Buñuel, Part 1

Besides Bakunin, the main person I had in mind when beginning this blog was master filmmaker Luis Buñuel. His autobiography, My Last Sigh, is one of the most enjoyable books associated with the art and practice of filmmaking that I know of, and probably one of my favorite books in general. It may seem difficult to imagine the director of Un Chien Andalou, The Exterminating Angel, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie having any sort of routine at all, but I have two points on that. Firstly, some times in his life he did, and some he didn't. Both aspects can be quite interesting and entertaining to read about. Secondly, there may be less of an actual separation between the director's films and the times in his life that appeared more ordinary and staid than first meets the eye... perhaps that's part of the reason the book is such a pleasure to revisit. 

There's so much on the topic at hand to be found in the book that I believe I'll cover it in a few parts. First, a bit of background on a pertinent subject, bars - "Today I'm as old as the century and rarely go out at all; but all alone, during the sacrosanct cocktail hour, in the small room where my bottles are kept, I still amuse myself by remembering the bars I've loved." - and a good excuse for me to share Buñuel's thoughts on that subject, especially as it relates to his conception of the café:

I can't count the number of delectable hours I've spent in bars, the perfect places for the meditation and contemplation indispensable to life[...T]he crucial point is that the café is synonymous with bustle, conversation, camaraderie, and women. The bar, on the other hand, is an exercise in solitude. Above all else, it must be quiet, dark, very comfortable – and, contrary to modern mores, no music of any kind, no matter how faint. In sum, there should be no more than a dozen tables, and a clientele that doesn't like to talk.

One of his favorites was the Paular Hotel,

in the northern part of the city, set in the courtyard of a magnificent Gothic monastery. The room is long and lined with tall granite columns; and except on weekends, when the place trembles with tourists and noisy children, it's usually half empty. I can sit there for hours, undisturbed, surrounded by Zurbarán reproductions, only half conscious of the shadow of a silent waiter floating by from time to time, ever respectful of my alcoholic reveries. I loved the Paular the way I love my closest friends.

Bunuel was able to do his work there on a regular basis:

At the end of a working day, my scriptwriter-collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière would leave me there to meditate. After forty-five minutes, I'd hear his punctual footsteps on the stone floor; he'd sit down opposite me at the table, which was the signal for me to tell him a story that I'd made up during my reverie. (I've always believed that the imagination is a spiritual quality that, like memory, can be trained and developed.) The story might have nothing to do with our scenario, or, then again, it might; t could be a farce or a melodrama, short or long, violent or sublime. The important thing was merely to tell it. 

Alone with Zurbarán, my favorite drink, and the granite columns cut from that marvelous Castilian stone, I'd let my mind wander, beyond time, open to the images that happened to appear. I might be thinking about something prosaic – family business, a new project – when all of a sudden a picture would snap into focus, characters emerge, speak, act out their passions. Sometimes, alone in my corner, I'd find myself laughing aloud. When I thought the scene might fit into our scenario, I'd backtrack and force myself to direct the aimless pictures, to organize them into a coherent sequence. 

And in another bar, we find a shining example of the routine/ritual in praxis:

I also remember a bar at the Plaza Hotel in New York, a busy meeting place which at the time was off limits to women. Any friend of mine passing through New York knew that if he wanted to find me, he had only to go to the Plaza bar at noon.

More to come from Jane and Luis....

 

The Spectrum

      - Go fish and hunt far and wide day by day, - farther and wider, - and rest thee by man brooks and hearth-sides without misgiving. Remember thy Creator in the days of thy youth. Rise free from care before the dawn, and seek adventures. Let the noon find thee by other lakes, and night overtake thee every where at home. There are no larger fields than these, no worthier games than may here be played. Grow wild according to thy nature, like these sedges and brakes, which will never become English hay. Let the thunder rumble; what if it threaten ruin to farmers' crops? that is not its errand to thee. Take shelter under the cloud, while they flee to carts and shed. Let not to get a living by thy trade, but thy sport. Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.

That was Thoreau's "Good Genius," as personified in Walden, an important experiment with a slightly more complicated relationship to the concept of routine than I'd like to delve into here. Rather, this time out, I'll merely be presenting various ideas that have arisen out of the technique of routine. With that in mind, take what you will from the above passage... as you can see, there's plenty to take.

