Bored To Death - Literally.

 

      Although you can count me among the disappointed I was surprised to see the intense reaction to HBO’s canceling of Bored to Death.  I enjoyed the show firstly for that same hometown pride, for that kind of insider thrill we used to get from watching Law and Order and to try to recognize all the on-the-street locations.  Likewise it was a kick to see Schwarzmann get baked with Jenny Slate in the stock room of the the Park Slope Food Coop, or hang off the clock of the Williamsburg Bank Building where I went to the dentist for years, or to watch Zach Gallifiniakis wrestle with a baby on stroller clogged Seventh Avenue, because who among us hasn’t faced that peril?  

But more than that it was a funny, well built comedy of urban manners, and while Jason Schwartzman, the charming avatar of Jonathan Ames, real life novelist and the show’s creator, leads a somewhat improbable life as a struggling writer the show did deftly illuminate a funny little cultural niche.  Schwartzman and Ames also created an unusual type of hero, a humble, sensitive, self-deprecating leading man, fond of pot and white wine, likes girls but is not opposed to at least trying a threesome with another man.  Other shows like Portlandia and Parks and Recreation have offered up a crop of similarly awkward if endearing characters, continuing the millennial worship of the geek/nerd personality type.  Schwartzman takes this model to a much cooler dimension though, he’s no Napoleon Dynamite after all, but in a way closer to Carrie Bradshaw, HBO’s other emblematic New Yorker of an earlier moment.

The show was similarly clever too, especially in the beginning, and the premise of Ames’ character falling into private detective work was silly enough to amuse us but believable enough to propel the scripts and illuminate the psyche of the fictional Ames.  The idea of shrimpy Schwarzmann as heir to the hardboiled Chandler and Hammett was undeniably funny too and the meta-world of a fictional novelist named after real life novelist, emulating the fictional creations of other (dead) real life novelists’ was handled perfectly, providing the right dose of intellectual acrobatics without getting pretentious.  Schwartzman’s quirky Jonathan was well supported by his fellow actors too.  Ted Danson, in some of his funniest work on television as the deposed magazine magnate George Christopher, replete with Graydon Carter coif, perfectly embodied the bemused perspective of old, rich Manhattan, quite comfortable in its bespoke skin but so curious as to what it’s upstart little sibling was getting into across the river.  Together with Zach Galliafinakis, who brought his trademark calamitous if cuddly stoner neuroses, they rounded out one of the most original threesomes on TV.

I’m a Brooklyn native and struggling writer myself, and I always looked forward to the show, especially after a joint and a glass of a nice pinot grigio.  I never quite felt like I was watching myself, (actually I hate the idea of identifying with characters) but any show about books, Brooklyn, and bud will get my attention.  If Facebook is a good cultural barometer for anything (Wait, don’t answer that question) then apparently a lot of other people felt the same - but I never would have thought it veered into fanboy territory.  Why the outrage, one wonders?  But also why the drop off in viewers then, and ultimately the cancellation?  (Apparently only 200,000 people watched the show’s season finale.)  Bored to Death had all the right elements after all and quite frankly had hit the ground running.  Then - pfffft.

I think, finally, that what kills most show is that they lose what is known in business parlance as “core competence”, though in TV has been called jumping the shark.  Usually it takes a few seasons, five in the case of Happy Days, which is where the reference actually comes from (Fonzi, on a trip to California, well, jumps a shark while waterskiing thus dismantling forever the show’s credibility and marks its irrevocable decline).  I don’t think any single moment did in Bored to Death, but without a doubt it crept from it’s original funny mashup of Woody Allen-style neurotics and Sex in the City escapades to a mostly directionless muddle that traded inventiveness for shtick.  The once effective premise of Schawrtzman’s private investigations provided him and Gallifinakis and Danson with their urban and urbane adventures, madcap perhaps but never at the cost of witty scripts or genuine characterizations.  That changed.  The real Ames’ and the show’s other writers increasingly pursued laborious, plot driven contrivances, discarding the natural charm of their characters, forcing them into artificially absurd situations with every “case” and extracting them with equal incredulity.  Sure, the wackiness was what gave the show it’s unique perspective, but even absurdity has to have at least one foot in plausibility, if only to make it funnier.  Once the main stars all don catsuits for example, or when sandbags are actually dropping out of the sky we’ve gone off into cartoon land and abandoned the players for gags.

