Gus Van Sant Shines in Palm Springs

Gus Van Sant is a multi-talented artist who excels in several creative arenas. He's a filmmaker, painter, writer, and musician. It would be annoying if it weren't for the fact that he's so unassuming. He was at the Palm Springs International Short Film Festival recently to receive the Spirit of Short Film award, and participate in a Q&A and screening of some of his shorts. At one point during the discussion, moderator PSISFF Director Darryl Macdonald mentioned his work as a musician and proded him to a little self-promotion, asking him to tell everybody where they could purchase his albums. Van Sant declined the opportunity and moved the conversation forward.

His mainstream success with films like Drugstore Cowboy, To Die For, Milk, and Good Will Hunting, has not altered his experimental filmmaker heart. He continued to make shorts even after his box office success with feature films. One of his more recent shorts, Ballad of the Skeletons features a close up of Allen Ginsberg reciting his poem against a backdrop of archive film and music by Paul McCartney. The provocative 4-minute piece must have been one of the last things Ginsberg did since it was made in 1997, the year of Ginsberg's death.



Van Sant also collaborated with William Burroughs. He talked about being a longtime Burroughs fan after reading Naked Lunch and other Burroughs selections and he took a liking to a story called, The Discipline of DE. He thought the story would make an interesting short film. So he tracked Burroughs down and it didn't take much tracking. He found him easy enough in a New York phone book. This was in 1982, a time when you could still track down a literary icon in a phone book. When he told Burroughs he wanted the rights to the story so he could make a short film based on it, Burroughs made a sarcastic comment about what a non-money maker that would be and gave him permission free of charge. Thus began their friendship.  

The storyline of The Discipline of DE is about "DE" - about going through life in a "Do Easy," extremely efficient fashion. It's droll and feels dated (even earlier than '82), but got into the New York Film Festival and Van Sant says it was a "big start" for him.  

Burroughs had a memorable role in Van Sant's 1989 film Drugstore Cowboy as Tom the Priest, but it wasn't the end of their collaboration on shorts. In 1991, Van Sant made A Thanksgiving Prayer with Burroughs.  It features Burroughs reciting an Allen Ginsberg poem with music by Phillip Glass and Paul McCartney.  It isn't your grandmother's Thanksgiving prayer, that's for sure. It's pure Burroughs and Ginsberg. One of the more mild lines is, "Thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business." (The film can be found on youTube.) 

Out of the all the shorts screened, I most enjoyed the two video diary pieces. They were raw and funny, and Van Sant was in them. They're two of seven 2-1/2 minute films he made once a year in the '80s while he was in New York trying to save money for his first feature. He describes the shorts as basically "one liner jokes" that cost him about $50 a piece. Interestingly, they are very much like a million other short films found today on youTube that showcase any silly thing about a person's life, but Van Sant's were made in the mid '80s. 

One of them, called Junior, could easily have been the first viral cat video if youTube was around then. It shows Van Sant's cat, Junior, chasing a circle of sunlight dancing on the ground while Van Sant plays guitar. 

Van Sant took question after question from the audience at the Palm Springs screening. He talked about his music videos (he wrongly thought music videos would be easier than making commercials); the turning point in his career ( Drugstore Cowboy was his first real job - "before that I hadn't made an honest living"); the serendipity of fnding his actors (he found the four boys for his short 4 Boys in a Volvo at a Grateful Dead concert); and how sometimes it's easier to direct a multi-million dollar feature film than a short with a bunch of friends ("it's harder to get your sister to do something on film than someone like Nicole Kidman"). 

When it comes to Van Sant's approach to filmmaking, possibly the most telling remarks he made that point to his willingness to still pursue the experimental were comments he made about cinematographer Christopher Doyle who he worked with on Paranoid Park (Doyle is on the left in the photo above). He told a story about how he was looking at some of the film Doyle shot and noticed it was out of focus. He mentioned this to Doyle. Doyle brushed off his concern and shouted excitedly, "Focus sucks!" And that was when Van Sant knew he was going to enjoy working with Doyle. He laughed at the memory.

Wall Tapestries a Visual Story of Israeli Culture

There are quilts, and then there are wall tapestries. Israeli artist Noa Eshkol created the latter. I came across her textile art work at a new exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The multi-disciplinary exhibit features Eshkol's wall tapestries, or wall carpets, and her dance compositions in a film installation by Los Angeles multi media artist Sharon Lockhart. 

(I'll write write about Eshkol's choreography in a separate post.)

