Not sure how these two separate half hour documentaries from the early 1970s came to be festooned together, but Lightnin' Hopkins and Roosevelt Sykes provides fabulous samplings of two of the great blues artists of the twentieth century. I've posted about both men before -- Hopkins on his own and Roosevelt Sykes as pianist accompanying Mary Johnson early in his career (he really got going in 1929, according to his own testimony here).
The vibe in both parts is definitely similar, but with Hopkins hanging out and performing in various types of venues near Houston, Texas, and Sykes doing the same in and around New Orleans. Priceless footage of both dudes in their element particularly for anyone who digs the blues. They are very much in a zone I like to be in.
The DVD is also titled as part of a series, Masters of the Country Blues. From my notes, it appears that Sam Lightnin' Hopkins was directed by Charles D. Peavy (Jack Bauer, producer for KUHT Film Productions University of Houston, circa 1971); the credits for the second part are Roosevelt Sykes / A film by Pasquale Buba & Dusty Nelson, 1972.
Definitely want to see Werner Herzog's latest, Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), a 3-D documentary exploring the ambience and milieu of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in France, where circa 30,000-year-old wall paintings remain intact (having been rediscovered in 1994), among other things left by various cave guests.
Decorated Vietnam War and Black Panther veteran Geronimo Pratt aka Geronimo ji-Jaga, RIP (9/13/1947-6/2/2011). I'm reading his epic story by way of a very compelling book by Jack Olsen: Last Man Standing: The Tragedy and Triump of Geronimo Pratt(Doubleday, 2000). Long story short, Louisiana-born Pratt was framed for murder as directed by the FBI's COINTELPRO (Counter Intelligence Program); was convicted on false testimony and served twenty-seven years in prison, including eight in solitary confinement; was released in 1997 when his conviction was "vacated;" was awarded $4.5 million in 2000; and just died a few days ago in Tanzania, his current home. Johnnie Cochran and Stuart Hanlon represented him.
Last Man Standing contextualizes Pratt's life and times in the 1960s, both in terms of what was going on in the USA and also during the US-Vietnam War. Descriptions of conditions in Vietnam are graphic and revealing. Pratt, serving with the 82nd Airborne, experienced the war's intensity up close -- more on that soon, perhaps. But adding insult to injury, he was next sent with his unit to help quell Detroit during the 1967 race riot. Then, back to Nam and the 1968 Tet Offensive. Then the Black Panthers, and then the false conviction and prison.
Raoul Walsh's Colorado Territory (1949) is a cool noir Western starring Joel McCrea, Virginia Mayo, Dorothy Malone, Henry Hull and others. I really like its twists and turns, and seamless inclusion of American Indian and Latino/Hispanic characters. Virginia Mayo's character, Colorado Carson, is supposed to be part Indian. McCrea is sort of like the Humprhey Bogart character in High Sierra, a 1941 film also directed by Raoul Walsh; Henry Hull plays a Southerner hoping to make a better life out West; his attractive, disgruntled daughter is played nicely by Dorothy Malone. French title above:La fille du désert.
Henry Hull, Joel McCrea and Dorothy Malone in Colorado Territory publicity shot. What works for you in a Western film?
Archaeology and geophysical survey work. Because it's an ongoing project site, I'll identify it in general terms as a former hamlet area on the grounds of an important battle of the American Revolution. The device above reads beneath the surface and records its field data for later analysis in a lab.
The scanning device is mounted and maneuvered on three wheels over the ground; roots at the base of large trees -- and cellphones -- interfere with its capabilities. A small copperhead snake guards a nearby woodpile; nicknamed Babyface George, it's the site "mascot."
Back in the computer laboratory, 3D scanning results are compared with field notes, looking for patterns, anomalies and features.
There are two types of scanning going on. This readout looks sort of like the surface of the Moon, but it's the same site. Here, apparent anomalies seem more pronounced.
Concurrent archaeological grid. This is traditionally how the artifacts are recovered -- carefully, and meticulously recorded. I saw some artifacts in the field and in the archaeology lab, including a trigger probably beloging to a Pennsylvania long rifle and some animal bone fragments. Also found: brickwork, ceramic and pottery sherds, a smashed (fired) musket ball, a button and a single grape shot.
In going through Ruth Benedict's influential anthropological study Patterns of Culture (originally published in 1934), I came to a passage that seems remarkably pertinent to today's world, bearing on very rich and powerful people who abuse their station (mostly men -- Trump being one caricaturish example -- but not all men: think Palin) ranging from Wall Street types to dictators and demogogues and beyond. She puts her finger on the problem, while also noting that artists tend to pick up on this (usually from the margins of socio-economic power), and observing furthermore that the customary status quo is what makes it possible for people such as she describes to be elevated into power in the first place:
Arrogant and unbridled egoisists as family men, as officers of the law and in business, have been again and again portrayed by novelists and dramatists, and they are familiar in every community. Like the behavior of Puritan divines, their courses of actions are often more asocial than those of the inmates of penitentiaries. In terms of the suffering and frustration that they spread about them there is probably no comparison. There is very possibly at least as great a degree of mental warping. Yet they are entrusted with positions of great influence and importance . . . They are sure of themselves in real life in a way that is possible only to those who are oriented to the points of a compass laid down in their own culture. . . In every society it is among this very group of the culturally encouraged and fortified that some of the most extreme types of human behaviour are fostered (pages 277-278 of the "Sentinel Edition").
Most of the book is about other things: Pueblo culture in the American Southwest, "native" cultures in the American Northwest and Melanesia, and ideas about cultural relativism. Benedict here and elsewhere argues strongly against racism and ethnocentrism in a time when segregation and xenophobia were the order of the day. She also took up the idea of synergy, another concept pertinent to the twenty-first century.
And so hurricane season 2011 begins. A tornado clipped downtown Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, today, which seems a bit weird, but then 2011 has been a real weird one in many of its transgressions. One report stated that Springfield's last tornado occurred in 1954, a fitting segue for today's post, because Hurricane Hazel of 1954 is the first named cyclone I remember being recalled by eyewitnesses.
Now, visiting with my parents in the Tar Heel state, I asked them about the 1955 hurricane season and subsequent flooding of East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where I "hail" from. Hurricanes Connie and Diane (whose names have since been retired because of their destructiveness, along with Hazel '54) hit one right after the other in August of '55.
At the time, the greater family was scattered due to work and vacation schedules. My Mom was working as a Bell Telephone operator in Stroudsburg, my Dad was working at Vacation Valley and my paternal grandparents, aunts and then-baby sister Vickie were "Down to Shore." Everything in the region was disrupted by flooding. Fifty kids camping along Broadhead Creek drowned. My Mom was ferried by helipcopter to the telephone switching center, and everyone else was stranded where they were for quite a little while. The event was traumatic enough that people were still talking about it when I was a little kid in the 1960s; they still do more than half a century later.
The 2011 hurricane season may be another big one. We'll find out soon enough, I suppose, adding the new names to the historic roll call. As for systematic naming, it began in 1950; starting in 1979, female and male names were alternated. Hurricane Bob '79 was the first "sporting" the latter.
Today's Rune: Protection. Original images source: US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
