[Suffer the Little Children] on Apolo Torre's [Girl on Side the Building]

by Dontrell Lovet't






            Street art can be defined as everyday reminders and representative of the beauty we can easily lose in melancholia during our everyday monotony. Perhaps the most fulfilling of mention, too, one of the most hideous of street art able to be found the world over, is Apolo Torres’s [Girl Reaching Above the City].

            There are skyscrapers, a sea-set in the sky above the city, an adorable child on the tip of her toes, extending herself, a backpack on her back representing growth in intellect and education. At the base of her feet, there is a snack she’s unaware of, winding around her legs and a Pit-Viper impishly looking up at her. We cannot assume but we can establish what snakes have always represented since biblical times and how childhood, that moment where the future generations grows, learns and blooms, are ensconced in potential victimhood, surrounded by a jungle of predators seeking to prey upon their naivety.

            Apolo Torres’s depiction, which can be found alongside an apartment building housing families, is a necessary image, a frightening image, the sort one has no desire to see yet find themselves unable to turn away when the event unfolds. If ever there are any visions the masses should take in, it is the art, representing life, representing danger, representing a will for longevity in the form of caution.

[The Exterminating Dream IV] The Starving Artist

by Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]



A pen, a pad and a dream; that's all the starving artist truly has, colossal haunting, evaporation into reality. Malevolent lassitude are frequent, sporadic bouts of nostalgia; they want to reconcile, they want reckonings, but art has become their predominant, has become predominant, superimposed itself as the vessel in which to channel their self-loathing, they, the vassal to shifting identity. Art is the thing of immortality, the road to immortality, time seems limited, because when one charts their inner darkness, they become not only aware of their impending demise, they can feel it.

They cannot create if they don't eat, or they don't eat if they don't create. Money is borrowed, then given away, always on the verge of utter collapse, their soul is a devouring force inasmuch it cannot devour itself- it burrows, deeper into the abyss of the body, refuses to resurfaces and enrages every sense without fail.

Their life has nothing to do with the scientific method; there is no controlled variables, more over, there is no control. Chaos is so frequent that in time, it becomes mastered, expected, commonplace, a tantamount, their equal. Lovers are transitory in their transitory homes. A few books, a desk, a pen, a pad and a dream- that is what makes it a home and if they fail to feel the comforts of homes, it is when the dream has called upon them to move, to another flat, into the arms of another lover, closer to an immuno-compromised fiction; there is not only a refusal to live anyway else, it is the incapability. Text is started, then abandoned, volumes of poetry are composed, then burned; the philosophical means to become a victim has thus far failed to rear its decapitated head; the void has become immense, vast, finite, a desert's sandstorm that continues its migration over the lush Savannah. Everything alive becomes endangered, Autumn is the only season that becomes the death of things, of all, the earth will soon become a desolate world, a fiber, a fabric of evolution brought to a standstill.

The horizon never stops receding and pain is forever unraveling in the disposition, the inherent, as the dream they dream is the same as when they were fetuses in utero; the juxtaposition to nothing, to no other man, in the sense of a scattered intellect, asymmetrically astute. The only genius is the possession of genius, an unmastered essential that drives man first to success, then infamy, then an indigent death.

There is a pen, a pad, a dream; religion is partially abandoned, if not, completely, family has fled and if they are still present, they are gone. Medicinal cures, psychiatric wards, sanatoriums have been built to house this askew visionary, yet chased to the ends of the earth, launching their words and art into the wind just before the plunge off the edges.

[Sleepless Nights] on the Art of Marzena Lavrilleux

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [Hand-Rolled, Post-Coital]

At its most precious limits, art has lost its way and found it within a new identity, an inane idea. If art stands in its current place, it may find itself in peril of decapitation; altercation is not enough, it must change, and not just change, evolve- its need is in the interest of being led to its forbearance and way from the guillotine, away from dismemberment.

This altercation is held in the hands of Orleans-based painter Marzena Lavrilleux. French-polish in descendancy, now alive in the aura of what once was the childhood home of Edgar De Gas, there is nothing, nor anyone who exists juxtaposed to her, for art is not a dream she has once dreamt, it is the dream she has moved into, sporadically re-emerged from as a conundrum ineffable, incapable of being fully comprehended.

If she has found anything that has scattered from the trauma of birth, she has found herself in the world, herself lightly upon the earth as the moon directly above her head has made a strenuous endeavor to lift from her a restless spirit.  And as a meteor that collects its gravity in the rays of the sun, Lavrilleux finds momentum in the methodology of existence, that is, in the world of her art.

Note the painting [Eclipse], an unbelievable depth in a chasm of surreal, an encounter of an abandoned town and its macabre ending, a setting where each and all things can be set free, return at will, if it may desire. One is reminded of poverty-stricken villages, browns, blacks and golds that assimilate in the sky as a loom on the floating horizon. What is removed from the haunting image, is resurrected in [Elephant]. A marvel, a marriage of depth to birth, then a plummet to an abortive sea of distortion, a molar pregnancy in a cadging womb demanding life in a most brilliant, grandiloquent plead. The angels can deny not, the demons can ignore not the angels frazzle to bedazzle, beloved and beget. It is, as in [District] is as nothing I've seen, deep abstraction, abstractive dimensions, seemingly unafraid to unleash its color upon the eye. It's color is its prayer, an finite expression to live- not in human interest but in its own.

Lavrilleux gesture is the gesture of seduction, the same, it can be the gesture of miscarriage, a sensory of failure as the brain. Her gesture must empty itself onto the earth if it is to become a criterion of this earth, the haplessness, the bliss, the fertilized, the calcified fetus. Let her gesture be what it is, what it may, enraged in the image of itself, the dew that depends on winter to imprint its moldlessness upon the pane. If there is a darker, most desolate corner of Lavrilleux, in her art, it flickers at a phase as to allow only one view before the arrival of again, a lighter gesture.

 In [Fashion Victim] there is a consistent them of tragedy, the vanity that is both bold and unforgiving, an unbecoming of women who've used up there inertia of life in time, bodies broken, battered, severed in the glamourous beauty of the doctrine they lived by. One thinks hastily of Gia Carangi, of Archana Pandey, Ruslana Korshunova, Hayley Kohle, Daul Kim, names of women who walked till the runway gave way, dropping them into an abyss. It is only in this painting that Lavrilleux allows us to live in victimhood, bygone victimhood, illegitimate nostalgia, overwhelming portraitures of what remains is only names. The sporadic flicker is now at its most solid state of being, alienated, the body of misery builds its own mausoleum, retracing its own steps time over for centuries.

   In this hideous reconciliation with the human miasma, we are beckon to rest in our misadventures with [Sleepless Nights.] The intervening distance, the equidistance from bliss to the plunge into our own dark corner is aided with the grey shades, trees hidden in a different shade of grey, a touch of infantile brown solidified as a vacancy. This vacancy rests in a vacuum, where body and space intermingled in a vortex of misgivings. This is a modern reminder of the fall of the altercation, a change at its most malevolent, most unvarying.

