My Favorite Movie

Me: Comma: King Kong

Being a cinephile of any degree, sooner or later people will ask you about your favorite movie of all time. While I can't give the equivalent answer about albums or books or television shows, I do have a definite and consistent answer in the category of movies, the same one I've given for the last fifty years. It's not a picture from my youth, although it was on television constantly when I was young. My mother would have been ten years old when it was released. Yet 'King Kong' was my favorite since before puberty and has remained, uncontested, ever since.

As a movie event, 'King Kong' was singular and unique even during the Golden Age of Hollywood. No other film used special effects as an integral part of the plot in such a way for another fifteen years, although a few very pale echoes emerged. It influenced young Los Angeles teenagers such as Ray Bradbury and Ray Harryhausen to go into their respective careers when both were just a few years older than my mother. It has been remade twice, and rebooted recently, with very mixed results. And as a brand, Kong still has a worldwide presence eighty five years after the premiere.

It was a project that took over four years to compete when directors finished that many movies in a single year. RKO wasn't a major player in Hollywood, just a step above Republic and the Gower Gulch independents, yet they did manage both 'King Kong' and 'Citizen Kane', an equally one-of-a-kind film. The special effects were done, then scrapped, then done again and again until they were right. This was at the height, or rather depths of the Great Depression, and today it would be more like taking over a decade and spending a billion dollars to create a movie.

And what a movie; it was more exciting and fantastical than anything else ever done before. Despite being primarily a visual effects movie, it was also the first film to have a wall-to-wall soundtrack, the music mimicking every act of the great ape star. The stop-motion character of Kong became the star of the vehicle, outshining all the humans. And the film is filled with perhaps more subtext that any other American movie, giving it a continuous resonance down to today.

Every great piece of art can be broken down three ways; text, context, and subtext. In the case of 'King Kong', which is indeed great art, the text is a black and white movie from the early talkie era with exceptional special effects work, both in matte painting and stop motion. The context is Hollywood and the Great Depression, both reflected in the script. As for the subtext, it could be argued that it concerns the original sin of America, overflowing with both gender and racial politics in ways unlike any other movie ever created.

'Birth of a Nation', Hollywood's first blockbuster, is more notorious for its odorous racial attitudes than it is for the groundbreaking use of montage and intercutting scenes. 'Gone with the Wind', the biggest money maker of the Golden Era, has a racial attitude not much better, treating negros both when slaves and after they are freed as children, in need of white parents to guide them. 'King Kong', while not explicitly about race, tells the story of a giant beast taken from the jungle in chains for profit in the New World, only to go on a rampage over a white woman. It actually brings sex and miscegenation into the foreground of the plot.

This was entirely accidental, of course; had the creators known what powerful topics they were dealing with, they could not have handled them so adroitly. Only blissful ignorance can balance the plot line so that everything is there in plain site but nothing is offensive. There is a racist attitude in the film, but it is a casual one, a typical white unenlightened stance that differs from the Southern attitude of D.W. Griffith and Margaret Mitchell, both knowingly racist. And there is a feminist angle that comes from the final screen write, Ruth Rose.

Edgar Wallace wrote the first draft, but the story was from Merian C. Cooper, who also served as producer and co-director. Wallace was a famous writer of mysteries, very popular, and he would remain a name brand in Europe through the 1960s. Perhaps Cooper wanted to repeat the slant that Arthur Conan Doyle, another mystery writer who also wrote 'The Lost World', the first plot to bring a dinosaur to a modern location, a key plot point in 'King Kong'. Wallace unfortunately died before doing much work on the script.

Another couple of male writers worked on the story, especially James Creelman, who filled in much of the backstory and plot details. But he was cautious about too many fantastic elements, and Cooper eventually removed him after Creelman finished a companion picture shot on the same sets, 'The Most Dangerous Game'. Ruth Rose was brought in by Cooper even though she was the wife of the other co-director, Earnest Schoedsack. Even though she entered the game late, Ruth Rose made all the difference in the world.

The first thing she did was remove most of the back story, instead increasing the screen presence of Ann Darrow, the female protagonist. Now the plot was seen through a female perspective, including all the threat, shown and implied, of the giant ape. Cooper had already come up with the climb up the Empire State Building and the 'Beauty and the Beast' angel, but Ruth Rose made the female character the fulcrum of the drama. All the other actors - even Kong - are seen in relationship to her.

Carl Denham, the director and showman, takes advantage of her poverty. The crew aboard the ship thinks that she is bad luck. The first mate falls in love with her. The natives want her as a sacrifice, since she is 'superior' to the native queen. Kong falls in love at first site and rips up the island getting her to his home, where she is promptly stolen back by the first mate. Kong goes nuts and tries to get her back, only to be captured and shipped back to New York, to be exploited.  In chains, Kong goes even more nuts when he thinks that Ann in being attacked by the newspapermen, tearing up the Big Apple. Going to the highest place for safety, the giant ape is mercilessly killed.

Consider how you feel at the end of the movie; once Kong is dead, you no longer really care about Ann Darrow or her lover, who supposedly rescued her. Carl Denham gets the last word, but you are furious at him for causing the tragedy through his actions. And it is a tragedy that is nearly Shakespearian, because there is a faint echo of Othello in the sexual and racial politics. It takes a stop motion gorilla's to give dignity and humanity to the African American male experience. That was the sorry state of racial politics in the United States at the time.

It is also, curiously, the glory of the movie. 'King Kong', through its sub textual resonance, hidden in plain site, is almost Biblical in the distribution of guilt. As I said before, the creators were playing with huge cultural issues, and in their ignorance came up with a masterpiece. Or there could be another reading; the leading light in the making of the film. Merian C. Cooper, went on to produce many other films. The last fictional film he produced is the other great classic Hollywood study of miscegenation, John Ford's 'The Searchers'. It also handled horribly divisive subject matter explicitly but without any of it ever spoken in the dialog. In 'The Searchers', that icon of America, John Wayne, becomes the villain, the cold hearted killer, intent on murdering his niece because she took an Indian as a mate.

