Shufflin' along, part 2: here's what comes up when I shuffle everything on my iPod--pop songs, classical music, soundtracks, dramas (which is what happens if I hit shuffle, because I can't figure out how to shuffle just the songs):
1. "Alone." Cue from soundtrack to Five Fingers by Bernard Herrmann. (William Stromberg cond.)
2. "Prelude" from Symphony No. 7, "Sinfonia Antartica," by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Andre Previn cond.)
3. Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1 by Ralph Vaughan Williams. (Richard Hickox cond.)
4. "The Shire." Cue from soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recording by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)
5. "Andante con Moto" from Symphonic Dances for Two Pianos by Sergei Rachmaninoff. (Pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy and Andre previn.)
6. "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon and Garfunkel.
7. "The Winter's Past" by Wayne Barlow (Jonathan Parkes cond.)
8. "Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon
9. "The Road Goes Ever On and On," Pt. 1. Cue from soundtrack to The Fellowship of the Ring, The Complete Recording by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)
10. "Cirith Ungol." Cue from soundtrack to The Return of the King by Howard Shore. (Howard Shore cond.)
"If everybody jumps off a cliff, are you going to too?"
"Only if I can yell "Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit" on the way down!"
1. "Stardom in Acton" by Pete Townshend. 2. "I Can't Give Back the Love I Feel for You" by Rita Wright. 3. "I Can't Take It" by Badfinger. 4. "Copperhead Road" by Steve Earle. 5. "Fortunate Son" by John Fogerty (live). 6. "Don't Be Long" (aka "It Won't Be Wrong") by the Byrds (Preflyte version). 7. "The House Is Rockin'" by Stevie Ray Vaughan & Double Trouble. 8. "In My Community" by Paul Revere & the Raiders. 9. "A Little is Enough" by Pete Townshend. 10. "Lazy Days" by the Flying Burrito Brothers.
Wow--great music to run to (except #2, which is a vocal rendition of a Jeff Beck instrumental that I love). Looking at this, I realize that the pop music I put on my iPod is still geared towards someone who runs 30-40 miles a week--which, unfortunately, ain't me anymore.
"Gee, too bad 'Living in the Past' didn't come up."
I had forgotten how dense and allusive V. is--it's one thing to remember a novel as being so, another to experience it all over again.
And I'd forgotten how funny and superbly written it is, probably because the last time I read it was when I taught it, and I spent most of the class time trying to explain V.'s layers of meaning. Explaining humor is difficult at best: I remember in my first college English class the professor looking out the window (he rarely looked at us) and laughing over some literary joke only he got the point of. One guy in the front of the room also joined in the laughter, even though he had to admit to ignorance later when we asked him what the hell he was laughing about.
Humor? Pig Bodine asking about Sartre's ideas of authenticity of character.
Well, you had to be there.
As a musical footnote, here's a clip from YouTube of Ornette Coleman, who, according to one critic, is the model for McClintic Sphere (although I don't think his alto sax is ivory).
Now that the writing workshop is over, I find myself--as I knew I would be--not so much relieved as depressed. As is usual with tasks that I find daunting and anxiety-fueling, it turned out to be exhilirating and exhausting. It charged me up in all kinds of good ways, and I look forward to doing it again next summer, if I still inhabit this astral sphere--and doing it better.
Now for some light reading, or in this case, re-reading, before I work on my next essay. Let's see--Ada or V.? Ada or V.? I'll chicken out for now--V. Back to Benny, Rachel, Pig, and the Whole Sick Crew.
And to conclude with a simply celebratory piece of music: another founding father of rock, Chuck Berry, from an appearance on Hullabaloo, which was NBC's mid-1960's rock show, and which usually forced performers to lipsynch, except during its concluding section, "Hullabaloo A Go Go," in which performers were sometimes allowed to sing live to a recorded intrumental track. Here Chuck performs "Johnny B. Goode" entirely live, because he had to, what with the weird choreography during the guitar solo (what are those guys supposed to be? Basketball refs?). It's fun, but it's also Chuck a couple of years before the delayed adulation he originally deserved, after finally being given to him, went to his head. Duck-walkin' his way into adolescent dreams of cars, school, and girls.
One Saturday afternoon in the 1970's I was watching WTTW-11, the public television station in Chciago, and a British music program came on, titled, I think, Don't Knock the Rock. It was interesting because all the music was live, not lipsynched, and the groups were interesting--the Animals, younger than I had ever seen them, and two rock'n'roll legends, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard, the latter two backed up by a British band, Sounds Incorporated. The period seemed to be after their initial exiles from rock: Richard's from his sojourn in the ministry (!!!), and Jerry Lee from the notoriety that accompanied his marrying his underaged cousin. It was also done before Richard became a caricature of himself.