Eshkol was 83 years old when she died in 2007. During her life she created about 1,800 wall carpets, which she began making in 1973 during the Yom Kippur War.  By this time she was well known in Israel for her innovative dance work and people throughout the country sent her clothing, aprons, umbrellas, and scraps of fabrics for incorporation into her wall carpets. Eshkol only wanted to use recycled materials, clothing no longer being used. Every scrap had its own story. No new clothing or fabrics were used.

Eshkol's process was about using the textiles with as little alteration as possible. So although seams were undone, the clothing pieces were left as whole as possible when sewn into the tapestry design. When you look closely at some of her tapestries, you can clearly see a skirt, a shirt, a collar, etc. 

LACMA explains her pieces as "evocative of the fragmented and disorienting experience of war, the layered fabrics bring together divergent and overlapping stories, cumulatively resulting in a map of Israeli material culture."

Although her work tells an Israeli story, it could easily be mistaken for American quilting. The American folk craft of so-called crazy quilting results in similar displays of mix matching and wild combinations of fabric and

design.

Given Eshkol's dance background, the movement in her designs is not surprising. Los Angeles multi media artist Sharon Lockhart was drawn to Eshkol's tapestries and her choreography. She apparently saw a correlation between the two, resulting in her film installation currently at LACMA, which brings together both of Eshkol's talents.

The Ghost of Jack London

Up to 70 California state parks are slated to close in July due to budget cuts unless rescued by non profits or other agencies willing to take them over. Luckily, some of the parks have been saved from closure.

One of the most recent parks to come off the closure is Jack London State Historic Park north of Sonoma where the writer lived until his death in 1916. I recently visited this historic park and am happy to hear it will remain open for others to visit. The park is a beautiful forest of redwoods, oaks, and Douglas Fir trees, creeks, canyons and wildlife, the place London fell in love with in the early 1900's. 

London was only 26 years old when he became internationally famous for his novel The Call of the Wild in 1903. He became the highest paid and most popular American author of his day. He was also a media darling, a celebrity, and handsome bon vivant not immune to controversy. But he was not a white gloved dilatante. He was an adventurer and nature lover.

He discovered Sonoma County's Valley of the Moon during a visit in 1903 and purchased his first property there in 1905. In the ensuing months and years he continued to buy parcels of land and eventually owned 1,400 acres of pristine Sonoma County forest.

One of the most interesting and tragic remnants of London's life at Glen Ellen, where the park is located in the Valley of the Moon, are the stone wall remains of Wolf House, London's "dream home" which was destroyed in a fire just days before Jack and his wife Charmian were to move in after two years of construction. Ironically, London and his architect Albert Farr, were influenced by the great SF earthquake and took great pains to build a rustic yet fireproof design that used local volcanic rock, boulders and unpeeled redwood mounted on a concrete foundation that could hold a 40-story building.

It's fascinating to walk the site and see that, yes, it was fireproof, but only to a point. Wolf House was a 4-story, 15,000 square foot house with 26 rooms and nine fireplaces. For its day, 1913, it was going to be a state-of-the-art home with hot water, heating, electric lighting, refrigeration, and indoor pool.

The cause of the fire remains a mystery although there are two main theories: (1) London was betrayed by a close friend or workman who started the blaze, or, (2) it was spontaneous combustion from building materials. Some say London never recovered from his shattered dream although at the time he vowed to rebuild. He died three years later from kidney failure at 40 years of age.

After Jack's death, Charmian built a smaller home on their property where she lived the rest of her life. The home now houses the House of Happy Walls Museum.

Inside visitors will find much of the home's original design and furniture, and of course the story of London's life with his books, short stories, and a model of his beloved boat, the Snark, which London and Charmian spent 27 months aboard sailing to far flung places.

Here's how Jack described his love of Glen Ellen and his ranch:

“I ride over my beautiful ranch. Between my legs is a beautiful horse.
The air is wine. The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame.
Across Sonoma Mountain, wisps of sea fog are stealing.
The afternoon sun smolders in the drowsy sky.
I have everything to make me glad I am alive.”

 What a shame it would have been if the park closed and no one could learn about Jack London on the property where he lived, and where he was buried. The rescuer is Valley of the Moon Natural History Association who signed a five-year deal to keep this historic park open.  

In SoCal, talks are currently underway to keep open Palomar Mountain State Park, Santa Susana Pass State Historic Park in Simi Valley, Pio Pico State Historic Park in Whittier, and Los Encinos State Historic Park in Encino. Hopefully the talks will be successful, and more non profits and agencies will come forward to rescue the dozens of other state parks in Southern and Northern California that are on the closure list.


You can find out more about which parks are on the list and what you can do to keep them open at
http://savestateparks.org/.