Kong himself never had it as good again. RKO Studios rushed 'Son of Kong' into production. If you've never seen it, don't; it is a terribly shoddy wasted opportunity. In fact, the only good thing in the movie is that the Carl Denham character is continued, and he is fleeing New York City to escape all the law suits resulting from his actions in the previous films. The production team never had the money or the time to duplicate the special effects, instead having more moderate success with such pot boilers as H. Rider Haggard's 'She' and the 'The Last Days of Pompeii'. It wasn't until 1948, a full fifteen years later, that the producing, writing, directing and special effects team reunited to create a movie that wasn't an embarrassment, 'Mighty Joe Young'. This time, the ape manages to live happily ever after.

Kong was evidently ripped off by the Japanese before the Second World War; the film no longer exists but there are a few publicity stills that don't look promising. Toho Studios, riding high on Godzilla, resurrected Kong and Skull Island with dubious legal rights and produced 'King Kong vs Godzilla', a movie so bad that even at the age of eight I was appalled at the atrocity. Dino de Laurentiis did the pretty bad 1976 remake, complete with a leading man with more hair than the giant ape, plus Kong made a leap from one of the Twin Towers to the other, unfortunate in hindsight. Peter Jackson did a Kong for the new millennium, but unfortunately showed only his shortcomings as a director, producing a movie that was spectacular in any individual scene but numbing in overall effect. At least his heart was in the right place.

The recent 'Kong; Skull Island' was a blast, a fun action adventure that made a great popcorn movie. It had none of the resonance of the original, but it didn't try to, instead bringing in the Vietnam war as the subtext. It's all part of a plan to get Kong to square off with Godzilla, and I'm down with that, since it will be nice mindless destruction. But the bigger Kong gets, the more removed from being a sexual threat he becomes.

And sex does play a big part. 'King Kong' borrowed a good deal of plot from 'The Lost World', but no dinosaur can pose the kind of threat that a thirty foot dark ape beast can, no matter how fetching Raquel Welsh's fur bikini may be. Kong stomped into gender, racial and sexual politics on such a grand scale that he became iconic, while the hidden symbolism was missed by most of the general public at the same time. It was closest to a retelling of the 'Beauty & the Beast' story, a myth for the modern age. This is how we find a way to live with ourselves over the sins of our fathers.

The What, Why & When of the Who

My Regeneration

As a lifelong lover of the Who, it was a blessing to finally get a legitimate release of  'Live at the Fillmore East 1968'. The bootleg had been around forever, and I had a copy since at least the early 1980s, incomplete, with a few infuriating fade outs and tinny sound, but of such historical importance that it was a vital part of any complete Who collection. In the 1960s, live rock albums were few and far between, of such bad audio quality ('Got Live if you Want It', 'Kinks Live at Kelvin Hall') as to be useless. It wasn't until 1970 that live releases, from 'Get Your YaYa's Out' to 'Woodstock' and 'Steppenwolf Live" came out, that engineers figured out how to deal with loud volume. And a prime example and perhaps my favorite live album of all time, 'Live at Leeds'.

Live albums before this were merely souvenirs of the concert experience. Bands played short sets, with the Beatles notoriously playing only for between 20 and 25 minutes a night. The audiences were considered naïve, not caring about quality. After Monterey, with the national dissemination of the hipper California groups (Jefferson Airplane, the Doors) as well as the second great British invasion (Cream, Jimi Hendrix Experience), venues developed that demanded longer sets. Audiences tended to sit and watch their heroes perform legendary feats of virtuosity night after night.

The Who were a little different. Their albums came out few and far between, and they released singles about as often as other groups released albums. The interpersonal infighting was legendary, as was the trashing of guitars and drum sets whenever they played live. They were very British, with only the Kinks being perhaps less American in their style. And the Who created music like no one else, not quite hip but not old school either, a category of its own.

Everything about that group was lop-sided, off center. They made a huge noise, and they kept it at noise level back in 1968, not trying to turn it into music the way Jimi Hendrix or Jeff Beck did. The Who loved gimmicks; nearly every single and their last album, 'The Who Sell Out', all depended on some kind of hook to get the audience. Pete Townshend was articulate enough to bullshit his way through any interview, and indeed he did a very long major piece for the Rolling Stone right around the time of this concert. announcing to the world his intention of writing his 'Rock Opera'.

The official release of this concert is a major event, capturing this group right before they changed gears and became one of the biggest bands in the world. Make no mistake, the Who were struggling in April 1968. The debt was staggering, and although they had become a major live attraction in America, their music wasn't selling that well. There was chronic dissention in the ranks; both Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck at various times tried to poach members of the band right before this recording. And, truth be told, while this is a great gig to have as a historical document, it isn't a great concert through and through.

The Who had a brilliant string of early singles to use as the backbone of their set list, and they play these very well, almost on auto pilot, as they would for years. Noticeably lacking are any of their last five singles, including such masterpieces as 'I Can See For Miles'  or later live favorite 'Magic Bus'. Stuff like 'Run Run Run' and 'Call Me Lightning' placed the group closer to the Monkeys than Hendrix. Even 'Pictures of Lilly', which was played at Monterey the previous summer, was missing.

Instead we get five cover songs, mostly old rock classics, including three excellent rockers from Eddie Cochran, along with 'Fortune Teller', which doesn't quite work, and an early version of 'Shaking All Over', which does and would be reprised to even better effect on 'Live at Leeds'. The obligatory 'A Quick One' is there, played in an expansive manner, showing the way forward to what they would be doing for the next four years, as well as 'Little Billy', a song that wouldn't get released for six years, Along with two songs from their last album and 'Boris the Spider', it is a slightly odd and self-defeating set list.

