Turn off your radio if you won't open your wallet

Millions of us who declare their absolute and undying love of music . After the declarations come still more hyperbole, which we can characterize as being , collectively, of the sort that music is what makes us human and that without the music and the people who create it, our lives would much worse , emotionally , morally, ethically. So music, along with arts in general, are regarded , en masse, as an essential for the life worth living, an element we cannot live without. I agree with the thinking,but find it ironic that increasing numbers of the consumers who are consuming what they cannot live without without paying for it. Streaming music, the death of record stores, music clubs closing, flat line CD sales, illegal downloading, popular radio narrow casting a slim variety of styles and approaches, nearly all of it market researched and created like the tasteless recipes that make up a Denny's menu, scores of us acquire music without paying a dime to the musicians and songwriters who create it and, even when albums do relatively well in terms of the number of units sold, contract schemes have made it tricky for emerging and even established artists to get the payment they're due. It's not a new story and I'm sure more than a few of us are aware that things are rotten in the distribution of wealth in the recording industry. The tragedy is that we love the music, but we evidently don't feel the musicians who create those soul stirring sounds deserve to be paid.

Whither film critics?

Where have all the film critics gone worries a Facebook buddy, citing the herd mentality that seems to come upon otherwise smart folks when they uniformly declare suspect films as "masterpieces". I see his point, that sometimes we who love the craft and honest appraisal of films-as-art as well as entertainment have reason to be dismayed when the judges seem to go from being a Greek chorus committed to telling the truth to a delusional protagonist to a peanut gallery. Time was when if you wanted to read film critics in different cities around the country, you went to the library and read the out of town papers they might be subscribing to. Now, of course, we have the internet, and each is available, every professional critic nearly, not to mention every blogger, content writer, and social media sycophant. It seems, indeed, that everyone who's review can be used in a promotion has read the same marching orders and commits to keeping the fix in place. Honestly, though, I am wondering how much of this is perception, as the sheer glut and easy access to endless reviews make it seem that that unseen hands are controlling the puppet strings. Really, was there ever a glory day when working critics, as a whole, had amazingly unique and significantly insightful thing s to say about Hollywood fare.

Yes, we had our Manny Farber, James Agee, Pauline Kael, and Andrew Sarris, but I'd wager the majority of the print media critics, the newspaper reviewers, that were very similar in style, argument, and range of views. While the cineastes paid attention to the true stylists and thinkers in the big city papers, the rest of the world remained middle brow and pretty much mundane in their judgments on films, yay or nay. You just didn't seem them altogether at the same time, gathered together around at an open bar. Now everything is online, at your fingertips, and the deluge of opinion, pouring on you like wet cement, can have the effect that the incidental sameness of views can seem the result of a sinister corporate force and a decline in critic intelligence. It's my guess that the ration of smart, interesting critics to the hoi polloi remains the same as it has ever been; I read whole reviews on Rotten Tomatoes more than I should,I suppose, but a fair number of the critics are literate and sharp and brandish a fine prose style, and are capable of making an interesting case for their view. And, to be sure, there's a surfeit of the mediocre opinion mongers with stale views and writing skills as rank as the very backwater that might claim them as local taxpayers.

Aerosmith are rich, clever bastards with their minds in the gutter

Truthfully, I used to like Aerosmith quite a bit and still get an adrenaline rush when I hear their best tunes. guitar-centric rock was my preference in the Sports Arena days, but where other bands of the era now bore me and dated themselves badly, AS were pretty much the best at catchy riffs, savage, terse guitar solos, and absurdly clever double -signifying lyrics. These fellas were sex-crazed old coots before they left their teens, and it’s an achievement, if a dubious one, that they managed to make their smutty wordplay the source for inappropriate snickers and wretchedly awful treatment of women for so many years.

