The Dirtbag Menace: AMY (2015)

What should it benefit the world if it should gain a talented jazz singer with an old soul, perfect pitch and a deep affinity with Ella and Monk, but then lose her to a tattooed snaggle-toothed dirtbag junkie in one of those goddamned mini-fedoras? Maybe we'd have been better off not to know her at all if means watching her make a slow-motion leap into the first smiling thresher that rolls past. The pain of our loss is so great there's only three things can stop it: crack, heroin, and sweet sweet booze. The things that make our fear of death bearable are the same things that kill us. Poison numbs the misery of being poisoned --this is the slow relentless clockwork coiling of the strangling python of addiction.

That's the pain of AMY, Asif Kapadia's chilling documentary about Amy Winehouse, which uses clips from her amply videotaped life, starting from her youth as an innocent Southgate shiksa with loyal friends, family, and the voice of a 40 year-old gold-piped diva, to straggly bulimic loping after a K-Fed-ish skeever. If we happen to be addicts ourselves and have read a few celebrity bios, then we might very well shudder with the realziation that perhaps glommers like her boyfriend (above) are the natural parasites of famous alcoholics. Even Lee Marvin had them, like lice, so tough guy stance has nothing to do with it. When you're drunk and stoned all the time there's not much you can do if a fast talking charmer locks in on you. Addiction has already taught you that the best way to live with yourself while slowly dying from your own lifestyle is to convince yourself you want to die in the first place. The egg's just an excuse for the chicken to sit around on its ass all day.

This is the realization that life's grim absurdity has all but demanded your slow sacrifice to it.

Jonesers and leeches come along like all the extra parts and warranties in the packaging of addiction. Never wanted, never asked for, but you don't throw them out since you may need them one day, when the shit don't even numb the pain of the shit's not working, and all your sane, sober friends are gone. This dirtbag glommer still asleep in your bed will mix your drinks for you, even lift them to your lips, even inject you with speedballs while you're already passed out. They'll never say a word about your 'problem' because they're part of it. They wouldn't be there at your side, access to your wallet unlimited, without it.

And when you're famous enough that passers-by feel you owe them a picture of you smiling next to them, and the paparazzi blind you with epileptic seizure inducing flash bulb light shows every time you peek your head out the door, what you want is someone who's going to keep you well insulated, warm and toasty in the twin orbit of narcissist neurosis, someone who can act as a 'cross-section of the American public' like Susan Foster Kane, or Joe Gillis, someone with whom you can play outlaw couple.



I've championed a lot of messed-up female artists (Lindsay Lohan especially) on this site. I've championed their right to revel in their time, to be ranked with the 'bad boys' rather than denigrated as 'skanks', warranting the pooh-poohing of the stern Puritanical popular Scarlet Letter press. But enabling is second nature to me. It comes from growing up with a heavy drinking dad whose rages always made me feel very very calm, as if I could counterbalance him through Zen stillness. So it's easy to see now that I've been to AA, and therapy, why I feel so relaxed and calm when in the striking radius of insane hotties, even as I shudder to see their insanity consume them in self-immolating hall-of-mirror narcissistic frenzy. It's far easier to criticize the brutal cost of our enabling pop cultural blind eye and schadenfreude than to make bad blood-boiling polemics on the near impossibility of holding onto your self integrity while surrounded by the flashbulb equivalent of the cannibal boys in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER. Kapadia's film may damn the British tabloid press's insatiable demand for complaints against its insatiable demands or--with the wry guidance of indirect directions--show how such a feeding frenzy creates the very death and tragedy it craves--their sneering and mocking a defense for their rubbernecking the slow-mo car crash that is a vibrant 23 year-old pop star slowly devolving into a bulimic walking corpse--but it offers no alternative. In a way, the film itself is part of the problem. Film corrupts and films about the corrupting nature of film are not somehow double negative made positive, i.e. immune to that corruption.

It's all there in Winehouse's hit song, based on a real attempt by her friends to get into rehab, an attempt kaboshed by her enabling moocher dad. "They tried to make me go to rehab / I said no no no." Dad was the one who told her she didn't need to go, that she was fine (which, I admit is what my mom would have said in similar circumstances), that she had to do another tour so he could get his share as her manager. A man who was largely absent from her life until she became famous and he realized he needed to take care of her, dad's the real villain of the story, not the press. His enabling is out of control. He even crashes her drying-out facility with a camera crew and rags on her for not taking care of her public, and flying her --while unconscious from the night before-- to frickin' Eastern Europe for a show she didn't want to do. But she allowed him into her entourage! How could she judge her dad without judging herself? No wonder she fell for such skeezy men. And I know that feeling too well, because when soooo wasted you can barely walk, you don't know who your friends are, so you just have to trust the ones who seem to know you, from somewhere...

