Set aside an hour-and-a-half sometime in the next week and take a look at Desperate Man Blues, director Edward Gillian’s 2003 film about Joe Bussard, known in record-collecting circles for his love for and devotion to 78s. Bussard seems like a curmudgeonly old fella who lights up once he drops the needle on one of his many rare discs. He chain-smokes his cigars, stomps his feet to the old blues and bluegrass and old-timey jazz that he collects, and rails against rock-and-roll as “the cancer that killed music.”
The part of the film I loved was traveling with him as he talked about searching for records, reminiscing about some of his amazing finds — some 78s he has are the only known copies in existence. He describes crossing streams to get to remote homes, flea markets, and dusty shacks lit by oil lamps, down on his knees, looking at for forgotten recordings by forgotten artists in a format that is not only part of a nearly-lost format, but the least-accessible type of that format.
On one of his trips to look at 78s, he views the man’s records and declares that they’re not old enough, rattling off a bunch of artists’ names. When the two men don’t recognize the names, he takes them to his pickup and plays cassettes for them. When Kokomo Arnold’s “Milkcow Blues” comes on, one of the men begins singing along and for a moment, all three are united in the experience. It’s a great moment, and it’s immediately recognizable for music lovers.
Desperate Man Blues (Pitchfork.tv) – available until February 6.
1982. Starring Kristy McNichol, Paul Winfield, Burl Ives.
Sam Fuller wanted to take on the world, and I love him for it. Just how I loved the advice he gave fellow director Jim Jarmusch — “If the opening scene doesn’t give you a hard-on, throw the goddamn thing out!” In White Dog, he takes on racism — and not overt racism, but the kind of racism that is bred into us, deep down into our instincts, that keeps us from all getting along.
Kristy McNichol stars as a Hollywood Hills actress who — in the opening scene — runs over a white German shepherd, and takes it to a veterinary hospital. She feels responsible, of course, and takes the dog home, where it bonds with her. The dog protects her from a rapist (although it doesn’t react while a war scene plays out on the TV), and McNichol comes to appreciate the dog’s devotion. The dog runs away, though, and attacks a black street-sweeper operator, and then a black co-star McNichol is working with, causing her to seek out a trainer for her pet. The dog, it’s explained, was trained as a “white dog,” a dog trained originally to track down slaves, then to attack black people. The fact that the dog is pure white doesn’t escape us. “Can’t the sick part of him be cut out, like a cancer?” she asks.
McNichol takes the dog to an animal refuge run by Burl Ives, who trains and tames wild animals, not domesticated pets like hers. Paul Winfield stars as the wild-animal trainer who takes on the challenge, admitting that he hasn’t succeeded with other white dogs. During a storm, the dog escapes and attacks a black man in a church. Winfield recovers the dog, and McNichol demands that he kill it. “So you’ve finally joined the club — a club of horrified people who raises holy hell about that disease — that racist hate — but do absolutely nothing to stamp it out,” he says. He demands to train the dog, but pledges that if he fails, he will get white dog after white dog until he’s eradicated the hate ingrained in its genes.
Winfield exhaustively works with the dog, feeding it, trying to work the hate out of its blood. He pulls back his shirt, displaying his skin, driving the dog mad. Eventually, the dog calms down, which to Winfield means that the dog has learned to accept a black man “that he knows.” The training continues, until a family shows up to claim him. In maybe the movie’s creepiest scene, McNichol meets the grandfather and his young grandkids who trained the “white dog,” and lets him know — “the dog has been cured. . .he’s been cured, by a black man!” It’s clear that the old man wants to pass along the white dog’s instincts to the young ones. The final scene is surprising.
I forgive Fuller’s sometimes ham-handed handling of this material. Certainly, no one was exploring the issue of internalized racism at this time — the movie studio didn’t want to deal with it either, not releasing it into U.S. theaters. But it’s well-acted and well-meant, and deserves to be seen. We certainly all need to be reminded of feelings held deep down inside that we aren’t aware of carrying on.
