At his best, Montgomery Clift was a better actor than Marlon Brando. For such a small, slightly-built man Clift had an intensity and depth to his performance that could eclipse Brando—even with all that actor’s realistic improvisations, impressive physicality and “naturalistic body language.”

Clift and Brando, along with James Dean, were the three “Method” actors who revolutionized an actor’s approach to performance. Their technique was about motivation and internal workings, which they used to make acting seem “real.” Clift was the first to bring this style of naturalism to the screen, appearing opposite John Wayne in Red River in 1946. His approach to acting irritated “The Duke,” who was of the “get up say your lines” school of performance, but the acrimony between the two added to the film. But it was his next film, The Search (1947), which alerted Hollywood to a new style of acting, leading one critic to ask the film’s director, Fred Zinnemann “Where did you find a soldier who can act so well?”

While Clift brought a subtly and depth to his work, it was Brando, with his over-wrought performance in Streetcar Named Desire (1951) that won all the attention. The problem for Clift was that he despised Hollywood, and the kind of stupidity the film industry perpetuated. It led to him making several bad choices in movies (rejecting On the Waterfront and East of Eden, pulling out of Sunset Boulevard) that later caused him to be labeled “difficult” and “unreliable.” He was also gay and refused to have his private life manipulated for the benefit of Hollywood publicists, in the way Rock Hudson would acquiesce.

The turning point in Clift’s career was a near fatal car crash that occurred during the filming of the blockbuster historical romance Raintree County with Elizabeth Taylor, in 1956. Clift had been driving home from an evening at Taylor’s place when he lost control of his vehicle. The crash was witnessed by his friend (Invasion of the Body Snatchers star) Kevin McCarthy, who was in a car ahead of Clift. Taylor arrived at the scene, where she removed two broken front teeth embedded in Clift’s tongue, it prevented the actor from choking. The crash left Clift disfigured with a broken jaw and nose, and in constant pain for the rest of his life. It also delayed production on the movie, but made it a box office smash, as fans came to see Clift’s face before-and-after the accident.

If Clift had died in the crash, he would have been lionized like James Dean, probably more so, as Clift had a greater and far more impressive resume of film work, including A Place in the Sun, Hitchcock’s I Confess, and From Here to Eternity. Unfortunately, the accident was the start of Clift’s slow and long descent, as he became addicted to pain killers and drugs in a bid to anesthetize the constant pain he suffered. It led one acting coach to unfairly label Clift’s post-crash career as “the longest suicide in Hollywood history.”

I worked on this documentary about Clift some twenty years ago, it was part of a series called Post Mortem made for Channel 4 television in the UK. The idea of the series was to look at an individual’s life through their medical history and how illness, disease and addiction affected or influenced their work. The others included in the series were Virginia Woolf (bipolar), Nijinsky (schizophrenia), Francis Bacon (asthma), Beethoven (deafness). With Clift, we examined his life through his various ailments, including childhood amoebic dysentery, chronic colitis, hypothyroidism (which caused him to age prematurely), alcoholism, drug addiction, and the tragic effects relating to his car crash. The documentary includes rarely seen home movie footage of Clift taken by his actor friend Kevin McCarthy and interviews with McCarthy, Kenneth Anger, and Clift biographers Patricia Bosworth and Barney Hoskyns.
 

 
South African artist Steven Cohen has been found guilty by a French court of sexual exhibitionism after dancing with a rooster tied to his penis in Paris.

Mr. Cohen was arrested last September, after being seen performing a dance in a square beside the Eiffel Tower, while wearing a corset, stockings, platform shoes, a feathered head-dress, made from a stuffed pheasant, with his penis attached to a rooster. He was jailed for 10 hours, interrogated and had to give a DNA sample and undergo psychiatric evaluation. Though prosecutors had requested a $1400 fine, the criminal court imposed no penalty on Mr. Cohen, as there had been no formal complaint and the artist had not engaged in a sexual act with the rooster.

After the verdict, Mr Cohen said:

“I think the victim is art. I’m not saying I’m going to, but my desire is to complete what was incorrectly halted by the authorities. I’m frustrated because it’s almost like being found guilty but not being punished. It’s like saying, ‘We are right but we are not going to do anything to you,’ which for me is a double injustice.”

As for the rooster, Tricoire (or “Frank” as Mr. Cohen named him), it is now in a chicken coop living “a totally happy life in Normandy.”
 

