In Love for the Mood of In the Mood for Love (or Something)

I'd recommend Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love anywhere, any time, from iPhones to plasma TVs meters across but, after seeing it in theater last week, I recommend it most of all on film stock. In cinema I prefer the love in my comedies to be requited and love in my dramas to be unrequited. ITMFL, with the so-quiet-it's-almost-nonexistent courtship between Chow (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung), falls in the second category.

Another way to summarize the film, from my other great discovery of the week: movie barcodes.

That white stripe in the middle is a fade out we see after an image that captures the incredible layering and precision of WKW's art. In this viewing, I noticed for the first time the complexity of the shot where Maggie Cheung centers the frame in her least densely patterned dress of the film: a daffodil print. She stands looking out a window fringed with foliage, next to floral curtains and in front of a sofa emblazoned with leaves. On her glass: more painted flowers. Floating at the bottom of her beverage: tea leaves. WKW's vision is total--he's left nothing out.

I paired my viewing of the film with Ming Wong's "In Love for the Mood" video installation at the Frye Museum. I can't pretend to unravel all the levels of meta- at work but to take a stab: Ming's piece is a multi-language, single gender reenactment by a white actress of a scene from ITMFL in which Chow and Su Li-zhen are not being themselves but are instead pretending to play the roles of their own unfaithful spouses. Postmodern confusion aside, it was fascinating to be in a room with the installation looping on three flatscreens with languages echoing around from surround sound speakers.

In more ways than the title, Ming's video loops seem an inversion of WKW's film. Rather like Godard's hidden earpiece technique with Anna Karina, Ming gives the actress her lines as she's speaking and her phonetic pronunciations are full of mistakes. Whereas Su Li-zhen breaks off speaking because of emotional devastation, the actress in the Ming's piece breaks off and giggles because she doesn't speak Cantonese. Despite precisely recreating the visuals of a scene from In the Mood for Love, "In Love for the Mood" feels offhand, less serious. WKW is notorious for the number of takes he requires, demanding that his actors' voices match an exact cadence he has in mind. Perhaps Ming's "first rehearsal" art reveals some of the sweat that's required to make WKW's frictionless celluloid machines.

Out Stealing Clouds

I steal all my best ideas from Katherine Hill. Not only am I taking her idea of posting about neato word clouds, I'm also going to use Ernest Hemingway as my first example:

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

Turns out just right, no?

I am furthermore going to borrow Katherine's idea and add a word cloud of my own writing because it's amusing. This is from my grad school submission which was, for reasons known to my 22 year old self, a crown of sonnets.

Field Poem

An added benefit to this one was my theatrical gasp of horror as I reread the poem (you'll note the preponderance of "like" and "thought," always the hallmarks of good writing). Now, thanks to the word cloud version, I can view Field and Trace as pleasantly colored abstractions and pretend the actual poem doesn't exist.

Paintings in Proust

I just picked up Eric Karpeles' Paintings in Proust and it's as sumptuous as I was promised. A sort of catalogue raisonne of a most interesting private collection. Here is Proust himself on Antoine Watteau:

I often think with a mixture of sympathy and pity about the life of the painter Watteau, in whose work lives the painting, the allegory, the apotheosis of love and pleasure....It has been said that he was the first to have painted modern love, meaning by this, no doubt, a love of conversation, the pleasures of the table, promenading, the sadness of masquerading, fleeting water and time, all hold a higher place than pleasure itself, a sort of gilded impotence.

 

I do think that the book will help me see a fuller picture when I reread In Search of Lost Time (I plan to start again immediately after winning the lottery, quitting my job and lining my studio with cork).

Fields

Next time you're in San Francisco don't miss the awesome, stroller-free Pier 24 Photography.

One of the many pleasures when I visited was the room devoted to Andreas Gursky, including 99 Cents, the magnificent photo you see above. Using digital manipulations I can't begin to understand, Gursky created a vast, impossibly sharp image. I only tore myself away from studying the picture when I became embarrassed at how long I'd spent staring, walking forward and backward.

It seems to me that the consumerist distribution of colored packaging mirrors the egalitarian use of shades in Gerhard Richter's color field paintings, another favorite.

