"The picture of a plastic box containing a joint is a nice bit of stoner fun, but it also evokes the glass-cube sculptures of Larry Bell, another of the artists whose work Hopper..."

"... and Hayward collected (and whom Hopper photographed). A neon Motel Alaska sign, with a glowing index finger illuminating a nocturnal streetscape, echoes a Duchampian credo that Hopper was fond of, that the artist of the future will 'point his finger at something and say it’s art.' Pointing fingers recur in the tender image of two hands—one an adult’s, one a toddler’s—hovering over a mud puddle, a moving study of Hayward and Marin."

From "Dennis Hopper's Quiet Vision of Nineteen-Sixties Hollywood" in The New Yorker.

"Hayward" is Brooke Hayward, Dennis Hopper's first wife. "Marin" is the daughter of Hayward and Hopper, and she is the "energetic steward of [Hopper's] photographic legacy." I'll say! Getting a New Yorker article with sentences like those quoted above is kickass stewardship.

I looked up Brooke Hayward in Wikipedia. Oddly (and speaking of photographs), the only photograph of her there includes Groucho Marx:



It's a really nice photograph of Groucho too. He and Hayward starred in "The Hold Out" on General Electric Theater (on TV in 1961). It was a serious dramatic role for Groucho, and the look on his face is not Groucho being Groucho (and thinking the serious thought, this is a seriously beautiful woman) but playing the part of a man who (according to the caption) "disapproves of his teenage daughter's (Hayward) marriage." She's quite beautiful, but nothing about her says "teenager." In fact, the actress was 24. Today, you could be 54 and look like that.

Speaking of artist-name-dropping sentences in The New Yorker and wives named Brooke, I was continuing to read "The Art of Dying/I always said that when my time came I’d want to go fast. But where’s the fun in that?" by Peter Schjeldahl, and I came across what I will declare the best really long sentence I have read in the 16-year history of writing this blog:

I went back to college in Minnesota for a year, dropped out for good, returned to the Jersey City job for three months, unwisely married, spent an impoverished and largely useless year in Paris, had a life-changing encounter with a painting by Piero della Francesca in Italy, another with works by Andy Warhol in Paris, returned to New York, freelanced, stumbled into the art world, got a divorce, which, while uncontested, entailed a solo trip to a dusty courthouse in Juárez, Mexico, past a kid saying, “Hey, hippie, wanna screw my sister?,” to receive a spectacular document with a gold seal and a red ribbon from a judge as rotund and taciturn as an Olmec idol.

The unwise marriage was not to the wife named Brooke. She arrived later. Like Hopper's Brooke, Schjeldahl's Brooke was an actress. We're told she quit acting after her best line in a movie was edited out, perhaps because Sean Connery thought it was stealing the scene from him. The line was about how nonsmokers were "in the hospital dying of nothing."

Isn't it interesting that the figure at the center of mass delusion is named Sandmann?

Wikipedia tells us:

The Sandman is a mythical character in Western and Northern European folklore who puts people to sleep and brings good dreams by sprinkling magical sand onto the eyes of people while they sleep at night, i.e. rheum....

Hans Christian Andersen's 1841 folk tale Ole Lukøje introduced the Sandman, named Ole Lukøje....

There is nobody in the world who knows so many stories as Ole-Luk-Oie, or who can relate them so nicely. In the evening, while the children are seated at the table or in their little chairs, he comes up the stairs very softly, for he walks in his socks, then he opens the doors without the slightest noise, and throws a small quantity of very fine dust in their eyes, just enough to prevent them from keeping them open, and so they do not see him. Then he creeps behind them, and blows softly upon their necks, till their heads begin to droop. But Ole-Luk-Oie does not wish to hurt them, for he is very fond of children, and only wants them to be quiet that he may relate to them pretty stories, and they never are quiet until they are in bed and asleep. As soon as they are asleep, Ole-Luk-Oie seats himself upon the bed. He is nicely dressed; his coat is made of silken fabric; it is impossible to say of what color, for it changes from green to red, and from red to blue as he turns from side to side. Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreams at all.

ADDED: Yes, yes, I know, and I knew when I wrote the post.... A hundred people are nudging me to include the candy-colored clown (which by the way sounds like another sobriquet for Trump):

"My dad wanted to name me Steak, the food, because he loves it so much. But my mom was never going to go for it."

Said Hopper Penn, the 22-year-old son of Sean Penn. I'm running across this today because I was looking for reviews of "American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House" and stumbled into the information that HBO is turning the book into a miniseries and the role of President Jackson is played by Sean Penn. It makes sense, no?

By the way, the story as told in "American Lion" seems to be 50% about whether this one lady (Margaret Eaton) was a slut.



Anyway, I can't find much info about the HBO series. Couldn't see who was playing Eaton or anybody else except Jackson. But I did run into that fascinating factoid about Sean Penn's son's name not being Steak but Hopper. Hopper was named after Dennis Hopper, the actor, not the painter Edward Hopper.

