Yann Demange: ''71' (2014)

Yann Demange's second film, White Boy Rick, is set in Detroit in the 1980s. In advance of checking it out, I had the opportunity to see his first film, '71, which is set in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during The Troubles.

Starring Jack O'Connell as British soldier Gary Hook, '71 is harrowing and absorbing, with an on-the-ground feel. Riot scenes in the Catholic sector are particularly exciting, followed by various chase scenes. 

The extra winning aspect is that one might be inspired by the film to learn a little more about British and Irish history. 

Sectarian fighting occurs just about everywhere, to varying degrees. 

Though Northern Ireland is no longer embroiled in The Troubles, trouble has, since the turn of the latest century, found plenty of other homes to wreak havoc in. 

In '71, Demange keeps one on edge, as befits the theme. His visceral, sometimes frenetic style feels somewhat akin to that of Jean-Marc Vallée (Dallas Buyers Club, Sharp Objects), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You), Sean Baker (The Florida Project), Jordan Peele (Get Out), Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker) and others.

Notate bene: 

David Bowie gets a mention in '71 -- and in Spike Lee's latest film, BlacKkKlansman (2018), too. 

Did you ever wonder what the anagrams in Sex Pistols' "Anarchy in the UK" (1976) stand for? All but the first tie directly into "The Troubles."

"Is this the MPLA
Or is this the UDA
Or is this the IRA
I thought it was the U.K.
Or just another country
Another council tenancy"

MPLA = Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola
UDA =  Ulster Defence Association
IRA = Irish Republican Army
UK = United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland 
Council tenancy = public housing unit

Today's Rune: Partnership. 

Ryan H. Walsh's 'Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968' (2018)

Ryan H. Walsh, Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968. New York: Penguin Press, 2018.

A kaleidoscopic time portal into trippy Boston centering around 1968, but opening out into the 1960s and 1970s. The possibilities for further study of its phenomena are wide and deep. 

The biggest revelation for me was musical, with Boston bands like Ultimate Spinach (a sort of psychedelic Doorsy head band); and interesting historical context for powerful music with which I was already quite familiar (James Brown, Velvet Underground, Van Morrison).  

And you get all sorts of crazy details about the local music scene, clubs, musicians, cultish and political activism (particularly "the Lyman family"), underground newspapers, Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970), the freaky What's Happening, Mr. Silver? show, Howard Zinn, Timothy Leary, Steve McQueen, the Boston Strangler, Tony Curtis, Aerosmith, Maria Muldaur, astral projection, Jonathan Richman & The Modern Lovers, Barney Frank -- and more! 

Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968 probably syncs well with an altered state, too, or so one can imagine. Can you dig? 

Today's Rune: The Self. 
   

Pier Paolo Pasolini: Il Decameron / The Decameron (1971)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Decameron / The Decameron (1971) presents a choice selection from the massive 100-story tome of the same title written by Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) between 1348 and 1353. I came to The Decameron via Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400), which appears to have been influenced by it in several tales. Not only are these not obscure texts, both are enduring world-class cultural treasures. 

Pasolini dives in, creating a vibrant movie version that combines the visuals of painters (as noted in an accompanying documentary in the Criterion Collection DVD set, especially Giotto and Bruegel), regional folk music and local actors. This is the first part of Pasolini's Trilogy of Life. 

Pasolini (1922-1975) is described in the same Criterion documentary as a "gay Catholic Marxist artist" with an interesting worldview, indeed. 

With his version of The Decameron, Pasolini selects a representative mix of Boccaccio's comical and tragic tales, some ribald and bawdy, a few scary and all both medieval and timeless. They range from grave-robbing, seduction, hypocrisy and ill intent to the most life affirming of activities, working within and around the social mores of the day. There's much to learn from this consciousness-raising film, and a lot more to write about. 

