1/19/08 Youth Run Wild (1944) – dir Mark Robson

A film about juvenile delinquency with a script written by John Fante?



On paper 'Youth Runs Wild' looks promising. But high expectations get doused early when a montage of sensational newspaper headlines, ("Juveniles Hold Up Gas Station", "Juveniles Cause Dance Hall Riot", "Scores Injured in Fight in Public Ballroom") is followed by a scene marred by 'cute kid' shots. Nothing kills a film faster than a cute kid appearing when one isn't needed.



Frankie and Sarah are high school age neighbors who hang out together a lot. After Frankie goes truant from school for a couple of days to earn some cash to buy Sarah a birthday gift his parents forbid him from seeing her anymore. This sets both off on a, ummm, road to ruin.



Frankie gets caught up with some bad kids and takes part in a tire-stealing scheme

Sarah, defying her parents, runs off to the amusement park with her girlfriend


"you don't have to explain nothin'... it's written all over your face in big letters and it says 'no good'".

Sarah ends up leaving home and taking work as a dance hall waitress


"I'm not a kid anymore, I understand a lot"

Frankie shows interest in becoming a machinist. And does what any self-respecting man would do when he gets rebuffed by Sarah while trying to rekindle their romance... he starts a fight.



Indirectly, Frankie's actions cause serious harm



But, in an obnoxiously propagandaist turn of events, he accepts reform. Sarah, too, decides to turn her life around and chooses a path that any honorable woman would approve of.


"i've got places to go and things to do"

After the studio cut and re-shot parts of 'Youth Runs Wild' Producer Val Lewton fought to have his name removed from the credits. Who could blame him?

In its time (the mid 40s) James Agee wrote a positive review of this film in The Nation. 60+ years later I can't be as forgiving.

1/12/08- Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

I put off reading Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke" until I could allot it a substantial chunk of time. Totally unnecessary (the delay not the reading).



"Tree of Smoke" contains multiple storylines that span 20+ years of time and make full use of 600+ pages but the actions are not dense and the dialogue is natural.

It's dialogue strewn with references to some of my favorite authors (E.M. Cioran, Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, etc). Dialogue that comes from characters who may be misdirected or waylaid by doubt, but who are rarely ignorant of their ways.

"Tree of Smoke" is a novel about a CIA Psy-Op agent in Vietnam. And what may or may not be an intelligence-gathering operation. But it's more about people then about plotting. People who do an awful lot of fucking, drinking, sweating and eating but who also have a spiritual hunger that's caused them to have done a lot of thinking.

Intense, everyday people who've turned to belief systems (Catholicism, Calvinism, Chinese medicine, the Muses, and the Four Truths of Buddhism among others) in an attempt to turn apprehension and experience into something noble. Or at least justifiable. Some succeed at this, more fail.

Historical references to Vietnam are present, but minimal. So minimal that what is described could have happened (or even BE happening) in just about any war.

EXHIBIT A
"Tree of Smoke-(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the 'guiding light' of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence-restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don't, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded beaurocrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government." --Tree of Smoke (p254)

The first Denis Johnson novel I bought (Already Dead) I read twice because I had to figure out why I disliked it so much. The second (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man) I read twice because its notions of faith and hope stabbed me and I had to open the wounds again to see just how deeply I'd been cut. I'll read 'Tree of Smoke' again... knowing how it all ends might make it even better the second time around.

12/31/07 - Looking At Photographs

Three of my favorite images from the book "Looking At Photographs:100 Pictures from the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art" by John Szarkowski (1973).



The book has fallen out-of-print but is worth tracking down. For the photos, of course, but also for the text, which provides perceptive ways of seeing and basic historical context.


text excerpts by Szarkowski

New Orleans, 1968
by Lee Friedlander




"The larger, dark figure reflected in the shop window is (obviously) the photographer.... The small figure in the bright square over the photographer's heart is also the photographer, reflected in a mirror in the rear of the store."

"It would of course be possible to draw a diagram, with lines and arrows, and shaded planes, to explain crudely what the picture itself explains precisely. But what conceivable purpose would this barbarism serve?"



At the Cafe, Chez Fraysse. 1958
by Robert Doisneau




"Regardless of historic fact, however, a picture is about what it appears to be, and this picture is about a potential seduction. One is tempted to believe that even the painters of the eighteenth century never did the subject so well. The girl's secret opinion of the proceedings so far is hidden in her splendid self-containment; for the moment she enjoys the security of absolute power. One arm shields her body, her hand touches her glass as tentatively as if it were the first apple. The man for the moment is defenseless and vulnerable; impaled on the hook of his own desire, he has committed all his resources, and no satisfactory line of retreat remains. Worse yet, he is older than he should be, and knows that one way or another the adventure is certain to end badly. To keep this presentiment at bay, he is drinking his wine more rapidly than he should.

"The picture, however, precludes questions of the future. This pair, if less romantically conceived than the lovers on John Keats' urn, are equally safe, here in the picture, from the consequences of real life.


Untitled. 1962
by Garry Winogrand
(this shot MUST have also been part of Winogrand's 'Animals' exhibition)




"Consider Garry Winogrand's picture: so rich in fact and suggestion, and so justly resolved; more complex and more beautiful than the movie that Alfred Hitchcock might derive from it.