 
Via Arbroath

 
In 1994, Japanese musician Cornelius began putting out CD re-issues of a long forgotten easy listening group by the name of The Free Design on his Trattoria record label. The Free Design were a family, The Dedricks of Delevan, NY—like The Osmonds or The Jackson 5—and were known for their extremely complex “sunshine pop” vocal harmonizing. The musical clan’s leader was their brother, Chris Dedrick, a classically trained musician. They come off sounding like a very Caucasian version of The 5th Dimension (not that this is in any way a bad thing). The Free Design are much loved by Stereolab, Beck, Super Furry Animals, Peanut Butter Wolf and Pizzicato Five.

The Free Design released seven albums between 1967 and 1972, mostly recorded for Enoch Light’s Project 3 label (Light’s record releases were noted for their extremely high audiophile standards as well as their gatefold sleeves. Project 3 was any early proponent of 4.0 quadraphonic surround sound, including Kites Are Fun). Their best-known album was probably their 1967 debut, Kites Are Fun. It took over 20 years after they disbanded but gradually awareness of The Free Design reached the point where they decided to regroup for a short while and record again. Their songs ended up on The Gilmore Girls, Weeds and on the Stranger Than Fiction soundtrack (and of course, a buttload of TV commercials the world over). Chris Dedrick died in 2010.
 

 

“Kites Are Fun”
 

The best version of the Sesame Street theme you’ll ever hear.
 
Here’s the sole example I could find of The Free Design on television, a 1968 slot on The Mike Douglas Show where they perform “My Brother Woody.” Since the group were a family, their lyrics often had references to “Mom,” “Dad” or “Uncle Bill.”
 

 
Artist Franck Bruneau of the Grévin Wax Museum in Paris prepares Mick Jagger’s head for the opening of a new branch in Prague on Celetná Street.

While the details are impressive, I’m still vaguely horrified by this.

 
They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll is a mildly notorious 2004 Christian indoctrination video series meant to scare kids away from Satanic rock music, and even apparently some easy listening and country and western as well. (Young people have eclectic iTunes playlists and the devil’s minions know this.)

With an awful lot of screen time to fill, the producers of They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll didn’t just go for the more obvious targets—KISS (aka “Kids in Satan’s Service”). Led Zeppelin, Ozzy, Judas Priest, etc—they dug deeper into the Satanic morass, managing to pull Garth Brooks, Billy Joel and even Liberace into their rambling and logically spurious “thesis” which is spread out over either four or ten volumes (there are two versions):

Is it true that Satan is the master musician working behind the popular music scene and influencing our youth?

Fasten your seat belts as you go on an eye-popping ride upon the roller coaster of Rock, and find out how Rock’s most popular artists have Sold Their Souls for Rock and Roll. In this mind-blowing exposé Pastor Joe Schimmel reveals just how Satan has been effectively using popular music to undermine God’s plan for the family and ultimately heralding the coming of the Antichrist and his kingdom on earth.

This full-length video series contains 10 hours of eye-popping, rare, and some never before seen footage that will leave you picking your jaw up off the ground, as you see hundreds of artists (most of whom are not covered in the abbreviated 3-hour version) being used by Satan to destroy many lives. Come behind the scenes with us as we expose the deceptive agendas of many of yesterday and today’s secular artists, such as: Elvis, The Doors, Led Zeppelin, U2, Creed, Madonna, Britney Spears, DMX, Tupac, Tori Amos, and many more.

It’s time to remove the blinders - guard yourself and those you love from one of Satan’s most powerful tools!

Ooh, talk about earnest. Naturally Marilyn Manson gets blamed for a lot of this devilish devilry and figures prominently, but ascribing all that infernal power to a dude who spends two hours doing his make-up before he leaves the house never seems to strike the producers as even the teensiest bit silly…

Pastor Joseph Schimmel is not actually the host of the series, as stated on the box cover—it’s actor Grant Goodeve who you might recall from The Love Boat, Eight is Enough or Northern Exposure. But if that is Schimmel breathlessly reciting the voice over—you can hear his saliva hitting the mic throughout the entire thing, as he repeatedly trips over his words—he should have paid Goodeve the extra bucks to narrate as well as host. It sounds like he’s amped up on crank and drooling the entire time. Say it, don’t spray it, Reverend…

Here’s one particularly good short sample of the, er… charms, I guess, of They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll that explains how Michael Jackson used an Aleister Crowley-style ritual to contact the spirit of Liberace! Crowley gets blamed for everything here, don’t you know? Scroll in to about 2:20 to start.
 

 

 
Part one of They Sold Their Souls for Rock N Roll. Should you wish to torture yourself with more, it’s easy enough to find the rest. I recommend the Amazon reviews.

 
I like teeny-tiny things. I especially like this handmade scale model of The Addams Family set by Los Angeles-based Etsy seller Everyday Miniatures. Paper, foam board, printed paper, time, glue and a lot of patience were used to make this wee set.

