What! No Pin?

It was twenty-seven years ago today.

Heaven is in the eyes

I have been wracking--probably wrecking too--my brain for movies to show at this upcoming workshop, since I almost immediately made the decision to show movies of more artistic or social importance than merely those that had a tangential connection to this immediate area. So, John Ford's The Searchers--that's a given; and to give the opposing point of view, Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals, a movie I was very happy to get to know.

So that leaves--what? Shane? Maybe, because then one can play the later Eastwood cards of Pale Rider and especially Unforgiven against it. But I also want to show the same historical event through the refractive lens of the movies, show how a legend is built--or deconstructed. So six gunfights at the O.K. corral, from Ford's black-and-white chiaroscuro in My Darling Clementine (Victor Mature as a consumptive!) to George Cosmatos's almost apocalyptic Tombstone (which, incidentally, is the one probably closest to the "truth"--Doc Holliday actually answered the cowboy who said, "I have you now, you son of a bitch," with "You're a daisy if you do.")

Then I watched Terence Malick's Days of Heaven, and was completely bowled over again by the beauty of its cinematography (supposedly shot by Nestor Almendros, but a lot of work was also done by Haskell Wexler). Most of the movie is supposed to take place in Texas, but, as is usually the case in these degenerate times, America's pristine landscape is played by--drum roll, please--CANADA. Much of the outdoor shooting was done during the time when the sun has not yet risen or has just already set, and the land glows. Even the actors' beauty becomes part of this theme, especially that of the males--the young Richard Gere and Sam Shepard, even the ragged, time-lined face of Robert Wilke. Few movies remind me more that the cinema is a medium of the senses, primarily the visual, but also the auditory, with Enni Morricone's delicate score, supplemented by Leo Kottke's guitar. The only weakness is the script, the initial version of which, I'm not surprised to learn, was thrown out, so the actors could find the story. Linda Manz's voice-over narration, which verges on the edge of incomprehensibility at times, has all the strengths and weaknesses of improvisation.

But those images overwhelm any weaknesses.

The Band on the Rilly Big Shew

I'd say I was trying to kill two birds with one stone with this post, but I just spent part of the afternoon being distracted from my reading by a flock of blackbirds feeding in my front lawn--rustling the grass like a larger animal, all taking off at once because of some danger I can't see, softly plummeting back to earth, one by one, myself fascinated by their individual flights. So no killing of birds, even metaphorically.

First: By 1969, the presentation of rock on television in America had gotten fairly sophisticated. No more lip-synching, no more stupid props (the Byrds singing "Turn, Turn, Turn" in a tableau of female models dressed as duckhunters), and a sensitivity to the mood of the song and who was singing it. This clip of the Band from The Ed Sullivan Show shows that evolution. I hadn't previously seen it before its appearance on YouTube, not even when it originally aired, and I was impressed with the shot selection and moving camera. The sound is another matter. The performance sounds entirely live, even the instruments, but it sounds thin, and not until 2:01 does the sound engineer remember to bring up the levels of all of the group on the soundboard.

The second subject: the Band, former backup group to rockabilly Ronnie Hawkins and more famously to Bob Dylan on his infamous electric tour, where, in response to folkies who were booing him for the sacrilege of playing electric, turned to the group and said, "Play f*cking loud" before breaking into a majestic rendition of "Like a Rolling Stone." The group who made the Basement Tapes in Woodstock, New York, with Dylan, after he "broke his neck" in a motorcycle accident. The group who released the album Music from Big Pink (a house in Woodstock) with "The Weight" and "I Shall Be Released" and "This Wheel's on Fire," and whose second album, the self-titled The Band, assured the group's place in rock immortality.

And, of course, as noted at the time, this album, a loving--yet never nostalgic--evocation of American history and themes ("Up on Cripple Creek," "King Harvest," "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down") was chiefly written by a Canadian, Robbie Robertson, and performed by a group consisting of three other Ontario natives (Garth Hudson, Windsor; Rick Danko, Simcoe; and Richard Manuel, Stratford) and one American, Levon Helm.

