DOCUMENTARIES ABOUT: BILL EVANS, TEDDY PENDERGRASS, AND THE GO-GO'S

 

Watched three great documentaries about great music makers in the past week. First: BILL EVANS: TIME REMEMBERED, then a few days ago caught TEDDY PENDERGRASS: IF YOU DON'T KNOW ME, and tonight THE GO-GO'S. The Bill Evans story has a tragic ending but is told well and has so much revelatory material, including archival footage and photos, I found it fascinating, compelling, and poignant. And, of course, the music is so f*ckin gloriously good.

I was a jazz piano playing teenager when Bill Evans first became famous in the jazz world (saw him and his original trio with Paul Motian and Scott Lafarro play in Rochester in 1960) and idolized him so much I copped a lot of his style, from trying to emulate his amazingly soft touch to hunching over the key board til my face was almost hitting the keys. His music is always the antidote to whatever may be disturbing me.

I always loved Teddy Pendergrass and felt as dismayed as all who loved him and his music did when he had that terrible car crash and ended up a quadriplegic. But I didn't realize what a crush I' always had on him until I was watching this documentary. Damn was he sexy, that combination of boyish vulnerability and muscular power and charisma. And though his story contains a heap of tragedy, it also has a more redemptive and satisfying ending than Evans. Nonetheless I found myself sobbing at one point and not being sure why, though part of it was the harassment he faced by his hometown Philadelphia police even after his huge stardom, so persistent and evil his wife and others feared for him every time he went out. That and the reminder that he was on the way to being as big as Elvis or Michael Jackson when the accident happened, and we'll never know how big a legend he may have become in the world beyond those of us to whom his legend already is infinite.

THE GO-GO'S documents the rise and fall of the first all girl band to reach number one on the charts and has the usual elements of the rock band docs except this time with women who had to (and still have to) overcome much tougher challenges than men, which this film documents as well. I found it at times as delightful as the band's music and image initially were to me, even in their most raw early days. But it too has its tragic moments, though less tragic than what happened to Evans and Pendergrass. It's a very satisfying experience, watching this film. And yeah, why the f*ck aren't they in the rock'n'roll hall of fame?!

PERRY MASON

HBO's first stand-alone season of the resurrected PERRY MASON is the famous character's origin story, and it's a pretty good one. The best things about the show are the music of Terence Blanchard and every woman actor in it. Just to mention two of the outstanding females in the cast: Juliet Rylance as Della Street and Veronica Falcon as Mason's lover. (Oh and a third best thing, a sex montage in an early episode that's the most realistic I've ever seen on TV.)

So it's worth watching PERRY MASON just to see the women actors work. Some of the men are good too. But for me the weakest element is the star of the show, Matthew Rhys. He has his moments, but I couldn't help thinking at times of what some other actors could have done with such a juicy role. And why cast a Welshman as such an iconic "American" character? But in the end watching this first season was satisfying, so I recommend it. 

MAIL

When I was a teenager I was hired by the local post office to carry what became known as "junk mail" to residences in our town during the weeks leading up to Christmas because the volume of Christmas cards overwhelmed the system. There even was more than one delivery a day so that no mail was ever late. The post office had been so important to the founders that they established it in The Constitution! You know, the document the rightwing republicans claim to care so much about.

Since Nixon the Republicans have been trying to privatize the post office, and pulled off a kind of partial privatization in fact, but in more recent years the republicans have been going more for crippling the postal service entirely to enhance the private carriers. And now with the upcoming presidential election the trumpers have been waging a direct attack on the P.O. to weaken support for voting-by-mail, making it difficult for the mail to get through without delays and losses.

For instance it's August 8th and I still haven't received my main pension check, which usually arrives on the first, or the day before or after, but has never arrived more than two days late. I hate this administration and the hypocrites who support and defend it with claims to be fans of the founding principles of this country but betray those principles every chance they get.

(C) 2020 Michael Lally 

 

MISSING TIM

Today would have been poet Tim Dlugos' 70th birthday (he passed at 40 from AIDS). He was 21 and I was 29 when we met at a poetry reading Ed Cox (also long gone) and I did in DC, at Catholic University as I remember it. Tim had quit the Christian Brothers (a Catholic order just below priests) after it was made clear that he was heading for dismissal because of what they then called "a special relationship" with another aspiring brother (as Tim told it to me).

He claimed Ed and I were the first poets he ever heard who read poems about being gay and our romantic and sexual experiences. He called us his heroes and we became instant friends (Ed and I and some others had a press called Some Of Us that published Tim's first book as well: High There). From that time on we were in constant communication until his death. We shared poems and gossip and theories and spiritual journeys (he became an Episcopalian priest and ministered to AIDS patients in a Jersey City hospital in the years before he passed).

We both moved to New York in the mid-1970s and even after I married a movie actress (with Tim's encouragement) and moved to LA, we spoke on the phone at least weekly. I saw him the last time not long before he passed in the AIDS ward at Roosevelt Hospital in New York when I flew back to visit him at the end, a ward he made famous in his great poem "G-9"—the designation the hospital used for the AIDS ward (he read it on one of the national morning news shows before his death).

I loved him from the moment we met and we became so close he would use (after asking my permission) experiences from my life in his poems, as if they were his experiences. He was my biggest champion and supporter and most honest observer, and a personal hero, who I miss constantly.

Click on this photo to see that's Tim in suit and tie at my second wedding (In a NYC bar/restaurant) smiling joyfully at me and my bride, actress Penelope Milford, and poet Ted Berrigan (in tee shirt, another close and dear friend gone too soon), and my daughter Caitlin and son Miles in the foreground (with a smiling actor/poet Michael O'Keefe at the right edge of the photo, Valentine's Day 1982)  

ADVICE FROM "UNCLE GEORGE" (VIA DEAR FRIEND MICHAEL FERRI)

NOW MORE THAN EVER

In times of trouble and stress, I often turn to a favorite work of art for solace and calm, including this masterwork of Bill Evans that's been offering me solace since I bought the first recording of it in the early 1960s: "Peace Piece":

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HYSFECKINTERICAL

You've probably already seen this or other videos of Sara Cooper channeling 45 but if you haven't:

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