Excerpt from My Bad Side: Everything was brittle and cracking. I beat my arms across my body, kicking my legs to get warm, and then lay there, as cold as before, worse, breathing fog. I closed my eyes. It was the same, awful and cold.
I was cold and dark in my head. My cheeks hurt. My breath was stuck. My sleeping bag was twisted and stunk of industrial plastic. I couldn’t move my fingers. I felt for my
heart and couldn’t feel that and then it wasn’t right, half beating and then
too many in a row and then none at all.
I half followed him across Union Square and took the 4 Train. I found an empty car. There was a homeless woman sleeping at the end, her head cushioned on a blanket against the window. I wondered if she was really asleep. I wondered if she ever slept. I sat and stared and missed my stop. I was going to get off, but I didn’t. I went to the end of the line instead.
“You ever think about throwing yourself in front of the train? I mean more like rolling along the front of it like a dance move or Cirque de Soleil thing. You spin up kind of, hands out like a spinning top, you know, with that old thick wire. And then it gets bad. You hit the wall. Not even that. You just fall down and the train cuts off your legs or something like that.”
We went to see Singin’ in the Rain this morning at Film Forum and found the theatre packed with film-buff kids and parents alike – including Ethan Hawke and Philip Seymour Hoffman. We asked if this was a special event, a benefit perhaps, but it was just a screening for which we had just squeezed in. We settled into our second-row seats and cricked our necks for the opening short, a 1935 cartoon by Max Fleischer, Dancing on the Moon.I wondered what it was that made a 1952 musical such a draw in 2013. The song and dance is certainly something to marvel at – even if I wasn’t that fond of musicals – especially Donald O’Connor’s Make ’em Laugh and Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds’ amorous You Were Meant For Me. It is also a surprisingly thoughtful film, a tongue-in-cheek expose of the artifice of the stars and executives of the Hollywood system – ironically mirroring the behind-the-scenes story of Singin’ in the Rain itself. But most of all, the essence of the experience is in the underlying theme of integrity, celebrated in such wide-eyed innocence, where Hollywood stars drink milk at 1:30 in the morning, friends are always loyal and the worst of crimes is singing (and dancing) in the rain. And, yes, it is hard to find things like this these days. I guess that’s what sells out a theater on a cold Sunday morning in 2013, especially to such a hip crowd.
There is no doubting that it snowed in the city. But it was just a snow storm, not a blizzard. Many in the city remain on edge about storms – storm alerts, panic buying, empty subways – given the fact that the last one was much worse than most expected.
It was rush hour. The northbound 6 train was packed, pulling into 33rd Street. The doors opened, and the crowds shoved in and out. Someone shouted and another snapped back; two men were in a shoving match at the wall. The bigger one wound up and punched hard; the second and collapsed on the bench.
“Stay there!” The attacker got onto our train. The doors closed behind him. He looked around at everyone. No one looked back. It was quiet in the car, silent except for the train on the tracks and the man’s heavy breathing. I was supposed to do something. I knew that. The idea of explaining to the man that what he did was wrong popped into my head. He looked my way and I looked past him. The train swayed through the tunnel. The man was given a lot of space as we pulled into Grand Central as he went to the doors. I considered following and pointing him out to a policeman. He left. I did nothing. Nobody did. The train doors closed and he was gone.
A couple of years after that, I was on the northbound 4 train just after midnight; we pulled out of Brooklyn Bridge. A man yelled out to the riders. “Watch this!” A boy, maybe 10 years old, assumedly his son, did a remarkable dance, spinning on the ground, flipping head over heels. He was very good. The father passed around his hat. I stared back at him. “This city has child labor laws, you know.”
“What’s that?” He had bad eyes, dark and small.
“You’re not allowed to do that.”
The train had arrived at 14th Street. The man turned away and then suddenly kicked at me sideways, right on my ass, hard, and walked out, his boy behind him. Nobody seemed to have noticed any of it.
There is a new Metro Transit Authority announcement these days: Stay Back from the Platform Edge. Recently there have been a couple of highly publicized incidents of people being pushed to their deaths on the tracks. I’ve always tended to be an edge-stander, but now I check behind me and stay a few feet back.
Disappointment is a simple word. It is a big word too. It is the signpost marking so many turns.
Mostly I am disappointed in me, but I find it too much in others as well, those I know, pass in the streets, in the news and everywhere else. Today, I was on the 6 train northbound, and a young woman sat down, crazily smiling. I thought she had just remembered something funny, seen somebody, something like that, but her smile went on and on. She kept smiling crazily as she put on her chapstick.
A homeless man got on the train at Bleecker Street and made his appeal. “Anything you can spare, even a penny, whatever you can give helps us provide those in need with a sandwich or a bowl of soup.” He held up a laminated badge. Most everyone ignored him except the crazily smiling woman, who gave him a dollar. He bowed to her for that. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” He made the rounds. No one else contributed. He bowed to the crazily smiling woman again. “God bless you. I hope you get safely to your destination.” I was disappointed in him making such a point of her dollar, weirdly damning the rest of us for not coughing up the money. (I doubted the soup story.) And I was disappointed in her for encouraging him to do it again – and take his “god-bless-your-trip” smiling still. But in the end, when they both had gone and it was just me and all the other silent, staring people, I was disappointed in myself. I had done nothing and, worse, had stood stupidly in judgment of a smiling woman giving a dollar to a homeless guy. Ugh.
