Lost movies and photomontage: two more great blogs

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I do it for no money whatsoever, but merely to spread the good word about the finest in high art, low trash, and other essentials. On the menu bar to the right I have a list of other sites and blogs that offer terrific content, but I think that perhaps only one of the bloggers actually is making money from what he’s doing on his blog (and that money comes from a nice side mail order business, and not the blog proper). These days, I seem to be discovering like-minded bloggers a few times a month, and have come to the very evident conclusion that the Internet is an unending series of trees falling in the forest. My advice is... just listen for the sound.

Sometimes another blogger approaches me, as happened when San Francisco artist Peter Combe wrote praising the full episode about New Yorker Films that I had put up on YouTube (btw, folks, it has been announced that New Yorker is coming back to life as of this writing). Peter does the blog A Tale of a Few Cities. He is a movie fan who posts arthouse-movie joke images in among the many fascinating images of l’art moderne.

And, since I like to move from art to trash and back again, I have to spotlight a blog that is absolutely chockfull of good things and represents of good deal of work by its blog-meisters. It’s called Temple of Schlock, and is a wonderful labor of love that sprang out of a zine started in 1987 by Syracuse residents Paul DeCirce and Chris Poggiali. Those gentlemen now run a blog with that name that incorporates a pretty sizeable collection of newspaper clippings, press booklets, posters (featured in the “One Sheet of the Week” entries), movie collectibles, and even View Master reels.

Here’s an example of the Temple-keepers’ newspaper clipping collection, including an ad for the “porn” re-release of Myra Breckenridge touting the participation of “Angel” Farrah Fawcett and a porn-ish promo ad for the Roman Polanski film What? (known over here as Forbidden Dreams or Diary of Forbidden Dreams). The blog also includes exploitation profiles, like this one about the marvelous Claudia Jennings.

The Schlock blog is very content-intensive, and two features are personal favorites of mine. The first is the “This Week on 42nd St.” entries, which gives us a list of what played on the Deuce on certain dates in certain years, for instance 1978 and 1985.

The most important entries DeCirce and Poggiali write, however, are the “Endangered List” blogposts about movies that they have information on, but which have never been released on VHS or DVD. They’ve written up dozens of these films, which include such unfindable rarities as the Romain Gary film Birds in Peru and an amazing-sounding (in so many ways) Rich Little vehicle in which Nixon and Agnew are seen as a kind of Laurel and Hardy for the Seventies. The film was produced by Tom Smothers, and directed by Bob “Super Dave”/“Officer Judy” Einstein. Its title? Another Nice Mess.

And what can be said about a blog that poses as many interesting questions about lost movies as it answers about surviving ones? In the case of the “endangered” films the bloggers ask us outright for more information on the films’ whereabouts, but in the case of some items, it’s time to just scratch one’s head and wonder. What in the holy hell was the midnight movie “event” entitled The Beatles Meet Star Trek? We’d all love to know.

Why I'm not rushing to see the latest "Scorsese picture"

“I have to wonder whether or not young people who have grown up on digitally engineered effects and DTS soundtracks can actually find the patience required to watch a film by Bresson or, for that matter, an Ozu or an Antonioni. In a way, it seems impossible: it’s as though they’re from different worlds….”

“Once Elvis Costello said that whenever he’s writing a song he asks himself: is it as tough as Hank Williams? Meaning: is it as ruthlessly pared down, as direct, as unflinching in its gaze at aspects of life I might feel more comfortable ignoring? Young filmmakers might ask themselves: is it as tough as Bresson?”
--Martin Scorsese, on filmmaker Robert Bresson

I was a child of the Seventies, so Martin Scorsese’s best films are works I can never shake, and would never want to. His masterpieces from the Seventies and Eighties are some of the best American films ever made, and even his big, wildly miscalculated coke-fueled messes from that period (think New York, New York) are fascinating to me. I have committed his older work to memory, but have absolutely no desire to rewatch anything he’s made in the last decade after I’ve seen it once. What exactly happened to the kinetic stylist who made character-driven films, the finest American filmmaker of his generation?

Well, perhaps he’s just not making films “as tough as Bresson” anymore, or perhaps it all comes down to his having said several years ago that it rankled him when he was considered merely a “New York filmmaker” — he wanted to be considered a “Hollywood filmmaker.” He also said in an interview with Bob Costas that he envied Steven Spielberg for the way that Spielberg was able to direct crowds, a la David Lean. The fact that Scorsese’s strong suit has never been and never will be pageantry, and the bigger and more Hollywoood-like that his films have become the less soul they’ve had, has apparently escaped the man himself.

Scorsese is one of the most devoted film fans in the filmmaking community, and a god in the preservationist world. He has often noted his utter adoration of the Golden Age directors who worked under the studio system, and are hard to get a handle on in terms of a visual style or an “identity” (as opposed to stylists like Ray and Fuller, whose personality is emblazoned in every frame of their work): brilliant craftsmen like Hawks and Wyler who made great movies in every genre and worked smoothly with the biggest stars of the Thirties and Forties. And who, of course, lost major ground and fumbled around in the Sixties (excepting the terrific The Collector), the era when Scorsese’s generation was beginning to forge a new approach to filmmaking. The traditional studio system, it seemed, was entirely dead and has remained so. But not so Scorsese’s desire to make that kind of film.

Thus, he’s chosen to make a string of extremely long, epic-themed films with Leonardo Caprio, an actor of limited means who was a superior child and teen performer, but has demonstrated a far weaker presence as an adult lead (thus his constant scowling, to approximate an adult demeanor). This phenomenon started with The Gangs of New York, where slight Leo was supposed to be the physical equal of the scenery-chewing Daniel Day Lewis, and is now continuing with Shutter Island, where Leo will once again do a “Bahston” (please, Mr. Scorsese, stop it please with the bad Boston accents already!). What seems to be going on here is that Scorsese views DiCaprio as a kind of Rock Hudson for the 21st century, an actor who couldn’t ever hack it in grittier films, but has a certain type of “glamour” — and more importantly, who had studio heads interested in him post-Titanic, although the success of that film was a convergence of elements and not specifically due to his presence. What DiCaprio seemed to represent was a performer who could get the movie financed and also, at the hands of a Douglas Sirk-like filmmaker, become a really interesting screen presence, despite his lack of range as a performer and the fact that his idyllic good looks limit his ability to play earthy characters.

