Beasts of the Southern Wild: Take Two

  


















Benh Zeitlin (and Lucy Alibar's) Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012) takes place in a seemingly parallel universe centered around "the Bathtub," Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana, which is (in "real life") peopled (at least in part) by a blend of Cajuns and Native and African Americans.

Everything sparkles in this frenetically independent film, including the actors, specifically Quvenzhané Wallis (Hush Puppy, the primary kid) and Dwight Henry (Wink, her father), both from Louisiana. Henry also owns the Buttermilk Drop Bakery and Café in New Orleans (Seventh Ward).

Today's Rune: Journey.         

Beasts of the Southern Wild: Take One

In the case of Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), believe the hype. Take Werner Herzog's visionary imagery and a dose of David Lynch, torque the mix with Amos Tutuola's fantastical energy and add equal parts originality. Presto and eureka, you've got Benh Zeitlin and Lucy Alibar's big bang for the modest buck. Loved it. Fragments of shimmering dreams resulting from seeing this are still swirling in my head. Wow.

Today's Rune: Signals.    

"To Please the Taste Buds of the Southern Ladies"

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The Waldensian Heritage Wines Winery in Valdese, North Carolina, is well worth checking out. The wine is tasty and quite reasonably priced (as in $8/bottle at the time of this posting). The folks who run it seem to be very much enjoying their work, their wine and the history of the Waldensians. Their polyglot phrasing at times reminds me in its peculiarities of Amos Tutuola's "Complete Gentleman." For example: "Villar Rouge Sweet . . . with extra sugar to please the taste buds of the Southern Ladies and the Southern Gentlemen." And: "Millennium Deux . . . Sipping it reminds one of memories gone by and memories to come." How cool is that? Believe me, it's even cooler after a little on-site wine tasting . . . 

Today's Rune: Wholeness.

Woody Allen: Annie Hall in Draft Form, Take One

On the way to San Antonio, I had the great delight of stopping in at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. My original intention was to examine some casual photographs revolving around American poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974) and Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola (1920-1997), but I became so absorbed in reading an entire untitled script for what evolved into Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman's shooting script for Annie Hall (1977) that I'll have to save the first two treats for a return visit.

First, the Harry Ransom Center has a beautiful interior that showcases a lot of interesting things around its spaces, items ranging from a photograph of Turkish horse cavalry in the snow by David Douglas Duncan to a manual typewriter employed by novelist John Fowles. I looked around while a courteous member of the staff retrieved a box from the Woody Allen collection acquired in 2005. (For more on its Scope and Contents, here's a link: http://research.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/allen.woody.film.html)

Once the items were delivered for pickup, I devoted my time to reading and taking notes and, much of the time I'll admit, quietly laughing in response to the dialogue. Officially, I was exploring "UNTITLED FILM SCRIPT" dated April 15, 1976. It includes 120 typescript pages with two appended scenes, white and light Carolina blue sheets of paper bound in red leather. Fascinating. It would appear as if certain pages were updated and inserted. And there are some fun inconsistencies. At times, Alvy's (the Woody Allen character) friend Rob (played by Tony Roberts in the completed film) is named Rob, and at other points, Roberts. Usually, Rob/Roberts calls Alvy by a nickname (Max, as in the movie), but at least at one point (page 53), Alvy refers to Rob as Max. This is just a small taste -- there's a whole lot more to underscore about the creative process. Once I sort through my notes, I'll post a bit more on my findings.

In thanks to the staff of the Harry Ransom Center; also in appreciation of Woody Allen and Marshall Birckman; and, of course, for the joy of Annie Hall. 

Today's Rune: Partnership.           

Amos Tutuola: The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts

Amos Tutuola's first major effort (so far as I know), The Wild Hunter in the Bush of the Ghosts (1948), serves as a stand-alone and prequel to The Palm-Wine Drinkard and His Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Dead's Town (1952) and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). Wild Hunter is rawer, more fragmented, but still quite a refreshing break from contemporary writing styles. Each of these works fuel dream states with pep; they might put a Tiger in your Tank of daydreams, too.

The Three Continents Press "First Standard Version" edited by Bernth Lindfors published in 1989 (with illustrations as above by Max K. Winkler) is a good place to start.  At least that's the version I got my hands on. Unlike the later novels, The Wild Hunter doles out specificities in time and names. For example: "It was on the 4th day of May, 1838, that I left the fourth town with tears, and began my journey again, seeking the way to my town" (p. 74).  The Wild Hunter's journey includes stays in Heaven and Hell -- heady stuff, and certainly kind of crazy. His encounters with one "Miss Victoria Juliana" and various other characters are intertwined. 

The Wild Hunter frequently provides commentary with his narrative. Here's a sample:

Alas, our people did not understand what was meant by the fifth town of the Ghosts. We explained that the Bush of the Ghosts was the reserved bush in which both ghosts and spirits of the dead were living as if in their own town. We explained further that though this bush seemed liked an ordinary bush, indeed it was not. Once one entered it, it was not easy to find a way out. One could not travel to the end of it; that was as impossible as it would be for a mosquito to travel around the whole world without perishing. . . (p. 125). 

I can think of several places like that. Places of work, for instance, like energy hives of pulsing intensities, with some co-workers (in the past, of course) rummaging around hallways and rooms like hungry ghosts.  In all truth, things one can observe in North America are not that far off from Tutuola's vision of the Bush of the Ghosts in Africa, despite differences in geography, culture and approach. 

Today's Rune: Journey.

What Completes the Gentleman?

What makes the gentleman complete?

