Crossing the Mighty Mississippi: There Is Much to Love Here

[purejuice]

Leaving Ground Zero: DC: The Farewell Tour
Rawlins Park, May 2009
Simultaneity of Wind, Water, Ducks, Sirens, Homeless, Pedestrians, Traffic
This is where my father ate lunch in the early 60s, and where, until Brown, little black kids swam in segregated D.C..

A couple of days ago I wrote about what I hated here. Now comes some of the things I really love. It's very strange and it doesn't exist in Washington, D.C. except for the entire [majority] black population.

I have written here about my Go-Go at the Smithsonian epiphany, when I went down to the brown bag lunch time lecture on D.C.'s indigenous music, expecting a crowd of perhaps 50 -- the usual size for these esoteric yet superficial talks.

There were at least 3,000 people there, all of them in crisp creased blue collar uniforms. The subway drivers, the UPS guys, the janitors, the mailpeople, the bus drivers, the dental hygienists and LPNs in their pink scrubs, the people you always wondered about how they kept their shit together to send, as they all do, their children to Catholic school and on to college. The godfather of GoGo, Chuck Brown, was there. Everyone had mind-bogglingly sophisticated questions about studio technology, music business contracts, music theory and so on, and Chuck Brown -- also amazingly groovy after 180 years of playing rough, nut-cuttin' crowds at the Ibex -- oh, the Ibex -- had nothing but the sweetest love and brilliant advice to give back.

Everybody had both a right livelihood and a right vocation, as Buddha in his Noble Eight-Fold Path recommends. We are stardust. We are golden. We are million year old carbon. And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.

Here it is the same. It's not that everybody is a rock star, although there is some of that. It is that everybody is an artist. The busman at the greasy spoon, El Fonz, has a closet full of vintage '50s clothes. The prune-like little old lady in the tennis hat is a Joyce scholar who leads Albuquerque's Bloomsday celebrations, and is heading up the Finnegan's Wake reading group. It reverse engineers, too: Dennis Hopper, to whom the Macondo Manana [TILDE!!!] devoted its own full page non-wire service obituary, purpose-written in gratitude and fraternity,* filmed part of Easy Rider here, and spent a lost decade getting high in Taos with all the rest of the hippies. Indeed Hopper's life is almost like my neighbors', Mr. and Mrs. Roper. The childhood on the Kansas farm and the always moving West. People like that never come to Washington, D. C. -- even if what's really wrong with all those Congressmen and Senators, which you only get after staring at them for a decade -- or looking down on the truly horrifyin' sea of hair plugs visible from the Senate Press Gallery -- is that they're the same people, with one difference. They're the high school debate champion, heliocentric, if you will: blossoming in the limelight. I am old enough to remember the Old Skool Pre-TV Senators. George Aiken and Mike Mansfield loved each other and had breakfast together every morning in the Senate dining room. I had breakfast with them once. They called each other Damon and Pythias, and had no hesitation, assuming I was literate and would know what they meant. Aiken was in his 80 and Mansfield in his 70s. They were totally studly and funny and twinkly and principled or unapologetic when they were not. Aiken is most famous for his end-the-war strategy: we should declare victory and pull out. Which is what sort of happened.

Now they all have that orange, bouffant, televangelist look and are like zombies who only come alive when the little red light comes on. There is no colloquy between the parties -- and I think performing politics rather than executing policy is the reason. Ron Zeigler, skipper of the Disneyland Adventureland jungle boat ride, I remember you too. Your tan. Your fisheyes. Your soft babyass double chin.

Elsewhere in D.C., and here in Macondo, one enhances one's livelihood -- and one's immortal radiance -- by having a vocation. One is a real person in the old school, manifest your destiny, godfather of gogo, Aiken and Mansfield way. This force of inner light creates true immortals, not pastiche collage personalities like M.I.A.'s.

_________________________________
If you are a subscriber to the Washington Post, do us all a favor and gank the magazine piece, Chuck Brown's Long Dance, post it, and link in the comments here.

Never mind. Here 'tis:

When Brown is ready to make his speech, it's a rambling mixture of reflections and rhymes. He speaks of his gratitude to the city that has been devoted to him and his music, amazed at how a poor boy that shined shoes down the street could grow up to have a street that bears his name.