Well, it hasn’t worked. The DiCaprio-Scorsese as Hudson-Sirk experiment that has gone on for three films and continues with the current Shutter Island is one that does not seem to have stirred a major interest in most viewers, but it has continued unabated. Each time De Niro worked with Scorsese in their shared heyday, there was a buzz of expectation from fans and in the press (this was quelled by the workmanlike and unnecessary remake of Cape Fear). Perhaps the nicest remark I’ve heard from movie-mad friends when discussing this constant casting by Scorsese of the Baby-Faced One in his films has been, “well, he was okay in The Aviator, he really tried in that one.” Yes, he tried, but the film was a giant, overblown biopic that got stuck on a Hughes court case that just wasn’t interesting. The scenes in which Leo was naked in the screening room were welcome in that they were strange and downright odd for a Hollywood biopic, but they also required an actor who didn’t look as if he was wearing fake facial hair while writhing around the room.

The obvious change in Scorsese’s style seems to have come from the fact that he was in personal transition throughout the period when his best films were made, and now that he’s a comfortable icon of cinema, he is making films that are sheer craft — technical experiments that have far more in common with David Lean than they do with his onetime mentor John Cassavetes. Casssavetes famously chided Scorsese on having made the (actually pretty great) Boxcar Bertha for Roger Corman, telling him to stop making “crap” and do something he really cared about. One can’t imagine what Cassavetes would’ve made of The Departed, a bloated adaptation of a tight, nothing-budgeted Hong Kong cop thriller that finally got Scorsese the Oscar he deserved for the rough-edged, uneven-but-yet-curiously-perfect films like Raging Bull. The craft pleases the eye, but the brain and emotions are not engaged. The “Leo era” has not been an interesting one for fans of Scorsese’s work.

Admittedly, the Scorsese style of the Seventies was already starting to become self-citation in the Nineties: in the brilliantly cast (supporting roles only) but wildly uneven Bringing Out the Dead, one wasn’t sure if the film was taking place in the Seventies or the Nineties, as he attempted to update his Taxi Driver style sans the energy, devotion, and drive (and chemical stimulants?) of that era. (As for the stimulants being a part of the TD process, this has gone into common lore, and was the premise for the plot of the only good episode of the cartoon series American Dad). In Casino, he offered a smoother, more stylized version of the Goodfellas approach; this was unfortunate, as the splendid Goodfellas was already a work that seemed to be intent on sanding off the rough edges that made Mean Streets such an eternally rewatchable work about a low-ranking mob member (the exquisite use of pop music from the Sixties that began in Who’s That Knocking At My Door? reaches heights of dazzling brilliance in Goodfellas — and then tapers off to become the umpteenth use of “Gimme Shelter” in The Departed). We can count our blessings that the Dino project, the proposed Scorsese adaptation of Nick Tosches' immaculately detailed Dean Martin bio, was never produced, as it in turn would’ve been a “cleaner,” smoother version of Casino (like a Russian doll version of the same film, slightly transformed with each larger-sized version….).

However, even though Terrence Rafferty this week in the New York Times remarked that the last decade has been the “liveliest, most varied, and most consistently inventive stretch” of Scorsese’s work since the Seventies, I’d make the argument that the very bumpy Nineties was the most varied era for Scorsese in recent memory, as the last two films of his that had a genuine emotional “kick” were the ones that seemed the most uncharacteristic and atypical, The Age of Innocence (1993) and Kundun (1997). Both were films I thought would be odd exercises for him, but both had small emotions at their core and were absorbing and brilliant as a result. Who would’ve thought that the story of the search for the Dalai Lama would’ve been the last truly involving film made by the filmmaker who made such cornerstones of gritty, challenging NYC cinema as Taxi Driver and King of Comedy?

But there haven’t just been fiction films, there have been documentaries. And yes, they have been very long. Scorsese’s love of cinema and rock music is unparalleled, but oddly, each time you watch his documentaries, you feel overwhelmed by duration, yet only in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies did it seem like he opened a doorway to invite viewers to actually experience the works he was praising for themselves. His study of Italian cinema, Il Mio Viaggio in Italia, is a hermetically sealed work that offers Cliff Notes-like plot synopses of each Italian film which tend to make the viewer feel as if he or she has taken in the whole film — they don’t inspire the inclination to view the complete film that just seeing a significant scene or two would produce (American viewers feel that if they know the plot, they’ve seen the movie already, or read the book).

His Dylan documentary was a project he inherited and didn’t do the interviews for — thus it was the polar opposite of his work on The Last Waltz or his wonderful film about his parents, Italianamerican, which can be seen here. Also, Dylan and/or his people clearly approved of the squeaky-clean image given of him in the film — thus it seemed as if (scenes of Greenwich Village from underground films aside — that was the old Scorsese!) he was making a record company-sponsored portrait of Bob that was really, really long (and Todd Haynes reached the core of the artist in a shorter time with a “fiction” film). His Stones concert docu, Shine a Light? I won’t kid, it’s the one Scorsese film I haven’t yet seen, and am not racing to catch it on the home screen.

I reflect on all this because the latest “Scorsese picture,” Shutter Island, looks to be a dedicated exercise in style with some beautiful craft (there will NEVER be a bad-looking film by him) but no emotional drive. The visual effects showcased in the trailer exhibit that Mr. S has watched a bunch of “J-“ and “K-horror” (Japanese and Korean) films lately, and wanted to try out some new visual tricks. That kind of mega-budgeted recreation of lower-budgeted Asian action fare has the feel of Quentin Tarantino, not the man who clearly (among many) influenced Tarantino with his own lean, spare, and haunting work. Unlike Scorsese’s personal work, which really needed to be viewed in a theater, Shutter Island will most likely be more overwhelming and eye-catching on a TV screen.

