Author: DC (Page 820 of 1134)

 

‘Over the last decade, Agnès Varda has reinvented herself spectacularly, most recently as a flamboyant installation artist with her exhibition ‘L’Ile et elle’ filling the ample space of Paris’s Fondation Cartier in 2006. Earlier she found a new lease of life as a digital film-maker, eagerly seizing on the first-person possibilities of the camcorder in her 2000 documentary The Gleaners and I – an essay on the economic and artistic activity of foraging and recycling, of which ‘L’Ile et elle’ itself proved a triumphant example. Among that exhibition’s acts of gleaning is the object in which Varda stands at the end of her newest film The Beaches of Agnès – a hut constructed from a discarded print of one of her films. Thus Varda can mean it both literally and figuratively when she concludes that she inhabits cinema.

‘Agnès Varda’s work is often connected to the French New Wave, and her early films were clear precedents for the stylistic tendencies which the New Wave directors delineated. However, her work remains particular to her own unique perspective on the world, resisting the paradigms of movements in art and film. The themes and issues in her films focus on eroticism and age, death and time, the collective unconscious, and the presentability of social taboos. Her work is distinct from the French New Wave also for its crossing of genres, as she is known as much for her documentaries and shorts as for her feature-length dramas. Not limiting herself to the borders of France, her films have been shot in a variety of locations, including the United States, Cuba, and Iran.

‘Between 1968 and 1970 she lived in Los Angeles and made a Hollywood hippy movie called Lions Love. She is the first director to become interested in Harrison Ford. It is during that time also that she met Jim Morrison, singer of the band The Doors. In fact, she ended up being one of the five people to have been at Morrison’s funeral in Paris’ cemetery Père-Lachaise in 1971. Once back in France she directed an optimist feminist movie: L’une chante, l’autre pas. In 1971 she is one of the 343 women to have signed the “Manifesto of the 343” thereby admitting to have had an abortion and making themselves vulnerable to possible prosecution. Varda went back to live in Los Angeles from 1979 to 1981 and during that time made two documentaries: Murs, murs and Documenteur.

‘Varda’s career itself represents a crammed micro-history of modern French bohemianism: from post-student flânerie in Corsica, through the advent of the nouvelle vague, through the political activism of the 1960s and 70s… She may have missed May 1968 in Paris, but she was chronicling radicalism elsewhere: immersing herself in Californian hippie culture and photographing the ascendant Black Panther movement. Varda’s role as feminist film-maker, and as feminist being, is reasserted with pride: One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1976) might have been her ‘official’ feminist film, but using images of Sandrine Bonnaire to counterpoint memories of her own militancy, Varda also highlights the ferocious engagement of her 1985 film Vagabonde (Sans toit ni loi).

‘Agnès Varda has always been ahead of her time – in filmmaking technique and style and also in political commentary. Just as The Gleaners and I is a contemporary look at capitalism and urban life and utilises the latest in digital cinematography, Kung-Fu Master sits comfortably alongside other dramas of the ’80s including those of Loach, Bergman and Greenaway. Uncle Yanco reflects the bohemian, drug-taking, moral ambivalence of the late ’60s and Cléo de 5 à 7 displays a French obsession with cars, fashion and identity. Agnès Varda is grandmother to the world community of filmmakers. At 74 she has a good perspective on a life which has given her breadth of filmmaking experience, it is hardly surprising she keeps going. “I think communication is difficult but essential and not just in love, but in work, in the relationship with one’s children, in one’s general attitude” There is some accepted wisdom which says, people only ever write the same book or film script over, but Varda has produced at least one unique gem for each of her five decades as writer, director and cinematographer. Her body of work cannot be described by genre, let alone fiction or reality. One imagines The Gleaners and I may well be her last film offering but as she has shown herself to be still so full of curiosity and zest for life, she may well have more to say.’ — collaged

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Agnès Varda @ IMDb
Agnes Varda Page @ Senses of Cinema
DVD: ‘4 by Agnes Varda’ @ The Criterion Collection
Agnes Varda’s films on mubi
‘Women in Film: That Object Named “Desire”‘
Agnes Varda interviewed @ Interview
Agnes Varda interviewed @ BFI
Tim Sternberg on Agnes Varda’s ‘Ulysses’
Emmanuel Levy on Agnes Varda
‘Multiculturalism In The Films Of Agnes Varda’
500 Words: Agnes Varda @ Artforum
‘The Grandmother of the New Wave’
‘Agnes Varda’s Open Harbour’
‘A Girl and a Gun: Agnes Varda and the Origins of Godard’s Breathless’

 

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Her

Agnes Varda interviewed & profiled in 1956

Agnes Varda & Susan Sontag in discussion in 1969

Agnès Varda ‘The Things We Leave Behind’ (2004, part 1 of 6)

Agnes Varda on poetry and film (2010)

 

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Interview
from The Believer

 

AGNÈS VARDA: I should say nothing! I’m through with it! I hate to repeat myself all the time. I cannot invent totally. I cannot say something different to one person and then another. I cannot make it totally different each time, you know. I say so much in the film and so much even in the press kit! I quoted Montaigne. So I would say, can we have subsidiary questions, or side questions? Can we speak about the weather? Or the tennis that I watch in my room?

THE BELIEVER: It’s so nice to see that you have had the same haircut always, because I’ve had the same haircut all my life, and I always try to change it but it’ll never change.

AV: I remember when I tried it. I was nineteen and I put a bowl on and I said, Cut around! Because it was not the fashion at the time when I did that hairdo—and I kept it all my life! At the time of Cléo I grew it a little more, and when Jacques died I grew a bit here. [She pulls out a strand.] I made a braid because Chinese old people, they say that the God will take you by the hair to join you with—but God didn’t take me, so I cut the braid. Now it’s the same hairdo but it has two colors—come on! It’s different! It’s like an ice cream of chocolate and vanilla! I tried a wig. I hated myself totally white. So now I cheat. It’s my white hair, and I put color there. My grandson says I’m punk. I tell you—better they laugh about their grandmother than think she’s a bore. Some grandmothers are really boring! They ask, Ah ha ha—did you do this?—be careful—put your sweater on! C’est ça. So, in a way, we try to please them somehow.

BLVR: You had a remarkable career in an age when women didn’t have careers—

AV: I had a world. I don’t think I had a career. I made films.

BLVR: Yes, it would be odd, thinking of cinema as an extension of life as you do, and at the same time thinking of it as a career or trying to make a place in history.

AV: I don’t try to make a place in history at all! People put me in the history of cinema because my first film, La pointe-courte, was so ahead of some other filmmakers. Many filmmakers have made resurgent work, and I was just a little ahead of the time. It happened because of La pointe-courte, which is a very strange film, but very daring for ’54.

BLVR: How did you get started?

