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The death of the actress Arlene Golonka on Monday of this week — who radiated a cheerful, adorable, and slyly sexy presence and was ubiquitous on TV in my kidhood — led me to this particular discovery. While it might not be as laugh-out-loud funny as I had remembered it, it’s still a wonderful slice of Sixties absurdist comedy that boasts a great cast and some terrific NYC locations as its “sets.”
The first time I encountered this telefilm was with a friend at the then-Museum of Broadcasting (now the Paley Center) around the corner from the Doubleday bookstore on 53rd Street and Fifth Avenue (a store I worked in for a few months and which features in the Streisand-Segal Owl and the Pussycat).
At that point, early in the museum’s history, you sat in a cubicle and a staff member came over to put your chosen tape (not sure if it was Beta or VHS at this point) in a deck. You were allowed to rewind and fast-forward it at your leisure. For some reason I remember the Museum’s version as being in b&w, but the YouTube upload is in very faded color. (Although it contains the original ads, all for Burlington.)
“The Love Song of Barney Kempinski,” the debut episode of the series ABC Stage 67, looked intriguing from an entry in the mass-market paperback The Television Years by Shulman and Youman (yes, we’re talking heavy pre-Internet geekdom here). The names of Alan Arkin, Arlene Golonka, and Murray Schisgal were already known to me, so I was eager to see it when I visited the TV museum. (Everyone has always called the institution that, no matter which of its three names was in use at the time.)
Arlene Golonka.
It’s been more than four decades since that initial viewing and while the sum of its often-great parts does not make a perfect whole, it’s still very much worth watching.
First, some words about Schisgal, who died on Oct 1 of last year. Viewers of the Funhouse TV show will remember that I did a series of episodes saluting “Sixties comic playwrights who were not Neil Simon.” (The theme being that these folks were less gag-oriented than Simon and also wrote wonderfully poignant sequences.)
Among this number were Funhouse fave Herb Gardner, Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, and Schisgal. Schisgal eventually became a “house-rewriter” for Dustin Hoffman, polishing scenes in movies Hoffman starred in, but in the Sixties Schisgal was a force to be reckoned with, writing tight, smart one-acts (“The Typists,” “The Tiger”) and one classic full-length play (Luv).
Arkin and Schisgal (and Gielgud) on the set of "Barney Kempinski."
More than any of the others cited above — and quite like Bruce Jay Friedman, whose comic plays Scuba Duba and Steambath were both weirdly and brilliantly dark — Schisgal was clearly aware of the work of the modern European playwrights, most prominently those in the Theater of the Absurd. “Barney Kempinski” heavily exhibits this influence.
One more detour before I discuss the show itself — a bit about the amazing experiment that was ABC Stage 67. The series, which lasted only one season, was most certainly a precursor to later PBS programs like The Great American Dream Machine. One unique connection was the fact that Elinor Bunin designed the titles for both ABC Stage 67 and Dream Machine and later was the creative director for WNET Channel 13. Stage 67 jumped from genre to genre with 26 episodes (which would’ve been 27, but Dylan’s Eat the Document was rejected because it was incoherent — a very solid judgment).
Arkin at City Hall.
21 of the episodes are available at the Paley Center, with the never-seen-again titles being very fascinating: A John Le Carré thriller with James Mason; documentaries on JFK and Marilyn (separate ones, spaced far apart); an Earl Hamner Jr. drama with a crazy cast (Pearl Bailey, Phil Harris, Lee Grant, Mort Sahl, and Jackie Robinson!); a Bacharach-David-scored musical with Ricky Nelson; docs about WWII and sex in American in the Sixties; a Rodgers and Hart songbook show; short films about teen boys; David Frost hosting “A Night Out in London”; a Comden-Green-Styne musical with Dick Shawn; and a “Look at Negro Humor in America” with Dick Gregory, Godfrey Cambridge, Redd Foxx, Moms Mabley, and Richard Pryor.The four episodes that did become available on VHS and DVD are: Sam Peckinpah’s adaptation of Katherine Anne Porter’s “Noon Wine”; Ingrid Bergman in a production of “The Human Voice”; the Emmy-winning “A Christmas Memory” by Truman Capote, working with Eleanor and Frank Perry; and “Evening Primrose,” an original Stephen Sondheim musical about a poet (Tony Perkins) who lives in a department store at night!
Before any of those episodes aired, “The Love Song of Barney Kempinski” was the premiere episode of the series (air date: Sept. 14, 1966). It is a thoroughly odd, often charming absurdist comedy that follows drifter Barney Kempinski (Alan Arkin) on the day of his wedding, as he moves from job to job. He talks to the audience about the wonders of NYC, yelling all the while as he “appropriates” a cab (he’s basically an opportunist and thief but a charming and clever one), then an ice cream cart, a butcher’s delivery truck, and a helicopter, among other vehicles.
An ad for the "Barney Kempinski" single!
It’s performed at a high pitch — Barney is prone to shouting (even when he’s happy) and he often bursts into a song of his own invention (which we hear under the end credits in its entirety and was apparently released as a single at the time). He shows us pictures of old NYC, as he wanders through the locations as they appeared in 1966 (the year the show was filmed): the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Village, all the way up to Lincoln Center.
On the way, his various “jobs” find him blundering into various situations — into the middle of an argument between a rich couple (Lee Grant, Alan King); a couple having sex (demurely depicted, of course); an Indian man meditating, on whose person Barney searches for money (as a tip for the package he’s delivered).
Since the film is made up of vignettes, it follows the fashion of episodic creations, with some of the scenes being very funny and some falling flat. The only semblance of a plot is that Barney is hoping to marry his sweetheart at 3:00 p.m. at City Hall and, as she evades him (going to the movies at 9:30 a.m.!), he falls in love with her sister (Arlene Golonka).
The “tour guide” aspect of Barney’s character (another job he “appropriates”) makes the film a true time capsule. Surely Schisgal predicated his script on this idea, but one can be pretty certain that the late, great, Ralph Rosenblum had a lot to do with how beautifully it is carried off. Rosenblum edited and was co-director (with Herb Gardner) of the exterior shots in A Thousand Clowns, which “opened up” what was otherwise a filmed play. (He also, of course edited perfect NYC films like The Pawnbroker and The Producers.)
