At some point some time back I noticed a trend where Baby Boomers online were regularly bemoaning how young people today don’t know who the Beatles were or scoff openly at the notion that the Beatles could be of any lingering significance or value. Oh, I laugh too. Do any of you raving Beatlemania outpatients remember who Sarah Bernhardt was? Not one of you does…except for the guy who thinks I’m talking about sassy comedienne Sandra Bernhard. No, Sarah Bernhardt was the most famous actor or actress on planet earth in the period directly before cinema. She died, in point of fact, before the cinema could grow up enough to do anything meaningful with her. Today, our imagination’s portrait of her could only ever be hazy and scant of resource.
Tallulah Bankhead, the sophisticated and frank Broadway legend revered the world over by gay men who dig theatre and gossip, in some ways followed in the path of grande dame Sarah Bernhardt, almost entirely eschewing appearance in motion pictures in order to continue mining the great yawning ineffable from up from under stage lights before a rapt live audience. Tallulah’s best movie is popularly believed to be Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime pressure-cooker Lifeboat (1944) in which it can indeed be observed that the great stage actress knows how to have the right wry sort of fun with unambiguously silly make-believe in a way that the camera itself cannot help but assiduously enjoy. That is the main difference between cinema and theatre: in the cinema you are playing the whole thing to one audience member and the audience member in question happens to be filming you.
Geraldine Page was likewise the biggest and most highly touted actress in all mythological New York City once upon a fabled time, but the movies rarely seemed up to doing us much help in remembering her from the remote and occluded hilltop of the transglobal global present. (The Internet was the Tower of Babel all along.) Do yourself a favour if you’ve never seen the film and swallow your pride and check out Woody Allen’s uncharacteristically heavy 1978 Chekhov/Bergman mashup Interiors in which Page gives as ruthless, festering, darkly humorous, and aggressively exposed a performance as any ever before captured on celluloid. The only performance that truly makes it as performance is the performance that achieves true insanity, argues the boisterously lounging Mick Jagger in Performance (1970). Well, okay, if that’s what you’re after, you Theatre of Cruelty geeks, I would advise you to take a look at and very seriously consider Geraldine Page. I believe this gig just might be her living destiny.
Part of what is not only noteworthy but outright historic about the unique celebrity of Charlie Chaplin, the cherubic itinerant tramp with the toothbrush moustache and mesmerizing balletic feats, was that his was the first mechanically reproduced face to be seen by and to have become recognizable to people from everywhere in the world you could take a projector. In a sense, if you really take the requisite time to consider it, Charlie Chaplin is much more like one interchangeable bottle of Coca-Cola or another than you or I will ever be.
Tallulah Bankhead on the set of Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944)
A handwritten prompt from the expedient beetle-beaked drones down in Arts and Entertainment. Ahem, achoo, as-salamu alaykum. Is it just me or can we all agree that fifty-five-year-old 2026 Beth Orton is a seamless meld of Marianne Faithfull and Stuart A. Staples that goes down like a nice woody and maybe sort of cinnamony single malt of most distinguished vintage?
I killed my dinner with karate— kick ’em in the face, taste the body; shallow work is the work that I do. - Joanna Newsom, "The Book of Right-On"
Not Five Easy Pieces
Aside from the fact that it could not conceivably have been made a year earlier or a year later, Zabriskie Point, Italian master of ennui Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1970 contribution to the short-lived Southern California Campus Uprising genre, features what is arguably the All Time All-American Boy-Girl Screen Pick-Up. Having just stolen a small aircraft because he is wanted for a cop killing he did not perpetrate but which he cannot explain away easily, Mark, played by drop-out ruffian Mark Frechette, who later got into communes and bank robbery, manages to successfully use his hijacked airplane to pick up Daria Halprin’s Daria, who is driving her boss’s ’52 Buick across the desert. Mark and Daria were a happening real life counterculture couple there for a hot minute, like the Isis and Osiris of Rolling Stone magazine, but then Daria briefly married Dennis Hopper, with whom she had a daughter, and ultimately she pursued a career in Gestalt and creative movement therapies.
All at once an absolute wild man, a guitar virtuoso, and an institutionally-certified ethnomusicologist, John Fahey of Takoma Park, Maryland was hired by Antonioni to do some of that patented Fahey American Primitive finger-picking music for the Zabriskie Point soundtrack, even managing to get himself flown to Rome. Perhaps some music for the sprawling desert orgy set piece, say.Fahey took exception to Antonioni immediately and thought the film was going to be a disreputable flower power hoodwink and a sinister exploitative ground operation. In a piece from his book How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life, Fahey claims that he and Antonioni got so drunk over one final, decisive dinner together that they found themselves in a loud, sloppy, very physical fight, rolling around the floor of a fancy restaurant, grappling. What Fahey had found most irritating and ultimately unconscionable about Antonioni was all the snobbish, knee-jerk anti-Americanism.
Joanna Newsom, "The Book of Right-On" [Live on TV]
I only ever wanted to be unspeakably gorgeous, impeccable in my affairs, and good at basically everything. You know, like your average, everyday James Bond type person...
Clark Gable’s sweaty, nervous handshake is the only real truth you will ever know, with your horse’s eyes and your halitosis. Montgomery Clift doesn’t know if he even cares very much for rodeo anymore. Did you hear that?! Montgomery Clift can no longer feel it even when he’s being gored by horns and hooves! All he desires is a hole to get drunk and die in, perhaps protected against rainwater and other environmental hassles. Obliviously he doesn’t want to be fucking about long in the dying. I’m sorry, but what happens if we stop and soberly assess the innumerable crises faced by our planet at the present time? Do we have the stones to look at what we have collectively wrought? Any alien intelligence that got a glance at us as we currently present ourselves, all but flagrantly, would upon cursory go-over determine that we must be the dazed survivors of some horrible catastrophe. Joke’s on them. Tag. You’re It.