AV: I was a photographer first. I went alone to China—not alone, I was in a group, but I worked alone. I did it my way as much as I could. I have been sort of courageous about doing things, because I didn’t think I should do less than my brothers. But I wouldn’t be courageous in terms of a physical thing. I never fought, I never learned kung fu or boxing, I never went into these sportif competitions. I wouldn’t cross the ocean. I think it’s ridiculous to take such risk. But look, people love to do that. But I was not afraid of doing things I wished to do. I did not think that woman would be restrained. I never saw that, especially not in filmmaking, where you don’t have to be strong. You have to be strong to be a carpenter, maybe, but the director of a film doesn’t need to have muscles. This is why I didn’t know why I couldn’t do it.

When I started my first film, there were three women directors in France. Their films were OK, but I was different. It’s like when you start to jump and you put the pole very high—you have to jump very high. I thought, I have to use cinema as a language.

When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done—people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway—in France we have Nathalie Sarraute—and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. Theater! I mean, psychology and drama and dialogue and making sense! At that time, when I started, in the ’50s, cinema was very classical in its aims, and I thought, I have to do something which relat
es with my time, and in my time, we make things differently.

(continued)

 

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21 of Agnes Varda’s 56 films

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La Pointe Courte (1955)
‘The great Agnès Varda’s film career began with this graceful, penetrating study of a marriage on the rocks, set against the backdrop of a small Mediterranean fishing village. Both a stylized depiction of the complicated relationship between a married couple (played by Silvia Monfort and Philippe Noiret) and a documentary-like look at the daily struggles of the locals, Varda’s discursive, gorgeously filmed debut was radical enough to later be considered one of the progenitors of the coming French New Wave.’ — Film Struck

Excerpt

 

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Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962)
‘Varda’s international breakthrough film, Cléo shows, in real time, an hour and a half in the life of a singer traveling across Paris while waiting for the results of a biopsy. Vain, childish and selfish at the start, Cléo’s journey through Paris becomes a journey of self-discovery –she transforms in the course of the film from a passive woman, on whom others project their expectations, into an active participant in her own life. Cléo’s movements through the city embody this metamorphosis—while the film’s first half is dominated by a shopping excursion through glittering, mirrored surfaces that reflect and refract her, in the second half, Cléo literally sheds her false image in order to actively observe the city, culminating in her spontaneous friendship with a soldier on leave.’ — MoMA

Trailer

Excerpt

Agnès Varda discusses Cléo from 5 to 7 in 2004

 

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Happiness (Le Bonheur) (1965)
‘Unlike the bulk of Varda’s work, Happiness, with its highly stylized form and refusal to explore the psychology of its characters, is completely removed from reality, rejecting any of Varda’s usual documentary or self-reflexive elements. It is also Varda’s most controversial work, revolving around a blissfully happy family man (Jean-Claude Drouot, appearing with his real-life wife and children) who decides, with uncomplicated ease, to expand upon his happiness by taking a mistress. Set in an idyllic landscape of leisurely country picnics and shot in cheerfully vibrant colors, there is nonetheless a distinct chill detectable underneath the film’s relentlessly sunny exterior. Although Varda resists any simple moralizing, she has said of Happiness, “I imagined a summer peach with its perfect colors, and inside, there is a worm.”’ — Harvard Film Archive

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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The Creatures (1966)
‘“Les Créatures” (The Creatures) is yet another reminder that film history is subject to the vagaries of availability and that work by great women filmmakers is all too often written out of it. In the early nineteen-sixties, when François Truffaut was planning to make his adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” he worried that French filmmakers didn’t do science fiction well. Varda’s film, which came out in France two weeks before Truffaut’s, proved his hesitations wrong exactly as his own film did. Above all, no less than Truffaut, Varda transformed science fiction into a subject in her own image—she did so even more radically and more personally, and the extremes of her ideas may be exactly why “Les Créatures” has wrongly fallen by the wayside of film history.’ — Richard Brody

Trailer

 

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Uncle Yanko (1967)
‘In her effervescent first California film, Agnès Varda delves into her own family history. The short documentary Uncle Yanco features Varda tracking down a Greek emigrant relative she’s never met, discovering an artist and kindred soul leading a bohemian life in Sausalito.’ — The Criterion Collection

the entirety

 

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Black Panthers (1968)
‘Varda’s half hour documentary on the Black Panther Party centers on a “Free Huey” rally held in Oakland. The film combines footage of the rally and Black Panther training exercises with interviews with Panther leaders such as Huey Newton (speaking from his jail cell about solitary confinement) and Kathleen Cleaver, who passionately defends the group’s militancy. Varda is clearly sympathetic to the Black Panthers’ politics, but she restrains her efforts as a director in order to let the Panthers speak for themselves. If anything identifies this as a Varda film, it is its attentiveness to the role women and feminine rhetoric (the camera repeatedly zooms in on the hands of women as they talk) played in the organization and vitality of the often excessively-masculine Panther party.’ — Retentional Finitude

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Lions Love (1969)
‘Andy Warhol discovery Viva, filmmaker Shirley Clarke and Jerome Ragni and James Rado, the creators of Hair, play themselves in Varda’s vision of Hollywood and the sexual revolution. Structured as a playful film within a film, Varda repeatedly punctures the cinematic illusion by discussing scenes with the actors from behind the camera and at one point appearing briefly, to show Clarke how to act out a suicide attempt. Combined with footage of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination and the shooting of Andy Warhol, Lions Love is a time capsule of free love and its consequences. Look for cameo appearances by Peter Bogdanovich and Jim Morrison, among others.’ — Cinematheque Francaise

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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Daguerréotypes (1975)
‘One of the great modern documentaries, Agnès Varda’s 1976 portrait of shopkeepers on the street where she lives—Rue Daguerre, in Paris—established a new genre, affectionate anthropology. Starting with the quirky pharmacy where her teen-age daughter, Rosalie, buys homemade perfumes, Varda peeps in on the rounds of commerce that keep the street vital. In the process, she exalts the sights and sounds, the very savor of daily life—the crust of fresh-baked baguettes, the alkaline allure of fresh-cut steaks, the sumptuousness of hand-stitched fabrics. She also sees what makes the street run: money (five francs for a cutlet, ninety centimes for evaporated milk) and the migration from the countryside to the city in pursuit of it. Observing traditional crafts and trades with loving fascination, Varda empathetically evokes their paradoxes—the depth of practical knowledge, the lack of variety in experience. These small-business owners (mainly long-married couples) may have no bosses, but they’re tethered like serfs to their shops; even their dreams are colonized by the crush of daily details. Meanwhile, scenes of a local magician at work in a café hint at the origins of Varda’s own enticing craft.’ — Richard Brody

Trailer

 

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One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977)
‘Varda’s most overtly feminist film, One Sings, the Other Doesn’t follows the lives of two very different women over the course of two decades: Pomme, a middle-class rebel whose singing career coincides with her radicalization and Suzanne, a young working-class mother whose financial hardships bring about her activism. Out of their friendship, Varda crafts a buoyant portrait of French feminism in the 1970s, capturing the optimism and energy of the moment. While the utopian period captured by the film has surely passed, the delicacy of Varda’s approach renders the film a timeless and poignant reminder of an age past.’ — Sight & Sound