The gig almost didn't happen, as Martin Luther King had just been assassinated the day previously. Billy Graham, the promoter, was fearful of rioting in the streets and considered closing for the night. Keith Moon also ran amuck, nearly getting arrested by the police for throwing cherry bombs from the ledge outside his hotel room, then getting the group thrown out of three hotels that same day. The Who showed up at the Fillmore in a rare mood. Naturally, the recording equipment didn't function properly.

That anything survives is a miracle. As it is, the first two songs from the set are missing, the whole thing sounds a little bass heavy, and portions of Moon's drumming, especially the cymbals, are barely there. While the official promotion touts the thirty plus minute of 'My Generation' that takes up the entire second disc, frankly it is a plodding mess that goes nowhere very slowly. This is not yet a band that is ready to be superstars. Strangely, within a year they would be.

Not that this is a bad release; there are many high points, and the recording is good enough to put the band over in great shape. Entwhistle's bass is particularly loud and effective; he has a pick scraping technique that is totally unique, filling in for the drums when necessary. And the vocals are top notch, Daltrey sounding powerful and Entwhistle's underestimated harmonies blending with him to great effect, as they would until the bass player became too deaf to sing harmony any more. 'Tattoo' and particularly 'Relax' from the 'Sell Out' album are great, as is 'Boris the Spider'.

"Relax', at over eleven minutes long, works as a jam exactly like the thirty minute long version of 'My Generation' does not. It has something to say, gets there, wanders around, and says it again before leaving, while the longer song just plods along aimlessly. The Who are trying to compete with Hendrix and Cream, and they can't on this turf. With the creation of 'Tommy' the very next year, they replaced the vast majority of this set list with a continuous piece of music that was perfect for showcasing the talents of the individual band members.

When 'Live At Leeds' came out to great acclaim in 1970, the main complaint from critics was the fourteen minute long version of 'My Generation' at the end. Keeping in mind that the forty minute disc was extracted from an over two-hour -long concert, and that the night before at Hull the recording equipment had misfunctioned (again), and that the 'Tommy' performance was removed in entirety, that version of the song acted as the opposite of an overture, a summation of the most glorious moments in the 'Rock Opera' quickly reprised. It worked very well, and shows that the Who realized that their long ramble through the 1968 version of 'My Generation' didn't work. I'm sure that they listened to these tapes and made adjustments soon after.

This is in no way meant to give any disrespect to the members of the Who. Never has a band had such a symbiotic relationship among individuals. The drums or bass can be the lead instrument at any moment. Townshend is not a selfish guitarist, demanding all the songs that he wrote be showcases for his talents. Many songs during the classic Who period become duets between the guitar and the drums, with Entwhistle's bass the moderating influence. While the real virtuoso in the band, Entwhistle would often do single note runs that replaced the bass drum part, allowing Keith Moon the freedom to do his signature vast crescendos.

The real classic Who period was 'Who's Next', when Townshend figured out how to add a layer of keyboards to their sound. That seemingly simple trick was perfect as the Who began to invent stadium rock, one foot in the progressive rock camp. As the audience grew, the music grew to fill the space as well. Pete learned how to write anthemic material on a universal scale. It doesn't really matter if you know what 'Baba O'Reilly' is about; you're going to sing along to it anyway.

The song that I included above is from my recent 'Saragossa' album, a tribute to the Who. The guitar plays the melody not in single notes but in chords, the drums answer, and the bass moderates. The whole thing builds to a couple of carefully planned climaxes, and at the end things wrap to a satisfying conclusion. The instruments go in and out of sync at specific points in the piece, and each instrument gets a moment of glory. It has all the trademarks of the classic 1960s Who sound, very consciously.

Later, the Who's glory would slowly diminish as Keith Moon's hilarious self-destructive behavior took it's toll. By the end, all too obvious at the 'Kilburn 1977' footage, he was struggling to keep up, not driving the engine. There was talk of replacing him, but Pete Townshend was reluctant to tour, appalled at the effect it had on his own physical and mental welfare. After Moon's death, the band continued on, more to fulfill contracts or to get Entwhistle out of debt. I saw them last in 2012, with Zak Starkey doing an excellent job drumming, and they could still get an audience to their feet effortlessly.

Keep in mind that the Who worked like dogs. They are the one band that played virtually every one of the great festivals, from Monterey and Woodstock through 'The Concert for New York City' and 'Live 8'. They even did a charity concert for Bangladesh in 1972, raised more money than George Harrison, got it to the needy in six weeks as opposed to the three year lawsuit between Harrison and Allen Klein, and never asked for credit. They may have been huge egos, but they weren't egomaniacs.

Next year will be the fiftieth anniversary of 'Tommy'. I hope they find a way to release the November 1969 Amsterdam live radio performance, another long circulating bootleg and the most complete and incendiary performance from the era. It's much better than the live disc included in the 'Tommy' boxset from a few years ago. Less than sixteen months after 'Live at the Fillmore East 1968', it is a different beast altogether. They aren't competing with Cream anymore. Now they perform at Zed Zeppelin levels of volume and power, and they dominate.

In their prime, which isn't quite yet on 'Live at the Fillmore East 1968', the Who became a major band on the level of the Rolling Stones and the Beatles due to the huge chances they took, both in performance and in conceptual art. Yet they were a different animal, both more sophisticated and yet simultaneously much rawer. They were a gang as opposed to a group, united in their effort to conquer the world. Once that had been accomplished, they drifted apart. But the debris that they left is beautiful, indeed.

