Carmen (1983)

 Carmen (1983)

Directed by Carlos Suara
Choreography by Antonio Gades

TCM is featuring Dorothy Dandridge this month. I watched Carmen Jones since I had not seen it before and was curious. Harry Belafante is in it, how bad can it be? Turns out, really bad. First of all, of course the singing is all lip-sync which always looks fake to me, but on top of that the stars have to lip-sync to the voices of other singers even though they are singers themselves. Then there is the setting of the romantic rival being a boxing champ, because that is the height of black men accomplishment, being a gladiator. Of course the whole plot of the Carmen story is horrible since she gets murdered because of jealousy. Anyway, I watched the whole thing and it was as bad as it was.

Then I thought about another old movie I had seen years ago on its release and got the DVD version of that through the county public library system. 
This Spanish flamenco version of Carmen is very good. It is a backstage sort of story of a dance company staging a production of Carmen. Antonio Gades plays the director, choreographer, and star of the production. He is searching for the perfect female dancer to play Carmen, eventually casting Laura Del Sol in the role. They start up a sexual relationship in addition to working together, etc, to the dismal ending to this story. The movie cleverly plays with reality. Is this what is going on in the production of Carmen or in the backstage drama?  

On the way there are a number of really excellent dance and song scenes. Unlike the 1954 Hollywood thing. These people actually sing on film in the lively communal dance song scenes all staged in the rehearsal studios.
Antonio Gades is a stunning performer with beauty of grave and form. Really rather sexy since he is so attractive. His dance performances with Laura Del Sol have an intense sensuality. He is the real star of this really fine movie that holds up exceptionally well 37 years later.
Also featured is Paco de Lucia on guitar and in an acting role as a musician in the company.


https://youtu.be/gBska8EAM8Q  

The Overstory By Richard Powers

 This is an ambitious novel. It is possible to feel the author’s frustration in not being able to express what ideally he would like to:

Page 383: 

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”

He comes close to his goal. But novels need these human characters that we can latch on to, that we can connect with, characters whose language and emotions we can understand.
Yet the main, dominant character in this novel is the trees. And not even any single tree. We do get introduced to single trees, mostly at the beginning part of this epic journey, but they themselves are part of a larger interconnective collective. We are told that they are together in this and that in fact it has been discovered, finally, that they communicate and interact in ways silent, and until recently, invisible to us. They are also attached to the ground, it is all connected, and we share 25% of our genes with the trees.
We come from the trees. Not in the sense of evolving from tree-dwelling primates, but that we are of the trees themself, a branch, a curious, isolated and lonely offshoot. A tree branch that takes itself as something else, something altogether separate without the empathy and intelligence to see that we are in fact IT.   

The first part of The Overstory comes on as separate stories. We are introduced to a character in each chapter most often with a tree involved and often in childhood. Is this in fact a novel at all or just a series of character studies calling itself one?

But like the humans who take themselves as separate from the trees, in the second and third sections of the book, these characters are brought together. They are brought together by the trees. We are among the people who see the trees, who feel the trees, who are vigilantly up in trees. They are people who care about the vanishing of the trees. The disappearance of beings hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years old. They want to help.

The question and the main dilemma for these good hearted characters is, how to help? Does defensive human action work in countering destructive human action? Or is there just too much human action?
What should we do or not do to be non-destructive. Is destroying ourselves, the beings who live via this industrial destruction, the answer. But if we are of the trees which are GOOD, how can we be BAD? This simple dualism can’t possibly point the way.

There is a certain open-endedness to these questions in this novel. Perhaps the spiritual mindset of the individual reader can only see it as they can. It could be read as “trees good, humans bad” and left at that.
But this is not the ultimate intention of the work. The intention is to show and call for connection, reconnection, by whatever means necessary. There might not be all that much to do right now other than stand down as much as possible and wait it out to a point when earth, trees, and humans can become one again, as they already are. The novel is never hopeless in regard to the resurgence of the trees, it’s just the humans who will blunder to doom and get themselves out of the way.

“. . . and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
The “lost people” do have compelling stories that make this a page turner at the same time as a lesson in the connectedness of everything.
While naturally missing the target that it is impossible for a novel to hit, it is an unusually and beautifully crafted great work.

