  Scotty got me first.  I was just finishing up a novel about a pedophile when I saw Boogie Nights, and that movie made me feel brave and as if I knew what I was doing because Scotty was in it.  He was stupid, creepy, glorious, and he occupied a space in cinema that was never before occupied and hasn't been since:  he was an inarticulate loser with a beautiful interior life that could only seep out in emotional tirades performed alone.  That scene with Scotty sitting behind the wheel of his souped-up make-believe sports car as he calls himself a fucking idiot over and over into infinity after confessing his love for Dirk is one of those things, right?  It's epic and it's embarrassing, gigantic and very, very small, and yet it also is what makes life worth living.

Philip Seymour Hoffman is no longer among the living.

What the fuck do you do with that?

You watch Capote.  He won the goddamn Oscar for it.

I'm watching it right now as Truman spoons baby food into the mouth of the murderer.  It's one of those dour gorgeous movies, a gothic sweetness leaking through the black Kansas trees.  And Philip Seymour Hoffman's Truman is the pale, red-headed sun the whole situation obits.  That lispy, musical, high-pitched voice, that shiny innocent yet somehow despotic face.  He got into that world by seeing its exterior, by examining what things look like from the outside, and he got in.  He got in.  That's probably what made him feel the most alive and yet it also probably damned him to that sad little death.  You know.  The needle in the arm.

You know what?  I don't fucking care how he died.

I only care about him right now.  With his horn-rimmed glasses and his melodic frilly voice and the silhouette he inhabits with the dignity of a queen.  He made the world safer for freaks.  The sad thing is he also was building his own spiral staircase to heaven.

You Are What You Steal (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part Three)

 

(This is Part Three in a series of responses to Mike Kelley's retrospective at MOMA PS 1 in New York City.  The show is amazingly thorough, and Mike Kelley was so amazingly prolific, I can't just write one post and move on.) 

 

"Memory Ware" is a series of "paintings" Mike Kelley did in the early 2000s, using trinkets and other crap in place of splattered paint in a sort of Jackson-Pollock flourish that feels both aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, the exact nexus where Kelley's work foams over into mythology.  These large, voluptuously stupid pieces of art really seem like toss-offs and yet the room they occupy had a heavenly, game-show majesty, a feeling of fever and brute-force and also somehow poetic justice.  These works reference folk art's intense focus on non-focus, as well as nervous doodling numbness, a pile of gaudy activity shored up and frozen, completely meaningless and yet chief among the suite's narrative statements is an exclamation of freedom and embarrassing pride:  Look what the fuck I shoplifted. 

 

These are tabula-rasa trash piles, paragraphs of plastic bracelets and digital wrist-watches and little dumb dolls, the shit that spills out of vending machines after a shooting spree, all of it compiled and composted into a manifesto about what it takes to not be an artist.  The pretend opulence is pre-teen drag-queen, an over-arching innocence spilling out of the hoarded phoniness.  You are what you steal. 

 

Think of kids dumping their bags of Halloween candy on living room floors.

 

Think of Paris Hilton's bedroom after she throws a tantrum.

 

Think of polluted rivers starting to sing Carpenter's songs.

 

Think of a tornado sucking in a Liberace chandelier and spitting out a monument..

 

Think of Mike Kelley painstakingly gluing all that goddamn shit and then framing it all in with tender loving care and knowing that's all there is.

 



Ready for the World

 

 

Last Thursday night I was lucky enough to attend a screening of A Whole Lott More, a documentary about a sheltered workshop being shut down in Toledo, Ohio.  I also was a small part of a panel discussion right after with the movie's three stars:  TJ Hawker, Wanda Huber (pictured above), and Kevin Tyree.  A Whole Lott More was directed by Victor Buhler, and Buhler's focus and dedication to showing every aspect of the shutdown has a procedural quality to it.  He concentrates intensely on a moment in time when a lot of people are struggling with past, present and future.  The past, in this case, is symbolized by a large sheltered-workshop facility in which many people with developmental disabilities have worked for most of their lives.  Back in the day, the facility was going gangbusters with contracts from Detroit car manufacturers, but as the economy has shrunk so has the contracts.  The present is dramatized through the lives of TJ and Wanda, who both work in different capacities at the workshop, and Kevin, who is transitioning from high school to work and has chosen to look for a job in the community.  Their struggles with work comprise one aspect of the film; the other aspects revolve around non-profit and governmental agencies and boards battling for control of the future, trying to figure out how to support people with disabilities in capacities that transcend programs and buildings and the past.