What I find interesting about this performance is that it contains the only instance I can remember of Garth Hudson's actually looking at someone else in the group (he usually appeared to be inhabiting his own astral plane at the organ), and how young they look compared to their appearance in The Last Waltz, Matin Scorsese's documentary of their last concert in 1976. And are they tight at the start. Even Levon doesn't settle in until the second line.



At the end, Ed introduces the band members, and his elision of "they came" from "from upstate New York" makes it sound like he means Levon came from there. He was mocked for his woodenness, but now I see he was trying to be a nice guy. For his willingness to present (even sometimes censored) rock music, I can forgive him Topo Gigio and Senor Wences.

"A grope is a grope. It's not the Annunciation."

The History Boys is one of those under-the-radar movies that caught my attention because of an Internet review, and word-of-mouth from an Australian friend in a chatroom. It's a wonderful movie, which, as the back of the DVD declares, is about "the true meaning of education and the relative values of happiness and success." And it's sort of sold that way, as a group of British grammar-school boys (the equivalent of US seniors in high school) vie for scholarships and admittance to Oxford University. The design of the front of the DVD implies that these boys will cut corners--perhaps cheat--to get there.

What is not mentioned in any of the ads is what presumably caused American posters on IMDB's message boards to write "This movie is disturbing" and "Unable to finish this movie." That would be the homosexual crushes, longings, and emotions among the "boys" and two of their male teachers. I think it's all sensitively and wittily handled, and interlaces with the overall theme of the movie (just what is history?) as well.

Scriptwriter Alan Bennett (who also wrote the play the movie's based on) has also so loaded the movie with quotations from poetry, philosophy, and popular culture, that most US audiences would baffled as to what they're talking about (I was asked "What's a nancy?" as we watched a scene in which W. H. Auden was quoted). In one scene, a picture of Rupert Brooke is visible over one of the boy's shoulders (Brooke is also quoted). How many Americans would know why Rupert Brooke would be important in a movie with such themes, or why two of the boys enact the end of Brief Encounter in one class?

I am not doing justice to the wit, subtlety, and range of this movie. The cast is superb, with Richard Griffiths almost stealing the entire film as the seemingly pitiable yet heroic Hector, and the always delightful Frances de la Tour (whom I fondly remember as Reggie's secretary in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin) as the history teacher, who absolutely nails a wonderful speech about women in history. (It is she who tells Hector the lines of this post's title.) The boys themselves are uniformly excellent.

Hector is the character who will linger longest in my mind. There's a beautiful scene in which Hector goes over Thomas Hardy's poem "Drummer Hodge" with a student. Why do we teach students about literature, or "general studies" as Hector's class is called? His explanation of the deepest joy in reading moved me to (crybaby!) tears.

And his use of popular culture in his classes was somehow very endearing to someone who, when asked to put together something to show how attractive the study of English could be to first-year college students, showed "Battle of the PBS Superstars" from SCTV to prospective majors. Every once in a while, we do have fun, and then we have to think about how it all fits together. That's the lesson the history boys ultimately learn.

Thanks to Criterion II

Sansho the Bailiff--a film that plumbs the depths of late Shakespearean tragedy and and rises to the heights of his late romances--recognitions and resurrections. And I lived 57 years without seeing it. Thank you, Criterion, for making this film available in an edition that displays the delicacy and textures of the image. More Mizoguchi, please.

"Relieve me of the bondage of self"

I should have expected what would happen if I started reading a biography as a way to alleviate, or perhaps illuminate, a rotten mood, especially if that biography is I'll Sleep When I'm Dead: The Dirty Life and Times of Warren Zevon by Crystal Zevon. It is a sad, hilarious, and ultimately harrowing story that left me in tears (but I guess I'm a weepy sod, at that).

At first I thought this was just another one of those lazy biographies, which is made up of snippets of quotations from the subject's friends, and not thoroughly composed and written by one central, controlling, selective intelligence. But in the end this method works, not only because of the connective narrative tissue that Crystal Zevon provides at appropriate times, but also the large amount of text from Warren Zevon's journals. Along the way I learned a lot of facts I might be the only person interested in: that the Turtles recorded "Outside Chance" (as I noted before) since they knew Warren's music from being on the same record label, White Whale, at the time. The title "Werewolves of London" is related to the 1935 Universal horror film, via one of the Everley Brothers. Oh, and Zevon was himself unsure of David Sanborn and his band when he appeared on Nightmusic (a clip which I commented on earlier). And so on.

Zevon's life mirrors my own on so many important levels--booze, books, OCD--that I can't even begin to talk about it. Mon semblable--mon frere, indeed. The end of the book reinforces an important lesson I might have to face someday.

The biggest difference between us is his talent, and I was just happy to learn about songs that do, and will help with these moods.

Don't let us get sick
Don't let us get old
Don't let us get stupid, all right?
Just make us be brave
Make us play nice
And let us be together tonight.

"Les Mis"--le Movie

I thought I would watch some of David O. Selznick's cinematic literary adaptations for MGM in the 1930s, but a new set of both of 20th-Century Fox's verions of Les Miserables intruded. It's just as well, for the producer of the first, 1935 version was Daryl F. Zanuck, who was almost as assiduous as Selznick in adapting famous novels, and even more daring--he supported John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath, getting most of the novel's anger on the screen. Zanuck was just as supportive of films that confronted social problems. The Day the Earth Stood Still was based on a 1930s short story ("Farewell to the Master") that had little to do with atomic warfare, for instance, but Zanuck supported Edmund North's added slant in his screenplay.

The 1935 Les Miserables stars Frederic March as Jean Valjean, whose search for justice as opposed to the law's precepts is the social fuel for the theme. March is an actor who seemed to be pretty much a journeyman when I was younger, but his subtleties I now appreciate. Near the end of his career he was able to display his range as the president of the US in Seven Days in May and as the William Jennings Bryan character in Inherit the Wind. Since Valjean requires him to be mostly stoic and suffering, he is only able to use his gifts when he portrays the addlepated double for Valjean who is being threatened with the galleys, and whom the real Valjean must save. March could have gone over the top, but his subtlety in showing the double's mental weakness makes him more sympathetic and Valjean's decision more believable.

Javert, on the other hand, is portrayed by Charles Laughton, who was making a career in the 1930s out of portraying all sorts of outlandish characters: Nero, Doctor Moreau, Henry VIII, Rembrandt, and, most famously, Captain William Bligh. His Javert is constructed by Laughton, as he did with so many of his roles, out of exterior make-up and interior tics. His face is baby-smooth, and he pouts like a malevolent Humpty-Dumpty. His internal weakness is revealed by a ghastly tremor of those fleshy lips, and he shows Javert's social origins by letting his voice betray him with a hint of a Yorkshire accent when Javert becomes ("becooms") angry.

It's a hammy performance, but it fits in with the expressionist touches that director Richard Boleslawski employs, in uneasy combination with some overt Cross symbolism and Alfred Newman's score (which comes close to plagiarizing Schubert's "Ave Maria" at particularly "spiritual" moments). The expressionism is evident in the sets, the Dutch angles employed during chases, and the lighting and cinematography. I remembered halfway through the movie that the DP was the great Gregg Toland, who collaborated with Welles on Citizen Kane and with Ford on The Grapes of Wrath. His close-ups are particularly luminous and effective, and his later daring use of shadows in films such as Ford's The Long Voyage Home can be seen in his lighting of Valjean's via dolorosa through the Paris sewers. The movie could stand to be fifteen minutes shorter, and the Cossette is fairly drab, but this adaptation shows how the studio system usually could produce something of lasting worth, even when it was not trying particularly hard.

The other side has the 1952 Fox adaptation, but that will have to wait until I finish watching History Boys.

Brain Candy

Nothing like a toothache to make higher-level brain functions (or at least what passes for them in me) impossible. Suddenly the prospect of tackling a difficult literary novel or writing an honest appraisal or preparing for a workshop I'm going to lead feels beyond me, and I grab whatever "easy" reading has piled up next to my bed and go through them like a bag of Chips Ahoy.

