I remember sitting on the fancy bus, going to Tempe for my language class, and sitting across aisle from Tamara, who was on her way to her language class, and digging this music CD that I never would have bought had it not been for the movie Basquiat. Every Silver Lining Has a Cloud.
Hard for me to believe, but that record is 13 years old. Movie’s 12. I think. It’s Monday morning a decade later, so detail sticklers, please forgive if necessary. I don’t remember bumping into Tamara between our library meeting and that day, but that’s the day I remember her best because we held a long enough conversation that taught me the sound and pattern of her voice. I read her more than I hear her, nowadays, but that part of her is the same. How she sounds won’t change.
Anyway, it’s a nice memory of a chit chat and subsequent listen to a nice record. I still catch myself singing the refrains of certain songs. Unfortunate that it didn’t survive the Spiritual & Material Cleansing of 2005, but I liked it back in the days of trying out the new-to-me. My copies of the Basquiat soundtrack and VHS (represent!) survived. I heart them both. I woke up one day, and my mother died by its end, and the day I flew home from her funeral in Milwaukee I started gathering someone and something elses that meant something, anything to me. I don’t remember what Tamara and I talked about except where we were going that morning, and so I remember Greek and Russian and what I heard after we stopped talking. It was a bus ride worth remembering.
Julian Schnabel directed Basquiat, and I hadn’t ever heard of Julian Schnabel or Jean-Michel Basquiat before that summer of 1997. I think someone who was obsessed with Michael Wincott knew of my adoration for Benicio Del Toro, and put that movie into my 1976 RCA VCR. Film and art critics alike will tell you, for different reasons, that the film’s flawed. But I love it. I’m lucky there. Not everyone can rejoice in flawed results, but since I’m so used to fucking up things, the fact that I ever got to watch the thing, in and of itself, is something I cherish.
I don’t get around to seeing Julian Schnabel’s movies right away. He doesn’t make them with much frequency, so I forget about him until awards season. I have seen one of his pictures in the theater, just this year. I’ve rented the other two, first Basquiat, and then the middle one, Before Night Falls, and that just last weekend.
It’s probably weird that I’m attached to these bio-pics, but really only his. And I think it’s because I am convinced that he’s never going to give me something about someone he didn’t love. If he didn’t love them in real life, then he must have from afar and/or on principle. I trust his sincerity. He clearly puts what he finds personally beautiful in front of us. His stories have bumpy patches, and the screen plays can be a tiny bit confusing, and over cast. Meaning some people needed to wear ringer T’s with their names screen printed onto them. It’s beyond ensemble. I get a little lost now and again, and am thankful for moustaches and how one walks when I need to see them.
I tend to get a little weepy for the tragic nature of how his subjects live and die. To date, all three men who were Schnabel’s subjects are dead. (If the i m d b is right, I hope he’s not junxing Lou Reed — or Berlin, for that matter.) The pain and suffering of their daily lives humbles me, when I consider what it evoked from each of them, and then got translated into their individual senses of beauty or horror. Sometimes, usually, both exist in tandem and despite the other. How life is so hard, in its entirety, but the moments in the sun and wind and water and dirt and love generate the happy instances that keep you alive for the next moment, whatever it holds, however predictable for both the hopeful and fatalist. Memories and futures keep you panning the dirt clods for the tiny gems of purity. It’s confusing. To me. But not.
Artists seem to be the only people who actually pay enough attention to yesterday to learn history. The evils keep on truckin’, stagnant in their expression, and amazingly, the truth and beauty and etc. factions stretch into new ways to light, paint, stage, sing, dance, and write. Art is so precious in that way because it embodies the spirit of renewal, of next, of what else might reach the sleeping or fearful masses. It’s the white to the black and vice versa, for human beings.
It is about enlivening our senses when they seem deadened or when they’re at risk. It is deeply personal, that mission, and deeply disappointing when we realize we have failed to reach someone. It’s equally, potentially heartening and disappointing when we discover that someone experienced something we hadn’t anticipated or intended. We never want to hurt people — except, of course, when we do.
