Dear Graham,
When film actors in 40’s & 50’s
even early 60’s strut their stuff
and smoke cigarettes, talk loud
and fast, staccato-clipped, wear
jerky hats: they don’t know any
better, true?
That’s what it is to act in those days.
Loud. Unsubtle. As if still on a stage
and have to swell a scene, get it out,
out: tableaux across the theater.
Fire! Fire!
It doesn’t occur to them but does
to us looking later: how artificial.
Fee. Fie. Faux. Because they are
inside the convention.
That’s how it’s
done.
Jimmy Stewart
Ava Gardner
Humphrey Bogart
Lana Turner
not with standing.
Paul Newman & Lizabeth
Taylor, Nim Novak and Frank Sinatra.
Stagy. Dramatic. Fake.
They couldn’t think they are.
Confirmed. Validated. Reinforced.
Hermetically sealed into the way-it’s-done,
representing reality, but who thinks of it as
mere representation? Arbitrary. Artificial. A
shared way to skin a cat and if it’s skun some
other way: well, who do they think they are
anyway!
It would take something like an immaculate
conception to penetrate the rhino-hide of
how-it’s-done on stage so as to see it as
merely convention—convenient.
How-conventional-I-am
busting thru to signal me
as arbitrary: artificial
Holy smokes:
apocalypse!
It only looks silly now looking backward
like silent moves and model Ts: histrionic
body language, clown-like: meat puppets
of the 20’s, 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and—really:
60’s and 70’s, too. Bonnie & Clyde
excepted.
Dated. Old fashioned.
Not at all like the realism
of anorectic binge&purge
bulimic cutting hyper attention-
deficient restless legs jogging viagra
pumping bottle-water-carrying cosmetic
esteem salvaging health addiction narcosis
we got now to do justice to how-it-is: the
conventions of in our time, sound & fury polite
policed theatrical correctness: few smoke any
more on screen and if theyvdo it affects the ratings.
.
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