Film Noire

On one of my regular web reads a writer enthused something about American Idol. Apparently I was on Mars or some such place as that's where he thinks someone would have to be to be unaware of the Idol show. I dumped my TV years ago and I have never regretted it, and so I have never seen an episode of American Idol. Perfectly content in my innocence, I was blissfully ignorant that some sort of climactic event was due that night. From what I've heard about the program it should be called "American Idiot."
No, I wasn't on Mars. I was in 1947 in rapt wonderment at how good a movie could be. That was the year RKO released "Out of the Past," with a cast of stars who were in the early stages of their careers and last night I had the pleasure of viewing it for the first time. What a treat. This film has been consigned to the 'film noire' by the artsy fartsy intellectual class but at the time of its making it was just a low budget thriller intended to make money for the studio. All these films have lurid titles to draw in the rubes. That doesn't mean it was tossed off in a slovenly manner. Far from it. This is a work of art. It makes even the best movies of today look sick. Kirk Douglas played the crooked big shot who lived in a palatial residence overlooking Lake Tahoe and Robert Mitchum played Jeff Markham/Bailey, the private detective who had crossed him years ago and was now leading a quiet life as a gas station operator in a small town on the edge of the Sierras. In the opening scene his bucolic existence is disrupted when one of Douglas' thugs informs him that the boss wants to see him.
It's not necessary to adumbrate the typically byzantine plot complexities, which are delicious. I would simply like to rave over the quality and intelligence of the production. First of all, what wonderful acting. This film was made before Stanislawski ruined the American acting fraternity. Then acting was still a craft but how did they learn it? The characters in this film are not passive sufferers of life's iniquities. They are struggling and striving, they have complexities that are revealed under the pressure of the struggle. This is what drama is about. There are five death scenes in the movie but nowhere are we regaled with the gory details. It's not about blood, it's about right and wrong. and the sometimes fine line between the two. There are no sex scenes except one that was implied but sex played a central role in the subtext of the film, more particularly the relationship between sex, love, and power...in a word, passion. Sex is about the genitals, and sometimes I think nature has played a cruel joke on us by locating the organs of reproduction in the same place as the organs of elimination. Passion is not identical with sex but is concerned with it. In this film, the passion Kirk Douglas has for Jane Greer is more closely akin to the desire to own things. He himself seems rather sexless. But between her and Mitchum passion triggers sex, not the other way around. What moves her never becomes clear. Does she love Mitchum or is she just using him for some purpose that not even she knows? In many ways the film illustrates my dictum: women use sex to get power and men use power to get sex.
How is it possible to for a mere 97 minutes of film to evoke so many levels of meaning? I don't know but it's a trick that can only be accomplished by a team of pros at the top of its game, and I know that the product is what we mean by a work of art.
The other day I ran into a friend of mine who writes poetry for children. We stopped to talk in the entry of the Bay Centre and in the window of one of those hip fashion shops hung a poster of a young couple barely dressed. They were both dark and thin in the tired old James Dean manner. They looked feral, as if they were contemplating some gruesome crime they had just committed. Another poster showed a young blond girl dressed a little like Barbarella staring up into the sky. She was pretty but also had that feral look. They weren't at all sexy to my way of thinking but were obviously meant to be. My friend pointed to them and said to me, "It doesn't look like any of them has ever read a book, does it?" And I had to agree. As much as possible I try to avoid any contact with the celebrity culture all young people seem to admire but it's impossible to go through a checkout line without one's eyes lighting on the latest escapade of whoever it might be. Is there even the slightest hint of any intelligence at all behind all the slathered on make up? None that I can detect. And how can an unintelligent woman be attractive? Not to me. I will admit that Paris Hilton is pretty. She has a lost little girl look about her that no amount of degradation can seem to erase. But there is also a blankness in the eyes, a deadness, as if some essential human ingredient was left out when she was made, as if all the time spent in a vain alcohol- and drug-fueled search for self gratification left her with no time to really taste the wonder of life.
What a contrast with the beauties of 1947. Jane Greer, who I had never previously heard of, was the female star, the femme fatale. It was her Kirk Douglas sent Robert Mitchum to find. The trail led to Acapulco and a seedy bar where Robert Mitchum sat drinking a beer. Then one day she "walked in out of the sun," and immediately we see why Kirk Douglas wanted her back. My jaw goes slack, she is so beautiful. It's not her physical appearance that draws this response. It is a presence. There is the intensity of her eyes, the expressiveness of her mouth, which seem to endow her with some sort of ageless wisdom combined with innocence. She has a noticeable feral quality, too, but no. Feral means a domestic creature gone wild. She is just the opposite, a wild thing who hasn't been fully tamed. And every single scene reinforces those initial impressions. She has complexities. She has thought deeply about things. She knows herself, not in that phony self regarding way of modern celebrities, but because she looksat the world and herself with unblinking honesty. Rhonda Fleming is another beauty whose small part later on in the film shows an entirely different kind of beauty. Hers is more buxom and fecund, more fully sexual. And somehow she is able to convey the essence of her character to perfection.
None of this would work, of course, without a first class script, and I'm afraid writing like this is a lost art. Too bad.

