Twittering Machines

I came across this on the King Midas Sound blog (which I just came across). Be sure to check out Videos that move me to tears when you visit.

Bob Dylan
Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
Original Soundtrack Recording

Director Sam Peckinpah didn’t know who Dylan was when it was recommended he be brought in to write music for his film. So Dylan went down to Mexico to audition:

“Sam says, ‘Who’s Bob Dylan?,’” recalls James Coburn.

“Oh yeah, the kids used to listen to his stuff. I was kinda thinkin’ of that guy Roger whatsisname, King of the Road guy, to do it.” And we all said, “What!! You gotta see Dylan,”…He said, “Okay, bring Dylan down.”…So the night we were over at Sam’s house and we were all drinking tequila and carrying on and halfway through dinner, Sam says, “Okay, kid, let’s see what you got. You bring your guitar with you?” They went in this little alcove. Sam had a rocking chair. Bobby sat down on a stool in front of this rocking chair. There was just the two of them in there…And Bobby played [his songs]. And Sam came out with his handkerchief in his eye: “Goddamn kid! Who the hell is he? Who is that kid? Sign him up!”

The story also goes when Dylan first showed up on the set of Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid to play his part as “Alias”, Kris Kristofferson joined him while director Sam Peckinpah showed them some dailies and Peckinpah was so pissed at the quality of the footage he stood up on his chair and pissed on the screen (Someone should compile all of the ‘people pissing on things’ stories like Jackson Pollock peeing into Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace and separate the book into two sections – people who were drunk when they did it, and people who weren’t). All’s I can say is I love this movie, even the cut-version (sorry Sam), and I love the soundtrack especially “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” (who doesn’t?).

On “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”:

Drummer Jim Keltner cried, “There weren’t any overdubs on that, the singers were singing live, little pump organ, Roger McGuinn I think played [guitar]. This was for a particular scene in the movie when Slim Pickens is dying and that’s the first time I ever cried while I played. It was the combination of the words, Bob’s voice, the actual music itself, the changes, and seeing the screen…In those days you were on a big soundstage, and you had this massive screen that you can see on the wall, [with] the scene…running when you’re playing. I cried through that whole take.”

Jerry Fielding, who was brought in to ‘supervise’ Dylan on his soundtrack, thought, “It was shit.”

Starring Kris Kristofferson, James Coburn, and a cast of the crustiest cowboy character actors this side of Durango – Chill Wills, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Slim Pickens, Barry Sullivan, Dub Taylor, R.G. Armstrong, Elisha Cook, Jr. and Paul Fix. And of course Bob Dylan as “Alias”. Released in 1973 the soundtrack came out the same year.

I had an opportunity to see Eric Clapton perform “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in Philly in the later ’70s and it was the highlight of his portion of that show. Muddy Waters had opened for Clapton which was the highlight of the entire show.

directed by Jonathan Glazer
(spotted on Dangerous Minds)

Jonathan Glazer’s next project is taking on directorial duties for a film adaptation of Michel Faber’s sci-fi-cannibal-tale Under The Skin. And according to the Hollywood Reporter -  “Scarlett Johansson to Play Alien Seductress in ‘Under the Skin’” and “Johansson plays an alien on earth, disguised as the perfect aesthetic form of a mesmerizing woman. She scours remote highways and desolate scenery looking to use her greatest weapon to snare human prey — her voracious sexuality.”

Indeed!

1991 The Year Punk Broke
A film by David Markey

David Markey follows Sonic Youth around on tour in Europe in 1991. Also features Nirvana, Dinosaur Jr., Babes In Toyland, Gumball, The Ramones and surprise guests. Release date September 6, 2011.

Watch some clips.

When I think of Ava Gardner, I can’t help but think of the 1964 film The Night of the Iguana, which was based on the play by Tennessee Williams and adapted for the screen and directed by John Huston. Starring Richard Burton as the Episcopal minister Reverend Dr. T. Lawrence Shannon who ‘left’ his church following a nervous breakdown and an inappropriate relationship with a “very young” Sunday school teacher, he’s now a bus/tour guide in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

Burton jostles a mostly aged group of all-female Baptist school teachers through the sweltering heat and dust while temptation builds with each passing mile. Charlotte Goodall, embodied by the ever tempting then 17-year-old Sue Lyon (who had just a year earlier done some serious damage to James Mason in Kubrick’s brilliant film-version of Nabakov’s Lolita), is after more than Burton’s soul and when her ‘butch’ aunt fires him in an attempt to save her niece’s purity (for herself?), the good Reverend hijacks the bus with the good ladies in it and heads down the coast to Mismaloya where Ava Gardner and her pair of maraca-shaking cabana boys add another twisted angle of temptation and possible redemption.

