Sparks To Be Blown Into Flame

Centrale électrique à turbine, General Electric, 1948.

Recently watched: Liza: A Truly Terrific Absolutely True Story (2024), broadcast on the BBC last night. My notes! Bruce David Klein’s documentary cleaves to the doggedly upbeat, smiling-through-your-tears, the-show-must-go-on “resilient survivor” narrative. The default mode is “effusive gushing.” Everyone (especially its subject, 78-year-old Liza Minnelli herself) talks in showbiz platitudes. There are many, many anecdotes beginning with “mama (Judy Garland) always said …” and “daddy (Vincente Minnelli) always told me …” punctuated with life-affirming, guffawing laughs. But did anyone expect anything else? Liza is firmly in the recent tradition of mature stars authorizing late-life docs where they can wrest control of their desired narrative and cement their legacies on their own terms (think of Tina Turner’s Tina (2021) and Faye: The Many Lives of Faye Dunaway (2024); 92-year-old Kim Novak has a new documentary due this autumn) – and I am here for it! Let’s love and celebrate these figures NOW while they’re still alive. Anyway, Liza’s smartest move: the film is divided into sections about how Minnelli’s mentors (Kay Thompson, Charles Aznavour, Bob Fosse, John Kander and Fred Ebb, Halston) helped sculpt a talented but raw and embryonic young starlet into the sequined, false eye-lashed and jazz hands-throwing diva we know today. Present-day Minnelli is physically frail but still dynamic. She’s an expert at seeming to be frank but actually revealing little (or at least, only what she wants to reveal). Her divorces, heartbreaks, miscarriages, addictions and stints in rehab are recounted, but I wanted more about her freaky marriage to David Gest. Except for Cabaret, Minnelli’s film career is skimmed over. Liza is surprisingly honest about Minnelli’s prickly, complicated relationship with Garland, who ushered her teenage daughter into the spotlight but also seemed threatened by her. Minnelli’s friends discuss her generosity and vulnerability (and hint at her loneliness) with genuine affection and protectiveness. Most gasp-inducing moment: Minnelli was a fixture (alongside Halston, Warhol and Bianca Jagger) at Studio 54, the epicentre of 1970s disco-era hedonism. A talking head relates how the club was awash in amyl nitrate, cocaine and Quaaludes. “Nobody did drugs!” Minnelli insists. “They just didn’t.”

Laetitia Casta by Jean-Paul Goude 2001

Alexander Rodchenko, Points, Composition 119, 1920 

two horses standing before an erupting volcano under a beautiful night sky with a forest illuminated by city lights laid out before them do these horses recognize the magnificent yet violent beauty in front of them or is this simply another day for them perhaps it is both as wild animals such as these know nothing but the constant bittersweetness of nature so perhaps to them all miracles of nature have the same wonder from an erupting volcano to a blooming flower to the split second life of an insect they are all products of the world that cradles horses and others in its loving yet murderous arms

Layered cliffs under clear sky by qing ying

rosa blasi, 2004.

Susan Sontag, On Photography (originally published in 1977)

The Princess and the Pea, 1976

Studio: Soyuzmultfilm

Nice