The Rafferty piece in the Times went along the lines of nearly everything written about Scorsese in the mainstream press (to wit, the Leonardo films have been “bold and exciting”). His best filmmaking work is indeed indelible, his work as a preservationist and a champion of the great films and filmmakers is unassailable. He is an incredibly valuable individual for film fans in so many ways. Thus, journalists and mainstream critics will not honestly reflect on how the films he has made have become less and less (and less) interesting in the last decade. To do so would be to not be able to interview him, not be able to hang with him, or simply to greet him at movie-industry parties (he does seem like a nice guy, and certainly a helluva conversation partner). This means that movies that are “al dente” (to quote Raging Bull on the subject of cooking, “it defeats its own purpose!!!”) and lack an emotional core are hailed as being in the same league as films that were angst-ridden masterworks.

I will continue to see his work, of course, as I hope he will somehow offer us a personal work at some point in the future. The model of countless “senior” European and Asian directors, as well as Funhouse god Robert Altman, seems to be the only way to proceed as a filmmaker grows older (unless, of course, the filmmaker started out as a crowd-pleaser, in the Spielberg fashion). In a phrase: “small movies.” Films based on character and plot, little films made on lower budgets, funded outside the established Hollywood studios. Films that are “as tough as Bresson.”

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And since, like “Marty,” we all love to watch movies, below are remembrances of the filmmaker when his films were smaller. Interestingly, there are NO interviews with the intense, fast-talking, bearded Scorsese on YouTube (it can’t be that they don’t exist, I have a few on VHS — does no one else have them, or were they taken down?). There was absolutely nothing like the intense pace that Scorsese used to think and talk at. Here, for example, is a rare audio interview from 1975



UPDATE: Somehow when I was writing this, I forgot that *I* put up a slice of Scorsese during his amazing "beard era." Here he is discussing Jerry Lewis in a French documentary:



The unforgettable beginning of Mean Streets:



Who needs a documentary about the senior-aged band when you have this?



The trajectory of Taxi Driver as recounted by Scorsese; mentions of Hitchcock, Godard, and Fassbinder:



The beginning of the De Niro-Pesci team. They had quite a way with comedy team-style dialogue (and where the hell has Joe been in the past decade?):



Very strong, extremely personal cinema:



The details are the picture: check out the gentleman on screen right mimicking Rupert’s every move:



Jerry lets loose, and the result is a sublimely uncomfortable sequence:



A memorably small, dark paranoid comedy:



The film that was the closing of the “golden era,” along with Goodfellas. The one he was born to direct, the uneven but visceral and powerful and VERY brilliant Last Temptation of Christ:



The 2000-year-old man said you could learn a lot of new words from Scorsese’s films. Here’s one:



And in closing, from the days when Scorsese's films excited us all incredibly. Note that, even though the video was made by the time that he had shaved off his beard, the pics used are all of him from the bearded period. The album version of the song is even more maniacal, as John S. Hall inserts the word "fuck" in every sentence:

J.D. Salinger. Jerry Lewis. "Catch" the excitement!

Now that J.D. Salinger has gone to that big Author’s Retreat in the sky, much has been made about whether his stories will ever be adapted for the movies. Not much mention has been made, however, of the fact that his son was a very busy actor at one point, and in fact played Captain America in a B-budget feature directed by straight-to-vid vet Albert Pyun. The pic costarred Ronny Cox, Ned Beatty, and Darren McGavin and, yes, Cap was played by Matt Salinger.



But what about his dad’s books? (You thought I forgot, didntcha?) The obits mention that Leonardo DiCaprio was interested in playing Holden Caulfield (hey, maybe Martin Scorsese can now buy it for him and they can make a fifth pic together). But the key name to be mentioned here is… Jerry Lewis. Jerry goes on in his autobiography, In Person (or was it The Total Filmmaker?) about how much he wanted to make The Catcher in the Rye into a movie starring himself as Holden. In the Joyce Maynard tell-all book about her affair with the notoriously press-shy author (you can say anything you want about Thomas Pynchon, but the guy has definitely been a far more productive and interesting hype-evader), Maynard quotes Salinger as having told her in the Seventies that “Jerry Lewis tried to years to get his hands on the part of Holden.” Jerry was 25 when the book came out, but he was most likely over 35 or (if the overtures to Salinger did continue until the Seventies) over 45 when he was trying to obtain the film rights to the book.

The mind fairly boggles about what a Catcher movie directed by and starring Jerry would have been like. I for one wouldn’t mind seeing him play Holden at 84. “You lousy, goddam phonyyyyyyy”….

"Perverb"-ially speaking: Hal Willner's tribute to Tuli Kupferberg

In a previous post, I detailed the joys of seeing two live tribute shows masterminded by producer extraordinaire Hal Willner. Willner has crafted a number of “songbook” shows for composers over the past decade, and has staged the majority of them for free (that’s right, no cash, no ticket) at various venues in NYC. The latest in the series had a high ticket price, but its purpose — to help legendary poet/mother-Fug Tuli Kupferberg pay for his outsized medical expenses — was certainly noble. And, in the process, Willner staged another marathon program that included a sublime mix of musical legends and “unknowns” that are supremely talented.

The show was held on January 22nd at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn (ooh… artsy!), and lasted a full three and a half hours without an intermission. The roster ran the gamut from stripped-down folk ensembles to sonic experimenters (or, as they would’ve been called a few years back, “reverb motherfuckers”). Willner’s propensity to dig deeply into the catalogue of the person he’s saluting proved eye-opening here, as the Fugs were certainly musical innovators, but hearing their music recited and played by people possessing gorgeous voices (and playing their instruments to perfection) lent a whole new dimension to the work done by Tuli, Ed Sanders, Ken Weaver, and the other band members four decades ago. Willner also “mixes it up,” so that a number of the unknown (to me) commodities — including White Magic, Jolie Holland, and Flutterbox — distinguished themselves quite beautifully in between old vets like Philip Glass and a sonic-noise combo of Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, John Zorn, and Sarth Calhoun playing his laptop.