Miss Lee from Korea

If there's one thing good about growing old it is this: you are no longer the slave of sexual passions. This makes it possible to concentrate on other things which are decidedly more interesting than the old in/out, in/out. Still, those hormones never entirely subside and you never know when some female is going to come along to get them boiling again. Maybe not boiling, but at least asimmer, with unmistakeable signs of wanting to start bubbling. That's how old guys like me get into trouble.
Yesterday a young Korean girl sat down next to me at the coffee bar and when she tried to take a picture of herself I offered to do the honors. This led to further conversation. Now it seems Korean girls haven't been brainwashed into fearing old guys the way their North American sisters have and I was a bit surprised at how friendly she was. She was visiting friends in Victoria but had been studying English in vancouver for the past few months. Victoria does a roaring trade in ESL schools so young Orientals are quite commonly seen in the various caffeine joints and most of them are Korean. She mentioned that she was going on a bus tour to the Rockies and I said, better watch out for the bears. That was a word she had never heard before and when I tried to find a picture of one in my laptop she perched on the arm of my chair. That's when the heat came on. The pilot light hadn't gone out and enough fumes were available to ignite a small flame. Her hands were what did it, hands being for touching. Oh, nothing came of it. She was on her way to catch the ferry.
No, I'm not one of those honkies who idealize oriental women. The two years I spent as an American sailor in Japan cured me of those illusions. I rather disapprove of older white men who shop for wives in poor Asian countries. I know a few who have done it and I don't hold it against them but then I try not to think of reservations when I meet them. Once done you want it to succeed, of course. And knowing all this I would have happily made a fool out of myself yesterday if I had been given half a lightly larger window of opportunity.
A book I often go back to without ever quite figuring out what he's talking about is Robert Graves' "White Goddess." Ostensibly about the origin and meaning of archaic European alphabets, it's above all about poetry, the language of poetry, the craft of poetry, and what it's for. The White Goddess in her various manifestations is who the poet serves. Her service is far from gentle. Now from where exactly Graves derived his wild speculations I do not know. I think modern anthropologists and mythographers would question his sanity. But there is something irrevocably true about his ruminations, but it's poetic truth which differs from prosaic truth. In his words, a real poem that engages the worship and awareness of the godess will makethe whiskers on your face stand out enough to shave. I'm not acutely sensitive to poetry but when one catches me unawares (that seems the best way. When you sit down to study a poem its 'meaning' seems to evaporate) Afterwards, when the shock dies down a little and I try to analyze it, the music of the words obviously has a significance over and above the literal meaning of the words. Not that the poet is thereby absolved of the requirement that the words make sense. Quite the opposite. Through the music the words devlop an aura, a super meaning that isn't constrained by the linearity of normal language. Most of these thoughts I'm trying to express I got from The White Goddess.
Although he tried to backpedal from the implications of some of the ideas he wrote about, I carried some of his logic a little further. I can't say I can prove it, but let's say I have a working hypothesis about one essential element of poetry. Only men can be poets. A poem is an offering of love to a woman...not just to any woman but to the woman who the poet identifies as an embodiment of the Goddess. Only a man can love a woman in that way. And so, although a woman can write verse as well as any man, she cannot write a true poem...any more than a man can have a baby. And I don't think a man can write a poem without the stimulus of a beloved, just as Graves contends.
