You Don't Need a Weatherman to Know Which Way the Wind Blows

James Lee Burke spices up his novels with asides that inspire additional consideration. For instance, this snippet from Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014), page 332:

"Green glanced up at the sky . . . 'You know what they say about Texas. If you don't like the weather, wait five minutes.'"  

And indeed, I've heard this said in Texas many times. Sometimes it's "wait fifteen minutes."

"'It was Missouri,' she said. . . 'Mark Twain said that about Missouri, not Texas. It's funny how people get a quotation wrong, and then the misquote takes on a life of its own. It's a bit like most relationships. We never get it quite right. The fabrication becomes the reality.'
Green nodded as though he understood . . ."

What may be even stranger is this: Burke's "she" gets the details wrong, too.

Here's the original quotation by Mark Twain, dated December 22, 1876: "If you don't like the weather in New England, just wait a few minutes."

(Documented in Hugh Rawson and Margaret Miner, The Oxford Dictionary of American Quotations, Oxford University Press, 2006, page 472).

"You know what they say about [this state or locale]: if you don't like the weather . . ." 

Whenever someone begins with this old-timey routine, I'm thinking: let me guess how this ends. Is there anything new under the sun?

Furthermore, why do people think that each state (or province or territory) has its own weather? Does anyone really believe that weather respects imaginary borderlines? 

Twenty Fifteen of the Common Era

Into Year 2015

MMXV 

14 Nivôse CCXXIII

New Year's, a wedding of Space and Time, requires: 

Something Olde

Something New

Something Borrowed

Something Blue . . .

A Sixpence in your Shoe

All such elements are jammed into my newly vamped gym jukebox iPod mix. Before last year lurched into this one, I purposely deleted my entire playlist and began a new one. It was high time.

The new stripped down core-first-round playlist, to be expanded during this year  -- already fondly known as Twenty Fifteen -- goes like this . . . playback is in random order, and sometimes I switch earphones or headphones to highlight different aspects of each track for the benefit of both the other ear and the other side of the mind . . . a good way to keep it fresh, keeping it reel-to-reel.

Open Up Like a French 75 -- drink or artillery, take your pick:

Breaking Glass  (David Bowie)

Chinese Rock (Ramones)

Editions of You (Roxy Music)

Feeling Good (Nina Simone)

Get Up Offa That Thing (James Brown)

I'm a King Bee (Slim Harpo)

The 'In' Crowd (Bryan Ferry)

Lust for Life (Iggy Pop)

See-Line Woman (Nina Simone)

Shake Your Hips (Slim Harpo)

Sound & Vision (David Bowie)

Super Bad, Parts 1 and 2 (James Brown)

Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum (Bob Dylan)

What in the World (David Bowie with Iggy Pop)

You Know I'm No Good (Amy Winehouse)

This stuff works for me. Specifically for the time blocks spent on things like the stationary bike, moon walk or regular treadmill. 

I've picked up a whole new appreciation for "Get Up Offa That Thing" (1976) -- can listen to it, the extended version, dozens of times and hear something new. For now, it's the side track electric funk guitar parts and embedded mutter-rapped words such as "Melvin Parker [on drums] . . . North Carolina . . ."   

2015: The adventure continues . . .

Today's Rune: Initiation. 

Coen Brothers: Inside Llewyn Davis

Seeing Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), it's 1961, okay? All across the USA . . . It's set mostly in NYC, Chicago and along the road in between. 

I really like this film, and it'll take a while to absorb. Kind of trippy, kind of existential, kind of like a mythical tale, with realism, magical. On the road between the cities in snow and at night -- these scenes were mesmerizing. And along came Dylan. Can you dig?

Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune. 
   

See the Bells, Up in the Sky: Lou Reed, RIP

The death of Lou Reed (March 2, 1942-October 27, 2013) is a "Proustian moment:" the man, the music, his words and vibe, all serve as memory triggers. All day today and probably well on into the future.

From Lou Reed solo, from Velvet Underground tracks, too, I can remember people, places, trips, journeys, books, surroundings, time drifts, compadre artists and lit candles. Among other things. 

