It was time
for Reena’s
first shoot. She
was nervous. A sickly fluttering feeling surrounded her, penetrating every orifice of her body. Seeping out
of her glands,
a trail of unease followed her every movement.
Reena and Maris hadn’t spoken since their last encounter; Reena had tried to
spot her at
After Dark the previous night but to no avail. She was panic stricken that she had totally
fucked it. What else could she do? She
was just hoping that she
would manage to catch her
alone at some point during the shoot.
Reena had no idea what the structure of the day would be. She had never been to
a model shoot before. It was a totally alien world.
Begin.
Minute by
minute the studio was morphing into a increasingly pathological idea of public
apace. The noise-level thickens as more people enter. There are lots of young
women and men, lots of their skin. It’s a big production. Temperatures rising.
Flesh on the stove. People walk in-and-out. This seems disorderly, but it’s the
noise of production producing good-looking confusion. The stylist puts on a Cat
Power CD and, singing along, begins to steam a rack of bras and pants.
Recently, on the radio she heard a replay of an old interview with Bob Dylan. When asked
if he ever would do commercials, he said… short and semi-toxic … only for
underwear. Then 2004, it came true, and the song was I’m Thru With Love.
The stylist’s
steam is rising.
Maris appeared and kicked things off with one of her classic pep
talks, saying this business still had a few sensations lurking in its sleeve if
we could all, for once, accept its machine-like nature and not insist on
bogging it down with our lazy ideas about art. She was speaking into a bin of
underwear, holding up item after item for all to see. Then, while refolding the
underwear into neat, little business-card-sized bundles, she confidentially
issued encrypted commands to the photographer, “Two words, Bjarne: carcass,
automatism. Love of course, would be a third.”
They had Reena run up and down
some stairs and then asked her to lie on her stomach on the floor and smoke cigarettes. They massaged a few
drops of oil into her
hair, combed it out, blow-dried it from various distances, repeating the
process several times before smoothing in something that smelled like apricots.
Reena Spaulings
as a medieval Russian pilgrim, male. “We’ll teach you, you fake saint, not to seduce
girls.” Two soldiers separating her from a girl who has come to her for help. Reena wearing only
underwear.
Reena as Henry David Thoreau with his brother on their boat trip
up the concord and Merrimack rivers. In their tent listening to dogs howling at
night. 2nd scene: morning, Reena digging around
in the boat for a melon. Brother visible in the tent.
They all seem
to know each other. There are in jokes in the air. Also, many different
clicking sounds: of computers, of cameras, of lights, speakers, digital
impulses, of high heels and wooden slippers. Everybody is talking to somebody,
incessantly. Everybody is doing a job. Reena is doing a job. The photographer is nervous. It
is a big job. No, it’s not… it’s not a job, somehow everyone feels it is their
own, and that it will move them wherever they might go, an aesthetic quantum
empire.
Dressed,
undressed, dressed again. New flesh, new mind, new people.
Her
bottom looks like soft white cheese. Mascarpone, spread. A smooth fresh ball.
It starts to perspire. She kneels on a wooden crate among scattered bales of hay. The set
is rustic, with Italian peasants, goats and wheels of ripening cheese. Her feet are dirty as
if dragged across a barn floor. She is posing like a bard, lazy, blank cat. In the
sun. It makes sense. She
laughs compulsively.
Reena, as pilgrim again, installed in an empty bathhouse. Legs
paralyzed and weak as bits of straw. “With this liquid, I rubbed my legs five
times a day. And what happened?”
Maris in the middle of the injunction zone called photo shoot. A
look of outer-body detachment, yet she can feel the smells of fears, excitement, existence.
She wears
black cotton panties most of the time. Every day, though, the ritual requires
some change. She
looked at Reena.
That’s not only a girl,
that’s culture.
Maris keeps punching the photographer in the back and telling him
Reena is not a
bowl of fruit. He is like a cautious rabbit being lured out of his hole,
starting to sniff around. He smokes a joint on the roof and comes back with
ideas. They converse through nods, glances and improvised hand signals,
sometimes breaking the silence with a word: “slumpy” “crass” “idiot” “rad.”
Reena stands in her museum guard pose, facing the camera and then the wall. They
expose 50 rolls in three hours. They take Polaroids between set-ups and have
excited conferences around each one, like generals around a battle plan,
pushing on, like people who believe they are getting things done, pushing on. Maris is rigid
with concentration and sometimes snaps at the studio hands. Maris is glowing
with creative purpose and sometimes ecstatically squeezes Reena’s hand. In a
movement of inspiration that nobody sees coming, she elbows the makeup artists out of
the way and begins to draw on Reena’s face with a red ballpoint pen.