Opening credits

Excerpt

 

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Mur Murs (1981)
‘After returning to Los Angeles from France in 1979, Agnès Varda created this kaleidoscopic documentary about the striking murals that decorate the city. Bursting with color and vitality, Mur Murs is as much an invigorating study of community and diversity as it is an essential catalog of unusual public art.’ — The Criterion Collection

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Le Documenteur (1981)
‘This small-scale fiction about a divorced mother and her child (played by Agnès Varda’s own son) leading a quiet existence on L.A.’s margins was made directly after Mur Murs, and though Documenteur is different in form and tone from that film, the two are complexly interwoven, with overlapping images and ideas. This meditative portrait of urban isolation overflows with subtle visual poetry.’ — The Criterion Collection

Trailer

 

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Vagabond (1985)
‘Anchored by Sandrine Bonnaire’s remarkable performance as a woman whose refusal to be known or understood pushes her into total detachment from society, Vagabond was Varda’s biggest success since Cléo and, like the earlier film, uses the trajectory of its itinerant female protagonist as a structuring device. Shot in a semi-documentary style, the film opens abruptly on the body of Mona, frozen to death in a ditch on the side of the road. Interspersed with flashbacks of Mona’s life as a drifter are reminiscences by the people she met along the way. In spite of Varda’s attention, Mona ultimately remains unknowable, even to herself. She is a cipher, misunderstood by those she has encountered even as they recall their impressions and interactions with her for the camera.’ — Criterion

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Jane B. by Agnes V. (1987)
‘Jane B. is London-born actress and recording star Jane Birkin. Agnes V. is Belgian filmmaker and “grandmother of the New Wave” Agnes Varda. Jane B. Par Agnes V is a cinematic recounting of Birkin’s career, from her breakthrough appearance as one of the nude models in Blow-Up to her pinnacle as star of such films as La Femme de Ma Vie (1986). It is also the story of Birkin and Varda’s close relationship, made stronger by their mutual admiration and their lifelong fascination with feminist themes. Viewers who prefer straightforward, objective documentaries rather than radicalized film techniques, may not appreciate Jane B. par Agnes V.‘ — Hal Erickson, Rovi

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

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Kung-Fu Master (1987)
‘Developed from an idea Jane Birkin shared with Varda while making Jane B. par Agnes V., Kung Fu Master stars Birkin as a forty-year old divorced woman who falls in love with her teenage daughter’s video game obsessed friend. By presenting Birkin’s desire without passing judgment, Varda evenhandedly explores a potentially explosive subject with a seriousness not usually granted to female fantasies. Although told as a straightforward narrative, the onscreen relationships are complicated by their offscreen associations: Birkin’s object of affection is played by Varda’s son, Mathieu, and Birkin’s daughters, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Lou Doillon, play her daughters in the film.’ — Harvard Film Archive

Trailer

 

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A Hundred and One Nights (1994)
‘This homage to the cinema by venerated movie-maker Agnes Varda, a 40-year veteran of the French film industry, features an all-star international cast. The story is based upon the memories and insights of the 100-year-old Mr. Simon Cinema. He is in a wheelchair and lives in a magnificent house filled with movie memorabilia. To help him remember the important details of his career he hires Camille, a film student, to write down his remembrances and experiences which have involved all areas of movie-making. Camille comes once a day for 101 days. Film clips, photographs and actual visitors highlight his stories. As he continues to spin his yarns, the imagery in the film smoothly morphs into other images. Camille, when not recording, is involved in other exploits including a romance with a production assistant, Mica, who aspires to become a director. She also begins plotting a way to get to Mr. Cinema’s fortune by having a friend pose as his long lost heir. Many other characters are peripherally involved including Death, an Italian seeking the rights to his film catalogue, and a memory specialist.’ — LDiC

Trailer

Compression

 

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The Gleaners and I (2000)
‘The Gleaners and I takes its title, and some of its inspiration, from an 1867 painting by Jean-Francois Millet that shows three women in a wheat field, stooping to pick up sheaves and kernels left behind after the harvest. The image is well known; it appears in the Larousse Dictionary of the French Language alongside the definition of the verb ”glaner” (to glean). The painting itself, which hangs in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, shows up early in Agnes Varda’s wonderful documentary, thronged by camera-wielding tourists. The painting — or, more accurately, the activity it depicts — sent Ms. Varda, a warm, intrepid woman in her early 70’s and one of the bravest, most idiosyncratic of French filmmakers, on a tour of her own. From September 1999 until May of this year, she crisscrossed the French countryside with a hand-held digital video camera and a small production crew, in search of people who scavenge in potato fields, apple orchards and vineyards, as well as in urban markets and curbside trash depositories. Some are motivated by desperate need, others by disgust at the wastefulness all around them and others by an almost mystical desire to make works of art out of things — castoff dolls, old refrigerators, windshield wipers — that have been thrown away without a second thought.’ — NYTimes

Excerpt

Clips

 

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The Beaches of Agnès (2008)
‘If you have not seen a single film by Agnes Varda, perhaps it is best if you start with The Beaches of Agnes. You don’t need to know anything about her work. She has a way of never explaining very much, and yet somehow making it all clear. She does this by not treating her life as a lesson in biography, but as the treasured memories of friends. This is not an autobiography, although it is about her lifetime. She closes it by saying, “I am alive, and I remember.” The film is her memories, evoked by footage from her films, and visits to the places and people she filmed. But that makes it sound too straightforward. The film is a poem, a song, a celebration. Although she is in robust good health, she accepts, as she must, that she is approaching the end, and je ne regrette rein.‘ — Roger Ebert

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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The Little Story of Gwen from French Brittany (2008)
‘The biographical short “The little story of Gwen from French Brittany” is a film about friendship and Gwen Deglise and the Director’s first meeting in France many years prior, Gwen’s journey to Los Angeles, and her eventual discovery of the American Cinematheque in LA, where the women reunite many times over the years to celebrate film.’ — AC

the entirety

 

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Un salut à Henri Langlois (2014)
‘À l’occasion du Centenaire Henri Langlois, Agnès Varda raconte un souvenir.’ — CF

the entirety

 

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Les 3 Boutons (2015)
‘“Miss Jasmine! I have a package for you!” The 14-year-old girl with braces takes a break from milking the goat. Her local postman has delivered a surprise. She opens it up. Out floats a magical magenta ball dress ten times her teenage size. “I am curious,” she says, and enters the folds of the dress. From here, Jasmine⎯headstrong, a dreamer, a realist⎯takes us on a modern anti-fairy tale through caves and stalagmites, streets and shop windows, obsessions and everyday empowerment. Les 3 Boutons is directed by the legendary 87-year-old Agnès Varda.’ — Miu Miu

the entirety

 

