The Wit of the Staircase

Strawberry Moon, Strawberry Queen, Strawberry Me

The full moon of June is called by some Native Americans "Strawberry Moon," as its rays give the last ripening lunar gloss to nature's most voluptuous, most fragrant, most summery berry.

How they lie, vulnerable, exquisite, their crimson--nearly black under nighttime skies--a rare and honest gift projected into the yawning enormity of the universe's star-flecked, infinite curve.

But where was I? Oh yes....

The Los Angeles Lunar Society officially welcomes in Summer 2006 on the full moon evening of June 11th. This is sure to be one of the known calendar's most heavenly summer moons, if my Head Lunar Librarian's bibliomantic auguries are correct. And under this rare celestial bud we will set an unprecedented precedent by crowning our first Lady Lunar Strawberry Queen.

From the ranks of our members, a maid aged between 16 and 78 summers will be selected. And if you've been to one of our midnight-to-dawn meetings, you know that some come in feeling 16 and leave wondering where the decades went, and some come in snow-haired, ancient bones creaking, cobwebs you-know-where and leave pink cheeked (on either end) and cartwheeling.

So while we've already gotten the evening's centerpiece--a cask of dandelion wine fermented by my very own father--shipped in from the wilds of Michigan, I'll still be busy with the details of the evening's festivities all day tomorrow. So when this once in a lifetime moon rises, think of us wherever you are. We with our Catherine Wheel firecrackers, our tiny vials of unisex bitter Casablanca orange cologne for each of our members as party favors, the just-so crimson and white striped paper lanterns that will extend to surf's edge in Malibu--and our gorgeous crown of strawberry-sized cabochon rubies, ripe and ready for the head of our Lunar Strawberry Moon queen.

As for me, busy organizing the evening's stellar Lunar event, most likely drunk on Daddy's jailhouse hooch, and exempted from participation in the pageant by my official duties as Head Lunar Librarian? I'll be thinking what every hemoglobically healthy American woman aged 16-78 involuntarily thinks whenever the fate of being crowned a temporary summer royal hovers overhead like a metaphorical moon:

"Please, please, let it be me."

See you Lunarians Sunday night in Malibu.

Jolie Triste: The Life And Times Of Jean Seberg

A lovely new slide show featuring the actress and activist Jean Seberg at Style.com, below.

Link: Jean Seberg: Beauty Icon on Style.com.

Historic Theaters Of New York City

Fascinating, thorough photographic slideshow.

Link: GuanoReturns - Photobucket - Video and Image Hosting. via.

"Give Me Leonard Cohen Afterworld / So I Can Sigh Eternally." --Kurt Cobain, Pennyroyal Tea

"I'm not looking for a new religion. I'm quite happy with the old one, with Judaism." --Leonard Cohen, 1998

In honor of Leonard Cohen's new book we bring you this fascinating list of 69 facts about the singer and sometime poet.

He's seen so much culture now in his mid-seventies, and is such a pioneering category-crosser that the list is quite fascinating. As usual he looks deeply into everything but himself, while using personal questions as a springboard. It's also educational that after so much travel and questing, he wound up where he started, a Jew.

Link: Guardian Unlimited Arts | | Who held a gun to Leonard Cohen's head?.

"The Foot Feels The Foot When It Feels The Ground." --Buddha

A blogger friend this week declares both his foot fetish and his hatred for flip-flops, which are apparently everywhere on the streets of New York City of late. (I have to stop and think to figure out East Coast seasons now.)

The Staircase's suggested alternate foot dressing, above: one giant, awesomely gorgeous topaz toe ring.

Link: Glenn O'Brien: Flip-Floppers.

Bizarrely thorough, pedantic foot fetish and foot symbolism site:

Link: Sexy Feet.

I Love Jerry Lewis

The Wit Of The Staircase is willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with the French on nearly anything, and that includes their much-ridiculed love of American comic Jerry Lewis.

I have come up with a shrewd {says I} thesis as to why the French revere Lewis. You will find this brilliant idea in the commentary below I recently wrote for the Library Of Congress' Mary Pickford Theater on the occasion of their screening a Wit favorite, Jerry Lewis' "Bellboy".

"Jerry Lewis' status as a filmic auteur revered by the French is something of a baffling cliché in the Anglophone world. But the Legion of Honor ribbon and approbation of Jean-Luc Godard are perhaps less perplexing than why, after directing twelve films, he still remains something of a prophet without honor in his own land.

The Bellboy is Jerry Lewis' directorial debut, and it alone may demonstrate why a reassessment of Lewis' stateside artistic reputation should be undertaken. Lewis also produced and starred in the film during the day in Miami's Fountainbleu Hotel while performing a month-long gig in the resort's ballroom at night.

The alternately claustrophobic and enormous spaces of Morris Lapidus' building make for an Alice-In-Wonderland filmic environment in which Lewis' character Stanley, the titular bellboy, is alternately overwhelmed or painted into a corner by director Lewis' mise en scene. Lewis here perfects routines he had previously performed for other directors, most notably Warner Bros. animation maestro turned feature film director Frank Tashlin. (It has been remarked that Tashlin was the only director who knew how to direct Jerry Lewis as well as Jerry Lewis).

Lewis had recently split from longtime partner Dean Martin when he made The Bellboy, and in the film he examines aspects of psychic doubling or split personality that he would take as the entire subject of 1963's Jekyll and Hyde-derived Nutty Professor. In The Bellboy, hotel employee Stanley's alter ego is a suave movie star named Jerry Lewis, who arrives at the Fountainbleu checkout desk draped with twenty-seven sycophants wearing identical movie-star shades. Lewis here finally inhabits the suave role normally reserved for Martin, but he also reveals a serious ambivalence toward his own worldwide stardom as "Lewis'" sycophants erupt into peals of laughter at his most matter-of-fact utterance, and follow him so closely that he is forced to beg for air. (This ambivalence toward fame would reach its apex in Lewis' turn as late-night TV emperor Jerry Langford in Martin Scorcese's King of Comedy).

While bellboy Stanley is frequently out of control of the hotel's suitcases and furniture and telephones and even his own body, director Lewis is completely in control of the Fountainbleu's fantasy environment, at one point snapping his fingers and turning out the blazing Florida sun.

Despite the brilliant gags and touches of Jacques Tati-esque poetry in The Bellboy, the simple reason the French revere Jerry Lewis may be that clumsy, loud, uncivilized Stanley is how all we Americans look to the French. Which might finally explain our resistance to Lewis' smart, insightful and particularly vernacular comedy: the joke, it seems, is on all of us." (writer/filmmaker Theresa Duncan)

Link: Film Schedule (May-September 2006): Mary Pickford Theater (Motion Picture and Television ReadingRoom, Library ofCongress).

For Lewis haters, there is this link, featuring an impressive array of multimedia on the inexplicable Lewis production "The Day The Clown Cried":

Link: Bedazzled!: The Clown, Still Crying.

867-5309: The World Comes Calling To The Staircase

We at The Wit Of The Staircase have received correspondence from many intriguing members of the culture at large this month. The breadth of experience represented by our correspondents reflects, perhaps, Wit's catholic tastes, but mainly it showcases the hybrid glamour of our extraordinary, uncannily erudite readership.

A random sampling of our cosmpolitan contacts:

1. A lovely fiction writer who is also an Army Officer stationed in Iraq.

2. An amazing British musician who wrote the great punk hit "Love And A Molotov Cocktail," who was also a successful producer of New Wave pop music and beyond.

3. A world class style writer, incredibly elegant dresser, family man, and Goncourt Brothers-esque chronicler of New York City's most interesting epochs ever.

4. A blogger, authoress and editor of the great new literary compendium called The May Queen.

5. An Internet legend who invented the word "blog" who also has a dizzying array of arch-sixties cultural experiences AND! is a noted Joyce expert whose many literary passions spookily dovetail with those of the Staircase.

Thanks for calling, (via email, natch) everybody!!

Walead Beshty's "Dismal Science Reading Room"

On exiting the utterly delightful Societe Anonyme show at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Mr. Wit Of The Staircase and I were also utterly surprised to find a good exhibit in the lobby galleries of the Museum.

