Then came Johnny Guitar, On Dangerous Ground, and, most recently, Criterion‘s bang-up resissuing of 1956’s Bigger Than Life. James Mason plays a milquetoast school teacher, who, thanks to the “miracle drug” Cortisone, releases with near-tragic consequences his inner Übermensch. You can watch a great, Mason-hosted trailer for the film here.
If you haven’t seen Bigger Than Life, please do—it remains one of the more scathing critiques of the “American Dream” ever committed to film.
After dying 31 years ago this month, Nicholas Ray popped up again in yesterday’s NYT. During the years preceding his death, Ray devoted himself to his experimental film, We Can’t Go Home Again.
Made in collaboration with his college students at the time, segments of the film pop up in Lightning Over Water, but now Ray’s widow, Susan, in honor of what would have been her husband’s 100 birthday, is assembling a full print of We Can’t Go Home Again for next year’s Venice Film Festival:
“It was an experimental film, a difficult film and I think a visionary film that is particularly important today,” Ms. Ray said from her home in Saugerties, N.Y., where she has also been organizing the storehouse of original scripts, notes and movie storyboards for a sale. Ray worked on the project from 1972 to 1976 with students he taught at Harpur College at the State University of New York at Binghamton. An early version was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1973, but Ray continued to revise, reshoot and re-edit it until his death. The film employs what Ray called “mimage” (short for multiple image), in which a number of camera images are simultaneously projected on the screen.
In certain respects his ideas were ahead of their time. On screen Ray and the students play versions of themselves, a conceit that smoothly fits into this era of reality television. Today’s digital techniques would also make it easy to create the effects Ray painstakingly tried to achieve on a shoestring budget. Ray and his students, for example, used Super 8 millimeter and 16 millimeter formats and early video technology, projected the images onto a screen and then refilmed these multiple images using a 35 millimeter camera.
Jean-Luc Godard famously called Ray, “the camera,” and for a man whose conflicts—bisexuality, drug and alcohol abuse—always seemed on the verge of overwhelming his talents, it’s not surprising the director’s life was the subject of more than one documentary.
What follows is another look at Ray, ‘74’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself. Directed by David Helpern Jr. and James C. Gutman, the doc covers Ray’s Harpur College teaching years, and features several sequences of Ray working on We Can’t Go Home Again. Remaining parts follow at the bottom.
In light of Dennis Hopper’s recent passing, it’s also definitely worthwhile checking out Wenders’ The American Friend. Hopper plays Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, and Ray, in the opening scene, contributes a small but impactful cameo as a painter who’s faked his own death. That scene, restaged with a frail and sickly Ray, opens Lightning Over Water.
I’m a Stranger Here Myself, Part II, III, IV, V, VI
A wonderful first-hand account of the 1969 Palm Springs Pop festival by my friend, the great rock ‘n’ roll photographer Heather Harris.
The Palm Springs Pop Festival, April 1, 1969, a music event a tad bigger quantitatively than the more celebrated Monterey Pop Festival of the same era although smaller by many triple digits than the later that summer Woodstock, was peopled by some eight thousand strong in drug-fueled hippie-dancing young souls. It was my first time attending a show that blocked off the front of the stage from the audience or photographers like me. I was as determined then as I am now to get good live shots, so I just tore down the chicken wire, entered the rarified area and took the following photo of The Flying Burrito Brothers, (left to right the legendary Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, Chris Ethridge and Sneeky Pete) all accoutered in their infamous custom Nudie suits, Gram with cannabis leaves and pills, Sneeky with pterodactyls etc. I only got this one shot of The Burritos because suddenly eight thousand people rushed forward to join me and I was terminally jostled from any further photography. It was uncomfortable amongst the new surging throngs, it was cold in the desert night air, the two bands we wanted to see had canceled, we’d seen the remaining other acts before, and my friend was starting to get drugsick, so we left. But apparently those pushing stagewards continued in their spirit of surging and mobbing, and eventually rioted throughout tony Palm Springs all the way to the Taquitz Falls park. It was one of the first instances in failure of concert crowd control ending in rioting, quite some months before Altamont, and I, dear reader, may be responsible for its inception. Later I would find access to stage photography limited by far more than chicken wire fencing, instead by micro-managing control freaks associated with the acts, and that has proven in long run a far more formidable obstacle to good photography than any 8,000 person riot behind me.
(C) 1969 Heather Harris
Myself, I adore The Flying Burrito Brothers. So much so that I had their brilliant pedal steel player, the late Sneaky Pete Kleinow play on the first Medicine record. Here’s a great clip of them lip-syncing the first song from their first album :
“The Alchemy of Things Unknown” exhibit intends examines individual works of art in relation to theosophy, sacred traditions and devotional practice. From William Blake’s illuminated works of divine imagination to Carl Gustav Young’s drawings of collective symbolic unconscious, the artists in this exhibition sought after or seek spiritual truths through art making.
