The morning after Meghan’s graduation I awoke to rhythmic pounding shaking stucco off the walls. I was back now, living inside of The Vacationer, forced out of my one-bedroom thanks to summer rental tolls. Beams of sunlight pierced the room at jagged angles, reflecting hard against a clock that blinked at 12 p.m. forever. I staggered limp across the hallway, took a piss inside the bathroom. I drank cold water from the faucet, felt that pounding, “BOOM-BOOM-BOOM.”

I put on jeans and grabbed a T-shirt. I wandered barefoot down the hall.

“Fire Inspector,” a man in uniform informed me. “I need to know if you’ve been living on these premises.”

My next-door neighbor stood along the sidewalk, leaning his chin against a broom.

“On these premises?” I asked the Inspector.

“On these grounds,” he fired back.

A pair of firemen filed past me, threw bright lights along the hall.

“No extinguisher,” the first one shouted. “Goddamn death trap,” the second one confirmed.

The inspector pulled his clipboard, slapped a sticker on the door.

“WARNING,” the neon sticker bellowed. “This property’s been inspected and conditions have been found which are unsafe and unsanitary and which are in violation of the NEW JERSEY HOUSING CODE. It shall be unlawful for this property to be occupied until repairs required by the NEW JERSEY HOUSING CODE as being necessary to again render this property as fit for human habitation have been made in a satisfactory manner and approved in writing by the DIRECTOR OF THE OFFICES OF CODE.”

The Inspector took my name down, wrote “dark hair” across a form.

He tipped his cap and said, “I’m sorry,” called his men and closed the door.

***

Continue reading →

“Three times, America has seen distance-running skyrocket, and it’s always in the midst of a national crisis. The first boom came during the Great Depression, when more than 200 runners set the trend by racing 40 miles a day across the country in the Great American Footrace. Running then went dormant, only to catch fire again in the early 70s, when we were struggling to recover from Vietnam, the Cold War, race riots, a criminal president, and the murder of three beloved leaders. And the third distance boom? One year after the September 11th attacks, trail-running suddenly became the
fastest-growing outdoor sport in the country.”

(Excerpted from Born to Run)

A year ago, I nearly skipped a screening of The Place Beyond the Pines due to the fact I had quite literally gone off my anxiety medication. As a result, I feared a sudden attack might sabotage me in the theater. Regardless, I attended, which turned out to be fortuitous, given I walked out wholly inspired, so immersed that I forgot myself entirely.

One week later, I attended a screening of Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder, a movie so laborious I suffered an ongoing series of attacks before the midpoint. I mean, how could this be? We’re talking Terrence Malick here … Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, etc. At the time I dismissed To The Wonder as perhaps a case of him, perhaps a case of me. Yet in retrospect, I believe that movie speaks to something more egregious, some aloof, misguided ideal of what an art house movie should be, as opposed to what it is, was or might eventually become.

More often than not, attempts at post-auteurism fall flat. The reason being people’s sense of excitement tends to evolve, while their innate sense of boredom never varies. And, make no mistake, Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac IS boring – a four-hour opus of dead air with academia between. There’s sex and death and god and love and wide-screen metaphors regarding fly fishing. Yet it all amounts to little more than one director’s masturbation – an icon forcing ample loads straight down your captive throat.

I’ll spare you the details, suffice to say that Volume I is vulgar, Volume II is unnecessary, and Shia Labeouf goes flexing muscles throughout scenes. Assuming you’re interested in an opus about sexual awakening, I’d recommend the 2013 movie, Blue Is The Warmest Color. Assuming sexual addiction is your bag, I’d recommend the Steve McQueen film, Shameless. Assuming you enjoy a wide-screen metaphor about fly-fishing, I’d recommend that you revisit A River Runs Through It. Just avoid Nymphomaniac at all costs. For it’s the cinematic equivalent of watching someone puke on Lady Gaga, only it lingers on for hours and the stench sets in for days.

(Nymphomaniac: Volume I is currently available via FlixFling. It also arrives in limited release via theaters this Friday. Volume II arrives via FlixFling this Friday with a limited release date via theaters set for April 4th.)

“Some pretty silly attitudes could be and have been struck over the subject of clothes: such as reproaching society for the fact that tenant farmers do not plow in swallowtails. The fact remains, however, that clothes are powerfully significant psychologically and socially: In every garment you see there is a badge and division of class as distinct as any uniform could effect and far more subtly exact. A human being is shaped by the clothes he wears quite as much as by the amount of money he is accustomed to feel the presence, or lack thereof, in his pocket. And as the world of today is the future of a marriageable girl, for instance, can be profoundly influenced by what clothes she can or cannot wear. Another fact to bear in mind is that ‘ugly’ or ‘humble’ clothes, shaped to their context, can like the people who wear them have an extraordinary dignity and beauty: and that this fact, in turn, is heavily qualified by considerations such as those mentioned above.”

Excerpted from Cotton Tenants.

Diane Arbus, much like Orson Welles, believed that black and white was every subject’s best friend. Her images maintained a haunting ambiance, exposing flaws without exploiting them. Arbus’s work defies convention, straddling the line between noteworthy and macabre. There are trannies and coquettes, naked ogres and listless freaks, all of them an apt reflection of poor Arbus, who slit her wrists at 48.

