Sunday Screening

OH MY GOD. Seems The Americanization of Emily, one of my favorite relatively-unknown classics, is available in full on YouTube (and in handy playlist form, at that). It's been up for over a month, which is a good sign that the YouTube Copyright Gestapo isn't on the hunt for it in particular, but these things often vanish suddenly so get it while you can. To whet your appetite, here is an appropriately bizarre and incoherent trailer:

Don't let the black & white fool you, this was 1964; the young James Garner plays opposite the younger Julie Andrews in a biting satire of war and war-politics. Almost unknown and criminally underrated, this is everything Dr. Strangelove should have been: calm, intelligent, and devastating. (I hold Dr. Strangelove, like all of Kubrick, to be criminally OVERrated, but that's for another day.) It's not a great film, to be sure -- the directing is lackluster, and Julie Andrews is not exactly known for her dramatic range -- but the writing alone makes it more than worthwhile. Paddy Chayefsky, who you probably know as the guy who wrote Network in 1976 and then died, is the force at work here; Americanization of Emily is one of a series of movies he did as he transitioned out of 1950s TV and radio. (I'm not qualified to comment on the rest of Chayefsky's work -- the only one I've seen is the absurd Paint Your Wagon from 1969, with Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood, singing. Let me tell you, the only worthwhile thing about seeing Paint Your Wagon is that you can subsequently say you sat through it -- a not insubstantial accomplishment, actually. ...I'm digressing.)

I imagine that some of you shiftless, MTV-addled teenagers will lack the patience to watch this whole movie (and you productive, career-building Harvard types certainly won't have the time); if so, I demand you at least watch this one scene. Here, James Garner devastates Julie Andrews' war-widow mother at a garden tea party, delivers a subversive speech about the virtues of cowardice, and in his grinning, clean-cut, all-American way, starts the 1960s. Skip to 3:27 and watch through into the next clip.

I'll leave you with that to ponder, and for heaven's sake, watch the entire movie. Meanwhile, enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

Sunday Screening

As a lover of classic pop culture, I watch a lot of videos that are corny. A lot that are cheesy. A lot that are campy. But less often do I find something, from what was at one time the centerpoint of the American mainstream, that is completely bugshit insane. Look:

That's Jan & Dean, performing their 1960 single "White Tennis Sneakers" on what I am assuming is American Bandstand. You can tell just by looking at them that there was something seriously wrong with these boys.

They were pioneers of surf music, which is best remembered these days for producing the immortal Beach Boys, but which was also a fad in its own right in the early 1960s that produced unbelievable amounts of dreck. My analogy would be that the Beach Boys were to surf music what the Bee Gees were to disco: a group of musical geniuses whose brilliance was outpaced tenfold by meritless commercial imitators. And if the Beach Boys are the Bee Gees, then Jan & Dean have to be ABBA: talented but totally synthetic and really, really creepy. To illustrate, here is the ultimate text of the surf genre, Jan & Dean's decidedly pre-feminist 1963 hit "Surf City" -- which was co-written, by the way, by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson:

This shit was everywhere. Here's a particularly unnerving little thing, a clip from a 1963 TV pilot called "Surf Scene" starring Jan & Dean themselves -- I'll let you decide for yourself why the networks never picked it up:

Surf music, always a strictly American phenomenon, passed when the Beatles came along and pop-rock as we know it today began. But Jan & Dean kept at it; Jan (his full name was Jan Berry) suffered debilitating injury, including brain damage, in a 1966 car accident, and briefly the name "Jan & Dean" was used for both an album entirely by Dean and, later, a truly freaky psychedelic album called "Carnival of Sound" recorded by the convalescent Jan, his girlfriend, Glen Campbell, Davy Jones of the Monkees, and Phil Spector's studio musicians, among others. It is a scattershot, nonsensical collection of songs and random noise; their label (Warner) never released it. (I had the luck to get it from BigO, a strange website run by Singaporean leftists who regularly upload rare lost albums and concert bootlegs, then take them down almost immediately. Want to hear John Cage in San Francisco, 1965? Get it while it's hot...)

Yet Jan & Dean pressed on. Here, as proof, see one of the most incredible things I ever found on YouTube: this is from a VHS tape called "Surfing Beach Party" that Jan & Dean made, apparently, in 1983. This thing will scramble all your chronological indicators. Look:

Are you trying to figure out why that clip feels so strange? I'll tell you -- and it's not just because the costume designers couldn't seem to figure out whether it was the 80s or the 50s (and the song is from the 60s!). It's because, even though "Surfing Beach Party" is a comparatively recent production, it's completely without irony. These boys are totally earnest! And that just doesn't happen in our understanding of pop music, post-1960s. It's not coincidental that I mentioned the Beatles above; they changed the paradigm for pop, which they performed with a knowing smirk instead of the traditional big ol' grin. Most latter-day performances of great classic pop understand this and temper themselves accordingly (not to mention, the songs are so great that they stand on their own) -- Jan & Dean, clinging as they are to a tiny shard of Kennedy-era flotsam, have no such luxury. If you're anything like me, that makes you uncomfortable.

I'll leave you to ponder that. Enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.

