Black Kos Tuesday's Chile is on hiatus until after the first of the year. To tide over until then, I offer the following essay entitled,

Movie Palace Matinees and The Drive-In at Midnight

by

Justice Putnam


I had an eclectic upbringing. My mother was a regional jazz singer in the Northwest and had pretensions of being an artist, while my dad was a college professor who espoused a Progressive historical perspective. That meant being exposed to Art, Literature, Music and Cinema at an early age. We didn't watch television much when we lived at Blue River in the Cascades on the way to Sisters; mostly because reception was so poor. Later, when we lived outside of Corvallis, reception remained poor. We would entertain ourselves at home; but movie palace matinees and the drive-in at midnight were important cultural excursions.

The first movies I truly remember was at the age of three, in our backyard. We lived next to the Cascade Drive-in along Highway 126 in Springfield, Oregon and the year was 1958. The concession stand had loudspeakers and the pole speakers for the cars would resonate to our house that we could just set up chairs on warm summer nights and enjoy the movies. The first one I remember, one that had a profound impact on me was, "Attack of the 50 Foot Woman." I was three, as I stated; the movie totally freaked me out and gave me dreams that foreshadowed the penance paid for a misogynistic life. I must say, I've always watched my step, lest I be crushed underfoot!

Though we could make snacks ourselves; often my parents would walk over to the concession stand and buy popcorn and sodas; hot dogs and hamburgers; french fries and Bon Bons. I have no idea of the prices, being so young. But I learned later that the proprietors of the Drive-in had a tacit agreement with the neighborhood that if we supported the concession stand that no walls would be built to obstruct the view of the screen. After we moved in 1961, a wall was built. The Cascade fell the way of most Drive-ins and a housing development has occupied the space for the last 30 years.

My dad began teaching at Oregon State University in 1961 in Corvallis, Oregon just before Bernard Malamud left to teach back East. In fact, it was Malamud who introduced our family to the Whiteside; a very ornate, Italianate movie palace. We saw "Twelve Angry Men," "Rebel Without a Cause," "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "Ben Hur," "Exodus," "Sunset Boulevard"; really so many it's hard to list them all. The concession sold a large tub of popcorn for 75 cents, hot dogs for the same, bottles of Coke, Pepsi, Dr Pepper and Orange Nehi for 50 cents. Reese Cups, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Butterfingers, and Baby Ruth Bars were 50 cents, Bon Bons were 75 cents; but Big Hunks could be had for a dime. Generally, the admission price was for a double feature. Yes, a much simpler and abundant time; except for the upheavals of the age.

In 1965, my father began teaching at Cal State Fullerton. Until the summer of 1969, we lived in the Rowland Heights/ West Covina area of the San Gabriel Valley in Southern California. We would go as a family to the Capri in West Covina, but I would also go with my friends to the 5th Ave Theater in Rowland Hts, since it was within the range of my Stingray bicycle.

The Capri showed a double feature for the price of admission. "A Patch of Blue," "Lilies of the Field," "Cat Balou," "Hud," "The Sound of Music," "The Great Escape," "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?," "Two for the Road," "Dr. Strangelove," and "Failsafe" are movies that stand out in my memory.

The 5th Ave Theater was a box-like single screen with non-descript concessions, but what stands out in my mind is seeing "2001: A Space Odyessy" six times in a row on one admission. The movie started at 11 in the morning on a Saturday. My chums and I watched and analyzed the movie until the last show let out after 11 that night. I had told my parents earlier that morning of our plan to see the movie repeatedly; they didn't think, though, that an eighth-grader would be out until almost midnight. I did have the movie memorized at that point, so my recollection proved the study.

We moved to Yorba Linda in 1969, the summer before my freshman year in High School. I mostly saw movies with my friends at that point, rather than with my family. We would go to either the Fox Fullerton, The Anaheim Drive-in off the 91 or the Highway 39 Drive-in off Trask near Beach Blvd. The Fox Fullerton showed one movie per admission; The Anaheim and Hwy 39 Drive-ins showed a double feature. One great "perk" about going to the Drive-ins was that we either brought a "picnic" or stopped at Carl's Jr before.

