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CRITICAL MASS: Exiles’ LA Indians far from Hollywood
By Philip Martin Tuesday, November 24, 2009 LITTLE ROCK — A couple of years ago, Milestone Cinematheque engineeredthe theatrical release of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a film thedirector made in 1977 while he was a graduate student at the Universityof California at Los Angeles that now is considered one of themasterpieces of American cinema. Burnett couldn’t get the properclearances for his film’s jazz score, and so Killer of Sheep wentunreleased for 30 years. In 2007, it played at a few film festivals,had a brief theatrical run and is now available on DVD - a movie oncethought lost can take its place in our cultural collectiveconsciousness. It looks like they might pull the same trick with Kent Mackenzie’slow-budget independent film The Exiles, about American Indians livingin Bunker Hill, a seedy residential neighborhood near the center of LosAngeles. It was mostly shot in 1958, completed in 1961 and though itgenerated a little buzz when it was shown at the Venice Film Festival,it never got a proper theatrical release. Thom Andersen gave it a nod in his legendary (and probablyunreleaseable) 2003 video essay about the ways LA has been portrayed inthe movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, calling it “the best Bunker Hillmovie.” And, in 2008, Milestone, working with the UCLA Film and TelevisionArchive (and Charles Burnett), arranged some film festival screeningsand a brief theatrical run for the film. Last week the movie, restoredto an immaculate black-and-white luster by the UCLA Film and TelevisionArchive, was released on DVD. The suggested retail price is $29.95 butfor a limited time it’s available directly from Milestone(www.milestonefilms.com/movie.php/exiles/) for $23.95. Like Killer of Sheep, The Exiles is a neo-realist movie that could betaken for a documentary. Mackenzie employed nonprofessional actors andfilmed them in the places they lived and frequented. The scriptconsisted largely of re-enactments of episodes drawn from their lives.Each of the three main characters wrote their interior monologues,which they read in voice-over, commenting on the action and driving theloose narrative. The film focuses on 12 hours in the life of a young couple, Yvonne(Yvonne Williams) and Homer (Homer Nish), and their friend Tommy (TommyReynolds). After Homer drops a pregnant Yvonne off at an all-nightmovie house to watch Westerns, he spends the evening carousing withTommy. Together they bounce around their neighborhood, drinking LuckyLager and Thunderbird wine, cruising in a convertible, playing poker,fighting, flirting and finally retreating afterhours to a high pointcalled “Hill X,” where they trade the four four rhythms of ’50s rock’n’ roll for the insistent measures of the tom-tom and traditionaltribal songs. Yvonne eventually walks home from the movies and ends up spending thenight with a girlfriend. When she wakes in the morning, she looks outthe window to see Homer - it’s never quite clear whether or not thecouple’s married - staggering toward home in his cowboy boots, his armdraped around a girl he’d picked up at a bar the night before. These young, urban Indians contrast to the iconic noble savages in theEdward Curtis photographs that serve as a prologue to the film. TheExiles is an understandably missing chapter from Hollywood’s officialhistory - these people are more ordinary and human than thestereotypical Indians that typically turn up in Hollywood products.They’re impoverished in spirit as well as in an economic sense, butthere’s nuance in their sadness. “Instead of leading an audience through an orderly sequence ofproblems-decisions-action and solution on the part of the characters,”Mackenzie wrote in the film’s original press notes, “we sought tophotograph the infinite details surrounding these people, to let themspeak for themselves, and to let the fragments mount up.Then, insteadof supplying a resolution, we hoped that somewhere in the showing, thepicture would become, to the viewer, a revelation of a condition aboutwhich he will either do something, or not - whichever his own reactiondictates.” But Mackenzie doesn’t approach his subject with ethnographicdetachment. He knew these people and cared deeply for them and theirneighborhood. An Englishman who became enamored of Bunker Hill while agraduate student at the University of Southern California, Mackenziemade a short student film about the neighborhood, which had beenselected for an urban renewal project. That film, Bunker Hill 1956,which is included in the two-disc Milestone edition, is an obviousforerunner of The Exiles, though most of its interviewees are poorwhites.Mackenzie knew the people of Bunker Hill; he cast his film fromhis friends. The characters in The Exiles are, for all their similarities to actualpeople living or dead, fictional characters. They may berepresentatives of a kind of extinct American; they are lost people,drifting along the margins. “I used to pray every night before I went to bed,”Yvonne says in one ofher voice-overs. “I used to ask for something that I wanted. And Inever got it. Seems like