[The Predominance of Art] a byline

It is not necessary for someone to have to know all of the world to despise it. All the entirety of the world can never be fully known by a single individual; it is with academics, travel, empirical research, all fiber-optically connected and thus the world seems to come into focus. The focus is but a caricature; one has to see every space of the world in time space to fully and truly know it- anything less, distaste or love for the world is all distortion predicated on a fragile strand of knowledge.

The world I know is the one inside of me and the one I wish to embrace. Along every shore of Madison lives the fossil of my footsteps, where Otis Redding once plunged to his death, swept away only by immense pressure of carbon. Only from a crisp and deep breeze that seems to dissect my bare skin is my presence reassured; I too am here.

The origin of the world is the origin of the individual, and lost upon the world which is split wide by the individual, is individuation. Becoming, I make of the world a smaller place, by shrinking it, it will someday be fully in my hands, as clay to mold, "the thinker" of Rodin. The ghost is given to uncertainty and an uncertain world, the haunt to the dream that never comes when I am asleep but only when I am awake, my eyes open, rational. Love is temporary derangement; I am always in love.

Of this love, of this infatuation, that is not of bodily form, is the only, for the love in human form has come long ago and gone long before and art, that decay that will dissect the cerebral formation of logic, bares itself down in haven to never again be removed.

Art is a constant; it lives when all else dies, it remains when everyone has left, it reciprocates when it knows it has complete devotion as a jealous god. Prayer is knowledge, prayer is lyrical formation, linguistic variation, self-expression, artistic absorption, and when all is said and one, art gives you a legacy of a thousand years and a death of a thousand occurrences.

Locking oneself up away from the world doesn't mean its cruelties have subsided, just that it has created another guise to hurt you. By forcing one into silence, into seclusion, it builds the walls that one believes they have chosen to hide in, it beats on the walls in the nights as a demonic presence and soon, it creates the doppelganger outside of the mirror and the omen that is insanity cradles you until that final sleep is about. Emily Dickinson accomplished nothing from seclusion, only the lost days that Walden found. His seclusion was bliss, Dickinson's despair, Chagall's prayer, St. Vincent Millay's seduction. One can only delay their deterioration by refusing to "go quietly into that good night," with seclusion comes defeat, with the artist, seclusion brings one to be twice defeated inasmuch art, there lives no triumph of the individual over art, for the individual is a byproduct of art as sulfites from fermentation.

If there is anything of self that is lost, it is only lost because it has been given up freely, without the battle to possess. The celebrity who hires the ghost writer to produce art in silence cheapens art, the ghost writer, by becoming and accepting the fate of the "ghost," cheapens themselves, the plagiaristic possess no genius nor is possessed by it and therefore must heist art, the singer whose songs are written in their stead is only a marionette on strings being pulled, toggled and turned to a virtue to be forgotten upon their fading. Art is only obtainable by suffering, not by pure fantasy or ideal, not by networking or collaboration, but by the broken body in the dungeon with only a spec of light invading the darkness. That single being of light causes the mock-artist to scream for others to aid them up; the artist writes of its being in poetry, in prose, in essay, in pamplistic novellas, paint its caricature on the walls. That light is what the artist has to hold on to, more would only expose wounds long before they are ready to be exposed to the thin air, to the awaiting pathogens.

Something awaits to be released in the aura of creativity, a story held from humanity far too long. A story is told behind "Saturn" devouring his child, Eiffel's rise over Paris and the Seine, the Golden Gate and its tomb of fallen steelmasters, the improvisation that iconolized Isadora Duncan and Miles Davis, the longings in the songs of Edith Piaf, the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Les Saisons of Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The story is the appalling spectre, the allure of this spectre where one takes upon themselves at the tomb of the fallen before them. The decadence of the artist is the likeness of the decay of their person; the two can only coexists so long before one is led to the plunge of death. Because art is timeless, limitless, finite, its immortalization is predominant as opposed to the human body that eventually, even at the lifelong absence of putrefaction, meets the Hayflick Limit.

I submit that for every Picasso that has lived, so has there been a Fante, for every Hemingway, a Kerouac, for every Fontaine, a Segarre, for every Frost, a Celan, for every Portman there is a Huppert, every Formiga, a Sedgewick. Art advertised only brings more fame, more fortune but art in itself is, it is dispassionate, one study no more suffered than another. The art thief is the only one seems to be getting out of his obsession what he has put it, by stealing art and laundering it through the black market, he makes it accessible to anyone with the currency or inclination to purchase it. By doing so, and only by this, art truly gains value, recognition, mysterious allure. By leaving its mainstream, visual accessibility from the curators aegis, it becomes bygone and in art, more often then not, posthumous recognition follows.

In the pertinence of the absentee father and the derelict mother, the artist is then an artist, for discordancy may hold importance but it must, in the  face of the embrace of new ideal, be relinquished without caution. The only descendants of the artist is art itself, the dominant gene that imbues the self-destructive mechanism. This self-destruction is measured only by the activity of the artist. Publish or perish, produce or be reduced; the moment the unknown artist sits idle, they are forgotten, the moment they naively choose to separate themselves from art, they descend into madness and narcissism.

Take the 1904 Opera version of [Madama Butterfly] by Giacomo Puccini that saw the tragic suicide of the heroine "butterfly" at her own hands for the love of a man, Pinkerton. From the beginning, butterfly, a 15 year old Japanese bride married by a lonely American Naval officer newly arrived in Japan, was a convenience until a proper American wife was found. In Japan at that time, a woman could be divorced if she was left-handed so it is not beyond any man's deceit to concoct reasoning for separation. Upon converting to Christianity and marrying Pinkerton, she is disowned by her family. After their wedding, Pinkerton departs for a length of three years. Everyone close to butterfly attempts to convince her that Pinkerton was never again to return, but because of her love, her devotion to him, she continues to wait, still sure of his eventual arrival. His return means more to her than just a wife awaiting a husband but of a mother awaiting the father of her child. Butterfly had become pregnant after their first night together and gave birth to a son while Pinkerton had been away. Butterfly awakes in an impossible position; Pinkerton has returned with his new American wife, Kate, who has agreed to raise the child. Butterfly agrees to give up her child if Pinkerton is to come and see her himself. Recognizing her ancestral gods in prayer, she puts the American flag into the hands of her son, blindfolds him and commits suicide. When Pinkerton runs in, he knows that he is much too late.

[Madama Butterfly] ends tragically, but only in the tragic predisposition. To me, the act of self-murder was the act of beauty, as Juliet for Romeo, as Abelard sacrifice for Heloise. Puccini's contribution was a magnanimous contribution to human glee. By recreating the tale of the greatest sacrifice for love, one's own life, there is a greatness engirdled in the marvel, and at time, tragic coexistence when love is a weak bond creating a carbon copy. Art by the production of Puccini is the sacrifice for love, in the harmonious chord of life, ended by the sword of that same volition to exist but not live.