Banjo by Claude McKay

I really enjoyed this novel. I felt close to the voice of the narrator. 
It was written in the late 1920s while the author was in Marseilles and Barcelona, two active port cities on the Meditranian Sea. The ports, the ships are critical to the action of the novel.

(I had a year of so myself in Barcelona in the mid-1980s playing the guitar and singing on the streets. The people were kind and supported me and my partner. This is a personal reason the novel worked so well for me, a certain nostalgia for the end of my wild youth and perhaps the beginning of my wild old age.)

The character, Banjo, is part of a loose network of traveling black street people, men. He plays the banjo and is a carefree somewhat wild character from America.
The novel is delightfully plotless. McKay apparently didn’t feel the need to contrive some through-story to carry the reader along.. That is a good thing. For me, that kind of thing, plot, in fiction and film has become increasingly annoying feeling so surprefulusly, artificial, as a cheap mechanism of wannabe popular commercial appeal.
In this novel, as in life, there is a series of episodes with a small cast of characters who move through and in and out. In this way, the book feels more real as if it is a fictionalized memoir and there is something very appealing about that over the plot/story thing that we are so often faced with in these fiction forms.

Among the international cast of black man characters there is one who we come closer to. He is another American and a writer. The novel is written in the third person voice, yet it is Ray, the writer and thinker whose thoughts and motivations we become privy to. It is certainly Ray who I felt close to. He is definitely a kindred spirit. Ray is a writer/intelectual. (I am caught in the modern bind of thought and ideas. This causes a constant measuring and distance, a position of observation, connected yet forever separate.) The novel is given its beautifully textured and deep philosophical and political detail through Ray.
He is part of this international gang of four or five, bums and panhandlers. But he gets a bit of money from the USA with a couple instances of selling a poem or two to some unstated publication.
Through clearly more “educated” and book smart than any of the others, he is legitimately egalitarian, he sees and feels the innocent human beauty and all of the others no matter how they might mess up in ways that might be seen as not beneficial to themselves.
He cherishes the uncivilised core in the others and traces that back to the African roots of them all. This is a philosophical rebellion against the enslaving machine of money profit getting ahead Euro-culture that is building the USA empire, it’s ultimate product. You call them savage, He calls them beautiful and naturally human. 

They party and form a little band that plays music in cafes. They drink. They share their windfalls. They eat and get by this way and that. Ships come into port and the cooks share food with this band of beach boys. Some of them have worked on boats themselves and know other sailors who come to port, feed, and party them all. 

Toward the end of the novel we see that things are changing. There is a tightening up. The English boats are not hiring black crewmen any longer. Only whites. A couple of them are arrested and kicked out of the country on the next boat. Passage paid for by the government. But sometimes they remain free, slip away. 

Some  of these changes are mirrored in B Traven’s novel written around the same time The Death Ship.That novel points out that a lot of this clampdown stuff is new. This need to produce “papers” to move freely around the globe. A fact we take as a given now, but according to Traven it is a ghastly new feature of the Industrial age. Before if you could manage to get somewhere, there you were. Free to walk across Europe and enter and leave at will. But these novels are written on the cusp of nationalistic control that is not all too familiar and continues to be on the rise. 

This novel remains powerful and relevant now, a century later because it so clearly sets the case for uncivilization. For the core hunter-gatherer human spirit of the ages that is being wiped out by civilisation’s necessities brought about by one of its major and troubling manifestations. Perhaps over-population contributes to a vicious circle of machine controls and one form or another of enslavement.  

The novel is a sort of “Fuck you modernity. I don’t owe you a damn thing and I will live wild and free on whatever fringe I can find and whatever handout and scam I can come up with without shame for this is the world I have been given to operate in.” It’s more of “I prefer not to” than a hostile tone.   
It is beautiful, wholesome and true in that.
This is a powerful graceful and beautiful piece of work of universal human relevance now and for all time.

All that said it is a man’s a male story. This is acknowledged in the final dialogue, the last paragraph. Banjo states that it’s also part of the current situation that the men can move and live on the fringes: “And theah’s things we can get away with all the time and she just can’t.”
Claude McKay saw things as they were and as they sadly yet also happily still remain 100 years on. How to set it all right? Hell if I know. We play it as it lies. There is no other choice.  
         

