Laureate of the Laid: Terry Southern, CANDY (1968)

Life is a latticework of coincidence whether we see it or not. Usually we don't want to see it, worried we'd go crazy if we did. With our blinders up, the coincidence matrix is less a pineal gland-buzzing latticework and more just white noise --the odd splotch of identifiable pattern--a word lining up with a word you're reading or writing or saying at the same second someone on TV is saying it--then back to white noise background before the meaning can be sussed; but dig, when you're 'alight with manic magic' or 'awakened' or 'enlightened' or 'tripping balls' or schizophrenic, or a genius -- then you might be able to behold how every single goddamn moment of conscious existence holds a hundred thousand such linkages, stretching from your mind into the screen and out to America and into biology and macro and micro fractal-ing out and in.Whether or not we can handle it, interconnectivity exists like vast and unknowable tendrils betwixt our eyes, ears, TV, film, music (only what is currently playing in that moment of our perception of course) and the outermost limits of one's living room and mind, connected to the point of Rubik's Cube inextricability; the retinal screen tattoos the wind and the DVD is a mere shard of a windmill, a record of our mind's ability to perceive shapes, faces, voices, targets. Every single element of perceived external and internal reality is an interconnected latticework 'other' staring back at you -- we block it out because otherwise we will go mad - and then art gives us the Perseus Medusa mirror shield by which to cautiously glimpse that which our soul cannot bear.

Mandrake, isn't it true that on no account will a commie ever take a drink of water?

And not without good reason!

When these latticework lightbulbs are flashing atop each pylon neuron 'round the pineal car wreck, that is (presuming fluoridation hasn't crusted it over) one turns naturally to Terry Southern, America's dirty Swift, the Texas Voltaire, the Watergate Lubitsch, The Lenny Bruce of Lauded Literariness, the acidhead Brecht. Southern took the ball from randy sordid men like Nabokov, Poe and Henry Miller and threw it straight through the Cuban Missile Crisis' shattering the speed of the three martini lunch glass bottom end zone and into the many Hindu deity arms of free love mind game psychedelic put-ons for an unbidden id touchdown. The true anarchy of spirit finds full flower of expression in his R-rated Marx Brothers, protozoic chest-thumping. His scripts and/or original novels for films like Barbarella, Candy, The Loved One, The End of the Road, and Dr. Strangelove, mix jet black humor with guilt-free sex, bawdy anarchy and trenchant satire, anti-Vietnam rants and un-PC skirt chasing, grim apocalypse and slapstick, in ways that may or may not seem dated today, but one can't deny that it makes the relative harmlessness and inanity of today's sexual satire seem woefully anemic.   

Southern dispatches from an era before The Rules refettered our once-unfettered naked lunches, before feel-bad skeeve was restored to sex, before the heavy price tag was re-affixed to free love, and when 'adult' cinema was adult--by adults for adults--and not the sole purview of 'endearingly' foul-mouthed but really sweet nerdy boys, who could be considered men only by sods who'd never seen Mad Men or any film made before 1982. This putsch of maturity and learnedness from the realm of animal sex may have seemed to the easily deluded PC snobs like a victory (1), but they were never good at spotting coincidence latticework anyway, their pineals being so calcified over from pollution of the precious bodily fluids that they're blind to even the idea they might be blind. They've forgotten that when intellectual satire is volleyed at sacred institutions, exposing the truth of the latticework to all our awakened horror it destroys only the dead cells within, leaving the rest vibrant and now hip enough to incorporate its own critique; meanwhile the potty-mouthed prattle of  today's grown infants is never a threat to the status quo and can indeed be yoked to the patriarchy's repressive practices. So it is WRITTED! Not one dead cell shall slough!

Jane Fonda - Barbarella

Thus Southern, the Alvarado Swinburne, the rabid hetero Wilde, was obscene only to illuminate the truer obscenities of religion, Washington, the pertrochemical industry, the funeral industry, the American military, Wall Street, academia, the Western Medical Association, even the gurus and hippie new agers of the counterculture, and especially himself. His was the the voice of the savage American expatriate id grounded in literature and art (Sorbonne, Paris Review  et al) full of unbeatable Bugs Bunny trickster tactics and willing to look deep into the horrifically obscene gluttony and madness of human civilization without blinking, or even judging. The kind of adult humor he spearheaded into existence wasn't aimed at naughty boys of fifteen, but real live adults, with deep smoker's voices and a level of maturity we no longer see today (think Johnny Carson vs. Jimmy Fallon, or even Animal House vs. The Bunny -- AND WEEP for tomorrow's America that will one day make even Jonah Hill seem a stalwart fount of manly gravitas).

If there's still an author with 'adult' intellect left standing after the PC putsch, who can be lusty without merely lapsing into unconscious misogyny through the sheer 'trying' of not to be, he is well-hidden, and would never dare write a book that could bring us out of this maturity death spiral, or could be made into a film like Candy, which seems to condone molestation, drugging women without their consent, borderline rape, and so forth. Seems being the secret word. Men now feel so bad if we say no to a relationship after saying yes to sex we'd just as soon say no to the whole bloody business, but back then no one was meant to feel bad at all, even for chasing a girl young enough to be one's daughter around the room with one's tongue hanging out. Well, if you neuter your satiric dog, he may stop humping your leg and peeing in the corners, but he's also apt to hide when the burglars of phony morality and 'sacred' patriarchy show up, thus making his entire existence rather pointless. And those burglars he let in are actually squatters who, once ensconced within your walls, shall not leave but proceed to eat your masculine drive down to a mawkish enfeebled little nub, to the point the only sense of power you have comes Cialis for daytime use.

You know what I'm trying to say, the institutional targets most deserving of take-down sit smug behind walls of standards and practice policies while writers are sent scurrying after mundane consensual love affairs, bawdiness relegated to teenagers at band camp or softcore augmentation puerility, and anyone who texts the wrong person at the wrong hour winds up shamed by the nation. And yet did we think we would shame nature? Knowing how little it did for us, sex-wise, would we 80s liberal undergrads have ever gone along willingly with our PC symbolic collective castration if we knew chicks would still pick the brutish lothario's casual lay over our sensitive pledge driving? What's the point of being a feminist if it doesn't get you laid?

