Eric Rohmer, master of mise en abyme

TALKING PICTURES

Screenwriters on the films of Eric Rohmer.

 

Zou Zou as Chloe in Chloe in the Afternoon (1972).

 

ERIC ROHMER REMAINS one of the most revered and enigmatic directors to survive the French New Wave. His films rarely exhibit the revolutionary fervor so often associated with that cinematic movement. Indeed his chamber comedies of bourgeois desire and disappointment could easily be mistaken as nothing more than pretentious talk fests. But what keeps his feather-weight dramas and supercilious characters infinitely engaging is how their actions serve to illuminate complex philosophical and ethical dilemmas. In Rohmer’s films the focal points are never on what the characters say or do, but in the distance between those two, in that netherworld between language and action in which we all try to make sense of the world and of ourselves.

Having first been a journalist, then a novelist, Rohmer never lost sight of the power — as well as impossibility — of words. He entered the French New Wave through the journal Cahiers du Cinema, serving as its editor from 1956 to 1963. When Rohmer started making films in the ’60s, he framed them as cycles (“Six Moral Tales,” “Comedies and Proverbs,” “Tales of the Four Seasons”) emphasizing their reliance on literary, rather than cinematic, genres.

In 1969, My Night at Maud’s catapulted Rohmer to international fame, even garnering Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Foreign Film for this comedy of inaction centering around a man failing to take advantage of a sexual situation. In his next two films, Claire’s Knee and Chloe in the Afternoon, what characters do not do is always more telling than what they do. His (male) characters, bound by social convention and place, create exquisite comedies of repression just to see how far they could take their desires.

In the ’70s, Rohmer experimented with historical allegory before returning in the ’80s to the breezy philosophical love stories that made him famous. In his “Comedies and Proverbs” series — The Aviator’s Wife, Le Beau Marriage, Pauline at the Beach, Summer, Full Moon in Paris, Boyfriends and Girlfriends — Rohmer made his protagonists women, examining the consequences of them trying to take control of their lives and romances. With the novelistic skill reminiscent of Henry James or Jane Austen, Rohmer turned the most banal social settings — beaches, summer vacations, a weekend of windsurfing — into the thorniest and most demanding ethical arenas.

This winter Winstar Cinema has collected a select retrospective, “Tales of Rohmer,” with new 35mm prints set to tour over 30 North American cities, beginning in New York City on February 9. In tribute to Rohmer, we asked three screenwriters (and sometimes directors) — James Schamus, Larry Gross and Ira Sachs — to write about their own sense of Rohmer and why he matters. –P.B.

 

 

Jean-Claude Brialy and Laurence de Monaghan in Claire’s Knee (1970).

 

Ira Sachs on Rohmer’s toughness

I admire Eric Rohmer for many of the same reasons I love Henry James: both find drama in the precise observance of shifting emotions. Every scene in a Rohmer film is taut with possibility; every character, on the verge of falling — falling in love, falling into melancholy, or just falling from their own sense of high and stable ground. His protagonists are an arrogant lot — his women are particularly surly — and that is what gives the films their subtle tension; we are always wondering how the mighty will fall.

Rohmer’s films are made up of conversations; they are filled with nervous, talky people, who act as if language could protect them from experience. With continual attempts at self-description (“I was born to be unhappy,” says Laura, typically, inClaire’s Knee), his heroes and heroines imagine that they can talk themselves out of anything, and thus be saved from pain, or even more specifically, the surprise of emotion. And they, like all of us, are wrong.

In almost all of Rohmer’s films, his characters run into themselves — they discover, or are made to discover, their own precariousness — and the result of this reckoning is always extraordinarily moving. At first glance, Rohmer seems like a very soft filmmaker. He works gently, but always, by the last reel, he has tightened the screws. Like the coming of seasons, with which Rohmer is clearly obsessed – witnessLe rayon vert (Summer) and Autumn’s Tale — we almost don’t notice the arrival of strong emotions. And then, like winter, they are upon us.

Eric Rohmer has the most consistent career of any of the great filmmakers alive today. There’s not one false note in his huge and expansive body of work. In that way, again, he’s a bit like Henry James. Of no one else but Rohmer could it be said that he is making films at 80 that are as perfectly realized and as emotionally risky as the ones he made 40 years before.

 

James Schamus on Rohmer’s depiction of character

Rohmer uses annoyance to achieve the sublime. His trick: to make us think that personality is a kind of illusory irritant, an encumbrance that keeps us from our presumed moral centers, but which, finally, turns out to be the very register of our moral being. Think of Delphine, the irrititatingly depressed secretary heroine of Le rayon vert (1986) — and one of the great mise en abymes of dialogue in cinema history: she’s at her friend’s summer cottage, an outsider surrounded by solicitous friends of friends, and she refuses the barbequed pork, politely explaining that she’s a vegetarian.

A polite query follows: “Should we prepare you something else?” “Sorry, we didn’t know of your specific dietary needs.” She tries her best to brush it off, but as she talks, and the more she talks, the more absurd, grating, hostile, self-defeating, alienating, tragic, weepy her explanations and excuses become. Rohmer creates an embarrassment so exquisite, a self-consciousness so finely attuned, this little scene takes on the psychic dimensions of a Busby Berkeley musical number, and all in glorious 16mm.

 

Larry Gross on Rohmer’s conception of intelligent masculinity

I went to Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s, with my 19-year-old brother, the week that it opened in a subtitled version in New York. 1967, I believe. I was 14.

I enjoyed it a lot. The enjoyment was enhanced by a certain bewilderment, which I confess, I haven’t entirely gotten over after all this time.

Here were three adults, who looked like adults you knew from everyday middle-class life, and all they did was what people you knew did. They discussed their past relationships, stuff they’ve read, and they expressed their opinion of things that mattered to them. So little happened, and yet it was somehow entertaining and never boring — but you couldn’t quite tell how it could be so entertaining and avoid being boring.

Obviously some of it had to do with the three central performers, Jean Louis Trintignant, Francoise Fabian and Marie-Christine Barrault. Trintignant in particular does something in the film that has only grown in significance with the years. He supplies a near perfect image of an intelligent man in love. A compelling alternative — and one of the few — to the silent, stoic, macho-killer tradition of Cinematic Masculinity embodied by John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. I would point in particular to the scene late in the film where Trintignant stands on a snowy hill with Barrault and hears about some unsavory details of her past love life. In that moment his expression of tenderness, disappointment, along with his determination to keep loving this woman define for me a type of conscious intelligent masculinity that has all too rarely found embodiment in cinema — or in real life. Indeed if I were to attempt to explain to a super-intelligent alien why the male race shouldn’t be erased from the order of things, I’d start by showing Trintignant in this film.

There are so many great things about this movie. It demonstrates brilliantly one of the iron laws of romantic comedy. When a plot turns on a character’s choice of mates, the stronger the “wrong” one is, usually the better the movie. Other demonstrations of this principle include the temptation James Stewart offers Katherine Hepburn in Philadelphia Story or the alternative Kristin Scott Thomas presents to Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral. In the latter case she’s almost “too” attractive an alternative for the movie’s denouement to be entirely credible. Here Francoise Fabian’s Maud truly represents all the mysterious roads not taken by all of us in our romantic lives. I remember my brother being unusually somber and meditative on the subway ride home after the movie. I asked him why, and he explained that it was truly painful to contemplate all the excuses one offered oneself for not having pursued or followed up with certain women. I didn’t entirely get what he was saying at the time, but 30-some years have gone by and I sure do now.

