Kiss Me Del Rey

LtoR: Lana Del Rey, Gaby Rogers, Candace Hilligoss

Lana Del Rey's panned performance on SNL this past weekend wasn't all her fault -- the mixing was dreadful. I instantly imagined the sound tech guy had hit on her during rehearsal and decided to 'punish' her, as douche bags are wont to do, after she rebuffed his seedy offers. See how protective I am regarding Lana? I feel like she's someone I once loved but couldn't protect as douche bags circled her every step like Kenneth Cole-clad vultures. I cringed and hid behind my book as she stood paralyzed against a white spider web of lights on stage, her legs locked together in a vintage thrift store chanteuse evening dress; her lyrics stuck on the endless repeat of a melody that fades on close audience scrutiny, that only works with clips (she should have had rear projections) as in her "Video Games" video, wherein she was only there for scattered moments, half drunkenly falling over or singing alone-ish, half America's Next Top Model entrant selling the brand "haunted."

Once I heard how far down in the mix she sounded I was hoping for a  moment like the one in Road House (above) when Ida Lupino sings her first song at the lodge and the whole cast of regulars and staff eye her with concern as her frail voice, barely above a whisper and without a mic, clings like Grant on Lincoln's nose at the end of North by Northwest to the melody, a ghostly after-effect of pure will and brassy, nicotine-stained courage gradually cutting through even the staunchest of drunk background conversations. It didn't happen.


As I wrote earlier, I like Del Rey for her hand-crafted post-noir persona but that persona hinges on intimacy, which SNL lacks. Rey's a post-digital artist meant for late night headphones and tear-stained iPhone screens, not sound stages and fancy lighting rigs and an audience keyed up by comedy. Thus we're presented with the same conundrum that sinks Manhattan nightspots I visited in the 1990s, they're now prime real estate 'hot locations,' so the night spots elsewhere; the mainstream snaps at the lonesome artist gentrifier's heels, stealing our small good things and baking them into oversize crap. Well, you mainstream sycophants, some stuff can't just automatically make the jump. I've seen the best bands of my generation destroyed by bottom line AOR guys who brought them up too fast and dropped 'em twice as quick: from Nightingales to The Wetlands to Nassau Coliseum and then dropped from the Humpty Dumpty wall when their 15 minute egg timer clicked crack time. Yeah I mean the Spin Doctors.

In the end the mainstream wants all the things it takes from the fringe to be tailor-made for them, never considering whether or not we invited them to even try on a sample. Thus we make ourselves deliberately off-size to scare away customers, for success means having to be surrounded at all times by douche bag entourages and clingy fans and thus be unable to hone our craft in the isolated anguish cocoons and starving garrets that best nurture our wild gifts. So we let our sophomore album grow bloated, and the AOR guys throw us to the cut-out bins and now not even Nightingales wants us back. One two / princes who adore you / just go ahead now. Yaaaa badibidip Dip deepa doo do da.

Then there's the movies: I finally bought and saw Criterion's Kiss Me Deadly (1955) Blu-ray which lived beyond expectations; I've had the MGM DVD awhile and watched it many times but it's a whole different movie now, like a crisp 3D diorama --now Mike Hammer's jazzy bi-level apartment seems to stretch deep inside the back wall at odd, skewed angles, and the sexy girl bare feet seem bigger than life, the treacherous west coast hills down which flimsy stairs carry tumbling thugs now recede deep down into the apartment below me. The two blonde girls who bookend the film are now extra insane: you can see the thin layer of sweat over their faces; when Gaby Rogers gets all glazed-eyed lunatic at the climax, you can practically smell the laudanum coming out of her pores; before that you can smell the sexual heat and traces of sodium pentathol pouring off Cloris Leachman, and later the toe-tingling chlorine and perfume aura of Marian Karr as the gambling kingpin's nympho poolside sister.

Spreading its influence out to post-nuclear Japan and films like Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill (1967), and into Altman and the Coens, from its backwards credits to its doomsday ending, Deadly enfolds rather than unfolds, in that sacred timeless backwards space occupied by Jimmy Stewart's Vertigo fingernails and the electric chair-bound flashbacks of Edward G. Robinson in Two Seconds, or Lee Marvin's mysterious resurrection in Point Blank or Naomi Watts remembering her own parallel reality as Samara's mother in The Ring, or those suddenly interminable songs Lana Del Rey sang on SNL Saturday. Nothing is by chance when Death is sucking us up through her rear view mirror.

