I thought the new Howl movie sucked

Netflix coughed up the new movie about Allen Ginsberg’s Howl last weekend. God, was I annoyed. I watched it for a half-hour and felt like throwing up. I don’t know what was worse, watching James Franco trying to imitate Ginsy (major fail—they'd have done better with Meryl Streep) or looking at those stupid Casper-the-Ghost animations flying around Manhattan. Just drape some guys in never-worn white t-shirts, show cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, a little saxophone music in the background, and we're transported right back to the Fifties, right, guys?

The worst of it was that the movie wasn’t—a primary feature of Howl—even funny. I returned this calamitous piece of shit to Netflix as soon as the objective circumstances permitted.

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Not the Twat of Tangiers

Nice show last night at the Thrillpeddlers revival of Hot Greeks, which hasn't been performed in these precincts since 1972. My favorite number was "I Am Not the Twat of Tangiers," tenderly rendered by Russell Blackwood, who looked like a crazed Kabuki actor suffering transfixion by Pallas Athena's Medusa.
Miss Sheldra's performance of "No, No, Nanook" convincingly informed the audience that there might be more going on at the North Pole than one might have logically supposed.
In "Divorcee's Lament," Michael Phillis did a remarkable job of imitating original Cockette Goldie Glitter's patented facial expression, which required continual fluttering of the eyelids alternating with a look of glazed, bovine stupefaction suspended in a fabricated state of intense horrification.

Trouble in Sherwood Forest

Ridley Scott’s new Robin Hood film has proved about as popular among movie critics as the Gulf Coast oil spill among ecologists. There are three sources of disapproval: 1) the film isn’t historically accurate; 2) it doesn’t reflect the traditional Robin Hood narrative; 3) Russell Crowe is a failed gangsta.

It is truly astonishing how quickly movie critics transform into accomplished medieval historians the moment a period movie hits the screens. Apparently they dash off to consult Wikipedia, following which the urge to play “spot the anachronism” seems all but irrepressible.

Granted that the present film seen as a historical exercise is skewed beyond all recognition. Richard Lion-Heart had no interest in England, spoke no English, died ingloriously, and was thought by some contemporaries to be gay. In effect he was a more or less failed war-lord who accomplished little, unlike the incomparably more genial King Philip Augustus of France.

Naturally Philip never invaded England, as depicted in the Omaha Beach invasion sequence beneath Dover Cliffs. Philip was far more concerned with breaking up the Angevin Empire, whose fate was sealed at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214. And Magna Carta was of course a revolt of the barons, not the peasantry, who couldn’t get a decent insurgency off the ground until the 1380’s.

History coincides with celluloid phantasy only in the person of King John. Generally viewed as a jerk who lost his empire, he was interdicted by the Pope, lost authority to the barons and was respected by no one. Within his kingdom, however, the basic antagonism was between Normans and Saxons, not between “England” and “France,” as was touched upon more successfully in Anouilh’s Beckett play.

That’s just to mention the larger, aristocratic narrative at the butt-end of the 12th century. One reviewer was distressed at the drabness of medieval country life -- but that part at least seems reasonably authentic -- colored cloth was unavailable to the masses, who must have been pretty filthy after working in the fields all day, where almost all of the population was employed. Americans would probably be as happy living in a medieval village as when suddenly teleported to somewhere in North Korea.

But the larger point is that all these historical issues just don’t make any difference. Films about the Middle Ages should be understood as acts of the imagination -- as medievalism, not medieval history; as food for thought, not for their accuracy in historical representation.

Who cares if King Phillip of France never invaded England? Isn’t it more interesting to ponder how it would have looked if he had been stupid enough to do so on Dover Beach? Would he have used D-Day-type landing craft? Wouldn’t you have deployed your archers upon the cliffs? Could a skilled archer really have shot the fleeing Godfrey of Boulogne through the neck at a hundred yards? And wouldn’t the siege of a Norman castle shown at the beginning of the movie really have looked something like that?

What I tend to think more distasteful is the depiction generally of all this aberrant male behavior: guys endlessly stabbing each other with spears or showering opponents with projectiles. But it’s of course exactly these battle scenes which make the movie really interesting.

Seen as a work of imagination, Ridley Scott’s movie takes on a different significance. And if it doesn’t follow the traditional story of Robin Hood in Merrie Olde England, are modern viewers really so keen on seeing a bunch of operetta bandits prancing around in green tights in the woods? Must we absolutely have to watch Robin and Marian screwing each other to confirm that they’re in love, as one reviewer was kvetching -- does there always have to be a sex scene to authenticate romantic love?

It has also become fashionable for journalists to dump all over Russell Crowe lately -- British reviewers question the validity of his movie accent, which for Americans is recognizable only as a kind of sullen grunting noise. But despite his proletarian demeanor, nobody seems to question his acting skill (just compare him to the disastrous Kevin Costner in the last Robin Hood film), or that of Cate Blanchett, who is a welcome relief in all this heavily gendered mayhem, but to which she too eventually succumbs.

The Smith Family

New heights of complexity were conquered and then rapidly abandoned in San Francisco last night at Small Press Traffic’s poets theater performance of Craig Goodman’s and Kevin Killian’s “The Smith Family.” The production featured such novelties as actual stage-sets, including a white picket fence and (gasp) a blue and white plastic waterfall; the employment of a genuine theremin to acoustically underscore certain mysteries associated with interplanetary travel; and the introduction of hard science with diagrams to demystify the genetic anomalies whereby persons named Patti Smith and Patty Smyth can exist simultaneously in the same biosphere and yet remain relatively disambiguated.
The play describes a family reunion wherein a number of celebrities surnamed Smith gather to sort out various problems that afflict them, ranging from lineage and patrimony issues, to an impending storm that threatens to obliterate their ancestral home at Fort Smith, Arkansas, and the malignancy of a vein of blue crystals evidently ready to erupt underneath the surface of the earth, while sports telecaster Howard K. Smith suffers abduction to Planet Beta-3 at the hands of the Blue Fairy, and other disasters befall, or at least appear ready to.
The appearance of Pinochio, brightly clad in a mountaineer’s cap and a pair of lederhosen, gave a touch of old-world ambience, but the best costume was worn or rathered shouldered by the Blue Fairy, whose wings emerged from a blue milk crate, to which a number of blue-and-white feather dusters were stiffly attached.
As the plot gradually imploded upon itself and devolved into a maelstrom of silliness, a very moving portrayal of the singer Anna Nicole Smith was offered by Cliff Hengst, whose off-handed drag performance superceded the grotesque and went on to knock ponderously at the gates of accomplished monstrosity.
One thinks of absurdist drama, or Charlie Ludlam’s Theater of the Ridiculous—but why bother really, these SPT poets theater shows are great fun and deserve lots more recognition from the community, from KQED-TV, for example, which needs to tape and broadcast them—how nice it would be to come home from work some day and see a show like this during prime-time, to replace the usual slobber on network televison.
And one might have hoped that Litquake, currently enraptured by the forthcoming sponsored appearances of Amy Tan and James Ellroy—now there's an idea for a poets theater show—could have at least mentioned The Smith Family on their Saturday event schedule.