You can buy the finished model here or you can purchase the instuctions here to make your own.
 

 

 

 
Below, some rarely-seen color photographs of The Addams Family set from an old TV Guide. I would have never guessed their digs were so… vibrant?! Totally unexpected color choices. Gomez And Morticia Addams liked pink?! Who knew?
 

 

 

 
Via Boing Boing

 
Chester Himes’ early life was as disjointed and chaotic as the crime fictions he later wrote. Born into an African-American family in Jefferson, Missouri in 1909, Himes was witness to the racism endemic in the States at the time. His father worked as a teacher—he was the son of a slave and wanted to instil the value of education in Himes and his brother, Joseph Jr. Their mother thought she had married beneath her worth, and believed that being of lighter skin was the only way to progress in America—his mother’s emphasis on having a white skin color caused Himes some confusion (later reflected in his novels) of what it actually meant to be black. This mismatch of parentage led to an unsettling acrimony between his mother and father that pervaded throughout Himes’ childhood. His mother irreparably damaged the marriage by over-nighting in a “whites only” hotel. The following morning she told the management she was black. Word of the scandal caused Himes’ father to be fired from his teaching post and it was the start of his long and slow decline into poverty and failure.

The one event Chester Himes claimed filled him with guilt and anger was Joseph Jr.‘s blinding at school in a tragic accident. The brothers were to attend a chemistry class where they were to make gunpowder. After misbehaving, Himes was barred by his mother from attending the class. Joseph Jr. went alone, mixed the wrong chemicals—they exploded in his face. Joseph Jr.  was refused treatment at the first available hospital because of segregation. By the time he reached a black hospital, it was too late to save his sight. As Himes later wrote in The Quality of Hurt:

“That one moment in my life hurt me as much as all the others put together. I loved my brother. I had never been separated from him and that moment was shocking, shattering, and terrifying…. We pulled into the emergency entrance of a white people’s hospital. White clad doctors and attendants appeared. I remember sitting in the back seat with Joe watching the pantomime being enacted in the car’s bright lights. A white man was refusing; my father was pleading. Dejectedly my father turned away; he was crying like a baby. My mother was fumbling in her handbag for a handkerchief; I hoped it was for a pistol.”

Himes left high school with below average marks, but had ambitions to continue with his education and passed entrance exams for Ohio State University. Himes was shocked to see the way in which his fellow African-Americans accepted the way they were treated by racist white students. His anger drove him to action. He was eventually expelled after a fist fight with a lecturer. Himes drifted and fell into a criminal life as a pimp, bootlegger and bank robber. He was arrested and sentenced to 20-25-years for armed robbery. Chester Himes was nineteen years old.

To pass his time in jail, Himes started writing short stories about prison life. These were sporadically published in various black magazines—eventually making it into the pages of Esquire magazine. Prison taught Himes how humans will do almost anything to stay alive.

“There is an indomitable quality within the human spirit that can not be destroyed; a face deep within the human personality that is impregnable to all assaults ... we would be drooling idiots, dangerous maniacs, raving beasts—if it were not for that quality and force within all humans that cries ‘I will live.’”

 

 
Released from jail after seven years, Himes started his career as a writer. His early books, If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947) examined elements of Himes’ ambiguous relationship to ethnicity and class.

“The face may be the face of Africa, but the heart has the beat of Wall Street.”

In later years, a friend wrote Himes saying he was “the most popular of the colored writers.” Himes responded:

“What motherfucking color are writers supposed to be?”

Himes was not easily swayed by simplistic political argument, and was critical of Left as much as he was of the Right. Instead he viewed his life as “absurd”:

“Given my disposition, my attitude towards authority, my sensitivity towards race, along with my appetites and physical reactions and sex stimulations, my normal life was absurd.”

Himes never received the acclaim or the respect he deserved when a writer resident in America. It was only after his move to France that he was rightly acclaimed as a writer of great importance, power and originality. It was also in France that Himes began the series of crime novels (the classic “Coffin” Ed and “Grave Digger” Jones series, which included A Rage in Harlem and Cotton Comes to Harlem) that placed Chester Himes on par with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

The following video clips give a good introduction to Chester Himes his life and work.
 

 
More on Chester Himes, after the jump….
 

 
The smart feminists over at Vagenda Magazine (slogan: “Like King Lear, but for girls”) asked their Twitter followers to fix the reflexively, egregiously, hyperbolically, breathlessly sexist tabloid headlines by creating new ones that seem to adhere to the actually humdrum events that happened. The celebrity press can’t exist without maintaining a continuous state of hysteria or high dudgeon over what is really nothing, and we certainly appreciate the corrective measures.

