WHEN ONE'S OFFSPRING BEGIN THEIR OPPOSITIONAL DEFIANCE, EVEN WHEN THEY HAVE LIBERAL PARENTS....

 

  THE VIEWER ANTICIPATES THE FATHER, WIPING THE CAKE FROM HIS OWN BUTT....AND SMEARING IT ON HIS SON'S BLURTING MOUTH......    EVENTUALLY,  MICHAEL CHAPLIN, STILL IN REBELLION,  DECLARED THAT  HE 'Couldn't Smoke The Grass On My Father's Lawn'...THEN,  'SOLD OUT' TO PEPSI-COLA....ONE YEAR....AND TO 'MILK MARKETING'....THE NEXT......  (AREN'T ALL THE DOGS BARKING AT THE SAME SKY, AFTER ALL?     LIFE IS, IN RETROSPECT,  AN UDDER-FEEDING OF THE PAST TO THE PRESENT, ISN'T IT ?) 

The willing suspension of disbelief still thrives, as critical sensibilities are abandoned beneath the hopes for entertainment pellets, dispensed to lab rat audiences, gazing at screens.......

I sorta and regrettably watched ten minutes of the worse guns, bombs, knives and ninja-kickfighting, cellphone-obsessed, closed-space action film, from a dozen years ago......."NON-STOP"..from the too-young producer of KICKASS 2, Jeff Wadlow.....Even with great actors...in this drivel for the bucks Mall movie...... The cast: Liam Neeson, Julianne Moore, Lupita Nyong'o and Linus Roache should turn their "serious" acting shingles to the wall~! This junky movie makes even Marvel and D.C. Comics junk seem intellectually valid and plot-perfect......I should have taken a clue, since it was double-billed with a billion buck comic book adaptaflick, CAPTAIN AMERICA....something or another capeless men-in-lycra movie for the infantiles that have abandoned their teddy bears to the muzzles of their dogs and moved on to wanton cruelty.

ROOTIE KAZOOTIE

 

My grandfather got a Televiewing apparatus, housed in a bulky cabinet, in 1949....soon, there appeared such silly stuff as Captain Midnight, Winky Dink and Rootie Kazootie....... I still have the "magic decoder", the "magic screen" and my Rootie doll, a constant companion to the wooden modelling doll and Scarlett...yum, yum.......let's make a Kazootie Witch peanut butter, banana and jelly sandwich.

AND.....THERE WAS "WINKY DINK"..........



makes the junk on kiddy tv, now, look pretty sophisticated, doesn't it? {it was fun to draw on the screen, though...i had to remember to wipe the screen before my grandfather watched Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, however}

STEP INTO THE DISSECTION ROOM AND LOCK THE DOOR......DISCUSSION OF 'THIS STUFF' IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN IN THESE PARTS, YOUNG MAN!

 

Noticing the re-make of Inherit the Wind was on TV, and not having seen the 1960 version since I was in 10th Grade.......I watched a few minutes of the 1999 movie re-make of Jerome Lawrence's great play; quickly, thinking 'Why did 'they' bother to make a 'new' version? To remake it 'in color'....or with 'newer actors'? The minutes that I watched, dredged up memories of my asking 'Mrs. Burke', my 10th grade Biology Teacher some questions about both the Film,...that had been 'condemned' in Alabama and withdrawn from The Lyric Theater that year.....and about 'Evolution'......Mrs. Burke asked me to join her in 'the dissection room'...appropriately!.....and said "you're right, Reeder, but I'd be fired from the School System if I admitted that in front of others...." Living in Rocket City", one would think that Science and Truth would be priorities in "High" school.....T'warn't that way until after the Social Revolution that was soon to sweep through the minds of American Youth....just a couple of years in the Future......In 1957, I was taken from my Jr. High School classroom...to the badminton court, and beaten ........with a wooden paddle....... for refusing to "pray" in 8th grade Home Room...."Just gimme some Truth", I thought...... But 'You have to find out....for yourself'....especially when you have to share the Cave, not with Plato, but some club-wielding Neanderthals.......

"I'm just a Disestablishmentarianist Reporter.......Don't handcuff and lock me away......" I would have protested, then, as I was ordered to 'tuck tail' and apologize for my Irreverential Moments during 5th Period English Class.....

Last night, I watched "THE INNOCENTS".....one of the several adaptatations of Henry James' end of the 19th C. novella, "THE TURN OF THE SCREW"......This brought back memories of an 'oral book report' that I delivered during a 12th Grade High School English Class, during which...I was interrupted a couple of times...by classmates that objected to my unredemptive lack of Religiosity.....although the class' teacher, later, awarded me the only "Excellent" as a reward for my precocious efforts......Some of my classmates would have preferred that I be smothered by a pillow of repressive punishments, if only a few 'tongue lashings', for being a 'free thinker' during an Era of Ultra-Conservatism....especially in The South.....just a couple of years before the massive cultural upheavals and unrest of the middle 1960's.....My refusal to acknowledge 'GOD', later, led me to be sent to the auditorium to 'sit alone with my thoughts', before returning to the classroom.......lest I challenge the cursive mediocrity of most of the other 'Book Reports'........I, certainly, 'got' the reasons that Miles had been expelled from boarding school...for being a 'smart ass', and that his prim and proper Righteous Christian Governess was a nut job, working behind any real intellectual depth, because of her own straight-laced corseted childhood, denied any sojourns in the moonlit garden of Good and Evil during this fitful Walpurgisnacht..... It's 11:31, Miss Giddens,.......time to pull the covers over your head and return to The Big Sleep....but, first, blow out the candles, in a gust from George Auric's beautiful soundtrack, lest the shadows twix dreamers' lids' initiate any fearful introspections or the faint light provide an exit venue from your fixed, guilt-ridden view, obfuscated...momentarily... by the fall of scented flower petals....(as photographed by Freddie Francis)....I thought, then: "In six minutes, I'll be seated...securely....in Mamie Steger's Solid Geometry Class....."Safe" from such intolerance, secured by the "Safety of Numbers", Logic and Analytical Thinking.......and out of this stinking 'Bible School'! " I wonder.....hmmm.....what take Rainer Werner Fassbinder would have had, were he to have lived a bit longer, on another remake of this movie....... and what orphaned Miles would have accomplished, as an adult, had he not been smothered to death by his Governess' pre-encephalopathologically-assuaging pillow of choking ambiguity.......