Graves envisioned a return to an imagined prepatriarchal era of European culture but I don't. I think there may well have been such a phase, but I don't think it was as idyllic as some of us believe. For a long time I have thought abortion, which has become acceptable since the advent of feminism, is a form of human sacrifice. On the other hand I think something is missing from Christian belief. The three aspects of the Goddess as Graves saw it was the Goddess as virgin, the Goddess as Mother, and the Goddess as bitch/slut and I think he wanted to say that modern patriarchal cultures have supressed knowledge of the third aspect at a heavy cost, and sometimes I think he's right. Poetic language is above all ecstatic and our Judeo/Chritian/ (and especially) Islamic religious legacy is revolted by the ecstatic. Maybe frightened is a better word. All I know is that these are deep waters.
The image I keep on my desktop most of the time is of Alice Faye. A very popular movie star of the '30's and'40's, she died about ten years ago and I only saw her for the first time when I bought a DVD of a musical, "Alexander's Ragtime Band." I can't look at this face without feeling like I'm falling into some deep chasm. A sweet ache comes over me. I want to touch her, kiss her. So what is it about this face, her face? Why not another face? Don't all faces have lips, eyes, nose, hair, skin? Why should it matter? But any man knows that he's attracted to some faces and not to others. Women, too, are drawn to certain faces and not to others. My Korean friend noticed the image right away. And she had some quality of her own, not only in her face but in her movements, her manner, unfathomable depths I wanted to explore. Sex? Is it only sex? The old in/out, in/out? If that was it why should the face matter at all. You've heard the age old coarse male joke, "They all look the same upside down." It's not true. The face matters, and for some reason the face is a signal of something else. Sometimes the signal is wrong. Sometimes a lovely young thing gets in my cab who looks absolutely adorable but as soon as she opens her mouth and spews the vulgarisms of the street she doesn't look so lovely any more. She reminds be of the dead dog I found under a hedge when I was a boy. He looked like he was asleep, but when I turned him over he was stiff and underneath he was swarming with maggots.
In another musical, "42nd Street," a song goes "I'm young and healthy and so are you." This could be a theme song for a Darwinist theory of human attraction. Utilitarian. The genetic imperative. There's something to it. Biologically we are animals and must reproduce. Youth and health are essentialfor 'reproductive success.' Until the last few generations in modern societies hard, demanding work was required for survival. But it isn't the sturdy ones we men go for, is it? I go for the delicate and demure every time. Like the little Korean girl.
No there's something else involved. It's almost like gravity. We do speak of magnetism but usually as a metaphor. But I think it's a fundamental law of the universe, maybe even more fundamental than gravity or space and time. That's one of the reasons I believe in god.
Here's a little poem of mine I wrote many years ago after meeting a beautiful young woman From Seattle at Second Beach in Vancouver. Since I can't get this blogger software to put the lines down as I want them I'll use slashes to denote line breaks.

I met lovely Linda so proud and so free,/
From soggy Seattle's steepy streets a refugee/
At English Bay- down by the edge of the sea./
We talked about something, everything, nothing,/
While the tide licked our feet- bare feet, felt neat, frothing./
I'll always remember the wealth of her hair, falling/
Over the glint of her eyes, green eyes, May eyes, searching./

I saw something sad there/
I wanted to kiss;/
After many a long year,/
When I strain to remember,/
It'll be something I'll miss.