So if it's not the dirtbags', jonesers', and moochers' fault then whose? Slithering beneath it all, right down in our chromosomes, that's the enemy. The sensitive / artistic gene is the same one that falls prey to drugs, alcohol and eating disorders. Our own chemical imbalances, genetic addiction, depression is what makes us artists, man. It's as tied up in the wheels of the celebrity death cult as anything. You can always tell the hacks from the real artists because the hacks have no drug problems. AMY delivers this global socio-historical truth in such a clear and concise way that it makes me kind of ashamed for my advocating self-destruction on this site. On the other hand, I've never stood up for cocaine, heroin, meth or their myriad derivatives and these are the ones that kill most savgely. These terribly un-psychedelic drugs bleed all over the psychedelic warrior's noble shoes by association. Me, I'm a drunk too, and if I vow I won't drink again until Hell freezes over, rest assured I'll freeze it, somehow or other. It shall be frozen.

All in all, AMY is a hell of a harrowing portrait of what alcohol, cocaine, and fame can do to a sensitive artist and her real friends and comes recommended, though the decision to show the lyrics of her songs as subtitles--every single song--seems sophomoric, for these lyrics aren't especially detail-oriented, or so I'd tell her if she was in my creative writing class, if I had one, and she was in it. Without the lyrics onscreen, maybe her raw bluesy chutzpah could shine better, for me anyway. I didn't like Whitney Houston either for the same reasons I'm not a fan of Winehouse. It's like hey, pick a note and stay there, all that single breath octave climbing gives me a headache. Give me Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson for the blues, Give me an old rocking chair and a song like "In the Gloaming," and Stumpy can take the bottle away.

In case you can't tell, that last sentence referenced NIAGRA and RIO BRAVO. May you find them now, on DVD. And for all the still sick and suffering in and out of the rooms--see you in Hell. I'll be the guy riding the Zamboni.  Watching a poor girl disappear down the chute of bulimia and alcohol addiction just isn't the kind of thing one should be sober for.

The Blackened Face of the Glory-Bound Golem: WONDER BAR (1934)

Playing like a midnight car accident between the Warner's Gold Digger series and a sleazy Dostoevsky-ish existential comedy, Wonder Bar was one of the last films to sneak by the Joe Breen production code and it all but dares the censors to cross the line backwards in pursuit, like a bunch of ball-snipping nihilists after the Dude. Occurring almost in real time, over one evening at the titular Parisian nightspot owned and emceed by Al Wonder (Al Jolson), the movie aims for a 'cavalcade of stars' vibe ala Grand Hotel, Dinner at Eight, or Paramount's  International House but it lands on a roof all its own. Onstage: Busby Berkeley-directed dance numbers including one spectacularly offensive cavalcade of black stereotypes savaging the folksy decency of the (then still just a hit play) The Green Pastures. Offstage, a savagery of future Breen no-nos: unpunished murders, endorsed suicide, gambling, unpunished extramarital trysts, and even homosexuality. If there's no W.C. Fields autogyro to lift you out of this dark madness, well, just walk home as nonchalantly as you can. It's Paris, after all --even the forbidden is permitted.. for now... but Nazism im der Winde kommt! 

There are several interwoven stories and emotions too strange not to unweave and examine separately:

1. The chilling exhilaration displayed by the Russian gambler who lost his fortune gambling the night before, so is planning to to kill himself tonight. Clearly hoping someone will talk him out of it since he can't shut up about the ways he might do it, his merriment in the face of being broke nonetheless recalls Dostoevsky's famous line, "a real gentleman, even if he loses everything he owns, must show no emotion." As he gives away his watch and remaining rubles to the scantily-clad chorus girls, they don't bat a single eyelash over his suicide threats (if they took him seriously, after all, they might feel obligated to give him his stuff back).