The time my buddy-pal JC and I schlepped our way to Richmond, Virginia, to see Lou and his crazy-electric band rip this joint, the Mosque, on October 9, 1984. (Life lesson: do it!) 

Birds of a feather like Andy Warhol, Nico, John Cale, Stooges, Iggy Pop, Patti Smith, Debbie Harry, Laurie Anderson (his widow), William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Bob Dylan, Ramones, Talking Heads, Hotel Chelsea, Václav Havel -- and outward goes the spiral.

"See the bells, up in the sky
Somebody's cut the string in two" 
-- Lou Reed, "What Goes On"

Lou Reed was sharp, pithy, jangly, often a pain in the ass, an artist. With him, beauty comes through distorted guitars and talking songs and words that stick in the mind. Rarely would Lou put up with "a saccharine suburb in the mush," to use the Iggy phrase. Love him or hate him, he was great. A fond farewell. 

Today's Rune: Joy.  

Jean-Pierre Melville: Le deuxième souffle (Take I)

Now digging Le deuxième souffle / Second Wind (1966), yet another meticulously shot black and white flick by Jean-Pierre Melville. Film noir, thriller, anti-heroism -- name it what you want to, but next time you say it, you better run!*

Again, Melville's experiences in the Resistance must have informed his taut feel for the underworld lives of his main characters. Riveting cat-and-mouse games, high stakes, bursts of violence.  The element of surprise. You can fairly often see scenes that telegraph Melville's influence on Quentin Tarantino and a slew of other contemporary filmmakers. Let's not forget detecting his inspiration in the details of various recent crime series, as well. Regardless,  Le deuxième souffle is all crystal cool and clear and groovy in its own right. C'est oh!

Today's Rune: Fertility.  *A phrase stolen from Bob Dylan, repackaged and rolled out in tandem.    

Ramblin' Jack Elliott Comes to Town (Part II)

Jack Elliott and friends at Live Oak Music Hall & Lounge (1311 Lipscomb Street, just off Magnolia) in Fort Worth, Texas (continued).

Ramblin' Jack sort of complimented Larry Mahan's black hat look with his own white hat and red suspenders, cowboy clothes, boots and acoustic guitar. He did "Old Shep" after a story abut his dog Caesar who would occasionally take the wheel of an old pickup truck and drive very slowly. He tuned up, said this was the final stop on his latest five week or so tour, that this was the first time he really tuned his guitar right. "It's an honor to break in a new edifice," he said.

Of his moniker, he noted "there’s no 'g' in his name except in England," where they say "Rambling Jack." Put his shades on after a while. Told about Jesse Fuller, the "Lone Cat," and did Fuller's "San Francisco Bay Blues," explained how the Lone Cat created his own multi-faceted instruments.

At some point, Ramblin' Jack got tired of his voice cracking due to touring and "weather changes," and asked for a medicinal drink from the bar. Live Oak owner Bill Smith brought him a glass of whiskey or its equivalent on ice.  Jack: "There’s too much ice . . ." He explained that too much ice is bad for one's humors (or humours, if you prefer), especially while singing and talking.

He told tales about busking around Europe for years in the 1950s, right into the early 1960s, with his wife at the time, June (Hammerstein/Elliott, now Shelley).  They eventually parted ways and later she became a special assistant to The Rolling Stones during their great Exile On Main St. (1972) period in France. He mentioned her memoir, Even When It Was Bad... It Was Good (Xlibris, 2000) -- more to tell about the whole episode, maybe in another post.   

After a particular breakup (with June?), Ramblin' Jack found himself in the middle of a snowstorm in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, a local appearance cancelled on account of the weather, so he made his way to a DJ friend's radio station and did some stuff on air until the DJ decided to close down the station. Before he did, Jack climbed a hundred rungs up the radio tower into the storm, head thrust into snow swirling all around, before coming back down, feeling bleak and cold. The DJ took him to a mountaintop hunting lodge, made a fire and they settled down to venison, Wild Turkey and a Bob Dylan album. This was when he learned (despite being a slow learner, he said) Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" (and later recorded it, in the late 1960s).  When he first played it with Bob Dylan in the audience, Dylan said, "I relinquish it to you, Jack." And then, after this storied introduction, Ramblin' Jack played the song and it was a truly groovy moment!   

