3 Generations of Blue Steel

One of the best things about losing touch with Classic Rock radio is that I don't have to hear the Doors slam the coffin shut on psychedaelia. Their nauseating drone of pretense! Tonight, I happened to hear "Don't You Love Her Madly" and hated it happily, pointing out to the girls that it is nothing but a ham-handed mash-up of music from one of those phony old-timey ice cream parlors and a barbiturated lounge singer.

James T. Morrison, actin' all deep and groovy and shit.

Mr. Morrison, front man extraordinaire, even said he was the Lounge Lizard King ("Lounge" was silent, but implied), and he is correct. Had he lived, he would be splitting his time between Atlantic City and Branson, always wearing giant shades to hide shame's bloat, driving away musicians and yet continuing to score groupies with his trademark blend of booze and abuze. 

He didn't live (and thus stayed young and famous while his peers became crones), but even a dead guy can stare out of print and pixels into the eyes of human hordes years later, enticing them to look up his fauxlosophical lyrics and poetry. He was photogenic, if nothing else, and in posession of a fine sense of how to make a silly gesture seem deep, like in the shot above. You may also notice that he's got the soft proto-70's version of the Blue Steel pout. The Lounge Lizard King lives not more, but Jim Morrison Male Model achieved immortality.

Henry Garfield by Thurston Howes. Check out his  gallery o punk photos.

Modeling involves posing, and one thing punks hate is a poser.* Actually, no, that's not true. It's just that the band had to have more that one pose, and it wasn't about being pretty; Blue Steel would not have cut it on stage. A singer in particular had to have a series of poses directed at the other players, the audience, and imaginary oppressors. Henry Rollins was pretty good at that, but could also be insufferable. The kind of guy who would pose with a book so people would see him and then he could tell them what it means (instead of reading it), or write about He Himself and what He thinks.**

Like Morrison, Rollins loves having cameras on him. Not being a druggie alcoholic, he lives to do it to this day, in a manner I've posted on before. He poses even when not on stage, like with his Blue Steely gaze above, shirtless and one shoulder dropped, just like he did as a kid in front of his Doors poster, alone in his room dreaming of being a star). But in all those years it's hard to find a candid shot. Frame after frame he poses, so we won't forget his face. Line after line he proses, so we can grok his enlightenment. Track after track he chooses, so we're immersed in his sensibility.

I guess now I am too old and unhip (a word that proves my point, I think) to know who is this generation's self-adulating intellectually pretentious pretty boy of music. But I do know who Derek Zoolander is: he's the man who perfected the look that Morrison and Rollins only approximated.

And that's not all he perfected. By throwing himself whole-facedly into his modeling career, jettisoning the need to be loved for his mind as well as his really really good looks, Zoolander became a better model than Henry or Jim, and way less annoying. Not for the inventor of Magnum to write pretentious crap, or to whip out a tome to be seen reading the right stuff. All he wanted was for the school for kids who don't read good to be big enough for them to fit in. A simple man, a grounded dream. Isn't that enough to ask of our models and our musician-models and model-musicians?



* I know, poseur is the 'real' spelling, but people who insist on that brand themselves with it.

** Like me, now. Dammit, I'm a fraud.***

*** But there is this silver lining: Now I can claim to be a legit critic.

Kid Rock's Comeuppance: Joe Dirt

Mostly, my posts tend to be mean and sarcastic, or at best something akin to a hipster's glee in irony or camp. I pick on targets like Heston and Jack Lord (both incapable of doing any more than haunting me), movies that are unintentionally funny, not what I'd consider to be great entertainment or art.

So now, it's time for one that I consider a cinematic masterpiece. A movie released in the first year of the millenium: Joe Dirt. David Spade, casting aside his sarcastic schtick and small-guy side-kickery to play a pure and humble (and so temptingly mockable) hero on an epic quest, a zen master never cowed by life's indignities. A working man abused but never downtrodden, he is the cream of the 99%.

He is, of course, imaginary. The real Joe Dirts are locked up, burned out, or beaten down, but this guy comes straight out of the halcyon days of his ilk, keeps on keepin' on, crankin some tunes, and ultimately triumphing with his hemi. The exalted hemi, his favorite bands, the Auto Trader obsession, and all that shit was not intended as documentary, but captures a reality that does exist, or did anyway. While not forgetting to be hilarious. Not high-brow, understand (although some lines would work as New Yorker cartoons), but not overly dependent on farts either and above the crowd in terms of literalizing the "he's being shit on" theme. Seems like everything Joe says is something I heard in high school. Anyway, thanks Spade and Wolf for a kick-ass script.

Whoever cast this was right on. His small-town girl-next-door-friend is sweet and genuine (and extra authenticity points for casting a Brittany as a Brandy), and having Dennis Miller portray a self-adoring douchebag mock-jock inspired by Dirt's story to a patronizing dullness is pretty dead-on. One of my favorites among the human(ish) cast is Kid Rock playing grown "man" still going by Robby (another authentic name, and this time the "actor's" actual name, as opposed to his clever trade name). It is incredibly satisfying to see Kid Rock get his comeuppance in the movie, and also to realize that this was probably the acme of his career. Finding a dog with such elasticity is a coup, as well.

Speaking of which, this movie has the funniest dog-ball scene ever, tender in every sense of the word. [Not really, it is not at all like these tenders: boats, caretakers, or those weird little strips of chicken meat with a big tendon at one end.]

So I was watching this with my older kid, up til just before the sex (maybe sibling incest) scene, when she was shooed out. As some of you know from an early procrastacritique of mine, I am home-schooling her in sarcasm, and wanted to show her the particularly mean (and in my opinion, unworthy) brand of snarkasm Dennis Miller delivers so oilily. When he's playing Zander Kelly, I mean.

But because I'm a censorous old man, my daughter missed the best pose sequence this side of the collected stretches of Nacho Libre. Joe takes off his shirt and strikes every attitude of bad-ass nonchalance he can, in slow-mo, while a white trash hottie takes it in. He's the carny sex god, and for some reason his stances and expressions just crack me up to no end. [I swear it is a coincidence that I just happened to watch Zoolander, and I am not really obsessed with model-style sequences].

One of the first things people comment on with Joe Dirt (OK, maybe the only thing) is his mullet, so of course for me it will be last. The hair is cool and all, but it is a wig, whereas his facial hair is natural; he doesn't even have to shave. This trigger's Miller's best line, "Now, you're telling me you were so ingrained with white trash DNA, your facial hair actually grows in on its own all white trashy like that?"

So. Joe Dirt. Ridiculous realism. The losers' winner. A story arc more than the sum of it's tangents. A movie here un-mocked.

Omigod Man: Omega Man

Aside from the online POTA (Planet of the Apes) crowd, almost nobody looks to me for film criticism. Maybe because I know so little, and don't know any of the names to drop or references to make. Also, I like to review movies way after they come out; I'm averaging nearly 4 decades after release, for I am The Procrastacritic.

In 1970 (+/-3), Heston embarked on a trio (plus the POTA sequel, if you wanna count that, which I don't) of sci-fi flicks, each set in an earthly future rendered dark and dystopian by human folly: the Hestopian Trilogy. Planet of the Apes kicked it off, and Soylent Green finished it. In my usual shiftless way I arrive last at the middle: Omega Man, a post-apocalyptic costume drama. Like the others in this triptych of hubristic humanity gone awry, OM returns to certain aspects of the species Homo hestonii: his journey from adventurous gay man to abusive heterosexual, pathological criminalism, and race relations.

We begin with the decked out in sweaty suave, epaulettes rippling in the breeze as he speeds though an abandoned city in a big red caddy (Hunter Thompson appropriated the caddy and sense of doom for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). The stylish safari look was judged just right for the character, Robert Neville, indulging in his twin passions of looting and shooting, and was so popular with audiences that studio execs green-lighted the epaulettes' re-appearance in Soylent Green.

He is alone, Colonel Neville, the reward and curse for having saved himself from a man-made plague while all around him perished (not having had the Hestonian wisdom to be germ warfare scientists themselves). Now, he must spend days hunting down and killing zombies. At night, he plays chess with a bust of Julius Caesar, and furthers the costume aspect of the movie by saying "I dress for dinner on Sundays," sporting a green velour jacket and ruffled blouses.

But let us not dwell on sartoriality, let us get to the point of the movie, which is…I'm not sure. So why not just make fun of the oddities? Three years after everyone died and presumably failed to produce more food, and Neville's got a fresh fruit platter and a string of bratwurst; there's always ice in the silver bucket. Car and flashlight batteries remain fresh forever in this miraculous world, different than the 1978 I lived through, where we had crappy batteries that lasted six months. Finally, in a world full of stores, Heston's natural looting mania seems to be focused mainly on clothes, expressing his every mood (to whom?) with a new outfit for every occasion.

Then there's The Family, a multiracial zombie-ish coven (disaster strikes a few years after the big race riots, so of course the first thing the survivors to is get together in harmony, right?). Well, almost harmony, because the black guy in The Family is dishonest and violent. So much for progess: the innovation of the movie is to have black people in white-face make-up. The strangest thing is that after three years of intensive searching, Neville has not found them, even though the first kid he meets knows exactly where they are.

He(ston) wants to root out their nest, kill them all before they kill him. Were they really trying to kill him before he took to shooting them on sight? I'm not so sure, but as usual when encountering the Other in Hestopia, the only solution is to shoot, for god's sake, SHOOT! Oh, and drive like a fucking maniac (because when you are the last man on earth, every car is a rental). Costume-wise: he usually chooses something militaryey looking for ops like this, like when time was of the essence and he managed to slip into a form-fitting blue rayon flight suit.

Eventually, Neville trips across a group of survivor children (awww), protected by an aspiring germ warfare doctor (no, no stretching the limits of plausibility there), who he should have taught how to make the anti-zombification serum. But instead, he goes to the only other healthy adult, so that he can have The Kiss That Changed The World (sorta,...OK, not really).

For she is African American. Yeah. And Chuck Heston is as white a Moses as you'll ever see. Of course, this shocking romance occurred years after Poitier and Hepburn had made the move on the big screen; even Shatner and Uhuru had blazed the trail on TV while Heston was avoiding women altogether on POTA. So Omega Man kisses a black woman, subject to certain rules: there must be a false start, the kiss itself must not be lit well enough to see, and she must die before there is an issue with, uh, shall we say, issue. The costume for this scene is an pirate shirt with understated puffy sleeves.

If I don't understand what this movie is about, it's not for lack of trying by the authors and director, who beat me about the head and neck with symbolism. They foreshadow and then at the end indulge in crucifixion, savior Neville arms asplay, passing a vial of his own blood to the future that they might be saved zombification by the Pharisees or Pagans, or whoever those anti germ warfare freaks are.

Shallow Time Travel: Soylent Green

Soylent Green is made of people!

Yeah. Planet of the Apes was not the end of my journey down the Hestonian road to the future. This time, to a closer one, a more plausible outcome to late 20th Century excess, introduced with the coy and squatty multiframe montage taking us from Manifest Destiny to Hestopia, penultidecadally before Koyaanisqatsi. Viewers are not asked to believe in evolution, just that overpopulation and pollution lead to some problems.

This time, our hero is not a space-ship commander, but a New York City dick, which you can read as 'detective' if you want, but the guy is a thief, a kicker of stairwell dwellers, who lets his friend kill himself and doesn't mind getting stains on the furniture. That last charge sounds lame, until you know that "furniture" in the far off year 2022 refers to the chick that comes (or at least pretends to) with apartments rented to bachelors. One piece took a swing at him, but didn't deserve the savage beating she got in return. Because in Soylent Green, the 'she was to be our Eve' sentimentality and desire for breeding of POTA is a thing of the unimaginable future. There are 40 million people in New York City alone, too crowded for love, even though the furniture might dream of it from time to time.

In the midst of this overpopulated mess--shot in yellow Hazescope (TM)--is some sort of college where Heston and his room-mate live in a dorm room. Books, mini fridge, squalor. Chuck's character is lucky, just like I was, to have roomed with Saul (I know, credits say 'Sol,' but it sounds like 'Saul,' and it adds another dimension), a Jewish guy (see?) whose intelligence and humor helps Heston's Detective Thorn make it through. Like the time he says something really beautiful, pauses for effect, and says "Schmuck."

Theirs is a tenderer relationship than me and my roommate, richer perhaps from having sprung from all they'd gone through back when Heston was Moses and Edward G. Robinson was that asshole Egyptian enforcer (General Suleiman, maybe?) bent on killing him. The general saw earlier than his colleagues did where the chips would fall, and besides, don't some boys have a thing about plaguing the one they love? The script does not tell us how they fell in together, just that Saul is the book-guy, with memories of the old world, and Thorn is the tough guy. Teacher, jaw-jutting antihero student. The only furniture around a random few rickety chairs and a dinette table, no complications.

Thorn investigates murders and kicks ass among hungry people who won't disperse. Everywhere he goes, he is a dick. Kills people he should have questioned, leaves every domicile with loot. But the thing is, he brings Saul treats when he can snag some, listens to the old man's stories, offers to pedal the generator bike that shines a 40-watt bulb on their dim existence. When Saul chooses a voluntary death, Thorn rushes to share the last moment, to repeatedly express their love. It is as tender and genuine as Heston gets.