So I've discovered that I can still read Lee Child after writing a long article about him, and that a British TV-producer-turned-writer is still producing the best American thrillers today.

And a trilogy of novels by a relatively new SF writer, John Scalzi, are not only in the tradition of Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Joe Haldeman's Forever War, but better than them. Old Man's War, The Ghost Brigades, and The Lost Colony are better because they are not written to support a thesis, as Heinlein's novels so often were. They are concerned at their heart with choices that characters must make, and the discovery of their own ethical boundaries. I like to see that portrayed in all types of fiction, from TV shows to Greek tragedies. By making these difficult choices, these characters become more meaningful to readers--I found myself actually caring about these characters' fates, and it's been a while since that happened while reading a SF novel. Scalzi wisely says at the end of The Lost Colony that he is moving on to other fictional universes for the moment, which I think is a wise decision--The Lost Colony could probably have been 100 pages shorter.

I wish other writers and editors would show the same wisdom in not succumbing to the lure of easy money in sequelitis.

"The Tune Ends Too Soon for Us All"

Since that last post was short--if not that sweet--here's another song that always gave me pleasure, and more so now that I have gotten older.

I never quite got into the Jethro Tull of Aqualung--the Who's Uncle Ernie (and their earlier Ivor the Engine Driver) gratified all my desires for songs about old pervs. But Ian Anderson did a lot more thoughtful and melodic stuff, and this song is a continual delight, as well as his "Up the Pool," about the British seaside resort, Blackpool, that he grew up in ("We're going up the Pool, from down the Smoke below...")



An even sadder song when you consider for how many people the song has ended since this video was made.

"We will meet in the sweet light of dawn." I hope so.

And It Has Hit the Fan

I'm trying to ration my YouTube posts: only if I write a couple of posts about other subjects will I let myself ramble on over another musical favorite.

Warren Zevon here encapsulates my mood right about now, and I think I'm going to read the recent biography about him and meditate upon bad karma and the indifference of heaven--WZ fans will get my allusions here.

Rock out--and why didn't someone stick a sock in Sanborn's sax?



An innocent bystander? No. Between a rock and a hard place? Hell, yes.

Criterion and Eclipse

When I moved to this god-forsaken--strike that--garden spot of America, my biggest loss was all the cultural opportunities that a large city like Chicago offers--symphony, opera, theaters (Steppenwolf, Goodman), movies, radio stations. A colleague in the Psychology Department introduced me to the joys--and addictions--of home theater, such as it was at the time, which helped make up some of that loss. Soon he had me buying laserdiscs, and I became familiar with the Criterion imprint, a company that released copies of hard-to-find foreign films (The Seventh Seal, Red Beard), as well as copies of American classics loaded with extras--Welles's The Magnificent Amerbersons with a reconstruction of the ending before Robert Wise and RKO butchered it--and commentary tracks by film critics and experts.

The only problem with these discs was their price. I remember buying myself a birthday present of Criterion's edition of John Woo's Hard-Boiled that cost over $100. Enter the era of the DVD, and Criterion began to rerelease many of its laserdisc successes, much more cheaply, and often improving on them: a three-disc edition of Brazil, consisting of the theatrical edition, the edition that the studio head wanted to release, and Gilliams's director edition--all this for under $50 on sale online. Their recent release of Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff includes the story the movie is based on in a beautifully printed booklet. Heaven! But recently Criterion has done themselves one better.

They've introduced a series of "no-frills" discs, without any extras, but still using the best source prints available, under the Eclipse label. These are multi-disc sets of works of one director that have not been often seen or collected before, such as the first films of Ingmar Bergman, or the early films of Sam Fuller. I am eagerly awaiting their release next month of a set of films by Yasujiro Ozu, a director whose subtle and deeply flowing joys I would have been unaware of if not for Criterion's release of Tokyo Story and other masterworks.