The combination of riff -craft and professed cocksmanship was made to order for any frustrated 20-year-old genius yearning to abandon his book learnin' and take up the microphone, center stage, instead.  As you know, my tastes have gravitated, gratefully, towards mainstream jazz and blues over the last thirty-five years--classic Miles, Coltrane, Mel Lewis, Wayne Shorter, Joe Pass, lots of Blue Note, Atlantic, ECM, Pacific Jazz, Verve, Impulse, Fantasy record releases--and rock and roll no longer interests me in large measure. But I still get a charge when a good AS is played--I rather like Tyler's rusty- can- opener screaming, and I believe Joe Perry is one heck of a good chunk-chording guitarist. It helps, I guess, that these guys never got far from some rhythm and blues roots, even if those roots come from the Stones and not Motown or Stax. This may be damning with faint praise, but they were a brilliant expression of a young glandular confusion. 

What makes this art is this band's skill at sounding like they never learned anything fifty feet past the schoolyard and no much else beyond the age of 25. As we age and suffer the sprains, creaks and cancer symptoms, inherited and self-inflicted,  our past gets more gloriously delinquent more we talk about it, and we find ourselves gravitating to those acts of yore who seemed to maintain a genuine scowl and foul attitude.  Nearly any rock band based on rebellion and extreme bouts of immaturity just seems ridiculous after a while--Peter Townsend is lucky enough to have had more ambition in his songwriting with Tommy and Who's Next to have lived down the  dubious distinction of having written the lyric that exclaimed that he would rather die before he got old.  Aerosmith, in turn, still sounds good and rocking as often as not simply because they have mastered their formula. The sound a generation of us newly minted seniors occasionally pined for  remains the audio clue to an idea of integrity and idealism; what is disheartening, if only for a moment, is that this band's skill at sounding 21 and collectively wasted is a matter of professionalism and not an impulse to smash The State. Rock and roll is all about professionalism, which is to say that some  of the alienated and consequently alienating species trying to make their way in the world subsisting on the seeming authenticity of their anger, ire and anxiety has to make sure that they take care of their talent, respect  audiences expectations even as they try to make the curdled masses learn something new and make sure that what they are writing about /singing about/yammering about is framed in choice riffs and frenzied backbeat. 

It is always about professionalism. The MC5 used to have manager John Sinclair, the story goes, turn off the power in the middle of one of their teen club gigs in Detroit to make it seem that the Man was trying to shut down their revolutionary oooopha. The 5 would get the crowd into a frenzy, making noise on the dark stage until the crowd was in a sufficient ranting lather. Sinclair would switch the power back on at that point, and the band would continue, praising the crowd for sticking it to the Pigs. This was pure show business, not actual revolutionary fervor inspired by acne scars and blue balls; I would dare say that it had its own bizarre integrity and was legitimate on terms we are too embarrassed to discuss. In a way, one needs to admire bands like the Stones or Aerosmith for remembering what excited them when they were younger and what kept their fan base loyal.   it's not a matter of rock and roll ceasing to be an authentic trumpet of the troubled young soul once it became a brand; rather, rock and roll have always been a brand once white producers, record company owners, and music publishers got a hold of it early on and geared a greatly tamed version of it to a wide and profitable audience of white teenagers. In any event, whether most of the music being made by Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others was a weaker version of what was done originally by Howlin Wolf, Muddy Waters et al. is beside the point. It coalesced, all the same, into a style that perfectly framed an attitude of restlessness among mostly middle-class white teenagers who were excited by the sheer exotica, daring, and the sense of the verboten the music radiated. 

It got named, it got classified, the conventions of its style were defined, and over time, through both record company hype and the endless stream of Consciousness that most white rock critics produced, rock and roll became a brand. It was always a brand once it was removed from the black communities and poor Southern white districts from which it originated. I have no doubt that the artist's intention, in the intervening years, was to produce a revolution in the consciousness of their time with the music, they wrote and performed, but the decision to be a musician was a career choice at the most rudimentary level, a means to make a living or, better yet, to get rich. It is that rare to a non-existent musician who prefers to remain true to whatever vaporous sense of integrity and poor. Even Chuck Berry, in my opinion, is the most important singer-songwriter musician to work in rock and roll--Berry, I believe, created the template with which all other rock and rollers made their careers in music--has described his songwriting style as geared for young white audiences. Berry was a man raised on the music of Ellington and Louie Jardin, strictly old school stuff, and who considered himself a contemporary of Muddy Waters, but he was also An entrepreneur as well, as an artist. He was a working artist who rethought his brand and created a new one; he created something wholly new, a combination of rhythm and blues, country guitar phrasing and narratives that wittily, cleverly, indelibly spoke to a collective experience that had not been previously served. Critics and historians have been correct in callings this music Revolutionary in that it changed the course of music, but it was also a Career change. 