Movies that stand out in my mind at the Fox were "Paint Your Wagon," "McCabe and Mrs Miller," "Mash," "Fists of Fury," "To Kill a Mockingbird," and "Cool Hand Luke."

The Anaheim Drive-in showed "The Godfather," "Two-Lane Blacktop" and "Bonnie and Clyde," while the Hwy 39 Drive-in showed "Vanishing Point," "Play Misty for Me," "Scarecrow," "The Shining," "The Wild Bunch," "Easy Rider" and "Apocalypse Now."

I started going to the Nuart in Santa Monica around 1978. I don't remember the concession prices because at that point, I rarely bought concessions at the movies. Admission was for one movie. The Nuart was famous for showing foreign and "independent" productions. I was fortunate to see all of Kurosawa's movies, as well as "Wages of Fear," "Les Visiteurs Du Soir," "Man Bites Dog," "Les Diabolique," "The Swimmer," "Belle du Jour," "Two or Three Things I Know About Her," "Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans," "Eraserhead," "Fires on the Plain" and "Spetters."

I saw "Blade Runner" when it was first released at the tiled-courtyard theater in Laguna Beach, when I lived there.

I moved to the Bay Area "full time" in 1984. I would mostly go to the UC Theater and since I live nearby, The Elmwood. Both showed one movie per admission. I've seen many movies over the years at The Elmwood, but two that stand out are "Blue Velvet" and "Wings of Desire."

The UC, when it was open, could be counted on for Documentaries, Foreign and Independent movies. Some I saw there were, "Henry and June," "Woman in the Dunes," "My Life As A Dog," "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge," (though I had first read the Ambrose Bierce story in jr hi and had seen the short in 10th grade at our "little theatre"), "Papillon," "A Boy and His Dog," "Cinema Paradiso," "They Shoot Horses Don't They?," "Desert Bloom," "Down By Law," "Man Facing Southeast," "The Player" and of course, the long running midnight showings of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."

I mostly see movies these days with my Netflix subscription; but when I do go to the theater, I frequent The Elmwood (since it has been refurbished and a neighborhood group "saved" it), and The Parkway in Oakland. The Elmwood shows one movie per admission and the Parkway shows a double feature, if you get there for the first one. They have gourmet pizza and foodie specials in the $6.00 to $18.00 range; plus microbrewed beers on tap costing $14.00 for a pitcher; and some superb red and white wines by the bottle or the glass. Yum!

Movies are no better and no worse than in years past. The same dynamic of Art and Commerce drives the industry; as it always has and always will. There might be movies "produced" by accountants and focus groups; movies that are brazenly formulaic. But as in every era of the cinema, from Hollywood and foreign alike, true gems of the art emerge out of the mediocrity.

It is the search and discovery of these gems that has always interested me.

(update: the Parkway and their El Cerrito Speakeasy locations have closed, a sad and predictable development.)

Dedicated to Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, whose writings were great guides to not only cinema, but to life in general.


© 2009 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen

Voices and Soul

by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor

15 December 2009



Cause and Effect is a powerful dynamic; it informs all the Physics of human interaction. This week's poem by Marilyn Nelson is a meditation on that dynamic and how, when least expected, the Physics of human interaction can produce a...

Minor Miracle

Which reminds me of another knock-on-wood
memory. I was cycling with a male friend,
through a small midwestern town. We came to a 4-way
stop and stopped, chatting. As we started again,
a rusty old pick-up truck, ignoring the stop sign,
hurricaned past scant inches from our front wheels.
My partner called, "Hey, that was a 4-way stop!"
The truck driver, stringy blond hair a long fringe
under his brand-name beer cap, looked back and yelled,
               "You fucking niggers!"
And sped off.
My friend and I looked at each other and shook our heads.
We remounted our bikes and headed out of town.
We were pedaling through a clear blue afternoon
between two fields of almost-ripened wheat
bordered by cornflowers and Queen Anne's lace
when we heard an unmuffled motor, a honk-honking.
We stopped, closed ranks, made fists.
It was the same truck. It pulled over.
A tall, very much in shape young white guy slid out:
greasy jeans, homemade finger tattoos, probably
a Marine Corps boot-camp footlockerful
of martial arts techniques.

