10,000 B.C. YET AGAIN??

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10,000 B.C. -A NUMBSKULL-QUASI-CAVEMAN-GENRE-SPINOFF WITH A SPOT OF SPECTACLE by John G. Kays

‘It was important for me to not over do it National Geographic style.’ Steven Strait on his role as D`Leh.

‘Lana, zug-zug.’ Grunts from Ringo Starr in Caveman 1981.

It looks like the light of day is dimming on this Easter Sunday and I am still rubbernecking the entrails of 10,000 B.C.? I replay the clip of the freeing of the saber-tooth tiger by D`Leh for parallels. Daniel and the Lion perhaps? Curiously, why did Roland Emmerich spend two years on the CGI of 10,000 B.C.; is Tony-The-Tame-Tiger and Wimpy-Wally-the-Wooly-Mammoth all he could conjure in the laboratory? Gadzooks, these cartoons are not that scary! The chomping gargantuan ostriches look like Thanksgiving Day turkeys shot full steroids and hybrid nutrients. This stuck out like a sore thumb, but was pleasant pulp inserted in these meandering (meaningless) excursions through tropical jungles; is this yet another Mayan-laden Central America of yesteryear (see Apocalypto)?

Now close your eyes, my pretty! You are getting drowsy, you are falling into a deep, deep slumber. I command you to jump through the white canvas screen and now you are literally in the movie 10,000 B.C. The plot, if you can detect one, is packaged in a frame of three periods. The first third covers the Ice Age (shot in New Zealand) and just includes some military training (see 300) and then the big wooly mammoth hunt, where d`Leh snags a big bull and gets the sacred white spear. The second third is the Amazonian Tropical Rain Forest segment (shot in South Africa), or the Jungle Book period, and includes the capture of some tribes people of Yagahl by the “four-legged demons” (Tartar-like equestrian warriors that are teeming with evil). Especially noteworthy is the snagging of the princess Evolet (Camilla Belle) whose destiny is mostly prophesized as a ‘pivotal one’.

Alright, I hope you are still drowsy. Oh, I am certain of it after snacking on this pompous piece of pie. Your eyelids could use some close-pins, I do believe. Nonetheless, the third and final portion of B.C. is the Egyptian-Desert-Pyramid-period (shot in Namibia), where stupid slaves are building leviathan pyramids with beaucoup Wooly-Mammoths at the behest of some odd anteater-looking high priests with real long, spooky claws. I don`t have the slightest idea what they are up to, I just know that they are evil critters of the highest caliber, and they seem to mirror some of the tricks of the bad guys in the movie Matrix. Go ahead and see for yourself? Oh yea, the “four-legged demons” are employed by this goofy priest cult. The finale is a Coors Light Spartacus with mostly fake violence.This is the crescendo and resembles the ‘let my people go’ loop (from The Ten Commandments), and as such D`Leh amasses an army of down and outs and commences to bust up this greedy party of golden-calf-idle-worshippers. Evolet plays a key part in the liberation too, but I am not certain just how? I do know she comes back from the dead, yea, resurrects right before your eyes, when the shaman-medicine-woman, Ma-Ma from the Adam`s Family back at the homeland, channels some magic across the universe. I know it turns out happily ever after, but the scrapping is ‘but a light affair’, as Santa Anna once said in conjunction with the siege of the Alamo. Gee whiz, that is most of it.

Anachronisms flourish like moldy fungus in and on B.C., but thrill you with their audacity. “Roland and I never intended for 10,000 B.C. to be a documentary.” Words of Kloser again. No problem, comprende senor! A few fauxpas` for ya: pyramids in 10,000 years ago? Dreadlocks on hunter-gatherers? Proper English diction? Weren`t wooly mammoths already extinct at this time? Military sailboats on this fake river Nile? Did One Million Years B.C. have as bountiful of a basket of anachronisms? At least we got to see Raquel Welch in that rockin` Flintstones` bikini! Ostriches the size of giraffes snapping at the little tickie boy? Can D`Leh cross time zones by multiple millenniums too? It doesn`t matter actually, in fact, it makes it funnier. A narcissistic comment here is in order. I was hoping to make this piece inspired, logical, and even with smooth transitions, the way good writing is suppose to be (as Judyth Piazza, the editor here, would want it, I surmise), but B.C. is so stupid, banal, irrational, historically inaccurate, and lopsided, that I don`t think it would be possible for me to apply any writing virtues in its portrayal. This is a clever rationale for the imperfections of this writing, don`t you think?

“Only time can teach us what is truth and what is legend.” Omar Sharif provides the narration that is overview for the gospel of the oppressed Yagahl, a tribe of Rastafarian cavemen with exquisite English diction. The screenplay is written by Roland Emmerich and Harald Kloser; it would be comical to read it in a script format. They created their own theology for this Paleolithic culture of hunter-gatherers. I do not need to see all the specifics, but it looks like a zany kaleidoscope (from my tree nest) of classic fragments, ransacked from say Cecil B. Demille`s The Ten Commandments or Mel Gibson`s Apocalypto, arbitrarily glued together into a tripping, fanciful collage of a B movie. I did not see Ice Age but it has been suggested that some of this was chunked in the mix as well. My own spot of gray matter senses some lifts from Jungle Book; they can be seen through the shop window, if you look hard enough.

