Larry Rivers


The Bedroom, 1961

Camels, 1962

From the Art and the Artist Series
n.d.

Larry Rivers in 2001
 (photo by Pamela Joseph)

for more on Larry Rivers go  here

What are the
greatest movies of all time?
How many are there, after nearly 100 years of movie making? Many, but only a few have achieved this wonderful status.

Tell us your favorite movies and maybe we will publish them. Or add some to our list. But to start things off, here are a few that we think must be included, but not in any specific order:

1. Citizen Kane

2. Apocalypse Now Redux

3. The Godfather, part 1

4. Once Upon a Time in America

5. The Third Man

6. All That Jazz

7. Casablanca (thanks, Scott)

8. Gandhi

9. Reds

10. Chinatown

11. House of Sand and Fog

12. Ordinary People

13. Gangs of New York

14. Mr. Hulot's Holiday (thanks, Anna)

15. Cries and Whispers

The Second Tier

1. Invincible (Werner Herzog, 2002)

2. Requiem for a Dream (Darren Aronofski 2000)

3. The Usual Suspects (1995)

4. Heaven's Gate (Michael Cimino 1980)

Isabella Huppert dances with Kris Khristopherson in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate. she is faithful to him only in her fashion, being a madam and a working girl.

Okay, so I missed it, first time around. And the second. But I had long held the idea that I had missed something special. And I had.

It is a film universally dismissed. It is overly long, confusing, and full of atmospheric dust and smoke sought by skilled Cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond. Soon we are all coughing in the audience.

It remains a compelling and gripping drama, well acted and thoughtfully produced. Michael Cimino knows what he is doing, though he gets understandably lost in the midst of such a vast undertaking and so much film lovingly shot and impossible to discard on the cutting- room floor. So he keeps too much of it, and I for one sympathize with his plight.

True, he tried to cut it and produce a shorter version in 1999 (149 minutes.) It is even worse. He and the rest of the world went back to the uncut version of 219 minutes. Good as it is, it drags on. We groan and wait for it to end, some of us fascinated still.

There is one, long gunfight, with the Association's fifty hired guns taking on the immigrant settlers, who speak no English and only want to steal a steer or two to stave off starvation. But a man's land is his land, isn't it, along with his neighbor's, if he can but drive him off of it?

Sheriff Jim Averill has a bit of a booze problem that often renders him comatose for a day or two, but he makes up for the lapses with a grim determination and a steady six-gun all the rest of the sober time.

Kristopherson is good in his part, and so is the lovely Huppert, who oft shows us her wares. Walken, though, plays his role with some ambiguity and confusion that may not be intended. He admires, perhaps excessively, Kristopherson, who seems to tolerate him and the competition he offers for the hand and the rest of Huppert, whom Walken wishes to marry. Well, women at the  end of Nineteenth Century Colorado were not that prevalent.  At times, though, Walken resembles a lost cowpoke out of today's favorite flick, Brokeback Mountain. (But he is not so much gay as simply silly.)

Director Michael Cimino and Star Huppert on the set of Nathan's (Christopher Walken) rough cabin, which he had thoughtfully lined with wallpaper in the form of old newspapers, in hopes that Ella, the whore he adored, would like it and marry him. But she still opts for the sheriff.

Roger Ebert viciously pans the entire film; perhaps it was something he ate, that night. He correctly (and Ebert is rarely factually wrong about anything) chides Cimino for allowing Walken to pen a long letter to the survivors and signing it with his full name while his cabin (see picture above for a shot of its interior) is furiously burning down all around him. Good point.

And there are many other oddities and non-sequiturs in the movie; one just simply blinks and waits for the next. But the drama, including the gunfight between the mercenaries and the settlers goes on longer than the battle of Troy, and makes less-than-credible use of a similar dodge: Not a wooden horse brought into the gates but a wooden barricade drawn by horses that is brought right up to the mercenaries' battle line. It takes a long while. And then appears the novel use of dynamite bombs, as the settlers approach the Association's fusillade.

Ho-hum. Good minor roles are played by Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, and Sam Waterston; each is characterized just enough so we can tell him from the others. We watch the minor players get killed off, one by one, including Walken, till only the Sheriff and the Whore are left.

The movie ends on a rather sour note of hope and redemption, with its two surviving characters riding off to a future that can't be any worse than what we've just endured--a violent past.

The movie oddly resembles Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller, both favoring likeable whores, who are keen accountants and have lovers who treat them mean. Both movies are lovingly filmed and have Zsigmond at the lead camera, which may largely explain their redeeming beauty and near-greatness.

