Bad girl, good boy?

Patti Smith begins Just Kids with a formal old-fashioned kind of language. The voice unsettles – it’s not what I expected. Soon after she departs Chicago for New York, that voice disappears and what replaces it is a frank and honest contemporary feel. Her story is beguiling – she leaves badly paid factory work and the shame of having a child out of wedlock in search of something more akin with who she is – a potential artist of some kind. Her mother – who thinks she will probably end up waitressing, gives her a pristine new waitress uniform and a pair of white waitress shoes which Smith abandons after a couple of hours of this kind of work. She’s not a snob about what she does though – the book has a humble tone.

Smith arrives in New York and almost immediately meets Robert Mapplethorpe. They connect as fellow ingénues and wanna-be artists. Actually Mapplethorpe is probably not an ingénue – but she initially presents him as a gentle beautiful artistic boy. She says: "We used to laugh at our small selves, saying that I was a bad girl ¬trying to be good and that he was a good boy trying to be bad."

They arrive in New York at a very dynamic time – 1967 (is there not a dynamic time in this city?) and gradually began to move in the same circles as a whole lot of artists and musicians. For the first half of the book, there is no mention of her being a practising musician though she certainly loves music and references artists like Dylan. Staying at the Chelsea Hotel for a while, she mentions contact with Jimi Hendrix, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin and wrote poems/ songs for some of these people. Much of the book is devoted to exploring the relationship that she has with Mapplethorpe - their struggle to make art, the fun they had, and the beginning of a clash in values as Mapplethorpe begins to work his way through the social set in New York.

The writing describing their activities is lovely – aesthetes who value the visual, who try to add beauty to the spartan rooms they inhabit, who express part of their identity through what they choose to wear. The image of the book released in the America is worth looking at (It's the one shown here) – Mapplethorpe and Smith dressed up for an excursion to Coney Island. Also worth looking up the very beautiful image that Mapplethorpe took of Smith for her first album, Horses - speaks for the essence of the book and their relationship - and the times.

One reviewer describes the book at embodying the spirit of Smith’s song Elegie written for Jimi Hendrix and that it was written “in a strong, true voice unencumbered by the polarizing mannerisms of her poetry.” True. I thoroughly enjoyed my time with her. And him.






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The Bad Cunt ambition

Like Samson and Delilah, Toomelah opens with a “waking up” shot. I’m beginning to feel like it’s a bit of a cliché in these kinds of low socio-economic contexts (also used in Blessed). It enables the cinematographer to pan around the home surroundings and give the viewer quite a lot of additional information before any of the action begins. The camera pans over cheap trophies won by a boxer (Daniel’s father), tracks along the cracked plasterboard and the rumpled bodies sleeping in the house. We see 10 year old Daniel wake up slowly and begin his day searching fruitlessly for money in his mother’s wallet. Toomelah is a real Aboriginal community on the border of NSW and Qld. The mother of the film-maker, Ivan Sen, grew up there so he had good links back into this community and it shows.

I wanted to see this film because I thought it might fit into the neo-neo realism genre. Relevant examples of this genre include Treeless Mountain (Korea) and Nobody Knows (Japan). Both of these films are concerned with the idea of children who have been abandoned by their parents. In both films, the children have a “problem” to solve that ensures that the audience is drawn into the film. A lot of the dramatic tension is in their management of the problem – surviving without appropriate adult support.

There is not the same sense of urgency in Toomelah, though Daniel is at risk because of the remoteness of his mother and the incapacities of his father who is an alcoholic. In almost all ways, he is more at risk than the children in those other films because his immediate environment is filled with trouble. He is disconnected from school, the elder in his family who is capable of providing support (his Gran) has other family business occupying her head space, and the most welcoming ‘family’ in town is a group of small-time drug dealers. Constantly in the film Daniel is asked “Where you goin’ bro?” “Nowhere.” Correct. Nothing to do and nowhere to go. The urgency of those other two films cannot be sustained in this aimless, deprived backwater. (And yet the question of deprivation is problematised – the school is modern and appears caring and other children appear with protective adults.)

As with the other neo-neo realist films, the camera lingers over landscape and character. Nothing happens fast – we can soak up the ennui of the day. Daniel was not a professional actor but manages to fill the screen with his personality – a withdrawn but feisty mix of bravado and deprivation. He wants to be a “bad cunt” but also yearns for contact. Reviewers have compared this to Samson and Delilah (this film is much better in my view because, as this reviewer says, “Toomelah has issues that Sen can tick off, "from deaths in custody to education to cultural extinction, unemployment, substance abuse, stolen generations". But although these are all woven into the fabric of the film, Sen has no interest in setting an agenda. "I wanted to make a film that was truthful to a little boy's experience of his world." (Read more) That lack of an agenda makes this a better film. It has a documentary-like quality that is deepened through the use of many non-professional actors.

Paul Byrnes, writing in The Age, said “The more recent films by Aboriginal filmmakers such as Here I Am (Beck Cole) and Samson and Delilah (Warwick Thornton) are noticeably internal. They do not look for outsiders to blame. There's a subtle reduction in the politics of victimhood that many black films used to carry as freight, unintentionally or not. There is more humour too, at least some of the time. Toomelah is like that. It offers us glimpses of a world most of us can never enter. That's the kind of thing that only film can do.” The school library has a large pin-up board with photographs of indigenous people through the history of the town and the mission which preceded it. Daniel’s gaze lingers on the men, proud looking men with shields and hunting materials or men loaded into a truck, clearly on the way to work somewhere. It is unclear what the modern context has to offer Daniel, except life as a bad cunt.

There is no sentimentality or manipulation in this film; things are what they are. The outcomes for Daniel are unclear. But for a short time, we’ve lived in his space.

The post 'Marriage Plot' world

I read this novel because of an article I read about the writer and this novel titled 'How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write ‘The Marriage Plot’'. I really liked the article and thought the book sounded good.
The article quotes from the actual text of the book:

"In Saunders’s opinion, the novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter who Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? As far as Saunders was concerned, marriage didn’t mean anything anymore, and neither did the novel."

Who wouldn't want to read a book playing around with what was possible in a post-marriage plot world? It's set largely in about 1982 in north eastern America and it's about a triangle relationship - Madeleine, Leonard and Mitchell. Because I was young then (1982) and just out of uni, the novel draws in aspects of my cultural world - vey nostalgically appealing. It might not work so well with another demographic. As I drew towards the end, I was intrigued to think about how Eugenides would end it - it seemed to me to be VERY difficult to find a satisfying end - but he really manages this part well. I loved reading about the advent of post-structuralism and the impact it made at this time. He also writes well about manic depression. It's made me want to read more of his books.