All this, though, does not make what the power of Berry's music--or the music of Dylan, Beatles, Stones, MC5, Bruce or The High Fiving White Guys --false, dishonest, sans value altogether. What I concern myself with is how well the musicians are writing, playing, singing on their albums, with whether they are inspired, being fair to middling', or seem out of ideas, out of breath; it is a useless and vain activity to judge musicians or whole genres of music by how well they/it align themselves with a metaphysical standard of genuine, real, vital art-making. That standard is unknowable, and those pretending they know what it is are improvising at best. This is not a coherent way to enjoy music.      All entrepreneurs are risk-takers, for that matters, so that remains a distinction without a difference. What matters are the products--sorry, even art pieces, visual, musical, dramatic, poetic, are "product" in the strictest sense of the word--from the artists successful in what they set out to do. 

The results are subjective, of course, but art is nothing else than means to provoke a response, gentle or strongly, and all grades in between, and critics are useful in that they can make the discussion of artistic efforts interesting. The only criticism that interests are responses from reviewers who are more than consumer guides--criticism, on its own terms, within its limits, criticism can be as brilliant and enthralling as the art itself. And like the art itself, it can also be dull, boring, stupid, pedestrian. The quality of the critics vary; their function about art, however, is valid. It is a legitimate enterprise. Otherwise, we'd be treating artists like they were priests. 

God forbid.                    

TOM PETTY, free fallin'

Tom Petty made me think of the “emancipated minor,” an underage teen legally separated from his parents, becoming free to engage in adult activities that would otherwise require parental permission. The teen becomes a legal adult, free to sign contracts, enroll in trade school, rent an apartment, and is solely responsible for the future that awaits him. There were a few of these feral minors around when I worked the carnival circuit in the ’70s during the dread days of summer. I was a college student working midway games for a long shaggy dog story I’d narrate to the end of my days. Meanwhile, I had classes and my parents’ condo to go back to when it was my time to go. They, however, were suddenly adults responsible for their direction, solely at the mercy of their wits, the wisdom of their rash decisions, and the kindness of others who gave a good goddamn.

They liked hard guitar rock, good marijuana, and a job that paid them a living wage for a solid eight hours of work. And there was that wonderful sense that the world had a moral map, simply drawn, with little gray between the extremes of light and dark. There is the Right Thing, and then there is being a Total Dick. No compromise is the game: young hearts, not so much idealistic, as much as expecting everyone to be playing by the same rule book.There was no backing down from this—you followed your path; you moved toward your dreams; and you cut ties to the people, places, and things that fettered a young soul’s determination to create and live a life that made sense. Following suit, the emotional life was the sort that took a heartache and converted it into a worldview, a philosophy of hurt articulated in simple sentences and short, clipped rhymes.

A broken heart, being fired, a flat tire on the turnpike between Sandusky and Stockton, buying a used Van Halen CD and discovering it’s a Shaggs record instead—all these abutments and letdowns and sorry-ass slaps in the face were savored, inspected, kept fresh in memory while one fell into a hard reticence to speak of one’s pain. A code formed, the choruses were bellowed while pounding the dashboard between drags of Marlboro 100s, a car full of young men, and the occasional carnie chick circulating through the twist-and-shout knots and narrow passage of the Grapevine making their way to the last of the Still Spots before The Season was over, smoke, open beer cans, 8-track tapes, and scratched CDs: “Stop draggin’ my heart around,” “You don’t have to feel like a refugee…,” I am free fallin’, and I won’t back down, so fuck off and get  out of the way  because this life is too short to wait in line….

