The Honor Code

The Honor Code

Steve Jobs was fond of (mis)quoting Picasso by saying: “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” The actual Picasso quote: “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal,” was verbatim stolen from Igor Stravinsky, who himself stole the line from T.S. Eliot’s more nuanced statement: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” This game of trivia celebrity telephone spanning a century is itself a refutation of Eliot’s nuanced take, diluted and vaporized over time until rendered a mystified Ted Talk koan accepted as truth and devoid of meaning.

Borrowing is an imprecise word in this context as it implies that the borrower will return “it” at some point, a nonsensical formulation in artistic creation. Eliot’s dichotomy of borrow/steal is premised on “stealing” defined as taking something that doesn’t belong to you and making it your own, and that in turn is superior to mere imitation. But there is also the element of concealment in theft, in presenting what you have stolen as your own. Is that, in art, superior to mere imitation? Mere imitation can sometimes be quite deliriously sublime. All of Brian De Palma best films (Dressed to Kill, Blow Out, Body Double, Raising Cane, Snake Eyes etc.) are tumescently imitative, they leave as much doubt of the sources of their inspiration as there is doubt of De Palma’s horniness.

I have been thinking on such things: on what artists owe their influences, owe their audiences, how much originality actually matters, whether discovering a work you thought was daring and original actually is deeply indebted to some previous more obscure work taints it and renders the artist suspect and pretentious for concealing such obvious influences. I’ve been thinking on this, because… it’s more pleasant than thinking of environmental disaster, rising fascism, and one’s own inability to do much of anything about it. You could rightly claim a note of defeatism in these daydreams, I have become just as the writer in Tarkovsky’s Stalker, when confronted with the Zone’s wishing well of our innermost desires, refuses and recedes “Let me grunt alone in my private villa” he says. Isn’t that more or less what a lot of us have done for the last two years and what we will continue doing in perpetuity until the power cuts off and the taps run dry and things become horrifically, urgently real? If so, we might as well have some lively salon conversations, no?

There are endless examples of egregious theft in art—Matthew Barney took so much from Carolee Schneemann that without her he would physically disappear like Michael J. Fox at the end of Back to the Future (a cold-comfort testament to Schneemann’s greatness is how often she was directly copied, think of Julianne Moore’s character in The Big Lebowski). Devendra Banhart ludicrously claimed he had never heard Marc Bolan, which given the similarity of the vibrato filled singing style, is akin to saying one has never heard of the concept of parents. These examples are clear cut, do we think less of these artists for their wholesale larceny? Yes, we do (or at least I do). They are the equivalent of a bank robber whose plan and execution are so brazen they are arrested almost immediately screaming and terrified in the drive through line of a Whataburger. I am more interested in the slipperier cases, where the artist really tried to get away with it and did.

Let’s take Bradley Cooper’s widely lauded A Star is Born. The fourth version of the classic doomed melodrama—one star’s meteoric rise, the other’s wheezing descent—was a rare adult drama smash. I, like most others, submitted to Cooper’s hard charging vulnerability and gifted-and-talented-kid show-off technical proficiency. Then, during the beginning of the pandemic, I was fiending for a theater experience. A local chain would rent an entire theater to you for eighty-five dollars. I invited some friends and screened the unstreamable film The Rose (1979). Directed by the underrated Mark Rydell (On Golden Pond, The Fox) the film chronicles a Janis Joplin like rock star’s (played with visceral commitment by Bette Midler) last few wrecked days on a turbulent tour. There’s a fantastic, vibrant, swirling sequence in a burlesque drag bar that is so similar to the burlesque drag bar scene in A Star is Born I would take any bet that Cooper had seen and obsessively studied The Rose. But he never mentions in it in this preening New York Times profile/interview in which Cooper, with relentless determination, seeks to present himself as a sincere throwback to a highly romanticized vision of mid 20th century alpha modernism. It is as if he is dressed like James Dean mumbling about all the phonies not “getting it”. With this self-mythologizing there is no room for a relaxed admission that as a first-time director he of course studied films like The Rose, Cooper needs to commit to his sober, penitent emotional crusader for “Serious Popular Art”.