I will be brief on the acting and music. Steven Strait, Camille Belle, and Cliff Curtis are manikins, crash test dummies for this empty caveman genre spectacle. They might as well have just twiddled their thumbs on the sets, but not that they didn`t do just that. The acting is easy to describe: it`s a polar bear in a snow storm, white on rice, lifeless bodies that phone it in. The music score by Harald Kloser contains misplaced notes, out of sync fanfares, obnoxious and intrusive; the football is greasy and squirts out of his hands, yea, he fumbles on the twenty yard line and the audience grabs for their earplugs but can not find them in the nick of time. Even Red Skelton himself is a better composer than that Kloser dude!

“Did I miss something?”, I asked myself as I exited the theater. I scratched my head in befuddlement as I pondered the convoluted theology that was generated by the flickering footage. When I got home I thumbed through the Bhagavad Gita for clues to fathom Emmerich`s vision. The Bhagavad Gita was created in 10,000 B.C. so it must contain keys to the universal understanding of say, the shaman-medicine-woman (Ma-Ma) draped in bone-beads who saw it all. I knew that D`Leh (Steven Strait) was a prophet and savior for the indigenous hunter-gatherer tribes seeking freedom from the bondage of the priest cult now ruling over the ‘new pyramid culture’. I fancied D`Leh as a Lord Krishna dictating a new philosophy to his troubled people. The blessed Lord Krishna said: “Fire, light, day, the moon`s brightness, the six months of the north-turning sun: dying then, men who are free go to absolute freedom.” Eureka, I was starting to see it now!

Surely there is something in 2001 A Space Odyssey that explains the events that unfold randomly on the screen? There is a beginning, middle, and end to both films so maybe that is the connection. Then I rehashed the tenets of eHarmony, a club that I have just joined, to divine an intersection; maybe D`Leh and the blue-eyed Evolet (Camille Belle) with the spiffy dreadlocks had met on eHarmony? Twenty-seven levels of compatibility would explain the harmonics between the two, wouldn`t it? Banality and boredom set in, then ultimately despair. I thumbed through the images again. Desperately, I turned the leafs of the Old Testament for harbingers. Icelandic legend anyone? A petrified scrap from the blind poet Homer? Come On! Reveal your secrets unto me, oh Karnack The Magnificent?

Why yet another dry review of an obvious cut-out-bin toss off, that will never see the light of day for even another nanosecond, much less a handful of millenniums? For one thing I have the flu currently and am trying to amuse myself until I recover (I will return to a more serious project in short order). Another reason is that readers love to witness shark-jawed critics rip the fatty flesh away from bone on such a paltry piece of pseudo-prehistoric fluff. B.C. is a plump partridge (probably in a pear tree) of caveman days` hocus-pocus; i.e. ripe meat for the carrion crow (film critics). The reader himself likes to join in on the act, yea, this is much appreciated audience participation; then they too can tear off a slab of chi kabob and devour it ritually, then guffaw defiantly at its .09 rating on the Rotten Tomatoes` Tomatometer. This may account for my perusal of all coverage of said film and the actual vacating of my condo to visit my local cinema for a viewing of 10,000 B.C., in person. The irony here is that this film is wracking up big receipts and the critics are receiving more reads, as dumb-down amateurs jawbone `bout the water cooler. Bravo! Everyone comes out a winner! That is cool, my fair weathered friends! B.C. is an oddity preserved in a bottle, a relic of P.T. Barnum that folk can Wow! over; it is a Hindenburg, a Tiny Tim, a Jumbo the Elephant that brushes us with a feather unmercifully. Have you seen Aretha Franklin lately? She fits in (but it is a tight fit) somewhere here, don`t you think?

10,000 B.C. The Legend. The Battle. The First Hero. Huh? This is the cornball slogan that is printed on the arcade poster that you stare at dumbly (that word is coming up a lot) as you enter your favorite local suburban multiplex, in every city known to man, in our great big country. Oh yea, Lost In Time. Duh! 108 minutes of Cheese Whiz and Ritz Crackers? Let`s try to snuff out the light here before a CGI herd of mastodons gets back up and starts charging us! Please bring closure to this thing, Mister John! Before you know it I`ll be pushing up old goat daisies! What we have here really, is a hefty bale of plastic, Pleistocene cotton candy, that gives you a whopper of a stomach ach as you wander through the Neanderthal ‘mall of life’. 10,000 B.C. is the new 2001 A Space Odyssey, April Fools, you gullible buffoon!

COMIN` UP DAISIES-hey, i`m a ginsberg or ferlinghetti too...!!!