The cast sell “Kempinski” wonderfully. The supporting players are NYC performers who worked in theater and TV: Lee Grant (who remembered here a stunt she had to do on the show), Alan King, Charlotte Rae, David Doyle, Jose Perez, Leonardo Cimino. And Barney’s cab fare is a drunken businessman, played by John Gielgud.
Golonka and Arkin.
Arkin is wonderful, mostly because his character, as written, is a pretty annoying guy and he makes him tolerable and quite charming.
And the lovely Golonka — yes, she who worked on dozens and dozens of TV shows and a select number of movies. She did indeed possess the ability to play both completely wholesome characters (as in Ernie Pintoff’s Harvey Middleman, Fireman) and also some “naughty” ladies. She will live on in reruns and will always seem just as cute. It’s no wonder that Barney Kempinski opts for her and not her absent sister, and the two ride off into the sunset (or at least mid-afternoon near Manhattan’s City Hall).
As an extra-special bonus, I offer up the super-obscure (but now “hidden in plain sight”) oddity that was Music for Rat Fink Lovers. The standup comedian Jackie Kannon, who performed slightly “blue” material, recorded several albums, had a best-selling book of naughty poems (Poems for the John), and also ran a nightclub called the “Rat Fink Room” in mid-Manhattan (located at 151 East 50th Street).
Kannon was stuck on the phrase “rat fink” and so he released a few albums with that phrase in the title. The oddest is Music for Rat Fink Lovers, an odd concoction that was comprised of regular Mantovani/Kostelanetz orchestral arrangements of then-popular tunes, with a sexy female coming on at the end of every track and saying the phrase “rat fink” in one mood or another (kittenish, delirious, angry, giddy, sexy). That voice was — Arlene Golonka!
It turns out that the entire album has been uploaded to YT and can be heard song by song or in a playlist that reverses the sides of the LP. For some inexplicable reason, someone took the album cover and identifies it in several separate uploads as a record by Dickie Goodman, but it definitely was a Kannon creation. (Although where he got the instrumental tracks from isn’t known — Arlene was lucky she got credited!)
The gimmick here is not only that Arlene says something sexy or “girly” at the end of every instrumental track, but that the record finishes up with Kannon’s own voice saying (in Yiddish-accented English) that he’s “the dirty rat fink.”
First, a giggling delivery:
I have been a big fan of Jim Steinman’s special brand of rock ’n’ roll melodrama for decades. I wrote about this fascination previously on the blog on the occasion of seeing the Toronto production of his life-long passion project, the dystopian teen sci-fi soap opera/Peter Pan mashup Bat Out of Hell. You can read my piece on Steinman and the show here, but I realized that my second blog post about Jim’s amazingly sincere yet overwhelmingly hammy (and I mean that in a complimentary way) Wagnerian pop-rock, focusing on his big European hit musical Tanz Der Vampires, had to be completely rewritten and updated. This was because the better of the two versions of the show that were on YouTube and had English subs was taken down.
The one that was left up is derived from the same original video in German that the “departed” vids was generated from — only in this instance, the poster of the remaining videos decided for some inexplicable reason to change the ratio of the video from “flat” to “widescreen,” thus stretching the damned thing visually. The remaining version is incredibly ugly to watch, but it is the only way to see and understand the full original production if you’re not fluent in German.
In discussing the musical, I focus on an earlier production since it was not only recorded more professionally (when I first wrote this, there was also what looked like a fan-shot full-length video of the show on YT — now gone), but the earlier production was closer to the original vision of the show as personally directed by Roman Polanski, who co-wrote and directed the source material, the horror farce The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967). The show began in 1997 in Austria as directed by Polanski, but the subtitled video of it hails from Germany in the early 2000s.
I have mixed feelings about FVR. Polanski’s farces pale beside his brilliant darkly humored pictures (like Bitter Moon). The reworking of the film for Tanz, however, is fascinating in that the stage show takes its characters and situations a bit more seriously — the result, no doubt, of the show running over an hour longer than the film.
The other reason the show is a must-see is that it finds Polanski directing a stage musical scored by the king of pop-rock melodrama, Jim Steinman. As mentioned, I’ve rhapsodized about Steinman before (and noted his difficulties with writing librettos), so I will simply note that, since we never got to see the proposed “video album” for Steinman’s girl-group project “Pandora’s Box” that would’ve been directed by “Unkle Ken” Russell, we can only content ourselves with a Broadway/West End-style musical with Steinman music and Polanski visuals.
As for L’affaire Polanski and the fact that his last two films — Based on a True Story (2017), co-written with Olivier Assayas, and the award-winning (and excellent) J’Accuse(2019) — haven’t come out in the U.S. and won’t for the foreseeable future, it has to be said yet again that one *must* separate the art from the artist or one will only experience art from squeaky-clean hands — and who wants any more Spielberg-Ron Howard-Tom Hanks-Tyler Perry-Marvel movies?
Polanski, Michael Kunze, Steinman.
As for his participation in this show, the piece was clearly undertaken with visions of Phantom box office receipts dancing in the producers’ heads. Thus, the budget was clearly large enough to indulge Polanski’s gothic impulses. (As for his stage credentials, he did take time out from the cinema to costar and direct productions of Amadeus in ’81 and ’99 in Warsaw, Paris, and Milan.)
The sets are large and the cast is filled with “background vampire” singers and dancers. The key ingredient, though, is Steinman’s music, which, true to form with Jim, consists of songs that he composed for earlier projects, both musicals and pop-rock albums.
The most-heard tune in the piece is “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” which is the central vampire’s signature theme and is repeated over and over in the show. Steinman has been quoted as saying that he used the very well-known hit song as a kind of place holder for some other song to be written later. Given that the tune is the central piece of music, I doubt he threw the song in there provisionally.
There is certainly something amazing about hearing Steinman’s Wagnerian pop-rock in German. For decades now he has crafted songs that require singers with “big” voices and a solid vocal range (well… maybe not Air Supply), and his aim was always to write Broadway musicals. Hearing his music in German is a hand-in-glove fit.