(I guarantee this: it’s the only movie in which Burl Ives pledges his love for sour cream and throws a dart at R2-D2.)
2008. Starring Philippe Petit. Directed by James Marsh.
Philippe Petit is trying to explain how he took the first steps onto the wire. He has been drawing it out over the course of the movie, talking about the planning, about procuring the supplies and sneaking them into one of the Twin Towers, about hiding under a tarp on the top floor as a security guard stood just feet away. One false step — even before walking out onto the roof — and his “fantasy” would be over before it was begun.
The dream of walking on a wire between the towers began for him many years before, and if it didn’t happen right now, it would likely never happen. The wire was stretched across, the winds became calm, and the mist rose to reveal a clear day. He stepped out on the wire. “Death was close,” he remembers. “No shit,” I thought, watching this documentary between my fingers.
I don’t like heights. I get dizzy just imagining the view straight down past a very thin wire between the Twin Towers. I wouldn’t have watched Man On Wire if the man in question wasn’t doing most of the talking in the documentary — proof that he survived the very simply insane stunt. For me, it was the scariest movie of the year.
Petit had already made tightrope walks between the towers on Notre Dame and above traffic on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. One day a friend receives a postcard of the newly constructed World Trade Center towers with a line draw between their tops. The plan was on. Man On Wire unspools the August 7, 1974 stunt as a caper, with all the bit players weighing in, the loosely organized gang pouring over plans and making scouting trips to the buildings.
Watching the construction of the towers, with workers climbing the floors and dangling from windows, is eerie for multiple reasons. The scouting that Petit and his gang conduct on the buildings seems unbelievable today, especially their ability to move thousands of pounds of materials to the top of one tower. And even as the final steps were being taken, the plan was in danger of falling through. The wire was extended across the space with a bow and arrow — in the dark, the archer couldn’t see the signals Petit was giving. The wire being pulled across almost fell from the roof. A security guard wandered onto the staging area and nearly discovered them. But as dawn broke, the building was quiet, the wire secured, and nothing left to do but walk out into the void.
Petit is an odd fellow, as you might expect, given to talking about what he does with a fantastic, childlike excitement, but what he does is truly astonishing. For 45 minutes he strolled back and forth on the wire, stopping to kneel, then lie down on his back, get back up and look directly at the ground below him. When the police arrive, he walks near them and then out of their reach. He quits the wire only when the police threaten to pick him up with a helicopter. He is arrested, then released with trespassing and disorderly conduct charges dismissed in exchange for a benefit performance.
But the performance he gave on top of those still-familiar buildings 35 years ago is still amazing. And for me, nearly unbearable to watch, even knowing how it turned out.
2007. Starring Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira. Directed by Thomas McCarthy.
It’s valuable for Americans to be reminded of how lucky it is to be free.
Richard Jenkins, previously a well-traveled character actor, takes the lead as Walter Vale, a Connecticut professor who admits that he hasn’t worked in years, despite “co-authoring” a paper on international economic development and having to present the paper’s findings at a New York conference. Dropping into his NYC apartment for the first time in months, he finds a couple staying there, having been misled into renting the apartment from a mysterious “Ivan.” He quickly and graciously offers to let the couple (Haaz Sleiman as Syrian-born Tarek and Danai Jekesai Gurira as Senegal-born Zainab) stay at the apartment until they are settled elsewhere.
Instead, Walter and Tarek bond over their love of music, with Tarek teaching Walter to play the drum. He also awakens the professor, who has drifted since the death of his wife, and provides him a cause when Tarek is arrested while passing through the subway. Walter visits Tarek in a sinister corporate-run detention center, comforts the vulnerable Zainab and Tarek’s mother (Hiam Abbass), and runs into the sterile, unsympathetic apparatus of Homeland Security.
