'Salt Of The Earth'

As I get older, I find it funny how humans are OK with stripping others of their dignity. I find it funny how principles generally are leaned upon when it’s convenient.

In our grandparents’ lifetime – not 50-75 years ago – Americans were not only irresistibly hateful, but uncompromisingly scared shitless of treating people above anything of that of a bug.

Salt of the Earth is groundbreaking. “Released” in 1954, it captures the struggle of not only union miners in New Mexico, but Mexican workers, and not only Mexican union minors, but the females, the women behind the workers. It’s progressive in so many ways because it was all taboo, it was all anti-American that it wasn’t appropriately released only being shown in 12 theaters in the United States for 10 years after its production. By the way, the production was done by all blacklisted film makers and starred only four trained actors, none of which played major roles.

The same folks that decry the influence of unions are the same that hold the Constitution in such high regard particularly when it comes to the right to bear arms. However, freedoms of speech and assembly are nominal allowances. The pursuit of happiness and equality are reserved for Fourth of July parades and grandstanding.

The deplorable way minorities (ethnic or racial) were treated is hard to swallow. The treatment of women is unconscionable. But the basic right for humans to assembly and demand a better work environment or more pay is as capitalistic as you can possibly get. The fact that unionization and withholding a workforce to affect production (and thus profits) is a means to that end is irrelevant.

The “not in my backyard” mentality kills us as a nation. 

'The Last Temptation Of Christ'

I cover high school football for a local daily newspaper. I often arrive at the game really early to make sure that all my equipment is working and that I'm assured a seat. I also often bring a book to read because I'm more often than not sitting there because all is well.

I took The Last Temptation of Christ one night and while reading I was accosted by, of all people, an advance scout from a high school that was preparing to play one of the teams I was covering.

He asked me about a dozen questions. I thought maybe he recognized the title (maybe) although he asked me what I was reading. A lot of the questions had to do with what I thought of the book and my opinions of what was on the pages.

I thought maybe he was asking because the book (and the 1988 Martin Scorsese) has been a topic of controversy because of its depiction of Jesus ... as an ordinary guy despite being ordained by God to be the messiah.

I can't recommend this book enough. Apart from the actual story, it's a rich, textural history of the time providing some revealing cultural discussion points when you consider the times in which Christ lived.

For one, Jesus (or the messiah) was not only expected to be the Son of God, the lamb slain for the sins of man into perpetuity. He was supposed to overthrow the Roman government occupying Judea (and the rest of the world). Not an easy task, even for the Son of God.

What fundamentalist Christians got most angry about was this milquetoast Jesus being depicted. He was forlorn, doubtful and amid great terror in his private moments (in the book, at least, Jesus publicly turned into sort of a badass). As if he weren't human.

Christians want to believe that Christ was sermonizing in the Temple from birth and took to the highway and byways at some young age. In actuality, he was a carpenter's son and he too plied his craft (in the book, he is vilified for making crosses for executions) until the voice of God took him elsewhere.

It's an interesting read and no matter your religious affiliation it is a must-read.

'The Mad Masters'

A very difficult documentary short about the Hauka movement in central and western Africa.

Hauka was a spiritual/ritual/farcical act that involved young African men dancing and mimicking administrators in the colonizing British army and bureaucracy.

I call it a spiritual/ritual/farcical because I can't make heads or tails of it. At times it appears to be just a bunch of deadbeat African guys wasting time. Then you see them frothing at the mouth, drinking the blood of a freshly slaughtered dog and digging their hands into a cauldron of boiling water to pick at pieces of the cooking dog.

Their eyes roll into the back of their head and their bodies take unnatural shapes that would be unreasonable should these men be conscious. They act in some sort of trance because even if they wanted to really fake what they were doing it'd be impossible for anyone with a clear mind.

Still, there's something stupid about the entire thing. The men consider it a protest of the colonizers. Others consider it a sort of tribute to the white conquerers as a means of becoming more like them.

I don't know if there's any more answers as there are questions once you finish.

'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?

'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.

'A Man Escaped' & 'The Hole'

Because you can't have enough French prison-escape movies. Although not connected in the least, both  have a lot of common threads outside of being tremendous films.

A Man Escaped was about a French Resistance fighter caught by the Nazis during World War II and imprisoned in Fort Montluc. The film was based on the memoirs of Andre Devigny, who basically lived everything in the film including the escape from Montluc.

Director Jacques Becker also was imprisoned by the Nazis due to his activism in film after serving as an assistant to Jean Renoir. 