I' ve just worked through the first disc of Eclipse;'s Series 2, "The Documentaries of Louis Malle," which I had never heard of--and they are wonderful. The first one is a short 20-minute film on the Tour de France, Vive Le Tour, which shows that people were complaining about doping in 1962, and shows riders eating, leaping off their bikes to grab bottles of wine or beer from roadside bistros (the owners send the bills to tour organizers after the race), and struggling through the mountain areas. Twenty minutes, and you get more of a feel for the event than if you had watched hours of it on televsion.

At first glance, the title of the second film, Humain, Trop Humain (Human, all too Human) seems ironic, for most of it concerns how a car is made in a Citroen factory in the north of France. (In the middle of the film, Malle cuts to people discussing and buying these cars at an auto show.) But in the end, it is not the machines that we remember, as in Chaplin's Modern Times or Lang's Metropolis; it is the people who are operating these machines--especially the women. The film ends on a freeze frame of a woman doing an exasperatingly repetitive action, as all the workers do, and we are left to confront the question of how human these people are as they perform the same tasks, some simple, some, such as threading wiring, maddeningly complex. No narration: we have to make a narrative in our minds.

The last one is perhaps the best. Place de la Republique is a street in Paris where Malle and his small crew interivew a variety of people over a week or so. At times we can see the camera and microphone; the crew asks people whether they can talk to them; all the devices are in the open, so to speak. By the end of the film, Malle returns to some people who have been interviewed earlier; one of them, a young blonde who bears a slight resemblance to Malle's wife, Candice Bergen, actually conducts a few interviews herself. The final interview is a long diatribe-monologue by a woman talked to earlier, who is is either mentally ill or just a monomaniac nationalist; her tirade fades into the sea of voices at rush hour, and the last image in the film is Malle and his soundman racing after the woman as she pedals away on her bike. By placing their tools in view, they remind us that while this may appear to be a slice of life, it can never be absolutely, as long as people know they are being filmed.

Thank you, Criterion and Eclipse. I'll be reporting on further films in this series as I get to them. But now for some literary classics as seen through the eyes of David O Selznick.

Tracing Icons

Joseph Lewis's Gun Crazy came up in a discussion, and as I was checking up on it (the most reliable and understandable information about it came from a book, not a website, but that's a whole other discussion), I came across this image from the movie--an updated version of Bonnie and Clyde (for 1950).

This still comes from a montage of Peggy Cummins and John Dall doing a string of robberies. It's the outfits that are interesting to me, the trenchcoats and shades. I don't know if this particular type of costume for cool robbers began in this movie, but John Woo had certainly fastened on it by A Better Tomorrow.

Supposedly a run on the brand of sunglasses that Chow Yun-Fat is wearing in this scene occured after the movie was released in Hong Kong.

I tried to find an image of Nicholas Cage in the same regalia in Face/Off when he's playing bad guy Castor Troy, but couldn't come up with one. Oh, and here's a still from the scene in Gun Crazy that secures Cummins's place in the film noir Femme Fatale Hall of Fame.

Which gun are you going to play with, John?

Till Human Voices Wake Us...

The other day I was interviewed on public radio concerning a writers' workshop I'm taking part in, and of course, I couldn't hear the broadcast because it was live. But it was rebroadcast later that evening, and is available on the network's website. People asked me if I listened to it, and I answered, "No!" For some reason, I cannot stand listening to the sound of my recorded voice (students will attest that I don't have any problem listening to my voice live, so to speak).

It is not so much because of its sound (although it's more nasal than I would like, and I have more of a Chicago accent than I think I do, although not as much as George Wendt when he does the SNL "Da Bears"). It's because I can't edit what I say; I always think, "Why did I say it that way?" I am just thankful that other people seem to enjoy the sound of my voice, and leave the psychological ramifications of my distaste with other character fragments I sweep up every once in a while and send down the memory hole. I've got bigger problems to worry about.

Back to the Books

Vladimir Nabokov used to tell his literature classes that any novel worth reading was worth rereading; he must have faced the same distaste for reading endemic in college students today. His main point is unquestionable: one reading of a novel such as Bleak House by Charles Dickens will not reveal the patterns with which Dickens has interlaced his narrative. We read for story, initially; for style too, and for overall theme. We approach the depths only when we replunge into the work.

