Letter

Seven years ago, after rewatching La Belle Noiseuse, I returned to figure-drawing class after a twenty-five-year break. I had a really good time and swore I’d incorporate it into the weekly routine going forward. I only lasted a couple months. I don’t know why I stopped but ever since then I’ve promised myself I’d return.

Now I have.

I go to the art store to get a pad of paper and see an old man checking out newsprint and charcoal at the register. He waves at me as I’m strapping a portfolio to my bike in the parking lot. I have an inkling I’ll see him again and sure enough he’s sitting in the waiting area outside Platform Studios with a couple other oldsters at 6:15pm.

The doors open at 6:30pm. There are seven or eight of us out here. Used to be that I was the only one to show up early. Times have changed, I guess.

A guy I vaguely remember arrives to open the doors. He’s overloaded with shopping bags and cases of beer. We filter into the room and claim spots before he’s even had the chance to turn on all the lights but the room looks unfamiliar to my memory of it seven years back. It takes a few minutes to see it’s a different room. Smaller. Oriented in a different direction. I learn later they had to downsize during COVID.

A few minutes after I set up at my horse, Noah walks in. I’d heard he’d been coming to draw. We joke that if Frank shows up we could pretend it’s 1991 at the Art Institute. I text Frank and he answers with a series of our old teacher’s mantras rapid fire. It never goes away when you get phrases lodged in your head young.

This is as close to church as I have. A set of innocuous actions repeated over and over with slight variations every time. The room is packed with others all doing some version of what I’m doing. On model breaks, I go to the bathroom and wash the charcoal off my hands. I don’t look at anyone else’s drawings. I just want to go through the motions of the ritual to see if I remember how to do it. To see if it still means what it used to mean. To find out if I want to do it again, again.

I don’t know when I’ll return but I believe I will. Doing this is a part of me. What it adds up to? Who knows. Who cares. The stakes are very low. To have no expectations is not a thing I get to feel where art is concerned. It’s a feeling I wouldn’t mind more.

RIP David Thomas. This is a sketch from the Abbey Pub twenty-plus years ago. Wish I had a better scan but the sketchbook it’s in is god knows where by now.

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.