Mike Mills is one of my favorite multi-hyphenate creative people, and has been for a long time. Back in the era of my tidal obsession with Air’s Moon Safari, I read up everything I could on the band, and Mills– the designer who’d crafted their rad cover art. I watched as many of his music videos as I could track down with the middling assistance of dial-up internet and my primary pre-YouTube rad video source, the late great RES Magazine. Ever since then, Mike Mills’ creations– in print, feature filmmaking, documentary, graphic design and music video have only grown successively more and more awesome.
His latest endeavor is his most intimate and most emotionally evocative work yet, the film Beginners. It tells the story of a sad graphic designer (Ewan McGreggor) learning to love (Melanie Laurent) late in life, and his elderly father (Christopher Plumer) who comes out of the closet in the twilight of his life. It’s a simple story but its scope is epic: it’s about mortality, growing up, the unchangeable nature of historical circumstance and seeking connection in a disconnected family. As heavy Beginners‘ themes are, Mills juggles story and concepts with significant grace, blending melancholy and humor in a way that somehow manages to reveal the intimate inner lives of his characters.
Beginners is in theaters now, and I strongly urge you to check it out on the big screen. And luckily, since Mike Mills can’t be confined to one medium, he’s released a companion book to the film called Drawings From the Film Beginners. It’s full of funny and charming sketches that relate to the Ewan McGregor’s character in the film, who also designs album covers for a living.
Thanks to Focus Features, I’m stoked to announce that we’re giving away a copy of the book, as well as a dropcard that will let you to download the Beginnerssoundtrack for free. Comment with your favorite work by Mike Mills and we’ll choose a winner at random this Friday!
Watching L’amour fou, the documentary about the art auction conducted by Pierre Bergé after the death of his partner of 50 years, Yves Saint Laurent, is a little less inspiring than watching Herb & Dorothy, the 2009 documentary that’s also about art collecting (and then unloading late in life). But I’ll get to the reasons why in a minute, because first I want to praise this movie for what it gets excellently right:
1. You get to see a tiny amount of very intimate, loving footage related to the relationship between YSL and Bergé. Bergé’s eulogy for his deceased husband is as moving a moment as you’ll see in theaters this year. And, earlier, some vintage one-on-one conversation footage where YSL playfully tells his man that he enjoys male “body hair” and that he wants to live in “a large bed, a full one,” should clear up any clueless viewer’s ideas about them being strictly business associates. Bergé was YSL’s daddy bear.
Left: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Right: one of YSL’s Mondrian-inspired dresses.
2. Bergé is not the kind of guy to waste time mourning the past. His clear-eyed approach to the dismantling of the couple’s astonishingly large art, furniture and rare object collection is a study in not being attached to things when it’s time for them to exit your life. Besides, he had plenty of time to mourn while YSL was alive and trying to simultaneously drown himself in booze and snort up all the cocaine on the planet. During that time Bergé stood by and took care of his clinically depressed, sickened, addict partner and kept all the paperwork in order so that YSL could design clothes and then hermit himself in a private room, put on a caftan and inhale a small pyramid of blow.
3. You get to see a healthy amount of Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux, YSL’s muses. One light and warm (de la Falaise), one dark and swaddled in black leather (Catroux), they are cool injections of French womanhood into YSL’s insular gayness. Catroux, especially, is like something a writer would invent, never without her sunglasses, even at night.
Loulou de La Falaise and Betty Catroux
4. Their lives were an orgy of luxury and shopping. They bought houses, art and more houses and more art. “One fine day a Mondrian came into our lives,” says Bergé, like it flew into their window and decided it was happiest living next to that Picasso over the fireplace. And then, when it was done, Bergé sent it to the auction house, a place he describes as “the undertakers of art.”
5. Thrill to the head-scratching vagaries of the art auction secondary market where an Ensor fetches more than a Degas.
6. This sort of thing:
And if, in the end, it’s all a little less inspiring than Herb & Dorothy, it’s because of that wealth. Extreme capitalism, even when it’s predicated on the work of a design visionary like Yves Saint Laurent and subsequently used in the service of building an awesome art collection, is sort of automatically less interesting than going on a journey with two extremely ordinary, working class collectors like Herb and Dorothy Vogel, whose lives revolved around living on her librarian’s salary and amassing crazy amounts of conceptual and minimalist pieces (when no one else wanted them) on his postal worker’s income. It’s easy to see a Brâncusi and say, “I’ll take it,” when you’re swimming in cash, or getting a Warhol piece for free because you hang out with him and he decides to photograph you. It’s way more dangerous to risk your retirement savings on work you love just because you love it, become Christo’s cat-sitter and then later donate all of it to various museums without asking for anything in return.