The interval between readings also matters. I would say that I read "The Alexandria Quartet" (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, and Clea) by Lawrence Durrell several times in my early twenties. I remember this because of the different editions. I first read the small Pocket Books paperbacks, then later the sturdier Dutton paperbacks (which I still have). At that time I read the work for its subject--love--its style--fervid and lush--and its experimental basis. The Quartet is not a roman fleuve like Galsworthy's Forstye Saga or Ford's Parade's End, that is, a series of novels treating the same basic group of characters, each novel a chronological advance.

No, Durrell's claims were much weightier, as he says in the Note to Balthazar: "Modern literature offers us no Unities, so I have turned to science and am trying to complete a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition. Three sides of space and one of time constitute the soup-mix recipe of a continuum. The four novels follow this pattern." This may sound pretentious, and it is, to a degree. The "three sides of space" are the first three novels, and the last novel advances the plot--it is a sequel to the first three.

Justine tells the story of the relationships among a group of lovers, friends, and acquaintances in Alexandria, Egypt, at an unspecified time soon after WWII, from the point of view of an English teacher and writer, Darley. X loves Y, who is afraid of Z's jealousy, but X also loves A, who might love B, and so on. The second novel, Balthazar, is again narrated by Darley, who learns from the title character that most of his assumptions--or at least the major ones--have been mistaken. Y actually loved C, and X was a kind of "beard." D, who was supposedly killed for raping Y when she was a young girl, is really alive and living in Syria. The third novel, Mountolive, is a conventional third-person narration, with some excursions into various first-person points of view via letters. Here Darley is a quite minor character, and readers learn that Balthazar was wrong, too, and that the underlying causes for many of the events in the first two novels were not personal but political.

I remember from my initial readings that I was disappointed to learn that everything devolved into politics; the explanation seemed reductive. Now as I reread Mountolive, I'm struck at how prescient Durrell was. He was a diplomat as well as a novelist, and he could foresee the effect that the clash of religions and nationalism would have in the Mideast. Also, I find that the political basis for personal attraction is not as far-fetched, or simple, as I thought then.

The relativity link that Durrell postulates seems overblown, because novels have been written for centuries based on the limited knowledge of their main characters, how wrong they are in their assumptions and conclusions: Don Quixote, Emma, and The Good Soldier spring to mind. The results can be comic (Emma) or tragic (The Good Soldier) or both (Don Quixote), and novels are often about the limits of humans' knowledge of each other, and the gulf that is often bridged on the flimsiest of evidence. Why does Bartleby "prefer not to"? Who can say for certain?

Durrell's metaphor for his "investigation of modern love," as he calls the subject of the Quartet in his Note, is, however, apt in that relativity implies the importance of the observer or measurer in making sense out of phenomena. And each successive novel in the spatial trio does seem to add another dimension; the second expands the narrative laterally, the third vertically. It is an astonishing achievement.

Clea awaits.

"Now cracks a noble heart"

"Hey, Perfesser Misogynist, don't you like songs and performances by women?"

I certainly do, and are you sure you're registered in this class? Here are two that break my heart every time I watch. The first is by Laura Nyro, singing "Save the Country," and shows that, like Randy Newman, all she needed was a piano.



The high school I attended in Chicago gave us Thursdays off; we went to school on Saturdays instead. So I was able to get a subscription to the Lyric Opera for Wednesday nights fairly cheap. Unfortunately, this next artist had already gotten into her fight with the Lyric's GM, Carol Fox, so I was not able to see her live. Maria Callas is singing "O Mio Babbino Caro" by Giacomo Puccini from Gianni Schicchi, probably Puccini's most ravishing melody, and the funniest too, since the singer is threatening to throw herself off the Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) in Florence unless Gianni, "O my dear daddy," lets her be with her lover. Look at Callas's eyes when she sings "Ponte Vecchio"--you believe she'd do it.