Some website says Edward knew he was gonna die--and followed through (unlike Thorn with his pedal offer) just 12 days after filming the scene--and kept it secret until telling Chuck just before his death scene to amp up the emotion. Others say that's a bunch of crap, that Heston offed Robinson and concocted the cancer story to amp up the box office. Either way, there's nothing the furniture likes better than a poignant death.

On the other hand, they don't so much like the cannibalism. Neither do the characters in this flick. You'd think they'd be a little less surprised, not banished to Catatonia like the priest or executed for 'unreliability' like the victim, Simonson, in all his Joseph Cottony blandness, a scene that plays out as an over-wrought exchange between a monkey with a crowbar and a tired old thespian unaware that the audience left long ago.

Yeah, a shocking murder...1973 style. No visible carnage, just some really fake blood. To set it up, to make us understand that it is a major conspiracy, the killer meets with his handler, a state security heavy who supplies him with one of those fancy two-piece crowbars. Yeah, lock and load crowbar, man. Only the big boys have them. (Later, they make a point of Thorn deducing that the crowbar proved the killer was a pawn, a nobody being used by guys with guns. Sweet sweet guns....but back to the story.) So he has to use the bar to bash footholds in the concrete wall surrounding this rich guy's house so he can gain entry and bash holes in his head. Which cranial violations did not appear in 1973 mainstream film (I say with no data to back me up).

Somehow, all the clanging does not alert security. No matter, since this crime is just one guy and there is Soylent happening right under everyone's pollution-impaired nose. Thorn figures it out, though, not with fortuitous information and implausible plot lines, no, but with beatings and his smart roommate's help.

First, though, he must brachiate his way down stairwells full of huddled masses nearly as dumb as POTA humans. Then swagger into the building where the rich guy lived, where he must pass the super, who is an honest to god lawn jockey. Red jacket, weird hair and all. Turns out the guy is also an incredible dick, who doesn't even wait for the furniture to hit him before he beats them. Thorn lets him know who is boss, but doesn't kill him.

Another Dick in the movie is of the Van Patten variety. Dead and gone in 2022, but when this movie was made (MLMXXIII), he still had the glory years of Eight is Enough before him. Younger, but still bald and dull, his mattress-salesman future reverberating backwards, Mr. Obvious Tool played the role of usher to the chamber where the depressed and old could kill themselves in return for a 20 minute, clumsily edited sequence of nature shots that would not have passed muster in 1982, much less 2022.

I'd've blown the budget making the Styx-crossing movie mind-boggling, but back in '73 they went with a thing they called a 'cathode ray tube game,' an oversized Leggs container with a field of Asteroids featuring limited Pong action. Yes. Such a primitive video game that even I can describe it. The furniture had to stoop over to play the damn thing, desperately pretending to be thrilled, just to let us know that these are rich people without a care in the world.

Rich people. It seems like they keep coming up. This post is already getting long, and it's nearing midnight. If I forget to continue this later (I'm thinking "Soylent Greebacks" would be a good title, then remind me.

Shallow Space Travel: Planet of the Apes

The other day I subjected my older child to Planet of the Apes, the original (1967 or 68, depending on your source), the Hestonian dystopia (Hestopia?), the ... uh, movie. Yeah. I'm film illiterate.

The point is that the kid needs some education regarding the crazy culture I grew up in, totally alien to this 21st century progeny. I mean, when I was a kid people were racist and new technological frontiers kept expanding and the US was mired in a war that dragged on nearly as far as this IED-laced road to Nowhere, Afghanistan we're on now and uh...

Yeah, completely different.

Sarcasm is not taught in schools, except by often ill-disciplined student prodegies and wannabes. So I have to home school, but I'm not really turned on at the prospect of the religious curricula, which I consider to be merely snide, sarcasm turned weak and mean, like an aged chihuahua from a bad home. Besides, who wants to pay their prices?

Kindof with Mystery Science Theater in mind, I pulled up a couple comfy chairs and started the flick. Heston in a suaved-out swagger on the bridge of a Spaceship, a cynical antihero who doesn't let some pinhead back at Command tell him he cannot smoke a cigar in a pure Oxygen environment. Then he shoots up and the movie begins.

