I started Kill Fee in 2005 as a kind of clearinghouse for writing clips and blog musings, and now four years later I’ve decided to retire the site’s blog aspect. I’m still planning to maintain the homepage as a static site with links to reviews and updates for new articles—so please do check back—but my more diaristic writing has moved to a new blog about going to the movies.
It’s called Queerantino, a name I came up with once when I was slurring Quentin Tarantino’s. Initially I thought it would be a great handle for some kind of film-centric, homocore superhero. He or she would have friends like Louchette and Assbender and together they would solve crimes or remedy bad movies. But so far all that has remained only a dream. Instead, I decided to take a more Quentin Crisp approach, and I’ve launched a new blog. It begins with accounts of The Group and Broken Embraces and I hope you’ll check it out.
From an article in today’s New York Times about the emerging field of sentiment analysis:
a preponderance of adjectives often signals a high degree of subjectivity, while noun- and verb-heavy statements tend toward a more neutral point of view.
I have a short Q&A over at the Museyon Guides website about film and travel, and earlier this week Tom Beer also talked about some of his favorite film moments.
(Tech rehearsal for In the Air screening.)
In the Q&A I mention the last film I saw, which was Liza’s new film In the Air. This was a screening for the cast in Portsmouth, Ohio, just last week. The film is a portrait of a deindustrialized steel town in Appalachia and, among other things, it’s about the effect the local circus school has on the community there. One of the things that has really stayed with me was how extraordinary it was to be in same space with the cast, who are all non-actors, while they watched themselves projected on the big screen. And it felt very unusual to see a movie about a place in that exact place. I love going to the movies—I love the whole element of voyeurism. But this was really different. This was more like bearing witness—to the people who were on the screen and in the audience at the same time. I’ve never had a filmgoing experience like that, and I’m not sure I can really quite capture how unique it was. You can read Tom Bridwell’s account here and Liza has posted photos here and here.
Also, I loved answering the question about what movie I’d want to live inside and imagining all the night clubs I’d go to that exist only in films like Piccadilly, Mulholland Drive, Who Killed Teddy Bear, Sweet Charity, The Wrong Man, Pillow Talk, Klute, Taking Off. This is clearly a list to be expanded.
For now, here’s Barbara Stanwyck and Gene Krupa in Ball of Fire playing “Drum Boogie” with matches.
Last month Museyon Guides launched three extremely handsome guidebooks about film and travel. The New York Times recently ran a short piece about the series.
I contributed articles about film locations in San Francisco and Italy, which made for a highly enjoyable research process: The Conversation, Dirty Harry, The Birds, Bullitt, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dark Passage, Greed, The Lady from Shanghai, Zodiac, and Vertigo (natch), plus lots of Anna Magnani, Marcello Mastroianni, and Monica Vitti. Other contributors include Tom Beer on the UK, Andrea Chignoli on Argentina, and Alvaro Ceppi on Chile. The next series, Music + Travel, is due out in September.
Mabel Normand and Fatty Arbuckle Viewing the World’s Fair in San Francisco, 1915.
Update:More about the series and editrix-in-chief Anne Ishii in Publishers Weekly.
One of my recurring frustrations with entertainment biographies is overdocumentation. Concert dates, recording sessions, studio memos pile up as if the profusion of unmediated data will ultimately transmit a deeper understanding of the performer. Usually, though, all that minutiae just ends up obscuring the subject. That you learn a singer took a fifteen-minute break during a recording session tells you that the biographer has been doing research but not a lot else.
Another hazard of the genre, as Jenny Diski points out in “Queening It,” her review of David Brun-Lambert’s biography of Nina Simone in the London Review of Books, is the prevalence of authorial speculation that relies on shallow psychology, and it’s this that leads Diski to a pretty radical conclusion. (The full article is here and requires a subscription.)
Increasingly I wonder if we wouldn’t do better without biography. Of course we want to know other people’s stories and to roll around in distant tragedy, but the pairing of talent and life too often suffers from banal, received assumptions based on ghastly popular psychology. The thing about Simone isn’t her mental illness, whatever that might have been, or her bad temper; the thing about Simone to anyone who didn’t know her personally, is her recordings, or having witnessed one of the really good concerts she gave. Reading this biography and knowing much more about her life hasn’t improved her music one bit. That’s what she had to offer, her claim on our attention, even now. It might be better for everyone if we took what there was for what it was. The superficial has its place. She was a stylish, sometimes stunning singer who could hold an audience. Perhaps it should be left to fiction to worry about why and how, because fiction has the possibility and the freedom to be original in a way that dogged biography doesn’t.