Horizontal shot & freight train in frame he sleeps in all day movies…what a dreadful day I want to see blood pond & treeline screech of train rewind rotten wood grinding political posters weapon da nang in the jungle failure of commonwealth peace mission histoire de art newsreel tunes camera eye on audience rewind to start janus films Gerard beytoud ominous tones gainst red characters anna karina superstar of French new wave velasquez captures shimmering colors ethereal waves imperceptible dust still together in celluloid painter of evening open spaces torrid sunshine ciggies bathtub art book blue floral wallpaper pink skirt director of standard oil scandale girdle ad its invisible age of ass sounds of life babysitter Balzac 5th of Beethoven infrared soap washes fresh aerosol uncommon elegance live through past in past Samuel fuller in paris flowers of evil what is cinema infragreen lamore violence hate emotions hairdo stays light & soft golden silk infrable lingerie loses its lure ciggies in frame necklace earings party jazz toss the cake home sleepy girl you`re alone? Bland days wondering about yourself thunder and lightning four years since we met to want something you have to be alive are you still American car lights garrison massacred by Vietcong loves women his wife his mistress what makes me so sad…in car still and neon red Marianne whistle kissing you all over you`re beautiful my pet see Renoir anna karina good voice cabaret singer barrelhouse piano …so happy in same bed blue eyeliner blank white screen yoko & john imagine love & mirth in film bonnie & clyde again hurral judy garland sad but wistful rosy girls in Renoir red lamp Hitchcock again Bernard herman riffs remember janet leigh fleeing same pathos here Ferdinand & Marianne escape their daily lives for greener pasturesblue bathrobe & bacj Picasso on wall citylife match mag on wall green bottles guns & corpses ditty then edith pioff of golden screen new wave spontaneous words of love rose…bric a brac we could live together ordinary lives…romping tectures bit by bit never let go simple flat bob Dylan with a typewriter allen ginsberg karoac types undulous words groovtflick pounds character art homicide in Toulouse golden armchairs flats & office buildings pathos in white mao se tung gainst manichens gun-running sail away Simbanese liberation army free long time ago paris eifel tower seine sixties brown hair flip red auto ambience total gas…laurel & hardy abbot castello lewis martin mcmanon Carson giant total tender is the night starry night an off w/ear Angola congo revolution in Africa have you ever killed a man strobes of cherry red paranoid park but time ago bring it back look at yourself kisses and pathos rendezvous entering central france student born in 1936 viviane blassel andy Warhol video portraits blue gainst white anna jean-paul liberty equality perfume…film extra fall of Constantinople William of orange study crusades for foibles of west 30,000 saracens gone what bout Algiers again blue brick & door lovers long for warm evening air cartoon arcades pensive piano Copeland & billy the kid were dead ya ever see lost weekend? Sympathy for devil saw at unionhall in 70s revolution anarchy depicted 1965 early radical themes flames in field telephone wires a season of hell narrative of characters in river…themes again wistful tones bucolic greens in wood spring on rack w/ strings stones corn stalks grinding riffs gainst yellow wildflowers van gough café in arles maybe? Natural aire an sounds buses cars wind military fatigues sedan Chinese hat noise gainst fins oil change repair ford gas pumps melancholy mania blue skies anna jumps in jumpsuit carnival toons arcade themes coney island lampoon horns naked together in bed ciggie silhouettes flashback cabarets chatter chaos give us a ton a doe rewind…in one take to park afternoon delight sunglow look at the fool! Car in ocean love must be reinvented…begin to cry ocean blue & sky Riviera back to yesterday waves shells sounds want to start over fetal position beaming rays & stingrays kill in florida…moon is only inhabitant stuff his head full of Lenin ¾ moon birdseye shot fuck me seagulls sand bright sunlight mingle in sand parrots & sanddunes flats stucco white cupids arrow diary an tractors singing in sunshine surreal language poetry wildflowers colors addlib mister godard but shoot naturally no script no story but maybe content cactus shoots and parrot squabbles bread & brooms cham cham cham labo close up shadows wander in water sing & chant parrot & poetry wash out `til footage fades….

10,000 B.C.

10,000 BC is one of the corniest prehistoric epic flicks that I have ever seen, but I`ve seen quite a few other bloopers as well, in my time. Caveman with Ringo Starr comes to mind along with One Million BC with the rockin` Flintstones` bikini of Raquel Welch. 10,000 BC is racking up the customer count at the box office too, & this says something about peoples preferences for viewing. My guess would be a need for hollow entertainment with pretty good dinosaurs and Geico cavemen that get too much in the way of the action. The reading of 9 % on the tomatometer was shocking, I don`t believe I have ever seen such a low score! This boomeranged for me & caused me to go see it since I was curious about the disconnect between the large quantity of people who want to see it and the universal axing it`s got from the critics! What doesn`t kill you makes you stronger! Oddly, For some unknown reason (none of these could have been strong enough) I actually got in my truck & drove over to Southlake Meadows, `cuz I still had one more flick to burn off on a gift certicate. I should get the congressional medal of honor for braving this mirage of cottoncandy on the eye sockets! The special effects could not have been the draw since they were abysmal compared to say Ray Harryhausen who`s the all-time genius for dinosaur action figures come to life. The plot was one of the dumbest I have ever seen and the acting was double bogey tanker-takes that couldn`t even substitute for blooper-takes. The mamasita-shaman-medicine-woman draped in bone-beads was kind of a nice touch and the dread-lock-rastafarian-hunter-gatherers were out-a-time weirdoes with too much cake-make-up & crusty scabs & lice. Tony the saber-tooth tiger was too wimpy & didn`t devour hardly any cave-boy types. The hordes of woolie mammoths run about recklessly, but are dumb beyond belief & just fill the screen with hair and feet & tusks `til you think ya will upchuck your popcorn. Did anyone get the bit about the daddy splitting to found a new colony? I was having trouble putting that together too,…a with the Egyptian-like slave culture who were building those funky new pyramids, what did that have to do with diddlysquat? Half of the action takes place in white cold regions and half happens in hot tropical rainforest terain, & this is a good move in terms of contrast & composition. & what about that kinky ant-eater looking leader with the long claws of the New Civilization Cult? It was hard to tell what he was up to or where he came from. Was he maybe the hero`s dad? & that was weird the way the princess comes back to life after the shaman mama blows out that icy breath? I missed something…but will be able to review the chapters once the DVD comes out. It wasn`t really that violent, but I don`t know that it would be improved with more gratuitous killing…but maybe it would? It could have benefited from some meaner dinosaurs, like T-Rex, but I suppose they were extinct by 10,000BC. But why try to be accurate about the prehistoric timeline with this clunker? It doesn`t make sense but it don`t matter anyhows! Almost thirty-six million take home so far, this is the most important thing to remember at this point. I did love the costumes & make-up, the wild hairdos and grease paint galore and sandy thick cake makeup on their pusses. I will study the look again for next year`s Halloween costume. For the plot i`m wondering if they were looking at Homer or maybe retelling a story from the Old Testament, but it looks like the writers were covering their tracks pretty good. I know there was some Egyptian stuff in there, but the hieroglyphs were beyond my ken! One good thing is I`m considering putting the aforementioned titles with Ringo & Raquel to the top of my Netflix queue. I have to reconsider why this caveman thing is so appealing. Once I do that I can figure out the charms of 10,000 BC. Now that`s a stupid goal that will chew up lots of time! Oh well…I`m just that stupid I suppose. I do have a working theory as to why the caveman genre films are so popular. People want to think back to the way things were eons & thousands of years ago, & they like to channel how they would survive in the thick of things-wooly mammoths, four-legged crusaders, & dinosaurs of course. The dumber the producer makes the flick, the better the box-draw will be! That`s the formula & that Roland Emmerich knows that. In fact, if he made it series it would flop. A series loop would be 2001 A Space Odyssey, the beginning part. But this is not a pure caveman genre product, so it does not count. People want it to be corny so they can praise there own empty lives! Now you see it, don`t you? The worst the reviews, the better the draw too. This has an inverse function-formula on it that can make someone millions in receipts by recognizing the secret pattern. The pecking flamingoes are really obnoxious & this helps the movie too. The slave rebellion was cool & was kind of a Spartacus thing. The hero dude is a savior for the repressed cave-people on this bummer mission of building the city of gold or whatever it is? The theology here is illusive but one can vaguely comprehend multiple spirits at work here, but the mama mia-supremo gets it & reads the tea leaves with precision. I think everyone lives happily ever after in the end, but it`s a little hard to tell. Is that the impression that you got? Another epiphany I just had is this is Drive-In fodder, & that can translate into big bucks, but that type of outlet does not exist anymore! IE the Cinemarks of the world can absorb that business!