Two other things. This was the first film I ever saw photographed by Nestor Almendros. Although it was almost all interiors and close-ups, I knew without quite knowing how or why that the black-and-white images had a crispness and delicacy fundamental to the film’s mood. It was the beginning of a vague understanding on my part that to be “cinematic” didn’t necessarily mean epic locations, lavish production values or overpoweringly flashy visual mannerisms.

Finally I remember being puzzled and charmed by a unique fact about how this film was edited. Rohmer often chose to stay on the character, listening rather then always cutting back to the person speaking. Once again, without knowing why, I got the feeling that there was something momentous about such a procedure.

Zoning laws inhibit artistic expression

A Man’s 6-Pack Can Serve as His Castle

By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

NY Times, Published: March 7, 2008

HOUSTON — From his front porch, John Milkovisch was able to see the beer truck heading for the local grocery, spurring him into action. “He’d run over there and clean them out,” recalled his son Ronald. “He never had less than 8 to 10 cases stacked up in the garage.”

Enlarge This Image

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Last-minute preparations are made before the opening ceremony of the Beer Can House.

John Milkovisch, left, with his wife, Mary, spent 20 years at work on what is known as the Beer Can House.

From 1968 until his death 20 years later, Mr. Milkovisch, an upholsterer for the Southern Pacific Railroad, not only emptied 50,000 cans or more of his favorite beverage but also put the containers to good use, cladding his house and workshop with thousands of maintenance-free flattened beer cans (Falstaff was a favorite) and shading the sun with garlands of tinkling beer can tops and tabs.Known to generations of sidewalk gawkers as the Beer Can House, the folk art monument was dedicated Thursday and will open to the public on Saturday for the first time since its purchase from the Milkovisch family and a seven-year restoration project totaling $400,000.“Most people who take the lead in doing something truly innovative are considered a little bit crazy,” said Mayor Bill White, cutting a ribbon and paying tribute to “the hard work of generating all those beer cans.”Inside, a quote from Mr. Milkovisch adorns a wall. “They say every man should leave something to be remembered by. At least I accomplished that goal.”What may now be Houston’s second-zaniest spectacle was bought by the zaniest — the Orange Show Center for Visionary Art, a foundation growing out of one man’s obsession with his favorite citrus fruit.Working alone from 1956 to his death in 1980, Jeff McKissack, a Houston postman, built a maze of connected chambers, balconies and tiled walkways extolling the health benefits of oranges. The structure costs a dollar to tour, the same as the Beer Can House.Marilyn Oshman, the art patron who founded the Orange Show, said it was no accident Houston played host to such attractions. “One good thing about not having any zoning is you can do stuff,” Ms. Oshman said.

James Taylor is a certifiable genius even though he loved his career more than his kids

Carolina In My Mind Lyrics » James Taylor

In my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m gone to Carolina in my mindKaren she’s a silver sunYou best walk her way and watch it shinin’Watch her watch the mornin’ comeA silver tear appearing nowI’m cryin’ ain’t IGone to Carolina in my mindThere ain’t no doubt it no ones mindThat loves the finest thing aroundWhisper something soft and kindAnd hey babe the sky’s on fire,I’m dyin’ ain’t IGone to Carolina in my mindIn my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m goin’ to Carolina in my mindDark and silent late last nightI think I might have heard the highway callingGeese in flight and dogs that biteSigns that might be omens say I going, goingI’m gone to Carolina in my mindWith a holy host of others standing around meStill I’m on the dark side of the moonAnd it seems like it goes on like this foreverYou must forgive meIf I’m up and gone to Carolina in my mindIn my mind I’m goin’ to CarolinaCan’t you see the sunshineCan’t you just feel the moonshineAin’t it just like a friend of mineIt hit me from behindYes I’m gone to Carolina in my mindGone to Carolina in my mindThen I’m on to Carolina in my mindGone to Carolina in my mindGone – I’m gone – I’m goneSay nice things about me’Cause I’m gone southCarry on without me’Cause I’m gone

Jeff Mangum & Neutral Milk Hotel, the best indie band you’ve never heard of

Slate, music box

The Salinger of Indie Rock

What happened to Jeff Mangum?

By Taylor Clark
Posted Tuesday, Feb. 26, 2008, at 1:45 PM ET

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Ten years ago this month, a songwriter from nowhere and his ramshackle band brought out one of the few truly great albums of this generation, a musical curio so gloriously odd that it almost defies explanation. The group called itself Neutral Milk Hotel, and the record, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, is a concept album about Anne Frank in which vocals about lost Siamese twins and semen-stained mountaintops mingle with the sounds of musical saws, fuzzy tape loops, and an amateur psychedelic brass band. It seems like a formula that would blister your eardrums, yet Aeroplane is a gorgeous, much adored work of art. In 2003, the alternative music magazine Magnet dubbed it the best album of the past decade—better than Nirvana, better than Radiohead.While the record sells better today than ever, you won’t see Neutral Milk Hotel onstage anytime soon because, for all intents and purposes, they’ve vanished into thin air. At the end of Aeroplane’s final song, you can hear Jeff Mangum—the band’s singer, songwriter, and all-around mastermind—set down his guitar and walk off, and, minus a few months of under-the-radar touring, that’s exactly what Mangum did in real life. When the major labels and the glossy magazines and the half-crazed fans came calling, Mangum never responded. There was no breakup announcement, no reason given for the radio silence—he just faded out. After a decade of speculation, sightings, and hoaxes, his story remains a mystery: Why did he decide to disappear? And where has Mangum gone?

Even before his public vanishing act, Mangum was something of an elusive character. Raised in the arts vortex of Ruston, La., he bristled at his hometown’s jocks-and-booze ethic and hoped from an early age to unchain his creative spirit. In the early ’90s, Mangum and a few friends formed a now-legendary collective called Elephant Six, which grew to encompass dozens of strangely named bands creating eclectic music mostly for their own enjoyment. Yet Mangum himself seldom stayed in one place for long; he constantly hopped from city to city, acoustic guitar in hand. At home in the collective’s base of Athens, Ga., or out on his peregrinations, Mangum cut a strange figure: a long-locked, intense-looking man with a gale-strength singing voice who liked to wear garish thrift-store sweaters and embellish the cuffs of his pants with cartoon sketchings.