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w/ JR Faces Places (2017)
‘Agnès Varda, whose unique cinematic vision since the 1950s has earned her a loyal following of enthusiastic cinephiles around the world, and the iconic photographer/ muralist JR, boasting over a million followers on Instagram, have more in common than one might imagine. Both share a lifelong passion for images and how they are created, displayed, and shared. Agnès chose to explore her passion through cinema and documentary, JR through his emotionally arresting open-air photo installations. When JR, a long-time fan, went to meet Agnès at her home on Rue Daguerre, they both knew immediately they wanted to work together. FACES PLACES documents their heart-warming journey through rural France and the unlikely, tender friendship they formed along the way.’ — Madman Films

Trailer

Excerpt

Excerpt

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Armando, Hi. Cool, and thank you. A favorite spot in Paris? Hm, I can’t think of a particular spot. I love the 10th arr., and I love being there in general. Cafe … I seem to always end up at this cafe called La Favorite near the St. Paul metro station, so I must like it particularly. Today’s plans … mm, buy food and cigarettes for the weekend. Maybe see Gisele. Go see if any art galleries have reopened. Work on a GIF thing I’m in the midst of. Not sure what else. You? ** Jonathan, Hey, Mr. M! Awesome to see you! Damn, that’s your photo! I found it doing a google search and swiped it without checking out its source, oops. I heard about the MUBI windfall, and I intend to see what kind of booty France has been allowed today. The last time I saw Zac he had just started to read Harry Dodge’s book. I haven’t read it yet although it’s on my list to buy on a planned bookshop outing this weekend. I flipped through Zac’s copy, and it looks to be really great. Are you reading it? ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. ‘Centurions of Rome’ is nuts. Yeah, boy, they don’t make them like that anymore. There were some crazy, ambitious ones back in the 70s. I remember one called, I think, ‘Ghost of a Chance’ that was about some hunk who died and came back as a ghost to fuck all the guys he’d wanted to when he was alive, and the porn was mostly boys bouncing around solo on beds trying to simulate that they were have sex with an invisible partner. And so many weird other films. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. Thank you so much for saying that, man. I don’t think I even have a full run of Little Caesar Magazine anymore. I think I gave my only copies of a couple of issues to Fales Library for my archive. Big honor if LC had any help in inspiring you to do TamTam. ** Niko, Hi, Niko! I’m good. Things in Paris are upswinging at the moment *knock on wood*. Cool you found a copy of ‘Coming Attractions’. Tim Dlugos and I were very close friends. And he turned me on to a lot of the young poets in NYC who ended up being close friends and whose work I published. Mm, he was sensitive and warm but also very witty. Great personality. He was kind of the center of the poetry/fiction/art scene in NYC for a while, introducing everyone to everyone else. I’ve often said that an oral biography of him would be key to understanding NYC downtown culture in the 80s, but it has never happened, and so many of our mutual colleagues are dead now. Amazing guy. Hugely missed. My new novel is definitely very personal and emotional. I think it might feel more raw than my others, but it’s just as heavily schemed out and structured. I hope you’ll like it. Thanks a bunch for coming in here. I hope you’re doing really well. Are you? ** Jeff J, I’m glad it worked, and thanks for being its impetus. It was good to do. Yeah, I’m a pretty busy worker/creator even now, but it’s hard to imagine how I could have done Little Caesar, which was an entirely one-person operation, and run the Beyond Baroque events, and also write my own work at the same time. Weird. Sure, I’m happy to do fact checking or talk or anything. I’m around. Just let me know when is good on your end. Brad Gooch’s book was eventually published by SeaHorse Press at the same time they put out my novella ‘Safe’. Otherwise, yeah, most if not all of the work in the Dlugos, Britton, Lally, and Brainard books are in their respective selected/collected poems. I think Ron Koertge is one of the greatest American poets, and he is criminally overlooked, and most of his books are out of print, so I would definitely say reprinting his Little Caesar books, maybe in one volume, would be a great idea. The Rimbaud text is very cut and dried, an article he wrote for a geographical magazine very late. A very few tiny Rimbaudian turns of phrase, but it’s pretty rote really. I don’t know why Peter Schjeldahl hasn’t had a Collected Poems published, It’s very strange. He was/is an amazing poet. ‘The Brute’ was his last book before he basically swore off writing poetry. Even in its strange current state, Paris still pretty dreamy. ** _Black_Acrylic, Thanks, Ben! Sweet about the Deller print! ** Bill, Hi. Well, Ron was totally posing to the nines in that photo. I’d be pretty shocked if you find any Little Caesar books in bookstores. Those books have been out of print for 40 years. Copies of some of them do pop up on eBay and Amazon and Abebooks and places like that sometimes. My mother, who was bankrolling Little Caesar, which was a deliberately money losing project as you can tell by the tiny prices I sold the books for, pulled the plug one day, so the books I had planned and partly typeset and the 13th issue of Little Caesar Magazine, got killed. Still breaks my heart. Little Caesar 13 was the best ever issue of the magazine. Sucks. ‘V/H/S: Viral’ … mm, you’ve kind of won me over to taking a look with that description. Great weekend! ** Julia Gloria, Hi, Julia! Very nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming in here. Well, when I started Little Caesar it was a combination of writing to poets and artists I really liked to beg them for work and publishing young poet/writer peers of mine whose work I wanted to get out into the world. The magazine/press became kind of known and considered a cool thing at one point, and then I started getting submissions from all kinds of incredible, famous writers and artists and even rock musicians. My original plan was to make a magazine/press that tapped into the energy and rebelliousness of the punk music scene, which started up at the same time in the late 70s, and to make poetry seem cool and exciting by bringing in other things like art and music and films and stuff. I later edited a publishing imprint for a while in the late 90s/early 00’s called Little House on the Bowery, and I published a couple of dozen books of mostly fiction. I stopped it when I moved to Paris because I couldn’t give it enough focus from over here. Mm, I don’t think I knew of any of those cannibals when I wrote ‘The Marbled Swarm’, no, if I’m remembering right. I wish I had. Maybe for my next cannibal novel if I ever write one. Thank you again so much! Please feel more than free to come back anytime. Take care. ** Derek McCormack, Thank you, thank you, dear and great Derek! ** Dave Barton, Hi, Dave. Welcome! Good to meet you. Yeah, the idea of doing a Collected Little Caesar Magazine book in facsimile has been discussed for a while now. And, yeah, the potentially giant problem is getting the permissions since so many people who contributed are either super famous now or dead or have disappeared into obscurity. My agent was going to look into what rights actually need to be acquired, but I don’t know what happened there. There is/was some thought that if such a book was a ltd. ed., getting the rights might not be necessary. But it would a herculean job to track down all the permissions, and there’s no money to pay anyone to do it. Worst comes to worst, yeah, I’ll try to find a way to do a facsimile pdf and just upload it and have it be free for anyone to download. Thanks! I’m well, and I hope you are too. ** Steve Erickson, Hi. That’s true. Also, since porn was shot on film and generally at feature length, it attracted daring filmmakers who saw it as a form to work in. A number of the more interesting gay porn makers in the 70s were graduates of film programs at universities like UCLA, USC, and so on. Big up on your AC. I hope our works when it comes time to turn it on. Yes, I explained the Little Caesar Collected book thing to Dave just up above. ** Misanthrope, Ha ha, ‘I Was Made for Dancing’ is such a horrible, horrible record. I had all of Leif’s records back in the day and played them for all the wrong reasons, and that song was nails on a chalkboard even back then. I had to google Juan Epstein since I never watched ‘Kotter’, but, yeah, I remember his face from the commercials for that show. Hair. ** Corey Heiferman, Hi. If that Collected Little Caesar book ever happens, I’ll probably write an intro explaining all that stuff. It was an insane amount of work. I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s so, so, so, so much easier now thanks to tech. I had to type everything into a typesetting machine, print out the pages, which then had to be put in chemical solution for an hour to set them, then they had be dried and then cut with scissors then pasted down on these graphed page layout things, and, if there were typos or mistakes, I had to go back and type the corrections into the typesetting machine, develop, dry, cut, and paste the corrections down in  the proper spots, etc, etc. It was nuts. I think editing is definitely a big help. Journalism really helped me in terms of learning how structure an article to work properly. There is standard format, but you can play with it within limits. I never liked or was helped by the deadlines though. That part blew. Nothing huge ahead for my weekend that won’t be unexpected so far. Cold sesame noodle … grrr. ** Right. Here’s another post where I went, ‘Have I really never done an Agnes Varda Day before?! Is that possible?’ And it was. So enjoy Agnes Varda Day until I see you next (Monday).

