Memory and Forgetting

Forty years ago today was one of those days that I remember all too well. In the early morning of Wednesday, 5 June 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was shot by an assassin shortly after finishing the victory speech he gave upon winning the California Democratic Presidential primary. He survived the day, but would die the next, on June 6. I say I remember the day (bits and pieces), although I don't remember the moment itself. The funny thing is, I remember watching the news report about his primary victory and privately celebrating it, but in those days television stations signed off at midnight, and hence I'd gone to bed a couple hours before the shooting happened (Central Time). At the time, my parents owned a business, a bowling alley, and normally they weren't able to close much before 1 or 2 a.m.--very late. I remember my father waking me up when he and my mother arrived home after closing the place, and told me the terrible news (apparently hearing about it on the radio). Although it was highly unlikely that my father would have voted for Robert Kennedy--he was a "staunch" Republican--I think he and my mother (who probably would have voted for RFK) were both very upset by the event. The memory of John F. Kennedy's assassination was not all that far distant in the past, and two months earlier, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated; although King's and Kennedy's assassinations were two months apart, my memory has collapsed the time between them into contiguous events, one right after the other.

I was just a teenager at the time, but I remember the summer of 1968 being a terrible one--the Democratic Convention in Chicago, likewise a disaster, was just two months away. For reasons I no longer remember, Robert Kennedy was a very powerful figure for me (the figure of the martyred JFK perhaps a reason, but certainly not the only one), and hence I cannot explain the reason for it, but I do remember how badly I took the news of RFK's death. I remember the day after he died, I was sitting by myself at the front counter of the bowling alley--it was open for business, but there wasn't a soul in the place except for me--and sobbing over the news of his death. Again, I can't tell you precisely why. I no longer remember. Youth, naïvete, the historical moment, the power of the media.

The location of his assassination, the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, is now gone, and with it, of course, the pantry off the Embassy Room, where the actual shooting took place. The Ambassador Hotel opened in 1921, designed by renowned architect Myron Hunt, who also designed the Rose Bowl Stadium, among other famous buildings in L.A. Located at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, it was about four miles south and east of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood. Six Academy Award ceremonies were held there--including the ceremony the year Gone with the Wind swept the Awards. The Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove became famous for live entertainment on the West Coast for decades. Amid controversy, the Ambassador Hotel was pulled down in 2006.

One can't imagine the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas being pulled down, but then Robert F. Kennedy, despite his popularity at the time, hasn't captured the public memory like John F. Kennedy. The location of one assassination is memorialized--become part of the official cultural memory, while the location of the other has been erased. These disparities reveal the writing of history itself, which is always both an act of remembering, and forgetting.

Gunslingers and Guitarschlongers

Last time I wrote about the significance of the album cover to Bo Diddley's Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger (Checker, 1960; pictured in the blog entry below). I observed that Bo Diddley wasn’t the first black musician to appropriate the iconography of the American West for an album cover; as Michael Jarrett has pointed out, jazz great Sonny Rollins did that, with Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957). Subsequently, the association of the popular musician with the myths of the American West--in particular, the musician as outlaw hero--became a significant one in the 1960s. I suggested that by appropriating the image of the outlaw hero for a generation of rock ‘n’ roll musicians, Bo Diddley became an iconic figure of rock 'n' roll, not simply a musical inspiration. Bo Diddley's album was released at the beginning of the 1960s. During the decade of the 60s, through a process that Robert Christgau calls a "barstool-macho equation of gunslinger and guitarschlonger," the musician as outlaw was formed, and his image, formerly associated with the values of the bohemian subculture, became, according to Michael Jarrett, "an icon recognized by all and embraced by many" (200). According to Robert Ray, the musician as outlaw stood for "freedom from restraint, a preference for intuition as the source of conduct, a distrust of the law, bureaucracies, and urban life" (255).

Outlaw iconography became a metaphor for individuality, integrity, and self-reliance. In addition to albums such as The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo (1968) and the Eagles' Desperado (1972) that I mentioned last time, we can also add the following albums and songs. Perhaps a key album in the development of the popular musician as outlaw hero was Bob Dylan's John Wesley Harding (1967), in which he merged his own biographical details with the figure of the notorious Texas outlaw. Hence Jimi Hendrix's decision to cover "All Along the Watchtower" is much more deliberate than it at first may seem. The following list of albums with frontier imagery is not intended to be an exhaustive list, merely an indication of how widespread was the appropriation of the imagery of the American West.

Duane Eddy - Have 'Twangy' Guitar, Will Travel (1958)
Bo Diddley - Have Guitar, Will Travel (1959)
Duane Eddy - Songs of Our Heritage (1960)
Bob Dylan - John Wesley Hardin (1967)
Quicksilver Messenger Service - Happy Trails (1968)
The Flying Burrito Brothers - The Gilded Palace of Sin (1969)
The Jimi Hendrix Experience - Smash Hits (1969) (back cover; pictured)
Mason Proffit - Wanted! Mason Proffit (1969)
The James Gang - Rides Again (1970) (and numerous other album titles)
Mason Proffit - Movin' Toward Happiness (1971)
War - The World is a Ghetto (with "The Cisco Kid") (1972)
Bob Dylan - Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid (1973)
Willie Nelson - Red-Headed Stranger (1975)
Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Tompall Glaser, and Jessi Colter - Wanted! The Outlaws (1976)

Reggae musicians adopted the image of the outlaw hero as well: the late Jimmy Cliff with The Harder They Come (1972) and The Wailers with "I Shot the Sheriff" (1973). The so-called "Outlaw" movement in country music picked adherents as well, such as David Allan Coe, with his album Rides Again (1977). And, eventually, even a rock band from the American South named itself the Outlaws. The eponymous first album of the Outlaws was released in 1975, by which time the musician as outlaw was well over a decade old.