Dreamwatcher By Theodore Roszak

This novel is about dreams. The setting is a psychiatric clinic built around a doctor’s research into dream states. He has stumbled upon people who can tap into the dreams of others. He can help guide them into doing this. He can train people with these innate abilities. He can develop them into tools, “instruments”, to explore and indeed, effect, the dreamscapes of others. But early on in his career, some years ago, the potentially good doctor has fallen for the sick bargain of generous funding, a clinic in his name, but the cost is secrecy and control of a government intelligence agency.
The doctor’s instruments, his dreamwatchers are used by the mind control MK-ULTRA wing of intelligence to enter the dreams of people on their hit list and neutralize, discredit them by psychiatric manipulation. 
Roszak humainizes his big story with Deirdre, a dreamwatcher, who we come to know and gain sympathy for. She and the doctor, Devane, are the main players in the story. The doctor is a good guy but is trapped in a devil’s bargain. He wants the world to know and benefit from his work, but it must be kept secret as it has been bought and weaponized by ruthless power. The critical point comes when the doctor is ordered to destroy the serenity, and public stature of a radical Catholic nun from Central America. The CIA just doesn’t want her to get the Nobel Peace Prize.
The character of the nun brings in with her a childhood connection to indiginous  spirituality. She was taken off as a child and initiated by an aunt who was connected to that stream of ancient female shamanic energy, and training; this magic.

The novel tells an exciting suspenseful story around all this.
Is this just a fun fantasy read? Is it just a spy mind control adventure?
Dreams are so important. Are our dreams manipulated by power above us. In the novel to mess with people the dreamwatchers take them to a place of dark emptiness. At this writing Senator Bernie Sanders has just withdrawn from competition for a presidential nomination. In the address that contained his announcement he said something realated to the power of a dream:

"The greatest obstacle to real social change has everything to do with the power of the corporate and political establishment to limit our vision,” he said.

Are we watching over our power to dream? Are we keeping it clear from less than wholesome influence? What dreams, or nightmares, would come from power if it actually could influence our thoughts and mental well being?  Where are the borders between awake and dreaming? Are our stories related to dreams? Do they influence dreams? When we hear a story well told around a campfire, how does part of us enter that story, feel with it? What type of stories attract us? Do the most frightening ones draw us in because we are fragile and must be aware of environmental hazards?  Do we instinctively know we have to look out for danger? Is this being exploited for nothing more than commercial interest? 

This writer is aware of mass media influencing his own dreams. 

This happened just the other night after watching a good movie on a 13” computer screen for picture and stereo headphones for audio. 

The movie was Seberg about actor/activist Jean Seberg. The movie was not so much about her but, not so distant to the theme of Dreamwatcher, about government intelligence operatives messing with her business. They spy on her and ultimately try to destroy her by spreading lies about her. 

It is brought up here, not to review the movie itself but as an example of this powerful medium to enter into dreams. 

That night this viewer had a vivid dream of being with the character of Seberg in the movie in an apartment. This was not his first experience of this sort. In this case the movie was very good and the dream benign. This dream was about fitting into the environment of the lavish new all white NYC tower apartment setting, maybe class anxiety but not with longing, greed, or lust triggered by the movie. 

Yet the movie had the power to enter the dream in this way. An expensive mass media entertainment had the power to do that little trick. It wasn’t the first time and this dreamer is a fully developed elder adult far from the relatively open vessels of children who are increasingly exposed to screen dreams direct from powerful corporations who’s only goal is to manipulate them to increase their profit and power. 

Beyond that militant intelligence is also involved with the CIA using a massive portion of their budget to direct mass media in lines with their interests. 

This is not so from the melodrama of the plot line of Roszak’s very fine and thought provoking novel from the relatively innocent times of the 1980s.

The Tale (2018)

The Tale
Written and directed by Jennifer Fox

This is a complex, well krafted and very effective autobiography movie of a young girl, age 13, who is raped and pulled into an ongoing exploitative association by a male running coach age 40.
Personally, the movie was not an easy entertainment at all.
It is like being inside someone else's nightmare dream, which also parallels one's own.

