The Trial of the Chicago Seven (Well, Eight)

Aaron Sorkin's new Netflix movie 'The Trial of the Chicago 7' arrives on our screens in October. In the present climate, it's going to be a timely piece. The film is set in 1968, when the Vietnam War and institutionalised racism were dividing America much as it is divided today. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago that year, the police famously ran riot and viciously assaulted hundreds of young people who had come to the city to protest against the war. Although the motivation of those who came was more various and complex than that. Poet Ed Sanders saw the assembly of youth in the streets and parks of Chicago as a 'Festival of Life' that would act as a kind of karmic counterweight, in its affirmative message, to the hawkish warmongering inside what he called the 'Democratic Death Convention'.

Britannica suggests that the reason for the brutal attack by the police on the young people who'd come to the city was the attempted enforcement of an 11pm curfew, which the protestors refused to comply with. The city, run by the notorious Mayor Daley, denied the groups in attendance permits to all marches and rallies except an afternoon rally in Grant Park. Unsurprisingly, given that they had nowhere else to go, about 15,000 people turned up, but when they tried to march out of the park they were intercepted by police in a manner so violent Sandi Thompson revealed that it made her husband Hunter weep. He was in Chicago for the Convention. I've always believed his seething hatred of Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, which flowered magnificently in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, took root during that campaign.

Julius Hoffman

Hundreds of people were arrested during the police riots that lasted, in total, five days and nights, among them eight significant political activists and counter-culture leaders. And in the trial that followed, which is the subject of the film, Judge Julius Hoffman and the Prosecution did everything they could to have the defendants jailed.  Everything legal and everything that pushed the law to breaking point. I've known about the trial for years because I am a fan of Allen Ginsberg, who testified for the Defence (though his testimony is not shown in the film). And yet the last time I saw the 1987 play Conspiracy: The Trial of the Chicago 8, it still shocked and angered me, even though I knew what was coming.

Bobby Seale

The film is titled differently from the play because Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers was severed from the case by Hoffman and sentenced to four years for contempt of court. Eight, therefore, had become seven. Why? Denied the right both to be defended by the lawyer of his choice or to defend himself, Seale was understandably furious:

[…] Those jive lying witnesses up there presented by these pig agents of the government […] lie and say and condone some rotten racists, fascist crap by racist cops […] I demand my constitutional rights!

Seale's reward for those comments, initially, was to be bound and gagged and made to sit in the courtroom as proceedings continued. This lasted for several days before Seale was finally removed. Even watching a group of actors play out this moment is profoundly distressing. To think that it happened in real life, in our time (mine anyway), boggles the mind. I don't know if the history of the Black Panthers is taught in American schools; I'm pretty sure it isn't in the UK. But in the era of Black Lives Matter, after the murder of George Floyd and the outrageous exoneration of the cops involved in the death of Breonna Taylor - at a time when cities in the US are burning with the need for racial justice - the spectacle of a black man being humiliated deliberately by a judge who the current president would invite to dinner might possibly prove incendiary. 

The Silent Women of 'Don't Look Back'

Sally Grossman with Bob Dylan

There's a poetry documentary shot sometime in the Sixties in which Robert Creeley talks while his then-wife Bobbie listens and throws in occasional observations of her own. But interjections are all she gets to make. She has a place at the table, but her role is to be there as witness to her husband's speech, his insights, to be (I can't help thinking) in her rapt attentive state a sort of boast that reinforces his importance. Creeley, we learned when Bobbie found her own voice, was open about his expectation of the woman he lived with. He did not want to compete with another writer. But conscious or unconscious misogyny were a habit of the times.

bobbielouisehawkins.com 

This afternoon I watched the D.A. Pennebaker masterpiece Don't Look Back for the first time in years and I saw something in it that I'd never seen before: the silence of the women. Several women appear in the film; some make interjections like Bobbie Hawkins and the others say nothing at all. The only exception is Joan Baez, who's extremely vocal, sings songs (mostly Dylan's) and follows Bob from town to town hoping (we learn when we read a little deeper) that he will invite her onto the stage as she had invited him when his star was in the ascendant in America. He doesn't reciprocate. Another woman silenced, at least publicly, although Joan didn't really need Dylan's help. Her reputation as one of folk music's greatest artists is undiminished 55 years after the movie was shot.

