Rocketman (Elton John), Bob Dylan, Lou Reed

Rocketman (2019) is an absolutely electrifying movie in how it deconstructs the typical rags-to-riches, sex-drugs-and-rock’n’-roll story: it starts with the downfall and uses the comeback path as its map for exploring how it all came to be. Recovery and redemption mirror rise and fall. The film opens with its damaged hero—a stunningly good Taron Egerton— stalking into rehab in full “Elton John” regalia: a jumpsuit in tangerine sparkle-flames, devil horns, feathered wings, “electric boots.” And as he tells the tale, in extended flashbacks, about how he came to sink so low as to be taken over by drugs and alcohol even as his career and renown skyrocketed, he strips away the fantasy persona to get back to the Reggie Dwight he was born as. It’s group therapy, literally in the context of the film, and figuratively with us as his confessors. The terrific script is by Lee Hall, who wrote the in some ways similarly themed, and definitely fictional, Billy Elliot. As a vision Elton has of his beloved grandmother (Gemma Jones) tells him during his stint in rehab, “You write songs millions of people love, and that’s what’s important.” Source: www.flickfilosopher.com

The first-look photos from Martin Scorsese’s new Bob Dylan film Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese have been released. The eagerly anticipated film, which has been give a summer release date, will hit streaming platform Netflix on June 12th and will also be premiered in a select number of cinemas. The film will follow the 1975-1976 tour that saw Dylan work with a handpicked group of collaborators such as Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, Scarlet Riviera, Patti Smith and many more. Part documentary, part concert film, part fever dream, ‘Rolling Thunder’ is a one of a kind experience, from master filmmaker Martin Scorsese. Scorsese’s previous Dylan documentary No Direction Home, was released in 2005 and won a Grammy Award for best long-form video. Source: faroutmagazine.co.uk

The rise of streaming through websites like Soundcloud have without a doubt changed the nature of the music industry. It is becoming less and less of a possibility for bands and individual musicians to receive widespread recognition. The culture of rock music had a large role in society's culture  and was at its peak in the mid to late 20th century. With electronic and hip hop basically taking over the mainstream, record labels are unlikely to sign rock bands in the current music climate. I believe there will always be young people starting rock bands, and they may even tour, but never again will a rock band achieve the level of fame and recognition they did throughout the 20th century like The Beatles or Nirvana. There will never be another group like The Beatles for the same reason there will never be another Beethoven.


The genre has been perfected through its evolution and it's virtually impossible to surpass its peaks. So irrelevant is rock in the music industry at large that the Grammys didn’t even bother to air its rock category awards at this year’s ceremony. The metal band Avenged Sevenfold, seemingly through some sort of unfortunate clerical error, was nominated for a Grammy for “Best Rock Song” but had the good sense not to show up for the untelevised award presentation. But even though things look grim for rock, here’s the bright side: The genre has always best served as the underdog. It's not seen as cool music now because of its association with (mostly white male) guitar theatrics. All of the young kids that had a rebellious spirit and didn't "fit in" in the grunge era were put on Ritalin and turned kids into zombies. If you ask me there is a deliberate effort to rid the mainstream of rebellious attitudes and push people towards materialism and submission to the system. Source: www.vice.com

It was 50 years ago since the release of the Velvet Underground’s 1969 LP. It’s also been just over half a decade since the death of the band’s lead singer, songwriter, and creative visionary: Lou Reed. Throughout his life and work, Lou Reed constructed and deconstructed his own masculinity. Panic attacks, anxiety, and depression plagued his teenage years. His condition only worsened during his freshman year at NYU, when his parents  made the ill-advised decision to pursue electroshock therapy and brought him home in a shell-shocked state. Reed would feel the results of the treatment throughout his life, including short-term memory loss. After graduation, Reed moved to New York to be an in-house songwriter for Pickwick Records. Reed’s innovative spirit was present long before he met John Cale and Warhol’s Factory. Heroin featured just two chords played ad infinitum. In lieu of harmonic change, the tempo mimics a user’s heart rate while shooting up: speeding up, slowing down, on the brink of emotional collapse. Cale’s screeching electric viola punctuates the final segment, one of the gnarliest sound ever put to tape. You have to remind Heroin was written in 1964. In ’64, the Beatles were singing “Can’t Buy Me Love” in suits on The Ed Sullivan Show. Years before the Summer of Love, Reed was face down in a gutter.

