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The next title card rises with clean, Euro-smooth sans serif: Christmas With My Sister.
We are in a car driving though foothills of pine, heavy with snow. Music jangles from the car radio. Judging by the cracked beige interior and the smudged stitching of the vinyl seats, we’re in a Volvo-like station wagon on its 200,000 mile.
It looks cold outside, the gauzy dead of winter.
Carson is driving. He drives like an old man, hands at 10 and 2. Sasha's voice behind the camera makes up a song. “We’re going to a party .... “
Carson nods carefully. She asks, “Tell us about it.”
Carson blinks, cautiously choosing a moment to swing his attention from the road to the camera. “I guess they hold these ever year. It’s pagan. In tone.”
“With bonfires.”
Carson shrugs, tries to nod. He isn't really sure.
“What’s your sister like?” Keeping a two handed grip on the wheel, he shrugs his elbows.
“I haven’t seen her in years.”
With intense concentration, he slowly releases the wheel with his right hand and starts calmly fishing in his jacket for something. Out comes a sleek red palm-sized camera. He points it to us like a badge.
And then we’re looking at Sasha with her camera in the passenger seat. Because Carson is focussed more on the road than his camera, Sasha is in accidental Dutch angle. She has on a bright blue and white striped, hand-knit ski cap with Pippi Longstocking drawstrings dangling. They film each other. Soon her camera pans right, straight down a rippling two lane road which, with compression and the whiteness of plowed snow vibrates with a hovering blue cast. You have to guess where we are – Montana? Michigan? Maine? There are no houses around.
“I hope I like her.” She turns the camera back to Carson. “I hope I don’t feel like I’m visiting the goddess Kali.”
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| Embroidery © by Anne Aube |
“That’s fine. I just don’t want to spend Christmas vacation in constant awe.”
Carson visibly draws a breath, darts his gaze perilously to the dashboard, then exhales. Squirms a bit in his seat. You can tell he hates driving. Or is just plain nervous about visiting the sister.
We're outside the car on the snow, at first watching the road. The formerly copper Volvo scoots past. And then slowly, a bit mysteriously, we zoom in on a field across the road that bottoms out to a flat, frozen white, lake disk. In the center of which rises a petite island with three bristling trees sprouting crookedly and a tall straight pole, unconnected to utility lines or anything else, a branchless single pole stuck among the trees. Apparently the zoom's subject.
Cut again, outside the car, in snow near a black, cleared driveway. You can see Carson's track marks in the snow. With practiced speed, the car drives into frame and turns up the driveway.
And then a quick wipe to a delighted sister, arms wide, walking out of the house, each step a swaying organic combination of mother and lover. Shannon’s beaming, all grown up and glad to see her younger brother on her doorstep. You wonder if she was watching this scrupulous attention to filmmaking from her window or was told to wait just a minute and recreate her greeting. Still, another quick wipe of the camera reveals two children peeking out from the doorway, under a tall redbearded man in winter coveralls. Their house is sort of a single story lodge that looks hand-built, not prefab. In the yard nearby, a large stone disk, a sundial, stands shadowless.
“I think it’s been like seven years?” Shannon asks. She has dark eyes and an abashed, plum lipped smile. Carson, also a little embarrassed, nods. “Something like that.”
Later, a smudgy winter sundown over a lake, the same lake with the trees we saw earlier. From here, the pole looks like it's got a hood on top, like a needle's eye. Curious. With the crunching of snow underfoot, the camera turns completely around: there’s his sister’s home in the gloaming, lit inside like an ember.
A quick collage of eating and talking and the crack sounds of silverware on ceramic. Little hands grappling with bread and butter. Profile of Shannon leaning with her shoulders across the table, hands below, making a flamboyant point. Hefty, sweatered Ken, guardedly raising his eyes from his plate, either listening or scrutinizing Carson. A shy glance from nervous Sasha. A toothy, mashed food grin from one of the boys.
