Fuck Yeah Henri-Georges Clouzot at MoMA

Clouzot directed the controversial 1943 film Le Corbeau, in which the residents of a charming little French anywheresville turn against one another after someone who signs off as “The Raven” begins sending letters alerting folk to their spouses’ acts of adultery, business partners’ fraudulent dealings, their pharmacists’ drug-stealing, and accusing the local doctor of performing (illegal) abortions. (Otto Preminger later remade it as The 13th Letter.)

Here is a scene (un-subtitled; I looked) from near the end of the film, in which the protagonist, the widower Dr. Rémy Germain, finds an unsent letter signed by the Raven on the desk of his girlfriend, Denise Saillens. It reads, “My dearest surgeon, the time is ripe for an operation: Denise is pregnant with your child. Did you know?” While he hides, Denise enters the room, addresses an envelope to Germain, and seals it. When he confronts her, she denies being the Raven, claiming tearfully that she has written only this one letter, and that she did it because she knew no other way to tell him that she is pregnant. “Je vais avoir un enfant de cette demi-folle?” says German, angrily. He even threatens her with an abortion: “Non. Je veux pas d’un fils taré. Le Corbeau a raison.” The conversation gets at the meaning of evidence, perception, and the nature of guilt. Denise implores him to look into her eyes, to truly look at her, so that he might know that she is innocent. But Germain, in the film’s emotional climax, says he doesn’t know. He can’t know. He needs some more tangible proof than a look. Romantic ideas of human behavior don’t cut it, in France in 1943.

It is most emphatically not made explicit, or even really alluded to in the film — which was financed by a German-French production company, again, in 1943 — but I always saw the unsavoury developments that unfold as a metaphor for Pétainisme and the culture of denunciation and collaboration that it spawned. And the film was in fact suppressed by the Vichy government. But the underground Résistance press, too, objected, and condemned Le Corbeau as a vicious and inaccurate portrait of the ordinary French people as immoral, spineless, and conniving — Nazi propaganda in disguise. After the war, Clouzot was tried as a collaborator for making a film with German backing, found guilty, and banned from film-making for two years. It would have been for life, but for the interventions of dozens of actors, directors, and writers, including Marcel Carné, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Paul Sartre. So thanks to them, we got the whole 1947-1960 Clouzot golden period: Quai des Orfèvres, The Wages of Fear, Diabolique, La Prisonnière, and all the other films that will be shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s series. It runs from December 8-24.

There’s a special kind of drunk that can only be achieved after many hours of careful, consistent drinking. You have to climb through tipsiness, buzz, slur, and slop — but over on the other side lies a place of perfect equilibrium, an alcoholic zen state where all the ethanol coursing through your veins resolves itself into something jangly and serene. Certain drugs aim to hasten or mimic this effect, but they do so poorly. You really have to drink your way there to get there at all. Recently, I was sitting in a bar that made gestures towards an “English” theme — there was a red “Telephone Booth” where you could pay to charge your iPhone — when it struck me that I had been drinking steadily since a first cup of whiskey consumed in Prospect Park around four that afternoon. I was watching New Zealand play the Rugby World Cup final, and for some reason Mickey Rourke was there. If I concentrated, I could retrace my steps. I’d moved from dark liquor through beer and onto vodka and back again, through dinner and a Jean Renoir movie and yet more beer, and now, sitting in the corner of a dank and fundamentally charmless Greenwich Village bar at a quarter to five in the morning, drinking PBR tallboys at $3 a pop, I realized I was balanced on the tip of that spear. Then France scored a try, and converted. The score was 8-7.

Tommy Ton took my photo on the first day of New York fashion week as I was racing to the Richard Chai show (which I reviewed here). A tremendous compliment to my $30 Filene’s Basement skirt and Harlem street market satchel! I am embarrassed, but only moderately, that I was going about my business the morning after still wearing the wristband from the night before.

I Saw Courtney Love Play “Violet” Last Night

And I wrote about it for the Village Voice. My only regret is that she did not play “Credit In The Straight World.” Celebrity Skin came out during my last year of intermediate school, when every cultural experience still left marks. And even though I could hardly bring myself to look at the cover of Ask For It, when I bought it that year at a second-hand record store in Christchurch, New Zealand, it still kind of changed my life. I don’t care how many times Courtney Love, with middling coherence, insults the blog I write for; I will never not know and love each and every word in “Northern Star.”

UPDATE 1: Courtney Love saw the review, and wrote a long response in the Voice comments section. It mentions Pynchon, “several  high end bythat i mean GOOD  psychiatrists” with whom she has experience, and split infinitives. It is an all-round highly entertaining read.