The half hour comedy, while necessarily dependent on plot (how else to do something different each week?) needs to respect it’s players.  We relate to them, not their escapades.  We like to see them challenged by their circumstances but bend them too much too soon and we no longer recognize them, and no longer watch.  Only Danson really held his ground and remained believably George through whatever was thrown at him.  The fictional Jonathan Ames in finding himself not so much in implausible situations but  became considerably less compelling and Galliafinakis, despite a wickedly funny arc as young lover to octogenarian Olympia Dukakis, was forced to turn in the same expected if funny gags, becoming a clown instead of flexing his talents as an actor with a real comedic gift.  The Galifinakis/Dukakis affair, while improbable in itself was handled instead so simply and matter of fact that its humor was only amplified by the realness both actors brought to the relationship (and to the sex which was pretty explicit - see: “bathtub handjob”).  A pratfall spotted episode however on the Dick Cavett show vastly underused Cavett’s own laser-like wit, and exemplified the show’s further descent into gimmickry.

I also had issues with much of the dialogue, which again often abandoned the idiosyncrasies of the characters, Jonathan in particular, and at times was downright flat.  It was as if the writers expected the show’s plot convolutions to carry everything.  I know that the Schwartzman’s Ames was supposed to be a little shy and self-effacing, but he is a writer after all.  Could we not have had a little more verbal wit?

I would have rather that HBO give the show a little while longer to find itself again. This season Jonathan’s main investigation was to discover the identity of his biological father after learning he was conceived from donated sperm.  Jonathan’s quest for his real dad, (Stacy Keach as a could-have-been-funnier Coney Island schlock-merchant) was a compelling one, and a perfect foil for the comedy that fronted it.  That he inadvertently slept with his half sister, Isla Fisher, who was also investigating her origins at the sperm bank, and veered off into incest was daring if a little off-putting, though how it would have played out we had yet to see.  We’ll never get that chance I guess.  

Maybe it was just an insurmountable sophomore slump or maybe the demise of Bored to Death is the harbinger of something else.  If anything we were drawn to its well tuned cultural perspective.  It was a show about the “right now”  without feeling cloyingly hip and while the show made many nods to the texture of Brooklyn life, it never became a lifestyle catalogue.  Schwartzman was always spot on too, perfectly balancing Jonathan’s self deprecating charm with a writer’s quiet, urgent passion.  Something else changed.  It became harder to believe that these characters actually inhabited the lives they were written into.  We can believe anything after all, sexy vampires, an ethical serial killer, even a horny Betty White.  What we can’t believe is how it only takes two seasons to fuck up a good show.

the nervous breakdown - corso, ginsberg and the heretofore unexamined similarities between haiku and oral sex

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/maquilone/2012/02/1991/

http://therumpus.net/2012/01/remake/

Jess @ Tibor De Nagy

Jess (born Jess Collins, 1923-2004)  is one of those idiosyncratic American art figures with a trajectory that defies categorization. California born and bred he became a nuclear chemist, joined the military and even worked on the Manhattan Project.  Disenchanted with the realities of atomic energy he turned to art in his late twenties.  Immersed in the pre-Beat San Francisco scene he soon met the poet Robert Duncan (author of the landmark essay “The Homosexual and Society” ) and the two stayed together in improbable monogamy for almost forty years until Duncan’s death in 1988.

