Billboard, corner of Wilshire and Fairfax, advertising the LACMA exhibition of photography by Philip-Lorca diCorcia now through September 14th 2008.  This image of "Todd," from the series the artist made in the early 90s of male hustlers he met on Santa Monica Boulevard, in L.A.

Part Two.  Sacred and Profane?

A friend of mine, many years ago, posed for the artist Don Bachardy.  Although uncomfortable whenever I see my friends naked, I could not help admiring a reproduction of one of the finished studies.  I think the artist successfully captured my friend's likeness, at least insofar as he must have looked when he was a very handsome and very young man.  Parts of him were lovingly rendered in rather fine detail.  "You look..." I paused, searching for the right word.

"Bored," my friend said, completing the thought for me.  "People say I look tortured and full of anguish and all that.  But trust me, I was bored.  Plus Chris hung around the studio the whole time I was there."

"Isherwood was there?" I asked.  I shivered as I contemplated how much less than six degrees (and how many years) separated me from a writer I had long admired.  My friend nodded.  

"Sure," he said.  "You don't think he was going to leave us out there by ourselves, do you."

I had no idea, actually, but I felt a pang of identification with the famous writer as I thought of what might have been Isherwood's angst, even uncertainty perhaps, peeking in on his (much) younger lover with his young (naked) model.  After all, a thirty years difference existed between Isherwood and Bachardy.  And as I've grown older I have not become immune to the charms of youth, and so I confess I was imagining Isherwood (and myself) in the role of the Marschallin (played by Schwartzkopf) in Der Rosenkavalier.  

Of course I can't be certain whether Isherwood experienced anything remotely like what I might have felt in the same circumstances, and my friend (who is the soul of discretion) declined to speculate with me and was not forthcoming in details.  Which I confess I find a little disappointing.  I am not a sex tourist; there is more to my interest in the lives of celebrities than what they do or did in bed.  Unless they've made a point of drawing attention to it themselves, in which case I don't feel my curiousity is entirely prurient.  In any case, my experience has taught me that, generally speaking, most old friends, artists' models, kept boys, courtesans and second wives are all notoriously flattering in their accounts of their intimate history with the rich and the famous.  If they've been treated well.  

The ones to look out for, as you are doubtless aware, are the young and the poor.  The young because they'll outlive you and determine your posthumous fame, and the poor because they probably won't get to have their say, being disenfranchised and all, but God help you if they do ever find a voice.  I was thinking this just the other day while visiting the exhibition of Philip-Lorca diCorcia's work at LACMA.  These hustlers and pole dancers who are the subjects of many of his photographs are mute, but in their silence their faces are the faces of the young and the poor and in that way they manage to tell us something -- about our world, and about what it's like to get by in it, what you have to do to survive, what it costs.  In so doing they say something about all of us, really. 

None of which, however, is what I wanted to say about Isherwood, or about divine consciousness and Love and the Sacred versus the Profane and what you or I are doing in this world or in any other world.  My own guru is coming to town this week.  Somehow because of that, I was so sure I would have something meaningful to say --something important about Art and Faith and Desire, and possibly something about how the older generation has a responsibility to the younger, a duty that goes way beyond lust or envy or projected regrets or sanctimonious wisdom by virtue (specious reasoning) of being older.  "Suffer the little children," is what Jesus said.  "We are all God's kids," another wise man has explained, and I for one hope so.  Because it is so easy to forget and objectify youth.  We all know how Desire drives the Internet (well, porn does).  But the Internet also gives a voice to young and old, rich and poor alike.  A cacophony of blogs and opinions and images and voices and truths and sex and lies and videotape.  Which I for one believe is a good thing.  A Pandora's Box, to be sure.  But released from that casket of noise and horrors, along with everything else -- let us not forget -- came Hope.

Part of the diCorcia exhibtion is a display of one thousand Polaroids the artist culled from his collection and arranged in a series of rows on three walls.  A thousand images, quickly taken, quickly thought about and not intended for posterity but created as a preliminary gesture toward a later and more final, studied composition, a trial shot ... the overall effect is somewhat overwhelming.  And yet what the eye does is seek a pattern, and a repetition and a rhythm -- your eye searches out meaning.  Which is what I think Hope is, and we can't help it.  We look in the chaos of color and shape and composition, in the details, in the arrangement, in the random and not-so-random, in the eyes of strangers and children and in the clouds and in the shadows, for what is true.  We look for the meaning.  The thinking that we'll find it is the point of it all.  The hope comes in the seeking.