Bo Diddley: Outlaw Hero, 1928-2008

And so Bo Diddley, author of the so-called “Bo Diddley Beat,” one of the foundational figures in rock ‘n’ roll, is dead at age 79. There is a comprehensive obituary here, a fine appreciation by Iggy Pop (written some years ago for Rolling Stone Magazine) here, and a post-mortem tribute to Bo by Dave Alvin, once of The Blasters, here. I cannot add anything substantial to what others have astutely observed about his contributions to American popular music, but I do think that his influence on rock ‘n’ roll is more than simply musical. Although, ironically, he later became a law enforcement official, I think a great part of his allure was his image as an outlaw hero.

Pictured above is the album cover to Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger (Checker, 1960), in which Bo anticipated the black cowboy, and hired sheriff of Rock Ridge, Cleavon Little, in Blazing Saddles (1974) by some fourteen years. (The Count Basie Orchestra, incidentally, was featured in Mel Brooks' film playing jazz in the wide-open desert.) Bo Diddley wasn’t the first black musician to appropriate the iconography of the American West for an album cover—jazz great Sonny Rollins did that, with Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957)—and Herb Jeffries, who once sang with Duke Ellington’s band, had played a black cowboy in the 1930s, in Harlem on the Prairie (1937), Bronze Buckaroo (1938) and Harlem Rides the Range (1939). I choose to think that Bo Diddley saw these films as a kid, later inspiring him to conceive of this album cover.

But if the album cover of Sonny Rollins’ Way Out West, as Michael Jarrett observes, associated the jazz musician with the myths of the American West—“the musician as outlaw hero; the music as a movement or push outward” (p. 197)—Bo Diddley appropriated the image of the outlaw hero for a generation of rock ‘n’ roll musicians, and in doing so became an iconic figure of rock 'n' roll, not simply a musical inspiration. Bo Diddley's album was released at the beginning of the 1960s, and during the 1960s, notes Robert Ray, the Radical Left became obsessed with the iconography of the American frontier:

Clothes (jeans, boots, buckskins) and hairstyles (long and unkempt, moustaches) derived from daguerrotypes of nineteenth-century gunfighters; and pop music returned repeatedly to frontier images: The Buffalo Springfield's "Broken Arrow," The Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones," The Band's "Across the Great Divide," James Taylor's "Sweet Baby James," Neil Young's "Cowgirl in the Sand," Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Proud Mary," The Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and the Eagles' Desperado. (pp. 255-56)

His musical influence on subsequent figures such as Jimi Hendrix is widely acknowledged, but no one has acknowledged his power as an iconic western figure, as one can see by the pictures found on the back cover of the Jimi Hendrix Experience' Smash Hits, released in 1969. While most certainly a foundational figure in rock music terms of his music, perhaps we ought to think of Bo Diddley's influence in inspiring any number of outlaw rockers as well.

Digital Divide

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my weekly (more or less) visit to the local Goodwill Store, where one can, occasionally, find something interesting. I stopped by the store yesterday, and as usual perused the record albums (why are there always so many damned gospel records?), 8-Tracks, and cassettes. The numbers of CDs are increasing (replaced by digital downloads?) but usually the CDs themselves are not in the greatest shape. I also noticed a new trend: the growing number of VHS tapes. I saw many dozens of VHS tapes, so many in fact that the managers had to construct a new bin just to handle them. I didn't find anything interesting yesterday, but that's not why I'm writing.

I also noticed four older model televisions, ranging from 13”-26”, one an old black & white, sitting next to each on a shelf, but each of the sets had a bold yellow disclaimer pasted to it stating that after February 18, 2009, the antenna would not work unless it was attached to a converter box: in other words, buy at your own risk, because come next February 18, analog signals will be turned off forever.

Seeing those old TV sets served as a reminder that in fewer than nine months, old-fashioned (analogue) broadcast television will go the way of the vinyl LP, 78s, 45s, 8-Tracks, music cassettes, VHS tapes, and so on. I suspect that many Goodwill stores around the country will find themselves inundated with old television sets within the year. It occurred to me the Goodwill store is a repository of déclassé technology—typewriters, record turntables, 8-Track players, for instance—even old DOS computers. Essentially, the function of the Goodwill Store is in part to serve as a waiting room for discarded technology, until these inert objects, perhaps, someday end up in a dusty museum or in the hands of collectors with enough disposable income to restore the things to their original glory.

Of course, the store's bins also serve to hold other discarded things as well: T-shirts emblazoned with bowl games won or lost, old toys included with Happy Meals, bestselling paperbacks with yellowing pages, gauche lamps, clunky radios, scads of coffee cups emblazoned with arcane organizations, old bed frames which once supported lovers embracing in desire. Was it Walter Pater who said he hated museums because they always inevitably gave him the impression that no one was ever young?

I read an article the other day stating that roughly 20% of U.S. households still rely on antennas to receive TV signals, which for some reason I found astonishing. And if these households don’t have sets with digital tuners, they won’t be able to pick up a digital signal--in other words, come February 18, or about nine months from now, no more television. Moreover, households with new digital TVs or special converter boxes for older sets also may need to upgrade their antennas because of a unique aspect of digital television: the signals that produce digital images can be more difficult to pick up than the old analog waves. In other words, it is quite clear that the digital transition will be more costly to people than at first anticipated. I read that the National Association of Broadcasters and the Consumer Electronics Association have a website, Antennaweb.org, that shows which stations’ signals you can get where you live and also offers help choosing an antenna. Goodwill Stores around the country better start now constructing additions, because I suspect there will be lots of TV sets showing up a few months from now. How many, instead, will show up in landfills?