From the transcendentalism of Thoreau, we'll move across the spectrum to the debauchery of Charles Bukowski, "laureate of American lowlife" (Time). Consider the following two passages from Factotum - his depiction vérité of the living nightmare of capitalist survival - as a one-two punch (and Buk did enjoy the fighting arts); while light on actual description of routine (essentially, candy bars and booze), they thoughtfully hammer down some of the main ideas of the Bukowski ouevre:

That was all a man needed: hope. It was lack of hope that discouraged a man. I remembered my New Orleans days, living on two five-cent candy bars a day for weeks at a time in order to have leisure to write. But starvation, unfortunately, didn't improve art. It only hindered it. A man's soul was rooted in his stomach. A man could write much better after eating a porterhouse steak and drinking a pint of whiskey than he could ever write after eating a nickel candy bar. The myth of the starving artist was a hoax.

While that selection nods to my last post (on Miller), the following serves as a reminder that a routine, like a temporary autonomous zone, need not last a duration of more than a few days.

When I got back to Los Angeles I found a cheap hotel just off Hoover Street and stayed in bed and drank. I drank for some time, three or four days. I couldn't get myself to read the want ads. The thought of sitting in front of a man behind a desk and telling him that I wanted a job, that I was qualified for a job, was too much for me. Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed.

Again, talk what ideas from these you will.

And finally, in the middle of the spectrum (or off it completely), we find outré filmmaker/artist/musician/transcendental meditator David Lynch. And here is perhaps one of the best examples of routine in the service of idea generation that I can imagine:

I like things to be orderly. For seven years I ate at Bob's Big Boy. I would go at 2:30, after the lunch rush. I ate a chocolate shake and four, five, six, seven cups of coffee--with lots of sugar. And there's lots of sugar in that chocolate shake. It's a thick shake. In a silver goblet. I would get a rush from all this sugar, and I would get so many ideas! I would write them on these napkins. It was like I had a desk with paper. All I had to do was remember to bring my pen, but a waitress would give me one if I remembered to return it at the end of my stay. I got a lot of ideas at Bob's.

Every day! For seven years!
 

Henry Miller

Last time I discussed some of my favorite theoreticians, and now I will get into one of my favorite novelists/"fiction" writers: Henry Miller. I put fiction in quotes because while books such as Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Black Spring, and The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus) come across as completely autobiographical, sources (including Miller himself) indicate that they are at least slightly fictionalized. In spite of that disclaimer, I'll treat them here - as I always have in taking inspiration from my go-to fornicator/philosopher/flâneur - as the real deal.

We'll start things off with a selection from probably his most famous (and possibly best) work, Tropic of Cancer. It describes his routine as a prototypal "starving artist," in the city perhaps most associated with that role: Paris. The first line, dealing with his Parisian rush hour whimsy, also harkens back to my last post, as a sort of precursor to the dérive: 
 

     Nothing better between five and seven than to be pushed around in that throng, to follow a leg or a beautiful bust, to move along with the tide and everything whirling in your brain. A weird sort of contentment in those days. No appointments, no invitations for dinner, no program, no dough. The golden period, when I had not a single friend. Each morning the dreary walk to the American Express, and each morning the inevitable answer from the clerk. Dashing here and there like a bedbug, gathering butts now and then, sometimes furtively, sometimes brazenly; sitting down on a bench and squeezing my guts to stop the gnawing, or walking through the Jardin des Tuileries and getting an erection looking at the dumb statues.

Later, in Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, Miller marvelously depicts the time period in which he wrote books like Tropic of Cancer, in the "merry, devil-may-care atmosphere" permeating Paris before World War II:

       

     Just to take a walk into the outskirts of Paris – Montrouge, Gentilly, Kremlin-Becetre, Ivry – was sufficient to unbalance me for the rest of the day. I enjoyed being unbalanced, derailed, disoriented early in the morning. (The walks I refer to were 'constitutionals,' taken before breakfast. My mind free and empty, I was making myself physically and spiritually prepared for long sieges at the machine.) Taking the rue de la Tombe-Issoire, I would head for the outer boulevards, then dive into the outskirts, letting my feet lead me where they would[...] If I was suffering from a hangover, as I frequently was, all these associations, deformations and interpenetrations became even more quixotically vivid and colorful. On such days it was nothing to receive in the first mail a second or third copy of the I Ching, an album of Scriabin, a slim volume concerning the life of James Ensor or a treatise on Pico della Mirandola. Beside my desk, as a reminder of recent festivities, the empty wine bottles were always neatly ranged[...] Breakfast, chez moi. Strong coffee with hot milk, two or three delicious warm croissants with sweet butter and a touch of jam. And with the breakfast a snatch of Segovia[...] Belching a little, picking my teeth, my fingers tingling, I take a quick look around (as if to see if everything's in order!), lock the door, and plunk myself in front of the machine. Set to go. My brain afire.

