Dee - Eddie Carmel Clung To Her Bones
Saturday, July 25, 2015
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| Photograph by Diane Arbus |
For quite a few years I have been delighted in mating my
images with excerpts from the novels of Nuwyorican writer extraordinaire Jerome
Charyn. Currently I am illustrating every one of the thirteen stories from his
Bitter Bronx – Thirteen Stories.
Charyn’s friend and companion Leonore Riegel tweeted me, “What
about the giant?”
She thinks that the story, Dee, about a female photographer
who is friends with a Jewish giant might stump me. She is almost right.
For starters Dee is a thinly disguised ( Deeyyan as Eddie Carmel, who did exist called Dee) Diane Arbus. The only photograph in
my files that could possibly illustrate Charyn’s story is my slide of wrestler
and actor Andre the Giant. I could certainly not get away with using any
photograph that I might have of a female photographer. The closest would be
Annie Leibovitz and she is not Arbus.
What has saved me and I hope this will please Riegel is
that the story is about one of Arbus’s few failures. The
story is of her inability to capture the essence of the big man who happens to
be her friend and who also can compose poetry on the spot only with Dee as his
inspiration.
Every photographer (and I am one) can blurt out his
failures. I have had many. Uppermost in my mind was my failure to break Candice Bergen’s tough, thick wall. And this one was almost a failure but became one of
my personal and major successes.
Perhaps only a photographer can understand what led
Charyn’s Dee to frustration in her inability to find an image in her camera or
one that she took with that other one (not a twin Mamiyaflex but one with her twin
and very green eyes.) On the other hand Charyn does a fine job in explaining it to my satisfaction.
Dee clicked. Eddie stood there in his wrinkled pants
while Mrs. Carmel was in a daze and Mr. Carmel struck his own pose, with a hand
in his pocket, distancing himself from all giants and his son…
One of the art directors she’d worked with had called her
a huntress and she probably was. She’d found what she wanted – it was as if the
image itself had pressed the shutter. Some of her compassion had fled after
that click. She wouldn’t photograph Eddie Carmel again, and now she was trying
to distance herself, the way Eddie’s dad had done. But she couldn’t. Eddie
Carmel clung to her bones.
The Polish Rider at the Frick
Friday, July 24, 2015
The Polish Rider is a seventeenth-century painting,
usually dated to the 1650s, of a young man traveling on horseback
through a murky landscape, now in The Frick Collection in New York. When the painting was sold by Zdzislaw Tarnowski to Henry Frick in 1910, there was consensus that the work was by the Dutch painter Rembrandt . This attribution has since been contested, though this remains a minority view.
Wikepedia
I'd lapsed into illiteracy after the High School of Music
and Art. I could spell, yes...and think a little. I hadn't forgotten
Modigliani. I'd pick up girls at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'd wander to
the Frick Collection, stand in front of Rembrandt's Polish Rider, wait for that
light, lovely sound of the Frick waterfall. I'd been a cartoonist once. I could
draw every hair on King Kong's head and paint his blue nostrils. But I wanted
to be Modigliani and elongate everything with hands, feet and faces were
stretched out like a choo-choo train. I was a counterfeiter. Modigliani manqué. –
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| Jerome Charyn - Photo by Bob Jewett |
I was fifteen when Rosenzweig discovered me at the Frick Collection. We were both standing
in front of Rembrandt’s Polish Rider,
and he came up to me like Count Dracula bathed in perfume and said, “Young man,
have you ever modeled before?”
Some
nabob with a boutonniere was always trying to flirt with me at the Frick. But
Rosenzweig was all business.
“I’m a
freshman at the High School of Music and Art,” I said.
He
handed me his card, said his chauffeur would pick me up after class.
Wolf Dogs in Central Park
Thursday, July 23, 2015
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| Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
Marla was caught in a maelstrom and a widening
mesh. She dreamt of wolf-dogs in Central Park. Winter came, and she would
wander about after every snowfall, sometimes in the midst of a storm. But she
didn’t neglect her court cases. She had a wolf’s silver eyes in court. Lawyers
were frightened to sue her firm. Marla would tear witnesses apart, Marla went
for the throat. But she couldn’t visit Little Sister again, wouldn’t make those
excursions across the Henry Hudson Bridge. The Bronx fell out of her dreams.
The Little Duchess
Wednesday, July 22, 2015
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| Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
The little duchess sat
on her aluminum throne at the dinner table, in the wondrous light of a candle.
She had aged, certainly, and could have been puffed with cortisone, but she had
on the same lipstick she wore at seven, the same red smear, when she was
Scarlett O’Hara on her elocution class. He offered her the white rose.
“Carleton, “she said,
never bothering to shake his hand, ”that’s rather daring of you.” Her voice had
the same old fiddler’s ring. That sound fired up his loins. He was her prisoner
after a single sentence.
The Electric Dark of the King Cole
Tuesday, July 21, 2015
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| Maxfield Parrish's King Cole at the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis |
“I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you spend the night
with me – that’s what I pay for my shoes.”
He tightened his tie around her windpipe, but even that
violence in his was gentle. Marla was lost. He whispered in her ear.
“If you mention money one more time, I will set you on
fire.”
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| Photograph - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward |
She started to cry, but it was the noiseless whimper of a
little girl. She could have phoned the nighttime nurse who looked after Lollie
and Mortimer, or even Twittered [Jerome Charyn’s conscious, on-purpose choice
of expression] her two girls. They could survive without mother, at least for
one night. She’d never bothered to bring pajamas to the St. Regis. Marla’s room
had the same glow as the King Cole Bar. She could see the outline of Raoul. His
eyes seemed to burn in the dark – she loved that dancing, electric dark of the
King Cole. She hummed to herself as Raoul wiped her tears with a finger that
had the miraculous touch of velvet fur. Lord, as Lollie would say, I have
myself a man. What did she care if Daddy’s detectives came for her tomorrow?
Daddy didn’t have detectives. He had to negotiate each step to the toilet.
Let him tumble. She wouldn’t run home to him. Marla was
spending the night with Raoul.
|
What has saved me and I hope this will please Riegel is
that the story is about one of Arbus’s few failures. The
story is of her inability to capture the essence of the big man who happens to
be her friend and who also can compose poetry on the spot only with Dee as his
inspiration.