my prayers were never answered. So I just gaveup. And now I don’t hardly go to church or say my prayers no more.” Watching the f ilm 50 years after it was shot, one is more immediatelystruck by the imagery than the narrative, by the strange and vibrantpicture of a teeming Los Angeles. It provides a striking contrast tothe starkly provisional city projected by Burnett’s Killer of Sheep.It’s as much an expressionistic portrait of a fissured city as acharacter study. Mackenzie’s chief gift was not as a writer orstoryteller, but as a visual artist.He was a capturer and curator ofindelible images - a cigarette throwing off sparks in the wind, theinexorable crawl of headlights up Hill X, the smeary jots of nighttimeneon. Andersen, in a clip from Los Angeles Plays Itself included among theDVD’s bonus materials, says that The Exiles “reveals the city as aplace where reality is opaque, where different social orders co-existin the same space without touching each other. Better than any othermovie, it proves that there once was a city here, before they tore itdown, and built a simulacrum.”POP NOTES It’s better to burn out than to fade away? Don’t buy it
By Philip Martin Sunday, November 22, 2009 LITTLE ROCK — Count me as one who is still angry at Kurt Cobain forjoining what his mom called “that stupid club” of rock stars deadbefore they reached 30. Early death is not romantic - Neil Young livesand so does Johnny Rotten. It’s better to grow fat and slack, to becomea middle-aged hasbeen touring your back catalog than to check out at27. The cult of the good-looking corpse has been around at least since18th-century English poet and forger Thomas Chatterton died at age 18from arsenic poisoning. There’s nothing pretty about a mentally ill kid killing himself. So while Nirvana has become a part of the classic rock pantheon -unlikely commercial stablemates of Styx and Zeppelin - in the 15 yearssince Cobain’s suicide, they’ve pretty much faded into irrelevancy forme. Part of that is purely generational, I know - I had the Clashandthe Replacements; Cobain was younger and I was part of whatoppressed him. So it goes. Yet in retrospect, it is difficult to deny the importance of Nirvana -even if that importance is (like that of the Doors, Buddy Holly, JimiHendrix, et. al) inextricably bound up in the romantic notion of thebeautiful dead boy. Had Cobain lived, Nirvana might have soldiered oninto mediocrity, he might have become ridiculous. Orhe might, asMichael Stipe believes, have matured into an artist who sang softly andemployed lots of strings. But while we might be suspect of any product that emerges more than adecade after a band’s demise, Nirvana Live at Reading (Geffen), theirstoried and often-bootlegged performance at England’s Reading Festivalon Aug. 30, 1992, released on a limited edition CD-DVD combo earlierthis month (and on vinyl last week) is simply revelatory. This was onefierce band - Cobain sang like a man trying to scream his way out of agrave and, while not technically brilliant, had as good a grasp of theelectric guitar vernacular as anyone. And bassist Krist Novoselic anddrummer Dave Grohl wereremarkable complements, the ’90s’ answer to JohnEntwistle and Keith Moon. Long considered the band’s seminal live performance by cognoscenti, theReading show features an energized, intense Cobain who is, by turns,playful and provocativeas he leads the band through a blistering25-song set that included the bulk of Nevermind, the band’sbreakthrough album that was released less than a year before. The concert is famous for Cobain’s entrance. For days before theconcert, rumors about Cobain’s health and mental state had beencirculating. Some held that Nirvana, the festival headliner, would haveto pull out at the last minute because Cobain was in a hospital, neardeath from a drug overdose. Acknowledging these rumors, the concert begins with Cobain, in a whitefright wig with a hospital gown over his jeans, being wheeled out in achair. As he’s rolled toward his microphone, Novoselic protests thatthe sight is “toopainful.” Then he addresses the seemingly incapacitatedsinger-songwriter-guitarist. “You’re going to make it, man,” Novoselic says. Then to the crowd:“With the support of his friends and family, he’s going make it.” At that, Cobain theatrically pulls himself out of the chair, up to themicrophone and begins to sing, a cappella, the opening lines to theAmanda McBroom chestnut “The Rose” - “Some say love, it is a river” -before comically toppling backward. By now the audience is completely in on the joke (in truth, Cobain’sacting is none too good and anyone with a reasonable view of the stagecould probably tell from the moment he appeared that the wheelchair wasa prop). He quickly springs up, straps on his Fender Mustang and skonksout the opening chords to “Bleed” and the band kicks into gear. They proceed to tear through their catalog, flashing forward with threetracks from the yet-to-be released In Utero (including a triumphantsounding “All Apologies,” which is introduced by a genuinely touchingshoutout from Cobain to his thenbeleaguered wife Courtney Love), andback into their pre-rock star days on Sub Pop,with their first single“Love