"What did you say back there!" he shouted.
My friend said, "I said it was a 4-way stop.
You went through it."
"And what did I say?" the white guy asked.
"You said: 'You fucking niggers.'"
The afternoon froze.

"Well," said the white guy,
shoving his hands into his pockets
and pushing dirt around with the pointed toe of his boot,
"I just want to say I'm sorry."
He climbed back into his truck
and drove away.

-- Marilyn Nelson

The unedited draft from Black Kos Tuesday's Chile 8 December:



Voices and Soul by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile Poetry Editor

It is a great honor to be included in one of the most important serial diaries on dKos. I hope to not only entertain one's sense of how Art and Poetics intersect with Politics and The Human Condition; but also to share the voices that so deftly make that intersection known. There will be Poets in this series that are immediately recognizable in the pantheon of American Letters; I want to remind those here then, of those famous names, but I also want to introduce those not so well-known.

Bob Dylan wrote in the liner notes of Bringing It All Back Home that,

"A poem is a naked person."

And it's true; it is the proverbial mirror of the soul dynamic. But it is not just the mirror of the poet's soul, it is also a mirror of the culture, the nation's soul; and in the process of giving voice, poetry becomes alive. In life, Poetry is not a noun; it is not a description or name of something. In life, Poetry is an adverb; it's an Action Word.

I've often been asked what makes a particular Poem, Art; and another poem, not? A Poem becomes Art when it can attain that state of Timelessness; when in any age, it can have relevance to the reader of the Poem, while not knowing of the time the poet wrote the Poem, (that relevance becomes even more so if the reader does know); when the reader can indentify with the poet's point of view on the most visceral of levels; when the Poem has and communicates, Soul.

Elizabeth Alexander is more recently known for her poem recitation at Obama's Inaugural; but I was introduced to her superb work from a much earlier poem.

She states in the voice of the individual, how we are all sinners, we have all violated some Social Order; that we are all a:

Peccant



Maryland State Correctional Facility for Women,
Baltimore County Branch, has undergone a facelift.
Cells are white and un-graffitied, room-like, surprisingly airy.
This is where I must spend the next year, eating slop from tin trays,
facing women much tougher than I am, finding out if I am brave.
Though I do not know what I took, I know I took something.
On Exercise Day, walk the streets of the city you grew up in,
in my case, D.C., from pillar to post, Adams-Morgan to Anacostia,
Shaw to Southwest., Logan to Chevy Chase Circles,
recalling every misbegotten everything, lamenting, repenting.
How my parents keen and weep, scheme to spring me,
intercept me at corners with bus tokens, pass keys, files baked in cakes.
Komunyakaa the poet says, don't write what you know,
write what you are willing to discover, so I will
spend this year, these long days, meditating on what I am accused of
in the white rooms, city streets, communal showers, mess hall,
where all around me sin and not sin is scraped off tin trays
into oversized sinks, all that excess, scraped off and rinsed away.

-- Elizabeth Alexander
Peccant

Black Kos

Passing




Passing

by

Justice Putnam

"Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught.

Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught."

-- Ambrose Bierce

My father died the summer before last and I didn’t cry. I still haven’t. But when my dad told me he was diagnosed with prostrate cancer last spring, I cried like a little kid.

I felt sad that my father had died, mind you; after all he brought me into the world and was a dad for eight years. But the last time I talked to him was the day my son was born. He said he couldn’t talk at that moment and he’d call me back. Twenty-eight years later, I still hadn’t received that call. It was ok, though. He had changed for the better. Any revenge I had harbored growing up waned when we had met again when I was twenty. Anything I wanted to prove no longer mattered.