Thus we add it to our Second Tier of Great Movies. 

Kingfisher Salutes:
Poet Frank O'Hara, and the Fertile Fifties

Frank O'Hara, pictured in "Haunted Corridor," an oil by J. Gold, done about fifty years ago

Ah, Them Were The Days. . .

Or Were They so Great?

Perhaps not. They were a tumultuous time, anyhow. In 1952 President Harry Truman decided not to run again. Governor Adlai Stevenson (D., Illinois) opposed the great general and supreme commander from World War II, Dwight Eisenhower. And lost by  ten percent of the electorate.

The war in Korea had finally ended, but the cold war with Russia still ground on. In the arts scene, New York City was the cultural center of the world.  It is where everything of consequence happened. Never mind Chicago and San Francisco.

Painters Wilhelm de Kooning and Larry Rivers were leaders of the New York School, or so it was later named by the critics and arts writers. Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery were two of its chief poets: Allen Ginsberg was there originally, but had moved West to Berkeley and San Francisco, where he and Jack Kerouac formed another school, nicely bisecting the nation and leaving a huge void in the middle.

Meanwhile, the students of Theodore Roethke in Seattle, carved up what was left of the poetry scene. James Wright and Richard Hugo (already reviewed by Kingfisher Journal in earlier issues) were two leaders. New York and San Francisco commanded the poetic scene. It is where a budding poet would want to live. Many, though, sought teaching jobs at receptive universities. Universities were sympathetic and often offered poets tenure.

New York City was a heady place to be in the Fifties. (Still is.) Composers, novelists, journalists, and painters crowded the scene. Many knew each other and spent time together, drinking and talking about art and life. They drank and used drugs. O'Hara counted among his friends  Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns,  Joan Mitchell. Wilhelm and Elaine de Kooning, of course. And Larry Rivers was a special friend. Poets James Schuyler and Kenneth Koch were among their friends.

Rivers, left, being recorded by O'Hara for an article

For a further biography of O'Hara, go here

"Portrait of Frank O'Hara" by Wilhelm de Kooning
(I don't see him here, but maybe you can. Ed)

O'Hara's models were Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. If a disassociation of the senses would help him write better, he would live such a life; if not, well, it was a keen way to go.

A favorite poem of his, though too long to quote in its entirety here, is "A City Winter":

1

I understand the boredom of the clerks
fatigue shifting like dunes within their eyes
a frightful nausea gumming up the works
that once was thought aggression in disguise.
Do you remember? then how lightly dead
seemed the moon when over factories
it languid slid like a barrage of lead
above the  heart, the fierce inventories
of desire. Now women wander our dreams
carrying money and to our sleep's shame
our hands twitch not for swift blood-sunk triremes
nor languorous white  horses nor ill fame,
   but clutch the groin that clouds a pallid sky
   where tow'rs are sinking in their common eye.

  *   *   *

3

How can I then, my dearest winter lay,
disgorge the tasty worm that eats me up

Okay, no more from this peculiar stanza. Frank has been reading the Metaphysical Poets, evidently, and they remain in his mind, on his tongue, and in his search for apt images and peculiarly archaic phraseology; I mean, for Christ's sake, it is 1950, or thereabouts, and we folks don't talk like this. Marlowe, maybe, or Willie Shakespeare, or surely Webster, but not us common folks, nor does O'Hara or Koch or Ashbery.

What might Friend Ginsberg have thought of such diction? Wouldn't he laugh aloud?

We go now to stanza 4, which still echoes weirdly of the Elizabethans, but has some nice images and phrases of its own; besides, I for one, kind of like iambic pentameter, especially when it rhymes. But for young poets--and O'Hara here is young--it provides a deadly trap.

4

What are my eyes? if they must feed me, rank
with forgetting, in the jealous forest
of lustrous brows, so luminously blank
through smoke and in the light. All faint, at rest,
yet I am racing toward the fear that kills
them off, friends and lovers, hast'ning through tears
like alcohol high in the throat of hills
and hills of light, alluring! their black cheers
falling upon my ears like nails. And there
the bars grow thick with onanists and camps
and bivouacs of bears with clubs, are fair
with their blows, deal death beneath purple lamps
    and to me! I run! closer always move,
    crying my name in fields of dead I love.

Okay, here is more of that terrible crap, admittedly, redeemed with only a couple of nice touches--the "bivouac of bears with clubs," the "purple lamps," the "alcohol high" that O'Hara, an alcoholic himself , knew well. The cheer of friends and lovers that fall on his ears "like nails." Good image.

