I will hang two shows at Rainbo tomorrow, then hang around from 4-8pm in case anyone wants to come have a drink and a look. If you can’t make it, I’ve made this cheat sheet for you to follow along from home.
I wrote a description here and even more there so I won’t go on about it except to say that these two bodies of work are what has occupied me the most over the past year-plus. I expect an in-between/transition/hangover period to follow unless I dive quickly into the next thing. I have a couple ideas and will surely settle on something soon.
The prospect of having nothing to work on and just sitting here is terrifying enough to get my ass in gear post-haste.
I’ll have something more clever or interesting to say next week once this art is up, I promise.
We log onto Zoom and start talking right away. Nate offers to use his since the school he teaches at offers an institutional account that doesn’t kick you off after forty minutes.
We talk about many things including his new book, which I’d recently read and was going to write about. We have an easy rapport. Our first conversation went an hour and a half but felt a lot shorter.
We talk about comedy, the literary scene, the pains of being edited, and the reviewing racket. He tells me he and his ten year old son watched Modern Times the night before and the kid had enjoyed it. How when he was a kid he was mostly allowed to watch westerns. How he and his son watch John Wayne movies together. I tell him how I can’t stomach John Ford’s sentimentality. He suggests Howard Hawks’ Monkey Business if I need a laugh and I promise I’ll watch it that night.
We talk about what it would take to feel like a success. I say if they threw a parade in my honor down Michigan Avenue I wouldn’t go. He says if they threw him one he’d go. When his wife asked him what he expects when his book comes out, he told her he wants to be carried aloft through the streets.
It’s a good time just as the first one had been. We’re at about two hours when he says he has to go pick up his kid from school. I thank him for his time and ask him to send me the recording. That’s when we realize there isn’t one. We both assumed the other had hit the button. But it’s his invite so it’s on him. Still, this isn’t my first rodeo, so I might’ve noticed. We have a laugh about it and schedule an encore. I joke that we’ll reproduce the first one verbatim.
We talk again two days later. There’s a recording of it but the link Nate sends is password-protected, accessible only to students and teachers of the Tennessee college he teaches at. Perhaps he’ll send me a password sometime. then I’ll share it with you. It’s a good one so far as I remember.
The idea of being rediscovered is an attractive one for any artist who’s been ignored or forgotten. Usually, it happens after they’re dead, so it does them no good and the rediscoverers can make them into saints or devils and to write their legends anyway they see fit. But what if the neglected genius is still kicking?
That’s the subject of Kent Jones’ beautiful little movie. Screenwriter Samy Burch (who wrote Todd Haines’ vicious May December) changes Arthur Schnitzler’s late-19th century Vienna to present-day NYC but I think this story would work in any period or culture. It’s about receiving an unexpected gift, then realizing you don’t want or even need it. That gap between what we imagine and its reality is one of the most commonplace human conundrums.
Ed (Willem Dafoe, beautifully underplaying) is an aging postal employee with a comfortable, decades-old routine: he goes to work, goes to the neighborhood bar, eats his humble meals, and ignores increasingly desperate calls from his sister-in-law about his estranged brother’s imminent demise. One night he finds a dandyish young man outside his door. The young man has discovered the poetry collection Ed published fifty years back and wants to invite him to be feted by his group of aspiring aesthetes. Ed hesitates but is eventually bullied into joining them by the young man’s dogged persistence.
We’re never told why Ed gave up on poetry but his apartment full of books indicates that even if he has not written a sentence in decades that literature has not entirely let him alone. The band of eager young acolytes lights a flame in Ed. No one in his life knows he was once a writer but his new friends treat him as a neglected genius. He doesn’t completely buy it but is not untouched by the unexpected attention. He starts wearing a scarf, earning some teasing from his old drinking buddies, and buys a pack of American Spirits at his corner bodega after asking the clerk what artsy young people smoke.
But the bloom comes off this new rose quickly. The class differences between Ed and the young people make it impossible for either side to truly see the other. They idolize what they take to be his “authenticity” and champion him as an antidote to the skin-deep culture of influencers and fad-chasers they claim to loathe, but, in the end, it’s clear most have not even taken the time to read Ed’s collection of poetry. To Ed, these aspiring artists represent freshness and hope, yet one by one, each one’s mask falls to reveal a far less romantic or idealistic reality. Rather than the next Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or Bloomsbury Group, this is just a bunch of aimless trustafarians desperate to latch onto anything at all that might give their day-to-day some meaning.
The understated ending is neither tragic nor comic, but just the right size and shape for this little story. K said after we left the theater that it gave her a new fear of being “discovered” by pretentious writerly types but I say, bring it on. I’ll take whatever kind of misguided, misinformed attention I can get!
There’s a dedication at the end to poet Peter Gizzi who I read with at a house show in Western Massachusetts a couple years ago. Thought maybe it meant he died but it seems he’s still kicking.
