Pier Paolo Pasolini's 'The Canterbury Tales' (1972)

Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1972 cinematic sampling of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (1387-1400) forms the second part of Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life." You're not likely to see in many other 20th century directors anything quite like the way Pasolini mixes earthy and mystical, sacred and profane. 

Warning: if nudity offends you, if a scabrous image of the Gates of Hell might offend you, if the blending (true to Chaucer's original) of Catholicism and pre-Christian elements (such as Proserpina and Pluto) might blow your mind, you might consider seeing this in some kind of altered state, or not at all. Given that I'm open-minded about such visionary approaches, I know that many are more prudish in their preferences, so be fairly cautioned. 

I first saw Pasolini's version of The Canterbury Tales when I was in college (one of the subversive dangers of a liberal arts education is consciousness raising), and man, it really did have quite an impact. Still does -- wild stuff. 

Today's Rune: Flow. 

Conrad Rooks: 'Siddhartha' (1972)

Siddhartha, Conrad Rooks' 1972 movie adaptation of Herman Hesse's short novel of the same name (German, 1922; English, 1951), does justice to the original. Though the acting is gently stylized, not "naturalistic," this doesn't bother me in the least. Here and in other ways, Rooks' Siddhartha is on a Buddhist-style par with the Christian-oriented films Pilgrim's Progress (1978) and Christiana (1979). I find all three more enjoyable and more interesting than the majority of films that I've seen over the years. Probably because the stakes are so high, and so relevant to every one of us at all times.

Siddhartha's look benefits from the Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist (1922-2006), probably better known as an Ingmar Bergman collaborator. And it's nice having actual Indian actors playing all the parts, with Indian music in the background, and Indian architecture and ecosystems as the visual backdrop. 

Simi Garewal as Kamala, Shashi Kapoor as Siddhartha

As for the director Conrad Rooks (1934-2011), he was an interesting fellow in his own right. Beneficiary of Avon wealth (as in, "Avon lady here"), he shook off adult alcoholism and drug addiction through a Swiss "sleeping cure" and then went on to make Siddhartha. His earlier film Chappaqua (1967), is a chaotic mess, but it does have some groovy scenes with William S. Burroughs, Alan Ginsberg, Ornette Coleman, Ravi Shankar and Moondog, among others. 

Nothing remains the same

Everything changes

Everything returns

Today's Rune: Partnership.   
   

'Pawn Sacrifice' (2014/2015): Bobby Fischer vs. Boris Spassky

Edward M. Zwick's Pawn Sacrifice (2014/2015) delivers a dramatic rendering (with some comic touches) of the great but erratic chess player Bobby Fischer, culminating in his world championship match against Boris Spassky in 1972.

I love the cast of Pawn Sacrifice, which includes Tobey Maguire, Liev Schreiber, Peter Sarsgaard, Michael Stuhlbarg, Lily Rabe, Robin Weigert and Evelyne Brochu, among others. Overall, the movie is fun and interesting, definitely lighter fare -- and hokier -- than the documentaries Red Army and Best of Enemies -- although all three compliment each other within the Cold War Zeitgeist and all three are worth watching. 

In Pawn Sacrifice, Fischer (played by Tobey Maguire) is depicted as a person existentially located somewhere between an anti-social and paranoid "idiot savant," chess prodigy, and enfant terrible -- fittingly compared to Mozart (although Wagner might be even more fitting). Stuhlbarg and Sarsgaard, pictured here, play Fischer's handlers, the one an eager promoter-patriot and the other a worldly Catholic priest and chess coach. 

Liev Schreiber makes Boris Spassky seem a whole lot cooler and classier than Bobby Fischer, albeit tightly contained by his Soviet "management team" (which he resents, but begrudgingly understands). In 1972, both players are "pawns" of the Cold War. 

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Солярис' / 'Solaris' (1972): Take II

Andrei Tarkovsky's Солярис / Solaris (1972) uses windows, mirrors, water, color and intermittently, black & white film to enhance its existential themes, to great effect. 

"This is my wife." So says Kris Kelvin (played by Lithuanian actor Donatas Banionis) to his colleagues, formally introducing them to Ocean-created Hari / Khari (played by Russian actor Natalya Bondarchuk).

There is a cool driving scene featuring a Japanese cityscape that manifests complexity and pattern recognition in human social relationships. 

The Library on the Solaris space station is a key meeting point; it's also where a gorgeous scene of zero gravity takes place. Solaris explicitly cites Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Miguel de Cervantes, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, among other cultural touchstones. 