So much of the movie and these actual situations is reconstructing memory, verifying memory, and discarding memories that have been softened and made more manageable, less horrible. The abuse can be seen as one’s conscious act of righteous rebellion which is natural in a child who can see the flaws in their parent’s troubled relationship and imperfect lives. The child can be alienated by that and seek light and hope by looking up to and following a handy and charismatic, in a child’s eyes, mentor. These memories are dealt with, placated, and reconfigured as a matter of choice by the victim when the reality is far from that. This is well represented in The Tale.

The Jennifer character now, at age 48, is played by Laura Dern. Jenny at age 13 is played by Isabella Nélisse. There is a brilliant and very effective moment involving memory and the casting of the young girl. When Jennifer starts to remember, and we see her past depicted, Jenny is older, played by a 15 year old. But then in a scene looking at old photographs with her mother she is shocked and has to reset the age and the extremity of her innocence at the time of the abusive calamity when she sees a photo of how she really looked when this occurred, at age 13.. From then on young memory Jenny is played by a much younger girl who’s childlike look and contenance of innocence and inexperience cannot be denied.
(This moment really sold the movie to me personally because there is something that went on with me during childhood that I am unable to place without question on the blurry timeline of childhood. Was I 10? Younger? Older? I have reconstructed the age of the boy at 5 years older. Does that make the ratio 10 to 15, 9 to 14, 12 to 17? None of these ratios look good for him and his buddies, but I would like to know what it is for sure.)

The movie deals with this sensitive subject quite explicitly. There is no question of the totality of the phsyical rape. Yet there is not a hint of erotism or gray area in the sexual scenes reenacted. There is text at the end that states that an adult body double is used for these horrible scenes that would not be proper to put a child actor through for the sake of a movie. I wish I could say that for some other films that involve children crisis sexually or otherwise. 

The viewer might want a “trigger” warning for this one. And although a difficult ride, it is so well done and carefully thought through that one can also come out of it with personal insight to the ongoing damage that such an experience causes throughout life even into old age. Is that the reason for one's addictive behavior, lack of a wholesome fulfillment in social life, or spoty career? The reason one hid out wishing not to be noticed?

The Coldest Warrior by Paul Vidich

This is a CIA spy genre novel which steals its plot from the Frank Olson “fell or jumped” story. 

The reader coming to this because of interest in the Olson story might be better off just reading some other account of it. But if they want a heavy dosage of a hero's journey spy story along with pieces of Olson, then maybe read this. The Coldest Warrior doesn’t really work for me because I’m no longer interested in spy novels and that is the book’s main function. The conclusion was quite dramatic in a cinema spy story sort of way. Maybe some filmmaker has already grabbed this one. It has a nice heroic male lead. Righteous story.

This is a story people like to exploit or at least hope to profit from. 

It’s the same story as the Netflix Errol Morris documentary series Wormwood. 

Wormwood was frustrating because it took 6 hours to tell a story. The story ends up getting lost in the details and the reenactments. Six episodes!?! Errol Morris probably wanted to get the word out, but probably didn’t mind the hefty paycheck for a production on that level. 

Fell or jumped?

Tossed.

It’s not a spoiler of this novel. 

Murdered and tossed out the window. Then covered up for decades. 

But the story is about one spy guy trying to find out what other spies were involved with this. 

That’s the story, the mystery plot not to be revealed here. It doesn’t really matter that the Olson character was murdered because he was upset with the USA using biological and chemical weapons in Korea. Perhaps having this as a minor detail that is overshadowed by the main plot of the novel trivializes it as just part of the set for this play story. It might have even helped if it had spelled out exactly why using these things in Korea was so bad.

LSD is a missed opportunity. It is not explored at all. At least it is not to blame for anything. Maybe it makes one more empathetic for a time. Maybe that is part of what happened with Olson. He tripped and saw the error of the path he was following. Some people have that reaction to LSD, don’t they? Well, this is not the novel to discuss all that.

At any rate the book was not my cup of cheap entertainment brewed from something once living into a rather standard manly adventure saga.

Times Square Red Times Square Blue by Samuel R Delany

This one sometimes took me to the same place as reading about what can be a happier life for humans in a hunter-gatherer group. It is the place of emotional frustration for me. The feeling that things could, without a lot of effort, maybe even less effort, be a lot more pleasant. The restrictions of civilization when mixed up so deeply with global capitalism create a reality that we live in that we take to be normal. But who determines “normal”? The current situation, current meaning during my experience, does not feel normal to me. It feels empty and dark and lonely and without much hope of real human connection that is not somehow connected with money. 