At various times, Ramblin' Jack's live singing style reminds me of Willie Nelson, Woody Guthrie, Nick Cave, Neil Young and Bob Dylan.  Here he did "Diamond Joe" and a mix of folk, blues, country and country rock.

 

He also did one version of  Jelly Roll Morton's "Windin' Boy," which has the line "I’m the Windin’ Boy, don’t deny my name." (He referenced Alan Lomax here -- and there are two versions, both ribald but one version more so than the other -- as in NC-17 rating).

Ramblin' Jack Elliott is a living reminder that recorded music really only goes back about a century. What's incredible is that he (like Chuck Berry and B. B. King, dudes I've also turned out to see in the near past) has been playing and singing for more than half of its entire arc. How humbling and cool is that? My motto: any artist 65 or over, get out and see 'em before they retire or otherwise stop performing -- if possible.

Today's Rune: Journey.  

 

 

Ramblin' Jack Elliott Comes to Town (Part I)

OK, folks, found some if not all of my fistful of notes about Ramblin' Jack Elliott and friends at The Live Oak Music Hall & Lounge (1311 Lipscomb Street, just off Magnolia) in Fort Worth, Texas.
 
The interior music hall part of Live Oak (like the lounge, outside floor level and upstairs deck area) is relaxed, intimate and -- at this early date in the venue's history, anyway -- easy to negotiate. For the Ramblin' Jack show, round tables and chairs were available and maybe fifty or sixty people really lucked out by turning up and tuning in on a two-tufted Tuesday night.
 
First, The Whiskey Folk Ramblers played their energetic "folk noir" for the greater part of an hour as warmup act. New album: The Lonesome Underground. A link to their website here: http://www.whiskeyfolkramblers.com/  Got my ear -- keep one out for 'em.
 
Just about everyone in the room seemed like a real character. During an interlude, I spoke with a dude with an accent like Billy Bob Thornton's, originally from Abilene, who spoke at length about the Fort Worth music scene past present and future. When not also talking about his kith, he focused on kin, in particular the storied wildman who died as a brigadier general fighting for the Confederacy at Pea Ridge in 1862, Ben McCulloch. This Ben here had followed Davy Crockett from Tennessee to  Texas but was laid out with a case of measles before he could reach the Alamo, and so lived a while longer, long enough to fight two different duels with the same man, one with rifles and the second with pistols (he finally killed the other feller); he himself was felled by a Union rifleman.  Anyway, it was also important to this dude to elaborate on why Fort Worth is a far better place than Dallas, whose denizens always manage to mess up a good thing (examples given included Deep Ellum and the sculpture garden). 
 
Before even the Whiskey Folk Ramblers took the stage, two fierce looking cowboy type dudes walked back and forth along the side edges. One of them had a broadbrimmed black hat and was vigorously chewing gum.  Figured out later this was Larry Mahan, a world rodeo champion in the 1960s and 1970s. He had real style, like a gunslinger, and ended up on stage with Ramblin' Jack to sing a ribald variation on a cowboy song. 
 
As for the main act, Ramblin' Jack performed for about two hours, including a break for Jim Bonnet (or Bonet -- pronounced the French way and maybe even a distant relative) to recite a couple of cowboy poems -- one of them called "Lasca" from the 19th century. I looked up the words. One small part goes like this, about "Lasca, this love of mine:"

. . . once, when I made her jealous for fun  
At something I whispered or looked or done,
One Sunday, in San Antonio,
To a glorious girl in the Alamo,
She drew from her garter a little dagger,
And -- sting of a wasp -- it made me stagger!
An inch to the left, or an inch to the right,
And I shouldn't be maundering here tonight;
But she sobbed, and sobbing, so quickly bound
Her torn rebosa about the wound
That I swiftly forgave her.
Scratches don't count
In Texas, down by the Rio Grande.

