No Depression

In his essay on the Galaxy: A Hundred or So Stars Visible to the Naked Eye exhibition showing through the summer at the Berkeley Art Museum, my Guardian confrere Johnny Ray Huston wisely observes that a recession can, in the case of a museum, have the welcome effect of encouraging reflection and reexamination in place of acquisition. The Galaxy show goes well beyond simply dusting off some old favorites; the cabinet of curiosity that is the archive is reinvigorated by the spirit of collage and chance, fostering fresh lines of sight, eccentric cross-references and a wayward index of inspiration. I enjoy museum captioning as a genre of writing, but the decision taken here not to freight the artworks with any kind of informational appendage (there’s a gallery guide book available to peruse) presumes a wandering eye: it’s not trying to sell you on a story. This puts you in the mood to discover connections between Paul Sharits’ frozen film frames (pictured above) and Bruce Connor’s inkblot drawings, William Blake’s etchings and Ajit Chauhan’s salty recitation, Giovanni Caracciolo’s erotic portrait of Saint John and De Kooning’s figure studies, Goya’s etching of a bullfight and Zoe Leonard’s vertiginous photograph of the same, and on and on. The marquee names are scrambled with lesser knowns in a hurly burly of eras and materials. It’s one of my favorite shows in a long time and a perfect demonstration of a small museum’s particular charm.

Critics are subject to the fever of acquisition too, especially as the gap between exhibition and publication is twittered away. In her book On Photography, Susan Sontag memorably described the camera as “the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.” Is there any doubt that web communications have stepped into this fray? Some of the Cannes coverage I read was quite good, but wearying nonetheless—a Dexedrine errand. Ideally, critics can cultivate the same lingering spirit as Galaxy.

There’s certainly no shortage of troves. We’re in a golden age of music reissues, whether they come in the form of a terminal collection like Goodbye, Babylon, a spacious, unknown corner of pop history turned up by any number of reliable labels, or the bare voraciousness of the  Mississippi Records releases. Jonathan Rosenbaum’s “Global Discoveries on DVD” column for Cinema Scope charts out the similarly labyrinthine world of DVD (sample the last one here). The packaging of these objects can get pretty elaborate, but many are done with a care that invites you to hole away for a long time, studying and loving. That’s certainly the case with Take Me to the River, a beautiful new book of found gospel photography published by Dust-to-Digital (the same folks that did Goodbye, Babylon). The book comes with a CD of scratchy gospel recording gleaned, hiss and all, from old 78s—a terrifically immersive project.

There is a world of difference between these excavations of previously neglected works—if not critically, than commercially—and the grubby remastered 24-bit director’s cut cash-in. The appeal of genuine archive work in hard times is twofold: besides encouraging the kind of meditation Huston discusses, it often throws light upon work created within modest means. That’s certainly the case with the last two films I’ve watched on DVD, Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks and Eagle Pennell’s The Whole Shootin’ Match. The former, which I’ve seen before, looks great thanks to a UCLA restoration. A perhaps insolent question struck me this time through: can Fireworks be called a noir? Not without stretching, I know, but it’s the right era (1947), the right plunge into night, the right swirl of fantasy and transgression…

The Whole Shootin’ Match was new to me and a happy find. Essential viewing for fans of Old Joy, California Split, Red River and any other movie that limns male friendship—it splits the difference between The Last Picture Show and Dazed & Confused as a Longhorn tragicomedy. The film’s Quixote picaresque traces two friends as they hopscotch between different moneymaking schemes: they don’t have enough, and what they do have, they spend at the bar. Like all good country music, good times and despair comingle in The Whole Shootin’ Match. The roughshod acting takes a little getting used to, but the spikes in mood tells a different truth from the smooth emotional curvature practiced by professionals. Lloyd and Frank are constantly rescuing each other, even when they don’t deserve to be, and while Roger Ebert had it right that Pennell’s film is about alcoholism, it is also concerned with what it means to be good company.

Take the “hellraising” sequence. Frank wrecks dinner by forbidding his son from accepting a would-be cuckold’s gift and then whacks him with his belt a couple of times for making a fuss (offscreen—Pennell’s film consistently uses offscreen to his advantage). Plainly derelict as father and husband, Frank shucks off for the easy grace of camraderie. One thinks of Montaigne: “If there is such a thing as a good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.” Back at Lloyd’s garage, we get a great composition of the two friends in depth, framed in such a way that it seems as though they are leaning back-to-back. Lloyd chucks his gadgetry aside (at one point he likens life to spare parts; by life, he means Pennell’s film). Frank opens a wide grin and asks how long it’s been since they’ve had fun, a real hellraiser, and Lloyd says too long, and it’s clear they’ve had this conversation before, that they’re slipping into a comfortable groove. My friend Vince once proposed a rule of adventure: given a certain radius (was it 500 miles?) and a couple days of notice, he’d turn up on any trail or dive bar for some reckless friendship.

The following scene could be from a silent film or a dream. The girls at the bar tussle over insults, and Lloyd and Frank peel off with two of them (the fastest ones to leave?), repairing to a moonlit riverbed. There is no plan; everything goes according to plan. Meanwhile, Frank’s wife Paulette is at home, listening to the radio, sure that the preacher is talking to her. We feel sorry for her at our own risk—she has hope where Frank only has the night.

And since something has to pay the beer tab: links to two new pieces, one on Dillinger is Dead, the other a song of memory for the Lemonheads.

~ by maxgoldb on June 11, 2009.