Walter tries to comfort his newly confined friend, while finding himself attracted to his new friend’s mother, and abandons his professorial responsibilities to free Tarek and, taking the responsibility to his country and its pledges of freedom and fairness, to make everything right.
What makes The Visitor resonate with me is the acknowledgment that the music-loving Tarek has more to do with me than the heartless, faceless authorities that engineer his deportation. The scene where Tarek invites Walter into the drum circle is a clear metaphor in these terrorism-fearing days. The U.S. has little to fear from people like Tarek and Zainab, who are musicians and peace-loving people. Instead, they are identified on a racial and national basis, throwing out the good with the bad, and dashing any goodwill promised by the Statue of Liberty standing watch in the New York harbor.
I’m the grandson of an immigrant, and just like the contemporary immigrants, my grandfather came here to make a better life. Not to take advantage of the country, but to contribute to it, to become an American and cast his fate to the destiny of his new home. It’s why, after less than two decades of living here, he volunteered his life in the first world war, and lived a shortened life as a result. I’m sure that, during his first years here, trying to scratch out a living and establish himself, he was considered an opportunist among those who only arrived a short time earlier.
I hope it’s time that America embraces the fact that it has many ancestors, and that its beauty and its appeal and its importance is that it is a mixture of cultures, and always has been. The Visitor is a compelling film, and Richard Jenkins’ quietly moving performance is an inspiration.
1974. Starring Peter Fonda, Susan George, Adam Rourke. Directed by John Hough.
Two-Lane Blacktop is more contemplative and Vanishing Point is more elegiac, but Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry isn’t concerned with much of a story, allowing it to focus on some really great chase scenes. Larry (Peter Fonda) and Deke (Adam Rourke) are small-time crooks who have planned a grocery store robbery, holding the owner’s (Roddy McDowell, uncredited) wife and daughter hostage until they can make a clean getaway. That getaway is complicated by Larry’s girl from the night before, the trampy Crazy Mary (Susan George), who refuses to be left behind.
The trio is pursued by an unconventional sheriff (Vic Morrow), who is determined to stop their escape, no matter how many squad cars are sacrificed in the process. When he feels they are trapped in a maze-like walnut grove, he even commandeers a helicopter to pin them down. (Seeing Morrow ducking as he runs toward the helicopter is disturbing, knowing that he’d be killed on set in a helicopter accident nine years later.)
For most of the movie, Fonda and George argue and pick at each other, trading some ridiculous lines meant to show their juvenile attraction to each other (their argument as Rourke fixes the car is hard to understand), and Rourke is brooding and silent. None of them are likeable, which helps the viewer not care whether they live or die in the car chases. The stunts are well worth waiting for, including a drawbridge jump and the billboard crash that we’ve seen many times since. The sequence where the helicopter is trying to force the car off the road is jaw-dropping, even 35 years later, and the ending is very satisfying.
I’m on a roll with these drive-in classics — not sure why. The cars are fantastic, including the 1969 Dodge Charger with the “Limelight” paint job. The Northern California roads are nearly empty, and the gas stations are just feet off the blacktop. Susan George drifts in and out of her “American” accent, sporting a real tan and those great, crooked teeth. Fonda seems like a bit of a jerk, but earns credit for doing much of his own driving. There’s a rebellious feel to the whole movie, even among the cops doing the chasing.
It might be that, instead of trying to convince us of its coolness, Dirty Crazy (as Fonda calls it in the DVD extras) puts it all on the screen, and lets you decide that for yourself.
Ξ January 17th, 2009 | → 0 Comments | ∇ Music |
Willie Nelson was fairly new to Nashville when he wrote Hello Walls and pitched it to Faron Young, who was on a hot-streak at that time. Still, the song bears the songwriter’s trademark cadence — almost as if Faron is impersonating him. It was a great performance of an odd little idea, and became a huge hit.
Hello Walls (performed by Faron Young)
Written by Willie Nelson
Hello walls
How’d things go for you today
Don’t you miss her
Since she up and walked away
And I’ll bet you dread to spend
Another lonely night with me
Lonely walls
I’ll keep you company.
