Constance by Patrick McGrath

 Constance by Patrick McGrath

This is a period novel. It is an odd period. It is set in NYC in the early 1960s. Penn Station is being torn down. This fact becomes a sort of metaphor for social institutions decaying and being torn down. The enormous monumental train station that seemed so permanent, and perhaps should have been, is coming down and it is a slow painful dirty process. This is not the “swinging ‘60s” this is the prefeminist, echos of the 1950s, 1960s. And the city is changing demographically which upsets the white conservative character in the novel.

This is the story of a marriage between a twice previously married older professor/writer and a young woman, new in town and an editor.
The writer is working on a book he is calling The Coservative Heart. The novel doesn’t state the point of view of this work or anything else about it other than that the character Sidney, the British man living in New York writing it, is having a hard time with it.

He meets young Constance at a book party on Sutton Place. It is love at first sight. He wants to be with her and somehow can detect her loneliness and damage.

The story is told in two voices, there are chapters in Sidney’s voice and others in the voice of Constance.

The feel of the novel is dark gothic in the settings of her ramshackle, in disrepair, family house upstate along the Hudson River and in Sidney's enormous dark upper west side apartment. The house has been in the troubled family for a couple of generations. Constance’s grandfather built out a smaller house with ostentatious towers. She has lived there with her distant father and her younger sister who she had to mother after their mother’s early death.

There are murky dark secrets up there that had traumatized Constance and her sister and maybe her unfeeling doctor father. All these secrets are revealed in the course of the novel.
Sidney has trouble finding his way through the morass of Constance’s family mess, often seeing and taking the father’s point of view without enough information to justify that and to the added distress of Constance. Part of the gothic bind for Constance is that she is trapped between these to patriarcal older men, her elderly father and her new husband 20 some years older than she is.

It is a dark, interesting drama of family and a marriage relationship.
McGrath has a way of making an America Gothic melodrama, out of ordinary life,  that is convincing and disturbing.

 

King Cohen (2017)

Written & Directed by Steve Mitchell

This is a nicely done, cheerful, documentary about legendary TV/movie writer/director/producer Larry Cohen.

It is cheerful because it tends to focus on the joy, the fun, of filmmaking on the hardscrabble indie edge in the 1970s and early 1980s.
It is also NYC centric. Cohen, classic 1970s movies are set in the city.

We are told and shown examples of Cohen’s knack for stealing location shots in the city. This is when a stripped down, fast moving, production crew just shoots stuff on the streets without establishing permission through the city authorities, such as today’s Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, or informing bystanders and pedestrians who happen to be there.  Cohen also did not put a lot of planning into stunt coordinating. Fred Williamson, star of Cohen’s 1973 Black Caesar, tells some interesting fun stories about this mode of working with Cohen. He contradicts Cohen’s claim of performing a stunt of jumping from a moving cab before his star agreed to do it. “He’s lying.” says Williamson, smoking a big cigar. It’s very amusing.

Those familiar with Cohen classic 1970s-80s indie feature work, such as It’s Alive (1974) and it’s sequels and Q (1982) might be interested in learning through this documentary that Larry Cohen did a lot of TV writing of popular shows in the 1960’s when very young, in his 20s. These include The Fugitive, The Defenders, and being the creator of Branded (“Scorned as the one who ran, What do you do when you’re branded and you know you’re a man?”), and The Invaders. 

Larry Cohen is interviewed in the movie. He is an interesting personality that only NYC could have produced, likes to talk, is proud of his work. He likes to focus on the positive end of a very difficult business that he managed to succeed in way beyond most others who attempt it.

This is a very entertaining fast paced documentary filled with enthusiasm and joyfulness in the creative process.  
It could serve as an inspiration for young moving image storytellers. 

Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany

This one sometimes took me to the same place as reading about what can be a happier life for humans in a hunter-gatherer group. It is the place of emotional frustration for me. The feeling that things could, without a lot of effort, maybe even less effort, be a lot more pleasant. The restrictions of civilization when mixed up so deeply with global capitalism create a reality that we live in that we take to be normal. But who determines “normal”? The current situation, current meaning during my experience, does not feel normal to me. It feels empty and dark and lonely and without much hope of real human connection that is not somehow connected with money. 