2. The love quintanglement between the ballroom dancing couple of 'The Gigolo' (this is how Jolson introduces him- at the time it still meant one of the professional male dance partners that used to be for rent at upscale ballrooms) played by Ricardo Cortez, his partner Dolores del Rio, and a whole slew of their former lovers, past, present, and future angling for a spin. There's the rich married woman (Kay Francis) after Cortez; and after Dolores, the bandstand crooner Dick Powell and, most masochistically self-abasing of them all, emcee Jolson (Powell 'knew' her first). But no one is going home happy tonight because Dolores is way to obsessive over her Gigolo. To the point, perhaps, of murder. A crime which Jolson is all too eager to cover up in a bid to win her over. 

Seriously, the way these people crawl and scrape shamelessly after each other is almost Carson McCullers-level degrading; Jolson's level of bootlick self-pity, especially, is just way too adult for the future era of the code and too self-pitying for our jaded age.

3.  Gold Digger regulars Guy Kibbee and Hugh Herbert as randy old duffers trying to score on the sly with two 'party' girls while their matronly spouses look on in shocked disapproval (Guy laments: "there out to be a law against bringing your wife to Paris"). But-- in the dreariest, stalest sub-plot of the evening--the ladies too find matches in younger, jewelry-hungry gigolos. There's some amusingly drunk interplay of old pros Kibbee and Herbert, but it's dispiriting to see the weird Gold Digger three-way romance of the 1933 film reduced to slovenly old midwesterners drunkenly drooling over mercenary French hustlers. 

4. Busby Berkeley's usually dazzling choreography and surreal camera movements seems somewhat flea-bitten this go-round. Showing perhaps a less Gold Diggers-level budget, forced to rely too heavily on angled mirrors and a spinning circular stage to create most of the effects. And more than in the past, Berkeley brings us to the edge of anthropomorphism: our eye is continually shifting from seeing his overhead patterns first as people and then as abstract patterns, then back again, in a way that's truly relevant to the film's uneasy sense of self-loathing and dehumanized alienation. 

5. The cast's freaky 'otherness' is played up even as they are meant to be identifiable as certain types, i.e. the foolishly-smitten with her young gigolo trophy wife, the jealous Latina firebrand, The hood-eyed Latin playa, the bug-eyed Jewish golem, the hick tourists from Indiana, etc. There's no sense of connection or belonging, just humanity slipping in and out dehumanized abstraction. Only the suicidal Russian seems to be all the way human --no Wonder this Bar is making him suicidal.

5.  Al Jolson singing "Going to Heaven on Mule," in blackface.
Yikes, here we go...

Grinning and strutting like a spastic jackanapes through an array of offensive stereotype postures, cavorting and twisting his blackened face into hideous leering grimaces, Jolson's blackface is truly a shocking sight to see. Meant as a homage-cloaked xenophobic satire of the then-popular stage play, Green Pastures, one "wonders" how this or any aspect of Al Jolson was ever popular. He does grow on one in a forgotten curio sort of way over the course of the film, but then this number kind of dispels any good vibes he might have generated. The shock of stumbling on this, buried deep in the rest of the film, is like overturning a rock in the the Museum of Radio and Television and finding a nest of hideous vermin.

Notes the Museum of Family History site, almost by way of apology-cum-rationalization:

Back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, actors performing in blackface were more accepted by the general public, though Jolson was the first comedian to use blackface. He did this with a great deal of energy and spirit; he felt freer and more spontaneous behind the burnt cork than he ever did in 'whiteface.' As time went on, though others may have used burnt cork, it was obvious that no one could do blackface like Jolson.

In his book Dangerous Men, Mick LaSalle describes Jolson as the 'troll king' of early sound film, the golem who segued between evoking the lovesick deformed circus masochists of Lon Chaney-Tod Browning silents and the fast-talking toughs of the pre-code gangster boom. Unlike the Chaney freaks Jolson's was an inner deformity in his own mind, leading him to project a level of insecurity and self-loathing so intense it became its own grandstanding narcissistic opposite. A kind of slow motion downward death spiral down a Vitaphone crackle-and-hiss drain, it was if being the first person to speak and sing on film had left him permanently self-conscious, yet tickled to a childlike fit of jouissance over the attention it got him. "In film after film, Jolson not only watches himself, he watches you watch him," notes LaSalle. He's a "borscht belt Pagliachi... a monster as masochistic as Chaney, but needier, more self-pitying, and, of course, louder." (18-19)

Now there are some who think two wrongs don't make a right, but this ground zero of semitic self-loathing coupled to black-face racism has a train-wreck pull for others, such as myself. Does it help that Jolson was a big supporter of black entertainers and possibly felt a kinship with oppressed African Americans? (i.e. slave race ancestry?) A Jew who played up his own Jewishness, Jolson had to struggle with stereotypes himself in an age where clubs were openly 'restricted' and long before Gregory Peck made his Gentlemen's Agreement. Jews and blacks alike had to play humble, decent submissives who understood and respected Jim Crow and social restrictions as being for their own benefit, helping them hide their inferiority from their WASP overlords. 