The vanishing of Southern's ilk is a reminder perhaps that writers are not allowed groupies anymore. Comedy writers now must lament their loserdom, their failure with women, their small dicks. Dying in the desert of the modern masculine they turn back to their buddies for support: bromance, and gay jokes, whistling in the hetero foxhole dark as women become more and more unapproachable, let alone molestable (Jody Hill's Observe and Report a rare, glorious exception). When we do see a famous comic in a standard groupie hook-up its presented in the most mutually demeaning manner possible (ala Adam Sandler in Funny People). In France and England (or Argentina) on the other hand, writers can be pot-bellied and balding, and too drunk to even make it to the party plane, but as long as they've produced books or filmed scripts, they're allowed sex, groupies, and lovely ladies on each arm with no reason to brag or feel bad or be made to look sleazy or pathetic.

Southern, centered

This is actually quite a luxury since writers must retreat from the social groove in order to write about the social groove, so in fact may only very lightly tread therein, but the three times said writer went out drinking with other luminaries are well recorded in their respective historical annals - making it seem like they went out all the time. The truth is, we writers are all in the head, the noggin, the throat of the soul, so when we seduce it's in an awkward half-paralyzed lurching movement. That's why we tend to do our boondoggling in frenzied bursts, getting as many women mad at us as possible, then running off and settle with the one girl willing to do all the heavy lifting, and who won't mind when we jump out of bed to write about the experience before it's even over.

Southern may have been a little sneaky getting some bird into bed but it was under the rubric that both of them would have a good time, that free love was just that - especially if you were a friend of the Beatles and worked with Kubrick. So the high-functioning gropers of Candy may come from Southern perhaps witnessing blokes gone instantly from birdless to beflocked statue status with a single hit record and noted the accompanying changes in their sexual drive and finesse or lack thereof, for 'tis easy to be a stud when you're not actually putting out --once the pants come off all sorts of embarrassing equipment failures can manifest, Cialis for daily use still decades away, uncut coke dust in the wind and groupies impatiently waiting, their plaster cast a-drying as we speak.

All of which is an elaborate, rambling set-up for the discussion of Candy because even in contemporary America's chilly intolerant climb we wouldn't dream of calling Ringo Starr or Marlon Brando a dirty womanizer, or Richard Burton or James Coburn a pathetic joyless bathroom groupie humper -- which is one of the reasons their characters' over-the-top sexual harassment, abuse of patriarchal authority, even medical malpractice, flourishes into full subversive flower in ways that would be to unappetizing if ugly hairy-backed plebeians were doing it. That Brando, Coburn and Burton, particularly, lampoon themselves and their status' and profession's own most private (dirty) groupie-trawling here should brook no scolding. Indeed, should be celebrated!

Especially when juxtaposed with modern stuff like HBO's use of graphic rutting which stresses the more mutually demeaning and bestial aspects of sex, Southern's brand of erotica is positively life-affirming. Southern takes the Voltaire hint and presents the sex drive, and the naked body with all its hairs and gasses, as incorruptible. Ultimately, what is being satirized is the sexual repression that forces men to strike comically affected postures before becoming slavering beasts when within striking distance of some hottie naif with blonde hair and a pink mini dress, and the way all their strutting and hot air just makes them all the more ridiculous when their trousers are off, for no amount of hot air can smooth the awkward transition from civilized gentleman to a spastically humping mastiff. One look at conservative hysteria over birth control on one end, or the PC lockstep of the other in today's sexual clime, and the once de rigueur Joy of Sex deflates to a pleasant moment before acres of guilt and anxiety and as far as movies are concerned, the kind of ravishment women like to read about in some of the more disreputable Harlequin offshoots is completely out. One false step and you wind up on Lifetime. 

 Though only based on Southern's original novel (written with Southern's fellow Parisian ex-pat and Olympia Press dirty-lit writer Mason Hoffenberg), adapted for the film by American satirist Buck Henry (coming hot off The Graduate), directed by Christian Marquand (a French actor, as odd and illogical a choice for an American satire as Mike Sarne for Myra Breckinridge [1970]) and filmed by a French-Italian crew, Candy seems, in large part, based on what it has in common with Dr. Strangelove, quintessentially Southern. Both films are savagely honest critiques of America's noisemaker patriotism and paranoia and the sexual puritanism that underwrites it. Kicking things off, Burton is mind-blowingly grandly spectacularly pathetic and hilarious as McPhisto, a grandiose 'dirty-minded' poet making a grand appearance, wind in the hair, electric rock blaring, at a student assembly, brilliantly modulating a cascade of punch lines in a cue card rhythm  - "I wrote that," he says after his first poem, long hair and scarf blowing, "laying near death... in a hospital bed...  in the Congo"  (pause for political righteousness).. after being...savagely beaten... by a horde of outraged Belgian tourists." His fluid Welsh wit makes great rolling use of pauses and accented words as he orates, speaking in Latin only to admit he's not quite sure if it means anything, mentioning his books have been "banned or burned in over 20 countries... and fourteen... developing nations." Shifting from famous genius posing to hangdog contrition as he mentions his book is available, signed by the author for three dollars in cash or money order, even bringing Welsh florid anguish to the mailing address, culminating in "Lemmington, New Jersey." It's a great performance not least for the wry way Burton satirizes himself, and actors in general - the psychosis that can result when one is carried away too firmly by one's own booming mellifluence.

Burton, orating with creepy alien hybrid

Candy: "Oh my gosh, (watching Burton fall out of the car, soaked in whiskey) he's a mess!
Zero: "Well man, that's the story of love."

Moments later MacPhisto has Candy in the back of his Benz (indeed there's the idea he came there expressly to pick out a co-ed) while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) drives, though there seems to be a kind of understanding that they share the automobile and get into sexual adventures together ala Don Juan and Leporello (switching roles nightly, perhaps). "Candy - beautiful name," he says as prelim to his attack, "it has the spirit and the sound of the old testament." A Scotch spigot in his glass bottom Benz gets turned on by accident, and McPhisto winds up crawling around, booming about his 'giant, throbbing need' making a play for Candy but winding up pathetically (truly surreal) lapping spilled Scotch off the floor, getting it on his trousers, and ending up in Candy's basement with his pants off, heroically making love to a doll that looks eerily like abductee descriptions of alien-human hybrids while reciting random verses and sobbing heroically as Ringo Starr as a Mexican gardener (terrible enough with his half-assed Alfonso "Stinking Badges" Bedoya-by-way-of-Speedy-Gonzalez accent to be a real adult film actor) paws at Candy on the pool table, all while Zero (Sugar Ray Robinson) helps himself to the basement bar dispensing bon mots ("Quo Vadis, baby!") and beaming so approvingly at the crazy scene methinks I was in the kind of hetero-camp heaven I once believed the sole province of Russ Meyer!