Just as the Western Union Company—a company that became synonymous with the telegram—sent its last telegram in January 2006 because it could not compete with emails and cell phones, so too do the old analogue airwaves give way to digital transmission. One technology replaceth another.

Time, Peace, And A Saucerful of Friends

In my blog entry of May 16 I discussed my experiment of trying to listen to all the rock and R&B albums released in the year of 1968 in the order, as best as I could determine, in which they were released. Why 1968? I'll refer readers to the earlier blog for an explanation of the motivation for such an unusual project. At any rate, I promised I would post a June listening schedule, which can be found below. Since posting that earlier blog entry, however, I've discovered additional information which has prompted me to emend that earlier list, both adding and removing albums to more accurately reflect the current state of my knowledge. For instance, I'd listed Nilsson's Aerial Ballet as being released in March--at the time, an educated guess on my part. Information in the liner notes to the 2-CD BMG/Camden Deluxe 2000 reissue indicate July as the release date, which I accept as accurate, so I removed the album from the March set of albums and will include it as part of the July list. I still cannot claim that my list is infallible, but I continue to work on it. What I've found is that there were dozens of albums released in July and August, so those months' lists will be rather long (assuming the information I've come across is accurate). Perhaps record companies heavily slated album releases for the summer months, or, alternatively, some of the albums many sources indicate as being released in July were in fact released a bit earlier, that is, June. At any rate, here is what I currently have on tap for June, if anyone would care to listen along:

The Rascals, Time Peace: The Rascals’ Greatest Hits
The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble, The New York Rock & Roll Ensemble
The Beach Boys, Friends
Pink Floyd, A Saucerful of Secrets
Fairport Convention, Fairport Convention
Manfred Mann, Mighty Garvey! (6/28)
Otis Redding, The Immortal Otis Redding
Vanilla Fudge, Renaissance

List emended 7/22/68

Man of 1000 Voices at 100

Perhaps the most talented voice actor of the twentieth century, Mel Blanc, nicknamed "Man of 1000 Voices," was born 100 years ago today. Blanc died in 1989, but his memorable vocal creations live on in Warner Brothers cartoons and elsewhere. We all instantly recognize the images of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester Pussycat, Porky Pig, and Elmer Fudd--but rarely do we conceive of them separately from their distinctive voices. Indeed, these 'toon characters' bodily movements seem irrevocably sutured to their voice: if they couldn't move, they couldn't speak, and vice versa. In a sense, their voices animate them. Among his other vocal characterizations were Pepe le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Wile E. Coyote (when he spoke--rarely), Marvin the Martian, Barney Rubble, Woody Woodpecker (initially), the Tasmanian Devil, Speedy Gonzalez, and Yosemite Sam, the diminutive but feisty cowboy who was "the blood-thirstiest, shoot-'em firstiest, goshdarn worstiest bandit North, South, East and West of the Pecos!"

Because Mel Blanc is so strongly associated with his vocal characterizations, one doesn't immediately think of the few feature motion pictures in which he had supporting roles--Neptune's Daughter (1949) and Kiss Me Stupid (1964)--for instance; if not classics, they are still well worth seeking out simply to see the man as an actor. Although there are many websites devoted to Mel Blanc, a good overview of the "Man of 1000 Voices," by Kim Newman (find his link to the right), is available here.

That's all, folks!

Joseph Pevney, 1911-2008

The Los Angeles Times has reported that Joseph Pevney, the film and television director who directed some of the most memorable episodes of the original Star Trek TV series, died on May 18 at the venerable age of 96.

Pevney was a former Broadway actor who played supporting roles in several notable films noir—always inevitably the “sidekick”—in the late 1940s before turning his talents to directing feature films. If the Internet Movie Database is correct, I count he directed 32 feature films during the period 1950-1961, many of these B pictures with short shooting schedules, to be sure, but a remarkable stretch in any case. He made his debut as a director with Shakedown (1950), a film noir with Howard Duff, Brian Donlevy and the inimitable Lawrence Tierney. I seem to be one of the few who admire Pevney's atmospheric The Strange Door (1951), featuring two fine performances by Boris Karloff and Charles Laughton. And although the film was made late in the actor's career, the Errol Flynn-starring Instanbul (1957) has a lot to recommend it, including a reasonably good role for Nat King Cole. The James Cagney-starring Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), about the silent film star Lon Chaney, is also widely admired, while Torpedo Run (1958) is a classic of the subgenre (pun intended). Other films Pevney directed during that prolific decade include Meet Danny Wilson (1951), starring Frank Sinatra and Shelley Winters; 3 Ring Circus (1954), starring Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis; Female on the Beach (1955), starring Joan Crawford; and Twilight for the Gods (1958), starring Rock Hudson and Cyd Charisse.

Beginning in 1961, he turned to television, directing episodes of numerous series such as Wagon Train, The Munsters, The Fugitive, Bonanza, The Virginian, Adam-12, Marcus Welby, M.D., Emergency, The Incredible Hulk, and Fantasy Island—all of which are television shows that are as familiar, to me anyway, as old friends. But it was, of course, Star Trek (TOS) that became Pevney’s most enduring television credit as a director and made him a familiar name to Star Trek fans.