The giant lobby space is usually quelle disaster, taken up by some marginally craftsy female sculptresses' interior decoractor visions. The little gallery, where I found the photo above, I normally can't be fucked to poke my head into, but we visited a few weeks ago and discovered some innovative contemporary photography by a young artist that is visually interesting and worth more than 30 seconds' contemplation.

"On View at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, Walead Beshty's project, EMBASSY! A Dismal Science Waiting Room, takes the abandoned Iraqi diplomatic mission to the former DDR as its point of departure. Made in transit between Berlin and Los Angeles, the works in the show are an index of governmental limbo, the non-places of international travel, and the embassy itself, creating a constellation of objects which bear the marks of otherwise invisible forces. The exhibition is comprised of photographs distorted and abstracted by their travel through airport security x-ray machines, a sculpture "made" by the Department of Homeland Security, a direct dial phone connected to a provisional line at the embassy, and a "dismal science reading room" containing a collection of reproduced materials read in preparation for the project, encountered in its execution, and taken from the embassy itself. Beshty's work comments on the history of photography, as it inflects on our conception of place, on th e powers and limitations of the medium and on the ways in which it both depicts and transforms contemporary culture..."

Link: UCLA Hammer Museum: Walead Beshty.

A 500 Page FBI File And Hollywood To The Rescue: Haskell Wexler's King Size Cool

The Guardian UK interviews Haskell Wexler in his Santa Monica beach condo. The Wit Of The Staircase has awesome neighbors.

"Yeah. 500 pages! Most of them are redacted, all black ink. A lot of nothin'." And he was blacklisted. "I had my passport taken away. I was living in Chicago working for Encyclopedia Britannica Films." Now there's a subversive organisation. "Oh yeah! I was asked to shoot a series of Shakespeare films in Britain and they yanked my passport so I couldn't take the job. And I should make clear that I was decorated in the second world war. I was a sailor, I was torpedoed, spent two weeks in a lifeboat. I was on the Murmansk run, I worked a 20mm machine-gun, helped bring down a Stuka, all that kind of stuff. I've got letters from Franklin Roosevelt for things I did then. But those kind of credentials didn't work for you in the cold war."

The fiercest attention Wexler received came in 1977, when he acted as cameraman for Emile de Antonio's Underground, a surreptitiously-filmed interview with members of the Weather Underground, ex-SDS radicals and bombers who'd been on the lam for five years. "I was told to go down to Wilshire and La Brea and wait until a red Volkswagen went by, then to walk to a park and there'd be a guy with a red beard waiting on a bench, this dumb, fake beard. All types of clearances to make sure I wasn't being followed. And that went on for a few weeks." Finally he was taken blindfolded on the floor of a station wagon to the safehouse - "I could smell the ocean nearby" - and the interviews took place.

"I am unalterably opposed to violence," he says, "All violence, except in self- defence. I spoke to them saying it was counterproductive, that I didn't think America was at the point where bombing anything was gonna be very effective. But of course, others were in charge of the cutting; after shooting my job was done, and that bit's not in the movie." After filming the fugitives - all on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted List - De Antonio and Wexler's raw footage was subpoenaed by the Feds, prompting an outraged reaction from a surprisingly united front of Hollywood liberals. "And then, believe it or not, Hollywood, which had in its day succumbed totally to the blacklist, came to our rescue! It was great."

Link: Guardian Unlimited Arts | | Through a lens darkly.

A Statement Against A Very Grey World

New Psychedelic Art exhibit at the V & A museum in England.

"This 'new society' did not have a single cultural or political agenda other than resistance. Some favoured direct action against the status quo, others hoped love would save the day - the former group associated with Oz, the latter with rival newspaper International Times. Psychedelic posters were not communicating a specific programme, but were messages in themselves, colourful protests against the dinginess of postwar London. 'We were just making a statement against what we saw as a very grey world,' says English. 'That's what we used to call them, the majority of the country, the greys."

Link: Guardian Unlimited Arts | Arts features | The hazy gang.

Above, the cover of Cream's "Disraeli Gears" by artist Martin Sharp.

Link via Jorn Barger.