Some thoughts from Mr. Blake on free love, fidelity, procreative pressure, and the institution of marriage as it functioned (and did not) for ladies during his lifetime:
Jane Birikin and the dread Serge G.
… She who burns with youth and knows no fixed lot;
is bound
In spells of law to one she loathes:
and must she drag the chain
Of life, in weary lust!
Must chilling murderous thoughts obscure
The clear heaven of her eternal spring?
to bear the wintry rage
Of a harsh terror driv’n to madness, bound to hold a rod
Over her shrinking shoulders all the day;
Marilyn and Arthur on their wedding day. Marilyn’s dress was ivory but her veil arrived white, so rather than freak out or buy a new one she soaked it in tea overnight. She was an orphan and imminently practical.
& All the night
To turn the wheel of false desire: and longings
that wake her womb
To the abhorred birth of cherubs in the human form
That live a pestilence & die a meteor & are no more.
(William Blake, excerpt from Visions of the Daughters of Albion. 1793. Shockingly self-published.)
The Graduate (Kubrick, 1967).EDIT: It was directed by Mike Nichols, not Stanley Kubrick. Jesus-christ-bananas. How that got past me is a mystery. Mucho mas mucho thanks to Peteski for the heads-up!
Happy bride month, am I right? Goin’ to the chapel…
In all seriousness, William Blake was a sort of pre-feminist and a great admirer of Mary Wollstonecraft but for all his forward-thinking, he could behave curiously backwardly and contemporarily to the times in his personal life, almost as if his own wife, Catherine, did not count in his reckoning of the equalities of the opposite sex.
Audrey and Mel. She looks terribly unhappy and trapped. I do not believe this was their wedding day but rather shortly before their breakup in an ad for Givenchy’s L’Interdit, the first celebrity fragrance. I wear Givenchy Amarige when I am Really Me. But that is very rare. So often it is best to be Other Me-s, so I roll with Michael by Michael Kors.
As an example, when they had trouble conceiving, Blake openly advocated bringing another, younger woman into their marriage and relegating Catherine to second-class status in a different bedroom. My guess is he backed up his proposal by citing the timeless, good ol’ Rachel/Leah biblical argument, which reminds me that I get to hit Handmaid’s Tale next month.
Humbert and Lo’s toes. Lolita (Kubrick, 1962).
Okay, I went in to more insomnia-fueled bookfoolery and this entry is now uncomfortably longer than I’d prefer a Blake one to be. I’m going to split it up. Meet me in the next post. More Kubrick, even (I didn’t intend for that to happen but now that it has I’m on board). (edit: again, The Graduate is directed by Mike Nichols. Not Stanley Kubrick.)
When I was at school I used to scream in trains, in those concertina things between the carriages. I used to try to be so good that sometimes I couldn’t bear it any more.
It was when I turned down a project, because I thought I couldn’t be funny anymore, that my mother booted me in the ass and said, “You have to get out of this. Laugh and the world laughs with you. Cry — and you cry alone.”
The gold moth did not love him
So, gorgeous, she flew away.
But the gray moth circled the flame
Until the break of day.
And then, with wings like a dead desire,
She fell, fire-caught, into the flame.
A personal patron saint, Jane has come up several times on this journal but on review I see it has so far been only in regard to her daughter (yay), the lovely and talented Lou Doillon, and her second husband (boo), Serge Gainsbourg, a personal devil. That is a scandal. Here is an entry in her own right.
Lou Doillon by Max Vadukul for Vogue Italia, August 2009
“Crescendo ho ocupato l’unico spazio rimasto libero in famiglia; quello dell’eccentrica, del giullare che strappa un sorriso. c’era talmente tanta perfezione che solo comportandomi in modo diverso sono ruiscita a trovare me stessa.”
If you are not lucky enough to speak Italian (I am mainly not, either, no worries!), then here is a very rough translation pieced together via babelfish (don’t you love that it’s named for a Douglas Adams invention), Conversational Italian in college — which I spent most of my time ditching to fuma (smoke) and hang out with various uomi (men!), in my defense, I was being hella Italian — and a couple online dictionaries:
“Growing up, I occupied the only space which remained free in my family: that of the eccentric, that of the jester who snags a smile. There was so much perfection that being involved in various ways has helped me to find the same [in life].”
“Lou Doillon Intime,” Playboy France, March 2008
A bit of background. Her father is director Jacques Doillon, and her mother is international superstar, ye-ye idol, and reknowned vintage beauty (a personal patron saint) Jane Birkin. Oh, and Jane’s previous husband was probably the most famous and successful male French musician of all time, (a personal devil) Serge Gainsbourg.
Beautiful, marvelous, multi-talented Jane Birkin during her marriage to That Creepy Soul-Reaper (Gainsbourg).
Birkin’s relationship with Lou’s father, film director Jacques Doillon, ended her marriage to Gainsbourg, and because of that the French press have a love-hate relationship with Lou: on the one hand, she is a daughter of cultural aristocracy; on the other, her very existence symbolises the end of one of France’s great love affairs.
Lou’s various step and half-sisters are famously beautiful models, actresses, and musicians such as Charlotte Gainsbourg, Kate Barry, and Lily Doillon.