Art creates the individual, decays the individual, else art decays.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

Roger Ebert & [The Death of the Film]

 Film critiques and pundits have come out of the woodwork in this latest century; we must attribute this to the average film connoisseur believing they are entitled to an opinion. On the contrary, if one is to look into their own biographies, we'll find that none have created any successful work of filmography themselves...

This is where Roger Ebert stood alone, the greatest film pundit perhaps to ever walk this earth.

Ebert had a way with film, as though film spoke to him immediately upon viewing, and in so doing, he find their flaws as one does psychoanalyzing the human personality. He was meticulous, his eye was a third, his methodology and dedication to film itself was of a gargantuan measure. If film evolved at all, it was not due to the creativity or the auteur's exploration of unorthodox measure and truth, it was in fear of Ebert's critique, one that alone, could make or break a film, become a ladder to a filmmaker's career or the precipice they'd plummet from.

In my perspective, film critiques are separated in 4 distinct genres;

1. The Preference: Filmmakers, as most humans, take into the likeness of certain genres, be it, horror, drama, comedy, action, so much so, they lose perspective in the critique outside of their chosen genre. The door is closed when one adhere fanatically to standards and preference, disallowing their capabilities to see anything outside of their desired view.

2. The Comparable: This is the erroneous form of judgment where one film (namely the film under review) is judged in comparison with another. This is commonplace when judging an original with a sequel or trilogy but a film cannot be judged on its own merits if it is compared to the work of another filmmaker. As Antonin Artaud once said "Masterpieces of the past are only good for the past." The budding filmmaker garners experience as they grow, as they produce, as opposed to an experienced filmmaker who has gained world renown recognition for their work; there comparison is an unrealistic practice and one that needs to be dealt away with if film is to ever receive its due in proper.

3. The Incapable: As success is well-pursued and well-desired, there are some in this world who are not driven and thus receive no accolades to their loiter. It is easier to break down a film, tear it apart from its foundation and axis, then to start at that very axis and foundation and create a film. The failed filmmaker who has lost their momentum can easily become competitive only in the nature of destroying films in reviews. For those who are familiar with Francois Truffaut, film director of the French New Wave, known as "The Gravedigger of French Cinema." Unforgiving in critique, his every notion was to push filmmakers into a direction of forward and remove them from complacency. With the 1959 release of "The 400 Blows," it is clear that Truffaut wasn't an incapable, but the 4th genre of the film critique.....

4. The Capable: This is the filmmaker who has accomplished a solid, legendary film that lives one and rival those of the "modern." His Pulitzer prize for criticism aside, his near four decades of the most notorious pundit in perhaps all history of film remarks him in a hallmark of nothing but, nothing less than brilliant and genius. The 1970 screenplay to Ross Meyer's "Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, co-written by Ebert himself was slowly received by the public, now hailed as a cult classic of the crest. 1999 saw Ebert lose his colleague Gene Siskel; modern film critic great Richard Roeper, admixing a different taste to Ebert's dispassionate reviews, joined him in transforming the method that had begun to take film a step back rather a step forward into transcendence.

 As the loss of Buddy Holly was known to Don McLean as the "Death of the music," the loss of Roger Ebert has come to be known as "The Death of the Film." No one is left to drive filmmakers into their desire, into transcendence; we are now burdened in the realm of art to lose our dreams, borrow those from the past, and recreate them in a petulant complacency

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [PsychoNeuroFilmography]

[The Exterminating Dream III] Moveable Easels

            A true artistic ideal is the one that obliterates all in the name of its very creation; the artist, is this creative animal that lives a quiet life amongst the noise, behaving only recklessly on paper and canvas. With every urge to create arrives a frantic urge to recreate, what they have created and what has been created by another, ideal in need of updates, albums left to wither and denied their right to bloom in a new generations forfeiting their own right to turn around, take a step back and discover what it is that caused what they love today to become.

            Every man (anthropos) must account for their bruises and heal those very wounds if indeed they are to move past them; the artist deny such healing, expose the grotesque of the deep, impacted injury, photography, paint it, describe the hideous preludes and epilogues surrounding the impact, becomes the wound and becomes beautiful because of them. The trends of today, they are embrace and are happily left to be had by the sycophants fixed on being misers of gray matter; the art of yesterday becomes the billboards for the artist of today to not aspire to become as, to be aspire to become as they are, as for every individual, comes an individual stylism unique to their personality, their environment, fears, indifference and ambivalences, the very thing that breeds them.

[Where All the World Can be Witnessed] on van Gogh's [Cafe Terrace at Night]

Take this as an advisory note;
wake one morning, make no plans, gather only a pen and pad, walk outside, follow the crowds until you come to the first cafe you can find. Order yourself a Latte, or an Ice Coffee, or a Mocha Cappuccino whatever your fix of caffeine may be. Forfeit the inside seating and find yourself a nice comfortable table outside, pull out that pen and pad, allow your eyes to fix and adapt to the passing crowd and after a day's time, you'll see how sharpened yours senses become, how much more, or how much rather less, this human existence makes more, whilst simultaneously, makes less sense all the while.

Van Gogh, in all his terrible aloneness, sought nothing more beyond that moment where you are sitting. His mind riddled with an almost debilitating shyness, tertiary Syphilis and a cataclysmic mind feeding on itself as a cannibal, brush to canvas, view inside of eye, words only filtering within the conflict and confines of mind, the renown 20th century painter came of age truly when his shadow had become and would be the last company to truly know how the simple act of painting a Cafe Terrace, a place where the people who were always estranged to him gathered for small talk, the goings on about the town, speaking too, of the latest artist to drift into town, and the last one claimed by yesterday.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[Art & Outrage] Art, Menace & the Modules of Madness

Art reproduces as the cell, as our cells, becomes immortal by our own mortal hands; we envy its lack of date of expiration.

It is possible in this hatred, we lash out, displace rage upon the world inasmuch art cannot be murdered; we aspire to create a legacy and as certain mothers do certain offspring, despise their very becoming from their bodies and loves the prior or preceding without question nor restraint.

Haunted since the first dream in utero, the artist begets not art but madness in various, vicarious sorts, adorned in battle dress to march out against the dream that has long made them a pariah, caused the wedge between them and the norm, exterminated the falsities the human condition is likely to attach as a parasite. This condition of the human race beckons them one direction but they stray to the opposite, advises a move and they loiter, signals self-preservation and death descends in a torrential fault. Art is inherent in the artist, it is not a choice; to attempt to abandon it, is but an unheard scream for help in a desolate world, an introduction to mortal misery and weakness; to give up their disposition is to become human and thus possessing human fragility, human simplicity.

