cheese it, the cops!

Anna Deavere Smith on Black Panther

I am always flummoxed by the way people think about representations and reality; they appear to think that representations create reality, or that a novel or a movie can transform you and the whole world. Nowhere is the absurdity more apparent than on Black Panther, and I've never seen it more clearly expressed or displayed more clearly as implausible than by Anna Deavere Smith in the May 24 New York Review of Books. She portrays BP as being to this era what Malcolm, Martin and the Black Panther party were to the 60s.

'There is a conversation to be had,' she writes, in a core sample of her prose style. 'Filmmaking is collaborative,' she observes. 'The producers are essential.' Perhaps she's trying to lull us toward her vast conclusions/rhetorical questions by saying as little as possible for awhile. 'Killmonger [the super-villain] is competitive,' she claims. Like Donald Trump, 'he behaves with no decorum.' Yeah? Say that to his face, why don't you. Consider by contrast the Dread Dormamu, for instance, who always made etiquette his calling card. 'Women have commented on how thrilling it is to see a powerful black woman,' especially one who is 'fresh-faced in every way.' Cosmetics are going to be key, I feel, to Smith's new transformative Black-Panther oriented social movement. 

The character Shuri "represents a new type of young black woman - a science genius who spends her days in the lab making inventions and powering what she invents with vibranium." That *is* a new type. She suggests - I don't think she's trying to be funny - that 'Wakanda Forever!' is to this moment what 'Power to the People' was to the '60s and 'No Justice, No Peace' to the '90s. I want you to picture people chanting that at the demo after the next police shooting. 

'A sense of self comes from the mirror in which you see yourself - and it also comes from gathering information on how others see you. . . . What is it about the human condition that causes us to need to see ourselves in art forms? Is it that art forms are meant to be mirrors?' Or in other words, movies make the self. The 'mirror' of Black Panther is undistorted at last. That required a lot of CGI. If you can hold onto your sense of yourself as an invulnerable costumed superhero, I'd be a bit worried what happens after that, but go for it I guess.

She doesn't know whether Black Panther will change the way judges sentence black men; it's quite possible. She doesn't know whether it will transform schools and the children within them, but it just might. She thinks Shuri will lead to black female CEOs in Silicon Valley. If people didn't say things like that regularly, you'd just go 'have you lost your frigging mind?' She appears to believe that a billion-dollar blockbuster can have results comparable to the entire Civil Rights movement. Plus it can sell more cars than Malcolm and Martin put together.

 

Well, it was the same with Wonder Woman, the Lucretia Mott of our time, the final triumphant realization of feminism, who so transformed us all and demonstrably led to higher SAT scores for girls. And plus WW is super-hot in every way. I know a bunch of sexual harassers who just couldn't continue after they saw that movie. "There is a conversation to be had," one of them told me as we gazed at the screening with almost superhuman intensity.

 

animatronic lessons

i just saw selma, and i'm going to express a negative assessment. but first, the production design is excellent; it really gives that feel of the deep south in the '60s. and it is a great and inspiring story, though a bit compromised in its inspiration by the slow or non-pace of racial justice in the decades since.

but there is perhaps too much reverence for king to make a realistic movie about him. it is hard to escape the impression that the actors were cast as look-alikes, and that in itself might make you a little suspicious; they were perhaps not chosen for the excellence of their acting. but it's hard to tell, really, because the script and direction and even make-up makes them like wax figures of king, andrew young, john lewis (that actor was a cut above, though, even if he was partly cast on the basis of the size of his nostrils), coretta scott king, hosea williams, and so on.