Bruegel, Jagers in de Sneeuw (1565), a copy of which Hari examines with great intensity, looking for clues about human nature. 

Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Солярис' / 'Solaris' (1972): Take I

To date, there are multiple versions of Solaris, starting with Stanislaw Lem's 1961 novel and proceeding through movies, plays, radio programs, albums and operas as recently as 2012. It's a compelling story.

In this case, let's consider Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 movie version, Солярис / Solaris. This is a very cool film. The basic setup is this: a research station, mostly depopulated due to Earth-bound decision making, hovers above Solaris, a planet with super consciousness by way of Ocean. Ocean can create human beings out of cosmonauts' memories, and put them on the space station. How the different beings relate to each other is the nexus of the story. Spectacular! 

Today's Rune: The  Mystery Rune.

Jean-Pierre Melville: Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (Take II)

Images from Jean-Pierre Melville's Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (1972) keep floating around in my head, days after seeing it. That's worth noting. 

Commissaire Edouard Coleman, the protagonist (Alain Delon), is comparable to Clint Eastwood's character in Dirty Harry (1971), another cop movie that came out about the same time. Both characters are laconic to the extreme. Neither has any qualms about employing "enhanced interrogation techniques" whenever they see fit. 

In addition, Coleman is nearly identical in temper and disposition to Costello, the main character in Melville's Le Samouraï (1967), also played by Delon -- even though Coleman is a cop and Costello a contract assassin.

German title for Un flic: Der Chef

Two of the main "robbers and gangsters" in Un flic often play cops and military types. For example, think of Richard Crenna as Colonel Sam Troutman in the Rambo flicks, or of Michael Conrad as Sergeant Esterhaus in Hillstreet Blues. And because you never quite know who's throwing heads or tails, or which are the sinners, which are the day's saints, remember: "Let's be careful out there."

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Jean-Pierre Melville: Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (Take I)

Un flic / A Cop / Dirty Money (1972) -- the last film ever made by Jean-Pierre Melville before he died at age 55 -- features Alain Delon in the lead role, Catherine Deneuve in the middle and Richard Crenna on the far side. Literally tinged in various tones or shades of blue, Un flic is a superbly bleak noir affair. Even scenes involving a helicopter and train -- both appearing as no more than miniature replicas, even toys -- remind us that the arcs of our lives are largely made, at least according to some, but for the sport of the gods.

What's the difference between the cops and the robbers? Not much. One side has "legitimacy," the other has defiance, flying only the black flag of piracy. They duel against each other -- such is their shared destiny, their interplay.

The following statement is laid out twice during Un flic, the first time in caps: 

“Les seuls sentiments que l'homme aie jamais été capable d'inspirer à un policier sont l'ambiguïté et la dérision." - Eugène François Vidocq [1775-1857].

This is subtitled in English as:

"The only feelings mankind has ever inspired in policemen are those of indifference or derision."

Google translator gives a slight variation:

"The only feelings that humans have ever been able to inspire [in] a policeman are ambiguity and derision."

Does something different about people inspire "the robbers" and "the gangsters?"

Today's Rune: Harvest. 

Jaimy Gordon: Lord of Misrule

Lord of Misrule (2010), a novel by Jaimy Gordon, won the National Book Award in 2010. That was the same year Patti Smith won the same award in non-fiction for Just Kids. If I understand the formula correctly, National Book Award finalists are awarded $1,000 and winners another $10,000 -- in case you were pondering.

I'm about halfway into Lord of Misrule and taking my time. Not a book to blithely rush through without missing a lot of fine craft and nuance. It's absorbing; you have to work at sorting out characters via their thoughts and dialogue without quotation marks or other traffic markers.

Lord of Misrule is centered around a racetrack and its attendant milieu in West Virginia in the early 1970s. Ever been to West Virginia?

Jaimy Gordon's writing is intense in the way Marcel Proust's and Patti Smith's writing is intense. Here's just a sample snippet regarding Little Spinoza, an easily spooked race horse, from the point of view of Medicine Ed, one of the people characters:

He always was a baby. He scoping around at the cats, the raindrops pimpling in the puddles, the sparrows hopping up and down and cussing each other in the eaves. He stopped and had him a long sniff of Grizzly's goat. Now that Deucey had the two horses, she bought Grizzly a ten-dollar goat to keep him company. When the goat wasn't in the stall he was tied up like now on a chain in the grass patch between the shedrows, but he always pulled it out tight as a fiddle string if folks was around, for he was nosy. . . (page 101).

