The Wizard, the Beast, and the Beauty

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Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

Klaus Kinski in Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972)

For the last few weeks, I have been thinking about one of the strangest actor/director partnerships in the history of the cinema. There have been many famous ones, such as Marlene Dietrich and Josef von Sternberg, Greta Garbo and Clarence Brown, Toshiro Mifune and Akira Kurosawa, and Randolph Scott and Budd Boetticher; but the strangest of all was between Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog.

I say “strangest” because Kinski was that most unusual combination: A brilliant actor and a raving maniac. According to his friend and mentor Werner Herzog, Kinski was a complete egomaniac. When he felt that attention was being diverted away from him, Kinski went off the rails. He would start screaming with his eyes at the maximum bug-eyed setting, with his face at times two inches away from whomever he was directing his rant, During the filming of Fitzcarraldo (1982), the chief of the Amazonian Indians in the cast asked Herzog’s permission to kill him. This story is recounted in Herzog’s book about the making of the film, The Conquest of the Useless.

And yet, there have been few actors quite as outstanding and natural as Kinski. He knew how to make an impression onscreen. At times he could be loving and tender, as he was with Claudia Cardinale in Fitzcarraldo and Eva Mattes in Woyzeck (1979).At worst, he was a disruptive force that could destroy a film production and leave it a gutted ruin.

Why, considering this reputation, did Herzog decided to make five films with Kinski? These films were Aguirre, Wrath of God (1972); Nosferatu the Vampire (1979); Woyzeck (1979); Fitzcarraldo (1982); and Cobra Verde (1987). Three or four of these would be considered in any list of Herzog’s best films—and Kinski’s, as well!

After Kinski died of a heart attack in 1991, Herzog directed a documentary about his contentious, and yet rewarding relationship, with the actor which he called My Best Fiend (1999). To see an excerpt from this documentary, click here.

Klaus Kinski’s Daughter, Nastassja Kinski

Klaus Kinski’s Daughter, Nastassja Kinski

And now we come to the strangest part of the story. The bug-eyed demon, Klaus Kinski, was the father of one of the most beautiful actresses who ever lived, Nastassja Kinski. The daughter did not have an easy relationship with her father:

“He was no father. 99 percent of the time I was terrified of him. He was so unpredictable that the family lived in constant terror.” When asked what she would say to him now, if she had the chance, she replied: “I would do anything to put him behind bars for life. I am glad he is no longer alive.”

She managed to escape being sexually abused by Kinski, but just barely.

I find it surpassingly odd that someone so out of it as Klaus Kinski could work successfully with a director like Herzog and give birth to a woman with such unearthly beauty as Nastassja.

A Dangerous Time

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It’s the Least Wonderful Time of the Year

It’s the Least Wonderful Time of the Year

I am a great believer in the Mayan calendar—not, mind you, of the many misconceptions relating to the end of the world and such. The Mayans were, in the long run, optimists. Their calendar begins with the creation of the world of humans on August 11, 3114 B.C. and just keeps chugging along. Whenever we come to the end of a baktun, as we may (or may not) have done in December 2012, when a bunch of nattering fools predicted the end of the world, we just move on to the next baktun. As Kurt Vonnegut would have said, “So it goes.”

In the meantime, the last five days of the Mayan 365-day year were called the uayeb, about which I wrote a year ago:

In the Haab’, or Mayan Solar Calendar, there are eighteen months of twenty days each. Where does that leave the other 5.25 days? To account for the difference, the Mayans created an intercalary five-day month referred to as the uayeb. Unlike other days in the Solar Calendar, the five days of the uayeb are thought to be a dangerous time….

According to Lynn Foster in Handbook to Life in the Ancient Mayan World, “During Wayeb, portals between the mortal realm and the Underworld dissolved. No boundaries prevented the ill-intending deities from causing disasters.” It was a time of fasting with abstention from sex and all celebrations. People avoided washing their hair or even leaving their huts during this time.

This being a Saturday, I will probably violate the spirit of Uayeb by going out for lunch and getting together with friends. There are other ways of honoring the Mayan gods, probably by not making any major decisions during this time unless I absolutely have to.

