Author Archives: Lloydville

HIGH COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

Posted on by

Before the anti-Western there was the twilight Western — a series of films which seemed to sense that the genre was almost played out, or at least that America no longer looked to it for wisdom and inspiration.  The iconic Western stars were becoming old men in the 1960’s, and no figures of comparable stature were riding in to replace them, with the possible exception of Clint Eastwood (who would start the important part of his journey far from Hollywood) but the older stars still had box-office pull, for some part of the audience.

So we were given Westerns about the passing of the West, the last days of aging heroes.  These Westerns continued to affirm the traditional values of the genre but acknowledged that the world might no longer need them, or if it did need them, no longer understand them.



The twilight Western really began with the last shot of John Ford’s The Searchers in 1956.  Ethan Edwards, a somewhat deconstructed hero, walks off alone, having performed his last heroic deed — there is, at any rate, a suggestion that no more such deeds await him.

Ford continued the deconstruction of the Western hero, and offered a look at the times that made him irrelevant, in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence — a film told mostly in flashback.  Budd Boetticher had previously made a series of brilliant films starring the aging Randolph Scott, still noble and implacable in virtue, but always alone — not just a lone wolf, like many Western heroes, but marked with a sadness  for lost times.  The Boetticher-Scott Westerns are uncompromising in their celebration of traditional values, but haunted, too, by a sense of something coming to an end . . . by the idea that Scott’s stoic hero may be the last of his breed.

This idea is made explicit in Sam Peckinpah’s first Western (and second feature), Ride the High Country, from 1962.  Scott (above on the left) plays an aging hero who loses faith, at least for a while, in the code he has always lived by.  Joel McCrea (above on the right), almost as old as Scott, holds on to that code, knowing full well that the world no longer gives it much credit, if it ever did.

The film is an elegy for and affirmation of this old code of
the Western hero — a combination that is both inspiring and poignant.
It’s a new kind of Western, too, in its treatment of its female lead, played by Mariette Hartley (above).  She offers, as in many Westerns, an occasion for testing the gallantry, and thus the true worth, of the male characters, but Peckinpah makes an effort to get inside her head, to let us imagine what the test means for her.  One can’t really call Peckinpah’s perspective feminist, but it’s a step in that direction.

Ride the High Country has taken on a deeper emotional significance over the years, since we now know that the end of the Western genre it seemed to sense was in fact just over the horizon.  Curiously, the most successful revivals of the Western have gone back to the twilight theme — Lonesome Dove and Unforgiven, for example, have aging heroes out for one last adventure.  It’s a pattern also followed in two modern-dress Westerns, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada and No Country For Old Men, both starring Tommy Lee Jones, of Lonesome Dove.  The title of the Coen brothers’ film might have served as the title of Ride the High Country as well.  Both films suggest that with the passing of the old men, some hope for the redemption of the new world coming into being has been lost.

PULL MY DAISY

Posted on by

Paul Zahl (of this site's The Zahl File and his own marvelous PZ's Podcast) observes beats and a bishop cavorting on screen in a strange document of the Fifties:

SNAKE-DANCING BISHOP

 

Pull My Daisy, the 1959 “beatnik” movie by Robert Frank and Alfred
Leslie, with narration by Jack Kerouac and music by David Amram, has
one amazing character in it, unique, I'll bet, in American literature.  The character is a Christian
bishop possessing, to put it mildly, wide-ranging interests.



 

Pull My Daisy is a casual treatment in film of Act Three of Kerouac's
1957 play entitled Beat Generation.  The play was not produced.  It
concerns some Lower Manhattan beatniks, played by Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, and Larry Rivers, who receive a chaotic
visit from “The Bishop”, played by Mooney Peebles.  During the visit,
the beatniks, especially Allen Ginsberg, try out their ideas on this
religious man, and variously try to tease him.



 

Here is Kerouac's narration of the Bishop's grilling:

 

“And Allen is saying, Is ignorance rippling up above the silver ladder
of Sherifian doves?

 

“(The Bishop) says, Yes yes yes, Sherifian doves, yes . . .  In any case
we are not concerned one way or the other about what we're thinking about,
about anything in particular.  But perhaps we sit in some kind of quiet
bliss.  And he goes on trying to explain it because he really knows
what he's talking about.”



 

Later, the filmmakers, in a high reflective pause, somewhat lengthy,
show The Bishop leading the women and children of the beatniks in
prayer and song, all standing out in front of the Third Avenue loft
building where the visit is taking place.  Kerouac voices this over:
“The angel of silence hath flown over all their heads.”

 

Towards the end of Pull My Daisy, The Bishop excuses himself in order
“that I go now and go make my holy offices (laughter): if you know what
I mean.”

 

But Wait!  There's more on this Kerouacian Bishop.