"I love ya'll so much," he says. "I remember when the only people that wanted to take a picture of me -- 50 years ago -- was the police," he laughs. "You understand what I'm sayin'? Thank you to the city and to all of you for giving me all this love, all these years."

When the Chuck Brown Way sign is revealed, the crowd cheers, Brown's face, behind his large black sunglasses, crumples with emotion. He reaches for his wife and pulls her in for a tight embrace.

The fans at the foot of the stage strain forward, reaching out their hands toward Brown. He bends over, shaking hands and offering thank yous.

"I'm not going nowhere," he says, looking out over the crowd. "Like I said before, 'Every time I hit this stage, I become enraged.

"'Ya'll party so hard, I forget about my age.'"



_________________
*

Publication: Jnl Final Edition 8/2005-today; Date: May 30, 2010; Section: New Mexico; Page: B1


Dennis Hopper 1936-2010

Troubled and often divisive, Hopper reinvented himself through the years

ICONIC ACTOR

Journal Staff and Wire Reports




Dennis Hopper, the highflying Hollywood wild man with close ties to northern New Mexico, has died. He was 74. Hopper died Saturday at his Los Angeles-area home, surrounded by family and friends, family friend Alex Hitz said. Hopper’s manager announced in October that the actor was battling prostate cancer.

Hopper’s memorable and erratic career included an early turn in “Rebel Without a Cause,” an improbable smash with “Easy Rider” and a classic character role in “Blue Velvet. ” He had close ties to Taos, where his brother lives and where he maintained a studio. He visited often, and he curated a show at the Harwood Museum of Art there last year.

“Dennis Hopper will be remembered by many, including myself, as an icon whose impact on the film industry cannot be measured,” Gov. Bill Richardson said. “But just as important, I will celebrate Dennis Hopper as a great New Mexican who leaves a legacy that will continue to inspire artists in the Land of Enchantment.”

Hopper first visited the area in 1969, when he was scouting locations for “Easy Rider.” He bought a rambling old adobe that had belonged to Mabel Dodge Luhan and made it his home for a dozen years.

Taos artist Ron Cooper, who met Hopper in Los Angeles the same year that “Easy Rider” was filmed, remembered Hopper as “a really great guy — a great friend, a really cool person and artist.”

John Nichols, a Taos writer whose novel “Milagro Beanfield War” was later made into a movie, also met Hopper in 1969 in Taos. He said Hopper “had a hard time” at first.

“Nobody thought he would last five min- utes,” Nichols said. “Instead, he cleaned up his act completely and really had a distinguished career in art and films. He was closely associated with Taos, and he kept coming back.”

The success of “Easy Rider,” and the spectacular failure of Hopper’s next film, “The Last Movie,” fit the pattern for the talented but sometimes uncontrollable actor-director, who also had parts in such favorites as “Apocalypse Now” and “Hoosiers.” He was a two-time Academy Award nominee and, in March, was honored with a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

After a promising start that included roles in two James Dean films, Hopper’s acting career languished as he developed a reputation for throwing tantrums and abusing alcohol and drugs. On the set of “True Grit,” Hopper so angered John Wayne that the star reportedly chased Hopper with a loaded gun.

“Much of Hollywood,” wrote critic-historian David Thomson, “found Hopper a pain in the neck.”

All was forgiven, at least for a moment, when he collaborated with another struggling actor, Peter Fonda, on a script about two pot-smoking, drug-dealing hippies on a motorcycle trip through the Southwest and South to take in the Mardi Gras in New Orleans.

On the way, the Hopper and Fonda characters befriend a drunken young lawyer (Jack Nicholson, whom Hopper had resisted casting, in a breakout role), but arouse the enmity of Southern rednecks and are murdered before they can return home.

“ ‘Easy Rider’ was never a motorcycle movie to me,” Hopper said in 2009. “A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.”

Fonda produced “Easy Rider” and Hopper directed it for a meager $380,000. It went on to gross $40 million worldwide, a substantial sum for its time.

The film was a hit at Cannes, netted a best screenplay Oscar nomination for Hopper, Fonda and Terry Southern, and has since been listed on the American Film Institute’s ranking of the top 100 American films. The establishment gave official blessing in 1998 when “Easy Rider” was included in the United States National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.”

