Authority: Essays by Andrea Long Chu

 

Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days. Cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.

Essays and reviews by the noted trans scholar Andrea Chu. I enjoyed her biting tone in the reviews, but am suspicious generally of critics, whom I tend to judge mostly by what they tend to criticize. And PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, Bret Easton Ellis, and Zadie Smith hold little interest of me. 

The cultural entity she praises most highly is the streaming junk, THE LAST OF US.

She is funny, and brilliant - but reserves her emotional energy for her essays on her own trans journey.

Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith by John Szwed

 

Early Abstractions films: various soundtracks added by various people.

The Critic, Ernest Pintoff, short comedy film, Mel Brooks voiceover.

Heaven and Earth Magic.

HS Mahagonny: based on Brecht/Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

Compo, Seven Flute Solos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWuFrgzxukc

Shirley Clarke, documentary film maker. Bridges-Go-Round, The Connection, The Cool World, Kaleidoscope (w/ HS)

HS paper airplane collection: https://www.amazon.com/Paper-Airplanes-Collections-Catalogue-Raisonn%C3%A9/dp/0989531139

shape note/sacred harp records

John Fahey summary of contents of HS Anthology of Folk Music: "The evidence is in the shakedown."[169\

HS on what his collections meant: It is a way of fooling away the time, harmlessly as possible. [271]

Make a person think they think and they love you; make them think, and they hate you." [ 332]

HS on "automatic synchronization" of his films--

Fred Camper: ... as I was sitting on the floor near a stack of records, [Harry Smith] said, "Hey, you, pick a record, any record." Without looking... I passed the first record on the stack up to him. He looked at it and aid, "You idiot, not that record." [97]

Duchamp, The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even

The Sun and Her Stars by Donna Rifkind

from The Sun and Her Stars: "Salka chose instead to adorn her house with people... There was a feeling of abundance here, but the extravagance was emotional rather than material..."

A valuable and graceful book that rescues Salka Viertel from being mostly famous as a minor character in Greta Garbo's life. Rifkind firmly establishes Viertel's unique place in history as someone who singlehandedly comforted a generation of European emigrees who made their way to Los Angeles in the 1930s to escape fascism and the murdering Nazis. The grace and richness of Rifkind's use of secondary sources is astounding, as she uses the words (from correspondence and memoirs, novels and films) of the dozens of distinguished writers, artists, actors who found a home in her home, to richly animate the life of the mind her house became for this embattled homeless group. Irwin Shaw, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Christopher Isherwood, Arnold Schoenberg, Billy Wilder are but a few.

For just one example, the following from the novel Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood, about his character Friedrich Bergmann, based on Salka Viertel's husband Bertholdt: "The face was the face of an emperor, but the eyes were the dark mocking eyes of his slave." Or the title of this review, which Rifkind uses to describe Viertel's last view of Berlin when she left:  "Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too," from a poem by Rilke, another Viertel acquaintance.

Rifkind, with verve, density and grace, makes what could have been an exercise in esoteric filmography into a gripping cultural history of a singular woman and her courage in a terrible time. Highest recommendation!

"See the black souls of the Jews fly away" p 131

Salka's son Peter's novel The Canyon. always mud, heavy and brown, that was the water's brother.

director Rouben Mamoulian, who used a metronome to time Garbo's movements in Queen Christina ("I have been memorizing the room")

Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain

A rivetting book. A bunch of liars, drunks, addicts and misfits telling lies and embroidering others lies, and somehow, it triangulates into a sort of truth about the genesis of punk rock music.