After a break recovering from tonight's very real Texas tornadoes, to be continued.

Today's Rune: Signals.

Ramblin' Jack

A very real performance by Ramblin' Jack Elliott at The Live Oak Music Hall & Lounge (1311 Lipscomb Street, just off Magnolia) in Fort Worth, Texas. 

If I can translate notes scrawled in dim light on a tattered napkin and a couple of business cards, details will follow in the next post. Wonderful night, including a Havana (food) and Revolvers (ale). Yes! Tuesdays are rarely this good in life. 

Today's Rune: The Self.    

With Striped Zoot Jacket That Salts Can Plainly See

Consider the Zoot Suit, an "extreme style" that swirled around the world like this past year's Gangnam Style and still-ongoing Harlem Shake. Race. Class. Gender. Style. Status Quo. Pied Pipers. Fashion statement. Join the bandwagon. Crackdown.

What's it all about, Alfie? Can you dig?

Great Depression, World War Two, Race Riot. In the Navy, Wild in the Streets. "Twenty years of schoolin' and they put you on the day shift . . ." It's all Zoot!

New books include: Kathy Peiss, Zoot Suit: The Enigmatic Career of an Extreme Style (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) and Elizabeth Escobedo, From Coveralls to Zoot Suits: The Lives of Mexican American Women on the World War II Home Front (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, March 21, 2013).

Today's Rune: Warrior.
  

Malik Bendjelloul: Searching for Sugar Man

Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man (2012) presents the compelling tale of Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez (b. 1942) and his impact in South Africa. Neglected in the USA, his albums Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971), recorded in Detroit and orginally distibuted by Sussex Records, eventually went big in South Africa and Australia. Meanwhile, back in Detroit, Rodriguez worked construction jobs and lived frugally for most of his years since the inititial album releases, with only sporadic live shows and the occasional overseas junket.  

As for the songs, they feel like a mix of Bob Dylan, Donovan, James Taylor and José Feliciano, as conceived by Rodriguez. Some of them have off-the-wall accompaniment, reminding me of David Essex and his strange 1973 hit, "Rock On" and, again, Donovan. They must have had an impact on the Detroit music scene upon first release. Certainly the title "Inner City Blues" (1970) reappears on Marvin Gaye's 1971 blockbuster album, What's Going On, as "Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)."   

In Searching for Sugar Man, Detroit looks terribly beautiful. Rodriguez has an eccentric, enigmatic persona, at turns like Andy Warhol, Michael Jackson and Bob Dylan. Weird, man. His construction buddies are hilarious, especially Rick Emmerson's pithy observations -- he'd be a great person to interview. Rodriguez' daughters are fantastic, very heartwarming people with a touch of bittersweet -- Eva, Sandra and Regan. I love them! Overall, Searching for Sugar Man is a wild ride to and fro the pumpkin patch and back again.

Today's Rune: Signals.          

Babbitt

To follow up on Main Street, here's a little plug for two more novels by Sinclair Lewis (there are several others, too): Babbitt (1922) and Elmer Gantry (1927).

Babbitt is the "respectable" status quo guy who frequently turns out to be a total hypocrite or flimflammer on some level or another. Like Elmer Gantry. Lance Armstrong. Tiger Woods. Civic Leader A. Politician B. Religious Leader C. Sports Figure D. Officer F. 

This is why it's almost always better to present a persona that's more on the Bohemian side of the continuum. I've never heard anyone deride Bob Dylan for maintaining relationships (reportedly) with numerous "baby mamas" or other "special lady friends" along his perpetual tour routes. Why? Because he's a Bohemian, an artist and free spirit, and has never projected otherwise.     

High profile people who proclaim loudly in the "public square" that they are Puritans quite often turn out to be, well, something else -- behind the façade of a conservative status quo.  On the other hand, many of these status quo figures are a joke even on the face of things -- people like Glenn Beck and Donald Trump, Newt Gingrich, Pat Robertson, John Edwards, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum, Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and so on (nine out of ten of these hucksters ran for president, come to think of it).
















