A Simulacrum Now:The Afternoon I sat Across The Table From Nat King Cole

Nat King Cole--Mona Lisa

One Sunday afternoon I sat across the table from Nat King Cole. My high school friend Jinny Poad (Zechman)had an uncle Jack in California who played the bongos (he taught Marlon Brando to play them) with NKC and his trio, or was it a quartet with the bongos? The year had to be 1951 or 1952. We were invited by her uncle to Chubby's in New Jersey - Cherry Hill then? New Jersey served liquor on Sundays so Chubby's had an afternoon matinee and we were there. I think there may have been one other table with people.

Between sets the band sat at our table. We sipped sodas but the band did not. Nat King Cole came a little later and sat with us, across from me. All his images on google do not look the way he looked that day. Perhaps he was irked at having to perform for so few people. Maybe it hadn't been a good tour. The photo above is the closest I could find.

Actually his face was terrifying. Cold as stone with eyes like a snakes. Knife blade thin face. Chilling. He did not say a word but then I guess we were too intimidated to say anything to him. He sat and drank and smoked until the next set. As I contemplate this afternoon in my memory I think he was probably high - heroin? grass? - hard to say. I think from time to time of Natalie Cole and what he was like for her as a father. He was completely still except when he drank or smoked. And he sang Mona Lisa that afternoon. So I have linked it above. But his performance was entirely different from this 1961 link than it was that day in the early 50's. He was already a big star then but there he was performing in this shabby club on a Sunday afternoon for an almost empty room.

Of course now he is dead but his images and his music are digitally stored and circulate globally. He is now a simulacrum. A simulacrum is a copy without an original. All people will know of him now is what is stored on disc so I thought I would write something about him that day. He made me afraid but of what I didn't know.

Water For Elephants: Reese Witherspoon is Electrifying!

Water for Elephants

Just this past Saturday night I saw the film. There were about five of us getting a private screening in the multiplex.  Reese Witherspoon gave one of the finest performances I've ever seen. I have not been complimentary of her in the past and I apologize for my stupidity in writing about her "new tricks" for this performance before I saw her. The trailers create a different impression but what else is new.

Her Marlena is so finely nuanced that she is a wonder to watch. Face to face with Pattinson her expressions screw up, her mouth tightens into a hard, harsh line, and we can glimpse the embittered woman that is emerging in her present life with August. How brave she is to do this! Not a seductive gaze to be seen as she talks to him across the table before August comes to join them. This is a woman from the working class or lower middle class with no illusions. Aware of the illusion she creates in her performances she thinks she is nothing in real life. She sees into this woman as Sarah Gruen could never have had the creative expertise to write her, as Lawrence the obtuse director could never have guided her, as the clueless screenplay skimmed over. (You're a beautiful woman, you deserve a beautiful life. So if you're ugly you deserve an ugly life? Gimme a break.) Marlena is not only tough, but she sees herself in the present and where she is heading down the line. Jacob's comment about the dry skin of Rosie does not escape her notice. She is not old but no longer young.

"Where were you when I was seventeen?" she says to Jacob. Well Jacob was somewhere in school. But she means that there were no young men around like him then just as there are no young men like Rob Pattinson around now.

The complaints about the sex scene and the lack of high powered chemistry between the two have been moaned over.

Get this straight. Marlena finally loves Jacob, but she does not fall in love with him. And there is the difference. He is fascinated with her, not in love, just absolutely fascinated and accepts the responsibility for this and what has occurred because of it. Inexperienced and innocent his feelings have been the catalyst for the crazed jealousy of August. (Go to Freud's explanation of paranoia for this if you are curious.) The sex scene in the hotel has been criticized for the lack of chemistry also. Lawrence has received not a little of it in that he has had no experience in directing romantic scenes. But Marlena is not a romantic, although she has been seducing him.  Jacob is attractive, educated, wants her, and he is responsible. And she loves him. Who wouldn't. It seems everyone learns to love him so why would she be any different. But so passionate that it has to be a steamy sex scene? No. It's a first time between two people who have not really committed themselves to each other. And one of them is fairly innocent. That the old Jacob has romanticized their relationship is true. But he is old and alone and his children are not very devoted. Jacob tells her he will get his degree, they will go to Ringling, all practical words to convince her of his intentions. When she is dragged away and he is beaten he plods after her. But knife in hand he cannot even kill August for her. Marlena looks at him with her bruised eye with the sleeping August's arms around her  and her look says it all. It's up to you if you want to kill for me. I won't urge you nor will I object. And in the book and film Jacob calls to Rosie in panic as he sees what she is going to do. Fortunately he cannot stop her and Rosie does it for him.