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Plautus: Amphytrion, The Pot of Gold, Casina

Three comedies by Titus Maccius Plautus (circa 254-184 B.C.): Amphytrion, The Pot of Gold, Casina. I read from this version: Plautus, Amphytryon and Two Other Plays, translated and edited by Lionel Casson, N.Y.: W. W. Norton & Company, 1971 paperback edition. 

After a quick go through these one comes away with a good idea just how much contemporary situation comedies rely on ancient plots, characters and themes. Anyone who's seen Three's Company (1977-1984) will find themselves at home. 

Amphytrion involves doubles and mistaken identity. The God Jove (Jupiter, Zeus) wants to spend a night with Alcmena while her husband Amphytrion is off fighting a war, so he masquerades as Amphytrion and posts his son Mercury (Hermes) to keep people away, masquerading as Sosia, a servant. The comedy revolves around thwarting all threatened disruptions to Jove's desire to have his way. The highlight is Mercury/Sosia keeping the "real" Sosia at bay.

The Pot of Gold is a ludicrous comedy showcasing human greed and tomfoolery. There are sneaky servants, idiotic rich men and cagey women. The coolest elements in this one are the house spirit and the Temple of Trust. The silliest aspect is having to see the great lengths to which miserly Euclio goes to safeguard his little pot of gold, never able to conquer his constant fear of losing it. 

Casina (aka The Lot-Drawers) is a more involved but still clownish elaboration involving a rich older married man who seeks access to a younger woman by arranging her marriage with a dependent who will share her but is simultaneously threatened by another suitor -- and so on. The wife and her servants see through all of it, and plot to refashion the endgame. 

If you've seen or know of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Fawlty Towers (1975-1979), Three's Company (1977-1984), The Benny Hill Show (1955-1991) or Seinfeld (1989-1998), you know of Plautus.  

Finally, it is notable in these three plays that Plautus shows both empathy and fond sympathy for women. He aims his sharpest barbs of mockery and satire at the foibles and hubris of men high and low. 

Unfortunately, once Christians gained control of Rome and its territories, most of the comedies of Plautus were destroyed by some of the more puritanical and joyless zealots among them. Perhaps more of Plautus' 2,200-year-old plays will be revealed again in due time -- another pot of gold at the end of a future rainbow?

Today's Rune: Protection.   

Friday Night Lights

Checking out the 2006-2011 Texas-based TV series Friday Night Lights. It seems warm and familiar like The Last Picture Show (1971) or Dazed and Confused (1993) but also fresh and new, luxuriating in longer term character development, extensive moral dilemmas and the annual cycle of American football seasons. Very good stuff.

You can look at this from multiple angles. For instance: change versus tradition, sort of like Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" (1948).  The cool thing is that Friday Night Lights lets you see change as both a good thing and a sad thing; same for tradition. What is football, anyway? What does football -- or any popular social ritual -- mean to people, and why? Is it important, or whimsical, or both? Is it healthy, or damaging, or both? Is it life-affirming, or life-denying, or both? 

One can empathize with all the main characters, no matter where they're coming from or going. I like that. It's a fun, thoughtful and engaging series.  Clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose.  

Today's Rune: Partnership.    

Jean-Pierre Melville: Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (Take II)

Images from Jean-Pierre Melville's Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (1972) keep floating around in my head, days after seeing it. That's worth noting. 

Commissaire Edouard Coleman, the protagonist (Alain Delon), is comparable to Clint Eastwood's character in Dirty Harry (1971), another cop movie that came out about the same time. Both characters are laconic to the extreme. Neither has any qualms about employing "enhanced interrogation techniques" whenever they see fit. 

In addition, Coleman is nearly identical in temper and disposition to Costello, the main character in Melville's Le Samouraï (1967), also played by Delon -- even though Coleman is a cop and Costello a contract assassin.

German title for Un flic: Der Chef

Two of the main "robbers and gangsters" in Un flic often play cops and military types. For example, think of Richard Crenna as Colonel Sam Troutman in the Rambo flicks, or of Michael Conrad as Sergeant Esterhaus in Hillstreet Blues. And because you never quite know who's throwing heads or tails, or which are the sinners, which are the day's saints, remember: "Let's be careful out there."

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Jaimy Gordon: Lord of Misrule

Lord of Misrule (2010), a novel by Jaimy Gordon, won the National Book Award in 2010. That was the same year Patti Smith won the same award in non-fiction for Just Kids. If I understand the formula correctly, National Book Award finalists are awarded $1,000 and winners another $10,000 -- in case you were pondering.

I'm about halfway into Lord of Misrule and taking my time. Not a book to blithely rush through without missing a lot of fine craft and nuance. It's absorbing; you have to work at sorting out characters via their thoughts and dialogue without quotation marks or other traffic markers.

Lord of Misrule is centered around a racetrack and its attendant milieu in West Virginia in the early 1970s. Ever been to West Virginia?

Jaimy Gordon's writing is intense in the way Marcel Proust's and Patti Smith's writing is intense. Here's just a sample snippet regarding Little Spinoza, an easily spooked race horse, from the point of view of Medicine Ed, one of the people characters:

He always was a baby. He scoping around at the cats, the raindrops pimpling in the puddles, the sparrows hopping up and down and cussing each other in the eaves. He stopped and had him a long sniff of Grizzly's goat. Now that Deucey had the two horses, she bought Grizzly a ten-dollar goat to keep him company. When the goat wasn't in the stall he was tied up like now on a chain in the grass patch between the shedrows, but he always pulled it out tight as a fiddle string if folks was around, for he was nosy. . . (page 101).

Yeah, Lord of Misrule is quite risible in parts! Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Psychedelic Saigon

Sublime Frquencies (Seattle, Washington, USA): Saigon Rock & Soul: Vietnamese Classic Tracks 1968-1974 2-LP SF060.

This collection is a mind-blower, but as soon as you think about it, everything makes perfect sense. Of course there was a music scene "on the scene" in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) during the US-Vietnam War. Of course there was more going on than that reflected in Hollywood movies about the war. Yes, there were and are Vietnamese people, too! South, North and everything in between.

I've known several Vietnamese Americans and all of them have had rich, complicated family histories. One was a stewardess who emigrated to the States in the late 1960s, having married a GI. Another, an entrepreneur in Philadelphia, was raised Catholic and brought with her two sisters by her mother -- initially to Omaha, Nebraska, in the early 1970s. Her father remained in country, fighting for the North. Texas has a large Vietnamese population, too, fanning out from eateries to goods and services businesses and into local colleges. I've worked with many Vietnamese students in Philadelphia, Detroit and in Texas, working on basic English writing skills, and am always struck by how poetic Vietnamese turns of phrase are, even when morphed into English. For these reasons and more, it's with great delight that I choose this collection for today's post. 

To quote from Sublime Frequencies' product description: Every song is a mini-masterpiece be it heavy acid rock psychedelia, horn and guitar drenched funk grooves, or gripping soul ballads reflective of life during wartime. The tracks that form this collection cut a window into a rich musical Vietnamese music scene that has long been obscured, and for the most part, forgotten. As the scope of electrified Vietnamese music from the 1960s and 1970s begins to be revealed, it becomes evident that this was among the heaviest and most eclectic musical scenes of South East Asia at the time. These songs tell of war, love and what war does to love. All of them were recorded in makeshift studios and even US army facilities while the Vietnam War raged – and were issued by a handful of Saigon record companies on vinyl 45s and reel or cassette tapes.

One of my favorite tracks so far is this one by Thành Mái: "Tóc Mai Sợi Vắn Sợi Dài (Long, Uneven Hair)." It's got a trippy tempo with strong vocal. For more from Sublime Frequencies, here's a link. I'm a big fan.



Today's Rune: Joy.                                         

Four Banana, Three Banana, Two Banana, One

Just finished checking out "Electrical Bananas," a chapter in John McMillian's Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press, 2011).

