It’s a big picture. It appears to be dead noon, under shrilling grasshoppers.
The heat looks as heavy as a vice.
Off center, a peasant, wearing a pair of
eloquently battered boots, dozes under his hat.
A metal pail that once held a mid-day meal
pewters dully in the weeds.
Straw-yellow grays ride up to a line of hay ricks,
low hills, a sky pocked with little clouds.
A woman sits by the peasant’s side, slouching forward,
half asleep, awkward, unaware of the observer,
for a moment lost in a wild country of thought
that fills her thick features,
her surprised and dismayed black eyes,
with . . . well, what might it be?
shock?
fear?
an unexpected, and unwelcome,
discovery? –
Whatever it is, it came to her as she drifted asleep,
and thrust her awake with astonished pain.
There’s no way to know: the painter has told us
only what we see.
We know nothing but this fragment,
nothing before and nothing after –
a quick snapshot in oil
on the magisterial canvas.
Then it’s gone.
You step back into the museum crowd,
and her blind, wondering face,
frozen on canvas for as long as the canvas will last,
disappears behind a wall of cloth and backs
into the gallery’s subdued glow,
and the sounds of shuffling feet,
and the bored, suspicious gaping of the museum guards,
and the scratching scratching scratching on paper pads of art students. . . .
It does not disappear:
it follows you out, into the sun,
nagging, futilely, yet with an odd sweetness –
you ponder the woman in the picture as you might
the most obscure philosophical questions,
the metaphysics of loss, the holiness of unknowing,
or a lover’s impenetrable enigma:
a strangely enchanting question that has no answer.
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins) and the founder and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
Such a shipwreck of flowers – a petaled wreck
on an azure sea, of blood-red salmon
stained with peach, with a steady clear
tolling of deep bells under a sheer blue sky
half-deafened in the gale – flowers staining
the sea in disintegrating color, like the heads of children
drowning – and the magnificent ship slowly dissolves
in the whirlwind of its wreckage,
a dream of itself, a littering of its losses
to wind and tide, a fatal cry of roses
brimming its mouth – the thunder heaves a shout,
and the sea rumbles like a vast
train in a tunnel – a flare of lightning
disappears, silent as the shipwreck sinks,
spilling its wreckage across the white floor
of a seasick ballroom, bales of flowers
splitting till the petals cover the wastes,
like the Roman’s feasters, drowning them in roses.
The ghost of a sea swallows the ghost of a ship
under the ghost of a sky: listen, you can hear them,
the ancient sailors singing like the sirens,
calling you to sea – to sea – to sea –
steel gray, enamel blue, and white with foam,
to join the ships that blossom like so many roses
and scatter their petals as they perish, and drown, and sing,
like them, calling the next generation
to sea – to sea – like us – well? will you brave it?
will you build your ships of roses and brave the sea?
or is its storm a terror worse than childhood’s,
not to be escaped, the waves and wind
the white of a cage, the ice and snow cold bars
in a burning sky that seals the world and twists
down on our heads even as we heave
out into the open sea, our white sails out
like butterfly wings, our hopes so many hooks
the wild sea can catch and hold us with,
like love itself, a bark, a cage, a brand?
Shall we build our ships of roses and brave the sea,
that rose of fire, garden where winds take root
and grow into forests?
Though night is coming, shall we aim our bow toward the dark,
though the storm is coming, shall we spot the thunderhead
and steel our sheets till they thrum in the underwind
and the water flails and hisses over the bulkheads
and churns and cries and crashes in our wakes
like an arrow thrusting us ahead, to sea,
to sea, far out, pushing us till we fly
into the storm? Shall we build our ships
of roses? Shall we flower over the whirlwind sea?
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org). “The Rose Shipwreck” was originally published in Caveat Lector.
Josette Day as “Belle” and Jean Marais as “the Beast” in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.
GIVE ME BACK MY BEAST!
