The Baudrillard Series: The Oppression of Narrativity

The Baudrillard Series

There are about ten videos in this series, so make a cup of strong coffee if you plan to watch.

Distraction and Regret

peace

Futility and Disgust

It must be winter. I seem to have already been hit upside the head by futility and disgust.

The letter that ran in the News-Gazette (loosely based on the letter that Gregoire Melville wrote, below) was a travesty, stripped of humor and value, in order -- no doubt -- to fit into the Gazette stylebook.

What's the point? I've given up writing to the newspaper before. I'm taking winter off of even reading the nonsense.

Stephen Gaskin

I had to postpone an earlier post until it appears in the newspaper, for those who may wonder what happened to it.

Anyway, I met Stephen Gaskin at a book signing years after his 1960s hippie bible appeared in San Francisco. Were the Grateful Dead referring to him in the song "St. Stephen"?

Here's what the Amazon review says about the book:

Book Description
Monday Night Class, a weekly event in San Francisco conducted by Stephen Gaskin during the heyday of the hippies, attracted over 2,000 people each week. This new edition is a collection of the original transcripts from these historic meetings, with new commentary by Stephen from today's persepective.

About the Author
Stephen Gaskin is an active speaker on the alternative lifestyles circuit and was inducted into the Counter Culture Hall of Fame in Amsterdam in November 2004. In the 60s he ws renknown as a "hippie guru" and along with 250 of his students founded The Farm, one of the largest alternative communities in the U.S. He lives on The Farm in Tennessee.

My early edition (with only the mandala, not the title), was inscribed by Gaskin years after publication. He wrote, "To Greg, who was part of Monday Night Class, too. Stephen Gaskin."

Everything since the 1960s has been, at best, a simulation of reality, the raw energy of those days. What generation is going to come up with something truly revolutionary? When? Are we all just going to melt?

Letter to the editor

It's official. Champaign-Urbana is the epicenter of a surreal, Grumpy Old Man universe. In Sunday's paper alone, the former mayor of Champaign, Dannel McCollum, blasted the works of Impressionist artists (talentless), Picasso (ugly), and Jackson Pollack (nonsense) in favor of Buggereau (who?), whom he describes as a "classicist."

Buggereau may have been a typo or homosexual Freudian slip or a stripper's stage name or a mistake on the News-Gazette's fact checking desk. There was a 19th century artist named William-Adolphe Bouguereau who painted porcelain-skinned full-frontal female nudes. For some time, grumpy old men have been known to prefer naked dancing forest nymphs to abstract colorful squiggles.

In the same issue, David Eisenman complained at length about those whippersnappers and their newfangled electronic toys. Let's outlaw them!

Another outraged grump dictated that the government should round up and bus 12 million Mexicans across the border. Do people realize that their names appear at the ends of these letters?

And then there are the inevitable letters from Henry Seiter, his fans and his progeny, which offer bizarre, pretzel-logical versions of American history and religion. None of these letters can be written without using epithets and taunts, words like "pinhead" or "loony," to describe those who have other interpretations of reality.

I won't bother to mention Glenn Poshard or the NCAA.

Grumpiness has become the new national addiction, from Lou Dobbs to Rush Limbaugh. We shouldn't be surprised. War, lies, torture, greed, Blackwater and the Religious Right, the aversion to science – the hallmarks of the last half a decade, are bound to take their toll on our reason and compassion and humanity.

One good thing to come out of the Bush Administration may be the dawning realization that the USA is not necessarily the best or the only place in the world to live.

We have a right to be grumpy.


Gregoire Melville

Gina Lollobrigida

As I said, I'm bored with listing the people I have met or seen or talked to or peed standing next to and so forth. I still haven't told the good stories about Tom Waits or Werner Herzog or David Johannsen and John Woo or on and on ad nauseum.

I realized that the reason I didn't ask people for autographs is because, I didn't really see the need to accumulate such things. In the same way, why am I accumulating, writing, these stories now?

I had thought that, when I had finished my own list, I would start listing names of people that friends of mine had met. There could be no end to this. I should be baking bread right now.

But just today, I got an email from Banjo who flew back to NYC after a good visit and poker night here. He wrote,

"Flight from Chicago was uneventful save for the fact that Gina Lollobrigida was on the plane. She was a parody of an aged movie star wearing large red sequined sunglasses, a red cape with a black dress and black boots and a big brown wig. I stood next to her and her friend at baggage claim but didn't ask for an autograph. If I did I was going to tell her that I was Gregoire Melville and a distant relative of the novelist but I chickened out."

John Landis

I'm bored with this. And there are still so many people yet to name. That's the way things are for me, often. I like short term projects. I like to do something, see it through, and appreciate the result, and then -- like Tibetan sand mandalas -- destroy them.

Or, stuff them in a drawer for rediscovery years later.

I haven't made a YouTube movie in months. And I have a lot of subscribers. They'll just have to wait.