J.G. Ballard

The First Post-Industrial Author

Post-modern is a term that gets bandied about quite a bit when talking about various art forms. Back in art school during the later 1970s, I remember having to raise my hand to get an explanation when those words were first thrown at me. Being a thieving magpie already, it was easy to understand and see how much of the world had already become post-modern. As I use to say about my old job, it's all about shuffling clichés, a blunt way of describing 'borrowing' from older existing forms to try and create something new. It works until you start borrowing from an already post-modern form; then you run the risk of creating a mobius strip up your own sphincter.

Growing up, I noticed a world that was increasingly post-modern. It often feels as if nothing new is being created, that we are feed a steady diet of recycled ideas. Yet as we grow older there is a greater reluctance to accept anything different than that with which we are comfortable. This poses a strange Catch 22; being the problem while complaining about the results. But sometimes there is something so sideways that it pops out as neither new or old, just different.

I read J.G. Ballard early, and I felt a strong kinship to his material. Notice that I didn't say that I enjoyed his books and short stories. I could go to Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft if I wanted to enjoy a good read. Ballard was completely different, and it worked at a level beyond merely like or dislike. It was strong stuff, to be pondered. The imagery seemed to come from my own life, like scenes lifted from my memory.

It wasn't exactly science fiction, although Ballard was often grouped in with those writers. Speculative fiction works better; there was a 'new wave' of writers who used the trappings of science fiction to explore the human condition instead of postulating about technological breakthroughs. During the 1950s and 1960s a number of new writers came up. Some, like Harlan Ellison and Phillip K. Dick, were locked in the SF ghetto; others, like William Burroughs and Kurt Vonnegut, wound up as major Avant Garde or mainstream authors.

Ballard was something else, the last author to have a book banned in the United States, yet managing to have one of his works turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg. He wrote not about outer space but inner space instead, the world inside our minds. England has a long history with dystopian end-of-the-world fiction, from 'War of the Worlds' to 'Day of the Triffids'. In Ballard's future, the world doesn't end with a bang, but a very long whimper indeed. His first four novels were written closely together in the space of a few years; 'The Wind from Nowhere', 'The Drowned World', 'Drought' and 'The Crystal World'.

It was enough to establish JG as an author to watch, at the vanguard of English science fiction in the early 1960s next to a young Michael Moorcock. Joseph Conrad's influence can be felt, but instead of white men in exotic locations going a little weird in the head, it was white locations gone exotic, with the locals still going off by the end. "The Drowned World'  was particularly effective, London gone tropical from global warming, a swampy lagoon with a few disaffected survivors hanging on, working at cross purposes.

'The Crystal World' was the breakthrough, a psychedelic 'Heart of Darkness', crystal leprosy taking over the darkest jungles of the world, slowly spreading. A doctor goes to treat the patients, witnessing strange human behavior, and barely escapes with his life. Puzzled but attracted to what he see, he is compelled to return, doing what he had seen the others had done. The ending is strikingly similar to Kurt Vonnegut's 'Cat's Cradle', but instead of a cosmic joke, it becomes a metaphor for all those impulses; the imps of the perverse we cannot control. It is a beautiful and frightening work.

Ballard had a unique upbringing; raised in Shanghai, he was separated from his parents and survived the Japanese internment during World War II, first scrounging around the abandoned European sector, then in an concentration camp. Feeling an outsider when sent back to Britain, he wound up in the RAF, helping Strategic Command from frozen wastelands in Canada. The feeling of civilization in ruins as well as the attraction to vast empty spaces remained with him for the rest of his life.

Like many other fledging science fiction authors of the time, JG worked as a technical writer for scientific journals. Unlike most of them, he was also extremely attracted to experimental art and was fundamentally left wing in nature, although not any more communist than democratic. Knowledgeable about the Surrealists as well as the Beats (especially Williams Burroughs), Ballard managed to incorporate all of these influences into his stories while making them more commercial and almost mainstream. Almost.

After his wife died in a car crash in 1964, Ballard began writing a series of very Avant Garde short stories both in reaction to becoming the single father of three young children and as a way to explore his most extreme experiments in fiction. These shorts were not narratives in the normal sense, more like articles written for scientific journals, but combining the most outrageous pop culture subjects possible. Later gathered together as a novel-of-sorts called 'The Atrocity Exhibition', just a list of the titles will give you some idea of the insane level of provocation in these pieces:

The Atrocity Exhibition
The University of Death
The Assassination Weapon
You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe
Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown
The Great American Nude
The Summer Cannibals
Tolerances of the Human Face
You and Me and the Continuum
Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy
Love and Napalm: Export USA
Crash!

The Generations of America

Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan

The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race

It was the story about Ronald Reagan, first published twelve years before the former actor's ascendancy to the Presidency of the United States, that caused Doubleday Books to destroy the entire first American edition. Talk about predicting the future! It's a difficult read; the stories all do relate to each other and have the same protagonist, but are not told in a reader-friendly manner. Nonetheless, it fuses Surrealist writing technique with Ballard's inner space exploration. Somebody even tried to make a film of it thirty years later, a somewhat futile exercise.

The next novel, 'Crash', went back to a more linear narrative but kept the extreme content in place. It expanded on one aspect of the previous book, creating a tale so strange that even twenty five years later, when David Cronenberg adapted it into a fairly faithful movie, people were still freaking out about the plot line, trying to ban the film in England. Ballard managed to weaponize popular culture, to turn it into a destructive force to attack the very thing he was writing about. 'Crash' isn't a pleasant read but it is an unique and vital story.

