SUFFRAGETTE

I've been looking forward to this film, SUFFRAGETTE, since seeing the trailer weeks ago, and I can say after seeing it that it didn't disappoint, although the trailer made it look more action-paced than it is. In fact the pacing—rhythmically as steady as a heartbeat, but within each beat including the stillness between the beats and the buildup to each—is a big part of its appeal (to me). What I mean is, it feels like almost every scene begins slowly, sometimes achingly so, only to eventually progress to an often tension releasing climax just to begin that entire process again.

I don't want to generalize and say that it comes closer to a feminine or female sense of timing and pace than the usual male dominated film, but that's the way it seemed to me. This is a female dominated movie, directed exquisitely (for my taste) by Sarah Gavron and written (with the rhythms I've described) by Abi Morgan. It is both a beautiful film and a powerful experience, and yet also seems at times as predictable as the inevitable political outcome: i.e. women finally attaining the right to vote.

I suspect some viewers will find SUFFRAGETTE slow or inconsistent or even erratic or at times contrived, despite its basis in historical reality, but others, if they surrender to the artistry and skill of the filmmakers, including the cast (in which the female characters have the main roles, which unfortunately is almost never the case in movies today) they hopefully will have a unique movie-going experience, as I did.

At any rate, SUFFRAGETTE is worth seeing, and in fact should be required viewing, especially for those who take the gains made by any suffering segment of humanity for granted.

MARTHA KING'S OUTSIDE INSIDE

Went to a reading at The Sidewalk Cafe on Avenue A and 6th Street Thursday evening to celebrate the publication of some sections of the downtown art and poetry scene icon Martha King's memoir OUTSIDE INSIDE. Several poets read excerpts from it, along with memoir poems or prose of their own. Though unfortunately my friend and I were late (NJ Transit), everyone we got to hear was terrific and the sections from OUTSIDE INSIDE they read were brilliant.

The magazine itself is so well produced and appealing, I suggest you get it just to have as a work of art itself. But especially for the bits of OUTSIDE INSIDE. As described in the table of contents ("Baz and I had Fame and Rejection. We lived in a flow of contradiction.") and as its title suggests, Martha and her husband, the artist Basil King, lived the classic bohemian roller coaster lives of making and being a part of cultural history while at the same time being overlooked and/or dismissed at certain times by those writing that history.

But now Martha has written her own take on that history and it's a fundamental document of survival inside and outside that world. Here's a sample paragraph describing the eighteen-year-old Martha who had her moment at the famous Black Mountain experimental school and collective of creative originals:

"If I had not been. If I had not been always in transition, always the new girl, the one no now knows, the one with the Southern accent, the one with the Yankee accent, the rich or the not-really-rich one, the one from the house with all those books, on East Eighty-Sixth Street and then in Chapel Hill. If I had not been the faculty brat. If I had not had such comfort with poverty, which gave me a feeling of calm and normalcy. If I had not been any of those things I would still have been just as desperate to leave home the summer I was eighteen. And I would have found a bohemia somewhere, a gang of people at odds. All runaways know this. Black Mountain was accidental. I was passing through my days without deep attachments. I felt everything could be exchanged. Everything almost was."

Check it out.

THOSE WERE THE DAYS MY FRIEND(S)

Me in the window of the Duane Street loft I was illegally living in with my two oldest kids, Caitlin and Miles, in what I still called "Washington Market" but realtors were pushing as "Tribeca" c. 1980 just before Di Niro moved into the neighborhood and they changed the laws to allow lawyers and millionaires to buy lofts and whole buildings and transformed a sparsely populated rundown boho neighborhood into an upper class shiny new enclave etc. (PS I didn't find out until recently when a specialist looking for something else informed me that my nose had been broken three times!) [PPS: photo by the composer Rain Worthington who lived with me and my kids at the time]

TRUTH

This movie got some bad reviews, including some by critics I often agree with. And I can see some of the flaws that caused some of that. Part of that might be attributed to the fact that the director/screenwriter is young and most of his experiences are as writer and/or producer. This is the first film he directed and he makes some of the mistakes of a first-time director, including being a little overzealous in getting the point of a scene across.

I went to see TRUTH, because I've always admired Robert Redford's acting, even when he was still just considered a pretty boy by most. I recognized, from my own experiences acting in films, that Redford's minimalist acting style was unique in many ways and worked well with almost all the projects he chose to do. He was originally an artist and as a film-acting one, he uses very few brushstrokes to create an impact.

So I wasn't disappointed to watch Redford play Dan Rather in this story about a seminal moment in the history of mass media news. Rather's and his producer Mary Mapes's (whose book the film is based on and who is aptly played by Cate Blanchett) reporting about George W. Bush's special treatment in the U.S. military when many of us had friends dying in Viet Nam because their parents weren't wealthy and politically powerful, was attacked for details that didn't change the truth of the story but changed the focus of the media.

The success of the Bush family and their political machine in changing the subject from the then president's lies about his service and his having behaved in a manner that would have gotten the rest of us who served in the military and didn't have his connections court martialed and probably imprisoned was a turning point in TV journalism.

The film dramatizes the moment when the right won the battle of media focus. No longer would stories be about the facts but about conceding to the right's demands to have the news framed in ways that took attention off their misdeeds and failures and crimes and put it on opinions and attitudes and the idea of misinformation deserving equal time with the truth. The tactic of attacking any reporting that made them look bad won the day and continues to, a la the recent CNBC Republican debate and the reaction from the candidates to the moderator's questioning based on facts etc.

The story is a necessary one and I'm grateful it's been made into a movie, though the power of movies or media in general has been greatly diminished after the shift this movie chronicles. Still, it's worth seeing, worth having younger people see it as well, even if at times it's tries too hard (including the music soundtrack). Redford doesn't. He captures Dan Rather's awkward charm without imitating him—no accent, no strange metaphors, just the self-conscious smile and the deep rooted integrity.

PETER CASE (APPRECIATION AND MINI-RANT)

The legendary Peter Case (first of the seminal punk band THE NERVES, then front man for THE PLIMSOULS, and now the hardest working singer/songwriter blues troubadour of the 21st Century) stopped by to visit and made my day sharing new and old stories before moving on.

One of the musical highlights of my life was when Peter lived with me for a while in the 1980s in a house I rented in Santa Monica and on the night he moved in we stayed up for hours jamming, him on guitar and me on an old upright piano I also rented. It was just one of those times when everything seemed to click and our different styles and tastes came together to make something unique and fleeting though entirely fulfilling.

Peter signed a copy of the first slim volume of his musical memoir AS FAR AS YOU CAN GET WITHOUT A PASSPORT and I've been reading it since and can't recommend it highly enough. Go buy a copy now. He also gave me his latest CD, called ROUTE 62, with some stellar musicians on it and all brand new Peter Case songs. Go buy a copy now.

(The mini-rant is that after over a million people downloaded it on Spotify (or do whatever you do on sites like that) Spotify was kind enough to send him a check for about thirty bucks.  The new economy that was already old in The Gilded Age where everyone without a lot of wealth is viciously exploited to get as much productivity out of them as possible for the most minimal of compensation while those in control of most of the wealth get more.)

If you are anywhere near New York city tomorrow night at 10:30 don't miss him at Rockwood Music Hall, 196 Allen Street.

WEEKLY BERNIE QUOTE

HAPPY CELTIC NEW YEAR!