Long a hero in the San Francisco scene, especially among the radical queer hyper-aesthete set, Jess is not as well known outside that city or art circles in general (despite an amazing retrospective at the Whitney in 1994), and among those who are aware of him he is primarily thought of for his inventive collages (or “paste-ups”) particularly the Transitions series which in their frantic recombinant density almost redefine horror vacui for the modern age.  The current show at Tibor de Nagy however shows us a different side of this very different artist.  This suite of simply lovely paintings is drawn from Jess’s early work, mostly from the fifties, some even from Jess’s student days at the San Francisco Art Institute.  He covers familiar ground: landscapes, still lives, portraits and interiors.  While simple and sometimes even spare, the traditional subjects however are given special intensity, often by heavily worked surfaces and glossy impastoes, that take them beyond the physical reality they actually possessed into a realm located instead somewhere deep inside.   But that’s usually the case with masterful figuration, right?  - because what makes all these paintings feel both special and of a singular mind is an pronounced sense of interiority.  The works don’t have the same complicated sensational qualities as his later collages, and feel anything but socially or historically observant.  In fact they bear little if any reference to an outside world at all - anything beyond the artist’s field of vision at the moment.  They are restrained, quiet, self contained and the simple glance they offer is actually a glimpse into an sensitive artistic intellect, one which for his young age was quite impressive.  

But these are not works about the “artist” himself.  They’re not filled with psychological signifiers of the kind found in some of the collages with their chemical/alchemical references, but instead simply display subjective feeling.  (That’s something all too often missing in modern work, especially without qualifying self-conscious quotation marks.)   As a result the paintings are all beautiful, courageously felt and darkly luminous and their unassuming subjects belie the intensity of the witness and his brush.  A few do have Jess’s signature flat “paint by numbers” feel but are nevertheless inhabited by beautiful if humble light - the kind other Bay Area painters would later interpret in much more overt ways but in Jess’s hands is much more matter of fact and less sentimental.

Few galleries today are as invested in the tradition of figural painting and assert its vitality the way they do at Tibor De Nagy - Nell Blaine, Jane Freilicher, Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter - all familiar names from an often under-sung midcentury moment in New York when Abstract Expressionism started to collapse under the weight of its own ponderous importance and artists began looking at things again (right before Pop jaundiced that view however and drew us into another half century of irony).  Last year’s “Poets and Painters” exhibition at the gallery gave us the clearest and most comprehensive survey of this interesting moment in American history when the poetry (Ashbery, O’Hara, Koch) upended tradition while their painter friends and lovers seemed to reinvent it.  They held hands while they worked and the result was nothing less than an illuminating double-teaming of the zeitgeist.  Jess finds a natural home at deNagy, and even his hopped-up Transitions find a place in this same trajectory.  (The collages are almost textual themselves after all.)  This is not just a place for pretty paintings then but instead one of the most cogent clearinghouses for an oft neglected curlicue in the too often rigid branches art history offers.  Few other galleries seems as loyal to context, and do so without clumsy pretense.  A number of hard-to-pigeonhole artists like Ashbery and Joe Brainard exemplify the ecumenical deNagy outlook.  Jess in his deep and complicated career is another, and it is a revelation to see.

Infanta

Spain is the land of flat red earth.

She points herself at you at dinner after a glass of red wine.

She stinks after love but you can only bathe her with questions.

Ask the darkness, the fur of her brow and wrist, her navel delicately inscribed.

A dream from the land where dreams are written in unholy wine.

With such severity has she parted her hair.

She is afraid of her father.

The sadness of music and drinks.

But the happiness inside that sadness too.

Not much is better than tears cried in happiness. 

Even the idea of tears.

Even the memory of tears.

Even just one drink.

But never just the idea of a drink.

Some things are not that happy.

Conversation

How do I leave?  You go out the front door.

My feet don’t work.  Take the boat,

Water is always moving.  I am afraid

Of drowning.  We all are.  It’s been years

Since I swam, back at the beach 
That summer.  You’ve returned.  Yes,

But I never went out that far again.  But 
You stole something, didn’t you? Yes.

That means you have to leave.

An old thing spoke to me.

Its words had followed it to the end

Faithful beyond death, 

Bound by something I did not understand.  

The old thing was lonely and vain, 

And asked only to be admired 

Now at the end of its time.

I could not oblige and so it died

Dissatisfied and unfulfilled.

