for 30 January 2001. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Tim Cavanaugh
Special Guest Editor

Terry Colon
Art Director

Heather Havrilesky
Senior Editor

Joey Anuff
Publisher

You were really on to something today. Harris' interest in Jack the Dripper is as a laconic, Sam Sheperdized western character, caught in a snotty east coast milieu. I loved the painting scenes, and I did feel that the movie communicated how hard it is to be a serious artist, in the scenes of Pollock heading off wordlessly into his studio in the snow. But I left the theater thinking that the movie was a lock without a key. The key is, I think, in the 900 page bio by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the source for Pollock. The book suggests (with a lot of convincing evidence) that the reason why Pollock took it out on himself with boozing and fighting was because of his bisexuality. Ed Harris, stern actor that he is, wasn't about to get into that matter. Also, it can be strongly argued that de Sade was much more than just a head case; and if you don't have the time or inclination for some of the arguments (especially Angela Carter's witty, pro-porn book The Sadean Woman), it should be noted that De Sade was actually very funny at times, just like his spiritual disciple William S. Burroughs. De Sade does repeat himself a lot — maybe he didn't use an eraser after all.... It's the way the writer's life is treated in the movies that really makes my blood boil, though. It was bad enough to go into Finding Forrester and discovering that it actually wasn't the new Mystery Science Theater 3000 movie. The writing scenes in Finding Forrester are action writing, and what good comes out of that? Did you ever get a sense of what it was that Connery's Forrester had written? (His famous novel was called "Avalon Landing", which ought to be subtitled "Estate Homes from $250,000"). Movie shorthand (vide Forrester and State and Main) has it that real writers use manual typewriters; the rest of us fakers have computers. And when was the last time you saw a writer in a movie reading a book? Rant, rave, snarl...

Richard von Busack
<regisgoat@earthlink.net>

RVB!

Are you related in anyway to the ECW former TV heavyweight wrestling champ Rob Van Dam, who goes by the moniker RVD?

Maybe movies about artists fascinate movie directors because, unlike Pollack or de Sade, the movie director is so dependent on everyone around him.

My main point about Pollack and the rest is context. Why was the work important at that time? A bunch of responses I've seen to "The Artless Bastards" assume it would take hours to explain and be painfully dull, but as Ken Burns' Jazz is showing, Wynton Marsalis can illustrate the difference between pre-Armstrong trumpet and post-Armstrong trumpet in about thirty seconds. My main complaint with these films isn't watching them dab paint, but simply, show me a little of the world before and after them. Why bore me with all the temper tantrums, booze, and violence if you can't give me one minute of enlightenment? They should have just called these movies "VH-1's Behind the Muse" and be done with it.

Bertram Blaht

While this gent's no Terry, the point illustrated in the attached is a good one.

If the movie misses the point of Pollack, you and the critics seemed to get it. I recall David Lee Roth kvetching about the critics and how they liked Elvis Costello better'n him, but Diamond Dave et al. sold more records than Elvis and Slim Whitman combined.

Sometimes the critics know best, other times it's the public. Is it ever Hollywood?

Hope all is well. Stay off the motorcycles -

Steve McNally
<steve@ultradigital.com>

Thanks, Steve.

That's probably my favorite Rockwell in the whole wide world. Pollack wasn't such a bad abstracter himself. I think the David Lee Roth line was something like "The reason most rock critics better than me is that most rock critics look like Elvis Costello," or something to that effect.

Bert

Dear BB:

Quills — At least in the original stage play, where I saw it — wasn't actually about the historical deSade at all. Rather, it was a wonderfully violent, intensely theatrical argument about the appropriate limitations society may put upon art and the artist. Very much Grand Guignol, it dramatized that which it argued. Unfortunately, film is a much more literal medium than is live theater (odd, that...you'd think having real people close enough to spit on you would make it the other way around, but it ain't), and something got lost in the movement to the screen, even though the playwright did the moving. Poetry, as they say, is that which is lost in translation.

But I really want to talk about Pollock. There was an enormous retrospective of his work a few years back at MOMA, and it provided an opportunity to see the work that led up to the drip paintings and the work that followed them. It was instructive. Up until the drip paintings, Pollock was a competent, smart, arrogant, derivative painter, doing skillful and attractive work that really was no better than a dozen others working at the same time. His work was getting steadily better and better, but you could still walk up to almost anything he worked on and say "nice, but Miro/Picasso/Matisse/Braque/ whoever did it better."

And then it changed. The drip paintings are so much better than what went before that if you couldn't see how the earlier work informed the later you would swear they were done by a different painter. While one can look at the work done just a few years before the drip paintings and see logical consistencies, you just can't imagine that the same guy could be good enough to create the beauty of those paintings.

Sure, one can argue that a new technique merged with a limited talent to create something totally new and wonderful. It's probably true. You still can't believe it. I don't think Pollock could either. I believe, without — to be sure — a shred of evidence, that Pollock was as amazed, stunned, and confused by what he had created as was anyone else.

It gets worse. Pollack — again, judging only by the artistic evidence — really didn't have much to say, and the drip technique wasn't (and isn't) all that flexible a tool anyway. In a very few years, he had exhausted it and stopped doing drip paintings. Go ahead and look at what he produced then...art every bit as competent and as boring as the stuff before the drip paintings.

The story of Pollock isn't that of a mad genius inscrutably creating great