12/27/07 verboten

12/24/07 - City of Heaven

Much of what I post about here probably seems dire or stark to a lot of people. Even though, for the most part, I consider what I read, watch and listen to to generally be uplifting. Mixed in with a little despair, for sure, but with a whole lot of hope and maybe even a little redemption, if ya look hard enough.

Would this get through to any of the luckies who've never really felt 'out of sorts' or ill at ease with the world for more than a day or two? I don't know, but there are times when I hear something that seems like it's from a place I've never been, from depths I've never felt, and I'm stopped in my tracks until i can figure out where it comes from.

Today I was listening to the 2CD Smithsonian/Folkways compilation "Voices of the Civil Rights Movement".



Voices of the Civil Rights Movement


I'd played the first of the two discs (the one that's heavier on sermons, chanting, clapping and call and response) a few times last summer and was about to file the collection away when I noticed blood curdling howls in the background of a solo gospel/piano song on disc 2 called "City of Heaven" by Cleo Kennedy.

I restarted the 9 minute long track and listened to the voices in the audience; noticing how they became increasingly affirmative as Cleo K. belted out her number.

"yes sir"
"sing it, sing it"!
"amen"
"HA HA. YEAH"!

Then, six minutes in, that voice in the background started howling. And this time I could understand that it was saying... YES. YES. YESSSSSSS.

Intense. True. Optimism not masked by elements of existentialism.

Forty+ years have passed, anon. congregationalist, and I am humbled.
------

SFW40084
Voices of the Civil Rights Movement: Black American Freedom Songs 1960-1966
Various Artists


Notes - This double-CD reissue documents a central aspect of the cultural environment of the Civil Rights Movement, acknowledging songs as the language that focused people's energy. These 43 tracks are a series of musical images, of a people in coversation about their determination to be free. Many of the songs were recorded live in mass meetings held in churches, where people from different life experiences, predominantly black, with a few white supporters, came together in a common struggle. These freedom songs draw from spirituals, gospel, rhythm and blues, football chants, blues and calypso forms. The enclosed booklet written by Bernice Johnson Reagon provides rare historic photographs along with the powerful story of African American musical culture and its role in the Civil Rights Movement. "The music of the spirit with the history of the flesh." — New York Daily News

12/23/07 Street of No Return - David Goodis

For years I've been shuffling a pair of David Goodis' books closer and closer to the top of the stack that I hit when I can't think of anything else to read.

In 2007 Millipede Press (of Colorado) reissued a couple of Goodis titles and when I found a copy of one, 'Street Of No Return', on clearance for a stinking 1.00! I knew i had to crack it open before it, too, got buried.

millipede press



"Once upon a time Whitey was a crooner with a million-dollar voice and a standing invitation from any woman who heard him use it. Until he had the bad luck to fall for Celia. And then nothing would ever be the same"

The chapters of the book that introduce Whitey as one of a trio of Skid Row alkies read like standard hard-boiled fiction. But when it becomes clear that he is not just an outcast from society but also an outsider on Skid Row who seems to have landed there just as much by choice as by hard luck, Goodis' characterizations get more intriguing.

"I bet you're full of secrets"

"Who ain't?" - Whitey

After discovering how Whitey carried himself through a 24 hr long bad patch that included confrontations (okay, beatings) from both the police and a Puerto Rican gang during the midst of a race riot in urban Philadelphia; what appeared at first to be simple stubborness or personal weakness seemed more like an arbitrary persistence bordering on craziness. Leading to justice (if not a happy ending. In the traditional sense, at least.)

No happy endings for the cops either in this story (remember, this IS 'Street of No Return') but Portney, the outsider cop who's accused of being a "freak", also takes a stand.

"You're a freak, Portney. You hear what I'm saying? You're just a freak"

"Really, is that what they call it"?

"You hear that? He ain't even ashamed."

"In the final analysis, we're all in the same boat. We're all ashamed of something"

"That's right, get witty again. Cover it up with a gag"

"No gag... it's fundamental truth".

All in all, not a bad story and I dig the soft spot that Goodis has for characters of all social classes who are strong enough to endure their compulsions and maintain a sense of dignity and decency.

I'm a little leary of what might be a Goodis tendency to sanctify those who 'play to lose' but I'll resolve that one after reading 'Cassidy's Girl' and 'Nightfall', both of which have again found their way to the top of the stacks.

12/04/07 - Bettye LaVette - Dakota- Minneapolis

Because of snarled traffic I had to walk two miles thru a snowstorm to make it to this show. I arrived in time to see Bettye hit the stage wearing a sleeveless top; wiping sweat off of her brow by the third song. Some people age and hurt... Bettye looks and sounds better every time she passes through town.

For late 2007 she's made a few changes in her band (I think this was the first show with the new bassist and guitarist). And revamped her set to include a bunch of songs from her recent LP 'The Scene of the Crime' ('scene of the crime' being Memphis-- where she recorded an LP in 1972 with David Hood and this new one in 2007 with David's son Patterson (from Drive-By Truckers).

After opening the early set with The Stealer she followed with ten or so songs over the course of the next hour. Every Bettye set includes at least one song that is a show stopper; this time it was Elton John and Bernie Taupin's 'Talking Old Soldiers'. Other songs from the new record that were performed were Choices, You Don't Know Me At All, They Call it Love and Before the Money Came (Ballad of Betty Lavette)--during which she made a run through the audience and sang to the booths and tables at the perimeter of the club.

Bettye's records are usually good, sometimes great, but as a live performer she's the fucking utmost. One of a handful of singers who never fails to blow me away.