Keep Your Heart Right (The Nexus of Hex and Tease)
Sorry for the delay in correspondence but a beastly bug (hey there, little insect!) is nestling stubbornly in my bronchial tract, delivery mechanism probably the unfiltered Jetblue air on my return from SF (germs on a plane), was a long time, uh, germ-inating but now me and the missus are both enduring the effects, as so it seems is half of Manhattan (just came from lunch with Jerry Harrison at I Tre Merli--Jerry in town to scope his production proteges O.A.R. who headline Madison Square Garden tonight--and the Soho streets on my stroll over West Broadway seemed eerily deserted under siege of slate grey skies/cold bitter wind passing by/ this microbial miscreant), anyhow bug's sapped a smidgeon a soupcon of my old elan but haveta report the week started swimmingly enough as we were very very VERY well-received last Saturday at the Knitting Factory Winterjazzfest, where the legendary Roswell Rudd tailgate-trombipulated his way through the labyrinthine Gods and Monsters songbook (gig netted a rave in showbiz-bible Variety, see my homepage--to quote Lord Buckley, "play the rahdio, play the video")...
ROSWELL RUDD!! (His very name connotes sanguine spaciness)...First heard and grooved on Ros in the late 60's on Archie Shepp's seminal "Live in San Francisco" Impulse side which got alot of airplay on a particular Syracuse University free jazz program I liked to tune into on WAER FM (not Lou Reed's "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail", this was a few years later), I remember shifting gears and gliding smoothly into the Ra-Lin's loading dock in my Dad's Ford van (did deliveries for my father afterschool, Ra-Lins was one of my stops) to the sound of Archie's dramatic cultured bespoke voice sermonizing "The Wedding" ("'I said THANK YOU JESUS!' Sister Beatrice said..."), "vaunced on Panamanian Red", or some variant thereof...the nightfly dj followed this Shepp-specimen with a track from the same album featuring Ros blowing his brains out on trombone (Ros went to Yale 'jes like me) during Archie's arrangement of Herbie Nichols' ever-so-sad and beautiful "Lady Sings the Blues" (which is not to slight Archie's own compositional talent, I rate him right up there with Mingus for small-group ensemble writing--"Keep Your Heart Right" is a sinuous bluesy gem)...and when I finally got this album I couldn't help but admire Ros' sartorial splendor where he is pictured out front of the band on an SF stoop probably somewhere in the Fillmore district sporting a natty muted- plaid jacket...niiiiiice!...anyway I've known and dug Roswell for some years now, we've jammed together before but this was his first public appearance with my band, and must say that Ros really hit some seriously beautiful heights on our extremely eclectic music--music that may well not technically fall under the rubric of (what is this thing called) Jazz (thank God for open-minded listeners and open-minded musicians)... but we sure rocked the house with it--hope to play with Ros again soon!
During my nocturnal fitful tossing and turning last night fighting off this little critter doing the buggy boogie woogie in my bronchia I flipped on the IFC channel's Friday night Grindhouse show at midnight-- and saw a delirious masterpiece that matched my own semi-delirium to a tee, straight from the heart of the most unique, fantastic, singular film director until very recently completely unseen by me (although known to me by name, for years)...
I speak of Brazilian primitive genius Jose Mojica Marins, a/k/a "Coffin Joe" (Ze do Caxao in Portugese)-- whose astonishing 60's oeuvre has enjoyed a recent release on DVD through Fantoma--order it NOW, you will not be disappointed...an oeuvre that is an unholy cross between Bunuel, Dali, Mario Bava and Russ Meyer, that simultaneously comes across like experimental cinema (mainly photographed in deep black and white... although last week's showing of "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse" had a shockingly abrupt switcheroo to an ultra-vivid colour sequence set in Hell) tricked out with all sorts of jump cuts, close-ups, and time/space narrative disjunction...and also resembles Latin American soap operas, morality plays, and sex melodramas (officially sanctioned "pornochanchadas")...
A renegade auto-didact who grew up literally inside a cinema his parents operated in the 30's and 40's, Marins started off at age 6 directing myriad home-made short films, eventually directing and starring in what is regarded as Brazil's first real horror film in 1963, "At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul"--and after the military junta took over somehow was able to sneak out the aforementioned "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse" in 1966, and again in '69 bestowed yet again upon the world the twisted charms and enchantments of "Awakening of the Beast" (which was on IFC last night)...he's been a folk hero for years in Brazil, comics, serious philosophical treatises, and pop songs about him have flourished there for years, renowned Brazilian filmmakers like Glauber Rocha have praised him while others in the Brazilian Novo Cinema movement revile him...
if you have any interest in world cinema, the macabre in any shape or format, or intellectual kinkarama in general-- you owe it to yourself to see "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse", in which Coffin Joe (the traveling undertaker/son of an undertaker played by Marins, decked out in black top hat, black cape, black beard, and foot long talons) delivers wall to wall Shakespearean, Lear-like soliloquys equal parts Nietzsche, Freud, and Sade while on the quest to find the perfect female mate to sire the ultimate child with (children are the only true innocents in the Marins cosmogony), as he moves through the most beautiful/grotesque mise en scene, blasted landscapes, fetid swamps, snake-infested torture chambers, diabolical laboratories and dungeons, boudoirs crawling with tarantulas, bedeviling, murdering, and seducing a variety of hefty/nubile naked beauties and lug-headed men, pursued by angry townsfolk in awe of his Black Arts--I won't give the ending away except to say that it involves a direct dialogue by the evil nihilist Coffin Joe with a very pissed-off, very Catholic God, who answers Joe's florid metaphysical curses and imprecations in a dialectic of howling winds and jagged lightning bolts...