there are a few half-hearted attempts at humanization, but they are...insincere, i think. perfunctory. everyone talks in extremely written complete sentences: they simply emit inspiring speeches at one another all day, which does not actually constitute dialogue. they don't talk like human beings. when a tear flows down the face of a character, it's like a miraculous but hieratic crying icon of mary or something. this turns the whole movie into quite the didactic little history lesson rather than a real human drama. honestly, it's also a lesson that is taught incessantly to everyone already in every school in america, a million television shows, etc etc, a lesson you cannot have avoided on a thousand previous occasions. and i don't think that david oyelowo as king quite brings off the electrifying preaching, admittedly an extraordinarily difficult task. but truly, there is no reason to pay money to see david oyelowo deliver king's speeches, because there are recordings of the real ones.

on the other hand, i also don't think, as some have asserted, that johnson is portrayed too negatively. i'm glad they included a little malcolm x, but lord i wish they'd shown a bit of his speech in selma: they just showed other people talking about it. anyway, i wouldn't have nominated it for any academy awards except in set design, art direction, and such. 

oprah produced the thing and cast herself as annie lee cooper. she is repeatedly beaten. now, watching civil rights protesters getting beaten fills me with rage. but watching stupefyingly banal self-esteem entrepreneurs/billionaires get beaten, which was quite how i experienced those scenes: well, i don't actually straight condone it, but i wouldn't say i take absolutely no pleasure in it either. go back to inspiring us by your yoyo diets or whatever, sweetie.

here's another little problem. basically, a film about king is above criticism, expecially if you're a white person. that is a formula for making and selling bad movies. but the thing is a mega-million cash franchise produced by oprah winfrey, for god's sake. nothing anything like that can be above criticism. you can't be required to give academy awards on the grounds that someone played king or whatever it may be. just because your gigantic movie is about king doesn't mean, for example, that it couldn't have been better in many filmic or human dimensions. i sort of think a lot of people are pretending to think selma is a good movie to avoid being racists.

the greatest story ever told

people do look awfully grim about the war between kim jong un and seth rogen, but i just want to point out that it is the greatest story ever, just a complete delight. when 10th graders in 2153 read about american history, seth rogen will be the major figure, the turning point, like lincoln or napoleon. we have lived through the moment when seth rogen went from so-lame-it's-funny comedian to world-bestriding colussus. this will be remembered as the era in which americans followed seth rogen unquestioningly to our doom. the seth rogen era, world war seth, was always where the inevitable process of history was going to end up. now only james franco can save or redeem us.

just when you need jean baudrillard

it really is too bad that jean baudrillard croaked before world war 17, pitting north korea against sony entertainment. a comedy assassination is taken as an 'act of war' and leads to an overwhelming virtual response. also, it's about time a government went to war with a corporation, or i also think that the us government is now at cyber war with north korea on behalf of the japanese corporate sector. pundits are debating whether the hacking is 'terrorism'. really the virtual and the actual have flowed or flown into one another, at least in all the rhetoric; the distinctions have broken down...in the media! there does seem to me to be an important difference between actual and virtual murder and war and terror, though, even though cgi is getting better and better. i think the whole thing is entertaining indeed. if i was sony or kim, i'd be figuring out how to monetize this bad boy in terms of an ongoing podcast or an unfolding assassination contest or nuclear holocaust conducted on buzzfeed. 

mpdg

i was a sullen, withdrawn young man (ok ok i was pushing 40), and in a quasi-courageous attempt at life-affirmation i married a real-life manic pixie dream girl (ok she was pushing 40 too), indeed a person who for awhile was going to be played by zoe deschanel in the film of her memoir. i came out of the whole thing with a new appreciation for sullen and withdrawn, so it did have a life-affirming effect after all.

terrorism

more terrifying words have never been uttered than these: "produced by stephen spielberg and oprah winfrey". one thing such a collaboration is likely to achieve: a higher density of gaseous pseudo-wisdom and hyper-emotional cliches than was considered possible in such a small space. there's likely to be an explosion of banal proportions. i have no idea what the thing is about, but one thing i do know: it will teach each of us important moral lessons, touch us to the very depths of our superficial souls, and uplift us all for the umpteenth time into the very ether of Yacketysmackety.

