Just Kids

If you grew up or had your young adulthood in NYC in the late 60's, 70' or 80's, Patti Smith's memoir/love letter to Robert Mapplethorpe will trigger your nostalgia for a city you once knew well.  It has inspired me to write a few passages recounting those days for myself, but I will spare you the tawdry details.

I am struck, by how, in youth, it is almost impossible to do anything other than just be.  There is not a large enough frame of reference to really conduct the obsessive meta-analysis of later life.

            Your whole life is ahead of you.
             You don't know how good you have it.
               You don't know how bad you have it.

You endure unimaginable loss; it goes underground, or it kills you.

So much in Patti Smith's story of love and loss goes unsaid.  The circumstances are intense and so are the emotions, but they are softened by the lyrical prose and the feeling of inevitability and possibility contained in youth.

It's Hammertime!

Hammer! Making movies out of sex and life

by Barbara Hammer

Hammer is a book that found me.  It was chosen with great intention, not by me, but my gifted healer Shane Hoffman, when he heard I was planning to read about women’s lives this year.  It arrived in the mail from a used book shop via Amazon, and I thought, “I didn’t order this.”  Then I began to look through the book and found it to be too staggering a coincidence that this book would have fallen into my hands at this moment.  To who else would the topics of lesbianism, feminism, art, liberation, and aging have been so important?

Hammer begins her autobiography with a quote from Doris Lessing, “Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life.  Now I think, “that is what they thought at that time.” An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.”  This is an especially apt quote for a document made up of writings from throughout the author’s life. I ultimately got a lot out of seeing someone’s writing from many decades of their life.    When I started the book I thought, “this is naive, this is not very well-written,” and I laughed about my constant fear that my writing will be naive or badly written.  Not that I am naive, but that my writing would fail to express insights that I have or am capable of having.  This book kind of did away with that bullshit for me, because here is the thing, even in the early pieces, there is tremendous value for the reader.  The later pieces have more maturity in writing and thinking, but miss the passion of the younger work.  It all has it’s place.

This book is intensely and provocatively sexual, especially in its early pages, when Barbara is young and middle aged.  Her descriptions of masturbation are vivid enough to revive anyone’s auto-erotic life.

I wonder about the privilege of intimacy that Barbara Hammer had when she was first creating films in the 70’s and 80’s.  She was able to really cultivate her audience, showing her films at women only venues at first.  For sure, she was making herself incredibly vulnerable with her sexuality on film, but not in the way that one would today, when privacy is all but gone and intimacy with an audience, I think, difficult to achieve.  It makes me wonder how can I make spaces for myself to take risks with art and politics in this internet era.

In the last few years I have been going to more live theater and burlesque performances, I think because I like the intimacy and the fleeting relationship that is created in those spaces.  It is a respite from the on demand digital interaction, where everything is edited if not perfected.

I think about the choices that Hammer has made throughout her life, choosing art and relationship over money, choosing the role of lover and companion, choosing not to have children (although she never directly addresses whether or not this was a conscious choice).  I was talking about Hammer to a friend and he was wondering how she makes ends meet.  I imagine a rent stabilized apartment comes into it, but I don’t know.  She has traveled extensively, and the book does talk about a period when she was without housing, that lasted several years, when she stayed with different friends.  Could I make those kinds of choices with kids and a husband in tow?  I mean I could, it has been done, but would I?  Who and what would choices like that serve?

Some of the essays in this book seem essential for filmmakers and art makers everywhere, especially those who also teach.  I am not a filmmaker or art maker, but even so recognized the wisdom in many of these passages:

“An active audience engaged in ‘reading the text’ will also be active in making their own decisions about campaigns, elections, issues and demonstrations.”

“To me imagination is what is spiritual, what is renewing.  The creative process is a spiritual process.”

“To me it keeps me humble to realize that much of who I am is shaped by my mother, the high school I went to, and the lesbian culture I came out in.”