McMillian starts off the chapter with Sara Davidson's observant coverage of New York City in mid-1967: " . . . especially noteworthy for Davidson was the sight of a young hippie in a wizard hat selling bananas on an East Village corner. They were going for ten cents each, with a three-cent deposit on the skins" (page 66).

Reports were circulating at the time, describing the hallucinatory effects of smoking dried banana peels. . .

As in: Gone fishing, gone bananas . . .  

McMillian follows various leads as to the origin of the idea of smoking banana peels, and looks at contributions ranging from a 1963 article through Country Joe & the Fish, and Donovan, with even a footnote about The Velvet Underground and Nico (including Andy Warhol's banana cover), all circa 1966-1967. 

But how did this notion spread from there? The subtitle for "Electrical Bananas" suggests an answer with "The Underground Press and the Great Banana Hoax of 1967."

Beyond that, semiotic bananas must have been part of the Zeitgeist, the spirit-ghost of the high-time. Because there are other examples, even beyond the main scope of McMillian's study, moving from 1967 into 1968 (The Banana Splits TV series, Juanita Banana) right into 1971 (Woody Allen's Bananas) and probably right into the
21st century . . . 

If this theme song for The Banana Splits doesn't sound trippy, I'm not sure what does:

Tra la la, la la la la.

Four banana, three banana, two banana, one.
All bananas playing in the bright blue sun.
Flippin' like a pancake, poppin' like a cork
Fleagle, Bingo, Drooper and Snork. . .

Today's Rune: Signals.     

What's Your Name? Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master

Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master (2012) might more accurately have been called The Acolyte or The Unstable Follower. It stars Joaquin Phoenix (the unstable follower), Philip Seymour Hoffman (the Master) and Amy Adams (the Master's Wife and de facto chief of staff). Beautifully photographed? Check. Craftily directed and acted? Check. Set at the end of the Second World War (Asia Pacific War), on a small ship (captained by the Master) and on land in the 1950s USA? Check. Long at 2.5 hours? Check. Main characters kind of ick? Check. Glimpses into cult psychology and brainwashing, drawing out each person behind the persona of his or her name? Check.

Still absorbing this one. The most disturbing scenes involve homemade alcoholic concoctions blended with nasty ingredients like paint thinner. I understand that many veterans turn to alcohol and drugs to address psychic pain, but man . . . horrifying. I've heard tales of Red Army vets drinking jet fuel and going blind; but here, we have an ex-sailor from the US Navy looking mightily messed up, contorted, erratic and bizarre joining a fledgling Scientology-like cult that is like a cerebral reflection of the same, masked behind "rational ideas" that are anything but. To boot, Joaquin's character seems to have gone into the service already damaged -- his father, an alcoholic, is dead and his mother in a mental institution by the time he falls in with "The Cause." He has little or no impulse control going in.

The Master is a psychological drama about two willful men and the people around them. There is a menacing feel throughout much of the film, accentuated by occassionally alarming background music. Overall, the film's ambience reminds me of Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968). Some of the push-pull of wills reminds me of the split sides of human nature depicted in the second half of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971) -- primal vs. tamed/trained.  However, on first look I didn't find either of the main characters in The Master (both somewhat demented) that alluring. Amy Adams is particularly good, though, as the person behind the throne keeping the Master more or less "on the good foot," at least when facing the outside world. 

Today's Rune: Growth.    

Claude Chabrol: Le Boucher

Claude Chabrol's Le Boucher / The Butcher (1970/1971) exposes the strange underbelly of a seemingly idyllic town in Dordogne in the Southwest of France. Similar to, say, David Lynch's Blue Velvet (1986) and Sofia Coppola's 1999 adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides. However, the main focus is on two characters who meet at a wedding: Hélène (Stéphane Audran), Headmistress at the town school, and Popaul (Jean Yanne), a traumatized fifteen year veteran of the First Indochina War (Vietnam) and the Guerre d'Algérie (Algerian War) who has resumed in civilian life his occupation as a butcher. The interaction between these two is intense, but masked in part by the routine business of town life contrasted with the introduction of murder. Chabrol subverts convention by making the investigating police inspector a minor distraction rather than either plot-driver or mystery solver. 

