Lady Day (1933)

1. Hammond

Music, music, music!
Everything is beautiful

Blown up and distorted
Beneath my Melody Maker

pen. Few have heard
or seen what I have

in that microphone
and spotlight. Oh!

and she is so
beautiful and buxom.

Over 200 lbs.
Glittering as if she

was covered by millions
of refulgent stalactites.

Finally I am Cuvier,
on the brink of exposing

this brown-bosomed
vocal goddess to our

unsuspecting rectangular world.
I’ll take her to Monette’s

where she’ll wow
them with Sarah Baartman

presence. She is the new canary
singing towards heaven,

and I’ll be the toast of the town.
Big things in this world are mine.


2.

There is unexpected sun today
in London, and the crowds that
most days I see upon this stage
where I am working have dispersed.
I am a black cutout against
a captive white light, singing
the blues so the audience
can stare at my naked sex.

I am called “Lady Day.”
I left Baltimore with a promise
of revenue: quarter the profits
and freedom for us working girls;
because I wasn’t gonna be nobody’s
goddamn maid no more. Mr. Hammond
says I’m going to be the biggest hit since Josephine
and he is writing an article on me right now.

I am the family entrepreneur!
Putting on my shining dress
I take the smoky stage, and
you should see how they
stare at me. Like Susanna,
I am a strange fruit they
dare not embrace, but will
never turn away from.

In the coming years, my strange fruit
will ripen into a public animal of excess
and sex. So I like men, a lot, and
women too. I’m an artist, damnit!
And I like to smoke, drink, and feel
good. What do these people know of feeling
good? Ain’t nobody’s business if I do.

I refuse to forget Eleanora Fagan
and the misery she was born into.
I refuse to apologize for not wanting
to remain there, in Baltimore, turning
tricks. My flexible tongue and
healthy mouth bewilder these
people with their rotting teeth.

If they would just listen to
my song without being forced
to undress me with their eyes, maybe,
I could convince them to come up
on stage and have the light expose
their dullness and fetidness, so
the whole world audience could see
them as shriveled and hard,
geometric, deformed, and unnatural.

© Valentin Katz, 2005

A Life Unexamined

Don't let the pedestrian title of Richard J. Lewis' film adaptation of Mordecai Richler's irascible novel of the same name fool you.  Barney's Version is a haggis of angst, romance, betrayal, comedy, and tragedy.  Paul Giamatti inhabits the eponymous role with usual dejected brilliance.  Playing an overweight, balding yet hirsute drunk with few redeeming qualities, Giamatti still makes himself likable enough to root for. No wonder he won a Golden Globe for best actor. I mean, it'd be hard to like Barney Panofsky even if he was played by a butterfly.

The throbbing question I had upon exiting the theater is "what the hell did everyone see in this guy?"  Not only do gorgeous and brilliant (to be fair, one is certifiably insane too) women want to sleep with him, they want to marry him too.  We meet him as he lives a bohemian lifestyle with writers, painters, and musicians in 1970s Rome.  Doesn't get much cooler than that.  And yet, by all accounts, Barney has no discernible talents, rarely works, lacks a sense of humour, and his sole skill may be the inherent ability to aggravate and enrage all those around him, a skill which his Jewishness betrothed upon him.

The real charmer in this tale is Dustin Hoffman as Giamatti's blue-collar widower father, Izzy.  Hoffman brings a warm Jewish patriarchy to the proceedings but elides cliché by being the kind of father who comes over and sleeps with the maid whenever his son and daughter-in-law leave the house, or, when Barney comes to him with his plans to leave his heiress wife for another woman, he reminds him of a few facts to maintain perspective, like her infinite riches and that his son is "married to a woman (Minnie Driver) who has a fantastic rack!"