There's another clip on YouTube of Callas singing this, from much later in her career; her voice is weakened, but she makes up for it in expressiveness.

Good night, sweet singers, and may flights of angels sing you to your rest.

Good Movie Rock, pt. 2

Another way to use rock music effectively is to have a rock songwriter write the music and songs for your movies. I realize this is a matter of taste; I like the work Alan Price, original keyboard player in the Animals, did for Linsday Anderson in O Lucky Man! The title song summarizes what will happen to the main character, Malcolm McDowell, during the course of the movie. (Anderson is in the black leather jacket during this clip.)



I wish someone had posted the reprise of the song at the end of the movie: it rocks more, and we can see a young Helen Mirren dance, somewhat unmajestically.

How to Use a Rock Song in a Drama

"Well, Dr. Smartypants, it's easy to criticize, but can you name any effective uses of rock music in a movie or tv series?"

Yes, I can, and thank you for asking that perspicacious question. Certain directors are fairly effective at selecting rock songs to play within their movies, such as Martin Scorsese, who often gets help from friends like Robbie Robertson or Eric Clapton. In Casino, when Joe Pesci's character describes how he and his gang used Las Vegas as their personal thieves' paradise, Scorsese plays "Can't You Hear Me Knocking?" by the Rolling Stones as the underscore. Chilling as well as cool.

Television producers, though, can rarely afford to get the music rights for tunes by such well-known groups--although I notice a Rolling Stones song was used during an episode of Criminal Minds this year. They also have to worry about securing the rights for any future viewings of the show--such as on DVDs now. Some shows have not been released on DVD because the cost of the musical rights for the songs in them are prohibitive.

However, one movie director who is fairly accomplished at using songs in his movies also directed a two-part television episode of CSI that contains one of the best uses of a song in a drama I've ever heard. Quentin Taratino directed the episode "Grave Danger," in which CSI investigator Nick Stokes is kidnapped by a man who wants revenge on the department for what he thinks they unfairly did to his child. He send a cassette and a jump drive to the other members of the team.



The song is "Outside Chance" by the Turtles (it was not coincidentally written by Warren Zevon). The song works at several levels. As Marge Helgenburger's character complains, it taunts the team. "You don't stand an outside chance." It also describes Stokes's situation in his grave. "Stone walls surround me--I'm surprised that you even found me." And its jaunty, percussive use of the electric piano is an ironic counterpoint to the concern on the team's faces as they watch the monitor. "I'm only flesh and bone--but you may as well forget me . . . you better leave me alone--yeah."

When I first saw this scene, I immediately realized that it was a) unlike most other scenes in a tv show, and b) that was only possible because of Tarantino's clout. On a normal episode, this scene would have lasted a quarter of the time, just long enough to give the audience the pertinent information. But look at how Tarantino draws out the scene--the first circular pan around the team at the table, the camera swooping up and down. Then the look on the faces of the team as they watch Nick--the time spent on the slow close-ups and push-ins. It makes you wish that tv directors focused less on plot and more on character.

Oh, and in case you think that the CSI team was completely glum that day:

Uses of Rock in Movies--What not to Do, pt. 2

The Yardbirds are a fabled group because of their trio of lead guitar players--Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page. I stumbled across them in the Beck era; I wore out the grooves of their Having a Rave Up With the Yardbirds LP. My favorite song from that album was "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" which, fortunately, is one of the few Yardbirds live (not lip-synched) performances preserved from that era at a concert sponsored by a British publication. The song is always notable because of the way Beck on guitar and Keith Relf on harmonica imitate the eponymous train and trade licks with each other. But in this performance, Relf at one point looks like he's ready to blow that lonesome whistle, while Beck goes softer.



Fast forward to--well, the same year, 1966. Michaelangelo Antonioni is filming his indictment of Swinging London, Blow Up. He wants to get the Velvet Underground, but can't, so he gets the Yardbirds. By now their bassist, Paul Samwell-Smith, has left the group (to produce, among other people, Cat Stevens), so their rhythm guitarist, Chris Dreja, becomes the bassist, and the new guitar player is a rather callow but enormously talented Jimmy Page. For their scene, the group does "Train Kept A-Rollin,'" but probably for copyright purposes it is titled "Stroll On." This clip has become so famous that one version of it on YouTube claims it comes from the Yardbirds movie.