After the war, his own film career started and in 1960, four years after A Man Escaped, he released The Hole, which was based on Jose Giovanni's book, which featured Jean Keraudy, who was cast to portray Roland in the film (he also introduces the film after being shown working on a car. 


The Hole is far superior, I think. Mostly due to the excellent performances from the small main cast of five guys, who basically had zero acting experiences. For the most part, The Hole was each of their first performances. 

Becker died just weeks after the conclusion of filming. 

'Ikiru'

As someone haunted and often terrified of death, my mortality and general existence as I internally grapple with the mysteries of meaning, a film like Ikiru, or To Live, strikes at my very core. I don’t know if it soothes my inner demons, but it helps knowing that it’s a universal rock in the shoe. 

Watanabe is a mid-aged mid-management bureaucrat in “public affairs” – a position where he hears the complaints of the public only to marginalize their problem or pawn it off on another group.

He lives with his son and daughter-in-law, both ugly and unforgiving as they care more for their father’s death and subsequent inheritance than they do anything else.

After learning he has stomach cancer and a few months to live, he searches for meaning or perhaps a quick fix to the anxiety that he’s wasted his life, including an understated fear that he somehow caused some sort of ruin upon his son, no thanks to the early death of Watanabe’s wife.

Watanabe seeks solace. He ventures into the wild underbelly of earthly pleasures such as a striptease and club. He partners with a young female co-worker in searching for the secret of happiness. It’s not until he learns that the most immediate impact can be made in his existing job where he works tirelessly (sorta) in having a park created in a blighted part of town.

The final quarter of the film are his co-workers at his wake, getting drunk and putting together the pieces as to Watanabe’s change in attitude the last five months.

It’s as poignant of film as you’ll find. No explosions, unfortunately. But there is a swing.

'Dance Mania'

All I imagine are a bunch of white people awkwardly twisting their limbs as a stage full of the best mambo instrumentalists and Tito Puente are on stage.

Making fun of stuffy white people dancing aside, this is a fun, vibrant record. I really love the Latin sound (as previously noted) but I think from the mambo or Afro-Cuban sound, my favorite instrument is the piano. Jazz piano generally is one of the most fascinating. Rarely do I hear a jazz pianist who isn’t doing something totally unique.

The Latin piano is so rhythmic and such a backbone to the entire group, which you will hear if you pick up this album. Puente, of course, was a percussionist and the genius there is not lost.

Double thumbs up for putting attractive female on the album cover.

'Zorba The Greek'

Nikos Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek based on his real-life experiences with minor George Zorbas. No real word if the man was anything like the literary character, but we must assume as much. We do know that Zorbas was a spiritual man becoming a monk, which is how he met Kazantzakis.

Religion, faith and spirituality are the major themes to Zorba the Greek: “The boss” being an academic who is coaxed into this listless, carnal way of life by the free-wheeling Zorba, the man who’s seen too much death and war to put value into the faith of a God or gods. Even the struggle within the narrator is great although you get the feeling that the complexities of life – and even the small moments of gracious humanity – make a higher power a definite likelihood. If that makes sense.

I found myself thinking a lot about Jack Kerouac and his work while reading this. He himself a spiritual person, seeking some sort of satori or nirvana through life (drugs, women, poetry) not unlike Zorba who found it through women, food and music. And perhaps a hard day of work. Zorba the Greek was published in English in 1952, five years before Kerouac would publish On The Road, which is just the American version.

I wonder too how Kazantzakis’ home country of Greece and its current place in history affected his writing and even his personal thoughts on God or religion. In his time, there had been three prominent holocausts, one of which included his Greek brothers in the Ottoman Empire, a regime which also took its toll on the Armenians. Meanwhile, the word “genocide” hadn’t even been coined until Adolf Hitler gained power and began his pogroms against the Jewish population of Europe.

I would imagine the idea of God would be hard to comprehend under those circumstances.

'Jack Takes The Floor'

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott was an interesting kid. Although throughout his career, he posed as a train-car hoppin’ roustabout cowboy, he was the son of a Jewish doctor in Brooklyn. At 15, he ran away from home and joined a touring rodeo. His parents eventually hunted him down. 

In the rodeo, he came upon a storytelling, guitar- and banjo-playing rodeo clown. Upon his return to home, he picked up the guitar. He befriended Woody Guthrie – who appears on this record for “New York Town” – and eventually found initial success in England, where he was signed and recorded his first three albums, including Jack Takes The Floor. It was not released in the United States for another 10 years. 

Elliott played influence to Phil Ochs and Bob Dylan although they were largely contemporaries. He got his nickname for talking too much. He also was some sort of influence to Eric Clapton, who also covered “San Francisco Bay Blues” from this album.