AND GOD CREATED WOMAN...THE SEQUEL

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Bonnie & Clyde...Bonnie & Clyde...And God Created Woman started something Dionysian for the stiff Americano. Brigitte loosens us up and Cold War paranoiac behaviors vanish into the atmosphere. The paparazzi came into being with pics of Brigitte. Maybe it initiated the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Brigitte Bardot was free and natural and visually stunning. The 1950s in the U.S. were stiff and inhibited with Doris Day epitomizing lady stardom with corny parts and bellowing songs. And God…came out in 1956 and suddenly things have changed. The superstar looked stunning to Americans, in part because she was French, and the French Riviera, and sunny, free St. Tropez was an exotic place of Americano dreams…escape from the states to romantic interludes where you play on the beach all day and cha, cha, cha in the cafes by night.
The brilliant blue Mediterranean was gorgeous beyond belief and the French language poetry to stodgy local farm boys. Bridgette silhouetted against a jukebox with lounge guitar, rolling sandy locks and green panels, cut…Roger Vadim knew what he was doing…see the connection with Jane Fonda…see Barbarella for Bardot look-alike. Big Machito jazz band sounds against Brigette strutting up the stairs, in bed, tucked into white cotton sheets and giggling. Camera through panels coastline blue waves cascading boats on the mooring. She falls on the sand cut to docks with boats and she shoots it up for kicks, laughs and fires the pistol out the window…The Phocaeans colonized Provincia 4th century BC wanders the bedroom blue pajamas jealous lover in doorway…Juliette sleeps away cut to boats again…regular at the Cannes Film Festival, rocketed to stardom…Brigitte Bardot the ultimate bikini siren, (read this discreet bikini essay) gingham becomes the rage…languorously on the beach then romance scene buttons back up the back to bed. St. Tropez king of bikini…why am I dwelling on these silly matters…watching And God Created Woman for the first time ever, behind the curves but in the shot and biography of animal rights…Will see Contempt this weekend…they`re still raving about it…shots of coastline…wonders down winding roads goin` nowhere Havas Exprinter concrete walls motorcars and cafes Coco Chanel and the bathtub revolution…Bar de Amis…Les Amis gone the Bardot of my youth? Play the café wild dance scene again with Latin afro-jazz maracas, bongos cowbell jazz and Brigitte begins to move claps twist and albums on wall Juliette pulls her hair up twirls like a wild dervish the jass swings changes syncopation pulls up skirt wilder and wilder grinds the dance floor gone further and further husband jealous takes the stage legs grind wilder and wilder sweats hair flowing bongo furry she is gone caught in passion faster and faster shot fired and the moment is gone and so am I….created more jealousy then anyone thru time…
These picture galleries of Brigitte Bardot should keep you busy for a while… Couple that with some Serge Gainsbourg ala “Bonnie and Clyde” and you will be in a cloud…Uh la la…Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) is the best artist for the Cote d`Azur for food, palm trees, hotels, ocean, & sky…the natural light floods his canvas with joy and innocence. Study something of The French Riviera too before you watch this movie…it will enrich your experience. Shot of hills and seas laundry on the lines…away on bike flowers and shops Les Batounos cage liquore will build the casino by the road…bus and blue dress Antoine!! Fun in Toulon smiles and giggles…suitcase goodbye! Boats and green hills eici de tous tems s`ccampe you`re doing the mambo…cha cha cha troubadours from a lowly lot of jugglers ..kiss me cool jass café tabacs journaux frescoes cocktails bamboo accordion frescoes…vibes and dancing the Duke of Aquitaine & Frederic Mistral verse provencal verse romance and spices cool nightclub knights at the crusades lonely ladies …you`re a nasty drunk darts industrialist makes a play for Juliette hotrod kisses are you taking the first bus…Japanese fan take you back to st. Mary`s orphanage flowing golden hair plate of fruit and red curtains rabbits galore and greens go by Socrates the rabbit flees…yachts or Mister Hale shameless impolite & lazy daily news is stale a proper young lady? Le provencal give me a big kiss boats & birds blue azure motion & business easter Sunday graveyards and chapels play games ciggies marry juliette floral wreaths leave tomarrow sad postcard racks blinds and bikes stroll away Steve Reich`s 18 Musicians in the background…got to get to Flatstock poster show…free Michel I want you married to Juliette wedding day white wedding gown bells they chime…shadows & roman arches lawful wedded husband veil of tears matrimony you`re still in love? Husbands wearing horns punch and fight Hotel kick kick poupette old castles wine & chandeliers handsome you know passion and simple sets with bouchets cakes & fruits & bread stripped robe panorama syrupy music Saint Tropez is dazzling deep blue shutters afro-jass blast cha cha cha go in the car and twist Bridgitte is bored silhouettes and seas palms and cars scotch Venetian blinds architects plans golden balustrades skinny dipping