'Concrete Island' followed, a short novel about a man crashing his vehicle, breaking a leg, and finding a microcosm of society living in the traffic island where he is stranded. It merges themes from his earlier catastrophic novels with themes from 'Crash' and the 'Atrocity Exhibition', and it paved the way for his real masterpiece, 'High Rise'. Ballard was concentrating on mankind's unlimited talent for self-destruction now, a theme that he focused on for the rest of his life. He had found his muse and would follow it until his death in 2009.

'High Rise' is strong stuff, a solid narrative about the descent of an entire apartment block into savagery, detailing every small step. The narrator, like all Ballard's heroes, can be surprisingly passive, but survival instincts kick in when needed. What starts out as a shining example of social engineering turns into a tribal nightmare, everyone living like primitive cave dwellers by the end. It was a giant influence on punk rock, the Clash in particular mentioning the novel frequently.

A comparison of two covers shows how the publishing houses were completely confused by Ballard's writing. Should they try and exploit the more extreme story features or treat this as high art? That was a dilemma that would face JG for the rest of his life. The English press praised him generally, calling him the 'Seer of Shepperton'. He lived a safe suburban life but constantly showed how fragile the social norms that tied us together were; a few simple events can strip away the veneer of civilization to display us at our most voracious.

Ballard hit the big time in the 1980s; his fictionalized account of his youth and internment in Shanghai,  'Empire of the Sun', was first an international best seller, then a major motion picture with Steven Spielberg directing. 'Empire of the Sun' shows the underpinning of JG's obsessions and made him a wealthy man. Yet he continued to support Avant Garde magazines like 'Ambit' and write disturbing novels like 'Hello America' and 'The Day of Creation'. He never abandoned his dystopian themes, and he may very well be the first person to view the modern world with a wistful glow of contemporary nostalgia, such as in 'Memories of the Space Age'. By the time he died, there was a robust collection of both essays and short stories to examine, both probably easier to assimilate for a first time reader than some of Ballard's more challenging novels.

From when I first read these pieces, both novels and shorter pieces, I felt a kinship with the imagery and the world view. I grew up in a world where the infrastructure was collapsing. In the next town over on Long Island, Jamaica, what was once the largest bakery in the world was an abandoned factory, now the playground for all the kids in the neighborhood.  Across the expressway, Belmont Racetrack was closed for six years while the stands were torn completely down and rebuilt, giving us another place to sneak into and wander at will amidst the ruins.

These huge empty post-industrial sites were burnt into my brain in youth, and it would only get worse. The most striking example of this crumbling society happened right around the time I moved out of the New York City area, in 1973. The West Side Elevated Highway in Manhattan, also called 'Death Avenue' because of it's terrible design and construction, collapsed. I visited it shortly after; it was an abandoned structure next to rotting wharves near the West Greenwich Village gay community, not a location that you would feel safe in for very long. It was also the direct inspiration for 'Escape From New York' and every other post-apocalyptic movie, since it sat there for well over a decade before being removed. It looked like the aftermath of World War III.

The only person who contemporaneously addressed these issues and used these images in their art was J.G. Ballard. He wrote about the post-industrial age, turning it into something interior well before anyone else, and he kept doing it his entire career. As society fell to pieces during the 1970s, as the government had a president resign and the military abandoned a murderous foreign entanglement, I had to find a way to cope with the world that I was inheriting. The only way that I could process this information was through the fiction of J.G. Ballard.

Ballard was the only thinker who treated the current day as well as the future as archaeology, not being blinded by the promises of tomorrow but constantly reminding us of the destructive nature of mankind, when ever and where ever humans might me. He clearly saw into the heart of darkness, and recognized the wreckage of past generational hopes laying around us all. I recognized myself in those narratives, another wanderer in strange desolate landscapes both exterior and interior. You didn't need to be Conan to be a barbarian; you could be a happy suburban resident just like me and be equally as savage, given the right set of circumstances.

If you think that you can handle something outside of your normal comfort zone, I cannot recommend J.G. Ballard enough. Sure, things have gotten better, at least on the outside. The West Side of Manhattan has been turned into a series of waterfront parks. My wife and I had a delightful stroll along it for miles, both impressed by the urban renewal and the magnificent views of New Jersey across the Hudson. But the visions of youth stay, and anyone who could turn the uncertainties of the world around us into such unique art as Ballard deserves the highest praise. And I still insist of viewing both the present day and the future as a series of ruins slowly happening before our eyes.

Conspiracy Theories

Paranoiac Nostalgia

Growing up in the early 1970s was the great days of conspiracy theory. Whether it was ancient astronauts or alien autopsies, the Lock Ness monster or Jack the Ripper, the wilder the conjecture, the more it entered popular culture. My personal favorite was the Illuminatus! trilogy, three paperbacks written by Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea. A crazy mixture of John Dillinger's preserved penis in the National Archive, the hippie drug culture, and around one hundred characters finally ending up in Dealey Plaza to watch the JFK assassination, it was designed solely to blow all your pre-conceptions to smithereens.

Leonard Nemoy's dark voice was always welcome, 'In Search of...' beaming into our living room, detailing yet another cockamamie theory. Watergate was happening, as were the Pentagon Papers. We were slowly coming to the realization that our government was perhaps not always working to out benefit. And nowhere was this feeling more self-evident than in the series of assassinations that rocked America in the 1960s, particularly the 1963 John F. Kennedy Assassination.

I'm not going to open the Kennedy Assassination can of worms. There's is no way that I or anyone else can solve the murder of the President at this late date. The death of JFK has gone from tragedy to suspicion to mystery to controversy. Now it is entertainment, thousands of books and documentaries not only covering the subject as fact but as fiction as well. My personal favorite is 'American Tabloid' by James Ellroy, the NY Times Book-of-the-Year for 2000, but there are many to chose from.

