Photographing the Naked City

Now that I have a few things off the table, I’m gearing up for Season 2 of The Naked City, and in preparation for it, I’m checking out the photography of Arthur Fellig aka Weegee whose dispatches from the streets of New York informed the gritty style of The Naked City film and the television series that followed. Weegee also loaned the title Naked City to the film’s producer Mark Hellinger (Naked City was the title of his first book of photographs) and something of the shock and confrontational power of that title can still be felt in his crime photographs, many of which are have colonized popular culture, like the “Corpse With Gun” photograph from 1940 (pictured below) which appropriately enough adorns the cover of John Zorn’s Naked City album, or the 1942 picture “Arrested for Bribing Basketball Players” which was used as the cover of Penguin’s Raymond Chandler collection The Big Sleep and Other Novels. For more Weegee crime photographs, follow this link to Google Images

Walking the Road

I've just finished a 3 day marathon of Season 5 of The Walking Dead... I actually hadn't planned to watch this latest season anytime soon, but a screening of John Hillcoat's film of The Road put it in mind and from there on I was hooked. There's a moment in Season 5 where Rick Grimes utters the title of the show - a first time I think, when he reflects: "This is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead", and interestingly it echoes a line from Cormac McCarty's novel when the unnamed wife spits "We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film." Despite the astonishing levels of splatter in The Walking Dead, and the writers willingness to kill off the cast, I feel the series doesn't have the hardness of The Road - there's been nothing yet to match the moment in the book (and the film) where the Man and the Boy discover a basement full of naked human livestock - a truly chilling turn of events. With Season 5 behind me, I look forward to the next series and the introduction of the sinister band of hostiles, the Wolves.

The Lyric

The time, 1981, the place, the Lyric Theatre on 42nd Street… I was sifting thru some snapshots of Times Square as it was in the halcyon days of Exploitation film exhibition and one can’t help getting caught up in the romance of seeing MAKE THEM DIE SLOWLY looming large on a theatre marquee. The Times Square of this era which bumped and grinded to the rhythms of extreme violence and sleazy sex is a sort of Xanadu within the Exploitation headspace, a collection of pleasure domes that sold dreams for the price of a double-feature. But for all my rampant cinephilia, I probably would have given Times Square a wide berth, preferring not to run the gauntlet of pimps, pushers, sex workers and freaks looking to turn out a quick buck from some babe in the woods. What an unnerving experience it would have been to see a late night showing of Maniac at the Lyric, and then having to make a 30min trip home on the subway to one of the boroughs, negotiating the bums and pickpockets and perhaps the odd serial killer working the hole (as William Burroughs called it).

The Lyric theatre which sat right in the middle of Times Square was one of the more salubrious picture houses on the strip, its grand spacious lobby was immortalized in Taxi Driver as the theatre where Travis Bickle takes Betsy on their doomed date. I was reading some memories of the Lyric by people who attended the theatre in the 70’s and there was some interesting speculation on whether Scorsese had the marquee specially dressed for the shoot (displaying the double-bill Sometime Sweet Susan and Swedish Marriage Manual) as the Lyric was not generally known as a porno theatre. That scene in Taxi Driver hinges on Betsy’s disgust for “dirty movies” so perhaps a regular fixture of the Lyric, say Andy Milligan’s Bloodthirsty Butchers, might not have worked so well…

The Black Angel’s Death Song

I've recommenced reading Transformer: The Complete Lou Reed Story after a brief hiatus… I’m just heading into the Velvet Underground era so right now I’m cherry picking some favourite VU songs to set the mood (I’m planning on listening to the 4 albums proper at home later). I remain astonished as ever by The Black Angel’s Death Song off the first album. I seem to remember an article some years ago, in Q magazine I think, where the author singled out certain duck eggs found on classic albums, one of which was The Black Angel’s Death Song (as well as the incredible We Will Fall from The Stooges LP). The song is of course one of the most extraordinary moments in the VU catalogue. I was just reading thru the lyrics over at songmeanings.com and was enjoying the interpretations listeners were offering, from the vague (it’s about meaning of life) to the mundane (it’s about drugs). I’m less interested in what the song is about and more enthused about the song as a piece of Dadaist sound poetry – try saying aloud a few lines from the song

"Shining brightly red-rimmed and red-lined with the time
Infused with the choice of the mind on ice skates scraping chunks
From the bells"

and one can get a sense of what Arthur Rimbaud called the “systematic derangement of the senses” Morrissey selected the song as one his Desert Island Discs for BBC in 2009, and said: “Listening to Lou Reed as a part of The Velvet Underground, we are really listening to the W.H Auden of the modern world…not existing in print poetry but in recorded noise”