The World of Marcel

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The Comtesse Elisabeth de Greffulhe (1886)

The Countess Elisabeth de Greffulhe (1886)

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is one of the most incredible worlds to be found in all of literature. Stretched over seven volumes, it consists of some 3,000 pages published over a period of fourteen years, during the last several of which its author was no more. It tells of the life and loves of one Marcel (last name never supplied), who falls in unrequited love with a young girl named Gilberte Swann. At the same time, he adores—though not in a sexual way—the Duchess Oriane de Guermantes, who, in her person, represents the French aristocracy dating all the way back to the Middle Ages to the days of Gilbert the Bad. Above (and below) are illustrations of the Countess Elisabeth de Greffulhe, who is thought to be one of the models for the Duchess. Later he falls for bad girl Albertine Simonet, based on his male Italian chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli, the most successful transgender operation in fiction.

Over the last several days, I have read the last volume of the series—Finding Time Again—for the second time. I found myself so deeply involved in Proust’s world that I resolved to do a third reading of the entire series, beginning with Swann’s Way, during tax season. I can’t have enough of Proust’s world, such that I feel that I inhabit it in some way.

I see the Duchess de Guermantes in her elegant draperies and with her piercing azure eyes in my sleep. And sometimes in my waking hours. Here is another view of her, taken by the photographer Felix Nadar in 1900:

Countess Elisabeth de Greffulhe (1900)

The Countess Elisabeth de Greffulhe (1900)

The fin-de-siècle world of Marcel is a fragile one, with the horrendous Dreyfus affair on one side (fully as divisive as our own cultural divisions between religious conservatives and sane people) and the First World War on the other. Proust takes us through all, from his childhood to his doubts expressed in the last volume whether he can live long enough to do justice to his memories. Fortunately, he did. Although he never finished editing the last three volumes of the series, enough remains intact to warrant equating their quality to the first four.

Many of my friends cannot stand Proust. One, a very literate high school teacher of English, found Swann’s Way to be unreadable. In fact, we have not seen each other much after that because he thought I was reading too many works he regarded as being doubtful. What, Proust, doubtful? Far from doubtful, he is the Twentieth Century’s Gold Standard for other writers to aspire to, but never reach, not by a country mile.

This spring, I will return to the world Marcel made and dream of the piercing gaze of Oriane de Guermantes. It is as if I could see it already….

“Little Jimmy Drew This”

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I Was Always Into Drawing Castles in the Air

I Was Always Into Drawing Castles in the Air

When my mother died in August 1998, I spent a whole day going through old photographs and other memorabilia relating to Mom, Dad, my brother, and myself. In the end, I think I barely scratched the surface; but I was not able to spend more time at the task. One of the things I rescued from the trash was this drawing of a castle I made at the age of six.

In the upper left-hand corner, Mom wrote in Hungarian, “Little Jimmy drew this 1951 February 1.” At the time, she was pregnant with my brother Dan, who was born on April 5. We were living at 2814 East 120th Street in the Buckeye Road Hungarian neighborhood on Cleveland’s East Side. Already, I had gotten into trouble at school for not speaking English, so by this time my Dad was probably looking into getting a house in the suburbs so that I could become a regular Americano.

What does this drawing say about me? If I were a psychologist, no doubt it would speak volumes. I always had grandiose visions which were fueled by the stories my Mom told me, either of her own invention or from children’s books she took out of the library next to my school (Harvey Rice Elementary) on East 116th Street. According to one website about interpreting children’s drawings:

Children who draw fortresses or castles want to communicate their feelings of power and richness. But they may also be creative kids who love to create imaginary friends with whom they have long conversations or games. These children are full of fantasy and creativity but they generally have problems at school because they get easily immersed in their imaginary worlds.

That sounds about right to me, actually. Thanks to my Mom, mine was a richly imaginative world. Perhaps that’s why I write these blogs. I want to share my imagination with the world, or at least a small corner of it.

A Merry Christmas to All

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Wreath at Grier Musser Museum

Wreath at Grier Musser Museum

A Merry Christmas to all who happen on this website today! Although Southern California is bright and sunny today, with the temperature expected to reach record highs, I know that much of the country is mired in stormy weather. Regardless of the weather, may today be an oasis of peace and happiness for you and everyone you know.