For those with catholic tastes indeed, I urge you to get the full "Coffin Joe Trilogy" available on Amazon (comes in a coffin-shaped box housing 3 DVDs, plus a 36 page reproduction of one of the "Coffin Joe" 60's comic books)...never mind the auteurist visual feast, the soundtrack alone is brilliant: cutup snippets of hymns, obvious meller "movie music", eerie electronic tonalities, maniacal cackles and shrieks, cheap pop tunes-- in fact the credit roll last night at the top of "Awakening of the Beast" featured blood-curdling screams only--no music--in seemingly random intervals, louder and louder on the soundtrack, very unsettling/disturbing/reminiscent in fact of the time I happily watched a Chinese ghost-movie in Taipei in the mid 70's and the theater projectionist manually pumped up the volume in the Sino-kino to jumping-out-of-your-skin level whenever the "good parts" took over (I did a similar breaking of 4th wall intervention as a projectionist at Yale when showing Rupert Julian's silent "Phantom of the Opera", by switching on and off the house lights in Lindsey-Chittenden at the point when Lon Chaney as Erik makes the lights go on and off in the Paris Opera House before the chandelier falls)...in fact, during last week's midnight epiphany when I finally caught Coffin Joe for the first time (thank you thank you thank you IFC, best damn channel on cable!), I finally realized where Bruno, Eugene Levy's hunchbacked assistant to John Candy's lisping Dr. Tongue on SCTV, derives from--namely, the fetid imagination of Marins, as Coffin Joe has a similar slobbering hunchbacked factotum named Bruno in "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse"... I also realized where the spooky oooooooeeeeeeeeoooooooo electronic music comes from that crops up on the SCTV soundtrack whenever Dr. Tongue does his 3D House of Stewardesses hypno-moves, swinging objects towards a zooming in and out camera lens (a visual homage to Andre de Toth's original 1953 "House of Wax")--o those cheeky Canadians!--as (but of course) similar theremenic glissandos are heard at judicious moments on the soundtrack of "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse"...
'Nuff said (or should I say, snuff said)--Jose Mojica Marins and his Coffin Joe "Cinema from the Mouth of Garbage", as it was known in Brazil in the 60's, rules! (not all that far afield really from the same slum environs/Manichean mindset from whence emanated such contemporary Brazilian masterpieces as "City of God")...
and I will now retire in pursuit of golden slum-bers as me wife is summoning me to the boudoir of tarantulas :-)
xxLove
Gary
ROSWELL RUDD!! (His very name connotes sanguine spaciness)...First heard and grooved on Ros in the late 60's on Archie Shepp's seminal "Live in San Francisco" Impulse side which got alot of airplay on a particular Syracuse University free jazz program I liked to tune into on WAER FM (not Lou Reed's "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail", this was a few years later), I remember shifting gears and gliding smoothly into the Ra-Lin's loading dock in my Dad's Ford van (did deliveries for my father afterschool, Ra-Lins was one of my stops) to the sound of Archie's dramatic cultured bespoke voice sermonizing "The Wedding" ("'I said THANK YOU JESUS!' Sister Beatrice said..."), "vaunced on Panamanian Red", or some variant thereof...the nightfly dj followed this Shepp-specimen with a track from the same album featuring Ros blowing his brains out on trombone (Ros went to Yale 'jes like me) during Archie's arrangement of Herbie Nichols' ever-so-sad and beautiful "Lady Sings the Blues" (which is not to slight Archie's own compositional talent, I rate him right up there with Mingus for small-group ensemble writing--"Keep Your Heart Right" is a sinuous bluesy gem)...and when I finally got this album I couldn't help but admire Ros' sartorial splendor where he is pictured out front of the band on an SF stoop probably somewhere in the Fillmore district sporting a natty muted- plaid jacket...niiiiiice!...anyway I've known and dug Roswell for some years now, we've jammed together before but this was his first public appearance with my band, and must say that Ros really hit some seriously beautiful heights on our extremely eclectic music--music that may well not technically fall under the rubric of (what is this thing called) Jazz (thank God for open-minded listeners and open-minded musicians)... but we sure rocked the house with it--hope to play with Ros again soon!
During my nocturnal fitful tossing and turning last night fighting off this little critter doing the buggy boogie woogie in my bronchia I flipped on the IFC channel's Friday night Grindhouse show at midnight-- and saw a delirious masterpiece that matched my own semi-delirium to a tee, straight from the heart of the most unique, fantastic, singular film director until very recently completely unseen by me (although known to me by name, for years)...