John Landis was another elevator encounter. We were getting in at the same time. It was at Cannes. He was with someone and I was with someone.

I asked him, "Are you John Landis?" because I wanted to explain to him how I had worked on his movie, The Blues Brothers, in Chicago as a paid extra -- a Military Guardsman (among hundreds). They even insisted I get a military crewcut, in their effort to throw money out the window and make the most expensive movie they could. (My haircut would be hidden under a helmet, but that didn't matter.)

He just glared at me and said nothing. So, I never got to tell him what I wanted to say. Now, if I had it to do over again, I'd say, "And your movies suck, too, you has-been egomaniac."

Jerry Van Dyke, Craig T. Nelson

I might as well throw these two out at the same time, because they were at the same performance of "How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying" (the revival with Matthew Broderick, although I hesitate to mention that I saw the original, with Robert Morse, when I was in high school, my first musical) when we met Laurie Metcalf.

Both Van Dyke and Nelson, stars of the TV show "Coach" which I'd never seen, were wearing leather jackets and being escorted by sexy, younger women. Van Dyke was flanked by two. I stopped him in the aisle during intermission, since they were seated close by, and told him we lived thirty miles from where he grew up in Danville, Illinois.

"The old stomping grounds," he said.

Laurie Metcalf

By no means have I exhausted this ongoing list of encounters with the famous.

Laurie Metcalf is a great actor. Most people know her from her role on the TV show Roseanne. In fact, when I ran into her in a theatre lobby, I am sure she thought I was just another idiot TV fan. I'm sure I behaved like one, since Ernie was with me - he was probably only about 13 at the time -- and I said to him, right in front of her, about her, "Do you know who this is?"

She smiled that kind of grimace she has anyway and I scrambled to clarify myself to her.

"You were wonderful in Balm in Gilead," I said, or something like that, hoping to have redeemed myself.

Her performance as a naive prostitute in that Lanford Wilson play off-Broadway was electrifying and at one point she gave a monologue that literally stopped the show. There was a 15-minute standing ovation IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SHOW! It was heart-stopping.

So I respect and admire Laurie Metcalf and I'm glad I met her, even though she probably didn't return the favor.

Next up: Lanford Wilson

Lily Tomlin

When Lily Tomlin's one-woman show, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, first appeared on Broadway, I was privileged to attend.  The audience was not only rapt by Tomlin's tour de force, they responded as a single body, sighing and crying and gasping in unison.  I've only had that happen a couple of times in the theatre, when the audience was so synchronized with the performer, so unified.  This was one.

We waited for Tomlin by the stage door.  We were surprised when she emerged with her crew of friends, especially because they looked exactly like some of the crazy people she had just described in her show.  Apparently they were not fictional at all -- like the woman who had shaved her head on one side only and dyed it green -- but the people she really knew.

She and her friends said their hellos and then crawled into their limo.

Merl Reagle

Merl Reagle isn't really famous, except to puzzlers, I guess.  He appears in the movie Wordplay and is a frequent contributor to Will Shortz's program.  He writes a Sunday size puzzle weekly that appears in the New York Observer as well as elsewhere.

I was attending an alternative newsweekly convention in Nashville one year and Reagle was in the lunch line next to me, where I stood working on that day's New York Times puzzle.  This, of course, was the start of a conversation.  We ate lunch together and I later subscribed to Reagle's puzzle for our paper, The Octopus.  The first time we ran it, the designer (reluctant to allow a puzzle into the paper) ran the grid with all the answers, instead of blank.

The paper folded about a year later.

Philip Glass

Philip Glass is 70 this week.  I like his music, just in the way I like Gertrude Stein.  It's repetitive.  In conjunction with an appearance of the ensemble locally, I had a phone interview with him.  I tried to pin him down on some of the weaker aspects of his work, his score for "Mishima," for example.  He was having none of it.  He likes his own music and he listens to his own music.  Good for him.  Happy birthday.

I have never met Bush

And now, more Devendra...

Dennis Hopper

Apocalypse Now was being given test screenings at Cannes, introduced (in two versions) by Francis Ford Coppola.  I went to both.

At the same time, hoping to regain some recognition,  Dennis Hopper was trying to hawk his post-Easy Rider movie, The Last Movie.  He hadn't yet been "re-discovered" and legitimized.  He seemed desperate.  Not many people came to the screening room to see his experimental narrative movie and he boasted that it had won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival years before, but had bombed commercially.  He was trying to get a new re-distribution deal.  It wasn't working.  I was just a critic.  I tried to listen to him and express understanding for his lack of favor in Hollywood.

Apocalypse Now changed that for him, but The Last Movie continues to be an obscure oddity.  It still isn't on DVD. He made it back into the limelight.  He does television commercials.

