CHARACTER BUILDING

When he came to watch me work, Wade said it was amazing because you couldn’t tell where instinct left off and technique began.  I couldn’t either, and Alex said it didn’t matter.  Wade thinks Alex has a very commonplace mind, which is the result of confining himself to the movies and never getting a whiff of the keen stimulating air of the theater.  

When you work in the theater, even in a flop, you realize all over again that an actor can be the prisoner of his mechanical responses.  Anyway, my instinct makes me do a lot of things that Stanislavski teaches, and they’re right.  Frankly, this doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve studied in my own way, and I really knuckled down when I made all those recordings on the pier, thinking about the songs and the feelings they gave me, etc.

However, Wade points out that even if you start with a rare natural gift, the world will corrupt it.  You have to be a very special kind of person to stand up to the world and say no.  Even though I said no to the last scene of Song and Dance and I don’t intend to sing unless I believe it, according to Wade the whole experience is insidious and the world tricks you into believing your own lies.  That’s what happens when I go cute.

   

Gavin Lambert, Inside Daisy Clover, New York, Viking Press, 1963.

BRACKETS

I reconnected with Kasimir Malevich’s beautiful and haunting 1933-34 painting entitled The Running Man or Peasant Between A Cross And A Sword while researching the text and history of Tom Clark’s Beyond The Pale entry (Link). 


Dating from the very end of the great Suprematist artist’s career, The Running Man is interpreted as an indictment of the Holdomor, the 1932-33 Soviet Russian-perpetrated “Terror Famine”in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which killed many millions.  This Stalinist scar across the 20^th century is justifiably recognized and annually commemorated by post-USSR independent Ukraine, among other countries, as a political, class-cleaning, genocide.


I couldn’t help contrasting Malevich’s brackets (hieratic figures and shapes; color borders; arrested time and motion) with yesterday’s annual nauseating public relations distraction force-feeding the idle (because jobless) American public the crucial news of the U.S. president’s NCAA “March Madness” basketball predictions. (“My pick: Michigan State. Bring it home for me. It's been a while since I've won my pool.")  Good golly Miss Molly.  Where does he find the time?
 

I love when Ian Hunter asks at the end of Mott The Hoople’s All The Young Dudes:  "How are you feeling?” and then answers his own question, "I bet you're feeling really sick.”


Cheer up (dude).  It’s Spring.

THE MIDGET STOOD ON TIPTOE, TELEPHONING

Voices battled with other voices, landslides of laughter and the juke-box that never stopped.  People carried glasses above their heads as they made their way through the dancers.  In one corner the midget stood on tiptoe, telephoning.

 

Excerpt from: Gavin Lambert, “Nukuhiva,” first chapter in “The Slide Area,” New York, The Viking Press, 1959.

Note:  I learned about Gavin Lambert’s “The Slide Area” from Tom Clark’s Beyond The Pale blog.  It’s extraordinary and the first book I’ve felt compelled to read compulsively by candlelight (that’s the way it is 2/6/14 A.D. in Chester County, Pennsylvania) for a long, long time.  More soon, in daylight I trust.

Artwork:  Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.  Upper:  At The Moulin Rouge (1892-95); Lower:  Dancing At The Moulin Rouge (1897).