Review

This is not a passion-love/death scenario. These are two people planning a future in the hotel room and as they go off to Ringling. As we see Jacob in his nineties, it is obvious that he has needed mollifying from time to time like August and Marlena knew this. He also maybe drinks just a little bit too much. Their children are not exactly adoring and attentive to him in his old age, and Marlena, while she is affectionate, is not sentimental with her horses, nor probably with her children. Caring yes, but also expecting certain types of behavior from them. Is all this in the book? In the screenplay? Hell no. Gruen could never have imagined it all nor does she have the ability to put it into words.

But Reese does exactly all that. We get a Marlena not on paper between covers, not in the screenplay nor in the flat footed direction. We get it from the experience and courage and intuitive imagination of Reese Witherspoon.

Waltz is very good but his is a watered down Landa from Inglourious Basterds. That he gave up the role of Jung with Cronenberg for this film makes me wonder about his real sanity.

As for Rob Pattinson, Lawrence has used him 99% of the time as eye-candy. And he has been there many times before (The Haunted Airman, Harry Potter). He is completely aware of this. He has the uncanny ability to send his feelings out in vibrations that have nothing to do with the character he is playing. I was anxious halfway through the film, feeling his discomfort. He is in every single scene. His face is very up close and personal in almost every shot. Baudrillard's analysis of the face as pornography says it all. Jacob/Pattinson is beaten up a lot, his face bruised, swollen and bloody. Hollywood used to do this to women a lot until the feminists protested this model for men. Now they use it as a femme sign for Rob Pattinson and since he is a male it is OK. It is NOT OK to use gratuitous sadism/masochism vented on a face to induce sexual stimulation, whether that actor is male or female. It is gratuitous period, like soft porn for no other reason than to sell tickets. And Lawrence has done the same with Rosie only that has backfired on him with real allegations. Reese and Christoph are constantly in the background, and it is as if Lawrence is saying he expects Rob Pattinson to be his ticket to success in the big time world of Hollywood directors. So he has planned all along in seducing Rob with Tai and jumping on the Pattinson bandwagon. Then he trots him out all over the world to make sure the foreign sales are up.

Simply, he is pimping Rob's face. Rob knows this and has no way of objecting. Lawrence does not dare interfere with Reese's interpretation of her role, nor Waltz's, but he controls the way Rob is seen with his camera. And his editing. Emile Hirsch would have been a better choice for the integrity of the film as he would have been expected and allowed to interpret his character instead of be a face. So any criticism of Rob Pattinson is NOT deserved.

I guess I could go on but who wants me to. I don't even want to.

Gender Ambiguity and Judith Butler : Gender Trouble; Bodies That Matter; Undoing Gender; Giving An Account of Oneself

Breaking Dawn Photo Shoot=Summit

Judith Butler

Judith Butler Illustration

Undoing Gender

Bodies That Matter

I am at a loss as to why Scummit would release the above photo of Edward and Bella from the Breaking Dawn shoot. At robsessed there has been a lot of discussion about gender ambiguity, especially as it concerns Rob and the way young men perceive him, talk about him, shun his films, etc. I don't think he has ever been photographed any more femme than in this one, so why would they do it? Do they not see? And the oooohs of the young fans (young?) over this one in the comments following it  are very enthusiastic and drooley.   Are they releasing it to appeal to gay men and gay women? Conscious or unconscious? 


As simply as possible Butler is analyzing gender as socially constructed and she is speaking about the body, the mind, gestures, thinking, and all performative signs indicating gender. Now these signs are becoming mixed, they are acting as masks, or they are simply empty signs. 