This book is all about connection from the most basic to more complex. Much of it centers around sex. Sex with people in public situations and in places of business fexible enough to permit it or even have it somehow built into the business model. Delany describes these places. They were mostly movie theaters and most of them were old rundown places that had shown pornography. Delany describes himself as, for years, a frequenter of such places where he would engage in oral sex with other men. 

Delany is an urban man. Raised in Manhattan. He has the spirit of a city about him and love of the random encounter, sexual or otherwise. I can only report with a great deal of shame what this book clearly showed me about myself. I was already spoiled by the isolation of suburbia before arriving to live in NYC in my early 30s, over 30 years ago. I could just be a temperamentally shy awkward man or that could have been learned in the safety and isolation of suburban life, and this was in Ohio; a conservative place in a conservative time. I never even visited a major city until age 18 when I hitchhiked to NYC by myself. Being honest about my behavior in the city, I now see that I used it as more to escape, hide out, ti become anonymous, and not be looked at too closely since my social skills and impulses were so low. Maybe if I had grown up in the city with more variety of people about, I would not have developed such lonerism. Maybe I would have found a more welcoming community where my impulses could be channeled to play with like-minded individuals rather than half buried in shame, hiding out until it’s all over. Maybe I could have connected with others better. 

I had been to several of these movie theaters he writes about. I remember Variety Photoplays on 3rd ave and the Metropolitan a couple blocks away on 14th St.. Both sites have gone to demolition and new taller buildings some years ago. I mess them, as well as the Cameo on 8th Ave midtown. 

I wasn’t as into the scene as energetically as Delany but I’m not gay, but somewhere on the bisexual scale and from Ohio, etc.

So much of this is about The Enclosure. A major part of the story of modern civilization is about Enclosure, locking away, fencing off what was once collectively free and making it owned and somehow involving a fee of labor or currency for continued usage. First there is free land where plants, animals, and human animals roam free and live from this land the best they can. But then someone wants to own this land and the people end up having to pay some way or other to survive rather than scratch a living out of the land. Or they can still scratch a living but must give the owner a percentage of their efforts to be permitted to continue surviving.  

The sex in the book is to illustrate the varieties of connection. The prime theme is that connection is better than networking. He morns the destruction of the public sex venues in the renovation of Times Square, because they can facilitate “interclass connection” through basic human sexual interest. His stance is basically anti- big capitalism as destructive of small local business that has an intimate connection to the community and street life and that  brings the safety of people around a healthy and diverse street life. 

I think he is missing some big critical part of the Enclosure. He talks about the buildings, the difference between infrastructure and superstructure, which is the skyscrapers that replaced the small, the rundown and the local with big business national brands. 

But this didn’t happen just in the 1990s the process was already going on for decades. It seems to me that most these theaters themselves were an earlier manifestation of local live theater or whatever entertainment being destroyed by the products of the Hollywood movie business already connected to Wall Street investment dazzling us with its powerful superstructure of dreams. The theaters becoming redundant with television and later even porn theaters less in use when one could watch porn at home via VHS cassettes. By the 1980s the theaters were the realm of those interested is some same sex teasing or action or the men who situationally couldn’t watch tapes at home. Of course now this is all on the internet. 

This Enclosure was very late to the city. The suburbs were built that way, with the places the public could go almost entirely limited to commercial venues such as the shopping mall which became the only place for kids to hang out and try to connect. 

There are a lot of people now who have fled the suburbs for a better life in the revitalization cities. But they are pre-conditioned for the Enclosure that is part of the revitalization. Unaccustomed to and unaware of earlier city life, they are most comfortable with the Starbucks and other familiar brands and they bring this brand familiarity and loyalty with them. 

Delany discusses women a bit and how the open, anonymous sex venues are not used by them. He envisions a sort of hostel set up where women could bring strangers or acquaintances in a public setting safer than bringing someone into the privacy of a home. Some women can and do enjoy hookups with strangers, so perhaps that is possible some time in the future as the restrictions of the ideology of the patriarchy, and its women followers, continue to crumble. 

There is a big fat novel Delany wrote about the theater sex called The Mad Man. I read that some years ago. It is rather unique I think.