The implements of self-impalement are but few effective, as one summoning by intonations the angel of eternal sleep. Film is the one true line in which to view the plausibility at the future, of a future, and what can become of it. What cannot become of it, whose to say, we can only speak of the then and now and not with confidence the latter and later. A leap of faith is determined only once the erroneous, one-sided ignorance of this world is relinquished and all avenues subject to the abject are considered, given a diverse spectacle, grown and nurtured at its distances.

One work of art is not the entirety of the artist, it is a fracture of the fragmented dream migrated in all direction. We don't know if Rimbaud was the figure literature has made his memory to be, nor do we know if Kafka ever intended to share with the world his journals and letters; what we do know is that the world desired their ghosts.

Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[The Seduction of Modigliani]

In a syphilitic night, where clouds erode the sky and opens it in a French fashion, nothing much is left to seize other than the thought. The stillness is a remnant of the erosion, all are temporarily dead to the world, or temporarily dying at the spearhead of coitus; in continuum, coitus is the formula that expressed the finite of the body, the gesture of the painter to imitate.

In every epoch, there is one who is determined to attain that prime existence of wander; it is in that, where he detaches himself from any culture, brings limit to that culture and attribute to its eventual decay, whilst still holding on to his forbearance as an heirloom. This brings us to the numbered days of Amedeo Modigliani, the conundrum of Leghorn devoured by the lights of Paris. An artist who immortalized Rapheal, it was in the language of art expression itself that gave outrage to the being of Modiglianni.

Rapheal divided mankind into three genres; those who suffer helplessly, those that dream confusedly and those that are entranced by supernatural things; but there is another, a fourth I believe, and that is the one who scours the dream only to squander it. Descartes was unknown to Modigliani and thus art was not the only that needed to be when all is forgotten and discarded for its sake. And on his death bed, he still proclaimed in the words "Cara, Cara Italia," his love for Italy and its entirety in his heart. Though  he left Italy, he was never a motherless child or one illegitimately concealed.

To live amongst the likes of Jacob, of Picasso, to survive the fledgling flourish of Parisienne aura, Modigliani arrived with Italy inside of him as a woman who carries the whole of the world within her. It was of the most pristine, the most Florentine Italy that the Italian-Jewish painter represented, the Venician Republic before it had been plundered and fallen under his fellow Italian countryman Napoleon in 1797, after one thousand years of independence. It was not the Italy brought by Chirico, nurtured by Greek myth and German philosophy, it was a portraiture of his own reflection.

The cubist were intent, driven to reduce the human and its form to a simple structure. When in all regards art was accumulated in Paris, its accumulation meant the burial of Italy, of Spain, of Germany, of Russia. When the artist arrived in Paris, they soon became expatriots with no true nation of origin, for it was buried in them long before their arrival. It is in the portrait of Lunia Czechowska that Modigliani makes an endeavor to paint the way he breathes, resurrect and save his nationalism in the Levant, picturesque display in the form of the woman.

It is in woman that Modigliani expresses his anti-Descartes, anti-cubists forum. It is the symmetry of woman that seduces man one moment and renders him powerless the next. To indulge in the cubists notion that aimed to distort the human, in lieu the woman, would pull Modigliani not from his scouring of the dream but from his native Italy, which to him was the woman all together. The woman wasn't the vice it was for Picasso, Rodin, Simenon and Miller, it wasn't the vice alcohol and drugs were for him; woman was the means to his end, the art that would become an obsession, a harbinger behind their nude bodies, his eventual decay.

As poets of the 18th and 19th centuries demand much of the readers, Modigliani demanded nothing of the one who took into their eyes his caricatures but demanded more of himself. His posthumous fame, which came at the cost of his self-destruction and the self-murder of his wife and artist Jeanne Hebuterne, who threw herself from a fifth floor window from the grief of Amedeo's passing, taking the life of their unborn child with her. The stylist harmony in which he approached the female body, capturing in large part the seduction and charm that has long made men captives in their own creation, came with the cost it would for the old man who saves a city and in turn, is resented for it.

` Everything was deliberate in the work of Modigliani, even that of his own self-destruction. The incidence of woman becoming on his canvas or be it the coincidence of the much admired 1906 death of Paul Cezanne that coincides with the year Modigliani arrived in Paris, the true subject, the naked body, never eluded him. He was a born portrait-painter and what he saw in flesh was all the deliberation he took upon his gesture to recreate it as best any man who is a devout student of the female form could ever, or will ever again.

It was the naked form of the world that Modigliani wanted to truly capture, a world that no one man can ever fully see for himself, but borrow visions that sketches the world out into display. The nakedness of woman before his eyes gave Modigliani that complete vision of the world, authenticity, a rationality so painful he took to alcohol and drug abuse to self-medicate and dilute the weight of it all and if given the chance to breath again, to be resurrected, I do believe he would again inject the opiate of woman, the scent of her skin, the texture of her light and being, and self-destruct all over again.

In the nights, during the long walks deep in the winter of Madison, along Lake Menona, I visualize the portraits of Modigliani, a man after my own, who knew he owed the world a price and dealt with it best the way he could to pay it in full. The chaste brilliance that has become the memory of Modigliani itself is the stigma of the woman of then, the woman of now, that in their very birth, with their very becoming, is the homunculus of the world that unvarying demands in cruelty, if not in subtlety.

-Dontrell Lovet't

from, [To Whom All Humanity is Dreaming]

[Toulouse-Lautrec's Regular] Ladies & Gentleman, Suzanne Valadon

            There is no certainty many can draw from Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s portrait of Suzanne Valadon, alone, propped in ennui, at a table, a bottle of wine at both her leisure and sole company.

Is she a regular? In what Paris haunt does she meet the inebriate state she’s bound to meet? And if not that very state of intoxication, is she planning to meet another to replace that intoxication with momentary flames?

            So much can be drawn from a portrait, particularly one of a woman who mothered the great Montmartre artist Maurice Utrillo, at beck and call to Lautrec, to Jean Renoir, to Edgar Degas, all of which could have been the possible father of Maurice, who’d developed an abuse of his own for alcohol by the age of 10, presumably, at the very moment Lautrec’s brush made congress with canvas, could have been in the depth of his many wanderlusting fits, walking the streets of Paris, in utter displace of a boy of his age.

            But during that very portrait, Valadon has no interest in Maurice’s whereabouts, nor her own; she’s unkempt, she has shredded the beauty the myth of Art History has passed down to us as heirlooms; and where myth makes immortal, witnessing a vision in abstract depth reminds us that before immortality was conceived, flesh and blood, trial and tribulation, bludgeoning at the spearhead of blunt objects, strangulation by garrote, has all left their mark as to remind us, no one reaches a timeless time without their time in timeless torture.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[The News of Amedeo Modigliani's Death]

            You could say she looks familiar, perhaps a woman you’ve seen while walking down the crowded sidewalks in a city you’re not a native of; her olive features appears she may be a descendant of that boot shaped peninsula in southern Europe, the one that lost its might and will to fight at the decimation of the Roman Empire, transforming itself into a nation of seduction rather brute force. Modigliani is Italy, and so is she, Marie, the daughter of the people, appearing in 1918, in the 24 year of Modigliani’s life, 2 years prior to his death. Perhaps it was an homage to a death he knew was impending, an inevitable obituary one writes, savoring their own vanity, so gargantuan, the subject of death itself fails to render it obsolete.