Whatever your opinion of the Kennedy Assassination may be, the one provable fact is that the Warren Commission was one bungled and slanted investigation. It is the classic case of fitting the evidence to the conclusion when any proper investigation is supposed to be run in the opposite direction, fitting the conclusion to the facts. The destruction of evidence during the most important criminal case in American history alone is mind boggling. It left the door open for counter arguments that have not been answered to this day.

What I really want to get to is a series of three movies released in the 1970s in America that reflect the JFK murder, all refracted takes on the national paranoia and suspicion that was growing rapidly during the decade. The films are 'Executive Action' (1973), 'The Parallax View' (1974), and 'Winter Kills' (1979), and they show an increasingly complex view of American politics. The first one is nearly a documentary, while the third is hallucinatory. How did things get so far out of hand?

The 1960's had really invented the paranoid movie, with 'The Manchurian Candidate' being perhaps Ground Zero, although the loser heroes of Film Noir certainly pointed the way. The director of 'The Manchurian Candidate', John Frankenheimer, made a trilogy of paranoia films that decade, along with 'Seven Days in May', about a military takeover of the White House, and 'Seconds', a descent into identity removal and madness. All three are great films but are once removed from current events.

'The Manchurian Candidate' did use recent politics such as the McCarthy witch hunt and the televised political debates of 1960 as plot points, again once removed. It was the infamous political assassination with a high powered rifle from a vantage point used at the conclusion of the plot, a prediction that caused producer Frank Sinatra to pull the movie from circulation of a quarter century, that makes that movie a landmark. That hit too close to home, prophetic, not reportage. 'Seven Days In May', in production on November 22, 1963, detailed the Military Industrial Complex trying to overthrow a 'weak' President. Conspiracy theorists have thrown that into the JFK assasination mix frequently.

One of the stars of 'Seven Days in May', Burt Lancaster, was the driving force behind "Executive Action, and he received financial help from co-star Kirk Douglas. This film was the first time in American mass culture there was a serious challenge to the Warren Commission, going beyond either Mark Lane or Jim Garrison and actually making it to movie theaters for a month before being pulled by the distributor, not appearing again until it showed on up television around fifteen years later. It was an attempt by the generation contemporary to JFK to deal with the murder.

The biggest draw to the movie, besides giving the official verdict two stiff middle fingers, was in getting Dalton Trumbo to write the script. Trumbo, famously blacklisted and then redeemed, was the dean of American screen writers at that time. He came in with no agenda, not being a conspiracy buff. His screenplay is both sober and very clear, a detailed description of the events and politics behind the killing of a President. Along with a few big name Hollywood stars a little past their prime, most notably Lancaster, Robert Ryan and Will Geer, it is the non-exploitative nature of the film that is its strongest asset.

The budget was around that of a typical Roger Corman movie, and Dick Miller even shows up as one of the shooters. Lancaster is in button down mode, very somber and determined, not flashy at all. Much of the plot is given over to the details in the execution, while the other half details convincing a rich Texas Oil magnate to give the go-ahead. Afterwards, there is an even more paranoid conclusion. Overall, it is a little stodgy but very on point.

Critical reaction was harsh despite the fact that no US government entity was directly connected with this plot. The movie lasted less than a month in the theaters then disappeared. Considering the extremely sober and somber tone, it is hard today to see what all the fuss was about. The most important thing is the fact that the movie even got made. It was a great starting arguement, going point by point in repudiating the official (and improbable) story. This is the last time sobriety will be noted.

'The Parallax View' was a more contemporary film with a more contemporary star, Warren Beatty. It is also vastly more entertaining, with some great set pieces. It fits in well between 'Three Days of the Condor', another excellent political paranoid thriller, and 'All the President's Men', which in fact was the director's (Alan J. Paluka) next film. Still not getting a huge budget, it was filmed in Seattle and uses the location well, especially in the opening assassination at the Space Needle.

It also has the highest IMDB rating of the three films in discussion and it was distributed by Paramount, doing okay during initial release and winding up on television within three years. It is especially noted for the orientation film segment, a wonderfully effective short industrial film embedded into the plot which has to be seen to be believed. Here is an excellent article about the use of montage:

https://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s76parallax.html

The film ends with a set piece that stands as perhaps 1970's paranoia and existentialism at it's best. My only complaint is the present of Warren Beatty, who, with his Jay Sebring haircut and designer jeans, always remains a sex symbol, never disappearing into the role. Beatty is not a favorite actor of mine, despite making a few very good movies. Here, he gets the opportunity to sleep with women and have John Wayne-style fist fights, trying hard to pretend to be a psychopath but not succeeding. Still, the movie works well despite his presence and still packs a punch.

The story is once removed, trying to imagine the machinations behind an assassination network, but strictly from a corporate viewpoint. The movie is uneven, with some embarrassing macho moment for Beatty, but excellent performances from Hume Cronyn and William Daniels. Most especially, the montage above shows how emotions can be ripped apart solely by a series of images and remains perhaps the best example of such a technique ever attempted. And the movie never gets close to be boring. I give Beatty credit for making a star vehicle that was that crazy and treated the main protagonist so badly at the end.

My favorite of the batch, although not the highest rated by others, is 'Winter Kills', filmed in 1975 and 1976 but not released until 1979. I can see why it is a polarizing film; it starts out with the type of shock that comes at the end of 'The Parallax View' and only escalates from there. If you are looking for a linear plot or resolution, you will be disappointed. The film is a Gordian Knot, constantly unfolding upon itself, never revealing any final truths, just a series of betrayals and misinformation. Richard Condor wrote the book on which this movie was based, and he also wrote 'The Manchurian Candidate'. It is on my bucket list to read one day. I am sure that there are major differences in the plot and it has to make more sense than the movie.