Gender Trouble

Let's look at male six-packs. Rob has said he thinks all that is silly but he is willing to work out for a role. A six-pack is a butch, macho, male sign. Without it you are considered femme, unmanly. It is also considered as an inverse sign, a mask of masculinity, masking an underlying femininity. Are you with me so far?


Women have now given up the cast down eyes, the submissive gestures, but they have also botoxed their faces, plumped their lips, and had silicone injected in their breasts to enlarge them and produce cleavage. Not seductive cleavage, but produced cleavage to signal a sex sign of femme. 
Gender is no longer sexed. Anything goes. Justin Timberlake in Social Network as Sean Parker played Parker as emitting transsexual signs. The way Rob stubbed out his cigarette in Remember Me was drag. Men and women are playing at this. Kristen signals masculine signs in aggressive gestures sometimes. Her approach to her career has been active, while Rob's has been passive. 

David Bowie Ground Control to Major Tom youtube

These are all the things Judith Butler is writing, speaking, lecturing and teaching. She will be at Columbia in the spring semester of 2012 and 2013 in comparative literature.  She is a visiting professor and is actively being wooed to leave Berkeley to come to New York. Anyone who is in the area, I suggest you find a way to attend her lectures. Usually someone of this prominence often has open lectures that can be attended by people not studying for credit. 

Twilight was/is an EVENT and Water For Elephants is a Movie

Rob and Tai WFE

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  Loisada 2 days ago in reply to nikola6

  I think Reese herself only took $2M up front, betting on backend points. Her willingness to take a drastic cut is what got the film off the ground and drew in Christoph and Rob. I think the entire gang was ready to put art over commerce, too bad Fox didn't follow their lead!

  1 person liked this. 

• nikola6 1 day ago in reply to Loisada

  I hadn't heard that but it doesn't surprise me. A lot of times actors will forgo their big salaries in order to get a film up off the ground. And some absolutely will not. No pay. No play.
  And like your friend and mine has said, the big studios cannot, will not take chances. They speak in lofty pladitudes, but their shingle's out for business for one reason and one reason only...coin. And while we cannot predict audiences, one sure bet is that they don't run to the cinema in droves to see R rated, gritty dramas with high sexual content. So what's a big studio to do? Raise the bar on them or give 'em what they want? And Rob's figured this game out. He goes to work for the majors, he's compromising. But compromising in those instances will allow him to go back into the world of independents and/or avante guard in which he can set his inner artiste loose. It's a game and those who learn how to play it...survive. Those who don't...don't.Loisada and 1 more liked this 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  An EVENT can be defined as an Irruption - Baudrillardian term. An Event cannot be predicted. It is singular, unique, without precedence. 9-11 was an Event. The JFK assassination was an Event. The Beatles were an Event. Woodstock I think. Twilight - books and films, Robert Pattinson's Edward Cullen - were part of the Event along with everything else and it is still going on. An Event irrrupts, it has parts of the Symbolic Order in it. 

  
  

  

  Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

  An Event cannot be produced. It cannot be re-produced. It is not of the Order of Production. Robert Pattinson can no more recreate it with another movie than Hollywood can. Can he anchor a movie? Yes he can. He can carry it. But he cannot turn it into an Event. It will remain a movie. He is correct when he states that it is Edward Cullen they long for, not him. That he is not Edward Cullen. He is not. The young twihard fans do not want to see him being anyone except Edward Cullen so they do not flock to his new movies. They wish to preserve their illusionary fantasies, their fantasied illusions. They do not want other realities intruding, especially on the big screen.