Hyperbole, sure, but kind of nice. As for "crying my name in fields of dead I love," well, we have to grant the poet some license, some apt middle ground. And the "bars thick with onanists" is arresting and visually shocking. But his friends and lovers are being killed by the same "fear" towards which he, the poet, inevitably races.

It is a world of fear and early death for poets and artists. Still is.

The start of stanza 5 is wonderful, but the poetry soon drones and is reduced to flatulence. Here and there are some nice touches:

5

I plunge me deep within this frozen lake
whose mirrored fastnesses fill my my heart,
where tears drift from frivolity to art
all white and slobbering, and by mistake
are the sky. I'm no whale to cruise apart
in fields impassive of my stench, my sake,
my sign to crushing seas that fall like fake
pillars to crash! to sow as wake my heart

and don't be niggardly. The snow drifts low
and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.

And there the poem ends. The poet tries to tie in all his loose threads, such as they are, and seemingly does so. But some new bewildering images that have no precedent can be found, which muddle rather than illuminate the poem. Not good.

I mistyped "clobbering" and was tempted to let it lie, in place of "slobbering, (as my belated gift to O'Hara), but couldn't. All nouns continue to have their adjective modifier here, much like long-married husbands and wives accompanying each other through a prosaic life. And the inversions pile up. The bit about "I'm no whale to cruise apart in fields impassive to my stench," well, I've never been close enough to a whale to experience its odor, but can (unAhablike) not wish to, and will take O'Hara's word for it, hyperbole that it seems to be.

Art equates with artifice in this poem, and in keeping with the foregone Elizabethan world. But art also frees a person. To O'Hara the sound of words is what is important; their meaning only incidental. He is careless, alas.

Queens have jealous eyes, all right, granted, but to place a comma before the verb in a simple sentence? Why? Perhaps, to indicate a verbal pause, for someone who happens to read the poem aloud. Which is unlikely. And we each carry with us a suitcase full of pauses, so extra ones are not needed.

Yet I like the juxtaposition of "hidden city" and  "white swan." They are a relief from "crushing seas" and "fake pillars," which have no referents and seem meaningless. Again, paired adjectives with each noun.

I like the foolish image of the poet dancing ahead to stay in front of the low snow that "neglects" to cover him. Why? Why not? And why does he dance ahead? Why, to keep "his heart in sight." Hmmm.

I think this is enough O'Hara. In among the 500+ pages of poems and prose-poems, there are some sweet lines, some strong images, but they do not long persist, and soon we are back to mechanical drivel. His method of composition was to get loaded and then write down whatever came to mind. Day after day.

He didn't try to publish most of it, wisely, but  he hung on to it, as writers compulsively do, and Donald Allen later came across it and made the decision on what to publish. He published too much but, hey, it was a charitable error. We can always choose not to read on--read any more O'Hara than we already have, which is what I did, and take a chance on missing out on something wonderful.

But life is like this--we try to make intelligent choices. There are some things in his collected poems that are not exactly poems but have considerable merit. One is his essay on Larry Rivers, which is carefully and lovingly done. Nobody will ever write any better on Rivers the  man. O'Hara applied his considerable talent and intelligence to the loving task at hand and excelled.

He tried again in his long prose-poem, "Biotherm (for Bill Berkson), and in stanzas that evoke Pound and Ginsberg and Kerouac, performs quite well, producing  a stream of poetic consciousness that reflects the times and also has literary value of is own.

Similarly, "Personism: A Manifest" is a good, solid account of O'Hara's poetical aesthetic, and states quite strongly what he does and why  he does it. This makes him an important figure in the artistic history of his times, the Fifties.

Besides knowing everybody who was to be known, and many sub-luminaries, he performed well at  his craft, and deserves being read today on his own merits.

Robert C. Arnold
Editor

POETRY SECTION
poem d' jour

HEARD WHISPERS

The spider sways in October winds; she hears the whisk

Of the bat's feet as it leaves the branch, the groan

The bear makes far out on the Labrador ice,

The cry of the wren as the hurricane takes

The house, the cones falling, the sigh of the nun

As she dies, the whisper Jesus makes to

The woman drawing water, the nearly silent weeping

Of bones eager to be laid away in the grave.

Robert Bly

Quoted without permission from The New Yorker, October 31, 2005

The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1994. Edited by Donald Allen, with an introduction by John Ashbery.

Frank O'Hara is not an easy poet to read, nor does he wish to be. He was reared on poetical obscurity, and his favorite mentors include Pound, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Joyce, and Mallarmé.  Among his friends and peers were Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

Frank makes a point to a young Allen Ginsberg, while an unidentified friend is ready to make a rebuttal, or so it would seem

A typical O'Hara poetical line might read (and does):

"The door of her wings opens on a gesture of infinitude which must be smiling into laundry bags." (from "Jane at Twelve," CP p. 89)

Got it? I sure don't.

