The Salt Marsh

The salt marsh in Broad Channel weathered the storm. The lights are still out in The Rockaways and Howard Beach and the town of Broad Channel has been devastated to the point where a fishing vessel presently makes it home in the middle of a traffic island. The first impression is that it’s some new gimmick, a come on for a fish place, but then the mind begins to assimilate the debris that lines the curbs and sidewalks in front of the darkened storefronts and houses, many of which may never be habitable again. A once thriving community has been turned into a ghost town and yet amidst it all the marsh nestled in its own little inlet in Jamaica Bay is imperturbable, a complex organism with a built-in staying power. The beauty of the marsh is almost taunting amidst the scene of wholesale destruction in which a few weary survivors stanch themselves up against another storm, an imminent Northeaster. Nietzsche once said that "what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger."  In the dusk the marsh is almost defiant. It’s shrubs and weeds, its little plot of mud and sand have little to defend and hence are harder to defeat. The sirens are still howling in the distance, but along the spit of land, the mood is curiously serene. The marsh is like a Buddhist monk, his body perfectly calm, as the river of thought passes him by.

A Matter of Taste?

“A good risotto is a fine thing, but it isn’t going to give you insight into other people, allow you to see the world in a new way, or force you to take an inventory of your soul,” says the venerable essayist William Deresiewicz in the Sunday Review section of the Times (“A Matter of Taste," NYT, 10/26/12). Escoffier may have propounded a philosophy of eating, but he was no Epicurus for whom the understanding of the senses led to philosophical notions like “the golden mean.”  Earlier in his essay Deresiewicz remarks about America’s growing obsession with food as a form of high culture, “what has happened is not that food has led to art, but that it has replaced it. Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known—in the days of the rising postwar middle class…as culture. It’s costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseuership…It is a badge of membership into the higher classes …Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.” The fact is that “foodism” is just  the latest manifestation of the middle brow and ersatz in American culture that Dwight MacDonald identified when he coined the term “mid cult." If you were seeking  entree into the realms of the cultivated you could subscribe to a tony magazine like The New Yorker, which provided not only a baedeker of what was good or bad, but excerpts and abridgements which afforded short cuts. Why read all of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King when you could read the excerpt? But of the ways to arrive, food is the most reprehensible. Yes, it’s work to become educated, but having to pay exorbitant prices for meager portions of heartless food (that is also not hearty) is likely to make you feel empty in more ways then one. Get a horse.

Repulsion

People don’t understand mental illness is probably the simplest way to describe Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. The film which is currently being revived at Film Forum is an essay in at least two forms of subjectivity: that of the omniscient viewer of Carol, the disturbed woman played with such enigmatic brilliance by the youthful Catherine Deneuve, and of Carol herself. Carol is not some urban neurotic out of a Woody Allen film. She exhibits the kind of symptoms (she hallucinates and hears voices) that cause sufferers to jump out of windows. In her case, the violence is unleashed on those around her, an infatuated young man Colin (John Fraser), a greedy and lustful landlord (Patrick Wymark) and her sister’s husband Michael (Ian Hendry), the only one who escapes unscathed. Deneuve’s beauty is a perfect foil for the subjective states of those around her since she is such a cynosure (particularly when she walks around wraithlike in her diaphanous nightgown). This is epitomized in the scene when the landlord, her second victim, comes into the apartment, looks around at the disarray, which unbeknownst to him already includes a corpse in a tub, and says it looks like a “nuthouse,” a piece of humor worthy of Hitchcock. Before coming to his own end as he attempts to rape Carol, he tells her “a cup of hot tea and an aspirin and you’ll be as right as rain.” The world of insanity is where Polanski is expert and the film was oddly prescient since the director himself would come home to face the carnage wreaked by the Manson gang on his own home only a few years later. The iconography of madness begins with an eyeball, segue ways to a beauty salon customer receiving a mud facial and ends with the camera closing in on the eyes of the already distant Carol in family snapshot from childhood. A rotting piece of rabbit is the centerpiece of the decay, but roots of sprouting potatoes soon replace the ticking of the clock as indicators of time passing. Polanski has at least as good a grip on the subject of subjectivity as Bishop Berkeley and maybe better, but the Bishop’s universe had built-in insurance against implosion in the form of God. Repulsion, shot in wonderfully stark black and white, was made one year before Blow Up and much of the shooting take place in what looks like Chelsea’s Sloane Square, the epicenter of the swinging London that Antonioni would capture in Technicolor a year later. La Dolce Vita (l960) is also referenced in the form of a mocking Leaning Tower of Pisa postcard Carol receives from her sister’s boyfriend. But Carol’s episodes, the famous crack in the wall, the fantasy of being molested, the “repulsion,” she experiences, all center on sexuality and in that sense, for all Polanski’s reputation, the film functions as a kind of psychiatric jeremiad against the liberties of the era in which it’s situated. Repulsion also antedated Bergman’s Persona, another film which dealt with the break from reality, by one year though perhaps the character closest to Carol is Shakespeare’s Ophelia who was created almost four centuries before.

Defenestration

Phtograph:Richard Drew/Associate Press

Defenestration means being thrown out of the window. Jan Masaryk, the democratically elected President Czechoslovakia was defenestrated when the Communists took over in l948. There had been historical precedents for this going back to the 15th and 17th centuries when there were two separate acts of defenestration in Prague. The Prague Defenestrations are in fact now a tourist attraction.The artist Carl Andre was suspected of having defenestrated his wife the Cuban born artist Ana Mendieta, though he claimed it was suicide. The Falling Man was of course the famous image from 9/11which later became the title of a novel by Don Delillo. After the stock market crash of l929 there were a number of defenestrations by despairing investors who’d lost everything. The soul singer Donny Hathaway reputedly was suffering from a depression that made him jump from his New York hotel room, though there were those who suspected foul play. Defenestration is such an elegant word and yet the acts associated with it derive from political conflict, domestic violence, financial ruin, clinical depression and in the case of the falling man, one of the greatest acts of terrorism in history. No one has ever jumped out of a window because they thought they could, though there have been some exceptional cases where children, falling from unprotected windows, miraculously survived. When you see someone like Phillip Petit effortlessly walking on a high wire high above Manhattan, you begin to wonder how agile man can be. Petit is a human fly who like Spiderman might be the only man or woman on earth who could turn defenestration into a sport.

The New York Times Magazine

Back in the 60’s pre-adolescent boys and sometimes their fathers eagerly awaited The New York Times Magazine for the lingerie ads. By then the publication was an old warhorse, but a stately one with the kind of in-depth pieces that The New Yorker is singular in running today. Some of those pieces became celebrities in their own right and are still remembered. Today you get lost in the loopy graphic design of the post-modernist skeleton of a magazine-that-once-was before you can find any ads or articles. Making your way through the Times Magazine graphics makes the Amazonian rain forest look like a piece of cake. Perhaps the design is there to cover up the vapid content. If you want a taste of the great ideas and news coverage that once characterized the Times Magazine you have to go to what is now the best section of The Times, the Week in Review. Once called The News of the Week in Review, this newly revamped section has intellectual firepower while its fey cousin is only a poseur, a restoration fop, a dandy living in the house of an Enlightenment intellectual. It’s hard to believe that these are two sections of the same paper. Of course if you’re a reader of the Thursday or Sunday Styles sections you’ll understand that there’s plainly a cabal in The Times establishment. The lingerie may be hung out to dry, but there are boys and girls who just want to have fun.