'Marketa Lazarová'

All I could think about while watching this Czech film set during the ruthless and unforgiving Middle Ages is how North America never had a time like this. Also, how has that shaped the United States.

Sub-sub-question, is it possible that right now is the United States' Middle Ages and we've simply swapped out savage violence … well, for savage violence (that by gangs in Chicago or teenagers on video game consoles).

Are there ages any more? Ages always recorded some advancement in culture. Point being, is the United States in one age and will that transition to a new age where things are better, where science and understanding rule? Or, are we beyond ages? As things evolve they also tend to devolve in a lot of ways.

There is no real history of North America in the Middle Ages. The Europeans hadn't come over yet except for some Vikings. Otherwise, the indigenous peoples that traveled over the Bering land bridge centuries inhabited the free land. It would take several lifetimes for anyone of a  different skin tone to set foot on the continent and begin to really screw shit up.

There were North Americans during the Middle Ages, but it takes fragments of pottery and weapons to really understand a fragment of their culture. We don't know their lives quite like we know that of the Europeans. Chances are, the lives of the North Americans during the Middle Ages probably wasn't too drastically different than those centuries before or centuries after.

Let's hope that the worst of the Middle Ages is Facebook.
d

'Cut'

I'd never heard The Slits before this and you can color me green with envy for anyone who'd been listening to them since the 1970s. This is a tremendously cool record. Nothing fancy, just some rocksteady ska rhythms mixed with a robust slate of bass lines.

This is a must-listen for anyone interested in early punk.

Lead singer Ariane Foster (or Ari Up) was at the ground floor of it all. She was the god daughter of Jon Anderson from Yes. She also wound up married to hot head John Lydon, lead singer of The Sex Pistols. Their house became a hovel for the young punk bands including Joe Strummer, who's own music is a direct cousin to The Slits.

The Slits were an all-female group. It's worth noting I think that the album cover to Cut was the band nude and caked in mud.

'I, Robot'

Mostly, it's about artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence and the parameters that organic intelligence attempt to place on it. And how this could possibly even succeed. Artificial intelligence is only as capable, as intelligent as organic intelligence strives to make it.

Yet, organic intelligence feels the need to place rules on something organic intelligence has every opportunity to temper.

Isn't that weird?

'Dead Souls'

A clever novel by Nikolai Gogol, the Russian novelist, who set most of his stories post-Napoleon. This novel portrays a certain important stage in Russia's history -- an empire still stuck in serfdom.

This novel follows Chichikov, a middle-class shyster seeking to climb the ladder of land ownership. The only way he saw to acquire land was to roam the countryside buying up dead serfs, or dead souls.

The idea being is that the only way to acquire wealth -- or the facade of wealth -- is to collect serfs, dead or alive, which were essentially slaves, used by the landowners to farm their land.

The book is not so much about the actual deceased serfs but instead the grotesque land owners that Chichikov encounters in his voyage. The serfs are the lucky ones, they're not living monsters.

Chichikov winds up using the idea of owning all of these serfs as collateral to buying land. Dead serfs have the same value as live serfs, in mother Russia.

'Live At Folsom Prison'

Listening to Johnny Cash's live records from prisons, I always wondered what a treat that was for the guys in lock up. Really, it's probably more of a privilege than they actually deserve. To see one of the stalwarts of early rock and roll and country and western while you're wearing a prison uniform. I bet those dudes never even thought twice about how lucky they were. 

Although a neat concept, this album is just some sort of fantasy play for Cash as he attempted to paint himself as some sort of outlaw. It's my one gripe about Cash, the simple boy from backwoods Arkansas  that grew up singing gospel songs to his mother is suddenly a pill-popping badass, who is singing songs  about killing his cheating wife, snorting cocaine and counting down his minutes to his meeting at the gallows. 

Cash was a big phony baloney, in actuality. He was a small insecure man, who was probably incapable of having any kind of real human compatibility or useful relationships. He wasn't Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis or any of those other guys and he knew it. And he tried everything he could to make up for that. 

Live At Folsom Prison was actually a comeback record for Cash. It was his 27th EP. Strung out on drugs, his popularity waned in the 1960s. He got (somewhat) clean and a change in leadership at Columbia Records prompted him to approach several California prisons to record live. 

Just glad he was able to go inside to keep up his image. 

'Les Vampires'

A 10-part series of episodes that runs just under seven hours total. It's a messy confluence and often hard to watch. I often found the action confusing, I mixed up characters jumping from episode to episode and it was a very complex plot for it being 1915.

I kept thinking, however, that all these people are dead. And that depressed me. Even the little boy, Eustache Mazamette. René Poyen played the boy and he was seven when he did Les Vampires. He was out of the film business when he was 24 and he died at 59. 

But he made his name as Poyen appeared in dozens of short films before doing Les Vampires starting at age four. 

The most interesting plot point of Les Vampires is that it's not about the mythical, blood-sucking immortal demons, but instead an Apache gang, which I had no idea about. These were violent roving packs of gangs that terrorized members of the middle and upper class in Paris during the early part of the 20th century. 

They were known for their violence and for using an "Apache revolver," which was a third knife, a third revolver and a third brass knuckles. 

'Peking Opera Blues'

An odd film because it's pretty foreign-film wacky with all sorts of Chinese tomfoolery, which probably  drew a billion laughs back in 1986 from repressed young Chinese kids. Then, suddenly it turns into this very bloody, dark shoot-em-out action movie.

they hold nothing back. They have a girl getting whipped nearly to death and strapped to a bed, we assume, to be raped by a general. She is saved when a friend acts to seduce the general to create a means of murdering him, which she does and the two girls pull a "Weekend at Bernies" in order to appease the guards.

The only real interesting part of the film is the kabuki actors in the ornate face paint screaming into the camera.

'The Eagles'

The Eagles might be one of the few (if not the only) band in recorded music history to have all its best songs be, also, it's greatest hits.

I do think the Eagles get slotted pretty unfairly as a boring 1970s rock band when in fact they were a California country band with obvious rock leanings. They were nearly a niche band if they didn't write really good radio songs that became insanely popular. That's not their fault that they can write a good song. We praise Lennon and McCartney for doing this.

Fact is, "Take It Easy" and "Peaceful Easy Feeling" are fantastic songs from the music, lyrics to the ability to scream sing all the lyrics in the car.

There's nothing wrong with the Eagles.

It is worth noting that Glen Frey co-wrote "Take It Easy" with then-neighbor Jackson Browne, who actually wrote about 90 percent of the song with Frey adding "It's a girl, my Lord, in a flatbed Ford" which sounds like a measly contribution to such a huge hit until you come to understand just what an awesome lyric that actually is. Sorta makes the song.

'Pandora And The Flying Dutchman'

My only real remark on this film is why the graphic artists were intent on making Ava Gardner as wholly unattractive as possible on just about every poster for this film.

At times she looks fat. Others her body and face are so distorted that it looks unequivocally like someone else, someone less attractive. Even in the poster here James Mason looks like a retarded James Dean.

Generally though, the hideous posters basically are the only interesting tidbit of a pretty boring movie. I mean, she was his wife reincarnated. It’d been better if she had left him and let him roam for eternity upon the high seas. Because, you know, he murdered her in a jealous rage 500 years earlier.