The problem with Barney, though, is he's vindictive, petty, rude, careless, and he has absolutely no reason to be!  Women love him, and in the case of his third wife, played with subtle angelic sexiness by former Bond girl Rosamund Pike, is a downright saint whose patience and adoration of this Falstaffian figure is inexplicable.  He's also got wonderfully interesting friends, and tons of money, even though based on the glimpses of him working leads one to believe all a TV producer does is sit in the director's chair with his forehead in one hand and a whiskey neat in the other. 

Oscar Wilde famously said, "There are only two tragedies in life: one is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it."  Barney Parnofsky's tragedy is that he didn't know what he wanted, and only realized he had everything any man could ever wish for -- and threw it all away -- by which time it was all too late to make good.  Throughout his life, he disavowed any introspection, he never learned from his mistakes, and in the end, he lost perhaps the most precious possession of all, the magical ability to remember.  It may as well have been as if he had not lived at all.

Arbouretum / Secret Mountains @ Ottobar 02/13/11

On a night when a pneumatic music industry celebrated itself, to the sole delight of the disengaged pre-adolescent genus, it was with more than just a bit of irony that I found myself as the aggressively self-assured Arbouretum decided to eschew the Grammys and celebrate the release of their new record, "The Gathering," by dominating the stage at the Ottobar.  For here is a band that matters; a band that makes you care.

With a foundation of David Heumann, Corey Allender, and Buck Carey, the group lays the classic power-trio bedrock, constructing heavy dark space jams with strong manic 60s psychedelia undertones.  They depart, however, from those ancestral giants, with the inclusion of Matthew Pierce on keys and percussion, who provides a swirling apocalyptic undercurrent to the proceedings.

Be not deceived by the darkness and the gloom, Arbouretum doesn't forsake you wallowing in misery -- at a precise moment they unveil pulsing positivity, and the virtuosity of lead guitarist David Heumann jettisons the hirsute foursome to moments of genuine catharsis.  It is quite appropriate, then, that "doom/ecstatic" is listed next to genre on their facebook page.

Here is a low-fi clip from the show:

Preceeding Arbouretum, Secret Mountains took the stage with a simple greeting, "Hi. We're a band."  Said with David Byrne-like unironic innocence, the six-member band unfurled exquisitely formed dream-pop that has become a unique feature of Baltimore's music scene.  Chanteuse Kelly Laughlin shows her amazing range in the band's most affecting tune, "Rejoice."

Vive La Meritocracy!

We've all seen them, growing up, in college, around town.  They've been blessed with everything:  personality, physique, and most vital to the equation, rich wealthy parents.  They win all the races, they get all the girls.  The hottest girl of them all, Lady Luck, is always on their side.  Individually, they are the embodiment of Shakespeare's Man of All Hues. And then comes along an unassuming computer nerd, a son of a Jewish dentist, from Dobbs Ferry, New York.  A scrawny kid with kinky hair, he's a bit of an asshole.  He also happens to be a once-in-a-century super-genius.  The nerd invents Facebook.  And for the first time in his life, Hue, or in the case of David Fincher's The Social Network, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, comes in second, a very very distant second.  This is not the way it's supposed to happen.

The Social Network is not -- as so many will have you believe -- about the lawsuits, the partying, the girls, the envy, the backstabbing, the money, all of which are indeed part of the Facebook foundation myth.  No, those are just the MacGuffins, the narrative tools employed by highly-skilled writer Aaron Sorkin to hook his audience.  This is about our wonderful, all-equalizing, supreme meritocracy.  This is about how a computer-geek with slight anti-social tendencies revolutionized interpersonal relationships in the 21st century.  The underdog not only won, he pulverized those standing in his way with such ferocity that their only recourse was to litigate, and as Mark Zuckerberg (played with menacing authority by Jesse Eisenberg) sneers to his attorney, "They aren't suing me for intellectual property theft. They're suing me because for the first time in their lives, things didn't go exactly the way they were supposed to for them."  Even Daddy's millions can't get their pleas to not fall on deaf ears when they go whining to the Harvard President.


