The Wheel of Fortune

We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.

I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.

But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.

The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.

Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.

There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.

At that moment something very strange happened to me.

The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.

But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.

The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.

Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.

So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.

And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

How Memory Works

Because memory is visual verbal and communal and rehearsed, it can disappear under dominant images. I lived in L.A. for about ten years. I've been to Venice Beach a few times (housecleaning, showing a friend from home who wanted a particular book). And so I have visual and muscle memories of the canal, the boardwalk, and the cavernous 2nd-hand bookshop that had been there for years. (That must have been in '91.)

After seeing Dogtown and Z-Boys I now have visual memories of Venice Beach since the 1970s, when I was actually living on the bottom edge of the other side of the world in small patch of rich dairy-farms, and on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain, and in Melbourne.

So what happens in a densely populated, media-rich location such as L.A., is that underground movement proliferate, document and ultimately broadcast themselves; the wealth generated by corruption is so fabulous it makes its own myths – Chinatown and the rest of L.A. noir from Chandler on – I will mount that film festival sooner or later – and these images become our not only our images, but also our memories. We remember going to the pictures; we remember what we saw. Seeing them was what we did.

I almost remember World War 2: until Sputnik it was the largest thing in our mental landscape. My parents and brother had lived through it. The first film I have a whole sense of is The Dam Busters. The radio serial we all listened to was Five Fingers. (Adapted and directed by Morris West. Yes, that Morris West).

I remember having anxiety dreams about the Korean War. I remember the Catholics fleeing the Communists, an exodus from North Vietnam – a 16mm film at school shown by a visiting priest.

There was nothing epic, filmic, beautiful, dramatic, noteworthy, about going to work or church or school, cooking, gardening, going to the beach or the hills.

And so to the vexed matter of Australian film.

There had been a silent film industry which never gained a truly sound footing.

Efftee Studios and Cinesound Productions foundered, in 1935 and 1936, repectively, on the Australian Government's failure to introduce a quota for domestic films. (The British did introduce one, giving rise to the "quota quickie" and, via Korda's Private Lives, to Von Sternberg's failed I, Claudius.)

Once Efftee and Cinesound and failed, there were very few Australian films. Some wartime action/morale boosters (40,000 Horsemen, directed by Charles Chauvel, The Kokoda Trail, directed by Ken G. Hall), and then almost nothing.

The only genuinely working production facility in the country was the Commonwealth Film Unit, the documentary arm of the Commonwealth Government. (Tim Burstall, Bruce Beresford, and Mike Thornhill worked there.)

When I was seven or so there was Smiley Gets a Gun at the drive-in; the same night, before it, a trailer for The Sundowners. We never saw that. My family didn't go to the pictures much and this kind of thing rubbed us the wrong way: Peter Ustinov & Robert Mitchum weren't Australians, couldn't get the accent, didn't reflect our lives; the flick was a foreign concoction, an exotification, a falsification, and we weren't going to pay to go to it.

(At the same time, when I saw South Pacific I kept wanting the camera to swing around and see us. I spent decades waiting for them to turn and see us.)

And so, from the mid-'30s until the early '70s, there was a dearth of images of Australia connected to anything the movies and the world thought important: and which we, therefore, might also find  defining and iconic now that cattle-drives and droughts and generally faux-Western tropes had stopped reflecting our lived experience in even the remotest, most analogical way. (1)

In 1971 there was Walkabout, another exotification, a journey with a hilariously mad geography.

Australian Literature was by and large out of print. Henry Lawson and Judith Wright existed in school editions, like Nevil Shute, Colin Thiele, and Kylie Tenant. Frank Hardy wrote on the Gurindji struggle for land rights. Wake in Fright was passed from hand to hand among teachers who'd never intended to be teachers (a terrifying Lord of the Flies at the edge of a country school). White was... too unique, adult, aristocratic, sophisticated, bizarre, to become a generally understood vision. (2)

Lawson's world was 70 years gone. For sense of place attached to the memorable – it all boiled down to the stark landscapes and dispossessions and implied genocides in the Wright.

1975, Picnic at Hanging Rock. And there, finally, the hills we'd driven through since I'd been a small child; the hill I'd looked at through my schoolroom window as a young teenager: stubble in summer, green in winter, round, low, inevitable, the true last shape of mountain and stone.