Hello window
Well I see that you’re still here
Aren’t you lonely
Since our darlin’ disappeared
Well, look here, is that a teardrop
In the corner of your pane
Now, don’t you try
To tell me that it’s rain.
She went away and left us all alone
The way she planned
Guess we’ll have to learn to get along
Without her if we can
Hello ceiling
I’m gonna stare at you awhile
You know I can’t sleep
So won’t you bear with me awhile
We must all stick together or else
I’ll lose my mind
I’ve got a feelin’
She’ll be gone a long, long time
When Young sings, “We must all stick together/or else I’ll lose my mind,” it feels like his whole world is coming apart, and he’s talking the elements around him into staying, staggering around the room, pausing to hear the “Hello, Hello” echo back at him.
I can’t guess the number of times I’ve walked into my apartment and begun singing Hello Walls. There’s something so conversational about the song, which is probably the reason for its popularity. It does sound like someone talking to the walls, the window, the ceiling, to avoid feeling alone. The singer is trying to comfort his surroundings because he doesn’t know how he’ll ever comfort himself.
Faron Young sings Hello Walls on YouTube
2008. Starring Larry Bishop, Michael Madsen, Eric Balfour. Directed by Larry Bishop.
Most of the biker movies I’ve seen have been content with stressing the antisocial appeal of the gangs — beer-drinking, authority-flipping, whatever-rebelling nature of a bunch of smelly guys. Plus there was always one guy who took things too far. Few, if any, have had a message other than drop out, turn on and over act. The Quentin Tarantino-produced Hell Ride had a couple things going for it. First, it wasn’t made in the ’60s or ’70s, so it doesn’t revel in the fact that the lead characters smoke weed or chug beer. Second, it doesn’t seem to require the use of counterculture vernacular like “far out,” “groovy” or “man,” all of which make standards of the genre so tiresome. And third, it has the benefit of being made 30 years after most other movies of its type, so it takes the opportunity to steal all the cool aspects of the films that came before.
Biker movie regular Larry Bishop, who also wrote and directed the movie, stars as Pistolero, the leader of the Victors, a gang battling with the 666ers. Pistolero has two lieutenants, the Gent (Madsen, looking cool in tuxedo colors and arms outstretched by ape hangers) and Comanche (Balfour), a young pup he treats like a son. But there’s trouble a-brewin’, as there usually is where gangs are concerned. A member of the Victors has been executed, and the 666ers are beginning to move back into the territory. We learn through flashbacks that, on July 4, 1976, a woman named Cherokee Kisum was killed by members of the 666ers, and it seems that Pistolero has vowed to avenge her. He enlists the help of Eddie Zero (Dennis Hopper) and begins to act on that vow.
I like how the plot unfolds, so I’m going to hold off on details. Needless to say, an updated version of the biker flick, produced by Tarantino, is going to be brutal. And the sexual carnival that’s always portrayed as being attracted to gang life is amped up here. (Although the women here, when not portrayed as disposable, are laughably overwritten sex kittens.) There’s even a peyote-fueled hallucination scene. Then David Carradine makes a cameo and gets a couple of the movie’s best lines. There’s a twisting, meandering revenge-powered plot that keeps you guessing until the end.
This is not a very well-reviewed film, and there must be a story why it spent next to no time in theaters. But it’s not as stupid as earlier biker films, with their parties full of ugly people and “outrageous” behavior, and it’s not nearly as brutal as most of the slasher flicks still pulling in the teenagers. It’s much more like Reservoir Dogs on Wheels than Hells Angels on Wheels, and that’s a good thing, in my book.