(Portraits of America by Diane Arbus and Candy Noland continues through April 19th at the Gagosian Gallery Annex, Free, 976 Madison Avenue @ 76th Street.)

Five More For The Offing: 

• Paris As Muse, photography 1830s-1940s featuring various artists @ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (Free with suggested donation, through 5/4, 5th Avenue @ 83rd Street)
• Matter of Life and Death by Jerome Liebling @ Steven Kasher Gallery (Free, through 4/19, 521 West 23rd Street)
• The City In Transition by Berenice Abbott & Charles Marville @ Howard Greenberg Gallery (Free, through 4/12, 41 East 57th Street, Suite 1406)
• Transfigurations by Oswaldo Vigas @ Dillon Gallery (Free, through 4/19, 555 West 25th Street)
• Ambassador for the New by Ileana Sonnabend @ The Museum of Modern Art ($25 general admission, through 4/21, 11 West 53rd Street)

Click through for full-size gallery.

Continue reading →

Click through for full-size gallery.

Continue reading →

Last night I watched The Spanish Prisoner, and was reminded of this truth regarding David Mamet’s heist films: There are always gaping plot holes, and those holes don’t seem to matter. This is the result of first-class writing, taut suspense, and a storyline much broader than the flaws inside its wake.

Art of The Steal is not a David Mamet movie. But it is a mainstream heist film … one so caught up in its own conceit it squanders all its currency on improv. At its center is a takedown crew, completely capable of world-class scores. Only Jonathan Sobol turns his lead cast into morons, bumbling through a bloated script that’s overrun with trite cliches. Set along the all-time heist movies – The Killing, Dog Day Afternoon, Thief, Quick Change, Reservoir Dogs, The Usual Suspects, Heat, The Score, Inside Man, The Prestige and Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead – Art of The Steal is nothing more than methane gas and white noise. It approaches every plot twist like a pratfall, posing set-ups with the bombast of a slick peel on the ground.

Editor’s Note: Kurt Russell plays a character named Crunch in this movie, adding to a resume that boasts the likes of Stuntman Mike, Bull, Snake, Cash and … Snake.

(Art of The Steal opens in limited release this Friday.)

“One reason why I have stressed so much the immoral, the wicked, the ugly, the cruel in my work is because I wanted others to know how valuable these are, how equally if not more important than the good things … I was getting the poison out of my system. Curiously enough, this poison had a tonic effect for others. It was as if I had
given them some type of immunity.”

(Excerpted from the Rolling Stone article, “Reflections of a Cosmic Tourist“)

(Please Note: Spoilers abound. If you’re not up to date, probably best to hold off.)

The entire thing’s laid out bare during that “throwdown in the woods” – murder, mayhem, mystics, a pair of unreliable narrators … sex, death, dosing, drugs, a war-time jungle full of tripwires. This is True Detective making its real intentions known – six is nine and up is down … the world has blurred both right and wrong.

Carcosa, The Yellow King, a corpse with antlers, the Man With Scars … True Detective represents a bold new level in anthology, one solution to a problem that’s plaguing good TV for several years. Namely, what does one do after the mystery’s exhausted? Well, assuming you’re the producers of True Detective, American Horror Story, or even the upcoming Fargo, the good news is, renewal’s part of the equation. The bad news is, no brilliant character lasts long.

In that spirit, the eight-week odyssey of Rustin Cohle – and, by extension, Martin Hart – will come to an end this Sunday evening. A tragedy if for no other reason then we’ve learned so little about Rust Cohle. His records are redacted, his memory astir, his daughter’s death’s labeled a blessing, despite the fact we’re still unclear as to what occurred.

We first meet Cohle working a crime scene, the ritual murder back in 1995. We quickly learn that he’s obsessive, intellectual, convinced of nothing but his own beliefs. We learn that Cohle’s a skeptic, anti-Christian, that he meditates about surrender in Gethsemane. We learn that Cohle’s methodical, amphibian, capable of manipulating any motive toward his purpose. He’s positioned as a martyr, an anti-hero, a pair of archetypes we’ve been conditioned to adore. He’s got no past, no home, no family, no account of where he’s been between late childhood and 30 (nudge, nudge). His arrival in Louisiana sets the earth on fire, linking God and Satan’s fury to a murder in the woods.

What we’re looking at is one man’s creation of a bogeyman, an imaginary monster inciting fear as control.

Consider Marty Hart, a southern Christian (like both proven victims), prepared to place his faith in Cohle once more. Marty now resembles Cohle – detached from his profession, forever estranged from both his wife and daughters. Rust Cohle played a major part in that, quietly stripping Hart of all he owned. Worst of all, he’s got poor Marty back to drinking, slow-dosing him with subterfuge toward a big fall down the road.

What we may be gearing up for is the coup de grace of one man’s long crusade – a holy war against religion, against a God who’s led mankind astray. It’s a commentary on our culture, on the manufacturing of monsters as a means of mass control. And you can bet Rust Cohle will find himself inside Gethsemane, where he’ll surrender to the guards once more.

(The final episode of True Detective: Season One premieres Sunday at 9 pm on HBO.)