Tom Petty did not wait in line. He got it done. Grounded, responsive, principled from experience, always aware of who pays his bills. This man worked, he felt, he got it done, and then left us, headed into the great wide open. Perhaps we will see his likes again, but you know, the waiting is the hardest part. So get it done, pick up a guitar, play your harmonica, son. Tom Petty wrote songs about standing your ground, being true to the good things within yourself, of being helpful when help was needed, of admitting when he was wrong and taking responsibility for the results of his decisions, he was a man who refused to be a doormat and would tell you to your face, in terms plain-spoken and truthful. Petty was everything the essential spirit of rock ‘n’ roll should be and occasionally still is, a kind of realistic worldview that was neither abstract philosophy nor stale bromides reinforcing a crucifying relativism, but rather a way of seeing precisely what’s at stake, what’s involved in the dramas, transactions, and passions of our time on Earth, and intuitively knowing the best course to take. His were the songs of the trials, tribulations of a life he’s fully engaged in. 

His rock ‘n’ roll was simple, predicated on anthem-like choruses and simple, assertive, thrashing guitar riffs, and a honed backbeat. Tom Petty’s voice relayed his plain-spoken lyrics with a sound that was an emotional storm working itself out, the hurt, and anguish, the acceptance, and the courage and strength to continue to the next day—with the realization that life goes on and that he’s in it and that he has a life that is truly his own, beholden to no authority apart from his consul and the people and values he holds dear. Tom Petty was, I think, everything I had hoped Bob Seger would become: the working journeyman rocker with the common man’s experience expressed brilliantly, movingly, in the terse, unadorned cadence of the best rock ‘n’ roll. Seger, though, caught Springsteen fever and gravitated to bigger arrangements, strained melodrama, and grandiosity dressed in a work shirt. Petty never forgot he was a rocker, never forgot what made rock ‘n’ roll such a powerful medium of self-realization. He wrote about what he knew what he had done, and what he learned. It was a conversation with his fans he never stopped having.

Hefner: Goodbye and good riddance

So Hugh Hefner is dead and the thinking of many my age, sixty something lets say, is that we ought to praise the Pajama pornographer for defending civil rights, exposing readers of his magazine to many a Nobel-worthy authors and fighting against all manner of authoritarian censorship. As far  as that goes, sure, but  for decades Hefner seemed to be the slimy pipsqueak no one would sit with during lunch period who, in the cruelest irony to the self image of jocks and culture-vultures everywhere, became the standard by which be defined smart and sophisticated masculinity. Praise for his influence as a cultural revolutionary is undone once we realize that he's turned a generation or two of young men into a compulsive, masturbatory yahoos who, over time, hadn't a chance to escape the prison of their arrested development.  Results varied , of course, from the indoctrination into this greasy promoter's school of consumerist Hip, but the effect on our national manner and collective assumptions is that of find yourself at ground zero for the kind of self contentedness you go into doubt, psychic and financial, to get access to. Praising for bringing enlightenment to America only repeats the lie and hides the fact that Hefner's surrounding himself in beautiful and submissive women, great writers, important intellectuals and advancing variously defensible causes was actually subterfuge obscuring the man's  Inner Carnival barker and distracting us from the unvarnished turth that he made us coarser people in the long run. 

Hitler, Mussolini and the early iterations of the Soviet regimes gave untold numbers of artists jobs , but that does not mitigate the calamities those monsters foisted on the world. Hefner, I realize, is different,but the comparison holds to degree. His inclusion of writers, intellectuals and serious musicians into his world was middle brow culture at its worse, a means to lure large swaths of the public,mostly white males with privilege and power and influence, into a seductive consumerist thinking. Hefner may well have advocated for civil rights for blacks, but certainly not equal rights for women. What he actually did to the culture and its habit of mind undoes the good things he might have accomplished only incidental.This attitude is classic objectification, and it's the same deep and fatally seated cosmology that made slavery a morally defensible institution.  He was singularly responsible for instilling in American mainstream the greedy , sociopathic libertarianism of Ayn Rand-- generally anti-government, pro-wealth accumulation, pro subjugation of women as sexual objects. Hitler, Mussolini and the early iterations of the Soviet regimes gave untold numbers of artists jobs , but that does not mitigate the calamities those monsters foisted on the world. Hefner, I realize, is different,but the comparison holds to degree. 