 

In many ways this documentary is a ghost story, and the Lott Industries work facility is a haunted house that has outlived both its cultural and economic purpose, and yet the people who worked there and were supported to be there did not experience it as anything other than the place they worked and socialized and went to every day.  The symbolism gets lost when you're living your life, as do the politics and the controversy.  That's one of the more profound themes coming from A Whole Lott More:  we live our lives in whatever systems, codes, rules and values surround us, and making fundamental change happen often isn't about the will to do it as much as having the patience and dedication to reinvent and reimagine the environment in which the change is taking place.  That building full of folding tables and windowless walls and concrete floors is more than the sum of its parts:  it was a refuge, a place for people to know what they were and where they fit.

 

I work everyday trying to help figure out how to support people with disabilities to get jobs in the real world, but it's incredibly hard in a universe where sheltered workshops, and the concepts and mindsets that helped to build them and staff them, still exist. These buildings and symbols often become the only answer and the only vision, places and programs and cultures where waiting for a job becomes the job.  And everything else follows:  businesses, employers,  supported employment service providers, families and the people being helped all get bogged down in a status quo that supports preconceived notions, the main notion being:  you're just not ready to be in the real world.

 

And I know "real world" is a prejudicial term, but still the concept of isolating people and then training them to return to the world rehabilitated more often than not eliminates the possibility of a chance at individuality.  It assumes you deserve a uniform group status, a place where you can only hope to ascend once you figure out you can't.  That hopelessness often becomes a way of life, and that's okay because you don't have any alternatives.  In the movie, Wanda lets us know about her employment history from the get-go, saying when she was younger she went to Sears and K-Mart and applied but they turned her down, she said, because they saw she was disabled.  "I don't want to be a part of a community that does not want me."

 

I totally understand that feeling.  Of course she doesn't.

 

But is that the only dichotomy we're dealing with?  I hope not.  Maybe the discussion isn't about a sheltered workshop being shut down, but maybe the conversation is about the rest of the world?  What if the concern wasn't about the closing of an institution, but the promise of what's "out there" waiting for people to come and get it with a little help from their friends and the people paid to help them?  What if systems and bureaucracies, instead of turf wars, got into a discussion about how to figure out how to make more and more and more connections, more and more actual job opportunities, more and more business opportunities, knowing that there's no alternative?

 

Kevin is the representation of this line of thought in A Whole Lott More.  He never became a part of the workshop culture, and from graduation he pursued getting a job.  That's fraught with all kinds of dangers of rejection, dead-ends, and all the other obstacles in the way of anyone pursuing employment, but he kept trying, just like anybody else, and he finally got a job at Best Buy, even though he truly wants a job in a library.  He settled, but still has a vision forward. 

 

I think all the folks involved in this film are heroic in all kinds of ways, because they are all in pursuit of  a decent wage, a decent life, and a little dignity.  I completely understand how the Lott Industries facility that shut down was a space that held a lot of great memories involved in that group struggle, but at the end of the day I know that everyone who worked so hard within those walls should have a chance to give a try on the other side...

Unfortunately Toxic

 

 

Some movies you just hate.  Some movies you walk out on. 

 

The Wolf of Wall Street you walk out on. 

 

It's a meticulously shitty piece of work, and it's that meticulousness that pisses you off.  Martin Scorsese directed the thing, and Leonardo Dicaprio is the center of his focus, and their relationship is unfortunately toxic and even worse than that completely fucking boring.  Academy Award?  Jesus.  Why do we need this movie in our stratosphere?  Is it a form of punishment, or some kind of satire that needs to teach us how to live?  Nope.  Morality play?  Silly romp?  Nope.  It's just vanity.  Scorsese pretending to be what he once was, and Dicaprio pretending to be Robert Deniro.  Hell I don't know.  From the get-go I felt trapped.  Something about the self-congratulatory voice-over, the half-felt parody with the stupid lion walking through the busy Wall Street office, that sense of some blow-hard getting hepped up on his own storytelling ability.  And it's more than obvious that he's counting on you being impressed.  This movie ain't satire.  It's a total paean to status-quo.  It's a hymn to Ronald Reagan.  Which is fine, but goddamn propaganda is propaganda.  Not art.  Not even fun.  (Although it's fun to many people obviously who want to have a sort of time-out from the 21st Century.)  Fucking blond bitches and throwing midgets at Velcro targets and snorting coke off of blond bitch-tits and busting that fag butler in the nose, etc:  that's just some idiot in a bar telling you what it was like managing at TGIFriday's back in the day.  Nothing sharp or insightful about it. 

