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 O'Connell's right. The evolutionary progress of man was changed... and in 1968 we were yet to take the first of our steps toward changing it back.

It's hard to imagine a moment remotely similar in the history of the human race. Between 1966 and 1969, LSD was still semi-legal and becoming hugely popular, as much a middle class rage as Twitter is now, turning an entire demographic from self-absorbed mopes into eastern spirituality-embracing free spirits (instead of vice versa). And not only the young people but adventurous parents were jumping into the fire and disappearing from the 9-5 fidelity-based spousal system. Kids began to grow up in communes instead of two car garages; group marriages and swinging were acceptable substitutions for the exclusivity of the two person pair bond; and LSD was everywhere, recommended in 4 out 5 clinical psychiatrist offices, doctoral psychology experiments, and middle American homes. Owsley gave out thousands of pure 'purples' (from which "Purple Haze" gets its name) as free samples at Monterey Pop Festival alone. Tastemakers were jumping onboard right and left. One hit and your whole life opened up like a flower you never even knew had been closed. Films like Blow-Up, The Trip, Easy Rider, and The Endless Summer made a conventional three act narrative strictly for squares.

No matter what your age, it was pretty 'hip' in the upper and middle classes to at least have tried it, even if it was just so you had something to talk about during Friday night's bridge game. Having that 'experience' made you cool, like skydiving or bungee jumping (or cocaine) in the 1980s, or ecstasy in the 90s.

So along comes REVOLUTION, about which the always insightful Flickhead writes:

In the free spirit of the times, [filmmaker] 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? With music by the Steve Miller Band (freshly formed), Country Joe and the Fish, and Quicksilver Messenger Service, we get some ideas of how to pick up the egoless thread. Watching today, 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. My Pupils are dilated in the mirror but reflecting someone 20-years old and foxy, dancing like a girl who just found freedom, who just stepped out her shell... 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. Dig? Can you imagine where that chick's head is at, man?

Her big LSD trip--captured by O'Connell's camera from start to finish--anchors the whole second half of the film: There's Today, begging 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 redwoods. There's 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 rose tint-free glasses you can see the auric waves as her whole body sighs in relief as five hundred years of socio-genetic programming is short-circuited and overcome with a single white pill and the kind of good set and setting the Haight in 1965-7 could provide.

Unfolding with one eye on the exploitation market, it could be argued on some level that REVOLUTION was meant less to wake the people up from their westernized stupor and more to turn on the raincoat brigade, all those lusty adults curious about the supposedly limitless free love available if they ever went to San Francisco. Hence there's a lengthy naked dance troupe going nuts under liquid psychedelic lights to Country Joe and the Fish's most psychedelic instrumental, "Section 43" (below). But such a prurience is addressed in the film, too, as the Sexual Freedom League explains that only couples are allowed into the orgy to keep the numbers even (so dirty old men don't overrun the scene and turn it into the end of Requiem for a Dream or Viridiana).

In a way, it's sad the SFL had to do that, such rule-making is the first unraveling thread on total freedom's poncho. As someone who's done decades of grieving for the loss of the countercultural revolutionary dream, I've always had a keen hatred for male sexual aggression for just this reason. You can't have a free utopia with members who are obsessed with sex. It's like being an over-eating pig at a communal picnic and you didn't even bring anything--not even a jug of wine. But America's trained its 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! They orgied it up, but they were rich and attractive. No one wants to sleep with ugly raincoat pervs, so the problem just gets worse. Oh well, as long as they pay to see it, because bulbs for those light show projectors are frickin' expensive, take it from me

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. By now I've done some of both. The counterculture died, or did it? 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, we blew it. But now of course I'm in AA with the chastened old men and my guitarist's in Ibiza with jet-set supermodels, so there you go. Frankly, I don't envy him. Sounds like an awful lot of bother.