Artists include Paul Laffoley, Harry Smith, Marjorie Cameron, Willian Blake, Austin Ossman Spare, Scoli Acosta, Kenneth Anger, Aleister Crowley, Zach Harris, Susan Hiller, Alfred Jenson, Angus MacLise, JFC Fuller, and Marilyn Manson.
Khastoo Gallery, 7556 W. Sunset Blvd., Los Angeles; 323-472-6498
Image: “Kwaw”: an undated self-portrait by English occultist Aleister Crowley done in the 1920s, part of the exhibit at Khastoo Gallery through July 31. Courtesy William Breeze.
Amusingly the Japanese press is now “debunking” this article’s claims, which appeared in the Korea Times. Not that she didn’t say this, and not that she’s not having sex with the Chinese students. It’s just that Anri Suzuki apparently has no PhD!
Japanese AV star with a doctorate, Anri Suzuki, 24, is having sex with Chinese students for free in Japan to apologize for her country’s invasion of China.
Suzuki won her doctors degree in history at one of the prestigious universities in her home country. Unlike other graduates, she focused on the Japanese invasion of China; writing the paper “The History of the Japanese Invasion into China.”
“We have to respect history and cannot obliterate it. I want to cure the wounds of Chinese with my body, and I am practicing this by having sex with Chinese students in Japan,” she said. “I think it is psychological compensation to them. Actually, Chinese students treat me more friendly and comfortably than Japanese.”
Today, writing on Esquire’s Politics blog, Esquire’s executive editor Mark Warren posted this rather succinct piece about what GOP Rep. Joe Barton (TX)—a man who has received over $1.5 million in campaign donations from oil and gas interests—had to say about the BP oil spill catastrophe in his “apology” to BP and what it says—LOUDLY AND CLEARLY—about the Republican Party and whose side they are on. Hint: It’s not the people of the Gulf coast and it sure as hell ain’t mother nature’s side either. This is an ASTONISHING admission and something everyone in this country—even the Tea partiers—should read. The ones who can read, I mean…
Just when you thought nothing could improve upon the statement released yesterday evening by the Republican Study Committee’s chairman Tom Price of Georgia — which attacked the deal struck at the White House yesterday providing for the $20 billion escrow account to compensate the people of the Gulf Coast for damages as “Chicago-style shakedown politics” — came the unthinkable: This morning, Texas Republican Joe Barton apologized to Tony Hayward — twice — and said that he was ashamed that such a thing could occur in America.
He apologized.
Now, it was puzzling enough that the Republicans would think it wise to attack a deal that seeks to make American citizens whole from damages caused by a foreign corporation. But it is incomprehensible that even a lobby puppet such as Barton would place the Republican Party squarely on the side of the corporation and against the people of the Gulf Coast.
In so doing, in one five-minute opening statement in a hearing that otherwise seemed to be yielding nothing meaningful, Joe Barton may have changed the calculus of this fall’s elections.
His party will protest and say otherwise, but Barton has revealed something quite extreme and very ugly about what he and his colleagues truly believe.
—snip—
So today, in Washington D.C., Joe Barton has placed himself and his party so far outside the bounds of decency that he has even Tony Hayward shaking his head.
It is important to note that Joe Barton is not popularly regarded in his caucus as a whackjob. Rather, as the ranking Republican on Energy and Commerce, he is well-respected. He cannot be marginalized as an outlier. This moment cannot simply be allowed to pass. And its importance cannot be overstated.
George W. Bush once famously said: “You’re either with us or against us.”
Indeed.
THERE SHOULD BE A MOVE TO IMPEACH THIS SON OF A BITCH TOMORROW. WHAT ARE THE PEOPLE OF TEXAS WAITING FOR AFTER THIS?!?!?! NEED ANY MORE EVIDENCE THAT JOE BARTON IS A FUCK? I DON’T THINK SO!
The Joe Barton Apology Tour Is About to Bring Down the GOP (Esquire)
(Via Esquire’s newly minted News and Features editor at Esquire.com, Dangerous Minds pal Marty Beckerman! Congrats are in order for both Mr. Beckerman and for one of the most venerated magazines in American, Esquire, for making such an inspired hire as Marty. Salut!)
Eight days after the West End premiere of the play based on his autobiography, Dandy in the Underworld, top-hatted London-based extreme artist and lifestylist Sebastian Horsley was found dead this morning at age 47 of an apparent heroin overdose.
Born to wealthy alcoholics, Horsley is best known for traveling to the Philippines to be crucified as part of his research for a set of paintings dealing with the topic. But besides his arcane fashion sense, penchant for whoring, and ability to make the scene—running with the likes of Nick Cave, Current 93, Coil and others—Horsley was an accomplished painter and writer, and a guy with a drawling accent who could hold court in a red velvet chair with the best of them.
The Soho Theatre cancelled tonight’s performance of Dandy…, but will continue on tomorrow. Our own Richard Metzger put it best when told the news: “How sad that the world has one less total pervert.”
I’m not sure who made the smart-ass tweak to the truly puke-worthy “painter of light” artist and accused drunk driver Thomas Kinkade‘s work (above) but I would surely like to kiss them.