We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

Exhibition alert! The Animazing Gallery in New York will debut the largest exhibition and sale of original Maurice Sendak illustrations and etchings on October 1st. How many? More than 200––plus a limited edition sculpture based on Where the Wild Things Are.

The show happens to coincide with much-lauded Sendak retrospectives at the Morgan Library & Museum in NYC and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, completing a nice trio of Sendak celebrations. Good stuff all around.

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As if being an artistic genius weren’t enough, Maurice Sendak is an endlessly fascinating man. His candid, acerbic wit is underscored by a generous intimacy. The shocking jokes spilling out of his mouth come off as invitations to share in a special rapport. And as sharp as his fangs seem to be, most of his jabs are directed inward in hopelessly self-deprecating dismissals. When Sendak gets serious, it’s like listening to a wise sage. He’s verbose yet understated, naturally paring even his conversational speech down into economically worded insights.

Tell Them Anything You Want is Lance Bangs and Spike’s compelling personal document of Sendak’s life during the five years of Where the Wild Things Are’s production. The film airs October 14th on HBO. A special advanced screening will be held at Cinefamily in Los Angeles, this Wednesday, September 30th. Expect the unexpected!

A Tribute To Maurice Sendak

In 1963, with just 10 short sentences, a dark and dreamy emotional landscape of hairy monsters and tropical jungles, and one wannabe feral child, Maurice Sendak created one of the most critically acclaimed and popular childrens’ books of all time– “Where the Wild Things Are”. In this loving tribute to everyone’s first favorite author, the Cinefamily will show original animated adaptations (on 16mm!) of “Where the Wild Things Are” and “In the Night Kitchen”, along with new short films made by Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze while the new live action adaptation of “Wild Things…” was in production. Jonze had been friends with Maurice Sendak for more than five years before he began working on his feature film, and these new short films capture a sometimes melancholy but always wickedly funny Sendak as he reflects on his Depression-era childhood in the Brooklyn shtetl, a joyous day at the World’s Fair, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, his books “In The Night Kitchen” and “Higgledy Piggledy Pop!”, his two beloved Hermans (Melville, and his German shepherd namesake), and a long-buried secret. Lance Bangs, co-director of Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak will be in attendance!

Tickets - $12

It’s hard to imagine the unease that adults felt about Where the Wild Things Are upon its release. While so much was changing across the spectrum of society in 1963, how could a now-beloved children’s book ruffle so many feathers? To understand the climate of that time, we must consider the popular children’s books that preceded Sendak’s revolutionary work.

“Significantly there were fewer child protagonists than child surrogates in the forms of animals and mechanical personalities,” wrote children’s librarian and scholar Sheila Egoff in 1981. “But when children did appear, there was no question as to the tone of security, affection, and familial comfort that surrounded them.” The mere fact that Max was a mischievous child, rather than a monkey or a duck, represented a subtle break with the prevailing order. Egoff paints us a picture in her fascinating collection of writings, Thursday’s Child:

The picture books of the first two-thirds of this century reveal a single vision of a secure childhood and an abiding social order. So sure did the society of the time feel about its values– safe, placid, and hopefully enriching– that creators of books for very young children could depict them implicity rather than explicitly. The picture books show a gentle control, usually played out with animals as exemplars. H. A. Rey’s monkey, Curious George (1941) ends up in a zoo because of his pranks, but it is pictured as a pleasant, happy playground where George can indulge in his monkeyshines. Marjorie Flack’s duck Ping in The Story about Ping (1933) receives a gentle spank on his tail for being late. Both animals have an order to return to after their escapades: George to “the man in the yellow hat” and Pink to “the wise one-eyed boat.” The concept of order in Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline (1939)–”twelve little girls in two straight lines”–gives a feeling of reassurance and security rather than regimentation.

Above all, children were to be protected, and writers and illustrators, however different their themes and styles, were unanimous on this point. That these protectors were sincere is unquestionable, but, even more importantly, their views were reinforced by the adult world in general. This consensus was shattered in 1963 with the appearance of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and it would appear today that not “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” could restore that phallanxed viewpoint.

While the illustrations disturbed those adults who saw the “Wild Things” as ferociously threatening rather than humorously subservient to Max’s will, the extreme reaction to Sendak’s work intimated that there was more at stake than a matter of interpretation of the pictures. As it turned out, this as yet unformulated anxiety was justified. Sendak’s underlying theme that a child has unconscious needs, frustrations, and fears unsettled society’s hitherto conceived ideals of early childhood and the book itself broke the stereotypic mold that had held for almost a hundred years.

What made Sendak an innovator was that he expressed this catharsis for the preschool children through their own medium, the picture book. He also caught, very early and creatively, a general trend of society which was to rise to the fore over the next two decades: an acceptance that the very young child matures more by sharing in the real and emotional world around it than by being protected from it.

The Wild Things is a book by Dave Eggers adapted from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are and based on the screenplay by Eggers and Spike. Got that? Cool.

In typical McSweeney’s fashion, The Wild Things is as much a tactile and visual experience as a literary one. A title silhouette of wolf-suited Max against a burgundy jungle background gives the volume a treasure-box feel, like something you might store beneath your pillow between chapters.

The novel is a cross between a children’s book and a book for adults, and the idea of a novelization originally belonged to Sendak, who suggested it to Eggers. Fittingly, the book is a pleasure to read: tender, colorful, and as richly imagined a work as you’d expect from Eggers. Or Sendak. Or––in this case, in some ways––both!

