Re: Scenes from a play [no title, WIP], including ramblings + Re: Joana Craveiro, CQN # 3.

I got myself a book for Christmas full of AWKWARD FAMILY PHOTOS. I skimmed through it over the Holidays like a sociologist on the prowl – or a screenplay writer eagerly looking for characters and fictionalisations, in both cases equally fascinated by what others make of the term 'family'; how they choose to project themselves as a family, both inwards to its core members and outwards towards an audience beyond the front door. Although a lot of the pictures were taken by professional photographers within the space of a studio, these projections are filled with slip-ups – misplaced gestures and looks; they seem to come apart, open up space for speculation, theory, therapy where there should be the calm unit of the nuclear family after all. The AWKWARD lies in the fact that no, this is not the SIMPSONS' annual Christmas family portrait in which Bart makes it abundantly clear, year after year, what is just going on behind that front door. No, on the contrary: everybody was told to behave and they did, and still, that's what they got.
There are very few pictures of my core family, my parents, my brother and myself – come to think of it, there might be not one family portrait. We never went to let it be taken by a photographer and – as my father used to take all our pictures– he is missing in all of them. There are however pictures of my broader family, a potpourri of myself with different pairings of relatives. Page after page of them going yellow in photo albums, twenty years weighing down on them. A handful from the past ten years, scattered around somewhere, in drawers, on harddrives.

„I will let go of the memory of Germany twenty years ago, all of Germany...“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, CINE QUA NON # 3 [summer/fall '10])

Thumbing through these albums, I don't feel less like a sociologist or a story-teller, maybe even more so – scrutinizing myself. I don't recognise her, I don't remember her, I don't know why she's having that look upon her face. It is as if more than one life has come and went by in between her and me, all discarded and replaced at one point; I do remember odd ends, memory stroboscope, flashes of something or the other, celluloid snippets piling up underneath the editing table.

„All autobiographical work as I practice it is a fiction. Because I edit, [...] , omit, unsay. Autobiography doesn't hurt me. Rather it saves me, ...“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Of course I know her and of course I know the story; I made it up. Of course I know why I am sitting at that table next to my grandmother. It is my grandfather's 70th birthday, 1989. He is sitting at the head of the table, flanked by an equal number of relatives on both sides. Closest to the camera, there is my grandmother next to myself on the left hand side, my mother next to my brother on the right. I am 4 years old, my brother is five. My father decided to document the moment. I smile, a bit cautiously; my brother is leaning forward towards the table, a flash of enthusiasm. Both my grandmother and my mother smile at him, albeit as well cautiously. It is a behaved smile that mirrors their hands, which rest shyly in their laps; they sit up straight as not screen myself and my brother from the camera. The scene is very symmetrical, dignified (as the occasion calls for), Last Supper-ish even (as there is food spread out on the table), calm, yet cheerful-ish - -
No, it is AWKWARD. In the foreground, on the center stage, at the other head of the table facing my grandfather, there it is on display, prominently on a plate, holding my father's place so-to-speak. A chicken leg. A chicken leg, the meat nibbled off. It is mocking us in its bony factuality. And we tried so hard and yet you might just put the picture in the book and call it: In commemoration of grandpa's 70th birthday and that chicken leg, what a yummy one - - - - -
And above my grandfather's head is all that space, all that wall paper and those hands in the sand, just barely touching, a reprint of Walter Womacka's AM STRAND ('On the beach', 1962). Two people, a man, a woman, fingertips, everything that goes on between them, is it careless not to look at one another- -, lovers, // thick as thieves //. It is not a photo op, it's not a couple, it is not honeymoon at the beach. It is not AWKWARD, its perspective is screwed, the ocean is behind them, and what are they looking at- -, it is an idea of that, of what - -.

„I would like to make a toast to the fact that we enact each other constantly...“
(Joana Craveiro, BEING PORTUGUESE, ibid)

The reprint has been hanging over my grandparents' brown nubbly couch me and my brother used to sleep on whenever we visited them as small children for years. I looked at it for the first time then and saw hands. I inherited it after my grandfather's death and looked at it for the first time. I took it from my parents when I moved out and looked at it for the first time. It had been standing on my wooden floor for years before I looked at it. And saw them. I found out that it was the most re-printed painting in former East Germany and so I finally looked at it and saw hands. I made that story up so many times, I cannot remember when it was true.