Since his death, several Star Trek fan sites have noted that Pevney directed fourteen episodes of the original series—many of them fan favorites—tying with the late Marc Daniels as the credited director of the most episodes. He directed those favored episodes over the course of 1967, averaging slightly over one show a month:

Arena – 1/19/67
The Return of the Archons – 2/9/67
A Taste of Armageddon – 2/23/67
The Devil in the Dark – 3/9/67
The City on the Edge of Forever – 4/6/67
Amok Time – 9/15/67
The Apple – 10/13/67
Catspaw – 10/27/67
Journey to Babel – 11/17/67
Friday’s Child – 12/1/67
The Deadly Years – 12/8/67
Wolf in the Fold – 12/22/67
The Trouble with Tribbles – 12/29/67
The Immunity Syndrome – 1/19/68

The episodes he directed exhibit a wide range of subject matter, from some of the strongest dramatic episodes to comedy. “The City on the Edge of Forever,” from a script by Harlan Ellison, is generally considered to be the best episode of the original series by virtue of its compelling moral drama, although “Arena,” in which Captain Kirk battles the nasty, thuggish, and devious Gorn (pictured), is perhaps more famous episode among “non-Trekkies.” But there are some very good episodes in the above list: the Robert Bloch authored “Catspaw” featuring two byzantine aliens named Korob and Sylvia; “Journey to Babel,” in which Mr. Spock’s parents were featured, played by Jane Wyatt and Mark Lenard; "Wolf in the Fold" (also written by Robert Bloch), in which the soul of Jack the Ripper (Red Jack, or “Redjac”) has managed to transmigrate from planet to planet through outer space; and, of course, the inevitable “The Trouble with Tribbles,” a comedy in which the Enterprise gets infested with a gaggle of little furry creatures. (I've always loved the bit at the end of the show when Captain Kirk prepares to sit in the Captain's Chair and stops himself, thinking he might be crushing a Tribble.) I was barely a teenager when I first saw these episodes, and they have remained indelibly etched in my mind ever since. They are classic television.

Not a director ever likely to be championed by auteur critics, the films of Joseph Pevney have nonetheless formed a part of my identity every bit as significant as those made by more celebrated names, those of the putative "Great Tradition."

The Name Game

Part 3 of The Squonk

At the conclusion of my discussion of the Buoys’ “Timothy” the day before yesterday, I observed that some readers might take issue with my interpretation of that somewhat obscure pop song, thinking it to be an aberrant decoding of the song’s meaning. An aberrant reading is simply a way of remotivating an artistic object, the switching of the external context surrounding it. Perhaps the most famous illustration of a remotivated art object is Marcel Duchamp’s goateed Mona Lisa, retitled “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919; pictured).

Duchamp later said that the new name of his remotivated art work was a phonetic game. The most common claim is that L.H.O.O.Q., when said out loud in French, sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul,” meaning “she has a hot ass" (or is "hot in the ass"), suggesting that the famous subject of the painting was not only in a state of sexual arousal, but sexually available as well. In a 1966 interview, Duchamp said, “I really like this kind of game, because I find that you can do a lot of them. By simply reading the letters in French, even in any language, some astonishing things happen” (see Pierre Cabanne, p. 63).

The androgynized, goateed figure of Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q is the visual equivalent of the androgynous figure of "Rikki" in Steely Dan’s "Rikki Don’t Loose That Number," a song title that proves Duchamp's insight that with any series of letters, some astonishing things can happen. Like Duchamp’s letters, L.H.O.O.Q, the name RIKKI likewise invites us to play a phonetic game. While spelled Rikki, phonetically speaking, of course, it is the diminutive form of that most familiar of American nicknames, Rick—Ricky. For instance, Ricky Ricardo of I Love Lucy; in Casablanca, Ricky is what Captain Renault (Claude Rains) calls Richard Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), rather than the more formal “Mr. Richard” that Sam uses, or the “Richard” Ilsa uses (at least in Paris). Rikki shares the same unusual spelling as the titular figure of Rudyard Kipling’s children’s story, Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. And yet, the lyrics of “Rikki Don’t Loose That Number” suggest not a world of innocence, but rather a sophisticated world in which people play sophisticated games:

We hear you’re leaving, that’s okay
I thought our little wild time had just begun
I guess you kind of scared yourself, you turn and run
But if you have a change of heart

CHORUS:
Rikki don’t lose that number
You don’t want to call nobody else
Send it off in a letter to yourself
Rikki don’t lose that number
It’s the only one you own
You might use it if you feel better
When you get home

I have a friend in town, he’s heard your name
We can go out driving on Slow Hand Row
We could stay inside and play games I don’t know
And you could have a change of heart

CHORUS

You tell yourself you’re not my kind
But you don't even know your mind
And you could have a change of heart

CHORUS

I assume the "you" referred to is Rikki. Although initially the singer says he hears Rikki is "leaving," in fact Rikki is a coward ("you turn and run"). Rikki is a coward because he is "scared," scared of himself, that is, scared of what he is doing and what he has done. What is he doing, what has he done? We're not told, just that he was having a "little wild time" with the singer, a "little wild time" that had just started. Rikki has a number, the singer's phone number, and he's invited to phone (call) once he feels better about himself. Rikki is invited to "send it off in a letter to yourself," which I take to mean, "look at it to remind yourself who you are," the number in the letter serving as a reminder to himself of who he really is.