I came out of the subway tonight just below St. Paul’s Church, and a man ran past, half crashing into a passerby. He apologized, spun away and continued fast down the road. Someone muttered, “That’s awkward.” Another man came past, a security guard, and then another. The only sound was of the feet. Nothing else. No yelling. No heavy breathing. A third person came past a moment later, a woman, looking tired. She was quiet too. All of them vanished up the road toward St. Paul’s, police lights flashing. It didn’t look like the first man had much of a chance. It stayed quiet.
Ragnar Kjartansson’s new show The Visitors opened at the Luhring Augustine Gallery in Chelsea last night. Hundreds of visitors – including Bjork, Antony, dozens of project participants, not to mention the artist himself – filled a space not made for such a crowd. And so it was hard to digest the work, a 53-film displayed on nine different screens, all of them surrounded. The title of the piece is derived from the 1981 album The Visitors by Abba, their final work together. The film opens with isolated people in different rooms – kitchen, living room, bathroom – connected to each other only by headphones, humming, strumming and singing lyrics from a poem by Ragnar’s former wife, Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir: Once again I fall into my feminine ways.The music is entrancing, the tone meditative, the desire to sing along hard to resist; it is at times ecstatic – Ragnar, in the bathtub, raising his guitar above his head, a wheel-less canon fired into the evening – and always inviting. Everyone eventually exits their disparate spaces to join together at the front porch of the house (Rokeby Farm), still singing, to walk down into the fields together.I was tired when I arrived at the gallery, feeling the flu coming on, and the crowds didn’t help. I wanted to leave, come another time, but stayed and was, once again, enveloped by Kjartansson’s work. It was not only the music, but the hypnotic quiet, in spite of everything, my tired knees, the inability to see much of anything, missing screens, unable to move, the anxious pushing around me, the chic personages. Indeed, I was privileged in the end to meet and thank Kjartansson for his work and expect to return – a few times, I imagine – to see what it’s all really about. It’s Bliss all over again!
The Trisha Brown Dance Company performed four pieces at BAM last night, including two New York premieres. I know very little about dance and lack the vocabulary to describe the movements and style; but I do know when it works, when the energy makes sense. It is like music in how it opens thoughts from the day-to-day into something skulking deep within. The dancers spun, flipped and dashed, and I found myself thinking back to my first book, The Sacred Whore. As I told agents time and again back in 1988, “It’s the story of a group of prostitutes who kidnap a college basketball team so that they can air their views on what is wrong with America on primetime television.” The first draft was 720 pages and had 15 major characters.I eventually got that down to 282 pages and five main characters. It’s a chaotic, action-dependent, socio-political piece that stumbles and ultimately fails, but I still am interested in the premise. It opens on the back roads of Oklahoma, women climbing out the back of an 18-wheeler truck like refugees. They’ve been kidnapped by a pimp who wants to address the hypocritical morality of the nation with a hair-brained kidnapping scheme. I was standing in a Paris apartment when I thought of this, a mannequin sitting in the dark beside the bed. Prostitutes transported across the country by a truck. What about that? It seemed like something, I didn’t know what, like the moment some months later, halfway through the book, when a character I had expunged from the text, Chantal, decided to return. She did that on her own. I want back in. She was like the woman on stage last night at BAM, dancing with a camera on her back. She was self-realized, something out of nothing. I thought about that coming back over the bridge.
Film Forum’s current program New Yawk New Wave showcases director-centered New York films in the 1950s-70s, including D.A. Pennebaker’s 1 P.M. The genesis of the piece, as Pennebaker explained in his comments before the screening, arose from Jean-Luc Godard’s belief that the United States was on the brink of revolution. Pennebaker, esteemed for his work on Dont Look Back, Monterey Pop, Ziggy Stardust and the Spider from Mars as well as The War Room, didn’t share Godard’s belief but saw an opportunity for something to unfold. The film centers on Godard directing various people in 10-minute unedited sequences, including political activist Tom Hayden, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, actor Rip Torn, The Jefferson Airplane in a rooftop performance, that identify the unnatural order of filmmaking and narrative construction. As heavy-handed and off the mark as Godard might have been about America’s revolution, this is a great film for filmmakers. It is a genuine attempt to merge form and content and also features many candid, almost heart-warming moments of Godard on camera.
A screening of Maidstone followed 1 P.M. Pennebaker confessed in his pre-screening comments that this film (directed by Norman Mailer) had bored him in the end…that is of course until the infamous scene in which Rip Torn attacks Mailer with a hammer. It takes a long time to get there, but we have Pennebaker to thank in the end for never letting go of the trigger.
Excerpt from My Bad Side: Everything was brittle and cracking. I beat my arms across my body, kicking my legs to get warm, and then lay there, as cold as before, worse, breathing fog. I closed my eyes. It was the same, awful and cold. 
