Multiple Maniacs

Three Days in L.A.

Satan Exulting over Eve (detail), 1795, William Blake. Color print with graphite, pen and black ink, and watercolor. Getty Museum.

This past weekend, I left Colorado for a happy social event in Los Angeles, and with some free time on my hands did some museum going.

First stop was the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, an endeavor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the Oscar people. It’s in an enormous building next to LACMA on Wilshire Boulevard. I’ve been there before, but this time my target was the John Waters retrospective.

I first experienced his work as a Berkeley undergraduate. While I intended to apply to graduate school in psychology, I wanted to keep my options open, so I decided to take the LSAT. After relentless practice sessions with the prep booklet and an egg timer, I figured I’d take it easy the night before the exam. On a whim I went to see a double bill of Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble.

I had no idea what I was getting into. The films were bizarre, disgusting, and amusing. They certainly took my mind off the LSAT. I scored well, but in the end didn’t apply to law school until after my first year of psych grad school (long story).

In Philadelphia, I saw Polyester, the Waters movie featuring a scratch and sniff “Odorama” card, which reinforced my interest in the cultural aspects of smell. Years later, when writing What the Nose Knows, I interviewed Waters over the phone. He was witty, well-informed, and thoughtful. A delight to interview.

Waters is an inspired weirdo. He has created a remarkably coherent philosophy (if one can call it that) and is fiercely independent. (In some ways, he’s a pop culture version of Camille Paglia.) That said, taking in his entire oeuvre in a single session is rather overwhelming. Definitely worth a visit, though.

[John Waters: Pope of Trash, through August 4, 2024.]

The next day I hit the Getty Center, on the 405 just north of Sunset Boulevard. It’s a huge complex atop a hill with magnificent views of downtown L.A. and the coast. My objective was the special exhibit on William Blake. Like most people, I’d known Blake (1757–1827) as a mystical English poet and sui generis maker of colored prints and illustrated tracts.

Of course, there’s a weirdo movie angle here as well. Red Dragon (2002) was based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Thomas Harris. In it Ralph Fiennes, playing Francis Dolarhyde, eats a print by Blake.

Blake is mentioned a lot in the big, difficult, but brilliant book by Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, which I’ve mentioned before. McGilchrist quotes frequently from Blake’s poetry and uses some of his images as well. Blake—definitely another weirdo who marched to his own drummer—was particularly insightful about the creativity-enhancing power of paired contraries (think Songs of Innocence and of Experience, or The Marriage of Heaven and Hell). He expressed his views in enigmatic, Zen-like verse as well as via startling graphic images (for example, he pictured Jacob’s Ladder as a spiral, not the traditional straight ladder). McGilchrist invokes Blake’s verse often enough that one understands he wasn’t a kooky artist with some cool quips, but rather a man with a coherent philosophy of mind-in-the-world, and one that he could express in depth. (Julia Friedman has a useful essay on Blake at The New Criterion.)

A final note: At the Getty, I was surprised to find Blake’s images for the Book of Job. This is the subject of a new project of mine. More later.

[William Blake: Visionary, at the Getty Center through January 14, 2024.]