All in all, the show was a terrific revue-style (or is that variety show-like?) procession of top-notch talent paying tribute to Tuli’s work (a good account of the proceedings can be found on the my friend Carle's Station Sign blog). It’s hard to pick standouts, but one of the nicer surprises of the evening was former Del Fuego and current kid-entertainer Dan Zanes addressing the issue at hand, by performing the Fugs’ “River of Shit” (what a nice tune for the kiddies!) as a tribute to America’s rotten-as-fuck healthcare system. Zanes certainly tapped into the Fugs’ raw energy, but I’m sure that Old Man Kupferberg would’ve surely enjoyed “the ladies of Karen Black” (as they were called, Kembra Pfahler being the only recognizable figure) performing “Slum Goddesss of the Lower East Side” naked, clad only in their trademark primary-colored bodypaint (Tuli was never above a bit of carnal indulgence, as will be indicated below). The Fugs themselves performed twice, which gave one a bit of a nice chill up the spine, as NYC poetry legend Ed Sanders is still in fine voice (at the age of 70) and the group blazed on such fine vintage numbers as the psychedelic spoof “Crystal Liaison” and the theme song for this particular Willner show, Tuli’s terse, brilliant summation of Western Civilization in a few minutes, the anthemic “Nothing.”

The ensemble that seemed to capture the true anarchy found on the Fugs’ Sixties records was led by John S. Hall and Dogbowl of King Missile — I’d love to i.d. the other musicians, but the only downside of Willner’s mind-roastingly wonderful what-will-come-next? show-construction is that acts are announced once and once only (so if you miss the performer’s name, that’s essentially it, just enjoy their voice or playing). Hall and co. did high-energy versions of “Defeated” and “The Ten Commandments” with minimal instrumentation and copious amounts of histrionics. They reminded us all of how really strange and unusual the Fugs were in their day (and our own — do you think performers as un-photogenic and grubby, and brilliant, as Ed and Tuli could ever get on the pool of tedious mediocrity that is American Idol?).

Willner’s shows are truly unique events. At points they seem mildly disorganized, but the short-lived disorganization seems to stem from the fact that the backstage area is literally teeming with talented folks, and Willner seemingly wants to keep the show going all night – I still have a strong memory of performers on stage during his Neil Young tribute at Prospect Park getting the neck-cut “we gotta end the show” gesture, after three hours of great entertainment had been presented, and Hal apparently had even more wonderfully obscure Young tunes lined up.

So who is this Tuli fellow that the folks packed into St. Ann’s were cheering? You can check out his biography here, but suffice it to say that he’s (along with bandmate Sanders) one of the remaining Beat-poet pioneers and a consummate “commie” troublemaker. The Fugs are legends who can be sampled at various places on the Net, including their official site. For Manhattanites, it’s been our pleasure to see Tuli on Manhattan Neighborhood Network, the public-access organization that airs the Funhouse, for three decades now as host/producer of “Revolting News.” When YouTube became the most immediate mode of communication, Tuli wisely moved in on that too, and has posted a few hundred clips to YT and Daily Motion. Recently he suffered two strokes and is now blind and essentially housebound and in need of constant care. The “Nothing” benefit was held to raise money for his care, and wound up drawing attention to what a prolific guy he’s been over the past five decades, which was no surprise to those who’ve even sporadically followed his multi-media output.

A few clips have been posted from the show, including Jeffrey Lewis performing Tuli’s “And,” backed by the multi-instrumentalist, Holy Modal Rounder founder, and all-around joyful-noisemaker Peter Stampfel and his daughter:



Also from the Willner show, Gary Lucas performing a composition for Tuli:



To get a feel for what the Fugs did, here is a golden clip of them performing their psychedelic parody song (this written back in 1968), “Crystal Liaison” on Swedish TV:



Tuli’s clips on YouTube and Daily Motion are truly moving, because here is a gent who is now 86 and not at all healthy, but is totally with it mentally. He will not stop entertaining and enlightening us with his knowledge, his poetry, his aphorisms, and gags. Here he reads a poem from the early 1950s, “Snow Job”:



I highly recommend the clips uploaded by former Manhattan access host/producer Coca Crystal. Tuli guested on her show several times, and the clips can be found on YT. He does a version of the Calypso song ”Everybody Loves Saturday Night”. And here is a terrific version of an anti-nuke song done by Tuli as part of the “the Revolting Theater”:



Tuli has also been posting “Daily Perverbs” on YT, offering us quick jokes and silly puns. You gotta love the guy:



Another perverb:



And a final sample (there are literally dozens of these quickies on YouTube, check ’em out):



Guesting on Coca again, doing the “parasong” “No Business Like War Business”



Tuli’s updating of Woody Guthrie’s classic, with a slightly more realistic tint, “This Land is Their Land.” This “parasong” was performed at the benefit by Penny Arcade, who couldn’t quite sing it on-key, but who cares?



And finally, Tuli peforming a song he claims is his favorite of the ones he has composed, “When I Was a Young Man”:



Tuli has a way with finales — he provided a closing video for the “Nothing” benefit that found him urging us all to have fun on the way home. “It may be later than you think!” The clip above also offers a very nice closer for this tribute to an exceptional poet and, yes, troublemaker: “What are ya gonna do about it? Don’t just sit there!”