Another example with a different pose. Last year saw the release of Adam Curtis’ magnum opus Can’t Get You Out of My Head. Curtis has emerged as a shamanic interpreter for these beleaguered, psychotic times. His signature narrative refrain: “but then a strange thing happened…”is a sort of ruby slipper portal to a technicolor understanding of frenzied disparate events. Across six hours in Can’t Get You Out of My Head Curtis chronicles black radicals in England, Mao’s cunning mistress, a satiric novelist in soviet Ukraine and more, crafting a patchwork quilt of struggle and revolution and the strange ineffectiveness of it all, how difficult and elusive change really is. I was blown away by the sheer scope, the intellectual audacity of the project; and then our film club in San Antonio screened Chris Marker’s own magnum opus Grin Without A Cat (1977). Marker, perhaps the most interesting of all the French New-Wave is best known for his still photograph sci-fi stunner La Jetee (the inspiration for 12 Monkeys) and his ineffable travelogue Sans Soleil, but he made dozens of other films, mostly cinematic essays and documentaries. Grin Without A Cat is split into two parts: “Fragile Hands” and “Severed Hands”. The first part chronicles the revolutions of the late 60s, the global solidarity against the atrocity that was the US war in Vietnam, and the second part chronicles the letdown, revolutions’ discontents, how things seems to track back to another oppressive status quo like metal filings to a magnet. Much more rigorous than Curtis who can be described as shooting straight from the bong, Grin Without A Cat is an astonishing document, a hidden history of the 20th century and just as with Cooper and The Rose, its influence, from the slow motion scenes of Chinese ballroom dancing to its analysis of global events and de-emphasis of the US as the protagonist of history, on Can’t Get You Out of My Head is irrefutable. Just like Cooper, Curtis never admitted this in the many interviews and articles for its release. Instead, he presented himself as a kind of oracle, like Neo in The Matrix, he alone could see the code. To acknowledge those that came before him, the lineage, the concert he was involved in with past luminaries, would betray this.

In stark contrast to these thefts, which can really be designated as heists, is the work of Trenton Doyle Hancock, in particular his show at the Menil in 2019: Epidemic! Presents: Step and Screw! Doyle covers the walls with large, dazzling comic-strips depicting his alter ego Torpedoboy who is hounded by hooded Klan figures clearly, openly, unabashedly in reference to Philip Guston’s astonishing second act as a figurative painter of the belly of Hog America. Hancock is open about this reference because it is a part of who is: he is inspired and in dialogue with Guston the artist, and is forced to reckon with the hooded subjects, psychically, physically, politically, and otherwise as a black person in America. To obfuscate and conceal Guston’s presence would be akin to pretending one was a shipwreck survivor, afflicted by an oceanic amnesia. This image, a man (always a man) surviving the endless wave crash of living by the force of their own agency, desire, and taste is central to the concept of genius and its conniving Gemini twin, originality.

And that is self-evidently embarrassing. Like Johnny Depp’s jaw-dropping Sauvage cologne campaign for Christian Dior, there is a chortle in realizing that an artist is in fact serious in their pomposity. A friend who was on an art residency told me that one night at the group dinner, the lead singer from a once semi-popular college rock band smugly intoned “no one knows what we do.” Yes…we do. You artists take in the world around you and all the other art, materials, aesthetics, history, and circumstance and run it through the bootlegged DIY Rube Goldberg machine we would call an individual’s creativity. So why all this secrecy, as if one had a trust fund but didn’t want that getting out?

As with all these daydreams, I tend to begin and end with Tarkovsky, who said on the great French director Robert Bresson:

“For me Bresson stands as an ideal of simplicity. And from that point of view, I, just like everybody else who strives for simplicity and depth, can’t help but identify with what he has achieved in this field. But on the other hand, even if Bresson would never have existed, we would have eventually come across this notion of a lapidary style, simplicity and depth. And when people tell me during the shooting of my film that a certain scene is in a way reminiscent of Bresson–and this has happened–I will immediately change the approach to avoid any resemblance. If there’s such an influence, it doesn’t show on the surface of my work. This is an influence of a deeper nature. It’s a moral influence between artists, without which art cannot exist.”

This beautiful and elegant truth: that some artists attain this lapidary, platonic ideal that would have been emulated one way or another. There are many of these lapidary scions; Bresson was one, so was Tarkovsky, so was Alice Neel and Nina Simone; Paul Bowles and Werner Herzog; Howard Finster and Diamanda Galas and on and on. These are the saints and prophets of the only true religion, the thing we humans do better than any other animal, the impractical need to tell stories and make meaning. These saints and prophets are now more reachable than ever. We can talk to them anytime, why shroud it all in the secrecy of a confessional screen?