In the beginning/end of Kiss Me Deadly, Hammer is drugged, beaten, and driven off a cliff with his first lost blonde (Leachman), and maybe he's still dead at the bottom of a sandy ravine and the girls around him the Carnival of Souls reverse gender equivalent of the weird white skinned zombie guy with the crazy hair who follows Candace Hilligoss around. And maybe the big whatzit in the box is an atomic Skynet variation of the Hitchcockian Mcguffin grown suddenly aware of its abstract unimportance to the mise en scene and so deciding to change the game, swallows the universe whole and runs it backwards only in its guilty 'I can't believe I ate the whole thing' nightmares.

Now it all finally makes sense: here it is 2012 and the film 2012 is coming to TNT (my take on it here). The snake, having swallowed its own tail first, continues unknowingly along, its radius tightening, and only as it speeds up to the infinite point does memory finally catch up to its 'this is where we came in' crux apocalypse. Death is from here on out more a dawning awareness than a traumatizing finale, and a parting word to those who will be forced to watch the black hole close around us seems prudent. Thus, Christina Rosetti's (left) poem "Remember:"

  And afterwards remember, do not grieve:

         For if the darkness and corruption leave

         A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,

Better by far you should forget and smile

If we feel the final darkness closing around us, is it at all possible that we're remembering it rather than experiencing it now, and thus are immortal after all? Maybe we who will die in the coming floods will not our deaths remember but rather still live in a landlocked world where no further burgee cords and yacht club burgees unfurl but for the brief cocktail steward span that bridges sleep and death--that fluttering spasm of alertness; the forgotten hand that clutches once and having clutched drops its eternal bong --and watch will we instead as the blackened water's through the carpet soaked and gone? Soaked...

... and gone? As Mike Hammer says when giving up the key to the whatszit, "I didn't know... I didn't know..."

He didn't know he's been dead all along and the same girl twice has died with him in a drag race (left). As J.J. put it in Sweet Smell of Success, "You're dead son, get yourself buried." Mike Hammer didn't know he really was pulling a Lazarus Scotty Hilligoss Parker shuffle.

Right. Thing is, no one ever does.

So remember to "forget and smile" when the waters are rising higher than any hit count and our apocalypse year begins endlessly over with one January after the other, never reaching the dreaded December 21, 2012, all time slowing down like a black hole's infinite approach, remember what the fortune teller said when Lisa Simpson asked if there was any way to avoid her grim future, "No, but try to act surprised." All else is... Silencio... and those picky, tourist conqueror worms that just won't give it up... for Lana Del Rey!

Ms. Icarus Risen: BLACK SWAN

Kiss Me Deadly (1957) happened to be on TCM as I was suiting up to go see Black Swan at the Brooklyn Academy of Music today, and something I hadn't noticed before caught my attention: the "Swan Lake"-ish classical background in the scene where Ralph Meeker rummages through Chloris Leachman's boarding house room. Coincidence?

Then I got home, The Eye remake starring Jessica Alba was on Lifetime: Jessica Alba looking in the mirror and seeing someone looking back who, while a lot like her--hot, damaged and mildly Mexican--is not her. Coincidence, tambien?

There was a moment in the crowded matinee BAM theater when the black swan Portman looked down at me with malevolent intensity (I sat in the fourth row center) and her eyes were like two white opals, her eyes they were like two white opals, coming together in a shaman bouquet and I thought of how weird I'd felt all last week while sick and hallucinating and possessed with a medicine-spiked serenity, focus, stillness and the ability to listen to Patti Smith's "Birdland" on endless repeat. The black swan of Birdland possessed me through the miracle of fever dreams, down on that New England farm, now walking down 5th Avenue towards Atlantic-Barclay Center. I'll go up. Or down. Don't give a shit for my feet have wings like a florist.