To its immense credit, REVOLUTION keeps up the even-keeled in its discussion, even into the thick of the tripping. Interviewing cocktail hour executive types relaying the open-minded adult opinion, the front line reports from cops, and hospital doctors who deal with the bad trip freak-outs, to counterbalance the starry-eyed unity proponents. 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, they say--power to the flower! Good luck to you all--but either get a job or stop using public bathrooms to wash your sandals! The rest of us work to pay taxes so we can use them on the weekends with our kids, not so you unemployed system-bashing vagrants can use them as free showers while making us feel like the imposers. The doctor talks about LSD casualties in the hospital, as if it's the drug's fault and not the hospital's and the bad trip victim's punkass friends! 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. Soooo typical. Man when I was in that scene I was known as 'the doctor' for a reason, I could talk anyone off the ledge, a one-man chill-out tent, and it was to me door you'd go before considering a hospital.

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," as opposed to just escape reality. "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 didn't happen. I saw you there!

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 may not have had such a 'trip,' for it truly changed my life forever. But after awhile even I realized LSD was like reading the same travel brochure over and over without ever quite starting the journey. Eventually you have to try and get there, like, permanently, the hard way, via meditation and good deeds, and (alas) AA meetings. My gorgeous Connecticut hippies got married and had mutant kids and I got sober and then stopped going to AA and then found what I was looking for in Effexor. But the revolution, as in a permanent change for the better, never quite happened for me, no matter how many trips I took, nor America. But we have the music, and a parameter of spiritual experience and knowledge we'd have missed otherwise (our western openness to yoga, Deepak Chopra, etc would never be where it is today without the LSD revolution) and the hopes for a next generation of snotty youth to latch onto something bigger than themselves.

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 dirty old men 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 bouncer at the gates of dawn, what kind of utopia is that?

Now let me in, goddamn it!

++++++

PS - There was sequel made to check up on Today Malone and see what those hippies 'grew up' to be, 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.



PPS: REVOLUTION is no longer avail. on Netflix Streaming and has never been available on DVD but I'm sure it's '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 yet been co-opted by the media to sell its fall line-up and dance-dance video games. 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 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

The Girl who Fingered the Frenchman

The 32-year-old maid told authorities that when she entered his spacious, $3,000-a-night suite early Saturday afternoon, she thought it was unoccupied. Instead, Strauss-Kahn emerged from the bathroom naked, chased her down a hallway and pulled her into a bedroom, where he sexually assaulted her, New York Police Department spokesman Paul J. Browne said. (HP)

Ah  France, the big scandal erupting with Dominique Strauss-Kahn is a reminder that where there's liberty et fraternite' there are also sleazebag rapists in high places. The attack (ED NOTE: It's since been downgraded to prostitute-blackmail scam) happened in a New York hotel, and maybe its my city pride that makes this story resonate as a great David and Goliath style upset, something the Millennium Trilogy could be proud of, and might even be a little bit indirectly responsible for: the word of a rattled immigrant hotel maid was enough for our cops to pull this high roller Frenchman off a first class plane and throw him in the clink. Word is finally out: clergymen and politicians are the sex maniacs of our age - believing the word of the victim is the new black!

To see more? Cinema, naturalmente. The above attack sounds very plausible, in fact I've seen it in at least two films, and recently: Asia Argento's self-directed SCARLET DIVA (with a crazy producer played by artist Joe Coleman chasing Asia down the hotel hallway in Paris, naked but for cowboy boots, ah, Cannes! - my in-depth discussion here) and Vince Gallo attacking a Paris hotel maid in TROUBLE EVERY DAY (above, here). The evil rapin' madmen of power in GIRL WITH A DRAGON TATTOO and the Millennium Trilogy are apparently in France now that said girl made it too hot for them in Sweden (see my piece on Bright Lights, 'The New Lurid: Cinema's Rape Disavowal Fantasy').

