Jane Fonda: Redeemed by Resilience

 

“Well, there's this man... and I don't know exactly what he wants out of me, or anything like that. But he took care of me… When you're used to being lonely and somebody comes in...and moves that around, it's sort of scary I guess…I want to...manipulate him. In all the ways that I can manipulate people. I mean, it's easy to manipulate men. Right?”

-          Dialogue from ‘Klute’ (1971)

She was never robust, but had a hardness about her, as if Life, early on, had delivered low blows…. a mother’s suicide, an industry that celebrated beauty above brains… You could hear it in her sharp delivery, see it in her curt smiles. Perhaps Jane Fonda’s sublimated pain compelled her – professionally and personally – to haphazard choices.

We have a sex queen in Barbarella (1968) evolving into a political activist who poses in a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun unit in Hanoi (1972). Just four years apart... Aside from an extremely private pursuit of integrity, she’s to be admired more for diligence than condemned for dreadful photo ops.

It comes as little surprise that her greatest role is of an emotionally damaged prostitute, striving to escape ‘the life’. The film Klute (1971) seems tailormade for someone detaching from the corporeal and sliding into a more cosmic vibe, the world of the mind where people can’t find you.  Jane Fonda always hummed with a West Coast 60s ethos…but never a hippy like brother Peter. There was a drive to escape herself, to transition the entertainer, the dancing bear, to Citizen Jane, to be taken seriously, damn it.

And she was. Jane Fonda was redeemed by her resilience. She never let up. Even her exercise videos attest to a discipline unknown by many. Relaxation is not in her lexicon.  She always had more angular lines than curves. And it was this emotional awkwardness that empowered her performances. Her difficulty in expressing compassion and understanding did indeed look real.

Again, from Klute.“You make a man think that he's accepted. It's all just a great big game to you. You're all obviously too lazy and too warped to do anything meaningful with your life, so you prey upon the sexual fantasies of others. I'm sure it comes as no great surprise to you when I say that...there are little corners in everyone which were better off left alone. Little sicknesses, weaknesses, which should never be exposed. That's your stock in trade, isn't it, a man's weakness? I was never really fully aware of mine...until you brought them out.”

In her best roles, perhaps in her life, Jane Fonda reveals the difficulty of emotional honesty. And the camera just loves emotional honesty. It’s so difficult to fake.

#janefonda #klute #donaldsutherland #peterfonda #1960s #cult #film #rogervadim #barbarella #vietnam #film #review #pop #culture

Princess Margaret: Just a Passenger in Life

Princess Margaret became a little manic at receiving such approval of her musical abilities, and she started wriggling around in her crinoline and tiara as she tried to mimic the sexual movements of the professional entertainer. Her dress with its petticoats bolstered by the wooden hoops that ballooned her skirts was unsuitable for the slinky act but all the rapturous applause seemed to make her forget this. Just when she had embarked on a rendering of “Let’s Do It,” a very menacing and unexpected sound came from the back of the crowded ballroom. It grew louder and louder until it eclipsed Princess Margaret’s singing. It was the sound of jeering and hissing, of prolonged and thunderous booing. – Caroline Blackwood

 

‘Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret, the Countess of Snowdon, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II of England’... That was on her business card, so to speak…

Her sister is just over there, over in the shadows… so what else to do but crank it up and what better time in the history of the planet than the 1960s? Swim through the hemp fog, scotch in hand, to set the table on a roar. There was the drinking, the parties, the men, the cutting remarks, the petty squabbles. Given her position to do good things, why turn so sour?

Why indeed. Her friends disappeared or lingered only for tidbits. The men left her. If they stayed, it seemed for something they could later trade. She was…tolerated. So there she is, nightclubbing with Liza and Mick and McCartney and whoever was called to the table.

Cloistered during the formative years, she was ill-equipped for the world of grownups. Too often rude, too self-involved, too selfish… perhaps too smart, too many ribbons to cut, too many hands to shake.

At the time of her death, the papers wrote of a wasted life, privilege squandered, time wasted, and talent ignored. “I have always had a dread of becoming a passenger in life,” she mused... Well, she was successful in that regard: but was she pushed from the train or did she jump? 

#princessmargaret #royalfamily #english #britain #queenelizabeth #princediana #princeharry #scandal #1960s #paulmccartney #mickjagger #petersellers

Jim Morrison: Rage from the Stage but Think on the Page

 

Whether he lacked the talent or time to develop into a great poet remains unclear. Much of Jim Morrison’s brief life is obscured—perhaps strategically—with vague pronouncements, clumsy metaphors, spacey diatribes and art house pretension. But when he was great, he drifted far beyond expectations, completely original, yet always too smart for the job.

Importantly, Jim Morrison looked like a rock star. The image matched the music—perfectly. In 1967, he invented how a rock star must appear—the hair, the leather pants, the boots, even the attitude. So powerful is the image of Morrison that his influence remains undiminished.

With The Doors, he found a band to match his dark visions. Ray Manzarek’s brooding organ seemed wired to Morrison’s dread. When Morrison died, so did The Doors, though they struggled for a while, pushed on by the momentum of their silent singer.  

He grew uncomfortable with show business, more artist than magician, more preacher than singer, hungering for fame until aware too late his soul had stopped. You can rage from the stage but only think on the page.

Restless demons empowered his words. He battled bravely until no drug or drink could forestall The Big Sleep—which was his end game anyway. Or maybe not.  With months to live, he was trying to get better in Paris, get his lungs back, repair a heart damaged by rheumatic fever, but never made it. His girlfriend didn’t help. Or maybe it was all predestined, just as he had predicted.  Like his contemporary, George Harrison, much of Morrison’s life seems passed in preparation for death. And Death always obliges the eager.

