Janis

Nothing exceptional as a documentary, just performance footage and interviews, this up-close look at one of the icons of my youth definitely reconnects me to a cultural moment. It’s so up close that it doesn’t even refer to Janis Joplin’s drug-related death in 1970, just focusing on her defiantly plain, exaltingly contorted face as she belts out the white mama blues that helped define the Sixties or wincingly remembers growing up an outsider in Port Arthur, Texas, during the conformist Fifties. The raw bacchanalian frenzy of her performance may strike the un-initiate as caterwauling, but to her devotees she is simply the transporting Truth, the raw emotional reality of agonized longing, sung loud and proud. Janis came out, burst out of her shell, strode from the margins to centerstage, and millions came out after her, and the Right has been struggling to put us back in ever since. To me the real divide in this country is not between Democrats and Republicans, when it comes to reaching and moving the public, but between the Party of Pleasure and the Party of Fear. Janis is a genuine apostle of the principle of pleasure (along with its attendant pain.) She had one of the best replies ever to the question of what the youth of the day wanted: “Sincerity and a good time.” Dead at 27, she’s not dead yet. (1974, Sund/T, n.) *7*

This past week, under calendar deadline, I have been putting together a Winter film series at the Clark to be called “Triple Feature: 3 Colors, 3 Painters, 3 Studios.” I will certainly write more about the series as its time approaches, but the final slot came down to a choice between the Eames and Hubley studios. I went with the latter, because they will better complete a day of animation, but I have definitely noted the films of Charles and Ray Eames for future showing. “Toccata for Toy Trains” and “Tops” were delightful semi-animations of vintage toy collections, and “Fiberglass Chairs” was a marvelously concise and cogent visual depiction of the design and fabrication process. “Powers of Ten” was a predetermined choice, but the revelation to me was “The World of Franklin & Jefferson,” made to accompany a traveling exhibition that the Eameses designed for the Bicentennial in 1976. More than the slow and talky Ken Burns style that has come to characterize historical documentaries, this is a rapidfire survey of the entire visual culture of the revolutionary era, while Orson Welles supplies the informative narration. Really outstanding.