Screen Tests
Page 3
Beckett in Shorts
Those photographs of Beckett strolling around the square in Tangier with his collared shirts and short-shorts that show off his tanned stork legs. How cheerful he looks. Smiling! In 1978 he was seventy-two years old. Beckett’s plays are obsessed with age, like Krapp listening to his past monologues on an old tape recorder on his sixty-ninth birthday. It was on holiday in Morocco that Beckett found inspiration for the visual imagery for his short play “Not I.” In a café he watched a woman waiting for her child to get off from school, which inspired the play’s silent Auditor, clad in a djellaba, who makes isolated gestures of compassion as he or she observes words pouring out of the Mouth floating above the audience. To play the Mouth, Billie Whitelaw had to be strapped into a sort of vise, elevated eight feet above the stage, where she couldn’t see or hear anything and so had to memorize the fourteen-minute monologue, which narrates with incredible speed the sad, lonely life of a woman about seventy: her early parental abandonment, her unspecified trauma, lying facedown in the grass, standing in line in a grocery store. The visual of the open mouth was inspired by Caravaggio’s painting of the beheading of John the Baptist. Beckett preferred Billie Whitelaw’s performance to Jessica Tandy’s, who debuted the role in New York. Whitelaw, his favorite actress, knew how to make it mechanical, automatic, just like the voice in Krapp’s tape recordings. The Auditor disappeared after the early performances. How many times I’ve watched the film version of Billie Whitelaw in “Not I” on YouTube. “It looks like a vulva!” Beckett exclaimed after seeing the close-up of her mouth on screen.
And I
(after Borges)
The other day, I read a story in which I was a character, or at least the other “I” that has my name, who is an author, was a character. The story—or was it more of an essay?—was written by my friend M., who I actually wrote about in my last novel and, I suppose, am writing about in this story now. I think the “I” in the story—or was it an essay?—was less the friend who communicated with M. about our children, our writing processes, our various complaints, or the private matters of needing time, but the “I” she first met while reading my books. It was an unsettling experience, to be made a character in someone else’s writing. I confess, I didn’t like it. Although, more so, I didn’t like that the other “I,” the one who shared my name, was the character. It would have been better, I think, if I, the I who is I, were the character instead. It was a splitting feeling. I realize the author-I and the other-I are in some ways the same person, in that we both share a love of Roland Barthes, of famous hermits, and of slow film, but the author-I is interested in all of these things in a showy, off-putting way, as if to announce her interests to the world. I realize writing this that in reading M.’s story a third “I” emerged who shared our name, that of someone else’s character.
My friend M. and I have a lot in common—I imagine she experiences a similar strangeness when she is written about in my work. We have often quoted to each other Foucault’s line “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.” The way Foucault says, “I am no doubt not the only one,” is in fact a gesture of friendship.
Of the three “I’s” that exist, I do not know which of us is writing this now.
Author Photo, Part Two
After a haircut: “You look more like yourself again.” When asked to elaborate: “Well, more like photographs of you.”
Sontag in the Bear Suit One
Susan Sontag follows you around in a bear suit, offering trenchant critique, but only you can see her, like an update of Harvey.
Sontag in the Bear Suit Two
. . . but how does she manage to still look so serious?
