Dragonslayer (1981)

Part of a spate of fantasy movies that came out in the very early '80s (along with The Dark Crystal, Conan, and a few more embarrassing ones that I loved when I was, like, twelve), and part of Disney's turn-of-the-decade effort to crawl into the modern world with live action films in genres kids actually liked (The Black Hole, Tron): given this pedigree, it's amazing that it's any good at all. But Dragonslayer is one of the better fantasy films ever made, and nearly thirty years later, its dragon is still the best one ever caught on celluloid.

So, the dragon: it's worth glancing through the description on Wikipedia of how it was done, because it took a lot of work and ingenuity. It's a shame that this film is mostly forgotten today, because it was intended to be a landmark in special effects, and it was. I'm old enough to have seen it first-run, and I can tell you: it blew me, little dragon-loving pre-teen, away. And the dragon still looks good: and not just because they made it convincing, but because they made it look so darn dragony. They got it right. If Peter Jackson's Hobbit ever gets made, Smaug has his work cut out for him.

I really don't need to write more, because the thing's worth seeing just for the dragon. The fact that the rest of the movie works as well as it does is just a bonus.

It's basically a sorceror's-apprentice story, with Peter MacNicol as the apprentice; he's slightly off-center, for a fantasy hero, a little modern, and that works nicely (if you can get his later TV appearances out of your head) with the off-center heroine, Caitlin Clarke; the casting overall does the job, with suitably crusty-looking fighters and florid noblemen.

The scenery is beautiful - lush forests and forbidding rocky mountainsides. It has that fairy-tale-wonder quality to it that a good fantasy movie needs. But for a fantasy movie, it's surprisingly unsentimental about its medieval setting: society is a mix of superstition and venality, religion is powerless, and magic, the only hope, is equal parts ill-understood science, actual sorcery, and pure chicanery. The movie aims for a sweet spot between Lord of the Rings romance and Conan brutalism, and hits it. I've always remembered the scene at the end where (spoiler alert) the king drives his sword into the smoking carcass of the dragon and pronounces himself the slayer of it. That kind of bracing realism about governments, about human pride, can make a deep impression on a young mind.

A gem of a movie.

Charles Dickens: Oliver Twist (1838)

After Pickwick Papers, I was pretty excited to move on to the next Dickens, and the first blockbuster. I was expecting to love Oliver Twist (or: The Parish Boy's Progress). Instead, it was a real effort to get through.

I'm not sure why; and before I start to point to reasons within the book I want to hasten to admit that the fault most likely lies within myself. That is, for various reasons maybe I was just too stressed to have the patience for Dickens this month. Anyway, it rather bothered me that I didn't enjoy it more. This is high melodrama, and I've come to fancy myself to have an unfashionably high tolerance, even appetite, for old-school high melodrama.

But in fact I found Oliver himself to be just as insufferable as most modern critics seem to. The latter half of the book, where he disappears from the narrative for long stretches, is vastly improved by his absence. Problematically, that's the half of the book that doesn't matter.

What matters about this book, of course, is its indictment of contemporary attitudes toward and treatment of the poor. Oliver's stint in the care of the parish, his experiences in the workhouse, and more generally the acidic burn of Dickens' prose when describing anybody with parochial or legal authority over Oliver and other paupers, is essential reading. Even/especially today, when it's increasingly clear that one of the two major political parties in this country would like to see the return of the poor laws, and when the other party, while not agreeing, would rather talk about anything than the poor.

The assumption that underlay the poor laws, the prejudice that excused Oliver's mistreatment, was that the poor were different from you and I: lazy and prone to criminality, they deserved what they got. Therefore, the moment it becomes clear to the reader (and this is quite early in the book, if you're paying attention and are reasonably attuned to the melodramatic wavelength) that Oliver is among the poor but not of them - that he's of solid upper-class stock - a lot of the fire goes out of the book. True bravery would be for Dickens to stand up and say that we should have compassion on the poor because they're no different from us, only less fortunate; instead, he wimps out and says only that we should have compassion on them because one of them might accidentally be one of us in disguise.

Again, I know this isn't an unusual critique of the novel. And now that I come out and say it like that, I wonder if it isn't slightly harsh. Certainly the book would constitute a stronger denunciation of the poor laws if Oliver wasn't highborn. But what's harder for secular moderns to appreciate is the quasi-Biblical resonance of Oliver - there's an echo of St. Martin and the Beggar in his story, and the old Christian idea that Jesus could appear to one in the guise of a pauper, and that this was reason to treat all paupers as if they were Jesus. In other words, what makes the book's critique seem weak to us now might have been what made it cut deep in its own day.

Another thing that bothers me about the book is, of course, Fagin. Irving Howe (who wrote the intro to the edition I read) is right: there's just no disguising the nastiness of Dickens' conception here. There's anti-Semitism in Shylock, sure, but also great humanity; there's no humanity in Fagin. To Dickens' credit it seems that later in life he more or less realized what he'd done, and regretted it, but that doesn't change what he did here.