This book is all about connection from the most basic to more complex. Much of it centers around sex. Sex with people in public situations and in places of business fexible enough to permit it or even have it somehow built into the business model. Delany describes these places. They were mostly movie theaters and most of them were old rundown places that had shown pornography. Delany describes himself as, for years, a frequenter of such places where he would engage in oral sex with other men. 

Delany is an urban man. Raised in Manhattan. He has the spirit of a city about him and love of the random encounter, sexual or otherwise. I can only report with a great deal of shame what this book clearly showed me about myself. I was already spoiled by the isolation of suburbia before arriving to live in NYC in my early 30s, over 30 years ago. I could just be a temperamentally shy awkward man or that could have been learned in the safety and isolation of suburban life, and this was in Ohio; a conservative place in a conservative time. I never even visited a major city until age 18 when I hitchhiked to NYC by myself. Being honest about my behavior in the city, I now see that I used it as more to escape, hide out, ti become anonymous, and not be looked at too closely since my social skills and impulses were so low. Maybe if I had grown up in the city with more variety of people about, I would not have developed such lonerism. Maybe I would have found a more welcoming community where my impulses could be channeled to play with like-minded individuals rather than half buried in shame, hiding out until it’s all over. Maybe I could have connected with others better. 

I had been to several of these movie theaters he writes about. I remember Variety Photoplays on 3rd ave and the Metropolitan a couple blocks away on 14th St.. Both sites have gone to demolition and new taller buildings some years ago. I mess them, as well as the Cameo on 8th Ave midtown. 

I wasn’t as into the scene as energetically as Delany but I’m not gay, but somewhere on the bisexual scale and from Ohio, etc.

So much of this is about The Enclosure. A major part of the story of modern civilization is about Enclosure, locking away, fencing off what was once collectively free and making it owned and somehow involving a fee of labor or currency for continued usage. First there is free land where plants, animals, and human animals roam free and live from this land the best they can. But then someone wants to own this land and the people end up having to pay some way or other to survive rather than scratch a living out of the land. Or they can still scratch a living but must give the owner a percentage of their efforts to be permitted to continue surviving.  

The sex in the book is to illustrate the varieties of connection. The prime theme is that connection is better than networking. He morns the destruction of the public sex venues in the renovation of Times Square, because they can facilitate “interclass connection” through basic human sexual interest. His stance is basically anti- big capitalism as destructive of small local business that has an intimate connection to the community and street life and that  brings the safety of people around a healthy and diverse street life. 

I think he is missing some big critical part of the Enclosure. He talks about the buildings, the difference between infrastructure and superstructure, which is the skyscrapers that replaced the small, the rundown and the local with big business national brands. 

But this didn’t happen just in the 1990s the process was already going on for decades. It seems to me that most these theaters themselves were an earlier manifestation of local live theater or whatever entertainment being destroyed by the products of the Hollywood movie business already connected to Wall Street investment dazzling us with its powerful superstructure of dreams. The theaters becoming redundant with television and later even porn theaters less in use when one could watch porn at home via VHS cassettes. By the 1980s the theaters were the realm of those interested is some same sex teasing or action or the men who situationally couldn’t watch tapes at home. Of course now this is all on the internet. 

This Enclosure was very late to the city. The suburbs were built that way, with the places the public could go almost entirely limited to commercial venues such as the shopping mall which became the only place for kids to hang out and try to connect. 

There are a lot of people now who have fled the suburbs for a better life in the revitalization cities. But they are pre-conditioned for the Enclosure that is part of the revitalization. Unaccustomed to and unaware of earlier city life, they are most comfortable with the Starbucks and other familiar brands and they bring this brand familiarity and loyalty with them. 

Delany discusses women a bit and how the open, anonymous sex venues are not used by them. He envisions a sort of hostel set up where women could bring strangers or acquaintances in a public setting safer than bringing someone into the privacy of a home. Some women can and do enjoy hookups with strangers, so perhaps that is possible some time in the future as the restrictions of the ideology of the patriarchy, and its women followers, continue to crumble. 

There is a big fat novel Delany wrote about the theater sex called The Mad Man. I read that some years ago. It is rather unique I think.