Rewind in Peace

I see there's another trio of celebrity deaths. Eartha Kitt really was blackballed like Losey, Lardner, Faulk, Robertson, Kirsty McColl, Geer, Trumbo and so many sadly more. LBJ had more and deeper Hollywood connections than those pikers Bill and Hilary. I'd like to remind my reader(s) that Sir Harold Pinter was taken to visit Quentin Crisp back in the days when he, QC, kept company with hooligans and rough trade. Pinter describes this visit in the memorial Stately Homo and says it was the genesis of his first play, The Room.
The headline that saddened me most was the announcement that, for all intents and purposes, VHS was officially dead. The awkward poorly designed winner of the VHS vs. Betamax scuffle was now only a memory. Perhaps in ten years VHS collectors will pop up like eight-track tape aficionados. There's a boutique market for vinyl records, so who knows? I'm pouting over VHS not only because I own so goddamn many films-on-tape but because my most intense phase of movie viewing and film scribbling centered primarily around VHS. Home Vision, tape predecessor to the overrated Criterion Collection, had the best looking copies of Alphaville, Spirits of the Dead, L'Enfants du Paradis, Kwaidan, Peeping Tom, L'Avventura, Rules of the Game, Shock Corridor and more. The room seemed to expand when I manipulated the frame-by-frame advance button.
David Cronenberg was urging me to find out how long they waited to cut from the actor to the exploding head in Scanners. Hal Hartley assured me that it was quite all right to stare at Adrienne Shelly putting on her glasses to look at Martin Donovan, disappearing in the back of a police car in Trust. Even Polanski could look back to 1965 and that eerie flat in Repulsion.
Brian Eno was right. Tape is a plastic medium. Even prerecorded tape.
Now the obsolete DVDs are piling up, tidy and flat and crammed with "extras."

I creep over to the turntable on its stand and cue up the soundtrack of Absolute Beginners and hiss at the Luddite in the mirror.

Art Victim

Last week I went on vacation. Vacation, that sacred time of the American worker when sometimes, for a drunken instant, the place of return is forgotten. I didn't go to Key West or Portland or London for my vacation. I chose Baltimore,where it rained as much as it does in Portland for an entire week.
Instead of prowling the streets as is my wont when I visit Charm City, I went Christmas shopping at various downmarket locales ( no Saks thank you)and visited the Baltimore Museum of Art, home of the fabled Cone Sisters collection ( possibly the biggest private collection of Matisse, Picasso, the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists extant). The BMA was literally my downfall.
The current exhibit by Franz West is called To Build a House You Start with the Roof. A 25ft sculpture The Ego and the Id was created especially for the BMA show. This looping construction features seats or porches for the viewer to use for rest or for a new angle of this multicolored giant Slinky. I perched at different points on Ego and Id and, deciding I wanted to investigate the rest of the show, stepped off the rim of the two foot high platform and fell to the floor.

My mother always told me to put out my hands palms-out when I fell so's not to mar my face. My face won't stand much more damage, it's true, but neither will my operant left arm, which I knocked the bejesus out of. Since Thursday I've been wearing a brace on my left hand and avoiding strenuous use, like typing. At the emergency room I was told to avoid excessive use of my arm, which means I don't go back to work for a few more days.
Now that I'm back home perhaps the weather will improve.

p.s. The Franz West show is really a lot of fun especially for lounge lizards and sedentary types. I've never seen an interactive exhibition where the interaction consisted of sitting and gazing. Any ambulance chasers out there who have their search engines set on keywords like victim and injury please don't bother me.

Critics of the Future

This is for the artist Everett Swinson of Norfolk,Va, who died in 1998 after several years fighting AIDS and continuing to make art and do community work until he literally could not move. Norfolk is like a very small galaxy with a mass of overlapping solar systems. When I lived there I spun in the peripheral orbit of a few of these systems, one being the Younger Artists Gang. Everett was one of the youngest and most accomplished. He had a sense of publicity that's necessary sometimes to get one's work noticed by the non-artistic world, the press, the evening news.
Every spring at the annual Ghent Arts Festival he was highly visible, doing some type of process or performance piece that usually necessitated his moving among the crowd. This guaranteed him a few seconds and sometimes even interview time on WAVY-TV and the other local stations. After Ghent moved out of the park at Stockley Gardens and went to Norfolk's Rouse monstrosity Waterside, Everett and some comrades organized an alternative arts event in Stockley Gardens, a protest against the glitzy new downtown Ghent Arts Festival.
Everett stood at one end of the park, near the entrance, holding a ream of multicolored paper. He disposed of it a sheet at a time, a fixed grin on his face. Halfway through the piece, a trio of tweenage boys arrived and paused on their skateboards.
" Shit man what's this?"
" I dunno, what's he doing?"
" We're gonna be late dude."
" Wait a second. I want to see .."
"See what, Jimmy?"
" This is weird man."
" Yeah it's weird."
" Come on you faggots. Let's get the hell out of here."
Later that evening I ran into Everett in a bar and complimented him on the success of the festival, showing him all the free Hare Krishna literature, including dietary advice, I'd
picked up. " Did you hear those kids?"
"You mean the ones who got scared and left?" He laughed. " The critics of the future."