The "eldest brother" of the New Wave: Deceased Artiste Eric Rohmer

Eric Rohmer remains for me a “subject for further research” (phrase courtesy Andrew Sarris). I have thoroughly enjoyed the films of his I’ve seen, and yet I haven’t seen a good deal of his oeuvre. Perhaps this is due to the fact that he grouped his films in themed series, and although the films can be viewed individually with no loss of comprehension, the completist in me always wants to watch a series of films in the order it was released in. Perhaps it’s because Rohmer’s films are inherently literary in nature, and as such are chockfull of dialogue and characterization, as opposed to the poetry (Godard) and mystery (Rivette) found in my favorite New Wave films (although without question Rohmer stayed “purer” to his own vision of an intellectual cinema than Truffaut and Chabrol did to their initial rebel tendencies). Perhaps it’s simply because Rohmer made films the way Woody Allen has here in the U.S. — and although Woody favors Bergman as his model, I do see him more firmly following in the footsteps of Rohmer. Which is to say, he produced a steady flow of films that ranged from mini-masterworks to deftly realized but forgettable character studies (with his view of Paris and other locales being akin to Woody’s magical depictions of NYC). Sometimes the more films a filmmaker produces, the more I need to see everything he or she has made; sometimes I just see the “classics” and wind up losing track of the artist’s work in midstream.

In any case, what Rohmer did well, he did extremely well. And that was depicting the nuances of male-female relationships, keeping the viewer focused on the action by avoiding all “frills” (close-ups, flagrant musical soundtracks), and, let’s be honest here, casting really beautiful women as objects of desire, usually found in bathing suits on a beach.

A very early Rohmer work, shot in the early Fifties but not released until 1960, is the short Presentation, ou Charlotte et son Steak, starring none other than Uncle Jean himself, our hero Godard. He is so young here he’s not wearing glasses, has hair, and is ridiculously thin. He dubbed his own voice when Rohmer released the film in 1960, and Anna Karina and Stephane Audran dubbed the voices of the two actresses.



Rohmer’s first feature, Le Signe du Lion (1959), is very rarely seen on these shores. Here is a pretty thorough trailer from its initial release, running three minutes long:



And here is a key scene for Uncle Jean lovers, JLG does with a record player what Jean-Pierre Leaud later did with a CD in his terrific Grandeur et Decadense…. So does that mean Rohmer came up with this bit, or did Godard do it at parties to drive everyone nuts?



The opening of the short Nadja a Paris (1964), sans English subs (it’s all about location and girl here):



Rohmer’s first venture in color is BRIGHTLY colored, perhaps because it was released in the magic little year of 1967. La Collectioneuse can be found in its entirety here. This is a peek at the film's opening, and the quite lovely Haydéee Politoff dressed for some conversation:



Pauline at the Beach (1983) was one of Rohmer’s bigger arthouse hits over here. This is the U.S. home video trailer for the film. I love these odd artifacts of VHS Past:



Another underseen Rohmer title, starring the terrific Pascale Ogier (who died tragically at the age of 26), Full Moon in Paris (1984). Here, my friends, is a a little slice of the Gallic Eighties:



Rohmer’s final series was the “Tales of Four Seasons.” Here is the trailer for A Tale of Summer (1996):



I hate just linking to trailers, but Rohmer’s films are notoriously hard to excerpt. Here is the preview for The Lady and the Duke (2001), a period piece in which Rohmer made brilliant use of CGI to render period atmosphere:



And a wonderful rarity, Rohmer’s film of Jean Renoir and Henri Langlois speaking about the Lumiere bros, Louis Lumiere (1968):



My own offering is a slice of Rohmer acting for his friend Jacques Rivette in the intricate and wonderful miniseries Out 1 (1970). Rohmer plays an expert on Balzac who lectures Jean-Pierre Leaud on the mysterious group known as the “Thirteen.” This very dialogue- and seemingly plot-portent-laden scene comes in the series’ third episode after there has been *very* little dialogue. Thanks to Zach for pointing the existence of this English-subbed print out, and Paul for transferring it so awesomely:



And the chunkier second part of the scene:

What the Hell were the Green brothers thinking?: A post-mortem on the death of Air America

I still listen to commercial AM and FM radio. There’s just about nothing at all of any interest or intelligence on commercial radio stations, but like any other deluded dreamer, I keep thinking there’s a chance that something good will appear on the commercial stations — whereas. as anyone who’s still following the Forgotten Medium knows, the only good programming is on listener-sponsored stations, be they Pacifica, NPR, or college stations. Satellite radio offers terrific specialized programming, but I don’t have the money to subscribe to it, and it was sunk right from the start by its massive investment in shock jockery (which ain’t funny when cursing is actually allowed).

And so, yes folks, I’ve listened to the shipwreck that was Air America for the last six years, from its very first week on the air to this week, when I was still monitoring the snippets of the brilliant Lionel, the one remaining must-hear host on the network. Today the death of the network was announced, and its website was taken down, replaced by a goodbye note.

When it was first announced, it was to be “the alternative” to right-wing talk radio, and the three names that were sought were Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and Michael Moore. Moore wisely sidestepped doing a show on the network. Now-Senator Al took the plunge, however, and was stunningly not into the medium. Interestingly, the exceedingly boring Sundance Channel visual presentation of his radio show revealed quite clearly that he was constantly reading from scripts, had no idea how the medium was paced, and never ever would take listener calls, because he couldn’t banter with dissenters.

Ms. Garofalo, once the crush of just about every guy I knew in the mid-'90s, was extremely angry on-air, extraordinarily angry on-air, to the extent that she would brood at odd moments (usually Friday nights) about not being able to indulge in drink anymore, insult her cohost (the very patient Sam Seder), yell about how ridiculously stupid Republicans are for voting Republican (one time she lit into a befuddled Rachel Maddow and David Bender about this — and they are not now, nor have they ever been, Republicans); yet, on the one occasion when a bona fide dickhead conservative was on her show, namely one Sean Hannity, she remained curiously quiet and withdrawn. Her radio appearances thus made for really absorbing listening, if only because the meltdown factor was front and center. For instance, she would come in on a Monday and describe how she cried over the weekend in frustration because her conservative father had fought with her on a political issue. As with Franken, who tormented us on a regular basis (to the point of dial-switching) by pointlessly debating a “dittohead” friend who never changed his opinion that Rush is always right, Janeane had her conservative dad frequently call into the program (she, like Franken, avoided the call-in aspect of talk-radio otherwise), and she enlisted, among others, Howard Zinn and Mario Cuomo to convince Dad that his beliefs were misguided. She failed each and every time.