Movie audiences these days can drive me nuts with nonstop blue lights of cell phones and people whispering loudly but I can hear every word --but this time--emboldened--I merely hissed, like a swan might at a tourist without breadcrumbs (but who still wanted pictures) --and, having so hissed-- I let it go. They may have yelled the whole time I wouldn't have noticed after that, for I'd spoken up. I'd done my part. I felt the liberation and the intensity of the swan (along with the DXM) My insane rage at their uncouth bourgeois unconsciousness brought me closer to the Blanche Dubois-meets-Ms. 45 gonesville of Portman! Portman! Bravissima! 

I could go off in multi-hued directions about Black Swan in comparison with Aronofsky's last film, The Wrestler (see "Mess with the Horns"): together they are the his and her fictional artist career capstones, Oscarbait elegies to artists caught in amber at that pivotal acrobat swing from the arms of Ben Vereen to Jessica Lange's in All that Jazz (1979). They are Icarus--amber-frozen in the Led Zeppelin Swan Song label instant--the war-face grin of true freedom and anticipation affixed, dissolving like wax in the blazing sun, like the final mylar shield between the priceless comic book and the greasy thumbs of gravity's unclaimed child. They move beyond viewer and screen so that even the distractions become part of the whole--the screen in front of you, the seats below you and the Exit sign behind you--even the blue cellphone glow and whispers of the annoying latecomers--it all incorporates beautifully into the complex soundscape of scratching black swan wings fluttering like the rain of pine cones on ANTICHRIST's tin roof. The
whoosh 
of feathers and clatter of feet on squeaky floors, the horse-feather hoofs of long-maned and nice-legged ponies and cute girls in raincoats and blonde bobs--one dead, one missing-- one masturbating while her hysterical stage mom pounds on the door, boggling Mike Hammer's sadistic mind in KISS ME DEADLY colors; the beeping of its hideous heart-monitor and the applause of the crowd. As Smith's song goes, I'll go up /up / up / I'll go up.

Is Aronofsky the Patti Smith, then, of his generation, and Swan his Horses? Going fearless into the two white opals whiteness of credits with nary a pause of regret or doubt, at the end I burst into slow applause a few seconds as wild applause rang out on screen, and the people around me started to applaud by reflex, and then caught themselves--shot me waves of accusation in their gun-like glances. Why do we applaud in movies that aren't premieres, i.e when cast and crew aren't there to bow? Are we applauding ourselves for 'getting' the morbid black comic gut punch of it all? Are we applauding because our moms would hate it? To salute the projectionist for keeping it all in focus? No, we're applauding because we've forgotten we're watching a movie, and so we've shared a collective dream; we're applauding the machine because we hear the applause in the sound mix and we are trained to respond. We applaud because finally we're in the movie, too. That's how Aronofsky tricks us, and it's the best of tricks, the trick of only the greatest art, where it bleeds out of the screen and all over your lap, then follows you out the door, precedes you like a giddy, tumbling herald.

As I walked out of the BAM and headed up towards Park Slope again I felt free, the reality behind the screen, the audience of the world in rapt awe looking up at me, and me swimming through a thin walkway past the godawfulness of the still-under-construction Barclay Center, feeling safe in coat and iPod against onrushing lights and tires up Flatbush avenue past desperate storefront Xmas lights, the diva swan sculpture chrysalis-talizing into Sofia Coppola twirling the ribbon in Spike Jonze's acrobatics video for that Chemical Brothers song whoisthisdoin'thissynthetictype-a-alpha-beta psychedelicfunkin?  Coppola's trophy case the same as that Buffy the Vampire episode with the cheerleader mom witch getting trapped, a la bruja en ámbar... in her own trophy after trying to literally live through her daughter. Hershey as the mom with no life but to micro-manage her tortured daughter's each breath, Norma Bates harming the fly, the filly... Sophia Coppola going on to direct a film about suicidal virgins - "Cecilia was the first to go."  Trip Fontaine reaching through the suffocating lather of Catholicism that binds them only to run after mistaking orgasm/conquests' hollow aftermath panic for a real emotion; Sinead O'Connor ripping her papal way to persecuted freedom from popularity on SNL; Tyra Banks looking through light blue cellular eyes back out the TV at the pictures of her model contestants behind you on the wall; Annie Hayworth's bird-beak-busted skull eye sockets hidden by picket fences in THE BIRDS; Marlene Dietrich covered in ink black feathers slashing the Shanghai Express screen open with her swan talons, letting the rotten corpse fruit come sagging out.

