January 31, 2017 On Film The Reluctant Enthusiast: Orson Welles on Casablanca By Noah Isenberg Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. In anticipation of Casablanca’s seventy-fifth anniversary this year, I’ve made a sustained attempt to reappraise the significance of the film and its illustrious afterlife—in particular how the film, which involved so many European-refugee actors and studio professionals, resonates in the current political climate, with the increasing turn to the right, toward protectionism and isolationism, and a global refugee crisis of a similar scale. But in searching out some of the lesser-known, and least likely, voices on the subject, I’ve been reminded of another critical reappraisal of the film, one that dates back several decades and that hasn’t really received much attention. Tucked away in My Lunches with Orson, those delicious recorded snatches of midday schmoozing between directors Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles (edited by Peter Biskind and published in 2013), is a late chapter titled “Gary Cooper turns me right into a girl!” in which Welles admits, among other things, his hidden affection for Casablanca. The recordings took place at Wolfgang Puck’s Ma Maison, in West Hollywood, in the early 1980s, by which time the once-towering American auteur was approaching his final years; after a string of box-office disappointments and financial hardships, he was notoriously crotchety about all things Hollywood. At different points in his conversations with Jaglom, he skewers the producer Irving Thalberg, snubs Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, throws shade at everyone from Bette Davis, Laurence Olivier, and Joan Fontaine to Woody Allen and Marlon Brando, and expresses untrammeled contempt for Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Ford’s The Searchers, and Polanski’s Chinatown. All of which makes his fondness for Casablanca, the seeming apogee of classical Hollywood and “the most decisive exception to the auteur theory,” as Andrew Sarris once called it, that much more surprising. Read More
January 31, 2017 On the Shelf The Talking Heads of Yesteryear, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Heinecken, TV Newswomen (Faith Daniels and Barbara Walters) (detail), 1986; image via Aperture Get a load of this, people—it’s the story so unbelievable, so astonishingly perverse, that George Eliot’s family doesn’t want you to know about it! I’m talking about the size of her hands—or of one of her hands, anyway. Kathryn Hughes has the hot scoop: “One day in the 1840s a young woman in her midtwenties was talking to her neighbor in a genteel villa on the outskirts of Coventry. At some point in the conversation Mary Ann Evans stretched out her right hand ‘with some pride’ to demonstrate how much bigger it was than her left. It was the legacy, she explained, of having spent her teenage years making butter and cheese on her family’s farm, eight miles outside the city … Over the next fifty years George Eliot’s increasingly genteel descendants periodically issued stern denials about the great novelist’s labors in the dairy. There was, they maintained, nothing remotely odd about her right hand: it had done nothing more taxing than practicing the piano and taking tea.” In times of deep suffering and anguish, solace can take unusual forms. Sleeping pills, for one. Or a long talk with an old pal. Or maybe just an enormous grid of old televisions reminding you that things have always been shitty. The Getty Center, opting for the latter, has opened an exhibition called “Breaking News: Turning the Lens on Mass Media,” which will console you with the terrors of administrations past—most of them perpetrated before the advent of social media, when the news was still fake, just in a different way. Travis Diehl writes, “One of the Television Political Mosaics (1968–9) by Donald R. Blumberg, like televisions splayed out on a contact sheet, includes row after row of vintage talking heads from the vetting of Richard Nixon’s own unlovable cronies. Others in the series superimpose a faltering transmission of then-candidate Nixon’s profile into a black and gray miasma. Further Zen might come from Blumberg’s Television Abstractions (1968–9), a picture of a grid of sixteen TVs, all tuned to static. The white noise has never been worse, yet this exhibition offers critical insight for those who would turn today’s cameras on today’s screens.” Read More
January 30, 2017 Look Number Twenty-Four By Dan Piepenbring “#24,” an exhibition of paintings by Rebecca Morris, is showing through February 25 at Mary Boone Gallery. Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#01–15), 2015, oil on canvas, 95″ x 95″. Read More
January 30, 2017 Our Correspondents Crisis in Cosmetology By Jane Stern I’ve started to realize how homely I’ve become. I look like crap. I need a total makeover. When I was a teenager, and then into my twenties, I would never have let this happen. Back then, I was mad for makeup. I read Glamour and Seventeen with the intensity of a Talmud scholar. It was the pre-hippie days, and no one wanted to look natural. Being a young woman meant knowing about eyelash curlers, and the right hairdo for your face shape (there were only three choices: round, triangle, or square), and how to cover acne pustules with thick sheets of foundation. I worshipped at the altar of every department-store cosmetic counter. With the right mascara, lipstick, and face powder, my life had limitless possibilities. Read More
January 30, 2017 Look Aubrey, Illustrated By Lucas Adams Last November, New York Review Books published Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. Aubrey, who died in 1697, is remembered for his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies with a candor and color that enlarged the possibilities of the genre. Scurr has assembled an “autobiography” for Aubrey from remnants of his letters, manuscripts, and books, setting his sensitivities against the turmoil of Restoration-era England. He emerges as an empathetic, surprisingly modern figure. Below, Lucas Adams illustrates some of his favorite entries from My Own Life. Read More
January 30, 2017 On the Shelf The Raging Flood and the Peaceful Pond, and Other News By Dan Piepenbring Robert Smithson, Broken Circle/Spiral Hill. Chris Ware has been reading a lot of Krazy Kat, as we all should in these trying times. In the Kat and his creator, George Harriman, Ware sees a tacit African American tradition: “Krazy Kat has been described as a parable of love, a metaphor for democracy, a ‘surrealistic’ poem, unfolding over years and years. It is all of these, but so much more: it is a portrait of America, a self-portrait of Herriman, and, I believe, the first attempt to paint the full range of human consciousness in the language of the comic strip … I may be in the minority here, but I really think that most if not all readers of Krazy Kat during Herriman’s lifetime would have had a hard time thinking of Krazy as anything but African American. Krazy’s patois, social status, stereotypical ‘happy-go-lucky despite it all’ disposition all funnel into a rather pointed African American identity.” Robert Smithson’s Broken Circle/Spiral Hill is classic land art: it’s dirt and sand and raw geology, and it’s all fun and games until someone decides to sell it. Phyllis Tuchman visited the work in the Netherlands, musing on its history and the difficulty its owner faces in passing it on: “At 6-foot-3 and often dressed all in black like a character in the B-movies he watched on West 42nd Street, Smithson cut a striking figure. His prescription aviator glasses, slicked-back brown hair, blue-gray eyes and pockmarked skin completed the persona he projected … Unlike his colleagues, Smithson accompanied his earthworks with films, which made them accessible to people who couldn’t travel to see them. But his death at age thirty-five in a plane crash in 1973 prevented the completion of the film of Broken Circle/Spiral Hill until 2011. In it, we learn how Smithson’s artwork relates to both the prehistoric past as well as more recent times … ‘Between violence and calm is lucid understanding and perception,’ Smithson also said in Arts magazine in 1971. ‘What goes on between the raging flood and the peaceful pond? I hope to make that an aspect of the film on Broken Circle/Spiral Hill.’ ” Read More