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.
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