Adapting a beloved ballet into a children’s film is tricky business. Cinematically emulating a child’s wonder at the grandiosity of the theater, especially the jaw-dropping spectacle of The Nutcracker, is almost a futile pursuit, even for a true blue auteur of the genre like Caroll Ballard. The director responsible for The Black Stallion, Fly Away Home, and 2005’s criminally underseen Duma could easily have made a rare misstep with Nutcracker: The Motion Picture. Luckily, however, Ballard had oodles of help from Maurice Sendak.

Sendak’s production design, costumes, and general creative input on the film provide the perfect layer of gritty, craggy humor to a tale that traverses through a dichtomy of dark and light, but often threatens to veer into the saccharine. The dazzling strangeness of Sendak’s subtly sinister influence more than makes up for the unavoidable inadequacies of this ballet-to-film crossover. Nutcracker: The Motion Picture is entirely salvaged by Sendak’s unique ability to immerse us in his breathing, pulsating aesthetic, slicing through the preciousness with a twisted genius almost on par with Herr Drosselmeyer himself.

Watch the full movie here:

The bottom of this vintage Sendak poster got cut off by my scanner, but it says:

READING IS FUN!
International Year of the Child 1979

(Symbiosis, a biology-inspired dance performed by members of Pilobolus at the 2005 TED Conference.)

Veteran experimental dance troupe Pilobolus has performed everywhere from Sesame Street in the 1970s to the 2007 Academy Awards, where they contorted their bodies into a bunch of giant silhouettes symbolizing Little Miss Sunshine and Snakes on a Plane. Discarding the normal rules of dance and incorporating mind-boggling acrobatics into a built-from-scratch physical language, Pilobolus has redefined modern dance several times over.

In 1999 the dance troupe teamed up with a pair of unlikely collaborators: Maurice Sendak and opera director Arthur Yorinks. It was the first time Pilobolus had allowed outsiders to contribute to their unique process, and the result was a dark and masterful rumination on the Holocaust called A Selection. While the end result may have been a brilliant success, the journey to that point was awkward and contentious, to say the least. Mirra Bank’s 2002 documentary Last Dance provides an intimate look at the backstage drama, the dance’s evolution, and Sendak’s imagination at work.

While the dancers freely improvise in early meetings, we see Sendak sketching figures and jotting down wild, poetic interpretations of bizarre contortions, constructing a theater piece based around a living Rorschach test. Fusing the dancers’ fluid instincts with abstract narrative elements culled from Brundibar (the Czech opera that Sendak later adapted into a picture book with Tony Kushner) and the real life drama of Theresienstadt, Sendak imprints a sinister, melancholy mood into the piece– but not without his signature pension for playfulness. Watching A Selection come to life is a thrilling and rare chance to see the birth of a collaborative artwork, even for someone (like myself) completely unversed in the world of dance.

Highlights from Last Dance include Sendak’s brilliant costume designs and decorations, the constant presence of an exceptionally peculiar dance critic, and a villainous choreographer/Gallagher-doppelganger’s futile attempts to wrest control from Sendak by complaining that the author was making the dance “too narrative.”

With a series of nightmarish polaroids, Lucas Samaras took the 1970s art world by storm. His ugly addiction to the deepest crevices of his own body became an unexpected sensation, fueled by the hazy allure of his distorted self-portraits and a series of distrurbingly glib interviews with himself. Maurice Sendak’s late partner, psychoanylist Dr. Eugene Glynn, described the artist thusly in a 1971 article:

Samaras, self-fascinated, scarcely notices society at all. He is very aware that he doesn’t like peeople. They are too warm, too pressing, too smelly. “The needs of other people” is what frightens him. He can’t think about females “in terms other than extreme anger;” he can’t think about males “in terms other than extreme anger.” He likes apricots, flowers, fireflies, he likes best to stay alone in his apartment “existing alongside my utensils, furniture, materials, surfaces, spaces with an erotic freshness.”

Samaras’ persona is a caricature of misanthropy. Through his works and interviews, he presents himself as a devilish trickster whose narcissism knows no bounds. The repulsive nature of Samaras’ character is only exceeded by the aching talent underlying his depravity. The fragile enigma of his intensely personal work almost illicits sympathy, or at least curiosity. Like Glynn, we’re tempted– beckoned– to analyze the artist and his work, poring through recurring motifs: glass, teeth, mirrors, cannibalism, materialism, the body, the place where individuals end and society begins.

Still active in the art world at 76, Samaras’ latest exhibit is currently on display at the Venice Biennale. Samaras has built a dominating sculpture of endlessly mirrored reflections, surrounded by dozens of video monitors. A series of close ups fill the screens– reaction shots of friends like Jasper Johns and Chuck Close being treated to footage of the artist getting naked in his studio. Awkward!

A few weeks ago we featured the splendid Vanessa Dualib on We Love You So. As if she weren’t already awesome enough, Vanessa recently pulled this brilliant recreation out of her hat. Among other materials deployed in the image are mango, kiwi, celery, a moon made of lemon and, get ready, a wolf suit made of mozzarella cheese.

Yowza!

We’ve written before about Terrible Yellow Eyes , a delightful tribute site dedicated to interpreting the art of Maurice Sendak and Where the Wild Things Are. If you haven’t been there already it’s worth the time simply to scope the multitude of contemporary variations on the beloved monsters. As an added bonus from Sept. 19 – Oct. 6th the Terrible Yellow Eyes crew will be hosting a group exhibition at the Gallery Nucleus. We will probably have more to say about this as it draws closer, but just wanted to give you a head’s up.