| SCANDAL IN BOHEMIA : William A Kirkley's 'Excavating Taylor Mead' [7/10] |
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 My philosophy is from Nietzsche: minimum of effort and maximum of error. It's gotten me practically nowhere. - Taylor Mead Pioneer performance-artist; groundbreaking underground movie 'star'; Andy Warhol muse/collaborator; award-laden stage actor; published poet; beloved Manhattan eccentric/barfly/raconteur; survivor: Taylor Mead (b.1925) has been all these things and more. Bitchy, endearing, acerbic, anecdotal and jaw-droppingly indiscreet (Montgomery Clift fans beware), Mead is very much one of a kind: especially so since the demise of fellow Manhattan-resident Quentin Crisp, whose famously lax house-keeping habits seem the acme of Martha-Stewart-esque purity alongside Mead's chaotic domestic "arrangements". Seemingly granted access to all areas of Mead's life - including his nightly perambulations around the bars and cafes of Greenwich Village, and his regular 4am feeding of the area's stray-cat population - Kirkley at several points bravely shoehorns his camera into the minuscule one-room apartment on downtown Ludlow Street that's been his subject's residence/lair/storeroom for the past twenty-odd years (with the emphasis on the odd). Mead 'lives alone' only in the sense that he doesn't cohabit with another person - but he certainly doesn't want for company: he has several pampered felines to take care of - not to mention hundreds, perhaps thousands of cockroaches and other assorted creepy-crawlies who seem perfectly able to fend for themselves (and stir memories of the BBC's Life of Grime programmes). Excavating Taylor Mead - the (saucy) title in part a gag on the way Mead has become 'buried alive' by his own paraphernalia - covers a period in 2002/3 when the Ludlow Street pad is threatened by an unsympathetic landlord and the dreaded public health department. For a while it looks like Mead might have to seek alternative lodgings - but his plight rapidly becomes a cause celebre among the Manhattan demi-monde, emblematic of the way the character and charm of old Noo Yawk is being swept away by the Trump/Giuliani/Bloomberg wave of gentrification and rocketing property values. Serendipitously, one of Mead's periodic spells in the limelight turns out to be just around the corner: long-time admirer Jim Jarmusch casts him in Champagne, the last-and-best segment of his shorts-compendium Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) And needless to say Mead proceeds to steal the show not only in the film itself but also at the glitzy Manhattan premiere, posing for photographs alongside his 'co-star', Wu Tang Clan wizard The RZA. Such exposure is, we soon realise, no more than Mead deserves: Kirkley and his assembled expert witnesses explain (in disappointingly conventional talking-head fashion) just how central he was to the nascent underground American movie-making scene of the late ‘50s and early ‘60s: several critics have compared his antics in seminal titles such as The Flower Thief and Lemon Hearts to the finest physical comedy of Chaplin and Keaton. A genuine polymath - and also a genuine dilettante and a bona fide bohemian - Mead's haphazard literary exploits make him a rare link between the Beat Generation (with whom he was so closely acquainted in San Francisco that he calls himself 'the last of the Beats') and radical visual experimentalists like Ron Rice, Jack Smith and Warhol. Biographical documentaries in which the subject takes part tend to stand or fall on whether or not said subject is sufficiently good company to maintain our interest/sympathy over the course of feature length. And this means Kirkley is in luck - and how. On the brink of his ninth decade, born-performer Mead (born 1925) has on this evidence - and despite numerous debilitating drug-fuelled escapades and physical mishaps over the years - lost little of his sparkle, opinionated recall or irrepressible joie de vivre. Equally at home on the big screen or small, Excavating Taylor Mead is an unapologetic fan-letter, as rough-edged and wayward as one of Mead's own 'creations'. The ramshackle feel may or may not be intentional - but the film makes for an engaging, informative watch. The only real negative - and it is quite a problem - is Kirkley's approach to music: the score (credited to Buzzy James) is near-incessant and way too loud. Like Mead's colony of uninvited, entomological house-guests, this dialogue-drowning quasi-muzak cries out for a savage dosing of Raid. Neil Young 30th March, 2006 (rewrite - see below) EXCAVATING TAYLOR MEAD : [7/10] : USA 2005 : William A KIRKLEY : 106 mins (timed) seen at Pictureville cinema, NMPFT, Bradford, (UK), 18th March 2006 - public show - Bradford Film Festival (CineFile section) click HERE for other films reviewed at Bradford 2006 originally seen and reviewed from VHS, January 2006 |
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