It’s hard to pick a favorite Janeane meltdown moment, but perhaps the time in November 2004 when Kerry lost the election would suffice. It was a painful moment for every right-thinking person to see Dubya stay President for another term, but only Ms. Garafalo would have to call into her show on the phone because she couldn’t leave her house, having been so unnerved by Kerry’s loss that she had thrown her back out and was lying on the floor to relieve the pain. It was really something to follow Janeane’s travails during her stay on AAR — as with several of her stand-up colleagues, including ones I find extremely funny, one is never sure when watching or hearing her if one is witnessing an act or a real-time therapy session.

Okay, so the original hoped-for trio of hosts were those noted liberals. But what happened once the network went on the air? The shows hosted by seasoned radio hosts turned out to actually be the best-run programs (surprise!).

-Mike Malloy was a late-night barn-burner who was a bit too left-wing for the network and was jettisoned early on; he remains a dynamite host who can be heard here.

-Randi Rhodes became the single biggest radio celebrity to emerge from the network, with her hardcore Brooklyn accent, her very strong traditional liberal values, her commendable emphasis on reading and “finding out the facts,” and her own propensity to melt down on the air. I will always remember her yelling non-stop at Patti Smith about the latter’s affection for Ralph Nader — it was the most out-of-control, ridiculous behavior in a two-person chat on NYC radio I’d heard since veteran Lefty Lynn Samuels (seen in the pic above with Randi, who has noted she can't stand Lynn) spent two entire airshifts (or was it three?) shrieking at her conservative on-air “partner,” Barry Farber, on WABC.

Randi is now back in Florida and a good deal calmer; she can be heard here. She of course was pitched off Air America for publicly calling Hillary Clinton a “cunt” at an AAR-sponsored live event. She noted that she had received a letter of thanks from AAR for hosting the event at which she made that lovely remark, but Air America was never a truly radical outfit and decided to oust her — and then, months later, heavily promoted her return to radio through another syndicator on its website! (When the second, AWFUL, daytime airing of Montel was playing on AAR stations around America, the AAR website was streaming Randi, who wasn’t even a part of their network — ah, the Greenery of it all!)

-The breakout star without question, however, was Rachel Maddow, whom I wrote a little paean to here. Rachel was consistently sidelined and minimized by the network, particularly when its ownership was purchased by politician Mark Green and his realtor brother Stephen Green. Initially Rachel cohosted the wonderful “Unfiltered” with Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead and Public Enemy founder Chuck D, and was clearly willing to stick by AAR no matter where they placed her on the schedule. As the months went by and she began to develop a following, through positive reviews from people like the very perceptive Richard Corliss, the heads of AAR began to move her to the worst “dayparts” one can imagine, to the point where she was actually on for a single hour in the morning (the ungodly fucking hour of 5:00AM!).

All the while her star kept rising through appearances on MSNBC, and as it became apparent that she might indeed get her own show on that network, AAR finally put her back on at a listenable time — which then, of course, clashed with her MSNBC show (and in the meantime, the Green administration had pink-slipped her essential on-air sidekick Kent Jones — great move, guys! Especially since Kent had stuck with her even through the dim, dark 5:00AM period). Rachel finally, very wisely, chose to not do a daily radio program on AAR — how could it possibly benefit her to prepare a new show every day on a network that has been dying since its inception, and most certainly since the Green takeover? Despite her brilliance and warm radio personality, she also, like Franken, was not used to answering phones or bantering with dissenters.

As the years went by and the network seemed more and more like it was functioning without a rudder (or a map, or a compass, or the *slightest fucking idea how to run a radio network*), other great hosts came and went from the network. Al Franken’s departure brought in Thom Hartmnn, who is incredibly intelligent, if a bit too nice-guy-ish and dull. Sam Seder hosted shows on his own after Janeane departed for the greener pastures of 24, and distinguished himself as a witty, wise-assed host. Stand-up vet Marc Maron hosted a series of shows that were unfairly and moronically bounced off the network one by one — first an incisive morning show co-hosted with the excellent Mark Reilly, and later in highly personalized programs that live on in his current podcast WTF, where he offers his own memorably neurotic insights on pop culture and offers much “shop talk” about comedy with fellow stand-ups. Noted (and notorious) first-amendment lawyer Ron Kuby did a hell of a good afternoon show on AAR for a while, which was tossed off the air in favor of everyone’s favorite charlatan, Montel Williams, who was the “final movement” in the insane saga of the network. The final astounding decision to air Montel twice a day — the second instance being a time-delayed rerun, during afternoon drive time! — was nothing less than a sure-fire way to kill a network. And we now see the results.

I had the opportunity to personally chat with Mark Green sometime in the summer of 2008 when he was standing on a street corner in Brooklyn, asking passersby to sign a petition to allow him to run for Public Advocate. [For those outside of New York, I should note that Mr. Green is a devoted liberal who has done some great work in his years as a politician, but his disagreements with the equally stubborn Fernando Ferrer split the local Democratic Party in two in 2001… and thus was born the never-ending Mayoral term of tiny tyrant Mike “Greedy Rich Bastard” Bloomberg.]