La Belle et la Bête
An Opera by Philip Glass
(based on the film by Jean Cocteau)
The Philip Glass Ensemble, with vocal soloists
Conducted by Michael Riesman
To celebrate Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, the Philip Glass Ensemble came to San Francisco to perform the magisterial minimalist’s opera, La Belle et la Bête (“Beauty and the Beast,” based on Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s celebrated fairy tale).
What makes this work unique is not that Glass based his work on a film; he had already done so with the first of a trilogy of works based on work by the unforgivably talented, unapologetically gay, and compulsive appropriator of surrealist gestes, Jean Cocteau: the chamber opera Orphée.
Here he went a good deal further. He stripped out the entire original soundtrack (which took some gall, as it’s a very fine one, composed by Georges Auric, an original member of the bad boys of French modern music, “Les Six”) and replaced it with an original score, with singing parts for the original spoken ones, the entirety performed live as the film is screened overhead.
And he chose a nearly perfect source, as Cocteau’s 1946 film – with actors Jean Marais, Josette Day, and Raoul Marco, and handsome camera work by Henri Alaken – considered by many critics to be Cocteau’s masterpiece, is a work itself of near-operatic fantasy.
What might have turned out to be one more lamentable exercise in postmodern kitsch is a near-masterpiece, a posthumous collaboration that would probably have tickled the ever-experimenting Cocteau.
The story is almost too well known to recount, yet is told with a few fresh twists: Belle, a Cinderella-like figure, is scorned and exploited by her two wolfish sisters and ne’er-do-well brother, though doted on by a father oblivious to his daughter’s misery – Belle is an unwittingly willing victim, in which those who love her, and even she herself (through an ideology of self-denial that reinforces the victim’s weakness and the power of the dominant – sound familiar?), comply in her servitude. She has a lover, a companion of her irresponsible brother, whom she refuses to marry because she feels bound to take care of her oblivious father, who allows Belle to be bullied and exploited by her two older sisters, who intend to get married and out of the household as soon as they find victims – er, husbands.
The father goes off to the city after promising Belle he will bring her back the only thing she asks for: a rose. After a business venture goes badly awry, he rides back home through a forest at night, where he discovers a magic castle, magically alive, which he enters and is served a feast by magical servants. Later he visits the castle’s garden, where a rosebush blossoms. Remembering his promise, the old man plucks the loveliest rose for his daughter. Upon which the prince of the castle, a hideously deformed monster (in the film, he looks like a giant cat, with sensitive ears that telegraph his feelings, perking him up when he says a prey for his next meal in one of the film’s deftly humorous touches), appears and tells the old man he has committed the one crime that is unforgivable in that castle, and now must die. The old man pleads for his life, and the monster relents, telling him he can go home to give the rose to his daughter, but only if he promises to return.
Once the old man is home again and tells his children of his plight, Belle refuses to let him go back, and goes in his stead, to face death as punishment for her father’s crime. But the monster, upon seeing her, falls instantly in love and instead of killing her, imprisons her in his castle and begins to woo her, even though he is aware that his hideous ugliness makes it impossible for anyone to genuinely love him.
Some men feel a curious self-contempt when they become aware of the strong physical feelings they have for women they admire and love; this story works well as an allegory for this, in an age that likes to pretend it is beyond such callowness.
The film, while never losing its fairy-tale quality, never falls into camp or archness, satire or over-sweetness, even at the dangerous happy-ever-after ending: it has a darkness, a fadedness and grittiness, that gives it, for all its fantasticality, a hardness, an actuality – like any poem worth its salt. This helps make the film’s final transcendence peculiarly credible and moving. Never has wishful thinking had a kinder, more eloquent advocate. (Though the final transformation of the Beast into a prince has disappointed some; is fabled to have made even Marlene Dietrich cry out, “Give me back my Beast!”)
Cocteau, who had made only one film before this one, in 1930, the surrealist classic Blood of a Poet, had refined his cinematic technique so that he knew just how much magic he needed to create in his world: disembodied arms holding candelabra in darkened hallways, disembodied hands pouring wine into the old father’s goblet, the masklike heads carved into the fireplace mantel shifting their eyes in curious glances at the innocent human partaking of his magic fare without so much as a question, Belle moving down a long corridor wafted by curtains blowing from floor-length windows, on invisible wings, without stirring her dress or seeming to move a shoe.
