Sensation

I'm currently enjoying a Who obsession, and last night I treated myself to a screening of Tommy, which I hadn't seen in a few years. With previous viewings I tended to concentrate on the fast-flowing current of Ken Russell's astonishing visuals and set-pieces, but for last night's viewing, my focus was on Roger Daltrey and the incredible physicality of his performance. I'm hard pressed to name another rockstar-frontman who lends himself so completely, even fearlessly to an acting role (Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth would be another), and certainly Ken Russell puts him thru his paces. But a tremendous film, and had I the time last night, I might have segued right into Peter Watkins' 1967 film Privilege, but it's certainly in mind for another day. Incidentally, as the credits were rolling I spotted the credit "Sculptor Christopher Hobbs" whose production design work I know from Derek Jarman films, but it was a nice Russell-Jarman connection...

The 'orrible 'Ooo !

I'm currently reading Mark Blake's brilliant 2014 book Pretend You're In A War: The Who and the Sixties. In fact I just started it just last night, but it's such a compelling read, I quickly polished off the first 100 pages before the lights-out, bringing the story up to 1963 (before Keith joins the band the following year and completes the puzzle). The Who had a certain undercurrent of aggression, even violence in their music, their huge egos and open hostility towards one another resulted in shows performed at ear-splitting volumes and more famously, there was ritualistic destruction of their stage equipment (and the occasional hotel suite). Blake writes vividly about the London performing scene, and it surprised me how violent the early years of the 60's were. The reports of Mods and Rockers warring en mass have long since been debunked, but both subcultures amped up by cheap speed brought trouble to Who shows. Roger Daltrey himself, to borrow a line, "knew a few performers in his time" (Townsend remembered one local hood who hid out at Daltrey's home as an "awful, awful man") and at one point in the book, Daltrey had to talk down an associate who turned up a show with a shotgun intent on shooting someone he had a beef with. The kids it seems were not always alright...

[Update] I'm further along the book today and when I last left it, Michelangelo Antonioni accompanied by Monica Vitti saw the group perform in London, where Antonioni was prepping Blow-Up. Antonioni was said to have been intimated by the group, their volume and that the band played on seemingly indifferent to a huge brawl that broke out amongst the crowd. Antonioni was looking for a hip group to appear in Blow-Up, and was persuaded to go with The Yardbirds instead, who went on to smash a guitar in the film Townsend style...

Zaireeka ????

How does it work ?

I was reaching for a Flying Saucer Attack CD this morning and scrounging around the F section of my album collection, I found myself looking curiously at my copy of The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka. This has always been something of a dust-gatherer in my record collection - the album designed to be heard via four simultaneously-playing CDs was never possible back in the day and the album was quickly consigned to the shelf forever. But rediscovering the album again and having a couple of hours to myself at home I pressed my CD player, one of my DVD players and an old kitchen radio into action. 3 out of 4 discs was the best I could do on the day so having carefully set them all up, I let loose this wacky Flaming Lips experiment. I think I lasted all of two tracks, the whole thing sounding very much like 3 unrelated CDs playing at the same time. I had to admire Wayne Coyne's powers of persuasion for convincing Warners to put this out - this was a couple of years before the group found unlikely critical and commercial success with The Soft Bulletin, and I wonder too did anyone actually play the album as designed back in the day when DVD players weren't readily available as CD players. I imagine there's a Warners storage facility somewhere with a section of racking consisting of nothing but unsold copies of Zaireeka...

One eye on Brando

I’m currently reading The Contender, William Mann’s 2019 biography of Marlon Brando, and as ever with film biographies, it gives me a good excuse to go back and revisit the films. This weekend it was the turn of On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks. Waterfront I’ve seen a number times over the years (I was lucky to see it in a theater in 2017), but One-Eyed Jacks I hadn’t seen since the VHS days. Actually, I had seen portions of the film in recent years, on one of those backwater TV channels that shows public domain titles in unwatchable sub-youtube broadcasts, and somehow One-Eyed Jacks was one of the titles that screened 3 or 4 times a week. I’m astonished at how a Paramount film of this prestige could fall into public domain, but all that was swept aside courtesy of the Arrow Blu-Ray which features the 2016 restoration. One could hardly measure the work done on the film against the scrappy thing that I had last seen on Showcase TV, but in any case the film looks absolutely magnificent. What always excites me about the One-Eyes Jacks is the mighty Pacific ocean which features heavily in the film - certainly not a typical piece of Western iconography, but this idiosyncrasy (if you could call it that) gives the film a grandeur that must have looked quite majestic in theatres fitted out for big Vista Vision productions.