In the song, "Any Major Dude Will Tell You," also on the same Steely Dan album, Pretzel Logic, the singer tells the unnamed you (Rikki?), "You can try to run but you can't hide from what's inside of you," a virtual restatement of what is being said, in this song, to Rikki. "We could stay inside and play games," the singer says, meaning hide away and pretend, but again, the implication is that Rikki can try to run, but can't hide avoid the truth about himself, despite what he pretends to be true. Rikki's "change of heart" I take to mean the moment when he comes to terms with who and what he is, when he eventually can "feel better" about his true self. I've said "himself" because the rather inescapable implication is that singer is trying to make Rikki come to terms with his homosexuality, to feel comfortable about it, to stop denying it. "You tell yourself you're not my kind," a highly ambiguous phrase susceptible to many meanings, but its meaning in this context is highly suggestive of the similarity between the singer and Rikki. ("But honey, he's not our kind," is used in Janis Ian's "Society's Child" as a sign of racial difference, but in light of Janis Ian's subsequent outing, the song takes on an added level of meaning. Racial (external) difference is not the issue in Steely Dan's song.) That the relationship between the two is sexual can be inferred from the meaning of "our little wild time," "wild" a word in English having the same colloquial meaning as Duchamp's "chaud au cul," hot ass, or hot in the ass. I should point out that there's nothing to prevent my decoding of the song in this way, as I've simply expanded the meaningful context of the possible meanings of the deliberately ambiguous spelling of "Rikki." It seems to me I'm being invited to play this name game.

In my discussion of "Any Major Dude Will Tell You" of a couple blog entries ago, I linked that song with "Timothy" and "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," and subsequently I've queered all three songs. Initially, the key figure for me was the figure of the Squonk, invoked in the context of an unnamed figure in the midst of a personal crisis. In that song, the singer asks, "Have you ever seen a squonk's tears? Well, look at mine," the use of a fantastic creature suggesting some fundamental difference, an otherness, that the singer and the unnamed "you" share. The same idea is used in "Rikki Don't Lose That Number," although obviously without the figure of the Squonk.

I also earlier mentioned the song titled "The Squonk" on the Genesis album, Trick of the Tail (1976), made a couple years after Pretzel Logic. The song is used in that album as part of its general concept, songs about realities or things that no longer exist, are imaginary.

Sydney Pollack, 1934-2008

Although highly feted during his lifetime, Sydney Pollack (pictured, with award), who died yesterday, May 26, at age 73, was never a director championed among auteur critics, and probably never shall be. While he had a long career in both television and the movies, as a director he was not as prolific as, say, Robert Altman (1925-2006), a director of his generation whose work ultimately is more significant and, overall, more interesting. But like Robert Altman, Sam Peckinpah, John Frankenheimer, and many other directors born during the decade 1925-1935, he is one of a select group of film directors who began in television in the 1950s and later moved to a distinguished career in motion pictures.

According to the Internet Movie Database, Sydney Pollack began acting in television in 1959 and directing in 1961. His first feature motion picture, A Slender Thread, starring Sidney Poitier and Anne Bancroft, was released in 1965, but most certainly it was They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (1969), based on Horace McCoy's excellent depression-era Hollywood novel, that was his first significant work, and one widely admired by the critics. And despite the hesitations of its writer, John Milius, I still find Jeremiah Johnson (1972) a highly compelling, very watchable Western. However, nothing Sydney Pollack directed in the decade after much interested me--until Tootsie (1982), a fine comedy, in which Pollack himself acted and was excellent.

For me, though, his best film shall always be Out of Africa (1985), based on the remarkable memoir of Isak Dinesen, an old-fashioned screen romance to be sure, but which for reasons I cannot completely explain, I find the story of Karen Blixen at turns disturbing, compelling--and devastating. It was a film in development for at least a decade--in the early 1970s, for instance, Nicolas Roeg was attached to direct--but somehow, Pollack managed to get the film made, and won an Academy Award as Best Director in the process. I note that his audio commentary for the 2000 DVD release of the film release is excellent, and it remains one of my favorite films.

Perhaps that Best Director award was enough, for afterwards, he directed only five features in the next twenty years. I remember most vividly his acting appearance in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999), but I saw none of the pictures he directed after the mediocre Havana (1990). I found a very good obituary of Pollack here, in which critic Jeanine Basinger is quoted as saying, "Sydney Pollack has made some of the most influential and best-remembered films of the last three decades." I'm not deeply convinced of this alleged truth, but that he made at least one of my favorite films is quite enough for me.

The Anthrophagic Killer

Part 2 of The Squonk

The linking of homosexuality and cannibalism in literature and art has been noted by both gay and straight critics. Critics have found the linkage of homosexuality and cannibalism in the work of Freud, Herman Melville, Yukio Mishima, and, as we shall see, Tobias Schneebaum. Rupert Holmes, songwriter of the Buoys’ “Timothy” (1971) claims to have been inspired to write the song as a result of the serendipitous juxtaposition of working on an arrangement of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “16 Tons” (“...a coal man's made out of muscle and blood”) while watching a gourmet cooking show on TV, shortly after seeing the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer (1959) on television. I should point out that Williams’ play also links homosexuality and cannibalism, a feature of the story which Holmes doesn't mention but which would have been hard for him to have missed. A remarkable serendipity, to be sure, although most certainly the lyrics to "Timothy" support his claim about the song's diegetic action:

Trapped in a mine that had caved in
And everyone knows the only ones left
Was Joe and me and Tim
When they broke through to pull us free
The only ones left to tell the tale
Was Joe and me

Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go?
Timothy, Timothy, God why don’t I know?