crispy hates folk music

crispy hates folk music, even or especially the early sixties in greenwich village. but why? well, partly for the same reason that a lot of people despised the thing back then; i was too young but soon i would be an even a bigger authenticity brat than they were. i think anyone choosing to hear some nyu student play the blues was making a terrible mistake when actual masters of the blues were everywhere, for example. the nyu student might have been semi-competent, but his blues were at best a simulation without the oomph, without the context, without the knowledge that gave the music urgency, without the thirty years of intense playing. the folkies simulated passion and they hardly even bothered at times to simulate competence: in fact, they were advocates and avatars of ineptitude. they eventually learned to simulate incompetence, which is why dylan still sounds the way he does. they understood the blues or country music as rough-hewn spontaneous outpourings of the uneducated: blues or country artists were allegedly naive, unspoiled by the corrrupt civilization that produced the folkies; the folkies yearned to recover a sort of innocence or ignorance that they associated with american traditonal musics. that is the precise way that they were 'counter-cultural'. the theme wasn't black music or rural music; it was a critique of growing up in suburban jersey or whatever, and that is the only level on which it still works.

but actually the blues was a decades-long tradition of extremely excellent and sophisticated professional musicians. so, you could listen to the great virtuoso blind blake, say, or you could listen to van ronk or whomever struggle like a very white dork through material that blake nailed perfectly. if you viewed jimmie rodgers or robert johnson or the louvin brothers or flatt and scruggs as naive hicks - american primitives, noble savage natural phenomena - and loved them because of precisely that, you were making multiple fundamental errors, including horrendous political/racial/class errors. not to grind this axe again, but allen ginsberg thought that charlie parker was a sheer spontaneous genius who never had to practice or whatever; it just came out of his tribal negro head. it is a mistake literally impossible to make if you can hear the music at all. thank god ginsberg never released an album of bop saxophone: it'd have been to jazz what dylan was to country: nothing at all, really, but nevertheless entirely unlistenable and greeted among kids who grew up just off the sixth hole at the golf club as the work of a god. either way, our god is a jealous god, a loutish god, a fuckwad god, a god who never quite rose to mediocrity.

 

 

(i am personally offended by the approach to the harmonica; it's as though he's ridiculing my instrument. little walter and sonny boy were still around at the time, and i hope they just rolled their eyes. maybe dylan can't play the harmonica. maybe he's pretending he can't. either way he has no business playing out.)

 

now i described myself as an 'authenticity brat' earlier. but say you look at dylan's outfit, his woody guthrie demeanor, the black and white, and listen to the simulated rural grittiness, and think that that's very much more authentic than big lapels, electric guitars, etc. (and cf. george and tammy or buck owens, making the actual music of the actual volk of that period). you have got the whole thing obviously reversed, and you are responding to little signs that are intentionally constructed to convey the impression of authenticity - like dylan ran a focus group on what sorts of gestures make people think a person is honest - as opposed to watching a living musical form being actually inhabited from the inside at a certain moment of its development. it's embarassing even to ask who is the better musician between zimmerman and king, but in case you watched those and are still confused, it's freddie, exponentially. (oh and just to throw the jab: freddie's got better lyrics). when dylan electrified, everyone was all upset because he'd compromised his enactment of pseudo-authenticity. but muddy waters' incomparable band had electrified the living blues fifteen years before. the authentic blues sounded like bobby bland by the time dylan betrayed the folkies etc. it all had to do with privileged northern white people's simultaneous romanticizartion of and complete incomprehension about rural or african-american communities. 

so: here's my actual objection: due to all these circumstances and others, the music sucked, specifically compared to the music that the figures themselves venerated. the urgency and passion were essentially simulated by people who needed to borrow and reflect other people's actual passion. they misconstrued the power of their sources. some were better than others; joan baez could sing or whatever: always it was a deracinated, dare i say back at them, extremely bourgeois music. they took the approach of lou reed or john waters or allen ginsberg or willem de kooning: the worse this sucks, the more authentic and important it is: look how technically incompetent we are; that is a sign of our moral and emotional urgency. to say that is an insult to mississippi john hurt is an understatement. i assume hurt was thrilled to get some recognition and some money, to make records and have large audiences. i would like to have overheard his actual assessment of the quality of the musicians he was playing with on the folk circuit.

