I recently read Hollywood Bablyon, a brilliant catalogue of trash (drugs, sex and suicide) from early Hollywood. It mentioned someone, can’t remember who, whose diaries were released after death, which contained explicit description of her sexual affair and activities. After one was publicised, I think, no more were released because they were classified as ‘pornography’, and this began the press’s obsession with censoring stories and details in regards to a categorisation of ‘porn’.
Now I am going to very simplistically rebuff this decision (way back when, so what is my aim with this exactly? Nevermind…) by arguing that this particular star’s personal accounts, and subsequent personal accounts by others, are in no way pornography as they are nothing more than writings of life. How can something be branded as ‘pornography’ rather than, say, ‘legitimate writings’ if it is not even trying to intend itself as ‘art’ in the first place? Pornography, as excluded from art, can only be so if is in competition with it (this, actually, I have much problem with too, but I’ve already written an essay on it and been entirely uninterested, so I will leave it there). Diary writings are in an entirely different realm of text, and of published culture.
For the last semester, during which I lost all feeling of care for much of my university degree and was entirely distracted by other parts of my life, I got the best results of my university career. How does this happen? Things seem to come together when I am feeling the least together about things.
See this article about the Museum of Se[x] on The Times website. Exerpt:
Academics ruin sex. They analyze it, explain it, deconstruct it, and by the time they’re done, you wish they had stuck to talking about Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. So when the Museum of Sex opened in Manhattan, I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was heavy on the museum and light on the sex. Maybe if it were called the Museum of Erotic History, I wouldn’t have been as disappointed. But when I heard about the Museum of Sex, my mind shot right past museum and straight to the sex part. I think my past experiences at the end of the Hershey and Guinness factory tours had built unreasonable expectations.
Well, I know I am going to visit this museum when I’m in NY, I can’t wait. But academics do ruin sex, in a way – I couldn’t help but question my (habitual, it seems) activity of psychoanalysing sadomasochism. ’This takes all the fun out of it,’ I thought, ‘why not just do it?’ Regardless, it can be fun to theorise your perversions.
I fucking love working at Priscilla, Queen of the Desert – The Musical. I realised this the other night when I was sitting up the front, indulging in the fact that I was watching all these beautiful-bodied men wearing makeup. Especially Daniel Scott as Adam (or even Felicia!). So. Damn. Attractive.
Someone said the other day that they didn’t think any school groups would be going to see Priscilla. I thought- why not? I have loved this film since I was eight, and found Guy Pearce very attractive, it’s very much something for kids too.
Talking to friends about it last night, Elanna said that because there was too much sex and sexual issues in it for adults to approve of it for children, schools probably wouldn’t be taken to see it because then teachers would have to accept responsibility etc. But then I thought, verbatim, ‘Even though it is about sex, it reinforces heterosexual values in the end with a monogomous union between a man and a woman (even though, shit, she’s actually a transsexual, maybe that doesn’t work).
And then I thought, what a fucking wank that I thought that about eight year olds going to see a show. As if they would recognise any of that.
Point is, it’s still quite a bit of fun. Kids should go see it.
I read so much theory and sometimes I just become completely overwhelmed by it. There are some sentences that are just so perfect and so beautifully written that I wish I could have them tattooed to me and could read them forever. Where do I write all these amazing things?
Some, I can write here:
Postmodern nostalgia of spaces: ‘the impossible nostalgia of postmodern attempts to retrieve fullness of being by retrospective memory…the nostalgia for a moment that points forward to an event that never happened.’ (Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny)
And:
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completel without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defined a technological polis based parly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other’ (Haraway, A Manifesto For Cyborgs)
Rural noir. Noir is ‘fundamentally nocturnal’, writes Oliver Harris, but in They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948), the city is seen in the daylight. It is the rural spaces, those close to nature that should signify peace, earthliness, purity, that are represented only in darkness. The open spaces here do not signify freedom but uncertainty and inevitable destruction. The open pathway leading Bowie (Farley Granger) to farewell his wife leaves him stripped bare as target to the unseen killers. A retreat to this landscape was, and always will be, fraught with deadly consequence. In noir they are always enveloped in danger, even when they are surrounded by nothing, by emptiness, by pure and (visibly) untarnished space. Bell is right: there is no place left to go.
Aside from the above line, there’s not too much I liked about Mommie Dearest (Frank Perry, 1981). Explain:
A little bit of a rehash (lite) of Sandra Dee’s Imitation of Life appeal to Lana Turner: ‘Oh Mother, stop acting!’ A bit too easy to run into this territory when depicting a celebrity-mother/daughter relationship.
*aside: this is a great film.
Supposedly, according to the script, Joan Crawford said something like ‘the real world expects us to live a certain way.’ Who knows if she did? But, I can believe it. Interesting to consider in contrast with Dyer’s Stars. Stars were types, images, significatory. Did stars control this? Sometimes, yes- Dyer says Joan Crawford controlled hers. Or was it the media? Certainly not entirely bottom-up controlled by fans, but taken into consideration. By Crawford? Maybe this needs a thesis…
Film finishes with some crock about Christina saying she doesn’t have the last word, accompanied by a meaningful fade where the audience is meant to clue in and think ‘Oh, haha, no she doesn’t because we just saw this movie about her, isn’t that clever’.
Second adopted son (or, third, factually- these lines are nicely fictionalised for the plot) conveniently disappears so Perry can concentrate on the mother/daughter relationship for the second half of the film. Then reappears for a mourn at Crawford’s death. If only reality was that easy.
Yesterday I got up early, had a coffee with a friend, picked up Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema from the library, then went home and it took me until 5pm to write a 500 word post for my World Screen blog. Very slow day.
Went to the gym (a house excursion!), cooked eggplant and chickpea soup. Read some Susan Sontag, Jean Baudrillard, and went to sleep at ten o’clock thinking about Sontag: ‘Most contemporary expressions of concern that an image-world is replacing the real one continue to echo, as Feuerbach did, the Platonic depreciation of the image: true insofar as it resembles something real, sham because it is no more than a resemblance.’
I’ve recently made myself a Facebook profile- is my obsession, and obviously thousands of other peoples’, with our images, constructed of our chosen ‘interests’ and our uploaded photograph collections, evidence of this disappearance of the real world? My online page resembles me, but so vaguely- it is a sham because it is no more than a resemblance, and a resemblance of only some of my parts. For a sum of my parts, I need myself, in the real.
That said, I’ve been having a lot of fun with my mobile phone camera lately. And am obviously moving in the direction of wasting yet another day for study.
Rural noir. Noir is ‘fundamentally nocturnal’, writes Oliver Harris, but in They Live By Night (Nicholas Ray, 1948), the city is seen in the daylight. It is the rural spaces, those close to nature that should signify peace, earthliness, purity, that are represented only in darkness. The open spaces here do not signify freedom but uncertainty and inevitable destruction. The open pathway leading Bowie (Farley Granger) to farewell his wife leaves him stripped bare as target to the unseen killers. A retreat to this landscape was, and always will be, fraught with deadly consequence. In noir they are always enveloped in danger, even when they are surrounded by nothing, by emptiness, by pure and (visibly) untarnished space. Bell is right: there is no place left to go.