I agreed to sign the petition if I could talk to him about the network, being the wildly disappointed, but also curiously devoted, listener that I was (I guess I can’t look away from shipwrecks — especially if the ships contain talented individuals!). Mr. Green allowed me to comment on the network, and I thus filled his ear for a quick 90 seconds (those who’ve seen the show know I can talk very rapidly and cogently when I need to) with a laundry list that started with making Montel the “face” of the network, after a similar AAR decision to do so with Jerry Springer had died a horrible death years before; mentioned Maron and Seder being reduced to an online-only stint that found them hosting a very funny but barely acknowledged show from the network’s kitchen; Kuby being taken off-air; and the station’s sole remaining brilliant broadcaster, Lionel, being kept off-air for a time (only to be put back on later in the early morning, before-the-dawn slot not carried in NYC and many, many other markets by AAR affiliates). Mr. Green listened to my articulate little laundry list, and responded merely with, “So you don’t like Montel, huh?” When I replied that Montel brought on his favorite psychic-friend, Sylvia, on a weekly basis for more than an hour of air time, and it took AAR completely away from its original progressive message, Green nodded, and clearly wanted to move on to getting his signatures.

So now that the network is dead, those of us who really need to forget commercial radio entirely can bask in the memories of the meltdowns we heard on AAR on a regular basis; the truly golden moments supplied by Lionel, Rachel, Randi, Mike, Marc and Mark, Ron, Sam, even Ron Reagan and weekend host Mike Papantonio; and the fact that the AAR management provided an object lesson in how not to run a progressive network. Or a network of any kind for that matter.

Final message: someone get Lionel a slot quick, the man is brilliant and does a helluva smart, savvy, and very funny radio program. I would even brave the wilds of commercial radio to hear him again… (we all know never to say never….)

From down-home rock to gorgeous folk: more Deceased Artistes take their leave…

Last week reader “Jckinnick” brought to my attention the fact that Bobby Charles died. I will readily admit I didn’t recognize the name, but on further research I definitely knew the music. Charles was a Cajun rock ’n’ roll pioneer who jumpstarted the subgenre known as “swamp pop” as a performer, but who is best-known as a writer. He gave us “Walkin’ to New Orleans,” by the Fat Man (Mr. Domino) and “(I Don’t Know Why I Love You) But I Do.” His biggest hit as a tunesmith was this rock classic:



In digging into the Charles tunes that are readily available (where else? YouTube!), I found a bunch of really great traditional r’n’r, such as “Good Lovin’” (not the one the Rascals sang):



I’ve only heard about an album’s worth of Charles’ music, but my hands-down favorite has got to be “Take It Easy, Greasy”:



Charles died last week, and today’s music-obit news was about the passing of dyed-in-the-wool folkie Kate McGarrigle at 63. Of course best known as half of the the McGarrigle Sisters (not to be confused by old movie fans with “the Great McGonigle”) and as mom of Martha and Rufus Wainwright, Kate made some absolutely beautiful music, and here is a memorable sample, the song “Talk to Me of Mendocino”:



It was noted in Kate’s obits that she and Anna were first taught to play piano by nuns. It’s good to hear of some teaching nuns actually doing something productive.

A Part of You: Gumby and Deceased Artiste Art Clokey

I deeply loved Gumby as a child. I still love the little green guy, because his creator, Art Clokey, who died this week at 88, was a wonderfully imaginative individual who subtly injected the Sixties zeitgeist into the minds of children like myself. This is not an insignificant achievement — especially considering that his other contribution to pop culture was the extra-sedate, morally balanced, and too often preachy Davey and Goliath.

Cloakey’s mythology has been explored at length: how his biological father’s odd “tilted” hairstyle inspired Gumby’s odd-angled head; how he was going to make religious films until he studied under avant-garde master Slavko Vorkapich and came up in 1953 with “Gumbasia,” a blissful mindfuck of colors, shapes, and patterns, all rendered in clay. The three-minute short was purely inspired by earlier works of cinematic art. Clokey said that he didn’t even try a hallucinogenic drug until *after* he had completed the first series of Gumby episodes:

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In 1956, he created his first Gumby short, which premiered on the Howdy Doody show (I can’t imagine what it looked like in b&w, seeing as Gumby was always a multi-colored sensory assault). From that early era, here’s “Gumby on the Moon,” one of the many shorts where Gumby doesn’t talk. I love the free-form weirdness of the Fifties shorts, but wasn’t a fan of the sloppier-looking Gumby (I was too used to his later, sleeker incarnation):



The character continued on until 1959, but was fully, er… fleshed out in the Sixties, from ’61-’63 and ’66-’68, when warped children like myself were treated to the color adventures of Gumby, his pony pal Pokey, and the evil Blockheads, who were always around to totally undermine and destroy, for no particular reason other than that they were evil, and very, very square. From that period, I give you the theme song burnt into all of our brains:



One diehard fan has put up several Gumby shorts, but I should also draw your attention to the documentary Gumby Dharma. Here is a clip in which Clokey talks about becoming a middle-aged hippie and experimenting with drugs:



From the Sixties, we jump ahead to 1988, when a new series of Gumby adventures was created by Clokey (a few years after Gumby came back into the public consciousness, thanks to Eddie Murphy's characterization on SNL). I will openly admit that I was unemployed in 1989 for some weeks and became hooked on these episodes, as they were the strangest viewing experience one could have watching commercial television (and did not require the ingestion of any sort of chemical). At that time, Clokey recognized what the hot trends were, and so one adventure found Gumby preparing to make a music video with his band:



And to close out this post, I want to mess up your minds the way Clokey messed up mine. First, you need to see “All Shook Up,” a 1968 short that finds Goo and Prickle, Gumby’s pals, performing a “modern music” concert. Goo and Prickle were intended by Clokey to represent Alan Watts’ two states of being (the fluid and the rigid), and so for this concert, Prickle, the male dinosaur/dragon plays a note on an instrument and Goo, the seal/fish-like female turns into a visual representation of it. This is some VERY STRANGE stuff to watch when young. Clokey was oh-so-subtly working on the developing minds of his kid viewers.