REFLEXIONS ON RE-WATCHING 'MIDNIGHT COWBOY' A HALF CENTURY 'LATER'......

 

I'd was in NYC during the filming of MIDNIGHT COWBOY around the W44th Street Slums....hanging out on 47th Street, where I'd met some 'cool characters' in 1963, during my high school's 'Senior Class Trip'....in search of 'People Like Me'......then, Beatniks, that hung out in divey joints, reading their poetry to improvisational 'on stage' guitar & flute 'jazz'..     Hansel and Gretel McAlbertsen were Midnight Cowboy's alters for Gastone (Paul) Rosilli and  Viva Hoffman, who introduce Buck and Ratso to the Factory World of Taylor Meade, Paul Morrisey, Ultra Violet,  International Velvet and the World of drug-obsessed tripping 'over' the light fantastic and down the stairs to the hard floor of Reality.....a baker's dozen years or more before the hedonistic clean-up brought Studio 54 to contain the scrubbed and re-fashioned narcissists that disco'ed under the mirror balls that reflected the shallow glamour that had displaced the grunge and filth of Joe Buck and Ratso's Rizzo's urban Fantasy World.....

NOTICING THAT THE 1957 "Tracy/Hepburn" movie, "THE DESK SET", WAS BEING SHOWN ON TURNER CLASSIC MOVIES......

      I THOUGHT,  TODAY,   ABOUT HOW PREDICTIVE THE FILM WAS, WHEN IT WAS FIRST RELEASED......AND WAS, MOMENTS AGO, REFLECTING ON IT'S 'MEANING'.....  I PLAYED SAMMY OGG'S CHARACTER, KENNY,  IN A 'RUN-THROUGH'  PRODUCTION.. WHEN I WAS IN 6TH GRADE AND HAD JUST VIEWED A GIGANTIC  PRE-ANTHROPOMORPHIC "FAIL-SAFE" COMPUTER, RECENTLY ASSEMBLED AT REDSTONE ARSENAL'S 'ARMY MISSLE COMAND CENTER' , IN HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA,  IN THE EARLY 1960'S.....A TECHNOLOGICAL PRECURSER OF 'THE FORBIN PROJECT'S "COLOSSUS" AND, OF COURSE, THE 'HAL 9000'....   TODAY....AN AVERAGE BONEHEAD CARRIES, IN HIS HAND....MORE COMPUTING POWER WITHIN THE CIRCUITRY OF HIS UBIQUITOUS MOBILE PHONE......NEITHER REQUIRING THE INTELLIGENCE NOR THE WIT OF KATHERINE HEPBURN OR EVEN HER OBEISANT ASSISTANT, RUTHIE SAYLOR....{PLAYED, INCIDENTALLY, BY SUE RANDALL....AKA "MISS LANDERS" OF "LEAVE IT TO BEAVER" FAME..... IN HER ONLY MOVIE APPEARANCE......}   

"LOVELY TO LOOK AT" Adrian's Fashion Excesses of 1952

the gowns/costumes in all the SAG and GOLDEN GLOBES, EMMYS, and the ACADEMY AWARDS SHOWS keep Fashion Trendiness on a linear path of Surrealistic Over-The-Topness......Perpetuated, with some humor...well, a lot of humor.......on RU PAUL'S DRAG RACE  and PROJECT RUNWAY......

tell us about it, Tilda!  what!...a bare head???

Doesn't 'everything' have an effect on 'everything else'? "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds"

In a philosophical mood, this morning.....I thought of this film, that I'd not seen in many decades.....The internal dialogue of Matilda "Tillie" Hunsdorfer reminding me of my own childhood, immersed in a Gilbert Chemistry Set, a terrarium that represented...to me...a microcosm for the Universe, and meditations on a world that I fantasized, existed beneath a huge boulder in our back yard, where the Akashic Records existed within small chrome-like spheres that could be played in a device that had been left there by aliens, a billion years before........

this led to 'sessions' with a shrink...and a battery of tests to evaluate my sanity......The Psychiatrist determined that I was merely an artist, with a vivid imagination and who was squarely in the center of the Masculinity/Femininity continuum.........I was relieved to be released from others' constructs and prejudices about what and whom we/I should be........Nothing is forgotten.......Everything is remembered, if only  for the amount of time it takes for light to pass over a  hydrogen molecule.  

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I'll ask Guy Maddin about this 'matter'......

Guy knows all about the Grand Malaise....

if his Films are any indications......