heart in throat art watching/reading

Today I have engaged in my favorite way to approach art objects, or books, but it is the most personal intimate, way, and I can't do it this way when anyone else is around. That sometimes when I know I love something too much I cannot ingest all of it. I stop and start. I stop and start and walk around. And fidget. And sometimes can only do a little. Today it was that with Jelinek's Women as Lovers and Lust, and actually I've never finished Women as Lovers because of that feeling of fullness. Overwhelming fullness. I think medieval mystics like Marguerite of Porete described their experiences with spirits in such a way. That's how I began to write O Fallen Angel by the way, I read the first 10 pages of Jelinek's Women as Lovers and then wandered dazed over to my desk and began to write.

And now I am only 5 minutes into a 15 minute video that AD Jameson posted at Big Other, of Mike Douglas and Yoko Ono and John Lennon interviewing the actress/filmmaker Barbara Loden and he sent it to me a week ago because we have this shared obsession with the 1971 film Wanda, the film Barbara Loden wrote and starred in, that I write about at length in my manuscript Book of Mutter and also in this essay collection. I am more than obsessed with Barbara Loden - I love her in such a real and sometimes frightening way, a cinematic mother - and seeing her drift across stage the feathery long blonde hair I feel like I'm uncovering a home video of my mother, who is also dead. My mother and Barbara Loden who both died of cancer. Barbara Loden who was supposed to direct a film adaptation of The Awakening. In Book of Mutter I go on and on about Barbara Loden, and her famous husband the director Elia Kazan, who directed Barbara as the Marilyn Monroe character in Arthur Miller's play After the Fall and also had an affair with Marilyn, I link the two orphans, Barbara and Marilyn, and also write at length on Barbara as the rebel flapper in 1920s Kansas in Kazan's film Splendor in the Grass, and also the novel Kazan wrote about their marriage The Arrangement (I read Wanda, about a lost woman drifting across the depressed coal town of Scranton, PA, who gets involved in a robbery, the anti-glamor Bonnie & Clyde, as being about their marriage as well).

But this video. My god. The mannerisms of Wanda. And then her and Yoko. Both so "bashful." Two such famous wives. And they speak about having feeling for each other because of this. And red-faced jovial Mike Douglas having never seen Wanda, not knowing she stars in it, he only asks her about her famous husband, does he help her make movies? "He was the one who made me do it." she says. "It had never entered my mind. I had no ambition that way." I don't believe her. Just like my mother. Later she repeats. "He made me do it. He forced me." When the truth being he soon after divorced her for being too involved in her own career, he just wanted a wife, a housekeeper, a helpmate. And John Lennon finishing Yoko's sentences. It's so mesmerizing. I dont' know if I can watch more of it.


John Lennon - Yoko Ono - Barbara Loden
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