It is intentionally obscure and perhaps without identifiable meaning. The current psychological technique of free association is at work here, along with the idea that anything that passes through our mind is fit fodder for poetry. Joyce (James, not Kilmer) is a powerful influence here, but there is a difference, and it is a great one. Joyce wielded a firm editorial control over what he put down and retained on paper.

O'Hara, well, anything goes. And his poetical scraps and long prose/poem narrations go on and on. Perhaps they were never seriously meant to see the light of print, for many of them were found after his early death in a dun buggy accident and were published posthumously by friends, Donald Allen and John Ashbery, the latter a classmate at Harvard as an undergraduate.

And yet there are poems by O'Hara that are quite professional, well done, and beautiful. He could grind out decent iambic pentameter when he wanted to and rhyme in tight, end-stopped lines, such as the sonnet reproduced below, classically titled

"A Pastoral Dialogue

The leaves are piled thickly on the green tree

Among them squirrels gallop and chuckle

about their emeralds' raindrops; a buckle

like a piece of sun excites them where he

lies drifting in the grass. Towards  him they prance,

dart, riot towards the lovers down the mast

and o'er the bounding sod! and she at last

awakes, wakens him quietly. They dance.

"I love you. Their furry eyes and feathers

are for us riches for a shipwrecked pair,

loving on this seashore this forest's porch."

"My hands beneath your skirt don't find weathers,

charts. Should my penis through dangerous air

move up, would you accept it like a  torch?"

Okay. Sophomoric, perhaps, but talented. The poem is put into a classical frame and justifies itself playfully with archaic phrases such as "o'er" and "bounding sod." It is fun. And there are lovers hidden in the grass. The world the poet evokes is pastoral and ancient, well and good.

But the  gay poet--and O'Hara is unambiguously gay--puts his modern sensibilities to work by slipping his metaphoric hand beneath his imaginary lady's skirt. They are shipwrecked and in a forest glen, both at once; place matters not a bit to a pastoral poet. What he finds there is not nautical nor weather-related. It is the classical female anatomy, perhaps not too familiar to him. And then the poet asks (and fewer than the required fourteen rhymed lines of a sonnet have gone by) whether she would accept his penis "like a torch" if he were to offer it to her "through dangerous air." (If she is truly a she.)

Well, I like the poem. I like its playfulness and its acknowledgement of the long, classical tradition of love poetry. And (nevermind) whether a lady or the lady is to his liking. This is the world of poetry, after all, a fantasy in the use of language, and not the ultimate gritty reality.

And try to forget, as I have, that the leaves are "piled thickly on the green tree," and try to see it as a conceit that is a bit flatfooted and dull. Enjoy instead the squirrels "gallop and chuckle" as a buckle from a newly loosened belt glints "like a piece of sun" and excites them. The lovers in the grass awaken, she first, and then they dance, or is it the birds and furry animals who perform the dance?

It doesn't really matter, for the dance is a metaphor for sexual coupling--male and female, male and male, bird and bird, squirrel and squirrel, or, dare we think it, bird and squirrel? O what fun. And nicely done, too.

O'Hara was highly knowledgeable in the art world, and in the world of music. He wrote for ArtNews and worked behind the desk at the Museum of Modern Art. About the same time as he wrote the poem above, he produced a sonnet for his friend, Jane Freilicher.  This poem has a much better first line, something a skilled poet must be able to provide:

Wakening at noon I smelled airplanes and hay

rang wildly on long distance telephone

ah! what a misery abed alone

alas! what is that click hurray! hurray!

the sky was wheeling under sad and grey

sweet clouds but wickedly ne'ertheless shone

outside my lonely coverlets where gone

oh the Operator Eight-one? today

bring me that breath more dear than Faberge

your secret puissance Operator loan

to pretty Joan whose paintings like a stone

are massive true and silently risqué.

"How closer than Frank to the cosmic bone

come the bold painting of Fernand Leger"!

The poem was written about the same time as "A Pastoral Dialogue," perhaps even in the same week. O'Hara is enjoying his skill as a young man responsible to no one but his muse, and his muse is infinitely forgiving during this period and most others that followed.

For he may not be taking his poetry very seriously. It may be written mostly for fun. And there is no better reason to approach art than to have some serious fun with it for the sake of one's self alone.

BACK ISSUES of Kingfisher Journal
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