But what of other locales in France, outside Paris, ala the French countryside? This seems to be a pretty terrible place. Vast stretches of emptiness given privacy by giant tank-hidin' hedgerows allow slavering mutant sexuality to flourish. A group of normally upstanding males commit a horrific gang rape when they realize a woman is living alone in a stone house by a remote stretch of French country road in ONE DEADLY SUMMER (1983), with the victim's daughter (Isabelle Adjani) enacting an elaborate revenge before realizing maybe it didn't happen or whatever (I had to stop watching after that). Indeed, in this array of films, the French countryside is a place where no one can hear you scream, and no law can come to your rescue with any quickness, the law may even be the source of evil groping. Men must stand on their own good conscience, and many do not. Remote areas are a creep's power source as much as above-the-law titles like politician and priest, but the ambiguity and self-reliance goes both ways. All is not always what it seems.

Take the 1970 British film about two birds cycling on holiday through rural France, AND SOON THE DARKNESS. Over at Britmovie, Drew Shimon cogently discusses the film's ability to create suspense without much overt violence or even actual dark:

Ironic, really, for a film bearing the title And Soon The Darkness, that practically no darkness is actually seen throughout, but such things are part of the strange fascination of British horror: in Die Screaming, Marianne for instance, Marianne neither dies nor screams, and in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo, the identity of the slayers is in no way a mystery to the audience. What it doesn’t deliver in honour of its title, though, it makes up for by exceeding every other possible expectation.

I was led to expect this film would be really disturbing, ala THE VANISHING, which is why I steered clear for so long, but it's actually just suspenseful, sexy and awesome. Also, if you know any French at all, you get an inkling of the identity of the rapist-killer early on, and the savagery of rape as depicted in GIRL or something like I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (see my 'Towards a New Cinema of Castration') is absent, replaced by the gross caricatures of lust you get in Japanese pinku films: the eyes of the rapist bugging, lips snarling in deformed adolescent exaggeration, tongue wagging obscenely... truly possessed, insane by an inability to repress basic lustful instincts. I find these depictions much less traumatic, they're more symbolic renderings, the men demeaning themselves with twisting grimaces; you never get the sense these guys getting very far, mostly humping air like a dog--it leaves one confused. If it's not meant to be harsh and repulsive ala SPIT or GIRL than what? A chance for a woodsman to ride to the rescue? A moment of kinky objectification? Or a moment to have the ugliness of base id-lust rubbed in our face as a cautionary tale? I muse on this at length in my cogent 2010 celebration of FEMALE CONVICT SCORPION: JAILHOUSE 41, Stung by the Belle. 

DARKNESS gets a lot of mileage out of short skirts and dried patches of grass, a spooky bunch of wooded patches separating vast empty fields, the gradual setting of the sun (it all occurs over the matter of a few hours), the onset of clouds and rain, and the vast language barrier between a holidaying Brit girl and old French gas station workers. In such a tranquil setting, the sexual violence seems almost quaint, a mere flaring up of an old forgotten splotch of vile repressed desires left too long untended in the fields. Because the film works, as Shimon says, without the darkness promised (and soon, like CCR's someday, never comes), it escapes our condemnation, but there's an aftertaste of sleaze that lingers on. But hey, it's on Netflix streaming! So is the remake! Avoid the latter!

Also on Netflix streaming, all of a sudden!-- is a bunch of Jean Rollin films, including REQUIEM FOR A VAMPIRE (1973) Read Ethan Spigland's essay on the film in Acidemic #6, here to get the lowdown on the film's use of Freud's uncanny and the sexual doubling of Georges Bataille. Using what looks a lot like the same road from DARKNESS, this film follows to young naifs in clown costumes who wind up lost in the wilderness, eventually abducted by a castle full of old debauched vampires and their slavering rapist underlings. The girls are sexually attacked, and then forced to watch, hypnotized, as various girls chained in the dungeon are raped in the usual slavering, grotesque but bloodless, bruiseless, Sadean, confusing, tedious, all very abstract and philosophically cogent.

