I think the downward rush of images from inside the cafe—history, our collective popular unconscious—performs ironic sabotage in the same way Huskies celebrates, subverts, the atmosphere of Pop Art and the New York School. We’re touched by the nostalgia, seeing Walter at the center of our extended European family, but our smarter selves find greater satisfaction knowing history as we understand it is really just an avalanche of garbage toppling down.
CHICKEN MARENGO
I come over to your house with a bag of groceries in the late afternoon. It’s beautiful California sunlight. I go into your kitchen and start making Chicken Marengo.
(Sautee garlic in olive oil, then add chicken for 20 minutes while cutting up onions, carrots and potatoes. When chicken’s brown, add crushed tomatoes, then the vegetables. Then add bay leaves, pepper…)
It’s an easy kind of scene and you walk in and out. When that’s all done I put it in a pot to stew. I come out and tell you it needs 45 minutes simmering. We go to bed. What else could fill the time as well? Is this the purpose of slow cooking?)
After we have sex we eat chicken marengo, talk awhile.
And then I go…
ROOTLESS COSMOPOLITANS
Lately I’ve been imagining other scenes of beauty too. Tearing down 2nd Avenue last night in my truck, plotting the best grid to beat traffic all the way to 8th & 5th I flash suddenly on parties that I’ve been to in New York, East Hampton: everybody jagged, brilliant, cinematic, all of these personas blurring as the night goes on, drugs, ambition, money, electricity… Do you remember the wretched movie Oliver Stone made about Jim Morrison’s life? According to Oliver, Jim was a wholesome California Boy—cute blonde girlfriend, magic mushrooms, milk & freckles—’til he met the Crazed Kike Witches of New York. The Witches dragged him down with their exotic drugs, their wild parties, their mindfuck demonology. They understood his poetry, though. The Witches are why Jim died of an overdose in the bathtub of a Paris hotel.
Realize, D, that I am one of those Crazed Kike Witches and I understand your fear.
And why’s Janis Joplin’s life read as a downward spiral into self-destruction? Everything she did is filtered through her death. Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, Kurt Cobain, Jimi Hendrix, River Phoenix all suicided too but we see their deaths as aftermaths of lives that went too far. But let a girl choose death—Janis Joplin, Simone Weil—and death becomes her definition, the outcome of her “problems.” To be female still means being trapped within the purely psychological. No matter how dispassionate or large a vision of the world a woman formulates, whenever it includes her own experience and emotion, the telescope’s turned back on her. Because emotion’s just so terrifying the world refuses to believe that it can be pursued as discipline, as form. Dear Dick, I want to make the world more interesting than my problems. Therefore, I have to make my problems social.
The correspondence between Gustave Flaubert and Louise Colet reads like a Punch & Judy show. Louise Colet, female writer of the 19th-century, had rosy cheeks and little ringlet curls. Unlike her enemy George Sand who chose to “live like a man” until age shielded her as a grand matriarch, Louise wanted to write and she wanted to be femme. Louise turned the difficulty of combining those two occupations into a subject of her art. Flaubert thought: “You are a poet shackled to a woman! Do not imagine you can exorcise what oppresses you in life by giving vent to it in art. No! The heart’s dross does not find its way on paper.” For years they met in Paris at times and places designated by him—sex and dinner once a month whenever Flaubert needed a break from his writing schedule in Rouen. Once, Louise asked to meet his family. And here Flaubert’s biographer Francis Steegmuller steps in: “Flaubert’s depiction of Emma Bovary’s vehemence was doubtless nourished somewhat by Louise’s shrill demands.” When Flaubert finally broke her heart she wrote a poem about it and he replied: “You have made Art an outlet for the passions, a kind of chamberpot to catch the overflow of I don’t know what. It doesn’t smell good! It smells of hate!”
To be female in 19th century France was to be denied access to the apersonal. And still—
I found it hard to write about the second painting, the one paired with Walter Benjamin that everybody says deals with the Holocaust so I went back on Sunday to take another look. I drove down to New York City after spending Saturday with my old friend Suzan Cooper, a Crazed Kike Witch of the First Order. Suzan’s been exiled by her family after many years in New York to Woodstock, where she runs a gallery.
Suzan always has several hustles running. One of them is selling photos taken around Andy Warhol’s Factory by Billy Name. I bought a black & white print of John Cale, Gerard Malanga and Nico staring stoned into the distance in their Nehru jackets in a park that looks like the murder scene in Blow Up. I don’t know if Billy Name’s name at the bottom of the photo in silver magic marker was signed by Suzan or by Billy but I didn’t care.
There are two groups of three people (men) gathered in If Not, Not, the second picture. Each group is joined by one naked woman. The first group is gathered at the bottom left of the frame beside a blackish pool with floating objects. The subconscious is a dark oasis. The men are wounded soldiers. These are the objects in the pooclass="underline"
—A sheep beneath a bushy olive tree
—Two blue-backed books, discarded
—A girl’s face looking straight up at the sky from underwater
—A broken pillar
—A naked man sitting up in bed from sleep
—A black crow perched on parchment writing
—A red cylindrical kitchen garbage can
The second group of men are resting in a palm-grove at top frame right. The palm trees move and bend like people’s backs. Between the resting men, a shadow or a cloud rears up from the ground like a wild rat or a pig. Have these men already visited the pool or are they looking towards it? Either way they’re exhausted, in a state (“where the river don’t bend”) that’s something like Richard Hell’s great cover of Dylan’s Going Going Gone.
The sky above these people’s streaky purple, orange, exploding nuclear Hawaiian from a tangerine funnel in the middle of the painting. But the sky on the left-side of the funnel’s very different—black-green thunderclouds drawn around a barn-like institutional building. Dachau, Auschwitz. A gaping double door: a mouth, a port of entry. We can make what we like of the differences between the two sides of this sky—are these skies evoking centuries or geography? Though everybody knows “there is nothing that can change the sky or make anything even approaching a wrinkle in its skin… no scream of terror or despair or hate or the imploring eyes of 60 million saints and innocent children ever moved it.” (The Angel, David Rattray) The nature of a sky is to be implacable.
A duckshit-colored roadway, leading to an arch against the sky, separates these two sides of the painting. But through it, in an opening where the tangerine-slashed sky ought to continue, we see the painting’s single act of superimposition. A blue tree on the roadway just before the arch points towards this archway. It’s the door to heaven. And heaven here’s some clustered bushy trees and blossoms, a Fra Angelico landscape in green and pink. And this tiny scene itself contains another superimposition: the sky behind the trees has been replaced by an abstracted close-up: a blurry mass of pink and green slammed up behind this almost Biblical landscape.