            This voice, all canvas, all olive texture in the frame, form and symmetry of Marie, is latent, then and now, a war-cry given a century after the conclusion of a war that has wiped clean a nation once occupied by its own illusions. Does this explain the grey emptiness in the eyes of Marie? Or the elongated stretch of her body, as if she herself is peering through a window with a distorted view as to investigate the gossip of a world gone quiet herself? And does she ever conclude those rumors to be of substantial truth?

            Indeed she does; so she pulls her hair behind her neck, wraps it in a dense black tie, dresses herself too in black, becoming two years prior, an attendant at the burial of her creator, her peace spoken from the dazzling arches of dulled lips.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[Olga] Pablo Picasso's right-side immortal

          Anyone who has ever had the initiative to visit Paris, that is for its rich history as an artistic mecca, may have become familiar with the adoration of Parisiennes; Napoleon III and Olga Picasso, two, some would say, with as much inclination as the next, defined an era of art between Napoleon’s reign and Olga’s zenith.

          Born in the Russian Empire in 1891, in what is today Ukraine, Olga’s childhood ambition to be a ballerina was the very dream that brought her face to face with Pablo. Already making a name for himself as an artist, Picasso designed the costumes for [Parade], Sergei Diaghilev’s and Jean Cocteau’s collaborative ballet, which took center stage at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. And as classic Picasso, propelling charm, intelligence and the spell of the artist, Olga departed the touring ballet as she delved into a freefall love affair with Picasso, who invited her back to live with him in Paris upon their return from Barcelona that very year.

          Almost a year since the day they met, in 1918, Olga Khokhlova became Olga Picasso in the observation of Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau. While the Great War (the war to end all) was coming to a final yet destructive close and the Great Influenza became its predecessor, taking the life of both August and Rose Rodin, Olga became Pablo’s first wife and the mother of his first-born child and son, Paulo. The birth of Paulo was the birth of their deterioration as a couple. After discovering Pablo’s affair with his 17-year-old Paramore, Olga took Paulo and moved to southern France, filing for the divorce which Pablo would refuse due to, under French Law, having required to divide his estate evenly with Olga. Olga would be married to Picasso until her death in 1955 but with Picasso, when those four years of inseparability was abundant, Olga picked up the brush, familiarized herself with acrylic, led Pablo to place vivid vision on bland canvas, creating unimaginable masterpieces. It came be said that Olga, as his muse and wife alone, was another era in the many Pablo Picasso would begin, but the only to eroded across all the rest.

          Evolutionary Biologist would postulate that monogamy for most humans is such a difficult feat inasmuch we, as a species, weren’t meant to be monogamous and with that very postulation, Pablo isn’t given an out or exclusion from breaking his vows, even in biology, a man’s crimes committed are always his to be held accountable for. If the “Non-monogamy” postulation so happens to prove solid, then too is its other half, the part which makes marriage so much more a beautiful becoming, something that endures, if love is enough to deter two humans from their own biological pull, stay afloat against the falling waves of overwhelming odds, dance in the dazzle of “temporary insanity,” an act that has been known to prolong its effects. Pablo’s legacy required 9 decades to solidify; between 1917 and 1921, was all that was needed for Olga, her reparation, the part of the estate she was denied, having endured love for such a restless soul as Pablo, so that our admiration of her sacrifice, can find its place to dance on her tongues as she once dance in Chatelet.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[To Paint is to Love Again] on Henry Miller's A-plenty Passions

Any man who can take into account the reality of his very own destitution, smile, thenceforth uses this poverty to draw hunger as a means of non-conformity, is familiar with Henry Miller, even if they've never heard of his having once existed.

-then too are they familiar (without actuality of being) with Langston Hughes, Selby Jr., Bukowski, William Burroughs; all loss and all that will be loss allots only the very life demanded if the individual indeed desires unvarying individualism rather a collective passivity.

It doesn't take much gumption to follow a crowd, even being completely unaware, to aim, to not, bout face to walk against the heavy tides of zombies, takes an artist who has lost the fear of death, embraced a physical decline, an embrace dictating; if we shall die our individual clash against bouy
s bumping like herds heading submissively to slaughter, has been enough to take us farther beyond our physical end, if even a second following, it says, it has been enough.

[Faceless; Chrysalis] on Amy Judd's [Mute Butterfly]

She's the woman nobody knows, the one who wonders why wandering amongst millions of people still leaves her without a face to be recognized.

Can there be a more-so double-edged resilient and frail existing things than the woman and the butterfly?

The original named given to a Butterfly was "Futterby," described almost inaccurate in the old English description, as a butterfly's stark colors, darling flight and becoming is of vast wonderment by everyone and everything that lays its  eyes upon it. Color brings dimension,offers an animate state, a zenith to serve as the platform in which to take flight. The woman, the reason humanity exist and why men have many times over waged wars over the rights of them, relentlessly evolves, socially and physiologically, lending to her stock, adding the buy-in to her heart an almost significant amount for the average man to ever accumulate; a greater difference; I've never figured a butterfly,its instincts notwithstanding,to ever feel the need for the natural world around it to validate its existence. It is against any laws of physics that may work against it, any form of modernism displacing its biome, its indication of Spring and a new year where all things bloom as beautifully as wayward flowers, the same bringing about repetition of evolution, events happening as anything inhabiting the earth, becoming disrupted by a new being not purposeful in its ability to usher in a pre-existing species into bondage, then soon after to an extinction not to the will and rights of its own self-destruction.

Will anyone ever know who this woman is? Will anyone ever inquire as to why no one knew before? Amy Judd only gives us the contours, replacing the physiognomy
with the variant visions we know nature never forfeits.

[Love is a Losing Game] on Amy Winehouse

An artist is worth only what they will leave in this life when they are gone; that may all there will ever be of their existence, or ever known, their works and contributions to the immortality of art.

  The sensation from Camden that was Amy Winehouse has left the echo of the artist legacy, still rich today as the it became the day of her demise 4 years ago. The Southgate-born vocalist inspired numerous artists and fans the world over, and still continue to do so today. Winehouse's 3 album career spanning 8 years, her last [Lioness, Hidden Treasures] released posthumously 5 months after her death, is a compilation of unreleased songs and demos collaborated with both Island Records and Winehouse's own [Lioness.]

  Winehouse was a tragic figure that lives a life based on purely existing. The infamy of her lifestyle which contributed ultimately to her demise was a source of controversy amongst journalist and media networks but all fell inane to the music, to her music, diverse and creative rhythmic spun from a suffering soul to cure another. Winehouse sacrifice herself not in the interest of self-destruction, but in the interest of the music; the medium chosen was one indulge rather battled, a source of infection left untreated, without attendance nor attention- as long as the music continued, as long as the people responded, the hits were recorded and the Grammy's acknowledged, her tragedy was one of her own, left to it on her own, one she perhaps needed if she was to face her inherent obligation to create.