The roots behind intellectual S/M still boils down to the most sleazy of crimes against empathy, and if anti-pornography advocates are right--and apparently they are--there's nowhere else left to go but to that wretched basement. Once the consumer of the image has let himself become dehumanized via the suffocating access to so many images, the image suffocates as much as the proximity of the other. Rape fantasies are actually common in both sexes, but as I noted in my BL piece defending the Twilight films from anti-feminism charges, Someone to Fight Over Me: Rape is not called rape when it's in romantic fiction; it's "ravishment" / the erotic charge of setting a romance in a past era lies with the straitjacket moral code: the only way a woman can keep her honor is by resisting both the man and her own desire. She indirectly invites the overpowering on herself as a means of sidestepping issues of her feminine resolve and honor, and the uncertainty of responsibility over one's actions. This is not weakness on her part, but an intrinsic understanding of what's truly erotic about societal loopholes. She has the strength it takes to surrender... (more)

Another interesting French film dealing with slavering maniac males in the countryside is DON'T DELIVER US FROM EVIL (1971), loosely based around the same real life case as HEAVENLY CREATURES, but with a lot more teasing of leering male strangers. It starts in a banal schoolgirl reverie: two lead girls are having a holiday over the summer in the country after a long stretch in a Catholic boarding school. The pair delight in flirting with and teasing passing male travelers, but the men they lure into the brush or home to their hideout have only two speeds: grotesque tongue-wagging sexual assault and motionless confused indulgence. The men never try to tease back or engage in the girls' weird head games. Instead they let themselves be teased to a certain point and then snap, becoming insane slavering rapists in a flash, precipitating their own deaths. As Kim Morgan notes on her Sunset Gun:

Thank goodness they lived in the early 1970s. No manic panic hair, no PVC mini-skirts, no cheap fetish boots and tired, sullen expressions for these best friends. These girls are enjoying their evil. So much that they put together a crafty, dainty black mass in an abandoned chapel (you can feel fellow bad girl Martha Stewart heartily nodding her head in approval). With the dim groundskeeper serving as "Priest," they seal their Satanic deal and drive the man nuts while sitting in the rowboat in the thick of night -- he can see through their cotton Communion gear. (more) 

So can we, man. I still think of that scene at certain times...

The key thread I'm fumbling for through all this is the ultimate emptiness of sexual gratification as the be all and end all of power. All that smoke and perfume and grinding strip show razzle dazzle leads to nothing more than an expensive feeling of emptiness behind the wizard's peepshow curtain. It's culture's job to make you forget that post-orgasmic depression, but just as rich women like Winona Ryder may shoplift for a weird thrill, trying to recapture a time when acquiring possessions brought them joy, so the oversexed rich French politician may accost a hotel maid because all else has failed him, and he figures himself above the law, and maybe still thinks he's in some role-play brothel from the night before. Who knows? His world is akin to the one Kim Morgan describes, of "tired, sullen expressions, cheap fetish boots and PVC mini-skirts." But rather than be hypnotized into the world of surfaces and possessions like the men who want them, the girls in the equation are coming from a different place, trying to harness real power--to master their own chthonic sexuality-- to surf rather than dutifully drown, to dare live beyond social roles, mores and the tedious commodified grinding that passes for modern rebellion. Rather than settle for the $900 call service fee, they want to try for curtain number trois.

For these sleazy rural Frenchmen, however, all the curtains have long since been open, and they have no more control over their desires than a near-unconscious diabetic smashing his fist through a candy shop window.  It's fascinating to contemplate how a man with so much to lose as Strauss-Kahn could be so careless and crazed. Of course it could be a set-up, created to depose him by his enemies. On the other hand, even if it's true, isn't it still a set up, a trick of desire, of the devil, who rewards the debauched with all the riches of the world at the cost of their ability to enjoy them? Aren't those creepy noblemen in Sade, Huysmans, and Bataille really just depressed from having to constantly up the sadomasochistic sensation ante just to feel anything but benumbed ennui? Pity them...  certainly jail them and denounce them in the press and even castrate them but pity them, for they are dumb enough to believe the lies of their own merciless hard-ons. They have become dupes of the genetic con and are destined for incarcération... ou paternité. 