Lewis gave an performance almost demented in its frenzy, climaxing in a delirious rendition of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," replete with large dollops of tent-show evangelism (not for nothing is his cousin Jimmy Lee Swaggart) and foot-banging on the keyboard. A current seems to run through him, and he's surrounded by fans (almost all male), who, it seems, just want to touch the hem of his garments.
Then Little Richard comes out, and I've always felt he watched Lewis and decided to blow his doors off, so to speak. Nothing proclaims this more than his version of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On." It's like the Beatles coming on after the Stones and playing "Satisfaction." Right from the start, when members of the crowd run to begin dancing, and Richard catches them out of the corner of his eye, it is completely Dionysian, but almost deliberately calculated. When Richard takes his jacket off, he carefully folds it (while impishly ogling someone off camera), then loosening his collar and tie before he tucks in his shirt. Lewis's hushed diminuendo in the middle of the song becomes Richard's Singsprache on his knees, from which Richard explodes back into singing. He doesn't play piano much, perhaps realizing he could not compete with Lewis's bits of stage business, but by his standing in front of the band, they are able to follow his rhythms better, and the beat becomes one huge machine, as Mods and Rockers spin in the aisle.
I did not see these performances again until they, like so much else, were shared on YouTube. I was surprised to learn from the closing credits that the show had been "designed" by Alan Price, whose name has come up before in these posts.
With apologies to Chester Himes for the title of this post--
Once if the nice things about a blog is that you can think on the "page," as it were. My last post, on Jean-Pierre Melville, led me to line up and arrange some ideas in my mind about him and his movies, which I have always liked, but without being able to state precisely why. None of my thoughts are particularly original, but they help clarify and deepen my viewing experience. So I decided to re-view Le Samourai, perhaps Melville's most influential movie, which stars Alain Deloin as Jef Costello, a contract killer.
Never have blue eyes been blanker, more glacial, more affectless. Costello is a samurai in that he lives alone, and by his own code. His hat and his coat become his uniform, and like the gunslinger Wilson in Shane, when he put his gloves on, he's ready to work. Melville's deliberate pacing of the plot makes the action, when it erupts, all the more startling. Both the police and the men who hired him pursue Costello, and there is almost, but not quite, a Langian equation of the two (as happens in M). Both groups are ruthless towards women, and it is Costello's code towards women that dooms him.
Le Samourai was released in 1967; Bullitt, with Steve McQueen, in 1968. A chase occurs in each as police pursue hitmen; the cops pursue Costello on the Metro in Paris, and Bullitt pursues the black Dodge Charger in his green Mustang. The latter is adrenaline-inducing; the former engages higher brain functions. Both chases--on a subway and in a car--occur in The French Connection, but it is the car chase that is remembered, which is unfortunate, because Melville's meticulousness, his precision, deserve to be as influential.
But then again, Hollywood always goes for the glands.
Jean-Pierre Grumbach so loved things American (particularly its movies) that he changed his last name to Melville, and it's under that name that he directed a brilliant series of movies about the French underworld of killers and thieves, including four of his last five movies. The series begins with perhaps the best of them, Le Samourai, starring Alain Delon as a contract killer with his own code (the movie is also important because it forms another link in the stylistic chain of fashionable criminals from Gun Crazy to Face/Off). The movie not about criminals in that group of five is 1969's Army of Shadows, a film about the early French resistance to the German occupation of France during World War II. It was not shown in the United States until last year, and when it was, it was hailed as a lost classic. Criterion recently issued a characteristically outstanding DVD of the restored film, and having seen it, I have to agree with the general consensus.
At first, though, it's hard to understand why. Most movies about a resistance movement are chiefly engaged in generating suspense, yet Melville is so methodical, almost architectural in building his scenes, that little tension is generated. What then becomes interesting is character.
In one scene, the active leader of the small cell of resistance fighters has been captured by the police and is about to be shot without trial. A long scene in a jail cell shows him distributing the last of his cigarettes to his fellow prisoners; as the camera follows the pack around the cell, we see from each prisoner's face how he will face death. They are summoned from the cell, and during their slow journey to the death-room, the leader meditates on how he will face death. Their shackles are deliberately removed; the guards leave them; they face a machine-gun some 50 feet away. They are told to run in the opposite direction: the first one who reaches the wall will be spared until the next execution. The leader refuses to run, until the German officer shoots at his feet. He runs; stops because of smoke bombs that bar his path; notices a rope hanging from a side wall; escapes. As they are driving off, one thought dominates his mind--that the German officer knew he would run.
All this is presented almost clinically, almost--dare I say it?--existentially. The escape is as surprising to us as it is to the leader, but it's not exhilirating in any sense. In fact, we realize that if he hadn't run, he would have been dead. By displaying courage, he would have doomed himself. The movie is full of moments like this, where we are forced to evaluate motives, causality, character.
What is trust? What is true loyalty? Can a mathematics of morality be achieved? These are the questions Melville asks in this somber movie about ombres, and indeed, throughout his crime pictures as well.