But Picnic gave rise to a spate of chocolate-box historicals, and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith was something you could only watch once, like Wake in Fright.

When I go to think of Australia there's only a rectangle of yellow-green, fading into over-exposure.

...

My family's photos have been largely destroyed. I met my father at the back door by chance one morning in 1988, as I came home from an errand; his hands were full of packets and books of old photos I'd never seen. He was on his way to the incinerator. (I'm so like him in so many ways I know what he was thinking. My mother had died; his life was over; there was no point to the images.)

Seeing what he carried I took everything with a cheerful, "I'll take those, Dad" – so smoothly I'm still amazed at myself – and mailed them to our L.A. address. When I sorted, ordered, and annotated them (nothing between 1927 and 1947 had been dated), I realized there were dozens from the 1950s that have utterly disappeared.

Nostalgia for the Light begins as an account of the astronomical telescope in the high desert of Chile and ends with a consideration of the deliberate suppression of evidence of the dispossession of the indigenous population before the suppression of evidence of mass murder by the Pinochet regime. That felt very familiar.

...

My parents were both very good dancers. My father loved musicals; my mother loved dramas.

"Cities are supposed to stimulate you, but Adelaide just puts me to sleep," a cousin of mine said to me a long time ago. Every time the tram crossed Greenhill Road on its way to the Bay I agreed, and thought of my mother wrestling with the washing and the shopping and the garden (that hard Adelaide clay), thinking of Joan Crawford.

...

So, if memory is visual and verbal and communal and rehearsed, then what is memorable is determined by authority. In colonial situations what the colonizing power wants suppressed will be buried. What the colonizing power thinks important will be believed to be important, and what the colonizing power deems unimportant will fade into unimportance.


Because the political has inserted itself into the personal, the personal is political. We must remember and create our own stuff. Our masters won't.

===

1. There was something called Jack and Jill: A Postscript, which arrived (I seem to remember a film can of huge diameter) when I'd asked for something else for my Film Study class in 1971. It came from something called the South Australian Film Corporation, instead of from the Education Department. I showed it, having nothing else: it turned out to be about a bloke with a motorbike and his mate and his girlfriend. It had been shot on weekends over 5 years, as funds and the availability of the actors allowed, by Phillip Adams. (He never did anything as unfunded, difficult, frustrating, unrecognized and unrewarded again. He continued in advertising.)

2. Having Patrick White for your national novelist is like having Pablo Picasso for your portrait photographer.

The Black Swan

And so we finally saw The Black Swan. I didn't know much about it before watching it, and so I was surprised to see all the ancient tropes: the fragile virginal acolyte, the powerful impresario, the stage mother (only in the chorus, then pregnant), the role too hard to play, the self-slaughter at the moment of triumph...

It was The Turning Point and The Red Shoes, only worse. (There was no supportive company or converted composer, no jealous director / dramaturge. No one at all cheered for the woman in The Black Swan.) There was an amazingly cruel scene where the new principal dancer is introduced to the donors and supporters, pained and complex expressions and champagne on the staircase, while the former principal dancer is in the crowd on the floor below, a nobody, left to scurry off as best she can. (She's later run over by a car, sustains massive damage to her right leg, and cuts herself in the cheeks because she is & has nothing now.)

It was not White Nights. (Oh, that timid, wicked, commissar-loving Helen Mirren, that coward and inferior artist, that failure who failed to grasp the freedom embodied in the West!)*

The Black Swan definitely was not Tap. It wasn't anything with Ginger Rogers; it wasn't Singin' in the Rain or even bloody Yankee Doodle Dandy.

Art is dangerous for women, mostly, it seems, because men control it. Were any of the men in The Black Swan too virginal, too timid, too frigid? (Too unmanly, as you might have thought, but possibly not said, about Robert Helpmann?) Were the men's toenails splitting? Did the director sexually assault them to improve their performances? Were they declared unfuckable? No? And why not?

Arnofsky also directed The Wrestler. It could be argued he's just a misanthropist... But… The Wrestler kept reminding me of Lipstick and Dynamite, a documentary about women wrestlers in the U.S. in the '40s, '50s and early '60s – the punishing schedules, the drugs to keep you going, the cheating managers, the cheating spouses & partners, the virtual impossibility of working your way out of your contract –

Some of management's deceptions in L&D took me straight back to my time in boiler-rooms. So I thought The Wrestler was about class, not gender.