Joan Baez

Don't Look Back is about Bob Dylan, of course, and the frantic nature of his growing fame. It's not about Joan Baez, although Pennebaker does seem interested in her as a subject; and Allen Ginsberg has only a minimal role - although he features in the outstanding sequence for Subterranean Homesick Blues that opens the film, and was already infamous enough to need no introduction. But the presence of Sally Grossman seems almost decorative, and Marianne Faithfull sits so quietly in Dylan's noisy hotel room you would hardly know she's there (the grainy black & white film Pennebaker uses makes her harder to see, I have to admit). It's Alan Price who talks and sings, and Donovan who Bob seems almost threatened by until he meets him. Many Dylan fans feel he deliberately owns Donovan by singing It's All Over Now, Baby Blue after the latter's To Sing For You when they are trading songs at the hotel. Bob's is undoubtedly the better song, but Donovan asks him to sing it, and Dylan looks pleased by the request.

Who is the woman who sings with Alan Price backstage at one of the shows and gamely tries to be heard over the chorus of loud male voices? This may be common knowledge among bigger Dylan fans than me (although I have admired him for nearly forty years), and among devotees of Alan Price; but I've been searching on the internet for two days and I can't even find her picture. Nor can I find any information about Jones Alk, other than that she was the first wife of Howard Alk, the bearded, bespectacled, bear-like figure in the movie who seems ready to throw people out of the hotel room for Bob when a beer bottle is dropped out of the window.

Howard was a filmmaker and Jones is clearly recording sound throughout the film. So you might not expect her to speak anyway. But in a long sequence toward the end of the film, when Dylan confronts an admirably restrained reporter from Time magazine, Pennebaker makes the curious decision to shoot the interview from such an angle that only Dylan and Jones can be seen, notwithstanding cutaways to the reporter; other people, the men in Dylan's entourage, can be heard, joining in with Bob's impertinent attack on the reporter in what looks to me like an act of collective bullying (I know many would find that an absurd statement), but they have had their exposure earlier in the movie. Jones is in full view for 6 minutes and says nothing at all; she smokes and listens with rapt attention, as if what she's hearing is provoking the deepest thoughts. Her presence at the table is so similar to Bobbie Louise Hawkins' in its nature and symbolism it can't be a coincidence.

The difference is that Jones doesn't speak at all. I can't be the only one who wants to know if she agreed with Dylan that Time would be improved by collages or that he was onto something when he said each word had its little letter and big letter. I'd like to think that she was really writing a poem in her head as I sometimes do when someone else is talking too much; but I suppose we'll never find out.

Rare and Collectable: Rexroth & Ferlinghetti 'Poetry Readings in the Cellar'

This was recorded in 1957 in the Cellar on Green Street, San Francisco, and released on the Fantasy label. The Cellar, apparently, was a downstairs nightclub that in a previous incarnation was a Chinese restaurant. The album features Kenneth Rexroth, the reluctant and sometimes unacknowledged progenitor of the West Coast bohemian scene, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the legendary poet and City Lights bookstore owner, whose most celebrated cultural achievement, perhaps, was publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl in his Pocket Poets series. Ferlinghetti almost went to jail for that bold visionary act, but thanks to a landmark decision by Judge Clayton Horn, what resulted from the Howl obscenity trial was a liberalisation of poetic expression in the Western world, enormous publicity for Ferlinghetti's store and publishing house and global fame for Ginsberg.