It's a credit to Fincher, director of other such explorations of masculinity as Se7en, Fight Club, and Zodiac, for keeping the tension maddeningly taut throughout the film even though almost everyone already knows the story.  There was a massive piece on Zuckberberg in the New Yorker which outlines the entire story, and with greater detail.  We all know how this tale ends, or rather, where it stands today, and yet we're still kept on the edge of our seats.  Frequent Fincher collaborator, Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor, along with seasoned English music producer Atticus Ross, ratchet up the immediacy of the action with a score that can only be described as militantly ambient.  The aggression in the music and direction mirror the intellectual and creative aggression onscreen.  Zuckerberg is a wunderkind tour-de-force.  He's not just the smartest kid in the room, he's the smartest guy in any room, even all the elite rooms in Harvard.  


The reviews and commentary surrounding The Social Network focus on how unflattering and unseemly Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is depicted.  This is simply a ruse to stir up controversy.  The portrayal is honest and unrelenting.  People are rarely kind and loving and fair and nurturing, especially when those same people are inventing billion dollar enterprises.  Is he insecure? Sure, but since when is insecurity a character flaw?  If anything, insecurity is pitiable. Did he box out possible early cohorts?  Of course, but since when is an abstract formative idea patentable?  

Come to think of it, with the exception of Zuckerberg's condescension to his girlfriend (Rooney Mara) in the opening scene, and the marginalization of his best friend, and initial financier (Andrew Garfield), when Facebook begins to legitimately explode, there is little that points to Zuckerberg being anything other than the guy who is 100 times smarter and talented than everyone else around him, with an uncanny ability to continually innovate and drive his creative vision to new heights.

Success stories like Mark Zuckerberg, and many others, show that in the face of true genius, the entitled class will cling to their last, and only, vestige of retribution, they'll sue.

The Frostly Pen

once more, for the right

climb up and reach that penned

soon it will be night

---youve a dagger to send

into the heart of

                       my master's mistress

she requires yr phallic kiss

to diffuse her beastly sex

carve her skin into sonnets lest---

be destroyed by that vile hex

I struck a match to help yr way

but it faltered in its blueness

---my mistress has sent me away

I am without home and spoonless

the carving word has

                         betrayed us both

my guilt arose in curdly white froth

at the deed which I fatigued

I took my match with scorning scoff

and came straight to yr mistress' bed

                                 intrigued

When I came to her she sat 

                                   in cower

so I graced her with my 

                                   golden shower

11/05/02

Swan Lake of Fire

There's a moment in Godard's Breathless when Jean Seberg's Patricia asks the famous novelist Parvulesco (played by the seminal Nouvelle Vague director Jean-Pierre Melville), "What is your ambition in life?"  Methodically turning his gaze towards her, Parvulesco triumphantly replies, "To become immortal....and then die!"  Fifty years later, Natalie Portman's ballerina, Nina, in Darren Aronofsky's exhilarating Black Swan must chant this mantra in her head at every pirouette.

Aronofsky's cinematic bitches brew begins with heavy doses of The Red Shoes, All About Eve, and Sunset Blvd., adds a corporeal helping of Kubrick's The Shining, and finishes off with Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  Claustrophobia, paranoia, and general creepiness ensue.  For a film staged within the uber-refined confines of the supposedly quietly classy world of dance, there is not a single moment of peace or general pleasantry.  Even Nina's hyper-pinked bedroom glutted with girlish knickknacks and stuffed animals has a pinch of psychosis to it.