In sum, the moral of these stories: if you want to more freely enjoy yourself without worrying about rightfully being called out as a shameless hypocrite, it's better to present as a Bohemian than as a Babbitt or Elmer Gantry.

Today's Rune: Journey.         

The Night-Blooming Cereus: A Version

I was introduced to the night-blooming cereus by English architects John Adams and Marina Dunbar in the summer of 1991, in Clapham, London SW4, while boarding at their customized avant-garde house on Macaulay Road, and interning at English Heritage, where John also worked.

The situation during the summer months began straightforwardly but became increasingly complex.  At the outset, John Adams had put up a flyer at English Heritage seeking a boarder (a fairly typical way to supplement household income in London at the time, and to keep creative energies flowing, I suppose), and, via my sponsor (US-ICOMOS*), I was simultaneously seeking a place to board, so the twain met neatly, working out for both parties. If memory serves, I paid sixty pounds per week for room and board at John and Marina's in Clapham, and the same (which became a discount, at first a slight source of tension) when relocated to Bob and Tatiana Blagoveshenskaya Dunbar's (Marina's parents')  labyrinthine flat off Bentinck Street (London W1U) due to unforeseen  circumstances. 

My stay in London started like a verse of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate" and took off from there.  I'd end up with an English architect girlfriend, have dinners and wine with John and Nick (Nicholas) Dunbar, hear about Marianne Faithfull (John's ex-wife and Nick's mother) and Mick Jagger, discover how John Dunbar had introduced Yoko Ono to John Lennon, learn about Bob and Tatiana's life and film work in Mexico, Russia and the UK, hear about Marina and John Dunbar's twin sisters Jennifer (married to American poet Ed Dorn) and Margaret, speak at length with their son Lev (whose break in mental health was the catalyst for my relocation), hang out with Italian poet-sculptor and fellow Bentinck Street lodger Livia Livi, and yes, yes, see the great night-blooming cereus growing from what appeared to be latticework in a sort of solarium-and-socializing space at the Macaulay Road residence.

Marina Dunbar and John Adams told of the Mexican varieties of night-blooming cereus, the Queen of the Night. This strange and resilient cactus plant represented something about Mexico to them. In 1968, while Jennifer Dunbar and Ed Dorn headed to Paris to see the "disturbances" there, John worked as an architect at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the one caught up in the Tlatelolco student massacre and featuring the Black Power salute. Bob and Tatiana had married in Mexico City at the beginning of the Second World War, and had started their family there before being redeployed to the British embassy in Moscow. In a sense, the night-blooming cereus was Mexico.

The mystique of the night-blooming cereus came in its name and origin. It bloomed rarely, and at night. Maybe once a year, maybe more, maybe never. 

When I was preparing to return to the USA (or "States" as they would say), Marina gave me a couple of moistened leaves in a plastic bag, and back went strands of their night-blooming cereus to the Americas.  Twenty-one years on, several plants have sprung from these "mustard seeds." It's a hearty and weird cactus, this night-blooming cereus, though I have yet to see one bloom at night or at anytime at all, with my own eyes. In due time, I suspect. Somewhere, somehow. Meanwhile, the story of its origin remains for me as transcendent as the night-bloom of a summer's dream. 

Today's Rune: Fertility.     

*The US National Committee of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a fully paid internship, enough to survive on overseas.  Pictured at top: cover of Night-Blooming Cereus: Stories by K.A. Longstreet (University of Missouri Press, 2002).
      

Bob Dylan: Tempest

I rarely buy CDs anymore, because albums hardly seem to exist as such these days with iTunes and other downloadable formats making individual favorite tracks available.  However, I wanted to hear Bob Dylan's new Tempest album the tradional way, from start to finish. And here's my response after a couple of spins -- subject to change after further listening.

First of all, a salute to Dylan for fifty years of album-making, without resting on the laurels of a sack full of early hits. Second, special recognition for his combination of lyrical and musical exploration -- carrying the torch for a variety of traditional musical styles while keeping a sharp edge as he looks to the past yet forges ahead. Finally, his singing voice is as gravelly as ever as befits a prophet of primal myth and fragile human fate.

