Love on the Ground

Jacques Rivette’s Love on the Ground begins with a play performed in a small Paris apartment and ends with a more elaborate performance in a sprawling manse. It’s more or less the same play. The same one that’s in so many Rivette films. An endless rehearsal, elaboration, and collapse of a series of set pieces, blurring the lines between performance and reality, between actor and person.

The setting is the undisputed star. The two actresses of the apartment play—Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin, who have character names though it’s impossible to think of either as anything but themselves—are summoned to a shambling but grand house by one of their audience members. Turns out their costar/director lifted what he told them was an original script from this mansion dweller, who isn’t angry at the theft. In fact the theft has inspired him to cast the trio in his new play, to be performed in his opulent home.

Every room in the house features extravagant painted walls. I don’t know whether anyone was actually living in the place at the time of filming but it had to’ve been used to shoot commercials, fashion spreads, and the like. Whether the actors are acting or trying to just live the setting is always a stage so even their most innocuous gestures become suspect or multivalent. Rivette never lets you forget it’s all a put-on on some level.

Chaplin and Birkin make an odd pair. Neither is exactly a good actor but each exudes a specific energy, often completely disconnected from one another even in their most intimate moments. The problem with Chaplin is that looking at her face it’s impossible not to see her father. It’s kind of disconcerting. Her manic flitting about and nervous juggling between French and English made me anxious whenever she was onscreen. Birkin’s English-accented French is off in an entirely different way. She’s so beautiful it’s easy to forget whatever she’s saying or doing. The men are all mediocre in various ways. Women in Rivette’s films are nearly always more compelling than the men.

What he does is set up a situation, then lets the actors run around in it, repeating themselves in varying ways, their behavior often amounting to concentric patterns. Time doesn’t ever work narratively with Rivette. This is why his movies often run long and need to. This one is a quickie at nearly three hours.

With characters called Beatrice and Virgil there’s no way not to think of hell. But it’s never maudlin or heavy-handed. The sense of play keeps things buoyant.

I was so happy to’ve discovered this thing.

I reviewed Emmalea Russo charming, wacky novel about the imagined girlfriend of the horribly real Hans Bellmer.

tindersticks

Do you have music that’s so tied to a person or a place that anytime it comes on everything comes flooding back in?

I don’t know when I first heard tindersticks, sometime in the late-90s most likely. They were a favorite of people I got to know after moving back to Chicago in 1997 and getting a job at Pearl Art & Craft. It didn’t suck me in right away. In my late-twenties I wasn’t so susceptible to the florid over-the-top romanticism tindersticks traffick in. Still, they’d invade my psychic space from time with their sweeping strings and despondent melancholy.

In 2009 the band played at a deconsecrated church called Epiphany on Ashland Avenue. I didn’t go but a woman from that group of friends a decade back did. We got together a year later and tindersticks, especially two or three particular songs, were the de facto soundtrack of our relationship.

We broke up at the end of 2014 but I packed up those songs and many of their others in the boxes I moved to my tiny apartment in Bridgeport. My attachment to this music outlived the relationship. Now there were other associations formed when I listened again and again to the same songs. But underneath, the memory of the failed romance and the whole era that led up to it lingered. It’s never gone away and by now I don’t want it to.

In 2020 the band announced a New York show. I bought a ticket and a seat on a plane. Then, a Chicago date was added and I got tickets for that as well. But neither concert was played for reasons we all know about.

In the fall of 2024, they announced a US tour. I bought my ticket the second it went on sale. Then November 5th happened. The tindersticks show at the Athenaeum the following April was one of the very few tangible reasons I had not to get of the ride for good.

I race from the bookstore, north to the theater. My seat is in the second row. Some friends are directly behind me. I catch my breath and stop sweating from the ride as we chat. Then the lights go down and it begins.

They didn’t play a single song I wanted to hear but it was still one of the more sublime concerts I’ve ever been to.

Can I ask a favor? If you were planning to order a copy of my Moby Dick, could you do so now to ease my publisher’s mind?

Arcade Publishing will be putting out my version of James Hogg’s The Suicide’s Grave—being the Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner as well as re-releasing The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories, probably later this year or maybe early the next. If you want a copy of the current version of the latter, you should get it soon, as I’ll probably take it off sale in the coming weeks.

Disaster is My Muse

One of my fondest art-school memories is Art Spiegelman telling the entire history of comics in an hour from within a cloud of cigarette smoke in the old auditorium on Columbus Drive. I didn’t grow up with comics nor ever made any, but some of the best artists of our time have dedicated themselves to the form.

Chris Ware, a master of the medium, was a grad student at the ‘Tute. He’d been published in Spiegelman’s anthology magazine Raw already, but was in the painting program, attempting to make “serious” art. Cartoonists are forever battling the perception of being lowbrow or less-than so-called fine artists.

I think Terry Zwigoff’s Robert Crumb documentary is one of the best movies about an artist ever made. Seeing him in the new movie about Spiegelman creates a link that’s hard to break. Judging solely by what’s on film, Spiegelman is a far less flawed individual than Crumb. I don’t know if that’s truly so as I know neither of them personally.

Spiegelman is haunted by his family history and the work he will forever be known for is all about his father’s WWII experiences but aside from a very Jewish brand of neurosis he doesn’t strike me as a damaged individual. The chainsmoking (now vaping) may counter that view, of course. No one can see inside anyone else really.

What I like best about the film is how it shows a whole community and network that was created to counter the conformist/consumerist culture of this country. As Emil Ferris said in the Q & A afterward, what artists do is needed now more than ever.

I still don’t “get” comics for the most part. I like some of the drawing and some of the writing but it rarely coheres into a whole. I’m either reading or looking but not both at once. Might be something wrong with me or just the fact I didn’t catch the comics bug early enough for it to burrow in properly.

Whatever your relationship to comics is, you should go see the Spiegelman movie.

My drawing from the front row during the Q & A.

I have a few signed and bookplate-stamped copies of Babbitt and Marvel Universe for sale. If you’d like one, send me $25 (postage included) via your favorite mode of payment and I’ll send it right out.

Also, I made another bookstore zine.