Joining Cocteau’s magie, douceur et poésie is Philip Glass’s. The signature style of the master musical stylist of our time is much in evidence. The essentials are all there: a steady rain of eighth-note ostinati, with the occasional long arpeggio, broken unpredictably by stately static chords; a steady house-music like pace that rarely varies over the 90 minutes of the work; continuous harmonic variation; and a keen sense of orchestration, which his ensemble, which includes several keyboards that can produce a theoretically infinite number of different sounds, makes possible.
Glass does not always avoid the danger of monotony, though what is remarkable is that he fails so rarely. He does this by constantly varying the melodic shape of the rhythmic ostinati and rarely allowing the music to sink into a groove of exact repetition except where such figures work to create a feeling of oppression or suspense. The singing lines are not arias but quickly paced, almost conversational lyrical recitatives, which cut through the ostinati like shards of roughness through what is sometimes an excessive smoothness of musical texture.
One peculiarity (noted by Romancha Pralapa) is that the original film is 94 minutes long, but the opera is only 90 minutes, as Glass, when composing the score, seems to have used a version of the film projected at too fast a speed. The result is that the performers in the film act and speak at just slightly too brisk a tempo, which has the effect of making the film seem a little like old-fashioned screenings of silent films before modern projectors were able to project them at the originally intended speeds.
The Ensemble has this music in their blood and clearly love the score. The admirable singers were Gregory Purnhagen, Hai-Ting Chinn, Marie Mascari, and Peter Stewart.
The opera was performed, as part of San Francisco Performances, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Lam Research Theater.
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
“Why is a Solar Ray Burning My Eye When the Sky Still Lies in Ice?”
Words and Places: Etel Adnan
California College of the Arts Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
Through June 29
A review by Christopher Bernard
This retrospective of the artistic and literary career of the Lebanese artist, poet, novelist, essayist and journalist Etel Adnan is a major event, not only for the local art and literary community, but also for members of the Middle Eastern diaspora in the San Francisco Bay Area, and for the many, displaced by conflict and war, who have had to bestride cultures in an attempt to maintain a complex identity in a constantly and often violently changing world. Etel Adnan’s resilient spirit, her vitality and warmth, glow in the work like a tough flame.
San Franciscans are fortunate to have this wide-ranging exhibition of drawings, paintings, poetry, videos and films by, or about, one of the most important living writers of Middle Eastern descent – it is one of history’s minor ironies that Adnan, who was born in Beirut in 1925, then moved to Paris, where she was just young enough to meet the ageing André Gide, lived in the Bay Area for several decades and only now is getting a major exhibit here (she currently lives in Paris again).
The centerpiece of the exhibit, for me, is Adnan’s arguably most dazzling creations: her leporellos, or folding art books: accordion-like “scrolls,” from a couple of feet to several yards long, some made up of ink or ink-and-watercolor drawings on separate panels or smeared and blotted between folds, others painted in large strokes like Japanese foldout landscapes – displaying drawings like abstract ideograms, smudges of explosions or flowers, of a striking energy and delicacy. Other leporellos include scraps of verse, surreally enigmatic aphorisms, and entire poems, including what may be Adnan’s masterpiece, from 1968: “Funeral March for the First Cosmonaut,” on the death of Yuri Gagarin.
Another leporello of note is “Late Afternoon Poem,” also from 1968, in which the poet and artist asks the perennially relevant question, “Why is a newsman caught in a crossfire while reporting something he does not care to know?” and later asks the profounder one: “Why is a solar ray burning my eye when the sky still lies in ice?” Other leporellos include “Five Senses for One Death” and several smaller ones, including “Sausalito” and “View From My Window.”