The film starts on an oil barge, a huge space, and the sense of living in an oversized world continues until the conclusion, a huge American flag being symbolically ripped in two. Jeff Bridges may be the star, but he is always the most naive and least intelligent person in every room. He tries to investigate the death of his brother, who was President of the United States. Yet even with the help of his father, a billionaire played to perfection by John Huston, he never seems to get anywhere.

The movie seems like an exercise in futility until the end, when things get seriously tragic. Some call it a black comedy, but I consider it a dream-logic nightmare. By now, America is eating its young, and everybody is involved in the conspiracy. This is helped by the numerous cameos in the movie, some of which work - Eli Wallach, Tomas Milian -and some of which are wasted, such as Elizabeth Taylor and Toshiro Mufune. The plot is episodic, with innumerable small segments piling on top of each other.

The production itself is among the most notorious of the 1970's; the producers were big time drug dealers who were perpetually short of cash, and the film went bankrupt three separate times in three separate locations. One of the producers was sentenced to 40 years for pot smuggling, while the other was executed fourteen days before the film premiered, a bullet to the back of the head. Richard Condon claimed in a magazine article that the two made their money dealing coke. Each of the star cameos required an individual shoot to accommodate the crazy scheduling.

It is a testament to Jeff Bridges and the director, William Richert, that they stuck with the project until completion. I saw it in the movie theater but it was considered a box office bomb. Now it is a popular cult item. To me, it stands as a symbol of the Kennedy death investigations, convoluted and somewhat indecipherable, a story that you can never quite get to the bottom of or figure out the truth of the matter.

What started out as a sober examination in 'Executive Action' had turned into dream logic by 'Winter Kills', a sign that America was dazed and confused by the end of that tumultuous decade, ready for the warm lies of the Reagan era. In today's environment of 'fake news' and alternative facts, we are living in the world of 'Winter Kills'. What started out as a reflection on the past has somehow turned into our present day reality. God help us all.

Oliver Stone blew these three movies out of the water with his masterful 'JFK'. He packed his statement on the Kennedy Assassination just as full of bullshit as the Warren Report had; it was a huge hit and extremely controversial. It was also very well made, with especially fantastic editing in the use of white. The tone and even the music harkens back to 'Executive Action', except that unlike the three movies from the 1970s, he places the blame of the President's death squarely on governmental forces. That's when the shit really hit the fan, even resulting in yet another round of Congressional hearings.

We're fifty five years past these events, yet we still can't seem to move past the trauma. No one trusts the government any more, and we take it for granted that our elected officials do things against the law. Guns violence has become an everyday event, with a new tragedy and outrage happening against the most helpless while sides are chosen. Perhaps the high school kids, born after even the movie 'JFK ' came out, in their Children's Crusade against gun violence, can find a solution. In all these years, the older generations certainly have not.

Groovenator 5000

The Groove & Nothing But The Groove

I finally got off my butt and did another music video, the first one in perhaps four years. As usual, there has been the continued accumulation of raw material; vacation footage, film and photos from public domain archives, and special effects templates. There is rarely a plan to tell a linear story when doing a video; just get layered imagery to accompany the audio. I leave the relationship of the video and audio strictly up to chance most of the time.

There are a lot of new songs to chose from, both the remixes done in 2016 and the new material recorded in 2017. In fact, I need to do about a dozen music videos; it's a way to purge old stuff out of the system, get ready for the next batch, wipe the slate clean. I've always had a love/hate relationship with music videos. They were one of the ingredients, with the birth of MTV, that, IMHO, ruined music, making the visuals more important than the sound. But when done right, they are a form of art.

Naturally, what you consider a well done video will differ wildly from my opinion on the same subject. Years ago, I liked linear narratives, little stories told in three to five minutes. Now, I like semi-abstract images piled on top of each other, forcing the synapses in your brain to overload and find connections that aren't there. Your mileage may vary.

Here's one of the rare music videos that I did that has something like a straight narrative. It was a cover song, and old blues called 'Mother Earth' that I heard from a Memphis Slim record. His version was just solo piano and voice, and it was chilling. I later learned that Eric Burdon & War as well as Gov't Mule had done versions. Not to brag, but I think that mine was more interesting. The video has a linear content, not exactly following the song but telling a parallel tale.

For over twenty five years, video editing was part of my skill set, practiced and perfected over thousands of projects. It's a strange place to put your mind; manipulating graphic space over time. It's a bit like being Dr. Strange. It is also the most pure design element in video production, even more than text overlays. In editing, form must follow function or nothing makes sense. Except in music videos, which can have a couple of different functions; either trying to sell a product or image, reflect on the song, or refract on the sound. I refract.

In film school, the more experienced staff warned me to never do music videos, which were a hot commodity in the late 1980s/early 1990s, and to certainly NEVER put one on my reel since no production company would hire me. It made sense; these places were looking for someone to edit either corporate or news pieces, and the skill set for those has nothing to do with the more self-indulgent music video. I followed the advice and I did get hired, the only one in my graduating class to work in our field. Two decades later, I did one for a friend who was trying to become a musician. Only later did I learn that he had an affair with the actress that he had hired during the shoot, ending his marriage with my unwitting help. I was not impressed.

Editing, as I soon learned, is an odd discipline; it's easy to get lost in the weeds. The longer the finished product, the more complicated things get. In the bad old analog days, there was a lot more off-line work, since there might only be one good editing console with chromakey and dissolves. Engineers were your best friend; if the system went down, they had to get things working again, keeping the signal to noise ratio at a minimum. Paper edits were common, logging all the raw footage and marking the in and out points on a pad and handing it to an editor. It took a lot of time and the equipment was costly.