Immersion Theory

Two of my great pleasures this week, along with Simpsons mania at Splitsider and the continuing presidential insistence that wearing a shiny bomber jacket around military dudes will make them look real tough, have been the documentary Marwencol and Werner Herzog's Conquest of the Useless.

Jeff Malmberg's Marwencol seems like a short, sweet documentary about an outsider artist but its meta (or meta meta) implications linger well after the 80 minute running time. After being beaten into a nine-day-long coma, Mark Hogancamp loses his memory and, without much professional psychiatric care, begins to reconstruct his life with G.I. Joe and Barbie dolls.  They represent himself and his acquaintances and inhabit a handmade, fictional WW II-era hamlet named Marwencol.

His stories have shocking, telenovela-style plot twists (e.g. exes are disappeared by blue-haired Belgian witches) with a Michael Bay-level of violence (red is clearly the most used color of craft paint). Mark's idiosyncracies (besides the fact that he's created a 1/6th scale alternate reality behind his trailer) reveal themselves as the film goes on. As the owner of 200+ pairs of ladies shoes, he's able to use the term "Manolo Blahnik slingback" knowledgeably while trying on a pair.

A feature in Esopus Magazine eventually lands Mark a gallery opening in New York City (where he laments wussing out and wearing "fucking man shoes!"). But I'm still considering which part of his work that I like the most. The stories are great and I hope he's writing them all down. The figures and buildings themselves are gorgeous, not to mention the customized miniature fashion he mains down to distressing individual threads of doll-sized military police armbands. And the photographs (which a critic points out are refreshing for their lack of irony) are what sell in the galleries and what, I hope, keep the man in food and action figure money for years to come. 

That a book about the making of Fitzcarraldo would be interesting is not surprising; that it's both an in-depth look at exactly how unlikely it was that the film would ever be made and a startlingly detailed travelogue puts Conquest of the Useless high on my list of compulsively readable books. One can pick a great quote by opening the book at random, but here's an example:

Our monkey escaped from his cage and is stealing things from the set table when no one is there. He has taken possession of almost all the forks. This morning he stole the milk bottle used by Gloria's little daughter, and Gloria saw him out in the bushes sucking on the nipple until the bottle was empty. She is convinced the monkey will rape the baby, and she wants him shot before he does so. Around his waist the monkey still has the piece of electrical cable with which he had been tethered, and when he climbs he holds the cable high in the air with his tail, with which he can grasp things like a hand; that way it cannot interfere with his movements.

In this passage we see the one of the myriad, vaguely terrifying challenges that the production faces but also Herzog's winking affection for creative adaptation in the wild. As the director of Fitzcarraldo he must work through many such constraints, handling his actors with the same dexterity he does his prose. 

Herzog begins his journals with a focus on slices of jungle life but he really revs up when putting down the original star of Fitzcarraldo, Jason Robards Jr (he's introduced a coward whose real problem stems from his "inner emptiness"). He complains about everything, even the "porcelain toilets" that Herzog was so careful to provide in their remote Peruvian camp.

I'm enjoying the hell out of Conquest of the Useless, and Klaus Kinski hasn't even arrived yet...

In these works, Hogancamp and Herzog live their art every day, even if they are occasionally interrupted by the need to make meatballs or slash snakes with machetes. I sense that Herzog would have gladly made his own documentary on Marwencol (I picture him listening to recordings of the assault on Hogancamp and telling Mark he must never listen to them).

I want the same immersion in my day-to-day but the challenge is finding meaningful art in three hole punching and filing.

Matisse at MoMA

Of all the big name paintings at MoMA's Matisse: Radical Invention show, the one that's stayed with me longest is his above "Bather," from 1909.

The iconic, saved for last paintings "Bathers by a River" and "The Piano Lesson" are tremendous examples of art that is plainly correct, in a way that makes us feel Matisse's perfection of color, figures, space and brush/knifestrokes must be intuitive. The canvases are like the best poetry, with the finest details (of fabric, form, architecture, anything else) on top, then layered by importance. And some of the show's ordering was fun, like the way that still lives of apples matched the heads of the "Moroccans" in one room.

But back to my "Bather." He's rather hunched, like me studying him, and poised, black outlines quivering. The part that grabbed me was the aqua in his wake. The lighter blue infers movement in the otherwise flat blue sea. In that tension I could almost feel the water myself.