  Winehouse was an intricate figure, a controversial one, but moreover, an artist who shape-shifted the lives and work of art the world over, leaving the light in the universe that a star does when it suffers a supernova explosion. If there was anything left unfinished in the life and career of Winehouse, it was meant to be that way inasmuch it is that way that she lived, an unfinished marvel.

-Dontrell Lovet't

[The Atypical Painter] on Egon Schiele

 Perhaps the most infamous figure to come from Austria, Egon Schiele refined expressionism like no other artists of the era. With the demand of raw sexuality, self-portraits, portraits and nude self-portraits, Schiele's allowed his desires to leak our of his mind and onto the canvases. At 15, Schiele lost his father to Syphilis, making him a ward of the state with a broken interest in academia. At 16 Schiele began to attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste but left due to dissatisfaction at the normality of his instructor and his contemporaries. By 1911, wanting to escape the claustropobic atmosphere of Vienna, Schiele moved to the small, unassuming Austrian town of Český Krumlov , where his recruitment of young teenage girls for nude paintings soon led to him being expelled from the township.

In April of 1912, in the town of  Neulengbach, Schiele was arrested for seducing a girl below the age of consent. Over a 100 drawings were seized by the police that were considered pornographic. Schiele was charged with exhibiting erotic drawings in a place accessible to children. Upon sentencing, the judge burned one of his paintings in court and after 21 days in custody during the trial, he was sentenced to a further 3 days. During that brief time of detention, Schiele completed a 12 drawing series of the discomfiture of life inside of jail.

In today's standard, Schiele would be undoubtedly labeled a pedophile or more accurately, an Ephebophile; he was an artist of impeccable dysfunction, irrepressible talent and compulsive expression. There are distortions, malformations, inexact beauty, derangement beyond repair, where functionality is suspended and calcified.

In the portrait of Dr. Erwin Graff, completed in 1910, the dark tint, the elongated hands of Dr. Graff are of note, as is the disassociation in his eyes. The portrait was said to have been completed in exchange for the doctor performing an abortion on one of Schiele's underage lovers. Symmetry is left to be, to fill out its own wayward margins, the intricacy that details from the portrait displays the true talent of the controversial artist, almost forgotten by modern times.

Schiele's faults made him a menace of the day but his art was the thing that could not be restrained. The triumph of the individual over art being a myth is found in the very biography of Schiele; his art demanded that he put himself on the line. The becoming of art always holds an infamous tale; when the personal life meets turmoil, art rises as a beautiful malignancy.

[Babaouo]an Unpublished, Unfilmed scenario by Salvador Dali

     

Salvador Dali was a surrealist painter from Catalonia, Spain. Best known for the "Persistence of Memory," Dali was known as one of the most influential painters of the 20th century. In 1929, he collaborated with the surrealist filmmaker and fellow Spanish artist Luis Bunuel on the masterpiece "Un Chien Andalou," Though contracted to do another film with Bunuel the following year "L'age D'or" due to personal disputes with Bunuel over a married mistress, Dali resigned from the film as a co-writer. The following is an excerpt from an unpublished film script first printed in 1958 by Gideon Dachmann in the hand-typed collection [Cinemages, Unfilmed Scenarios]

 


[Babaouo] Translated from the French by Jaume Miravitlles





Before the film begins and while the titles and credits are being shown, the tango "Renacimiento" is heard. This will be repeated from time to time during the film as a sort of leit-motiv.

 The corridor of a large hotel. The camera follows a bellhop, who appears to be in a great hurry, as he looks for a room. He finds it at the end of the corridor. He starts to knock, then stops in surprise as he hears coming from the room a veritable concert of strident, hysterical laughter, punctuated by the sound of violent shocks, as of very heavy objects being thrown against the walls and furniture. The laughter quickly becomes convulsive, giving the impression that about ten people are in the room.

(For laughter use Pathe sound effects record X 6285)


 After hesitating, the bellhop takes advantage of a moment when the noise subsides somewhat to knock politely on the door, but the laughter and blows are heard again with even greater violence. The bellhop, who should give the impression of continual impatience, begins to bang loudly on the door, but in vain.

When the noise dies down again, the voice of a woman is heard. Through bursts of laughter she articulates with difficulty, "Just a second, you can't come in now."


After an interval during which the laughter rises again and two even more violent blows are heard, the door opens slightly, just enough to reveal half of the figure of a woman in transparent negligee. Camera pans from rear view of the bellhop to the woman, who is extremely young and beautiful, with somewhat dishevelled hair and an open countenance. Her looks, in the artificial light of the room, form a sort of nebulous aura about her, an impression accentuated by the soft lens which is customarily used in such scenes. In an infinitely soft voice she asks, "What do you want?'

"I have an urgent letter for M. Babauo. to be delivered to him in person."

"I will tell him," answers the woman, and closes the door again. The noise and laughter, which have not ceased, now grow louder than ever. The door shakes under the blows it sustains, opens suddently as an object is hurled out, and shuts with a bang. The object is a decapitated chicken, which flutter down the corridor and finally collapses, its blood tracing its course across the floor. Close-up of the chicken in a sea of blood.

The bellhop who has paid no attention to the chicken, grows more impatient then ever.

The door of the room opens and M. Babaouo appears. He is extremely insignificant in appearance, yet not without a certain distinction. He is in his shirt sleeves and has just finished wiping his hands on an absorbent towel. He shakes off the straw with clings to his trousers and removes the bits which are tangled in his hair.

He takes the letter from the bellhop and without the slightest show of emotion beings to read it.

Text of letter; "All alone in the Chateau de Portugal for three days, I can't stand it any longer. Help. Your adored, Mathilde Ibanez."

Babaouo tosses the towel away, looks at the time, gets his jacket and hastily leaves the hotel. He is constantly followed by the camera.

As he crosses the hotel lobby, a grand piano falls down the elevator shaft from the third story, crashing loudly on the marble floor.

He has no sooner reached the street than he meets a friend with whom he has a long conversation, as follows: (1) about the transformation of certain rooms in a former "agricultural syndicate" in Figueras, a small town in Catalonia (Spain), in the Province of Gerona, three hours from Cerbere; (2) about the difficulties which has risen in connection with a certain book-binding firm, which are such that they agree the only solution is to rebind all or at least three-quarters of the catalogues in question; (3) he and his friend decide on a rendezvous, in turn dependent on the very precarious situation of certain of his associations.

During this conversation the two men, who are walking slowly and stopping often, are followed by the camera, after panning, the camera stops, at which point the men, still walking, come back into full view. A veritable deluge covers the street, and the two friends are seen walking in water up to their ankles. The torrent brings with all sorts of debris and dead animals (donkeys, cows, horses.) In order to advance, the two men are frequently obliged to kick these objects and animals out of their way, and to protect themselves from them are at times forced to climb up onto benches or embankments, which hinders their conversation and prolongs it. Finally they take leave of each other.

Babaouo then proceeds along with absolutely dry street and reaches a large square which is covered with cyclists slowly weaving in and out. Their eyes are bandaged and they each carry a heavy stone on their heads. The celebrated little white cape, very clean, hangs from their shoulders.

Babaouo, threading his way carefully among the cyclists, crosses the square.

He goes down a subway entrance, not falling to greet with a familiar wave of his hand a woman of mature years, in her chemise, who is loudly sawing wood at the top of the stairs.

The camera follows Baraouo, who is shown in a long sequence descending the stairs. A pair of tango dancers several times cross the stair in a single exalted glide.

Baraouo reaches the platforms, where a large crowd is waiting for the train, mingled with the members of an enormous orchestra which has assembled and it about to begin playing the Overture of "Tannheuser."

The music starts, the members of the orchestra ignoring the crowd, who walk among them and talk audibly, oblivious to the presence of the orchestra or the music.

The musicians show exemplary self-control in the face of the annoyance caused by the incessant coming and going of the indifferent crowd. The faces of the musicians and especially the conductor, as well as their slight gestures and expressions, reveal their perfect training and patience, a resignation, which is not without dignity and even pride. The people in the crowd as they move back and forth knock over the music stands, and the musicians, already forced by the continuous jostling to play wrong notes, restrain their understandable anger and meekly bend down, with bitter smiles on their lips, to pick up the sheets of paper soiled and crumpled by shoes of the crowd. With the utmost sincerity and professional discipline they begin to play again, taking up at the point in the score which their colleagues have managed to reach with scarcely less difficulty and annoyance than they themselves have endured. This spectacle is prolonged until the arrival of the subway. The crowd stampedes to get seats, running over the musicians, who are almost obliged to stop playing altogether. Some of them are even forced to clutch their instruments to their chests to protect them, while others look for their instruments to their chests to protect them, while others look for their under the feet of the crowd, which kicks them around like footballs. Others try desperately to continue playing, turning to the wall to protect themselves from the chaos. The conductor on his podium; towering above the disorder, grips his baton as though he were about to resume conducting at any moment; from time to time he impatiently raps the desk. Whenever the confusion and tumult become particularly unbearable, he shuts his eyes and bites his lower lip.

The train leaves and the musicians regroup almost instantly to begin playing where they left off. But before they are able to do so, at the very moment when the whole orchestra is waiting for the signal to start, another train pulls into the station and a new crowd, as heedless as the first, pours headlong out of the cars and swarms over the orchestra, creating the same confusion and deplorable incidents as before.

Baraouo is seen sitting in a subway car. He frequently consults his watch (soft). Among the passengers, at the far end of the car, a woman is standing, entirely nude. Next to Babaouo sits a mailman, his legs are crossed, his hands in his pockets. On his shoe, which does not reach the floor, are poised two "eggs on the plate"* (without the plate). At a sudden stop the eggs onto the floor. This scene lasts three minutes.

Babaouo gets out to change trains. He is seen for five minutes waiting for the next trains arrive. The only other persons on the platform are two or three women, each carrying a child in her arms. Babaouo sits down on a bench, gets up and walks around, sits down again, etc...Finally he notices a small legless cripple in a wheelchair advancing with difficulty between the rails and stretching out a hand for alms. Babaouo gives him a franc, but, as the beggar's hand is already holding two eggs on a plate (without a plate), the franc punctures one of the yokes. The beggar, closing his hand around the coin, squashes the two eggs. Beyond, in the darkness of the tunnel, several seals can be vaguely discerned.

Arrival of the subway trails. Babaouo gets on. He is shown for two minutes traveling on the train.

Babaouo comes out of the subway station and walks for several moments towards a taxi stand. He gives a driver the address of the Chateau de Portugal and gets into the taxi, checking to make sure that his revolver is loaded.

The taxi is seen driving through a rural landscape, when suddenly the driver stops and gets out of the car without a word. He puts on an Indian feather headdress (from this point the film is in color and approaches a large fir tree. He beings to climb the tree slowly and when he reaches the point where the trunk divides he sits down meekly, turning up the collar of his jacket as though to say "What do you want me to do?"

After a brief outburst of anger, Babaouo realizes that there is no time to lose, and seizing the wheel of the automobile, drives away.

Babaouo reaches the town where the Chateau de Portugal is situated. He is seen driving the taxi. The streets are absolutely deserted.

Babaouo stops the car, gets out, and goes into a cafe which is completely empty. The camera follows him.

He comes out of the cafe and walks through several long streets, all deserted. Large sheets hang from the house-fronts as though deposited there by a strong wind, which picks them up and sends them whirling down the street again. The tango "Renacimiento" is heard faintly, Babaouo penetrates farther and father into the city, which appears to be immense. His footsteps ring loudly on the pavement. Dusk is beginning to fall. Babaouo hastens his steps, turning frequently to look around or behind him. His face, which expresses growing anxiety, is covered with sweat. He finds himself once again in front of a large cafe, which he enters. He looks intently, one by one, at the hundreds of absolutely deserted tables and suddenly emits a piercing cry of terror. Covering his face with a convulsive gesture, he rushes toward the door. It becomes apparent that his fear is caused by the discovery he has made on one of the tables of a coffee cup containing a neatly folded napkin. When he uncovers his face, he sees in the window across the street the upper part of the body of a standing woman, her naked, beautiful arm hanging in an attitude of fatigue, moving slightly. With a gesture of relief Babaouo goes toward the window, but as he approaches it he seems again to be frozen with fear. After a long hesitation, he is seen rushing into the house, and almost immediately comes out again in the same attitude in which he was seen at the cafe, his face in his hands, uttering a cry of terror. The tango "Renacimiento" fades out and the lights grow noticeably dimmer.

Babaouo, followed by the camera, now proceeds along a street almost entirely covered with flowers. Seeking to avoid treading on them, he hugs the wall, for the roses grow more abundantly in the middle than along the sides. At a crossing he has a choice of two streets. One is a continuation of the rose-covered street, the other is without flowers. In spite of himself, he takes the street covered with roses, which leads to the open door of a large theatre.

He climbs to the fourth floor of the theatre following the roses, which are strewn along the stairs. From a window on the fourth floor Babaouo contemplates the panorama of the city with its deserted streets. The sheets blown along the streets by the wind are again seen; Babaouo, his eyes wide with terror, draws back, biting his hands. He backs into the door one of the boxes, which gives way under the impact so that he falls into the box.

When he picks himself up he sees that the theatre is empty. In the center of the dimly-lighted stage he sees a violinist literally transfixed in the impassioned attitude of a virtuoso, balancing on his head a wardrobe of medium height out of whose open doors and drawers linen is tumbling in tumultous disorder. The violinist in his fanatic pose should be balancing his entire body on one legs; the cuff of his other trouser-leg should be carefully rolled up, the bare foot plunged into a plate of milk.

Brusquely Babaouo looks at his watch (soft), rushes headlong back down the stairs, and goes out into the city. From the outskirts he begins to discern the Chateau de Portugal, which should be of as nondescript an appearance as possible, but enormous.

As Babaouo approaches the Chateau a rhythmic sound is heard which suggests some monstrous, exhausted breathing. It grows louder.

Coming near and nearer, the sound is deafening, terrible and Babaouo is assailed by fright. Covered with sweat, advancing in almost total darkness, he reaches the end of a long, high retaining wall.

Huge waves are breaking on a pebbly beach which has been hidden by the wall. The sound that suggested anguished breathing is produced by these waves. It diminishes gradually as Babaouo moves away from the water on a road which is seen to lead to the Chateau de Portugal.

Babaouo reaches the gate of the Chateau which is adorned on either side by a work of sculpture placed symmetrically, each representing a chicken with its head cut off. Inside the garden gate, on a lawn, a bed fifty feet long is seen, on which is lying a cypress almost as long as the bed. In the background, the Chateau; through its half-open main door a coffin is silently passing.

Babaouo hastily crosses the garden and enters the chateau.

Mathilde, a very beautiful and distinguished woman, throws herself into the arms of Babaouo, who consoles her and assures her that she is no longer alone, that he is with her. Then he turns toward a room the entrance to which is covered by a large curtain. But Mathilde, with a supremely tragic gesture, throws herself in front of him to prevent him from entering.

Babaouo, shaking Mathilde, forces his way into the room.

On the bed, something considerably larger than a corpse is lying under a white sheet. Babaouo tries to draw back the sheet to see what is underneath but Mathilde stops him with a coquettish laugh, saying "You musn't do that. It's too horrible. It's been there for six days." Babaouo, won over by Mathilde's coaxing tone, gives in to her with an affectionate smile.

Mathilde informs him that her mother is probably arriving, as well as several friends who, she hopes, have been notified. In any case, in the likelihood that no other people will come tonight, it would be best for him to take off his clothes and make himself comfortable.

Babaouo and Mathilde go back into the other room and begin to undress. Mathilde puts on a luxurious pair of pyjames. Suddenly a handerkerchief falls from a dresser onto a black armchair, and Mathilde, uttering a piercing cry, almost faints.

Before Babaouo has time to take care of her, someone is heard running mechanically in the neighboring room where the object under the sheet is lying.

Mathilde and Babaouo runs toward the room, and at the same time an aged woman with white hair appears from behind the curtain. She throws herself into Babaouo's arms, crying horribly. It is Mathilde's mother, who has just arrived.

At this point a group of friends enters, men and women dressed in evening clothes, who crowd around the old woman lying almost unconscious in the armchair. Some of them seem alarmed, others perfectly calm and indifferent. One of them starts the phonograph and several couples begin to dance.

The old woman, her head resting on the chest of the kneeling Babaouo, recovers her senses and says in a plaintive tone "I want to see him just once more." She seems to be about to go into the room where the strange object is lying.

Mathilde and Babaouo rush toward the room, and at the same time an aged women with white hair appears from behind the curtain. She throws herself into Babaouo's arms, crying horribly. It is Mathilde's mother, who has just arrived.

At this point a group of friends enters, men and women dressed in evening clothes, who crowd around the old woman lying almost unconscious in the armchair. Some of them seem alarmed, others perfectly calm and indifferent. One of them starts the phonograph and several couples begin to dance.

The old woman, her head resting on the chest of the kneeling Babaouo, recovers her senses and says in a plaintive tone "I want to see him just once more." She seems to be about to go into the room where the strange object is lying.

Babaouo, his eyes filled with tears, tries to dissuade her, but Mathilde, with a roguish wink, advises him to let her pass if he wants to see something amusing. Going ahead of him, she runs into the mortuary chamber with a young man who has been embracing her in a corner a few minutes earlier.

Babaouo, whose tears have been succeeded  by an indulgent and mocking smile, gives in to the old woman's pleas, and leading her gently toward the room, he parts the curtain himself.

Mathilde and the young man are seen swinging the object, one by the head, the other by the feet. When it has gained enough momentum they throw it at the old woman, who utters a mournful cry and sinks to the floor under its weight.

The ensuing confusion is indescribable. All of the guests are present, running hither and thither. Two individuals seize the object and throw it at a group of guests who are trying to flee. This act, which adds enormously to the general excitement, seems to have a contagious effect and is repeated several times.

When the confusion reaches its height, Mathilde and Babaouo, taking advantage of the wild disorder that reigns in the Chateau, take flight in a car driven by Babaouo.

Along the road patrols of communist soldiers pass at regular intervals.

The car now crosses an immense public square which is absolutely deserted. The sound of machine-gun fire is intermittently heard. On a small street leading downward from the main road is seen an enormous bus, five times life-size, filled with water, on which can be seen a little boat. In the boat three tiny legless Japanese singers with white eyes are giving a sensual rendition of the rumba "The Peanut Vendor." Babaouo stops to look at them.

The singers, embarrassed at being observed, burst out laughing, putting their hands to their faces, and in spite of their efforts they are utterly unable to go on with their song.

After a friendly wave and smile from Mathilde, Babaouo, very pleased with himself, starts up the car again.

The car is now seen going down a hill boarded by a thick forest.

Suddenly, without warning, Mathilde throws herself at Babaouo and ferociously buries her teeth in his neck.

Babaouo lets go of the wheel. The car crashes into a tree.

The car is completely smashed. Mathilde, thrown a distance of ten feet, is inert. Babaouo pulls himself with difficulty from under the wreck. He rubs his eyes. He is blind; He feels about him with his hands, veinly calling from Mathilde.

"Renacimiento" faintly is background.

Babaouo crawls on hands and knees, feeling trembling for the body of Mathilde.

Finally he comes upon a shoe ten feet away from her, which he supposes is still on her foot.

Sure that he has found Mathilde, he feels farther, and coming  upon a tire which has been out in half, he thinks it is her leg. Hardly daring to touch Mathilde's body with his hands, trembling at the thought of feeling her head and discovering, as he fears, that she is not breathing, he caresses a cushion which he mistakes for her stomach and breasts.

Then he grasps what he thinks is her head with its hair; but it is only the stuffing coming out in handfuls from a torn cushion in the middle of which are burning coals.

Overcome with emotion, Babaouo draws towards his lips the object he believes to be Mathilde's head, passionately uttering her name. Through his tears he murmurs all the endearing words he knows. "You are alive,' he says "I feel the warmth of your body." Suddenly with all this strength he clasps to himself the coals of the cushion, which is beginning to catch fire.

Horribly burned, he throws away the cushion, which is now all aflame and cries "Merde!"