Another poster claims that this is an accurate portrayal of London in the Sixties. Bull. It's Antonioni riding his hobby-horse that modern Western society is vapid and vacuous. The audience stares listlessly at the group, two people dance as though they were stepping on ants, and one girl has regressed to an infantile state. The crowd only emerges from its narcolepsy when Beck destroys his guitar--then it's a bunch of savages. I liked this message better in L'Avventura.

To show that even film commentators can be full of the same material as posters, I listened to the commentary track for this scene on the DVD. The commentator said that the Yardbirds were a proto-punk group known for destroying their instruments. Sorry--that's the Who. I'm surprised he didn't talk about the neo-colonial implications of the club's name (Ricky Tick).

The most interesting fact to me is that I have always thought that the bystander who picks up the guitar neck and throws it down after Hemmings has discarded it was played by--Jeff Beck.

Sumer is Acumen In

And loudly sing cuckoo. . . Another academic year is down the--uh, has just passed, and as usual, I feel better about the literature courses than the freshman writing courses, although I think there were fewer really weak writers this year. Maybe it was the absence of those novae stellae that made it seem so uneventful. Oh, well. How to teach Dante's Inferno next fall now that the Pope has consigned the idea of Limbo to, well, limbo? Just have to muddle through.

In honor of the occasion, a 1999 video of "Here Comes My Baby" by the Mavericks, who, according to Wikipedia, are an alternative country group. The title says that they are performing this song with Cat Stevens, but I can't hear him, or see him--unless he's got clown make-up on. And the horns give this more of a salsa feel than a country one.

I became enamored with this song again after Wes Anderson used Cat Stevens's version of it in Rushmore. Anderson has a real knack, for me, of using the right song at the right time--or maybe it's just because I like his musical taste, such as "A Quick One" by the Who in Rushmore, or songs from the Stones's Between the Buttons in The Royal Tennenbaums.

Maybe 89%

Part two. When science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was asked why 90% of science fiction was crap (or crud, in one version), he replied, "90% of everything is crap," thus formulating what has become known as Sturgeon's Law. In youtube, that percentage seems a little low, as one searches for an elusive video, only to come up with countless amateur performances digitally immortalized, or the song recorded over a picture of the artist--as happened when I tried to find a video of Cat Stevens doing "Here Comes My Baby."

So when searching for "The Shape of Things to Come," not only did I get the Wild in the Streets Version (as well as clips from William Cameron Menzies's move version of H. G. Wells's novel of the same name), I found this compilation video done by Heroes fan StevieOh: stills from the series displayed during a recording of the Mann-Weil song done by the Ramones.

And it works.

I have no idea if the song is used in the show--I've never seen it. But this makes me want to see the show, and seems to capture its spirit, from the little I know of it. StevieOh calls it "Something I threw together during the March-April hiatus," but it seems to be that elusive bit of gold that it's possible to find in the effluvial river that is youtube. I hope NBC doesn't pull this video off of youtube, because it's made one person ready to go out and buy the DVD when it's released.

Up Against the Wall--and here's your ticket stub

A two-parter. First, a clip I had never seen, even though I was familiar with the song. It's from the 1968 AIP youth-exploitation film Wild in the Streets, with Christopher Jones (whose bod almost got Ryan's Daughter an R-rating) as Max Frost, a demagogue rock'n'roller who takes over the government (his drummer was played by Richard Pryor). I never saw the movie, hating such cynical crap then and now. But the theme song was cool: "The Shapes of Things to Come," performed by a band masquerading as Max Frost and the Troopers. I've learned that the song was written by (surprise, surprise) Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, whose other ditties include "We've Got to Get Out of This Place" (our real anthem at the time) and "Kicks."

So here's pretty-boy Chris Jones lip-synching "The Shapes of Things to Come" in a scene so boring you wonder how they took over.