En attendant Godot

Waiting is literally a pregnant activity. It is what expectant mothers do of course, but it’s something that bears fruits that are not always the anticipated end of the act itself. Common situations in which people wait are airports (where flights are frequently delayed), auto repair shops (where cars are rarely if ever ready when they’re supposed to be) and most dramatically the waiting rooms of offices where patients are often waiting for results. Those being tried for crimes have to wait for the verdict of the jury and you’ve undoubtedly seen these dramatic moments when the judge reads a guilty or innocent verdict based on a jury’s deliberations on TV. In the most dramatic instances life itself is at stake. But in everyday life, which is filled with moments which have little to do with criminal matters, the end result of waiting can be rather prosaic. Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot and lots of people mistakenly think the play is about God or answers. But Beckett wrote Godot in French and the French title, En attendant Godot, “while waiting for Godot,” throws a light on what the playwright was getting at. The play is not about waiting for anything to happen, as the theater critic Richard Gilman liked to point out. It’s about what one does while one is waiting. So the next time you find yourself waiting for a hamburger, on one of those long lines a Shake Shack, don't even entertain the notion that there is an end in sight. Once you get your food, you're simply going to scarf it down. What’s more important is what happens, the interactions, the perceptions, the conversations you might have, before you satiate your appetite.

Separated at Birth: Keith Richards and Samuel Beckett

Two of the most iconic faces of the 20^th and 21^st Century look curiously alike, those of Samuel Beckett and Keith Richards, and you wonder whether maybe Beckett could have been a fitting accompanist to "Sympathy for the Devil” or conversely whether Richards, might have been a perfect Nagg, the father of the biblical Hamm, who inhabits a dustbin in Endgame. It would be weird to see Richards performing without his axe, but the same bemused expression, a cultivated stoicism, an inimitable cocktail of pomposity, demandingness and complacency would make the rock star the perfect vehicle for the Beckett character. And imagine Beckett as a Stone, certainly he’s stone faced enough. Imagine the legendary perfectionism employed in the service of Richards' improvisatory style. Legendarily Richards never performs the same riff twice. His “Sympathy for the Devil” is always sui generis, which might not fit with the intractable nature of Beckett’s mis en scene, but certainly conforms to the spirit of his oeuvre and its all around attempt to render fractured consciousness. If consciousness is a crucifixion, then Beckett provides the stigmata. On the most basic level the great playwright and rock star so totally share the same weathered look that one might assume they’d both either attended the same Parisian sun tan salon or that both had competed in the America’s cup in another life. The lined faces, the haunted eyes, Beckett and Richards are fellow travelers—in fact ontological twins. Beckett may never have tried his hand at rock, but Richards gave his writing career a start with a very Beckettian sounding memoir called Life.

Notfilm

Esse est percipi, to be is to be perceived is the famous line of the l8th century Anglo-Irish subjectivist philosopher Bishop Berkeley that Samuel Beckett disputed in his sole screenplay, Film--in which Buster Keaton played the leading role. Would Beckett have said, "to be perceived is to die?" Film, shot in l964, was commissioned by Beckett’s American publisher Barney Rosset, directed by the renowned theater director Alan Schneider and shot by Boris Kaufman the cinematographer whose older brother was Denis Kaufman aka Dziga Vertov director of the iconic Man With a Movie Camera (1929). All of this is more significant than it even sounds since Beckett shared the protomodernist rapture with celluloid that’s the basic theme of the Dziga Vertov film;  at one point in his career he even applied to study with Eisenstein, while at the same time experiencing a rejection of photography not dissimilar to that of a body rejecting an organ transplant. Notfilm,  which recently completed a run at the Anthology Film Archives, is Ross Lipman’s movie about the making of Film. But Notfilm is less a documentary than a filmic homage to the original, adopting the form of the Beckett work in which the world that is being sought by the camera vanishes before the viewer’s eyes. Partly due to the vicissitudes of age, Rosset and the famous Beckett actress Billie Whitelaw (whose legendary performance in Not I, the film's title references) are interview subjects whose very being seems to dissolve in the course of Lipman’s encounters with them. Replication is a little like what water does to the Wicked Witch; in a famous moment of the original Film Buster Keaton’s vision of himself is met with great horror recalling the dopplegangers in both the Borges version of Dostoevsky’s The Double: A Petersburg Poem, The Other and also the terrified look of the nurse in the famous Odessa steps sequence of Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). The plot of Film is rather simple an Eye (E) is seeking to capture an object (O) and Lipman brilliantly frames the narrative movement of the Beckett work as a chase film, which segues perfectly from the heyday of silent film out of which Keaton emerged (Chaplin had been offered and declined the role). Lipman is a little like an obsessed lover who is competing for attention with the object of his adulation, only to fall short in almost oedipal way. Yet Notfilm is loaded with wonderful perceptions  (“Soundlessness became for Beckett a metaphysical campaign,” Lipman comments at one point) and invaluable archival research.

Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict

watercolor by Hallie Cohen

Lisa Immordino Vreeland’s Peggy Guggenheim: Art Addict illustrates all that is wrong with the art world and all also all that is wrong with being an artist, to the extent that it underscores the way in which narcissistic grandiosity can camouflage itself as a spiritual quest. As she's depicted in the movie Guggenheim is truly repugnant (though the despicable nature of her character also exudes the sadness of the poor little not so rich girl). In 1939, at the outbreak of the war, she spends $40,000 to acquire the works of many artists who desperately needed money to escape the Nazi onslaught. Hitler had in fact pointed his finger at modernism in his l937 Degenerate Art Exhibition. She picked up works by the likes Leger and Brancusi and in the course bedded literally any artist who came into her path. Writers weren’t exempt. She’d once spent four days in a hotel room bed with Beckett, who only got up to get sandwiches left at the door by room service. It’s an anecdote which makes one realize that even the most brilliant and demanding of wordsmiths can still be afflicted with bad taste. She was a bottom feeder, who had a good "nose" and hung around with talents like Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst--to whom she was unhappily married. Speaking of her famed proboscis, she seemed to take pride in a botched up rhinoplasty that even Cyrano might have had second thoughts parading about. Her sister Hazel's two children      had fallen off the roof of the Surrey Hotel and the art addict, really sex addict, that Vreeland’s movie paints was not much of a mother either. Soul Murder is the title of a book by the analyst Leonard Shengold and Guggenheim’s emotional abandonment of her two children Pegeen (who died of an overdose) and Sindbad Vail fits the bill entirely. When she returned to the states in l942 she established a gallery on 57^th Street, The Art of This Century (she described her at the time scandalous book Out of This Century: Confesssions of an Art Addict as being about “fucking”) in which she showed the work of Still, Baziotes, Pollock, de Chirico, Rothko among others. She exhibited the works of both Robert de Niro’s mother and father. When asked what role she played in the development of 20th century American art she said, “I gave birth to it. I was the midwife.” She was never known for her modesty. Mary McCarthy wrote a highly critical story about Guggenheim called "The Cicerone." Merriam-Webster defines cicerone as “a guide who conducts sightseers.” The portrait the movie paints, whether intentionally or not, is of a promoter and impresario doing for modernism what Phil Spector did for rock 'n roll. Actually the two had something in common. Both had tremendous commercial instincts and an obsessional streak when it came to sex. Guggenheim said in her later years, “I wish I were young enough to have lovers.” In Spector’s case the results were a little more dire. He was convicted of second degree murder in the death of the actress Lana Clarkson. Still she succeeded in collecting some great works as well as men and her legacy, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, now resides on the site of the Venetian palazzo where she lived for 30 years.