 

Sorrow and the Writer

Sorrow

Sorrow

Sometimes, when a painful section is still in rough draft, a new attachment, and new suffering, come along which enable us to finish it, to give it substance. One cannot really complain too much about these great but useful sorrows, because there is no shortage of them and they do not make us wait long for them. None the less, we have to hurry if we are to profit from them, for they do not last very long: one finds consolation, or else, if they are too overwhelming, and if one’s heart is no longer very sound, one dies. Because happiness alone is good for the body; whereas sorrow develops the strength of the mind. Moreover, even if it did not reveal a law to us each time this happened, it would be no less indispensable for returning us each time to the truth, forcing us to take things seriously, and uprooting each time the weeds of habit, scepticism, levity and indifference. Admittedly this truth, which is not compatible with happiness, or with health, is not always compatible with life either. Sorrow kills in the end. At each new, unbearable affliction, we feel yet another vein stand out, extending its deadly sinuosity across our temples, or under our eyes. And it is in this way that are gradually formed those terrible, ravaged faces of the old Rembrandt, and the old Beethoven, whom everybody used to laugh at.—Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (Trans. Ian Patterson)

Christmas in Cleveland

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Me at the Age of Ten (or Thereabouts)

Double Trouble

Here I am at the age of ten or thereabouts. At the time, I was a student at St. Henry’s School on Harvard Avenue in Cleveland. My enjoyment of Christmas at the time depended on whether the people buying me gifts wanted to please my parents—or whether they wanted to please me. I remember asking my Mom’s friend Edith Antal to buy me comic books instead of clothes, which she graciously (and I think gratefully because of the price) did. Some people, such as my maiden Aunt Margaret—we called her Nana—bought me clothes all the time. Best of all was my Uncle Emil, who would give me a twenty-dollar bill. After being sworn to buy something useful, like clothes, I would gleefully buy something I wanted instead.

We would spend every Christmas Eve at my Uncle’s house in Novelty, Ohio. My Dad and my uncle, being identical twins, were inseparable. It was a long ride down Kinsman Road to Route 306 in Geauga County, where we would take a left and then a right on Marden Drive. There my Uncle Emil had a ranch house which he designed himself. I remember a long dark corridor leading to the bedrooms. There we all were: My Mom and Dad, Uncle Emil, Aunt Annabelle, Nana, and my cousins Peggy and Butch. While the adults talked about things that were of little interest to me, my cousins and I would shoot pool in the basement.

Ohio Route 306

Ohio Route 306

Then we would go up for dinner, which was never as good as what we got at home: Aunt Annabelle always preferred convenience to quality. Then we would exchange gifts in the living room. As long as I got my twenty, I was happy. When the gifts were all clothing, I was miserable. In any case, I was usually in pain by that time because of my allergies. My uncle had a cat and dog to which I reacted violently. I would sneeze and develop an asthmatic wheeze, while my eyes itched and watered.

This whole thing was re-enacted so often that I never really had any great expectations of Christmas as a holiday. My Uncle never came over to our house on East 176th Street because he was the wealthier of the two brothers, being the owner of the Metal Craft Spinning Company in the Flats downtown, and rather liked playing the baronial lord and master. It was all right, because I liked my uncle. He was often funny, while my Dad took things too seriously. The sad thing was that, being twins, they died within months of each other in 1985-86 of the same medical conditions.

 

Cellphone Hell Is … Other People

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Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

Another Technical Innovation That Has Overstayed Its Welcome

We’ve all seen it. That shit-eating grin and the walkie-talkie walk that says, “I have somebody with whom to carry on a meaningless conversation—and you don’t!” And now the FAA and FCC have okayed the use of mobile phones on planes. Is this a good thing? For every call that actually has to be made, there will be half a thousand stating “We’re in the air over Kansas right now” and “We’ve just landed at ORD and are taxiing to our gate.”

Then there will be the fake business calls just to make the caller look important. I can just imagine the guy at the other end, “What are you saying, Jason? You don’t own any stock, and last I heard you were in bankruptcy proceedings.” Of course, we never hear the tired, slighty pissed off voice at the other end of the line, just the mock triumphalism of the caller.

There are several ways of fighting these self-important a-holes who force you to listed to their bloviating:

  1. Sneeze all over them without covering your mouth.
  2. Spill part of your drink on them and offer to pay their dry-cleaning bill, giving them a false name, address, and telephone number.
  3. Read out loud from your book, making occasional significant gestures in their direction, as if it were all for their benefit.

In the end, I suspect this will not become a major problem, if only because most people are virulently against it. In today’s news, two airlines have come out against allowing cell calls on flights: Delta and JetBlue. If any other airlines join them, I may well vote with my feet, choosing only airlines that place restrictions on the nefarious habit.

It would be nice we could do something about that other noise-making nuisance on long flights: crying babies and whining small children. But on humanitarian grounds, I think I’ll just shut up for now.

“All That Moveth, Doth in Change Delight”

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William S. Hart (1864-1946)

William S. Hart (1864-1946)

Today Martine and I went to the William S. Hart Ranch and Museum in Newhall. Around this time of year, the docents and other volunteers make the place all Christmassy. With the Grier Musser Museum yesterday, a visit to the Hart Museum today made it a real holiday weekend.