Tanz was his first big-budgeted musical to become a hit (it has run in various permutations in Germany over the past 20 years). That’s a chronological distinction, since an earlier collaboration with Andrew Lloyd Webber, Whistle Down the Wind, flopped in the U.S. in ’96 but ran for several years in the West End, starting in ’98, a year after Tanz opened in Austria. Steinman’s long-gestating dystopian sci-fi/Peter Pan musical, Bat Out of Hell (which I, yet again, reviewed here), toured around the UK (where it did very well) and North America and only played in NYC as a limited edition run (where that show was cut as well, but nothing new was inserted — the plot was streamlined and songs were removed).
One other individual should very definitely be highlighted here. Michael Kunze wrote the libretto adapting Polanski’s film to the stage. He also wrote the German lyrics, which confirm the show’s status as an “almost operetta,” since the dialogue is minimal and the songs drive the plot entirely. Kunze has written German lyrics for many British and American shows, has had a number of his own hit musicals in Germany, and wrote and produced the disco hit “Fly, Robin, Fly” by Silver Convention (!).
It should be noted that the very short-lived American version of the show starring Michael (“Phantom”!) Crawford had a troubled production and ultimately flopped big-time on Broadway. Steinman was initially hired as co-director, then fired, and he has never spoken well of the show, titled (rather obviously) Dance of the Vampires. By the time of the American failure, Polanski was long gone from the project.
Mr. Steinman and Mr. Loaf.
So here is all of Tanz from its German incarnation. The YT poster has broken it into six segments, each of which has its standout scenes and songs. Note: The English lyrics seen here are completely different from the other set of English lyrics that were posted in the “square” (correct-looking) version of the video. I have no grasp of German, so I can’t tell who did a better job of translation. (I did keep .mp4 copies of the other person’s better-looking videos.)
The first part has an amazing paean to garlic (tongue in cheek, of course) and the first appearance of “Total Eclipse” as the vampire’s signature song. It ends with a very Gilbert and Sullivan-esque song sung by the professor character (played in Fearless Vampire Killers by Jack MacGowran).
The second part has the first big duet between the youthful sidekick of the professor and the daughter of the innkeeper (played in the film by Polanski and Sharon Tate).
The third part leads up to the famed “Jewish vampire” scene, which explains why one character looks like he’s Fagin or a Semitic stereotype. The initial scenes are set in a shtetl, and Polanski and his original co-scipter Gerard Brach provided a nice comedic pay-off to go with that choice of location.
The fourth part, which begins Act Two, starts off with a full performance of “Total Eclipse” and the bravura vampiric nighttime fantasy “Seize the Night.” (A title so good I’d like to attribute it to Steinman, but it surely was Kunze’s contribution.)
The fifth part contains another big ensemble number — “Eternity,” performed by a host of vampires after they exit their coffins.
The sixth part is the finale (bows included), leading up to the big closing number, “Dance of the Vampires.” The song is really “Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young,” an incredibly rousing Steinman song from the Walter Hill film Streets of Fire (1984). It’s a great way to end the show — kinda like Rocky Horror, but as if “Time Warp” was the finale.
So there you have it — the entirety of Steinman’s “lost” (in America at least) gothic vampire musical as scripted/with lyrics by Michael Kunze and directed by none other than Roman Polanski. It’s a shame that the YouTube poster did indeed alter the image so the video looks dreadful all the way through, but perhaps that was the only way to keep it from being taken down? (Since YT’s rules are arbitrary, whimsical, capricious, and absolutely without rhyme or reason. It’s a video-viewing site run by robots that pretends it’s the creation of people.)
*****
Jim and garlic.
As a closer I want to add some items that were not in the preceding posts about Steinman. Three are from his only album, Bad for Good (1981), which is an odd affair — made up of songs that would’ve been on the sequel to Bat Out of Hell that never materialized because of Meatloaf losing his voice (although he used these songs and other Steinman tunes for both Bats 2 and 3). Steinman also doesn’t sing on some of the tracks — the one hit from the album, “Rock and Roll Dreams Come Through,” was sung by session singer Rory Dodd.
Here, Steinman delivers a Jim Morrison-esque spoken-word piece, “Love and Death and an American Guitar” (although Jim S. was kidding — or at least half-kidding). He had started doing this monologue at Meat Loaf live shows and later re-used it for the EPK of the Original Sin album he wrote and produced for his attempt at a prefab girl group, Pandora’s Box.
The album’s title song, “Bad for Good,” is a classic Steinman tune, with full-blown rock-drama in effect. (And quite corny interpretive dancing in the music-vid.)
The last video from his album is not found on YouTube (no reason why, really) but can be found on Vimeo. He often referred in interviews to the “boner moments” in his songs, where he indicated that the male narrator was getting crazy over his object of desire. Here, Jim not only sings (lip-synch of course) with the ever-lovely Karla De Vito (who took over for Ellen Foley and toured with Meat Loaf, performing back-up vocals and duets from the first Bat LP) — he also dances. (Or something resembling dancing.) This is his silliest epic song (and intended to be so):
I can’t resist closing another tribute to Steinman with the Holy Grail of the music-videos for his songs. No, not “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” This video for a song Jim wrote and produced in 1989 for his girl-group Pandora’s Box (but which became a giant hit for Celine Dion several years later) is directed by none other than Funhouse interview subject Ken Russell.
Steinman and the Pandora's Box ladies.
It is the union of a filmmaker who often went deliriously, deliciously over the top and a songwriter who stayed in that register all the time. (Jim’s oft-stated heroes were Richard Wagner and Little Richard, and clearly many tragic story-songs of the early Sixties.) The video finds “Unkle Ken” (as he liked to be called in his later years) repeating a plot he developed for his contribution to the anthology film Aria (1987), and in the process producing frenzied, stylized visuals that perfectly match Steinman’s words and music.
In a recently posted piece by Sylvie Simmons, Steinman is quoted as saying that Russell “'shot enough footage for a whole porno movie.... The record company,' he added with a grin, was 'horrified.' ” (Jim had a penchant for hyperbole that never failed him.)