Finally, let me introduce a bit of antagonism to the ongoing discussion of routines... In Plexus (Book Two of The Rosy Crucifixion - I highly recommend all three books, although they add up to something like 1400 pages... so it's a bit of an endeavor; Plexus may be my favorite), Miller viciously attacks his conception of life in the suburbs, which, if nothing else, at least highlights his amorous characterizations of living in the city:

      

     As for the suburbs, so sinister and forlorn – everyone I knew who had gone to live in the suburbs had given up the ghost. The current of life never bathed these purlieus. There could be only one purpose in retiring to these living catacombs: to breed and wither away. If it were an act of renunciation it would be comprehensible, but it was never that. It was always an admission of defeat. Life became routine, the dullest sort of routine. A humdrum job, a family with a big bosom to slink into, the barnyard pets and their diseases, the slick magazines, the comic sheets, the farmers' almanac. Endless time in which to study oneself in the mirror. One after another, regular as the noonday sun, the brats fell out of the womb. The rent came due regularly, too, or the interest on the mortgage. How pleasant to watch the new sewer pipes being laid! How thrilling to see new streets opening up and finally covered with asphalt! Everything was new. New and shoddy. New and desolate. New and meaningless. With the new came added comforts. Everything was planned for the coming generation. One was mortgaged to the shining future. A trip to the city and one longed to be back in the neat little bungalow with the lawn mower and the washing machine. The city was disturbing, confusing, oppressive. One acquired a different rhythm living in the suburbs. What matter if one was not au courant? There were compensations – such as warm house slippers, the radio, the ironing board which sprang out of the wall. Even the plumbing was attractive.

 

Mension, Debord, & the young Lettrists

One of my main influences in the field of radical theory over the past eight years (and some of you who know me can perhaps attest to this, as I haven't held back from sharing) has been the situationists, chiefly embodied by Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, and their descendents. The Situationist International had its roots in the Letterist International, a group of young radicals formed in Paris in the early 1950s, of which Debord was a primary instigator. Jean-Michel Mension was another early member, shortly kicked out on the grounds of being "merely decorative" (Debord learned the practice of expulsion from the surrealists, and carried it on in earnest). In The Tribe, an excellent book-length interview with Mension, he recalls the days preceding the formation of the LI, including his time spent with Debord.

The first of these days was Mension's eighteenth birthday:
“My birthday party was on the sidewalk across the boulevard from the Mabillon. I rather think the metro station there was closed at the time. I was drinking – drinking vin ordinaire on the sidewalk with Debord. Other people came along; I was panhandling, and so were they. Not Debord – but then Debord had money; he got living expenses from his family, because officially he was a student. People with allowances – there were surprisingly many of them – made it possible for the rest of us who were flat broke to survive." And thus began the routine:

      That was the beginning of our friendship; we sealed it that day, so to speak. After that we went drinking together every day or almost every day for several months. We would go drinking, just the two of us, Guy with his bottle and I with mine. He was usually the one to pay; occasionally I had money, but as a rule he bought, then we would go to Cour de Rohan, a little courtyard off Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie, and settle down in the passageway – there are some steps there, and we would sit on the bottom step, holding forth. In other words, we would set the whole world to rights while polishing off a liter or perhaps two liters of wine[...] We pulled the world apart and put it back together again – and I imagine there was more of the former than of the latter. Still, it was fairly important work: they were real discussions. Guy, for his part, was highly cultivated, enormously well read.

Mension and Debord maintained different schedules, and would meet

     Late afternoon as a rule, because usually I got up late; he got up much earlier. He was living in a hotel in Rue Racine; I have no idea at all what he did in the mornings. He had a more or less regular life in terms of the hours he kept: he never went home really late. During the whole time I knew Guy, I used to get home in the morning five minutes after my mother left for work. He would call it a night fairly early, around midnight or one; he rarely closed Moineau's, and I suppose he must have been in the habit of leaving when he felt he'd reached his limit, had enough to drink. He was methodical that way. He must have drunk alone before I met him about six or so.