1953. Starring Richard Widmark, Jean Peters. Directed by Samuel Fuller.
Pickup on South Street begins with a claustrophobic encounter on a streetcar, as three-time loser and talented pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark) sees a promising target in Candy (Jean Peters), and stands directly in front of her, eye to eye, breathing each other’s breath, and removes the wallet from within her purse. He doesn’t know that, tucked within that purse, is hidden microfilm, being tracked by a couple of federal agents who are only feet away. Such close quarters don’t allow for many secrets, but McCoy makes the most of the elbow room he has to try to turn the score into more.
The world of petty criminals in Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street is very small, and very quickly, detectives have McCoy’s name and address, thanks to Moe (Thelma Ritter), maybe the most-pathetic snitch ever. Moe trades information and sells cheap ties to add to her savings, with the goal of buying a grave in a private cemetery and avoiding an anonymous home in Potter’s Field. The fact that she gives up her colleague Skip to the law doesn’t bother him — “Moe’s got to eat,” as he puts it.
The source of the microfilm isn’t clear, but it’s intended destination is — Candy’s erstwhile boyfriend, Joey (Richard Kiley), is making the transfer on behalf of some shadowy “communists,” and its detour into McCoy’s hands is a big problem. Joey sends Candy to get it back, and a funny thing happens — which actually happens a lot in film noir — when the dame falls for the thief. Candy pays a hefty price for her attraction to McCoy, as she gets knocked around more than almost any femme fatale I’ve seen. But she loves the mug, and might be his best chance for survival.
Richard Widmark is one of film’s great conflicted characters with his smug grin and beady eyes, and he’s as believable as a small-time hustler without an allegiance. When being interrogated about the missing microfilm and asked to consider that the police are trying to keep it out of the hands of commies, he snidely responds, “Are you waving the flag at me?” Sam Fuller explains in the Criterion Collection extras that J. Edgar Hoover wanted that line removed, but didn’t get it.
There are so many great scenes in this movie that I’m always surprised that it’s only 80 minutes long. Thelma Ritter has a great role here, and makes the most of it, playing what she calls, “a clock winding down,” but with enough strength to resist when dealing with the real bad guys. And I’ve always loved Skip McCoy’s shack on the river, with its creaky walkway and convenient icebox — a crate at the end of a rope, dangling out the window and deep into the river below. It seems like the perfect hideout for a hood who isn’t sure that the roof over his head tomorrow night won’t be up the river.
I’m finding so much music online these days. One really unique stage I stumbled across is provided on Black Cab Sessions, a site that features artists playing about as stripped down as one can get, riding through London in a cab. There’s something about the intimacy and necessary acoustic nature of these videos that is very appealing. I really enjoyed the Fleet Foxes, Beach House and Ryan Adams performances, and there’s a link below to a great Bon Iver appearance, but there are many more that I have to check out.
The Black Cab Sessions: http://www.blackcabsessions.com
Bon Iver on Black Cab Sessions
The Stooges recorded three frantic, intense LPs, developed a tough and nasty reputation, then watched as their lead singer became an icon. They got old, were remembered and idolized by a relative few, then reunited — like stepping out for the expected encore — and gathered the respect and adoration that might have escaped them earlier.
To perform in the shadow of Iggy Pop and not become invisible means you’re doing something right. Ron Asheton’s guitar on the The Stooges and Funhouse records was as raw and wild as Iggy’s vocals and stage behavior, and endeared him to many who came later to create punk rock and its many descendents. He was reportedly happy to tour again and to record another Stooges LP a few years back, and had since lived a quiet life in his native Ann Arbor. When no one had heard from him for a couple days, the police were called. He was found on the living room couch, dead at 60. I hope it was as peaceful as it sounds.
The Stooges have been nominated repeatedly for inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but have not been invited. Steely Dan, but not the Stooges. The Police, but not the Stooges. Madonna, but not the Stooges. They are nominated again in 2009, but so is Chic. Pretty tough competition.
But their place in rock-and-roll history has already been secured, despite the deliberations of some. And somewhere tonight, as the old cliche goes, Ron Asheton is joining in on the greatest jam ever.
RIP, Mr. Asheton.
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