The singer, for the record, is Elaine Caswell. And this is a mega-blast of Steinman (and Russell) grandiosity.
For close to 25 years now I’ve been paying tribute to Christian kitsch on Easter episodes of the Funhouse TV show. One of the individuals whose work I returned to a lot in the ’90s and a bit of the 2000s was Carman, the Christian pop singer, who died on Feb. 16 at the age of 65. Carman’s music videos were little marvels that contained imagery, tropes, and cliches from music-vids of many different genres (each video seeming to “capture” the genre it was mimicking) and demand repeated viewings.
But who was this guy Carman anyway? Born Carmelo Licciardello, he was a Sicilian-American from Trenton, N.J., who reportedly found Christ at an Andre Crouch concert and then became a proselytizing singer espousing Christian values in his lyrics and performances. (From this point on I’ll use the abbreviation “Xtian,” as it makes things simpler.)
The New Jerseyness generally disappeared from Carman’s public persona — he acquired a Southern accent when preaching, never performed songs that referred to his upbringing (his mother was part of a girl group that often played Atlantic City), and became an all-American presence who was as patriotic as he was Xtian. He was noted as “bringing Vegas to Christian music” but he also, according to his official website, had his own ministry. On the site you can sign up to be a “monthly partner.” (“Our partners are the lifeline of our ministry. Your monthly contribution allows us to win more souls to Christ.”)
He was also clearly a guy who worked out a lot — he appeared muscular and startlingly groomed even shortly after he recovered from a battle with cancer in the mid-2010s. In his songs and videos he often stressed fighting the Devil and depicted it as a physical fight. (An “enforcer” for the Lord, if you will.) Of his four acting roles in feature films, two were self-penned vehicles in which he played a tough guy — the more prominent of the two being Champion (2001), about a boxer who must come back to the ring for one last match (and ends up fighting more fiercely outside the ring – with MMA moves rather than the Marquess of Queensbury).
Rat Pack Carman.
Before I get to the catchy songs/perfect approximations of genre music videos that are Carman’s major legacy, let’s touch on his political side, since that fed into the evangelical tack he took in his religion. The best introduction to this aspect is “Revival in the Land” (a 1990 song), a spoken word piece done in full costume and a Hellscape set. A demon (voiced by Carman) checks in with Lucifer (also voiced by Carman) about how things on Earth are going. He mentions a problem (the spread of Xtianity, of course!), but the Horned One first must query his minion, “Is there something wrong with my abortion clinics?”
The response, “We eliminate human life in the name of convenience” and comparison of abortion to the Holocaust probably was a fusion of Carman’s holy roller adult beliefs and his Sicilian-Catholic upbringing. The video, directed by Stephen Yake (more on him below), is an Xtian Reefer Madness for the George H.W. Bush era. If the propaganda won’t getcha, and the fully styrofoamed Devil figure doesn’t, surely the end explosion will. (Satan’s throne blows up real good.)
Carman’s patriotic side was a strong component of his work. At these moments he would forget about singing — only a sternly-worded lecture would do. In “America Again” (a 1993 song; Carman is credited with writing or cowriting all of the songs from his “boom” period in the ’90s), one of his finest-ever complaint lines gets an airing: “When it gets to the point where people would rather come out of the closet than clean it, it’s the sign that the judgment of God is going to fall!” (I have gloried in that line for years — turning from a metaphor for queer identification to sanitary reality in the deft, deranged turn of a phrase, we learn that the downfall of this country will most assuredly be not only homosexual behavior but also cluttered wardrobes.)
Carman’s concern about people’s gender preference is manifested in depth in an episode of his 1993 series Time 2 (Dir: Stephen Yake, 1993). A full playlist of the episodes on YT can be found here. Most episodes were named after a societal problem — psychics, new age spirituality, single-parent families, drug abuse, cults, “singleness” (!) — and the most politically grounded is homosexuality, in an episode called “Confused Affections.”
Here, although Carman notes that it is possible to “separate the person from the sin,” he also declares that this sin is considered grievous (as illustrated by various Bible passages). In fact, “If God had a stomach, he would vomit at these practices.” The question thus becomes “Is it an alternate lifestyle — or a perverse and deadly sin?”
The buff Carman.
Here we learn about the fact (according to studies unmentioned) that most gay people had “very troubled childhoods.” An interview subject notes how he was called “sissy” and was indeed gay. Now, his lovely wife keeps on the (very) straight and narrow. It is even noted by this ex-gay man (this unbidden by Carman) that, if a naked man were to appear in front of him, he wouldn’t care. Carman closes out his earnestly sincere plaint by noting that gayness can result in a “physical penalty” — from altered speech and mannerisms to diseases like AIDS.
The episode ends with a rather curious footnote — a vignette in which a redneck Good Old Boy is seen crowing to his wife about how he and the local preacher “drove off” these two “light in the loafers… pansies.” We, the audience, realize that his wife thinks what he said is too cruel and against church teachings on loving one’s neighbor.
But no such thought is expressed — we just see a “isn’t he a silly?” expression cross her face and a Bible quote appears onscreen (“Do not regard him as an enemy, but warn him as a brother”). Thus, if you know an individual who is not acting Xtian to their neighbor and hating them for some aspect of their personhood — hey, just shrug it off!
Aside from his concerts (which were large, sell-out, stadium affairs in various cities — his website declares that his largest audience was 80,000 people in Chattanooga, Tenn.), Carman’s main vehicle for his pop ministry was the music video. And the best of these are indeed a wonder — as noted above, they not only seem like a performer trying out a “crossover” identity, but they work as encapsulations of the genre in question. If Carman made a country line-dancing video, it was the ultimate line-dancing video (every image, framing, and editing trope you’ve seen in those music-videos). The same for gospel, rock, white-boy rap, movie-soundtrack homages, bubble-gum pop, and even metal.
The young Carman.