* (restored)
—-

(photo: Dorothy Dean’s portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe)

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and Jackie Curtis)

 

Let’s begin at the end, shall we?

—-“Dorothy Dean, a former editor for The New Yorker and for such publishers as Times Books and Harry N. Abrams, died of cancer Friday at the Hospice of St. John in Denver. She was 54 years old and lived in Boulder, Colo.
—-Ms. Dean had also held editorial positions at Vogue magazine and at Harper & Row. From 1963 to 1964, she was a member of The New Yorker’s research department – then called the fact-checking department. At her death, she was a proofreader for The Daily Camera newspaper, published in Boulder.
—-Ms. Dean was born in White Plains. She was a graduate of Radcliffe College, and earned a master’s degree in fine arts at Harvard University. She also studied art history on a Fulbright scholarship in Amsterdam.”

As these things go, fairly accurate. But not accurate enough for Dorothy, the ultimate “stickler for details.” So let’s turn the floor over to my long-time saddle pal Bill Reed who writes of her in his matchless memoir Early Plastic (o.o.p., but available on eBay):

The following definition of the genus fag hag (you won’t find the term in Webster’s) appears in The Queen’s Vernacular: A Gay Lexicon, by Bruce Rogers:
—-“Some are plain janes who prefer the honest affection of homoerotic boy friends; others are on a determined crusade to show gay boys that normal coitus is not to be overlooked. A few are simply women in love with homosexual men; others discover to their chagrin that their male friends are charming but not interested sexually.”
—-All of which-and much more. except for the chagrin part-was true of my friend Dorothy Dean. The Mother of All Fag-Hags, she felt the term had an ugly ring to it, and much preferred “Fruit Fly.” I didn’t get to know her until some time after her mid-1950s glory years during which she was the Queen Bee of a Harvard set that operated out of the Casablanca bar (where Edie Sedgewick later came to shine). And where the men that she hung with —none of whom had any notion that there was anything coming down the line called gay lib—looked to her as a kind of ultimate arbiter of style, attitude and taste. She was an outrageous woman who would say things that no one they had ever met before would dare utter. She would tell people to their face exactly what she thought of them and continued to play this role later on in a number of different contexts. It was almost inevitable that Dorothy would become part of Andy Warhol’s Factory circle, where it was demanded that people be outrageous and try to top one another. But that scene had pretty much disappeared by the time my boyfriend David and I met her in the Seventies. Her breakup with longtime closest friend Arthur Loeb was indicative of a lot of dissolutions and changes that were going on within the social scene. Gay militancy had to some degree turned the fag-hag into a symbol of the past, both in its traditional cheer-leader style and even in Dorothy’s overwhelming she-who-must-be-obeyed approach. In addition, unlike your garden variety fag-hag who fears sex, Dorothy wanted to get it on with her boys-she wasn’t afraid of anything-and was equally inclined toward heterosexual inamorata.
—-Complex to a fault, Dorothy was the sweetest, brightest, and most frightening woman I have ever known. I met her in 1970 while working at a bookstore owned by her friend Arthur, the inspiration for the Dudley Moore movie of the same name (or so it has always seemed to me) and a member of a prominent New York family long perched in the more vertiginous heights of New York’s 400. In exchange for their son’s pledge to put aside his legendarily dissolute lifestyle, Arthur was being backed to the hilt by his parents in this literary emporium that advertised itself as “a carriage trade” operation in the classified ad that I answered for a job. I was on staff when the place opened, and although Dorothy wasn’t an employee, she was so omnipresent a fixture that she seemed like staff. My boyfriend David was dazzled when he found out she hung out at the place.
—-Working for Arthur was not at all like work. A past master of the zippy comeback department, one day an East Side matron came into the store and with a totally straight face asked him what might he suggest for “a man who has everything and is going on safari.” Without missing a beat, he replied: “Have you considered giving him Deborah Kerr?” An avid reader of the New York Times, who always first read the bridge column and obituaries each day before getting on to the day’s less important news, Arthur said that his memoirs were going to be called (in a play on the Rocky Graziano autobiography), Somebody Down There Likes Me. I was surely as good an “audience” as Arthur was ever likely to get.
—-While she may have been black and a woman, in the final analysis, she wasn’t black and she wasn’t a woman: she was Dorothy Dean. Slight, ferret-like, and possessing coffee-with-cream skin, Dorothy wore horn-rimmed coke bottle lens glasses, usually dressed in a simple, tasteful shift dress; and was, without question, New York’s most incurable diseuse. Nearly every time I was with Dorothy, she happened to be drinking; she would invariably ask me the same question: “Did I ever tell you about the time I once danced the ‘Tennessee Waltz’ in Tennessee with Tennessee Williams?” (Which was true.) She claimed that it was one of her proudest accomplishments in life. I don’t think she was joking.

 

(photo: Henry Geldzahler and Dorothy Dean)

 

In 1995 the New Yorker ran a lengthy profile of Dorothy, entitled “Friends of Dorothy,” by which time she had been dead for nearly a decade. Fifteen years earlier the Soho Weekly News had run a picture of her at a party with “living legend” underneath it, and the New York Times contained a brief obit of her in 1987 when she died; but until the New Yorker, that was just about the only public acknowledgement of the unique part Dorothy had played in at least a half-dozen overlapping social and professional “scenes” in New York in the Sixties.
—-Hilton Als wrote in the New Yorker profile [which can be found in his collection of essays called The Women } that years after her passing, people are still “dining out on Dorothy stories.” One of the many tales not included by Als was related to me by Dorothy herself shortly after I met her. In her usual nasal drawl, which bore a remarkable resemblance to Mae West if she had gone to Radcliffe (which in fact Dorothy had), Dorothy asked me, “Have you ever heard of this person, Kris Kristofferson?” An odd question, because of course I had heard of the hyphenate performer who had just crossed over from recording artist to actor in a series of mildly interesting films such as Cisco Pike and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Dorothy then went on to tell me about a brief and intense relationship (were there any other kind for Dorothy?) with the entertainer that had taken place in Italy fifteen years earlier. She was on a Fulbright and Kristofferson was (hard to believe) a Rhodes scholar, fully one hundred eighty degrees away from the public shit-kicker image he began cultivating in the 1960’s.When it came to pass that Kristofferson resurfaced in this entirely unrecognizable form of movie star-country singer, Dorothy sprang into action. She sent him a letter excoriating him for all the cultural criminalism he was wreaking (“Jesus Was a Capricorn” has to be the all time worst song title ever, she opined) on records and in films. Her missive to him was minus a trace of for-old-times- sake sentimentalism, but instead was a request—more like a pronunciamento—that Kristofferson tithe a reparative ten percent of his considerable earnings to the New York Public Library. She never received a reply.
—-Growing up, Dorothy was felt to be exceptional. Born in 1932 to Reverend Elmer Wendell Dean and his wife, Dorothy was the first black valedictorian of White Plains High School. In 1950, she entered the gates of Radcliffe to become one of the few African-Americans on its campus. Four years later she graduated there with a bachelor’s degree, with honors in philosophy, and then went on for a masters at Harvard where at some point, Dorothy later told me, she had become pregnant by a wealthy student there. The boy, fearful of the consequences of his blue-blooded parents learning that he had impregnated a girl-and an African-American at that!-washed his hands entirely of the matter. Dorothy, even then possessing a fair share of temerity, proceeded to blow the whistle on the cad to his fraternity brothers. Forthwith they, in an act of honor, broke into the boy’s dorm room, stole a small Matisse from his wall, gave it to Dorothy, who sold it for enough to pay for an abortion-and then some. In 1956 Dorothy became pregnant once again; this time, though, she went full term before giving the child up for adoption. Some people believed the father was a Dutch student she met while on a Fulbright; others thought him a certain M.I.T professor.
—-In 1963 Dorothy, her extensive formal studies finally concluded, arrived in New York, where she was immediately taken up by a set of sad young men and bright young things, many of them relocated from Cambridge. Once again, they became seminal to her reputation as the mother of all fruit flies. Now Dorothy also found herself becoming acquainted with the world of Sixties New York debs, druggies and drag queens.
—-Some believed that Dorothy harbored toward fellow blacks an aversion bordering on loathing, as perhaps evidenced by the fact that she ofttimes referred to James Baldwin as Martin Luther Queen, and was not at all adverse to using “watermelon” and “jigaboo” rhetoric when writing or talking about blacks. While this might indicate that even Dorothy found it hard to avoid the tradition of red, white and blue racial self-loathing, it never seemed to bother her that my friend David was African-American.
—-A stickler for grammar, even in the most casual of conversations, one nearly always felt the presence of a giant red pen in Dorothy’s hand ready to strike you down and mark you up for incorrect usage. Thus, it isn’t surprising that her passion for lingual concision led to one job after another in various copy editing and proofreading capacities at such publications as Vogue, Show, the New Yorker and Essence, “the magazine that proves black is pathetic,” she once said. She was fired from the latter after suggesting that the magazine run a picture on its cover of her friend Andy Warhol in blackface.
—-As with most people of slight build, it didn’t take much in the way of intake to get Dorothy drunk. Like my mother, one drink and Dorothy was well on her way to Blotto City. One evening she came to have dinner with David and me at our apartment on West 85th Street and was as charming as ever. . .at first. But it only took a couple of glasses of wine to put her in her cups. She ended up staying the night, and was more or less a royal pain-waking David and me up, tickling us, crashing crockery to the floor, etc., until finally passing out in the wee small hours. A couple of days later we received from her a pluperfect “Miss Finch’s Day School for Young Ladies” bread and butter letter thanking us for our hospitality, except for the postscript in which she profusely apologized for her besotted behavior. We were scarcely the first to be sent such a note. These thank you/apology missives, we later learned, were a part of Dorothy’s dinner going modus operandi.
—-Dorothy often referred to herself as the Black Barbarella, but reminded me more of Dennis the Menace’s prissy friend Margaret, who wanted your friendship and was willing to lose it at any cost. In the last analysis, she was an unreconstructed hipster, cut from much the same cloth as those I had known at Stanley’s Bar on the Lower East Side.
—-At one point Dorothy was hired to guard the portals of a somewhat trendier, slightly more uptown version of Stanley’s, known as Max’s Kansas City. It was home away from home to the conglomeration of failed hippies, artist manques and Euro-trash who satellited around Andy Warhol, and had the back room of the trendy spot pretty much all to themselves. No bigger than a minute, Dorothy Dean may have been the only bouncer ever hired strictly for the brute force of her vicious tongue.

 

(photo: The Sugar Plum Fairy (Joe Campbell) in My Hustler)

 

