*Hell on Wheels*: No Cliche Left Behind, Plus, yanno, THAT Revisionism

Nor am I alone in this 'toode:

*Shaka Zulu* All Singing, All Dancing, All Fighting, All Ten Hours

Shaka Zulu (1986) South African television 10 episode series, viewed online from netflix. I started watching this in 'the House' and concluded watching here on the nights after the day's bending, twisting, turning, etc. to put the Apt. back together left me wiped out.

The series follows the arc of this leader’s life, which is that of the Cambellian ‘hero’s journey,’ similar to entertainment portrayals of King Arthur and Genghis Khan, among others -- even Roots (1977), which is founded in all kinds of mendacity, even plagerism -- complete with magical weapons, prophecies of future greatness for self and the kingdom, occult and magical influences, spells and curses, formative mothers, hidden fathers – and here we have the Asian-Greek commonality of killing the father.  Have we noticed the score? Why, yes, for there is no time the score is not overwhelming.  It is all dancing all singing all fighting or all three at once all the time, all of which need to be scored. Soaring South African voices, gorgeous drumming, and some of the dumbest lyrics this side of "We Are the World."

We have a cornucopia of bare black bodies, naked breasts and buttocks. No episode is complete without barbaric African brutalities committed by and upon each other. There’s an endless supply of gorgeous costumes of fur and feathers and beads.

What we don’t see is who provides the massive amounts of feathers, furs and beads. who works them into headresses, robes, sleep skins, clothes of all these soldiers and nobility. Who teaches all these musicians how to drum, how to dance, what to sing, when and where? What is the economy of this kingdom? Who farms, when do they farm? Is this a kingdom that lives entirely by conquest, with the invaders the nobility, and the conquered their slaves doing all the work of provision and services? The children? In this series the impression is that the Zulu nation does nothing but praise dance and sing to Shaka, dress extravagantly, commit atrocities on each other, and go to war. There is no trade, herding, agriculture or hunting.

All this war is accelerated and enabled by English gentlemen, who manage to bring Shaka down, via Jesus (King of Kings -- Messiah, Immortal) and the Bible -- and hair dye! (African male vanity, don't you know.) Among the English are the superiorly educated (the doctor and the linguist) and a warrior as fierce in obession as Shaka (the English officer).

It is entertainment on the extravagant scale of Cecil B. DeMille spectacle.  In terms of history and culture, though, with the slightest of reflection, we feel we missed something. 

Decompression Avoids Depression

I need to decompress from an enormously fraught couple of weeks, not to mention teh cough that hangs on, because I am getting deeply depressed.  Also this coming week is going to be a killer.  The course begins, right after the teach-in for Haitian history and culture.

So I shall stop reading Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. This massive novel is brilliantly written. But I have no idea how he was able to write it without needing to stop periodically and throw up, or maybe kill himself. This novel is an inconceivable achievement -- getting inside the mind of a high nazi officer who is involved with the ever-escalating scope and number of nazi atrocities in WWII. Its structure, like the methodology of the nazi evils, is methodical, organized and carefully bureaucratized, with all the details punctilliously  recorded, to ensure no one got blamed for doing or not doing what they were told. There must be some good reason for this award-winning literary novel. But I can't continue reading it. Why must this central consciousness be a homosexual? Would Dr. Maximilien Aue be less evil if he wan't a homosexual?  I can't  read this before going to bed.

I've finished Bliss Broyard's One Drop: My Father's Hidden Life -- A Story of Race and Family Secrets, which is a memoir of NY and NO we're using for the course.  Her father was Anatole Broyard, long time book critic for the NY Times  and Book Review.

I've begun Daniel Boone: An American Life.

I read several Mario Puzo novels last year. Without redeeming literary value of any kind they take no time at all; in paperback they are just right for the subway.*  Though Puzo never finished The Family himself, he and a collaborator worked on it before he died. This novel of the Borgias reads as if it were being written a screen play. This would make a most terrific historical movie.  This winter I'm watching the films that were made from the Puzo novels. I suppose this is like what I used to do back in the 80's and 90's when things just got to be too much. I headed out to Brooklyn, to the heavy metal club, L'Amour, just to make my ears bleed. Sometimes your nerves need that. But I'm frailer now, so I resort to dvds instead.

Like the entire world, I have indeed seen The Godfather before, though a long time ago. Though it seems  unlikely, Vaquero and I went together to see Godfather III when it came out. I've watched The Godfather II (1974) for the first time in which Robert de Niro plays the young Vito Corleone; the old man version in The Godfather, as the world knows, was played by Marlon Brando. So much of Viggo Mortenson as Aragorn in Jackson's LOTR reprises de Niro's in body and head stance as Vito Corleone, a perfectly still body that contains infinite capacity for effective violent action, that one wonders about actorly influence. What is different though, is the deadness of Vito Corleone's eyes when he goes for the needed kill, as are Al Pacino's eyes, playing Vito's son and successor, Michael Corleone. Aragorn's eyes are always filled with a warm light. However, in his later roles of violence, that deadness is nearly there, as in A History of Violence. So far though, Mortenson's eyes still possess soul when his characters kill.

I've also watched one and half seasons of The Sopranos this winter. It is inferior to both the Godfather films and The Wire, by so much. But it does distract one. The Sopranos also flatly states several times in several ways -- at least so far -- that it owes its very existence to the Godfather films. It so much lacks the heft, the weight, the seriousness of the old days. The difference between the stone, wood, gold and marble of the old ways, the old faith, of Italy and New York, and the prefab materials of contemporary New Jersey and movie-mad priests. In other words Coppola, with Puzo, created a mythos and legend for Italians in the New World.** The population of The Sopranos' characters, er writers, are acutely aware this is so. So are our other brands of U.S. gangsters, but that's another story -- and a whole bunch of other films and lots of music.