The director of all the best of these videos is Stephen Yake, who has a quite lengthy videography of work for Xtian artists. His work with Carman is indeed extraordinary — and, even though I embarked upon showing these videos on the Funhouse TV show in the ’90s as a wise-ass Atheist confronting remnants of his Catholic past, I have always been impressed by Yake’s thorough “inventory of effects” (to quote the Big McLuhan) and the fact that his videos for Carman’s songs might seem like parodies of the genre (in the sense that a video for a Weird Al or Spinal Tap song is), but it was clear that, in each case, Yake would try to “grab” a genre’s music-video images and drop Carman in the middle of them.
A reviewer given to academic interpretations would, of course, call this kind of thing “deconstruction” of a familiar pop culture phenomenon; I will simply say that Yake and Carman knew how to target the demographic for each song.
And the hooks! You can approach these videos as I do — again, wise-ass, intent on mocking the message of the songs and their visual presentation – but there is no way you won’t end up with these songs engrained in your memory for hours (and perhaps days) after hearing them. Thus, of course, the Xtian songwriter wins the battle, if not the war. Carman did indeed get the last laugh on me in the “hook so catchy you can’t lose the damned thing for a long while” department.
Celebrity Carman.
Case in point: his 1991 lamentation on the loss of prayer in schools, done as a metal song. This tune, credited only to Carman as a songwriter but performed with Xtian metalheads Petra, is basically just a hook with a song built around it.
The video features Carman in an eye-grabbing blue suit that jars wildly with the nearly monochrome visuals of the “high school without Christ,” borrowed from any number of those damned metal and even grunge power ballads with little stories in ’em. (Yake puts in a number of evocative touches that would signal “hard rock” even in small snippets on “Beavis and Butt-head.”)
Warning: You may indeed laugh at the earnestness of this message (again, the morals Carman taught us had a lovely Reefer Madness urgency to them), but you won’t easily discard the ersatz metal heard here.
NOTE: This embed works, but for some reason has no thumbnail.
And skipping straight to the most hook-heavy song Carman ever produced, there’s “Sunday School Rock” (Dir: Yake from this point on, 1993 song). The video is an “American Bandstand”-type 1950s affair, with all kinds of visual steals from Fifties and early Sixties TV clips and movies.
But the song! In an audio commentary with Yake found on YT, Carman notes he wrote it as a memory-aid for kids to remember the books of the Bible that had inspiring messages, but each verse is a little speech set to a catchy beat, with Carman at points reverting to his Sicilian NJ heritage (with tough guy hand gestures, even). The chorus is the dumbest, simplest thing imaginable — and thus it BURNS into the brain. In the commentary video, Carman notes it became a signature song he sang at every concert.
Jumping genres entirely, there’s “Satan Bite the Dust” (1991 song). It’s Carman doing “cowboy music” and acting out a “Sheriff cleans up the town” scenario in a bar setting. Again, Carman and his collaborators decided the hook was all that mattered, so the chorus is “Ghost Riders in the Sky,” with added-in snippets of very familiar Western themes — from The Magnificent Seven and “The Wild Wild West” to, of course, “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.”
The fact that the Muppet-like villain who purveys “false religions” is wearing a turban and playing a foreign-looking stringed instrument is a nasty bit of inter-faith racism. But the catchiness of the tune and the “borrowed” elements make it rewatchable.
Now, onto the inevitable: Carman’s rap white-boy rap music. Here again, Yake reproduces all the visual “cues” for softer rap (think the Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff) for a video featuring Carman (in shorts, even!). The lesser of the two Carman vids is “Who’s in the House?” (Answer: “JC!”) where he lets us know that “we’re kickin’ it for Christ!”
That video pales in comparison with “Addicted to Jesus” (1991 song), which Carman performs with the Xtian rap group DC Talk. If you want to take a time trip back to the early ’90s with a music video you’ve never seen before, this would be your ticket to ride. This time Carman wears a purple suit and the visual effects that signal “friendly rap song” flash by in very fast succession. He also dances with the DCT boys, showing off his steps and urging the slack-jawed viewer to “Praise the Lord with your feet!”
Now, the all-out strangest and most colorful video in this whole collection, Slam!” (song: 1998). This time out Yake delivered a powerhouse of strangeness — a video that takes Prince’s “Batdance” song and video and overlays “Rhythm Nation” dancing and imagery out of A Clockwork Orange. I will bet good money (well, at least five bucks) that this is the only Xtian music-vid that references that particular early Seventies classic.
It’s definitely the ultimate collaboration of the Yake-Carman team, since it’s a catchy tune showcased by a delightfully deranged video. This posting of the video has an audience clapping along (with girls cheering for sexy Carman), as it premiered as part of the anti-Halloween Xtian special Halloween 3:16, which Carman posted on YT in its entirety. (A show that really should have a Goth kid following, as it is the kind of thing that made them run away from church imagery and over to the darker side.)
Sample lyric, as the once again pugnacious-for-Christ Carman threatens to beat up the Old Scratch: “In my mind there is no fear/In my mind there is no doubt/Yes, I am that Christian that Hell warned you about!”
And while we’re on the subject of the Devil, one of Carman’s best-known videos is a spoken-word piece in which he, a Jesus-loving man of propriety, meets an evil witch-man (perhaps even… a warlock?) who wants to brag about his Fallen Angel rather than the Big G that Carman is pledged to.
In the piece, the witch — purportedly (per another preacher’s interview, found on YT) based on Isaac Bonewits, the only American to get a BA in Magic, from UC Berkeley (here called “Horowitz” to make him Jewish; Bonewits was an ex-Catholic) — invites Carman over to his stronghold. There Carman sees all manner of Evil Things: horoscope signs on the walls! A crystal ball!! A Ouija board!!! And (in case you needed proof this is the Eighties/Nineties) a “Dungeons & Dragons” book!!!!
The Devil-worshipping, pentagram-wearing, goateed nemesis of our man Carman taunts our hero with a scrapbook containing his accomplishments (including an article about a man dying of AIDS). Carman, naturally, tells off this sick 666-er and dramatically leaves his house. Illustrating once more the desperate Xtian need for the Devil — for if there is nothing to continually and persistently condemn as Evil, how can one continually and persistently show that one is Good? (Bragging rights count, you know.)