This made me think of Zachary Lazar’s terrific novel, Sway, which I read about a year or so ago and found incredibly compelling and original in its treatment of the Rolling Stones, not to mention Kenneth Anger, Bobby Beausoleil, and Charles Manson. Lazar does worry about why and how a singer holds an audience. He also manages to capture something so familiar and yet still take the reader somewhere new:
An electric bass thuds out a pattern of syncopated triplets and eighth notes, matching the repetitive pounding of the drums, and with each notes comes a twitch in Mick’s legs, a jangle of his spine, a definite lifting of his chin, a hundred little signs to let you know that it’s not fake this time, that for the three minutes of this song the god will be real. He raises his arms, all sinew and muscle. The decade will pass, forty years will pass, and maybe you’ll hear a snatch of it through a car window, the sound of it still a surprise over a stranger’s radio, the old song sent around the planet in waves that never end.
The other day Liza pointed out this passage in Mary Gaitskill’s Veronica:
A car rolled up and got stopped in traffic in front of us. Music poured from the radio, carrying a voice that was all smooth and elegant, except burps and grunts kept popping out of it like a baby trying to talk. “She says I am the one,” it sang. The music was a dark bubble in which the singer danced and twitched.
And here’s a clip of James Brown and Michael Jackson at the 2003 BET Awards:
Since reading Susie Boyt’s memoir, I’ve been thinking a lot about Judy Garland and Michael Jackson–as have others–and I found this clip on YouTube. It’s Michael Jackson doing Fred Astaire’s moves while singing “Get Happy,” one of Judy Garland’s signature songs, and it’s totally riveting. The melody is so decidedly hers, but the voice is unmistakably his.
But then those Fred Astaire moves weren’t entirely Fred Astaire’s. They come from Bill Robinson and John William Sublett. And Ruth Etting was the first one to sing the Arlen/Koehler number in 1930, and Arlen and Koehler clearly turned to black gospel music to begin with.
And now, here comes Michael, probably in the 1970s, “heading across the river to wash your sins away in the tide.”
Forty years ago a massively popular performer died from a drug overdose. Judy Garland was 47 at the time. Her fan base was enormous. Some 20,000 people lined up to view her body at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel on Madison Avenue.
Susie Boyt, who was born a few months before Garland’s death, has recently written a book about her passion for the star, and my short write-up of My Judy Garland Life is at Newsday. During my reading I thought often of Wayne Koestenbaum’s writing and the way in which one’s passionate fandom doesn’t have to be divorced from criticism but can actually fuel it. (In her bibliography she cites Koestenbaum’s Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon under “Hero worship.”) Boyt’s book, though, is not positioned as criticism. Its subtitle is clear: a memoir. Still, the author is the daughter of Lucien Freud and great-granddaughter of Sigmund Freud, and there’s a strong sense of interrogation, of Boyt turning her adoration over and over as if it were an object that you might see from all angles.
I’ve also been reading Heavy Rotation: Twenty Writers on the Albums that Changed Their Lives, an anthology edited by my friend PeterTerzian. So far I’ve read Stacey D’Erasmo on Kate Bush and Clifford Chase on the B-52s and I’m loving how the memoir genre is refracted through the authors’ meditations on sound, how the essays turn inward toward the writer and at the same time outward to the music itself. From “Beautiful Noise” by Stacey D’Erasmo:
We quilled our hair into stiff spikes and spent our paychecks on leather jackets. We felt like survivors. We knew about the trains, which car to ride in and how; on dark streets, you carried your keys poking between your fingers, weaponlike. We stayed out late in places where punky strippers danced on the bar.
So I thought Kate Bush’s sixth record was naïve. She made so many strange noises: beeping, hooting, ringing, sighing, screeching, impersonating, invoking, murmuring like someone rolling over in bed.
On another note, last week at the book launch for Heavy Rotation, Martha Southgate talked about her girlhood love of the Jackson 5 and passed around her own LPs, artifacts that then took on an eerie significance a few days later with the news of Michael Jackson’s death.
My grandmother was born in 1905 and I don’t remember her having much interest in the popular culture of my childhood. I just don’t think she paid that much attention to a lot of what was on television and the radio in the 70s and 80s. But she always loved to watch Michael Jackson move.