 

The emperor here has no clothes, but he sure as hell has a lot of stupidity.  Watching this thing reminded me of being in high school.  A bunch of dumb-asses in shop telling themselves lies.  This movie is a goddamn lie and it pisses me off.  And I'm using expletives because I can.

Being There

 

 

Fruitvale Station is one of those self-assured, steady-handed, stylishly executed movies that both transcends and exemplifies its subject matter.  It's a distillation of one man's life into an examination of the day he's killed, and the killing becomes a nexus of sorrow that allows us to understand what happened without outrage, even though what happened is completely outrageous.  That's what really great movies can do:  burn away the peripherals, the politics, even some of the facts, so we can have access to a point of view that doesn't bark or bite but somehow lives.  In Fruitvale Station, Oscar Grant lives, at least for a few hours, and we have access to that life.  We see him cleaning up his bedroom, losing his job, answering fish-fry concerns with help from his grandma, trying to help an injured dog, picking up his daughter at school, going out on the town on New Year's Eve...  The movie's chronology and pace have a sort of airy, dreamy realism, but all of it is anchored by the knowledge (given to us in real footage from the actual shooting) of Oscar's killing.  

 

Oscar was shot by a policeman in Oakland, California on New Year's Day.  The shooting caused riots and revolts across the area.  

 

First-time director Ryan Coogler takes on the controversy but doesn't use it as fuel for anger, but as a microscope to envision Oscar's interior and exterior life.  The lighting of the film is blue-sky and chrome, with a darkness on the edges burnished with holiday lights.  The houses and streets have a deadpan solidity to them, lived-in but also ghostly.  Each scene is a link in a chain, and Coogler is completely in control of what the chain pulls.  This is director to watch.  He knows how to dramatize while also pushing the drama out of its preciousness.  He accesses real life but shapes reality into story.  

 

Michael B. Jordan's Oscar is an exercise in effortless grace and strength about to lose its footing.  He's pissed and not trying not to be, and many times throughout the film you recognize that he is triumphing over the past just by living in the moment, helping people, joking around.  You could label Oscar a "thug" or whatever, but Jordan allows you to understand that the label is meaningless once you enter into Oscar's orbit.  He's just trying to figure shit out.  Octavia Spencer plays Oscar's mom with an exhausted love and dignity that doesn't seem forced or abstracted, just simply there. 

 

In fact the whole movie is an exercise in "being there," stripping away style to create its own stylishness.  From the beginning to the end, this movie is a work of art.  It allows you access to an overheated debate and then cools down the situation to the point you can feel the immensity of the loss without having to locate a villain, or even a hero. 



Look How Beautiful It Is to Be So Terrifically Small (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part Two)

 

(This is Part Two in a series of responses to Mike Kelley's retrospective at MOMA PS 1 in New York City.  The show is amazingly thorough, and Mike Kelley was so amazingly prolific, I can't just write one post and move on.) 

 

In one suite of classrooms at the MOMA PS 1 (a renovated public school that now showcases MOMA contemporary art), Mike Kelley's Kandor variations and obsessions nest side by side like universes collapsing and blurring together.  The whole sensation is like a lava-lamp blooming into philosophy, glow-in-the-dark sci-fi kitsch wrestled and edited into thesis.  Kandor is the capitol city of Krypton, Superman's home planet, and in comic-book narratives it sits inside a bottle within Superman's Fortress of Solitude, fully populated and filled with intrigue and tragedy.  The architecture of Kandor morphs from comic book to comic book, and it's never been represented fully in any of the Superman movies, so Kelley has full access to a range of representations and shapes and ghosts that haven't really fully entered the pop consciousness outside of a few fan-boy fantasies.  That vacuum between "knowing" Superman through the movies or through a segment about Superman movies on Entertainment Tonight, and "knowing" him in a fevered, pointed, meticulous manner allows Kelley transformative powers.  He's a wizard in those rooms inside PS 1, spinning out Kandors in all shapes and sizes, meditating without meditating on the meanings of each one.  It's like he's trying to disappear into the magic lamps he manufactures, trying to find the dream to fit the fever.  There's an endless variety of glows and glimmers, like Christmas aboard a space-station, or a 1950s kid's chemistry set growing out of itself and into a thought you should not think. 