The inclusion of writers, intellectuals and serious musicians into his world was middle brow culture at its worse, a means to lure large swaths of the public,mostly white males with privilege and power and influence, into a seductive consumerist thinking. Hefner may well have advocated for civil rights for black Hefner's influence made him a cultural force whatever his original intentions happen to be. Hedonism maybe as American as apple pie, but decency ,fairness, equal and uncompromised rights are as well,; much that most of the liberal and progressive movement, which evolved from the Civil Rights movement, turned against Hefner and his sensualist libertarian-ism because his over all presentation, his long standing and consistently articulated production of his ideal society, worked mightily against the aims of women achieving rights that are naturally and legally theirs in the first place, not favors awarded them by male masters. It's my thinking that the Playboy philosophy did more than build a media empire. It became an ideology of a kind, a rationale that rather conspicuously worked against the advancement of human and which resulted in a seemingly permanent strain of angry emotional dwarfism that has yet , if ever, to be removed .s, but certainly not equal rights for women. What he actually did to the culture and its habit of mind undoes the good things he might have accomplished only incidently. He was singularly responsible for instilling in American mainstream the greedy , sociopathic libertarianism of Ayn Rand-- generally anti-government, pro-wealth accumulation, pro subjugation of women as sexual objects and breeders of off spring. His Playboy philosophy, if fully implemented, would have been a cruel and narrow path to hoe.cts and breeders of off spring. His Playboy philosophy, if fully implemented, would have been a cruel and narrow path to hoe. Hefner's influence made him a cultural force whatever his original intentions happen to be. Hedonism maybe as American as apple pie, but decency ,fairness, equal and uncompromising rights are as well,; much that most of the liberal and progressive movement, which evolved from the Civil Rights movement, turned against Hefner and his sensualist libertarian-ism because his over all presentation, his long standing and consistently articulated production of his ideal society, worked mightily against the aims of women achieving rights that are naturally and legally theirs in the first place, not favors awarded them by male masters. 

It's my thinking that the Playboy philosophy did more than build a media empire. It became an ideology of a kind, a rationale that rather conspicuously worked against the advancement of human and which resulted in a seemingly permanent strain of angry emotional dwarfism that has yet , if ever, to be removed .Truth is is that Hefner was a relentless self promoter a mere step or two removed from being a pornographer. He essentially dressed up his magazine with classy writers and journalists and he promoted a good number of causes advancing the cause of civil rights and civil liberties, but that was a cynical move to purchase himself a veneer of legitimacy. He was sexist and, I suspect, a misogynist, dehumanizing not just his models but women in general. Men, as well, suffered wounds at the market and image manipulation of this salacious Svengali, instructing generations that one can be sophisticated and cerebral at the same time as they are emotionally stunted, locked into a narcissistic world view that regarded half of the world's population as property. Hefner dehumanized all of us . He was not a great man. He was very successful creep.

Shane Hall

Human Condition-Shane Hall

Songwriter and vocalist extraordinaire Shane Hall is an artist preferring to eschew hard labels as to his style of music and brings to one's players and streaming devices an alluring but slippery set of original songs with his new album Human Condition. Hall, highlighted in the August 2017 issue of the San Diego Troubadour, is often classified --hurriedly, it seems, as a blues artist, but that doesn't quite get at what this musician is up to. Human Condition, while having a conspicuous blues base in the songwriter, isn't a journey through yet another session of twelve and sixteen bar chord progressions with pallid rewrites of the expected blues tropes. Hall is from the tradition, we can say, but he does not restrict himself, instead bring something more inclusively American for the listener:  folk revival, traveling man tales, the swaying call and response  of gospel-inflected work hollers, music that recollects and reconditions the music of the American soul and the wide avenues of its collective heart.  

And pushing this “Americana” mélange forward is Hall’s voice, a versatile, resonating baritone, filtering the traces of Muddy Waters, Hank Williams and, it seems, Van Morrison, voices of individual distinction and grit of personality. Each had assimilated their influences, wedded them with their own experiences, in turn creating new legacies of sound and soul music. Hall does much the same, his voice a harried, gritty plea for relief and love in the opening track. A testimonial of a man’s willingness and patience to shoulder his burden and wait for either a lover or Salvation, this is a simple and simple and powerful paean.  The strumming, galloping guitar of “Shell Life”, stopping and starting with odd emphasis that makes you lean closer to the singer’s entreaties, is a clear tale of someone taking stock of his life; between the desire for the pleasure of the moment and the need to maintain one’s integrity, this is the sad tale of a situation where there is heartbreak and regret whatever the choice happens to be.  Human Condition benefits from the spare, uncluttered arrangements, by Hall, and the clear, gimmick-free production provided by Kris Towne; the varying moods the songs create, from hill music laments to the bittersweet country-blues cadences of “Rare Form”, the songwriting is plainly and effectively showcased. Hall does not undercut his best virtues with the extraneous gesture.