at Hippie Hollow huh?? Sprigs of green wild nights spritely days of haze and smilesteal my heart and away sweet jukebox again stagey scenes are fashion shots Bardot`s got um quick as a fax & away she`s the queen of the parking lot…gear up for tango guitar charley christianson hollow body dream riff tell me something sweet revolution is starting bundle of fire playboy foldouts started here…chauvinism spinning and trouble female trouble bubbles under later with Gloria Steinem pound spoons slap then cuddle and croon exotica born too lotta staircases smooth horns cotton sheets are cool white as lamb idle cards no brainer Juliette is made for you..poster before movie international sex star the first of her kind go on to chores but more Bardot first blue and sand stucco I`m scared to the ground romance in the cote d `azur (here`s a nice, simple map) it`s 1956 and I`m three shoots and laughs target practice on bottles squabbles Stone Age hairclips orange stucco into room diary dear god…black & white marriage snaps riffs loop over seduction buffoonery boats jeeps chatter Marseilles to do books phone ahlo ahlo…vibes piping hot bowties orange lamps casino royale princess of Monaco grace Kelly drives off a cliff…why sleeping beauty with the flowing golden hair age of innocence …camarat lighthouses blue waters calm sailboat mister dufy smoky explosion & fire woman overboard floating & swimming shoreline longshot calm breezes salt water taffy palms beige open dress saving grace foam and swirl beach pose biting kissing broken trees you`re feverish miserable stop drinking drag a ciggy `gainst white stucco walls I don`t love him maybe I wanted a friend…drunk in the kitchen blue blinds snap to super vixen in the sack again want to talk she`s fine…putting on blue/green skirt pots & pans spices arrayed songs project piano cascading down the scales hills & fortress country life is gone walks medieval corridors winding to forbidden fruit…struts the pole & into café again bar reads the paper downs a drink bar de amis again icebox in here a double oh it`s awful…moans to a girlfriend a bar where the whores go?...yesterday she was screaming in my arms?...gun fires…penny arcades of oldtimes yankee doodles where the theater was pinball machines for real unreal been a long time one million bc & rachel welch swinging jass up over swoonin muted horns alto sax dances again and finale catharsis this time sways gyrates cha cha amazons miads wild wood woman hair is swingin rhythms jam & twirl twirl twirl crescendo coils to a boil swings & sweats free love is born!

AND GOD CREATED WOMAN

And God Created Woman started something Dionysian in the American consciousness. Maybe it initiated the sexual revolution of the 1960s.; it certainly was a trigger for new ideas. Brigitte Bardot was free and natural and visually stunning. The 1950s in the U.S. were stiff and inhibited with Doris Day epitomizing lady stardom with corny parts and bellowing songs. And God…came out in 1956 and suddenly things have changed. The superstar looked stunning to Americans, in part because she was French, and the French Riviera, and sunny, free St. Tropez was an exotic place of Americano dreams…escape from the states to romantic interludes where you play on the beach all day and cha, cha, cha in the cafes by night. The brilliant blue Mediterranean was gorgeous beyond belief and the French language poetry to stodgy local farm boys. Bridgette silhouetted against a jukebox with louge guitar, rolling sandy locks and green panels, cut…Roger Vadim knew what he was doing…see the connection with Jane Fonda…see Barbarella for Bardot look-alike. Big Machito jazz band sounds against Brigette strutting up the stairs, in bed, tucked into white cotton sheets and giggling. Camera through panels coastline blue waves cascading boats on the mooring.She falls on the sand cut to docks with boats and she shoots it up for kicks, laughs and fires the pistol out the window…The Phocaeans colonized Provincia 4th century BC wanders the bedroom blue pajamas jealous lover in doorway…Juliette sleeps away cut to boats again…regular at the Cannes Film Festival, rocketed to stardom…Brigette Bardot the ultimate bikini siren, gingham becomes the rage…langorously on the beach then romance scene buttons back up the back to bed..St. Tropez king of bikini…why am I dwelling on these silly matters…watching And God Created Woman for the first time ever, behind the curves but in the shot and biography of animal rights…Will see Contempt this weekend…they`re still raving about it…shots of coastline…wonders down winding roads goin` nowhere Havas Exprinter concrete walls motorcars and cafes Coco Chanel and the bathtub revolution…Bar de Amis…Les Amis gone the Bardot of my youth? Play the café wild dance scene again with latin afro-jazz maracas, bongos cowbell jazz and Brigitte begins to move claps twist and albums on wall Juliette pulls her hair up twirls like a wild dervish the jass swings changes syncopation pulls up skirt wilder and wilder grinds the dance floor gone further and further husband jealous takes the stage legs grind wilder and wilder sweats hair flowing bongo furry she is gone caught in passion faster and faster shot fired and the moment is gone and so am I….created more jealousy then anyone thru time…