Be they straight or gay, Dorothy specifically had a “thing” for men with high cheekbones-in fact, she could be said to have elevated such a taste to the veritable level of sexual fetish. Her small Greenwich Village apartment was dominated with the famous Personality Poster of a very handsome, young and shirtless Herb Alpert who, say what you will about his corny music, had cheekbones like the White Cliffs of Dover! The same could be said of Clint Eastwood – another Dorothy passion. But the most devastating cheekbones of all belonged to one Joe Campbell, aka the Sugar Plum Fairy who, despite that moniker, was one legendarily tough little number. A co-star of Warhol’s classic comedy of manners, My Hustler, where he does his butcher-than-thou act to the max, this demi-mondaine was the lover of Harvey Milk, when the gay-politico- martyr-to-be was a closeted New York investment banker. He was also, along with Dorothy, a major “character” in Warhol’s taped “novel” A. I never met him, but my friend David certainly did. One afternoon in the basement of the Museum of Modem Art, while waiting for the doors of the film auditorium to open for a screening of something foreign and obscure, Joe spied David (sitting demurely, leafing through a copy of the latest “Sight and Sound”), and made his move. Terrified by Joe’s ability to move from a quick hello to an even quicker “let’s go back to my apartment,” David politely declined. “You turned down The Plum!,” a horrified Dorothy exclaimed when told of the incident many years later, “How could you?” Still for all his cheekboned perfection, Joe didn’t mean as much to Dorothy as her longtime running buddy Arthur did.
—-For a couple who were not married or even sexually involved, Dorothy and Arthur were an extraordinarily famous twosome. For years they had been nearly inseparable, with their main base of operations being Andy Warhol’s inner circle; one so inner that it is unknown to all but the most well-versed in Warholian lore. In A Dorothy appears as “Dodo Mae Doom,” she’s “Gwen,” a central character in Lynne Tillman’s Cast in Doubt (Tillman also features Dorothy stories in her book about the Warhol Factory The Velvet Years); and in James McCourt’s novel, Time Remaining, she appears as herself. Additionally, she pops up as nearly herself in several Andy Warhol films, including My Hustler (a very funny walk-on in the last reel), the original cut of Chelsea Girls (her section, “Afternoon” also featured Arthur, was shot in his apartment, and somehow disappeared during the second week of the films’ initial run), and in several sequences of Warhol’s legendary 25-hour-long Four Stars. The truly Dorothy dedicated can also find her playing a secretary in Jean-Claude Van ltalie’s gay porn classic American Cream.
—-In what Dorothy later described to me as “an act of systematic sobriety,” Arthur began-shortly after opening up the rehabilitationaI therapy/retail establishment where I worked and initially met Dorothy-to slowly chop away from his life all the people and things that he felt had reduced him to his previous, pitiable alcoholic estate. Almost like he was going down a list ticking off people, influences and controlled substances one by one. Just like a tornado which first appears to be miles in front of you and then suddenly is right on top of you, Dorothy never saw her own de-annexation coming. Finally one day Arthur came to her on his mental list and, without provocation, never spoke to her again: she would come in the store, he would leave; she would phone, he would hang up. Previously thought to be as invulnerable as Margaret Thatcher crossed with Loretta Young, suddenly Dorothy was a bundle of raw nerve ends-crying like a seventh grader who had just been terminally dis-ed by someone they had been friends with for a lifetime. Dorothy begged me to intervene with Arthur, but I wouldn’t have known how to even begin, and so I spent a lot of supportive time with her in her cups, while she just sobbed over and over again. . .”Why?” She was willing to do anything, even Alcoholics Anonymous, to regain Arthur’s friendship. But the door of fraternity was inexorably slammed shut. Here was the toughest woman in New York, and she had met her Waterloo. I have never known one human being be so hurt by another’s actions. And yes, as far as I know, the once notoriously wet Arthur is still sober twenty-five years later-a feat comparable to crossing the Rubicon. Shortly after Arthur fired Dorothy from his life, he also gave me, without explanation, my walking papers as an employee. I never saw him after that.
—-Dorothy was a long time member of the National Board of Review, the fuddy duddy quasi-official film board. This was indicative of her station in life as a frustrated film critic. She once told me an hilarious story about viewing, in her capacity as a NBR member, a particularly racy foreign film, Louis Malle’s Les Amants, in which the heroine and hero are both horizontal in bed nearly naked. When the former, going down on her lover, disappeared frame left, the woman next to her began to question hysterically, “Where did she go? Where did she go?” “To the bathroom,” Dorothy answered. Which seemed to have satisfied her fellow Board member.

 

(photo: All Lavendar Courier cover)

 

Dorothy, David and I had dinner the last night before he and I moved from New York to California in 1975; but it was not the final time I heard from the “Queen of Spades” as she sometimes called herself-along with the “Spade of Queens.” In what was clearly a working out of her long suppressed desire to be a film reviewer. Dorothy began putting out her own rather wild manuscript reply to the NBR’s long-running. But exceeding unimaginative publication Films in Review. Calling her publication the All-Lavender Cinema Courier. we began receiving copies of it shortly after moving to California, starting in July 1976 with issue number 3. Knowing Dorothy there may not have even been a 1 or 2, or else these might have been issued sometime during the Sixties. Enclosed with the issue was a form letter which was a request for money to keep her venture going. In it she wrote:
—-“We are all aware, I fear, that most practicing movie critics are pragmatically useless. They consistently lose sight of the point that the cinema’s prime function is entertainment; they are misleading, pretentious. and needlessly longwinded.” In the letter Dorothy never explains how she intends to avoid such pitfalls. but in the “Courier” proper she cuts right to the chase, heaping praise upon well-crafted commercial crowd pleasers and damning almost all other films, domestic or otherwise, which fell outside these rigidly constructed critical boundaries. Much of the “Courier” is Wonderful Stuff. Here is one entry chosen at random:
—-“The Last Tycoon. Not very good and who is to say precisely why. Let us not forget that F. Scott Fitzgerald, it is said, by definition can never be successfully translated into the movie medium. But given the long string of flash names attached to this latest attempt—Elia Kazan. Harold Pinter. Tony Curtis. Rbl De Niro. Robert Mitchum (gone, sadly to fat). Jeanne Moreau. Jack Nicholson, Donald Pleasence. Ray Milland. Dana Andrews, etc.—one had hoped for much better. However. all is most humdrum and drab. inane and vacant, constituting a movie without a personality. The dialogue comes mostly from FSF. as I remember. except of course for the pitifully false ending; and so it is really difficult to imagine how Harold Pinter. as has been claimed. consumed an entire year in ‘crafting’ a script from what survived of the original MS. It is disheartening to learn that someone brilliant enough to describe scotch whiskey as the ‘great malt that wounds’ (Pinter. No Man’s Land) could fail so markedly at patching together extant Fitzgerald. Perhaps if some of the planes and trains and what have you in the original had been retained, the results would have been perkier. The spectacle of De Niro stalking about in expectation of conveying a commanding presence as the high panjandrum of a big-time Hollywood movie studio is ludicrous; Robert Allen could easily get away with this kind of thing but not the aforementioned mealy-mouthed invertebrate.”
—-Doubtlessly Dorothy’s ad hominem characterization of DiNiro was based on actual experience, for she was definitely not of the school that believed that revenge is a dish best served cold, as evidenced by her remarks re: the film The Other Side of Midnight in issue no. 8 (14 July 1977) of the “Courier”:
—-“[Marie-France Pisier] is eventually in a most enviable position, indeed as regards implementing the revenge of one’s dreams- the very best kind, whereby the revengee is made to hopelessly writhe and squirm and agonize, fully cognizant of the source of his suffering.”
—-As for the film itself, Dorothy deemed it, “Quality trash on a high level, and a stunning paean to [you guessed it] revenge.”
—-Below the “Tycoon” review is one for Brian De Palma’s Carrie (a wish fulfillment fantasy for Dorothy if ever there was one!) which begins: DO NOT MISS!!!! Eight to ten such squibs were included in each issue of the “Courier” which, at the bottom of number three, Dorothy scrawled a personal note to me:
—-“I am dismayed at myself that it’s taken so long to get the ALCC going again. Will answer your letter properly in a few days (I hope)—glad to hear you have settled in, as it were.”
—-But Dorothy never did answer my letter, and then after issue number 8 of the “Courier” dated July 14, 1977, I stopped hearing from Dorothy altogether. Radio silence.