Now, alas, the MacPhisto adventure is the the best part of the entire film and even that is marred inn the second part by Ringo's terrible accent and 1/4-assed performance.  Luckily John "Gomez" Astin kicks it back into some sort of gear as Candy's swinger uncle, setting up a nice contrast to his square twin brother (Candy's father); the uncle's nymphomaniac swinger-in-furs quipster wife Livia (Elsa Martinelli) tells Candy she'll like New York, where kids "aren't afraid to scratch when it itches" but a drive to the airport finds them all accosted by Ringo's three sisters riding up on motorcycles like banshee harpy wicked witch Jezebel Humongous' gang debs, their long black veils fluttering behind them for a brilliant wicked witch of the west / harpy / Valkyrie / flying nun effect --another high point though once the whips and brass knuckles come out the film starts to just hang there, leading to another mixed segment: Walter Matthau, miscast as a deranged Albanian-hating airborne paratroop general (it should have been George C. Scott or Lee Marvin -- who ever heard of a New York pinko Jew general?) and since when would a general waste his time in the air in control of only a planeload of shock troops? Though he does know how to keep deadpan when mocking military patriotism, Matthau's cadence as he rambles on about having a kid with Candy and sending him to military school lacks the kind of deranged jingoistic ring that Scott brought to both Patton and Turgidson or Hayden to Ripper, it's just depressing to imagine his scenario coming true, that poor kid, the both of them!

But Candy's next adventure involving James Coburn's toreador Hackenbush-ish brain surgeon Dr. Krankheit ("This is a human life we're tinkering with here, man, not a course in remedial reading!") is a most definite second peak. His histrionic operating theatrics might seem a bit Benway-esque but Burroughs was a friend and Coburn has the spirit of the thing in the way, say, David Niven never did in Casino Royale. Like Burton, Coburn modulates Shakespearian antithesis and masculine actorly power, seizing the chance to let his sacral chakras vibrate and hum; aside from Burton he's the only other star in the film's luminary cast to recognize the covert brilliance buried in even the most seemingly mundane lines (which Matthau breezed right over) and to let each word ring like freedom (from sanity). Amping up his patented actorly mannerisms to conjure a physician as liberated but completely insane Wellesian titan-- accusing the audience of thinking what he was a moment ago just saying--throwing his scalpel to the floor and just sticking his curse fingers right into the comatose Astin's brain (one slip and the patient "will be utterly incapable of digit dialing") saluting the crowd with his bloody middle finger in triumph, Coburn is MAGNIFICENT!

And just when it can't get any better, Anita Pallenberg (alas, dubbed, as she was in Barbarella) attacks as Krankheit's number one nurse; Buck Henry cameos as a mental patient in a straitjacket trying to attack Candy in the elevator; John Huston as a prurient administrator who seems to get off and trying to shame Candy in front of the entire post-op party after she's caught being molested by her uncle; and what a party! Krankheit dispenses B12-amphetamine cocktail shots in the ass like party favors, and the pink-clad nurses wait around like beholden nuns in some religious spectacle for their master to wave his hand. Coburn's medical innovations include a 'female' electrical socket affixed to the back of Candy's father's head, so he can drain off the excess wattage and power a small radio. Again, the kind of thing that modern films would not approve of, i.e. How dare you satirize a litigious, lawyered and humorless institution like the AMA, sir!? For another the president of John Hopkins is a friend of the studio!

Candy - w/ James Coburn and Anita Pallenbeg

There's still good things to come, but the next adventure, involving a trio of groping Mafioso and a crazy wop filmmaker, is just crude, pointless and skippable; ditto the shocked cops playing up their blue collar bewilderment at all the preversions (shades of Col. Bat Guano) as they bash frugging drag queens, crack nightsticks down on colorful hippies, and wind up crashing the squad car because they can't help leering down Candy's dress. As usual, the dialogue is interesting but the targets too easily lampooned, like yeah we know cops are jerks, man. Why not branch out, have the cops be groovy. Hell they were the best part of Superbad! But it being 1968 I guess these things were still new. Now, though, the police brutality angle is pretty dated and also closest moment the film comes to out and out hostility toward its satirized, and so the film begins its slow wandering downhill. Candy hides out in Central Park where she hooks up with a criminal mastermind hunchback played by Charles Aznavour, who can climb up walls and jump into watery windows ("an old stereoscopic trick" says the unimpressed cops), all well and good but Aznavour's aggressively twitchy rat-like Benigni-Feldman-style behavior is another soul-deadening stretch, centered around a gag you'll see coming a mile off (if you've seen Godfather 2 - which admittedly came after).

Candy finally winds up in the holy water-flooded mobile ashram of the guru Grindl --played by Marlon Brando -- funny if not quite at the level of Burton or Coburn and stuck in a limbo between sounding strangely like modern Johnny Depp, with an Indian accent that starts out high and fast but quickly unravels into 'Abie the fish peddler' Jewish territory, mining the rhythm of Lenny Bruce as Groucho or Sky Masterson as Peter Sellers in The Party. Brando's way too internalized for Grindl to reach the egotistic grandeur of McPhisto or Krankheit but for fans of old pre-code WB and Paramount comedies it's a gas linking his accents to the ancient Vaudeville rhythms. When he says you 'must travel beyond thirst, beyond hunger" he's noshing on a sausage and sounds like Hugh Herbert, which is great, but it's such a dick move it's hard to feel anything by a sympathy headache for poor Candy if one doesn't have one by then anyway. Once the fake white snow comes down through the open top, Grindl now hopelessly congested and spent after a scant six 'levels' of enlightenment utters his last lines like "you muss fine da sacred boid" with a seeming mouthful of borscht and Godfather cotton. Shocking and racist as it might be to find an actor of Brando's caliber in Indian garb trying to be as downtown hip as Lenny Bruce, and hanging in the sixties equivalent of a shag carpet lined party van, just remember Brando (and Burton) liked working in adult film Europe at the time (when adult meant adult, remember) making things like (the X-rated) Last Tango in Paris, and Bluebeard (both 1972) where they could be in the company of vast acres of underdressed starlets, dining with jet set Italian millionaires who knew the good life in ways Hollywood could never duplicate and free to drink and smoke and screw to excess in a country that understood the joy of the finer things vs. America's globe-destructing pressure cooker of Vietnam and post-Puritan repression.