Although “Slam!” is probably the single most dazzlingly weird Carman video, I will end on the one that short-circuited my brain. Carman’s video “Mission 3:16” (a 1998 song) is a little mini-movie in which he is a James Bond-like spy called “Agent 3:16” who meets with his “M”-like boss and “Q”-like supplier of top-secret gadgets and weapons, then goes on a mission to topple a villain who is spreading a hopeless message (literally, with video billboards that say “There Is No Hope” and “Life Is Meaningless”) to the people of “the entire country” (which looks like an Eastern republic but is supposed to be America).
His mission is to defeat the villain by tapping into his “network” and supplying a different message. In this music video, the song is a nothing — a bunch of lines about being brave, punctuated by John Barry-like horn trills and Bond guitar chords The video, however, is an all-out action flick in miniature, with car chases, machine gun blasts, fistfights (more of Carman’s beating up evil), outrageous stunts, and elementary fx. The song is so unimportant to the final product that the audio from the chase-fight-defeat narrative nearly drowns it out.
But then – the guest star appears. Agent 3:16 (who never once kisses a woman — this is a very chaste super-spy) finishes off the bad guy and he hears the “message” that he was supposed to spread, as intoned by “Mission Control” (a Presidential seal, followed by a Presidential type in an Oval Office-looking room).
The message is John 3:16 (“For God so loved the world...”), and the messenger is an actual guest star — Tony Orlando! Yes, it’s the man who tied that yellow ribbon, who knocked three times, who ventured into the strawberry patch with Sally. Those who know me know that I have a great affection for Tony’s upholding of the old show-biz “give 110%” attitude toward showmanship and his fanboy appreciation of other artists — his NYC host segments for the Jerry Lewis telethon consisted of him bringing on his favorite artists from his era and later. (I in fact heard about Carman’s death from Tony’s WABC “oldies” show where he announced it and played a Carman song in the mix of Sixties and Seventies hits that have been long missing from NYC radio.)
To have this veteran of the Seventies TV variety show and the Vegas/Atlantic City lounge-nexis show up in a Carman video was without a doubt the ultimate sign that Carman was still, despite his ministry and preaching, an old show-biz type who basically knew, and proved, that packaging — well, it’s everything.
The world’s greatest living filmmaker still has some ideas he’d like to impart. He’s now 90 (offering an excuse for his crankiness, which, admittedly, he’s displayed for the 60 years he's been making films), his voice trembles, and he’s clearly not in peak condition. But he still smokes fat cigars, is amenable to being interviewed at length every few months, and has some things to say.
The gent in question, Jean-Luc Godard, speaks in a decisive, declarative fashion, but he often travels circuitously around a topic he’s been asked about, only to give an answer that is related to the question but also introduces a second, related idea. He speaks conceptually yet also poetically — making his answers to questions seem like prepared notions or aphorisms while they are really just the products of a very unique method of thinking.
It is that unique approach to ideas and poetry that has made his films so important in the six decades since A Bout de Souffle. He remains one of the most influential filmmakers currently working while still also offering new ideas, striking imagery, and playful audio collages. We can count ourselves lucky to still be able to see new work by him in this most confused and chaotic of centuries.
Two lengthy interviews have been conducted with Godard (hereupon referred to sporadically as “Uncle Jean,” his farcical alter-ego from some of his Eighties “comeback” fiction features) since the onset of the pandemic. In the more recent one he is seen to be less healthy, more fragile, yet still engaged and opinionated. Much was made of the fact that the second interview contains his declaration that he will retire for good after making two more features. Given his current condition, we would be very lucky to see two more features come from him. After that, he certainly deserves a rest. *****
The first of the two interviews was conducted for students of the ECAL, Ecole Cantonale d’art de Lausanne, on April 7, 2020. Although Godard has noted that he felt Swiss in France and French in Switzerland, he does have a strong connection to his homeland — since that’s where he came back to, to focus his energies on film- and video-making, and to just live. (Of course, to be the true-blue contrarian he has always been, he notes “I may have a Swiss passport, but I’m French.”) He tells the interviewer, Lionel Baier, that he can have as much time as he wants, but Baier sticks to his own questions and doesn’t ask the ones that were supplied by students. He, like the later interviewer, is obviously a great student of Godard’s work, and so his questions are mostly about the themes that JLG has been obsessed about for the last few decades.
The discussion starts with Godard mentioning a project he thought about but never went through with — showing the life of a cable-news anchor. In classic poetic JLG-speak, he notes this about his inability to get a real news anchor to allow their professional and personal life to be seen on-camera for his film: “They were willing to die for the news, but not willing to live it.”
The interviewer asks him how he takes in news these days, and Godard says he reads three newspapers (Liberation, Charlie Hebdo, Le Canard Enchaîné) and watches TV news (the kind without commercials) twice a day.
The first major topic tackled is, of course, the pandemic. Godard immediately goes into metaphorical mode, noting that “the virus is a form of communication… It needs to latch onto a host like certain birds.” In reference to the rapid progression of COVID, he notes “Yes, that’s capitalism for you. It’s all about growth.”
He speaks in metaphor and poetic likenings throughout. He posits at one point that the American attack on Iraq could be viewed as an attack on the area where language began (Chaldea). He then notes that, of course, George W. Bush and his cohorts wouldn’t know at all what was meant by that, but he then launches into a characteristically brilliant riff on how the best writers and artists tried to go “beyond, besides, and below language.” He quotes the poet Boileau-Despreaux, who said [JLG’s phrasing] “Review your work 20 times, and polish and re-polish it constantly.”
This returns to a theme I’ve talked about on the Funhouse TV show in the past few months — how non-American filmmakers, especially those brought up in Europe, are very knowledgeable about the other arts besides cinema. We’re lucky if American filmmakers know the history of cinema, whereas the masters of the medium have always been familiar with literature, painting, classical music, and other foundational work that one can then veer away from (while still being aware of what the seminal works are in other media).