The exhibition is of interest not only for the light it sheds on Adnan’s exuberant synergy of talents but also because it places her work in a context of work by other important artists whose work addresses similar themes and follows similar approaches: filmmaker Chris Marker, director and visual artist Rabih Mroué, and the artist collective, The Otolith Group.
Marker, the late doyen of experimental cinema, is represented by his film Junkopia, about the outdoor statues along the bayside in Emeryville, which he made on a visit to the Bay Area in the early 1980s. There are rhymes and echoes between his shots of the bricolage spooks and cast-off avatars on the mudflats of the East Bay and the lively explosions of black, like midnight roses, that populate many of Adnan’s ink paintings.
Fellow Lebanese Mouré is represented by a short film of a house in Beirut being blown to pieces, the film shuttling back and forth in time, so that the exploding house seems to move from ruins back to wholeness, then ahead again to ruins, in a jagged, jazzy rhythm, while a voiceover speaks about the tension between remembering and forgetting, or rather the compulsion to remember and the need to forget: “I am not telling in order to remember. On the contrary, I am telling in order to make sure that I have forgottten, or at least to make sure I have forgotten something . . .”
Lining the walls of the gallery are drawings and oil paintings that Adan has made over the decades: the paintings are often simple geometries that evoke landscapes and still-lifes, some with an awkward luminosity reminiscent of an abstract Morandi.
Also included is a slideshow of articles Adnan wrote in the 1970s for the francophone Beirut newspaper Al-Safa, and a table displaying Adnan’s books, including the modern classics of displacement, Sitt Marie Rose and The Arab Apocalypse.
In the back gallery is an installation where a film about the poet by The Otolith Group is screened, titled (quoting from a poem by Adnan) I See Infinite Distance Between Any Point and Another. The French filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard is quoted as saying it is almost impossible to film a person reading – the experience is entirely internal, indecipherable: the only filmable signs are the blinking of the eyes, pursing of the lips, a deepening frown of concentration, a body changing position on the chair, in bed, on the beach; the turning of a page. How does a person reading Jane Austen look different from a person reading James Joyce or Karl Marx? How would you be able to see the difference from outside? Perhaps the only way to film it would be to film how that person acts after the reading is over: the reader of Jane Austen tries to say witty things to her lover; the reader of Karl Marx organizes a revolution. This film tries to answer Godard’s challenge by filming the act of reading aloud by Adnan of one of her poems, “Sea and Fog,” with intense close-ups of the poet, thus emphasizing the bodily presence of this most spiritual of acts.
Several films will screen during the exhibition, including Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Soad Hosni’s Three Disappearances of Soad Hosni, and the delightfully frank and engaging Autoportrait, a filmed self-portrait (perhaps the first of its kind) by Simone Fattal, Adnan’s longtime companion and publisher.
Along the back wall, an installation film Adan made, a celebration of the California landscape, screens in a continuous loop.
Last but surely not least, as part of the exhibition, local artist Lynn Marie Kirby has created a short, witty online collaboration with Adnan, called “Back, Back Again to Paris”…It is a kind of love letter to the poet.
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press . He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
Music by Morten Lauridsen, Pauline Oliveros, Nik Bartsch and the Tin Hat Trio
Thekla Hammond, Soprano; Lucy Collier, Alto; Marguerite Barron, Alto; Griff Hulsey, Tenor;
Dean Fukawa, Tenor; Glen Leggoe, Bass; Richard Stanton, Bass.
At the San Francisco Performance Art Institute
Performance: May 4, 2013
By Christopher Bernard
I couldn’t make it to the performance of “Continua in Light” at the San Francisco Performance Art Institute, but was invited to the dress rehearsal the evening before.
The stars were in conjunction, the talents were promising, the evening was bright. I was ready for a little adventure.
The institute is housed in a big, blocky facility that looms at the edge of San Francisco Bay with a lonely and mysterious banality, like a building out of a de Chirico painting, in a part of the city I had never heard of: Dogpatch.
Hold on. Here was a moment of surprise, puzzlement, charm. I was intrigued: anyplace called “Dogpatch” has already half won me over.