I was godlike at that moment, Divine

And deadly insistent in what was mine to give

And who should live and who would not

For Love was in my hands 

A bloody knot that I had tied

Considering those ridiculous wishes 

That were granted at my birth 

And upon living

Subsequently denied.

There there

Real responsibilities replace the eruptive excitement

And it is all downhill from there.

A man carries a bag and suddenly empires fade 

As if they had never been there.

A visit to a familiar place is dissapointing

And you wonder why you ever went there.

You hear a sound and it is your mother calling

And it is all downhill from there.

I am condemned just as you are

And so we find ourselves together

Reading books and drinking wine

Dying of a good time in a city we love.

But there is no city, and no you and I,

Just a set of pictures moving in the mind

To remind us of the lies we offered

A long time ago, when we were blind by choice

Instead of force, like now and like tomorrow.

Love Song

I want a flower

That is a part time dog

I’ll crack your skull

And share my dirt with you

We’ll stink together

We’ll eat off the floor

My nose where it oughtn’t

Hair in my teeth

Taste me when you’re dying

Die for me

I’ll pick up your bones

I’ll hold your hand while you sleep

Morning Glory (waking from a restless dream)

I am 

Leg and cock

Am hair

And snot

And teary eye

And

Weary heart

Left weary

By lie

And helpless want.

My breath

Is sour

From 

Mornings in your  wetted wood.

Who will 

Let Me

Re-draw

The dream

Reclaim

The good?

I have heard 

There’s a man like that

With word for face

And wish for hat

He stands by

The corner

Waiting

And unsure

While in the harbor

Dark craft 

Blow warnings 

Of their departure.

The day will be

A sunny one

Already the dream 

Is burned away.

Another day then

To discover

The man

And if he is my brother.

you live in me more than you live

such is the cost of loving

to never really know a thing

to know a thing too well, then nothing

I’m only awake in your dream 

at your mercy, nothing at all

Heaven is the hole I live in

your heart the hand of my Fall

I saw it down south

No first I saw it reflected north

I saw it down south

A single strike to the ground

Then I noticed for the first time the F-train

At its highest point

Down south at Ninth Street

From here, the ninth floor

Lightning lighting up the window

Reflected in the dirty window

Of the apartment where my brother died 

Then I sat in bed

More reflections looking north

Buildings in the way

Then it came

The rain

Like a train

From the south.

The pages are gray dreary dreamy.

My ideas not there at all.

Forgive me for not forgetting

            Shoes should be left in the hall.

The dream forgets its pages.

Ideally we are forgiven.

Dreary doll gray and all.

            Shoe is good to be living.

Every goddamn day

The same thing

Or else I go crazy:

Sit and eat

And think and drink

And try to remember what love is

Then

When it gets too hot

Sleep

And dream of love

Wake up hungry

For love

Work towards love

Until the sun sets

Then sup on love

Then wash my face

Turn out the light

And listen for love in the dark

I come to you fully formed

Not with word but with sword

Fully drawn

            In the image of a song

Ready-made

Free of wrong

Sum total of accepted law

Engorged

           

            With virtue and virtuosity

Witness: Precocity

And precious specimens of

Luminous love and atrocity

Fully aware

And fully present

Peasant

            And proud to smell of it.

The poet is a beautiful man

And appears in the mirror enthusiastically

But nothing changes

The image of a rotten inside

Perhaps it is a condition of Hope

To lack faith in the evident

           

Perhaps seeing damages the eye

Just as love breaks the heart

He is beautiful

Upon reflection

            But knows not to trust a second-hand light

image: John Dugdale

Ghost

Stubborn, but still a shadow

So still cold.

Face, self, shade, breath –

Fade with my delirious dream

But never gone

            For good.

Better to be misunderstood

Than stand

One foot

In a grave

            Mistake.

Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.

Define: Equal.

The fatigue that follows transgression?

The hunger after rage?

Humiliation and honesty?

And a poem,

            What law does it obey?

What follows

The opening created by a patient heart or mind

Whose only aim is stillness

And its own disappearance?