 

the idea that you'd pick up a dave van ronk or bob dylan album of real and simulated incompetence in preference to a fun and amazingly proficient and also urgent and eloquent hurt is a colossal failure of taste. 

on the other hand, they  did venerate a lot of good artists and revived careers at folk festivals, and got old blues guys making records again before it was too late. they did bring many people to the heart of american music eventually. but insofar as they themselves played gigs and recorded albums: you always had better choices, and rarely had worse ones.

if you want to pay tribute to these sources, you should do what, say, eric clapton or paul butterfield or duane allman or bonnie raitt tried to do: master the thing technically and then find a voice within it. 

 

smoked brain

we live - really, we do - in a mind-numbing age of stupidity. nyt:

Mr. Miyazaki’s film, which is aimed at adults, also features at least eight scenes in which characters smoke cigarettes. That imagery, while historically correct, stirred controversy in Japan because of its potential impression on young viewers and could prompt an even louder reaction in North America, where animation is seen to a much greater degree as a product for children.

so you'd take a great artist, and condemn his work of historical fiction on the grounds that people smoke in it? if this even occurs to you, you should quit our species now. smoking might kill you, but procedures like this are worse: they make you deserve death. in fact, if you're watching a hiyao miyazaki movie and counting the scenes in which people smoke cigarettes, i think you should begin to regard yourself as a disease vector.

knock the little jockeys

i'm sure eugene allen, the white house butler, buttled excellently, and was a dignified person and a sort-of friend to presidents, in that 'help' kind of way the races used to interact. he was also a jockey on the white house lawn. i wouldn't blame him for that, but i wouldn't make a movie about it either. you might imagine to yourself what malcolm x might say about this project.

 

i forgot how great that song is.

 

liberace and liberation

guardian:

Soon after moving into Liberace's gaudy Las Vegas mansion in 1977, Scott Thorson, then a teenage hunk in the foster care system, learned that the jewel-smitten showman could love just as extravagantly as he decorated. Touring the premises before their relationship began, Liberace pointed out some decorative highlights, which included 17 pianos, a casino, a quarry's worth of marble and a canopied bed with an ermine spread. On the ceiling was a reproduction of the Sistine Chapel with Liberace's face painted among the cherubs.

When the pair became a couple, Liberace, who was 40 years older, was just as excessive. He couldn't bear to let Thorson out of his sight.

"We were at a hotel in Florida, and Liberace had the manager give us another suite, with windows that faced the beach," said Thorson, now 54. "He knew I'd be near the water and he wanted to be able to look at me."

i guess liberace is being treated as a profoundly liberatory figure. now, was the admirable part the abuse of foster children? or maybe it was the music? it's as though we were lionizing the lifestyle of roman polanski, and also it's as though roman polanski's movies just sucked all day every day. if you make such people your heroes or aesthetic exemplars, you better face up to the fact that you could have chosen something else instead, and the fact that you didn't really says more than i need to know about your taste or decency or intelligence.

look i understand that you can get into a mode where the worse something sucks the better it is. maybe you get sick of stuff that keeps trying to mean something; maybe good taste gets oppressive. but there are many kinds of cool schlock, mindless yet amusing cant, kitsch that arises from the depths of human depravity or consumer capitalism. the liberace variety of grotesque conspicuous consumption, excruciating mediocrity, and total, fatal corruption is only one of your myriad liberatory possibilities. for god's sake try something else.