Hungry as hell no food to eat
And Joe said that he would sell his soul
For just a piece of meat
Water enough to drink for two
And Joe said to me, “I”ll take a swig
And then there’s some for you”

Timothy, Timothy, Joe was looking at you
Timothy, Timothy, God what did we do?

I must have blacked out just around then
Cause the very next thing that I could see
Was the light of the day again
My stomach was full as it could be
And nobody ever got around
To finding Timothy

Timothy, Timothy, where on earth did you go
Timothy, Timothy, God why don’t I know?

If the act of cannibalism in the song is hard to miss, so, too, is the act of homosexuality, although both events are repressed by the traumatic blackout, hence the amnesia ("God why don't I know?"). A traumatic blackout, remember, also occurs in Ode to Billy Joe (1976), the film based on the song by Bobbie Gentry, in which a young man commits suicide after a homosexual encounter with an older man.

While Rupert Holmes, perhaps best known for the song “Escape (The Pina Colada Song),” cites Tennessee Williams’ Suddenly Last Summer as part of the inspiration for "Timothy," there was a more sensational event linking homosexuality and cannibalism that Holmes might well have known about by 1971: the publication in 1969, by Grove Press, of Tobias Schneebaum’s memoir, Keep the River on Your Right. The memoir by Schneebaum (1922-2005) has become something of a cult classic, an early exploration into the question of embracing otherness (although an anthropologist might say it is instance of someone arguing for the principle of cultural relativism). In it, Schneebaum told how he, a gay New York painter, wound up living for about seven months among the Arakmbut (also spelled Harakumbut), cannibalistic people living in the rainforest of Peru.

In 1955, Schneebaum was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to study art in Peru. Shortly after his arrival, he vanished into the Peruvian jungle and was presumed dead. Several months later, he emerged, naked and covered in body paint. He later said the experience had transformed him, although in a way he hardly could have imagined.

He wrote in Keep the River on Your Right:

...I knew that out there in the forest were other peoples more primitive, other jungles wilder, other worlds that existed that needed my eyes to look at them. A flash of real terror came over me.... My first thought was: I’m going; the second thought: I’ll stay there. No coming back ever. Death or life, it’s all the same. (Grove Press, 1994, p. 50)

The Arakmbut, however, welcomed him. Moreover, he discovered that homosexuality was not stigmatized there. Apparently Arakmbut men routinely had sex with women and with other men, a practice Schneebaum himself soon adopted. At any rate, perhaps the most profound experience for him was the day he accompanied the men on what he thought was a hunting trip, but which turned out to be a raid on a nearby village. The men of the nearby village were massacred by the Arakmbut (so much for the idea of "the noble savage"), and in the ensuing celebration, parts of the men were cooked and eaten. While not precisely offered a pound of flesh, Schneebaum was indeed offered a portion of a roasted human male, which he ate. Later during the celebration, he said, he ate part of a man’s heart (hence he was, for a time, an anthrophage, like the narrator of "Timothy"). Although some have found Schneebaum’s story very dubious, the author maintained the story was true to the end of his life. The documentary film, Keep the River on Your Right: A Modern Cannibal Tale (2000), corroborates his claim that he indeed lived among the Arakmbut, although the issue of cannibalism remains unconfirmed.

Nonetheless, the important point is that the linkage of homosexuality and cannibalism is well established, allowing us to explore the meaning of a pop song such as "Timothy." While some may see my reading of the song as an aberrant decoding of the song, I'll point out that "Timothy" is not about cannibalism--that is the diegetic action we are encouraged to construct based on the clues the narrator gives us. To say what the narrative action consists of is not to say anything about what it means.

The Squonk: Part 1

Please forgive the splitting of my recent blog entries into parts, but I have a number of writing projects going on at the moment and as you know usually what I’m writing about on these blogs demands a rather time-consuming, detailed exposition.

The Squonk, an imaginary being whose existence was first written about in a book of American regional folklore published in 1910 titled Fearsome Creatures of the Lumberwoods by William T. Cox, became popularly known in the late 1960s after the English language publication of Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings (E. P. Dutton, 1969; co-authored with Margarita Guerrero). I’ve always believed the word is a portmanteau comprised of “squawk” and “honk,” both onomatopoeic words (that is, derived from a primarily oral culture) the squawk associated with a chicken and the honk with a goose. But the Squonk is described by William T. Cox not as a fantastic, bird-like creature but rather as a four-legged beast having “a very retiring disposition” and having “misfitting skin . . . covered with warts and moles” (pictured, image courtesy of the online edition of Cox's book).

The first edition of Borges’ and Guerrero’s book, containing 82 pieces about mythical creatures, was published in Mexico in 1957, titled Manual de zoologia fantastica (Handbook of Fantastic Zoology). A second edition, re-titled El libro de los seres imaginarios (The Book of Imaginary Beings) was published in Buenos Aires a decade later (Editorial Kier, S. A., Buenos Aires, 1967), with thirty-four additional articles (now totaling 116 pieces). For the English-language edition, several of the original articles were corrected, emended, and/or revised with four new ones added. Thus the E. P. Dutton edition, published in 1969, contains 120 entries about fantastical creatures.