Here, Rexroth and Ferlinghetti read poems and the Cellar Jazz Quintet accompany them, improvising impressively. (To me Rexroth's voice is weirdly like Tom Hanks when he's in deep character.) On the original vinyl lp at least - I haven't heard the cd reissue - the sound is wonderful. I don't have the critical vocabulary to explain why it's so good, being neither a critic nor a musician, but I love the way it transports me, when I hear it, back to the time when High Fidelity was the most advanced technology they had. I could almost look out of my window and see businessmen in macs and fedoras coming home from work in the dark. Sound on cd tends to be so clean and pure all the atmosphere is distilled from it. 

ruth weiss, who waitressed at the Cellar but also mesmerised audiences with her readings there, famously said, 'Ferlinghetti and Rexroth were poets who read over jazz; but jazz was part of me; I swung.' That's true, but it doesn't matter. Both wrote great, intelligent poetry - Rexroth sometimes overtly, angrily political; Ferlinghetti hipper, funny, subtly political - and some of it is represented on this record. They're not jazz poets, they're poets of words and ideas vocalised over microphones, but the Quintet are sensitive accompanists who weave their jazz around and through the orations so they're given greater emphasis and emotional context. Which is to say that you might understand what they say a little easier and give them more attention because of the jazz, and if you're encountering Rexroth for the first time you might need the help.

Highlights for me are Rexroth's 20 minute reading of 'Thou Shalt Not Kill (In Memory of Dylan Thomas)', which at certain points rises to such magnificent rhetorical levels it has echoes of the Moloch section of Howl; I also really like Ferlinghetti's Autobiography. But Ferlinghetti has an impish charm that makes everything he does appealing, even if he sometimes seems a little too cute and doesn't quite get to the meat of the matter. You'd certainly rather spend a night out with him than intense, grumpy old Kenneth, snarling anarchist slogans through his well-groomed moustache. 

'Ratched' is an Entertaining Let-Down

Ratched arrived on Netflix the other day. It's based on one of American literature's most memorable creations, Head Nurse Mildred Ratched from Ken Kesey's One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest. Everybody who read that book, or saw the movie of the same name, was chilled by Ratched's cold, brutal domination of the ward at the acute mental hospital in which. the protagonist, and Ratched's antagonist, R.P. McMurphy arrives after doing time at a prison farm for statutory rape. (How times have changed. Imagine trying to sell that as a heroic backstory now.) He isn't mentally ill; he wants to avoid hard labour for the rest of his sentence - which by any reckoning is profoundly sensible. The question of how mental illness is defined and how it should be treated is of key importance to Kesey's novel and the film.

This new show is, in one respect, a prequel to Kesey's novel because it presents us with the early life of Mildred Ratched. It shows her, in the pilot we watched last night, getting her first job in a mental hospital. She is already displaying the cruelty and menace of her later incarnation and we learn why. The show's star Sarah Paulson even bears some resemblance to Louise Fletcher's Ratched from the movie. But that's where the similarities between original and prequel end.

Ratched is described as a 'psychological thriller drama' or a 'psychological horror drama'. It's genre, and Paulson's Ratched is a grotesque, drawn so large her wickedness is less shocking than it is comedic. This is the sort of tv you watch to laugh at each new grizzly murder or incredibly rude comeback. Kesey's Ratched - and Fletcher's Ratched - was frightening because her evil (if such a thing exists) was coldly banal. I worked with more than one person who Kesey might have modelled his Head Nurse on in my 15 years as a care worker. They were appalling, cruel people, completely lacking in empathy, and they went home every day to partner and children and led utterly normal lives, popular in their communities and untroubled by conscience.

I intend to watch the rest of the series, though. It may be derivative and occasionally predictable; it may be yet another show that depicts the mentally ill as physically ravaged, stooping, body-slashing maniacs (some are, most aren't); but it's also great fun, something colourful and stylish to sit down with for an hour before you go to bed. If you want something deeper you can go back to the movie or the book. Then you'll really learn about the true nature of madness, and the improper exercise of power.