But before that, think back to when I was talking about having the teach Sarcasm 201 (she placed out of Intro without batting an eye, just those slack lids and the teeniest of eyebrow lifts). One great technique is the Training Film, liberally basted with audience comments. There were some Archaeology Training Films that shaped who I am. Platoon (imparting the proper sense of doom, leavened with the fun of stalking through the jungle and giving hand signals), Indiana Jones (learning to say "That belongs in a Museum!" with conviction, and at other times a series upon which sarcasm is to be heaped), Predator (cannot remember why, probably because of swampy jungles and the dude's cool dreadlocks), and so on.

To Planet of the Apes, featuring Cornelius, an archaeologist-hero who clearly knows his methodology better than Indy and has respect for human remains. Not only that, but he's a staunch evolutionist and is romantically involved with Dr. Zira; together, they defend science from the ruling cadre of light-skinned religious bigots. They seek Truth, and my beef is not with them.

It's with Heston. Always with Heston. And maybe too it's just fun to make fun of decades-old effects and stuff like the sudden pointless zooms that punctuate the movie (I kept expecting it to cut to commercial). Oh, and of course the Ape technology. They can do brain surgery and make functional guns, but their means of capturing humans is the Crudely Woven Net, available in sizes large enough to be effective (the trip-wired net fences that I'm pretty sure they stole from Marlin Perkins), but usually deployed awkwardly between two horse-riding Gestape-o, invariably in a size too small to entangle a large biped.

The Planet of the Apes is geographically interesting, too. They land in a lake ringed by the telltale white stains of a drawdown, evidence that the lake is impounded behind a major hydroelectric dam, yet there are no power lines in the whole movie.

What there are are footprints, on the sands before them in several Forbidden Zone scenes. Because nobody has been there in 1200 years or so, they must be fossils, remnants of the last people stupid enough to abandon a lake full of water to strike out aimlessly through the desert in white patent leather boots with back packs full of useful things like test tubes containing pink sand. More sand. In a desert where you banished yourself. Sarcasm.

On the more local scale, there's the big boulder inexplicably rolling down a hill at them, after which they rest, beneath another precariously balanced boulder! Heston is the best captain ever. Yeah.

History lessons can be drawn from this flick as well. The casting is a window on the 1960's that era of upheaval and promise, change and retrenchment. I'm sure that including among the astronauts a woman and what were then called Negroes (one of the sequels has a character by that name, in case you have doubts) gave the writers a warm fuzzy feeling, but consider what their roles were. The woman has been brought because the uterus would die witrhout her. Cap'n Heston briefly mourns the passing with the creepy "She was to be our Eve," although the idea of repopulating with 3 guys and one girl instead of the other way around is a recipe for at least one murder. Then of course the female lead for the rest of the movie is the perfect woman in Hollywood terms: enamored with the hero, mute, and scantily clad sexy body topped by a great head of hair (legs and armpits shaved, though she acts amazed that Heston can shave).

The one black guy in the movie, although clearly the smartest of the survivors, is given every bit of work that happens. Need someone to climb up and flip an important switch inexplicably located at the other end of the sinking ship? He'll do it. Test the new planet's soil, or run ahead and find the path while everyone else jawbones about their egos? Call on the Negro. Somebody need to get killed to establish the apes' disregard for human life (only to later appear as a museum specimen, suggesting that they have some scientific curiosity)? Perfect job for a Negro in 1967. Or 1968.

And through it all, Hestonian machismo. The derision for his lesser crew. The violent attempts to grab paper from Dr. Zira instead of just pantomiming or gently reaching out. The insults hurled at his captors. The only break in his mindless macho posturing is his obvious homosexuality. That's pretty much the only explanation for why he would order his man-crew to strip naked and cavort in the water (check out the scene where they stand together looking at each others peni), then indulges in a diva-ish strip of his own under the gushing white waterfall. I have it on good authority that Chuck got so deep into this aspect of the role that he insisted the film be the first to show several naked men, but no naked women. Groundbreaking. And if you doubt my conclusions about his gender, consider this: even if the ape scientists only gave me a mate because they are horny voyeurs, I'd have started repopulating immediately, but Chuck barely touches her, even when he hears he's about to be gelded. Maybe he'd planned on ordering the Negro to start breeding the new human race, but in 1967 (or 1968) even science fiction frowned on interracial relationships. Ergo our current president's childhood diaspora.

So, having looped around to the present again, I should consider stopping, or surrender to another gyre over that ridiculous planet. Rich grounds for smartassery and sarcasm, but I think I'll just have to step away for now...