There’s no hashtag, apparently, but just go to the Vagenda twitter feed and you’ll see a bunch of them mixed in with other things.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
via HUH.

Garbage piles up between buildings during the 1976 strike of Local 32B-32J members in New York City.
 
1976 was a real interesting moment for the New York Times to commission a disposable little one-pager on “101 Things to Love About New York City,” but commission it they did. In the mid-1970s New York famously almost declared bankrupt, leading to the immortal Daily News headline of October 30, 1975: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD,” and aside from that, New York’s image (not without reason) was of a violent, cramped, dirty hellhole. It was also something of a creative mecca for artists, musicians, comedians, and what have you—artists could afford cheap lofts in Soho, and the tensions of the city were or would soon be reflected in a remarkably wide-ranging and multicultural brew of rap, punk, avant-garde art, salsa, disco, graffiti, and who knows what else.

The Times piece, by Glenn Collins, appeared in the June 16, 1976, edition. Today such items are commonplace, but one imagines they weren’t so common before the advent of consumer-friendly “alternative” newspapers and the like. The article is amusing for several reasons: the highly mordant tone of the article, the difficulty of thinking up 101 actual reasons to like living in NYC (although such padding is almost a requirement of the genre), the lack of overlap with the reasons some of us would have liked to live in New York, and the utter incomprehensibility of a good portion of the list. The world’s gone from analog to digital, moneyed interests have taken over Manhattan and much of Brooklyn, and well, some things just change.
 

 
Here they are in a more readable format:
 

 
Now, first things first. I was a resident of Staten Island for several years until quite recently, and I’m having difficulty imagining a New York City where the Staten Island Advance, SI’s hardy daily newspaper, is the #6 thing that occurs to a person writing about why to love New York. Thanks to the good works of the ScoutingNY blog, which discovered the list in the first place, and its readers, we know that 873-0404 was the “Dial-A-Satellite hotline, providing you with daily information about passing satellites.”

Anyone know what #45, “Degree days,” signifies? I must confess, I enjoy #46, “More movies, plays and ballet than anywhere else, and not going,” there is nothing more New York than that. Do people remember #12, which referenced strange PSAs the local news would run, or something. I don’t know if they were a local thing or a ‘70s thing in general. I do remember them quite well. The entry at #22, “New York’s proximity to Montauk,” is kind of interesting because the whole Long Island experience has been utterly transformed in the last decade or two; I don’t think anyone actually finds it charming anymore.
 

 
Over on this half of the list, I really enjoy the concept of #85, “the rabbit hanging out near the World of Birds at the Bronx Zoo.” The diaspora reflected in #69, “East Siders on the West Side,” will puzzle anyone who isn’t aware that the Upper West Side was something of a wasteland as far as posh people were concerned, before the creation of the Lincoln Center arts complex in the mid-1960s. “A winning OTB ticket,” at #60, is a little hilarious, considering I’ve never set foot in an Off-Track Betting outlet and would never desire to.

Overall, this is a cranky, creaky, weary list. At least twenty or thirty of the items signify what an awful place New York is, and a handful directly reference the fiscal problems New York was going through.

But most of all, there’s pretty much no mention of the things the average reader of DM would be likely to think of, which probably isn’t very surprising: great music, great art, great food, accessible drugs, an AIDS-free social-sexual environment (can’t fault the NYT for missing that one), cheap downtown rents, the assertion of Latino and African-American and queer identity, public eccentricity everywhere, and on and on.

Not quite contemporaneous but close enough, here’s the annoying 1982 “I Love New York” promotional ad campaign:
 

 
Issachar Ber Ryback was a Russian Jewish painter, sculptor, art critic and arguably the spokesman for the Yiddish avant-garde movement. These lithographs are from his series, Shtetl, My Destroyed Home: A Remembrance. It’s a beautiful work of spastic geometry and destabilizing perspectives, depicting Ryback’s Ukrainian village before its destruction in a pogrom. One might interpret the style as echoing the precariousness of life in the shtetl, even as Ryback depicts a dynamic community, rich with vitality.

Ryback did this work in Russia, but went to Berlin in 1921 after the murder of his father in the Petliura pogroms. There he became a member of the collective of expressionist artists Novembergruppe and he had a very successful career, traveling around Europe and Russia until his death in 1935 from a chronic disease. The work reminds me a lot of the German Expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari which in turn was a big influence on The Night of the Hunter—check them both out if you haven’t already, I implore you. It’s also worth noting that although Shtetl, My Destroyed Home was published in 1922, most of these lithographs were done in 1917, three years before Caligari. Ryback really was on the cutting edge.
 

 

 

 
More after the jump…