i suppose one possibility is that all the aesthetic and ethical problems are redeemed by the homosexuality. really, you might want to think about that again. or: maybe my critique is driven by homophobia. so, really, you're going to put liberace above criticism on the grounds that he had sex with men (while denying it in public)? there's nothing wrong with men having sex with men (though i do hold that there might possibly be smething wrong with men having sex with boys), but on the other hand there isn't anything heroic about it either. also it doesn't per se improve your art, if any. also, if you will excuse my saying so, it's common as dirt and just not that outstanding or interesting.

wake me up when woody allen is over

i would definitely support any two 'scantily clad cocktail waitresses' who want to make woody allen's dream come true by stomping him to death. indeed, anyone, cocktail waitress or not, has my unconditional support in their efforts to stomp woody allen. at least there wouldn't be any more woody allen movies, of which there are way too many. actually, i could do without anything woody allen ever made, not to speak of his basic persona, which makes me ashamed to be a human being. you know really i don't see anything by woody allen unless some woman drags me, so i missed his cult-of-the-artiste francophile jivefest midnight in paris. so perhaps i shouldn't express an opinion. ok, keep buying tickets and wake me up when he's over.

copyright them treasures

speaking of indiana jones and the turkey of doom and the era of copyright protection, the government of belize is apparently suing lucasfilm for using the 'likeness' of their national treasure, the crystal skull. or i'm not sure from that piece who is suing whom for what, precisely. but i do like the idea that governments own the likenesses of the 'national' treasures in the territory they claim to administer. oh you know you can't freely reproduce those pictures of the rockies or the new york city skyline or the great lakes or the declaration of independence. or my ass. just speculating now but any crystal skulls there may be are of non-ancient origin. but that is as nothing compared to this whole new world of intellectual property. well, you never should have started down this road of people owning the likenesses of themselves or others or works of art and so on because, just a bit further on than that, all representations - all images and pictures, for example, of any sort, also reflections, shadows, and footprints; in short, all likenesses - are potentially litigable. now on the other hand say you are, per impossibile, a proponent of intellectual property. why exactly can't persons or governments or corporations own things like that? is there any plane of reality that can't be colonized by imperialistic regimes or sold off in tracts? now this particular battle could be complicated, because no doubt lucasfilm has trademarked the adjective-noun pair 'crystal skull.' so if i were their squad of attorneys, i'd be preparing to counter-sue on the grounds that the government of belize and its representatives say, without permission, that the crystal skull is their national treasure.

sacha baron cohen's new role

as mutassim gaddafi. i can hardly wait for the film: watch the people of sirte freak out as he struts around talking smack in a ridiculous accent, threatening to drop them into mass graves. har har!

after midnight in paris

there has never been a clearer expression of provincialism than americans' obsession with paris, which just seems to redouble every few years. hasn't this gone on long enough? the food! the wine! the angst! the sex! the pseudo-sophistication and clumsily simulated identities! honestly i'm tired of paris in the 20s: fatigued by hemingway and stein, exhausted by picasso, etc. even if these people weren't excruciatingly overrated, there surely could be no point in writing or thinking about them any more, after infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters have worked them through for decades. i'd be more interested in south-eastern north dakota regionalism of the same period, and its influence in alberta. 

i more or less share the current moral panic over bullying (well, sorta), and it's hard to look at gay students committing suicide and not suggest that something should be done. but i also scent a new tsunami of censorship and self-censorship in the offing: a new and even narrower and more excruciating political correctness. so various groups have been protesting the use of the word 'gay' in movies. i saw the statement of one group accusing vince vaughn squarely of causing the death of untold young people with the fatal phrase "that's so gay." please. you know there has to be some notion of art. so for example if you were trying to realistically depict loutish young american heterosexual men - and this is the essence of the current idea of comedy in america - they would absolutely have to say "that's so gay," as this is central to the actual vernacular. treating actual problems by demanding that people delete phonemes from movies is a sad admission that you can't do anything actual, and that you have massive totalitarian impulses, and that you are a philistine from soup to nuts. it's like blaming jim crow on mark twain using the word 'nigger' in huckleberry finn and suggesting that the greatest american novel must be burned. that is some gay shit, y'all.