And for what? The sociopath, the narcissist, the sexaholic, even just the pervy father hanging around his daughter's room at her sleepover... who made them what they are? The answer is just the soft sound of French countryside crickets... and the flutter of pages from an old, discarded Maxim. 

Acid's Greatest #19: Brother Sun Sister Moon (1972)

In 1968, one of the key films of the budding counterculture was Franco Zeffirelli's adaptation of Shakespeare's ROMEO AND JULIET. Featuring genuinely hot young unknown actors--as opposed to established stars (like Leslie Howard-Norma Shearer in the 1936 version)--the tale of love destroyed by violent family feuding proved a zeitgeist-riding analogy for our Vietnam state of mind. Capturing the lovely classical beauty of hot young things to old Verona street corners (including a sensational Michael Yorke) and dusty-aired garrets under Old Masters streaks of morning light, Zeffirelli had scored an unlikely smash hit, both a museum masterpiece come to life and an urgent tale of the moment. Naturally El Zeffir (as he was never called) decided to follow up its massive success with a similar period hippie piece. Drawing on the early life of Saint Francis, BROTHER SUN, SISTER MOON took the same ideas--the purity of youthful idealism struggling against the repressive conservative dogma of their time--but was released in 1972... which was too late -- by then we no longer felt youthful idealism had a chance in Hell. Our hopes were dashed, then re-adjusted. The zeit had geisted and Zeffirelli was considered square yet again. It was a bridge too far.

Maybe it was because, unlike ROMEO--which started just an adaptation of Shakespeare, never intended to find such a huge youth market (perhaps explaining why it did)--BROTHER was a film specifically designed to click with that generation, and they hated when adults tried to pander to them that way. Intentionally trying to click with the youth (and not being one) was a kiss of death, like the dad who shows up at his son's basement make-out party wearing a Beatles' wig.

The wig in this case was the soundtracks. Instead of Nino Rota (whose instrumental theme for ROMEO had become a classic) there was a whole soundtrack full of Donovan singing medieval folk tunes, with nary a trace of insincerity or heaviness... or even self-awareness.

Had he forgotten ROMEO AND JULIET was the tale of lost innocence? Why did he expect us to have kept it? It was like he forgot how that movie ended. 

The analogies to the Vietnam era and the anti-war movement were now all too apparent. Francis' story was a  parallel to those of Vietnam vets turned war protesters (à la Ron Kovic) - young Francis starts out a soldier, but comes back broken from the war, with a terrible fever that  leaves him--when he awakes from it--able to talk to animals and flowers). Francis' bedridden hallucinations before his enlightenment intentionally resemble a heavy acid trip -- a heavy symbolic rebirth/death cycle ala that undergone by Peter Fonda in THE TRIP - when trapped in the tomb of leftover Corman Poe props. His subsequent gratitude to be alive and the burning away of illusion leads to a rejection of his father's plastic fantastic textiles gig for a communal church - evoking parallels to so many young panhandlers in the Haight.

But, vibrant and full of amore' as Zeffirelli's style and dusky gorgeous cinematography still was, SISTER MOON committed the sin of trying too hard to be Edenic, becoming so flower-power guileless that the counterculture could only laugh from their aloof new vantage points. Peace and love? no thanks man! Won't get fooled again! Romeo's dead, man. Juliet's dead. Jimi dead, Janis dead, Altamont, Kent State, the Democratic National Convention, Nixon, the Baader-Meinhof Complex, Manson...