Then dinner plates clear, led by Ken. The table is an enormous slice of clear varnished oak with a black burl just off center. Shannon stays put, still wearing an apron over her white turtleneck. The children, who call Carson “Uncle Brother Carson” are sent away. She takes over much of the length of her side of the table. Carson sits around the corner, perpendicular to her, arms on the table, the eager interviewer.
“So which is it?" He asks. "Shannon or Tillie?”
A brief shiver of annoyance in Shannon gives way to charity: “Doesn’t matter. I’ll answer to Hey you.”
“Shannon,” adds Ken from the kitchen. The camera swings belatedly in his direction and rockily zooms in as he scrapes child-mashed scraps and ketchup into a little bucket. “She was Shannon when we met.”
“Whether I knew it or not,” she concedes. “Tillie is just a professional nom de guerre. Nom de photo,” Shannon offers, achieving a brisk, fully enunciated Parisian accent. A vocal curl amid her flat West Coast contralto. With help from inserts of photographs and clips, a scrapbook pulled out of a drawer, newspaper headlines and ambiguous reactions from Ken, Carson leads Shannon through a brief summation of her life so far.
Leaving home for a small rural college, she renames herself Tillie Harm, partly due to an impetuous affinity for indie queen Jennifer Tillie, and partly as a rock and roll warning to the quiet preciousness of a liberal arts campus. It doesn’t take long for her to realize she was just yelling in the woods. She quits school, heads to Boston with her new identity intact and almost magically becomes the growling front woman of The Meesels.
[a clip shows her striding a little ungainly in black high heel boots, black leotard and frilly pink bustier.]
For those unfamiliar, the Meesels careened around the style of bands like Hole and Babes in Toyland, a musical path that culminated years later with The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. I don't think the Meesels were ever better than any of them, although, in retrospect, they meet the requirements of a successful band: some celebrity, tours, videos, two albums and disintegration after four years. “We all hated each other," Shannon says. "It was a race to be the one who left first.”
(Side note: it's hard to find any Tillie Harm retrospective interviews anywhere. Granted he has built-in access, but Carson's interview of his sister is, for some of us, a total coup.)
First husband, Travis Rex, guitarist of Killholler, kisses her in a handheld wedding video. She leers drunkenly for the camera. They’re on an ocean beach somewhere far from family. Images and references to Travis disappear soon after. “He was boring and a jerk and the band sucked. I almost want those years back.”
Modeling, artistic and otherwise, turns from a lark into a career. We see books by photographers like Harris Lord and his updates on Vegas red leather banquette glamor and Willa Schoendorf with her women as plastic architecture series. But mostly there is Danton Khoudry who in retrospect seems to have invented the sooty dawn-of-industry look absurdly popular back then, with sawdust pallor, ruddy eyes, spindles and needles in the mouth, ears and eyebrows, flour dust halos, sweaty flat hair and torn cotton or canvas apparel. Tillie was his muse.
In fact, Shannon clarifies this, saying she was the one fascinated with spindles, pinions and needles and what she calls “the Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire look, with burn marks in billowy sleeves, grubby fingers and tears running down black powder. “Meant to be political and winding up tragically, depressingly hot and sexy,” she says. “Really, it's our ability to sexualize anything that separates us from other animals.”Any way, after the success of Mill/Child, Danton Khoudry takes over not so much as husband but as sunglassed game warden. Following with camera behind Tillie, they become fixtures in the rarified, cross pollinating worlds of the European art scene, international conceptual fashion, and the rise of pornographic gangsterism in Eastern Europe, circa 1992.
Image of Tillie backstage in Milan straddling, barelegged, the smooth bald head of a blank-eyed runway model, her feet on the model’s upper arms like her head was an ostrich egg or Tillie, a living Versailles bird’s nest hat. At a cocktail party, kissing Croatian president and demagogue Franjo Tudjman on the mouth for Rolling Stone. Lying seductive as a ripe-hipped Venus on a spring-punctured mattress among neighborhood rubble, just as a landmine explodes in the background.
