25 July - Midnight in Paris

I just saw the new Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris. It is absolutely enchanting.

New York Times film critic Joseph Berger describes that “many a writer or artist has longed to travel back in time to the sizzling Paris of the 1920s, to sip absinthe with Hemingway at Les Deux Magots or dine on choucroute garnie with Picasso at La Rotonde.” The main character in the movie, Gil (brilliantly played by Owen Wilson), does just that. Gil parties with Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, has his unpublished novel critiqued by Gertude Stein, confesses the absurdity of his situation with Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí, (who are utterly unfazed by a troubled time traveling novelist), and gets love advice from Ernest Hemingway (love, sex, death, and manliness).

Without a thorough knowledge of the cultural explosion and characters of 1920's Paris some of the incredible dialog and intimate jokes may go unnoticed, but for anyone who loves the literature, art, and legacy of that era this film truly cannot be missed. In the words of Filmtwitch critic Jim Tudor, the “abrupt humanization of these icons of the art and literature is as amusing to Gil as it is to us. The electricity of the time is felt as he makes not just priceless connections and contacts, but friendships. The magic and charm of 1920s Paris is right out in front of everything...”

The film failed for me on one critical level. The moral of the story is that the present is as vital and splendid as the past. Allen attempts to teach us that the lens of nostalgia paints a far more enchanting image of an era than it truly is in its own time. The film is so sumptuous, superbly filmed, and the icons of the past are so vibrant and seductive that I am convinced without a doubt that I would rather be in Paris in 1920 than in Santa Fe in 2011. Sorry, Woody - I'm just not buying it.

images: Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), a moment in the film, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald (Alison Pill and Tom Hiddleston)

6 July - Just Kids

Over the weekend I read Just Kids, a biography by punk poet Patti Smith about her life with Robert Mapplethorpe. I was astonished by her linguistic radiance, her capacity to make even the most banal of moments enchanted and acute. I did not know much about Smith – I remember looking at stunning and fearsome photos of her in Interview Magazine in the 1990’s and assumed she was a reckless, iconic, somewhat talented drug addict rocker.

Smith and Mapplethorpe met on the streets of New York in the late 1960s and immediately found in one another a confidante, an ally, a lover, and a source of unwavering inspiration. They made a pact to stick together and this book is the narration of that enduring promise. Smith winds her words through New York street life and encounters ranging from fleeting moments to lifelong friendships with such luminaries as William Burroughs, Salvador Dali, Janice Joplin, Allen Ginsberg, Sam Shepherd, Jimi Hendrix, and Brice Marden. The book is the story of finding authenticity in fleabag hotels, clarity of vision in the darkest moments of rejection and fear, and each ultimately finding a distinct voice - through poetry, collage, photography, or punk rock – that transcended the cacophony and messiness of life.

In describing her belief in Mapplethorpe’s profound genius, Smith describes that “it is said that children do not distinguish between living and inanimate objects; I believe they do. A child imparts a doll or a tin soldier with magical life-breath. The artist animates his work as the child his toys. Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power.”

Just Kids begins with an account of one of Smith’s earliest recollections of walking along a river with her mother. “The narrows of the river emptied into a wide lagoon and I saw upon its surface a singular miracle. A long curving neck rose from a dress of white plumage. Swan, my mother said, sensing my excitement. It pattered the bright water, flapping its great wings, and lifted into the sky. The word alone hardly attested to its magnificence nor conveyed the emotion it produced. The sight of it generated an urge I had no words for, a desire to speak of the swan, to say something of its whiteness, the explosive nature of its movement, and the slow beating of its wings.”

Smith, as she describes Mapplethorpe's "creative impulse, his sacred sexual power" infusing objects with magical life-breath reflexively and intuitively describes herself. Her husband once said that every photograph Mapplethorpe took of Smith ended up looking just like Mapplethorpe. They were bonded to the end, two lives navigating the thin line between chaos and creativity, theirs an integrated existence of life as art and art as life.