I do not know the year of the Italian translation of Borges' book, but so far as I know the Squonk was first referred to in the popular arts in Mario Bava’s film Ecologia del delitto (Ecology of Murder, 1971), released in the U. S. in 1972 first as Carnage and subsequently as Twitch of the Death Nerve. According to Tim Lucas, in his IPPY Award-winning Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark (2007), the Squonk was, rather interestingly, first popularly invoked in the context of post-coital pillow talk, when the character Frank asks his sex partner Laura, "Can't you hear it calling? It was a squonk." When asked by Laura what a Squonk is, Frank says the Squonk is a "dark-colored creature...covered with moles...And do you know what it does when it's captured? It dissolves into tears. Some of its peculiar qualities are sulkiness, diffidence, and possessiveness" (864). Tim subsequently observes that the Squonk is a figurative substitution for the figure of the female (Laura), who also has the traits of "sulkiness, diffidence, and possessiveness." Hence, early in its popular usage, the Squonk serves as a heteroclite, figurative displacement for a sexualized human being.

The Squonk soon reappeared in Steely Dan's song “Any Major Dude Will Tell You,” included on the album Pretzel Logic, recorded late in 1973 and released in March 1974. One wonders whether Walter Becker and Donald Fagen learned of the Squonk through Mario Bava’s horror film or through the 1969 English-language version of Borges’ book. Given the lyrics it is hard to tell.

I never seen you looking so bad my funky one
You tell me that your super fine mind has come undone

CHORUS:
Any major dude with half a heart surely will tell you my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart falls together again
When the demon is at your door
In the morning it won’t be there no more
Any major dude will tell you
Any major dude will tell you

Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears? Well, look at mine
The people on the street have all seen better times

[CHORUS]

I can tell you all I know, the where to go, the what to do
You can try to run but you can't hide from what’s inside of you

[CHORUS]

Although Borges placed the Squonk in the category of fantastic creatures, I prefer to say that the Squonk is a cryptozoological creature. I know this is not precisely the correct usage of the word cryptozoological, but the reason I prefer this term is that carries the meaning of “hidden” or “hidden away" or even “secluded,” all behavioral characteristics associated with the Squonk, a solitary, acutely self-conscious, innately morbid creature that lurks in the woods, avoiding civilization and hence human beings, preferring to keep its own company. The Squonk hides itself away during the day, preferring, according to Borges (and his source, William Cox), the twilight and dusk.

The singer of “Any Major Dude Will Tell You” asks “you”—the unnamed person that would seem to be in the midst of some personal crisis—the rhetorical question, Have you ever seen a squonk’s tears? assuming that the answer has to be no: since the Squonk is a very retiring creature that leads a solitary lifestyle and is rarely seen by people, the singer assumes you has never seen a Squonk, let alone a Squonk’s tears. “Well, look at mine,” the singer says, the point of which is to tell you that while the singer may not be a Squonk, he is figuratively much like a Squonk, and perhaps even strongly identifies with a Squonk—an unhappy creature with a misfitting skin covered in warts and moles—that is, a highly singular, solitary species given to a morbid personality which, as the result of a certain genetic birthright, not a curse as such, simply a matter of genetics, has a rather unattractive, if not ugly, appearance (hence the self-consciousness). Moreover, the unnamed you can “try to run” but cannot “hide from what’s inside” of himself, meaning despite himself he must be acutely aware of his real self, his true identity, the ineluctable reality that you wants to run away from, to hide from, to deny—but cannot. He—you—cannot escape what he is; like the Squonk he cannot escape his own freakishness. The singer speaks to you as one can do only when one is like the one to whom one speaks. They are two of the same kind, equals: I and Thou. The same. Hence the Squonk is used here, figuratively, as a creature with whom one can identify that is not like other people, one that is different because of genetics, a certain ugliness as perceived by others.

Steely Dan likes such singular, solitary creatures, especially crepuscular ones—those who come out when the sun sets, like the Squonk. A bat is a crepuscular creature, as is the rather ungainly, awkward creature known the opossum, the closest actual living analogue to the Squonk, I think. Steely Dan likes such crepuscular figures; take, for instance, the figure of Deacon Blues, a figure that likens himself to a snake (viper), a creature that comes out at night. He tells us:

I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
I’ll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I’ll make it my home sweet home

The next appearance of the Squonk was in the eponymously named song by Genesis, on the album A Trick of the Tail (1976), where the text of Cox's 1910 depiction of the Squonk was more or less re-told in narrative form. As in Steely Dan's song, there is a figure referred to as "you" to whom the lyrics are presumably addressed, but "you" is a much different kind of figure than the one in Steely Dan, the latter the one that interests me the most.

Part 2: "Timothy," Cannibalism, and the Queering of "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"

What Lies Beneath

In yesterday's mail I received the copy of Ed Sanders' 2002 update of The Family (Thunder's Mouth Press) I'd ordered, and last night I had the chance to (re)read it, looking specifically for references to any mention of bodies being buried at the Barker Ranch. I'm getting too old to sit up reading late in the night, especially when accompanied by a bottle of good red wine. But I did so, against my better judgment, but I'm happy to report that I did find the information about the Barker Ranch that I was looking for.