  
  

  The above two posters at robsessed nailed it just fine.

  http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2011/04/new-robert-pattinson-kristen-stewart_28.html#comment-193934551

  
  

  
  Fox Following Scummit's Pimping Ways With Water For  Elephants

  
  

  In  Paris the waiters are unionized. They consider themselves professionals. They do not keep bothering you at your table asking if everything is all right, do you want anything else, etc

  They leave you alone to have conversations that are not interrupted constantly, and allow you to enjoy your meal  without being polite with meaningless words of solicitude as American waiters, service providers do. American waiters are working for tips. The French waiter knows that an automatic 10% surcharge is added to every check and no one has to pimp or whore for their tip. What is expected is excellent professional service and that is what you get. No schmoozing to soften you up for a tidy tip. Now by sending Reese, Christoph and Rob to premieres all over the world to pimp WFE was a strategic move. All three accepted low offers and backend deals for their services. They are complicit. They are selling the movie like new cars, the same model, same template.They deluded themselves in thinking they were doing it for art, because they loved the book, the story and wanted to make the film. Well anyone who has read the book , or just gone to www.amazon.com to read the reviews will know that it is a romantic,  generic unoriginal entertainment for a certain audience. Twilight has  been considered to fall in this category but it does not belong there. But more about that in my other blog on Twilight. The studios are indicating that they want to change the rules of the game, get their stars for cheap and make them into car salespeople. Their appearances turn into images that go all over the globe, they appear before crowds of people who ordinarily would not get to see them,  and their images become diluted and tame and lose their illusion. What is the cinema? Amos Vogel

  

  Film As a Subversive Art

  
  

   used to say it is a dream, a collective dream as you see it with others. It is illusion, in the Order of Seduction and as you parade these people all over you strip them of that, you turn them into a reality show and who in hell wants more of this ugly reality we are all in. These actors and actresses - I like the sound of the word actress -are being made ordinary, overexposed, devalued, watered down, and used up. But there are always new young faces - trophy actors - just around the corner to take their places who will jump at the chance to become visible until it is their turn to be displaced. Fox did this on purpose for financial strategic reasons and they were lied to as it is not an artistic film. It is a family PG-13 entertainment and that's all it is.

Review: Water For Elephants

A Great Review from Total Film Magazine and Funny Too! The last 2 pages are the ones to read. Click on the pics and then click again in photobucket to enlarge.



http://www.robsessedpattinson.com/2011/04/robert-pattinson-water-for-elephants_09.html





IMO I think this review is exceptionally intelligent and a very accurate assessment. It is also hilariously funny, witty and snarky.  What a pleasure after reading mainstream media boring garbage and all those professional smilers interviewing Rob Pattinson along with Reese to show how great they look together. Fox is following Scummit in their pimping of Rob to sell the tickets. Cronenberg has swiped at Francis Lawrence when he criticizes Waltz for leaving his Freud and Jung cast to do WFE, the big budget Hollywood mass pleaser entertainment. Long after WFE is being sold at yard sales, Cronenberg's Freud and Jung film will still be a collector's item and a classic after we are all dead. The reviewer's assessment of a watered down Landa, a still smouldering Rob and Reese with a brand new set of tricks and skills. Wow!

Of course the real star will be Tai the elephant.

Gruen's book is an inch above the young adult shelf, but that's probably where most readers fit anyway. At least for the best sellers that will be in the bin in a possible future in the thrift stores, along with all the rest of those mass best sellers:Edna Ferber, Taylor Caldwell, Frank Yerby, Uris et al.  Go to Amazon and read reviews if you want to know more. Her strength is her research on 1930's circuses and the grainy photos included. This part pimps the book just fine.

And now for Baudrillard's assessment of this kind of film. The elaborate set for shooting was composed of 150% of authentic objects of 1930's vintage. Nothing was modern. All was more real than real. In fact the recreated circus set was a simulacrum.

A simulacrum is defined as a copy having no original. Baudrillard writes and says that this historical perfectness in being more historically real than historically real, read hyperreal, is just another piece of reality being stolen from us in homeopathic doses. For those left living who remember what those times were like, their memories will be effaced, wiped out by the overlay of this simulacrum set for the film.

So folks, this is nostalgia being fed to us by Hollywood presents. And the ticket buyers are going to eat it up. Can't you just hear the ooohs and ahhhs now.

Vanity Fair Interview:Rob Pattinson 3-11

Most Rob fans don't like this interview but don't seem to know exactly why except for the fact that many redundant questions are asked.