 

We learn in Act One of Beat Generaton, on the third act of which Pull My Daisy is based, that The Bishop's denomination is “the new,
ah, Aramaean church.”



 

We also learn The Bishop is wonderfully weird.  He says to the Allen
Ginsberg character, “We cannot expect solutions, or nirvana, eh, if you
wish to call it that, without making some eff-fort in the direction of
God, some movement (AND HE TWISTS)”

 

IRWIN (Allen Ginsberg):  Ooh you twisted just like a snake then . . .  Yes
your movement then was exactly like a supernatural illustrated serpent
arching its back to Heaven . . . I mean that was the hippest thing I've
seen you do tonight.”

 

The Bishop also praises the Kerouac character, whose name is “Buck”:
“You're making sense and you do drink (LAUGHTER)”

 

Our “Buck” has the last word on The Bishop:

 

“Bishop, let me say, you're positively right in everything you say and
you're a very sweet man.”

 

BISHOP: My disciple here!



 
Behold, then, dear Sisters and Brothers, a hip bishop, snake-dancing
with the beats over on Third Avenue.  May his tribe increase.

PALPABLE SPACE

Posted on by

This is the eighth in a series of essays in honor of André Bazin.

Susan Barry was born with slightly misaligned eyes, which couldn't both be focused on the same object.  As is common for people with this condition, “normal” vision produced an image in which objects situated in different spaces were superimposed on each other, and distant objects seemed to vibrate.  So her brain, as is also common, learned to disregard the image from one eye, for greater clarity.  But this meant that she could not see in stereo, in three dimensions — she could not perceive the spatial relationships between things, except by inference.

In her 48th year she trained herself to focus both eyes on the same objects — something that was previously thought by medical science to be impossible.  Suddenly she could see in three dimensions.  It's wonderful to hear her talk about the joy of this.  Before, she had seen falling snow as a flat screen of moving white dots, the branches and leaves of trees as a flat pattern of shapes.  Now, she says, she can see the “palpable spaces” in depth between the snowflakes, between the branches and the leaves.

It's an interesting choice of words, since palpable meant originally something that can be physically touched.  It comes from the Latin word palpare, to stroke, and has the same root as palpation — now mostly a medical term for a doctor's examination of a patient by touch.  (It can be used aesthetically, as well, as in “the beauty of the female breast is best appreciated by palpation.”)  You can't physically touch the spaces between things, of course, but Barry was using the word palpable correctly, since it is now often used figuratively for anything that is obvious, readily perceived.

And yet . . . there is something “palpable”, in the original sense, about space.  If you close your eyes and move your hand between two objects, it's the absence of feeling something you can touch that tells you how far apart they are.  This is a kind of “negative touch”.  And if you close your eyes and try to navigate around, the absence of objects that can be touched tells you where you can safely go.  Empty space always has the potential to be filled, occupied, by something that can be touched.

You can think of space as the kind of mold used in casting an object out of bronze or plastic.  The mold receives the impression of the model, which is then removed, leaving a negative space.  The mold is next filled with the material to be cast, and when it hardens the mold is removed, leaving the cast object.  The mold is a kind of negative (solid, palpable) impression of the space around the new object.

In practice, we think of objects and the space around them as both “palpable”, since they both deliver the same kind of information to us about the physical world.  We take this “palpability” of space for granted, see it as emptiness, just as we throw away a casting mold when we've made what we want from it.  But Susan Barry's joy at “palpable” space reminds us of what a wonder it is — perhaps reminds us of our joy as infants in learning to use the “palpability” of space as a prime way of understanding and navigating the world around us.

It seems to me that paintings and photographs which convincingly convey the illusion of space, and all the plastic arts, from dance to architecture, which celebrate the wonders of “palpable space”, work in large part by reprising and tapping into the joy of these first discoveries — reminding us of the beauty of a spatial palpability we come to take for granted in the course of time, but which Susan Barry had never learned to take for granted.

Movies are the art most wired into this beauty, the beauty of spaces.  Movies are flat images, but when people and objects move through the spaces depicted on screen, or when the camera moves through those spaces, the wondrous palpability of space is reborn for us.  At the end of his life, D. W. Griffith lamented that movies, in the post silent-film era, had lost touch with this beauty, the beauty, he said, of leaves rustling in the breeze.  And it is the beauty of leaves rustling in the breeze, along with snowflakes, that Susan Barry cites as the things she most enjoys now that she can see in stereo.

Griffith didn't mean, of course, that there should be more trees in movies.  He meant that movies needed to reconnect with the phenomenon out of which their fundamental magic arises.

[Susan Barry's book about her recovery of stereo vision, Fixing My Gaze, has just come out in paperback, and Oliver Sacks devotes a chapter to her case in his forthcoming book The Mind's Eye.]

FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 5 APRIL 1999

Posted on by

The advent of these bright, mild days of April means only one thing to
the Ventura resident whose soul burns for adventure — the
rollerblading season has begun.

The view from the back of a horse is one of antique magnificence, in
which honorable deeds seem inevitable and glory within mortal grasp.
The view from rollerblades is not quite so lofty, of course — but
still, how one towers over the ungainly tread of the joggers, with
their slightly embarrassed smiles distorted by anguish and despair.


On rollerblades your feet are winged, your spirit flies out ahead of you, and it's all you can do to keep up.

For the full report, go here:

Ventura, Rollerblading

FROM THE ARCHIVES: REPORT FROM THE BEACH, 5 APRIL 1999

Posted on by

The advent of these bright, mild days of April means only one thing to
the Ventura resident whose soul burns for adventure — the
rollerblading season has begun.

There is nothing quite like strapping on the blades and gliding out of
the carport onto the smooth gutter that runs down the middle of
Weymouth Lane, turning left on Pierpont and navigating its bikepath to
the end of the avenue, where it runs into the entrance of the San
Buenaventura State Beach.

A wide bike path there, divided by a row of tall palms, runs behind the
dunes, which offer only brief glimpses of the ocean to the rolling
traveler — but already the waves sound clearer and the wind comes off
the ocean unmitigated by the houses of the lanes.

Up past the lifeguard headquarters the dunes fall away and you are
travelling in view of the surf, across a wide flat expanse of beach,
staked out with volleyball net posts, unstrung as yet.

Then under the Ventura Pier and along the beachfront esplanade, as far,
if you want, as Surfer’s Point, the legendary surfing spot that starts
at the end of California Street, or just “C” Street, as the surfers
used to call it.

It’s pleasant to pause for a while then, take off the blades and climb
the stairs to the pier, for a little refreshment at Eric Ericsson’s
restaurant on the pier.



You can sit at one of the tables out front, braving the chill that
still comes in on the wind at this time of year, and have an iced latte
and a plate of fresh, steamed Santa Barbara mussels, prepared with an
astonishing amount of garlic, and chopped tomatoes and basil.

Behind the pier you can see the cars whizzing along the 101, and on the
ridge behind that an Amtrak train will likely roll by. In front of you
is the reliable incantation of the waves, the sun hitting hard on the
deep terraces of sets at the point. Beyond these, depending on the
light and the mist, is the shocking closeness, or mysterious distance,
or utter invisibility of the Channel Islands.

All this whets the appetite, not just for the mussels, which turn out to be delicious, but also for the dreamlike gliding home.

The view from the back of a horse is one of antique magnificence, in
which honorable deeds seem inevitable and glory within mortal grasp.
The view from rollerblades is not quite so lofty, of course — but
still, how one towers over the ungainly tread of the joggers, with
their slightly embarrassed smiles distorted by anguish and despair.

You realize the truth of the maxim that all exercise which feels like
exercise diminishes the soul to the exact degree that it improves the
body.

On rollerblades your feet are winged, your spirit flies out ahead of you, and it’s all you can do to keep up.

AN N. C. WYETH FOR TODAY

Posted on by

This is one of Wyeth's illustrations for Children Of the Bible.  The tale it illustrates is curious.  In Mark's account of the incident at Gethsemane, where Rabbi Jeshua was arrested by the Roman soldiers, there's a little aside about “a young man” dressed only in a sheet.  When the soldiers tried to seize him they tore the sheet off and the young man fled naked into the night.

This is such an odd detail, and so scandalous, since nakedness was a real scandal in the culture of that time and place, that many scholars cite it as an example of something that must have been reliably reported from the earliest times and widely known, since no later chronicler would have included it otherwise.



According to Mark it was a cold night — so what was a kid doing out there dressed only in a sheet?  No one knows, of course, but scholars have speculated that the young man (often identified as Mark himself) was sleeping in the house where the last supper was held, and seeing the rabbi and his disciples head off to Gethsemane, decided on an impulse to follow them.

That moment of impulse is clearly what Wyeth is depicting — in a dramatic tableau where the rabbi, touched by moonlight, walks off into darkness.

[With thanks to PZ for illuminating the incident, and to Golden Age Comic Book Stories for the Wyeth illustration.  The painting above, by Gérard Douffet, from around 1620, clearly owes a lot to Caravaggio's masterpiece The Taking Of Christ, painted about 20 years earlier and a far greater work.]

COMMIE JESUS

Posted on by



If you’re not familiar with it yet, check out the amazing graphic art of Dima Drjuchin — in which many wondrous traditions somehow converge into something new.  Mexican lotoría cards and lucha libre ads and Día de Los Muertos imagery get mixed up with Catholic devotional art and 60s psychedelic concert posters and comic book panels, all inflected with a truly eccentric imagination defying category.

It’s cool.

See more of Dima’s art here:

Dima Drjuchin