Moses Supposes

Lance I

The two funniest episodes of a very funny series.

Lance White is the Bizarro Jim Rockford: cheerful, calm, lucky, free of self-doubt, liked by all (especially girls and cops). And amazingly stupid. As Jim says: "Lance always comes out on top in the end. It's always some innocent bystander who eats the bullet."

"White on White and Nearly Perfect" from October 1978.

Lance II

Rockford and Lance are nominated for "Best P.I. of '79" in this beauty of an episode, stolen by James Whitmore, Jr. as a would-be Sam Spade. Tom Selleck bankrolled these two eps into Magnum, P.I., unfortunately.

"Nice Guys Finish Dead" -- 11/16/79.

Cis This

A long way from Mario Savio. . .

   

Berkeley must be so proud. C.J. Hopkins with more.

Next?

Why, full-blown fascism, of course.

Falling

Dr. Michael Parenti's brilliant (and very funny) explanation of the Roman Empire ~ and our own.

Vegetable vs. Man

Ghosts

I've never been much of a fan of Rod Serling or his original Twilight Zone. (Its contemporary genre sister One Step Beyond has always seemed more genuinely strange and mysterious and honest). There's a quality of over-literary slumming to most TZ episodes (the same feel I get from Herb Leonard's Naked City and Route 66 [George Maharis!] -- Method Museums both). Yet, from the position of hate and degradation we're all covered in by our current Commodity Culture, to deny the show's occasional greatness is absurd.

Episode number five was called "Walking Distance" -- premiering October 30, 1959 and starring the sadly forgotten Gig Young (who seems to have once lived in the Amberson mansion). Strange to say for a network TV show, but the greatness of "Walking Distance" is in its music -- perhaps the most moving ever written for a single episode of any series, by Bernard Herrmann, coming off of Vertigo and North by Northwest, and preparing for Psycho. An excess of love seems to come from the sound, a kind of abnegation and loneliness which speaks of what is tender and what is lost forever. Herrmann's music contains the ghost of tenderness itself. (And how much better the episode would be without Serling's nail-on-the-head narration.)

Go Forth

Miss Yamada is Waiting for You

The collage is formed from Ryuichi Sakamoto's music and the five movies Isuzu Yamada made with Kenji Mizoguchi, 1935-36: Downfall of Osen, Oyuki the Madonna, Osaka Elegy, Sisters of Gion and the recently discovered Ojo Okichi (a Mizoguchi co-direction).

Of the four members from the inner circle of Japanese Classical Actresses (Setsuko Hara, Hideko Takemine, Kinuyo Tanaka are the others), Isuzu Yamada is the most melodramatic and moving, the most beautiful and erotic, and certainly the loneliest. Under Mizoguchi, her atmosphere is like pure oxygen: if you breathe it deep it can make you dizzy and joyful; or poison you. Her always melancholy eyes and faintly hollowed cheeks make it seem as if she is feeding on her own beauty.