Foucauldian thought looks at it from a different POV. In Foucault's 1974-75 Abnormal Lectures at the College de France he goes into great detail about the genealogy of confession beginning with the Inquisition. In Western Civilization the Roman Catholic Church began persecuting heretics in the 12th century continuing until the early 19th century.


Confession was afterward initiated to probe the minds of members of the church by their village priests and began to be incorporated into the hierarchy. Eventually confession landed on the psychoanalyst's couch where it continues today. The practice is widespread and completely accepted in our modern times. Confession is the accepted prevailing Discourse for the interview. The confession is to be extracted from the interviewed object by the interviewer subject. Extracted confession is the important term to be understood.


"...when I join the nosy chorus asking if his on screen love mirrors his relationship in real life," Pattinson says laughing, Are you asking me if I'm really a vampire?

"As I wait for an answer, Pattinson literally starts squirming, Yes. Um. No, not really, he says, It's pretty hard to...It's just very traumatic, he says cryptically."

The interviewer is asking whether he is fucking Kristen Stewart. Confession was initiated to probe sexuality to root out the heresies of Catharism and along with analysis sex continues to be of prime interest in interviews and on the couch. Vanity Fair's interviewer is extracting the confession, a Discourse that began in the 12th century. The interviewer is also torturing Pattinson as she waits for an answer while he squirms.


It is clear that she has made him uncomfortable and has no intention of doing otherwise.


Going back to his first response, Are you asking me if I'm really a vampire? he is expressing his feelings unconsciously. Switching from a Foucault reading to Lacan we can invert his sentence: I am asking you if you are really a vampire. Yes, Rob, you are telling the interviewer she is a vampire and the interviewer really is a vampire. That is exactly what you are saying. To extract a confession you must be pierced, crushed sometimes, and the confession pulled out, extracted, from the unwilling but complicit object that is being tortured, however politely and according to custom. An analyst trained in Lacanian listening will hear what he is saying. (Remember Bush 1 and his astonishment at the bar-code? Bar being the name his wife is known by. Read Diane Rubenstein for a long discussion on this.) But Rob is squirming because he has not heard what he really said and so instead of sitting calmly he is squirming.


And the bitch doesn't stop. "I mean, are you very intense about each other?" Oh, I don't know, "he says finally." She's really cool. Even before I knew her I thought she was a really good actress. Like, I saw Into the Wild, and I thought she was really good in that. ....And then he goes on to say that when all this is over things can go back to some sort of normality.


Baudrillard has interesting things to say about the interview situation, especially since he has given many of them. Essentially he says that what he has said about the hostage situation applies to the interview. The interviewer and the interviewee are in complicity.


Rob is complicit in this interview. He is allowing himself to be tortured. When asked the same kind of question by her recent Vogue interviewer, Kristen replied, That's not my job. She didn't squirm, she responded assertively, a tad aggressively in fact, as the interviewer had no right to be trying to extract a sexual confession out of her. Kristen is not complicit, so with her the hostage analogy does not apply in quite the same way.


Ramping up confession and torture please turn to my review of Inglourious Basterds Part 6 posted down on this blog. It's from the very first scene of IB, another masterpiece by Tarantino. An excerpt:


But back to the first scene of IB. Landa knows and he could just simply have his officers rape the farmer's daughters, torture them in front of him until he tells, shoot them all, whatever. But no, he sits down to drink a glass of fresh milk, chat a little over tobacco, and squeeze more fear into his victim. Because the farmer knows he knows but hopes he doesn't. His careful performance is perfection. His eyes get stony with protective cover. He sweats and Christoph Waltz watches with pleasure and he tightens his hold. They speak English, so the Jews underneath won't understand. He reaches a climax where he tells him ever so charmingly that he will take his family in for interrogation or he can just indicate with a nod where they are hiding. The French peasant is known for his astuteness, and this one needs no prodding. He knows what will happen to his young and beautiful daughters. He knows the Jews down below are doomed anyway. Now he is being asked to become a collaborator, to sully his soul, to do such a despicable act that he will forever torture himself afterward. (Think Sophie's Choice.) Now this is violence. He is asking him to be Judas. His reward is not 30 pieces of silver, but the safety of his daughters. He can berate himself the rest of his life by weighing the two alternatives and BTW Corrie Ten Boom had Jews hidden in her house walls and wouldn't tell and she and her family and all the Jews went to a camp. But that's another story.