And, finally, a fascinating Gumby adventure called “Funtasia,” which Clokey did not make, but his influence is felt throughout. This must hail from the 1988 series, and it’s an evocation of the 1950s shorts with no dialogue. Here a character perplexes Gumby and his pals by changing shape every few seconds. I’m certain that Bruce Bickford (of Baby Snakes and The Amazing Mr. Bickford fame) — whose stop-action claymation is the freakiest and most imaginative work I’ve seen intended for adults — was heavily influenced by Clokey’s ground-breaking work in the Fifties and Sixties. And, of course, drugs can enhance the experience, but are not at all necessary.

Turn Off the Lights: Deceased Artiste Teddy Pendergrass

R&b superstar Teddy Pendergrass was an ordained minister at the age of 10, a seasoned drummer, and then a charismatic singer who rose from the ranks of early ’70s Philadelphia soul and kept his career moving right up until his untimely death this week at 59 from cancer. Pendergrass’s crippling injury in a car accident way, way, way back in 1982 might have curtailed his live performances, but it in no way stopped his singing career.

Since I deeply love the works of the wildly underrated filmmaker Alan Rudolph, I’ll of course point out that Pendergrass supplied the sexy songs for Rudolph’s “turning point” picture, Choose Me (1984). The opening credits for the film (sporting that wonderfully dated yet still awesome “neon” Eighties look) have been posted to YT by a Spanish fan (thus the dubbed lines of dialogue at the very end of the clip):



For most AM radio fans, Pendergrass will forever be best known for his terrific work as a lead vocalist for Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes. Here they are back in 1972, doing their biggest hit “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” on (what else?) Soul Train:



And here is arguably the group’s most timely (and timeless) song, the Marvin Gaye-esque “Wake Up Everybody” from 1975. It might not quite be “What’s Going On,” but it stands as a rather conscious “answer song” to “Let It Be” that urges the listener to change the world:

When "Stinky" Met Sky: "The Mothers-in-Law"

Two posters have already uploaded to YouTube the legendary moment when garage rock burst onto America’s TV screens in the odd guise of a “hippie band” appearing on a very square sitcom: the Seeds, led by the late, great Sky Saxon, doing their hit “Pushin’ Too Hard” on “The Mothers-in-Law,” the Desi Arnaz-produced sitcom starring Eve Arden and Kaye Ballard. One upload is here, my own addition folllows... (the color on the first clip is very washed out)



Now that’s all well and good, but I noticed that no one had uploaded the episode’s finale, in which the Seeds encounter a certain Mr. Joe Besser, the fey-est Stooge and well-known as grown-up man-child "Stinky" on The Abbott and Costello Show. Thus I provide the missing link. And just in case this sitcom meeting of immortals isn’t weird enough, let me just note for the record that Desi himself directed this episode. The Sixties were a strange, bizarre time for popular culture….

"Video Business" magazine closes up shop

As if any further indication was needed that the DVD industry is in a tailspin, I sadly note the death this week of the trade publication Video Business, which much to my delight had kept its original name all these years (hey, the “V” in DVD does stand for “video”). In a weird way, the home-entertainment industry has seen nothing but deaths in the past decade or so — most interestingly, the chain that set out to decimate the mom-and-pop store in the Eighties (the dreaded Blockbuster) has now fallen victim to Netflix, a notion that requires the absolute minimum of activity on the part of its customers (ah, the pure American-ness of not having to actually *do* anything, and yet still be a consumer!)

For full disclosure’s sake, I will note that I have been writing for the magazine for approximately nine years as a freelance reviewer and reporter. But I began reading it when I worked at a video store back in the late 1980s and later on, when I worked at the most famous (and still curiously alive… why?) TV listings weekly, I returned to VB as a reader because we were desperately in need of finding someone, *anyone* who actually was watching the crappy straight-to-video features (Shannon Tweed, Don “the Dragon” Wilson, Jeff Fahey, Shannon Whirry, et al) that we couldn’t evaluate because the cable nets showed ’em but were never going to provide screeners of them.

Video Business has filled that void for thirty years, and yes, these days you can indeed find a stray blogger who will review the same material for free and perhaps even in more depth, but it just ain’t the same, since VB often actually panned the freaking things, and their reviewers (I’m talking a decade before I had any participation in it) seemed to be folks who knew their bad films (and, more importantly of course, their good-bad films). Bloggers generally know their topic backward and forward, but they are a tad cautious to pan things they are getting for free from cordial publicists.

In any case, Video Business issued official word on Wednesday that it ceased publication this week with its current issue, December 4th. As a regular reader of the magazine, I think that it’s a major loss, since I notice several movie-news websites simply tossing up DVD label press releases with no fact-checking or follow-up calls involved. VB has been a reputable source of home-entertainment industry news, even as its happy stories about new horizons in technology were turning to revelations about the ways in which its readership — namely, the local video merchant — were being squeezed out of business by the lazyman juggernaut that is Netflix. I’ve heard that the magazine’s website will go offline, which is a major loss since the magazine covered titles that weren’t being reviewed anywhere else.

As a writer for the publication, I extend a personal thanks to editor and good friend Laurence Lerman, who’s done a terrific job of covering the disparate threads of an industry that’s gone in some very strange directions in only two decades: from a glut of “straight to videos” (with titles like Indecent Deadly Bloody Fatal Illusion), to rather luster-less “DVD premieres” (not ANOTHER Dennis the Menace sequel that no one knows exists?), to crystal-clear BluRay restorations of the same films that have been out umpteen times before. Laurence is a class act who has been one of the best editors I’ve had the pleasure to work with. His sweet tooth for kitsch aside (why do you think we’re friends?), he has exhibited a special talent for juggling both the “high” and the “low” in VB’s movie-review section; this aspect made it a very important read for DVD retailers around the country. And yes, there are still some mom-and-pops bravely weathering the slow, strange death of the home-entertainment industry. They deserve your business right now — get up off your asses and forget the Netflix envelopes and *rent* a movie in person, fer chrissake!

And so I raise a glass in toast to Laurence and the other folks who like myself have toiled in any capacity for Video Business. I can’t imagine future news-sources of info about movie “platforms” (Download Business???) ever being as adventurous, or as worth reading.