I speak of Brazilian primitive genius Jose Mojica Marins, a/k/a "Coffin Joe" (Ze do Caxao in Portugese)-- whose astonishing 60's oeuvre has enjoyed a recent release on DVD through Fantoma--order it NOW, you will not be disappointed...an oeuvre that is an unholy cross between Bunuel, Dali, Mario Bava and Russ Meyer, that simultaneously comes across like experimental cinema (mainly photographed in deep black and white... although last week's showing of "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse" had a shockingly abrupt switcheroo to an ultra-vivid colour sequence set in Hell) tricked out with all sorts of jump cuts, close-ups, and time/space narrative disjunction...and also resembles Latin American soap operas, morality plays, and sex melodramas (officially sanctioned "pornochanchadas")...
A renegade auto-didact who grew up literally inside a cinema his parents operated in the 30's and 40's, Marins started off at age 6 directing myriad home-made short films, eventually directing and starring in what is regarded as Brazil's first real horror film in 1963, "At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul"--and after the military junta took over somehow was able to sneak out the aforementioned "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse" in 1966, and again in '69 bestowed yet again upon the world the twisted charms and enchantments of "Awakening of the Beast" (which was on IFC last night)...he's been a folk hero for years in Brazil, comics, serious philosophical treatises, and pop songs about him have flourished there for years, renowned Brazilian filmmakers like Glauber Rocha have praised him while others in the Brazilian Novo Cinema movement revile him...
if you have any interest in world cinema, the macabre in any shape or format, or intellectual kinkarama in general-- you owe it to yourself to see "This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse", in which Coffin Joe (the traveling undertaker/son of an undertaker played by Marins, decked out in black top hat, black cape, black beard, and foot long talons) delivers wall to wall Shakespearean, Lear-like soliloquys equal parts Nietzsche, Freud, and Sade while on the quest to find the perfect female mate to sire the ultimate child with (children are the only true innocents in the Marins cosmogony), as he moves through the most beautiful/grotesque mise en scene, blasted landscapes, fetid swamps, snake-infested torture chambers, diabolical laboratories and dungeons, boudoirs crawling with tarantulas, bedeviling, murdering, and seducing a variety of hefty/nubile naked beauties and lug-headed men, pursued by angry townsfolk in awe of his Black Arts--I won't give the ending away except to say that it involves a direct dialogue by the evil nihilist Coffin Joe with a very pissed-off, very Catholic God, who answers Joe's florid metaphysical curses and imprecations in a dialectic of howling winds and jagged lightning bolts...
For those with catholic tastes indeed, I urge you to get the full "Coffin Joe Trilogy" available on Amazon (comes in a coffin-shaped box housing 3 DVDs, plus a 36 page reproduction of one of the "Coffin Joe" 60's comic books)...never mind the auteurist visual feast, the soundtrack alone is brilliant: cutup snippets of hymns, obvious meller "movie music", eerie electronic tonalities, maniacal cackles and shrieks, cheap pop tunes-- in fact the credit roll last night at the top of "Awakening of the Beast" featured blood-curdling screams only--no music--in seemingly random intervals, louder and louder on the soundtrack, very unsettling/disturbing/reminiscent in fact of the time I happily watched a Chinese ghost-movie in Taipei in the mid 70's and the theater projectionist manually pumped up the volume in the Sino-kino to jumping-out-of-your-skin level whenever the "good parts" took over (I did a similar breaking of 4th wall intervention as a projectionist at Yale when showing Rupert Julian's silent "Phantom of the Opera", by switching on and off the house lights in Lindsey-Chittenden at the point when Lon Chaney as Erik makes the lights go on and off in the Paris Opera House before the chandelier falls)...in fact, during last week's midnight epiphany when I finally caught Coffin Joe for the first time (thank you thank you thank you IFC, best damn channel on cable!), I finally realized where Bruno, Eugene Levy's hunchbacked assistant to John Candy's lisping Dr. Tongue on SCTV, derives from--namely, the fetid imagination of Marins, as Coffin Joe has a similar slobbering hunchbacked factotum named Bruno in "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse"... I also realized where the spooky oooooooeeeeeeeeoooooooo electronic music comes from that crops up on the SCTV soundtrack whenever Dr. Tongue does his 3D House of Stewardesses hypno-moves, swinging objects towards a zooming in and out camera lens (a visual homage to Andre de Toth's original 1953 "House of Wax")--o those cheeky Canadians!--as (but of course) similar theremenic glissandos are heard at judicious moments on the soundtrack of "This Night I Will Possess Your Corpse"...
'Nuff said (or should I say, snuff said)--Jose Mojica Marins and his Coffin Joe "Cinema from the Mouth of Garbage", as it was known in Brazil in the 60's, rules! (not all that far afield really from the same slum environs/Manichean mindset from whence emanated such contemporary Brazilian masterpieces as "City of God")...
and I will now retire in pursuit of golden slum-bers as me wife is summoning me to the boudoir of tarantulas :-)
xxLove
Gary
posted by Gary Lucas at 5:21 PM
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