February 2007 Archives

To the Hellman Wyler Festival, where they're celebrating Lillian Hellman's plays and William Wyler's Hollywood film versions.

South means Birmingham, Alabama, and the town of Demopolis in Marengo County not far from there.

Why there? If you ever saw "The Little Foxes" you'd know. Hellman, who was born in New Orleans, based the scheming Hubbard clan in "Foxes" on her mother's family, which came from Demopolis.

The festival will be staging "The Little Foxes" and screening the film, along with three other Wyler-Hellman pairings: "These Three" (based on her first play "The Children's Hour"), "The Children's Hour" (a remake more faithful to the play), and "Dead End" (based on a Sidney Kingsley play that Hellman adapted).

As a Wyler biographer, I've been invited to take part in panel discussions with Deborah Martinson, Hellman's latest biographer, and many other invited guests.

Back next week.

Don't have time this ayem to read Seymour Hersh's lengthy New Yorker report on our Banana Republic's new strategy in the Middle East? Here's a short analysis by Ian Black in The Guardian. No time to read that, either? Here's the lede of The Guardian's news story about Hersh's report: "[The President With His Head Up His Ass] has charged the Pentagon with devising an expanded bombing plan for Iran that can be carried out at 24 hours' notice. ..." Quicker still: N.O Mustill's yummy collage. When it was first published in 1969, in VDRSVP, it was titled "The Vietnam Question." Today it could just as easily be called "The Iran Question." Anyway, you read last week's Apocalypse When and Surging With Chomsky. Right?

Postscript: On a separate issue, how's this for hair-splitting? The International Court of Justice in The Hague, the main U.N. judicial organ, "today overwhelmingly acquitted Serbia of committing genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Balkan war of the 1990s but" -- get this -- "found it guilty of failing to prevent genocide in the massacre of more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslims in the town of Srebrenica," a U.N. press release says. Yeah, we know. It's all about the legalisms. This way Serbia doesn't have to pay reparations.

Five little words of wisdom. Robert Altman's words. Words cited earlier this week in a tribute to the late director at the Majestic Theatre in New York. Smarter words than the old Hollywood cliché cut to the chase, which of course is what he meant. Fitting, too, given the paradox of a filmmaker who loved words, especially words that overlapped.

It wasn't only Altman's words that dazzled the crowd at the tribute, which ran uninterrupted for more than two riveting hours.

"I do not think he was a lover of truth as much as he was a hater of lies," Robert Reed Altman, one of his sons, told us. "He did not like conformity," Bob Balaban remarked. "This is an understatement. Bob never met a status quo he didn't hate."

The wire reports I read -- AP's in USA Today and Reuters' in the NY Times -- give a pretty good account of what was said, including Balaban's remark and others I took down in my notes. (Tim Robbins: "He would not only not suffer fools, he'd make fools suffer.'' Garry Trudeau: "I just talked about my old friend for several minutes without interruption, with no overlapping dialogue, without him being able to change a word. He would have hated it.")

But the funniest words of the afternoon -- Julieanne Moore's -- went unreported. Moore recounted the thrill she felt when she was cast in "Short Cuts" early in her career. Altman warned her to read the script before accepting, she said. The role he was offering called for frontal nudity, and it was "not negotiable." She said she didn't need to read the script. Plus, she added, "I've got a bonus for you: I really am a redhead."

That is how Altman always told the tale of "my bush," she said. But he told it so many times to so many interviewers that she became sensitive about it and asked him to stop. Besides, she didn't remember making that comment -- not exactly, anyway. Of course he would stop, he told her. He was a gentleman, after all.

Then one evening over dinner at one of his typically convivial gatherings with lots of friends, including Moore, Altman's wife Kathryn began to tell the tale of the bonus. Altman looked up, and true to his gentleman's word, politely shushed her, putting his fingers to his lips. "Julieanne," he said, "doesn't want us to talk about her pussy."

Shuttling among poetry, art and politics, yeah. Here's more politics. It's an excerpt from "Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World," the latest commentary at Foreign Policy in Focus. He was asked, "What do you think the surge is for?"

Are you ready for three nights of "Shoah and Pin-Ups," a documentary about the NO!-artist Boris Lurie? I am.

Screenings begin this evening in Manhattan. The first one, at Hunter College, is free (followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers). The second screening, on Thursday, is at Makor ($15); the third, on Friday, is at Anthology Film Archives ($8).

"Most of the film's protagonists will be at the AFA screening," Matthias Reichelt, the curator and art historian who collaborated on the film with the director Reinhild Dettmer-Finke, tells me. Appearing at the AFA "makes sense," he adds. "It's a substantial downtown art institution that's well known, and it's linked through the great Fluxus artist Jonas Mekas to the good old days of the '50s and '60s" -- when Lurie and his fellow NO!-Artists flourished. Did I say flourished? In fact, it is precisely the opposite of what happened.

Unfortunately, Boris Lurie, who's in his 80s and lives in New York, will not be able to make the screenings. "For understandable reasons," Reichelt says. After recovering from heart surgery, "he had two strokes and has been in hospital for more than one year now."

Norwegian master photographer Tom Sandberg's first solo exhibition in the United States -- on view at P.S.1 MoMA -- made me feel like I was walking on air. That's my groundling's take on what one expert, Yngve Kvistad, describes as the "ambiguous surfaces that do not quite reveal themselves" in Sandberg's large-format, often painterly, black & white photographs. It's not just in the "titanic, almost monochrome skyscapes" that there's "an invigorating presence of visual paradoxes" or a "tangible absence revealed." It's in the portraits, too. They show what Derrida called the "invisible interior of poetic freedom," Kvistad notes. I'll leave the technical terms to the experts and philosophers. Here's what the Sandberg exhibit did for me: It turned my eyeballs into flotation devices.