 

You want to be able to eat parts of these luminescent fruit-cake Metropolises; you want to return to your grandma's living room, the one filled with weird colored little bottles; you want to splash on iridescent perfume that smells like a school-teacher's wrist. 

 

Kelley conjures.  He makes a world for himself here, one that he can't live in, and yet one that he can wish for when no one else is around.  That sense of yearning burns through the very idea of Kandor, a city in a bottle in a fortress of solitude, and you start to imagine the busy streets, the floating smoke, the interiors of plush bars and restaurants, bedrooms and ballrooms and government offices.  At times Kelley perches Kandor bottles bubbling with light and oxygen orbs on makeshift stage backdrops and you can walk around to see what's behind.  In one of these set-ups is a silver wash bucket; behind another a simple brown basket.  It's like you've stumbled backstage, which is probably where Mike Kelley thrived when he was alive, even when he was front and center.  He seems to adore that hushed static intensity of mundane little items stored away.  He seems to try to reach through the phantasmagorical rainbows he makes so he can sit with a janitor on his break and have a smoke.

 

With the Kandor pieces Kelley  merges school-boy myth with a sort of creepy-pervert sweetness that almost seems too beautiful, too precious, to witness, and it is, but Kandor is also a trap, a nightmare of smallness that Kelley knows is a dead end. 

 

And yet look how beautiful it is to be so terrifically small. 



Even a Fire Kisses Itself (Mike Kelley at MOMA PS 1, Part One)

 

 

So a few days before New Years Day we went on a pilgrimage to New York to see Mike Kelley's vast, terrifyingly beautiful retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art's PS 1 space in Queens.  The space is an old school, and there could be no better place to review all of Kelley's oeuvre than that:  a haunted institution gets haunted by a fucked-up phantom-genius.  It is four floors of art made by Kelley over a period of 30 or so years, ranging from drawings and paintings to sculptures, videos and installations.  It's like entering a gigantic ear and finding your way through tunnel after tunnel until you hit the center of the brain.

 

The center of this brain is pictured above.  Titled, "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991/1999)," it's a school-room inside PS 1 cordoned off, with an attendant at the front sitting in a folding chair, allowing two or three people to enter into the space at a time.  The ceremony is papal somehow, as are the plush, dirty, gorgeous satellites of love Kelley created, hanging on pulleys and ropes from the ceiling.  On the walls are huge pine-scented room deodorizers hissing out their smell every few seconds like background singers.  You approach the satellites the way you might approach a loved one who has Alzheimer's and is currently living inside a locked unit in a nursing home.  Carefulness turns into reticence and memories start leaking through your game-face.  These are clouds you used to climb into.  There are mass-graves lifted from the earth.  These are toys you used to talk to suddenly turned away from you forever.  A hellishness and heavenliness combined, and in that Blakean moment you're just stunned.  Completely fucking stunned. 

 

You know exactly why Kelley did this and yet the words don't come to you.  They just drift by like jokes on bumperstickers on shitty cars in shitty towns.  You stopped paying attention a long time ago, and now here you are confronted with the results of that ignorance, that amnesia.  The creatures from all the bedrooms from the 1980s have combined into a holocaust that doesn't even matter anymore, and yet they have fused into a religion that replaces religion.  That's Kelley's lyricism, his curse, and his triumph.  This little locked chamber of dementia, these heavy brains suspended in mid-air, planets once populated by action-figures and loved deceased house-cats, grandmas and gunslingers, basket-cases and unaccountable freaks laughing into pillows. 

 

I'm reading Straw for the Fire, selections from Theodore Roethke's notebooks, a hodgepodge of greatness fit for kings and for morons.  Roethke and Kelley have to be sitting at an Applebee's in Heaven right now, discussing their favorite thrift-stores and ditches.  Straw's greatness comes from its total randomness, and in one section, titled "The Proverbs of Purgatory (1948-1949)," little haiku-like nothings are presented streamlined into a manifesto. 

 

Here are a few that I've pulled that somehow remind me of Kelley's "Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites":

 

All interiors call.

 

In a house of louts, I lived too happy.

 

Vision is the end of religion.

 

The angels ask but never answer.

 

Even a fire kisses itself.

 

(This is Part One of an ongoing blog-post series about Kelley's PS 1 retrospective.  I'll be going on and on about many of the other suites of works in the show in upcoming days and weeks.  It's just too much to fathom in one post...)