Yeah, Lord of Misrule is quite risible in parts! Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 

Rapture of the Deep

Music can quickly induce the rapture of the deep, that feeling caused by an altered state while diving way down below the surface of an ocean or a deep sea. All the more rapturous when such music is drawn out, as on Van Morrison's Saint Dominic's Preview (1972). Wow. Such an altered state can be evoked purely from listening away from "the madding crowd." I get this from Van Morrison, John and Alice Coltrane, from the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. (1972), Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti (1975) -- and many others.

On the manifest production side, writing does this for me, researching, delving, musing, doing anything I'm "really into."  

How about you?

Today's Rune: Wholeness. 

The Swedish Connection: Ingmar Bergman's 'Cries and Whispers'

I. Ingmar Bergman's Viskningar och rop / Cries and Whispers (1972) is heavy, dense, intense, and color-saturated, punctuated with ambient sounds emanating from people, objects and spaces at an alternatingly beautiful and claustrophobic estate in late Victorian Sweden.

The Criterion Collection website renders a succinct overview:

Legendary director Ingmar Bergman creates a testament to the strength of the soul—and a film of absolute power. Karin and Maria come to the aid of their dying sister, Agnes, but jealousy, manipulation, and selfishness come before empathy. Agnes, tortured by cancer, transcends the pettiness of her sisters’ concerns to remember moments of being—moments that Bergman, with the help of Academy Award–winning cinematographer Sven Nykvist, translates into pictures of staggering beauty and unfathomable horror.

Source: http://www.criterion.com/films/237-cries-and-whispers 

II. In addition to its emotional freight, Cries and Whispers provides a glimpse at socio-economic class before the Great War, particularly through the eyes of domestic servant Anna (Kari Sylwan). The males in this film do not come off well at all, but then, neither do most of the females, either. Anna, though, is the most centered of them all, even though her economic status is dependent on the whims of her employers. She has suffered the loss of a child and can be dismissed from her difficult service job on a moment's notice.

III.  For me, Anna's perspective evokes Anna Victoria "Tora" Ringberg (1890-1966), my great grandmother, who travelled aboard the SS Baltic, White Star Line, from Liverpool, arriving at New York City on April 18, 1909, when she was eighteen years old. By 1910, she was a domestic servant at the Wilford-Hitchcock household in Branford, New Haven, Connecticut; and by 1914, she'd made her way to the Chicago area, where she married Alexander Drougge (1889-1966), my great grandfather. They resided for at least part of the time in Ludington, Michigan, because Alexander worked as a moulder and steel worker there during the Great War, and then for the next fifty years in Kenosha, Wisconsin. 

Today's Rune: Journey.       

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Take Three

Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) contains so much material, I can barely tick off all that's shown or heard. In addition to MLK, we see Coretta Scott King (1927-2006). And the Black Power salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico City (1968). The Last Poets, inspired by Malcolm X and formed in 1968. Eldridge Cleaver, Kathleen Cleaver, the Black Panther Party. Bobby Seale in Stockholm, saying "in the final analysis" -- a phrase nearly identical to today's "at the end of the day." Free food, free breakfast program hosted by the Black Panthers. J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO. Exile in Algiers, Algeria. Huey Netwon, From Russia With Love in the background. TV Guide taking issue with Swedish journalism. Emile de Antonio (1919-1989 -- director of In the Year of the Pig, 1968, and other influential films). The Attica Prison uprising (1971). Civil rights lawyer William Kunstler (1919-1995). Elaine Brown, Black Panther. Governor Ronald Reagan of California vs. Angela Davis (1972) and her aquittal; her earlier study wih Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979). Robin Kelley, Sonia Sanchez, John Forté, Erykah Badu, Louis Farrakhan, Harlem and Lewis H. Michaux (ca. 1884–1976).        

The bonus "reels" are also well worth delving into in their own right. There's a heartbreaking section about Shirley Chisholm (1924-2005) and her bid for the presidency in 1972 -- ahead of her time, she was hopelessly outnumbered, defeated but unbowed. There's more with Stokely Carmichael. And there's a very interesting section on the 1974 trial of Joan Little in Raleigh, North Carolina -- charged with first degree murder for stabbing a rapist-prison guard with the ice pick he threatened to kill her with, immediately after he raped her. She was eventually found not guilty. 

Today's Rune: Harvest.   

The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Take Two

Göran Olsson's The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975 (2011) begins with footage from 1967 when the US population is 210 million (it's now 312 million at the time of this posting) at the height of the US-Vietnam War, with a military draft in place and 525,000 American soldiers deployed in Vietnam.