It’s been noted about Godard by some who knew him that the books that he’s quoted from in his films have not actually been read by the filmmaker. He has himself admitted that he has looked for the best quotes in certain works of fiction and poetry. In the ECAL interview, he notes he currently prefers reading non-fiction (and detective stories in the world of fiction — the names Jean-Patrick Manchette and David Goodis are singled out for praise). He notes he remains interested in the scientific method and the work of scientists (thus, his interest in the virus).
At the point the ECAL talk was done he was working on a project, but would only say it was on the topic of (and he says this phrase in English) “fake news.” He said the notion was to pit the “news virus” one gets at home with simply living one’s life. (And he acknowledges that one of his best-known films is titled Vivre Sa Vie). Another project he was interested in doing in 2020 was an opera, with music to be provided by the jazz-experimental record label ECM (which has released the full soundtracks — dialogue and sound effects included — of some of JLG’s films). He talks about Anne-Marie Melville, with whom he’s been involved as a filmmaking partner and as a real-life partner since the 1970s. He notes that their devotion to the cause of Palestine brought them together — and in the second interview, discussed below, he refers to her several times as “my wife.” (But the two have never legally married — unless they’ve hidden that fact away from the public and press — and haven’t lived together for years.)
Then the real contrarian impulse kicks in, since he’s talking with a film scholar and being viewed by cinephiles — Uncle Jean starts bitching about living and dead filmmakers by saying that “three-quarters of them are not auteurs.” Of course, the buffs will love this, thinking he’s bitching about mainstream directors who make crappy action movies, crappy comedies, and crappy dramas. But, in a characteristically cranky mode, he wants to redefine who was in and out of the Nouvelle Vague, and who of the critically vaunted directors really was an auteur and who wasn’t.
Ben and Benedict poster
Thus, he orphans Claude Chabrol by saying he was not truly a New Wave filmmaker — “he was never an auteur. He was different. There was Truffaut, Rohmer, Rivette, and me. And three or four lesser-knowns, such as Claude Nedjar’s wife, Paula Delsol, who made a good little film [Ben et Bénédict, 1977], which I consider to be better than Agnes Varda. At the beginning Agnes made a few good films, two or three….”
He then admits that a few other names could be included in the New Wave. He, of course, leaves out the Left Bank, except for Varda whom he demotes — Resnais, Marker, and other directors of the same age group and similar disposition — Demy, Malle, and a few others. He basically has a problem with the term “filmmaker” as well as auteur/author. To him, auteur “is a status,” not a marker of quality.
He also downgrades two of the greatest cult heroes of the critic/filmmakers of the Fifties/Sixties: Sam Fuller and Nick Ray. The great Fuller acted for Godard in Pierrot Le Fou and his shots are mimicked in a bunch of JLG films, including A Bout de Souffle; the rebel-icon Ray was habitually mentioned in the Sixties Godard films and his work was included in later video essays like Histoire(s) du cinema. They are now, according to older, crankier, Uncle Jean “auteurs moyens” (middling authors).
Possibly the most surprising “demotion” for lovers of great French cinema is his current day takedown of Jacques Becker — after he himself wrote one of the finest-ever reviews of an admittedly lesser Becker film, which I quote in this blog post.
Casque d'or (1952), one of Becker's many masterpieces.
“We [at Cahiers] even defended authors of bad films. In my opinion, there’s only one film in which Becker was really the author, and that was Touchez Pas au Grisbi. None of the other films…. were [as good]. I wrote a review that upset him. I said, it’s because it was bad that he dared to do it badly.” JLG never clarifies which film he’s talking about, but again I direct you to his rave review of Montparnasse 19, which I mentioned in my posts about Becker.
Bresson, however, has lost none of his luster for Godard — he notes the reverence the New Wavers had for Bresson’s little book Notes on Cinematography. He also later in the ECAL chat oddly also underscores that the now-“rediscovered” (by cinephiles like the recently departed Bertrand Tavernier, whose list of favorites seemed to be comprised mostly of those directors “demoted” by the Cahiers group back in the Fifties) Claude Sautet. Godard praises Sautet’s films as “tight.” An odd combination, that — Bresson and Sautet….
At one point the interviewer does touch an emotional cord by asking if Godard misses his old New Wave colleagues. “Yes, I miss them a lot. Because we talked a lot, but now we hardly ever do. We talk about films when there’s a film to make, but apart from that it’s different.”
Young French filmmakers in 1959. Front row, left: Truffaut. Back row: Chabrol (glasses), JLG (shades).
Keep in mind, of course, that when he recorded this interview, even Varda had died, so the core of the Nouvelle Vague *and* the “Left Bank” brilliant innovators had all died. So, one assumes he’s speaking in the present tense about the past – or simply implying that he used to talk with more collaborators (as when he had the same cinematographer for several years — Raoul Coutard — and when he had a filmmaking partner other than Ms. Mieville — Jean-Pierre Gorin).
In closing, he is asked to provide the usual “advice” to young filmmakers. With typical circuitous elan, he simply says, “They should check what they’re doing.” (We return to the Boileau-Despreaux quote above.)
And the interviewer does “break character” to add in, while the tape is still running, “You mean a lot to us.” Uncle Jean’s unsentimental but still jovial response? “Yes, I’m aware of that. … So far, so good….”
*****
A year can make a lot of difference in a senior’s life. In the second lengthy interview video, which was uploaded to YouTube on March 2 of this year, Godard seems shakier, more tired, and more uncertain. The last, however, comes from the fact that this interview came off poorly, not for its content but because of persistent technical troubles and difficulties in understanding between the interviewer and Godard.
The talk was tied in to the fact that Godard was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the International Film Festival of Kerala in India. Godard was seen briefly via his cellphone at the ceremony where he was awarded the honor but, luckily for the festival, he agreed to be interviewed at another time. Unluckily for the festival, the chat was conducted on the Net and was conducted in English, a language that Godard admittedly doesn’t remember all that well. (A translator was standing by online, but she also had technical problems and had to render quick translations of what Uncle Jean had said, which is not an easy task under the best of circumstances.)
So, this is a more jarring and saddening viewing experience, but if you view this interview video first (as I did), it’s a lot less jarring (minus the obvious increasing tremor in JLG’s voice). The difficulties encountered in the discussion are quite daunting, though. Godard’s circuitous, conceptual, and poetic language is very hard to translate and make sense of. (One would have to paraphrase or rethink the wording in the second language.)