 

(photo: Dorothy Dean and the gang on Fire Island)

 

—-I began to inquire after her; but Dorothy had been on her last legs as a scenemaker, and no one I contacted seemed to know or care much about what might have happened to her. My first trip to New York after moving to California I devoted much of my time toward a search for her, but unlike Thompson in Citizen Kane I couldn’t gain a clue. I went to her apartment, but her name was not on the mailbox and no one answered when I rang the bell. A few weeks later, after I had returned to L.A., David got in touch with a seemingly reliable source, someone from Dorothy’s old Warhol days, now a successful movie publicist, who told him the following story: an extraordinary tale, but one not so far out, considering its subject was Dorothy, that it couldn’t conceivably have happened. It seems that she had attended a cocktail party at the penthouse of a well-known Broadway composer, the gathering composed of the usual witty, brittle people who congregate at such affairs; the kind of event to which Dorothy had probably been to hundreds of times. At one point in the evening, her usual two sheets to the wind, she found herself in the middle of a particularly bothersome conversation with a musician friend of the host. Finally when Dorothy could take no more, she allegedly leveled at the offending party just the sort of attack that she’d launched on hundreds of such boors in the past:
—-“You are a boring, insensitive lout who has misused and mangled the English language exactly 20 times in the last five minutes while in my presence” she said, “and if you had any feelings of regard toward the human race, you would march over to the edge of this terrace and throw yourself off.”
—-Which, according to David’s informant, is exactly what the man did, killing himself and in the process causing Dorothy to have a total nervous collapse, resulting in weeks spent in a mental hospital. Afterwards, she had gone to Boulder, Colorado, to stay in a commune run by Off-Broadway playwright, Jean-Claude Van Itallie.
—-In truth, I was to soon learn, there was not much veracity to the story (the part about Colorado, though, was accurate). Apparently an individual who happened to have been at a party with Dorothy a few days earlier, had killed himself; then somehow the two unrelated incidents had become conflated. An seemingly apocryphal tale, but Dorothy would have loved the idea of someone killing themselves over bad grammar.
—-All the years of drinking had finally caught up with Dorothy both physically and mentally. Thrown out of her longtime Morton Street apartment, she was rescued by sympathetic friends who began the process of trying to help Dorothy put her life back in order.
—-After obtaining Dorothy’s address in Boulder, I wrote her a simple chatty letter, making no reference to the recent unpleasantness. I received no reply from her. Then in February 1987, the same week that Andy Warhol died, I opened up the paper to the Death Notices to learn that Dorothy had succumbed to cancer. She had long been associated, the notice informed, with the likes of Vogue and Harper and Row and at the time of her death was a proofreader for the Boulder newspaper, The Daily Camera (what fun Dorothy would have had with inept Boulder cops and the Jon Benet Ramsey case!). Otherwise, the obituary—the only such New York Tunes unpaid obit ever accorded a mere proofreader?—was short and perfunctory and with no hint of the “real” Dorothy. Such as that—as I later learned—-after moving to Colorado she had not only joined a bible study group (!), but Alcoholics Anonymous as well. Joining AA, regardless of her sincerity or lack thereof, must have finally given her what she had been looking for all her life: complete and total command of a room full of people. Just like the old joke (one that the old Dorothy would have loved) about the comic who tells a friend he has to go to an AA meeting. His pal replies:
—-“But you’re not an alcoholic.”
—-“Yes, I know, but I need the floor time.”

To quote James McCourt in Queer Street quoting Joseph L. Mankiewicz via Bette Davis, “Slow Curtain. The End.”

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. Very happy today to restore Mr. Ehrenstein’s long dormant guest-post about the fascinating Dorothy Dean. If you want to have fun, you’ll have it. ** David Ehrenstein, And there you are! Thank you again from the future, David! Funny, I just made an upcoming Hanna Schygulla Day for the blog on Saturday. ** Sypha, Hi. ** _Black_Acrylic, Ha ha but … wait. I thought Eurovision was cancelled. Did they do a Zoom Eurovision or something. If so, no way! ** Tom K, Hi, Tom! Great to see you here! ** Bill, Hi. My weekend was all right. I watched Bruce Boone do a Zoom reading last night, so I was actually in your neighborhood in a way. Didn’t get to effedupmovies’ trove yet, but I think today. Yeah, I’ll expect to see whatever I see there while doing a shooting gallery number with pop-ups, ugh. Great about the progress with the little technical stuff! ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, T! I would imagine that your new masterpiece should be getting freed up and announce-able any day now, no? If you want to do a ‘welcome … ‘ post for it or anything just lt me know. Mark’s book is crazy great, no surprise. The Mark/Steven thing is on the other side of Paris still awaiting my grab. It’s definitely so, so much nicer being semi-reopened. It’s starting feel like a bit of normality. I hope you get your version soon, if it’s the right time, of course. Jesus. ** Damien Ark, Hi, Damien! It’s well worth the dough. Whoa, amazing progress on your novel! That’s great! I’m very careful with my novels. I only show them to one trusted person, and even then only once I think they’re completely finished, before I send them out to hopefully be published, so I totally get it. Nice that you’ve got an ideal cover artist committed. Well, ha ha, there are those who would have zero problem reading 400+ pages on that subject, but it’s true that the best seller lists might be walled-up. So sorry about your hand. Having broken both of my wrists at the same time, ouch. But I’m glad you’re feeling more you-like. Very good to see you, D., and love you too. ** Jeff J, Ace about the four tracks! Can’t wait to hear them! Yes, there’s a fantastic new Boone book from Nightboat, basically a selected/collected Bruce Boone (fiction, essays, poetry, etc.). It’s incredible, of course, and there was Zoom launch last night where Bruce read from SF. That was great. My weekend was pretty okay. Still enjoying the amount of freedom I have very much. Yours? ** Misanthrope, Hi. If you want the Steven/Mark one, you’d better order it lickety split. It’s way ltd. ed. There you go: all your LPS problems solved in one bite. Well, hundreds. Nice, the bonfire, the kids, the weekend. Sounds like a keeper. And … enjoy the grind? ** Mark Gluth, Hey, maestro! My supreme pleasure and honor! Such an incredible novel! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, that was an unexpected and happy surprise that Twilley got that late period hit. I hope you like ‘Twilley Don’t Mind’. The ‘Lost’ Twilley Band album is great if you’re a ‘Sincerely’ fan and don’t have it. Haven’t heard the new Ka yet. I did listen to a few things from the Charli XCX, and it sounds quite good, and I think I’ll go ahead and get it. The super neg stuff I’ve read about ‘Capone’ did seem very suspicious to me. I don’t how or when I’ll get a chance to see it, but I’ll take the future chance. ** Right. Dorothy Dean! David Ehrenstein! Power Couple! See you tomorrow.