Buzz,” “Blew,” “About a Girl” and “Negative Creep.” At one point, after aborting a run through their giant hit “Feels LikeTeen Spirit,” Cobain plays a teasing snatch of Boston’s “More Than aFeeling,” a corporate rock standard as unhip as it is melodic. One suspects Cobain, who valued melody even more than sonic power,understood his fundamental kinship with Tom Scholz, the MassachusettsInstitute of Technologytrained engineer and guitarist who foundedBoston (and found a way to avoid the stereotypical pitfalls of rock ’n’roll stardom). But the rebel pose didn’t - and doesn’t - allow forauthentic genuflection. In any case, the 90-oddminute Reading concert redeems Cobain as aperson, and allows us to glimpse the mixed-up kid before hisapotheosis. E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline.com Style, Pages 57 on 11/22/2009Unreliable memory shapes American legend
By Philip Martin Sunday, November 22, 2009 LITTLE ROCK — Defense attorneys know memory is unreliable, a badwitness prone to confabulation and self-service. Something flickers,shadows roil but whatever there is that moves remains unavailable. Weguess, and believe, but we know less than we think. It was three days after my fifth birthday, a tungsten gray day with akind of hardness about it. We were living on an air base in upstate New York. There may have beensnow though I don’t remember snow. There was a black & white TV, apatch of sizzling silver, and I was home from school on Nov. 22, 1963,with the mumps or chicken pox or some other childhood malady, dressedin fuzzy flannel jammies. I remember the house we were living in, agovernment-issue split-level, one of hundreds of identical houses. Itmust have been tiny, though I remember it as large, with a greatbasement. Things were bigger then, ask anyone who remembers. For a few years, I thought I had actually seen the assassination liveon television. This was not possible; there was no television coverage.That was before men with cameras shadowed the president on everymundane mission, recording every exposure to the public on the ghoulishchance that something bad might happen. Though my memory insists otherwise, it wasn’t until years later I sawAbraham Zapruder’s home movie, its blown-up frames grainy and garish.I’m not even sure that I was in front of a television set when-at 12:56p.m.Eastern Standard Time-the first bulletins came in. I could have been watching. I could have seen. I try to remember andsee a movie poster; a child viewed from behind, sitting before ascratchy gray maw, bathed in electronic gray murder. I know it’s notthe truth but it is what I remember. I was at home, sick, smelling of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, whenJohn F. Kennedy was shot. I know a man who was walking across HarvardSquare when some girl ran past him crying; he went to see what waswrong and she told him. I know a woman who was in her high schoolcivics class. Another friend who’s passed on now had been in thenewsroom of the Dallas Morning News. Two days later he was in thebasement of the Dallas City Hall when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswalddead. (His memory wasn’t perfect either; he once told me he thought he mighthave been one of the last people to speak to Ruby before he killedOswald. In his version, Ruby had been at the newspaper dropping off anad for his nightclub half an hour before the murder. Thatseems unlikelysince Oswald died on a Sunday-would there have been anyone at theMorning News to accept his ad? Besides it’s wellknown that Ruby was atthe Western Union office across the street from the Dallas City Hallimmediately before the shooting. But my friend remembered it as hedid.) I am always astounded to meet people-full-grown men and women-who haveno answer to that question, who have no trickster memory of the eventbecause they were born too late. To them, JFK seems as remote asNapoleon. Maybe they have September 11 to serve as the day when the adultswerestricken; we remember the zombie days of ’63. I remember riding in thecar with my parents through a shut-down town, half-mast flags snappingdully above colorless vacant-looking businesses. Whatever pain therewas was blunt and heavy and communal, diffused through millionsyetstill tangible, a nut of grief in the back of every throat. I’ve heard stories that in some parts of the country children cheeredwhen they heard the news, and I used to not believe them. But after Iran a version of this column a few years ago, I got phone calls,letters and e-mail from dozens of people who remembered just that. Iguess it happened, here and there. We were all bewildered. There is a way of looking at John Kennedy that will lead you totheconclusion that he was a centrist Democrat of unremarkablecredentials whose political success was largely due to a surfeit ofpersonal charisma and great gobs of Daddy’s money. There is another wayof thinking about Kennedy that might cause you to believe the man was ahypocrite and a hustler; a playboy who lacked the intellectual rigor tofulfill his considerable potential. There are those who will tell youthat Kennedy was a fraud and a weakling and that he was far from agreat man. Yet though his bones have been picked