Remembering Welles

May 6th, marks the centenary of Orson Welles’ birth, and there’s lots of stuff online and on FB to celebrate the occasion. I’m currently listening to the Mercury Theatre’s radio production of The Magnificent Ambersons, broadcast October 1939 as part of The Campbell Playhouse series. The recording like most of the existing Mercury radio plays is rather scratchy and lo-fi but it’s an excellent hour’s worth of drama, with Walter Huston playing “queer looking duck” Eugene Morgan and Welles doubling up as narrator and as the arrogant, immature George Amberson. Perhaps most significant though is that the radio play was what RKO used as a guide to shaping The Magnificent Ambersons film in Welles’ absence. Highly recommended listening. The Magnificent Ambersons radio play (and other Mercury radio productions) can be dl’ed here

An Art film for Teenagers

I've just listened to Francis Ford Coppola’s audio commentary for Rumble Fish and very much enjoyed the great director ruminating on his vision for the film, ( “an art film for teenagers”), his experiences with the actors and so on. Coppola makes no bones about his love for the film, it’s clearly his favourite picture and at one point he ponders why he didn't devote his career to making small, independently-minded films. It would have been an interesting alternative career trajectory to be sure. Elsewhere Coppola reveals that the look of The Motorcycle Boy was modeled in part on Albert Camus, with accounts for Mickey Rourke’s cool French intellectual style. In an amusing moment Coppola recalls an unhappy week Chris Marker spent on the set, invited to work on the film to pick up some second unit shots but completely uninspired by the location around Tulsa Marker promptly left. Highly recommended listening.

Waterfall

I had some time to kill earlier this morning and was leafing thru Thames & Hudson’s 'World of Art' book Graphic Design: A Concise History and spotted Japanese photo montage artist Tsunehisa Kimura's signature work "Waterfall" in which torrents of water are literally cascading out of the Manhattan skyline. There was something instantly familiar about Kimura's picture - a little bit of research tells me the image has appeared in various guises - in advertising, on a record sleeve, but what I had in mind was one of the poster designs for Koyaanisqatsi (which features on my Japanese laserdisc below) which depicts a cityscape emerging out of Canyonlands National Park. I haven’t been able to find the name of the artist but I wonder was Kimura's Waterfall an influence ?

Music from The Andromeda Strain

Listening to Gil Mellé's soundtrack for The Andromeda Strain (1971), an incredible 26min suite of glitchy, experimental electronics and alien soundscapes. I'm racking my brains trying to think of another film since Forbidden Planet to utilize a completely electronic score - I'm sure I'm missing an obvious one but right now I'm drawing a blank. It's a shame this important work (at least within the realm of electronic music) is unavailable thru official channels - there was a 2010 CD release on the Intrada label, but its run of 1500 units quickly sold out and this edition commands a small fortune these days. For the seasoned collector though, the album's first issue on Kapp Records is the one to get - issued as a hexagonal-shaped 10" record, with matching fold-out packaging containing stills from the film. Quite a beauty. The soundtrack (indexed) can be listened to in its entirety over at youtube

Why I Want to Fu*k Ronald Reagan

I'm currently 3/4's way thru a four part PBS documentary about Ronald Reagan but only this evening thought to re-visit J.G. Ballard's 1967 Atrocity Exhibition piece "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan" a short skit written in the cold dispassionate style of a scientific report investigating the sexual appeal of the then Governor of California. It's one of Ballard's finest moments, very funny to read, yet it remains quite shocking:

"The genitalia of the Presidential contender exercised a continuing fascination. A series of imaginary genitalia were constructed using (a) the mouth-parts of Jacqueline Kennedy, (b) a Cadillac rear-exhaust vent, (c) the assembly kit prepuce of President Johnson, and (d) a child-victim of sexual assault. In 89 per cent of cases, the constructed genitalia generated a high incidence of self-induced orgasm."

Ballard said of Reagan that he projected the image of Buick salesman, but in the notes for The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard felt Reagan was "a figure far closer to the brutal crime boss he played in the 1964 movie The Killers, his last Hollywood role". Ballard's story was enough for Doubleday to destroy their initial print run of US edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, which outraged Ballard, but in an 1982 interview Ballard said: "Afterwards I permitted myself the pleasure of sending a copy to Ronald Reagan complaining about whichever respectable US publisher dared print this smut and filth. Of course I never got any reply but it was worth it for me"

The Duelists

One last w/end screening to log some thoughts about... It was probably my recent reading of Kubrick's screenplay for Napoleon that led to me to revisit The Duelists. Another film I hadn't seen in many years, perhaps I thought it inconsequential in comparison with Alien and Blade Runner, but I now consider it Ridley Scott's most visually splendid film to date. Apart from the central story about two French soldiers locked in a battle seemingly without measure or end, this is a great film about weather, from French fields full of rain to freezing frost bitten Russian steppes. For some reason I had it in my mind that the film was shot by Philip Lathrop but upon checking it up, the cameraman was in fact Frank Tidy. The Duelists was Tidy's first film as a DP but looking thru his filmography, nothing else stands out to match the painterly beauty of Scott's film. By all means see the overblown Exodus: Gods and Kings but if you have a copy of The Duelists lying fallow, the film is ripe for rediscovery...