I remembered him as a mad Grizzly, red-eyed and gigantic; growling angry Death that reared on its hind feet. He was six foot five and when he was in shape, hovered around 265.

He was in shape when I met him again at twenty, but he was just a big teddy bear. The only real reason I played football and tried to play in college was with the idea that I would one day dominate my father in a game. That I would one day upend him and grind him into the ground on a head high tackle for all the beatings he drunkenly inflicted on my mom and my siblings. In that same game I would straight-arm him on a punt return and cleat mark his back as I high stepped over him for all the disparaging remarks he made about her, about how all of us would grow to be the failures that was insured by her terrible mothering. I would fill the gap from my strong safety position as he cut back on a sweep from his college-days full back spot. We would meet shoulder pad to shoulder pad as I drove him out of bounds for his religious hypocrisy; his taking the Eucharist without suffering Penance from the confessional.

Maybe it was that I grew to six foot one and 200lbs that he didn’t seem so big when I met him again at twenty. Maybe it was because I had been reading Merton and Forgiveness was for the first time a palpable Grace that washed over me. Maybe even it was because we all change and evil can in time turn contrite and apologetic and sincere. I forgave him and let him have his life. It didn’t even really bother me that he never returned my phone call to let him know of his grandson.

He was my father, but he wasn’t my dad.

My dad adopted my baby brother, my two sisters and I when he married our mom. I was a precocious ten-year old when they married, schooled in the pre-Vatican II rigors of Greek and Latin. I was an altar boy and could pontificate at length on the merits of St Francis of Assisi as opposed to those of St Augustine. I was accustomed to stern nuns and beatings at the hands of my father.

My dad never beat us. He was a college professor. We would be lectured at length for our childhood transgressions, we sometimes wished for beatings just to get it over with, but he never laid a hand on us. He never demeaned us but rationally made the argument that we have to be honest with ourselves and to each other.

Beatings are not an effective strategy to teach that character trait, I learned.

He had almost 8,000 books in his home library and another 14,000 at the University and not one was denied our scrutiny at anytime as we grew. He and my mom started the first ACLU chapter in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California in 1966; he wrote policy papers and researched historical points for local politicians, he was on the platform committee for the State Democratic Party. We all learned civic duty is not a chore but something gladly embraced.

He married our mom. She was not quite eighteen years old when I became her first born. By the time she was twenty-five, she had my two sisters and then my brother. In between my two sisters, she had five miscarriages. I figured my mom was pregnant so often because of my father’s idea of what made a good Catholic.

But it did give me a much better appreciation of what she was about when I had my son several months before I turned twenty-three.

One of the major conflicts my mom and my father had was over her being a jazz singer; it offended his idea of Catholic manhood, I guess. Her independence was a threat and she paid for it.

My dad by contrast, encouraged her independence. She looked like Anne Sexton but had the certainty of an Adrienne Rich; she was a survivor in the true Loretta Lynne myth.

My dad advocated for her and promoted her endeavors. She sang briefly and then "retired" of sorts and owned a few cafes and clubs over the years. Because it wouldn’t take much cajoling by her patrons for her to sing her version of "Strange Fruit" or an Ella Fitzgerald be-bop style song.

My dad has been stable and his PSA’s are what the doctor says they should.

My mom has not smoked since the early 80’s and a spot on each lung showed up on an image test a few days ago. It’s too early to tell, according to her doctor, what they might be. The spots are microscopic, but they are there.

I wrote a poem to my son when his son was born that has been published a few times. In it I tell him to kiss his son while he can, because any number of factors will intrude eventually.

Though I’ve been the dutiful son, writing and phoning my parents a few times each week all these years, because of distance I don’t get to hug and kiss them enough.

It’s a little like the long passing game in football. You’re throwing downfield all game, post and fly patterns, deep corners at will. Then Death intercepts and the whole game changes.

Passing is a little like that.