“Pale Blue Eyes,” off 1969’s Velvet Underground LP, covers more traditional rock ’n’ roll material: a classic affair-with-a-married-woman confessional. Drawn from a real relationship, “Pale Blue Eyes” is neither regretful nor celebratory of its affair. It is modest, painful, and candid. Absent is the machismo of the “Back Door Man” of Jim Morrison from The Doors. Love was not a conquest to Reed, even when it was a sin. Reed treated relationships, sex, and masculinity with a sense of simultaneous distance and intimacy. Just as femininity, sex clubs, and drugs were something to look at, so was masculinity. Reed’s explorations of identity  evolved  from rocker to strung-out junkie to effeminate songster to middle-aged intellectual. Reed was actually a doofus from Long Island who also happened to be one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Reed’s version of love, of life, and of masculinity was devoid of any sense of machismo. He was never Robert Plant, linen-shirt open, on stage soaking the crowd with a flick of his wrist. When The Velvet Underground closed up shop in 1970, he had to move back in with his parents. Reed was never a cavalier perusing the New York nightlife with a sense of empowered aloofness, he became that world. He lived what he sang about: drug addiction, free love, hopeless love, botched medical experiments, and being a sad sap washed up rocker living in his parents’ basement at 28 years old. The understated beauty of his lyrics, the ceaseless boundary-pushing of his compositions, reflect a dialectic vision of the world: beautiful and ugly, infinite and claustrophobic. Source: www.yaleherald.com

The Inheritance – Poisoned Fruit of JFK’s Assassination, Computer Predictions

In 1973, near the height of the ‘population bomb’ panic, a computing programme called World1 offered up some predictions for the future. It anticipated a grim picture for humanity based on current trajectories. Tracing categories such as population, pollution and natural-resource usage, World1 calculated that, by 2040, human civilisation would collapse – a century after the best year to have been alive on the planet: 1940. This film was originally broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) News as part of a report on predictions for the coming decades made by cutting-edge computing technology and leading thinkers of the time. “What the computer envisioned in the 1970s has by and large been coming true,” claims Paul Ratner at Big Think. Those predictions include population growth and pollution levels, “worsening quality of life,” and “dwindling natural resources.” In the video at the top, see Australia's ABC explain the computer’s calculations, “an electronic guided tour of our global behavior since 1900, and where that behavior will lead us,” says the presenter. The graph spans the years 1900 to 2060. "Quality of life" begins to sharply decline after 1940, and by 2020, the model predicts, the metric contracts to turn-of-the-century levels, meeting the sharp increase of the “Zed Curve" that charts pollution levels. (ABC revisited this reporting in 1999 with Club of Rome member Keith Suter.) Source: www.openculture.com

The Inheritance – Poisoned Fruit of JFK’s Assassination (2018) by Christopher and Michelle Fulton with an Introduction by Dick Russell. The Inheritance concerns some of the most important and significant records and evidence in the assassination of President Kennedy that remained out of government control for a long time, and crushed the lives of everyone who crossed paths with it, including RFK, Evelyn Lincoln, Robert White and Christopher Fulton. Only Fulton is left alive to tell the story and a convoluted one it is, but one that is factually well-documented and confirmed by other sources, at least the key aspects we are concerned with. The list of coincidences between the assassinations of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy first garnered my interest, one being Lincoln’s secretary was named Kennedy and Kennedy’s secretary was named Lincoln. The basic facts that can be acknowledged and elaborated on is that RFK knew that his brother was the victim of a conspiracy, one that was being covered up by the federal government, and he began collecting evidence and records on the assassination he wanted kept out of the government's control and left them with Mrs. Lincoln. We knew that RFK didn’t even trust the National Archives when he instructed the secretary at the National Photo Interpretation Center (NPIC) to collect, box and deliver the NPIC records on the assassination to the Smithsonian, instead of the NARA where they belonged. Fulton says that because the Cartier watch was only inches from JFK's head when he was shot, traces of the mercury coated bullet that exploded JFK’s head could be found on the watch, proof of conspiracy. Source: jfkcountercoup.blogspot.com

“The cost of freedom is always high, but Americans have always paid it.” -John F. Kennedy

"When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good and the ugliness of evil, and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own – not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me. No one can implicate me in ugliness.” -Marcus Aurelius

Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit

Happy 102nd Anniversary, John F. Kennedy! JFK: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source, where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. I believe in an America where religious intolerance will someday end where all men and all churches are treated as equal where every man has the same right to attend or not attend the church of his choice where there is no Catholic vote, no anti-Catholic vote, no bloc voting of any kind and where Catholics, Protestants and Jews, at both the lay and pastoral level, will refrain from those attitudes of disdain and division which have so often marred their works in the past, and promote instead the American ideal of brotherhood.”