Milt Hinton

I think my second post had fewer mispellings, stray commas, and grammatical peccadillos than the first, but I seem less sure of what I wanted to write about than I was when I contemplated this project. As for the little miscues I see writers of repute are plagued by them, too. I'm a technophobe so I don't yet know how to do links or photos but that will come. Far more important is it to try to find the right voice and possibly to clear out the kind of huge log jamb I suppose many frustrated writers accumulate over the years.
Yesterday I peeked into my thin little purse to see if I had a sufficiency of ducats for the purchase of a digital camera and decided after excruciatingly painful deliberations that, yes, I had enough. So now I have a little Pentax. And already I see that I should have waited until I had more to spend. The biggest problem is that it doesn't have a viewfinder. I didn't know this would be a problem until I tried to use it in direct sunlight. Impossible to see anything on the display. The next problem is that I like to take pictures in funny lighting conditions- backlighting, strong contrast between light and shade, artificial light- and with only the preset exposure contols to work with these are almost impossible. I suppose with practice I'll learn how to get what I want. At least my mistakes won't be so expensive as with film.
On my personal profile I listed Milt Hinton as one of my favourite musicians. In case you aren't familiar with the name I'll tell you a little bit about him. He was a jazz bassist who grew up in Chicago when jazz was just a youngster like him. Over the years he played with almost everybody at one time or other, but his main gig was with the Cab Calloway Band. I don't think there has been any other bassist who could swing a band like Milt Hinton. My knowledge of him comes almost exclusively from a CD set he put out when he was in his eighties called Old Man Time. Made with various musicians he had worked with over the years, these sessions included greats like Dizzy Gillespie, Doc Cheatham, Cab Calloway and many others. One great track has Cab singing the great song Good Time Charlie. You just don't hear singing like that anymore. Another of my favourites is when Milt and long time Calloway band guitarist Daniel Moses Barker sit down together doodling on their instruments, talking about old times and playing old tunes. Just the two of them. Talk about musicianship. And the wonderful songs, good melodies, lyrics with feeling, played by two masters with more musical knowledge between them than the entire crop of rappers put together. Milt was also a camera bug who took lots of photos of his musician pals that are now of historic as well as artistic importance.
Thanks to Jonathan Ives, Steve Jobs and a cast of thousands I am able to provide musical entertainment for my customers. I mean with my iPod, of course, which I route through the cab's stereo. This experience has led me to the conclusion that my young customers from the university campus have been deprived of something they yearn for without knowing it: beauty. They all seem to have lots of money, and expect to have more of it after graduation, and they all seem cool and clever, the girls pretty and well dressed, and definitely not sexually repressed, (as Sky Masterson in Guys and Dolls said of Las Vegas girls, they all have nice teeth and no last names) but about beauty they are surprisingly ignorant. Typically, after a little bevy of young things, or a couple are travelling in my cab for a block or two they start to notice the music. What radio station is that? Who is that singer? What is that genre? And the best response, when we arrive at the destination: I don't want to get out of the car. Not always, of course. The boys are a little afraid of seeming faggoty if they are with out with their friends pounding beers. (Yes, even after years and years of conditioning by the schools and the media that it's all right to be gay, most boys want to make it perfectly clear that they are hetero not homo.) Possibly one of the factors in the decline of popularity of classical music is that it has become associated with effeminate men.
That reminds me of an article I saw but didn't read about Billy Strayhorn where he was described as living in the shadow of Duke Ellington. More like living under the protection of Duke Ellington. Strayhorn was the composer of some of the most popular songs that came out of the Ellington band. One of them, Take the A Train, used for a lyric a set of directions the Duke gave him of how to get to Harlem. Strayhorn grew up in a dirt poor black working class neighborhood in Pittsburg and
was unabashedly gay. Musically precocious, he managed to get to meet Ellington when he came to town on tour and was offered an audition if he could find his way to Harlem. From then on, he was Ellington's most notable composer, arranger, song writer, and without that support there would have been no career for a stridently gay, black musician in those days.
We had a little snow this afternoon in Victoria. It was coming down pretty good but it wasn't sticking. Global warming, where are you?