 

In addition, Chabrol gives words and images their due. The scenery is gorgeous. Cro-Magnon paintings at Les Grottes de Cougnac (the Cougnac Grottoes) are shown in one key segment. Finally, more harrowing than any overt action in the film are certain descriptive passages, such as Popaul's recollections of war:

I've seen a corpse or two, their heads in the wind, cut in half, mouths open. I've seen three or four piled together. Kids with their eyes punctured. Indo-Chinese as old as Madame Touraint completely torn to bits. I've seen pals of mine rotting in the sun, being eaten by maggots.

From one vantage point, certainly, Le Boucher may be seen as a serious contemplation of the hidden costs of war even in remote places. In this case, a combat veteran is clearly damaged and demonstrably capable of murder on the world stage, but is he, in fact, the local murderer, too?

Today's Rune: Wholeness.       

Two-Lane Blacktop: Take Two

Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is one of the coolest indie-style movies I've ever seen. A meditative vibe, with all sorts of absorbing Zen-like elements, and an unexpected arc. There's also the valuable documentary aspect of filming along Route 66 and points East.

Makes me want to hit the road again, certainly. I've rambled along most of the extant stretches of Route 66 over the past thirty years, but there's always more to see. 

Today's Rune: Protection.  

Two-Lane Blacktop: Take One

Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop (1971) is a little gem of a film. It follows on-the-road street racers and dharma bum philosophes along Route 66, going West-to-East. Eclectic ambient music -- not anything like a contemporary, blaring soundtrack -- adds subtly to the feel of the story, getting at the spirit of the times. 

Offbeat cast includes Harry Dean Stanton (as H. D. Stanton), Warren Oates, James "Fire and Rain" Taylor, Dennis "Sound of Free" Wilson and Laurie Bird.

Today's Rune: Growth.

Richard C. Sarafian: Vanishing Point

Richard C. Sarafian's masterful road movie Vanishing Point (1971) brings many attributes to the screen, including primal excitement. It plays out like something from ancient mythology, with cerebral, mystical and existential touches featuring a souped up Dodge Challenger driven by Kowalski (Barry Newman), a Vietnam vet and ex-cop on a speed-fueled working joy ride pursued by highway patrolmen in three Western states. It's beautifully shot and an exuberent trip. 

The UK version includes Charlotte Rampling as a hitchhiker and harbinger of death.

The name Kowalski brings to mind Clint Eastwood's character, a Korean War vet also named Kowalski, in Gran Torino (2008), and Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (1947).

Today's Rune: Fertility.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: El Topo, Part 2

A little more on Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, (1969-1971). In yesterday's post, Sergio Leone was evoked, and there is definitely strong imagery that seems directly related to Leone's films. Others were added to the mix. After going through the second half, I'd expand the comparison and influences (across time, before and after) to Hieronymus Bosch, John Waters, all sorts of Medieval distortions of ancient myths, the Grimm brothers and David Lynch.

El Topo also reminds me of The Canterbury Tales / I racconti di Canterbury (1972), which was created with evidently scabrous delight by Pier Paolo Pasolini, adapted from Geoffrey Chaucer's influential late fourteenth century fragments and tales. For The Canterbury Tales, Pasolini employed Ennio Morricone, who also worked on the Sergio Leone films, to do the soundtrack, proving once more that everything is connected one way or another. 

Finally, after the nightmarish surrealism of El Topo, I'm happy to return to a more mundane reality, as least for a while!

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Alejandro Jodorowsky: El Topo, Part 1

Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (1970) is the strangest movie I've ever seen. Take the archetypal Sergio Leone Western, blend with Fellini, Buñuel, and Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers (1963), ingest some kind of metaphorical hallucinogen, pore over Surrealist art, and presto, that is El Topo in a single mushroom cartridge.