This one dude (though not necessarily a gentleman) loves to drink palm-wine more than anything else. His tapster (not necessarily a gentleman, either) dies in an on-the-job accident, falling from a palm-tree while tapping palm-wine. The one dude who loves palm-wine heads out for Deads' Town to find said tapster. 

Down the road, the village head gives him (the one dude) palm-wine and says he will point the way to the tapster in Deads' Town if he'll retrieve his daughter from a curious creature, known at first as the "complete gentleman." For what had happened was this: she was following him (complete gentleman) to an unknown place. But as she was following the complete gentleman along the road, he was telling her not to follow him, but the lady did not listen to what he was telling her, and when the complete gentleman had tired of telling her not to follow him or to go back to town, he left her to follow him.













DO NOT FOLLOW UNKNOWN MAN'S BEAUTY

Down the Road: Complete Gentleman began returning parts of his body to those who rented them out to him apparently in order to make him "complete" while earlier gamboling at the village market. 

Now this complete gentleman was reduced to head . . . now the complete gentleman in the market reduced to a "SKULL" and this lady remained with only "Skull".

THE LADY WAS NOT TO BE BLAMED FOR FOLLOWING THE SKULL AS A COMPLETE GENTLEMAN

Can the palm-wine drinkard retrieve the lady (who is village head's daughter) from Skull? Will village head tell palm-wine drinkard where his tapster is located in Deads' Town?  Finally, what will palm-wine drinkard do if he actually does find his (dead) tapster?

Answer: I know some but not all because I am still reading Amos Tutuola's book, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town (1952).  Italicized lines transcribed directly from said book.

Today's Rune: Journey.

Television-handed Ghostesses

When I was a small child, definitely under five, there were often ghosts floating up from grills and vents, goblins coming through cracks in walls, and witches roaming. I don't remember how or why, but even then I knew the naming rituals, I knew these apparitions as entitities and manifestations called ghosts, goblins, witches.

That's what I'm reminded of when diving into Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1954). It's weird, but seems dead-on as channeled through a child's Gestalt: rationalized as dreams, hallucinations, nightmares and imaginings to the reflective adult, what is real and what is surreal?   

To give some idea of the contents, here are some chapter titles: 

A Cola Saved Me
At a Ghost Mother's Birthday Function
My First Wedding Day in the Bush of Ghosts
On my Way to the 9th Town of Ghosts
Barbing Day in the Town of Short Ghosts 
I meet my Dead Cousin in the 10th Town of Ghosts
Hard to say "No" and Hard to say "Yes"  

About halfway through My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, I fell asleep and when I was awakened several hours later, there was an eerie hush in the air. 

As a child, did you encounter ghosts, goblins, witches or something else entirely?  

Today's Rune: Flow.

Grove Press 1984 edition of The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Amos Tutuola.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts: A Return

Some cool items to check out: Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts from the 1950s and the Byrne-Eno collaboration, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (1981)  -- plus remastered edition (2006).  

Hard to believe it's getting on thirty years since these first blew my mind . . . or that I was still a teenager at the time . . . In any case, think world beat, global, Earth Day, rhythms, beats, backloops, eeriness, dreamscapes  . . . all perfect for long distance night driving, among other things . . . I'd love to see feedback from anyone else familiar with these artscapes . . .

Today's Rune: The Self.

Television-Handed

Ghostess:

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts

First came the 1952 novel by Amos Tutuola; next came the 1981 album by Brian Eno and David Byrne.

Vickie France Stavish, my oldest sister, earned a master's degree in Linguistics up at Oakland University about the same time as the album came out, and I remember her waxing eloquently about the deep structure of language, about underlying patterns of communications. This is exactly what Eno and Byrne get at, where people's repeated, impassioned babblings ("found vocals") are looped and employed as rhythmic patterns. The whistles and bells the musicians add make it sound all the trippier, of course -- perfect for driving across vast expanses of country and urban landscapes, quite hallucinatory when combined with the various eerie lights one notices in the dead of night.

America Is Waiting

All of the tracks have their own place and sound, but the ones that really interest me are those with wild ravings off the airwaves, mostly a.m. radio talk shows and religious broadcasts. Take "America Is Waiting," for example. It sounds like a sample from every political talk show I've ever dialed across out of sheer curiosity. There are a lot of ravers riding those waves, and their voices are now bouncing along into eternity. "America is waiting for a message of some sort or another," indeed. This track, along with "Mea Culpa," also made up part of the original Wall Street (1987) soundtrack. The excellent new CD release of the album includes a short film, by the way -- it's about as exciting as watching Space Invaders, truth be told, but a good idea.

"Regiment" is a haunting, beautiful track featuring an Islamic singer.

"Help Me Somebody" features an old-time-religion preacher whipping his congregation into ecstatic visions: "He's so BIG you can't get AROUND him! He's so SMALL you can't get UNDER Him! Whoop! He's EVERYWHERE! Help me Somebody!

So You Hear Voices, You Are Possessed

"The Jezebel Spirit" is awesome -- excerpts from a real time exorcism. How often can you hear that? People may be plain crazy, but they are never dull -- even if sometimes I can relate to fellow UNC grad. Lewis Black when he said "every day I feel like I'm waking up on the Titanic and I may be the only one who realizes what's coming" (rough paraphrase). Or James Thurber: "There is no safety in numbers, or in anything else." So you hear voices? Please tell me all about them!

So what can I DO?

The new CD release has a good booklet full of new stuff and better yet, a "Side 3" that includes more Arabic sounds, experimentals like "Solo Guitar with Tin Foil," and the most excellent funk-backed found vocal, "Defiant." I love it!

If you agree to a free licensing arrangement, you can download some of the sounds and mix your own thing. Groove it at http://bush-of-ghosts.com/



All aboard for the Night Train!