As I was watching a video of Hart’s Hell Hinges (1916) in the Ranch House, a somber thought came to me. Hart’s career lasted only about twelve years, from 1915 to 1927. How many people alive today remember him, have seen his films, or even know who he is? Hollywood does not even make Westerns more than once in a Blue Moon. The lovely house on a hill in Newhall, which Hart called La Loma de los Vientos (“The Hill of the Winds”), may fall into ruin because it commemorates the life of a silent movie star who is all but forgotten.

At the same time, I am reading Marcel Proust’s final volume of In Search of Lost Time series, Finding Time Again. In this book, Marcel finds his world has all but disappeared with the start of the First World War. At one point Marcel the narrator muses:

In short, fashionable society had become disenchanted with M. de Charlus, not because it had seen through, but because it had never begun to penetrate his uncommon intellectual worth. People thought him ‘pre-war,’ old-fashioned, because the very people who are least capable of assessing merit are the ones who, in order to classify people, are quickest to follow the dictates of fashion. They have not exhausted, nor even skimmed the surface of the men of merit in one generation, and suddenly they have to condemn them all en bloc, because now there is a new generation, with its new label, which they will not understand any better than the last.

As I watch Marcel working his way through a Paris, lit by floodlights, zeppelins, bi-plane fighters, and a young generation in charge that has seemingly sprouted out of nowhere. In the same way, I marvel at all the young people crossing the busy street while checking their e-mail or texting to their buds.

I should know better. Edmund Spenser said it all half a millennium ago when he wrote about mutability:

Mutability

When I bethink me on that speech whilere,
Of Mutability, and well it weigh:
Me seems,that though she all unworthy were
Of the Heav’ns Rule; yet very sooth to say,
In all things else she bears the greatest sway.
Which makes me loathe this state of life so tickle,
And love of things so vain to cast away;
Whose flow’ring pride, so fading and so fickle,
Short Time shall soon cut down with his consuming sickle.

Then gin I think on that which Nature said.
Of that same time when no more Change shall be,
But steadfast rest of all things firmly stayed
Upon the pillars of Eternity,
That is contrare to Mutability:
For, all that moveth, doth in Change delight:
But thence-forth all shall rest eternally
With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight:
O that great Sabbaoth God, grant me that Sabbaoth’s sight.

As the year 2013 winds to a close, think for a moment of all the changes that sweeping your world away. I wouldn’t worry excessively about it, because the same winds of change will likewise sweep the fashions of the newest generation away. All the Ugg Boots, Jeggings, Razor Scooters, Smart Phones, and Google Glasses will go the way of suspenders, cowcatchers on locomotives, transistor radios, and pogo sticks. Right now, all these things are in the ascendent—but they won’t be for long.

An Angelic Christmas

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Angels at L.A.’s Grier Musser Museum

Angels at L.A.’s Grier Musser Museum

There are actually three angels in this picture: Reflected in the mirror between the two angel statuettes is Martine. This afternoon, we visited the Grier Musser Museum near downtown L.A. to see their annual display of Christmas-related decorations and figures. We enjoy seeing what Rey and Susan Tejada have collected and arranged for display at their antiquarian Queen Anne style house and museum on Bonnie Brae Street.

But first, we ate at Langer’s Deli which is nearby at the corner of 7th and Alvarado, just cater-corner from MacArthur Park. It is incongruous to find a classic Jewish deli in the middle of the Pico-Union Central American neighborhood. Just when it seemed that it might be fading away like so many Los Angeles landmarks, the opening of the MTA Red Line brought customers from other parts of town, though they are no longer open in the evenings. Martine has not been feeling good all week due to a flare-up of her irritable bowel syndrome; and this was the first day she could eat anything other than bananas, rice, apple sauce, and toast. (She calls it the B.R.A.T. diet.)

After we toured the museum along with six other guests, we sat down to punch and cookies in the kitchen and chatted for a couple of hours. Over the years, Rey and Susan have become good friends of ours. We enjoy the museum, which always holds surprises for us, and we enjoy their company.

Afterwards, we drove back the slow way, right down Wilshire Boulevard so that Martine could see the holiday decorations in Beverly Hills before we did the turn-off toward West Los Angeles via Santa Monica Boulevard.

It was a good day and made me think that this would be a good Christmas for us. As I hope it will likewise be for all my readers.