Walker Evans, Untitled, Movie Theater, New Orleans 1935

“…the stunned faces of the billboard…are an odd collection of individuals and are an attempt by the theater to procure an empathetic response from anyone who might doubt why they need to walk into such a theater to be dazzled and removed from their daily life. They seem so entertained and elated and they still struggle for dominance with Morton Salt.”

- Jeff Kitson, Liberty Theatre Image, by Photographer Walker Evans: Review.  April 24, 2009

Walker Percy, center – wearing khaki pants, stands in line to see a movie at “The Armpit,” one of his and his fellow Sigma Alpha Epsilon pals’ favorite local theaters in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, circa 1936

In 1959 Walker Percy was well at work on THE MOVIEGOER, an existentialist work describing the modern condition, isolation and a young man’s struggle for identity during a time when, as George Will states below, “America’s culture of restraint and reticence” was waning.

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A YEAR OF SLIPPING THE LEASH

George F. Will
Sunday, July 19, 2009
THE WASHINGTON POST

Fifty years ago, on July 21, 1959, Grove Press won permission to publish D.H. Lawrence’s novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover.” Two days later, G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company, sought government approval for Enovid, the birth control pill. These two events, both welcome, were, however, pebbles that presaged the avalanche that swept away America’s culture of restraint and reticence.

That change is recounted by Fred Kaplan, an MIT PhD and cultural historian, in “1959: The Year Everything Changed,” an intelligent book with a silly subtitle. There never has been a year — or a decade, century or even millennium, for that matter — in which everything changed. There are numerous constants in the human condition, including (and because of) human nature. Furthermore, pick a year, any year, in the past, say, 250, and you will find it pregnant with consequential births and battles, inventions and publications that made modernity.

Besides, one reason America got into so many messes after Sept. 11, 2001, was the disorienting mantra that on that day “everything changed.” Still, consider how much 1959 did incubate.

(more…)

I took the Crescent line, New Orleans to Birmingham, on Tuesday and saw the following:

A black Methodist preacher with a mustache and prosthetic leg, which he pulled off and kept next to him when he sat down.  He led his congregation of 3 in a prayer for safe travels as the whistle blew and we pulled out of the station.

A sunrise of orange and purple that wiggled through the old pier pylons just off the banks of Lake Pontchartrain.

A Bob Dylan lookalike dressed in vintage jeans, denim jacket, plaid shirt, boots and aviator sunglasses.  He carried a guitar over his shoulder and an old briefcase in his left hand.  He kissed a tall redhead goodbye in New Orleans and was picked up by a spry blonde in Tuscaloosa.

An old black man with a beautifully large belly and a slight stoop waiving from his crumbling storefront in York.

Two men doubled over the hood of a Chevy outside of Boligee.

A group of half naked children at a birthday party, running through backyard sprinklers in a suburban neighborhood somewhere near Cuba.

A solitary man wearing a Crimson Tide tshirt, hands in pockets, staring at the train from an embankment near some woods, far from anywhere.

An excerpt from a fine post on Ryan Hancock’s blog Esse, in which he gets into the thick of things, and mentions Percy:

…the building of a body of coherent work that is satisfying is really hard.. but it’s not the same as pushing around clay or paint.  The medium, in those cases, poses physical problems that require solving and often involve just messing around until things work themselves out.  (Or more often don’t work themselves out and end in a drink and a long walk.)  Photography, at least the way I work, is more like writing.. a writer (as Walker Percy points out) is trapped in his cerebral cortex.. marooned and waiting for an idea, or a sentence, or a word to begin with.  A painter can stretch and prime canvas, fiddle with pencil drawings, pastels, paints.. anything to trick yourself into overcoming the inertia of not painting until you find yourself working on a painting.  A writer sits and looks out the window and thinks.  Or sits and looks out the window and drinks.. or wages an attack of his choice on his brain that refuses to cooperate.  For me, photography is like that.. I don’t shoot any particular subject as a documentary photographer would, or fashion, or portraits.  What I want is complicated to explain (and I’m not going to try right now) but essentially it is based on being able to see in a way that I can’t bring about by force of will.  I just wait, and have a camera around, and try to look hard.

Ryan used to make pots.  He is a fine ceramicist – the best to ever come out of LaGrange College, where he graduated a few years before me – and he is now making beautiful photographs.  I’ve always admired his talent, intellect and style.  To see his work, go HERE

I am attracted to movie stars, but not for the usual reasons…it is their peculiar reality which astounds me.

- Binx Bolling, THE MOVIEGOER

From House Next Door: 

In Walker Percy’s 1960 novel The Moviegoer (often labeled an American existentialist work), William Holden is a character in a brief but important scene in which narrator Binx Bolling watches a man’s reality become “certified” by entering into the heightened reality of Holden the movie star. Binx spies a honeymooning couple on the street, and observes that they’re already off to a rough start, probably due to the new husband’s fecklessness. But when they cross paths with Holden, who is in town filming a movie, and the man offers Holden a light, he gains confidence suddenly and fully. “He has won title to his own existence, as plenary an existence now as Holden’s,” wrote Percy.  

More on Holden here.

I’m hoping to run into Brad Pitt sometime. Winning title to one’s existence sounds appealing.  By chance I met the lead singer of one of my favorite bands once in the French Quarter, years ago.  Like Holden, he asked me for a light. But unlike the newlywed I had no lighter, feigned that I might have one by patting down my pockets and was then forced to apologize for not having one. Pathetic, I know.  And yet I felt so uncool, so invalidated.  Its funny to think back to that experience and now recognize the situation and its accompanying feelings as described in Percy’s writings.  Here’s hoping I’ll have another shot at certification and a chance to lose my own nagging feelings of fecklessness.  Brad?  Angelina?  You around?

Its late.  I should have been in bed a couple hours ago.  My girl is already there, splayed out and entangled in a white sheet, part of her body wanting the comfort of a cover, other parts looking for nothing but the cool air of the fan.  Its hot.  She is bare breasted, beautiful as she sleeps.  

The scanner to my left is wheezing and whirring, crunching loads of freshly processed film into ones and zeros.  As the couple hundred images are loading into my digital library I of course feel ill at ease, discontent as the negatives become positives.  Turning ‘negatives’ into ‘positives’ belies what is actually occuring. I’m not sure there is a good picture here.  Strangely, I’m not sure I want there to be a good picture here.  I have a desire, albeit a desire difficult to articulate, to make everything look strangely mediocre, or in some way absolutely esoteric, banal, or confounding.  The problem seems to be that my eye’s natural tendency toward the geometric dictates compositions full of pos/neg shapes and leading lines- more the stuff of photo 101 class than the sophisticated images of those I admire like Eggleston, Shore or Epstein. 

The scanning process has provided a chance to reflect over the last few weeks: I’ve found nearly 40 sites of former neighborhood theaters; enjoyed thunderstorms and sunsets from this perch above the Garden District; I’ve met a jazz band in Treme, train kids in Central City; saw a matinee screening of Casablanca in New Orleans’ only remaining single screen theater; and I’ve spent too many afternoons inside books, in coffee shops and in bars.  

The experiences add up to something that is anything but banal.  Instead, my time so far in Nola has been romantic, often surreal.  After all, there aren’t many people in their 30s who can spend a summer chasing Binx Bolling’s existential crisis as a means of dealing with their own and making photographs about it.  Positive or negative, I’ll just have to let the images be what they are.