In a short essay on Censorship, Hammer described being threatened with the confiscation of a print of her film, and, because she could not afford to replace the print, she instead stood in front of the audience and told the erotic stories that she had been told while masturbating in the movie.  I love this scene.

“Women must write women.  Women must film women.”

“I experience shutting off to motion naturally and willingly, seeing fewer people, going out less, in order to have the stillness my work requires.  I appreciate and love these quiet, centered times when the world of newspapers, daily events, friends, and lovers spin around me in their ongoing cycles, yet I remain still and quiet.  In fact, I shut off the swirl like turning off a faucet, that my inner images might flow.  There is no way I can concentrate on a film, or writing, or a performance when I am moving from one date to the next so the week appears a veritable long weekend in my datebook.  I need this time - and the cycles move me here without my willing it - a long date with myself.

This plateau of stillness where I exist alone gives me the opportunity to concentrate on Self and the images that appear like rocks and craters on the moon. I have filled my time with motion to avoid the stillness for fear that there will be nothing there, but because I have built my identity, a self-construct, on being an artist, I am fed and nourished by whatever - even nothing, should I find that - is in my stillness.  This is the stuff from which art is made; and if I don’t go here, then I have nothing to make.  The social butterfly flapping her wings living years in a day with fluttery, hopping motions is at the opposite side from the still cocoon where the meditation harbors, the images form and grow. In stillness alone I find the motion for the moving images in film.”

For me, especially at this time of life, when waves of hormones wash over me like tides during a super moon, I am resistant to being alone, to being quiet, and, ultimately, resistant to working.  Because while I am not and artist and generally more of a critic than a creator, the space that Hammer describes is the space I need to simply THINK.  And once I am able to engage in thinking deeply about something, the process invigorates and nourishes me (though if I go too far in it can also exhaust and deplete me.)

At certain phases during my motherhood, my creative drive has been so intense, that I have ben able to create that “room” in a crowded subway car.  But never can I enter that “room of my own” in the presence of my children, even they are otherwise occupied.  I find myself on-call and vaguely on edge neither engaged with them, relaxed, or able to fully engage in another activity.

But beyond motherhood,  I think I have always struggled with the process of opening to work, beginning work, working, and completing work.  Hammer! is very instructive for me about this cycle of production.

OK, time to address the elephant in the story as it relates to my life.  While Barbara Hammer and I share a political sensibility, her life is dramatically different from mine because she has no children and lives life as a lesbian.  I have children and am in a monogamous, life-long, heterosexual relationship.  In some ways Barbara’s life reminds me of the road not taken.  In the early 90’s I attended Lesbian Avengers meetings, went to the first Dyke March (and the second and the third), danced at the Clit Club, and was really embedded in the lesbian renaissance happening in NYC.  Then, as now, I rarely mention that I am bisexual.

Nobody wants to know about bisexual men and women (except maybe porn producers).  Maybe things are different now, but when I was involved in LGBT politics, the B and T were recent additions.  And while bisexuals were tolerated in the political movement, I didn’t feel that identity was socially acceptable to most women who identified as lesbians.  Of course this was also during earlier days of the AIDS epidemic, and I think bisexuals may have been perceived as disease vectors.

But now that we are living in such an extremely gendered era, maybe it is even more politically important to be out as bisexual.  It feels awkward, I am married to a man and have kids.  But maybe it is just another political moment, like when gay men and lesbian women were told by some, “It’s fine what you do in the bedroom, just don’t flaunt it in public.”  As though identity is based only on activities.  You can be celibate and be a politically active lesbian.  I have known a few.  Still, It seems hard to talk about being bisexual without it seeming like you are talking about sex or you were a LUG (lesbian until graduation), or a lesbian in denial.  I think we need some name for the identity that doesn’t include the word sex - biSEXual.  I have always thought that.  Then, just the other day Oregon got a bisexual governor (who is also married to a man), so change often comes when you least expect it.