I saw Unzipped a couple of weeks ago and liked it a whole lot, so much so that I thought I might want to see it again. But I don't think I'll get the chance, since it looks like it will be gone from Honolulu by next weekend. I was going to write you about it then, but I decided that probably my reasons for liking it were so idiosyncratic that it wouldn't make any sense to recommend it.
The main reason I liked it so much was that it touched on my obsession with creativity, which is really much greater than even what I've told you before. It -- i.e. my desire to be involved in something creative -- seems to be something I'm thinking about almost all the time any more. So while watching this dress designer -- Isaac Mizrahi, is that his strange name? -- I kept thinking, "I'd really like to do that," and also, "I could do that." Although I don't suppose I'd be that much good at designing dresses specifically.
But I was also fascinated by watching the models at work, which reminded me of Petra. Having known Petra helped me understand these fashion models, although I only ever saw a tiny bit of Petra's work as a model. And conversely, seeing the fashion models in this film somehow helped me understand Petra even better.
In what the film shows of these models, there is first of all their almost childlike playfulness in dealing with Mizrahi and the photographers and the other people they work with. And then at the same time, in contrast, there's their aloofness, their stand-offishness, when on the show runway and when dealing with the public in general.
An interesting thing was that a few days after I saw Unzipped, I stepped into the elevator in the parking structure on campus, and I noticed that the woman who was already in the elevator had very long and very nice legs. I guess I must have been staring at the ground as usual, because for the first instance the legs were all I saw. But then I looked at the face, of course, and the face gave me back absolutely nothing. No hostility or annoyance, such as one often gets when staring at an attractive woman, but certainly no hint of friendliness either, nothing to suggest a ``Good morning,'' or ``Hi.'' No recognition at all, as if I were invisible. And it suddenly occurred to me, ``Aha! This woman is a model.'' Not necessarily a full-time model, but someone who does modeling from time to time. And as I looked at the way she was dressed, which was not super-glamorous but was just -- for want of a better word -- very careful, meticulous, and in particular as I watched the way she walked as she left the elevator, I was totally convinced that I was correct. Of course I had no way of verifying it -- I was certainly not about to ask her -- but I would have bet money on it.
All of which reminded me of Petra making her entrance at Tom's birthday party, striding in as Miss Glamourpuss. It was the first time that I could really see what this business of Petra being glamorous is about. The first time she ever really looked glamorous to me. But when I mentioned the incident to her later, she didn't know what I was talking about.
Anyway, I was reminded of this a couple of nights ago at Anna Bannana's. A couple of women came in wearing attention-getting low-cut dresses -- women probably in their early thirties -- and wound up sitting at the bar, which made it convenient for me to watch them since I was also sitting at the bar, around the corner from them. A few guys came by and exchanged a few comments, then a fairly attractive guy came over and was hitting on them for quite a while, and they were being very friendly in return: great big smiles. Then eventually he walked off and they started talking to each other again.
And as I noticed the way their whole personality changed, it suddenly occurred to me that men, for these women, were just exactly like students are for me. When men show up, these women have to put on their Attractive Female persona, and it's just exactly like when one of my students comes into my office and I have to put on my Professor Lady persona. And then the male, or the student, goes away and we can go back to being ourselves.
Anyway, going back to this idea of creativity: as I say, I think about it now all the time. PBS was showing their ten-part History of Rock and Roll here a week ago. I suppose you guys probably got it in San Francisco a year or two ago, since things don't get to Honolulu very quickly, even on public television. But I was thinking about the fact, as I watched it, that one only gets a few years of one's life to be creative. Because once one starts being successful at it, then the whole lifestyle that enables one to do that no longer exists, as one becomes almost totally absorbed in turning one's creativity into a business, marketing it, promoting it, and taking care of all the details of production. After that, one may keep on writing books, or making films, or turning out records, but one is no longer able to be creative in the same way one was to start with. And also, one becomes separated from the whole environment that one's creativity sprung from, as one starts living in an expensive house in an exclusive neighborhood and having as friends only other successful media people.
Maybe this is all a fairly trite observation. The brilliant writer being eaten alive by Hollywood, etc. I suppose it's a fairly foolish thing for me to worry about, since there is scant reason for me to fear becoming a successful creative entertainer in any case.
Anyway, there's one more thread to these ruminations. Tonight I went to hear a poetry reading by a guy named David Antin, from UC San Diego. (Well, one of the announcements said that it would be a poetry reading anyway. The other one I saw said it would be performance art. In any case, any signs of intellectual activity whatsoever on this campus are so unusual that I could scarcely pass the event up.)
This guy Antin has a BA in physics and then went on to get a PhD in linguistics, because he wanted to know about the subject, although he had no intention of becoming a linguist. And then somehow he wound up getting hired at UCSD in the Art Department as a critic or historian, something of the sort. And he's been there in the Art Dept for almost thirty years now, but mostly self-identifies as a poet.
He has a very strange conception of poetry. He comes into the auditorium and sits there on a table in front of us and talks about the plane trip coming to Hawaii, and his expectations of Hawaii and his impressions of actually being here, and talks quite a bit about the passenger sitting next to him on the flight over, and the glimpses he got of the book she was reading, and then somehow manages to segue to a couple of friends of his in San Diego who died two years ago, except he only heard about their death recently, despite the fact that they only lived a mile or so away from him. Etc. and etc., for about forty-five minutes, all the threads eventually semi-coming together and a couple of general themes emerging. And then he turned off the little tape recorder he'd been recording all this into. The End.
He gives this sort of talk, he said, a little more than a dozen times a year. That's his poetry. If one of his talks turns out especially good, he may write it up and work it over a little and publish it.
Afterwards, people asked him a few questions about how he goes about putting his talks together, how much is planned and how much is spontaneous. Then after a short while, people started leaving. I guess they'd had about as much of him as they cared for, but I would have liked to have stayed longer and listened to him answering more questions, although I didn't have any questions of my own. His creative process didn't seem like much of a mystery to me, though. It sounded pretty much exactly like the way I write a number of my articles on usenet, and for that matter this letter to you, and for that matter, it's not all that much different from the way I teach my classes a lot of the time.
So I guess basically what I was thinking as I sat there in the auditorium after his talk, until I finally got up and left after almost everybody else did, since I didn't want to be totally conspicuous, and I certainly didn't want to get involved in the dinner party being formed between him and a bunch of people from the English Department.... What I was thinking was that I am capable of doing what he does, and I could probably do it even better. So how is it that this guy manages to travel around the country doing this, and calling it poetry, and all I do is write weird letters to friends who begin to have doubts about my sanity?
Love and roses,
October 18, 1995
Addendum, Fall, 1996: Last summer I took a DHE (Design Human Engineering) Workshop with Rex Sikes. A significant part of the workshop was about developing personal charisma, and as a part of that he had each of us (we were a dozen males, as it turned out) walk up and down a catwalk (or a space we could imagine was one, at least) to appropriate music while the rest of the group stood on the sides and watched.
In light of the comments above, this was a very interesting experience for me. It had never occurred to me that if I am fascinated by a particular kind of person (runway models in this case), then I can simply try ``stepping into'' a person like that -- actually being that person.