At Pere Lachaise Cemetery, Jim Morrison appears nightly, courtesy of The 27 Club, alone in a dimly lit corner, forever searching for that single, indelible, timeless line that always tells the truth.

#jimmorrison #thedoors #lizardking #lawoman #lightmyfire #classicrock #perelachaise #georgeharrison #1960s #rock #music #27club #losangeles #whiskeyagogo

 

Eve Babitz: It’s All About Eve

 

Though labelled a 1960s ‘It Girl’ (but never ‘a West Coast Edie Sedgwick’), Eve Babitz, through force of personality, creativity, and a hard buzz of underlying craziness, made herself, and those around her, an enduring work of art. That’s a rare achievement that can’t be strategized or funded—thank God. (Corporations remained puzzled, restricted by an invisible blockade, unable to monetize whatever ‘It’ is.)

Consider ‘It’ as yet another definition of organic. Eve belongs more to a ‘sense’ of time & place than actual Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s... Faulkner is always the Deep South. Fitzgerald remains preserved in the sparking lapis lazuli of the Jazz Age. A time & place. That’s Eve.

So there she is seated, naked with pendulous breasts, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (1963), in a moment definitely closer to Dadaism than Cubism. Or she’s dancing somewhere on the Sunset Strip, in a hot club with Warren Beatty or Steve Martin or Ahmet Ertegun or Stephen Stills or Jim Morrison or Edward Ruscha or Warren Zevon or Harrison Ford… or whomever. More explorer than groupie. 

Her appetite for Life was enormous, enabling true participatory journalism, involuntarily leap-frogging Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson and other practitioners of ‘new journalism’. Eve wrote about Eve, even though it’s never clear she totally understood her subject. Thankfully, it’s all about Eve.

Her books and articles have a wayward honesty that pull readers into tentative friendships: you want to travel with her, but remain firmly in the back seat.

Eve’s often outrageous behavior is somehow subsumed in the inevitability of her actions—as if ‘it had to happen this way. Can you describe a more interesting alternative?’

Anyway, it’s those restless, Peter Pan-eccentric spirits, garnishing dull days with pixie dust, then to dance beneath diamond skies, to bequeath us the prayer ‘There’s wild magic everywhere. You only have to move.’

#evebabitz #losangeles #warrenbeatty #jimmorrison #harrisonford #normanmailer #huntersthompson #marcelduchamp #fscottfitzgerald #williamfaulkner #edie sedgwick #andywarhol #1960s #1970s

D.B. Cooper: Brushing Heaven’s Gate With a Landing Light

D.B. Cooper...or whatever...

Do not look for him

In brittle mountain streams

And do not examine the angry rivers

For shreds of his body

Or turn the shore stones for his blood

But in the warm salt ocean

He is descending through cliffs

Of slow green water

And hovering colored fish

Kiss his snow-bruised body

And build their secret nests

In his fluttering winding-sheet

-          Leonard Cohen

-   

He hails from 1971 but the vibe is sooo 60s. He’s Clyde Barrow with a parachute. He’s Randle McMurphy escaping into the midnight trees. Nobody really knows anything about D.B. Cooper, except that he hijacked a Boeing 727, got $200,000, and jumped out at 10,000 feet with a parachute over southwest Washington State. Pitch black. Raining. Never seen or heard from again. No body. No parachute. Nada.  The snake eats its tail.

The crime remains the only unsolved air piracy in commercial aviation history. It’s driven people crazy.  Thousands of books and articles have been written. There are a million theories. Why? Ask yourself why?

The FBI has given up. Exhausted after decades of futility... He’s gone baby gone, this black-feathered defrocked angel that ordered a bourbon and soda, stared out the plane’s window, then vanished forever into the night, as if he was never there; as if he never existed.  He is Camus’ Meursault, but more than an outsider—someone who has no need for terra firma; a fading phantom who cannot be traced through corporeal stigmata.

They could never find him because they were always looking down.  This narrative is clearly airborne. It has to do with winding jet streams and falling into the sky and holding onto the back of that silent condor as it sweeps up to the moon and brushes heaven’s gate with a landing light.

#dbcooper #hijack #cult #criminal #1971 #boeing #popculture

Kurt Vonnegut: Trapped in the Amber of this Moment

 

 He looked like the themes he wrote about—a slightly debauched Mark Twain who just may have traded river rafts for a space ships, and cigars for cigarettes.

Kurt Vonnegut had seen war close up with burning fleshing in the air and eventually counterbalanced the horror with child-like euphemisms.

His novels were somehow meta long before self-awareness became buddy-buddy with irony. His books are easy-to-read prophesies, non-sectarian but spiritual, dark with a flashing light at the end of the tunnel.

An obvious humanitarian, Vonnegut was wary of humanity. Slaughterhouse House Five, which he claimed to be his best book, isn’t about World War Two so much as it’s about the kind of people who participated in the war and how it affected them. His skill comes in melding the fantastic to the ordinary—and in that way explains how easily evil may overcome good, and vice-versa.

Like Hemingway, his sentences are deceptively simple. With Vonnegut, you’re misled by the often sophomoric humor, glib insights or near-cartoon characters. Then, later, the full force of the message hits you and that rare and precious reader-writer connection clicks in.

Initially embraced by the 1960s counter-culture, Vonnegut aged without relinquishing his Mark Twain follicles and cigarettes, his mustache sagging under the weight of worries—that humans might not make it over the fence; that people are too smart in the wrong way.

There is a Zen quality to his writing, as if he’s seeking the tranquility to be found in the acceptance that no one, ever, has really understood life.

                                ---

“Why me?"

“That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes."

- Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.”

-         Slaughterhouse Five

 #kurtvonnegut #vonnegut #slaughterhousefive #author #american #counterculture #huntersthompson #billypilgrim #glenngould