i'd personally like to do the real-life expendables, with a twist. so i say parole mark david chapman. maybe hook him up in a team of super-schizos with the person who shot selena. parole bob marley's cancer, or janis joplin's self-destructive impulses. arm them to the teeth and send them after...sting, billy joel, the indigo girls, elton john, etc. it's a matter of aesthetic security.

watcha watchin, crispy? well, tackled guy ("god i suck") ritchie's revolver (2005) last night, 'cause jason statham rocks. it is certainly the worst movie ever made by anyone up until sherlock holmes, which is a film made by idiots for inanimate objects. at any rate, revolver is unbelievably portentous clap-trap, really the last thing you want to see in an action movie, and though it is formulaic, it is incomprehensible: a very tough thing to pull off. what i don't get is how you make "lock, stock, and two smoking barrels" and "snatch" and then this butterball. it's the kind of film tarantino would make - indeed it's filled to the brim with his mannerisms - after the lobotomy.

took janie to see percy jackson the other day. pretty damn good movie for what it is, and i would also say of the books that they are written with far more wit and verve than hary potter. the movie in a stray remark gently suggests that barack obama is a demi-god, and i'd say that that has been the problem both ways round. the worship was ridiculous and unseemly and pathetic, and the disilliusionment is in process. a reasonable assessment of the human being would have been better for him, and for you, and for us all.

just watched the spirit, and it's got me thinking about comic books and movies. well, it is a failure as a movie, and it mystifies me a bit why that is. it's written and directed by frank miller, which ought to get some respect. the writing has a lot of wit: half campy hardboiled quasi-noir a la the original will eisner material, as in "i'm gonna kill ya real, real dead." the other half is pop culture references and high concept humor, as when scarlett johannson (playing silken floss) tries to explain why she's trying to help a madman (samuel jackson) become a god and take over the world: "my ph.d. will be paid for." the imagery is stunning, and it does seem like this is the time to do this: the time when film can create a true visual equivalent to the kind of stark power sometimes achieved in comics. miller's sin city was considerably more successful, maybe because it just wallowed in sickness, and the spirit uses the same visual vocabulary, such as making everything black and gray and then coloring in one neon-yellow or hot red thing. 

some of the failure has to do with pretty obvious stuff: it should be more of a tribute to eisner, and the decision to set it now instead of eisner's 1940s is questionable. or rather, it's set both in the 1940s and now (and also the future, maybe), which isn't a clever idea anymore, and is one of the factors disanchoring this movie from any discernible world. and though eisner and miller's visual sensibilities have some affinities, probably due to direct influence, ultimately miller erases eisner's look and substitutes his own, when trying for something more true to the original would have been appropriate (since eisner has himself become a god), and quite the little visual challenge. eisner's story arcs were short and often beautifully, perfectly constructed in their irony: i don't think miller actually gets that construction, and certainly doesn't try to achieve any cinematic equivalent for it.

other problems raise more general issues. i think film and comics have been in dialogue since there were comics. in some ways, of course, film and comics are very different. a comic book gives you a couple of hundred panels or whatever it may be. trying to get that kind of visual intensity into a moving image either breaks the cinematic flow into a series of frames - which miller does constantly - or it just visually overwhelms you: i almost felt assaulted by the visuals, even while i kept thinking how cool they were. sitting in a theater, you can't put the thing down and come back to it later, and 2 hours can be an awfully long time when it's that impacted. i think miller needed to back off or calm down: the striking frame has to emerge from a background or be suddenly salient; you have to build toward it.