UPDATE 2: Courtney Love saw this post, too. Hi, Courtney.

Meanwhile, if you’d like to read something by Courtney Love that is long, precisely written, and well-argued, I recommend the transcript of a speech she once gave about the economics of the music industry, which Salon published as an essay in 2000. It’s still riveting.

“Sometimes I say, What is so interesting about me?”                                                                                                                                                          — Carine Roitfeld

Underground

On a downtown A train recently, I sat opposite a couple in a curiously intense embrace. For the seven-stop express ride down Central Park West, the subway system’s longest held breath, these two sat locked together in the molded seats. Their heads were bent into each other, faces fully smushed against cheek and neck-skin. She had curled her body into his chest and he had wrapped his arms around her back. His knuckles were white. The privacy curtain of her hair fell around his shoulders. They did not move. Next to them, they had one of those rolling frames with telescoping handles, on which balanced a large cardboard box and a plastic pet carrier, secured with bungee cords. As the train shifted near 42nd Street, the animal in the carrier moved, and its fur brushed up against the air holes.

My companion at the time, who had been reading, and who I don’t think had noticed the couple, glanced up. “Oh, look — there’s a kitty,” he said. The man’s head snapped up, and he looked right at us. He looked at us hard. There were tear tracks on his face. I wanted to tell him in that moment that I was sorry — for seeing him, for failing to have the courtesy to convincingly pretend not to be seeing him, for living in the kind of city where people occasionally have to do their private things in public, for breaking that city’s taboo against noticing same, for my thoughtlessness and for my rubbernecking and for my finding his intense and intensely personal tableau strangely moving, for aestheticizing him, I wanted to apologize for all of that — but instead I got off at 34th Street and continued on my way.

I interviewed David LaChapelle about organic farming, bipolar disorder, bullshit, and being censored in China. He lives in Maui and works out of a big studio in Hollywood — an old sound stage. He was great to talk to.

 

Dis Satisfaction

I was honored to be asked to write a piece for the first-ever labor issue of the online art magazine Dis, which is out this week. I wrote about the fragile economics of the modeling industry, and why I still owe my former agency Elite Paris a sum I can’t actually pay. This piece was a bit difficult to write, because both my debt and my almost spectacular lack of success in my old career are sources of residual shame to me, but the response so far has been mercifully gratifying — I seem to have attracted links from everyone from the finance blogger Felix Salmon to the models Dana Drori and Sara Ziff, whose own observations about the industry, offered through writing and filmmaking, respectively, I respect enormously. (If you’re not reading Dana’s column for Blackbook, by the way, which she writes under her own name because she is far braver than I ever was, you’re missing out.)

But you should read the whole issue. It’s full of astute people making astute points about the often depressing interactions of labor and capital within the cultural sector. There is this insightful piece that argues for the establishment of a union for all the art handlers and gallery receptionists who toil in this city; it goes very well with this photo essay of gallery receptionists at work and this art handling photo essay, hilariously named “How To Travel If You’re A Fetishized Commodity”; it also goes well with the insight, “In the post-BFA landscape, hot women get jobs filing and hot men get jobs lifting”; there’s this piece about the history of political art censorship in America and the recent decision by the new governor of Maine to remove a mural from the state Department of Labor following one anonymous complaint; this wry pastiche of New York real estate sloganeering; there’s this: “Do you feel exploited? Do you feel like the people who work for the man are constantly taking advantage of your je ne sais quoi so that their place looks really fucking cool/political/hip/totally not sexist/racist/classist/homophobic? You know what I mean?”

Oh, do I. And that’s not even the half of it. The whole labor issue is really good. Go ahead, click on over. There’s a reason Dis has long been on the very short list of publications for which I’ll come out of my “retirement.”

The very fabulous Tamu McPherson took my picture for her blog recently — what a sweetheart! This raises an interesting question, however: who’s that woman who matched her red fur vest to her red shirt to her red pants to her red shoes? She looks fun.

Some New Work

Programming note: Should you be looking for a spot of spring reading — perhaps you woke up this fine Sunday morning with urgent, unanswered questions concerning Yohji Yamamoto’s libertine sex life and Diane von Furstenberg’s views on feminism — I have new pieces in the current Bookforum and the March issue of Jalouse (which has just reached New York City). In Bookforum I review Yamamoto’s intriguing, if somewhat maddening, new memoir and Ligaya Salazar’s monograph for Yamamoto’s retrospective at the V&A in London. In Jalouse, I talk to von Furstenberg about her life, business empire, and working relationship with DVF’s new creative director, Yvan Mispelaere. Neither story is available online.