Which brings me to my final thought bubble --the idea central to Candy's Christian value - which begins with what MacPhisto says in the beginning about being willing to giving oneself freely as the height of human grace. Sure it's a line men use to try and get women into bed but if they didn't try, where would humanity be, and as Lenny Bruce would say, that's the difference between obscenity and humanity. The truth of our 'huge, throbbing need' is unendurable any other way except as a joke that paradoxically lets us save face and free ourselves of it at the same time. It's the last bastion of the healthy human body's societal failings, the hairy gorilla reality that won't ever totally hide underneath the expensive's suit and polished air. We need a forgiving tolerance of this gorilla, because if you denude the beast in the suit only to sneer at him or deliver some drab lecture on morals or objectification, all you do is bum out the world, not enlighten it. Instead, Southern proves 'nothing sacred' is itself the most sacred of philosophies, that there's nothing bad about the human biological system, from sex to eating to shitting to dying ---in Southern's satire human biology, with all its hair and noises and needs, is celebrated, satirized, and forgiven its uncanny otherness, while the moral hypocrisy, the judgment and denial of these bodily inescapabilities, is attacked without mercy and it is these hypocrisies that create the situations wherein men are consistently unable to behave courteously towards the provocation of Candy's nubile wide-eyed innocence.

"We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals." - KR, in deposition

Macroscoping out to that first paragraph coincidence latticework now -- Southern comes from a time when intellectual men were still allowed to be men, and hipsters were not pale smirking skinny jeans wallies crossing the street to avoid second hand smoke and arguing in a mawkish voice about using plastic bags at the food co-op. Southern's era had more repression and obscenity laws to reckon with, but they had the artistic clout to bash into them with dicks swinging and fists helicoptering. If Southern and friends had been at that food-co-op meeting they would be hurling the organic produce at that anemic hipster, bellowing like a lion, inhaling every kind of smoke presented. Back in their own time all they could do instead was rage against the dying of their pre-Viagra erections, and then die for real, as nature intended, either in Vietnam or that Norman Maine surf rather than clinging to bare life like today's greedy octogenarians bankrupting Medicare so they can eke out one more month past their due date, the impatient specter waiting in the reception area, rereading that old Us Weekly for the eleven hundredth time while doctors stall out the clock since they're paid by the nanosecond. Real hipsters, having faced death abroad or within, heroically dodged the draft, or leapt into the waiting arms of the angry fuzz, or served jail time for a single joint--earned their aliveness and their stash of army amphetamine; they were able to dig on and understand out-there modern jazz, and to smoke anywhere without complaint. They lingered at the moveable feast of expat Paris, armed with coffee, whiskey, hashish from the Arab quarter, mushrooms from Mexico, burgundy from California, hep-C from New York and, if they pilgrimaged south, the holy yage. Today we're lucky if we can afford a single Sex on the Beach and there's no smoking, sir... sir.... no smoking (and in NYC no dancing either).

Perhaps in revisiting Candy we can, as a nation, whisper "Rosebud" for our lost sleddy balls and re-discover how well-read intellectual weight might once again benefit from rabid id-driven boosters in trying to make it through the zipper of hypocrisy and into the stratosphere. Southern was the first to climb up on the A-bomb of sexual freedom in lettres and ride the New Journalism (which he arguably invented) to the primary target, which is your face, and he had the chops to turn on your electric lattice of coincidence-detectors. America was still strong enough to handle any amount of MASH-style shower tent unveiling. America knew that facing its own monstrous extinction with a joke rather than cloaking it all in rhetoric and duck-and-cover exercises was noble, that working through the terror that strikes when a hot blonde girl with no discernible income lands in your lap is heroic, that being able to accept and engage in casual sex with a random girl on your commuter train is brave, while refusing waving a defensive wedding ring and racing out at the next stop is not noble, but shameful indeed (and lord knows I am ashamed for doing it). Gentlemen, we cannot allow a NYMPHOMANIAC gap!

From Left: Burroughs, Southern, Ginsberg, Genet

NOTES:
1. Southern's mincing gay stereotypes (espec. in The Magic Christian and The Loved One)

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"You have my word as an inveterate cheat" - WHAT'S NEW PUSSYCAT? (1965)

With the way Woody Allen's sexual neurosis has gone into a deep WASP-y freeze these past decades, it's easy to forget his 60's pro-libido worldview and that old carefree magic that used to show us the winking trickster behind his neurotic fussing: TAKE THE MONEY AND RUN, SLEEPER, BANANAS and PLAY IT AGAIN SAM, in fact everything he wrote before his break-out, STAR WARS-beating-for-the-Oscar success, ANNIE HALL. His Humbert-ish yens and ectomorph satyriasis provided an exhilarating freshness that was part of the sexual revolution. His nebbishy persona doesn't exclude him from the in-crowd of that era, so he's not as threatened by the competition for the WASP chicks with O'Toole a few successes down the road. But in PUSSYCAT he's not competing against O'Toole, he's writing for him. And he even gives the leg-humping lion share to a second Brit, Peter Sellers, and working as one and with a bevy of hot talented comediennes the film rises like a balloon way past the clumsy boudoir farce of types like Blake Edwards, who always seemed too easily hypnotized by a pretty shape with less of an idea how to film it, preferring to hang out in raincoat drag clubs with Oktoberfest grotesques.

But British directors Clive Donner and Robert Talmadge seem to know enough to just get out of the way, like you would for the Marx Brothers. In a great extended scene, Fritz and O'Toole get drunk together in a Paris cafe, half-fighting, then apologizing, then taking off their coats to slug it out, then forgetting why they took their coats off, before staggering over to Capucine's baroque apartment tower, arm and arm, to lob rocks and slurred declarations of love up to her balcony: "Tell her her face is like ze pale autumn moon!" beseeches Sellers. "I'm not going to say that," Toole slurs. "It's ghastly!" Drunken recitations from Hamlet are tossed instead to indicate the Immoral Bard is with them, and O'Toole playing a drunk doing Hamlet is about the best Hamlet or O'Toole can be. And Sellers' ridiculous black wig makes sense when he pops up as Richard III in a dream sequence (he apparently loved the wig so much he wore it all through the shoot). I love O'Toole here even more than in MY FAVORITE YEAR, and in some ways if you factor in the Allen worked in the Borscht Belt gag room of Your Show of Shows then you realize PUSSY might even be a prequel to YEAR, from an era smoother, bawdier epoch, before sex was relegated to foul-mouthed 17 year-old virgins.

