Mark Bradford at the Hammer

Mark Bradford's lecture at the Hammer Museum was fantastic! I didn't really know that much about his work (other than seeing it in photographs and brochures), but after Linda enlightened me, I started getting excited about some of the ideas he was working with -- Los Angeles, city maps, rough cartography -- and, of course, the fact that he used to be a hairdresser. So, last night I got to see a little more of his work (although not in person), which was nice, and I discovered that he certainly doesn't disappoint as a lecturer. He looms over the microphone at 6'8" with his slender limbs and velvety voice, talking about abstraction, urbanism, local communities, and the concept of borders with evident passion. And it's so infectious that you see where he's coming from; you hunger for more.

The initial wonderfulness -- even before he even started talking -- was the aesthetic pleasure of seeing this man talk about art to a ton of art-folks and art students (something that I hadn't done in so long!). But it was the broad scope of his talk that captivated me--and the fact that he really knows his art history. He understands not only his place within the confines of 'art history' as such, Bradford zeroes in on the issues with which he's grappling, both historical and contemporary. Here are just some of the words and phrases he turned, and some of the stuff he's been thinking about: palimpsests; the psycho-geographical; "no dependable subject to trace"; interruptions of the grid; barricades as parisitic; the inherent desire to map one's self in a space and to figure out where you fit in when looking at a map; and himself as a post-modern flaneur. And while all these sound like catchphrases and Bradford just spewing theoretical speech -- especially now that I've compacted it into a semi-colon-separated sentence! -- it's just Bradford talking about his work in abstract terms. The work itself is so tactile and hand-made, but there are elements of the work that Bradford acknowledges need to be addressed -- like the fact that he strips barricades of their posters, or the fact that he's mapping Baldwin Hills.

My favorite part of the lecture was when he was describing his collage/painting of the Jungle -- the low income housing-heavy community right at the bottom of Baldwin Hills. With some of his maps of houses, he will sometimes insert little narratives, simply indicated by the word "Haters." He described this impulse to give the community a completely fantastical narrative as born of the same impulse that one has when you see a person across the street and say, "I know what he's doing." And those kinds of imagined narratives -- those miniature short stories -- are what made me instantly fall in love with Bradford's work and his explanation about it.

There was also an interesting undercurrent to Bradford's lecture about the political and racial not necessarily being one in the same; obviously not being mutually exclusive, but not necessarily always falling into the same camp, one leading to the other. I was very interested in "Maleteros" for inSite_05. An artistic intervention into a under-the-radar community, Bradford set up towers at which Maleteros could access brightly colored shopping carts between and across the Mexican-American border near Tijuana. The question, of course, was what this does for that community of people. It certainly acknowledges them, but it becomes a program that dissolves a bit, or one that Bradford can't patrol all the time. So what happens to it? Where does it go? Has the art effected change?

There was a point during the Q&A session when he specifically stated that there should be a move away from simple political correctness, that it seemed like a tepid critique. And I definitely agree with Bradford. The thought of tiptoe-ing through difficult issues -- especially those regarding race -- because it's uncouth to talk about them feels like a quiet blow to discussions where race and the possibly political (or possibly not) implications of race occur. The question is how we can move the conversation forward after being confrontational, and how we can identify solutions to acknowledge that stereotypes come from patterning, but that not necessarily all things revert to type or fall into place into a pattern. Indeed, as Bradford shows, not everything can sit easily on the grid.

Needless to say, I can't wait to see more of Mark Bradford's work. I'm so glad that he spoke, so glad that he commented on "not worrying about shows" to the UCLA MFA grad students (just like Chuck Close!), so tickled that he showed an amazing video of his playing basketball in a makeshift hoopskirt fabricated with Lakers colors, and so pleased to hear this intelligent person with a desire to grapple with difficult, everpresent 'conversations' and observe them with such creative verve, such delight, and so much grace.

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Also see: New York Magazine's "Ready to Watch" profile of Bradford; Bradford's profile on the InSite_05 website; and an interview with Eugenie Joo.

