Word: hartley
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They make a strange menagerie, the Hal Hartley clan. The people in his odd, alert comedies (Trust, Amateur, Flirt) inhabit some Long Island of the mind, where Amy Fisher-style melodrama rubs up against working-class angst. They are part strong, silent types, part East Coast neurotics. They revel in their own contradictions; one Hartley heroine, a nymphomaniac virgin, explains the anomaly by saying, "I'm choosy." His creatures will sit mute and mopey, then turn endlessly articulate once they get going. Self-conscious but not self-aware, skeptical yet wildly romantic, they have a horror of the personal commitment...
...audiences haven't chosen to see much of Hartley. Each of his first six features (two of which are compilations of short films) has earned less than $1 million at the North American box office. His wonderfully intransigent pictures--neither chipper enough to appeal to the indie-film date crowd nor exotic enough to qualify as critical cult objects--survive on funding from Britain, Japan and Germany, where they are art-house staples. If not for this offshore financing, Hartley, 38, might be working as a radio repairman or a garbageman--jobs that keep his heroes occupied when they aren...
Dove, along with Marsden Hartley, was one of the finest talents of the early years of American modernism, part of the circle of painters whose hearth was the little 291 gallery in New York City and whose tireless promoter, supporter and voice in the desert was Alfred Stieglitz. Dove's father, a well-off Geneva, N.Y., brick manufacturer, expected his son to be a lawyer and never wholly forgave him for becoming an artist. To Dove, as to the more conflicted Hartley, Stieglitz was mentor, friend and (virtually) a second father. Starting before World War I, Dove's slow-maturing...
...Ossorio himself affectionately calls the rag-tag artists his "white and wounded fluffy baby birds." They are each other's best friends and worst critics, literally living through everything together and nurturing each other to the very last. "I don't consider myself psychic, just lucky--with friends," says Hartley. The reader, in being included in the circle, is equally fortunate...
Above all, though, the tongue-in-cheek chapter titles and neon-lit campy details capture the novel's overarching irony. As humor is Hartley's means of survival, it is also his means of narration: "Just when I'd decided I had the soul of a drudge, just when it came clearest I was the muddy flower-peddler, not her aftermath-princess, just when I felt that Immortality would only know me as a helpmeet, just when I'd gained six pounds, Farce, as it will when your happy-quota shades off into urban gray, intervened: all pinks, oranges, reds...