I was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo

Settling with the Dust

Emerging from the confusion of traffic congestion and automobile exhaust, like life from the primordial soup, some of Jack’s (at first light, later much darker) Creatures, in what look like elaborate Mardi Gras costumes (all masked in feathers, wire and beads,) mill about the smoked filled kitchen section of his Greene Street loft, lounge on the sofa and eat peanut butter just like regular folk.
 

The contrast here is very low: the images seem conjured from the woodstove smoke itself, coaxed into being by the craftiest of destitute masters.

One dark clad figure with an open umbrella and equally dark, black painted or charred, six foot tree makes her difficult way in through the door from outside.

Various fans visit Jack’s version of the Dream Factory, while Jack lounges and plays with his right eyeball and lid.

Scattered about the studio are various stiff charred bodies that look like they may have been cast from the hollow forms they found beneath the surface of Pompeii.

A nurse helps keep the fans at bay with a whip until one of them pulls Jack’s favorite curved dagger from concealment in her black silk jacket, and he is forced to intercede, if only to adjust the trajectory of the blade.

The final images of the remains of a once fancy hotel or movie palace being pulverized into dust are particularly poignant, again presented in low contrast, the images themselves seeming to disintegrate while being watched.

As much of I was a Male Yvonne DeCarlo was once part of a much longer film called No President, it’s appropriate that they should be shown together. In some ways this almost serves as a (mock) documentary of the longer film’s making. No one was ever better at combining the mundane with the mysterious, or of revealing and exalting the mystery of the mundane.

Self Portraits and Related Photographs

 

Seven Self Portraits and Related Pictures
The first photograph is from 1964, one of those school portraits everyone has taken, this one being my first.  The second and third photos are from 1966, when the Coventry fire department burned down the old abandoned house behind ours (with the owner’s permission) for practice.  I always warn my students about composing photos like the one directly below with the figures dead center and great expanses of landscape behind; but it is such a good likeness of my father and me together that it transcends my older brother's limited skills as a photographer at the time.  There will be a few more photographs of my father here and for the very good reason that we looked very much alike, allowing for our age difference of course.  

 

 

Though Stephen Kaplin actually shot the next picture of me (standing over a powerful lamp pointed directly upward along the edge of the Kennedy Center in DC right after we performed there in the Eisenhower Theater in 1980,) the concept and set up of the composition was very much mine and I take full responsibility for its perceptive qualities, whether good or ill.  The baby with the artfully placed vase of flowers was my dad posing in front of what was then his Grandparent Wells' house in Chaffeeville, Mansfield Center, Connecticut in 1927.  It was my Grandmother Wittig's house when I was growing up, and then it was my parents' place.  The figure standing in the window, wearing my face (cast in latex) and the suit I purchased to wear for my older brother’s funeral, was a construction I quickly assembled to photograph for a beginner’s photography class I was taking at the time, in 1983. 

 

 

The autumn leaf man is an old family photo that belonged to my grandmother, which I date to my father’s childhood, sometime around 1934 or so; and I trust that he made the figure and took the photograph because I remember being told that he did.  He used a Kodak Brownie.  The following four portraits were shot in an automated photo booth in Dover, England, just before I jumped on the ferry that would take me to Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, in October 1984, and convey my relief at departing the UK before my four day visa expired.

 

 

The boy with the chicken is again my father as a child in Fairfield, or possibly visiting his grandparents in Mansfield.   The young man on stage next to the very beautiful Ecuadorean dancer, Talia Falconi (in male drag,) is me, playing the Beast in an adaptation of La Belle et la Bête by Charles Perrault.  The backdrops were my work as well.  It was shot in 1986 in Orleans, Vermont.  Next there's another picture of my dad that I swear shows him looking exactly as I did when I was the age he is there.  Finally there's a photograph that Michael Dennison took of me when Mike was taking a photography class during his senior year of High School, which he took here in San Francisco, back in 1991.  Not only did Michael shoot it but he developed and printed it as well.  The whole series he shot of me were pretty remarkable, but this is the only good print that I have from it.  I can only hope that he still has all the negatives.

 

 

 

No President

The Borrowed Tambourine

 I first heard of this film under the title I’ve given this short essay. When I asked the author of the book in which this reference appears what became of it, he informed me that it was only its working title. It came to be known as No President.

Over the course of its making and exhibiting the movie had other names as well, including The Kidnapping and Auctioning of Wendell Willkie by the Love Bandit. Irving Rosenthal plays the infant Wendell, stuffed in his cradle, unshaven, with his eyes darkly shadowed with glitter makeup. In his book, Sheeper, he refers to the character he plays in the film as Serafino Villanova .

 Actually this is the name Jack Smith gave to the character he asked Irving to play. I take it to be a reference to Gene Kelly’s character, Serafin, in Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate, which was one of Jack’s favorite films (at least, according to one list he left.)

The Pirate character in No President bears an uncanny resemblance to Irving, and at one point I believed that it was him behind this disguise, but I’ve read elsewhere that the role was played by Doris Desmond, who also plays the woman wearing the oversize gorilla pelt hood whose face is revealed from behind a skull mask. From what I understand, regardless of their costume changes each player is only intended to represent one character.

Perhaps, as in Minnelli’s movie, where Gene Kelly is the itinerant Player pretending to be the Pirate and Walter Slezak is the Pirate disguised as the banal, upstanding, Mayor, these characters are intended as doppelgangers. The Pirate who kidnaps the young Wendell and sells him on the auction block is the role the child himself wishes to enact.

The film itself had a troubled production history. Filming was suspended after Irving received a severe physical beating from Jack. There definitely were scenes that Jack had planned that were never shot. How the story might have developed further no longer matters.

As the film is now, in its forty five minute version, it consists of passages from a newsreel documenting the Republican National Convention that nominated Wendell Willkie to run against Roosevelt for the Presidency of the United States of America, juxtaposed with Jack’s original material, representing an elaborate fantasy of this same politician’s imaginary life.

The movie begins with an excerpt from another documentary, a travelogue, showing handsome young Sumatran fishermen going off to cast their nets. Besides their obvious function as masturbatory fantasy material (for the young Smith, as well as this fictional Wendell, trapped out in America’s heartland, one can imagine well enough what these muscular guys in their wet loincloths could represent,) the fishermen serve a metaphoric purpose, representing the artist and his comrades casting their nets for the political prey.

There follows scenes from the convention and a campaign stop by Willkie to a farm and some admiring farm boys. The scenes that Jack shot show the infant Wendell surrounded by high society dames in turn of the century drag and a sleepy nurse reading My Book House: Through Fairy Halls by Olive Beaupré Miller. One of the ladies shakes a very phallic looking rattle in baby Wendell’s face as naked servants shake their cocks in the background.

There is another scene that appears to refer to Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus where dead or sleeping servants wiggle their cocks as baby Wendell fondles ears of native corn. Another piece of found footage shows Dinah Shore and an unidentified male singing in front of a fake down-home country farm house. Tally Brown makes a forceful appearance, setting the scene as another reluctant slave put up for sale, and some large handsome slaves in the background display the strongest phalli so far seen.

Irving, as Willkie clutching his designer satchel with prominent travel stickers, is finally forced onto the auction block. The film ends with Wendell, sold, enveloped by smoke as he is dragged down by unseen creatures, to the sounds of the conventioneers cheering on their candidate. In terms of its social and art historical reference points, No President contains some of the densest images one is ever likely to see in a movie.