Nobody Left by Mr. Fish

 This is subtitled on the cover:

“Conversations with famous radicals, progressives, and cultural icons about the end of dissent, revolution, and liberalism in America”

This book was discovered by accident in a local library in a town in Nassau County of Long Island, New York. It was in among the new graphic novels and comics. It’s large format 10” by 7” so supposedly that was why it was shelved where it was. It is also a good place for it. It’s the kind of thing that it would be nice for some suburban kid to accidentally come upon and then discover a new world. Actually the kid would be discovering an old world since Mr. Fish has set about talking to aged people who meant something to him and to the culture of the USA at one time.There are a lot of illustrations, the artwork of Mr. Fish. Some of them are a bit lurid and shocking which could also be a draw to a young person.  

This is a book from a left perspective. Not what the Trumpers and Republican Party call “far left”. That label is only a way to smear Democratic Party centrist liberals with Red Baiting because they might entertain leaving Social Security around for a bit longer, as long as it doesn’t take money away from the military budget.

The “left” referred to in this book is the old “New Left '' of the mid-20th Cemtury. That which reached its peak among post WWII Baby Boomers in the late 1960s. This left is the left that considers Clinton, and Obama, centerest sellouts who did more harm than good. The Democratic presidents who prepared the way for a Trump.

The book becomes a sort of memorial to that type of New Left politics since they have to a substantial degree disappeared from being a significant factor in mainstream politics. It could be argued that they never were much of a factor, but they certainly were more of a presence in the mainstream, even the old Big Three network mainstream of the 1950s and 60s.
High points of the book are interviews with greats Mort Sahl and (the late) Paul Krassner both of whom go back to the 1950s. But there are many others
And Mr Fish does talk about getting to people before they die off and missing that opportunity for some.

For those of us who miss that end of the dialog and adhere to that type of politics this is kind of a sad book. It’s about something that is dying off with a generation or a couple of generations that were a part of it. Mr Fish does not supply a path of hope forward. Most of the conversations are about what happened and why. 

The book was in print before the last great people’s movement appeared with the worldwide Black Lives Matter demonstrations and its movement.
That and the Bernie Sanders for President movements presented the old spirit. It is a spirit of rebellion and righteous anger at inequity that can inspire mass participating in demanding real change.

It is a spirit that has to be revived. There are millions waiting for it after being fooled by centrist Democrats that fail to deliver much other than, inadvertently, power to the rebellious tone of Right Wing populism which we have just seen in the Trump people and the January 6th storming of the Capitol Building. If a left movement does not come in, speak to these people and their needs and build a real socialist democracy, the fascist are going to rule the day and once they rule the day, that day can go on for decades.   
  

Daisies (1966)

Written and Directed by Věra Chytilová

This is a wild romp of a movie. Not much plot, but bubbling over with the silly joyous adolescent anti-authoritarian playful naughtiness.

The movie opens with shots taken from an aircraft during a military attack or a few different attacks, this is just the title sequence.

Then we go to a couple of young women (Jitka Cerhová and Ivana Karbanová) in two-piece bathing suits sitting side by side. These two are the main characters in the movie. We follow them on their adventures and hang out with them in their apartment as they talk.

They go to fancy restaurants, to dinners with old men. Or one is on a date with an old man and the other comes in and crashes the date. They order and consume lots of food, presumably at the old man’s expense. The old men appear well healed so there is not a feeling that they are cheating others in need. The implication is that they are rich horny old men taking a hot too-young date out in hopes of action later. And who has sympathy for men like that? At any rate the girls say, “We are late for the train.” and run off with him to the station. Then one gets on with him and jumps off before the train is out of the station with the old man, dumped and riding away, while the girls giggle. This sort of thing is repeated a couple more times with other distinguished looking older men. 

The movie is non-linear and avant-garde. The visual style goes from B&W to color, to filtered colors, and into moments that can only be called psychedelic.
This is not at all surprising because Czechoslovakia was a major center of manufacture and research on the clinical use of LSD during which many in the artistic community were given LSD. Further reading on that is here:
https://przekroj.pl/en/society/a-communist-lsd-trip-aleksander-kaczorowski?fbclid=IwAR0IA5io0YuC0-9BbyIuniAzn4ou71yR_7WE4zMkHBlzuFANY8EAL14XpiA
The young women end up in a large elegant banquet room which is all set up with a food table as if a large wedding party is about to enter at any moment. They have their destructively naughty glutinous fun in this setting.

This is a really interesting and fun short feature. A high point in 1960 film culture easily rivaling anything produced during the same period in the USA avant-garde in that era.

Yet this was so long ago. Something so lovely and immediate is now the work of the dead. Věra Chytilová died in 2014, and what has become of these girls 55 years later? They are old women presumably transformed by life into whatever they became after this crazy movie on their youth.
Moving image is so strange. It has captured time and sent it back to us. It was one thing in the 1950s when the cinema of 30 years before was a different thing, sometimes crude and technologically rudimentary, at best a wondrous world of pantomime, yet remote and definitely “then”.  But now in the 21st Century we can see much of the previous century 50, 60, even 75 years ago, looking brand new, not all that distinguishable technologically from the moving images produced today.
The dead regularly perform for us. This is different from reading the words of the dead, these people are really alive talking and moving.
This has never occurred before, this is totally new to the human experience. What does it mean? How does it affect us?

The young women in the film are unquestionably alive, giggling and vital in every way. They are relics of 55 years ago, yet fresh as, well, fresh as Daisies.