Partying and shopping with Dita Von Teese. Partying with Brazilian soccer star Lucien. Red carpets. Lounging in the white shambles of a loft in St. Petersburg where the only movement is the pluming smoke of her cigarette: the muse-star, pale enigma at rest.
You will know, if you look on-line, there is more to come. Cameos in risky independent movies, music videos, British lad and tattoo magazine covers, more modeling, appearances at awards shows on the arms of actors and musicians looking for an edgy bump to their image. Ken arrives after all that, much later, long after Tillie Harm quits Danton Khoudry and resumes her life as Shannon Hancock, a couple years after her father dies.
Outside, the delicate screeching light of predawn. Shannon, in wool and wellies, makes her way around mud puddles into a small barn. From a discreet distance, we see Ken driving a backhoe. We can barely make out the engine chugging, but a small work lamp bouncing on top of his rollcage breaks the dark with a wobbling yellow light.
Shannon is inside the barn, milking a goat with a trans-species murmur. Carson narrates: “It’s a small farm my sister and Ken have – if that’s what you want to call it. It’s more like maintaining a small engine of sustenance. The grass feeds the goats and sheep, and the milk either goes into bowls of granola for her kids or over the hill to a couple who make cheese.
“It’s some of the best cheese I’ve ever had. Actually, it’s the only great cheese I’ve ever had. But Shannon is not one to be outdone and is trying her hand at cheese." Row upon dark-caverned row of little tuffets of cheese in the barn. "She welcomes the arrival of mold with motherly joy.
“That’s why I ask my sister if she’s turning into a survivalist.”
Inside the root cellar with the green and white pillows of cheese in the background, Shannon pauses, cut short by Carson’s question. Not that she’s angry – just containing a patience bordering on condescension.
“That sounds different than what I’m doing here,” Shannon says. “What we’re doing. I think it’s more working inside life, keeping it going. But there are definitely people around here, people we do business with who are you know hunkered down inside four windowless walls. Mr. and Mrs. Ted Kaczynksi types. We’re definitely more in the ‘isn’t nature wonderful?’ camp.”
A hand pulls open the heavy wooden door of a stone house. Black and ruddy clubs of meat dangle from rafters. “As if to show me, we visit another building, Ken’s smokehouse. This is the turbine of the family engine, capable of bringing in a steady source of income. I'm told by others that this smokehouse is the reason my sister fell in love with Ken.”
“Me and four other people I didn’t really like, but I’d spent all night with them in this huge ... well I didn’t know why I was with them. But any way, there I was, still. Feeling sad, empty, withered, down to the wick. And just to get away from them and their eighth espresso I totter into the kitchen in my crazy heels and tell the chef who I am. I don’t really think he knows me, but either he smells money or fame or its his nature and he starts to show me around the kitchen when this delivery comes in. And it’s Ken. Bringing prosciutto. Swinging it over his shoulder like he just hunted it, bagged it, brought it home. And I thought, I want a home. I want someone like him to come home to me, with some kind of provision.”
She hasn’t really looked at the camera the whole time, pensively avoiding contact. The memory gives her a crooked, silly smile. “I forgot the chef, forgot my friends and followed him out to his truck and sort of made him take me with him.”
“I never dreamed my sister would marry a farmer,” Carson says to her.
Now she looks at Carson. “Nothing’s impossible. What about your mother as a born again? Or your brother as, whatever it is he’s doing? Compared to them, marrying a farmer is pretty sedate. Besides, I don’t think Ken’d know the difference between a seed and a pod. You can’t really call him a farmer.”
Carson adds, “He was up on a tractor this morning.”
A wry smile from Shannon. “He’s up to other things.”
/continued
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Next: What Ken's up to
"The Holly King" © CMMartin 2011
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