by opportunists as varied as MarkLane and Seymour Hersh, JFK remains a part of a nationalmythology.While his function may be more cultural than political, he is all themore potent for having died young and pretty, the first rock starpresident, James Dean in the White House, trim and well-married with ashock of Hollywood unruly hair. He had the good fortune to be born wealthy, and in that narrow windowthat made it possible for him to be both adored by television andimmune to journalistic enterprise. He benefited from both the cozinessof the elite reporters who followed him and from the cameras thatcaressed his upper middle class bone structure. The bullets that rippedthrough him killed him, yes, but they also provided the strobe flashthat burned his handsome, boyish, vigorous image intoAmerica’sscrapbook of iconic images. JFK, no matter who or what he was, is the fallen king and his story isnow an American legend. He was not the first president to be murdered,but the first to be murdered on TV, and America not only survived buteven seemed to congeal around the wound. Lesser countries would havesplintered, the army would have mobilized and the woods would havefilled with desperate, dangerous men. Poor Oswald thought he killed the king, that his murder would haveconsequences beyond the personal. It didn’t work out that way, therevolution didn’t come. Oswald was deserted on the beach, and only theimpetuous act of another lonely actor saved him from the indignity ofjurisprudence. We have made up fantastic stories about the JFK assassination becausewe need to believe that it means something when people die; especiallywhen those people are famous or pretty or young. We cannot quite acceptthe idea that any little man with a gun can squeeze off an unlucky shotand cause a nation to buckle. But it wasn’t hard. All Oswald had to do was make use of theopportunity that was presented him. He simply took his time with thethird shot and blew the world apart. He just found the seam and waitedfor his chance. Sometimes the truth is as simple and as unbelievable as that. Pop. Pop.Pop. pmartin@arkansasonline.com Perspective, Pages 80 on 11/22/2009
Moffett Field, Calif.
PICTURE a habitat atop a hill in warm sunlight on the edge of a crater near the south pole of the Moon. There are metal ores in the rocks nearby and water ice in the shadows of the crater below. Solar arrays are set up on the regolith that covers the Moon’s surface. Humans live in sealed, cave-like lava tubes, protected from solar flares and sustained by large surface greenhouses. Imagine the Moon as the first self-sustainable human settlement away from Earth and a high-speed transportation hub for the solar system.
We can finally begin to think seriously about establishing such a self-sufficient home on the Moon because last week, NASA announced that it had discovered large quantities of water there.
While we have known for decades that the Moon had all the raw chemicals necessary for sustaining life, we believed they were trapped in rocks and thus difficult to extract. The discovery of plentiful lunar water is of tremendous importance to humanity and our long-term survival.
There have been 73 missions, manned and unmanned, to the Moon, and understanding its chemical composition, particularly finding water, has always been a priority. So why haven’t we seen significant amounts of water until now?
The answer lies in the Moon’s rotation. Unlike Earth, which rotates on a significant tilt to the Sun, the Moon is barely tilted at all. At the poles, some hills remain in permanent sunlight while some troughs are always in shadow. When water lands in sunny spots, perhaps carried by comets or asteroids, the water transforms directly into gas; if it lands in shadow, the water freezes and can remain indefinitely. The lack of light explains why spectrometers — instruments that can be used for remote water detection but rely on reflected light to do so — never picked up on the water.
This changed last month, when NASA shot a satellite into a permanently shadowed region on the Moon’s surface, throwing a plume of material containing water up out of the shadow.
From the perspective of human space exploration, that water is the most important scientific discovery since the ’60s. We can drink it, grow food with it and breathe it — by separating the oxygen from the hydrogen through a process called electrolysis. These elements can even be used to fuel rocket engines. (Discovering water on Mars was not quite as significant because the major hurdle to establishing permanent settlements there is the eight-month journey.)
Creating a permanent lunar habitat is important primarily for our species’ survival. Humanity needs more than one home because, with all our eggs in one basket, we are at risk of low-probability but high-consequence catastrophes like asteroid strikes, nuclear war or bioterrorism.
But it would also lead to valuable technological and other advancements. Consider the side-effects of the Apollo program: it drove the development of small computers, doubled the number of doctoral students in science and math in about a decade and marked a new stage in relations between the Americans and Soviets.