The kids knew or believed it was better to just climb up the mountain and watch your parents' world burn than pray for rain and try to change their minds about love and peace. Climb up and if you don't want to watch the flames, watch anything else, in fact, except, perhaps, another goddamned scene of smiling youths running towards each other in slow mo dissolves through fields of flowers. The Free Love garden's once-open and extended tendrils were now curled back tight for the long night of frosty unrest. No one even wanted to be seen in the theater where BROTHER SUN was showing, lest they be spotted, mocked, and crucified by their conformistly unconformist hipster friends.

No only that, by then all that slow-mo flowery field running had been run aground by endless repetitions of antiperspirant commercials. The danger of trying to compete for a different country's youth market was thus illuminated: you have less commercials in Europe since TV is state-controlled in most countries; you don't always know what images and plots have become cliche through advertising overuse. European commercials tend to be very artsy and engaging and played only once a night or twice between shows. They don't drone in endless repetition.



Today, though, we can reconsider these things. I had to cover all Zeffirelli's films for Muze back in 1999, so I saw BROTHER SUN and the nine hour-cut of his JESUS OF NAZARETH (1977)  over one long weekend. I was newly sober and on a "pink cloud" so the spiritual stuff in both was coming through loud and clear. I don't mind saying BROTHER moved me to tears and after thatm JESUS brought me into a state of exaltation. I was a Christian almost all the way through to Tuesday! I almost volunteered for AA service I was so Christian; I even actually helped a blind man cross the street.

Seriously.

What a chump.

When I wrote about BROTHER again for popmatters a few years later, and re-screened it on DVD (I'd only rented the tape for the Muze gig), the giddy pink cloud had rained down into a gray socialist subtext sea. I winced at every Donovan lyric, like a dagger.

In other words, get a haircut, hippie! Oh wait he does... intentionally!

Recently I saw it a third time and thought that the imagery was beautiful and full of typically dusky Zeffirelli touches, but all the "Throw away your money! All you need is love" pleading it didn't even penetrate my outer layers (Heath Ledger's maniac bizarro world Saint Francis Joker in DARK KNIGHT by contrast, sends me far deeper into the post-chaos embrace).

Still the cast of BROTHER is tops: Graham Faulkner, bright-eyed with guileless spiritual ecstasy like Keith Moon crossed with Sam Rockwel; Judi Bowker, so frail and beautiful with such long gorgeous blond hair that for me the biggest tragedy of Christendom is when they decide to cut it all off so she can join their muddy little holy order. That's where my Christianity draws the line. Would you pick the lilies of the field right in fullest flower just to cut the heads off?

My Christianity thus withered anew.

Still, if I came across the post-awakening Francis in the fields outside Assisi, what would I do? Probably join him; lord knows I've joined up with hippies far dirtier and for far less noble reasons. Going after God is never a mistake, people! Following your heart takes guts, and the best Christians are the ones who bow their heads to lions daily. The rest of us forget and run off in fear, and are ripped to shreds, lifetime after lifetime.

I'm sorry I badmouthed Donovan before. He's very good, in his way. But the Age of Irony bideth not his naive frailty. He's like the guy who always gets shot first because he can't keep his head down below the sunflower line (yeah that's a PRIME CUT reference).

The question is: are you ever going to stand up, snipers and shrapnel be damned? Am I?

Not me, man, but I stood once, in '87 and even again in '98. Far-out!

I never really lost my love of this movie, just pretended otherwise to look cool.

And I'm ashamed, both ways.

Fuck Donavan, man.

But hallowed be the name of Saint Francis, as long as he ain't cuttin' off no more cute girls' long straight blond hair no more, not on my beat. And I do mean that metaphorically as well as literally. It's time to let compassion fuel our opiated veins and to open them up to our scuzzy neighbor's balloon. We are the church and the church is under a rock. Somewhere. Jesus said the church can be found under any rock.

But which rock?

Ladies and gentlemen, tonight we will seek that rock. Who among you would take off their clothes and follow me into the sun like Francis did?  The church, like the song, is you. Love thy neighbor as thyself, just don't let him corner you in the vestibule.

There's wolves about, and they don't like singing.