Sirio Maccione

The owner of Le Cirque, Sirio Maccione, appeared at the end of our meal at Le Cirque -- to bid us a good evening. Everything about the meal -- the food, the service, the atmosphere, the suspension of time -- was a perfection bordering on the magical, and this unexpected appearance of Maccioni was just the final surprise.

We still talk about that night. The waiters seemed to materialize out of the air, providing for our wants and needs without our having to speak them aloud. When I wrote an article about the experience -- and forwarded a copy to Le Cirque -- Maccione wrote me back and invited me to attend his "circus" again. Many years later, I did just that.

I have never been and will never be rich, but I felt perfectly comfortable dining amid the Manhattan billionaires and their trophy wives, who spoke with us casually, jokingly, letting us into their world. I hesitate to imagine aspiring or becoming accustomed to such a life; some part of me has resisted even middle-class comforts and complacency. But, for a night or two, now and then, it can be an enlightenment.

Here is the caveat. I don't think I would have enjoyed the meal, the wine, and the evening in the same way -- that soaring feeling of unearned privilege -- if I had paid for the meal. I am not driven by money and I make no apologies for this, but I do know how to appreciate.

I have not strayed far from the Abbie Hoffman taunt that everything should be free. And what did Patti Smith mean when she sang about "Free Money"?

Consider the lilies.

Ellen Burstyn

It was always one of my favorite moments of the Cannes Film Festival, when the city hosted the world press at a luncheon on the outskirts of the city. Wild strawberries grew on the grounds; the wine flowed freely; the food was served by three-star chefs. This was a picnic of epic proportions, even though it did cut into our hectic movie-going times.

The world press, however, are gluttons and pigs, diving into the buffet of incredible foods and stuffing themselves shamelessly.

One year, it was the 100th anniversary of Charlie Chaplin's birth and Ellen Burstyn came to the luncheon to actually carve and serve pieces from the Charlie Chaplin cake that was created for the occasion.

I talked to her about "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore" briefly. I was a little in awe of her and the formality she maintained, even while acting as a cake cutter. Not every movie star would pass out cake to the press.

Rudolph Nureyev

Nureyev would only count as a sighting, not an encounter, had I not snapped a picture of him which I later sold to some publication.  He was walking alone, glancing about.  I don't know why he was attending the festival.  He exuded a certain sexuality in his gait and glance.

Malcolm McDowell

Malcolm McDowell got into an elevator with me and Jenny Jobst once.  It was a corner elevator in the Palais des Festivals, rarely used.  He popped in and started talking rapidly about heaven knows what.  Jenny and I just looked at each other.  Whatever he was going on about, we never did figure out.  He seemed to be trying to be funny.

Kirk Douglas

Kirk Douglas was taking a leak in the Palais bathroom the same time as I was.  He was wearing a cream-colored suit.  He seemed discomforted by the old lady attendant in the bathroom.  He seemed discomforted by the whole festival process.  He made some off-the-cuff comment about the movie we'd just watched and which he clearly did not understand.  I think he just wanted to go home and get into old clothes.

More famous people coming soon...

In the meantime, here's Devendra....

John Waters

I watched Hou Hsiao-Hsien's film, Cafe Lumiere, this afternoon.  It's his homage to Ozu and I found it inscrutable and wonderful enough that I put it back in the player and watched it all over a second time.  I didn't figure I'd have anybody to discuss this movie with, though. 

The guy in the video store tonight, as I was stocking up on the other Hou Hsiao-Hsien movies I've missed, asked me if I also knew the cinematographer Christopher Doyle .  He knew everything about Hou's movies.

Someone likes to tell the (true) story of how I was hitchhiking back to Illinois from New York City one time when I found a bundle of one-dollar bills on the Geo Washington bridge.  It was enough that I turned around, went back to the city, and used the money to catch a double feature of John Waters films.

The story of John Waters is fascinating.  The fact that he is mainstream now ("Hairspray") is almost inconceivable.

The last time I was in New York, exploring the Summer of Love exhibit at the Whitney Museum, I ran into Waters.  I asked for his autograph and I talked about the play I'd seen the night before, a revival of the Living Theatre's The Brig.  It was a pleasant encounter and we parted.  I had scheduled myself to see the latest Bruno Dumont film, Flanders, that afternoon and I hopped subways to get in the downtown vicinity of the theatre.  As I waited, Waters also walked up. 

"I'm not stalking you," I told him.

Waters was meeting his group of oddly geeky looking friends.  They sat around discussing films, giving star ratings to this and that, and for all the world behaving like a goofball cinema club at any university. I envied them. They weren't glamorous in the least.  And I really liked the Dumont film, although not as much as Dumont's Humanity, which is one of my three favorite movies.  I watch it again and again.

John Malkovich

He's from around here, too, more or less, and went to college with local actor Gary Ambler.

Apart from seeing him at Ebertfest and shooting him in a video for YouTube, I once saw him walking his poodle on the Upper East Side in Manhattan.