El Topo builds a garish shimmering bridge between Sergio Leone's Wild West and the Road Warrior world of Mad Max that would begin, in the olive of time, in 1979. It is primal myth, dueling it out with the 20th century on the astral plane. Leone's world looks positively comforting by comparison.

Today's Rune: Signals.

A Thousand Ships

While Hurricane Irene makes waves, some have been casting around for examples of the cyclone's namesake. I think of Irene Papas, the great over-the-top Greek actress.

In this scene as Helen of Troy in Michael Cacoyannis' version of The Trojan Women (1971), she cleverly advocates her way out of the shambles of the Trojan War, almost miraculously avoiding a violent end. Hers, the face that launched a thousand ships.

One of the things I like about Helen's arc is this: she acts independently in defiance of societal norms, yet she does not -- unlike Madame Bovary nor Anna Karenina, for instance -- despair, commit suicide, or receive any particular punishment in her post-war freedom. The story of Helen of Troy after the Trojan War is, in other words, refreshing for its originality.   

Today's Rune: The Self.

Ali-Frazier: The Fight of the Century Plus Forty

[Orginally posted on November 6, 2008 -- now it's forty years later . . .]

Taking a break from the present, I found a ticket dated March 8, 1971, saved from when my Dad took little-kid-me over to Raleigh, North Carolina, to see "THE BATTLE OF CHAMPIONS" on large closed circuit TV at Reynolds Coliseum on the North Carolina State University Campus. The champions in question were Muhammad Ali and Smokin' Joe Frazier. What I remember: the palpable excitement, my Dad favoring Frazier because of his Philadelphia connections, and Frazier winning after fifteen tough rounds of mutual Frazier-Ali bashing. It was amazing to experience, and both men came off memorably well (hell -- here I am fondly writing about it thirty-seven -- yes, thirty-seven -- years later . . .)

What I didn't know then was that Ali had to fight in order to regain the championship -- he'd had his title taken away for protesting Vietnam. Good God, the more things
change . . . I also had no idea at the time that several of my favorite artistes were at the actual ringside in Madison Square Garden, wild cats as widely ranged as Woody Allen and Frank Sinatra (gee, was Mia Farrow there?), Norman Mailer and Burt Lancaster.

Glad that both Ali and Frazier are still alive and in their mid-sixties, about the same age as many of my favorite rock stars from the 1960s and 70s . . .

Today's Rune: Harvest.

Shock Delivered: Respect Yourself

Back to McGuinn's English class, I'm eighteen and it's 1979. Our "shot-gun writing" prompt on D-Day + 35 involves a response to Joan Didion's 1961 essay* "On Self-Respect." The touchstone I go for: "[T]he willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own

life . . . is the source from which self-respect springs." I think this choice underscores my early embracing of Existentialism, which may be grounded in religion, spirit or secular humanism.

I scrawl out three single-spaced pages, including this: "It is easy to [choose] not to have self-respect. For a person without self-respect is a person without independence [or] responsibility to himself." I then go on to use the word "cop-out" a couple of times, slang for shirking and, really, cowardice.  Freedom and Responsibility must walk hand in hand, or we are lost. I hold myself to that way on down the line from there to here. Be Free, Take Responsibility for your arc.     

*In Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968).




















The Staple Singers say it all right here (1971):



Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.

Patti Smith: Just Kids

Thoroughly enjoyed Patti Smith's memoir, Just Kids. My initial response: Just Kids is written with unabashed aristry; it is graceful in every sense of the word. We follow Patti Smith's early leap of faith into the unknown, begin to understand the courage of her acts. There is attention to detail, dates, meaning. There are many epiphanies about art, life. And there are many intersecting lives. Loved it and will now seek out the audiobook version, too.

Today's Rune: Partnership.