With Tempest, we have  a variety of musical styles blended seamlessly around intense lyrics. As always happens to me when beginning to consider for the first time some film by an avant garde director like Jean-Luc Godard, the visceral question is: can I get all the way through this in one setting? This is awful! When first considering Dylan's Tempest, as with a Godard work, it was only after about ten or fifteen minutes of paying attention that I was hooked. By the time I made it to "Narrow Way," the third track on Tempest, something clicked. I was in for a penny, in for a pound. This was something weird and cool, crazy and tight. By the end of the album, sheer amazement had kicked in -- by God, he did it again!

Some decades ago now, Ian Curtis, the gloomy lead singer of Joy Division, was watching Werner Herzog's gloomy film Stroszek (1977) while listening to Iggy Pop's gloomy album The Idiot (1977) -- whereupon he hanged himself. I thought of this today while Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) played in the background just as Dylan rounded out Tempest with a thoroughly heartrending fourteen minute chronicle of the sinking of the RMS Titanic one hundred years ago -- followed by a sendoff for John Lennon in which early in the song Dylan notes:

He turned around and he slowly walked away
They shot him in the back and down he went. ("Roll on John")

Tempest is a strong pot of coffee, an epic chronicle, so fair warning to those with fragile psyches like Ian Curtis -- you might better stick with humming "Don't Worry, Be Happy" or something along those lines. Seriously. 

For most Dylan fans, though, Tempest will be yet another masterful album to absorb and enjoy, for sure.

The watchman he lay dreaming
Of all the things that can be
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Into the deep blue sea.   ("Tempest")

Today's Rune: Fertility.

The Long Art

"Life is short, and Art long; the crisis fleeting; experience perilous, and decision difficult." Hippocrates (ca. 460 B.C.-377 B.C.)

Or, as Gore Vidal has compressed it, "Life is short, but the art is long."

Some things have persisted through a lifetime, and remain there seemingly as always. Cuba. Israel-Palestine, North Korea/South Korea. James Bond. The Rolling Stones. Bob Dylan. Space shots. Civil rights, human rights, gender issues. China. 

Some things have morphed. Vietnam. Ireland/Northern Ireland. Germany. The Cold War. The Soviet Union. Eastern Europe. The Balkans.

And the ball keeps spinning. Some plots thicken, some plots thin. Cuba is changing. Korea will, either in a violent spasm or in some unexpected manner. Palestine will become a nation.

In my lifetime, though these things seem slow, they have changed, even as the population has increased, half again as big in the USA alone (though half as small in Detroit and, probably, New Orleans). South America has changed, Africa has changed, and both continents will change at a quicker pace. All of Africa, not just North Africa, perhaps following the Arab Spring, may begin throwing off dictators. Who knows? What will happen in Mexico? How will the drug wars end? How about Iran, India and Pakistan? And so on. I remain as curious as a cat about all of it, but with vegan meals added. 

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Bringing It All Back Home Again

Coming at you from Tar Heel Land, Bob Dylan in the background, luxuriating. Lots of conversation, most lately about Dylan through the years as a sort of cultural yardstick, and Patti Smith, and Van Morrison and a bunch of other stuff. The Rolling Stones Some Girls (1978) brings about a boatload of memories as well. Get the oars out . . .

I've written a little about Saxapahaw before; it seems to get cooler even again, with new music and art venues, the all-important post office, excellent food, and only about twelve miles by back road to Carrborro, my old stomping grounds morphing into Chapel Hill. Greensboro, Durham and Raleigh are all within easy reach. The land here is lush and rolling, much greener and more wooded than in North Texas. The roads are in better shape, too, but gas costs about the same -- about $3.20 per gallon for regular unleaded.

Today's Rune: Journey.     

Jean-Luc Godard: Le gai savoir, Part 2

In Le gai savoir (1969), several references are made to mai 1968 and Year Zero. 1968 was, indeed, a cataclysmic and revolutionary year, in Paris and globally.