It might be that it's impossible to make a film about ballet that isn't about gender (the limitations of the f, the transcendence of the m.).

Just remind me never to watch another one. Ever.

---
* The character Galina was not an inferior artist: she was a peak performer of classical ballet. Classical ballet was becoming a thing of the past;  the Soviet Union was about to collapse.  Modern ballet, especially America modern ballet, was, in the movie, the dance of relevance, new horizons, the future - all packaged as "artistic growth." What of modern dance 25 years later, when America is on the verge of collapse? Is the Baryshnikov character now quaint and inferior, now that modern dance is becoming a thing of a particular era, emblematic of a future that leaked away into storms and sand? The plot prevented modern dance being presented as another choice, or something a classically-trained ballet dancer could continue to do with an aging body.

You can't separate the economic power of a milieu from the estimation of its arts...

The Karate Kid remake

11.13.10

The U.S. is now officially a client state. I saw it for a certainty when I watched The Karate Kid remake. Dre's mother had to go to China for a job.

That feeling of no bottom to my stomach was fear.

We've watched and lived through an epochal shift in geo-political power, and that moves the foundation of even an individual's identity.

You absorb the major power relations of the world as a cognitive and emotional foundation, a major indication of your place in it; and you do that when you're very, very young.

A Weekend on the Couch: Balm for a Bad Back

The Bourne Identity – a man betrayed into redemption by his own unexpected, unsuspected compassion.

Michael Collins – a man who hates war and waste wages the first urban guerilla struggle, expels an occupying power from his country, and creates peace.

Red Cliff – An alliance of defenders defeats an invasion.

Ah... Integrity asserted, defended, discovered, maintained. Yes.

David M. Koch and The Incredible Journey of the Butterflies (NOVA)

The Monarch butterfly migrates northward from high points on the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico in three stages. Three generations, living about two months each, each migrate northward before dying. The third generation reaches southern Canada. The fourth generation of caterpillars migrate southward through the eastern United States, taking about two months, eventually arriving at the species' winter shelter in the Sierra Madre. The first three generations live about two months each; the fourth lives about nine months.

In that area of the Sierra Madre the indigenous people welcome the butterflies' return each year with a festival incorporated into the Day of the Dead. The butterflies are said to be the returning spirits of their ancestors. This has happened for generations, the people, who are small farmers, the forest, and the butterflies co-existing in a balance. This part of the forest has been made a National Sanctuary.

One of the last points in the documentary is that this forest is now being logged to such an extent that it and the butterflies are now both endangered. The World Wildlife Fund pays locals to be informal wardens and prevent the logging. But the trees are cut down in the middle of the night and, as one of the WWF wardens said, "You don't want to meet these people. They will kill you."

On its face this didn't make sense. There had to be a third factor in this situation that NOVA hadn't mentioned.

Why is there so much more logging now? The WWF warden said that it was people "who couldn't meet their needs" who were doing the logging. So – very poor people.

As a result of NAFTA and its own corruption, the Mexican government stopped giving subsidies to Mexico's small farmers some years ago. As corn prices rose because the U.S. government subsidised ethanol for fuel, poor Mexican farmers were priced out of the corn market. The market in white bread and noodles, the cheaper, less nutritious subsitutes, is largely owned by Archer Daniels Midland.

This is missing third factor.

NOVA went nowhere near it – Archer Daniels Midland is a corporate underwriter of PBS, the entity which buys NOVA nature documentaries.

During the opening credits there are thanks to corporate sponsors of NOVA, among them David M. Koch. Who at the moment is doing his best to destroy both the butterflies and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (which airs material from PBS).

On its face this doesn't make sense. There must be some third aspect.

In the film there is one very short sequence where a butterfly is caught in a spider's web. The wings are caught and stuck, splayed and beautiful and helpless. The butterfly is effectively paralyzed. And then the spider comes and wraps the butterfly up in its own organic cling-wrap, and hauls it off (up, out of the frame) to be eaten.

That's what David M. Koch was doing, along with many other corporations / billionaires, sponsoring programming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Paralyzing it, keeping it unable to utter certain truths before moving to defund it entirely (wrapping it up in a complete lack of budget), and hauling off (up, out of our frame of reference) to be dissolved.