“That is the kind of America in which I believe. And it represents the kind of Presidency in which I believe a great office that must neither be humbled by making it the instrument of any one religious group nor tarnished by arbitrarily withholding its occupancy from the members of any one religious group. I believe in a President whose religious views are his own private affair, neither imposed by him upon the Nation or imposed by the Nation upon him as a condition to holding that office.”

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Source: www.irishcentral.com

Gene Tierney dated John F Kennedy in the late '40s. Emotions have always showed better in B+W than color. It is the way most people's brains are wired. The color distracts from the emotion (or more precisely, the brain processes more of the texture and brightness differences of the photograph in B+W). You see it very strongly in still photography. Look at the same picture in good B+W versus good Color and the B+W will almost always provide a stronger emotional feel to it.

Joseph McBride, a professor at San Francisco State University’s School of Cinema, wrote the Frank Capra biography The Catastrophe of Success (2011). McBride is also the author of Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit (2013).  Journalist and historian Joseph McBride, a volunteer in JFK's 1960 Wisconsin presidential primary campaign, began studying the assassination minutes after it happened. In 1982, McBride launched his own investigation. Both epic and intimately personal, Into the Nightmare: My Search for the Killers of President John F. Kennedy and Officer J. D. Tippit incorporates rare interviews with key people in Dallas, archival discoveries, and what novelist Thomas Flanagan, in The New York Review of Books, called McBride's "wide knowledge of American social history." McBride chronicles his evolving skepticism about the official story and shines a fresh, often surprising spotlight on Kennedy's murder and on one of the murkiest, most crucial aspects of the case, its "Rosetta Stone," the Tippit killing. 

McBride: I think we’ve declined a lot in American films since what we call the Golden Age. I think the 1920s might be the best period in American film, but I’ve also written about filmmakers of the 1930s and ’40s — Howard Hawks, John Ford, Ernst Lubitsch and others. Things started going haywire in the 1960s, when the big Hollywood studios were breaking up. It was really a factory system. Although the old studios had their flaws, it was easier in some ways to make a good film in those days. Today, it’s more difficult to get a good film financed and made through the system. Today, with the blockbuster mentality, film has been dumbed down. There are fewer films about people. That’s what I’m interested in, dramas and comedies about people instead of explosions and superheroes. All the trailers today look like the same movie — a $200M superhero spectacle.

McBride: Frank Capra’s films are complicated ideologically. Capra was confused; he was always a Republican but during the Depression era he was something of a social critic, and he worked with a lot of left-wing writers, which got him trouble during the blacklist period in the late 1940s and the ’50s. He was angry with America because after the war he was accused of being disloyal to America. After he had worked with the government during the war making propaganda films, they then denied his security clearance. During the Red Scare, he blamed his writers and sort of blacklisted himself. He moved to Fallbrook and lived on a ranch. He was consumed by self-loathing and doubt. Capra went into a tailspin. He was never the same after the blacklist. It shattered him.

-Capra, an Italian-American immigrant, did so much to craft the positive and enduring mythology that 20th-century Americans embraced about themselves — with films such as “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Did the immigrant experience influence his filmmaking?

-McBride: That’s a big part of my story and it was a key thing to his experience. He was a man who embraced America, and waved the flag fervently, but was also aware of the flaws in the system, which made his films complex and interesting. Being an immigrant was part of his drive, and he felt compelled to prove himself worthy as an American. (Film professor and author) Jonathan J. Cavallero wrote that Capra’s films are disguised immigrant stories because they’re often about a person who comes from the country to the big city and is confronted with corruption; there’s a conflict between naïve goodness and harsh reality, which makes his films fascinating. Capra's heroes were not Italian, they were WASPs like Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart. He was a self-made man and looked down on his own family and fellow Italians. There were many contradictions in Capra, who was a truly tragic figure, a Dostoevskian figure. 

-Are there parallels between the difficulties you encountered with the Capra book and the JFK assassination, which you’ve also written about?