Swedish archival footage gives us fresh glimpses at people, places and events, including stellar footage of Stokely Carmichael (or Kwame Ture, 1941-1998, pictured above) and his mother -- she has a fascinating Trinidid-New York City hybrid accent, while he retains a subtler Trinidadian lilt. When asked in Paris if he fears being imprisoned upon his return to the USA, he responds, "I was born in jail." He relocates to West Africa in 1969. 

Martin Luther King is clearly against the US-Vietnam War, as Angela Davis notes in narration made for parts of the documentary. His "Beyond Vietnam" speech at Riverside Church, NYC on April 4, 1967 -- exactly one year to the day before his assassination in Memphis -- epitomizes his overall stance: "We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered."

There's footage of MLK and Harry Belafonte meeting with King Gustaf VI Adolf (1882-1973) of Sweden in Stockholm, reminding us of ongoing Swedish support for human and civil rights as well as the international dimensions of American society.

Black Power kicks into high gear when MLK is killed in 1968, the year of the Tet Offensive and sometimes called Revolutionary Year Zero. (To be continued).

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.       

Sonia Johnson: From Housewife to Heretic

The recent death of environmental thinker and activist Barry Commoner (1917-2012) at ninety-five reminded me of several things. One, that Commoner ran for president of the USA on the Citizens Party ticket in 1980, the election that Ronald Reagan won (boo!). Two, that the next -- and last -- Citizens Party candidate to run for president was Sonia Johnson (b. 1936). That was in 1984, the same year Garaldine Ferraro (1935-2011) was chosen as Democratic Party vice presidential candidate backing Walter Mondale (Reagan-Bush won again -- double boo). Three, that not too long before Ferraro and Johnson, Shirley Chisolm (1924-2005) had aimed for the presidency as a Democrat in 1972 -- when Richard Nixon was elected to a second term (boo -- but at least that second term didn't last long thanks to the Watergate scandal).

Before she ran for president, Sonia (Harris) Johnson came through Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in the early 1980s, to speak about her then new book, From Housewife to Heretic (Doubleday, 1981), which sometimes is given a subtitle (derived from the 1983 paperback cover, I suppose): One Woman's Struggle for Equal Rights and Her Excommunication from the Mormon Church. She was energetic and fiery, still furious with the status quo of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church) because of what she saw as its backward patriarchal ways, particularly the way gender roles and expectations were seemingly set in stone from on high. I wonder how Johnson, assuming she's still alive and cognizant, feels about Mitt and Ann Romney in 2012?

Today's Rune: Growth.

Another Film, Another Planet

Continuing from the previous post, I'm happy to report that Alex Gibney promotes not just El ángel exterminador / The Exterminating Angel (1962), but also Luis Buñuel in general, including another one of my all-time faves, his Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie / The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

Gibney is primarily known for making thought-provoking documentaries ranging from Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) and Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) to a study of Hunter S. Thompson, to Casino Jack and the United States of Money (2010) and Magic Trip (2011).

A sampling of Gibney on Buñuel's Exterminating Angel: "things happen that are so mysterious and embrace the contradictions of everyday life. You didn't know whether to laugh or cry or get really angry. There was a tremendous sense of irony and mystery, and also the sense of a mischievous filmmaker behind all of this . . . It was a sense of humor that appealed to me, even within this world that was very harshly critical of these seemingly civilized people, who are in fact, in some ways, no better than animals. And animals are always appearing in the film. . ."  From Robert K. Elder, ed., The Film That Changed My Life: 30 Directors On Their Epiphanies in the Dark (Chicago Review Press, 2011), pages 95-96.

Still from Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie which, as a full-length motion picture, is in color.

Today's Rune: Movement.  

Show Me the Way to the Next Little Dollar

Above: from Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (1972).

A supermarket . . . 700 million francs a day in sales. A large sales outlet, and social theatre at the same time. Everyone's shouting . . . except the audience. Outside the factory, it's still like a factory.

Does one banter with the cashier at the end of each checkout line to make this a more humanizing economic exchange?