I was instructed to take the “T” Metro line to 23rd and 3rd Streets. Hold on! Don’t numbered streets run in parallel – except, perhaps, when they meet in infinity?! Where, by all the stars, was this place?
Simple: tucked between the southern end of Portrero Hill and the bay, a mile or so south of AT&T Ballpark, this place where (it seems) all parallel lines meet is an old working class cum industrial neighborhood, made up of half-retired warehouses, abandoned wharves, a neglected electrical generation plant, acres of parking lots, and a string of residential blocks built in the early twentieth century that – partly because it’s so little known, and so comparatively cheap, and partly thanks to the new “T” line – has been discovered over the last few years by artists and the evening set. A dance studio, the aforementioned PAI, and live-work spaces, and a handful of wine bars, clubs and restaurants have made it their home. There’s even a Dogpatch Saloon.
I swallowed my skepticism (which I have found can be as useless as another person’s unquestioning faith) and, trusting my instructor, took the “T” down down down the rabbit hole of Third Street, miraculously, to the implausible intersection.
I’d been told to walk from there toward the bay, go to the second of three walk-in gates at the building’s address, wait to be let in, make smoke signals with my cell phone in case of distress, and, if my psychopomp to this new underworld showed up, accept from him further directions to the mysterious venue.
After walking down two long, lonely blocks through a wasteland of open lots, with a half-abandoned electrical generation plant in the distance, its enormous unused chimney stack, the color of blood-red brick, towering against the sky, I came to a warehouse-like building with the word “STORAGE” painted in huge letters across its western face.
An amiable white-haired gentleman greeted me as if he’d been expressly sent for me, and another invitee (who appeared mysteriously behind me – hold on: where in heaven’s name had he come from? but by now I was starting to get used to this) and I wound our way up to the second floor and through a cluttered maze of artist’s quarters to a dark, cavern-like space at the back, divided in two by a long white backcloth, in front of which was a performance area and a several rows of small pale chairs.
A muttering of greetings in the dark. A moment to find a seat. A quick look around at other shadowy forms come to witness the ritual of rehearsing. A little eavesdropping on furtive laughter and chatter between the women. Then a little flash of light from two hanging bulbs. A stringing together of two hauntingly lovely female voices. And two female dancers work through the motions of a delicate, highly formal dance in a pre-full rehearsal version of the performance to come.
Think of yourself as watching the tracing of a bare-bones sketch before you see the full painting. That is what I felt, though I didn’t realize it at the time.
The air of a rehearsal is often one of casual informality alternating with intense focus. Stagehands put up ladders, remove ladders, disentangle lights, confer, change their minds, try again. The choreographer (the warm, quietly intense Nancy Karp, one of the Bay Area’s most admired dancers and choreographers) suggests this, that, the other thing – sits on the stage with her dancers giving notes, advice, encouragement.
Much of the music is staged live, and part of the rehearsal is strictly musical, with a small chorus singing in subvocalized polyphony off to the side.
As it turns out, only the first two “acts” are being rehearsed tonight. The first, “Gioia and Sine Nomine,” incorporates music and a large video projection. The second adds two graceful and tireless dancers, Diane McKallip and Randee Paufve. The third act, with its promise of audience participation, makes rehearsing it largely moot.
After half an hour, the rehearsal lights are finally disconnected, and a full dress rehearsal takes place. As so often happens, seeing and hearing the parts rehearsed separately gives no idea of the particular magic that will occur when the parts are finally blended.
What I then see is the final bit of mystery in an evening that has been, since its beginning, of a most lovely strangeness.
The opening act begins with a double projection against the large backcloth, of partly abstracted views of what I imagine are immensely long traffic flows at night along busy freeways, seen from a distance, the lights elongated through some sort of filtering, mingling and mixing, in long diamond shapes, pencils and pins of light, with starry foci generating them; the end result being an almost mystical play of light, random and yet directed, free yet orderly, bright and vague and shapely, created from the most ordinary of sources. Another projection includes a single light, stretched vertically so it looks like an electric candle flame. (This projection will return at the end, when the lights, stretched vertically before, will be stretched horizontally before re-emerging into their attendant darkness.)