There once was woman from Nanatucket (Deborah Kerr) and her very aged poet grandfather also await the troupe at Gardner’s jungle resort. Did I mention the good Reverend is also battling the bottle? Queue Tom Waits’ “Temptation” and hang on for the ride of your life. And to add some real-world spice Burton’s off-screen love, Elizabeth Taylor, went along for the ride.

You see that smile on Richard Burton’s face? You would be too…

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Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams based on the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in southern France is coming to a theater near you (well, maybe) in 3D. Discovered in 1994 by Jean-Marie Chauvet and his two friends, Éliette Brunel and Christian Hillaire, the Chauvet Cave contains the oldest cave art yet discovered determined to be between 30,000 and 40,000 years old (that’s like way way before Noah).

Apparently the cave, which lies 400 meters below the ground, was used as some sort of ritual site for thousands of years, a caveman destination resort, as scientists have recently discovered art dating to 10,000 years ago. There are also an abundance of abstract symbols used in the pictograms which means that we’ve had to re-evaluate and re-date our theories concerning when man first began communicating with symbols. “Because of near-toxic levels of radon and carbon dioxide [which cause hallucinations], nobody can stay in the cave for more than a few hours at a time.” Artists and drugs. Some things never change…

The Chauvet cave is closed to the public so this Herzogian-led view will be most people’s chance to see these amazing sites narrated by none other than the master narrator himself.

Shirley Jackson
The Haunting of Hill House

One of the first films I recall seeing as a child that scared me to the bones was The Haunting from 1963 starring Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, directed by Robert Wise (don’t bother with the remake, it sucks). The film was based on the novel The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959) which has been called one of the greatest ghost stories ever written (even though there really are no ghosts).

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone. — the first paragraph of The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (1959)

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Have you seen Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker? Or Solaris or The Mirror? My ex-roommate Gavin first recommended Stalker and I can still remember watching its two-VHS-tape-long intensity and thinking, this is madness.

Tarkovksy carried a Polaroid around wherever he went and these photos from his life and mind’s eye (taken between 1979 to 1984) have been floating around for a while, there’s a book of ‘em, but I was recently reminded to look again by Clara Engel’s FB comment “i’ve been looking at tarkovsky’s polaroids too much.”

They could be my memories.

Or yours.

photo credit: John DeVore

Last night was the first (of many more to come he types with fingers crostssed) Moviehaus. We watched, well, you know from that image, in its entirety. The Final Cut. On BluRay on a big-ass screen. It was amazing. A movie masterpiece. More human than human.

Then we listened to music. The Moviehaus to Monkeyhaus transformation took all of two minutes. We just removed the big-ass screen. Same hi-fi, home theater 2.0. DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/96s and Shindo. What more does a movie/music lover need? (hint: popcorn) Music for the evening consisted of soundtracks only, per the Hauskeeper’s rule. Sometimes its good to have rules. They can make things feel more creative because of their limitations. And watching movies and listening to music with friends reminds us that our own point of view is necessarily limited leaving our world-view enhanced and enriched through shared experience.

Bravo, Mr. Monkeyhaus.

I don’t have much to say about this film other than if you have an interest in Caravaggio and film, see it. While the story follows Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio it also seamlessly floats between the imagined then (1571-1610) and now (1986) with typewriters, tuxedos, motorcycles, cigarettes and calculators fitting into Jarman’s version of the late 16th / early 17th Century. There’s also lots of dark passion of all stripes, Caravaggio was apparently omnivorous, so if you’re offended by depictions of anything other than ‘family values’ you may want to grow up.

Jarman along with production designer Christopher Hobbs, cinematographer Gabriel Beristain, costume designer Sandy Powell and makeup artist Morag Ross (not to mention the actors, the rest of the crew and an un-credited Suso Cecchi D’Amico who said “Cinema should be written with the eyes”) have re-created the light and look of Caravaggio going so far as to stage some of his paintings which, to my eyes and mind, is a visually stunning and thought-provoking treat turning film into paint, paint into film, then into now, now into then, them into us, us into them…

Caravaggio also marks the film debut of Tilda Swinton and to say that she is stunningly luminous is to miss the point, and the stunning and thought-provoking treat, of seeing her act.

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Let The Art Score Card™ be your guide!

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