Part Animal Part Machine
"I only believe in dynamite"
January 2021; Third lockdown’s the charm. Been watching a lot of movies so thought I would write about some of them below (thanks to Sam Reiss & the Mil-Spec book for the recommendation on The Spy…) along with some gems from the world of youtube, because what else is there to do on a Sunday afternoon in January.
Part Animal, Part Machine
ROLLINS BAND & BLACK FLAG “LIVE ‘84” LP
There comes a time in every young man’s life when he spends four consecutive hours listening to the ROLLINS BAND discography. January 2021 was that dark dark time in my life. Henry Rollins sang in Black Flag from 1981 to 1986 which encompasses nearly all of the best music this band made, barring the Nervous Breakdown 7” which is in the pantheon of all time hardcore greats. This month I had a conversation about Henry Rollins as force of sheer will and thought it would be a good idea to reacquaint myself with the little knowledge I have of Rollins Band. Life Time, Hard Volume and The End of Silence are not necessarily good records but they are interesting historic artefacts of a time when a personality like Rollins could take session musician funk metal and turn it in to a lucrative project for 15 years. Black Flag’s LIVE 84 LP is a legitimately cool and interesting record of the period of this band as pure confrontation project. I was struck when listening that the guitar mix on this record bares some strange psychic connection to the Velvet Underground Legendary Guitar Amp Tapes. Ginn and Lou Reed seem like two key figures in a lineage of anti-guitar-technique pro-freak-flag Americana.
On The Sofa
I watched a bunch of good movies in January including DOG DAY AFTERNOON (1975; Sidney Lumet) and THE CONVERSATION (1974; Francis Ford Coppola) which both star John Cazale in two of his handful of roles before his death. In the former, Cazale is the near silent accomplice of Pacino’s bank robber star; whereas in the latter Cazale plays a small time surveillance technology expert who works for Gene Hackman’s reclusive surveillance master. In the former Cazale is constantly on edge and seems like the guy backed in to the corner on the front of the aforementioned Nervous Breakdown 7”. He’s great and easy to overlook because Pacino is so BIG and equally good in this film. In The Conversation Cazale’s character is more affable and again easy to overlook alongside the central storyline of Hackman’s looking-over-shoulder twitchiness. The Conversation doesn’t share a lot with Coppola’s other films but it’s a strong entry in the paranoid surveillance film genre along with Three Days of the Condor, All The President’s Men and THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD (1965; Martin Ritt). Damn what a great film. I can’t say much beyond what Sam Reiss said in the above review in the Mil-Spec book but this film will make you want to get a trenchcoat. Richard Burton is so curmudgeonly even when he’s supposed to be enjoying himself at the pub or at dinner with his communist party affiliated girlfriend. I found the latter, played by Claire Bloom, to be really empathetic and not just because she has the artwork that is on the front of Anti-Cimex’s Victims of a Bomb Raid hung on the wall of her flat. Maybe these films all feel oddly relevant now when the rare moment you get to step outside is met by near empty streets, individuals looming in the dark and a look over your shoulder to check whether or not a mask is deemed necessary.
On a completely unrelated note the other top recommendation of the month came in the form of DUCK, YOU SUCKER (1971; Sergio Leone), alternatively known as A Fistful of Dynamite or Once Upon A Time… The Revolution (that last one not so hot as far as titles go). In this film Rod Steiger is a Mexican thief turned unwitting revolutionary and James Coburn takes a killer turn as an ex-IRA man exiled or on a vendetta (his motives are left blissfully ambiguous) who falls in to the Mexican Revolution in 1913. The accompanying Morricone score is worth the price of admission alone. For some reason when watching this I kept thinking about how Leone treats the faces of extras with the same degree of care as Breughel treated the faces of individual peasants in his enormously detailed canvases. There’s something really enjoyable about that eye for detail in a genre that is often reduced to pastiche (unacceptable unless that pastiche is Blazing Saddles). Essential film.
On YouTube
LM