There is this
“I want whatever happens” body and a “nothing ever happens” face and the camera
keeps clicking at that face and that face clicks back. It is a brand new camera
with an extremely fast motor to capture the moments between the clicks. But
there are only voids between the clicks. Deepening the voids, that’s what this
odd model is doing. The spiritual and the popular are having a meeting, to
stretch some horizon? “You will be like the bum on the subway if you don’t
obey.” Where is the soundtrack for that? A couple of girls with clipboards and
pencils are arguing in front of the new boom box. It seems the CD player is
giving up with nasty gasps of noise. Suddenly everybody is pulling pills or gum
or cigarettes or cell phones out of their pockets and handbags. Reena by now looks
like a piece of scrap paper with a drawing of red ballpoint tattoo. Suddenly
everyone needs a break and a gallon of water.
Maris says we are all geniuses. She massages Reena’s rubbery shoulders with
long, cool fingers, the inches the waistband of the pants down a couple of
centimeters. Reena
cannot breathe. The photographer exposes his final roll.
Afterwards
John thanked reena
for having integrity, and said he hoped she would be able to continue with it, but Reena said it wasn’t
integrity because she
wasn’t whole, she
was in pieces. And John said well perhaps you’ll be able to remain in pieces,
and not become whole. Reena
said if I cared about it, I would be whole and not in pieces.
Reena looked around, Maris had already disappeared. Reena left, feeling
like she had
just spent the day being violated. She felt dejected. It was time to get fucked.
The next day.
Reena thinks to herself, “Get up idiot!”
She
thinks about the red numbers spelled on the alarm clock.
She
thinks about getting up.
She
thinks about having a look at her face, did anything horrific take place in the night, like in a
science fiction film, which she always secretly expected?
She
thinks let me relieve myself. I think about the dust that gathers so quickly on
the white tiled floor, and the shower hairs left high and dry by receding
waters. A cult had arisen. Without proper arguments or any established
philosophy, but with an aesthetic as tough as weeds, which is significant to
kitsch.
This was the
weirdest time of Reena’s
life. It feels like being showered with 100 roses. Or just sniffing life. Even
not giving a dam about flowers, Reena thinks this happened all too fast and came as a
surprise. She
thinks about the pee-toilet bowl acoustics and about the cotton rectangle on
the inside of her
underwear. Perhaps it will make her strong. She gives all, and will not receive anything. She thinks, taking
three squares of toilet paper, folding first along the perforations and then
folded the whole thing in half. Everything three seconds she is fine. Every
second second she
gives up. Every five seconds she rises up. Feeling perpetually x-ed.
She
thinks, standing naked before the mirror. She thinks about how she looks from the front, with
shoulders proper and back, and then with shoulders slouched, like normal. Shr thinks about her
body – is it sexy? Or better, is it touching? Could someone be moved by it? She thinks so. She thinks about her shoulder muscles,
which all on their own decide from day to day if they will appear masculine or
somewhat feminine, the different shades of her body, the relative white of her thighs, her ass, her stomach, the
darker shades of her
shins, arms and back, the splotchier bothered skin of her face, hands and feet. This is a
banality but it should be better understood.
She
thinks about the crack in the 11 inch all-in-one TV/VCR and about the throw rug
from Bed, Bath & Beyond. She thinks about the nook of bad spirits, the crevice between her dresser and some
stackable plastic storage units, which she had unconsciously made into a bad energy ghetto,
the bad part of town of her room where she put soiled rags, liquor bottles (both empty and full) her cigarettes and
ashtrays (when she
was trying to quit), plastic bags, and whatever else she preferred to hide from herself. She thinks about her nails. She thinks about the
dust on her CD
player, the week-old flowers, the faux wood paneling of her desk top, as she cracked her back to the left
and then the right and do some neck rolls. She thinks, without inspecting her feet, with so
much city around us our bodies are all we have to become dazzled by nature’s
unmanufactured forms, growths, cracks, fractures, fissures, deformities and
transformations. She
thinks about her
black plastic wastepaper basket to her left, which she had pissed in one night when she was too lazy to
make it to the bathroom. She thinks, she likes the floor a lot, as she goes to lie on a piece of it and looked up
out of the window, thinking of how the sky is shoved to the periphery of the
stage by our monuments and monumental buildings.
She
thinks as she
taps on her
computer,
Dear _________
Everything’s fine with me. Now that it’s almost spring, each
day around 4 o’clock, I speed down to the water to read for an hour or two.
It’s almost time to take out those sunglasses I brought last autumn. Yesterday,
as I approached the water, I discovered a movie was being shot. The scene was
about a man drowning in the river. It was great fun for us onlookers to watch a
man dramatically drowning and in grave danger.
Lots
of Love,
R
She
thinks some more, with her chin in the hole of my coffee mug.
She
thinks, dear artists (even those whom she liked) that they can’t escape it, they are making
art that approximates life and she’d prefer, at the very least, life that
approximates life. She
thinks about how her
body is her
brains and how her
brain doesn’t have a brain.