As if cementing the similarity, behold the above picture: the archaic Yiddish characters on the newspaper providing a reverse under-halo to the sunrise of loose straw from Jolson's hat, framing a blackface golem beamed here through a stray TV signal from some uncanny nightmare dimension. 

The Green Pastures satire aspect is eerily soothing in this bizarro world context: the opiate promise of heading into the sunshine of eternal glory (anywhere but here) on a mule, just like the code had planned for us immediately following this last moment of a wanderin' in the pre-code valley of the shadow of libidinal freedom.

 Here's Jolson fan Glenn Kenny on the many questions surrounding Jolson's 'right' to blacken up:

"For "Mule," Jolson's in full blackface, with overalls and a straw hat, talking to his little girl (a white child, also in blackface) of his dying intentions. What follows is a thoroughly outrageous parade of racial stereotypes and caricatures of the afterlife—an orchard from which pork chops hang from trees! giant watermelons! non-stop crap games! in all-singing, all-dancing glory, accompanied by one of Harry Warren's least infectious tunes... But in a way, the hands-down most bizarre image of the entire sequence is a weird double-joke on ethnic identity, which see's Jolson's blackfaced share-cropper getting a shoe-shine while engrossed in the Hebrew-language newspaper The Forward."

One of the comments on the post, from 'Karen':

"And the part of the film that has always horrified me the most is just what you've emphasized: the moment that Jolson's grinning face rises over the edge of The Forvert, like the White Queen's face rising up nightmarishly over the edge of the soup tureen in the closing chapters of Alice Through the Looking Glass. Perhaps it's because I'm a Jew myself--or maybe just because I'm a human being--his expression of knowing exemption is about as heinous as it gets. As far as blackface goes, it's well-nigh impossible for a 21st-century viewer to have an adequate grasp of how objectionable it may or may not have been at the time, but that grin while reading the Yiddish news, putting paid to any sense of homage to the race he's aping, just seems like it could never have been anything but vile."

I like her comparison to the White Queen, yet Karen scratches out any notion of context, noting that the 'grin' puts paid to anything but vileness. She's right that we'll never have an adequate grasp of the overall frequency of such a negative interpretation. 

B ut perhaps we can glean a rough idea from the post-WWI, pre-WWII Parisian setting.  

Paris had become a black musician expat refuge for two very good reasons: Parisians revered jazz and weren't as racist. There were no Jim Crow laws, or other humiliations (like not even being allowed to sit with the white folks at Harlem's Cotton Club). That treatment was more reserved for the French equivalent of the black person, the Arab. 

And yet (or maybe because of the lack of racism towards ex-pat African Americans) Paris nightclubs celebrated and overindulged in the spectacle of blackness, of difference, amplifying perceived traits to a state of almost avant garde shock value. The 'jungle music' aspect of, say, Duke Ellington, was played up in posters and set decor, band members changing from their usual tuxedoes into leopard skin for the film short. 

The exotica of Josephine Baker (left) made her a huge star (left), and let's not even go there with Sarah Baartman (i.e. 'the Black Venus).

And the connection between Jews and black musicians had always been vibrant, loving and reciprocal. During the Nazi occupation 'Zionists' were suspected of underwriting jazz's hypnotic rhythms, as Screen Deco's Mathew C. Hoffman notes:

Jolson was a Russian Jew and knew something about discrimination and could draw a parallel between the suffering of blacks and his own people. He grew up in the minstrel tradition of vaudeville and used his blackface as a way of bringing black music to white audiences. It was also a way for him to immerse himself in the characterization. It’s been said Jolson used the technique as a metaphor for human suffering.