But again, this isn’t meant to harsh on these guys. YSL backed up his decadence with a legacy of his own amazing art worn by fancy ladies the world over. The planet needs people like him, people who live their lives exactly as they please. And if that life involves getting high with Mick Jagger and flying around France in your own private helicopter and asking Betty Catroux what she wants for dinner and she says, “Cigarettes,” then that’s cool, too.
Leilah Weinraub has spent eight years working on Shakedown, “the story of a black lesbian strip club in Los Angeles.” What started as documentation of the club’s by-women for-women performances (which Weinraub used for video installations) soon grew into something much more personal and meditative, as she began to focus on the lives of the performers outside the club. The deeper she became invested in the project, the clearer it became that a wider narrative of labor, community and symbiosis was being woven through the individual tales of the women who make up Shakedown’s extended family:
The film is anchored in the stories of three women: Ronnie Ron, the creator and emcee of Shakedown, a large butch/stud lesbian and former Jehovah’s Witness; Egypt, a single mother, beauty pageant fanatic, and dedicated self – (re)inventor; and Jazmyne, the complicated and sometimes conflicted “Queen” of Shakedown.
Go check out the video on Leilah’s Kickstarter page, and consider making a contribution towards the completion of this epic untold tale!
Mary Woronov is the raddest B-movie actress of all time. This is true not only because she is self-aware, saucy and sincerely good at what she does– but also because she’s an artist, a Factory Girl, and a prolific writer. She’s written novels, memoirs, and essays for Artillery on legendary artists from Edward Hopper to Takashi Murakami. She’s a trailblazer and I admire the winding and unconventional path she’s taken through life. When I look at the insane number of marvelous trashy movies on her IMDb profile, all I can think of is what a shame it is that she’s not in ALL the B-movies. Side note: I’m pretty sure there exists a clause in her contract stating that all Mary Woronov movies must have AMAZING posters (see below).
Woronov will be gracing one of my favorite L.A. galleries, Workspace, with her presence on Sunday, October 17th, for a reading called Notes on Film. It’s the latest installment in Nikki Darling and Kate Wolf’s excellent Five Point Readings series, and she’ll be flanked by CalArts faculty member/curator Michael Ned Holte and Peruvian photographer George Porcari. Go see a living legend in the flesh!
As promised: Harmony Korine’s new short film, Act Da Fool, featuring Provenza Schouler‘s new collection. Fashion label with imagination meets filmmaker with imagination. It makes me happy when Korine chooses to remind us that there’s a whole big incredible world out there, decaying and thriving and reinventing itself everyday. This is beautiful.
Satoshi Kon was not just an incredible director, he was a man who understood the inner workings of our collective fantasies. Dreams, no matter how strange or wonderful, aren’t just magically conjured from the ether—they are built very carefully, sometimes deliberately from the people, objects, and ideas we encounter every day. Even our most intimate, personal desires which seem to stem from a deep-seated, primal urge can only reveal themselves to the mind’s eye in the guise of things we have found in the world around us: love appears as a celebrity’s face, truth sounds like an advertising slogan, happiness feels weirdly similar to your old Power Rangers pajamas. Whatever mundane symbolic vocabulary you might need to converse with your subconscious, Satoshi Kon knew it and he was fucking fluent.
It’s about girls who sleep in abandoned cars and set things on fire. It’s about the great things in life. The stars in the sky and lots of malt liquor.
Harmony Korine on Act Da Fool, his soon to be released short film for rad fashion label Provenza Schouler.
Consider us stoked. Peek at some behind the scenes photos and the film’s gorgeous poster after the jump, and read more about the collaboration at Nowness.
When Wu Tsang and Ashland Mines started Wildness– surely the most glorious of all L.A. club nights in recent memory– at The Silver Platter, they placed a huge spotlight on that small and obscure gay bar tucked away in MacArthur Park. The Silver Platter has for decades catered to a split clientele of discretely dressed macho Latino men and fabulous transgendered women, two factions once at odds that have slowly coalesced into an organic community. Wildness, through its unique mixture of contemporary art, drag, performance and hip DJs, attracted a brand new audience of artsy young queers spanning class and race boundaries to The Silver Platter.
Damelo Todo (Give Me Everything) is Wu’s bracingly intelligent and beautifully shot film that delves deep into the world of The Silver Platter, the hard social realities of transgender life, and the politics of partying. This innovative documentary/narrative hybrid has been in production for nearly two years, fueled by hard-won grants, small donations, and the tireless efforts of a devoted crew. Now Wu needs your help to finish the film. The Kickstarter finish line is less than $500 away, so every dollar invested in these final 4 days will make an enormous difference! Does the world need Damelo Todo in it? Yes, it does. And it’s up to you to make it happen.
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, 1982.
The girls sing Dolly Parton’s “Hard Candy Christmas.”
Directed by Colin Higgins (Harold and Maude, Nine to Five).