DIARY OF THE DEAD

The Diary of the Dead did not disappoint me, `twas narcissistic, a movie within a movie, & the media conduits by way of camcorders, act as mirrors to this spicy zombie gobbling fest. The documentary The Death of Death, done by one of the student filmmakers from Penn State, who are the anti-heroes in this drama-feast herein, sort of crash-test-dummies for George Romero`s outragious brainstorms, are downloaded to his blog, then seen instantly by 72,000 people through out the world. I sure wish I could get that many hits! The local nobody-guy is the only one who can provide reliable information about the cataclysmic events unfolding. Network News is mere propaganda that ruthlessly ensnares a witless public. A…this is not unlike what say, Fox News is doing now…is it? This whole project is self-conscious smoking mirrors and carnival poking fun at society, which is what George Romero does best. This one is his Interactive Dead, and stays focused on our watching ourselves watching (if it is possible to stay focused)…with lots of surveillance cameras, a panic room in one scene, and then the paranoia of phony broadcast news, where stuff is faked by opportunistic telly journalists, who get good & gobbled up like jiffyquick. There is a little scene where some African American coterie of survivors take the Penn students in for a bit, and they have high jacked all the surrounding swag into a Wall-Mart of purloined treats; now they are in power for a change. They end up being the human rights perpetrators of the story. I was seeing them as quasi-metaphors for the Black Panthers of old, but I do believe that`s a `lude in my coffee rather. The gunshots to the torsos and heads of the zombies are at point blank. For an unknown reason this is not real violence but rather ultra-violence or performance art violence…everything here is an interactive snuff film, but it is merely comic. The students are just two-dimensional, and when one of them dies you don`t give a hoot really; there are not any actual good people in the plot or anything. They`re not bad either but they`re just there. The camera jitters around a lot so I was reminded of Cloverfield quite a few times, but there is always a put down or another gag to keep your interest. The sequence with the deaf-mute Amish hay boy is something of a hoot. His demise is shocking too. Two good old boys play target practice with some zombies & blow off the head of one poor zombie lady. The Amish farm boy throws homemade grenades that detonate several of the freaks into sawdust. Just about no one gets out alive, so I was reminded of the Friday the Thirteenth franchise. It`s not that scary here though, and when someone gets it it is almost organic. This one wasn`t quite as high camp as The Land of the Dead, which was rich in social satire, but this one is more a study of where the media and the internet are going. My Space, Facebook, YouTube, blogs and the live streaming pseudo-information wars are the fodder for this cinematic clip. You are at a freak show here with trick mirrors sending you deceptive messages, where death is life, fact is fiction, and society is turned upside down! In other words it is just like our current reality. Oh…the National Guard are crooks here and the clan of brothers are heroes, because they control the swag (food & gasoline). Bravo Mister Romero! Mother & father are zombies and must be eliminated…scenes are shown first in real time, then shown again as footage on blogs and other cameras…it occurred to me that this is how we see our lives go by in reality. The same clips again & again! I do encourage you to see it and compare it to the other editions. None will ever beat the first though.

POP ART: ROY LICHTENSTEIN IS NOW!

POP ART: ROY LICHTENSTEIN IS NOW! By John G. Kays First Edition

*(Note: I keep saying to myself that I will rewrite this piece & make it better. I never seem to get around to doing that, so i`ll just give it to you in its lumpy state.)

'The insistent dramas of love and war interest Lichtenstein less than ‘the formal problem…Once I`ve established what the subject matter is going to be, I`m not interested in that…I think of it as abstract painting when I do it .Half the time they`re upside-down anyway when I work’. Most Pop Art is essentially emblematic in its conjunction of word and image. Lichtenstein shares with ‘post-painterly abstraction’ his enlarged scale, broad flat forms on colour fields, carefully depersonalized line, reductive composition, and expanded forms that seem to exist beyond the framing edge.' Pop Art-page 125-Lucy R. Lippard

I like to walk around the Austin Museum of Art fairly quickly and glance at all of the prints in order to get a pristine impression. I love the Lightning Bolt Banner Felt from 1966 and the Explosion from the portfolio lithograph from 1967.Lichtenstein was daring, innovative and defiant. He is seemingly anti-intellectual, cartoon-like, but at second glance reshaping images from the past to ‘something new!’ How can a catalog image be so unusual…Seven Apple woodcut Series simple and fresh. Apple and Lemon looks real as if you could eat it. Pyramids from 1969 an Egyptian lithograph clear and direct. Cathedral and Haystack Series laughs in the face of Monet…Seuratesque and yet not. Modern Head series from 1970 gets more and more abstract….