With these projections are performed two pieces by Morten Lauridsen, “O Nata Lux” and “O Magnum Mysterium,” and the modern classic “Deep Listening,” by Pauline Oliveros, sung by a small, tight chorus and a soprano and alto duet.
There seems to be no break between acts one and two. In act two, the two dancers join the video projections, with piped-in music by Nik Bartsch. The dancers perform, stretch, turn, reach out, reach up, reach forward, turn toward one another, then away, summoning and rejecting, embracing, meeting, parting, on an almost entirely dark stage, with low lighting placed along the stage front that projects the shadows of the dancers against the back-projected screens, creating a complex, immersive fusion of light and shadow woven together by the mildly pop-jazz-flavored score. A strikingly beautiful effect results, as the dancers dance not only with each other, and with their own and each other’s shadows, but with the video projections, continua of light and shadow in darkness and light. It is especially fascinating when the shadow of one of the dancers momentarily disappears (while the other dancer’s shadow remains), and the dancer seems to dance, shadowless, with her darkly doubled partner, like a spirit, a ghost, against a backdrop of dazzling streams of brightness. At the end, I could hardly believe I had been watching only two dancers; the stage seemed to be occupied by a perfectly coordinated corps.
I think I detect a story I have often felt in Nancy Karp’s work: a story of independent inspirations working together almost by osmosis, but without willfulness or constraint, to create a mysterious whole larger, more ramifying, more suggestive, than the mere sum of its parts would suggest alone.
Out of the simplest of elements, and imagination, trust and skill, a “magnum mysterium,” truly, emerges.
The next night the show went up. For one night. Then, like a candle, went out. Hold on: you mean, that’s it?
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
View of a scene from “The Clock,” by Christian Marclay
ABOUT TIME
Christian Marclay: The Clock
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Through June 2
A review by Christopher Bernard
Christian Marclay’s extraordinary work “The Clock” is like no film you have ever seen—and like every film you have ever seen.
The gigantic 24-long film, screening continuously throughout the exhibit, was created by splicing together scenes from films, old and new, in which timepieces appear or the time is mentioned, each moment of the time shown on screen being synchronized with the actual time the work is shown. When the film says 2:19 on the screen, it is (or should be) 2:19 on your watch.
“The Clock” is, indeed, a clock—perhaps the most complex timepiece ever devised, and like its fellows, infinitely provocative and suggestive. Watching it is like staring at, well, a clock—and as irritating and hypnotic as watching the minute hand move imperceptibly to the next number on the dial.
Christian Marclay, born in San Rafael, grew up in Switzerland, and now lives in London. As well as being one of the most important video artists now at work, he is also a DJ, using his skills in sampling and mixing in his visual as much as in his musical work. (SFMOMA has a special relationship with the artist, and has other works by him in its collection, including Video Quartet.)
At first I found his new work disconcerting. The steady pounding of scenes from unrelated movies most of which feature a clockface (including watches, sundials, hourglasses) in the fore- or background, sometimes barely visible, and all of them displaying the film’s “narrative” time, seemed mechanical and monotonous at first. I found myself compulsively searching for “the clock” in those scenes where it wasn’t obvious, but soon found the effort more annoying than enlightening.
Then at a certain point, I gave up and gave myself over to the peculiar flow, eddy, whirl, stops, starts, the leaps, swirls and peripeteias, of this immense temporal collage, and ignored the artificial cliffhangers created by scenes that set the audience up and then deliberately go nowhere except to the next minute, and I found myself mesmerized, taken into a dream of time unlike anything I have experienced since the day in childhood when I first discovered clocks and spent part of a morning watching the second hand sweep across the dial, and tried to catch out the minute hand as it moved with immense, majestic slowness toward the great number 12.
(I’ve visited twice so far, each time staying at least two hours; watching from just before 12 noon until 5:30 p.m.—and I strongly recommend taking the work in such long “gulps.”)
Many human experiences, of course, cluster around particular times of day, and as in life, so in film. “The Clock” displays these with clarity and flair: lunches in early afternoon, whether a sandwich grabbed in a diner, or a drawn-out business affair, at the toot of a midday factory horn or as a social occasion big as dinner; then the doldrums of afternoon classrooms; the stampede at 5 o’clock; and the buzz of the following cocktail hour.
Certain hours have always been used as dramatic markers, whether “High Noon” (and yes, the moment you would expect from the Gary Cooper film is here, although, if you blink, you could miss it) or midnight for romantic trysts, or cat burgling. Yet in “The Clock,” these times come and go, without the shock and stop to be found in a movie drama; in fact, with no more than a minute’s time before off we go to the next, equally parsed, equally sized, pitilessly brief slice of an hour.
That some of the minutes in “The Clock” seem longer and are certainly more dramatic than others is even explained in a scene where the psychology of time is discussed: you’re likely to remember “The Clock”’s depiction of 12 noon (with its dramatic lead-up, a countdown that leads to nothing more dramatic than . . . 12:01) a good deal more clearly than its depiction of 3:53 pm, even though both times take exactly a minute to depict.
In the end, as you whir through hundreds, eventually thousands, of scenes from films you have seen, and many you haven’t, from silents of the past and to the digital films of the present; through shots and scenes and entire sequences, some cut up and extended over many minutes, like a great musical cubist fresco, with famous actors flashing by in a fugal collage of faces and voices, you see that “The Clock” is more than just about clocks and watches, moments of panic, joy, terror, suspense, cliffhangers and the knife-edge moment, it is about love, loss, death, birth. About time, in its most human, and most inhuman, forms. It’s about our life, in all its messiness, fragility, and stress, the lives of individuals, and the unending cycle of life on earth, in its monstrous and relentless and yes, beautiful, mystery. In the eighteenth century, the universe was likened to a clock. This Clock can be likened to the universe.
“The Clock” is on display at SFMOMA in the weeks leading up to the temporary closure, starting in June, of the museum’s building during expansion. To accommodate those who want to see the work in its entirety, the museum will be open 24 hours on each Saturday in May and during one of the days leading up to the building’s closure.
On other days, though the film in fact screens nonstop, 24 hours a day (in its commodious yet intimate, sofa-furnished gallery, at the end of a short but effectively mazelike corridor), it can only be seen by visitors during the museum’s hours of admission, from 11 am to 5:45 p.m. most days (and until 8:45 p.m. on Thursdays).
The work’s rigid structure does not allow screening of the overnight portions during daylight hours, so those curious about how the work depicts, say, 4:53 a.m. (and this viewer is very much so) will have to visit the museum at the said hour. I’ll be there, with a Red Bull in one hand and a pillow in the other—if I can’t find someone warmer.
Christopher Bernard is a San Francisco novelist, poet and critic. He is author of the novel A Spy in the Ruins and co-editor of Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
Ernest Hilbert has written some of the most elegant poems in American literature since the loss of Anthony Hecht. A fascinating blend of the Augustan and romantic (an Augustanism that flirts with the sweaty Rochester as much as the marmoreal Johnson, and a romanticism charged with as much street grit as lyricism and longing), with a cadence that can be as wickedly eloquent as Lowell or compressed, as an elegantly held fist, as Bishop, Hilbert holds tight to an understanding of poetry and the role of the poet—proud without complacency, authentic without cheapness, self-respecting and self-mocking—that is (thank God) not particularly popular in poetic circles today. None of the shive and jive of hip-hop rap and poetry slams echoes in these lines, none of the pink-toned shrieks of social networks or the subliterate prattling of Twitter or the smug pyrrhonism of the postmoderns. Yet his poems are as fresh as the morning sun, sharp and alive as the latest headline or a brash tweet.
His latest learned and lyrical productions are a book and a CD. The book contains some 60 loosely formed sonnets, a form that Hilbert has made his own, proving this most classic of forms can contain anything the 21st century can throw at it.