Again, it's not just that Fagin is the villain, and that his villainy is entirely blamed on his being Jewish, and that his Jewishness is presented as a collection of grotesque stereotypes. It's that, in addition to all that, he's presented as lacking, basically, a soul. Compare his last hours to those of his crony Bill Sikes. Sikes is a murderer, as well as a thief and a batterer, but he's also, by heritage at least, a Christian (or so we're meant to assume, since it's never specified otherwise), and so after killing Nancy he's wracked with guilt. He's miserable with it, driven nearly insane. His last hours are narrated from within his thoughts and feelings - we know he's feeling guilty, and we come to pity him, although we never forgive him. In Fagin's last hours, too, we enter his head and heart, as he awaits sentencing and then execution, but although he's powerfully afraid of death, we're given no indication that he feels guilt. The message is clear: as a Jew, Fagin has no conscience. There's no getting around this.

Real-life ironic twist: as a graduate of a certain Northeastern educational institution whose brand is taking a bit of a well-deserved beating right now, I've been following the Marty Peretz story, and I had just finished this excellent retrospective on him when I returned to Oliver Twist and read Chapter LII, "Fagin's last night alive." Irony, as I say, because Dickens' character is an excellent example of the real-life anti-Semitism that pervades much of Western history, and that, by most accounts, seems to be one of Peretz's driving motivations. But right now Peretz himself embodies bigotry directed at Muslims and blacks. The content of bigotry, its arguments and excuses, never changes. Only its targets.

Jefferson Airplane No. 1

Jefferson Airplane No. 1 is actually all but undocumented. This is the very first lineup of the Airplane, in 1965, the group that Marty Balin put together to play his new nightclub, the Matrix: Balin and Signe Toly Anderson on vocals, Paul Kantner and Jorma Kaukonen on guitars, Bob Harvey on bass, and Jerry Peloquin on drums. Biographers insist that this lineup recorded a demo for Columbia Records, consisting of "The Other Side Of This Life." I've searched the web over and thought I found true love, but I've never found this demo. I'd love to hear it: this Fred Neil cover was the Airplane's true anthem, not "White Rabbit." It best summed up what they were all about, and it was in their repertoire from the very beginning, but they never released a record of it until 1968.

Since JA1 is effectively a matter of legend, we'll just call it JA0, or maybe JA0.5, and let JA1 be the first Airplane for which we have any aural evidence. This is the lineup that consisted of Balin, Anderson, Kantner, and Kaukonen, plus (well wouldja lookit that) Skip Spence on drums and (fanfare, please) Jack Casady on bass.

The original, and just possibly my favorite, Airplane. I know they wouldn't really take off, as it were, until Grace Slick joined the band. But as essential as their next few records would be, they don't sound as much like the organic product of a band as did their first record, the one recorded with Anderson. The factionalization and musical schizophrenia that would eventually destroy the Airplane was there from the moment Slick joined the band (not that she caused it); but it's not apparent on that first album, Jefferson Airplane Takes Off.

That first album, released in September of 1966, is a masterpiece of something. Not quite of psychedelic San Francisco rock. Of folk-rock, if anything. Truth be told, it's the work of a band much infatuated with the Byrds.

This infatuation is even more apparent on the few fragments we have that predate that album. Let's run them down.

Wolfgang's Vault has a three-song set dating from November 6, 1965: a benefit for the San Francisco Mime Troupe at the Calliope Warehouse. It's the earliest circulating Airplane, and the first show in SF promoted by Bill Graham - for some intents and purposes, the SF scene starts here. Sound quality is a bit iffy, but historical value is unmatched, and musically it's eminently decent. It shows a rough-and-ready band of folk rockers, ethereal harmonies backed by muscular musicianship. Some pitch problems, but that's more than made up for by a sureness of vision. Signe in particular is shown off to good effect in these three songs; in the studio she tended to be buried in the mix, at least compared to the way she was miked live. I might as well 'fess up here and now: I'm unbounded in my admiration for Grace Slick, but I loooove Signe Anderson. All contemporary photos show this cute Oregon girl in pigtails, but then she opens her mouth and she's just a belter. When she and Balin harmonized it was yin and yang, but she was the yang - that was the dynamic, and it's only intermittently in evidence on their album. This live rendition of "Runnin' 'Round This World," for example, is rougher but ballsier than the studio version, and the song benefits from it.