Watching the scenes with Timothy Carey I’m reminded of Stanley Kubrick’s brief involvement with the film, as was Sam Peckinpah, and I found some nice connections to Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, which reunites actors Slim Pickens and Katy Jurado. There were moments too when I thought of Monte Hellman’s great sixties Westerns and I’d like to imagine he was an early advocate of the film. I’m looking thru Brando’s filmography right now and I might have already hit the highlights in terms of the book. I probably won’t get time to catch The Godfather, Last Tango in Paris or Apocalypse Now in the next week or so, but I shall try to steal time for two noteworthy late-60’s pictures: the never-seen-before 1966 film The Chase (for that once-in-a-lifetime cast at least) and the 1969 oddity The Night of the Following Day, which I have great affection for. Sadly, I don’t have a copies of Burn! or The Missouri Breaks, two films I would have liked to sit down with, not to mention the 1967 Charles Chaplin-directed A Countess from Hong Kong, conspicuous by its absence in my 2003 Chaplin boxset…

The Greatest War and Peace film ever made !

Part of the plan for reading War and Peace over January was to toast the completion of the book with a screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 film adaptation. Catching a near-7 hour film is a rare treat in my house, so there was considerable excitement on Friday night when I dug out my 5-disc Artificial Eye DVD edition. This was just my second time sitting down with the film since picking up the AE set back in 2007, and my recollection of the film had faded over time. Certainly the poor presentation of the film had been forgotten, and while many of the flaws and inadequacies of the Russico transfer could be overlooked a decade ago, upon completion of the first disc, I returned the set to the shelf and promptly ordered the Criterion edition – hugely expensive, but those first two hours of Bondarchuk’s film swept me away with its sheer exuberance – the wild subjective handheld camerawork, and the film’s astonishing scale with its God’s eye view of battlefields strewn with thousands of extras and giant columns of drifting smoke. It’s been a surprisingly faithful adaptation so far, and I enjoyed Bondarchuk’s treatment of favourite scenes from the early part of the novel - Pierre’s dual with Dolokhov in a knee-deep snowfield, Prince Andrei’s return home from the Battle of Austerlitz to find his wife in labor, and so on. As if Sergei Bondarchuk didn’t have enough to do with helming the production, he also appears in the role of Pierre, and initially I felt he was miscast, looking a little older than the character in the novel, but I soon found Bondarchuk’s sad, watery eyes most agreeable. I’m eagerly awaiting the Criterion edition now…

War and Peace

Farewell to War and Peace ! I made a new year’s resolution in the dying candlelight of 2019 to finally read Tolstoy’s behemoth, the quintessential large trophy book of my collection which I’ve been saving for a long prison sentence. I managed to read it in just less than a month (not quite life-without-parole), and for the most part I enjoyed it immensely, despite it soaking up almost all my spare time (hence my absence from this place). The sheer scale of the book was daunting - and there was a moment when I reached 900 pages or so, that I felt like a marathon runner about to hit the plateau, the finish line, an unreachable 700-odd pages away. But having come so far there was nothing left to do but relax my pace, regulate my breathing and drive on. I’m making it sound like some foolish death march, but the joy of War and Peace is in its length - after a couple of hundred pages I had moved quite comfortably, bag and baggage into Tolstoy’s world. A Guardian columnist wrote a piece on the book in 2016 and claimed he read the book in just 10 days, and while I’m not doubting his fitness, it seemed to me that such a sprint could not do justice to the book’s grand sweep and the changes the war brings to the lives of the principle characters.

That’s not to say the book wasn’t maddening at times. My edition of the book, an e-copy of the 2010 Oxford edition (featuring a well-regarded translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude) includes the French dialogue which the characters would slip in and out of mid conversation (as was the custom among the Russian elites of the day it seems), necessitating the tapping of the footnotes to read the translation, and disrupting the pace of the scene. Another point of irritation was the morphing of character names from first names to family names to nicknames, sometimes within the one paragraph - another Russian convention that had to be grappled with. One particular aspect of the book I enjoyed was reading the battle scenes, which surprised me - my eyes generally glaze over the complex details of military maneuvers but Tolstoy writes his war scenes with clear, vivid language, and I felt a tremendous sense of the sound and fury of war.

Much of my reading was accompanied by various ambient music, the more minimalist and unobtrusive the better, which sometimes lent an agreeable Malickesque quality to the book as characters expressed their innermost thoughts, and for the early sections of the book, I was pleased to use Keith Jarrett’s 1987 album, Book of Ways, a double-CD of improvised clavichord recordings, an instrument featured in the book, providing a nice bit of cross-pollination between the book and my record collection. I finished the book at the weekend and went straight into William Mann’s Brando biography, but I can still feel the pull of War and Peace days later, the sense of time and place, but mostly the characters and a profound sense of loss for their passing.