What I’ve found especially appealing is the song ‘Roll”. In an album full of nuanced tales of seeking love, losing faith, resilience, regret and moving on down the road, “Roll” is a straight-ahead celebration of a young man who takes a fancy to a young woman’s beauty and manner. We realize, of course, that this new attraction, this infatuation, may be as ephemeral and fated for the dustbin of memory, but this song is about being in the moment, giving oneself over to the authority of their senses and finding someone sublime and perhaps loving in turn to make the hard journeys worth the shoe leather and heartaches.  The bounces, the chorus grabs you and leads you in a dance of momentary transcendence, and Hall’s voice lightens in texture and hews, it rises to a tone that suggests eyes upraised, not downcast, looking at the stars, in awe of something wonderful, quite wonderful. Finishing the album is the bluesy, funked-up meditation “Lady Cobra”, sulky and slinky, a statement of powerlessness as a prelude to a one night stand; Hall’s protagonist seems aware that he’s getting in over his head, but it’s apparent this young man thinks love is worth the blues.

This the appeal of Human Condition, in the fact, is that Hall does not preach, both lecture nor offer bits of piecemeal philosophy as the experiences are recounted and the tales are told.  He keeps the details precise, the emotions raw yet restrained, the overall personality stoic, but not stiff. His musical variety, the resourcefulness of his voice and the simply and superbly tailored dynamics of his songwriting make Human Condition a refreshingly crisp and tuneful set from a singer-songwriter. Hall transcends the merely confessional and up his game to some artful storytelling.

 (originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour.Used with kind permission).

Gritty, clammy, unresolved:Mailer vs Germaine Greer, Jill Johnson, Diana Trilling

Germaine Greer

There are perverse types who think that if one places a group of people in the same room who've sworn, metaphorically or literally, to destroy each other, the reflex to go for one's gun will subside and what will result is a frank exchange of opinion, insights and life stories. And after the participants have learned that they're not nearly as distant from each other as they had thought, they'll lock arms, brothers, and sisters all, and stroll down the beach into the fiery sun of a higher revolution. All eyes raised, shoulders broad, worker and intellectual, farmer, and chemist, all eyes upraised and looking to the top of the mountain we will climb, as one, united in cause and spirit. Anyone of us can, of course, say 'posh' to the .and know, ' smirking. that enemies remain antagonists to the bone despite the demands of decorum.  The results of these situations are inconclusive and crackling with uncertainty, a heap of hot laundry alive with static electricity,  neither side abjuring to the points made by an opponent. A lot of us like to watch a spat, a public argument of bright people trying to keep their personal views out of a heated grousing about matters that concern us all more so than the entertainment value of raised hackles and arched backs might otherwise indicate on first view. These are situations where otherwise reasonable people are reduced to the level of kids fighting over the use of a prized toy. As in hack-and-slash horror films, many of us get a cheap thrill over blood being drawn for no good purpose.  Or, one could postulate, no one looks good in a shouting match if that passes as a good purpose. That is a reminder to the rest of us to pick our battles and pick our venues in which to have them.

Norman Mailer

So was the case with the film Town Bloody Hall, a documentary in the cinema vertie mode by director D.A. Pennebaker,  a little view film I had the good luck to see at the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art in the early 80s. Filmed in 1971, it is an account of a debate between writer Norman Mailer and an impressive panel of prominent feminist  polemicists  including Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch), radical lesbian Jill Johnson, literary critic Diana Trilling and a representative from The National Organization of Women, whose name I am unable to recall. Pioneer 2nd Wave feminist writer and critic Kate Millet had viciously vilified Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and Mailer himself in her tract Sexual Politics as outstanding representatives of an elitist male literary culture that has oppressed women by distorting their image so that the imaginations of male fictioneers might be better served. Mailer. whose pugnacious reputation has at times dwarfed his writings in the public mind, countered with The Prisoner 0f Sex, a scathing attack on Millet's lack of literary critical skills and her deliberate misreading~of the texts she was dealing with. It is also at turns a brilliant defense of Millet and Lawrence and a convoluted agonizing over the "existential" aesthetic in male/female relationships.