Reformer
My Pilates instructor, Y., who I’ve been going to in order to attempt to push my abdominal muscles back together after delivering a nine-pound baby, is an interesting conversationalist. I think I might go to her simply to talk to her, as I don’t have any other friends in the neighborhood, though Y. and I are not really friends, the reality is I pay her to stand over me and force me to execute various small and slow movements with my legs, torso, and abdomen, both on the mat and on various machines, all while she tells me to get organized. Okay, now get organized, she says to me, looking critically at my body, before I am to begin a series of movements. She looks at my soft middle and thinks of ways to correct it, and I, in turn, attempt to do what she tells me, even though I often complain, and try to get her to talk about her life, which slows us down. She just got back from a meditation retreat where she didn’t speak for a week. She had a look on her face in our sessions afterwards, like it was disorienting to have to use her mouth again, to have to explain to an unfit person how to move her muscles in a specific way, as so much of Pilates is about very specific movements and routines, most of which I haven’t learned yet, as I’m still a beginner, despite having gone to her for several months. Y. goes to see plays and dance often, and since I haven’t figured out yet how to leave the house really, except for errands or to teach or for these sessions, I like to get her reviews, which are always negative, or at best indifferent. She often goes because a friend has a ticket. She just saw Misty Copeland perform with the American Ballet Theatre, which you could tell she found annoying, as the theater was crowded with celebrities, she said. Like what celebrities, I asked, as I was doing legwork on the Reformer and she stood over me, pressing on the bandages on my feet, to keep me in the right position. I was breaking in a new set of summer clogs, and she kept on remarking on my bandages, that they looked like the color of skin in an Alex Katz painting. Later, she brought this up again. Oh, your Alex Katz Band-Aids. Oh, you know, she said, in that specific way of hers. Like, Marla Maples. I really enjoyed the way she said “Marla Maples,” and also thought it was funny, her example of a celebrity in the audience. Maybe the tone of her voice and her example was a way to tell me that there were bad celebrities in the audience, annoying celebrities. Y. speaks with a slight Japanese accent, as she spent her adolescence in Japan, as she’s Japanese, but also with a twang that I found deeply familiar when I met her. During our first session, we realized that she spent her childhood only a few miles away from where I grew up, in the nondescript strip mall landscape of the northwest suburbs of Chicago, before moving to Japan. When we discovered this, it made me then realize that I was drawn to her partially because of this, because of how she spoke. I never meet someone from there, she said to me, and I agreed it was unusual. If I was going to project, I would say perhaps we were both a little embarrassed, as this was not a glamorous place to be from, or to have lived, and I guess you’d only know this if you were from there. I asked her if she remembered going to the Pickwick, the dollar theater in Park Ridge, and she did, and I felt disoriented then, talking about this, there, with her, after all of this time, and I remembered then the floors of the theater, sticky with Coke, and when I was a senior in high school seeing that Meg Ryan movie there where she’s drunk and hiding it while married to Andy Garcia, but one time gets so wasted that she crashes through the glass door to her shower, and has to go to rehab. I find Y. a pleasant mix of contradictions. She goes to silent retreats, but she is also a name-dropper. When I told her I was a writer, as I was lying down on the Reformer the first time, she said she wasn’t a reader, but then asked me if I knew her really good friend who was a famous novelist. I didn’t know him, but I knew who he was, as he had a recognizable name. I don’t know if she was really good friends with him, or was friends with him, or just knew him, although also didn’t know why she would lie. She also tells me the famous people she’s met while being a fitness and health devotee in the city over the past two decades (she is a few years older than me). Like that Madonna took yoga with her in the ’90s. The last session we had, as we were stretching out on the floor, she thought I had said “Kennedy” (I hadn’t, I think I said the word “cocktail,” but now I don’t know why) and began telling me that she used to teach a couple Kennedys. I had no idea wh
ich Kennedys she meant, the lesser female Kennedy cousins, I suppose. It’s so sad about them, Y. said to me. And I asked her what she meant, thinking she was referring to family tragedy. They have the most beautiful bodies, she said to me. But all the women in that family have that Kennedy face.
Rider
A silhouette of a cowboy on his rearing horse revealing a partial photograph of a Natalie Wood press photo underneath (white opera glove, cleavage)—against a saturated red background, one of Sarah Charlesworth’s red photographic collages. Something like a centaur or another hybrid creature. Natalie Wood before her mysterious death, drowned off the coast of Catalina Island in 1981 after going missing from the family yacht, Splendour. (That scene between Natalie Wood and Barbara Loden in 1961’s Splendor in the Grass, the two mirroring each other. Barbara Loden as party girl Ginny Stamper, Warren Beatty’s sister, who tries to get her to have a drink from the flask. Come here, Deanie-Girl, she says. Natalie Wood as Deanie looks by turns nervous and unsure, flattered and excited, by her attention.) In a 1961 profile, Time magazine wrote, “Natalie Wood has every reason to feel exhilarated . . . she is just about the raciest filly to come down the Hollywood sound track since Liz Taylor.” She resembles Elizabeth Taylor here, BUtterfield 8 Elizabeth Taylor. Most likely a publicity shot for 1962’s Gypsy. On