comic books do not primarily rest on characterization, and eisner really did not. but if you don't feel anything for the hero, really, except vague admiration or something, you can't build a film around that character. and the movie star system is pretty central to film, but is kind of irrelevant to the comic medium, and we have to peel away too many layers to deal with actual human interactions. there aren't any in this movie at all, really. that's precisely why alan moore's v for vendetta worked infinitely better as a movie. it's also why, even though they are much less imaginative movies, the spider-man and x-men things have worked ok on the screen. the characterization might be lame or even pretty perfunctory, but it's central for giving the film some kind of arc and the viewer some kind of connection. again, what eisner substituted for character was perfect narrative construction; miller doesn't do that either.

the visual atmosphere is stuck between the real world and a comic book world; different directors have negotiated this in different ways, for example setting the comic book characters into the real world a la spider-man, or on the other hand trying to come up with a whole comic-book atmosphere through set design or cgi, a la batman. or: merely presenting the manga as an animation. miller seems to want to take the real world and paint on it, which works beautifully at moments, but seems mannered at others. i still think the visual vocabulary is developing

watchmen is not exactly my favorite graphic novel, but i'll probably give some commentary when it comes out on dvd.

down at my mom's doing xmas, we watched the wonderful film man on wire, about philippe petit's wire walk between the towers of the world trade center. crime as beauty. beauty as an act of revolution. one couldn't help thinking that this was a better use of the wtc than as targets for jetliners. also better than the uses for which it was intended.

well just went with son sam to see "clone wars." um, not so good. the animation had cool aspects, but the human figures looked and moved like dolls: no discernible personality. and the dialogue, as in the last few star wars movies, was just pathetic, reams of witty repartee written by droids. it gets off to a nice start along these lines: "sir! we must send all the jedis we can!" "impossible! there are only two available." maybe these folks haven't mastered english? or at any rate the various concepts connected to possibility. a billion dollars to make the movie, but we can't afford $17.49 to hire an actual writer.

watcha watchin profcrispy?
well last night had the great emma over to the new house in the woods, with her boyfriend jason. we watched the astounding the thief and the cobbler. in some ways it's probably the greatest feature-length animation ever produced, but what a tale. richard williams spent some 26 years on it. then lost the ownership of it. miramax put out a version a week before aladdin - which in some ways derived from it - was released, and on a budget of 24 million it grossed 300,000. and they seized the film, adding the voices of a bunch of movie stars to a picture that was conceived as mostly silent. they also added a series of songs that were as bad as the worst that ever appeared in a disney film. in the process of finishing the thing they sent the art to thailand, where it was lost. even with all of that, the visual imagination is stunning, abstract, various, utterly brilliant. someday somehow a decent version of this film has to be produced.

i got to say i'm looking way forward to walk hard: the dewey cox story. why? well i think "walk the line" and "ray" sucked elephant schlongs. i'm never gonna forgive the singing in walk the line, e.g. but they were incredibly too-big, utterly inert, completely dispiriting. plus i have downloaded one of the wonderful dylan parodies from walk hard: "royal jelly." someone finally figured out that dylan was deeply fullofshit from the getgo. "royal jelly" is from dewey's "political period" and consists of incomprehensible pseudo-surrealist claptrap, switching on the chorus to "so let me touch you": the sixties in a nutshell. ":

here's a snatch of "subterranean homesick blues

Maggie comes fleet foot
Face full of black soot
Talkin' that the heat put
Plants in the bed but
The phone's tapped anyway
Maggie says that many say
They must bust in early May
Orders from the D. A.
Look out kid
Don't matter what you did
Walk on your tip toes
Don't try "No Doz"
Better stay away from those
That carry around a fire hose
Keep a clean nose
Watch the plain clothes
You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows

that this was welcomed ecstatically as the great poetry of the age is just one of those things, like the rise of mike huckabee. who knows how or why?
here's the entirety of "all along the watchtower":

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.


this could have been written by carl jung, had carl jung been a blithering idiot (or: even more of a blithering idiot than he actually was).

shit! where can i get me a copy of this ?