-McBride: It’s a very destructive thing for a country to live a lie. With the JFK assassination: most of the country doesn’t believe the Warren Report. The official lie is really damaging to the people’s trust in government and the media. The public—give them credit because they’re smarter than some people think. Source: www.localnewsmatters.org

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: Tarantino's love letter to Hollywood and Sharon Tate

'Once Upon A Time In Hollywood': In 1969 Los Angeles, a television actor and his stunt double embark on an odyssey to make a name for themselves in the film industry. Featuring a large ensemble cast, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood weaves "multiple storylines in a tribute to the final moments of Hollywood's golden age." Release Date: July 26, 2019. Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood finds a pulp-fictionally redemptive take on the Manson nightmare in late-60s California: a B-movie loser’s state of grace. Margot Robbie presents Tate as a free-spirited young actress at the beginning of her career, wide-eyed and excited about what the future might hold for her. And although the film deals with the events of 9 August, 1969 in its own way, Charles Manson is by no means its focus. Tarantino soaks up the atmosphere of a magical Los Angeles slowly going to seed, the movie mecca of buzzing pool parties and glittering hot spots being invaded by the wild grass of youth culture and drugs. It’s a decadent town slowly rotting away.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood really belongs to a figure who gets less screen time than either of the male leads but who fills the movie with light. Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, and in the movie’s most stunning sequence—set in February 1969—she comes upon a theater, the Bruin, that’s showing her most recent film, The Wrecking Crew, one of those spy joints starring Dean Martin. She goes up to the box-office booth to buy a ticket—and then it occurs to her that if she explains to the ticket girl that she’s actually in the film, she might be able to get in for free. DiCaprio’s Rick looks mischievously boyish, though you can’t help noticing the tiny crow’s feet marking the skin around his eyes, etched there by dried-up work and dwindling bank accounts—there’s an alluring, Robert Ryan-style weariness about him. Tarantino addressed the public’s continued interest in Charles Manson: “I think we’re fascinated by it because at the end of the day, it seems unfathomable. I’ve done a lot of research on it. How he was he was able to get these young girls and boys to cement to him seems unfathomable. The more you learn about it, the more information you get, it doesn’t make it any clear. It makes it more obscure.”

Rick and Cliff are basically nonentities in Hollywood, the only difference being that easy-going Cliff has no ego to bruise, no ambition to nurse. But their marginal status is transformed by Tarantino’s parallel-universe comedy, a piece of bloody mayhem which leads to a bizarre denouement which might well have you replaying the entire film in your head. It’s entirely outrageous, disorientating, irresponsible, and also brilliant. In real life, no one could save Sharon Tate. With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Tarantino and Robbie restore life to her. The magic spell lasts only a few hours. But no one has ever brought her closer to a happily ever after. Source: time.com

Margot Robbie is the heart and soul of this film. Her Sharon Tate is the most humane and resonant character of the entire movie. Almost every scene she's in is heartbreaking to watch. Tarantino told me, “This film is the closest thing I’ve done to Pulp Fiction.” What that means, I can’t reveal. But what that means in terms of structure is this: Think multiple characters (some real, some imagined) and story lines that are seemingly unrelated . . . until they intertwine in surprising ways. This film, Tarantino says, is also “probably my most personal. I think of it like my memory piece. This is my world. And this is my love letter to L. A.” It’s 1969, a year of tremendous upheaval, not just in America’s streets but also on the backlots of Hollywood. The Golden Age is ending. The original studio system, which has been a source of stability and structure for fifty years, is collapsing as the counterculture rejects traditional plotlines and traditional leading men. It’s the year Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy break big—films that celebrate the antihero and upend the definition of what a matinee idol looks like. 

It’s against this background that we meet Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), a declining star and a veteran of TV westerns. Joan Didion famously wrote, “the sixties ended abruptly . . . the tension broke . . . the paranoia was fulfilled.” Tarantino says: "‘How does the Manson Family fit in?’ It’s like we’ve got a perfectly good body, and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus. Through the whole movie, we’ve been hanging out on real Hollywood-western soundstages where phony versions of this kind of masculine drama are being played out for cameras. Then we end up on Spahn Ranch, on this dilapidated western backlot, and those masculine rituals are played out—but this time with real-world consequences, and no one’s acting. This is a Hollywood movie in the same vein as, like, The Stunt Man or Singin’ in the Rain or any other movie about Hollywood. And there’s a good-hearted spirit to it. Then you ask, 'How does the Manson Family fit in?' Well, that’s the trick. And that is, actually, how it is supposed to work: 'How does this rancidness figure into everything?' And I want the audience asking that question, and I hope that’s one of the things that helps lead you to the theater." Go in asking yourself, “What if that era had never ended? What if that awful, murderous night hadn’t crushed that balmy social heritage that still sends so many into a dreamy fit of nostalgia? What if we had found a way to presently thrive in its tranquil ethos?” It’s clear that Tarantino would rather live in a world in which we had found it. Source: wwww.esquire.com