The Lee Bonctreau retrospectve is at MOMA Queens, apparently to be the last exhibit before the museum scoots back to Manhattan, is really something to upset your sense of depth perception- her sculptures are full of what look from a distance like tricks of light and shading until you move closer and realize that the canvas really is jutting towards you. as the pamphlet says "the viewer's perceptual orientation goes back and forth between the 'image' and the concreteness imposed by the materiality of the sculpture." Neither of one of our descriptions really capture the work- so if you're in the city, try and bring yourself to her work. And the odd combination of found objects(zippers, soot, canvas bags) into quasi organic and natural objects have a tight, menacing quality- they seem similar to images of monster lairs from various cheapie horror films, and they keep pulling you back, trying to make sense of them.

Am reading Francis Davis's Afterglow right now- which is mostly one long last interview with Pauline Kael. In a way, it's odd that it took me this long to buy the book- Kael is the probably the first major outside influence on my thinking and development. I discovered her stuff on my father's bookshelf when I was twelve and looking for books with sex scenes in them, and naturally titles like "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang" and "I Lost it at the Movies" appealed to me. I don't know what kept me reading-I doubt I understood a third of what she was saying, but it was her style-personal, chatty, and devoted to evoking the feelings of a movie rather than the more protean elements of plot or dialogue. She hated or didn't review most of what I was into at the time- I remember feeling horrified and liberated at once to hear her call Star Wars a lousy film when it was still a near sacred object among my age group. And I sought out the films she reccomended and tried to watch them and drag my family around them- and at that time in the late 80's things like Altman or Demme's work were almost unavailable for rental, so I had to picture them in my mind- and I'd try and squint at and make myself like Nashville or The Rules of the Games. But she seemed to have invented a new way to react to and write about film- a way of turning your own personalized reactions to a work into an imperial decree that I tried most to imitate- she made it seemed so easy. And so far away from the five paragraph essay structure I was having drilled into my head. I have somewhere on my computer some film reviews I wrote for the junior high school paper attempting to imitate her style- I'm afraid to look for them now. And I went around evangelizing her opinions, even about films that I hadn't seen, proclaiming to my social studies teacher that Steel Magnolias was "Chalk scratching against a blackboard for two hours,"(this is, roughly, Kael's complete review of the film) after she praised it- even though I hadn't seen it myself. I must have been insufferable to be around, and I can only conclude pity is the only thing that kept me from getting the snot beaten out of me on a regular basis.

Returning from the autobiographical recollections- Afterglow follows the form of the other post retirement Kael interviews- a smattering of personal anecodates, a few responses to her literary foes, recounting of her writing process and her battles with the New Yorker editors, some sketches of reviews of contemporary movies just enough to infuriate you that there's not more, and the repetition that no, she never watched any movie more than once. It's distressing to read her casually dismiss everything after the first season of the Sopranos, or that she speaks so highly of the West Wing (she does nail the show's saving grace- the cast), and it's encouraging to feel her respond to the sweetness of Galaxy Quest the way you did. (I just realized that my use of the imperial "you" in that sentence is one of my Kaelisms.) I got about 30 pages left to go and mainly I feel I never met her- I was at boarding school in the early 90's at what I didn't know at the time was her hometown of Great Barrington. There's a good possibility that I shushed her at the movie theater (I hate people who talk during movies, and to discover that she gossiped, snorted derisively, and laughed at the wrong moments during everything she saw was to me a bit like a devout Christian learning that Jesus picked his nose during the Sermon on the Mount.) I discovered that she lived close by in the publication of an anthology of her work in late 94, and while carrying it around in early 95, discovered that my much hated French teacher was a friend of Kael's, or at least claimed to be. She claimed a lot of things that were demonstratably false, not the least of which was a proficiency for teaching foreign languages. My teacher said she could set up a meeting between me and Kael, but I never pursued it too strongly- partly because being too into film was one of my issues that the school was trying to discourage in me, and trying to push a meeting might raise the ire of the administration. At any rate, she was in ill health at the time, and I was probably afraid that the meeting would end up something similar to Wes Anderson's when he arranged for her a personal screening of Rushmore.