Computers changed everything, although for ten years it was two-steps-forward-and one-back. Pre-production could be minimized or sometimes eliminated, since you could make infinite variations of the same piece with a few key strokes. It wasn't all fun and games; my first digital editing system was built on a defunct computer platform, the hard drives had life spans of six months and were incredibly expensive. The heat generated by the whole contraption made the entire room unbearable in the summer. Eventually the hard drives improved and now just about any phone or iPad can handle some type of editing.

Anyone who has edited can tell you the universal rules to follow when making cuts; on action or to the beat of music. If you add music to the audio track, or if it is part of the ambience of the video, it dictates the rate of cutting. Physical action, from walking into a door or someone getting punched in the face, will require some network of cuts to be dynamic. The parallel that I have found in my life is in learning to drum.

I did get paid to drum exactly once; I was seventeen. There was a band that was friendly to the one I was in; we shared and traded equipment, being based in the same neighbor. These guys were more drug punks that us, and the drummer got busted and thrown in jail right before they were to play a gig. I was returning some amps when they told me their dilemma, the three remaining guys trying to rehearse. Sitting down being the kit, I banged out a respectable 'Iron Man' and they asked me to fill in. I did it as a favor and for the experience.

In total honesty, the Black Sabbath material was easy; all you had to do was follow the guitar. But when they switched over to Led Zeppelin, all my deficiencies came to the surface. There, the drums were supposed to lead. I was ill-prepared. The gig was a sweaty mess as I badly stumbled in front of fifty people; I received $25 for my efforts, which I donated to the real drummer's bail. And I never soiled a drum stool for another thirty five years.

Much later in 2009, after completing four albums using pre-recorded loops strung together as drum tracks, I found the process of music creation getting easier. But I was frustrated with the inability to take the music where I wanted. The songs had to follow the drums; I was starting to write and arrange pieces where drum loop could not be constructed that were satisfactory. It was time to try drumming again. I was in my fifties and crazy to even attempt this feat.

The first electronic drum kit was little more than a child's toy, and I fumbled along with it for two years before I started to be able to dial up the necessary ingredients to get a decent percussion part. Then there was a better kit with a better bass drum pedal, something that kicked back. A drum head snapping back is what allows for speed. It's all in the wrists and ankles, not arms and legs. When you are playing the drums, the set will play back to you, bouncing in sympathy.

That's when I found the groove, a loose term that means different things to different people. To me, the groove is the spine inside the beat, the repetition that may not be on the beat but provides the propulsion that the song requires. The groove is what makes you want to nod your head or tap your feet. Funk, jazz, rock, and all other genres are subsets of the groove.

It is no accident that the first song that I did a video for out of my 2017 batch of 45 songs was the one with the biggest groove. It makes it easier to edit to the beat, although I'm more concerned with random synchronicity. The song is based on chord progressions that T Bone Walker first played. They were common in certain R & B artists and migrated right into funk. It wasn't too difficult to slide the ninth chords hard up into a pattern where I could lay down a very wide groove on top, and that's exactly what I did.

You can really hear the snap back from the drums heads; it almost sounds like swing more than funk. There is a groove so wide on this one that you can ride it. You can also ride against it, hitting the off beat. If you really want to hear some people who could play with as well as against the beat, check out the J.B.s. It wasn't all on the one. Sometimes they could lay back, playing behind the beat, creating friction that way.

The other group to study for groove is of course Booker T & the MGs. The big difference between bands is that the MGs never seem to break a sweat, The groove is there, but it is a cool vibe, not the sweat-dripping-down-my-spine James Brown funk. From the MGs, you start to see the groove insinuate into white rock groups like Creedence Clearwater Revival. But the heavy funk also found its way into the beat of Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith as well. Fusion, particularly guitar fusion from Jeff Beck, John McLaughlin and Larry Coryell, absolutely depended on a funk pulse, as did electric period Miles Davis.

'Groovenator 5000', the song behind the video above, depends on pushing the one on the aggressive chord change, then laying behind the groove on the long vamp sections. The drums, playing fills behind the changes, mediates the two sections. It sounds like a manual transmission switching gears, finally hitting the open road. In these relatively flat spaces, the instruments are allowed to solo. I keep the brief organ solo to a percussive slab, but the guitar gets into exotic scales outside normal funk or rock, creating extra friction. In fact, the guitar manages to solo in three different scales, using minor and major ones over different chords. In essence, I'm playing the changes as you would in a jazz song.

As for the video, it is a layering of sometimes over a dozen elements on top of each other. Obviously, I'm cutting on the chord turn-around, using action stabs to emphasize the beat. All the techniques are straight out of Surrealism, taking everything out of context and only using the most sensational images. There is a Chinese ghost movie blurred way in the background and a Japanese samurai flick from 1973, when the technicians were among the best in the world.

Louis Bunuel and Salvador Dali did two very famous and controversial movies in 1929 and 1930. They were part of the Surrealist movement and they were designed to create riots in the theaters, cutting up narratives, leaving out all the contextual boring bits, only jumping from extreme moment to extreme moment. The plan worked all too well, and both had to leave Paris for a year while the lawsuits simmered down. Both films are still notorious, especially the first one, 'Un Chien Andalou', with the famous eyeball slicing opening.

I use similar techniques here, instead using decapitations and other over-the-top gore to accentuate the beat. It was difficult to edit and took around eight hours to complete. Besides the fast cuts, many a mere five frames or so, there are also slow dissolves and my usual excess of overlays. I experiment more with masking and picture frames in this one, not my usual method, but it works. There is also for reasons of incongruity a plane flying over an icy wasteland.

Writing this blog entry inspired me to go a little overboard in 'Groovenator 5000'. There is no reason for any of the images other than they fit the beat of the music. If you wish to create a message or a context, you are free to do so. Your eyes will try to penetrate the layers even if your mind tries to tell them to stop. Remember; 'Beauty will be convulsive or will not be at all.'