Its success prompted studio heads to schedule a new kind of movie: low cost, with inventive photography and themes about a young, restive baby boom generation. With Hopper hailed as a brilliant filmmaker, Universal Pictures lavished $850,000 on his next project, “The Last Movie.”

The title was prescient. Hopper took a large cast and crew to a village in Peru to film the tale of a Peruvian tribe corrupted by a movie company. Trouble on the set developed almost immediately, as Peruvian authorities pestered the company, druginduced orgies were reported and Hopper seemed out of control.

When he finally completed filming, he retired to his home in Taos to piece together the film, a process that took almost a year, in part because he was using psychedelic drugs for editing inspiration.

When it was released, “The Last Movie” was such a crashing failure that it made Hopper unwanted in Hollywood for a decade. At the same time, his drug and alcohol use was increasing to the point that he was said to be consuming as much as a gallon of rum a day.

Rick Klein, who started the New Buffalo commune in Taos in the 1960s, recalled partying with Hopper at the Mabel Dodge house. “There were a lot of excesses, and he embodied that, like a lot of people, including myself,” Klein said. “He was definitely the bridge between the old bohemians and whatever was emerging at the time.”

Shunned by the Hollywood studios, Hopper found work in European films that were rarely seen in the United States. But, again, he made a remarkable comeback, starting with a memorable performance as a drugged-out journalist in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic, “Apocalypse Now,” a spectacularly long and troubled film to shoot. Hopper was drugged-out off camera, as well, and his rambling chatter was worked into the final cut.

He went on to appear in several films in the early 1980s, including the well regarded “Rumblefish” and “The Osterman Weekend,” as well as the campy “My Science Project” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2.”

But alcohol and drugs continued to interfere with his work. Treatment at a detox clinic helped him stop drinking, but he still used cocaine, and, at one point, he became so hallucinatory that he was committed to the psychiatric ward of a Los Angeles hospital.

Upon his release, Hopper joined Alcoholics Anonymous, quit drugs and launched yet another comeback. It began in 1986 when he played an alcoholic exbasketball star in “Hoosiers,” which brought him an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor.

His role as a wild druggie in “Blue Velvet,” also in 1986, won him more acclaim, and, years later, the character wound up No. 36 on the AFI’s list of top 50 movie villains.

In the 2000s, he was featured in the TV series “Crash” and such films as “Elegy” and “Hell Ride.”

“Work is fun to me,” he told a reporter in 1991. “All those years of being an actor and a director and not being able to get a job — two weeks is too long to not know what my next job will be.”

In 2009, he was named honorary mayor of Taos and given the keys to the town.

“If I’d been named honorary mayor of Taos in the 1960s, that would have been really laughable,” Hopper said on the occasion, a news conference opening the “Hopper at the Harwood” show during the town’s 40th anniversary celebration of the “Summer of Love.”

Dennis Lee Hopper was born in 1936 in Dodge City, Kan., and spent much of his youth on the nearby farm of his grandparents. He saw his first movie at 5 and became enthralled.

Taos writer Andy Stiny contributed to this report.

Comments

[uberconfused.livejournal.com]

I love go-go, and have happy memories of EU/Trouble Funk concerts in weird places as a teenager. I had an go-go encounter not that long ago, myself.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

you're a rock critic?

[uberconfused.livejournal.com]

ha! I would never call myself that, although I have written for All Music, and a couple of other outlets. Mostly I just like to occasionally review shows or albums that I like for posterity.

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

Go-Go! I love that music, and how it's retained its popularity in D.C. over the years, resisting all outside fashions and trends. So many regional music styles have been swept away in the last 50 years, and yet Go-Go retains its primacy in D.C.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

i think it has persisted....because of the call and response, well-tested church euphoria thing, and because dancing altogether in a group for a long time may just be heaven itself. what think you, dancin' fool?

[villagecharm.livejournal.com]

It is excellent dance music, which has to be a big part of it. But I also think it's endured because it's not generation gap music - it's been around for over a generation, and teenagers love it as much as their parents. Adults don't see it as greasy kids' stuff and kids don't see it as museum music for the oldsters; it's what all those lefty folk revivalists were looking for when they went in search of "peoples' music," except they never thought to look for dance music in the city.

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

why do you think it has maintained the allegiance of all ages? (a true and interesting point, it is a peoples' music, loved totally outside the music industry machine.)