Chris Hedges was way ahead of the curve. Back in October he wrote on his blog:

War with Iran -- a war that would unleash an apocalyptic scenario in the Middle East -- is probable by the end of [Prez Huha's] administration. It could begin in as little as three weeks.

Probable? Was he nuts? Three weeks? Really nuts? Well, his timing may have been off, but the clock is still running.

Another old friend is gone. We spent many a winter night together in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, keeping ourselves entertained over a bottle or two. He died in Berlin. He was 81.

Emmett Williams was a poet who'd mastered "the write of arting." Here's an interview worth reading that fills in lots of details about him. And here's an excerpt from "THE VOY AGE," which "started out," he once explained, "as a long kinetic poem celebrating the travels and exploits of Two Buk Tim in Tim Buc Too." The format is based on a mathematical progression, the words a mere taste of Emmett's playfulness.

During our time in northern Vermont, after I had succeeded Emmett as editor of the Something Else Press, we taped a long conversation about poetry and art that was later published in the West Coast Poetry Review, in an issue devoted to his work. I asked him if he agreed that he was "a poet before anything else."

They left 12 roses on his doorstep along with half of their kidnap victim's California driver's license. He was grateful for the roses. "They could have been 12 bullets," he said.

The kidnappers were the Symbionese Liberation Army. The license belonged to Patty Hearst. The year was 1974. The roses were both a warning and an invitation. He'd done an "interview" with the SLA and printed it in his newspaper. This was their response.

The interview was faked -- nobody knew where to find them -- but their statements were real. He'd cobbled them together from fugitive literature, mainly a manifesto they'd issued. I'm talking about John Bryan, cherished friend and colleague, who died in San Francisco on Feb. 1.

As Warren Hinckle once described him, he was "the Peter Zenger of the underground press ... unconquered and ungovernable by the puny laws of journalism."

The world is a much poorer place without him. Here's the obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle, which gives an accurate (though necessarily incomplete) account of his life and career.

That warning-invitation led to meetings with the SLA. John became a go-between for the Hearst family in an unsuccessful ransom attempt. The SLA had claimed it wanted to trade Patty Hearst for SLAers Joe Remiro and Russ Little, who were in jail on murder charges (for the assassination of the superintendent of the Oakland schools, Marcus Foster).

John eventually wrote a book about Remiro (a Vietnam vet) and the SLA, "This Soldier Still at War." It was one of several books he wrote, in addition to the tons of newspapers he published. John was nothing if not prolific.

What the Chronicle obit doesn't say -- I dunno why -- is that John killed himself. He'd been suffering from full-body rheumatoid arthritis for more than a decade and was in constant pain. The last time I talked with him, in September, he was working at an indie bookstore, the Abandoned Planet. He sounded reasonably well, considering, though hardly like the roaring tornado I was familiar with during the good old bad old days -- when he was fiery, almost crazed, with anti-establishment fervor. I admired many things about John, his unrelenting conviction especially, but what I admired most was his raw personal courage.

He had a stroke in November, which prevented him from writing. That was the final insult. He downed a bottle of vodka and "blew his head off" with an antique rifle. Shades of Hemingway and Hunter T., whose company he joined.

Been gone. Now back. Why gone? Flew out west to see an old friend and collaborator, Norman O. Mustill, in his desert hideaway. Hadn't seen him or his wife Norma in nearly 40 years. Here I am in their living room, leafing through a cherished item in his vast media collection -- Bruce Bernard's "Century," a massive volume of photos from London's Sunday Times Magazine chronicling the years 1899 to 1999. The main point of interest, however, is the partial view of Mustill's large collage from the mid-1960s on the wall behind me. It's one of several I used to see decades ago on visits to his former home in northern California. And there he is -- l'artiste lui-même -- standing next to another of his large collages.

Care for a further taste of his fun & games? Go to Down With Culture! Up With Barbarism! and Anthem for America.

Molly Ivins, who died too soon, published her last column a few weeks ago. Headlined "Stand Up Against the Surge," it was a sober, even solemn commentary without so much as a hint of the satirical wit for which she was famous. She called it part of an "old-fashioned newspaper crusade to stop the war."

But Ivins wouldn't be Ivins if her thoughts weren't ripe with a sense of the ridiculous. She loved to skewer the President With His Head Up His Ass as often as possible. For good reason. (See The Molly Ivins Touch.) Her next-to-last column, "Iraq Exit is Up to Us," was more typical of her downhome style. "The president of the United States does not have the sense God gave a duck -- so it's up to us," it began. "You and me, Bubba."

There are many tributes to Ivins being published. Here are two at truthdig with a great photo of her. The headline on her obituary in Mother Jones, "Death of a Hellraiser: Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living," says what's needed. Or as she concluded in her last column:

We are the deciders. And every single day, every single one of us needs to step outside and take some action to help stop this war. Raise hell. Think of something to make the ridiculous look ridiculous.

Here's a video interview with Ivins from July, 2004, when her last book was published. Click the link. There's also a transcript.

Postscript: My staff of thousands should have paid more attention. Whitney Balliett has also died. Doug Ramsey -- whose Rifftides blog on jazz I love to read -- waved good-bye with a note of appreciation that had, as usual, just the right touch.