 

The Second Wave is Here

Boris Johnson announced yesterday what had been apparent to most of us for some time: the second wave of this coronavirus has arrived. Now, according to the news, the government are considering a second, short, nationwide lockdown to arrest its exponential growth. Whether that will happen or not I don't know. (Obviously.) My guess is that nationwide readjustments will come into effect to the measures that were announced when lockdown was eased. Another ban on visits to other households; perhaps a ban on meetings in parks, although as the colder weather comes in that will be less of a problem anyway. We might see a curfew placed an pubs and restaurants, which they already have in parts of the North. What's certain is that something has to be done, and as Angela Rayner, the Labour Party's deputy leader has said today, all of us should get behind the actions taken if they are indicated by the science. I would add that if the science indicates a complete lockdown, then that's what must be done, regardless of the economic consequences (although if it didn't work last time...). Perhaps I can afford to say this because I'm broke anyway and have nothing to lose except my life and the lives of the people I love. But two people in my partner's family have had Covid-19; others have had scares but were ultimately okay. It's like a small earthquake in your world when you hear somebody close to you has been struck down.

My fear is that the government's scientific advisors are too close to Johnson, Cummings and whoever else makes the political decisions at present to give a truly effective, impartial view of the state of the pandemic and the best strategies to tackle it. That could be my cynicism, of course - as a lifelong doubter of institutions - but having watched most of the broadcasts from Downing Street during the first lockdown, when Professor Whitty stood beside whichever half-bright minister Johnson sent in his place and looked far too meek and humbled for a clever man, I doubt somehow that the scientists have as much influence over government as they should.

Casablanca and Its Warning

Last night's movie at Bard Towers was Casablanca. If you're not familiar with the movie - and younger readers and movie watchers might not be - Humphrey Bogart plays the cynical Rick Blaine, who runs a bar in the unoccupied French territory of Morocco in the early part of WWII. Ingrid Bergman plays Ilsa Lund, the wife of Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a Czech resistance leader who has escaped from a German concentration camp and is seeking passage to America to continue his work against the Nazis. Rick can get him to America because he holds letters of transit given to him by Ugarte, a petty crook, played by Peter Lorre. But the letters were obtained by the murder of two German soldiers, which makes possession of them dangerous, and anyway, Rick doesn't want to get involved. Politics is not for him, he says; he's just a poor bar owner.

And at the beginning of the movie he's serious. This is a wartime film, however, released in 1942, so you wouldn't expect America's most famous flinty, pistol-wielding hero to stand by for too long as the Nazis press their jackboot down on a city run by a French authority that's apparently too weak to assert itself. Rick once loved Ilsa and she broke his heart; that's why he won't help anybody but himself. When he learns that she broke his heart to save him from the Germans as Paris fell, however, Rick begins to see daylight again, and decides to help her and husband. 'I'm no good at being noble,' he tells Ilsa,  'but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.'

That's just one example of some of the richest dialogue you'll ever find in movies. Julius & Philip Epstein and Howard Koch's screenplay, based on the play Everybody Comes to Rick's by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, gave the world, 'We'll always have Paris,'  and a line I wish I'd written, 'Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.' Beat that. 'Here's looking at you, kid,' one of the film's most legendary quotes, was allegedly ad-libbed by Bogart. I really want that to be true.

Fans of Casablanca will notice that I've missed one quote. It's the last line of the movie. Rick and Captain Louis Renault (Claude Rains), who's the leader of the French authorities in the city, are standing at the airport in a worryingly thick but no doubt metaphorical fog, having just seen Laszlo and Ilsa off in a plane. Rick has killed Major Strasser (Conrad Veidt), the German officer who has come to arrest him, expecting no resistance from Renault, who throughout the film has protested his complete lack of scruples. Renault, however, is tired of collaboration, and instructs his own officers to 'round up the usual suspects.' As Rick and Renault walk away together, the latter outlines his plan for Rick's escape. 'Louis,' Rick says, 'I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.'