But while MY FAVORITE YEAR was fun and O'Toole played a drunken old buccaneer well, it doesn't hold up well. It has terribly unimaginative lighting and scoring, and its reliance on a barrage of ethnic humor, nebbishy voice-overs, and 'oh how zany' old saws like stealing the police horse in Central Park at dawn are way too forced and cliche. But in PUSSYCAT there's real madness in the air and O'Toole has the energetic languor of a man who's been laughing a lot in between takes and is grateful to be having such clever lines, and so many pretty girls to woo, and he shows his gratitude by giving the material a depth of actorly resonance most dramatic stars playing comedy wouldn't bother with. When he brings cricket ball and bat to his insane group therapy meeting it feels like he's sharing something with these new friends that have been making his sides hurt from laughing all month. It's beautiful.

O'Toole plays a charmer so irresistible to women and so unable to resist them that his life has been one long series of one-night stands with one of his more insistent conquests, played by Schneider, demanding he marry her. He loves her so he tries to comply so goes to see a psychiatrist, Fritz (Sellers), to help him with what we'd now call sex addiction (and we'd now be compelled to say, "There's nothing funny about it!" in case a sanctimonious but cute girl is listening). Meanwhile, Woody shows up as Victor, a nervous stripper's aid who somehow winds up taking Romy Schneider home to his little pad --her act of reprisal against O'Toole's waffling, the way Miriam Hopkins was always going off with Edward Everett Horton.

PUSSYCAT began as a Warren Beatty vehicle apparently which makes sense, but it would have been a completely different film, nowhere near as fun. We'd just hate Beatty for managing to bed all these girls and still look tan and nonplussed. We can't hate O'Toole because his pallor is that of a man taking too much Cialis. And scoring loads of babes seems so critical to Beatty's self-esteem that it's not fun, just compulsive. O'Toole just genuinely seems too enraptured by the beauty and sparke. Each broad takes just a bit of his bodily fluids, and each takes him farther from being able to look his fiancee in the eye, but he's so enamored by each new girl, and so appreciative of their attention that each time is like the first. As he struggles valiantly against his inner nature, women are literally dropping out of the skies into his motorcar. What's a nobly drunk insouciant to do?

That's the joy of it all, we'd do just what he's doing, except maybe not try so hard to keep Schneider... though her parents turn out to be pretty fun at a party. Another genius rarity! You know those affairs where you stick it out an extra year because you like drinking with her parents!? You don't? O monsieur! And another thing that hasn't happened in 1965 (aside from AIDS, of course), that grisly story of what too much sex did to Three Dog Night's Danny Hutton. As far as we knew, there could never be too much sex. Oh man, to have Cialis for daily use, but as yet no AIDS? Can you imagine?

Naturally Allen's script is going to lean at some point towards his beloved Fellini, via a image of O'Toole with whip and slouch hat as women fight over him in a dream, but I always got the impression Fellini was too guilty Catholic to really go for it rather than run home at the last minute hyperventilating like Marcello's provincial papa in LA DOLCE VITA. O'Toole's women on the other hand are all believable conquests and his befuddled sense of crushing over-stimulation conveys what it feels like when every girl in the room is fighting over you and then they go home with someone else and suddenly no one wants you and you're suddenly tossed away in the street for twenty years, alone and wondering what you did wrong, like the Jeff Beck guitar neck in BLOW-Up or Donna's rain cake. O'Toole has that weakened look of a man who's been fought over enough that he barely notices.

from top: Ursula Andress, Romy Schneider, Capucine, Paula Prentiss

Then there's the women: Ursula Andress ("She's a personal friend of James Bond!" Fritz shouts) has seldom been more alluring as a mark-missing skydiver who lands in O'Toole's roadster en route to le Chateau Chantal, where the cast is assembling for the final, inevitable closet-hopping merry-go-round, along with Paula Prentiss, aces as a manic stripper-poetess ("Who killed Charlie Parker? You did!") working on her fifth nervous breakdown / pill OD (the detox ward later presents her with a commemorative plaque). Capucine is a sexy bundle of nymphotic repression and I love her to death, so why pick Romy Schneider's pussycat over all those meaningless... gorgeous.... succulent... crazy other pussycats? She's cute and can be vivacious but ends up with the one-note monogamy-hawker part; she even thinks she's being cute when she steals his car keys and won't give them back. And you know how she ended up --all but wrapped in collector's non-acidic mylar by Jacques Dutronc in The Important thing is to Love. (1975).
 

But what's important is that Woody doesn't really believe either notion - monogamy or nymphomania - is the answer, but he's having fun being funny rather than Artsy. Writing a character like O'Toole's sex addict seems to help this young version of Allen's pen live large: the sex is fun and easy and breezy, not the cranky old bourgeois intellectual renting a prostitute sex of his future films. O'Toole's tall lanky Britishness gives Allen permission to do things at a literally Wagnerian pitch. His pen's libido seems charged with that exhilaration that only comes when a non-Catholic writes farce in France, to the point that even when O'Toole starts tenderly yammering about how his true love was right in front of him all the while and his own back yard and love is where you left it and so forth, a big author's message sign flashes on... and on. Man, that author's message sign could be flashing nonstop in the last dozen films Woody's made!

That's fine because, marriage-minded women or no, there's some of that giddy thrill of when you're 'on a roll' and women start fighting over you, or you just get lucky and for once aren't saying idiotic things and blowing your chances, and actually getting a bottle, a bed, and a girl together all at the same time and life is a jazzy gas. Even if poor Allen's character spazzes and Sellers is basically trying to date rape Capucine all through the film, why not forgive it? And if you have laughter, it doesn't even matter if you end up with nothing else. Just look at those crazy actors in this picture below. They're having a blast, and why not?

So instead of getting upset just think about the way young woman all claim they're helpless nymphomaniacs to a man and then refuse his advances a second later, and all the other things that have disappeared from films due to PC ethos. There was once upon a time a book called "The Joy of Sex" that was on every adult's bookshelf --even in suburbia. Nowadays there wouldn't be a book like that, now it would be The "Joy" of Responsibility - where even porn stars are required to use aesthetically depressing condoms and there are enough lectures about the importance of family values and settling down in every romcom to turn off even a moralistic lecturer like the post-code MGM. But with PUSSYCAT we don't have to worry about that. Here, everything is always 1965 and no woman runs who doesn't secretly want to be chased, and even the cross fades are psychedelic, and the perfume of giddy madness eliminates any staleness in the boudoir-farcical air. Whoa whoa whoa Whoa! Whoa.

PS - And just when you think it can't get any better? Francoise Hardy. Now there's a French actress I'd have given up my low-down tomcat ways for, and all she'd have to do is sing "La Chazz l'infantile."

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Bouncer at the Gates of Love: REVOLUTION (1968)

"What we're seeing is a basic change in the evolutionary progress of mankind - something only priests and monks were into until a very long time ago, and that is consciousness expansion." 

So notes an unnamed head in Jack O'Connell's REVOLUTION (1968), a crazy, narrator-free documentary about the Haight Ashbury community that still glimmers with a bid of LSD sparkle even today. And he's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed, two steps forward and in 1968 we were yet to start stumbling back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race to 1967:. LSD was still legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, changing an entire age demographic from self-absorbed mopes into free-spirited truth seekers (Twitter would be perhaps vice versa). And not only the young kids but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-minded spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; LSD was everywhere--in clinical psychiatrist offices, research, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' from which "Purple Haze" gets its name as free samples at Monterey Pop.

Radical new paradigms could be soaked up very easily on acid. Evolution sped up on psychedelics. It was pretty 'hip' to at least have tried LSD even if just so you might have some actual insight into the hippie movement before you condemned their lifestyle. Having tried it made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping in the 1980s, or ecstasy in he 90s.

The always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, O’Connell doesn’t bother with conventions like linear construction or identifying subtitles. Themes and locations shift at whim, interview subjects go unidentified. Anonymous faces provide scant commentary on David Smith’s Free Clinic, and The Diggers’ Free Store and free food program, both deserving more time and respect. As does the mystery existentialist envisioning a cash-free future run by computers necessitating the need for a pot-smoking leisure class. But these shortcomings don’t diminish some otherwise perceptive passages in Revolution, the most nostalgic of which concern the reach for a communal utopia, one the counterculture — countering greed, materialism, superficiality — believed would erase ego from the equation, to render the desire for personal reward obsolete…  (cont.)

Damn right, Flickhead. What the fuck happened to the pursuit of egolessness? Backed by music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. The crunchy psychedelic guitars are a most welcome presence in one's living room (dig, the "living"... room) even if you're not paying full attention to the kids onscreen or the squares gawking from the sidelines at the never-ending parade  of panhandlers along the Haight.

Whoa man. I'm totally tripping after seeing it. Pupils dilated in the mirror. 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who done stepped out her shell like... a girl named... Today.

No man, that's like her name. She changed her name to Today, because that's all we have, that's everything there is. Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: she begs for change in a really attractive, clean looking brown and light green poncho; she climbs trees and frolics in the park; she drives up the coast to dig the old growth; there's more squiggly light shows. Flowers! Flowers! She strokes an apple --it's breathing! Someone eats a banana. Some dude paints some crazy colors. She lies in the grass with two girlfriends, giggling hysterically. Even with the 21st century's roseless, untinted glasses you can feel her whole body sigh with relief as socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and good set and setting.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued REVOLUTION was--at least on some level--pitched less at the kids themselves and more at adults curious about all the free love, as in the lengthy naked dance light show to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below), but prurience is addressed too: hippies interviewed include a girl from the Sexual Freedom League who explains how only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't capsize the boat). Ah the logistics of orgy-mongering!

As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a resolved hatred for male sexual aggression. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like over-eating - dude, once you have some sex, move on. But America's trained men to be hungry ghosts when it comes to sex -- I guess you need to have a lot of it before you can see the forest for the trees. Look at Siddhartha! Or Mick Jagger! But that doesn't make it any less of an issue.  No one wants to sleep with these ugly raincoat pervs, so the pervy aspect remains.

The peak moment in all this is the writhing naked theater group dancing in front of the wild psychedelic light show to Country Joe's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 42." With one eye to the bush shots, the long takes with the light show definitely have a certain magic Kenneth Anger-style power. You can feel the amount of LSD that surged through the audience, as if the black magick strength of their lysergic gaze is captured in the celluloid itself! Hey, acid is grooovy.

Decades later watching all this on our laptops we can either grin cynically at all the naive spiritual tomfoolery or we can cry in thinking what we lost. The counterculture failed, or maybe it didn't. I used to argue this point with my guitarist all the time. He said no, the counterculture was alive, it had been integrated--driven underground perhaps--but all the stronger for being more exclusive. I argued that we failed, but now of course I'm in AA and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go.

REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping, interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the pre-trip adult opinion, cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs. Many of the adults think the  hippies are just slumming middle class college dropouts. Change the world through love and spiritual union if you can--power to the flower!--but damn get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so those bathrooms can stay clean --that's the adult's message. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's! I wanted to scream at the screen: "Bro! the people who brought these poor kids to your gleaming white sanitary gulag are the problem. A tripping person has no place in a hospital - they belong in the garden, with the sunflowers, or on the roof deck, sunbathing in their body paint and funny hats. Being strapped in a hospital straitjacket is no way to come out of a downward spiral. Blame the youth again for though they don't pay taxes or acknowledge the relevance of the establishment, the minute something goes wrong on their acid trips they demand the hospital take their twitching friend off their hands.

Another interesting moment comes when a hippie leader (the one discussed by Flickhead above) discusses the rise of "cybernation," or the increased use of computers, resulting in something called: "massive compulsory leisure." The realization that "this job could be better done by a machine" becomes the prelude to dropping out: "Many, I think, need to learn to do nothing."

He also thinks "LSD should be used to reveal the divine, it's no accident that it entered the world right at the time nuclear fission did." He adds, "If you deny yourself access to that kind of experience, to that kind of energy, then you are simply a fool!" Word, brother. But what about if you continue to take it, over and over, every day, until you're a gibbering mess sitting in a puddle behind the stage at a Phish show? Don't say it can't happen.

I remember feeling all lysergically connected to this kind of youthful hippie revolutionary moment, back in 1987 when I lucked into an instant loving relationship with my future bandmates and a cadre of beautiful, brilliant, blazing hippie chicks, and I feel deeply sorry for kids who many not have had such a 'trip,' - it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and now I white knuckle in an antisocial rapture like Max Von Sydow in HANNAH AND HER SISTERS. The revolution never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took. "But we have the music," and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves even if the adults tell them its dangerous.

Hopefully, this time, they'll figure out a way to shut out the pervs, tourists, and freeloaders who inevitably cohere around such a righteous fire like metal shavings to a beautiful magnet.

That's the ultimate problem with utopias... to really do them right you need to have brutal ways to keep the scum out of the garden - or you need to keep evolving so fast the losers can't catch up. Exclusivity and a high vantage point are needed, as is a bouncer, a gate-keeper, otherwise, forget it. And if you need a gate-keeper, what kind of utopia is that? It may look a lot like 2012.

There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see where those hippies are now, it's called THE HIPPIE REVOLUTION, from 1996. Avoid it! Who wants to see a flower child get old? If you must witness such tragedy, check out my tale of time traveling psychedelic gumshoes and the desire to return to that high water mark when LSD almost changed the entire world overnight for the better -- HIPPY IN A HELLBASKET.



Not available on DVD but 'out there' if you know where to look--like everything, man, it streams, dig?--REVOLUTION is from a different time, one where the word "revolution" hadn't been co-opted by the media to sell shows. I bet now even the word 'revolution' is trademarked by The Beatles-Macintosh Inc. What can you do about it? Capitalism controls the very words out of our mouths. No way to fight it, that's what we say today, no way to stop the corporate leeches. They're already in our bloodstream. But the hippies didn't know that, and in 1967-8 they did something about it, until they got sleepy, and strung out. And they forgot what they were supposed to be fighting against. And needed to go home and get money from their corporate dads so they could buy Dead tickets and red feather boas. This is their story

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Hell's Angels Vs. The Flower Child Dead: GIMME SHELTER (1970)

In the wake of Woodstock it was apparent to even the hardliners in office that "relating" to the youth movement had become intrinsic to long-term survival. Where the rock stars went, young potential voters followed in legions, a city's worth of population literally on the move. If they stopped getting high long enough to realize the power they had, these kids could overrun the capital without a single gun. In true American fashion, these youths were an organized political force and a swarm of ravenous locusts, eating, drinking, and smoking everything in sight and leaving only broken trees, cigarette butts, beer cans and mud in their wake. When the big rock acts came to play like some band of bespangled pied pipers it was up to the old guard to make sure they led all the rats to the swamps way outside of town.

Today we roll our eyes in outrage that FBI had files on rock stars like John Lennon but Altamont shows the feds weren't all wrong in seeing Christ-like rock stars as a threat to national security. Even so, they should have known how fast revolution gets postponed when one is fucked up, and fucked up these kids were. So, when Mick and Keith decided to do their own Woodstock out in California, the politicians and state leaders didn't try to talk any sense into them, or shut them down, or run them out of town on a rail, but instead rushed to accommodate with starstruck obsequiousness. All this is captured in Maysle's film: Among the sights and sounds is a chance to watch legal superstar Mel Belli come in to make sure local speedway managers don't stand in their way. When he tells the contrarian owner of the speedway on speaker phone: "The Stones will be there tomorrow morning," it's with granite certainty; no amount of cops can hold back this tide of youth. A platoon of cops would be as outnumbered as a skeleton UN peacekeeper force in the middle of a Rwandan genocide.



If you don't know what happened man, the Stones got Hell's Angels to do security and as there was no room for the Angels to hang out and drink their beer between the crushing rush of fans and the stage, dozens of people got tapped a little bit around the head with bike chains, pool cues, and in one case, a knife.

I've seen this film dozens of times since the late 1980s when my punk rocker friends and I would watch it every day after school, so I've had lots of time to study the footage and see what went wrong. As a kid I was all terrified of the Angels and what I thought was random violence. Now I see the film in the context of the endless Resident Evil and I think Altamont would make a great addition to the series: RE18:  Altamont 1969! The Angels Vs. the Living Flower Child Dead. I'm sure that it's what it felt like to the Angels, who were misled into thinking it would be a cakewalk and were thus unprepared for a job that entailed controlling a crowd of hundreds of thousands of bad acid-guzzling, late-to-the-lovefest poseurs, all suddenly remembering they know Mick Jagger personally and Mick invited them onstage and... oh wow, man this shit is kicking in and... it's all cool so let me just bite... a chunk... off the band's shoulder and climb into Charlie's bass drum and sleep it off.  The Angels were outnumbered and high as kites, who can blame them for going a little Street Fightin' Man on the glazed-eyed, needy throngs trying to climb over them? The whole Manson thing had, by then, occurred, so we knew west coast hippies weren't all folkie peacenik like the east coast, yeah I said it!


I mention this not to belittle the tragic events, but to illuminate how powerful and well-done the film is that for all the times I've seen it, I never remember much of anything except Mick's attempt to stay cool and happy onstage during the Altamont melt-down, something especially emblematic of the fall of the movement as a whole. He can't see or tell what's going on with the lights in his eyes, but he knows something bad is happening, and the confidence and sense of artistic freedom leaks so fast out of his voice you can hear the whole world's optimism going with it.

"People always seems to get in some kind of a scuffle every time we start to play that number," he says. His sexy rockstar cocksuredness becoming a "let's all remain calm, children" kind of principal at the school assembly. "People, Cool out! Sisters! Brothers and Sisters! We don't want to fight, do we?" But he asked another rhetorical question just a few scenes earlier: "You don't want my trousers to fall off, do you?" And in both cases the answer is the same subhuman, pre-or-post-lingual howl.

Rock stars asking for restraint? Hilarious to a faux-jaded teenager for whom it's all just yesterday's papers such as I and my punk pals in high school. But as I age into it, the pandemonium and moments of quiet beauty throughout the film are all too real and too true to be merely simplified, tag-lined, and forgotten.


In the end, for all their peacenik lip service, GIMME SHELTER is the Stones as the sirens calling the hippies forward to dash their brain ships onto the rocks of Angel chains. The Stones were never about peace and love in the cornball "this is called prana yoga, everybody. It gets you really high, okay?" way of Woodstock; nor were they the working class yobs like the Who; the Stones were dandies, art school kids more concerned with their Carnaby Street clothes and chicks (or 'birds') than patchouli and sandal worship. The Angels had done good security for the Grateful Dead, but nobody needs to rush the stage at a Dead show. Ain't no one pretty enough in that band for even the hungriest zombie to want to maim, much as Bob Weir liked to think otherwise. The Stones had used a British chapter of the Angels at their Hyde Park Brian Jones memorial concert the previous July, but as Gadfly's David Dalton notes:

As security (for the Hyde Park performance) the (Stones) used Hell's Angels. Well, er, English Hell's Angels—the Stepney chapter. East End yobs playing at being in a motorcycle club. The Stones liked to flirt with pantomime violence—always fun and decorative, isn't it? And hadn't these rough lads given the show just that bit of Clockwork Orange frisson that the afternoon needed?

For years I thought Altamont as just a case of the Hell's Angels just being violent because they could--were bullies--a lifelong fear of mine (that never materialized) but as my viewings have increased and the image has become cleaner, I realize that while the Angel's methods may have been too brutal for the scene, there just wasn't good enough security otherwise all down in front of the stage and Mick and company would have been overrun, and possibly ripped to shreds like Sebastian Venable in Suddenly Last Summer if the Angels hadn't been there to fight back the tide the only way they knew how, with pool cues and chains. I bet Sebastian would have been glad to see the Angels ride to his rescue, instead of Liz Taylor's hippie pacifist virgin, just standing by the wayside, wringing her lily white hands!!

I remember a skinhead bouncer saving my ass once in a similar situation at a show in Trenton's City Gardens for the LA punk rock group X around 1984. Some guys were trying to turn the front nto a mosh pit back when the days it was still called "slam-dancing" and this big bald punk guy, probably about seven feet tall yanked me out of the way of a drunken fist flying right at my head through the melee while I stood there, lightheaded and dumbstruck. The tall bald guy stuck his own fist out and smashed it into the face of the guy who was coming right at me, halting his frame and forcing his fist to pull up inches from my face as if he'd run into a concrete wall. I got blood all over my shirt and if not for that skinhead, I'd have been knocked the fuck out and likely trampled! It was the coolest moment of my life up to then and when I looked up on stage, Exene Cervenka was smiling down at me like she'd just knighted my teenage ass.

My point in recalling this anecdote is that violence is not always bad. It's just that, like the cops at the Democratic convention the previous year, the Angels do not practice "restrained" violence, especially in a situation where there's no "out" door to escort rowdy stage crashers through onto the street where they won't have to deal with the same stage crashing culprits just showing up again two minutes later. You can only try and move them back a bit, and when the hippies are swarming all over you, it definitely is like Dawn of the freakin' Dead. I know, my band played Syracuse U's block party in the late 80s.

The sight in GIMME SHELTER of all the crazies thinking if they stagger drunkenly enough they can just force their way to the front of the stage makes for a chilling comment on when the wrong people do drugs without observing the proper rules of set and setting. And man, Woodstock or Monterey may have been cool, but Altamont was no place to be dosing your face off, naked and insane, crawling over the tops of people. If you've seen the film you should right now be thinking of that big naked chick who shows up zonked out of her mind "down the front," near the end and just starts rubbing herself on anyone in her way, zonked and oblivious to how much discomfort she's causing, acting like the humanity before her is just so much ocean to swim through, like she's a monstrous Titanic. There's no defense; punch her and she won't even feel it, and try lifting her up and out of the crowd without a crane, and PS - there is no 'out' of the crowd, no place to eject unruly fans to.

 You didn't see people crowding the stage in a mad rush over Ravi Shankar at Monterey! People were sitting in fucking chairs! There were big empty aisles... and that was only two years before Altamont. What happened?

The uncool masses who shouldn't be given drugs got some, is what happened. Drugs aren't all good like Woodstock made it seem, brown acid aside; nor all bad, like the sizzling eggs in the pan TV spots. Drugs might bring you enlightenment but you can't stay there in it forever, and that's a bum trip, so if you're an idiot, you try and take more and stay high, which never works.

One of the most beautiful love vibe sleepover parties I ever was at happened in a cabin in Vermont in 1991 in the autumn: brotherly love, pure liquid, dancing and discovery, everything became new and beautiful, steam out of the morning coffee cups like smoke signals from a far off mountain. It was so good the host had a second party with all the same people, in the winter, and this time all the same "right" ingredients added up to something that was so depressing  the acid just amplified the unbearable feeling of cut-offedness. No way to claw my way out of the saran wrap of depression, short of literally clawing my way out of my own skin. That's GIMME SHELTER. Woodstock had been trying to be a normal concert, so enough expectations were in place that the communal vibe had the element of surprise. When you expect it to all just miraculously work you're headed for a fall.

In the end it's all about balance. You can try to redress a longstanding imbalance with drugs, but you can't "outwit" balance. All good times have a bad times bill at the end, and vice versa. No pain no gain goes both ways... or to paraphrase Bill Cosby: "drugs don't kill pain, just postpone it." The marathon runner, the loyal worker and devoted soldier all demonstrate an intrinsic understanding of balance. The post-rave depression girl who pops one more hit because she just can't stand the pain, she's not helping redress the balance. You don't get a pendulum to stop swinging by pushing it harder. You have to wait.... shhhhhh. Calm down. That's what rehabs are for.... shhhh....

I wish I'd had a chance in this post to talk about how much I love seeing the Stones looking all hungover and adrift in the dirty south on their 1968 tour all through GIMME SHELTER. The scene at Muscle Shoals studio listening to "Wild Horses," which Kim Morgan writes brilliantly about here, or the emotion-cracked voice of Stones drummer Charlie Watts, who becomes kind of the de facto soul of the band via his seat at Maysles' moviola for the framing device. It's all brilliant and like all the best concert documentaries,--and like the movement itself--over much too quickly. But thank the devil for the Maysles, who make sure what we do have is fuckin' awesome. GIMME SHELTER reminds us of how the biggest highs crash hardest, while giving us priceless fly on the wall glimpses of the Stones at the pinnacle of their greatness. Best of all, it captures the peak moment when the great Satanic majesty Mick Jagger realized he'd accidentally stirred up some elder god of chaos and destruction beyond his control, a juggernaut of self-absorbed drug-guzzling pain that time would dub "the Seventies."

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