© 2007 by Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches-Strophe Verlagswesen


(cross-posted at Daily Kos http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/4/1/318394/-Passing )

(update: The photo is of my dad, the historian Jackson K. Putnam and myself; he is still healhy and writing another book. August 2009)

The Myth of Chimeral Evolution




The Myth of Chimeral Evolution

by

Justice Putnam


Darwin, Berkeley and Nietzsche were traversing through the primordial soup when a Booming Voice echoed throughout the world,

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" the Booming Voice joyously announced, for He was a joyous and happy Booming Voice, "so you have quite a conundrum before you now!"

Berkeley, as was his manner, nudged ahead of Nietzsche and announced,

"I know or am conscious of my own being; and that I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking, active principle that perceives, knows, wills and operates about ideas. I know that I, one and the same self, perceive both colors and sounds: that a color cannot perceive a sound, nor a sound a color: that I am therefore one individual principle, distinct from color and sound; and, for the same reason, from all other sensible things and inert ideas. But, I am not in like manner conscious either of the existence or essence of Matter. On the contrary, I know that nothing inconsistent can exist, and that the existence of matter implies an inconsistency. Further, I know what I mean when I affirm that there is a spiritual substance or support of ideas, that is, that a spirit knows and perceives ideas. But, I do not know what is meant when it is said that an unperceiving substance hath inherent in it and supports either ideas or the archetypes of ideas. There is therefore upon the whole no parity of case between Spirit and Matter."

Not to be outdone, Nietzsche elbowed his way past Darwin and Berkeley to his preordained spot,

"With the highest respect, I accept the name of Heraclitus. When the rest of the philosophic folk rejected the testimony of the senses because they showed multiplicity and change, he rejected their testimony because they showed things as if they had permanence and unity. Heraclitus too did the senses an injustice. They lie neither in the way the Eleatics believed, nor as he believed--they do not lie at all. What we make of their testimony, that alone introduces lies; for example, the lie of unity, the lie of thinghood, of substance, of permanence. "Reason" is the cause of our falsification of the testimony of the senses. Insofar as the senses show becoming, passing away, and change, they do not lie. But Heraclitus will remain eternally right with his assertion that being is an empty fiction. The "apparent" world is the only one: the "true" world is merely added by a lie."

Darwin strode forward in a gentlemanly manner, cleared his throat and began,

"As man can produce and certainly has produced a great result by his methodical and unconscious means of selection, what may not nature effect? Man can act only on external and visible characters: nature cares nothing for appearances, except in so far as they may be useful to any being. She can act on every internal organ, on every shade of constitutional difference, on the whole machinery of life. Man selects only for his own good; Nature only for that of the being which she tends. Every selected character is fully exercised by her; and the being is placed under well-suited conditions of life. Man keeps the natives of many climates in the same country; he seldom exercises each selected character in some peculiar and fitting manner; he feeds a long and a short beaked pigeon on the same food; he does not exercise a long-backed or long-legged quadruped in any peculiar manner; he exposes sheep with long and short wool to the same climate. He does not allow the most vigorous males to struggle for the females. He does not rigidly destroy all inferior animals, but protects during each varying season, as far as lies in his power, all his productions. He often begins his selection by some half-monstrous form; or at least by some modification prominent enough to catch his eye, or to be plainly useful to him. Under nature, the slightest difference of structure or constitution may well turn the nicely-balanced scale in the struggle for life, and so be preserved. How fleeting are the wishes and efforts of man! how short his time! and consequently how poor will his products be, compared with those accumulated by nature during whole geological periods. Can we wonder, then, that nature's productions should be far 'truer' in character than man's productions; that they should be infinitely better adapted to the most complex conditions of life, and should plainly bear the stamp of far higher workmanship?"

"Ha! Ha! Ha!" the Booming Voice joyously continued, "if it were not for your Minds, I would almost doubt my own existence!"


Sources:

"Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous" --George Berkeley
"Twilight of the Idols"--Friedrich Nietzsche
"The Origin of Species"--Charles Darwin


from “The Nature of Poetics Collapsed Outside My Window”

© 2006 Justice Putnam
and Mechanisches Strophe-Verlagswesen