While shifting my weight from leg to leg as I looked, I thought of the bit in Mates of State's "An Experiment" that asks, "I wonder if I could tie the ocean to your knees?" I also wished I had headphones to drown out the super-parents parroting the "correct readings" of paintings from audio guides to their 5-year-olds' ears.

Surely I would have been a better instructor, after the children got over the trauma of me dispatching their mothers and fathers with swift kicks to the head

Hello Time Waster

If you happen to have a job that involves hours of slow time, I can't recommend enough clicking through the entire 166 page thread of fake Criterion Collection covers on mubi.com. Start at the end and go backwards until fired.

There are cool designs:



Hilarious film choices:

And art so inspired you can't believe the DVD isn't already available for purchase:

If this thread is any indication, Stanley Kubrick remains the most fanboyed auteur (though he must be hearing Christopher Nolan's footsteps already).

Overall, it's amazing how important font is. Even the best designs are undone by font that doesn't look believable. But when the right combination hits the cover is instantly definitive.


If you wanted another thing to think about when watching films, now you can ponder which images would inspire the finest Criterion cover. Now if someone would just start a thread on booklet art...

From the Talented Bastard Dept.

I keep seeing these awesome posters for the Rolling Roadshow but today I looked at who designed them: one Olly Moss.


Somehow the Rolling Roadshow does not hit Seattle (presumably because Olly couldn't design a cool enough Heathers poster).

But there's still his website where, luckily, I can't find a way to purchase posters or t-shirts. A sampling of things I need to have, right now:

Drawn from Nature

I began my research of John James Audubon shortly after receiving a Christmas card of his cardinals and reading Anne Carson’s poem “Audubon,” which begins: “Audubon perfected a new way of drawing birds that he called his. / On the bottom of each watercolor he put “drawn from nature” / Which meant he shot the birds / And took them home to stuff and paint them.” In this rare instance, my research went beyond the Wikipedia and the Google Image Search and into a museum of “history and industry.”

Behind those wood-grained double-doors I learned that Audubon was a sensationalist. I witnessed static rattlesnakes coiling around a mockingbird’s nest, peregrine falcons desiccating a duck corpse and king snakes opening their mouths to end the life of a chuck will’s widow (some of the vines are red with blood-drop-blossoms). The melodrama continues even in his less impressive quadrupeds of America—the river otters rear and snarl. The leopard marmot is sly, just as I would imagine in a Wes Anderson-Big Lebowski sense.

But the birds. The birds are lush color and small and life-sized in the reproductions of his original double-elephant-sized printing. A complete set of Birds of America brought down $8.8 million at auction “recently” (I learned this watching a VHS-grain recording—nice that the PBS from the 80’s already has its own crackly, classic patina). One of Audubon’s major breakthroughs was hiring a 13-year-old assistant to do the background branches. J.J. solved the main problem of natural bird painting by shooting them and taking them home but I guess he needed a sketchy little friend to recreate exactly where stuffed birds last twittered.

The most important Audubon quote: “I want to comprehend all that I see.”
Quite a bar to set for oneself but he did make the Birds of America more awake than I had expected. I think it is somewhere in the detailed underside of those feathered throats—I’m dumbly impressed with their texture as if they are still swallowing air below those bright shiny eyes. More Anne Carson (if only she were available to write this whole post for me):

he built flexible armatures of bent wire and wood
on which he arranged bird skin and feathers—
or sometimes

whole eviscerated birds—
in animated poses.
Not only his wiring but his lighting was new.

Audubon colors dive in through your retina
like a searchlight

I spent a long time over his fastidiously detailed whip-poor-wills. The leer out, beaks gaping, in choice between moths and caterpillars patterned in 70’s browns, oranges and white that exactly matches the birds’ own feathers. Beautiful, cannibalistic fabric swatches.

Audubon believed in his shadow-less epics so much that he went on a double-elephant tour, peddling the Birds of America in Edinburgh and farther afield:

this Haitian-born Frenchman
lit himself

as a noble rustic American
wired in the cloudless poses of the Great Naturalist.
They loved him

for the “frenzy and ecstasy”
of true American facts

And here she reaches it—regardless of where he was born, we love Audubon because he brought us American truth, which is always separate from natural truth. Rattlesnakes might not slither up trees to eat mockingbirds that cast no shadow, but I saw a print of it that was beautiful.