I did find the NYT review of the book "American Lion." I especially enjoyed this:

“American Lion” is enormously entertaining, especially in the deft descriptions of Jackson’s personality and domestic life in his White House. But [the author Jon] Meacham has missed an opportunity to reflect on the nature of American populism as personified by Jackson. What does it mean to have a president who believes that the people are a unified whole whose essence can be distilled into the pronouncements of one man? Populist resentment is to democracies as air is to fire. But republics may endure best when leaders remain uncertain — as several dozen did in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 — as to whether the people can be entirely trusted with their own government. 

That was published November 14, 2008, when we'd just elected Barack Obama.

"He's trying to be Dennis Hopper... and failing miserably."/"Or Sam Shepard. Especially the shot with the finger to his brow."

"Immediately I thought, 'Please Unicorn Jesus, don't let this man make a remake of Easy Rider.'"

That's set-of-comments #1 about the Rolling Stone pictures of Owen Wilson, featured at Tom & Lorenzo (who say: "Owen, Sue them. Sue them all. Make everyone who did this to you pay in blood, money and tears of regret").

Set-of-comments #2 is: "Yikes! It's like the photographer was doing everything he could in order for you to see David Spade's version of Owen's nose."/"There should be a censor bar across that thing."/"That's ALL I can see."

I do not need to Google what did David Spade say about Owen's nose to know what they are talking about. I Googled it anyway, and I see it's not something he said, it's a prosthesis he wore on his own nose. I also found this:



Hesitating before hitting "publish," I wonder if this post would fall within Lena Dunham's definition of the kind of threat that the corporate gatekeepers should filter out of the internet.

Photographs by/of Dennis Hopper.

Hopper took some cool photographs in the 1960s — cool not just because he had access to some of the celebrities of that era (Paul Newman, Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, Brian Jones, Tuesday Weld, Andy Warhol, etc.).

And Terry Richardson did a nice cigar-smoking sequence of Hopper.

Via Metafilter, which highlights the great photoblog Chasing Light.

The Rule of 3.

After Art Linkletter and Gary Coleman departed, the Rule of 3 demanded one more celebrity move on to the next world. And though he wasn't born to follow...



... Dennis Hopper followed.

Dennis Hopper has died.

Cancer. He was 74.

Talk about your favorite Dennis Hopper movies. "Easy Rider," "Blue Velvet," "Basquiat," "True Romance," "River's Edge," "Rumble Fish," "Apocalypse Now," "The Trip," "Head"... a huge list. And look at all the old TV shows he had parts in... "Surfside 6," "The Naked City," "The Millionaire," "Petticoat Junction," "Wagon Train," "Swiss Family Robinson"... on and on.

ADDED: This is "The Trip":



AND: Here he is talking about James Dean teaching him how to act:



Here's his screen test for Andy Warhol, from 1965:



AND: That great scene in "True Romance":



NOW: What kind of beer are you drinking?



AND: Don't wait for heaven, get out and fly, just glide there, through the clear air, making figure eights, through the pearly gates, where the soul and the universe meet....

The politics of the zombie.

Manohla Dargis writes about "Land of the Dead":

With each of Mr. Romero's zombie movies, the walking dead have grown progressively more human while the living have slowly lost touch with their humanity....

[T]he greatest shock here may be the transformation of a black zombie into a righteous revolutionary leader (I guess Che really does live, after all).

With "Revenge of the Sith" and "Batman Begins," "Land of the Dead" makes the third studio release of the summer season to present an allegory, either naked or not, of our contemporary political landscape. Whatever else you think about these films, whether you believe them to be sincere or cynical, authentic expressions of defiance or just empty posturing, it is rather remarkable that these so-called popcorn movies have gone where few American films outside the realm of documentary, including most so-called independents, dare to go. One of the enormous pleasures of genre filmmaking is watching great directors push against form and predictability, as Mr. Romero does brilliantly in "Land of the Dead." One thing is for sure: You won't go home hungry.

Hmmm.... should I bite? I'm interested in politics. And I like a brainy film.

UPDATE: I saw it! Very good! High quality photography. Exciting narrative. Great villain (a Donald Trump-ish Dennis Hopper). Nice band of good guys (always in danger of getting bitten and going over to the other side). Some sympathy for the zombies, who, despite their impairments, are trying to figure things out and act in their own interest.

I must say, though, that I was surprised they gave the Dennis Hopper character a distinctly Jewish name (Kaufman). At one point, someone declares "jihad" on him too. Kaufman was a very greedy rich man, very attached to his bags of money. It isn't hard to put together the case that there was some serious anti-Semitism here. I'm surprised the commercial backers of the film didn't nix the Jewish name. Wonder what was going on there.

(A little spoiler follows.)

The zombies in the beginning are controlled by fireworks, which dazzle them into a staring daze. When they get a little smarter, they overcome this tendency and become much more effective. So a political interpretation would be: staring at the fireworks equates to being blinded by appeals to patriotism. When the zombies/workers stop being dazzled by the show, they can overthrow the rich and powerful.