A Walk Into The Sea, Wild Combination, Live Saints
Two documentaries about gay men living in New York and making art: Esther Robinson’s “A Walk Into The Sea” unlocks a story hinted at in Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s “Edie” – the disappearance of Factory film-maker and lighting designer Danny Williams in summer 1996. “Edie” hinted that Williams’ presumed death – his clothes were found piled neatly on a Massachusetts beach – was suicide but the film suggests that sheer exhaustion might have played its part. Much more interesting are the insights given into Williams’ life – he was Warhol’s lover for a brief while – and the vicious nature of Factory insider politicking. It now seems clear that Williams was largely responsible for the battery of effects that accompanied the Velvet Underground in the Exploding Plastic Inevitable – which was, in spring 1966, the most advanced attempt yet to capture what Gloria Steinem, in her August 1965 LIFE article on “The Ins and Outs of Pop Culture”, called ‘the spirit of Now’. In 1966, many strands of art, music and entertainment were all coming to the same point, by different means: the total focus on the instant that is the hallmark of: many Eastern religions; the happening; the drug experience; the ecstasy of dancing; the total synaesthesia of Pop Art. After all, as Warhol stated in Newsweek: ‘I guess it’ll all get so simple that everything will be art’. The EPI created an environment of complete instantaneity, FOREVER NOW. However these experiments were being conducted in the face of public indifference, if not hostility, and an atmosphere of unstable, debilitating competitiveness within the Factory itself. Warhol went on to someone else and Williams got bumped from his key role in the EPI. Factor in amphetamine abuse, and the potential for psychic disturbance and physical exhaustion was considerable. Apart from interviews with the remaining Factory players – Paul Morrissey is strangely evasive – the great revelations are the films that Williams shot in the Factory during 1966: there is one orgiastic sequence, a snake pit of writhing bodies, that is not reproduced in any of Warhol’s films or any of the proliferating documentation about the period. It makes you realise just how wild that scene was.
Matt Wolf’s “Wild Combination” is a portrait of acclaimed musician Arthur Russell – who spanned the previously irreconcilable worlds of disco, Performance Art, and singer-songwriter art song. Using sequences shot on super 8 – a wonderful format with its softer, blurred image field – and benefitting from access to Russell’s archive, Wolf uncovers a counter-cultural world: from the late sixties communes of Haight/ Ashbury to the years in the seventies and early eighties when New York was an artists’ haven. There is archive footage from the Kitchen, an interview with famed disco producer Bob Blank and singer Lola, and a fulsome tribute from Allen Ginsberg. Best of all, the film sends you back to Russell’s music: Dinosaur L’s “Go Bang 5″, Russell’s own “Let’s Go Swimming” (as mixed by Walter Gibbons) and the “World of Echo” album. I recently picked up “Death Race 2000″ cheap in a DVD dump bin, and it’s a hoot: directed by Paul Bartel and produced by Roger Corman, it mixes up humour, action and social commentary (bread and circuses, petrol-head mania, how revolutionaries become the new establishment, etc). It’s obviously a bit rough and ready but it’s very entertaining to see mid 70′s American fashions transported into a imagined future, and – apart from David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone – there is the added pleasure of seeing Factory star Mary Woronov as one of the racers. (Her Factory memoir, “Swimming Underground”, is highly recommended). I recently toured Germany promoting the German language version of “Teenage” with my translator Conny Losch, and one of the films that she insisted we show during the readings was “It” – the 1927 film inspired by Elinor Glyn’s best-selling novel. Apart from defining the Flapper as a recognised (and commercially powerful) social type, Clarence Badger’s film made its female lead, Clara Bow, into a superstar. One of the hallmarks of the Flapper was an increased sexual assertiveness, and Bow is just stunning: one origin of Max Fleischer’s Betty Boop (1930ff) with her easy, fluid presence, kooky warmth, and beautiful black bangs. Eighty years later, she still projects out of the screen. The film was a sensation when it was released: as the embodiment of the new sexual directness, Bow was the repository of her audience’s hopes and prejudices. The academic Alice Miller quoted a variety of young responses to her most famous film. A ‘boy scout of fourteen years writes of a motion picture called It: ‘I believe It with Clara Bow is entirely a menace to the community. Pictures of such short should not be allowed in the community”. An older boy, one of seventeen years, writing of the same film, says: “I liked It. It was a wonderful interpretation of alluring young women”.’ By spring 1928, Bow was hot: her fan mail increased to over 35,000 letters a month. Interviewing her in the first full flush of fame, the journalist and screenwriter Adela Rogers St. Johns, noted that ‘there seems to be no pattern, no purpose to her life. She swings from one emotion to another, but she gains nothing, stores up nothing for the future. She lives entirely in the present, not even for today, but just for the moment.’ Talking to another magazine, she told the truth: ‘I haven’t been happy for many months. The person you see on the screen is not my true self at all; it’s my screen self’. The US DVD contains a documentary about Bow, “Discovering the “IT” Girl” which is narrated by Courtney Love – an interesting association in itself.
Finally, youtube favourite of the month: the Saints live at Paddington Town Hall in April 1977, just before they moved to the UK. This is one of the few clips that capture what punk felt and sounded like in 1977: a relentless aural assault that leaves the group and the audience exhausted. Most endearingly, the Saints are either indifferent or actively hostile to the TV cameras.
Read an interview with Ed Kuepper of the Saints, over here