Because he suffered from night terrors, Mangum often stayed up until dawn working on his songs, sometimes addressing them to the ghosts in a haunted closet. At first, this method produced modest results: His first album, On Avery Island (1996), showed flashes of promise but had its sludgy and spotty patches. One day, Mangum wandered into a bookstore and happened upon a copy of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl. The book consumed him. After finishing it, he spent a few days crying over Frank’s story. As he told a Puncture magazine interviewer before Aeroplane’s release, “I would go to bed every night and have dreams about having a time machine and somehow I’d have the ability to move through time and space freely, and save Anne Frank. Do you think that’s embarrassing?” The songs and lyrics he started writing about Frank could be so nightmarish in vision that Mangum grew afraid of what was issuing from his brain: verses about “pianos filled with flames” and eating “tomatoes and radio wires.” At times, he seems possessed, singing on Aeroplane’s title track, “Anna’s ghost all around/ Hear her voice as it’s rolling and ringing through me.”

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is so expansive in its weirdness that one of its 11 songs is a rollicking bagpipe jam—yet it would be wrong to call it a “cult” record, since that would imply it’s some sort of flawed art-school project. Sure, Aeroplane occasionally sounds like a mariachi circus fed through a broken amplifier, but it all weaves together as Mangum guides the proceedings with percussive guitar strumming, singalong melodies, and his booming, emotive voice. The album plays like a document from a parallel-universe version of the 1940s, inlaid with Mangum’s haunting lyrics: “And here’s where your mother sleeps/ And here is the room where your brothers were born/ Indentions in the sheets/ Where their bodies once moved but don’t move anymore.” Aeroplane isn’t about airtight instrumentation or tricky songwriting—most of the songs have just three or four chords—but about a remarkable range of feeling put into melody. (Mangum recorded his part of the song “Oh Comely” in one scratch take, at the end of which you can hear a stunned band member yell “Holy shit!” in the background.)

When Aeroplane first debuted, sales took a while to warm up. Those who found the record would appear at shows and (to the annoyance of many audience members) collectively drown out Mangum’s singing with their own rendition, but this was still indie music’s dark, pre-blog era. By the time magazines started paying attention, toward the end of 1998, Mangum already had one foot out the door. Worn down by months of touring, he grew fed up with discussing himself and explaining his lyrics, eventually declining to accept any calls—yet friends say he still fixated on every word written about him. As his bandmates pressed him to capitalize on Neutral Milk Hotel’s success, he withdrew more and more. When R.E.M. offered a chance to open for them, he said no. And for the last decade, that’s nearly all he’s said.

As Aeroplane’s legend began to build, Mangum kept himself busy by having a total nervous breakdown. Laura Carter, his then-girlfriend, told the Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing that he spent entire days sitting in his house in a state of near panic, wearing a pair of old slippers and doing absolutely nothing. He became paranoid, hoarding rice for the inevitable post-Y2K apocalypse. Since 1998, Mangum has rejected every interview request save one 2002 conversation with Pitchfork in which he explained his meltdown. “I went through a period, after Aeroplane, when a lot of the basic assumptions I held about reality started crumbling,” he said. One of those assumptions was that music would somehow erase his problems. “I guess I had this idea that if we all created our dream we could live happily ever after,” he continued. “So when so many of our dreams had come true and yet I still saw that so many of my friends were in a lot of pain … I saw their pain from a different perspective and realized that I can’t just sing my way out of all this suffering.”

It took Mangum years to rebuild himself after this spiritual crisis—and since part of that crisis was his recognition that music would never save him from his demons, he couldn’t very well embark on another record. So he wandered the globe to find spiritual balance, even spending time in a monastery. (Aeroplane’s steady sales helped finance the quest; the album still moves a reported 25,000 copies a year.) Occasionally, Mangum flitted ever so briefly into the public eye. He released a disc of field recordings of Bulgarian folk music, then disappeared. Calling himself “Jefferson,” he hosted a late-night radio show on New Jersey’s WFMU a few times until he was discovered, then vanished once again. Sometimes he’ll appear onstage at friends’ rock shows for a song, sending the crowd into paroxysms—but when those friends suggest he record his own music, they say he becomes evasive.

Mangum’s continued silence has angered some fans, who accuse him of being selfish or “indifferent to his talent,” as if musical ability comes with some sort of obligation to society. At least once a year, someone writes a hoax message from Mangum and posts it online—generally throwing in some fanciful verbal junk to bilk fans into believing it’s the genius himself wielding the keyboard. Some have announced forthcoming records or tours, while others have revealed the long-hidden sources of Mangum’s misanthropy; they’ve all been debunked. All we really know for sure is this: According to his record label, Mangum now lives in New York City. He recently married filmmaker Astra Taylor. Friends say he still creates art and that he seems “very happy.” If he has plans to record more music, he hasn’t told anyone.

And if Aeroplane really is Jeff Mangum’s final statement to the universe, maybe we should be happy with that—not because of some tired line about going out at your peak (which he likely didn’t reach), but because his story is a kind of modern fable. Many fans see his disappearance only in selfish terms: They’ve been deprived of more great music for no good reason. They can’t understand why Mangum would shun success just to shuffle through his days, and, indeed, when musicians abandon this much promise, the culprit is usually drugs or debilitating accidents or people named Yoko. So he must have gone nuts, right? Well, no. After all, what if Mangum is just being honest? What if he poured his life into achieving musical success only to discover that it wasn’t going to make him happy, so he elected to make a clean break and move on? We should all be so crazy.

As always, though, hope for Mangum’s return still glimmers. Last month brought news that he may play a guy in a lobster suit in a soon-to-be-released conceptual film. But who knows? You can’t see inside the suit.

Taylor Clark is a writer based in Portland. His first book, Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture,was published in November.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2185219/

Lewis Black is better than the four blue collar comedy guys put together

Lewis Black will host his own Comedy Central series in March of 2008. The show, titled The Root Of All Evil, will pit two people or pop-culture topics against each other as a panel of comedians argue which is more evil, two examples being “Paris Hilton vs. Dick Cheney” and “Internet Porn vs. YouTube”. At the end of the argument Lewis Black will make the final decision as to which is more evil.

On February 18, 2008, Lewis Black will host “History of the Joke, with Lewis Black”, a comedy-documentary on The History Channel. History.com confirms it, saying “Join comedian Lewis Black in his provocative quest for the secret ingredients of a great joke. Black discovers living history among America’s greatest joke tellers, including George Carlin, Shelley Berman, Robin Williams, Robert Klein, Kathleen Madigan, Penn & Teller, Kathy Griffin, and Dave Attell; and he looks to the future of joke-telling, with jokes and interviews from over 50 standup comedians working today. Black’s hilarious journey uncovers where jokes come from, what inspires comedians to get into comedy, the nature of laughter, improv, the dirty joke and the role of truth in comedy. Black recounts what it takes to tell the perfect joke.”

Is this guy who fell on his priceless strad the reincarnation of Gerald Ford?