In an excellent From the Barrelhouse piece on Django Reinhardt comes this excerpt from a tract on 'Nazifying Jazz' -

“Strictly prohibited is the use of instruments alien to the German spirit – so-called cowbells, flexatone, brushes, etc – as well as all mutes which turn the noble sound of wind and brass instruments into a Jewish-Freemasonic yowl – so-called wa-wa, hat, etc.”               -- Step 5 in Nazifing Jazz, as recalled in Josef Skvorecky’s Bass Saxophone

None of this forgives the litany of stereotypes, even to me who grew up gazing with a five year-old's pre-racial mistrust at the cover Little Black Sambo (on thick 78s I inherited from a relative) and watching blackface cartoons like Coal Black and the Sebbin Dwarfs on local television, even seeing Song of the South in the theater, and never thinking anything was wrong about it except that it was boring as fuck and I wanted to get on to Treasure of the Matacumbe, which came on after Song in a 1976 double feature revival, though that sucked too. I ended up throwing up in the lobby, while my mom and an usher hovered over me in deep concern. It wasn't because of the racism, it was just too boring.

More than anything now, in today's light, minstrelry is our shame, not Jolson's or anyone else's. It's a sad example of the white compulsion to smite or mock all difference, a need still prevalent underneath the skin of so much news channel rhetoric. And yet, at the same time... exaggeration and performed accentuation of difference is sometimes the gateway to tolerance.

Speaking of difference, a few words on the seemingly altered face of Dolores Del Rio (above) as the dancer who has Jolson and Dick Powell mooning over her, but who loves only disinterested Cortez. I know she's beautiful or whatever but her face creeps me out. The sunken skull eyes, tiny bump of a nose, razor cheekbones, etc. She's like death incarnate... at least in this film. When the blunt cops in L.A. CONFIDENTIAL use the vile phrase 'cut' to describe plastic surgery (Kim Basinger plays a girl "cut to look like Veronica Lake"), I think of Del Rio, and vice versa.

In fact, and I hope the photo above bears me out, she's halfway to looking like Allida Valli in Les yeux sans visage (below). And the very fact that Jolson is still clinging to this hoary old Lon Chaney-style masochist cinema, where the ugly deformed performer sacrifices himself (so the plasticine dish can run away with the callow spoon) shows a terminal example of self-directed racism that's an illuminating mirror into the self-hatred of one's own image as 'other' even as one clings to it like a life raft. In a way he'd be ideal as the evil plastic surgeon in visage... slowly reducing his love's face to a featureless taut skin skull... "this time I'll burn all the animal out of her!"

This aspect, apologizing for one's unforgivable ethnicity and imperfections--bad teeth or big nose or wrinkles or thin lips--is mostly gone now. If someone wants surgery they have it, but we're intolerant of all hate crimes, even self-hate crimes... the bleaching and 'cutting' of Michael Jackson being a very public cautionary tale.

And the freak otherness doesn't even begin to end there: as the socialite craving the Gigolo, Kay Francis is at her most eerily caricature-like: that alabaster skin, triangle mouth and round fleshy head make her seem like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoon of herself or some drawing on the cover of a cigar box. I don't mean that as a jab either (I'm a huge Francis fan), but just trying to corral all the jarring elements of this extraordinarily bizarre art deco cubist face, and the way it seems to signify all the amorphous wrongness floating through the film, the International House anti-matter, the feeling that the foundations of Hollywood personae are crumbling right and left as Breen's brown-shirt inquisitors are kicking down the door.

But it's all okay, all bizarro world substitutes are welcome, because it's still Paris, in every sense of the word, and so there's a tolerance for both aberration and finger-pointing, for both freaks and gawkers, all races and some racists. When we see a pair of men dancing together, Jolson makes a bug-eyed effeminate exclamation of feigned surprise (below), the way he might whistle at an older matron like she's still got it ("Oh you kid!")  Jolson is, above all, a caricature himself, running around from table to table while emceeing and joking, his hands floating in front of him as if he's being lifted on a Nerf ball through the deep end of a pool, he's a freak among freaks. A user review on imdb sums his character up as a cross between Rufus T. Firefly and an early blueprint for Bogart's Rick in CASABLANCA (he owns a club, he fixes everybody's problems, he's hopelessly in love with a woman (del Rio) who's attached to somebody else...) I would add a metatextual furtherance to his comparison--just replace Major Strasser with Joseph Breen and Vichy with his army of toady censors.