“Destiny’s Daughter: Lou Doillon et Jane Birkin,” Getty Images
After a deliberately outre ugly duckling phase and some raw turns in cool indie flicks, Lou has been slowly transitioning in to a model citizen herself. So … yes, I can see where she is coming from with that quote. She’s a really cool chick, and as you can see from this small smattering from my collection of pics, she has taken it off, so she gets to be billed as lovely and talented, to boot!
Lou Doillon by Max Vadukul for Vogue Italia, August 2009
I’ll get to more about her another day, I guarantee, because I think she is a smashing girl! but right now I need to go put on my Square Face (read: look freshly-made-up, decently-dressed, and reliable and maternal) for my kidlet’s first parent-teacher conference. I don’t want my appearance or attitude or nuttiness or any grain of reality about myself to seep through to her teacher and influence said teacher’s attitude toward her. I know that’s crazy, but it’s a fear. Wish me luck!
“In films, we are trained by the American way of moviemaking to think we must understand and ‘get’ everything right away. But this is not possible. When you eat a potato, you don’t understand each atom of the potato!” (Interview with David Sherritt, The Christian Science Monitor, 8/3/94)
Art attracts us only by what it reveals of our most secret self. (Critique called “What Is Cinema?” for Les Amis du Cinéma , 10/1/52, a work which advanced the auteur theory but also kind of ripped off Bazin, which is weird cause Bazin would’ve read it and was a big influence on Godard but this was done contemporaneously of Bazin himself working on something titled this, about this, so maybe the quote is misattributed? … or maybe there is more to it than I know with my tiny ken of French movie guys, maybe it was a done thing to borrow titles from one another, or perhaps it was a continuation of a dialogue they were already having both in person and via publications, or, finally, it could even have been an “understood” question which anyone might use as the title of a book or article … I am probably over-reading it.)
Hands down my favorite picture of Anna Karina
Beauty is composed of an eternal, invariable element whose quantity is extremely difficult to determine, and a relative element which might be, either by turns or all at once, period, fashion, moral, passion. (“Defense and Illustration of Classical Construction,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 9/15/52)
Cover or liner art for her album, a collaboration with the dread Serge G
The truth is that there is no terror untempered by some great moral idea. (“Strangers on a Train,” Cahiers du Cinéma 3/10/52 — Godard wrote extensively and insightfully in his early career about the movies of Hitchcock, one of my favorite and I think misunderstood directors; I’ll try to share some good nuggets from time to time)
Anna cahorts about topless as Anne in 1968’s The Magus, also starring Anthony Quinn (Zorba the Greek), Michael Caine, and Candace Bergen (Murphy Brown) — no one seems to like this movie but me. That’s okay, because I like it a lot.
Today’s Model Citizen dossier is on the lovely and talented Vanessa Paradis, model, actress, singer, partner of eleven years to Johnny Depp, and mother of their two children. She’s a busy bee.
If she does not asplode your brain with her sexy, winsome flower child French cuteness, you have no soul.
Vanessa Paradis began her career as a singer, then acted, then modeled. She kind of did it backward, right?
At 15, she had rare cross-Channel success when her song “Joe la taxie” charted in both the UK and France. The single came from her debut album M&J (Marilyn et John), which got mixed reviews. She received a lot of backlash in the press and from peers about her explosive popularity and her kind of pouty, sultry look, like she could possibly control either of those things. “Sorry I’m crazy-beautiful and an overnight success, I take it all back and I’ll burn my face with acid,” is that what they want to hear?
Anyway, she was nearly booed offstage at an awards festival at Cannes, but she soldiered through and performed anyway; when she came back to do another number later in the show, she got huge applause just for coming out. So I guess people aren’t total dicks. At another awards show, she sang a cover of a Serge Gainsbourg song, which got his attention. I’ll leave it up to you to interpret whether that was a good move. (I try not to go off on the topic of Serge G, but it is sometimes very difficult.)
[Serge] Gainsbourg, present in the audience that night, was greatly impressed by the young singer’s talent. The legendary singer/songwriter soon contacted Vanessa Paradis, offering to write a series of songs for her. … Vanessa Paradis and Serge Gainsbourg hit it off immediately, Gainsbourg nicknaming the young singer “Lolycéenne” (“Lolita schoolgirl”). — RFI Musique
Why does it seem that French women are amazing and French men are so consistently creepy? I hate the way that makes me feel. Anyway, she moved to America in the early ’90s, dated Lenny Kravitz for a bit — another creep who somehow scores amazing women (Nicole Kidman?! really? that blew my frigging mind) — and released an English-language album in 1992. She has this whole French ye-ye girl-remastered-by-Phil-Specter sound that kind of eludes a place in the highly structured American recording industry, so she slipped through the cracks, but right about then her acting career was picking up, so it was no big deal, I guess. Here is a video for the very catchy “Be My Baby,” from the 1992 self-titled LP. You can see what I mean about her sound on there. Very 60’s. I like it.
Enough talky-talk. God, I get going on music and I don’t shut the hell up. I’m so sorry. Long story short, she is with Johnny Depp now and they have two rocking-adorable kids and her life is awesome and she is a really cool, graceful, giving lady who is also super-cute. The end. PICTURES.
Oh…and she has quite the smile.
I find it totally forgiveable and actually endearing — it’s gappy, sure, but because of that it is adorable. It’s kind of funky and charming. Bardot style, y’all. I love busted grills. I can’t even begin to overemphasize that enough. Love them.
Just in case you thought I had lost my touch, here’s a NSFW shot to finish us off.
The Thought Experiment 