The American Experience through Roy Lichtenstein is an intensively narcissistic voyage ; he takes you on a winding boat ride past the collective ephemera of Americana; it is shimmering like a lit-up, neon-glowing Times Square on New Years Eve! Roy invented Pop Art, perhaps subconsciously, in concert with several other likely heroes, traditional listings include: Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Claes Oldenburg. He attempted something novel and fresh and invented new techniques of expression by combining alternative printing media; he defied the ISMs but was studied in the printing craft and practiced the wisdom of ‘know thy enemy.’ The processes of printing confidently defines the content; I can only intuit this not prove it, although here is some reinforcement. ‘Everyone had to agree with Greenberg when he declared that “Picasso, Braque, Mondrian, Miro, Kandinsky, Brancusi, even Klee, Matisse and Cezanne, derive their chief inspiration from the medium they work in. The excitement of their art seems to lie most of all in its pure preoccupation with the invention and arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc., to the exclusion of whatever is not necessarily implicated in these factors”.- Pop Art by KlausHonnef-page 14. An element of mechanization existed in this new form and the idealism of Abstract Expressionism was abandoned. Content, per se, was secondary for Pop Art, but in the context of the 1960s the popular masses freely contrived meaning and/or symbolism within its frames. Ironically, these artists picked the most prosaic of materials, brillo boxes come to mind, then the audience sublimated these items as icons worthy of worship; this indulgence was unbeknoweth to Roy and Andy and Tom. The masses longed to glorify secular images, suc h as Chairman Mao, Elvis, or Liz Taylor for no particular reason other than their sheer elusive star magnetism or lack of it. This carried over in Pop Music where people would see extraordinary meaning in lyrics-you may remember the controversy surrounding the Kingsmen`s smash hit Louis Louis. The popularity of Pop Art is hard to explain, but perhaps people needed a sensational relief from monotony of daily life.

Still colliding downward from the happening of Pop Art…churnin` & yearnin`, yawnin` & dawnin`, rippin` & trippin`, thinking` & blinkin` Lincoln…where did you go Peter Blake?. Feel the energy rushing to my toes! Bought the lumber, picked up the art catalog, photographed the Roy prints, had visions of its outcome, went to Walgreens and created 25 pristine prints, trimmed and mounted them on maple, used about half a tube of 16 ounce Elmer`s, stirred two tubs of acrylic latex paint, one deep blue, the other off yellow, then used a stick and dripped oodles of pain-paint, undulating randomly, on the wood plate, glued two Andy Warhol refrigerator magnets on the surface, glued three randomly self-made Roy snaps on afterwards, including my favorite of Chairman Mao (an evil tyrant), tossed it right in the center…Will touch it up with acrylic paint dabbles and will call it a day. Purchased a two-inch stencil at the Hobby Lobby and plastered the logo to the top of the wood. Pop Art is now, wow, cow, unplanned, nerve-taxing, spiritual, a dichotomy of plagiarism and spontaneity, reaching for the stars but not getting there, pretty paper with poetry & pomp or circumstance, pusillanimous pussyfooters puffy and percolating… no-wheres-ville that is sparkling and catchy, will make you famous, will make you rich, will titillate the crowds, shown in the street galleries, forever young and alive! Good lovin`, goodness gracious great balls of fire, great Caesar`s ghost, and the Virgin of the Guadalupe, all in one bundle, visits us daily! Need to meltdown from pungent AGED SUMATRA Lingtong Peaberry Blue Batak bean soon! Let go, uptight out of sight, chitty chitty bang bang, coffee beans roll across your taste buds and paint pours on cloth in random patterns of crystal clear inspiration…huh!! What! Who says! Will beaucoup layer-cake `til the end of time! Blue Meanies yank you away to concentration camps for the incorrigible IF kids…which is just about anyone who likes to be free…see what I mean, I am paranoid `cuz the ‘American Dream’ is in peril, and I don`t want to be swept away in a maelstrom ….I like the world of the early sixties and try to remain there. Read this and be free. Free you, free me…censorship is not to be! Okay…I got a little carried away, this is not journalism. Maybe I will be more analytical tomorrow…but who really is going to care? Final product Luv Pop Art and rocks your world my pretty?

Moonscape (from 11 Pop Artists, Vol I), 1965 is an early screenprint that is dreamy and very blue and suggests a romantic, untamed world where the universe is in fluctuation, with undulating plasmas and gases in motion. Things are a bit balmy like a London fog o`er the Thames or a perfect storm brewing in the Florida Keyes. Van Gogh`s Starry Night surfaces, but this is more of an earth science thing that includes bubbling lava and some cacophonous skies of an angry Zeus spitting out torrent- pellet moisture in an isolated speck of the shoreline…in no particular point on the globe. I walked by it several times and returned with glee, but was shrouded with blues and raw energy, primordial feelings of forlornness and misgiving. This work led to Lichenstein`s tendency to publish whole portfolios of prints that would be one continuous series, that show the stages of the process. His model here is the Impressionist master Claude Monet, who liked to capture on canvas different measures of daylight reflecting on, say a cathedral or a haystack. Roy too alters common images through synthetic stages that mutate a popular icon a million-fold until it becomes a rather transformed creature. Like the Warhol Marilyns, it becomes its own object of worship. For me, this is the way that matter decomposes and changes in a possibly scientific and/or historical fashion, sometimes organic and often man-made. I do not need to know every nuance of Roy`s method to see what he is up to. Roy disguises plagiarism through crafty mutations that alter popular cartoon graphics and catalog snaps into new being; he does it with humor and panache extraordinary! He is the most original plagiarist ever, an oxymoron that works for him!