“I arrive, one more uninvited guest.
……………………………………
… A single white horse
Grazes down below, slowly consumed
By shadows that pour into the valley.” (“Dusk in the Ruins”)
He, or his poetic persona, moves across the world, an “earnest pilgrim,” from the necropolis at Vulci to Iwo Jima , to the bars of TriBeCa and the back alleys of Queens, to Senecan Rome, “from Grub Street to the Brill Building,” to the “dark suburbs” (“The insatiable sprawl thieves as it gives,” as he says in a memorable line in a book packed, jammed and o’erbrimming with lines you will want to linger over, savor, like the wines of Helicon), to New Jersey’s Mullica River, to a graveyard in Philadelphia:
“My parched heart slithers in its soaked bone chest,
Gorges on embers and crackles to ash.
Winter twigs are splayed like petrified veins,
Skeletal fingers to cradle a bare nest.” (“Levavi Oculos”)
Any page you open to contains, not a gem, but a treasury, a manuscript of illuminations, lapis lazuli and gold, even when the poet is watching his key chain spatter down a toilet bowl in a late New York club night:
“Keys splash in the toilet bowl and clank
Dully on the brown-smudged porcelain throat,
A cloudy silver quiver. The tiny blades
Swim through ripples.” (“City-Scape Gentlemen’s Club, Queens”)
Or, more bluntly:
“The city is cat piss and dog shit. It stinks,
And the humid air smells like mold. I lie in bed,
Too hot to move, slick with sweat . . .” (“Kalypso”)
He describes, like a Milton cast away in the alleys, what he sees on a bleak night in the slums of a great, wounded city, or in the hungover misery of a busride down the east coast’s suburban sprawled flank, in a poverty-stricken childhood homelife among “the peculiar clan at cul-de-sac’s end,” in the fissile fossilizing of a convention of archaeologists, in a list (far from incomplete) of America’s robust negatives, in a pixillated Oscar acceptance speech and a rancid envy’s tongue lashing of revenge—all without missing a beat or a foot, though he allows himself a respectable freedom in rhyme.
Hilbert’s CD is a particular treat for his fans: it includes a selection from his book Sixty Sonnets, read by the poet with musical accompaniment, including in some cases, orchestral arrangements, composed by Marc Hildenberger, Dave Young, and Christopher LaRosa. Four tracks, each containing a number of poems, are listed on the jacket and CD (“Failed Escapes,” “Legendary Misbehavior,” “Satires & Observations,” and “Elegies & Laments”), though a fifth track is included on the CD itself, a fine, cool ending to this ingenious journey through sense and sound. One of the tracks records a particularly successful open mike where Hilbert reads, followed by stimulating contributions by Quincy R. Lehr, Paul Siegell, and Kristine Young. And introducing each track are tantalizing mashups of recordings, scratchy and haunting, of older poets, from Whitman to Ezra Pound to Sylvia Plath.
Hilbert has a fine “radio announcer’s” voice that makes up in clarity and tone what it sometimes lacks in flexibility and character (he is not an actor). The poems tend more toward the demotic and streetwise, but never lose Hilbert’s strong imagery, feel for cadence, and rhythmic firmness. A wonderful release.
Postscript for poetry publishers: I loved both book and CD – though I must say I gagged at the listed price of the book. In some ways I hate Amazon for destroying my favorite bookstores (Borders) and wounding others (Barnes & Noble) almost to extinction, but Amazon, through its links to other sellers and various price structures, at least makes it possible to purchase books of poetry at a reasonable cost. When will poetry publishers realize that they might actually get sales if they priced their books reasonably? Many of the people I know who love poetry are “economically challenged,” to put it delicately; they simply cannot lay out $16.95 for a paperback of fewer than a hundred pages (and even Amazon’s “discounted” price is high). I buy very few poetry books for that reason.
Poetry publishers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose—but your losses. There is a market for poetry out here, but you will need to set a truly economic price for your wares—and not have so much faith that discounters will make up the difference.