Apparently in late March 1971 Sanders flew from New York to California for what he says was his final visit of the year: his publisher, E. P. Dutton, was pushing him to finish the book as soon as possible (it was published in the fall of 1971). On March 31, he and a fellow investigator, Larry Larsen, met in Berkeley with an individual claiming to have "access to Family films made as far back as 1967" (462), taping the conversation. Among the assertions made at that meeting by this unnamed informant was the following:

Vern Plumlee [a Manson associate] had told him, he said, that there were three people who got killed in Death Valley. He said they were buried "in back of the main house--maybe fifty feet in back of it. He said they were buried about eight feet deep." The informant also claimed that he had been up in Death Valley that fall of 1969, a claim difficult to verify because he was not on any arrest record up there. "I have six I.D.'s," he told us, and then rattled off the names. (463)

I'd speculated, based on the news articles published on the L. A. Times website, that perhaps the existence of these graves had only recently come to light, but that is obviously not so--their possible existence has been known about by law enforcement officials for the past 37 years. One wonders, then, whether this week's forensic dig at the Barker Ranch was prompted by other (unpublicized) information emerging that corroborated the decades-old rumor, or whether, more cynically, the dig was prompted simply in order to test the reliability of new forensic technology, as one can infer from this article. One also wonders, if the possible existence of these graves has been known for over three decades, why a serious forensic investigation took so long to occur--unless the possibility was never taken especially seriously by the authorities. Although I've visited Death Valley three times, I've never been to the Goler Wash area. Nonetheless, I doubt seriously whether Manson and his "Family" members had the wherewithal to dig graves eight feet deep in such difficult terrain comprised of such rocky soil. Even if the figure of eight feet is an exaggeration, I suspect the digging of graves in that area would be something of a formidable task. Perhaps for the same reason law enforcement officials thought the graves would be relatively shallow, and hence easier to locate--if there at all.

Given that the possible existence of graves at the Barker Ranch is now revealed to be nothing but sheer legerdemain, it necessarily calls into question the veracity of other testimony by the informant with whom Sanders spoke on 31 March 1971. I'm thinking specifically of the existence of the so-called "snuff" films alluded to by this informant, what Sanders calls in this latest, 2002 edition of his book "hemic films," hemic an adjective meaning "of or relating to the blood." Is his use of "hemic," rather than "snuff" (the term he used in the 1971 edition), a tacit admission that he no longer believes in the existence of so-called "snuff" films? During the same interview I alluded to above, the unnamed individual also reported the following information:

Then he spoke about some short films he claimed to have viewed, one of which he claimed to have stolen from a house not far from the Spahn Ranch inhabited by cultists and bikers. He said he'd seen two movies filmed in a beach locale. One, he volunteered, was on a beach near the Los Angeles and Ventura county lines. (464)

I'll spare you the gruesome details, but essentially the subject of these putative films were, 1) the killing and subsequent dismemberment of a dog, followed by the dog's blood being poured over two naked girls who then engaged in orgiastic sex; 2) "orgy films" with Charles Manson and the members of his "Family"; 3) a cat blown to pieces by an explosive; and 4) a film about five minutes in length "of a woman dead on a beach" (464). Sanders goes on to write that he believed this individual making these claims was involved in making sleazy films in the Berkeley area, and also writes that his associate, Larry Larsen, subsequently interviewed someone who claimed that the said informant had recently made a pornographic film featuring a thirteen year-old girl.

It is a well-known fact that the FBI has been seeking to verify the existence of snuff films for the past several decades, and has never discovered any evidence to verify their existence. I've contended in previous blog entries that the theoretical existence of the snuff film is made possible by photography's automatism, but even if we allow for the possibility that they were actually made, there's an additional, more practical problem: developing the exposed film. Assuming this footage was shot (at the time) on an easily accessible, 8mm home movie camera, how was this footage developed? By whom? If one says that the footage could be developed at the same locations as, say, pornographic films, then suddenly the number of conspirators has grown larger, making the possibility of containment of the conspiracy even more difficult to maintain. Two individuals might be able to keep a secret (although law enforcement officials use the "prisoner's dilemma" tactic, in which two conspirators are separated and then given false information about what the other one said or claimed), but three individuals compounds the problem, four makes it more difficult, five even more so, and so on. In other words, the greater the number of individuals involved, the more precarious the conspiracy becomes to contain. Indeed, the Manson "Family" itself, a rather large group of mercurial individuals, was incriminated by an off-hand remark by Susan Atkins to a fellow cellmate. (As Sanders notes, Inyo County officials had rather flimsy evidence to justify holding Charles Manson following his October 1969 arrest at the Barker Ranch; if things hadn't unraveled quickly in Los Angeles, he might well have had to be set free.)

It is this principle that makes the existence of snuff--or even hemic--films unlikely. Certainly there are films in which animals are killed on camera--Cannibal Holocaust (1980) immediately comes to mind--but if Manson "Family" members had made such films--call them what you will--where would they have been developed? And if shot using 35mm film rather than 8mm, the problem of developing the exposed film is even more daunting. Of course, videotape is a different matter entirely, not requiring development as does camera negative. But in 1968-69, video cameras were rather daunting pieces of equipment--heavy, awkward, and cumbersome, and while portable cameras existed, they were quite unwieldy. Moreover, the only way one could see the footage one had shot with the camera was either to have the proper playback equipment, or the necessary cables to play the footage through a television set (monitor) directly from the camera. Certainly none of this could have taken place at the Barker Ranch, which didn't even have electricity--meaning no television, and no way to recharge the portable batteries. Assuming the "Family" had video equipment at all, the equipment therefore could have been more easily used at the Spahn Ranch, which had electricity, but again, whatever sort of events, how terrible, took place, there still must be some degree of coordination between the camera operator and the action being recorded, the instantaneous reaction that is second nature to a trained cameraman. Would any of these individuals have had the technical skill to film rapidly unfolding events with cumbersome video equipment?

Hence I think the probable existence of these so-called hemic films is very, very near zero, not only for reasons I've explained, but because I also have deep hesitations about the trustworthiness of the informant who claimed to have seen these short films.