The next thing we have is the session for their first RCA single: December 16 & 18, 1965. The session produced the studio version of "Runnin' 'Round This World," the classic "It's No Secret," "High Flying Bird," and "It's Alright." The first two were released as a single; the second was also released on the first album; the last two were released on the 1974 odds'n'sods collection Early Flight. They're all available on the 2003 reissue of Takes Off, which does what a reissue should, and brings together the album and all the related studio tracks. There was room for more - it could have been better - but it could have been worse, too. ...This is a very auspicious debut. "It's No Secret" is a great first single, tremendously accomplished: a dicey love song in what would become the Airplane tradition, delivered by Balin in his trademark shudderingly beautiful style, and backed by the well-oiled Airplane machinery. It soars. They would soar higher before very long, but it's still a good start. The other side of the single (dropped from the album for pushing the limits of what you could sing about in 1965) is just as good. Less moody, more poppy, more of an accent on folk-rock harmonies, but again with a solidity that sets them apart. This is not just electrified folk, which is what the Byrds were for most of their career; this is rock.

That Byrds comparison. What do I mean by it? Well, the harmonies, sure: Balin, Kantner, Kaukonen, Anderson had all come out of the Bay Area folk scene, and their band from the very start was all about harmonies. And the Byrds had been the first to figure out how to bring complex, shifting folk harmonies into rock. The Airplane have learned from them. But that's not all they learned. Paul Kantner, like Jim McGuinn, is playing electric 12-string throughout the Airplane's early sides, lending an unmistakably Byrdsy vibe to the proceedings. And Casady, while very much his own man from the start, does sound a bit like Chris Hillman at times in these early days - when he plays way up on the neck, four beats to the measure, he adds the kind of march-like power that Hillman displayed on "Lay Down Your Weary Tune," for example.

But they're not Byrds clones. As I say, they're rock. Take Paul's guitar work. As much as it puts you in mind of the Byrds, he's not going for the kind of chiming effect that was McGuinn's stock in trade; instead he plays in a more impressionistic style, pinching the chords and slashing at the rhythms. And again I have to come back to the harmonies: Byrds harmonies were always all about innocence and joy, about bringing Dylan's lyrical image of "starry-eyed and laughing" to musical fruition. There was something churchy in them, no surprise given McGuinn's love of Bach. The Airplane were always darker, more sinister, more jaundiced: the tragic or Satanic side of romantic, and it was right there in their harmonies. In Signe's belting, and Marty's crooning, with its frank admission that he was after more than a peck on the cheek.

The folk-rock roots of the Airplane can best be glimpsed on the only other stretch of live Airplane that seems to be circulating, a tape from January 14-16, 1966, at the Kitsilano Theatre in Vancouver, BC. It's not a great performance, really, but it has a lot of things they either would never record, or wouldn't record with this lineup. They actually cover the Byrds: "Feel A Whole Lot Better." They cover Dylan (a song the Byrds also did): "Lay Down Your Weary Tune." Neither song comes off very well, and you can see why they dropped them, but still they're perfectly illustrative of where the band was coming from. Illustrative of where it was going are covers of "The Other Side Of This Life," already an anthem, "Let's Get Together," and "High Flying Bird." I really wish this last had made the album - it's one of Signe's best moments. ...The tape also includes a couple of r&b covers: "Baby What You Want Me To Do" and "In The Midnight Hour." I'm generally unconverted to Hot Tuna - when they played pop songs they were great, but as a blues interlude in Airplane shows, they were a drag. Jorma has to have been the least convincing blues singer in the entire SF scene.

Shortly afterward, in February and March of 1966, came the sessions for the debut album. What's there for me to say about it? I just love it. From the first, ominous rattle of bass and 12-string to the last sigh of Marty's angst, it's something different, despite all the obvious antecedents.

My take on the Airplane is that they were the inventors, in this country at least, of the idea of rock as art. They weren't the band-for-all-seasons that the Dead were, the life of the party, the band of the people; they were the most determinedly serious band on the scene. The downside of that is the raging ego-trips that ripped the band apart far too soon. The upside is that from the very beginning they had an ambition that most of their peers simply didn't have. For a while, through to the end of the '60s, that was enough.

Favorite moments: the descending bass runs (stolen from Bill Wyman and brilliantly repurposed) in "Let Me In." The impossibly taut upwards modulation in the refrain of "Don't Slip Away." The haunted, forbidden-fruit ecstasy of "Come Up The Years." Signe asserting (not screaming) bloody murder on "Chauffeur Blues."

Signe.

Dead white males

I read a lot of them, sure, but I try to read some other things too. Anyway, Sullivan today has a post responding to somebody else's essay saying maybe we should shore up the canon. The idea, basically, is that black literature focuses on the experience of oppression, and thus its perspective is narrow. Sullivan writes:

Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.

The dead white men never had to face the evils of slavery or the physical and emotional oppression of racism. Thus their minds were freer to range over the great philosophical questions, metaphysical quandaries and cosmological dilemmas. In short, they have been allowed to address man in relation to the macrocosm, as opposed to just the microcosm.

To which I say: isn't bondage a metaphysical quandary as much as a physical? Isn't oppression an inextricable part of the macrocosm of human experience? Is a mind that can't see this free in any way that matters? Why doesn't Andrew Sullivan, a gay Catholic who insists that his temperamental home is with the conservatives, see this?