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Recently in Salon People

Nothing Personal
No pierced nostril for Barbie
Vavavoomski doll keeps her tattoos, blows off nose ring; Sen. Inhofe's staff's got a woody for porn; tools of the sex trade tax deductible in New Zealand.
By Amy Reiter
[06/16/99]

Column
Looking for life in all the wrong places
Thanks to snorefests like the Umbilical Brothers' "Thwack," comedy is deader than Lester Bangs -- and someone is not amused.
By Cintra Wilson
[06/16/99]

People Feature
Camille Does the Movies: Program notes
Camille Paglia's notes for films shown at the National Film Theatre, June 1999 program, under the auspices of the British Film Institute.
By Camille Paglia
[06/16/99]

Nothing Personal
Attack of the giant Leach!
Ohmygawd! He's baaaack! Buffoonish Brit boor bathes bare babe in gooey chocolate; Steve Forbes hates money; Plus: Cardinal Sin says condoms are for animals -- Arf!
By Amy Reiter
[06/15/99]

Brilliant Careers
Take this longing from my tongue
With his songs of love and God and unspeakable yearning, Leonard Cohen occupies his own place in the musical cosmos.
By Sean Elder
[06/15/99]

Complete archives for People

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In my first free hours, I rush over to the British Museum to revisit the Parthenon's pilfered Elgin Marbles, thronged in their majestic shrine by pilgrims from all over the world. The austere Rosetta Stone, newly restored, is even more mobbed, with blinding flashes going off on all sides.

I introduce the evening screening of "All About Eve" (1950), which I celebrate as the dazzling zenith of old-style Hollywood craftsmanship in moviemaking. Its theme of the star as bitch goddess, I say, helped form my general theory of the artist's amoral will-to-power. But I cannot stay for Jean Cocteau's "Orphée" (1949), since I must dash off with an NFT contingent to St. Pancras Station for our trip to the north of England. Until our departure, I pace up and down the platform admiring the central vault's soaring Victorian ironwork.

On the train, the NFT party unpack a delicious picnic supper with bottles of choice red wine, which we quaff as the landscape flies by. We discuss the summer's upcoming total eclipse (the first in England since 1928) and then the lethal cruelties of high school proms -- an exclusively American social phenomenon, I'm surprised to learn, that the rest of the world knows about only through films (such as "Carrie").

We pass a mammoth nuclear plant with nine cheek-by-jowl cooling towers ("What if they all melt down at once?" I ask), and we launch into a discussion of Jane Fonda in "The China Syndrome." A huge rainbow, as in a Turner painting, appears in the heavy, gray-black sky near Leicester. I'm fascinated by a line of parked trucks with big attached signs, "Gritting in Progress" -- which I long to snatch for the wall of my office in Philadelphia. These are "grit lorries," I'm told -- sanding trucks for winter roads.

As we wind our way by taxi to our charming bed and breakfast in Sheffield, I scrutinize the old buildings from the city's manufacturing past and am startled to see "HINDU TEMPLE" in big orange block letters on a decrepit brick factory. Oddly, a lady's black, strappy high-heeled shoe sits abandoned in the middle of the highway in front. Here as elsewhere in the north, I am struck by the ubiquity of McDonald's advertising posters (offering "Spicy McLamb" and "McChicken Korma Naan") and by the number of road signs pointing traffic toward the local "Crematorium" -- apparently a focus of civic thought.

Sat., June 5 As we consume our lavish English breakfast, our vivacious chatelaine advises us to visit nearby Hardwick Hall, a Tudor stately mansion in the rolling Derbyshire hills. When we reach it by rental car, we are flabbergasted by the gaping ruin of the unrestored old hall, with its steep stone staircases and three stories of ornate fireplaces exposed to the open air. It's like an eerie Caspar David Friedrich painting under a sunny Constable sky.

This was the birthplace of the formidable Bess of Hardwick, a friend of Elizabeth I and a Hatshepsut-like political instigator who married four times and got richer and richer until she built the massive pile of new Hardwick Hall across the grounds. We dash over to Chatsworth, her family's more famous estate with its Baroque cascade and Victorian primeval "rockery," but return for tea in the cavernous Hardwick kitchen, with its gleaming array of period copper cookware. Touring the galleries, I am agog at the quality of historical portraiture, particularly relating to Mary, Queen of Scots (Bess of Hardwick's marital rival, genteelly imprisoned for 18 years at Chatsworth), whose parents' chic images hover like delicate blond ghosts.

Now we adjourn to the Sheffield theater for the NFT-sponsored screening of Ingmar Bergman's "Persona" (1966), a film that devastated me when I saw it at its American release in 1967 and that I paid homage to in the title of my doctoral dissertation and later book, "Sexual Personae." Although I have repeatedly studied it in video and in the classroom (via a worn print owned by my university), I have not seen it on a big screen since 1973, when I had it brought to Bennington College for a women's film festival that I organized.

The mood in the theater is hushed and thoughtful. When I begin my lecture, after the short interval, I acutely feel how close art is to religion. What greater function can a critic hope for than to introduce so oblique a masterpiece to a general audience? Afterward, the NFT team adjourns to a nearby Indian restaurant, where I feast on Lamb Madras with the two silver cans containing the five reels of "Persona" next to my feet. Overnight, the cans stay with me in my room. I feel awed and abashed, like a serf bunking with royalty on the Crusades.

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