Imagine what we could learn from living on the Moon permanently. On its far side, shielded from the Earth’s radio noise, there is a quiet zone perfect for radio astronomy — which allows us to see objects we can’t from Earth. Out of necessity we could develop bacteria to extract resources directly from the regolith — a useful technology for Earth as well. And an international venture could open a new era of global cooperation.
Almost as surprising as NASA’s announcement is the lack of attention it has received. Thirty years ago, a development like this would have been heralded as one of humanity’s greatest discoveries. Perhaps the indifference is partly because of the disappointment of astronomers, amateur and professional, who tried to watch NASA’s October blast through their telescopes, but couldn’t see the plume. Or perhaps it’s a symptom of our age, that the problems that bedevil us on Earth limit our interest in other worlds — just when we need them (and the inspiration they offer) most.
William S. Marshall is a staff scientist with the Universities Space Research Association based at the NASA Ames Research Center.
Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Opinion (4 of 28) » A version of this article appeared in print on November 20, 2009, on page A35 of the New York edition.
Restoration of blues legend's birthplace eyed
Shelia Byrd • The Associated Press • November 14, 2009
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-->-->The mystery surrounding bluesman Robert Johnson's life and death feeds the lingering fascination with his work.
There's the myth he sold his soul to the devil to create his haunting guitar intonations. There's the dispute over where he died after his alleged poisoning by a jealous man in 1938. Three different markers claim to be the site of his demise.
His birthplace, however, has been verified. The seminal bluesman came into the world in 1911 in a well-crafted home built by his stepfather in Hazlehurst.
Now, 71 years after his death, local officials want to restore the home in hopes of drawing Johnson fans and their tourism dollars to Copiah County, about 100 miles from the Delta region that most bluesmen called home.
Johnson's life and music have been the subject of multiple books. And producers are shopping a script in Hollywood about him penned by Jimmy White, the screenwriter for the Academy Award-winning film, Ray.
"It's amazing that after all these years, people still talk about Robert Johnson on the level that they do," said the bluesman's grandson, Steven Johnson.
Johnson's influence can be heard in the works of numerous artists, from Muddy Waters to Eric Clapton, who covered 14 of the bluesman's songs on his 2004 album, Me and Mr. Johnson.
The house is an important piece of Johnson's legacy, said Grammy-winning pianist George Winston, who will headline a fundraiser for the restoration Monday at the Belhaven College Center for the Arts in Jackson.
"Everything with Robert is mysterious, but the more we can demystify, we can get down to the truth," said Winston. "He was an inspired musician. He took a quantum leap." The story goes that Johnson didn't play all that well at first, then left town for awhile. When he returned, his music had undergone a transformation.
"He came back and everybody couldn't believe how well he played," Winston said.
That's likely what gave rise to the soul-selling rumor, a transaction purportedly taking place at the crossroads of U.S. 61 and U.S. 49 in the Mississippi Delta.
-->(2 of 2)Johnson's birthplace was verified in a letter from his half-sister years ago, said Janet Schriver, executive director of the Copiah County Office of Cultural Affairs.
The 1,500-square-foot home now owned by the county has fallen into disrepair, but it still bears evidence of craftsmanship. Johnson's stepfather, Charles Dodds, was a furniture maker and a prosperous landowner. The house had a double-parlor, a long front porch and a pump that allowed water to flow into the kitchen
Schriver said the county is trying to raise $250,000 for the restoration project, which coincides with efforts to get Johnson's story to the screen.
White was commissioned by HBO about three years ago to write the script, but the production company's management changed and the project was scrapped, said Cathy Gurley, who handles publicity for the Robert Johnson Blues Foundation.
HBO confirmed Thursday a project had been in development, but subsequently producers were allowed to take it elsewhere.
White, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif., said he was moved by the "sheer genius" of Johnson, who was self-taught on the guitar.
"He was so good that he would literally turn his back when they were recording him. He didn't want the other musicians to see his fingering technique," White said.
A restored Johnson birthplace would offer his latter-day fans something rare: a tangible relic linked to the long-dead musician. Few personal artifacts from Johnson's life remain. Only two photos of Johnson are known to exist, one known as the "studio portrait" made for Johnson by Hooks Brothers Studios in Memphis and the other referred to as "the dime store portrait" taken by Johnson.
White spent months researching Johnson's life and interviewing other blues artists, including David "Honeyboy" Edwards. Little known in their prime, the bluesmen created an enduring musical legacy.
"As a writer, it was exciting for me because nobody has been able to crack the code of how to tell the story of a blues singer from that era, especially the legendary one who sold his soul to the devil," White said.