Good taste

Any reservations I may have had about Barack Obama -- ok, ok, shut up. But if I had had any reservations at this point, they would be gone, after I read this:

The Democratic presidential candidate discusses the music he listened to while growing up -- Stevie Wonder, Earth, Wind & Fire, Elton John, the Rolling Stones -- and the music on his iPod -- all of the above plus Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Jay-Z, Bruce Springsteen, Howlin' Wolf, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, the Grateful Dead and others.

But perhaps Obama's most intriguing response came when he was asked to name his favorite Dylan songs.

"Actually, one of my favorites during the political season is 'Maggie's Farm,' " he replied. "It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric."

MAGGIE'S FARM. What a classic. Most people know that when Dylan went electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, he played the revolutionary "Like A Rolling Stone" -- but fewer people know that the first song he played, the shot heard round the world, was "Maggie's Farm." Picture yourself at a folk festival, listening to placid acoustic songs, and then suddenly you're facing this (actual 1965 footage):

That right there is one of the most historic moments in rock music. Make sure you watch all the way through so you can hear the booing at the end. (There's a better version on DVD -- The Other Side of the Mirror, which I had the privilege to watch in its entirety during a PBS pledge drive -- that captures the boos and shouting from the crowd right from the first notes on that guitar.) Good choice, Sen. Obama; good choice.

Oh, my head

Three months ago I got angry at Barack Obama, as I often do, for talking shit about the 1960s. At the time, I wrote:

[D]oes he just mean that Senator Clinton hasn't been forceful enough in denouncing the Port Huron Statement? Is John Edwards too soft on the Weathermen? What the hell is he talking about?

Ha ha! Funny anachronistic references to defunct 1960s radicals, which illustrate the silliness of the issue because they could never ever crop up in a present-day... what the hell?

The Hillary Clinton campaign pushed to reporters today stories about Barack Obama and his ties to former members of a radical domestic terrorist group... "Wonder what the Republicans will do with this issue," mused Clinton spokesman Phil Singer in one e-mail to the media, containing a New York Sun article reporting a $200 contribution from William Ayers, a founding member of the Weather Underground, to Obama in 2001. (Obama's ties to the radical group first surfaced last week in a Bloomberg News article.)

In a separate e-mail, Singer forwarded an article from Politico.com reporting on a 1995 event at a private home that brought Obama together with Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, another former member of the radical group.

[...] "If the Clinton campaign is truly concerned about the exploitation of the Weather Underground issue by the Republican attack machine, perhaps they should focus on the pardon of some of its members in the waning days of the Clinton administration," Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.

"The Weather Underground issue." OH MY GOD JUST FUCKING KILL ME. They know there's a WAR going on right now, don't they? Like, not a culture war, a war war? WHY ARE WE TALKING ABOUT THIS??!!?!?

...The Clinton campaign is simply beyond repair, if this is the level they're sinking to. (Not that Burton's doing himself any favors by jumping right down into their frame -- "Yeah, well, your guy is also a dirty hippie!") I understand such garbage scores points with the pathological media, who of course are obsessed with the 1960s, but for everybody else... this is rapidly becoming the stupidest primary ever. I need a drink...

Please, spare us

See, this is why I don't like Barack Obama's campaign:

"There's no doubt that we represent the kind of change Senator Clinton can't deliver on. And part of it's generational," Obama told FOX News. "Senator Clinton and others have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. It makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done. And I think that's what people hunger for."

OMFG ENOUGH with the generational politics. This is such crap. What "fights" from the 1960s is Obama talking about, and by what voodoo are they stifling politics today? "Gosh, I really hunger to reach across the aisle to my fellow Americans and get things done, but I'm just so mad about LBJ and the draft..."

And what cause exactly does Obama propose we abdicate? Women's rights? Civil rights? Environmental responsibility? Peace? Or does he just mean that Senator Clinton hasn't been forceful enough in denouncing the Port Huron Statement? Is John Edwards too soft on the Weathermen? What the hell is he talking about?

Oh sorry, my bad -- I forgot that Senator Obama never addresses actual issues, only generalities. (It's a Politics of Hope thing, I gather.) He must just be referring to radicalism as a category, the kind of politics that was deliberately aggressive toward Middle America. And certainly, nobody espouses that attitude better than... uh... Hillary Cl...

COME ON. I'm no fan of Senator Clinton, but to paint her as a 1960s radical is just insane. This is the second most conservative (after Richardson) and by FAR the most establishmentarian of all the Democratic candidates, and you want to call her a revolutionary? Get off my lawn. (The only way you could suggest Hillary's candidacy harks back to 60s divisions is by simple virtue of the fact that she has a vagina -- which is an argument I really hope the Senator's not making.)

No, I think this kind of comment is just 100% pure bullshit; a senseless sop to political elites, who have a well-documented irrational fear of hippies, and who are attracted to this generational-transformational rambling like flies to a septic tank. Obama's consultant-driven campaign tends to do this kind of thing, and it's sickening -- not only does it validate a right-wing talking point, which no Democrat should ever do (and Obama has a history of it), it's also a stupid political argument, one that has zero force outside the Beltway and the offices of the New York Times.

I mean, My God, our economy is imploding, people are losing their houses, Iraq is a meat grinder, nobody has health care, and Barack Obama -- Savior of Our Politics, Provider of Hope -- wants to talk about hippies. If the Senator really aims to implement "transformational change", I humbly suggest he start with his own talking points...