„I will definitely [...] give up the past, the songs I have been listening to for the past twenty years, the books I have been quoting from for the past twenty years [...], stop recording [...] the same [...] Velvet Underground song.“
(Joana Craveiro, 10PM: FINDING ANOTHER WAY OUT, ibid)

I re-enacted it in acrylics and filed it under biographical exorcism as if it had always been there, painted myself as her on a concrete rooftop in NY, Brian Kinney by her side and everything is flat and they are faceless and there is just her hand on the concrete. I looked at it yesterday and I didn't recognise them anymore - - And I wrote scenes for a play that I didn't give a title for I only toyed with the idea of it, of them, two paper dolls, one fictional/living, the other dead/dead, Andy Warhol, as dead as you can be, being a paper doll and all - - and in my head I still have a movie about two people, one sitting, one lying on the concrete, and it is so still, and there is all that static and crackling from a bad-quality CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION YouTube-rip played at a torturously slow speed in the background, and you'd only know that you're watching a movie after all by the sun's flickering reflection in the glitter around their eyes. It is Jack Smith in a James Benning movie - -

„It is me. But I wear a wig. Two wigs. And in the end I make an assay.“
(Joana Craveiro, OPEN LETTER ABOUT ALL THIS, ibid)

Or an essay or ramblings or a cut-up

ODD ENDS/ STROBOSCOPE/ HANDS

(the fictional/dead, the fictional/living and everybody in between)

2011.

A little death behind the eyes.

I admit I did not make it any further than 20 minutes into the pilot the first time around before I decided that yes, I am a bit bored, so why not leave it for another rainy day. I had been rather reluctant to watch the meticulous re-creation of N.Y.'s advertisement industry in the 60s in the first place. Why the past anyway? What I wanted to see was a meticulous depiction of the ad business in N.Y. in 2010. However, as a fellow pop culturaphil reminded me, it's not about the past and even when it is about the past it's actually about the present. And, you can only ignore such a big chunk of pop culture for so long. So, I sat myself down again and finally caught up on MAD MEN.
Yet, even after having watched it all and the series' fourth season finale this past Sunday, I am still not sure what's actually going on, what the series – and the fuss – is about (except for the obvious meticulous part). For it is not about mad men. The pun doesn't work, or rather it ends where it started: on MADison Avenue. These men are not mad, they are complacent. They aren't jumping from the roofs of downtown skyscrapers (as the title sequence suggests) and land in their office chairs. They had already been sitting there, and have continued to do so for the series' past 4 seasons, albeit in different offices - somewhere in between pantyhose campaigns, in between Lucky Strikes, in between drinks, in between marriages, in between secretaries. Yes, there is nothing wrong with that as a plot – or a philosophy (I have written a 'maximum of pleasure, minimum of bullshit' defense for another cable TV ad man, Brian Kinney – forthcoming in CQN # 3). Only why bother if you don't seem to be having any fun, if you couldn't care less?
And Don Draper, leading man, creative hotshot and womanizer (or so he's called), is not having any. Or maybe he is, but you can't really tell as the series' immersion in everything white straight upper middle class 1960ish also applies to its cinematography: it sticks to the kiss&pan-rule, and no taking off of tights during sex.
When Don Draper is not piling up secretaries, wifes, ex-wifes and children like ties (you just buy one after another, more of the same because you like the pattern and one can never have enough accessories for that matter), he is alternating between trying to stay sober enough (or get drunk enough) to come up with one of his hotshot ideas and indulging in introspective swimming. Not that it gets him any further than feeling a bit sorry for himself, a bit alienated from his womanized women, a bit empty. His favorite line in that case: You don't really know who I am! (Yes, he's not Don Draper, and no, he did not kill Don Draper to become him. It's not that bad.)
I have been watching MAD MEN together with the fifth season of DEXTER these past few Mondays: If you want to see a man with truly alienating secrets, try Dexter. Likewise Don, he has also diagnosed himself with being a bit dead behind the eyes. Unlike Don however, he's no longer too complacent about it - as it dawns on him that it doesn't go together well with having some things in your life that you can actually be bothered about.
Watching Don moping around, I find myself reaching that state of mindless cotton wool complacency, too, interrupted only from time to time by pointless rampages towards the screen: Don, come on! Aren't you living in New York in the Sixties? Isn't Andy Warhol sitting in his factory three blocks down the street, re-writing the history of something. Isn't there a revolution underway? Don, come on! Stop impregnating your secretaries and let's go get screen-tested!
But we know how the story ended, I'm only waiting for Don to catch up, too. Don won't have changed the face of anything, his children did. Those children I yelled at him not to have, my parents' generation - I stand corrected (for that part anyway).

// I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
[...]
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
[...]
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.//
(Sharon Olds: I GO BACK TO MAY 1937)

Men, desks, paper dolls.

A little death behind the eyes: Don Draper (MAD MEN), Brian Kinney (QUEER AS FOLK), Dexter Morgan (DEXTER).

sneakpeek

forthcoming in CINE QUA NON #3