“I can smell the look on your face, cowboy,” says a defiantly flirtatious and openly tittering Thelma Ritter to Clark Gable over a table where drinkers convene early on in John Huston’s 1961 hot mess masterpiece The Misfits. When the once young, elegant, and promising succumb to liquor and licentiousness, going grey in the hair and regularly missing a beat or two, this is how they will have the temerity to put it to you: I can smell the look on your face, cowboy. When the barflies are excited you just know there’s got to be a hot brick of shit sitting freshly unwrapped nearby. It’s all about the encumbrances of our biology and the putrescent mucous of swampy prehistory. Clark Gable looks like he would absolutely not ever do any job that failed to require as its prerequisite mature good looks, dumb and anxious friendliness, mild-to-middling inebriation, and nothing else, thy Kingdom come. It is sort of unabashedly just who Clark Gable is, but it is also a large part of why the story of The Misfits, on and offscreen, is such an overall downer. Of female lead Marilyn Monroe and her fly-by-night husband Arthur Miller, author of the screenplay for The Misfits, we can surmise with total certainty that both did a tremendous amount of drinking and chatting in their daily lives. In a way, the weary, exposed, and earthy film that The Misfits ends up being is a dust devil in the form of a film production and an actual movie dust devil too. Sometimes you have to be the dispassionate documentarian of your day-drinking desperado buddies and the situations you’ve all, uh, shook up. There’s a mood for that and once again Thelma Ritter has just the words: “The slogan of Nevada is anything goes…but then don’t complain if it went.”
For the director and for the audience there is more shadow in this shadowplay than the players know or are aware of. It were as though Eli Wallach as Guido Delinni, the only recognizably normal professional working this great big conspicuous circus, has found himself anointed Janitor of Lunacy, using a broom and tray to suppress the blows and the outcries of defunct celebrity automaton machines with outmoded tech, in and around various licensed drinking establishments. Marilyn Monroe at her best always seems like someone who did all the preparation and research possible and all of a sudden none of it is worth sweet fuck all, faces and places all depersonalized and scattered like puzzle pieces. She is always approximately breathy-voiced Theresa Russell perfectly prepared to explain special relativity in her husband Nicholas Roe’g Insignificance (1985).
Anybody watching The Misfits without much frame of reference would assume that Montgomery Clift would be the first from the beaten and bandaged cast to drink himself to death or commit suicide, but the sad truth is that Marilyn beat him by four years. She doesn’t seem nearly as badly damaged as Clift in The Misfits, but I think Marilyn hid away most of the substantial hurt where it couldn’t be seen by anybody…or not if she could help it. When she is exposed or vulnerable she becomes volatile. Spark plug. John Huston was the perfect director to legitimate and take a step back from the Great Marilyn & Arthur National Cocktail Hour. His 1953 film Beat the Devil is the closest thing to a straight-up pub crawl up and down the Amalfi coast in all decadent-phase Classical Hollywood cinema, and we were always going to need to bring Mr. Huston into discussions when we were going to be getting ourselves around to discussing hang out or hanging out movies, their rich history and transcendent power in certain hands…at certain times. Behold some of Huston’s very finest: Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), Fat City (1972), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), The Man Who Would Be King (1975), Wise Blood (1979), and, last but nary the least, Joyce’s The Dead (1987). You hang out when you watch these movies, and you’re damn proud of it, considering it time spent in the richest way possible.
The underlined implicit-but-illicit alchemy, the bearer of bad dust devils: when everybody on payroll is drinking then all working is drinking and all drinking working, and never again shall a lucid line of demarkation find traction nor anybody be able enough of mind and body to help the injured, shit-faced combatants who’ve gone and dropped some semi-remote place or other. Some were the shining angels of their hour who rather than rejecting cooption directly, pulled out the rug from under it peremptorily, like Warrior Gods. Some are found bleating on their chosen instrument in nightmarish tones of nightmarish woes, always at the most nightmarish and outright diabolical hours, disrupting all rhythm and good order with steady auditory complaint excreted by demons. Not to put too fine a point on it, but our token maidservant to audience identification, Eli Wallach’s Guido Delinni, Janitor of Lunacy, ruefully recalls for us, whilst driving, that he spent a good part of the Second World War attacking all manner of targets from the sky. The Misfits is about how what is unruly in the wind is unruly in us also, the each in fact a testament to the other or the other way around, all of us shit-faced in our pseudo-Irish finery the live-long. Tally ho! When it is time to be the storm that storms its storm in defiance of God is when it is time as well to be a photographic negative. A photograph is the passage of light through an artfully cracked eggshell, captured as a negative of itself. Eli Wallach/Guido Delinni/Janitor of Lunacy, as though making a concession to nerves: “If it weren’t for the nervous people in the world, we’d all still be eating each other.” Who were we this whole time if not the few lucky survivors of the impasse of physical contact?
The Misfits (John Huston, 1961)
Nico, "Janitor of Lunacy"
Shilpa Ray, "EMT Police and the Fire Department" [Official Video]
I'm interested in finding the genuine source of life in myself and the genuine source of music. I think those two consideration are tied up very much. I have certain spiritual beliefs about human beings, and the best place to find these sources of music are to look into the yoga and Zen teachings.
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