Virgin Suicides, The

In SWAN, Natalie Portman plays the ideal mix of perspiration and inspiration. Hers is a cloistered life of rigid discipline and striving for perfection, necessarily without freedom or any experience of decadence. She knows no outlet for passion and vice or even an orgasm--living with a crazy mom and no bedroom or bathroom door locks--so when finally released from bondage into supernova orgasm because she's required to, finally, for the very pinnacle of her art, be the black swan instead of just the white, the freedom of ecstatic release is a Pandora's box-cutting moment that makes the whole cinema tremble with aftershocks. The good, the bad, and the naked rotting corpse underneath the lobby are exposed to the angel's pecked-out sun orb eyes at last, and all pain and fear and work revealed at last to be only ever the flimsiest of veils for this one inescapable moment, the melting wing flutters into applause.... the cheering like a distant hawk.

And if death not ends it, why bother starting? As Oscar Jaffe said: the sorrows of life are the joys of art. Knowing this and accepting it gives us a way of preserving those sorrowful joys in celluloid amber, of letting our artsy life fade and wither like an en verso Dorian Gray: Barbara Hershey, Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman and now Mila Kunis - a single line of frozen youth unwillingly dragged into the middle ages, thence to become self-mutilating corpses. But first the bloom. If her name wasn't so reminiscent of Milan Kundera I'd like Mila more, but it is, and so I think of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and 20 years ago in Seattle trying to watch it on VHS with my platonic girl friend-friend, when I was still too young to realize that one can't not masturbate or have sex or any kind of orgasm forever and not get sullen and irritable when living in close quarters with a beautiful intelligent blonde woman and no locks on the doors, watching some European art film rank with perfume ad sex and cocksman swagger... I wouldn't mention all that, except that it fits the BLACK SWAN to rushing, headlong, screaming "It is Accomplished" Tee.

But when the eye is for art and not for pornography, when 'I' stands for love and not for base desire, when a heart yearns for naught but is complete just to watch movies and pound Rainers and Red Hooks then Milan Kundera can go to hell. I've always been one to appreciate the purity of a chaste love... but it's so hard to find free time to take care of yourself when you're living in a commune, or with Barbara Hershey, or Isabelle Huppert's mother in THE PIANO TEACHER or Lux's parents in VIRGIN SUICIDES, or Piper Laurie in CARRIE. If you're feeling like you need to invade Iraq, or give up on your dreams in a fit of whiny depression, why not first try Seroquel, or see your Lexus dealer or give yourself some 'you' time-- as they euphemistically like to say.... Psychedelics can save your soul just as masturbation can save you from regretful decisions, art can save your life but only death shows the true color of the light behind the curtain and only it is unavoidable. They can't arrest people for successfully dying, much as they'd like to. Some of us peak behind the curtain, but most are content to wait for the curtain to come to them. Oh! It hangs like a CGI vibrator, all for you Damien! That signpost up ahead - it's your life's credits--quick check to see who played you. I'll go up! I'll go up! 

Don't listen to a word of it. There are no words to Swan Lake, nor sex --just violins reflected in the inky blackness of its surface, and inky feathers in the sprockets overheating the projector until the bulb explodes in a shower of black swan Bergman's PERSONA blood:. You can live to be a hundred and never dance or you can blaze out by nineteen and never stop, but to find peace in sobriety you must first get drunk. You must become besotted to ever be bereft. You must first know MONSTER ugliness to be Oscar beautiful. You must first know fame before becoming eclipsed by your own empty spotlight. Like Moira Shearer in the Lermontov RED SHOES, like Lazarus risen from the dead, like Mike Hammer risen from the dead, the tortured barefoot husk of Chloris Leachman at his feet. Mikey! Brrrrrm! Pow! Swan-eee how I love ya / how I love ya.

 I love you Patti, Chloris, Natalie. Natalie... Nat? Nat. Nat, pour me another.... take the sandbags off and take thy waxy wing to sky and go up / go up /up

And.. suddenly--just like that--you're old.

POW!