Let me also include (and conclude with) and mention Mension's remembrances of the origins of the dérive, one of the earliest and most noteworthy techniques developed for the field of psychogeography. As he recalls,

     The first true dérives were in no way distinct from what we did in the ordinary way. We went on walks from time to time. One among others that became traditional took us from the neighborhood to the Chinese section around Rue Chalon – behind the Gare de Lyon. We would eat over there, because it was not expensive, or occasionally we would stop on the way near Saint-Paul to buy salted anchovies, which made us desperately thirsty. Then we would make our way back as best we could. Some made it, some didn't, some collapsed en route. We also used to visit the Spanish neighborhood along the canal at Aubervilliers. We would go there either at the start or at the end of the night. There was chorizo, paella.... Old workers' bistros frequented in the main by guys who had arrived after the Spanish Civil War, Republicans. We were pretty well received, because we drank enormously.

 

"We went on like that until we were completely potted. Not all that poetic, really."
   

Intro + Bakunin

Routines for radicals. Sounds kind of contradictory, doesn't it?

I've long been fascinated by the daily routines, over a period of time - anytime from a week to a decade - of people I find interesting. At the same time, I've felt the increasing appeal of the more radical aspects of life - in politics, in art, in whatever (in order not to limit myself, I won't elaborate) - and the people that perpetuate them. People whose lives are generally anything but routine. The spontaneity and creativity of the radical seems at odds with any conception of a routine. 

But to reverse the perspective, consider this passage from Clausewitz's On War, referred to by Andy Merrifield in his book on Guy Debord (and also by me, here): 

The baron, if he saw himself pressed on all sides, took refuge in his castle to gain time and wait a more favorable moment; and towns sought by their walls to keep off the passing hurricane of war.

 Also, these:

Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head, don't sign up for the armies of anorexia or bulimia - act as if you were already free, calculate the odds, step out, remember the Code Duello - Smoke Pot/Eat Chicken/Drink Tea. (Hakim Bey, T.A.Z.)

It is no longer a matter of foretelling the collapse or depicting the possibilities of joy. Whether it comes sooner or later, the point is to prepare for it[...] What remains to be created, to be tended as one tends a fire, is a certain outlook, a certain tactical fever, which once it has emerged, even now, reveals itself as determinant – and a constant source of determination. (The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection)

It's never too early to learn and practice what less pacified, less predictable times might require of us. (Ditto)

In the context of these precepts, the radical's routine takes on a zen quality, a sort of active meditation. Imagine the life of a Debord before May '68, or a Bey after the World of Islam Festival, or even a Clausewitz between campaigns....

What follows, then, is a Jane's Fonda workout guide to prepare one for the insurrection, an ultimate book of recipes for the revolution of everyday life: each post I make will consist of a brief biographical sketch of a particular "radical," followed by one or several accounts of the routines he or she practiced, for whatever length of time that ended up being.

 

I'm gonna start off with Mikhail (Michael) Bakunin, the legendary Russian anarchist, because the routine described below was the one that finally inspired me to begin collecting these accounts in one place. And I'll skip the bio this time - because Bakunin is not an easily summarized individual, and I've already written so much of my own intro - except to say that his life could mostly be characterized by the extreme opposite of routine. That is, except for here, a selection of Mark Leier's Bakunin: The Creative Passion, referring to a letter written by Bakunin's wife Antonia:

     His ideas on religion now resolved, Bakunin moved with Antonia to Sorrento in May 1865 to meet up with his brother Paul and Paul's wife, Natalie, for a short time. The visit was cordial enough, but did nothing to bring Michael back into the family[...] Nonetheless, Antonia painted a pleasant picture of the time in Sorrento. 'Life here flows peacefully and regularly as before,' she wrote. 'We rise early, Michael bathes, then has coffee and grapes.... The entire morning Michael writes, while I read.' At three, he would put down his pen, she her book, to take a short nap followed by a swim. At six they would dine, then go for a leisurely walk, return for tea at nine before Michael would resume writing until one or two in the morning.

So there, that's a fine example of what I find quite intriguing in the grander context of a radical life. In the future, these posts will be longer on original accounts, shorter on my explanations. Feedback welcomed. That's all.