I don't know why, but that seems incredibly poignant watching 78 years later, in our present hothouse political climate. It's regrettable enough that so much of England sees Europe as its enemy now, although the EU itself may have contributed to that alienation with its one-size-fits-all politics. But when an American president is a fascist in everything but name, and has more in common with extremist bullies and dictators than he does with the leaders of France and Germany, you can see how far we've come since the days of the beautiful, pragmatic, peace-delivering international friendships that began in the ferment of World War II.

The B-Side: Elsa Dorfman's Portrait Photography

'It's my role in the universe to make people feel better,' Elsa Dorfman says in this lovely, gentle, touching documentary, currently streaming on Netflix. Elsa passed away this year on May 30th, leaving a body of work behind unique in its success as well as its lack of pretension. Elsa frequently stood her subjects in front of a white screen and photographed them without props. When she did, however, something magical would happen. Elsa claimed she was only interested in surfaces, but somehow, by capturing what appeared on the surface of her subject, the essence was revealed.

We learn in the film that her camera was one of only six in the world. Maybe that had something to do with the magic of her portraits. It was a Polaroid 20 x 24 inch camera (quite a beast). When Polaroid went bankrupt in 2008, production of the film the camera used ceased. Elsa bought a final year's supply and that was it. Her whole modus operandi had become a relic of the past.

I first became aware of Elsa through her pictures of Allen Ginsberg. The two of them were great friends. Elsa had worked at Grove Press in the 1950s and taken photos of other poet luminaries like Robert Creeley and Charles Olson. The Ginsberg photos have endured, though, possibly because he has endured (to some extent) in the popular consciousness where the other poets haven't. Bob Dylan has certainly endured and Elsa's most famous photograph is of Dylan and Ginsberg together, backstage at the Rolling Thunder tour. In it, Dylan appears to be teaching Ginsberg how to play guitar. It's a brilliant, seductive picture, assumed by almost everybody to have been spontaneously captured.

Except Ginsberg writes in his journal the night before that such a picture would make a wonderful image. Elsa says herself in the movie that he always had one eye on posterity. He would never even send a letter without going down to Grove Press to get it photocopied first, she remembers.

Diana Rigg

One thing this blog missed recently is the death of Diana Rigg. It happened sometime last week. We were waiting for her debut appearance in the new tv adaptation of 'All Creatures Great and Small' when we heard. Sadly her first scene as Mrs. Pumphrey came a few days after her passing and the show ended with an image of the actress and her birth and death dates. It was quiet and moving.

I didn't see Diana in 'Game of Thrones' because like her, I didn't watch the show. But her career had blossomed again wonderfully in her seventies, when she began appearing as a succession of formidable grandmothers, some of them eccentric, and in the case of Mrs. Pumphrey, enjoying the freedom age brings to flirt shamelessly without responsibility. She had spoken of her advancing years as a release in a magazine interview.

She was great in those late roles. But of course it's 'The Avengers' for which most of us will remember her. 'The Avengers' is the essence of 1960s style, its cool, its unselfconscious silliness - if you're the best-looking, best-dressed person in the room, if you're the person who, as Dylan would say, knows what's happening, you don't have to take yourself seriously.

They never did. In a show I saw recently, Steed and Emma are out shooting to relax after an adventure in a castle. Emma raises her shotgun to the sky and shoots down a succession of teddy bears, one of which has a bottle of champagne beside it. The next volley of shots brings down two champagne glasses.

If you have to ask why, or if you feel the need to ask why, perhaps, 'The Avengers' just isn't for you.

POEM: 'In Amongst My Diminishing Stock of Days'

'In Amongst My Diminishing Stock of Days'

In amongst my diminishing stock of days,

the only good ones are the ones with you:

at home, or walking round a town somewhere,

searching for bookshops and for Roman ruins.

I'm too old now to try to seem to be

what I never was, like when the bosses loved me.

(Bruce Hodder 2020)