Two 1980s underground films; a new waterfront park; and ABC bows down to Trump; plus, let’s talk about Brooke Shields.
I’m All Lost In …
the three things I’m obsessing about THIS week
#62
1) Silence = Death and Positive by Rosa Von Praunheim
I went to Northwest Film Forum on Saturday night and watched a pair of long-lost, underground documentaries by German filmmaker Rosa Von Praunheim. They were companion pieces about the early years of the AIDS crisis. Embedded in New York City’s gay community in the late 1980s, Praunheim’s up-close films, Positive and Silence = Death (both 1990), chronicle, the the DIY artistic response to the tragic epidemic and the political evolution of the direct action gay rights group ACT UP (intellectual fount Larry Kramer is on camera and on point throughout).
Praunheim’s lively interviews, remixes of found news footage, stark set pieces, and concise voice-over script are shot in a grainy 1980s Berlin punk-art aesthetic that revives the lo-fi look of mid-60s avant-garde films (I’m thinking of Stan Brakhage), as both documentaries focus on anti-Reagan (and anti-NYC Mayor Koch) anger. Ultimately, these two films are time capsules of dissident 1980s eloquence more than perhaps the keen journalism they delivered at the time.
As for the artistic response to AIDS, Praunheim captures: first-wave slam poetry readings; earnest and dark theater pieces (the dark vein includes a graphic suicide monologue featuring a handgun and a butt hole); and the Satanic liturgies of punk opera diva Diamanda Galas.
Galas’ slithering sequences, sung in church chancels and in leather boots (over industrial beats), are, as they were in the late 1980s: Thoroughly stunning. Imagine Einstürzende Neubauten’s post-rock noise backing Maria Callas in drag.
Not Marilyn Manson. Praunheim films Diamanda Galas performing thundering pieces from her AIDS trilogy: The Divine Punishment (1986); Saint of the Pit (1986); and You Must Be Certain of the Devil (1988).
As for the political response, Praunheim zooms in on: DIY crisis hotlines (“If the phone rang, at least I knew someone was still alive”); Pride parades when the annual gay rights march was still incensed and came with a list of demands (“get vaccines into arms,” Kramer says); organizing bus loads to shut down international medical conferences; and notably (given today’s ham-fisted approach) graceful and judicious analogies to “the Holocaust.”
Bonus: Poet Allen Ginsburg, an elder gay statesman by then, is particularly compelling and well-spoken here. He likens the AIDS epidemic to the global environmental crisis that was (already) “a cancer” ravaging the planet.
2) Seattle’s Waterfront
Decades ago, when Erica and I were at the Stranger (me as news editor and ECB as star reporter), we editorialized in favor of civic activist Cary Moon’s compelling idea for the waterfront: Instead of accepting the state and city plan to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct with a new 4-lane highway tunnel, we should replace it with a pedestrian concourse and a human-scale boulevard (just one north-bound lane of traffic, one south-bound lane, and a center turn lane. Nothing more, but trees, parks, and food trucks.)
I’ll never forget convincing my editor Dan Savage and publisher Tim Keck to put this radical (“Nothing Goes Here”) option on the cover of the paper; other than election endorsement issues, we didn’t put politics on the cover. For months, both Dan and Tim, a bit oblivious to the news section’s regular reporting on the viaduct issue, had been fretting that we needed a new cause célèbre. (Our earlier hill-to-die on, turning the Seattle monorail into a citywide mass transit option, had finally flamed out.) So, I made the case that taking a stand against replacing the viaduct with yet another highway (albeit an underground highway), and supporting a pedestrian-centered promenade instead, could be the centerpiece of our fight for an eco-smart green metropolis.
They signed off on this new editorial campaign. But, as with our earlier monorail crusade, we would eventually lose this battle too.
Fast forward. In 2019, Seattle replaced the six-lane viaduct with a four-lane tunnel and a four-lane (and up to eight lanes at times) street-level arterial on Alaskan Way. Not only do we now have even more concrete for cars in total than we used to, but we squandered an opportunity to create a pedestrians ＞ cars waterfront mall.
With the Brutalist viaduct now long gone, the city did at least get creative around Pike Place Market. They seamlessly connected Seattle’s famous market bazaar to the waterfront at the doorstep of the aquarium and the nearby event-friendly, Pier 62. The “Overlook Walk,” as it’s called, opened two-and-a-half months ago in early October. I checked it out this weekend.
Instead of being forced to pad across the roaring street between the aquarium and the market, and scurrying underneath the groaning viaduct to access a steep set of dirty concrete stairs—or taking that infamous freight elevator, folks can now take the Overlook Walk. Just float from the sidewalk plaza in front of the aquarium onto a set of capacious steps that sweep up a casually tiered ascending pedestrian walkway from airy landing to airy landing. At the top, you come upon friendly plywood theater seating and an elevated park where you can gaze out at Elliott Bay and the Olympics before strolling on to Pike Place Market.
To be honest, I had my back to Elliott Bay during my visit to Overlook Walk this Sunday. I was too busy snapping pictures of the city.
12/15/24, “Overlook Walk,” Seattle waterfront
Book-ending this bit of reclaimed waterfront, there’s also a new hang out spot ten blocks south of Pike Place Market. Just west of Pioneer Square, between Pier 48 and Colman Dock, there’s the new Habitat Beach, an edible-friendly oasis of wild grass, pebbled sand banks, lanky driftwood, and Paleolithic seating where you can look at the bay.