Anyway, even tomorrow’s history will be old twice by the end of the day. Most artists seem to know that, at least subconsciously. “Been there, done that” didn’t come from nothing. Nothing ever comes from nothing anymore.
I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly on its next-to-last night playing here in Tucson. Bawling at times. I don’t remember why, exactly, today, but the metaphorical imprisonment that repeats itself in Schnabel’s films in such completely different manifestations tent to pound me into a salty, boogery puddle. There are actual victims, and those fight their way out of their cages, and die the death of their own choices’ consequences and natural causes.
We should all strive to achieve that kind of conscience liberty, yeah? But that isn’t it. It’s more how what I’m hearing managed to surface at all, considering his circumstances at the time it bubbled out of their brains, and through whatever vessel: his paintbrush, his pencil, or his eye.
Javier Bardem gives a careful, deeply felt and not exactly in-character voiceover of Reinaldo Arenas’ narratives and poetry, as well as the explanations of how he wrote his novel while imprisoned. Likewise, Mathieu Amalric’s series of spoken Jean-Dominique Bauby thoughts turned words were so calm and even funny, no matter how treacherous the pictures flashing before us and him. The torture of what he loved being inexperiencable, now, except inside. Same thing with Arenas.
I don’t know about Jean-Michel Basquiat, the drugs were just too prevalent for me to be able to sort him out. He’s a tough subject. His art illustrates that much, so just imagine the film. But I felt a real kinship with him while he screamed through the gates of an asylum, trying to reach his mother. It probably didn’t actually happen, in either of our lives, but I understand the picture and how it gave voice to the voilent, frustrated pounding of my, his heart. But the only thing I hear is Benny’s soft voice trying to wake his friend from his pass-out venue on the street, Willie Mays, Willie Mays, Willie Mays, and Gavin Friday’s light and sad rendition of ‘The Last Song I’ll Ever Sing’.
Sound is so important to film. Honestly, I rarely hear perfect, to the extent that I know that it is perfect. For me, it’s hearing the lines pushed past and around the heart stuck in their charater’s throat. Sometimes the visual aspects suffer for this kind of focus on sound, but I always always always hear it in Schnabel’s films. Schnabel has an ear for the sound yearning makes, and the sound of our need to at least try to satisfy others’ souls. He knows what will vibrate within our memories and keep us thinking about what he showed us. It’s the only thing we can make different anymore, the confluence of sound and image; and in this day of sensual overload, for me, sound is what sticks.
I still hear all of those women beginning the alphabet, stopping, repeating a letter, and then beginning again. And I still hear the one male voice repeatedly screwing it all up, laughing at himself for it, knowing very well that he won’t reach him the same way women can. In the end, he reads to him. He knows he can’t do anything better except be present, and feed his friend’s soul with someone else’s words. Men don’t require his response; women do. Of him, this is cooked down into a seriously difficult-to-arrive-at but simple truth. And it takes the nervousness out of his friend’s voice, the realization of that.
And since last Sunday, I’ve heard Javier Bardem’s voice saying I am the boy with a dirty face., over and over again, that first and possibly second line of each stanza of a poem. That’s how I remember it, anyway, and I can’t find the poem online, but it’s the poem at the end of the film, just before the credits.
The text appeared as I read, maybe in its entirety, maybe stanza by stanza, maybe even line by line. And I heard the words there before me, spoken and printed in either English or Spanish. I can’t remember which, or if it was both, maybe? Somehow I either see or hear “Yo soy,” and remember learning that, “I am”, when I was 15 in my high school Spanish class. I am.
I remember how it felt to see those words that came from the space just behind someone’s eyes.
Forced adulthood locked behind the eyes of children, ten to fifteen years before they can even think about putting these words on the same line, in pieces.
I am / the boy … and next time / with the dirty face … and then / standing in front of you. What a great poem. To point out that he and I both paid for not seeing him until he reminded me that I saw him, and thought we were unimportant to each other. The meaningfulness is neverending.
And that look sounds just like that, I think. Like that, and Willie Mays. And the confirmation of the letter that Bauby intended.
I really appreciate that ear of his, endeavoring to improve my reaction to what’s in my sights.