I take items out of a wheeled shopping cart or hand-held shopping basket, and the cashier managing the checkout lane I'm in conveys them down an automated belt with the flick of a switch, scans them for price transmitted via barcode, rings it up, maybe bags them after asking questions (paper, plastic, reusable, box, or nothing?). I pay by swiping a plastic card or with paper cash and maybe coins; if with debit card, I withdraw a little extra cash perhaps. My money is transferred via the cashier (or "sales associate"), who interacts with an automated cash register system, delivering my money to the store; eventually some of these funds make their way to stock holders as residual quarterly profits. Voila. Thanks to millions of such transactions, the Mitt Romneys and John McCains of the world can build another mansion they don't need and will never live in. Meanwhile, I have exchanged my money for goods; the cashier, who is being monitored, inspected, audited, randomly drug-tested and actively cajoled to be more efficient in every way possible, receives nothing more than a relatively low and flat hourly wage for her efforts. 

General questions about shopping in "supermarkets."

1) Why are so many lanes unstaffed most of the time at most such places I've been to in the USA?

2) Why do most American stores require cashiers to stand, instead of sit (with exceptions like German-owned Aldi stores)?

3) What impact does the U-Scan checkout line have on sellers and buyers?

4) Will buyers be forced to act more universally as prosumers? Marshall McLuhan and Alvin Toffler noticed -- forty years ago -- a socio-economic trend toward increasing producer-consumer do-more-yourself activity, which has come to change banking (ATMs, online banking), "service stations" (self-service gas pumping using credit, debit, barcode or cash), and replaced "travel agents" with do-it-yourself online (or telephonic) travel and dining reservations. Prosumer activity is supposed to save the buyer money; in reality, it saves the seller more money, thanks to transferring actual labor exertion to the buyer -- thereby reducing the seller's own labor costs.

5) Shopping lists and wireless beacons.  Lost in the supermarket? No worries, your shopping cart mounted device will guide you right to them! No need to ask a worker for help. What's next?  

Today's Rune: Protection.  

Jean-Luc Godard: Tout va bien / Everything's All Right, Part 2

In Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (1972), Jacques (played by Yves Montand) at one point says, "I'm only now starting to understand things that [Bertolt] Brecht pointed out forty years ago . . ." And now, almost forty years later, I can say the same thing about Godard and his crew. What's startling about Tout va bien is how urgent the socio-economic and gender issues remain in 2011. Today's basic advanced capitalist structure is already well in place by 1972 -- even without the internet and wireless devices. But more on that next time, perhaps. For now, let's consider this anthropologically (and sociologically) profound supermarket scene -- not exciting in the least, it nonetheless inspires deep contemplation:

Compare with the "frontal attack scene" in Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)

Now, consider the complex interaction of social organization, technology and movement shown in each scene. Then, check out the checkout lines in the next store you go to. What do you see?

Today's Rune: Initiation.

Jean-Luc Godard: Tout va bien / Everything's All Right

Here, Godard (with co-director Jean-Pierre Gorin) plays off the 1968 Paris-and-global uprisings to ask a bunch of pointed questions about the socio-economic structure of modern societies. One of the coolest techniques of Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (1972) is the use of slow cutaway tracking shots to show power relationships in a meat factory. It's like a play influenced by Bertolt Brecht.

The questions raised are entirely universal and relevant in 2011. So now let's ask: what is most important in determining a person's worldview, right here and now?

a. Geography
b. Language
c. Culture
d. Education (self- or institutional)/Literacy
e. Age
f. Gender
g. Family
h. Religious views
i. Race
j. Ethnicity
k. Zeitgeist (Spirit of the Times)
l. Sexual orientation
m. Diet

n. Calendar year/season

o. Housing
p. Income/monetary valuation
q. Strength of social-health safety net
r. Health status
s. X, y, z variables
t. Violence, safety
u. Water availability
v. Food availability
x. Shelter availability

y. Forms of governmental authority

z. Mobility, freedom of movement

Today's Rune: Breakthrough.

Picasso's Stare

Gearing up to see "Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912" at the Kimbell in Fort Worth. I remember roaming around the South of France and seeing Picasso works in many places, mostly small museums or displays. This was in the 1980s and there were many people who'd met him personally -- he'd only died in 1973.  I met Wallace Fowlie in Durham, North Carolina, and he had tons of good stories related to Picasso and friends. For his Rimbaud translation -- Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, 1966 (pictured above) -- he'd gotten Picasso to sketch Rimbaud, an act that took the artist just moments of scribbling. The new exhibit ought to be fun.



Here's The Modern Lovers song "Pablo Picasso" from 1972, pioneering in the Velvet Underground proto-punk style.

Today's Rune: Signals.  

Lightnin' Hopkins/Roosevelt Sykes

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.



Today's Rune: Fertility.  

Geronimo Pratt: Last Man Standing

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. 

Today's Rune: Strength.