Last night, I watched "In the Mood for Love," which I've been meaning to see for sometime. After bawling my eyes out at the end, I Wikipedia'd the film, only to find out that Wong Kar-Wai had meant for the English version to be called "Secrets." Thank goodness they'd convinced Wong otherwise because the film is so gorgeous and so elegant that such a paltry title -- edging on the side of nauseating horror flick -- would have done this magnificent film wrong.

"In the Mood for Love" is lush. It is so rich in its reds, and so accurate and so subtle in its portrayal of the evolution and heartache of forbidden relationships that watching it is absolutely delicious. Set in the `60s, the main thrust of the story is about a man rents a room in one apartment, and a woman who rents a room in the apartment next door. Their spouses have late shifts that leave the two lonely, but serendipitously running into each other in the hallways of their apartment building and noodle shops. They soon discover that their spouses are, in fact, cheating on them. In further fact, the cheating spouses are cheating with each other. And so, the abandoned spouses strike up a friendship, slowly and then longingly.

What makes the film zip during the first half is its humor. The laughs track a nice gradient: the slight humor of accident when Chow's (Tony Leung's character) furniture keeps getting mixed up with Su's (that's Maggie Cheung); the slightly more obvious humor of boisterous families obsessed with mahjong and cooking; and the overt humor of a bald, horny man trying to get into Su's pants. And who wouldn't want to get into Su's pants? Or, rather, who wouldn't want to slip off one of her elegant -- and eclectic -- cheongsams. It has been argued that they are supposed to mark different points in time, but they are also just beautiful dresses, strange for their stiffness, and, not surprisingly, unbelievably sexy. They reveal the exquisiteness of Su's character; her put-togetherness. And they leave the rest of the work -- the bottled emotion and the desperate loving -- to Cheung. And she pulls both off beautifully.

Su is equal parts feminine for Tony Leung's austere, belabored Chow. Leung (called "Short Tony" in the East) is enigmatic, calm, restrained. His composure and tightness hold the film together; and when something so small as a hair goes astray, one wonders what has happened to Chow and, simultaneously, why one is so enchanted and drawn to Leung. While, as a result of Leung's superb acting (and Wong's romantic sensibility), there is plenty of lingering over each scene, each cigarette smoked, each fraught gesture, there is a sense that the film itself moves at an unstrained, rather quick pace. Though the characters themselves ache, the cuts and fades-to-black are simple and easy. They keep going even if the characters aren't ready.

And it is this unreadiness that makes "In the Mood for Love" so poetic. When I watched "2046" (my first Wong Kar-Wai experience), I felt defeated and robbed by the tight spaces, and the tightness of Wong's camera shots. I thought it was born of interest for the sake of "interesting"; but, of course, that assumption was too easy. But while watching "In the Mood," I began to understand the strained quality of Wong's filmmaking. I realized that the tight spaces are devices committed to the characters; these awkward physical situations, and our peering into them, telegraph the characters' strained states. And they simply left me wanting more; not only just to see more, but to know these stories intimately, to know them well. I scoured my memory for pointers from "2046," but couldn't dig up anything of use. Some things are not meant fold up neatly and others, I suppose, are meant to be kept secret.

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Also see reviews by Stephen Teo (who points to Su's cheongsams as indications of the passage of time), Stephanie Zacharek (for Salon), Elvis Mitchell (for the NYTimes), Peter Rainer (for New York), David Walsh (writing vociferously for the World Socialist Website), Michael Thomson (of the BBC), and a refresher on the critically acclaimed (and bemoaned) movies of 2001 (from the Village Voice).

About the Oscars: Kenneth Turan got it right.

John Helmer is even better than their advertised $10 European berets.

A testimonial:

<>"Please take me off your mailing list. I now live with a handsome, wonderful "gent", who is now also on your mailing list. Was it divine providence or the gift of your Argyle socks that brought me such good fortune?" Giovanna K. Friday Harbor, WA