 Mailer's book sparked a fair amount of public debate, and some enterprising souls thought it would be a neat idea to have The Prisoner confront representatives from the opposition. To be expected, the event was hardly a shining example from a Kansas debate manual, but was rather a riot of rhetoric, name-calling, heckles from an unruly crowd and public spectacle. In other words, an intellectually worthless few hours, but, I'd say, a rousing good time. much like a TV wrestling match on a Saturday afternoon. With Mailer officiating, each speaker was to be given ten minutes to speak, after which Mailer would pose a question. Things got off to a proper start. First to talk was the NOW representative, who offered a list of moderate feminist proposals: housewives should draw a living wage, women should get equal pay for equal work and other less than incendiary ideas. Greer spoke next, eloquently attacking the premise of Mailer's literary heroisms and poetically called for an art of the collective, not of one voice but many. Then matters derailed and declined to the point where the night got permanently off-track. Reading from a text composed in the stream on conscious manner that has always sent me to pounding my head against the wall, Jill Johnson rhapsodized that all women are able to love all other women and until men are able to love all other men, the hopes of an all-embracing social revolution will be scuttled like pipe dreams. Mailer, poking a pencil through a cardboard coffee cup, his face a mass o( downturned lines, cut Johnson off at this point, saying that she'd done five minutes over the time limit. Johnson stands motionless while the audience heckles Mailer, demanding that he let her conclude. After an exchange of curses, he initiates an audience vote and concludes that the 'nays' have it. Someone heckles Mailer again. and Mailer, agitated. points to the crowd and says "If you think you can do a better job than me, then come up here (the stage) and take this microphone from me."Johnson effectively undercuts Mailer's angry-dad tantrum as she begins to make-out and grab as with a woman-friend on stage while Mailer demands that she "act like a lady." When the audience cheers the pair on, Mailer says "You people paid twenty-five dollars to see two pairs of dirty jeans wrestle on stage, which seems odd to me because you can ee all the cock and cunt you want down the street for four bucks." Johnson and friend leave the hall, not to return.

Picking up the pieces after Johnson's psycho-theatrics was hard, and for the rest of the debate the panel split hairs on Mailer's "poeticized" understanding of biology, whether vaginal orgasms were possible, Mailer's warnings that Women's Lib has the potential of becoming a leftwing totalitarianism, why the women's movement must concern themselves with their own lot over all other causes and a host of other feelings, all accompanied by the interjections of an audience. With that, the night was ended, with no one's mind changed and few friends gained. What fascinates me about Town Bloody Hall isn't how concisely it's members articulated their views - in the long run, everyone loses their cogency as tangent pin out faster than a car on a greased blacktop- but just how the women's movement will have to shore up their own politic. In 1971, when this film was made, the movement was just beginning to develop a coherent analysis of the society that was oppressing women. At this time of theoretical splendor,  a clumsy and clammy argument over vaginal orgasm, a pertinent citing of a housewife' right to draw a wage and a far-reaching critique of the culture and politics of art and literature were the order of the day. In the ten years since the debate, the right wing in the country has managed to shore up its own resources and have shown themselves to be astonishingly effective. The fact that Ronald Reagan won the presidency on a platform that opposes abortion and the ERA and holds a grab-bag of other. " Conservative sentiments means that the women's movement is faced with a crisis, a crisis that means that the advancements women have managed over the years could be handily wiped out, setting them back to square one. Town Bloody Hall quite unintentionally reveals what the women's movement must do: hipster bohemianism must be doffed and women must more than ever enter the gritty, un-scrubbed ruthlessness of mainstream electoral politics. And that will be the next test on the movement. If it's to have a lasting effect on the culture in which all of us live, it must be affirmed at the voting booth. A sudden, un-decorated realism is cast upon all of us.