Los Angeles 10

    

 

One mandatory event was “The Clock,” a 24-hour film by British artist Christian Marclay that showed at LACMA.  The work depicts time in film in real time. Everything from a character looking at their watch or running past a giant clock in a train station to alarm clocks going off rapid fire on the hour, every morning hour...pieced together moments in which time is a visual element from movies—in foreign languages, from all the eras, video or film, grainy and silent, or crisp and today-Hollywood.

At 6:41 I walked in to find a spirited person I know watching and waiting at the back left. I stepped around her and sat down slumping low and after a moment turned to her and said, “I’m so happy.” 

It was raining that day. I wore my grandmother's favorite hat.

This cinema experience had crowd movement-- some people stayed for huge blocks or maybe all of it and others in for 30 minutes. The ushers had flashlights, which they pointed at the backs of people looking for seats while they stayed clumped up by the entrance. I’ve never seen that before.  The ushers also checked their own watches quite a bit—ignoring the theme of the film or just following a force of habit.

After a few hours of watching, the scene from Pulp Fiction where Christopher Walken gives the little kid the watch appeared on screen. The crowd was getting louder in general. There had been laughs before but when he said the first line from his monologue in his own but almost over the top sounding Walken delivery people reacted noticeably. Everything was just getting framed better, weirder, funnier, smarter, stranger and totally worth leaving the house to see.

But the best was the low-grade ahhh sound, a painful stab not pleasant, when a tight close up of Gena Rowlands appeared. It brought on a whole different subtext of time passing because her beauty was so shocking as a young woman. And it brought me back to living in Detroit and seeing a Cassavetes film on the big screen for the first time and the exact same noise happened. That face, her fiery eyes, truly extraordinary—real beauty which lasts, surely must have to do with intelligence behind the eyes, awareness. Or maybe it is just the luck of having the camera love that face.

The darkness built up to a drug like intensity as noon approached. It was happening, something was happening, and it couldn’t be stopped. As opposed to 6:41am when capacity was about 10% the place was now packed with people standing on the aisles. We cheered and clapped as the last few seconds ticked down and the red curtains came down.

 Afterward a homeless fellow breezed past with the large chunks of a pastel Easter cookie in his greying beard.

There was a man in the museum after that said, "I really don't have the time to start that project." 

A few months before I accidentally put someone's name in my phone as Time.
 

Driving home in the rain I thought about my dad leaving the theater after we had seen Star Wars as a family and his turning to say, “Man, that old Alex Guinness really got his clock cleaned.”  That is about movies not a stab at relating "The Clock" to something else. He said the occasional great thing, like that. He died twenty years ago. He loved movies but he probably would have thought “The Clock” was a bunch of bourgeois garbage. As a family we used to see films at a crumbling old Tucson-type place, maybe the best place, called The Temple of Music and Art that is long gone. We saw Gold Diggers of 1933 there when I was about ten. 


I can say for sure that sitting in the darkness and watching Ginger Rogers wearing an outfit of coins and singing "We're in the Money" in pig-latin changed my life.