At its heart, Black Swan deals with the obsessive convulsions in the pursuit of perfection.  In her innocence and vulnerability, Nina is the ideal virginal White Swan, but the ballet calls for the same dancer to dance both roles, and the Black Swan is a seductive force, using her sex like a flyswatter -- something the technically perfect but timid Nina is incapable of.  Under increasing pressure, Nina immerses herself so deeply into the dual roles of Swan Lake that she completely and abruptly loses grip on reality.  She suffers grisly hallucinations, simultaneously haunted by an evil twin (paralleling the ballet's plotline) intent on destruction and an ambitious incipient rival, Lilly (Mila Kunis), who is everything Nina isn't:  carefree, reckless, promiscuous, and enjoys exploring feminine nether regions, both her own and Nina's.  As if the pressures of the role of a lifetime weren't enough for poor Nina, she shares a domicile with her bizarrely controlling and envious mother played ominously by Barbara Hershey, in an inspired piece of casting.

With Black Swan, Aronofksy achieves what today's gross-out horror moviemakers would sell their souls to replicate, namely, produce a film whose every move, every scene, every word, is shuddersome.  The camerawork and sound editing will make your palms sweat, the scene-cutting will make you cringe.  The thing is, you'll love it, and you'll want much more.  The transcendentally exhilarating climax will give life to Parvulesco's romantic proclamation.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing which contemporary filmmakers we found most intriguing; whose films, when they come out, would make us raise an eyebrow and take notice?  Darren Aronofsky came up in the conversation as someone -- for me -- who fell into this category.  The sheer fact that all his films were so utterly uncompromising and dark earned him that status.  The complete dread evoked by Requiem For a Dream begins and ends any Aronofsky debate.  Yet, with this recent achievement, let me add, along with uncompromising and dark, Aronofsky has become breathtaking.

You Will Meet a Short Ginger Cynic

“We are slaves to our desires,” is a recurrent theme in the work of Woody Allen, but with his latest effort, an accurate evaluation of this axiom begs adding the scornful, “and to our satisfaction.” Or dissatisfaction.

In the world of “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger,” just about every character wants something beyond their reach, a something (mysterious woman, literary success, reclaimed youth, illicit affair) they really have no inherent or moral right to have.  They covet wildly.  Besieged by dissatisfaction and ingratitude, they act out with shameless ambition.  The fear of being caught or found out doesn’t even warrant a pause – guilt and shame are nonexistent qualities.  As typical for most Allen characters, they are all hopelessly cultivated, wealthy, attractive, sexually adventurous and utterly insecure.

 

Roy (Josh Brolin) finished medical school only to spurn the doctorly life for the bohemian romanticism of a literary one.  Trouble is he apparently has only one good book in him – and three really bad ones.  The anxiety of his imminent doom is tempered only by the beautiful woman in red (Freida Pinto) he peeps through his window.  Roy’s father-in-law, Alfie (Anthony Hopkins), abruptly leaves his devoted wife of 40 years because “she was getting old and I refused to accept that.”  Impulsively marrying a rent-girl initially provides Alfie the robust rejuvenation he coveted, but quickly his life descends into bankruptcy and cuckoldry. 

The women show no better.  Roy’s wife, Sally (well played by Naomi Watts) at first comes off as a supportive and caring daughter and wife.  But those illusions fade when her boss chooses to have an affair with her artist friend instead of her, and her mother is told by a charlatan fortune teller that she shouldn’t give Sally the loan she desperately needs to open her own art gallery.  Avarice is rampant, pride a disease. Everyone's miserable. Not even the doe-eyed innocence of Dia (the mysterious woman in red) belies her faultlessness.  She is given to the same irrational dissatisfaction (and desire) as everyone else.

The problem is, even when they get what they want, they end up even more discontent than before.  Lives fall apart, relationships crumble, bank accounts collapse, frauds risk uncovering.  Woody Allen has always leaned cynical, but with ‘Stranger’ he’s promoted cynicism from bemusing leitmotif to central thematic element. He doesn't even bother much to developing the characters save the minimum exposition necessary to parade their selfishness. 

Most of us don’t know what we want, those of us who do figure it out are usually driven by wrongheaded and ungrateful motivations, and then when – always when, never if in Allen films – we do get what we want, we are punished heavily for it, usually by fate.  In the end, only the most delusional have a chance at approaching happiness.