You do have to push the “Wait! Wait! Wait!” pedestrian beg button and cross four lanes of traffic on your way over from Pioneer Square, though.
3) ABC TV Capitulates to Trump
Of all the foreboding recent news about Trump’s pending second term——robber baron Elon Musk’s ascension to Trump bro whisperer; anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist RFK, Jr. getting Trump’s nod to head DHHS (anti-polio vaccine, specifically); vindictive MAGA cultist Kash Patel getting tapped to head the FBI; and (is anyone surprised besides the anti-Kamala left?) a collection of Rapture evangelicals and West Bank annexation hawks coming on as Trump’s Middle East policy people——I think ABC’s decision to blink in the face of Trump’s weaksauce lawsuit is the most chilling development of all. (Trump sued ABC for defamation over their 100% accurate coverage of the E. Jean Carroll sexual abuse case.)
It isn’t so much Trump’s despotic impulse to go after the media that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand at attention—I got state media vibes from Trump all the way back in 2015 when he kicked Univison’s Jorges Ramos out of a campaing press conference. It’s more the Neville Chamberlain vibes I got from ABC this week.
Rather than total appeasement, ABC could have easily won this case by standing up to Trump’s bullying. After all, as they originally reported: Trump was, indeed, found guilty of rape and truth is a rock-solid defense against libel suits.
ABC’s acquiescence signals that the company—with its compromised corporate family tree—prefers (because of its compromised corporate family tree) to kowtow to Trump. This does not bode well for democracy.
***
This week’s Recommended Listening: Electronic music duo Frank & Tony’s 2024 LP, Ethos. Or more to the point: the moody and floating opening track, “Olympia” featuring vocals by Eliana Glass.
This week’s Recommended Viewing (and, I admit, also an obsession): Lana Wilson’s 2023 Brooke Shields documentary, Pretty Baby: Brooke Shields.
I ended up watching this because, as you may remember, I’m reading her ex-husband Andre Agassi’s autobiography. I’m not liking him much (he comes across as a superficial dullard). And the fact that he thinks she is superficial (he condescends to her throughout his book) made me think Shields was probably way over his dim-witted head and probably far more interesting than he is.
It turns out, yup, with a personal story that puts her at the center of queasy 1970’s Hollywood/teen super model sexploitation, a Reagan-era goody-goody rewrite, and a late 1990s Friends-era slapstick sitcom renaissance (after some dark nowhere years), she is, in fact, totally interesting. Thoughtful, and down-to-earth, Shields also had an alcoholic manager-mother, who is shown in Wilson’s film through contemporaneous TV interviews, calmly and philosophically unapologetic about Shields’ starring roles in soft-core Hollywood films and those infamous “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins” jeans ads.
1980
1978
Shields is just a year older than me, and I remember most of her story line clearly; the titillating tween movies Blue Lagoon (1980) and Endless Love (1981), and of course, the controversial 1980 Calvin Klein adverts. At the time, though—and I now understand that this is central to the feminist critique that child porn was being normalized—I thought Shields was too mainstream and Wonder Bread-pretty to seem risqué or transgressive. In fact, for me, her Reagan-era makeover into a virgin ended up defining Shields more than the gross late ‘70s Lolita voyeurism. In contrast, I readily understood that other (and similar) zeitgeist players such as Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver or Linda Blair in the Exorcist represented (and were forced into) messed up moments. In my mind, they, rather than Shields, highlighted the greasy-haired, creeper 1970s.
I will say that Shields’ disassociation, which she talks about in the documentary, comes through in the Calvin Klein ads in a way that (problematically so) de-sexualized them when I first saw the commercials as a young teen. There was a meta quality to the ads that seemed to say this isn’t happening, I’m acting. And despite the obvious sexual crime being committed in these commercials by director and photographer Richard Avedon, when I re-watched them this week, Shields’ Twister-mat flexibility was reminiscent of the physical comedy to come circa 1997 in her successful slapstick sitcom, Suddenly Susan.
The documentary also includes Shields, with tears in her eyes, telling the horrifying story of being raped after a phony casting call meeting when her star briefly faded in the early 1990s. But perhaps the most powerful moment in the doc comes at the end when Wilson’s unobtrusive camera settles in on Shields’ easy-going, current family. The scene captures Shields and her clearly still-smitten and loving second husband, and her two college-age daughters in a free flowing dinner conversation about Shields’ early career—particularly the problematic 1978 Louis Malle movie, Pretty Baby. This sexploitation film was made when Shields was just 11-years-old, and featured her in nude scenes and a kiss scene with then 28-year-old actor Keith Carradine.
During their family dinner discussion, Shields, seemingly unfazed by her past, plays the role of a contrarian yet inquisitive researcher (into her own history). Sounding uncomfortably like she’s parroting her own mother’s measured defense of the movie somewhere back on the Phil Donahue Show, she challenges her daughters to articulate exactly what’s so wrong with her 1978 kiddie porn debut. One of her daughters makes a clear-eyed point that seems like news to Shields: “You weren’t the only young female actor this was happening to during that time,” her daughter says.
Lastly, the Best Holiday Season Gift of the Week:
After Dad’s funeral in Gaithersburg, Maryland back in March, I took the Amtrak up to New York to decompress. During the trip. I did a load of laundry at my friend Dave & Jen’s apt, and I loved how floral and fresh my clothes came out smelling. They use Mrs. Meyers Clean Day detergent.
My bestie ECB, an expert gift-giver, apparently made a note of it and surprised me this week with an early Hanukah present.