Playlist: Real World Records

Peter Gabriel founded the world music label Real World Records in 1989, building an affiliated studio near Bath, England, and hosting the WOMAD festival yearly. It is now a legacy I would argue equals if not exceeds his own solo musical output (and I am a big fan). Here are some of my favorite songs from the first 12 years of Real World releases.

Movie Recommendation

The Hot Spot

Dennis Hopper is mainly known for playing various twisted drop-outs and psychopaths and also being both of those things at different times in real life. But he was a profoundly gifted visual artist—both as a photographer and director—with a keen aesthetic that was both visceral and dreamy. It is a shame that one of his less interesting directorial efforts—Easy Rider—is his most famous work, but understandable given what a phenomenon it was. Easy Rider has a vital visual flair and an incandescent early performance by Jack Nicholson, but not much else. It feels awfully dated, even the musical choices kind of suck. Two Lane Blacktop is the far more beguiling and interesting counterculture road movie from that era.

However, after Rider Hopper would make a string of fascinating and occasionally stone brilliant films. His follow up, The Last Movie, more or less ended his career for a decade, but has aged wondrously, a third eye through the fourth wall meditation of art, reality, and performance that has more in common with the performance art of Bruce Conner than narrative film. Next comes his masterpiece, Out of the Blue, an urgent, exhilarating plunge into darkness set amidst the dewy canopy of late 70s punk scene Vancouver. One of the most disturbing movies I’ve ever seen, is also one of supreme wonder and beauty—with several sequences deeply deserving of the Tarkovsky “Poetic Cinema” gif. Colors, from 1988, was Hopper’s first hit since Easy Rider. An interesting, if retrograde, look at gang violence in Los Angeles (the Los Lobos credit song kicks ass though). With that juice, Hopper made The Hot Spot, an adaptation of the 1953 crime novel Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams, updated to modern times with modern luridness. The Hot Spot isn’t a great movie, but it’s a wildly entertaining one that is photographed better than most movies released currently. Don Johnson, who bafflingly had a somewhat disappointing career given that he is a hotter and edgier Kevin Costner, is great as a swinging dick drifter. Virginia Madsen is electric and hilarious as a bored housewife fatale working in a zone she would rarely return to. Also, the soundtrack by Jack Nitzsche features John Lee Hooker and Miles Davis. You can watch it for free on Tubi and Pluto.

Book Recommendation

Deadwood by Pete Dexter

Pete Dexter has had an illustrious literary career. Winning the National Book award for his piercingly unsentimental exploration of the twisted heart of racism in Paris Trout, writing several screenplays, and having several of his novel adapted into films. Deadwood from 1986 seems a bit forgotten which is unfortunate. Providing an inspiration to both the underrated 1995 Jeff Bridges film Wild Bill and the beloved cult show on HBO, Dexter’s novel is far stranger and more lyrical. His Black Hills of the 1870s filled with gunslingers and drunks and gold panners is as grisly as that on HBO, but suffused with a dreamy, interior quality as it shifts perspectives from various characters (Wild Bill, Calamity Jane, Charley Utter, etc.) achieving a transporting emotional resonance. It seems like this is what the wild west was like, even if it wasn’t. The point is he makes you believe. 

Wild Card: The Fragrance Game

It’s easy for social hangs to devolve into conversation where one person goes: “I went to (some reliable restaurant that’s been around for a while) and [whispering] it was kind of bad.” So, I try to regularly come up with silly parlor games to drop when things flag. To me, fragrance commercials are the pinnacle of the 30 second ad: they always have a compact, generally nonsensical story, a celebrity, and a funny ending where the celebrity breathily says the name of the fragrance. Think of Elizabeth Taylor’s classic White Diamonds, Johnny Depp’s astonishing Sauvage campaign, or the recent (tasteful, but still absurd) Burberry campaign “Hero” directed by Jonathan Glazer where Adam Driver races a horse and then swims with said horse while an FKA Twigs song plays. So, the fragrance game: you choose the scent of your fragrance, the name of the fragrance, the celebrities you want in the ad, and what happens in the ad. I’ll go first: My fragrance is called Ritual; it smells like Palo Santo, tobacco, and sage; in the ad Javier Bardem plays a sort of Carlos Castanada, Don Juan like shaman leading Viggo Mortensen through a mountainous jungle, they stop at a clearing as light filters through, Javier blows a tepi pipe in Vigo’s face, a panther—silvery in the moonlight—appears and pads into the velvety jungle. Bardem’s voice: “Ritual”.