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* Unlike The Kindly Ones, which has a great deal of literary value -- at least many people believe this to be so, The Puzo novels make put a great deal of emphasis on honor and loyalty and family love, so there is comfort and less despair -- at least if one can forget that organized crime depends on a state and populaton that is mostly law-abiding, with non-corrupt institutions. When the state, people and the institutions become as ruthless, brutal and corrupt as the criminal organization the entire ediface defaults to warlordism.  Or fascism, which wasn't very friendly to the Sicilian Our Thing, supposedly.  In any case corruption breeds corruption -- see Our Own Nation.

** This is something I hadn't thought about much prior to living in New Orleans, a purely mobbed up city run out of the same southern Italian migrant waves that brought NYC the Godfather.

80's Series Cable Channel: Beauty & The Beast to Falconcrest

CBS American television series reflected upon by an avid British watcher back in her day.

This caught my attention in the London Times because for the last few months I've been watching 80's and early 90's American television miniseries, including two made from Judith Krantz novels (produced, partly written, and filmed by her husband, I presume). They are vastly entertaining effortless watching, of admirably high production and cinemagraphic values -- plus terrific locations. Stacy Keach in the roles of both the artist, Mistral, in Mistral's Daughter (1984), and as Hemingway, in Hemingway (1988), seen fairly close together, is interesting in itself, as the actor convincingly ages from young manhood to old man in both, but in very differently in each role.
The adaptation of James Clavell's Nobel House (1988) remains e my all-time favorite of these, so far. I've enjoyed Shogun, very much, more than once, but the novel was more affecting because it includes more, which is not the case with Nobel House. This is another way to say that many of these miniseries are made from novels written by writers I can't read, like Judith Krantz, but they adapt splendidly to the so-called 'small' screen, when produced, and acted, by professionals. No need here for a great artist: professionalism plus budget, and you get superb entertainment.  I adore superb entertainment; in my opinion there isn't nearly enough of it. And lavish! acres of flowers everywhere, in fields, gardens, and indoors, fabulous clothes and jewels and furs, marvelous architecture, vistas of great beauty that are vistas even when viewed on my computer screen (oversize screen, granted, but still ....).

By the 80's, movies seemed seldom to be made in other countries by US; the television miniseries filled the breach. We evidently achieved home entertainment center television screens of size about this time -- and cable, the internet, tivio, dvds, etc. had not yet taken down the broadcast television networks, which still had the bottomless pit of advertising revenue budgets to beat out anything cable could provide. This year I realized this era of the miniseries is another of television's Golden Ages, and again, one I never saw while it broadcast, but only long past its production era, via dvd -- or as with the Lucille Ball series, via re-runs when I was a kid.

From the Beauty and the Beast section of the London Times article:

Sitting down last weekend for a CBS Drama marathon, I was surprised to discover that, even after 22 years, I could still remember the opening monologue from Beauty and the Beast, delivered by “The Beast” — Vincent — in his ponderously husky voice: “Her name is Catherine. From the moment I saw her, she captured my heart with her beauty, her warmth . . .”

“And her breasts!” I shouted, automatically — our traditional response back in 1987.

God, it’s a weird show. The essential set-up is that there is a half man, half lion (Ron Perlman) living in the sewers, pining after a lonely society chick, Catherine (Linda Hamilton from Terminator). There obviously being a limited number of social occasions when a man-lion can meet a highflying lawyer, Vincent and Catherine have cutely hooked up after an horrific attack leaves her with severe facial lacerations by the side of the road. Vincent takes Catherine to his sewer lair and sews her up — his somewhat primitive handiwork reflecting the fact that he presumably has paws, with no opposable thumbs.

On regaining consciousness, Catherine pulls back Vincent’s cowl, and gasps as the reality of his freakish appearance is finally revealed. Yes, that’s right: he has dry, auburn hair, just like Carol Decker from T’Pau. “How did this happen to you?” she asks, staring at his half-man, half-lion face.

“I have no idea,” Vincent replies, as viewers are compelled to yell, “Your mum done a lion, Vince! She seen the lions at Longleat, innit!” at the television, while rolling their eyes.

For the next two series, the majority of Catherine and Vincent’s relationship is carried out in a haze of intense, unconsummated sexual tension — Catherine’s reticence presumably being at least part-founded on the fear that Vincent makes out cat-style, and will try and do her on the shed roof at the bottom of the garden, while making a series of unpleasant shrieking sounds.Watching it now, Beauty and the Beast looks like the forerunner to the current, highly lucrative Twilight franchise: a psychic, pining, non-penetrative beast, who is obsessed with an otherwise outcast and lonely girl. I could see exactly how I loved it as a virginal, socially outcast teenager. As an adult, however, I found it about as much fun as dry Weetabix. And, anyway, I was only watching Beauty and the Beast while waiting for the big guns: Dynasty and Falcon Crest. Come on! Shoulder pads! Earrings so big they make your head look like a mug tree! Film stock so strobingly orange that when Blake Carrington sits down behind his desk it’s hard to tell where he ends and £10,000 of teak begins! Proper telly.

"Proper telly" indeed.  For me though its not about Falcon Crest, which I've never seen either, or any of its ilk.  It's the miniseries, adapted from novels, which are written, whether I like their style or abilities or not, by WRITERS, giving writers money, to which I say heartily, AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAmen!