While I’ve posted numerous times about the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico this year, but I’ve been missing the chance to celebrate other faves. Now that I’m done with all those October horror posts I’m getting back on track with my notable music anniversaries.

American Stars and Bars isn’t considered to be one of Neil Young’s best records, but I’ve always loved the album which turned 40 this year. Critics complain that it’s uneven, but that’s one of the things I like best about it. One side of the record is straight country but the other side is rock. I guess it’s normal for folks to get confused by such an offering, but I like country Neil and rock Neil so of course I dig this double scoop. Plus, how can anybody not love an album that includes a classic like “Like a Hurricane?”

Here’s a cool Neil doc examining his career starting from the mid-1970s through the turn of the millennium. ‘Stars and Bars is the first record spotlighted here…

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Continuing our look back at 1977′s amazing year of movies I was able to find Looking for Mr. Goodbar online last night. This flick features Diane Keaton — the quintessential 1970′s actress? — and a slew of budding stars including Richard Gere, Tom Berenger, Brian Dennehy, and Levar Burton. It also has a stacked disco soundtrack to accompany it’s Manhattan-after-midnight mise en scène. But, most importantly, this film, like many of the movies that came out of the New Hollywood of the era, seems exactly like a movie that could never be made now: it features a flawed heroine with body image issues from a childhood illness who seeks out no-strings sex as a substitute for intimacy; the movie consistently blurs lines between sex and violence; this flick is full of disturbing moods exacerbated by lots of drug-taking, and it features one of the most brutal, unforgiving endings of all time. It’s also based on a novel based on a true tragic story. In short, Goodbar is a massive bummer of a movie. It’s also unforgettable.

Here’s the film…

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Another post celebrating the movies of 1977, here’s John Waters’ Desperate Living — an experimental fairy tale that according to Rotten Tomatoes features Waters’ penchant for “nauseating set-pieces, such as a transsexual lesbian having her new penis cut off with scissors and fed to a dog, women being fed live cockroaches, and Peggy being assaulted at a lesbian glory-hole.”

I was planning to include a longer description but realized I couldn’t improve on that one sentence. Desperate Living isn’t Waters’ best film, but it includes really good performances in a movie that reads less like three acts and more like three separate movies interacting in some kind of tasteless, probably infectious, definitely revolting manner.

You’ll love it.

Here’s the film…

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If you look up “movies released in 1977″ on Google, you’ll probably be just as amazed as I was at the amazing run of films that flickered to life on the screen 40 years ago. I’ve already been posting up about a few of them, and here’s another one: Dario Argento’s best-known film, Suspiria. The film tells the story of an American ballerina travelling to a prestigious dance academy in Munich before the weird, supernatural goings-on at the school begin to take hold.

The story of Suspiria isn’t as important as the outrageous stylistics that Argento puts on the screen. Here’s a bit about the inspirations behind the film’s unforgettable look which has turned it into a cult classic…

Suspiria is noteworthy for several stylistic flourishes that have become Argento trademarks. The film was made with anamorphic lenses. The production design and cinematography emphasize vivid primary colors, particularly red, creating a deliberately unrealistic, nightmarish setting, emphasized by the use of imbibition Technicolor prints. The imbibition process, used for The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, is much more vivid in its color rendition than emulsion-based release prints, therefore enhancing the nightmarish quality of the film. It was one of the final feature films to be processed in Technicolor.[3]

The title and general concept of “The Three Mothers” came from Suspiria de Profundis, an uncredited inspiration for the film. There is a section in the book entitled “Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow”. The piece asserts that just as there are three Fates and three Graces, there are three Sorrows: “Mater Lacrymarum, Our Lady of Tears”, “Mater Suspiriorum, Our Lady of Sighs” and “Mater Tenebrarum, Our Lady of Darkness”.

Scriptwriter Daria Nicolodi stated that Suspiria’s inspiration came from a tale her grandmother told her as a young child about a real life experience she had in an acting academy where she discovered “the teachers were teaching arts, but also black magic.”[4] This story was later said by Argento to have been made up.[5]

A remake of the film is due this year. That sounds really scary. Here’s the classic…

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Original image by Orikunie at http://orikunie.deviantart.com/

This year we’re celebrating the 40th anniversary of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. The imposing tome is a massive collection of mythopoeic works that tell the creation myth of Middle Earth, and recount the ages that preceded the saga The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is only for the hardest core hobbitphiles. It lacks the narrative drive of Tolkien’s classic stories while also being populated by a teeming host of unpronounceable creatures, characters and locales. It’s not without its charms, but readers definitely get a pass for not venturing very long into this very long book. With that in mind I think I’ve found an easier way: check out this video that uses some simple, charming animation to boil down the big bad book into a three-minute primer. This won’t substitute for reading the real thing, but it’s still a lot of fun for fantasy fans. Enjoy!

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Had a pretty busy weekend including hitting Red Arrow on Saturday night for Daniel Holland’s new exhibition. It’s a great show of paintings including collage elements and even shaped canvases that give the display more of a sculptural sensibility than Holland’s previous work. If you’re in Nashville you don’t want to miss it. That said, I had a pretty chill Sunday that mostly found me catching up on the new Sherlock series and reading a bunch of articles including a great piece about Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Scanner was the first PKD book I read and it’s still one of my favorites. The novel is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. Here’s a bit from the article at The Quietus…

Its main character, undercover narcotics agent, Bob Arctor, lives in a California that feels straight out of the early ‘70s, although we’re told the novel is set in 1994. When Arctor tries to infiltrate the supply chain of a drug called Substance D, he becomes addicted to it – his own supplier, Donna, is the woman he loves. His friends and housemates are all addicts, too. The plot ramps up when his police colleagues, from whom his identity is protected, ask him to run surveillance on himself, which is no-one’s idea of a good time: whenever he’s not on Substance D, he’s watching videos of himself on it.

Substance D is basically speed. For a long time, this was Dick’s drug of choice (I’ve written before about how you can conjure up an image of him at his desk, furiously typing, blinds drawn to block out the South California sun. He said he could turn out 68 pages of prose a day when he was on speed). Substance D is especially nasty, though. It destroys the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain, so that they first function independently and then compete, destroying any coherent idea of the self. In the case of Bob Arctor, it means that the addict self and the narc self eventually become unrecognisable to one another.

Here’s a long French interview with Dick shortly after the book’s release…

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Another post about The Clash, this one goes all the way back to the band’s eponymous first album. It was released in the UK in 1977 but actually followed the band’s second album, Give ‘Em Enough Rope, in America. The album helped to define the punk songbook with tunes like “White Riot,” “Janie Jones,” “London’s Burning,” and “Garageland.” It was an instant classic. Here’s the word from the Wiki…

In his 1979 consumer guide for The Village Voice, critic Robert Christgau gave the album’s US import an “A” grade and stated, “Cut for cut, this may be the greatest rock and roll album (plus limited-edition bonus single) ever manufactured in the U.S. It offers 10 of the 14 titles on the band’s British debut as well as 7 of the 13 available only on 45. [...] The U.K. version of The Clash is the greatest rock and roll album ever manufactured anywhere”.[19] In his decade-end list for the newspaper, he ranked the UK version as the best album of the 1970s.[20]

In February 1993, the New Musical Express magazine ranked the album number 13 in its list of the Greatest Albums of All Time.[21] NME also ranked The Clash number 3 in its list of the Greatest Albums of the ’70s, and wrote in the review that “the speed-freaked brain of punk set to the tinniest, most frantic guitars ever trapped on vinyl. Lives were changed beyond recognition by it”.

In December 1999, Q magazine rated the album 5 stars out of 5, and wrote that the Clash “would never sound so punk as they did on 1977′s self-titled debut….Lyrically intricate…it still howled with anger”.[15] The same magazine placed The Clash at number forty-eight in its list of the 100 Greatest British Albums Ever in 2000,[22] and included The Clash in its “100 Best Punk Albums”, giving it 5 stars out of 5, in May 2002.[23]

Here’s The Clash…

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I’ve been posting about the 35th anniversary of The Shining over the last several weeks, but I thought it might be better to wait until it was officially summertime to post about the 40th anniversary of Jaws. The summer movie as we know it today didn’t exist until Jaws devoured box offices all summer long in 1975. Along with Star Wars‘ release in 1977, the pair of films changed the entire calendar of film releasing, created the template for the modern blockbuster and put an end to the New Hollywood movement that made both of the movies possible in the first place.

Besides the game-changing industry impact of Jaws, the story of the making of the film was nearly as treacherous, desperate and paranoia-inducing as the plot of the film. From shooting on the open ocean, to the doubts about an inexperienced director in Steven Spielberg to the malfunctioning mechanical monster, it’s a wonder the movie even made it to the screen. Of course, it’s also become an American cinema classic.

Like Spielberg’s best films, Jaws is a genre potboiler, raised to the level of art: It features an ensemble cast of diverse believable characters inhabiting an airtight script that balances humor, thrills, chills and bloody gore into a monster movie that’s among the best ever made. The soundtrack is iconic and the point-of-view shark attacks are still enough to scare swimmers summer after summer for four decades, and Robert Shaw’s soliloquy about the sinking of the Indianapolis might be the best performance in any Spielberg film.

Here’s one of the best documentaries about the film. This might not be my last post about Jaws, but I hope you enjoy this first flashback to that scary summer of 1975…

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