So that's it, last call. Tomorrow Breen marches into Warners, but it's still tonight here at the Wonder Bar, and like people getting as sloshed as possible the night before Prohibition goes into effect, all the soon-to-be-verboten tropes are assembled for one last hurrah. The most glaring example to even the pre-code novice will ben seeing SPOILER ALERT Jolson get away with covering up his lover's crime of passion by letting another man make good on his suicide threat, a bit of opportunist sleight-of-hand so unconscionable it's shocking even for a pre-code, so shocking he mentions it to no one, as if he's getting away with something he doesn't want anyone even in the movie audience to notice, Was it someone's idea of a sick joke, the last one they'd be able to play for almost 30 years? Even the name of the bar, a play on the German word 'wunderbar' seems to foreshadow a draconian end to what used to be relatively harmless decadence--the Weimar era and the jazz age--and the arrival of corrupt, racist, sexist, colonialist  'morality' of the both the Nazis and The Production Code. Some joke, like when the bartender flicks the lights on at closing time and you realize you've been kissing an empty skull. If you're the type who can still laugh after that, get this movie.

Great Acid Shorts: BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929)

You can draw a thin but prominent line after a certain moment in jazz history, and the early-sound Duke Ellington short BLACK AND TAN FANTASY (1929) could be the pen. It marks the moment jazz split into sanitized radio 'sweet' music ala Benny Goodman or "the old Maestro" on one hand, and the delirious forward-thinking danger of Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives on the other. It's the line that separates uptown Manhattan from gritty swingin' Harlem, back in the day when the thing to do was get drunk and dance sweetly in midtown until around midnight, then jet up to Harlem and watch agog, through a haze of reefer smoke, as black artists strut, shimmied and blew the roof off. And in between those two lines, the point of that pen - was Duke Ellington.

Using the big band format to craft elaborate, beautiful, wistful, dark, surreal and elegant yet raw and bluesy compositions that sound fresh and new to this day, he was--especially in the 20s/early 30s (Prohibition made it all so urgent)--supernatural. He'd later become polished and institutional. But back in the late 20s he's like a fancy ship that starts out slow and sweet and is soon taking you to strange lands between life and death.

Duke's first film appearance, Black and Tan Fantasy  reflects this mix of surrealism, existential openness and social commentary. Floating elegantly by in 20 minutes or so, it begins as a piano rehearsal set around an almost-repossessed piano and--after a bit of comedy with a bottle of gin and some piano repossessors--segues into dance numbers on the Cotton Club stage and the lead female dancer, physically and spiritually exhausted, killing herself, Red Shoes-style, in a drugged-out shimmy. Finally she lays dying in a shadowy backstage dressing room. As her last request, she asks that the band, gathered around her like a mix of angels, coffin-bearers and an AA intervention, play "that Black and Tan." This becomes a bedside serenade, kind of like the dwarfs singing to comatose Snow White (the Disney film was still some eight years off, but the Betty Boop version (with fellow Cotton Clubber Cab Calloway singing "St. James Infirmary" as a rotoscoped ghost) was only 4 years off and is even more psychedelic than either, which says a lot about how DMT-enriched fairy tales used to be. 

Alas, most of the versions available online are just the music segments edited together, so you miss the drama of Duke, his dancer Fredi Washington (above) and his trumpeter (Arthur Whetsol) bribing the collection agency piano movers with a quart of bootleg gin. And you miss the backstage drama of the doctor warning Fredi not to dance because of a heart condition, and you miss her psychedelic collapse, but the more complete version can be found in a highly-recommended Kino compilation.

Alongside his fellow masters of Harlem Armstrong and Waller, Ellington's is the perfect music to wind down with after a long crazy night of psychedelic colors and angry inner demons devouring the soul. But while Armstrong focuses on the cheery and fun side of the psychedelic abyss, and Waller the playful trickster flirty side, Duke never shies from plunging down into the obsidian oval with you, wrapping you  up with him and his band in a warm blanket of opiates and starlight, and you're glad for the company, because when it comes to locating the redeeming angel of mercy buried somewhere in the vast core of the dark and lonesome blues, Duke is a magic bloodhound.

The film also offers a rare and precious glimpse of the kind of stuff white patrons would see at the Cotton Club, where the Duke often held court and lithe black Venus-style flappers gyrated in a manner that might be too shocking even for pre-code Hollywood. But Harlem was Harlem, and in this marvelous little 20 minute film, you see just why it mattered, and still should.

Standing at the dawn of the sound age with few surviving peers, BLACK AND TAN FANTASY still crackles with weird, lysergic power. That muted trumpet in the beginning can light up your spine like a Kundalini serpent if you're chemically open to it, so open up! As they used to say at prohibition era parties when the guy arrived with the suitcase full of bootleg bottles, "that man is here!"