Marilyn

I've had portraits on the brain lately, along with Marilyn Monroe. I'm reading the Marilyn biography that Norman Mailer wrote and looking at Eve Arnold's pictures of her. Not to deny serendipitous fortuities of timing, light and fate much less framing and sheer talent and vision on the part of the photographer, but with portraits it's all about posture and carriage. When something, other than who-what-when-where (maybe sometimes why), about a person comes across from within the static, I tend to fixate on the broad strokes of carriage and posture, grace and composure, as well as the exact opposite and complete lack of said qualities; sometimes it's both or neither and everything all-at-once: these kabukis are vibrating on a stationary wavelength. One of my favorite characters from literature is the Eskimo that Holden tells Phoebe about that was at the museum of Natural History when he'd visited as a boy and would be there for Phoebe as well. He wished for their lives to freeze in just one good moment and stay there. This mutability of time and its relationship to the terrors of death and loneliness hit a chord with me when I sit staring at pictures of people that I know are long gone and others that only probably are. They were then and now here they are, all that's left and all from less than a second a good while ago. Goddamn. I can see that Eskimo fishing through the ice right now, clear as day.
(photo: Eve Arnold)

I've been watching The Misfits repeatedly for the last few months, at least once a week. I'll leave it on while I do the dishes. Roslyn in the desert at the end, shouting at the men, leads me to thoughts about Freudian concepts in regards to hysteria. His patient, "Dora", quit treatment before a cure could be effected, and Freud learned about transference, but, on the other side, maybe Sigmund was projecting and dear Dora was simply a person with whom one does not meddle. Freud had a painting on his office wall of famed proto-shrink Jean-Martin Charcot demonstrating his clinical methods of dealing with a hysteric at Salpêtrière.

I always wanted to connect Freud's Dora with Picasso's (the possessive used reflexively as these men belonged, no matter how briefly, to their Doras). It may or may not be true, but I first heard of Dora Maar through the anecdote that Picasso sitting at a cafe on the Iberian and she was playing that game in which you spread your fingers on the table and tap a knifepoint between them; she missed, cut herself and began to bleed, all the while continuing to tap a cut, laughing all-the-while: Picasso was smitten.


You Don't Love Me (Yes, I Know) - Ike & Tina

Servant of Love - Van Bros.

I'm Looking for Someone to Love - Hank Williams

Oh My Lover - P.J. Harvey