cutriver

(Thursday slightly drunk after two cans of 1664, pulling sensually at the hairs beneath my navel, listening to 'Kim Chords', the last track on the latest Sonic Youth LP, still slightly inebriated, anyway, from four hours of La Belle Noiseuse in the apres-midi, and just revelling, basking, in my twelve-thirteen year relationship with the greatest avant-rock group on the planet, this is happiness, this is joy, this is some kind of wonderful...

*******************

So, not quite ready yet to begin my new life (Ha! what did you expect?), feeling tired and discouraged, feeling, in fact, rather like a sort of sub-species unworthy of fraternising with the strange human beings with whom I share my habitat, mysterious creatures capable of affection, interaction and reproduction, concepts that are not merely hard for me to understand but belong to an entirely different rung of the evolutionary ladder which i am simply not designed to reach; as usual when feeling this way, I seek comfort in works of art.
The Cinmatheque on Saturday night was showing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now I'm sure you've all seen 2001 many times and for me even to attempt to say anything about it is beyond futile: to attempt to describe it using such inadequate tools as words is somehow to insult its perfection. I will restrict myself to three comments of almost breathtaking banality:
1) the soundtrack alone is a work of terrifying genius;
2) the abstract final section is surely one of the most daring things ever attempted in mainstream cinema;
3) its symbolism is properly inexhaustible.
Maurice Dantec calls 2001 and Apocalypse Now the Odyssey and Illiad of modern America. He's probably right.

But did I speak to the young woman on the metro with the beautiful brown eyes who had also come out of 2001 and was looking as startled and dreamy as I was (sidr, the French say)? I did not. Did I speak to the skinny, Scandinavian-looking blonde who shared my route from Miromesnil to Place de Clichy? I did not. Did I, earlier in the day, make contact when I saw, at the terrasse of a local caf, the same sweetly camp old man who had, earlier in the week, fixed me with his unmistakeably lubricious gaze over the top of his little round glasses, and whom I had hoped to see again? I did not.
Do you see a pattern emerging here, folks? Hell, my life might be quite exciting if I ever actually did anything, if all the people I mention in these journals were actually people in my life rather than a combination of memory, fantasy and regret that I piece together in order to make myself sound more interesting...

**********************

There were a lot of young people at the Cinmatheque to watch 2001. For Jacques Rivette's Paris nous appartient on Sunday afternoon, however, there is nothing but old fogies. Practically every head in the auditorium was bald! I exaggerate a little. But the only young people in the audience were East Asian. I have noticed this before: there are a lot of East Asian students in Paris, as there are everywhere else, and they seem to take a lot more interest in our cultural heritage than their white European counterparts. I don't know what this means. Does this mean something?
Anyway, I take a secret pleasure in knowing that, in two or three years' time, when students watch Paris nous appartient on their Histoire du cinma courses, it is my book they will turn to to find out what it all means. And what does it all mean? Well that would be telling. But one thing's for sure, the film is not, as some critics have suggested, just a big game, or some kind of practical joke; this is a film about the most serious of subjects - about suicide and murder, madness and despair. Rivette was never this serious again...

On the way home, I stop by the Muse d'Art Moderne in the Palais de Tokyo to check out the exhibition of Richard Kern's borderline-pornographic S&M artworks. I had only planned to stay for half an hour or so, but there's a projection of his films and I end up staying over two hours. Of the films, 1985's Manhattan Love Suicides (more suicide...) is cute and rather witty, and provides me with an opportunity to see David Wojnarowicz (sp?), author of the queer-lit classics Close to the Knives and Memories that Smell like Gasoline, whom I've been trying to track down for about ten years on the strength of these titles alone (and I mean just the titles: I've never actually read the books). Otherwise, Kern's work is a little grubby and rather surprisingly beholden to old-fashioned Catholic guilt. A decadent western culture that still finds sexual violence titillating and transgressive two hundred years after the Marquis de Sade is, ultimately, rather sad and embarrassing. It's a slow process, this evolution...