the boat too was her husband, Robert Wagner; her then costar, Christopher Walken; and the captain. Natalie Wood was afraid of dark water—had she really been swimming? The autopsy revealed bruises on her body and a significant amount of alcohol in her system. She was forty-three years old. Natalie Wood is missing for the majority of The Searchers. John Wayne searches for her, but the film isn’t about her; it’s about the searching. Is Sarah Charlesworth referencing John Ford’s silhouettes in the film, like the woman’s shadow at the opening blacked out before the expanse of the Monument Valley landscape? John Wayne spends five years searching for his niece, Debbie, kidnapped by the Comanche. John Wayne plays a former Confederate soldier who takes years to return home after the Civil War is over, then sets off for years to avenge his slain family, and then, once that happens, sets off again. There is such rage to his hatred of the Comanche. It’s unclear whether John Ford and John Wayne are commenting on his character’s extreme racism, how it isolates him. There is some distance there, but how far, it’s hard to know. Time works strangely in the movie. Natalie Wood’s kid sister plays Debbie at the beginning of the film—she’s about eight. But by the time John Wayne finds her, now a bride of the chief, Scar, she seems about seventeen or eighteen years old, even though only five years are supposed to have elapsed. Natalie Wood is in the film for all of a few minutes, and has almost no lines. She’s there to be swept up (swallowed up) by these men looming over her on their horses. It’s my father’s favorite film. When I watch the film, again, I think about my father, at night, watching the film. When I see John Wayne, that shot at the end, leaving his homestead after delivering Natalie Wood to what remains of her home, I think of my father’s loneliness, watching Fox News, and then watching John Wayne, alone in his house. I was so bored when I watched this film when I was younger. But watching it now, I realize that beyond the cowboy rhetoric this film is mostly about wandering through empty landscapes, about duration and time passing, the way that John Wayne and his sidekick move slowly through snow, through water, through desert, through seasons. The artist Douglas Gordon remembers his parents showing him The Searchers while growing up in Scotland. He has said it was his first experience with boredom. His parents told him the film was about searching and waiting, searching and waiting, and that he’d understand it when he was older. In 5 Year Drive-By, his installation in the California desert, he tried to stretch the narrative of The Searchers to its real-time duration, 113 minutes to five years. A second of film lasted approximately six hours. The installation lasted seven weeks. He didn’t do the entire film. Viewers thought they were watching a stationary shot, most likely of John Wayne’s face, but they were seeing instead a sequence. “As I’m sitting there, I’m thinking this is the artist who stretches things,” says an interviewer for The Brooklyn Rail. Gordon replies: “The elasticity of it is interesting.”
Pink Bunny Ears
I find myself thinking a lot lately about Ray Johnson. The constellations of famous figures and friends that he put into his collages. How in those early years, in the 1950s, he carried these collages in boxes and shared them with strangers, mailed them to friends. He burned them in Cy Twombly’s fireplace, an act that John Baldessari mimicked with his paintings in Cremation. “Please send to Peter Hujar,” he writes in his pink-highlightered script at the bottom of the collage I saw at the Matthew Marks Gallery last summer. A postcard of an older Sophia Loren in leopard print with horn-rimmed glasses swinging a small child with a man on the other side. Ray Johnson drew pink bunny ears on the child and collaged over the child’s torso a photo of a nude man with his arms raised vertically, his hands obscured by a wooden crossbeam, mirroring the pose of the child and also suggesting a crucifixion. There are so many other crucifixions in collages in the show. It’s too small for me to see if this one is a Hujar photograph. I kept on looking at it—there were so many layers to it. How Peter Hujar rejected fame like Ray Johnson. That story of Hujar being introduced to Cecil Beaton at a party: “I hear you are a very fine photographer,” Cecil Beaton said to him. “I hear the same about you,” Hujar said, and walked away. When Ray Johnson was mugged at knifepoint in lower Manhattan on the same day his friend Andy Warhol was shot by Valerie Solanas—June 3, 1968, two days before Bobby Kennedy was assassinated—he left the city and moved to a small white hermitage on Long Island, with a Joseph Cornell attic, as he described. Many of his correspondents became famous. He became more and more reclusive, keeping in touch through his mail art and on the phone. Eventually he stopped selling his work. And yet both Peter Hujar and Ray Johnson were obsessed with stars and fame, like Ray Johnson’s series of collages addressed “Dear Marilyn Monroe.” He saw patterns in everything, especially numbers. That Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926 and died in 1962. The number 13 was important. There are thirteen letters in the name Marianne Moore, with whom Johnson kept a correspondence (like Joseph Cornell) and devoted a series of collages to, using as a reoccurring image her tricorn hat. The number 13 plays a role in decoding the patterns behind his suicide, which everyone thought must be a final Ray Johnson performance. He was 67 (6+7=13), and it was on January 13, 1995. The room number at the motel he had checked into earlier, 247 (2+4+7=13). He was seen dressed in black and diving off a highway bridge in Sag Harbor, Long Island, and was last seen backstroking into the sea. Hundreds of collages were found arranged in his home. “I’ve got to tell you, it’s like doing a gigantic puzzle,” the Sag Harbor police chief is quoted in the Times obituary. I feel like when I’m writing these little pieces I’m making a daily collage. Please send this one to Ray Johnson.