‘One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven. One two three four five six seven, all good children go to heaven. Pop anthems come from Pop art too. Batman lunch kits and cape crusaders costumes adorn my collection. Pop art entertains, it cajoles, it caresses, it flirts with the icons of posterity, it teases and pleases…sends us skyward, we`re Superman flying through outer space on his way to nowhere? Borrows from want ads, purloins sneakily from magazines, mocks the Abstract Expressions who mock the Impressionists…Pop! Bam! Zapp! Whish! You are in the Now, the in-crowd of the cow! Lucy Lippard is evangelical art critic for Pop art…her 1966 book Pop Art a dictionary of definition for me. The eyes are assaulted with absurdity. Rhythms are broken, calculus comes in play, an` extra texture is all around. Andy loves cows, Roy loves cows. Anti-war message in the blast of bombs! Brushstrokes are the DNA of an artist. ’

Paintings Series: Two Paintings: Beach Ball, 1984 catches the eye then tosses it to some giggling zephyrs blowing confusion boats pall mall to distant lands. The top image is an anti-cubist girl, the remnants of an earlier cartoon girl, possibly the one Girl With Ball, 1961, that launched Roy Lichtenstein to fame. I have been fond of this one for years, and use the postcard as a bookmarker. In Pop Art by Lucy Lippard, a very helpful primer on this subject, you can see the clipping from the resort section of the Sunday New York Times, 1963, where Roy got his idea for Girl With Ball. In the 1984 version she is abstract and resembles a Picasso, but the beach ball is recognizable and the frame is prominent bordered by diagonal lines that are reflected within the frame as well. The frame is part of the total work; it is as if we are staring at two painting in an arbitrary gallery, and our imperfect eyes can only see two portions of the respective pieces; the subjectivity of viewing art is suggested as a twist of larkish lime.

‘In Lichtenstein the prosaic becomes the profound; that is. there is no message, just a visual image to latch on to. There is no message in a bottle, no metaphor, no symbol, just a fun little construction project. Is there some subliminal voice beaming from the canvas?…no! The images are not real…the Rouen Cathedral has been done before…the Haystack Series has been done before…the bulls get more and more abstract…the Pyramids are not from the Old Kingdom…no real human being lives in the Interior Series… the couches are unreal, the lamps are mirages from an Industrial catalog…the painting fakes…the reflections in the mirror illusions of the mind…why does Roy make these prints? Because THAT IS WHY HE IS ON THIS EARTH!’

Reflections Series: Reflections on Conversation, 1990 uses a number of printing modes, including lithograph, screenprint, woodcut, and metalized PVC collage with embossing. The signature Benday dot pattern is employed as well. Just how Roy combined these media remains a mystery for mr presently. The observer is peeping into a room where a couple is talking, possibly through Venetian blinds, so there is an element of scandal or compromise. That is, we feel particularly guilty, because we are intruders to the singular intimacy that prevails. I immediately thought of the movie The Conversation with Gene Hackman, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola, that expresses the paranoia of electronic surveillance via the Watergate scandal of that time. We feel guilty because we are doing something that we should not be doing; we are Peeping Toms to a piece of art, now isn`t that funny? The Reflections Series has been portrayed as a narcissistic indulgence where Roy and the viewer are misremembering his early cartoon pieces. In this light, we are looking into the past, and maybe experiencing a dialogue about art and hence where one may travail in the bigger picture of things. One interpretation is that we are looking into a window of the past and witnessing the actual finalized plans for Art and its history! It is an inside joke for those that are on a pedestal, such as the New York school.

Cubist Cello, 1997 is just a screenprint and this is print 41 of an edition of 75; sure wish I owned one! This would come in the same year that Roy died, and so evokes a stack of experience and expression, a crescendo to a fruitful career in print production. It take the shape of a collage with profiles of a woman, a musician, a bird, and a cow, all staring in disparate directions, all unaware of each other, yet they miraculously impersonate an oddball ensemble…a platoon of hummingbird harmony. There is an abundance of balance here, the lines define simple objects in space, the dots and stripes are measured out in equal quantities, and the colors are simple yet faded, but the lines are sharp and suggest separate planes in space. The question arises: why are animals and musicians together here? The answer is for NO real reason at all. The cello instrument presides right in the center, and a portion of a flute player occupies the lower left-hand corner. The cellist with the marine-blue cap strikes the strings with bow while the merry flutist blows melody into the pipes. It is anti-cubist, anti-Picasso…but pays tribute with irony and gusto to that school of art. Its narcissism to the history of art is pungent, yet it`s delicate and catchy, defiant and funny, teeming with tones and geometric fragments…melodies and pastels sing out against colliding mathematical design, shades of earthen brown and grays, the lightest of yellows. Benday dots, bars and stripes…contours of mental memories; the band plays on. The Andantino of Symphony No. 3 by Aaron Copland is piping in my ears as I drink the cello print and remember its placement on the wall at the Austin Museum of Art. The composition is sound and classic, centered and serene; its methods are both in check with the ISMs of art school and in defiance towards them, a rejection of the past yet a winking to its inkings!

There`s a black hole in my soul but Roy makes it better. I`m supposed to report to Mr. Bellamy, I wonder what he`s like. Pop art is just intended to titillate, nectar for the eye…please enjoy my Luv Pop Art, I can do it too. Just innocence, a narcotic effect. Buy American People!