Here, both speakers are operating with verbal impediments. The interviewer, C.S. Venkiteswaran, is clearly a brilliant, sharp thinker, who speaks with an Indian accent; Godard, on the other hand, has his classic speech impediment (which was quite well approximated by Louis Garrel in the rather awful Le Redoubtable, aka “Godard, Mon Amour,” 2017).
One adds onto those trouble-causing elements for a bilingual conversation the fact that the Net connection between the two suffered glitches and lags, and the fact that both gentlemen are clearly very set in their ways: Godard is always going to answer in his characteristically circuitous fashion, and Venkiteswaran continued to ask rather lengthy questions, even when it was obvious that shorter queries would’ve worked better, given all the difficulties. (As someone who has many lengthy questions in interviews, I sympathize.)
Again, Uncle Jean smokes a BIG cigar with much relish and again, he starts off likening cinema to the coronavirus. When called “one of the youngest filmmakers” currently working, he admits “I’m still at the beginning” and then affirms that his main concern is “movies and reality — what reality is and what is the [best] way to catch reality.”
The central metaphor he latches on to here — and this seems to reflect on the commodification of “content” on the Net and the consumer society in general — is that “production” should be what people are concerned about, and instead “distribution” becomes the main obsession. In the case of cinema, he notes that “distribution has choked production to be at the service of the viewer.”
On the shoot for the 3-D film Adieu au langage (2014).
He continues with this metaphor for a while and revives the idea throughout the interview. He notes that commercials should be longer — one assumes, since he craves sheer honesty, and if commercials stopped pretending they were just mere interruptions, the viewer would be clearer about what they are and what they’re conveying. At this point a period of dead silence ensues, the first of a bunch in the video.
Godard takes this little sejour from the conversation to reflect on silence. He asks the interviewer if he could describe “an image of silence.” When Venkiteswaran says he can’t, JLG provides what might be the most profound and beautiful moment in the talk when he says, “I look out my window and there is snow. The [18th-century French] writer Jules Renard said silence is snowing on the water.” He then adds, “In doing that we are still making cinema.”
At this point one is happy to realize that Godard’s mind is as nimble as ever, with tangents that might only completely work if translated into and out of Japanese. (The above Renard quote has the distinct feeling of a Japanese epigram.)
Venkiteswaran’s best question for Godard produces another one of these tangents — in this case it is unfortunate, because the question is indeed so good. To wit, with surveillance cameras and webcams everywhere, the state is currently the biggest mass producer of images; add to that the wild profusion of images uploaded by consumers onto the Internet. With these two new sources for millions and millions of images, where does the contemporary filmmaker fit in?
Godard’s answer to this is refer to history — in this case “archeology” done on family history that he has done over the years. He refers to the human memory as being finite and emphasizes that our memory of our family can only be traced back a few generations (“a few grandmothers – I don’t count in centuries, but in grandmothers,” he notes).
At this point there is more silence, and so Godard goes into another reverie. Again, the meat of the conversation is a tangent. He meditates on the fact that in film “a few seconds after saying ‘Action,’ we say, ‘Silence!.’ The difficulty of today’s cinema is that it only thinks Action and does not think Silence. However, it says both while shooting!”
The next two topics are again extended metaphors by Uncle Jean — the first involves a discussion of his favorite topic, language. (He notes that “Today there is only speech, only words, only alphabet.”) The second returns to the theme of virus as communication. He mentions that he once appeared on TV with his cousin Jacques Monod, who “discovered DNA.” (Per Monod’s Wiki, he is “widely regarded as one of the founders of molecular biology.”)
Godard maintains he asked Monod in which direction DNA could go — his cousin maintained that it only proceeded in one direction, but the contrarian filmmaker says he still inquired about it going in the opposite direction… prefiguring the RNA molecule. (This is how he puts it — at these points, one assumes that his ideas are sound, but his method of conveying them is, again, roundabout and possessing a degree of Wellesian self-aggrandizement.) This retrovirus, he notes, brings us something that “we try to destroy,” instead of trying to understand it.
After another metaphorical tangent, in which he discusses how most filmmakers frame images (from the outside in) and how he likes to frame (from the center outward), he takes out his latest “script,” which is in fact an accordion-pleated succession of cardboard cards that have images and handwritten sentences on them. (His handwriting is a sight familiar to those who’ve seen any of JLG’s films from Pierrot Le Fou onward.)
At this point he makes the announcement that became the most-repeated item from this interview. He states that he has two scripts assembled, called “Scenario” and “Droles du guerres” (Funny Wars). “I’m finishing my movie life by doing two scripts, and after that I will say goodbye to cinema.” One hopes he can get both films made, or even one of them, since he does indeed seem shaky. (But infinitely determined, which is what has clearly kept him alive until the age of 90.)
Toward the end of the chat Godard speaks about the nationality of he and his “wife,” the filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. He notes that they are expatriates in both Switzerland and France — “The Swiss authority doesn’t consider us as good Swiss people, and the French authority has completely forgotten us as French citizens.”
At the end, Venkiteswaran asks Godard why India, the world’s leading producer (and, as Uncle Jean notes, the leading distributor!) of films, wasn’t included in his epic video project Histoire(s) du Cinema. JLG confesses that he knows nothing of Indian cinema outside of Satyajit Ray, because Indian films were very hard to see in France. When quizzed by the host of the event at the very end as to why he has never traveled to India, the always-circuitous Godard instead recounts a tale of how he was rejected from traveling to Vietnam when the war was on.
The end of the interview reminds us that Uncle Jean is indeed an old gent who is only passingly familiar with modern devices, even though he has several times in the last decade sworn fidelity to his iPhone. He wants to show an illustration of what he believes himself to be to the hosts, and thus he searches around for quite a while to find it. With the help of his cinematographer-producer-researcher Fabrice Aragno, he finally comes up with the image in his iPhone gallery — it’s a drawing of a fisherman casting his line, waiting to see what he will catch.
