Thursday, March 29, 2007

Trippin' the Heavy Fantastic

I Am Not of This World
I'm watching teevee (absolute fantasy--everything on teevee--everything, even the lottery numbers). I'm watching one of the CSI shows, the Vegas one--believe it or not, the Vegas CSI is much more believable than the others.

In this one, six showgirls (it's always girls, show or not) are found murdered in this house where they all lived. They're all tied up and all murdered as viciously as these CSI shows dare show--these girls all had their throats slit--and they are pretty daring with the graphic realities, especially during the scenes in the pathologist's lab where they dissect the bodies, you know, like gut them, or saw off the tops of their craniums--they show that very graphically--I mean with superPhotoShop applications these graphics geniuses can produce just about any damn realistic-looking thing they please--but still, there's something phony about them.

This is why horror movies never scared me. I always saw the papier mache qualities of the props used to scare hell out of you, especially kids. You know, like King Kong--he looked so damn phony to me--I didn't see the filmic qualities of those complicated graphics, all hand created in those days, you know, miniatures shot from angles where they look giant--or the use of a blue screen--I think they've used blue screens all the way back in the Dark Ages of Hollywood-type film.

I have been frightened by the drama of a film: Dali & Bunuel's Un chien andalou caught me offguard--you know, the eyeball-shaving scene. Shit, that happened so quick it made me gasp, though I looked at it, stared it right in the eye, in other words.

Another movie gave me a chill. Bergman's Cries and Whispers, about a woman dying at the beginning of the 20th Century among her frightening sisters. The chill came because of the exquisite cinematography of the great Sven Nykvist, a dude I've already praised in a previous post--the darkest camera work I've ever seen--darkest in the sense of how he used the black and whiteness of this hallway leading back to the bedroom where this beautiful woman is dying in this huge white bed--boy, that's a creepy scene--approaching that bedroom as if with Death itself, Death's shadows slipping along the white wall with the darkness outside--all done with camera work--no physical presence just Nykvist using the lighting and different shades created by those patterns combined with the right motion--movement of the camera. Scary as hell; especially when you dig Bergman's Swinbergian-type mind.

But, Jesus, how violent and bloody these CSI shows are--this one I'm watching tonight dealing deeply with death, with watching people die, this one dude talking to this CSI babe about how many people he's watched die--looking into dying eyes. Morbid and macabre.

Have you noticed how many military recruitment ads are running on network teevee these days--I saw three during the NCAA basketball tournament, an especially deceiving one put out by the Army that makes it seem just by joining the army you're suddenly a major player in a career field (yeah, a career soldier), you know, like showing a black dude dressed in a cap and gown, you know, graduating from college, followed by this same dude in his Army dress uniform standing in front of the flag and some other best and brightest boys and girls all wearing dress uniforms--during the whole commercial there is no sight of war or what the Army really does--no sign of that. At least the Air Force ads say you'll be flying a hi-tech-operated jet plane, though they don't say why you're flying the plane--you know, shows no bombs blowing the hell out of an Iraqi hospital. The best one is the Marine ad. Oh my God, you would think the Marines are the most honorable and gentlemanly of all the armed services. The Marines have an ad that opens with the words "They've stormed beaches defending our freedoms..." on and on how the Marines builds MEN--oops, aren't there women gyrenes? Jarheads we Army 6-month wonder officers used to call the gyrenes. My brother was a Marine--he was really Navy but he was assigned to the Marines and wore a Marine uniform and emblems--plus he was a proud member of the Marines Who Served in China organization, carrying their card in his billfold with him to his grave.

One of my very best friends in Santa Fe was a Marine--he's the drummer I wrote about a few posts back, the guy who had to take Thorazine to keep himself from going stark-raving destructive and mean, and that Thorazine worked like steroids on him, you know, made him strong as a bull. He was a Marine. He told me his commanding officer was still alive, in his nineties, and that he still made the Corps reunion dinners and was in splendid shape, as all Marines were always supposed to be. Marines are nuts. But then, isn't anybody who volunteers to go and kill or be killed nuts?; the Marines are a volunteer branch like the Navy and the Air Force. The draftees went to the dog soldier Army as combat troops--draftees were poor ass dudes who were too dumb to get college deferments and too F-ing poor to have their daddies bail them out of action.

Now the U.S. Army is volunteer; it really scares me to see a young man volunteer to join the Army. Why? Most of those who die in our wars are dog soldiers; combat troops; tank troops; airborne troops; artillery units...those are the ones who get killed. A lot of pilots got shot out of the air but they survived--like Cap'n John McCain, whose plane was shot down by the Cong and he was captured after he bailed out of his plane--and boy did they F old John up--he has to be crazy, doesn't he? Georgie Porgie Bush was right when he shot old Cap'n McCain down when he tried to run for president--said VietNam had made old John crazy as a bedbug. I agree with the Bush Boy on that one. Hey, Bush figured out a way to get out of that war; how come John McCain was too stupid to get out of it?

What a world. That's what I mean by I never have really felt a part of this world. Could my seed have been blown in from another galaxy? Buckminster Fuller believed we were riding on this earth spaceship being blown across the universe by solar winds like a cottonwood ball's seeds are blown in the wind to eventually reach their destinations, that place where they land and start a new cottonwood planet.

More Jack Spicer
"Look I am King Of The Forest
Says The King Of The Forest
As he growls magnificently
Look, I am in pain. My right leg
Does not fit my left leg.
I am King Of The Forest
Says The King Of The Forest.
And the other beasts hear him and would rather
They were King Of The Forest
But that their right leg
Would fit their left leg.
'Beauty is so rare a thing,' Pound sang.
'So few drink at my fountain.'"

[From Fifteen False Propositions Against God, II, The Collected Books of Jack Spicer, Black Sparrow Press, Los Angeles, 1975.]

"So few drink at my fountain," so sez Ez.

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler

Boys Choir of Harlem Dude Gives Up the Ghost

Boys Choir of Harlem founder dead at 62

Walter Turnbull died in a New York City hospital on Friday, March 23. He had suffered a stroke several months earlier. Turnball was born in Mississippi and studied music at Tougaloo College. He moved to New York to be an opera singer, eventually performing with the New York Philharmonic. Turnball founded the Boys Choir of Harlem in 1968 at the Ephesus Church. The choir provides music training and personal counseling to hundreds of inner-city teenagers. The choir has released over a half-dozen albums and can be heard on the soundtracks to movies including Jungle Fever, Malcolm X, Bobby, and Glory. Turnball was 62.

Sources: Associated Press, boyschoirofharlem.org

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