So this nice polite well thought of interviewer for Vanity Fair is really in collusion with her more violent comrades in arms. She has performed an evil act. It is transparent and condoned and accepted by all and sundry. It is even published and paid for.

Archetypes of Beauty:Rob Pattinson, Hedy Lamarr, Greta Garbo

Rob Pattinson in Car in Rio

I think that beauty offers two categories:the beautiful and the archetype. The archetype is Other, otherworldly, timeless, somehow austere and pure, androgynous. Beauty obeys fashion and fashion for faces changes with the time and era. Liz Taylor just misses being in the archetype category but only in my opinion. Ava Gardner? Very close. James Dean appears to just miss if you look at him next to Pattinson. This classic and timeless face is rare.


All three are recognizable I think. Garbo stopped going out as she aged because she was so disturbed when people were so disturbed by her aging. Hedy Lamarr lived her last 40 years worrying about her rent. Lamarr invented the concept of frequency change for coding messages in World War II. It is what allows wireless and cell phones today but she never made a dime from it. Sontag considers Garbo's face vacant and we all know what zillions have said about Pattinson.

For more about Hedy Lamarr that will surprise you:
http://tinyurl.com/6jc6k4h "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid." - Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr is right if you read this remark through Baudrillard. An image stripped of all meaning, all cultural baggage is only pure appearance. The enigmatic object looks at the camera lens as the lens looks at it. The object does not pose, provide meaning, the object simply is there. Few faces are able to do this. Hedy is saying she is not there. Her intelligence, her self, her feelings, her thoughts, her anything just disappears. She is not there. She is just standing there like any object:stupid. A tree is stupid as is a rock as is the sky.

Edward is standing there stupid then. Only his face, his vampire face, looking at you with The Gaze.

Deleted Ending for Vanity Fair Film with Reese Witherspoon DVD

Garbo was so perfectly beautiful. More beautiful than beautiful; therefore,hyperbeautiful. Is hyperbeautiful the same as archetype beauty? I think Rob's hyperbeautiful face was what got his scene deleted from the Vanity Fair film. Reese Witherspoon looked as if she were in drag next to him. The men all looked dead. This deleted scene was to look at cloning and Death. That could not be allowed.

This type of beauty is closely allied with Camp. On Sontag: The Androgyne is certainly one of the great images of Camp sensibility. ...the haunting androgynous vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo. Here, Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one's sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.


Beauty is not negotiable since its radiance simply emerges irrespective of any efforts made to deserve it, and no one can offer it its equivalent. Its annihilation it must perform itself. (Baudrillard - Cool Memories 1980-85 p. 96)

And another beautiful male archetype of beauty


Antonin Artaud - Beautiful, Tortured, Mad, Genius, Delirious, Perfect

Vanity Fair March 2011 cover Rob Pattinson

An old-fashioned young man went fishing one day. He caught a huge fish. It was so big and heavy that he had to sling it across his shoulders to carry it home. It became an Albatross around his neck just like the Ancient Mariner. It was as tough as shoe leather and had vicious teeth that could bite him, tear him to pieces and even kill him. Did he catch the fish? Maybe it caught him.

Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea caught a gigantic fish. In bringing it home it was eaten by sharks, torn apart day after day. Until when he came home, only the skeleton remained, all goodness stripped from the gift from the sea by the sea.

Jesus carried his cross, beaten and bloody and was nailed on it. A sacrificial willing victim to fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah.

Steinbeck's Kino opening oysters day after day at last found the Pearl of the World. Unable to exchange it for its worth he threw it back into the sea.

There is only one world. You have only one life. Neither one of these can be exchanged since there is only one. Baudrillard calls this Impossible Exchange. However, Virtual Reality can steal both of them. Baudrillard calls this The Perfect Crime.

The young man found a girl. As David in the film David and Lisa says, "A pearl of a girl."