BBC NewsFall destroys rare Stradivarius

Garrett’s violin, known as San Lorenzo, dated back to 1710

Virtuoso violinist David Garrett smashed a Stradivarius when he fell over after a concert in London over Christmas, he has revealed. “I fell down a flight of stairs and landed on my violin case,” he told the BBC. “When I opened it up, it was a total mess.” Garrett, 26, likened the accident to “losing a dear friend”. The 290-year-old instrument will spend the next eight months in a workshop, with a repair bill of around £60,000. “I think it’s worth the money,” said Garrett. “You want to have the best repair possible done, which is never the cheapest solution. “Certain instruments just work very well with the violinist… I just loved the violin very, very much.” In the meantime, Garrett has been offered the use of another Stradivarius, worth an estimated £2.5m, for a Valentine’s Day concert in London. It has been loaned by London-based dealers J&A Beare, who have arranged for the instrument to be flown in from Milan, Italy. “I’ve already got it here,” Garrett said after rehearsals at the Barbican. “It’s a beautiful instrument and it will sound perfect tomorrow.” Prodigy German-born Garrett first came to attention as a child prodigy, and he played as a soloist with the London Philharmonic before he was 10. He has recently returned to the stage after running away from home to study at the renowned Juilliard School in New York, against the wishes of his parents. He paid his own way for the course, supplementing his income by modelling for the likes of Vogue and Armani. The broken violin, known as San Lorenzo, was one of about 650 remaining instruments made by Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari. It was made during his so-called “golden period” of 1700-1720, making it even more valuable. In May 2006, a Stradivarius known as The Hammer set an auction record when it was sold for $3.54m (£1.8m). Garrett declined to say how much he had paid for his violin when he purchased it “six or seven” years ago. The star said his accident came as he tried to make an early getaway from the Barbican Centre last year. “I left the concert after the first half because my family was there and we wanted to grab dinner,” he said. “The stairs were very slippery and I still had my concert shoes on. I had my violin over my shoulder, but I slipped and landed on my violin case. “I’m not happy about it at all, but it kind of saved my life.” Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/entertainment/7242860.stmPublished: 2008/02/13 16:38:37 GMT

Mick, Jean-Luc & the devil – how much is one plus one?

Canadian art couple shows sympathy for the devil TheStar.com – entertainment – Canadian art couple shows sympathy for the devil

Hadley + Maxwell riff on Godard collaboration with Mick Jagger

theStar.com, January 31, 2008

Peter Goddard
VISUAL ARTS CRITIC
“They want to make One Plus One equal two. I don’t.” Jean-Luc GodardIn the burnt-out end of the hot ’60s, two famously disruptive characters met to make what evolved into two versions of the same film. Actually, make that three characters: The devil should be added to the list.The main characters were Mick Jagger and French director Jean-Luc Godard. The film – based mostly on a Rolling Stones rehearsal in 1968 – was released as Sympathy for the Devil (the producers’ version) and also as One Plus One (the director’s version). But the devil gets her/his due too, since nothing but bitterness and vituperation has resulted, with supporters of one version bickering with fans of the other.

New understanding is brought to this 40-year-old brouhaha in the form One Plus One Minus One (2007), a video installation at Jessica Bradley Art + Projects by the Berlin-based Canadian art couple Hadley + Maxwell, who go by their first names only.

But Bic-clickers beware. The H+M intervention in the Godard/Stones history is a model of intelligent, formalist inquiry. Even the most incendiary, politicized elements that went into “this orphaned film disowned by the director,” as Hadley calls it, are revisited by H+M in an analytical, savvy, detached fashion. The couple has always shown a streak of domesticity in their work. They’re fans of the pristine, “contemplative white cube gallery space,” Maxwell explains. “We’re trying to slow down culture a bit, to mediate it through objects, sound and music.”

A distilled version of the Stones/Godard film showing on one monitor in the Bradley gallery’s main space is paired with an improvisatory home movie on another monitor featuring a band of H+M’s friends in Berlin vamping on the Stones’ musical language. “We’re following Godard’s process of juxtaposition and interruption,” says Maxwell. “Here one composition interferes with the other.”

Equipment the Stones used is recalled in the back gallery in a series of stylish, pared-down watercolour, ink and gouache drawings on paper, each element (drum kit, mikes) positioned as if it were a topiary shrub in a French formal garden. Diffuse, caught-in-the-moment images taken from the Godard film – outline of lips seen through a blaze of lights, for instance – result in a series of silkscreen prints.

Hadley was born in 1973 when the Godard film had been mostly banished from view. Yet Godard’s film continues to get trashed, which must say something about its continuing reputation for potential sedition. “Pretentious” and politically “obscure” pretty much sum up how it’s viewed today. “Godard’s politics, for all his intelligence, were disgusting,” summarized a retrospective piece that appeared last year in the London Sunday Times.

Yet Godard himself was the first trash artist of record, when he disowned the film before it was first screened in November 1968. To the director, the film was meant to be boundary-less and open-ended. In a similar vein, One Plus One Minus One is to be considered “unfinished,” says Hadley. “We keep adding to it and extending it.”

Of course, 1968 was the watershed year for big trouble in the Western world. America’s “Summer of Love” was turning hate-filled. Student riots in Paris cut drastically into the cocktail hour on the Left Bank. Yet as much as he was caught up in these events, Godard never left behind his formal film-sense concerns. One Plus One was also his way of reinventing the Hollywood music only with Black Panther power rallies and porn purveyors inserted where the dancing numbers should go.

“In spite of all these heavy messages he’s putting into the film in terms of content, he still relied on the formalism in his filmmaking itself,” says Maxwell. “And that for us is the real content of his message, his formal use of cinema.

“So we’re borrowing his processes and translating them into a different media to emphasize his success with those processes,” says Hadley.

pgoddard@thestar.ca

The quintessential wacko parent

A Handmade Home

David Kadlubowski for The New York Times

PIECE BY PIECE Leda Livant created a sculptural home in Arizona with her late husband, Michael Kahn. More Photos >

By JOYCE WADLER

NY Times

Published: January 31, 2008

CORNVILLE, Ariz.

Multimedia

Slide Show

Exploring Eliphante

ANY fool can hire an architect to draw up a plan for a house, but it takes a truly inspired fool — which is to say, an artist — to start building and see where the earth and driftwood and shards of broken pottery take him, and an equally impassioned fool — say, a woman in love — to go along and carry the rocks on her back.This is how it was with the little-known sculptural home that is Eliphante, three acres of fantastical domes, shacks and follies created over 28 years by Michael Kahn and his wife, Leda Livant. Here there is the residence, which has 25-foot ceilings and incorporates rocks and scraps from construction sites; there, a studio, one wall of which is the Ford pickup that brought the couple west; and a labyrinthine art gallery called Pipedreams, in which every painting has its own environment.The building that gave the compound its name has a long, trunklike entrance made of rock and an irregularly mounded roof. “Aaah, Ella-fahn-tay,” a friend joked soon after it was built, giving it a playful faux-French pronunciation.The couple began building when they first arrived here, although they did not own the property, and they continued to do so until the progressive brain disease, which killed Mr. Kahn this December at age 71, robbed him of the ability to speak.Was there a floor plan? Did they discuss the number of bedrooms, the layout of the kitchen?“We didn’t think in those terms,” says Ms. Livant, who is 82. “We thought shelter from the elements and a beautiful place to live in: stained glass and pottery and wood, sleeping loft and a fireplace. Michael had no definite plan except to work and see what the natural shape would be. If you stay with a preconceived notion of what you want, it could be too restrictive.”Eliphante is in red-rock country, near Sedona, and while Ms. Livant and Mr. Kahn turned it into a nonprofit arts organization in the late 1980s and she still permits occasional tours to offset the costs, it remains hidden. (Information is at eliphante.org.) The sign, painted on a stump, is small, and the compound is bounded by a creek. If the waters are low and a vehicle is sturdy, a visitor can drive across; otherwise Lonnie Haight, a 46-year-old woodcarver and handyman who helps out at Eliphante, will get you in a canoe while Ms. Livant waits on the other side.This is where she was last week, a beautiful old hippie with lush white hair, a pink vest over a purple sweater and, around her neck, a leather pouch that does not contain, as one suspects, her husband’s ashes, but her hearing aid.The property is a mixture of disarray and magic: a tree adorned with clusters of bottles; a court fenced in with battered rackets, called the Nennis court since there is no net and no tennis; sculpture; and an incongruous carpet of AstroTurf, contributed by the nearby town of Cottonwood when it renovated its tennis courts. “At first I thought it was terribly artificial,” Ms. Livant says. “But it keeps the dust down, and it highlights the sculpture. And it does not prevent rain from coming through to nurture the earth.”Everything is slightly off-kilter, and many structures and pieces of art have been damaged by the floodwaters of the creek, the climate and what Ms. Livant calls critters. In the mountains of Arizona, that means more than squirrels.“You know what that is?” Ms. Livant says, as she takes a visitor up the rocky hill leading to the compound. “Coyote poop.” A portal in a rock wall that once afforded a panoramic view of the property has been filled with dirt by a gopher. Mice nibble the ends of the canvases in the Pipedreams gallery. Last year, Ms. Livant’s dog was killed.Coyotes?“Rattlesnakes,” Ms. Livant says. “They’re hibernating now.”Ms. Livant’s residence is called Hippodome. It rises gently out of the ground, looking somewhat like a hippo emerging from a lake. One exterior wall has a mosaic of yellow and blue ceramic tiles, left over from somebody’s expensive kitchen renovation.Ms. Livant’s daughter, Wendy Jones, who has come in from Halifax, Nova Scotia, for a visit and is a communications manager for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a life coach, says she understands why it might make a visitor stop and stare. “Looks like something a Hobbit would live in, doesn’t it?” she asks.Hippodome has electricity, heat, a phone line and water, but no bathroom or toilet. To wash, one goes across the property to the bathhouse, where the solar-heated shower is a length of chopped hose but the windows are stained glass. A small plot with a low fence and a tin roof serves as the outhouse and smells fresher than most New York City restrooms. If a woman wishes to urinate, she finds an AstroTurf-free plot of ground and does so watchfully, given what happened to the dog. After the tour, Ms. Livant sits down in the Hippodome’s kitchen, her daughter perched behind her on the free-form counter, and tells her story.She was 45 years old, married and living in Westport, Conn., when Mr. Kahn came into her life. Her husband was a psychologist named Saul Ader; there were two children, Wendy and Peter. They lived in an 18th-century house and owned a Volvo and a Saab. Ms. Livant had an interest in drawing and painting, but busied herself with volunteer work. Then, in 1970, when her daughter was in college and her son was in high school, and the domestic discontent of the ’60s had moved into the suburbs, everything changed.“My husband and I went for a vacation on Cape Cod, and I met Michael, who was an artist there,” Ms. Livant says. “He showed me one of his large canvases,” a dark blue abstract painting with a small rectangle of light. “What I saw in that particular painting was an image that invoked fear in me,” she adds. “I thought, there’s another world I have to explore. I knew I had to open my eyes to the rest of my life.”Three months later, Ms. Livant left her family and went to live with Mr. Kahn, who was 10 years her junior, in Provincetown. To support them, she took a job cleaning houses. “People said, ‘Leda must have gone crazy,’ ” Ms. Livant says. “It wasn’t craziness, it was like a rebirth. Within three weeks of my moving to Cape Cod, I got pneumonia and almost died, I was in such mourning for my family and so vulnerable, and the sadness of having left my kids has never left me.”She pauses, and her eyes tear up. “I always get a lump in my throat when I realize — but I have been forgiven.”Her daughter steps in, reminding her mother of her own work, her weaving and painting. “When you connected with Mike, there was something else,” Ms. Jones says. “I think there was a connection between the artists’ lives.”Ms. Livant is still unable to discuss her own work. “The hardships of my psychological life did not outweigh the fact that I was so in love with Michael that I would have and did put up with anything,” she says. “Cold in winter, not enough food sometimes, on my hands and knees to do housework, when I had paid people to do my housework.” In 1979 the couple came to Sedona, where Mr. Kahn had read that the rocks so inspired Max Ernst. There they met Bob and Joan Crozier, two business people who offered them three acres rent-free.The work on the first structure, which was built into a side of a hill, began immediately — when a friend with a backhoe didn’t show up, Mr. Kahn picked up his shovel and started digging. The building would have a piano set into a wall, driftwood sculptures and stained glass. During the five years it took to complete, the couple lived in an 8-by-10-foot shack with a wood-burning stove but no electricity or plumbing, which Mr. Kahn also built. They called it the Winter Palace, and Ms. Livant says it was the best home she has ever lived in. When they were not building, they made art.There was never any money. Occasionally, Mr. Kahn sold a painting. Ms. Livant’s father sent about $50 a month. Ms. Jones recalls sending $40 a month, directly to a supermarket in Sedona; it was the only way to insure it would be used for food, not paint, she says.Ms. Livant and Mr. Kahn continued painting and building. Sometimes others, like Michael Glastonbury, a British-born contractor who today lives in Oregon, joined them. “Whatever wood floated down the creek during the winter floods was salvaged,” says Mr. Glastonbury, who has worked on the compound for the last 20 years. “If it was a particularly nice shape, we’d twist it around and fit it in.”Mr. Glastonbury met the couple in the mid-1980s, when they were building Hippodome and they hired him to make the kitchen cabinets and counter. Mr. Glastonbury had been trained as an engineer’s patternmaker and had worked for Rolls-Royce in England. Mr. Kahn’s approach was a shock. “I was Mr. Straight and Plumb and Square to the world,” Mr. Glastonbury says. “He gave me no direction. I said, What do you like? He’d say, ‘What do youlike?’ ”Mr. Glastonbury admired Mr. Kahn. But he was aware of Mr. Kahn’s limitations as a builder. With money tight, Mr. Kahn had the habit of stretching a bag of cement — instead of using a ratio of four bags of sand to every one of cement, Mr. Kahn would use 8 or 10.In 2004, Mr. Kahn received a diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, a progressive brain disease similar to Alzheimer’s. But even in the last weeks of his life, when he was reduced to the level of a 3-year-old, Ms. Livant said, Mr. Kahn was drawing, an artist to his bones.Her concern now is for Eliphante. Her landlords, the Croziers, say they plan to deed the property to Eliphante, and they are in agreement about its future: they would like it to be a place to nurture the arts, where there might be performances and workshops, and the buildings would be maintained. But given her age, Ms. Livant says, she would like to have someone to oversee the management of the property. She needs to find a home for her husband’s paintings. And the property is in desperate need of repair.About 10 years ago, in an attempt to get a grant from the Smithsonian, the artists hired an architectural conservator to evaluate the property. The expert calculated that it needed about $28,000 in repairs. They never did get the grant.Michael Kahn was in good health at that time. Did they try to make any repairs? “We’d never done anything, except when there was a leak,” Ms. Livant says. “We had no money, and he was painting. He’d much rather paint than repair. Always, always, always, always, always.”

Edie is a charter member of the Hall of Flame-outs

EDIE SEDGWICK(1943-1971)

to JAN. 1965: ANDY MEETS EDIE

 Edie Sedgwick (1966)(photo: Billy Name)

Andy Warhol was often blamed for Edie Sedgwick’s descent into drug addiction and mental illness. However, before meeting Warhol, Edie had been in mental hospitals twice and came from a family with a history of mental illness. She was only close to Warhol for about a year, from approximately March 1965 to February 1966.

Another fallacy was that Warhol ditched Edie after using her up whereas the truth was that it was Edie’s decision to leave the Factory, lured by promises of stardom by Bob Dylan and his manager, leaving Andy feeling slightly betrayed.

HER PARENTS

Edie Sedgwick’s father was Francis Minturn Sedgwick (1904-1967), a Santa Barbara rancher who had three nervous breakdowns prior to his marriage in 1929 to Edie’s mother Alice Delano De Forest. Before the marriage, Alice’s father visited Francis Sedgwick’s doctors at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge Massachusetts, where he was recovering from a phase of manic-depressive psychosis. Alice’s father was advised by Francis’s doctor at the psychiatric clinic that Francis and Alice should not have any children. (EDIE49)

They eventually had a total of 8 children: Alice (Saucie) in 1931, Robert Minturn (Bobby) in 1933, Pamela in 1935, Francis Minturn (Minty) in 1938, Jonathan in 1939, Katharine (Kate) in 1941, Edith Minturn (Edie) in 1943, and Susanna (Suky) in 1945.

HER BACKGROUND

Edie Sedgwick’s family ancestry originated from Stockbridge, Massachusetts where Edie’s great-great-great grandfather had moved after the Revolution. Judge Theodore Sedgwick (1746-1813) had been Speaker of the House of Representatives in the time of Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and had also been the Chief Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. His wife, Pamela Dwight (1753-1807) had gone insane “halfway through her life.” (EDIE3) Stockbridge had closer ties to New York than Boston, with many of her family ancestors pursuing careers in New York after being educated at Harvard.

After their marriage, Edie’s parents, Francis and Alice, lived in Cambridge while Francis took classes at the Harvard Business School. Because of his “asthma attacks and other nervous symptoms” his doctors “advised him to develop his artistic side.”(EDIE50) They moved to Long Island, spending their summers in a house in Santa Barbara that they had bought on their honeymoon. They eventually moved to a 50 acre fruit ranch in Goleta in 1943. Edie was born at the Cottage Hospital in Santa Barbara on April 20, 1943. During the war, they moved to a larger ranch, Corral de Quati, in the Santa Ynez Valley with money inherited from Edie’s maternal grandfather, Henry Wheeler De Forest. Although he had lost much of his fortune in the Wall Street crash, half of the remaining money (several million dollars) went to Edie’s mother. (EDIE62)

THE RANCH

Although land rich (3,000 acres), “there was a feeling at this stage of being pinched for money, of cutting corners”, according to Edie’s sister Saucie. “We children were dressed in hand-me-downs from our Eastern cousins, and we got very little for Christmas or birthdays.” (EDIE62) Oil was discovered on the ranch in the early fifties and approximately seventeen wells were constructed to take advantage of it. With the additional money, the family was able to move to a new 6,000 acre ranch about six miles from Corral de Quati in July 1952. Edie’s sister, Suky, described the new ranch, Rancho La Laguna de San Francisco, as “gloriously beautiful” (EDIE78)

The Sedgwicks lived in their own world, and even had their own school constructed on their property. The children were not allowed to go to public school. (EDIE70) Edie and her sister, Suky, were taken to a woman doctor in the Santa Ynez Valley for daily vitamin B shots. (EDIE79)

MINTY

Edie’s brother Minty (Francis Minturn) was an alcoholic at the age of fifteen (EDIE83). Later, in the the early sixties, he ended up at Silver Hill psychiatric hospital, attending AA meetings when he was out. (EDIE102), In October 1963 he was committed to Bellevue after being found in Central Park standing on a statue making a speech to a non-existent audience. From Bellevue he went to Manhattan State Hospital. He then returned to Silver Hill and was found dead in his room in early 1964. (EDIE135-6) He had hung himself the day before his twenty-sixth birthday. The night before committing suicide, he rang Edie and, according to one of her friends at the time, Minty told Edie that “she was the only Sedgwick he could ever hope for.” (EDIE139/140)

BOBBY

Her other brother, Bobby, also had psychiatric problems. He had a nervous breakdown in the early 1950s during his sophomore year at Harvard. He was taken from his dorm, Eliot House, in a straitjacket. When he returned in to Harvard in the Autumn of 1953 he continued to see a psychiatrist in Boston. On August 20, 1963 he was committed again – this time to Bellevue, just a few months before Minty was admitted. After staying in Bellevue for ten days, he was committed to Manhattan State Hospital. On New Year’s Eve 1964 he was riding his Harley Davidson without a helmut and crashed into the side of a bus, dying on January 12, 1965. (EDIE147/152)

ANOREXIA

Edie was first institutionalized in the autumn of 1962 after suffering from anorexia and, like her brother, attended the Silver Hill mental hospital. Her anorexia continued until she weighed only ninety pounds at which time she was transferred to Bloomingdale, the Westchester Division of New York Hospital. (EDIE115) Whereas Silver Hill was fairly liberal, Bloomingdale was very strict. Near the end of her stay there, she became pregnant while on a hospital pass and had to have an abortion. (EDIE115/7).

CHUCK WEIN

After her release from the hospital, she moved to Cambridge in the autumn of 1963 and continued to see a psychiatrist. There she met Chuck Wein, who according to a friend at the time, Ed Hennessy, “had graduated a year or two before, but he had come back to bum around.” (EDIE126) She prospered socially, hanging out with people like Hennessy – “a kind of deliberately outrageous dandy at a time Harvard was not producing many dandies” (EDIE126).

She left Cambridge after turning 21 and moved to New York in 1964. According to Sandy Kirkland, who hung out with Edie in her Manhattan apartment, Chuck Wein “would be plotting out the next move of their strategy – whom he was going to introduce to Edie that night, what they could do for her… Chuck had a real promoter’s vision about her… He knew that she had this quality, but that she was totally disorganized and wouldn’t be able to pull it off herself… so he took over her life.” (EDIE176)

In January 1965, Edie met Andy Warhol at Lester Persky’s apartment. She began going to the Factory regularly in March with Chuck Wein. During one of these visits, Andy put her into Vinyl, at the last minute.” (L&D219-20) She had previously made a very short appearance in Warhol’s film, Horse, when she and Ondine entered the Factory toward the end of the film.

Ronald Tavel (Vinyl scriptwriter):

“I don’t think Andy was taken in by Chuck for one minute. What he liked was his blond hair and blue eyes.” (L&D220)

Jane Holzer:

“Edie was with this guy called Chuck Wein, and he had a bad vibe, a very bad vibe. Too many drugs.” (UW52)

Andy Warhol, Chuck Wein andSandy Kirkland on the Factory couch(photo: Stephen Shore)

ANDY & EDIE & CHUCK

When Andy went to the opening of his exhibit at the Sonnabend Gallery in Paris on April 30, 1965, he took both Edie and Chuck with him (as well as Gerard Malanga). Upon returning to New York, Andy told his scriptwriter, Ron Tavel, that he wanted to make Edie the queen of the factory and asked him to write a script for her: “Something in a kitchen. White and clean and plastic.” The result was Kitchen, with Edie, Rene Ricard and Roger Trudeau. It was shot at soundman Buddy Wirtschafter’s studio apartment. (L&D223/5)

After Kitchen, Chuck Wein replaced Tavel, being credited as writer and assistant director for the filming of Beauty No. 2 which she starred in with “Gino [Piserchio], a hunk in jockey shorts”. Beauty No. 2 premiered at the Cinematheque on July 17th and her onscreen appearance was compared to Marilyn Monroe’s. As a result of her popularity, she was getting a lot of advice from people to leave Andy and become a proper star. One of the people advising Edie was Bobby Neuwirth who has been described as “Bob Dylan’s right-hand man.” (L&D226/8)

BOB DYLAN & BOB NEUWIRTH

Bob Dylan and Bobby Neuwirth first met Edie in December of 1964 – approximately a month before she met Warhol.

Bobby Neuwirth:

Bobby Dylan and I occasionally ventured out into the poppy nightlife world. I think somebody who had met Edie said, ‘You have to meet this terrific girl.’ Dylan called her, and she chartered a limousine and came to see us. We spent an hour or two, all laughing and giggling, having a terrific time. I think we met in the bar upstairs at the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street, which was one of the great places of the Sixties. It was just before the Christmas holidays; it was snowing, and I remember we went to look at the display on Houston Street in front of the Catholic church… Edie was fantastic. She was always fantastic.” (EDIE166)

Neuwirth had first met Dylan at the beginning of May 1961 at the Indian Neck Folk Festival in Connecticut. In February 1964 Neuwirth joined Dylan on the road as a go-fer and became his “right-hand man.” At the time that Neuwirth and Dylan met Edie, Dylan was staying in Room 211 at The Chelsea Hotel with his future wife, Sara Lownds, and her 3 year old child from a previous marriage. While Sara stayed in the hotel taking care of her child, Neuwirth and Dylan enjoyed New York’s nightlife. The Kettle of Fish was one of their regular haunts. Dylan was also having an affair with Joan Baez which had begun in May 1963 after both performed at the Monterey Jazz Festival. The relationship with Baez continued until May 1965 when Baez broke up with Dylan after discovering him and Lownds together in Dylan’s hotel room during a concert tour of Great Britain. Dylan had previously neglected to tell Baez about Lownds.

In November 1965, Dylan married Sara in a secret ceremony – something that Edie apparently found out from Warhol during an argument at the Gingerman Restaurant in February 1966.

Paul Morrissey:

“She [Edie] said, ‘They’re [Dylan's people] going to make a film and I’m supposed to star in it with Bobby [Dylan].’ Suddenly it was Bobby this and Bobby that, and they realized that she had a crush on him. They thought he’d been leading her on, because just that day Andy had heard in his lawyer’s office that Dylan had been secretly married for a few months – he married Sarah Lownds in November 1965… Andy couldn’t resist asking, ‘Did you know Edie that Bob Dylan has gotten married?’ She was trembling. They realized that she really thought of herself as entering a relationship with Dylan, that maybe he hadn’t been truthful.” (UT36/37)

Edie went to make a phone call and when she came back she announced that she was leaving the Factory. Gerard Malanga, who was also there, thought she had rung Dylan. Malanga recalled that “she left and everybody was kind of quiet. It was stormy and dramatic. Edie disappeared and that was the end of it. She never came back.” (UT37)

There is no evidence that Edie ever had a sexual relationship with Bob Dylan. However, she did have one with Bob Neuwirth.

Edie Sedgwick [from the Ciao! Manhattan tapes]:

“It was really sad – Bobby [Neuwirth]’s and my affair. The only true, passionate, and lasting love scene, and I practically ended up in the psychopathic ward. I had really learned about sex from him, making love, loving, giving. It just completely blew my mind – it drove me insane. I was like a sex slave to this man. I could make love for forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, forty-eight hours, without getting tired. But the minute he left me alone, I felt so empty and lost that I would start popping pills… (EDIE315)

Bob Dylan’s album Blonde on Blonde was released on May 16, 1966. One of the women featured on the inner sleeve was Edie Sedgwick. Some of the songs were rumored to be about Edie. And Andy.

Andy Warhol (via Pat Hackett in Popism):

“I liked Dylan, the way he created a brilliant new style… I even gave him one of my silver Elvis paintings in the days when he was first around. Later on, though, I got paranoid when I heard rumors that he had used the Elvis as a dart board up in the country. When I’d ask, ‘Why did he do that?’ I’d invariably get hearsay answers like ‘I hear he feels you destroyed Edie,’ or ‘Listen to Like a Rolling Stone - I think you’re the ‘diplomat on the chrome horse,’ man.’ I didn’t know exactly what they meant by that – I never listened much to the words of songs – but I got the tenor of what people were saying – that Dylan didn’t like me, that he blamed me for Edie’s drugs.” (POP108)

Nico thought that Dylan might have been referring to Edie in the song, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, which was included on the album. Some claimed that the phrase “your debutante” referred to Edie on the track, Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again. It was also rumored that Just Like a Woman was about Edie. The non-Warhol film that Edie made after she left the Factory, Ciao Manhattan, had Just Like a Woman as part of its soundtrack. Some Dylan biographers, however, think that the song was probably about Dylan’s relationship with Joan Baez.

The supposed film with Dylan never materialized although D.A. Pennebaker, who filmed the documentary Don’t Look Back in 1965, recalled that he also shot “a lot” of footage of Edie who was often at his studio. Don’t Look Back covered Dylan’s concert dates in England from April 30 – May 10, 1965. The following year Pennebaker was also hired by Dylan as the cinematographer for a film for television broadcast that Dylan wanted to produce himself called Eat the Document. Bobby Neuwirth helped Pennebaker edit the 1966 footage.

Andy Warhol had filmed Edie Sedgwick for The Chelsea Girls but when she left the Factory, he edited her out of the film, possibly at Edie’s request. Her footage was replaced with a shot of Nico with colored lights projected on her face with Velvet Underground music in the background.

EDIE’S MODELING CAREER

An out take from Edie’sLife magazine photo session(photo: Fred Eberstadt)

After leaving Andy’s crowd, Edie, still in a relationship with Bob Neuwirth, tried modeling, appearing in Vogue on March 15, 1966. During her Factory days, she had appeared in Vogue in August 1965 as a “youthquaker” and also in a fashion layout forLife magazine in the September 1965 issue.

She never became part of “the family at Vogue” because, according to senior editor Gloria Schiff: “she was identified in the gossip columns with the drug scene, and back then there was a certain apprehension about being involved in that scene… people were really terrified by it… drugs had done so much damage to young, creative, brilliant people that we were just anti that scene as a policy”. (EDIE302).

Edie also auditioned for Norman Mailer’s play The Deer Park, but Mailer thought she “wasn’t very good… She used so much of herself with every line that we knew she’d be immolated after three performances” (EDIE314).

A FAMILY CHRISTMAS

At the end of 1966, Eddie, who had been living in the Chelsea Hotel for a few months, went home for the Christmas holidays. Her brother Jonathan remembered her as: “really weird when she arrived at the ranch… She was an alien. She’d pick up what you were about to say before you’d say it. It made everyone uncomfortable. She wanted to sing, and so she would sing… but it was a drag because it wasn’t in tune. A painted doll, wobbly, languishing around on chairs, trying to look like a vamp.” (EDIE310)

According to tapes she later made for the film Ciao! Manhattan, she attempted to get her mother’s physician to refill a prescription for Eskatrol, a form of speed, and her mother found out about it and talked to the doctor. Later that night her parents gave her some nembutal so that she could sleep. At one point they woke her up and told her she had a temperature of 105 and needed to be taken to the hospital. Although she thought she was just going to a normal hospital, they actually took her in a police car to the County Hospital to have her committed to the psychiatric ward. (EDIE311)

When Edie got out of the hospital, she moved back to Manhattan to the Chelsea Hotel (Room 105) and continued to take drugs. Bob Neuwirth eventually left her in early 1967, unable to deal with her drug taking and erratic behaviour.

CIAO! MANHATTAN

The shooting for Edie’s final film, Ciao! Manhattan, started on Easter Sunday, 1967.

According to Robert Margouleff, the film’s producer, “Everybody on the set needed a poke [of speed] – first once a day, then twice. We actually set up a charge account at Dr. Roberts office…. Shooting got so unpredictable. There was one scene in which Paul America was supposed to drop off Jane Holzer at the heliport at the Pan Am building. We filmed him driving up up and letting her out and then driving off. He was supposed to drive around the block and be available for more footage to the scene. But he just kept on going. We didn’t hear from Paul again for about eight months until finally David tracked him down in Allegan, Michigan where he was in jail. We had to get permission from the Governor to film him in jail and try to integrate that into the footage.” (EDIE 321/3)

On October 24, 1967. Edie’s father died. Toward the end of his life, one of his brother’s heard him say: “You know, my children all believe that their difficulties stem from me. And I agree. I think they do.” (EDIE356)

Edie was in Gracie Square Hospital at the time of her father’s death. When she came out, she moved in with L.M. Kit Carson who had written a film he wanted Edie to be in. They had an affair and moved into the Warwick hotel posing as man and wife. Unable to cope with her drug addiction and erratic behaviour, Carson moved out. Several days later Edie was committed to Bellevue Hospital. After contacting her private physician she was let out of Bellevue, but was later committed to the Manhattan State Hospital after a drug overdose. (EDIE363)

Her brother, Jonathan, describes her state when Edie’s mother finally took her out of the the hospital and back to the ranch in Santa Barbara in the late fall of 1968: “She couldn’t walk. She’d just fall over… like she had no motor control left at all. The doctor did a dye test of some sort and it showed the blood wasn’t reaching certain parts of the brain… She couldn’t talk. I’d say, “Edie, goddamn it, get your head together… She’d say, ‘I… I… I… know… know… know… I… I… can but it’s ha… ha… hard…’ “(EDIE370)

Eventually she was well enough to live in town and got an apartment in Isla Vista near U.C. Santa Barbara. She was hospitalized again in August of 1969 in the psychiatric ward of Cottage Hospital after being busted for drugs by the local police. While in hospital she met another patient, Michael Post, who she would later marry. (EDIE371/76)

When Edie got out of the hospital, she hung around with a group of bikers called the Vikings. One of the bikers, Preacher Ewing, remembered her as “a little larger than life in her capacity to hit the depths… I used to call her Princess, because that’s what she thought she was…She’d say her parents were so fantastically upper-class… she was condescending. It was really ludicrous, because she’d ball half the dudes in town for a snort of junk.” (EDIE387)

Edie was in the hospital again in the summer of 1970 but was let out under the supervision of two nurses to finish Ciao! Manhattan. (EDIE388)

For the shock treatment segment in the film, a real clinic was used and Edie knew exactly how the gag should be placed and how the airway went in. The segments of her in her “apartment” were actually filmed at the bottom of an empty swimming pool in Los Angeles. (EDIE390)

Soon afterwards, suffering from the DT’s, Edie was admitted to the same clinic they used to film the shock treatment in Ciao Manhattan, where she had real shock treatments.

Michael Post:

“She was in the clinic from January 17 to June 4… She had shock treatments – I don’t know how many – maybe twenty or more. Dr Mercer told me that she’d had some shock treatments in the East. He authorized the new ones because he thought Edie could be close to suicidal.” (EDIE398)

According to Warhol biographer, David Bourdon, “Between January and June of 1971, she received twenty or more shock treatments.” (DB316)

CIAO! EDIE

Edie married Michael Post on July 24, 1971. She stopped drinking and taking pills until October when pain medication was given to her to treat a physical illness. She remained under the care of Dr. Mercer who prescribed her barbiturates but she would often demand more pills or say she had lost them in order to get more, often combining them with alcohol.

On the night of November 15, 1971, Edie went to fashion show at Santa Barbara Museum, a segment of which was filmed for the television show An American Family, Lance Loud had already met Edie before on a beach in Isla Vista and she spoke to him in the lobby “drawn” by the cameras.

After the fashion show Edie attended a party and was verbally attacked by one of the guests who called her a heroin addict. The guest was so loud that she was asked to leave. Edie rang Michael who arrived at the party and could see that Edie had been drinking.

Eventually, they left the party, went back to their apartment where Michael gave Edie the medication that had been prescribed for her and they both fell asleep. When Michael woke up the following morning at 7:30, Edie was dead. The coroner registered her death as Accident/Suicide due to a Barbiturate overdose.

Saucie (Edie’s sister):

“Edie was buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Ballard, up over the San Marcos Pass. It used to be a dingy village so small that if you went through it at fifty miles per hour you’d miss it. It’s in the Valley, but it’s nothing. A few live-oak trees. No one would ever go there except to see the veterinarian.” (EDIE425)

Homage to Heath

For Heath Ledger, Princess Diana, James Dean, Janis Joplin, Thomas Chatterton, John Keats himself and all of the members of the Hall of Flame-outs, may you stay “for ever warm and still to be enjoyed, forever panting and for ever young” 

Ode on a Grecian Urnby John Keats 

Thou still unravished bride of quietness!

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flow’ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape

Of deities or mortals, or of both,

In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

 What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,

Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,

For ever panting and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,

A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea-shore,

Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 

Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!

 When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst, 

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” -that is all 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.