To recount, 1968 saw the Prague Spring; the Tet Offensive; the My Lai Massacre (not made public until 1969); the assassination of MLK; the 1968 Chicago riots and "disturbances;" the Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico City; the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol (who never fully recovered). Richard M. Nixon was elected president, unknowing then he was already Watergate bound. Bob Dylan was more or less recording underground post-66' motorcycle accident. Apollo 8 circled the Moon. Hair the musical debuted. HemisFair '68 was held in San Antonio, Texas. Within a year, Ireland entered the period donned "The Troubles" and the Stonewall Riots in New York City galvanized the gay rights movement. The American Indian Movement was formed, the Chicano movement launched, feminism and the womens' rights movement picked up steam and the environmental movement gained traction. 1968/1969 is as good a time as any to name Year Zero.

In Le gai savoir / Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Godard and his characters lay the groundwork for studying, learning, analyzing, acting and critiquing, as well as figuring out new ways to make films with import and impact.

By the time Godard emerges in 1972 from the intervening years of eclectic experimentation, in releasing Tout va bien / Everything's All Right (co-directed by Jean-Pierre Gorin) he has indeed done many of these things. Picking up from mai '68, the latter includes lines like, "Sometimes what's needed is a good kick in the ass" and, "We should just let outselves get fucked over?" "Workers are always made to look sinister." "Each is his [or her] own historian." "They looked at us and we looked at them . . ."  Unlike many other observer-particpants of mai '68, Godard remained determined to keep forging ahead on his own radical terms, despite or perhaps because of repressive political backlash. 

Le gai savoir was banned in France.

Today's Rune: Defense.

Jean-Luc Godard: Le gai savoir, Part 1

Jean-Luc Godard's Le gai savoir (1969) mixes in many late 1960s cultural and political icons and touchstones, ranging from texts and images of the 1968 unheavals, the US-Vietnam War, the Black Panthers, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William S. Burroughs, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Cuba, the Pentagon, the Beatles, Mao, William Faulkner, Noam Chomsky, Superman, Spiderman, the Hulk, competing maps of the world and its conflicts, Bertolt Brecht, pop advertisements, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Mozart. Even if it had no other value (it does), Le gai savoir remains a vibrant document still hot off the press from more than forty years ago.

Patricia Lumumba (Juliet Berto): "No, listen, we study links, relations, differences. . ."

If everything seemed to connect in 1968-1969, it still does in 2011. A of people in the know about the workings of the world just got tired, I guess, or are almost forgotten. All one has to do, now as then, is look and listen, with curiosity, and pay attention. Where there's a will, there's a way; where there's no will, there's no way -- in or out of a big ball of confusion.

Today's Rune: Strength.

Jean-Luc Godard: Masculin féminin, Part 1

Godard's Masculin féminin: 15 faits précis (1966) observes life among Parisian youth (mostly twenty somethings) in 1965, just as some things are starting to go swinging electric. More than one actual date is shown in the movie: December 5, 1965, for instance. 

Shot in grainy black and white, Masculin féminin feels like a mix of documentary, journaling and comedy-drama of manners. I find it helpful as a window into the relatively near-past. "Times had changed. It was the age of James Bond and Vietnam." 

Pictured here: Saigon-born Chantal Goya as the mercurial chanteuse Madeleine Zimmer.

In Masculin féminin, we see people playing pinball, drinking coffee and wine, smoking, reading newspapers and magazines, listening to music, watching movies, talking and otherwise interacting. In one scene, two friends discuss Bob Dylan.

What are you reading?

An article on Bob Dylan.

Who's he?

He's a Vietnik, you know.

What's that?

It's an American word, a cross between "beatnik" and "Vietnam."

Who are you, Mr. Bob Dylan?

Madeleine never mentioned him? He sells 10,000 records a day!

Later, Madeleine pops in to tell friends, "I'm Number 6 in Japan with 'Pinball Champ.'"  Who's ahead of her in the game? The Beatles, yé-yé singer France Gall -- and Bob Dylan. 

[To be continued].   

Today's Rune: Partnership.